by Richard Fox
She kicked with her left foot — gauging and controlling the distance — then thrust as hard as she could with her right. She twisted and dropped free. A moment later she rolled sideways to create sufficient space and use her swords. The flurry was less than her best, but more than sufficient against a single adversary.
She thrust straight at its throat with the sword in her left hand and slashed upward with the sword in her right a second later.
Teeth snapped at her face, chopping away part of her left cheek. “Curse you!” For a moment, she’d thought her eye was gone with the flesh on her cheek. “Demeter! I need help.”
Two of the Astral deca-ped creatures dropped from a melting ceiling and rushed forward.
Pyr retreated, hacking off Astral limbs one by one as the first of them screamed heat in her face.
Faster than before, she sprinted in reverse, tripped, fell, rolled to her feet. Her blades slashed with little conscious effort. Survival ruled her universe.
Two hallway junctions later, she paused to see a trail of dead Astrals, most of them dismembered. Unreal bodies and limbs twisted until they melted through the floor.
A young voice spoke softly yet urgently in Pyr’s ear. “I am on my way. I had to leave Demeter’s influence. She isn’t bad for an AI, but has to fight a lot of hardware and old programming.”
“Not going to lie,” Pyr said, pain clenching the end of each word.
“About what?” Eva’s voice asked.
“That’s I’m glad you’re coming. I can’t do this anymore,” Pyr said, realizing the words didn’t fit her situation exactly, but probably meant a lot more than she intended to say.
The girl arrived at the exact moment Pyr defeated a third, or perhaps fourth, assault on her position. The Astral shock troops came in many shapes and sizes and seemed never-ending. Pyr watched the girl who was probably the last of her race step over the carnage, intense concentration controlling her expression, but excitement and wonder in her diamond eyes.
Eva kicked aside a burning talon and knelt at Pyr’s side. “How can you stand the heat?”
“Help me up,” Pyr said. “We must move.”
“It took me a long time to reach you. The ship is accelerating toward the minimum safe distance for a displacement drive jump,” Eva said. “Do you think these monsters have killed my father by now?”
Pyr grimaced as she leaned on Eva to walk. “Only if he tried to protect the president. Relax, that was a poor jest. I know your father would not run away from duty. Look at you. Probably cut from the same cloth.”
Corridor after corridor revealed slaughtered Astrals and incinerated mortal soldiers. Pyr glanced at the girl, knowing she would fare no better in a hot fight. She didn’t even have armor.
“Did you kill all these creatures?” Eva said, eyes wide and breaths short.
“Most.”
“How can you fight so many soldiers? You’re just an assassin.”
“I am the Hand of Empyrean,” Pyr said.
“Still?”
“Always, I hope.”
Eva shifted her posture to better support Pyr’s weight. “I’m not sure you should hope for such a curse.”
“The curse is the only reason I am alive. I like you, Eva. I’m sorry it has to end like this for you and your father.”
“Don’t say that.”
“There is no escape, even if I reach the bridge before they burn every mortal on the ship to ash,” Pyr said.
Eva hesitated.
Pyr grunted, then growled against pain that traveled from the back of her knee to the back of her neck. “You were going to say something.”
Eva shook her head even as she spoke. “The president required my father to build an escape ship that can make a single displacement jump.”
“Then they might escape,” Pyr said.
Eva shook her head emphatically. “No, my father would never leave his team behind, nor would the captain leave his crew.”
“And the president?” Pyr asked.
“I don’t know the president. His people are supposed to die for him if needed, so I suspect he would leave them to escape Empyrean. It would be for the greater good,” Eva said.
“I doubt that.”
Eva looked around the corner, then leaned back. “The way is clear, Pyr. We’re going to make it. When I tell my father most of the crew is gone, he will use the escape ship.”
Pyr shook her head when the girl wasn’t looking. She gathered her resources, boosted healing to critical parts of her mortal form — the parts for fighting.
“We are getting close,” Eva said.
Pyr pushed aside the girl's arm. “I am feeling recovered. Go to your father. Use the ship, or don’t use the ship. I will stand here and buy time.”
Ignoring the girl and the ship and all the mortals who wailed in pain and anger beyond the damaged bridge door, Pyr called to Empyrean.
The God of Eternities, the god of sun gods as she preferred to call the aberration, said nothing.
“I do not want your gift. Let me die with what’s left of my people,” Pyr cried.
“Pyr,” said the eternal voice that had damned her so long ago. “My child, my deadly hand of death.”
Pyr could not respond. She stood ready with her swords as a new group of Astrals gathered in the hallway.
“You serve me now and forever, Pyr. There is no end. Come back to me now and I will spare the girl Eva. And perhaps her family.”
“The humans and their alliance?” Pyr asked.
“Do not speak of them,” Empyrean said, burning thoughts and emotions through Pyr’s mind. “Serve me, and I spare Eva.”
Pyr wept, then yelled her frustration. “That’s the same deal you offered me a thousand years ago.”
“It is.”
Pyr wept with her eyes open, chest rising and falling from the effort as she stared at five, then twenty, then fifty of the Astral shock troopers. Some appeared as humans in flaming armor. Others were insectoid and strange. The worst were clouds of gas or energy.
“I’ll take it,” Pyr said.
The God of Eternities, not her god but some other thing she hated with all her mind and heart, made no sound, and that was the greatest insult.
“Let me kill these things,” Pyr demanded.
No response. The entity she served burned with solar fusion, but was as cold as the void.
“Empyrean!” she screamed.
The first row of flaming creatures advanced, melting the corridor to slag. Ship atmosphere expanded explosively into space.
Pyr looked over her shoulder to be sure the blast door to the bridge was sealed.
“Empyrean! I demand more power. Let me kill these monstrosities. Every one of them has forsaken their own kind.”
“I will send them away,” Empyrean answered.
“No! I want to kill them. Give me this, you evil son of a bitch. They don’t matter to your existence. I don’t matter. None of us matter. You’re a billion years old. Let me kill them and die!” Pyr said.
“You may kill them,” Empyrean said. “But if you allow yourself to die I will make you regret it.”
Power like she had never known flooded into her physical and nonphysical being. Shooting forward like a comet, she slashed apart her foe one by one and ten by ten.
Some matched her fury and before long, she was tumbling through ship wreckage, looking for Astrals, seeking violence in the void.
Her right sword cut off the head of a space worm before it snapped her face off.
Her left sword blocked a meteor that would have knocked her into the planet.
She slammed into a fifteen meter thick support beam of the Impregnable. Pain shot through her head and she screamed a curse at Empyrean.
Fighting in space was difficult, but not a new experience to Pyr. She had the Gift of Empyrean. The power of her new bargain was too much. She would explode soon.
“Demeter!” she called into the blackness, unsure where her ship was in the deb
ris field.
“Yes, Pyr,” Demeter said.
“Where is Eva?”
“A portion of the Impregnable initiated a displacement drive jump,” Demeter said.
“Did you check for life signs?” Pyr asked.
“Well, shoot. Must have slipped my AI mind,” Demeter said.
“Pick me up. We need to have a talk,” Pyr said.
Silence. Pyr manipulated the energy around her to move clear of a large hunk of ship cartwheeling toward the planet behind her.
“There is too much debris,” Demeter said. “Can I meet you someplace?”
Pyr made her way to Astral’s Revenge, but paused to look at the scene. She’d seen worse, but never felt worse.
“I like Eva,” Demeter said. “She will be a good leader for her people.”
“What people?”
“You are such a pessimist, Pyr,” Demeter said. An airlock opened. “Can you put away some of that anger before you board? I would like to remain in one piece.”
Pyr vented the excess power that burned her body and her soul. The thick beam of multidimensional fusion arched into space like a solar flare.
“Welcome home, Pyr,” Demeter said when she drifted inside and closed the airlock. “Would you like to read the briefing for our next mission?”
Scott Moon Biography
Scott Moon started reading and writing science fiction and fantasy at an early age. He spent several summers of all night Advanced Dungeons and Dragons gaming before joining his first garage band and running off to Hollywood, CA to attend the Musician’s Institute. Always a dreamer, it was the writing muse that always screamed loudest.
Years later he is still writing, still dreaming, and connecting with authors and readers through the Keystroke Medium YouTube show and Podcast (www.keystrokemedium.com). Examples of his speculative fiction projects include The Chronicles of Kin Roland (military science fiction / adventure) and the Son of a Dragonslayer trilogy (urban fantasy / horror / adventure) available in different formats on Amazon and other fine distributors.
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Minimum Safe Distance
By Scott McGlasson
JoJo Watanabe’s EVA thruster suit hung motionless one hundred meters from No Logical Path’s aft airlock. She glanced at the heads-up display’s chrono as it ticked over from 2359:59 to midnight, and sighed. There had been a thin ribbon of hope that her teammates would surprise her with some last-minute gesture, but nope. The bastards had forgotten her birthday. Again.
She could forgive the scientists they were babysitting on this mission—she barely knew them, and vice-versa—but she had been with Sixten Bergman’s special operations team for nearly six years. When the jerks had missed her twenty-fifth birthday the previous year, JoJo had tried to remind them that she was a born-and-raised Trojan, that clancrews mining Jupiter’s L4 and L5 asteroid clouds tended to form strong interpersonal bonds. The effort apparently hadn’t made a dent. Typical Earthers. Self-absorbed and distant. There wasn’t much about humanity’s homeworld that JoJo liked.
Okay, she thought, Earth’s not a complete shithole. It’s got whales and baseball.
Like most outer-system natives, JoJo maintained a couple of Earth-centric interests. Most kept them secret, but every once in a while, JoJo would gather with a couple of like-minded friends behind a closed hatch to go over the latest box scores. Unfortunately for her pastime, the Path was geosync-parked over an Oort Cloud object sixty-five thousand astronomical units from Sol, so far from home that the word “sunlight” was a bad joke. Any major league updates, even if they were sent via high-powered maser, wouldn’t reach the Path’s comm array for another 318 days, and that assumed someone back home knew where to aim it in the first place. Sixten told them that only the CEO of Saint Clair-Galarza and a couple other board members knew where they actually were, that this entire op was suicide-before-discussing top-secret. Wormhole research was cutting-edge tech, and the higher-ups wanted to make sure SG stayed way out in front. The massive gravity waves involved would have been noticed straight away in-system, which was why they were out at the very edge of interstellar space, where temperatures never got above -269°C.
“Come on, JoJo,” Fazion Sedaris said over the proximity channel, his signal originating from the bright red and white maintenance pod holding station right next to her. “Just one game.”
JoJo groaned inwardly. Unfortunately for her, Fazion was not a typical Earther, where high population density tended to make people avoid speaking all the time. The kid just wouldn’t shut up unless it was to stop talking long enough to take another sip at his suit’s water tube. JoJo had put Fazion, too fat for a thruster suit, in the biggest spacesuit they had on board and shoved him into a pod that was just big enough. The red and white sphere kept rotating back and forth as he fidgeted endlessly with the controls. As a professional pilot, she winced at every clumsy overcorrection he made.
“Shouldn’t you be concentrating on this test we’re about to do?” she asked.
He laughed. “Most of my work was done back home. I’m only here if something goes wrong and they need to know why.”
“What can go wrong?”
“Nothing. Not only will this work, but both the math and the systems down on the surface are friggin’ ironclad. I don’t think even Doctor Bescond understands just how well-designed the emitters and the toroids are.”
“If you do say so yourself,” she said, to which he chuckled. Doctor Stephane Bescond, the science team leader on this op, had reassured the security team that Fazion’s lack of offworld experience was more than compensated for by his ability to work the complex math involved in punching a wormhole through space-time. Nobody on Sixten’s team had complained. If it did work, the bonus clauses written into their security contracts were quite generous.
“Well, I’m not much on video games, Fazion,” JoJo said. “The datalink from the Path down to the surface is up to its full operational bandwidth now.”
“So?” he asked.
Parked in a gyosync orbit, No Logical Path had been over six hundred meters long when they’d arrived.
Less a spacecraft than a cosmic freight train, she thought.
The self-landing modules contained everything from consumables to robots, fabricators, workshops, vehicles, generators and, of course, the many pieces of hardware that made up the wormhole generator. Now, two months after arrival, the base down on the dark surface of Erebos was fully established and the Path was less than half its original length, with just the reaction and FTL drives, the reactor, and a couple of crew modules left.
The planet was designated OCO (Oort Cloud Object) 2035SM117 by UEF cartographers. Sixten had dubbed it Erebos after they landed, describing the surface as darker than an overcast moonless night back on Earth. The rest of the crew agreed that it absolutely lived up to the mythological titan of darkness and shadows. At just under eleven thousand kilometers in diameter, Erebos was a tad smaller than Earth, but with a much higher than normal composition of iron and copper in its core, forming a relatively strong EM field and surface gravity that was four times standard. As the mission’s pilot, all JoJo cared about was that the higher gravity increased her parking orbit to fifty-nine thousand kilometers, quite a bit higher than the thirty-six thousand for a similar orbit above Earth. The immense gravity resulted in a low, undulating surface of asteroid and comet impacts, spider-webbed with extensive canyon systems that ran longer and deeper than Valles Marineris on Mars. The walls of those canyons were riddled with fractures resembling gigantic cave systems, and it was inside one of the smaller caverns that Sixten had put their base. After two months of construction, the full-bandwidth datanet link had been one of the more recent quality-of-life upgrades her teammates had installed. Like everything else on this mission, they had brought far more capability than they would likely need, and there was enough bandwidth to handle full broad-range VR simulations, including the god-awful tactical sims Fazion see
med to favor.
“So,” she said, “why don’t you play Ichabod or Harrison?”
Fazion rotated the pod so the main porthole pointed at her, his dark face illuminated by the control displays.
“Icky and Harry are okay, but I can beat them every single time,” he said. “Theorists make for horrible gamers. No situational awareness at all.”
In the light from JoJo’s suit, his cherubic smile gleamed white against dark brown skin. Fazion took another pull at the water tube.
“Play the AI, then.”
“Nah,” he said. “Addy only wants to play strategy games and I think he cheats, but I haven’t been able to catch him yet. Yet! Besides, you’re a pilot.”
“So?”
“So?” he exclaimed, rocking backward on his chair, causing the pod to wobble. “The whole hand-eye coordination and reflexes thing. The ability to make snap decisions and act on them without thinking. Just what I need backing me up as I breach some bad guy’s front door and rush in a-shootin’. Or better yet, that new Age of Sail sim Prem brought along. You’d think sailing ships and muzzle-loaded cannon would be boring when we can zip all over the sky now, but you’d be absolutely wrong!”
JoJo smiled in spite of herself. Fazion’s social skills were as inept as his skills at solving complicated physics problems were extraordinary, at least according to Doctor Bescond. He was the living, breathing stereotype of a hapless nerd. Utterly guileless and prone to naiveté, the “kid,” a twenty-six-year-old with two advanced doctorates, could simply wear anyone out with his enthusiasm.
“Okay,” she said grinning. “Maybe one game.”
“Great!” he said, taking another sip.
“You know, you should really lay off the water while we’re out here,” she said, rotating away from him until the center of her HUD lined up on the coordinate Ichabod had given them, and sighed, bored out of her mind. They were almost an hour overdue for the next great leap in human technology.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s wrong with water? I thought microgravity dehydrated the body.”
