by Ren Garcia
They fired, the Seeker returned, and down they went.
The more he looked at Syg's fakes, the more they annoyed him. It was clear that Syg had no idea what the Seeker looked like on the outside. Despite himself and the situation he was in, he found it galling, given the amount of pictures, paintings, and models of the ship available to her for reference, that she butchered it so badly; the Seeker was his baby.
She was going to get a stern talking to over this, he thought, right after he had properly re-united with her.
A transport fired on one of the fakes.
A canister popped out of the Seeker.
Bang, sunk. More wreckage.
Beyond, the temple began to fitfully rise. It struggled into the air, marking its progress in feet and inches.
Beneath it, he could see it was held in place by a thick black rope of Shadow tech, like a tether. And though the tether was stretching, he could clearly see that the temple would never be fully free of it on its own.
And, there was the Dark Man to the south, across the waterway. He stood hunched over with his hands on the destroyed remains of two buildings—like a child looking into a candy store window. He watched the temple struggle to climb into the air. His sinister thoughts were easy to divine: oh, what fun he was going to have, plucking the wings off this buzzing fly. He stepped over the line of towers and lesser buildings blocking his path and splashed onto the waterway. Striding in gore, he proceeded to its location. He was going to ensure it didn't go anywhere. He might just flatten it like an empty can when he got there after he tormented it for a bit.
Not if Davage had anything to say about it. Ignoring his aching eyes, he Sighted the monster, a cone of glowing light rising up into the blasted night.
Immersed in the hated light, it stopped in the waterway and flailed its arms about, fearing the light, despising it. It scooped up handfuls of dark water and threw it in Davage's direction, trying to douse the light; a rainfall of tepid water showered him, but he persisted. It plucked a Ghome 7 transport out of the sky and threw it at Davage. He Wafted away and reappeared some distance to the north on the vast, flat area near the water. Trying to divert his attention from the temple, he hit the Dark Man again with his Sight. Awash in his golden glow and in misery, it stumbled into the canyons of tenement buildings and rapidly neared, his huge strides covering massive amounts of distance at a step. At last, standing over Davage and his tormenting light, he raised a giant foot and brought it down hard, ready to squash this light, to stamp out this glowing cinder.
Davage saw the foot coming down, blotting out the sky. In his Sight, he saw something rustling around inside the Dark Man—something that enraged him to the very core. Using much of the strength left to him, he Wafted up and away, vanishing from the ground as the foot impacted.
* * * * *
"What the hell is that!" Kilos shrieked seeing this terrible giant striding through Metatron. It looked like a man-shaped mound of dried blood and gristle, three thousand feet tall, easy
Syg and the Sisters appeared shocked. Syg's hand came to her mouth. She appeared terrified.
"What is it?"
Syg sank into Dav's chair, weeping, defeated. "It means Dav's dead."
Kilos looked at the viewer. "What's that then?" she asked.
Syg looked up.
On the screen, as the Dark Man strode toward the Silver Temple, a cone of bright golden light came up from the dusty ground, shining right on him, like a searchlight. It waved its arms, not liking the light. Syg saw it and took heart.
They watched it splashing water, trying to drown the light, then it plucked something from the air and threw it. The light went out as a destroyed Ghome 7 unCloaked and slammed into the ground, and then the cone of light re-appeared to the north. The Dark Man turned and pursued, splashing through the water.
Then, she saw it raise its horrid foot and stamp down in a geyser of water and broken rock, dousing the light.
Syg screamed.
* * * * *
Dav emerged from his Waft right in the gullet of the Dark Man. It was a rugose, fibrous dark patch, as if the whole unholy construction was formed of sinew. The interior seemed to wrap toward him, trying to envelop him and pull him into darkness.
He lit his Sight; the coils flew away, giving him space.
He had seen something from below, something that had enraged him like nothing else ever had.
Ahead, in the foul dankness, was what he had seen.
There, four women lay encompassed in black tendrils. They were laid open, guts hanging out, joints cracked and stretched, yet they were alive, fed and sustained by dark tubes forced into their mouths. They were naked, but bits of red cloth gave away their identity—Black Hats, the ones who had fled the field. Here was their punishment, to feel all the pain in the world for as long as possible. Here, in the dark belly, was the price of failure, the price for being afraid and trying to preserve their own lives.
Davage approached them and with his Sight, freed them from the black.
Their faces, their eyes told the tale of the torment they were experiencing.
"I'm so sorry …" he said.
And he killed them, offering as merciful a death as he could.
His fury then turned to the Dark Man—this beast, this henchman and craft of the Black Abbess. "You wanted me, Abbess—here I am!"
He blasted the hardest Sight he'd ever tried, a cone of golden light, and he melted the innards of this thing, this Dark Man. He could hear it roar in pain, and he was delighted. Feel a bit of it, you bastard—taste it yourself!
He blew a hole in its belly, and he could see out into needly cityscape of Metatron far below. He turned his gaze upward, hoping to burrow up into its brain, hoping it dreaded every moment. He could feel it capering about, feeling its death near.
That's when his Sight faded, the Nyke poison inflicted by the Hulgismen robbing him of the strength to use it any further.
* * * * *
"It stomped on something!" Dieter said from his Sensing position.
"Who do you think it just stomped on?" Syg wailed.
She stood, near panic. "I'm Wafting down!" Syg screamed. "I want down there! I'm going to help him! I'm going to stand at his side!"
"You can't Waft, Syg, the Sisters have Wafting locked so that we can't get boarded. It's standard procedure," Kilos said.
"Then tell them to turn it off!" She turned to one of the Sisters standing near. "Turn it off!" she yelled.
The Sister looked at her dangerously and shook her head.
Kilos thought for a moment that Syg was going to do something drastic; she thought she might hit the Sister. And even though her relationship with the Sisterhood had greatly improved over the weeks, hitting a Sister would be a bad, possibly fatal, move.
Fortunately, events on the surface caught everyone's attention.
The Dark Man began exploding in light—a cone of gold came bursting out of its huge belly, reaming out a large, gory hole. He staggered about.
Dav—he was inside it hitting it with Sight. And it was staggering.
The Bridge cheered—crew, Ki, the Sisters, Syg, and all.
* * * * *
Davage plummeted out of the hole in the Dark Man's belly and fell to the surface. His strength was nearly gone, the Nyke flowing through him.
He managed to soft Waft down and he lay there, unable for the moment to get up.
The Dark Man blundered about, trying to recover from Davage's attack.
Ahead, the Silver Temple had managed to get about five hundred feet off the ground, the Shadow tech tether stretching but holding. All around, transports occasionally fired, and shortly after came crashing down, blasted by the Seeker. Apparently the Sisters couldn't break the Cloak, and Ki was using triangulation to locate them. Effective enough: to fire their cassagrains meant certain death.
The Dark Man recovered and
continued on his way toward the temple, and this time Davage had no Sight to confound him with.
He wrung his huge hands, ready to dig into the silver temple.
One of the fake Silver tech ships crashed into him with a splashy thud, sending him reeling. He grabbed it and began trying to pull it apart. It stretched and gave, like silver taffy.
It then exploded, taking half his dark head and part of his chest with it. Syg—good one! The monster fell, again taking a block or two of Metatron with him.
The temple gave a groan. Its engines were apparently beginning to falter. It needed freeing, and it needed freeing now.
He concentrated. He concentrated hard …
* * * * *
"Was that Dav?" she said, knowing how poor he was at basic telepathy. "Syg, did you get that?"
"Yes. It sounded like him!" she said, excited.
They turned their attention to the Silver Temple. They could see it was aloft. It was slowly spinning, slowly gaining altitude, but it seemed to hang there at about five hundred feet.
A black, twisted cord shackled it to the ground.
"What's that?" Ki asked.
"Shadow tech," Syg said. "A lot of it."
"Canister control!" Kilos yelled. "Fix coordinates on that Shadow tech cord and set dispersion for minimum radius!"
A moment later a canister missile shot out, snaked toward the target, and exploded.
The flash cleared. The cord was still there, still holding the temple in place.
* * * * *
Davage seethed with frustration. He saw the Seeker fire a canister and hit the tether, but to his horror, it was still there, still refusing to release its grip. He could hear the temple's engines starting to fail under the great strain of this protracted gravity launch.
The second fake Seeker skittered out of its meandering flight and dived down from the heights.
He saw it. Syg was going to crash it into the tether and explode it. Maybe that will do it. Maybe that will free the temple.
Maybe they will be free. Maybe they will triumph.
Only a bit longer, Drusilla. He could still feel her lips on his mouth.
When it was only a few hundred feet from the target, the Dark Man again!
He had sprung and intercepted the craft.
* * * * *
They watched the Dark Man, like a championship athlete, spring and grab Syg's Silver tech ship out of the air and fall to the ground with it. Almost comically the Dark Man twisted and spun about as he tried to hang onto the buzzing, careening vessel as it twisted this way and that.
"Syg, can you break it free?" Kilos asked.
"I'm trying. He's got it tight."
Kilos turned to Saari. "Helm, bring us down, five hundred feet, holding positive trim. And baffle those exhausts—we don't want to deafen the Captain!"
Saari pitched the wheel, and the ship dipped down. Immediately there was a crash as they slammed straight into a Cloaked transport, which spun down in flames and twisted metal and sunk.
Saari yelped and white-knuckled the wheel again.
"Don't worry about that," Ki said. "You just Slapped your first vessel, albeit accidentally, but no matter."
At five hundred feet, the ship leveled out and Kilos gave the order. "All Battleshot batteries, open fire!"
* * * * *
Davage watched the Seeker roar down from about two thousand feet to a very low, very noisy five hundred, Slapping a cloaked Ghome 7 ship along the way and bringing it down in a burning mass—more tough going to the citizens of Metatron.
At five hundred feet, he could feel the ground shake as the Seeker's Battleshot batteries opened up, raking the Dark Man with withering, explosive fire, making that deafening "Buurrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" sound.
A leg and foot—the one he was going to stomp Davage with—flew off. His genitals disappeared in a cloud of exploding shot. What was left of his head stretched out and then vanished, and his hands caved in, releasing Syg's silver ship.
Smoking, the Seeker turned to port, stopping the shot, batteries overheating in the long barrage, a swung stump from the Dark Man just missing it.
Deformed by incidental Battleshot hits, the silver ship—Syg's laughably bad attempt to re-create the outer appearance of the Seeker— tumbled in the air for a moment, righted itself, picked up some speed, and hit the black Shadow tech tether square in the center, where it exploded in a silver flash.
He cheered. When it counted most, Syg's little silver ship performed brilliantly.
And the Black Abbess's leash snapped with an audible twang!
The temple was free.
But his joy was short-lived. The temple still hung there, slowly, painfully clawing for altitude and speed. It rose as lazy as a balloon on a still, windless afternoon.
And the Dark Man wasn't done—not by a long shot. A shotriddled, beheaded, emasculated relic, he stood up on one filthy leg, rising into the night air like a stinking slag heap. In the stumps of his arms, he held his leg that had just been blasted off. He raised it high into the night, and he was going to use it to club the temple back down to the ground for good. It was right in his wheel-house, where he could really lay into it. There was no way he could miss.
Davage watched in horror.
* * * * *
Ergos appeared to Davage just then, standing there in the plain.
He waved his arms, and as if shot from a cannon, the spinning Silver Temple, flush with new energy, rocketed into the sky, shone there as a silver star for a moment, and was gone.
The hammer blow from the Dark Man missed, his leg and foot slamming into a block of dark buildings, leveling them. It rose up in froth; first it shall destroy the dammed starship and then it will flatten Metatron. Nothing will live after it was done. And then it will kill this Davage; slow and hard.
* * * * *
Nobody on the bridge could really believe what they were seeing. Headless, legless, armless, the Dark Man just kept on going. The Sisters were trying to dispel him as they would any they ordinary bit of Shadow tech, but he wouldn't go.
The door to the bridge opened.
"Sisters," came a musical voice, "will you please suspend the Waftlock for me?"
* * * * *
Someone Wafted onto the plain where the temple had been. Davage watched the person appear, astounded that the Sisters had dropped the standard Waft-lock. That was something they never did for fear of being boarded.
The Dark Man saw the person. Someone small and weak. This person will be the first to die, then the ship, then Metatron, then Davage.
All will die.
All will die.
The Grand Abbess looked up at the Dark Man, utter contempt on her beautiful face.
She listened to it rage for a moment. Without a mouth, its ragings sounding like the pipings of a broken steam whistle stuck open.
"And let it be gone," she said with a wave of her arm.
The Dark Man cried out in surprise and agony. For once in its evil, wretched existence, it felt fear—the fear it had so joyously inflicted on others.
It fell back. It felt itself being torn apart.
It exploded in a cloud of soot. Soon, not even that remained.
14
A VISION COME TRUE …
Davage watched the Grand Abbess destroy the Dark Man. With a simple wave of her arm, all that darkness was gone.
Always at the last moment, he mused. Who says only the Black Hats have a love of theatrics?
Despite all the things he had learned about secret agreements and abductions and all that, he still felt an unending love and admiration for the Sisterhood. They had earned it.
He felt his strength slip again. He found he could no longer hold his CARG—it was so heavy. How had he ever been able to use this thing?
He dropped it, and it
clanked into the dust. The Nyke was getting to him.
