by Tom Julian
Gray nodded, but he knew that was impossible. The door groaned open far above. A moment later, Timberwolf was at the bottom of the staircase. Thomas’s head hung. Since Timberwolf didn’t immediately dive for cover, or start shooting, it was clear that Sergey was successfully blocking his scans. He moved cautiously. He may have seen nothing in the shadows, but no doubt he knew this was an ambush.
Sergey moved toward Timberwolf, stepping around the chandelier. “I managed to get away. They’re working to get into The Chapel. Won’t do it, though.” Timberwolf stared at him. Sergey noticed his rig was shredded, black smoke snuck out from the ragged gashes. “Yeah, I know this place in and out. Built it. Ninety-five years ago.”
There was no response. Sergey fidgeted and came closer. He turned over the smart-device Gray had given back to him in his pocket. “So, I would say the thing to do, yeah, is to um…maybe…team up and I’ll take you to find…”
Timberwolf held up his hand to stop him. Sergey halted, sweat pouring from his brow. There was an echo from amongst the columns and something moved in the shadows. Without hesitation, Timberwolf raised his forearm and fired a laser. A Phaelon fell, shot in the neck.
Timberwolf just stood there, waiting for what he knew was coming. A return torrent of plasma fire came from all directions, the shots ricocheting off his armor. Sergey dove to his belly, dropping his smart-device. Timberwolf launched concussion blasts on auto-fire, unconcerned with overheating his rig. A wall of destruction blasted columns. He knocked back three Phaelon that rushed him, sending them flying. He threw holograms into the midst of his attackers. They slashed with faux plasma blades, fired fake bursts.
Gray watched wide-eyed, again in awe of Timberwolf in action. Timberwolf didn’t dive for cover, or take any defensive measures. He just attacked, plasma and laser streaming out of his rig. Burst after burst struck him, but he didn’t flinch, instead turning from one target to the next like a machine.
Sergey army-crawled towards his smart-device, now almost within his reach. He held his ears, the sound of the shooting like continuous thunder. Timberwolf pressed forward, his rig taking incredible damage, but the Phaelon and the human fighters scattered before him. Gray rose from his cover, fired a stream of plasma at him. Timberwolf turned on him and the two men unloaded on each other, both unflinching, at less than twenty yards.
Sergey had his smart-device now and he flicked it on. Timberwolf’s elbow glowed and fire spread up his arm to his shoulder. He spun as the suit burned off him, still firing at Gray until his weapon disintegrated. He fell to his knees, enveloped in flames. His helmet burned off, exposing a mouth open in pain. Droma rushed him, putting a heavy boot to his temple. Timberwolf rolled over to his back, skin smoking. The party encircled him, wary but awestruck. The humans made the Believer symbol on their foreheads and chanted, overlapping each other. “There is no god but God and I do his bidding!”
Gray’s armor was battered, but he’d only had the wind knocked out of him by Timberwolf’s fire. Gray looked down at his old friend, lying naked and burned. “I’m getting sick of you.” Timberwolf groaned, looking up at Gray.
NO REST
Meta stood at the top of the staircase at the start of The Catalog. She smiled, her tune playing like it had before. The door creaked open and red, glowing eyes were on the other side. The visitors she had detected streamed in—thousands of Arnock that had survived the Trikes and the descent to the planet. “Welcome to the Highland Industrial Park.” The creatures ignored her, passing around and through her. Meta stopped her pitch. With her limited autonomy, she was sure this wasn’t right. A forty-foot-tall sentry Arnock entered, striding above her. She spun around, unable to process what was happening.
Kizik entered and took up a position in the back, watching the remnants of his army descend into The Catalog. He had taken extraordinary losses. He’d lost a hundred percent of the crew on the command ship and thirty percent of his assault force. There were only two other masters besides him now, a doctor and a law-writer. He’d lost most of the know-how he needed to gain control of this place, but he felt he could manage at least in the short-term. He had mostly warriors and some techs. One of his techs checked in with him.
There are no remote ports.
Kizik dismissed the tech. No remote ports would mean they would have to go all the way to the command center to access the A.I. That would mean a conflict with Gray and possibly Timberwolf. He sensed both of them here. He knew they were in close proximity to one another, but assumed they could not possibly be working together. That meant one thing: Gray had captured Timberwolf. If it had gone the other way, Gray would be dead.
He considered his losses so far. Horrific. Not just in numbers, but what it meant for his people. He had hoped to bring almost everyone back home to rebuild, but that had been naïve. Timberwolf had tricked him. Bested him for the first time ever and it had been a horrible blow. Kizik had gotten too accustomed to manipulating the man’s mind. No more games. No more trying to use Timberwolf as a tool to clear the way for him.
When I get near him. I will kill him. Quickly, like the coldest wind.
He couldn’t reach out to Timberwolf now. With only two other masters, he was too distracted by controlling this force. He steadied and guided all their minds, leading them forward almost one step at a time. He felt their fear and buried it with feedback. It was cruel, but it was working. His control had helped many more than should have to survive the attack on the troop carrier ship. Exhausted, he rested a moment, retreating entirely back to his own thoughts.
Oh Radem, no!
When he pulled away from their minds, his force stopped moving all at once, dead in their tracks. They looked back at him, waiting for him to reconnect.
He needed a few more moments, but as he rested, the panic started. A huge sentry Arnock, already little more than a brute, began to stride towards him, knocking the smaller Arnock aside. Kizik bore down, shaking and buzzing. He threw his mind out to them like a life preserver. He struggled against the panic, but soon he had it under control and the throng started moving forward again.
Not a religious being, he appealed to the Arnock deity as a reflex.
Radem, give me strength.
SERMON
Timberwolf sat, his back to a column. He soothed his burns with a cream infused with nano-menders from a med-kit Gray had given him. Thomas hovered nearby, spinning a knife in his hands. He was angry from the loss of Wrath. Gray waved him off and he spat in the dust as he went.
Gray tossed Timberwolf a T-shirt and a pair of cargo pants. Timberwolf nodded, acknowledging their bitter familiarity; old friends, new enemies. “I’m glad to see you’re alive. I really am.” Timberwolf pulled on the pants and shirt. “Let me tell you a little about my religion,” Gray said to him, hokey on purpose.
“General, Governor, now Bishop Gray? You’ve worn a lot of hats. Your followers know you’re making it up as you go along?”
“I’m guilty of being a Jack-of-all-trades.”
“What’s with the conversion?” Timberwolf asked. He recalled how he and Gray used to snicker at the sky pilots that flowed into the Assault Corps and complain about how all the good gin joints were shutting down.
“Just an example. You know the Tiaski from near Tep Nine-Fifty?”
“Do I know them? We used to sneak up on their freighters and plant nukes.”
Gray ignored his remark. “Start with an octopus, but its head is just a pile of eyes. Its sex organ and its esophagus are the same. The stomach is the uterus.”
“They’re lovely creatures.”
Gray stepped atop of a small pile of rubble. He was preaching now, to a church of one. “Something God didn’t make. He couldn’t have made. He made man perfect in His image and aliens were a cancer that came later. And you know, it’s a species delusion aliens have, which was indicated by the Angel of the Alchemy. The belief that they were made in God’s image too. That can’t be. It’s absurd.”
“Angel of th
e Alchemy? You must be joking. You know that happened on a spaceship filled with sensors and that nothing was recorded? There was no Angel of the Alchemy, just a captain who made a decision to destroy a civilization and then blamed it on God. You recall the writ from The Clergy on the Tiaski. Their condemnation. Do you remember?” Timberwolf asked.
“Of course, the will of God. Infallible and committed to paper,” Gray smiled.
“The Clergy made trillions once we cleared out those shipping routes. Took those worlds. We couldn’t even live on them, but they had mines, trillium, radium, etcetera. The Tiaski are gone. All of them. They had been lazily plowing those routes for millennia. Since before we had agriculture! And we killed them to make The Clergy rich. Do you really believe this stuff, or do you just want your own war to go fight in?”
Gray took a hunk of metal from the ground. It was a piece of someone’s armor that had been blasted off during the fighting. He drew a Believer symbol in the dust with it, but with an eyeball in the center. “Wherever God takes me, I have all the answers I need, closed eyes. I don’t need to see the whole picture. I don’t care about The Clergy. I have my own path and so do you.” He wiped the eyeball from the center of the symbol.
“You missed a spot.” Timberwolf pointed to a part of the eyeball Gray hadn’t wiped away. There didn’t seem to be any point in talking to Gray about his conversion. “Where’d you find these winners?” Timberwolf asked, motioning to Windwhistle and others who rested on fallen pillars and hunks of rubble. “All of them with names picked out of the ass-end of the Bible—Blaise, Cisus, Sebaldi. Jesus.”
“From prominent Believer families. Couldn’t exactly go back to the Assault Corps or the old unit.”
“I am the old unit!” Timberwolf said coldly. “All that’s left of it.” He surprised himself by the tone of his voice, petulant and affected.
Gray dropped his eyes to the dust. That was a kick to the heart. He caught himself before arguing with him. “You’re going to see some beautiful things. You’re alive for this.”
“Alive? You knew what the Arnock did to prisoners. I’m alive because you wanted to see if I’d be useful.”
“You were useful, until you turned on me. Your use has sort of dropped off lately.”
“I’ve got it in my head. You could have let me die. I’ve wanted to check out, but…”
“I’ve heard the stories. Eight missions for Dr. Tier that can charitably be described as suicidal. That woman…” Gray shook his head, pressed his lips together. His eyes softened. “You’d drop into a hot zone with nothing more deadly than a can opener. Somehow you’d make it out. Mission accomplished and lots of dead bad guys, or dead freedom fighters or just dead who-knows-who. You don’t have to live like that anymore. You can come back now.”
“There is no back.”
“You survive. It’s what you do.”
“Survival? You can call it that?” Timberwolf snapped at him. “Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? The men in the ground from the two of us…” Timberwolf drilled his gaze into Gray and wouldn’t look away.
“I want to finish what we started. Get that cancer out of your head. You won’t be free until we get rid of all the Arnock. I assure you of that.” He put his hand on Timberwolf’s shoulder. Nearby, Michael thumbed his weapon, unsure if Timberwolf might try to tear Gray’s head off. “Don’t you want to hit back at what you hate?” Gray asked him.
“That’s why I’m here,” Timberwolf answered.
“Your soul needs peace,” Gray said, shaken that he had failed to get anywhere with Timberwolf. He had thought that if he could speak to him and make him understand, that there might be some forgiveness for him. He considered telling him everything, about working with Dr. Tier and exposing him to Kizik on purpose. He failed to see the point now, though, or maybe he just wasn’t brave enough to do it. “No one’s to speak to that man. Michael, put Droma on him,” Gray ordered.
Michael nodded, but Droma was nowhere to be found. He sent one of the Phaelon to find her. The rest of the party prepared to move on. Timberwolf felt the presence right then. It was far off, but it was more than Kizik. It was thousands of Arnock. With so many different minds, he was unable to sense anything but energy. He looked to the others, they weren’t feeling it yet, but he knew they would.
Up the stairs and on the other side of the door, Wrath lay in the dust, his breathing shallow now. Droma scrambled over to him, putting her hand on his side. She dripped the vial of sweet liquid down the beast’s throat. In its concentrated form, just a few drops should do it. Within moments, Wrath’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he tensed up, hacking and gasping. Droma wouldn’t have time to see if the sweet death worked, if the nano-menders in the liquid would be able to save Wrath. She felt the ground rumble below her ever so slightly. Off in the distance, she saw the first part of the Arnock army. She climbed a nearby boulder and raised a glowing plasma spear above her head. She shouted to the Arnock, knowing they couldn’t hear her.
“Wessei min ter!” she repeated until her throat was hoarse.
Clan Wessei was going to war.
REVELATIONS
D.P.E. Archangel—Eight Hours Out from Highland
“No, you cannot speak with Dr. Tier,” Captain Tirani said. Conrad stood in the doorway of his office. “She put you in charge and now you are in charge.”
“I’ve heard from Jude Izabeck. Timberwolf is alive, but Gray’s captured him. They are minutes from Highland’s command center. He wrote, ‘Hallelujah, we have the demon and the faithful are at the doorway of The Chapel.’ I got him to elaborate in plain English.”
Captain Tirani had sympathy for Conrad’s position and the faster this was resolved, the sooner they could all extricate themselves from this mess. “What kind of result do you want?”
“I want to blow Izabeck’s nuke, right now. Resolve this.”
“That certainly brings things to a resolution.” Captain Tirani considered the implications. That left Gray dead and Highland a non-viable prize for the Assault Corps. “Just do it and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
“We keep going after we blow it. We need to know what’s happened down there. We at least stay for a few hours before Challenger catches us.”
“So press the button.”
Conrad nodded, that was the hard part. “I need to see the cardinal.”
I should have asked Dr. Tier for a few hits of Terecine, Conrad thought as he stood outside Cardinal Jacob’s door, Gordon and Roberts standing guard on both sides. The Glox-crafted narcotic was infamous among D.P.E. personnel, but he’d never succumbed to it. D.P.E. agents and analysts had terrifically stressful jobs. They lived in a world of data and calculation. They saw every threat, every whisper of war or subversion. They molded lies into the truth and turned propaganda into facts. They routinely sent people such as Timberwolf out into the field to slit throats and break necks.
After a while, it became hard to disconnect from the job, from the awful things that they had to authorize in the name of keeping the peace. They were the bitter solvent used to melt away the sickness of constant war. There was a joke among D.P.E. people when the job got hairy. “You want the T or the S?” The T stood for Terecine; the S was for suicide. Application of both options was disturbingly common.
He couldn’t blame Dr. Tier for becoming a Terecine addict. On its surface, it was a stress reliever and sleep aid that used to actually be prescribed in minute amounts. She probably started small and gradually let her problem get out of control, but she was taking close to fifty milligrams a day now. Conrad was amazed she could still stand, let alone have the state of mind to order Captain Tirani to bump Challenger.
Conrad knocked on the door and it opened almost instantly, like Cardinal Jacob had been expecting someone. “Do you have a message for me, son?” he asked.
“I’m Dr. Tier’s replacement. I’d like to speak with you, sir.”
Cardinal Jacob looked him up and
down with barely concealed disdain. “It’s Excellency, my boy, not sir. I’m not a mister.” He smiled condescendingly.
“My apologies, Excellency,” Conrad said. Cardinal Jacob let him in and sat on a small couch, beckoning Conrad to sit next to him.
“Where are Cheng? McCord? I thought I was familiar with most of Thea’s staff.”
“Conrad Stonefield.” He sat where Cardinal Jacob indicated.
“A pleasure to meet you.” A realization went across Cardinal Jacob’s eyes. He’s too small a fish for my net. Conrad fidgeted on the couch; it was hard to make eye contact with Cardinal Jacob, sitting next to him. “I pray for Thea and her recovery.”
“Yes, I am sure she thanks you.”
“So sad. A strong woman.” He paused. “Women hold back our worst impulses. So much war driven by men, so much sickness. Many species have become matriarchies over time—the Glox, the Phaelon, Tiaski. They don’t really need us, you know, boy!”
“Both men and women wrote the Believer scriptures.”
“Yes, yes. And so many sons and families taken by war.”
Conrad nodded and pretended to agree; the Assault Corps had always been a boy’s club but the driving political and religious forces behind the stellar wars had come from both men and women.
“War is awful, Excellency. Awful. I pray that your man Izabeck is still within your fold?”
“I wish I knew! Dr. Tier took my communications device.”
“We’ve been in contact with him. His weapon is still intact. He claims Timberwolf Velez is alive and in Gray’s custody. They are on the verge of entering Highland’s command center.”
Cardinal Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Those are disturbing implications.”
Conrad’s lip quivered. “I would like you to detonate Izabeck’s weapon.”
