Why are you here? the other mind asked. Its voice was an elegant dagger backed by the strength of worlds.
I have to know what you are.
So be it.
The empty space around him gave way to a rapid strobe of memories and impressions. There was the warm flesh of Nemesis like a womb, and a song that touched the ears of their kind like a lullaby. He saw vast pits in which the hordes battled each other through a single endless day, and he felt the narcotic rush of victory that accompanied the long overdue night. Then finally Jack saw the the prince retreating in disgrace, accompanied by a mutant legion who marched to his hymn alone.
The link dissolved and Jack was still in that awkward instant between crouching and standing, as if time had been frozen the whole time. He stood up and stepped back from the Nefrem prince, who now gave him a wide birth.
"I truly don't know what you are," the prince said. "Your very existence confounds me, and I am compelled to understand you. I wish... I wish to see what you will become."
This Nefrem understood the concept of preservation.
Jack ducked his head. "And what of these organisms?" The translation of the last word wasn't so technical, and it left a foul taste in his mouth. It carried a strong implication of food.
"Killing them gains me little but available biomass, and there's plenty enough on this world without them... but it isn't up to me. Your kinsmen believe themselves victims and they will not rest until they see the crime avenged. As long as they're my allies, I will assist them with enthusiasm."
Jack had been on the receiving end of that enthusiasm, and he had trouble thinking of what it couldn't accomplish. Something so simple and savage as vendetta was the low-hanging fruit.
"Then you'll have to kill me," Jack said, while Hush squealed impudently in his ear.
Flashes of light struck the Nefrem prince, cutting deep holes in his flesh. He stumbled backward, tripped and fell with his face plastered in shock, dismay, and just the faintest hint of fear.
Jack turned and watched Kai stride toward them. The alien's shape was slightly different, as if the skin beneath his uniform had been hardened into curved plates. His eyes were locked on the Nefrem prince, and he held his blocky pistol out in front of him.
The prince spat blood on the ground. It attempted to stand and another bullet stabbed through it like a sharpened bolt of light.
Before Kai could fire again, the prince rolled out of the way and sprang into the air, bounced off a nearby wall, and launched toward distant cover.
Kai kept eyes on the Nefrem and cautiously walked over to Jack. "Nefrem prince," he said. "I hate these damned things."
"You've faced one before?"
"I've faced this one before."
And he'd somehow survived the encounter. It wasn't the right time for Jack to be this completely confused. "I have to get down below," he said. "Do you think we can take him?"
The skin of Kai's uniform became a watercolor painting of the world around him, and his every motion made Jack's eyes twitch uncomfortably as they fought to gain purchase in the image.
Kai said, "I'll face him alone."
Before Jack could disagree, the nearly invisible assassin charged off into the fray, and there was no choice but to trust him.
In another moment, Jack sprinted off to the city's edge. It approached more quickly than he would've cared for, then he launched himself off and cut down through frigid air into the waiting thunder below.
Chapter 50
Earthbound Piston
Jack shot out of the heavens like a divine spear. His target was only a few kilometers down... and he couldn't believe he was thinking in those kinds of terms already.
The peculiar new addition to his vision caught glimpses of things thrusting, spinning, and exploding in the snow that churned all around him. The rings of Nefrem craft stuck out in particular, forming patterns in the sky like a murderous and constantly changing mandala. They clashed mainly with the Legacy gunships, whose burning lances were actually powerful enough to do them harm.
One of the thrusting, spinning things took an interest in Jack and charged toward him, and the only option he had at that speed was to take the hit. Black armor knocked him sideways, held aloft on dark wings that spat out blue flames.
Jack caught a look and realized it was Smokey, back with a replacement arm and a variety of other new components. There was no escaping the robotic bear's grip, and together they streaked through the thrashing storm toward a wide and undulating Nefrem vehicle.
The enemy's shoulder crushed Jack down and they broke through the vessel's hull, both pummeled as they went by the same bones and dense organs. Then they exploded into an open chamber and shot down at the floor, chased by shredded biotechnological gore.
The room was filled with Nefrem infantry waiting to do battle on the ground. The smaller ones were men with bodies twisted into hateful weapons, and towering above them were mechanized monsters standing fifteen-meters high, shaped as if by some gruesome glandular disorder.
With no regard for their own safety, the Nefrem troops turned on the two invaders and opened fire. Explosions sounded everywhere, a fast drum that burst living bodies apart with its morbid beat.
Jack narrowly avoided the brunt of it by lurching into motion at the last instant, and he continued out running along the walls. Fire chased him all the way, snapping at his heels like firecrackers, until he dove back into the crowd and engaged them.
The next part came naturally even though his memories were several million years old and tattered like old cloth. The Nefrem hadn't changed that much, and the billion Eireki recollections of fighting the horde resonated inside him, guiding his body as he slid between them, wrenched them apart, crushed their brain cases.
One after another, the Nefrem fell and fell while Jack danced among them, striking and fading, leaping from danger only to dive back into the hairball. He launched backward off one creature's face, gripped the next one's neck as he landed and snapped it in half, then flung the remains through another on the charge, and finally launched himself like a javelin through a giant's chest.
As he landed, he snapped back around to survey the room. He found only the mass of the fallen and his black opponent standing in a pile of them. It looked as if the Nefrem/Union alliance might be suffering a few technical glitches.
Smokey stood still and regarded him, and Jack capitalized on the opportunity. He drove his fist through the floor and dove out through the gaping wound.
Judging by the scream of jet thrusters that erupted behind him, Smokey was still hot on his trail.
Jack needed to make himself harder to follow. He spun and angled to the side, flexing himself like a wing against the wind to change direction. He zeroed in on a New Union fighter, punched through its wing and caught hold of the other side, sending the craft into an uncontrolled spin that left a spiral of black smoke behind it.
He put his feet under him and launched off in a new direction while Smokey kicked hard and blasted his jets hotter to keep up.
Jack's flat trajectory took him over one of the Legacy gunships and he slid to a stop on its smooth hull, turning at the same time to watch his enemy approach. He slapped both hands down and the link sparked immediately to life, allowing his spirit to grasp hold of the gunship's forward turret. He brought its cluster of barrels around and energy surged out from his hollow-drive at the same time, flowing through the ship's artificial nervous system, and finally spitting out beams of accelerated particles so bright they seemed to darken the air around them.
Smokey wheeled in the air but couldn't avoid the blast. Chunks of mechanized man flew off, melting and disintegrating in the debris-choked air, and he twisted inside the blinding flames. In another instant, he tore his airframe free and threw the mangled mess straight through the gunship's cockpit.
Jack couldn't react in time. He felt the machine wail and die through the link, then it listed to the side and began to drop toward the still distant ground.
Sm
okey's smaller jets blasted and he latched onto a cuttlefish zooming by. His black hands tore chunks of flesh free as he clambered across its surface, and the Yuon Kwon tried in vain to shake him loose. Jack simultaneously rounded on him. From their respective airborne perches, they each sprinted forward and leapt out into the storm.
Jack and Smokey struck with a thunderclap so fierce it caused fighters in the nearby air to wobble and tumble. Together, the two newtypes dropped toward the Earth like a cannonball.
They scrabbled for dominance while trading vicious blows to the head, joints, ribs. The air around them filled with shards of black ceramic and multi-colored Eireki tile. Arm-bars turned to reversals, followed by a mutual lock that wouldn't be undone.
Smokey's droning mechanical voice growled, causing his entire metal frame to shake. Jack simply concentrated. He felt the Earth's gravity like an overwhelming force, a tide that never rested, never faltered. His hollow-drive sang out and the two wells resonated with each other.
His acceleration increased.
"How?" Smokey howled as his thrusters impotently whined against the crushing weight.
Light twisted in a bubble around them like decorative blown glass. It swirled with ethereal light in a hundred shades of white, while the ground quickly approached.
Jack readied his red hand, aimed at the bright source of energy in Smokey's torso, and then he thrust. His entire body projected out and through the strike as the Earth rushed up to meet them.
Impact.
A hollow bubble of air popped with a sound like a giant rubber band being strummed.
Jack stood up, stumbled to the side a few steps and looked down at the impaled machine at his feet... at the hundred-meter crater that surrounded them... at the spray of broken components that littered the otherwise pristine white snow beyond.
And still Smokey wasn't dead.
Parts of its face hung limply to the side, revealing wires and shorn circuit boards. Its arms and legs were gone, crumbled and torn to bits. The skeletal stub of one leg moved in mindless circles.
It croaked, "Finish it, alien."
Jack opened his facemask.
There was a pregnant second before Smokey said, "Human? Human? Howwww... can you... fucking... hate your own kind... this much?"
Jack felt his hackles rise, but he didn't answer. He didn't say a word. Nor did he reach inside and crush the small mass of living tissue inside of Smokey's shell, kept alive by a set of backup batteries and emergency systems. Instead, he simply turned and walked off toward the shadow of Donovan waiting a kilometer in the distance.
Chapter 51
An Imperfect Heart
The blizzard had become monstrous, fed in part by the terrible heat and chaos of the battle, but also by the motion of vast starships as large as cities. It swelled to hurricane-like proportions with its eye focused on the depression where Amiasha had rested, as well as the lake of biological sludge situated nearby.
Jack sprinted through shifting dunes made of fresh powder, pelted all the way by hailstones the size of coins and golfballs. A Nefrem ground battalion sprawled over the land ahead of him and they moved together like a millipede, pushing on toward Donovan with hunger and hatred.
They weren't just coordinated but unified, both driven and directed by the will of a single intelligence... that intelligence would have been Nemesis if she were in the picture, but Jack realized that the Nefrem prince must have been guiding his troops all along. The creature had kept control of them while he fought Jack, and even now while he was (hopefully still) fighting Kai.
Those troops suddenly came under attack by some other force. A golden stiletto shot up into the air and stabbed back down, sending twisted troops tumbling like bowling pins. They patched the gap without hesitation, and continued on to the savage howling of their biorifles.
Jack finally got a good look at their assailant and it was Sal; he immediately started to wonder just how many of those suits she kept in her closet.
She leaped, dodged, and then began to run across the land with the strangest, most elegant gait Jack had ever seen. She took impossibly long strides, and seemed almost to glide over the ground in a way that looked unreal.
Unreality, he realized, was the new order of the world.
Jack embraced it. He dug his heels in and propelled himself out faster, then barreled directly into the Nefrem formation's unprotected back while Hush hissed and squealed with delight. They melted once again into the fight while the world around became eerily quiet, strikingly serene. Power thumped out of the hollow-drive in time with his strikes, lunges, and throws, driving Eireki hands which speared into hard and leathery bodies, then tore them apart like plastic bags.
The mindless drones reacted as a unit, regrouping around him in an effort to tease out his attacks, draw him into traps, but he knew their playbook. He knew how the bull charged, and he knew when to step aside. But even as he shredded through them, he could see untold numbers stretching out beyond. There would always be more no matter how quickly he ground them down.
As attractive as that proposition sounded to both Jack and Hush, his only mission was to get through. Donovan was the priority, and so Jack began to traverse the field in great leaping bounds. He grabbed another of the demons and flung it back at the ground each time he landed, sending waves of chaos throughout their ordered formation.
When Jack came to one one of the monsters that stood three to four times the height of its brethren, he made fast work of it. He was already punching as he landed on its back, then his fist drove through the skin, grabbed a length of spinal column and pulled it free like the root of an unwanted tree.
The monster fell down and crushed some of its compatriots while Jack pressed on.
He came finally to the front edge of the formation where the rifle fire was its most thunderous, and there he dropped his shoulder and charged through. The broken monsters scattered at the strike, and yet they kept firing as they died.
Jack made it past the Legacy Fleet's line in another second flat, a defensive perimeter made of hexagonal drop-forts manned by soldiers in dark-blue armors, and guarded overhead by a hovering vanguard of similarly colored gunships. The troops on that line worked like firefighters, constantly pushing back against a raging blaze whose hunger would not be turned away.
Just when Jack thought he'd have a single second to breathe (or whatever his new body did), a golden stiletto tackled him to the ground and pinned him there. Her gauntlets were clasped together and aimed directly at his face.
Having seen what Sal's weapon did to the Nefrem prince, Jack was pretty certain it'd kill him outright, and he didn't feel particularly excited about testing it. "What's going on, Sal?"
"I know," was all she said. Her hands didn't move.
"It wasn't me," he lied. "I wasn't in control. It was some kind of emergency routine or something. I don't really understand it."
Her mask was like a golden mirror, and he couldn't make out much inside besides an intensity that made her many biomechanical implants glow.
"I'm here to help," he said. "I've got a hollow-drive, remember? We can get him off the ground."
Sal relented. "Of course you wouldn't..." Her voice trailed off mid-way. In another moment, she stood and offered him a hand up. "You understand," she said.
"Perfectly," Jack replied. "Now... uh, I need you to take me to his powerplant."
Her helmeted head stared at him blankly for a few seconds, then she waved him on toward Donovan's nearest iris.
Donovan allowed them in through inside without any fuss. Jack assumed that the vessel was in too much pain to think clearly about who or what was coming in, as long as it was human. Otherwise, internal defenses probably have already fried Jack to a crisp.
From there, he and Sal rushed through Donovan's internal tubes and quickly came to the hollow-drive chamber. Its protective wall was open, freeing the various researchers and engineers to rush in and out as the situation required. The drive's cage had been cut
open to allow easier access, and the device inside bled light through a spidery crack in its casing.
It was a wound that Jack himself had inflicted, and the memory nearly buried him in a rockslide of self-hatred.
And he wasn't alone in hating himself. Everyone in the chamber stopped what they were doing to watch him approach, with fear and bitter reproach twisting their faces.
"It's okay," Sal shouted. "He's here to help."
Her words did little to change anyone's mind, and Jack couldn't blame them. But he didn't have any other choice right at that moment.
As he neared the massive hollow-drive, he began to see a subtle glow around it hanging like a film in the air, which he doubted anyone else could perceive. Its shape was sharp edged and angular like a diagram from a baffling geometry quiz. He had a distinct feeling he was looking directly at the impression the device left on the ambient gravitation, and the thought nearly mesmerized him.
From that point on, as the terrified and overworked staff turned and fled, Jack moved on instinct guided by the living device embedded in his own chest. He climbed up into a large brace designed to hold seven giant hollow-drives, and he stood where the last should connect. Then he reached up on his tippy-toes, took hold of the connector above his head, and established the link.
Liquid fire burned across his body and filled him with its benefaction. He felt loneliness, fear and a stabbing pain on the approaching wave, and he braced himself. Then in the ancient manner of all Eireki and their noble starships, Jack Hernandez and Marcus Donovan were one.
One was forthright and driven while the other was mindful and devious. Memories drifted across the crumbling line between them like swirling currents between two colliding seas, and they both instantly understood. Despite their sins, each recognized the agony of sacrifice in the other, and that bond was enough to unify them.
Their hollow-drives sang out to one another, focusing the effects of one through the other like lenses arrayed in series, and unexpected power filled the starship's weakened flesh.
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