by Alex Oliver
He took two steps and almost ran himself onto a blade. No one moved. Damn.
"Where are the others?"
"Others?" He tried an innocent laugh, but was forced to his knees as a result, the spear tips grazing his head through his hair. His heart thundered in his ears and his stomach roiled. "They must have got away."
"Don't play stupid with me! Freya won't miss you that much. You are but one man and she has more."
Yas scrinched his eyes shut. I hope you appreciate this captain, when you can. "I don't know where they are."
"Just kill--" she began, only to be interrupted by another ringing fanfare of horns.
Yas opened his eyes in time to see his whole crew come jogging into the hangar, accompanied by Ruari, Red-beard, Disa and a dozen of the more familiar guards from Freya's temple. The ring of spears around Yas broke up in confusion as the young warriors were shoved aside.
"There you are," Ruari gave his tiny authentic smile at the sight of Yas, and held out a hand to help him up. "I told them you had gone ahead to prepare the ship. There has been another dark alf attack, and the goddess wants her champions to respond at once."
Yas could have kissed the guy. Or, well, not really. He rose to his feet and almost scampered over to the captain's side. Captain Harcrow greeted him with a nod that said he hadn't noticed anything peculiar about this situation, but Keva came up to squeeze him bruisingly around the arm.
"Yas. I'm sorry. They're attacking the borders of Ocuilin space, near Nahasdzáán, just leveling everything they come across."
He hadn't thought the dread could get worse, but this almost felled him. If they were coming for Nahasdzáán, they were coming for Yas's mom.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Attack on the gas giant
Yas followed the Captain on board with an indescribable mix of relief and confusion. The relief was clear enough, but... "Sir, isn't Nahasdzáán all the way over the other side of the galaxy? How are we going to get there in time? How did the dark alfr get there, for that matter? Those ships looked too big for the gates."
The Captain strolled to his seat - it took a lot to make Harcrow hurry, apparently. Lt. Vasto slipped into the pilot's couch and began buckling himself in, fast and sure. He shrugged. "I don't know. I just do what I'm told."
"Likewise," Captain Harcrow flicked on his screens and performed his pre-flight checks, making sure that everyone could hear him and that he could hear them. "She says the chariot can get there in time. She ought to know."
The bridge door slammed open, and the doctor jogged through, his pixelated face going from a scowl to an expression of astonishment at the sight of them. "Oh," he exclaimed. "I thought we had intruders again. It's good to see you all back on board. I have finished tests of the crew's blood-work and determined that a vitamin supplement is in order. I will administer it now so that you will be in top condition for the forthcoming battle."
Yas buckled himself to his own couch with a smile. Vitamin supplement, huh? That was what they were calling it these days?
"We can't launch yet?" Harcrow asked.
"No sir," Yas checked the external screens. "The hangar is not yet clear. Also sensors are reporting the forcefield on the hangar entrance is impenetrable. I'm guessing we have to wait ‘til we're let out."
He folded back his left sleeve and offered his forearm to the doctor's chilly touch. The doctor had brought a compressed air injector gun with him the size of small rifle. It looked slightly dangerous poised above the vein in Yas's wrist, but the injection itself was only a moment of icy pressure and then over. He didn't need it, but he figured that having it done first on himself would allay suspicion.
The doctor moved on to the captain next.
"Is it really necessary? I feel fine."
"It is, sir. Forestalling, interception, prohibition, prevention is better than a cure. This will minimize any deterioration in your performance."
The captain gave a little huff and folded his own sleeve back. Yas wondered if his easy-going nature was inherent or was something that Freya's spell was doing to him. Already it seemed hard to believe that he hadn't yet known these people for a week. There was nothing like being thrown into a whole new world to make the clan draw together.
Once the captain had been injected with the doctor’s 'vitamin supplement' - in reality the antidote to whatever hormonal bio-weapon Freya was using to maintain the loyalty of her people - the rest of the crew submitted to the same treatment without complaint. As Keva got her dose and then disappeared out to the engine room, Yas exchanged a delighted grin with the doctor. That had gone much easier than he had feared.
"If this works," he whispered, as the doctor passed him on the way back toward the infirmary. “I’m going to call you He Wakes Them Up. Can you live with that?”
“It is extensive, long,” the doctor mused, flashing up a smiley face emoji. “But ‘Wakes’ I like. Doctor Wakes. Thank you.”
“No, thank you! How long until it shows?”
"It depends very much on the individual constitution, framework, metabolism," Dr. Wakes intoned. "But hopefully within the hour. I have asked Desultory to help me in the infirmary until then, so you may have to ask Ambassador Sasara to operate comms."
Sasara paused with her hand on the rim of the bridge door. She had been on the way back to her room. A look of surprise and indignation passed vanishingly quickly over the captain's face. That had not been the doctor's call to make. But he narrowed his eyes at the ambassador nevertheless. "Can you?"
"I can." She dropped into the station. At that moment, a sucking, wrenching sensation shot through every cell in Yas's body. Raggy groaned and the walls seemed to chatter as if a thousand little mice were scrabbling there.
Then the momentary weirdness was gone.
The lights on the hangar wall turned from an icy blue to a fiery amber. At the same time, the sheet of sparkling gold that seemed to be closing off the end of the hangar thinned to a spiders-web of silvery strands, keeping the air in, but permeable to the larger, slower moving molecules of the spaceship. Recognizing the signal to launch, Lt. Vasto fired up the engines and edged them carefully out.
When they touched the void Yas took an involuntary deep breath. God, it was nice to be out of the chariot. It felt more like a trap the longer he stayed.
"Um," said Lt. Zardari on navigation. "Ergh... we're no longer above the gate planet. We, uh..." They shook their head helplessly. "We are right across the other side of the galaxy, just coming into the Ahoa Nda'iilniih system. That's their star right up ahead."
Ahoa Nda'iilniih was the confederation of planets to which Nahasdzáán belonged. Yas could have told them that it was not, in fact just one system, but this and the two nearest stars with each of their satellites and space stations. It was also the name of the trading city on the seventh planet. About a century ago, there had been border skirmishes between the systems, and a seething of smuggling and piracy. The city of Ahoa Nda'iilniih had been built as a no-man's land in the center of it all, a free trade city where everyone was welcome, where negotiations could be held and where, about fifty years later, the peace treaty had been signed.
The sight of it never ceased to take Yas's breath away, both for the history and for the sheer spectacle.
The star was an A class star, and burned with a silvery-blue light that he always associated with springtime. The seventh planet—Chindi—was a gas giant, blue-green as water, with a single silver ring of pure water ice. A much larger ring of dust and diamond swirled between Chindi and Nahasdzáán. From the perspective of these outer planets it was a moving shadow between them and the star. But from Nahasdzáán it could be seen in the night sky as a distant opal dragon, and it was said that the souls of those who died in space settled there, drawn by its ever changing beauty.
For a moment it seemed as peaceful as it always had. A trading freighter was just breaching the atmosphere of Chindi in a roiling of clouds and flame, as two smaller craft waited their turns to set
down. The city itself, huge as it was, was visible beneath the sapphire clouds as a smudge of light on the planet's dark face as Raggy moved into its shadow.
"I don't see any--" Yas began when suddenly they were there - the same arrowhead shaped ships they had watched torch the gate outpost. They had looked small, before, but here at a closer distance it was much more apparent that they too could have swallowed the Raggy whole.
Zardari flicked the cover off the cannons' fire controls.
The Dark alfr' ships were moving fast. Vasto took the engines up to max and Yas lost himself in the moment, peripherally aware of firing solutions scrolling up Zardari's screen beside him, of the curves and calculations of Vasto's intercept course. The thunder of the engines beat like a heartbeat in counterpoint to the whistles and pops of Sasara trying to hone in to the dark alfr communications frequencies, to hear what they intended to do.
As their course intercepted the planet, that became very clear. The five ships came into formation as they had above the outpost. That eerie beam of destruction lanced out, striking into the clouds of the gas giant and setting them on fire. Yas yelped involuntarily and at the captain's raised eyebrow explained.
"Ahoa Nda'iilniih is domed, sir. And the atmosphere's toxic. If they puncture the domes—"
"Everyone in the city will die?"
"Yes sir." And then they'll move on to my home.
"We'd better not let them, then. Are we in firing distance?"
"Yes sir," Zardari crouched over their screens like a cat. "Barely, but yeah, I can get them."
"Fire at will."
Both of Raggy's cannons coughed at once, sending packets of plasma into the knot of alfr ships. The armament spattered and dispersed on their glossy black sides, but the ships’ firing formation was blown out of sync and the beam flicked out. They began to turn to face Raggy as she thundered toward them at top speed, the inertial dampeners sparking as they tried to stop the crew from being squashed flat. Sparks spiraled like sycamore seeds as Yas used his point defense field to clear Raggy's path of debris.
"Straight through the middle of them, firing all the way," Vasto laughed.
"As you say, lieutenant."
As they approached, Yas saw with horror that the alfr ships were drawing together, trying to bring their beam to bear on Raggy. But the old girl was fast. She blew right through the center of the formation and Zardari's guns painted them red with flame.
And then a rail gun started up from the lead ship and shots smashed into the Raggy's portside engine. It blew up, sending the tail of the ship spiraling out. The very edge of the planet's atmosphere caught them and when Vasto tried to compensate a second engine died. There was a moment of suspension when they were finely balanced between gravity and their own velocity, and then, inevitably, the ship began to fall.
The whipping of the thin outer atmosphere of the gas giant sounded like phantoms screaming against the hull. Inside, Keva could be heard screaming in the engine room, though the screaming consisted of profanities punctuated by the clanging of spanners.
"She might be able to get the second engine back up," Sasara interpreted the yelling, "but the first is gone, sir. Give her five minutes, she says."
They didn't have five minutes. Already the thin shriek of winds had become a howl, and every part of Raggy was shuddering as the ungainly craft picked up speed, plummeting toward a high speed crash at the bottom of the gravity well.
Yas clung on to his seat and sent a prayer up to the real holy people of the void. And suddenly there came a jerk and a snap. The ship lurched and then stabilized.
"Did she do it?" Harcrow demanded. "What's going on?"
Yas bent to his sensors and had to laugh. Ironic. His prayer had been answered by Freya's mounted troops. Over a thousand of them had come close enough to grapple Raggy with magnetic lines, and they were descending with her, slowing her fall to something she would survive. "It's the valkyries," he said, cringing at the sentence as it came out of his mouth. "They're giving us an assist."
It was an astonishing spectacle, as the golden horses came pouring into the sky, their riders seeming to glow against the swirl of indigo clouds and flames. He could see why more primitive humans would have though of them as supernatural, angel-like, awe inspiring. Then the ground loomed up toward him, scoured gray rock blotched by sulfur-eating lichens.
"Hold on tight!"
They hit with a jolt, rolled and were down, unharmed. "Huh," Yas said, and started to laugh, the others joining in in relief. "Okay, I'll hand it to Freya. That was pretty sweet."
Harcrow frowned, as though he had forgotten something important, and Yas almost cheered again. That was definitely not as infatuated as the guy had been this morning.
Yas checked his readouts. "We're airtight. We're okay."
Through the starboard view-screen the air looked like an underwater sea, but the outskirts of the city could be seen, curving up in elegant reinforced glass domes, inside of which were shops and streets, planters and avenues of trees. In the center, even skyscrapers. The light was homely and human, and it shone cheerily on the black underside of one of the dark alf spaceships, which lowered through the boiling clouds to rest on top of it, the size of a city itself.
"Got you!" Sasara exclaimed suddenly, and the bridge was flooded with the sound of communications. Voices on the NXA channel were demanding reassurances from Captain Harcrow. Inside the city a public announcement was blaring out details of emergency shelters, departure points for the evacuation shuttles. Already small spaceships had begun taking off in panic. Flashes in the clouds above suggested that the other four elvish ships were picking them off with their beam weapons.
Now the airlocks were opening on the closer ship and an army was pouring out. They wore no suits, nor was there the tell-tale glister about them that said they carried a forcefield full of air. They were every nightmare tale Yas had ever heard come to life—owl women and skinwalkers, ghost witches and horned serpents. Creatures with long stretched muzzles full of teeth and human-like bodies, floating heads, antlered skeletal things that must have come from cannibals. He thought he was having a psychotic break for a moment, but looking around at the crew's faces, they could see them too.
The monsters scratched and scratched at the domed city and the glass began to crack.
Sasara's blended comms carried their voices, whispering and scraping pulsing in and out, as ugly as their forms. She straightened her shoulders, blew out a breath in readiness.
"Anything that can speak can be negotiated with," she said, and called up the dark alf ship.
The view screen showed their bridge as a seethe of shadow without form, flickering in and out of existence in a way that hurt Yas's head.
"I am Ambassador Quill Sasara. I wish to speak to Kelkalyn son of Kruin on behalf of..." she stumbled, looking at Yas with confusion.
"The NXA," he whispered.
Her face cleared. "On behalf of the Native Xeno Alliance, the ruling body of this galaxy. We are not your enemy. We believe in the rights of all species to govern themselves and to co-exist in peace. There is no need to attack us."
A pair of golden eyes opened in the darkness of the alfr' bridge. Kelkalyn stepped out of the chaos incarnate like a black cat coming in from the night. He had something of a cat's smug superiority about him too as he tilted his head to one side and studied Sasara with sudden interest. She lowered her hood to display her long black dreads and the indigo and gold tattoos on her dark face.
"A human the same color as us," Kelkalyn laughed. "Aren't you a delight. But perhaps you'd like to tell me why you shot at us, if you're not my enemy?"
"You were going to destroy this city. We had to stop you. Whatever it is that you need or want, we can find some other way to give you. You don't have to—"
"What I want," he sneered, "Is to kill every last human this galaxy contains. I want to wipe you out. I want the stain of your presence to be sponged from the face of the universe. Can you find another way to
give me that?"
A crack and shattering noise came from the city. The monsters had clawed their way in. Fog fumed around the intersection of the two atmospheres as the high pressure toxic winds of the gas giant tore through the breach, flinging massive shards of glass into the crowds. The dark alfr tore in with them, a flying storm of teeth.
"Don't. Don't do this," Sasara begged. "We should talk. You can tell me why you want this. What we can do to set things right. Don't hurt anyone else."
Yas switched the sensors off because he couldn't bear to watch what he was seeing.
"Send the visuals to my station, Mr. Sundeen. The people at home need to see this," said the captain, and bent to watch the carnage privately... if anything he did could be private with half the galaxy watching along with him.
Kelkalyn laughed again. "Perhaps we can talk," he offered. "Yes, why not." He turned to something off-screen and said, "Bring them on board. You can put them in the skull pile until it fills up a little more."
His grin transformed the handsome face into something feral - his teeth too long, too pointed and copper-red. "See you soon."
The comm line snapped shut and still both poison and monsters streamed into the city. Then a quake as a tractor beam got hold of the ship and pulled it slowly into the belly of the dark alf ship.
"Keva has the engine fixed now, sir," Vasto said, ready to fly. "We can--"
"No." Harcrow swallowed, wiping a sweat of nausea from his forehead. As if admitting defeat he too closed the feed from the city. "It worked with the giant, why not here too?"
"Sorry?"
"Let them take the ship in. Then I want you and Keva to breach the antimatter containment bottle and blow us to kingdom come, inside Kelkalyn's ship. We can't make those people alive again, but we can take out the alfr's leader and their capital ship in one blow. Show 'em the humanity they left behind is nothing like the one they've come back to. Show 'em we've got teeth too."
