Messenger

by James Walker

  “If I know the strings are there,” she whispered, then clenched her hand into a fist and turned her gaze up to the sky, the rain pouring down her face. “Then I just have to figure out how to cut them.”

  40

  As the enemy pilot had promised, the area behind her was clear of defenders. Vic reached the fence that surrounded the base, cut through it with his heat edge, and slipped inside. With the battle dissolving into chaos as each side's lines degenerated into a hundred indi­vidual skirmishes, the near-zero visibility, and the silence particles jamming all sensors, Vic's intrusion went unnoticed.

  After a couple minutes of searching, he found the aerospace hangar. To his surprise, he discovered another exosuit hidden around the back—a Mad Ox in repose position, its canopy hanging open and its cockpit empty.

  “Could that be Major Cutter?” he wondered.

  Briefly, he toyed with the notion of crashing into the hangar with his exosuit, but he realized that such a conspicuous act would bring the entire base down on his head; and besides, if the three-eyed girl was inside, he might hurt her accidentally. Instead, he knelt his exosuit, drew his sidearm, and disembarked. Then he rushed into the hangar, pistol at the ready.

  *

  Falsrain pulled Astral along behind him as he left the infirmary and headed for the aerospace hangar. Although Astral made no attempt at resistance, Falsrain kept a firm grip on her wrist. He could not afford any risk of losing the Messenger, not now that he finally had her in his grasp.

  Soon, they arrived at the hangar. The dropship sat in the middle of the cavernous chamber, its boarding ramp hanging open. Piles of crates and supplies ringed the hangar. Falsrain saw no sign of flight mechanics, which he thought odd, but that did not matter. He knew the dropship had enough fuel to return to the Onyx Down, and it was so heavily automated that he could launch it without assistance.

  He found a release lever on the wall and pulled it. In response, the hangar's arched roof groaned open, clearing the dropship's launch vector and allowing a torrent of rain to pour inside. Falsrain started making his way toward the boarding ramp.

  As they drew near the dropship, Astral, with surprising strength, pulled her wrist free of Falsrain's grasp and leapt back. Realizing what that meant, Falsrain jumped back with her just as explosives detonated on the dropship's airfoils, blasting them to pieces and sending shrapnel bouncing off the ground where he and Astral had just been standing.

  A tall figure emerged from behind a distant crate and aimed a pistol at Falsrain. In response, Falsrain raised his left arm just in time to deflect several bullets aimed at his chest. Astral leaned lazily to the side as one of the deflected bullets shot by her face, missing her by centimeters.

  Falsrain flung off his overcoat, revealing a miniature deflection shield strapped to his forearm, and drew an elaborate handle from his belt. With a flick of a switch, a rod of shimmering air emerged from the end of the handle, humming with deadly purpose. Falsrain sprinted across the hangar and took cover behind a metal crate as his opponent fired several more shots at him.

  A thrill of exaltation coursed through Falsrain's veins—exaltation at the sheer, towering irony of the coincidence. Or could it be fate? He did not believe in such absurd concepts, but where the Messenger was concerned, almost anything was possible.

  For he had recognized the face of the man who set the trap for him.

  “Imagine meeting you here, of all places,” he called, his voice echoing through the hangar above the patter of the rainfall. “Admiral Andre Maximillian, the Pirate Hunter, hero of T.U. Spacy. Or do they call you Cutter now? Pierson Cutter, hero of the rebel filth. Heroism certainly seems to come naturally to you, whatever side you're fighting for.”

  “It's been a long time, Falsrain,” Pierson called back. “A lot of things are starting to make sense now. I should have recognized your hand in the attack on Port Osgow. Even for Spacy, laying waste to a huge civilian space station is incredibly brutal.”

  Falsrain maneuvered through the maze of crates, trying to circle around Pierson and flank him. Astral was standing where Falsrain had left her, looking around at her surroundings with mild interest, apparently unconcerned by the smoldering dropship or the death match in progress.

  “I'm a little surprised you'd just leave your prize out in the open like that,” Pierson called. “What's to stop me from running out and grabbing her? Or what if she catches a stray bullet?”

  “Oh, don't you worry about that,” Falsrain replied, his voice rising with barely contained mirth. “If you really get it in your head to try anything, she'll know it. She might seem like a vegetable, but in her own way she has a better survival instinct than anyone.”

  Falsrain interpreted the silence that followed as Pierson trying to puzzle out his riddles, but then Pierson burst out from cover only a few meters away, his pistol blazing. Falsrain blocked the shots with his personal deflection shield and responded by swinging his shimmering blade. As he swung, the blade lengthened to cover the distance to Pierson, who leapt to cover just as the crate he had been hiding behind shattered. Falsrain ran around the crate's broken remains, covering himself with his shield and holding his resonance blade ready to strike, but Pierson had disappeared.

  *

  Vic entered the hangar to find a scene of chaos. The airfoils had been blasted off the dropship, the smoldering stubs billowing thin trails of smoke that were quickly dispersed by the rain. The sound of gunshots rang out from deeper in the hangar; then a deep thrum followed by wooden debris flying into the air from a cluster of crates. The three­-eyed girl stood in the middle of the hangar, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings.

  Vic ran for cover behind the nearest crate and peered around the corner. Apparently some kind of battle was in progress. The three-eyed girl was in danger. If he could rush out, grab her, and pull back to his exosuit—

  Just as he was about to leap out from behind the crate, a thump from behind made him jump. He spun around and saw Pierson crouching down next to him, holding a pistol.

  “Glad to see you, Vic.”

  “Major Cutter,” Vic hissed. “Perfect timing. Cover me while I go get the—”

  Pierson shook his head. “I think it's some kind of trap. I don't know why, but Falsrain is totally unconcerned about leaving her out in the open. That makes me nervous. He's the most devious man I've ever known.”

  “Who's Falsrain?” Vic demanded.

  “Well well, what have we here?” a disdainful voice called out from somewhere amidst the labyrinth of crates and supplies. “Has one of your new subordinates come to join you, Maximillian?”

  Vic looked at Pierson. “Who's Maximillian?”

  “Long story,” Pierson replied. “I'll tell you later. Right now, we need to take this guy out. He's got a personal deflector shield, which makes it hard. We'll split up and try to catch him in a crossfire. He can't block both sides at once.”

  Vic nodded and started to move when Pierson grabbed him by the shoulder. Vic cast an inquiring look back at his superior.

  “Be careful,” Pierson said, his voice urgent. “This man is extremely dangerous. Don't try to take him by yourself. Wait 'til we've both got a bead on him.”

  Vic nodded, then rushed out and took cover behind one of the dropship's landing struts. He peered out across the empty space in the mid­dle of the hangar and saw nothing but the three-eyed girl, who had begun to twirl a strand of wet hair around her finger. Vic changed position to a nearby pile of crates when the disdainful voice called out again.

  “I must say, though, this is quite a step down for you, Maximillian. You were the darling of High Command, all set to become the youngest officer ever to join the Defense Council. Then came the tragic news about your untimely traffic accident. Everyone in Command was quite devastated, but I guess now we know that was all a ruse, eh?”

  Vic froze. That voice—what had Pierson called him, Falsrain?—what was he saying? For that matter, why did Pierson know his name?

&nbs
p; “At least now I know why we had such a hard time crushing one pathetic rebel unit,” the voice continued. “You were the only commander who ever provided me a decent challenge at the war games. I wonder what your intrusive little subordinate thinks of this conversation? Must be rather shocking to learn that his beloved hero is responsible for crushing more rebel uprisings than every other Spacy commander in history.”

  Another series of gunshots rang out, then that vicious thrumming sound again. Vic ran out from behind his cover and saw Pierson and another man with long, pale hair fighting just behind the three-eyed girl. Before he could do anything, a shimmering blade in Falsrain's hand cut through Pierson, who fell to the ground in a shower of blood.

  “No!”

  Vic raised his gun and leveled it at Falsrain's back. Just as his finger tightened over the trigger, the three-eyed girl turned to look at him, the eye in her forehead growing scarlet, and his fingers slackened.

  It was happening again. That violating sensation, like an auditorium of voices whispering inside his brain, images flashing through his mind unbidden, his thoughts being smothered under the veil of another consciousness...

  The pistol fell from Vic's hand and he dropped to his hands and knees, gasping. He looked up at the scene unfolding before him, wanting to intervene, but the mental shock had left him too weak to do anything but watch.

  Falsrain stared at the three-eyed girl with something like adulation. He let his resonance sword, which deactivated as soon as it left his grip, fall to the ground and stumbled toward the girl. As she turned to look at him, he fell to his knees in front of her and gazed up at her worshipfully, his hands clasped together in supplication.

  “At last,” he gasped, “you reveal yourself. Your presence is overwhelming. You are such a higher life form than the miserable worms called humans that you can cow us with a mere glance. How I've longed to speak with you, the message in the bottle, the genie in the lamp, the Xenowave.”

  The three-eyed girl looked silently down at Falsrain. Vic could not be sure, but he thought he detected something resembling disgust in the set of her lips.

  “It was I who set you free,” Falsrain went on, tripping over his words in his enthusiasm. “Those fools in Command don't understand. They think only to harness the changes to the vessel. But I, I realize your true nature. I know what you really are.”

  He lunged forward and grabbed the fringe of the girl's raincoat, his expression glowing with fervor. “Please, I beg of you. Bestow upon me your blessing. Free me from this miserable existence. Make me your emissary. I swear, I will serve you faithfully in all things, whatever you may desire of me.”

  “No,” the girl said flatly, something not quite human tinging her voice. “I would never accept filth like you as my emissary. Release me, trash.”

  Falsrain's face froze. He turned still as a statue, still gripping the girl's raincoat. When she grabbed his wrists and pried his hands off of her, he fell backward and sat on the wet floor, as lifeless as a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  At that moment, the roar of powerful rockets filled the hangar. Vic looked up and saw an exosuit descend into the hangar, causing the ground to shake as it landed. The girl's gaze jerked up to observe this latest intruder, but Falsrain remained frozen on the ground.

  “The battle is turning against us,” Ridley's voice echoed through the exosuit's loudspeaker. “We need to hurry it up. Is that one of the enemy commanders? Perfect. Then let the execution commence.”

  Ridley drew his suit's giant blade and raised it to strike. Vic, finally recovered from the spell of the three-eyed girl's glare, scrambled to his feet and ran toward Ridley's suit, waving his hands.

  “No, don't,” he shouted. “That girl is—”

  Heedless of Vic's words, Ridley's sword came crashing down. Then his suit froze in place while the blade was a mere meter over Falsrain's and the girl's heads. His suit's arm trembled violently, then slowly began retreating.

  “What the hell?” Ridley's shocked voice echoed through the hangar. “Why won't the controls respond?”

  With one swift movement, the suit reversed its grip on its sword and stabbed itself through the abdomen. The blade missed the cockpit but impaled the power generator, causing the suit to topple over, spewing smoke and sparks.

  As the suit crashed to the ground, Falsrain leapt to his feet, swept his resonance sword off the floor, and dashed for the exit. Vic grabbed his gun ran after him, then flung himself to the ground as Falsrain whipped around and swung his sword, the shimmering blade passing centimeters over Vic's head. Vic fired several shots at Falsrain's retreating form, but Falsrain deflected them with his shield before vanishing around a corner.

  “Damn!”

  Vic spun around and ran back to the center of the hangar. The canopy of Ridley's suit popped open and the enraged P.S.A. director leapt out, coughing from the smoke filling his cockpit. Just as Vic drew near, the girl's eyes rolled up in her head and her legs gave way beneath her. Vic caught her before she hit the ground, astonished at how light she was. Although the third eye in her forehead remained open, the light in it had grown dim. Her soft breathing indicated that she had fallen unconscious.

  “What the hell just happened?” Ridley coughed. “Was it some kind of interference signal? I... wait.” His eyes fixed on the girl's unconscious face and widened in wonder. “That girl, she has three—”

  “She was the occupant of the Cage,” Vic replied. “The object Spacy is after. That's what I was trying to tell you when you attacked. But never mind that. What about Major Cutter?” He gestured to Pierson. “Can you do anything for him?”

  Ridley nodded. “Hang on.”

  Ridley climbed back in his smoking cockpit, extracted a first-aid kit, and rushed to Pierson's side. Vic cradled the three-eyed girl's unconscious form in his arms and followed Ridley. Pierson was lying on his back, the front of his vest covered with blood.

  “Director Nimh,” Pierson coughed. “Well, well. I never would have expected a high-ranking P.S.A. commander to be playing nursemaid for the man who's number one on their most-wanted list.”

  “Don't talk.” Ridley checked Pierson's vital signs. “Pulse, normal. Breathing, normal. You're not in shock, at least. Let's have a look at this injury.”

  Ridley used his utility knife to cut loose the tattered remains of Pierson's vest, then tore through his undershirt. “Not as bad as it looked from all the blood,” he remarked. “The cut is long, but shallow. Your vest must have taken the worst of it. I think you'll be OK. No time to sew up such a big wound, so I'll apply some artificial skin and then cover it with a bandage.”

  “I don't understand,” Vic said. “You were willing to afflict us with fatal poison to force us to cooperate with you. Why go to the trouble to help one of us now?”

  “I only authorized that because I knew you'd turn on us if I didn't,” Ridley replied. “Was I wrong?”

  Vic did not answer.

  “Besides, I promised that if you carried out this operation, you wouldn't have to die,” Ridley went on. “I'm a man of my word.”

  “What's the situation outside?” Pierson asked.

  “The attack's bogged down,” Ridley replied. “Only a few of us managed to penetrate their defensive perimeter. I came inside hoping to finish the mission myself by executing the rogue officers and retrieving Tango.” He glanced sideways at the girl cradled in Vic's arms. “Looks like at least one objective was successful.”

  He finished patching Pierson up and helped the rebel leader to his feet, lending him his shoulder for support. “We've got a problem, though,” he said. “There's four of us, and my exosuit is trashed.”

  “I came in a Mad Ox,” Pierson replied. “It's a two-seater.”

  “I did too,” Vic said.

  “That's lucky,” Ridley said. “All right, you take Tango back to your suit and I'll take Cutter in his. Let's move it. We don't have much time.”

  The four of them returned to the Mad Oxen waiting behin
d the aerospace hangar. While Ridley and Pierson boarded Pierson's suit, Vic gen­tly laid the three-eyed girl in the gunner's seat of his own suit, then climbed in the pilot seat and closed the canopy.

  Vic and Ridley powered up their suits, pulled back to the fence, and sliced through it with their heat edges. As they retreated from the base, the rain stopped and a break appeared in the clouds, allowing a shaft of light from the dawn sun to pour through, illuminating the corpses and wreckage of the smoldering battlefield.

  SIXTH MESSAGE: ASTRAL ~ AND SO THE PARASITE FILLS THINE MIND

  41

  Vic and Ridley slipped around the battlefront to rejoin their allies from the side. Ridley sent out an order for the main force to pull back while the rear guard covered their retreat. Initially, the Spacy defenders attempted to chase the attacking force into the forest, but Ridley left behind snipers who ambushed the pursuers. After the initial wave suffered heavy casualties, the pursuit petered out and soon only ran­dom artillery fire chased the retreating forces into the forest, until fi­nally they outdistanced the artillery's range, and then all about them was silence and darkness. They proceeded for a long time through the twisted jungle, feeling scarcely safer among the alien shapes of the foliage than the raging fields of battle.

  As Vic navigated his exosuit through the trees and underbrush, he heard stirring in the seat behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and craned his neck around the headrest to see the three-eyed girl coming out of her faint.

  He turned his attention back to the main viewscreen and remarked, “You're awake.”

  There was a pause, then the girl let out an exclamation of joy. Vic heard a scrambling from the gunner's seat and turned his head to see the girl's beaming face centimeters from his own, craning around the back of his chair.