The initiates recovered from their surprise and started to surround me. I activated my new sword’s Shroud rune, and then I vanished before their eyes. They glanced around in confusion while I circled behind them. I returned my falchion to my prot-belt and took a Knife of the Storm in each hand. I had a second until I would become visible again, so I moved fast. An initiate dropped after I buried a knife in the nape of his neck, and I jumped back to avoid the swipes of the initiates estimating my location. In the last millisecond before my position would become known to the enemy, I stabbed two knives into an initiate’s kidneys, and she screamed before toppling from the weapon’s paralyzing rune effect.
My form shimmered, and the invisibility wore off completely. There were still seven initiates remaining, and I had already used the element of surprise to my advantage. I could hear Olav laughing as he continued taunting the three Star Spears, and I glanced to see him sever a man’s limb and then sink his hatchet into another’s skull.
The berserker was butchering the more dangerous enemies with ease, so I needed to do my part. Even if I was alone against a squad of the Dax equivalent of squires.
Well, not completely alone.
I activated my Shadow Self rune, and two doppelgangers appeared in front of me. I reached for my lighting hammer again, struck the ground, and summoned another Lightning Sprite to harry the enemy.
I exchanged my hammer for my longsword and scuttled back four meters while the initiates busied themselves with slaughtering my sprite and attacking my doppelgangers. The soldiers laughed at me as though I was retreating, and I prepared my longsword’s Forcewave rune. When the doppelgangers vanished, and the sprites were dead, the initiates charged after me. I sent a forcewave into their front line, and the energy field bowled three of the men over like pins in an alley. The attack missed the other six, and they screamed in defiance before sprinting toward me. I quickly swapped my longsword for my falchion and then reactivated my targe shield.
Too many swords came at me at once, and all my efforts were put into not getting cut down. My energy shield sparked like a fireworks show with each block, and painful shockwaves rippled up my right arm whenever my falchion parried. The initiates I’d hit with my forcewave had recovered, and they added their frenzied attacks.
“Need a hand, Lyons?” Olav screamed, and I looked over the initiates to see the three Star Spears lying dead in pools of their own blood.
The berserker’s jetpack activated, and he launched twenty feet into the air with twin tails of orange flames. He slammed into the middle of the initiates, and blood sprayed out from a man he crushed from the impact. When the others scattered, I rushed into the confused pack, and my blade found a home in an initiate’s heart. With the arrival of Olav, the initiates learned their Star Spears had fallen, and they scattered in all directions.
“Do you just charge into battle every time?” I asked the berserker as I slipped my falchion between an enemy’s ribs.
“Of course! You’re really getting to know me, Lyons. I’m not sure I like it.” Olav grunted and buried his hatchet in the middle of an initiate’s chest. The blow hadn’t quite penetrated the man’s armor, and the berserker grinned before the weapon suddenly ignited. The man with the axe in his chest screamed as rolling flames devoured him, and Olav skidded along the ground to retrieve the weapon.
“That’s five to me and six to you. Only five of these bastards remaining. Winner gets to finish the last of my ale,” Olav said as he tapped the water drum hanging from his belt.
He was treating this fight like a game, and all I could think about was how soon I was facing soldiers from other kingdoms. I always knew the day would come, but I thought I’d have a few years of battling Grendels before I ever spilled human blood. Now, it was only my second mission, and I’d already encountered and battled soldiers from three different kingdoms.
But these Dax weren’t Caledonian. Nor did they belong to the Triumvirate Kingdoms. They were enemies, and they would either kill me or I would kill them.
I much preferred the latter.
“Six to me!” Olav yelled after spilling an initiate’s entrails out of a gutted belly.
My heart stirred with excitement at Olav’s challenge, and I went to work beating him. I rushed to the nearest initiate, but the berserker took his head off before I could strike the man down.
“I’m at seven, Lyons!” Olav roared.
I crushed my sixth kill’s skull with my energy shield and then spun to kill a second man. My sword ate through his chest, but Olav sliced the man’s head off clean above the eyes.
“Who gets that one?” I asked.
“You can have it,” Olav said as he threw his axe at a fleeing initiate. The blade struck the center of the woman’s back, and she ran a few more steps before stumbling to her death. “But that one is mine. Eight kills to me, and only one enemy remaining.”
I searched for the last initiate and found him running toward a Dax ship. When I glanced at Olav, I saw him staring at the same enemy with glee. A quick flurry of my prot-belt keys triggered my speed sequence, and I sprinted toward the ship.
I heard a roaring sound behind me before Olav’s jetpack took him above me and onto the fleeing enemy. I cursed the fact that the berserker hadn’t taught me how to work the jetpack, and I fumbled with my prot-belt’s menu even as Olav sliced the man’s left hamstring. He went down with a terrified scream, and the berserker raised his axe to finish the enemy. I found the jetpack’s activation trigger, and then my body propelled upward while I shot into the air before landing a meter away from Olav.
“Wait!” I screamed.
The berserker paused. “You’re not going to trick me out of winning, Lyons.” He grabbed the man by the throat and held the axe’s blade beneath his jugular.
“We should ask him what they’re planning,” I said as I raised both hands.
Olav narrowed his eyes at me. “How do you know if he even speaks Caledonian?”
“Why don’t we find out before we kill him?” I tossed my sword onto the ground to show Olav I didn’t intend to take his kill.
“Alright,” the mohawked knight said as he stripped the man’s helmet and threw it aside. “Speak Caledonian if you can, you Dax fucker.”
“I can . . . speak your language,” the initiate said as crimson bubbled from his mouth. He smiled and then let out a wet laugh before coughing up more blood. “Sir Uram has been waiting a long time to gain control of an Ark. The Emperor sent him to Ecoma for that very purpose, now he has achieved it. Sir Uram will have plugged into the main system by now.”
“What do you mean ‘plugged in’?” I asked as I lifted the man’s chin to help him speak.
“He now owns this Ark, and soon the entire planet will be returned to the Dax. You should make yourself comfortable for when our fleet arrives.” The initiate cackled before opening his mouth to scream. “For the Emper--” His battle cry was cut short when Olav snapped his neck with a twist of his hands and threw him over the gangway.
The berserker turned to me after peering over the precipice to stare at the corpse’s descent to the bottom. “Now, we have to make a decision, Lyons. We can either leave this Ark to get reinforcements, or we can take it back by ourselves.”
“I know which one you’re going to choose, sir,” I said in resignation as I picked up my falchion and removed my three knives from the initiates’ corpses. There was no way Olav would leave this Ark when the Star Spear was still around.
“Of course you do. Like I said, you’re getting to know me. We can take this Star Spear. He’s only one man, and a fucking pathetic one at that. Although he can bake a good pie,” he added. “We’ll have the Ark under our control before the captain and Treyin get back. We just have to find the main system.”
“I didn’t like what that initiate said. Getting plugged into the main system sounds like Sir Uram might be able to control the Ark.”
“And a lot of good that’ll do him when my axes cut him into tiny pie
ces!” Olav juggled the weapon in his right hand when the gangway suddenly shifted beneath his feet. He stumbled, and the weapon clattered to the bone-grating.
The bulkheads were shifting inward, and intersecting catwalks above us screeched and buckled. The gangway lurched and trembled, and I grabbed onto the guardrail so I wouldn’t fall.
“Sounds like you’re right, Lyons.” Olav eyed the organic bulkheads as they expanded like cancerous growths. The ships anchored to the docking stations toppled before the Ark swallowed them like a rapidly growing tumor.
The organic walls bubbled and rippled like a primordial soup while blood oozed from tiny orifices and formed double-helices like DNA. Flesh molded over the helices to create giant limbs, and massive protrusions wriggled from the stumpy ends like fingers. The hands flexed as though they were alive, and I guessed Sir Uram was somehow responsible for this.
The entire Ark was alive, and I’d seen the hemomancy used to create the statues inside the Prime Minister’s level. Whatever power Sir Uram wielded by being plugged into the main system, it meant he could now manipulate the very matter of the Ark.
“I respect your authority, sir, but we can’t stay here!” I screamed at Olav before I leaped over a giant hand that swept down to grab me.
“Like hell we can’t!” Olav’s eyes blazed with ember flames as he chopped off all the fingers of a hand in one blow. An alien scream split the air around us, and the severed digits wriggled on the ground before liquefying into pools of blood.
“I will teleport you whether you choose to go or not,” I said. The berserker madness had taken Olav, and he wouldn’t be prepared to flee. I had heard about what happened when a berserker’s battle rage was awakened, so I knew he wasn’t going to leave unless I forced him.
“Are you threatening me, Lyons?” he asked.
“No, sir. I only want you to see that we can’t win against an entire behemoth hell-bent on killing us.”
Olav jumped over a swiping hand while evading its grasp. When I slashed the palm with my falchion, it recoiled as though in pain and a bloodcurdling scream erupted from its originating point in the bulkhead.
“I’ll be forever known as a coward for fleeing,” the berserker said as he dodged a second hand.
“We’re not fleeing. We’re regrouping. We’ll jump on one of those skiffs, meet up with the crew, and then come back here!” After I severed one of the limbs with a two-handed swing, I heard a muffled cry and glanced to see a giant hand grab Olav. It started retracting into the bulkhead and almost swallowed the berserker, but he burst free in an explosion of flesh chunks.
“Pick a skiff!” Olav screamed at me as he pulverized the next limb that came for him.
There weren’t any of the Ecomese skiffs left, and the only ships the living bulkheads hadn’t destroyed belonged to the Dax. I started sprinting toward one when a giant hand attempted to snatch me. I activated my jetpack, and my leap took me twenty feet into the air. I landed on a catwalk with a roll, but when I stood, a giant outstretched hand enveloped me. The fingers tightened around my body, and my armor protested under the pressure. I clenched my eyes shut from the pain, and I tried desperately to break free from the Ark’s grasp. A second longer, and I would be crushed like an old starship in a wrecking yard.
I forced my eyes open and stared at the Dax ship anchored to the gangway beneath me. Its sleek black lines filled my vision, and I imagined standing on its cargo ramp. A scream erupted from my mouth as the blood-hand constricted. My entire being trembled, and then I teleported.
The giant hand released me, and it dropped to the ground like a piece of raw meat. The limb’s connection with the bulkhead had been severed from my teleport, and it exploded like a bucket of blood after a second of wriggling. More wailing noises sounded, and I guessed I’d just caused the behemoth incredible pain.
I turned to see a dozen more blood-hands extended from the bulkheads and shot toward Olav, but the berserker triggered short bursts of his jetpack to leap over gangways and evade their giant fingers.
“Inside the ship!” he yelled.
I didn’t need any more goading, so I darted up the ramp and found the pilot’s seat. I heard a crashing sound, and then Olav rushed into the cockpit.
The berserker palmed my face and gave it a shove. “Move over. I know how to fly this thing, and you don’t.”
I slipped into the seat to the right, and Olav flicked a selection of switches on the panel in front of him. The ship suddenly rocked, and the fuselage’s metal panels squealed their complaints. Warning signals blared, and red lights flashed across the overhead. When the thrusters roared as they initiated, the warning signals silenced.
“Ha!” Olav laughed. “Those hands couldn’t take the thrusters’ heat.”
The ship tore free from the gangway and spun to face the closed eye that was our exit from the Den Ark.
Olav gestured at the control panel in front of me and then at the eye. “You’ll need to take that out so we can leave.”
I powered up the weapons system, and the plasma cannons armed themselves in a second. My hands gripped the yoke as the arming circle initialized and shifted it so the eye-exit was in my sights.
“Get ready to fire!” Olav yelled.
My thumb tickled the trigger, and then a blood-red object flashed in front of the screen. More of the red arms moved into view, and they formed a crisscrossing web obstructing our ship from our exit point.
“Shoot!” Olav shouted as he maneuvered the ship. I rocked back and forth in my seat while the vessel dipped below a gangway and then angled away from a giant hand.
Another arm moved to snatch the ship, and I shifted the arming circle so the center locked onto its wrist. My thumb pressed the firing button, and a ball of red-hot plasma seared a hole in the hand. The flesh melted away like sand in the wind, and I fired a second blast at another blood-limb.
We continued darting around the giant chamber while more hands reached out from the bulkheads to ensnare us. I fired dozens of plasma blasts, and each one severed a hand from its arm. More came for us, and the numbers seemed to increase like the heads of a hydra.
“This isn’t working!” Olav growled.
“I know!” I retorted as a warning blared on the weapons screen in front of me. I couldn’t understand the text, but I suspected my ammunition was running low. “The plasma cannons don’t have a lot of firepower left.”
“Alright. One last ditch effort for the eye. I’ll evade those damned hands. I want you to save everything you have left to blast a hole the fuck out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” I said as my eyebrows stitched together in concentration. My stomach jumped into my mouth when the ship angled downward and then jerked upright. Zac had piloted a smaller ship than this on Tachion, but Olav was a much better pilot. He handled the controls with the ease of a man who’d flown ships for many years, and I wondered what untold stories may lay hidden within the berserker’s past.
We confronted the eye, and a series of hands shot forward to obstruct our path. Olav took the ship through them, and they grasped futilely as though our vessel were made of smoke.
I locked the closed eye within my aiming circle and then fired. Plasma exploded from both cannons and stuck to the surface of the eye in flaming globes. While the flesh burned, I sent another series of cannon fire at the obstruction, and a hole formed.
“That’s our cue to leave!” Olav shouted as he increased the thrusters, and we shot through the hole like a bullet from a gun barrel.
I unbuckled myself from the chair and went to the rear view screen. The Den Ark floated among the storm clouds, a massive creature stripped from a nightmare. There weren’t any ships pursuing us from the many eyes, and I sighed in relief.
Then I remembered who I’d left behind on the Den Ark. Casey and the enchanters were all inside the Watchtower, repairing the runes. I knew I couldn’t go back for them now, and my heart stung as I thought about what Sir Uram might do to them. I prayed they would be saf
e as the Den Ark grew smaller in my view screen.
“Well, that was fun. You see why I wanted the jetpacks?” Olav grinned at me, and I gave him a nod. It would have helped if he’d told me how to use them beforehand, but I had plainly seen their effectiveness. Without them, we might not have evaded the giant arms.
“You fight well for a traitor,” the berserker said as he triggered the ship’s navigation system. “We’ll head to the nearest Ark. Should only be a six hour flight.”
“I’m not a traitor, sir. At least, I wasn’t intentionally one.”
“You’ve already tried to explain yourself,” he said. “I don’t want--”
“Sir!” I interrupted, and Olav frowned at me. He gave me a calculating gaze as I continued. “I thought the crew were insurrectionists plotting the downfall of Queen Catrina. I was gullible, and I too easily trusted Duke Barnes and Sorcerer Polgar.”
“How the hell did you trust them? Duke Barnes is a fool, and Polgar was clearly a bad guy. I hadn’t met him until he captured me, but I knew he was evil from one glance at him. The old sorcerer looks like a villain from a children’s Cube show.”
“I wanted so desperately to serve on an RTF starship,” I said. “I let my ambition cloud my judgment.”
Olav’s jaw tightened and he turned away from me to face the front view screen. I couldn’t determine whether I’d just made the berserker ten times angrier, or whether he was chewing on my words. A few minutes passed while the sweat on my palms made my fluid extraction systems work overtime. Then the silence ended when the other man finally sighed.
“I’ve been there before, Squire.” It was the first time I could recall Olav calling me squire since he had learned of my treachery. “We’ll grab the crew, go back to the Ark, kill the Star Spear, then maybe I’ll decide whether or not to still hate you.” He gave me a smile, and I felt my heart stir.
My happiness didn’t last long because a warning siren sounded from the overhead. “I think we have a problem, sir,” I said.
Space Knight Book 2 Page 27
