Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Lyokh had just enough time to see its rows of jagged gray teeth, which looked to be made of stone, and its blood-red gums dripping with frothy tendrils. Its gullet lit up with the furnace at the back of its throat.

  In one swift motion, Lyokh was consumed by flames, and swallowed whole.

  THE COMMAND STRUCTURE of the new Gold Wing formally gathered for the first time in Deck 3’s main hangar bay, beneath the scorched portside wing of a V-33 skyrake. A couple of Orphesian mechanics had been climbing all over the wing, replacing compristeel panels and gutting its fried circuitry, but Lyokh had asked them to take a break.

  It was just the four of them. Heeten, Meiks, and Takirovanen sat atop empty crates, leaning forward, elbows on their knees and waiting to hear the official announcement. Lyokh stood in front of them. Their breaths were all coming out in tufts of chilled cloud; all of Lord Ishimoto’s Deck 3 air-conditioners were on the fritz, just one of a hundred glitches the maintenance crew was contending with.

  “So, let’s get the obvious out of the way,” said Lyokh, having to raise his voice to be heard above the whine of pneumatic drills going at the other end of the hangar. Artemis of Artemis was over there with his fellow Tamers, refitting a wyrm named Thrallyin with a new dorsal turret. “As you all will no doubt have heard, you’re being reassigned to Gold Wing, effective immediately. And I’ve been assigned as wing commander, official ceremonies pending.”

  “You’re leading us?” Meiks said, his breath smoking like the nostrils of a greatwyrm. “Oh, gods above and below, take me now.”

  Lyokh smirked. “If it’s any consolation, you’ve all been promoted, and you’ve all been put up for the Imperator’s Medal of Valor.”

  Meiks brightened immediately. “Hey! There’s some bragging rights, and no mistake! Might even impress a few of those navy gals in The Place To Be later.”

  “Too late,” Heeten said. “They already know your reputation. I made sure of it.”

  “We’re getting thirty new people, all from different groups,” Lyokh said, before they could derail the discussion. “General Quoden sent me a list this morning. Four of them are from White Wing, which was pretty much wiped out with Fifth Battalion. Couple of recon boys from Dragon Wing. Five mech pilots from Black Wing, only four of them have a working warhulk, but I’ve been assured that we have enough spares on Ishimoto to make do, Untamak Mark IIIs that made it back without their pilots. The order has been put into the fab room for any replacement parts we may need for those.”

  Lyokh hove a heavy sigh.

  “I’m going to need you guys’ help on this. I can’t do this alone. I’ve never been in charge of the wing’s training, muster, or movement. I know the drills as well as you guys, I’m sure, but I’ve never been the one calling the shots. I need you to be with me on this a hundred percent. If you don’t think I’m fit for the job, you won’t offend me by saying so because I might just agree with you. So, speak now, and I can probably work on getting you transferred to another wing.”

  “Bullshit,” Heeten said, looking at the others. “The fuckin’ wall.”

  “The fuckin’ wall,” Meiks agreed.

  “Indeed,” Takirovanen nodded.

  Lyokh felt a spike of courage he hadn’t expected from their approbation. He waved at the air, and his holotab picked up the movement and projected a pane in front of him. “This is the list of what we need to get done before we begin unit cohesion drills. Our new wing members are priority. Now, some of them have had…questionable psych evals. Shell-shocked. Some trauma troubles. You will all need to read each soldier’s dossier to familiarize yourself with the needs of each one.

  “Heeten, you’re in charge of our warhulk boys. They’re technically senior over you, but I don’t give a shit. They give you any trouble, you send them to me. You’ve been promoted over them. That’s the way I told the Visquain I wanted it, and they approved it.

  “Meiks, I took a look at your physical training scores, so you’re in charge of rounding these guys up twice a week for PT drills. That also means you’re in charge of keeping track of their physical and mental health, and getting back to me with any problems.

  “Takirovanen, looking at your shooting evals, you seemed like a natural choice for weaponmaster. These guys have been shaken, and I want to put them under a little pressure in the training room, see who’s still good to fight and who might be…” He searched for the right way to put it. “Ready for retirement.

  “My job is to take in your reports, and make final calls. I’m also going to cover the team’s squad-based tactics. We will train every single day in the training room, no exceptions. We’ll be doing room clearing drills, simunitions fire, CQC, deployment prep, the works.

  He looked at all of them.

  “Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” they intoned enthusiastically.

  Lyokh looked at each of them. He experienced something he had not felt in a while. A moment of great pride. He looked at each of them, probably all doomed to die within a few months. They certainly wouldn’t last years together. But, just as he had found when playing porhl with them in The Place To Be, Lyokh discovered that this, this right here, was enough.

  For now.

  “I’m sending you all the dossiers now. I want you to read them and have your preliminary reports to me by zero-eight-hundred Zulu. Let’s make it happen.”

  JUST AS THE ship’s night cycle was about to commence, Lyokh stepped inside Herodinsk’s sanctum. The blademaster’s training room was just as chilly as the rest of Deck 3. It was not a very big compartment, only about twelve strides long and just as wide, with a metallic knot of coolant pipes that rattled overhead incessantly. The room was ringed with training bots, all of them dented and scraped from years of use.

  When Lyokh got there, Herodinsk was running an oiled cloth over one of his blades. It looked to be a true quescha, sharpened and runed, not a generic one flash-forged in the fab room. The compristeel blade shimmered as he ran the cloth over it, and the runes pulsed in response to the faint layer of clear oil.

  With a few twists of the hilt, Herodinsk opened it up, and checked the field containers that coated the bas-diamond edges with accelerated plasmetomagnetic particles when activated.

  The old man looked up, smiling. He stood a head shorter than Lyokh, with short black hair flecked with gray, rough dark skin, and a careworn face. Bare-chested, he cut an imposing figure, with a spider’s web of crisscrossing scars. His arms were thick as trunks, with rippling muscles, and his grip was like a warhulk’s. Lyokh tested that grip each time they shook hands. No one exuded power and authority quite like a blademaster.

  “Doyen,” he said.

  Lyokh rolled his eyes. “Not you too,” he said.

  “You should be proud of the honor. I’ve only met seven others in my hundred years of teaching that was granted that title by their peers.”

  “That’s actually what I came to talk to you about.”

  “Oh?” said Herodinsk, waving an inviting hand to the center of his training room.

  Lyokh knew the drill—he would train while they talked. He grabbed a practice sword from the rack and assumed a position at the center of the room.

  “What’s on your mind?” Herodinsk asked, his chilled breath rolling out. He seemed unperturbed by the cold.

  “It’s my understanding that doyen means ‘the most adept’ at something,” said Lyokh. He lowered himself into a Fourth Form stance, rooting himself like a tree, with the sword held double-fisted, vertically, the hilt next to his face. “It’s not escaped my attention that people expect a certain level of skill from me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I sparred with a fellow from Artemis, recently. Big grig, that one.”

  “I heard. He is a big one. He comes in here often for extra training. I heard you did quite well against him.” Herodinsk stepped behind Lyokh, bumped his knees, suggesting his stance wasn’t quite low enough.

  Lyokh dropped lower. “I wouldn’t sa
y I did well. Well enough, I suppose. The Steps were what saved me. Come to that, I think they might have saved me down in those tunnels a few times. I didn’t have to think, I just wanted to dodge out of the way, and my feet obeyed. Like you said they would.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know how to say it. When I went up against the Artemis kid…there was a crowd watching. People wanting to see just how good the ‘doyen’ was. It shouldn’t bother me, but it does. It also changes things.”

  Herodinsk nodded, and patted his left shoulder, suggesting he relax it a bit more. “You feel like you are under a microscope now.”

  “I do.”

  “Your name is passing around the fleet, the story of Sergeant ‘Doyen’ Lyokh, and they’ve all heard that you used naught but a sword to fight your way out of that hellhole. You’re going to be in charge of Gold Wing soon, and you want your reputation to be above suspicion.”

  “I do.”

  “Forward lunge. Slash angle two.”

  Lyokh did as the blademaster said, lunging forward and bringing the blade down in a hissing stroke.

  “You want to up your training, make your skills better than anyone’s, so you can keep that hope alive in their hearts.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me see a shuffle-step backward, retreat blade to guard, Cat Stance.”

  Lyokh did as he was told, shuffling backwards and dropping the hilt so that the tip of his blade shot up, nose level, between him and an imaginary opponent. He ended in Cat Stance, rear foot flat and rooted, the front foot up on its toes.

  “Well, you’ve always been pretty good. And focused. I certainly have a lot of time on my hands now. Less soldiers are worried about their swordsmanship these days, and a lot of field swords have been lost on battlefields, leaving them not much to train with.” Herodinsk shrugged. “How often were you thinking? Four, five days a week?”

  “Every night from here on out,” Lyokh said. “It’s fine if my men outshoot me, or score higher on PT. But not this. They know me as doyen for this, so I had better be without peer. It shows discipline and commitment to something.”

  Herodinsk lifted a practice sword. “Then we start right now. Tell me, how many of the Forty-Seven Steps do you feel comfortable with?”

  “You’ve taught me thirty-nine, but I only feel proficient in maybe twenty of those.”

  “Then let’s review. On your guard!”

  THAT NIGHT, AS he slept, he was visited by the purple wyrm again. He stood on the same planet, with the three moons above him and the planetary rings bisecting them. Only this time it was night; the blue and white suns were nowhere in evidence. Lyokh stood atop a smoldering mountain, stumbling along the jagged rocks of its peak. He was exhausted, as though he had been walking for a hundred miles.

  Echoes…

  He knelt beneath the stars, like a supplicant come to give worship to the heavens. He looked up at the moons, at the disk, at the endless froth of stars. Something filled him with both sorrow and hope. A song filled his heart that depicted the horrific majesty of the stars and promised an end to all things, as well as a beginning to everything. Somehow, the dream imparted to him a fiendish quality to those stars, or rather to the darkness between each of those stars. Such vast emptiness, in which dwelt things that slumbered or watched.

  Beyond each of the three moons was a darkness not to be imagined. His hands started trembling. And Lyokh wept at the dangerous knowledge that the dream was imparting, this unspeakable knowledge of a thing none but him could see.

  Echoes…

  There were things in that vast darkness, and he could hear them whispering, and also laughing at the smallness of his mortal mind. Such a horrific, cachinnating melody of dark voices, harmonizing in a way that began to rip the world apart all around him. Stone was riven from stone, and Lyokh sensed a dark awakening. His dream made him privy to ancient knowledge, so intangible that, did he have pen and paper nearby, he would not even have been able to conjure a single word or utterance to describe its iniquity.

  Suddenly, a winged shadow fell over the moon and the stars. Lyokh could not see its full form, but he heard the thunder of its wings as it descended on him.

  Then, he saw a flame. It started small at first, then grew in intensity. The wyrm had opened its throat, and Lyokh could see down into its furnace. That furnace grew larger and larger. Electrical light began pulsating beneath its skin, revealing its purple scales.

  Echoes…

  He turned, tried to run.

  He got no further than a few steps before he was devoured.

  Lyokh awoke in a sweat, his heart pounding. He got up and went over to the fresher, splashed some water on his face, and took a few deep breaths. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He decided to take a walk.

  The corridors were mostly filled with bots, and two or three crewmen working late. At some point he found himself on the observation deck. Lord Ishimoto had come out of its FTL bubble long enough for the navigators to double-check their calculations. Standard procedure for such a long haul.

  The stars were before him. Lyokh stared out into that open and endless abyss, the window in front of him wide enough to give him the sensation of being out in that vacuum. He almost felt like he was falling into it. Too many stars to count burned meaninglessly before him. A poet could have summoned words to describe how he was feeling just then, but Lyokh was not up to the task. He was frozen in silence before the universe, understanding that he did not matter. He stood there not mattering for a while.

  Lyokh eventually returned to his bunk.

  When he went back to sleep, Lyokh saw only incomplete glimpses of that alien world from his dreams, and sensed the light of its three gibbous moons. And he heard the flapping of wings.

  Echoes…

  THEY ASSEMBLED IN The Place To Be. Thirty lost souls. Survivors that had made it through the hellscape of Kennit 184c. You could see it in their eyes. That hollow look that bespoke the witnessing of horrors best forgotten. Most of them were young, no older than fifty but looking thirty due to regen therapy. A couple of them were in their eighties and nineties, but none were as old as Lyokh.

  The lights in The Place To Be flickered on and off indecisively. They needed replacing. A lot of Lord Ishimoto did. But she was a tough old girl, and she would endure. She has to, Lyokh though. Like the rest of us, she’s got no choice but to move forward.

  They all came dressed for PT, which Lyokh was glad to see. They sat around tables, some of them nibbling at their breakfast that they brought from the mess hall.

  There had been no great ceremony or investiture of rank, no big announcement. Lyokh was now Captain Aejon Lyokh, Gold Wing, IX Legion of the Republican Army. His goal was to train these men up, prep them again for another war, and to report directly to the Visquain of any problems.

  Never in his life had he had such a mission. He had only ever taken orders and passed orders along, never issued them himself, not in a formal capacity. Lucerne and others had always been there for that. It’s your turn now, soldier, he told himself. Hoy up.

  “Shit, it’s cold!” one of the guys said, rubbing his hands together. It was a sergeant by the name of Yubret.

  Lyokh looked at all their faces. He massaged his wrists, as well as the fresh blisters on his fingers. It had been a long night of training with Herodinsk, and the blademaster had left him with this piece of wisdom: “When you teach, show only mercy for their hearts, but have no mercy on their bodies. If you do, then you do them disservice.”

  He saw a few expectant faces among them, and a couple of them looking raw at him, with arms folded in quiet defiance. Lyokh suspected that a few might admire him for his doyen status, while others would think him an overblown bigshot.

  He decided to address it immediately.

  “All right, here it is,” he said. “I’ve been granted the honor of doyen by the people who walked out of that god-forsaken shitstain of a planet with me, and I gue
ss there’s a bit of celebrity that goes with that. For what that’s worth, anyway. Oblivion awaits,” he said, looking at each of their faces. “But I damn well know that each and every one of you also trudged through that…that nightmare. And I know that you all made sacrifices along the way, just like me. You all saw someone die. Many someones. Some of you were injured. I wasn’t. Takirovanen over there was,” he said, pointing to the stoic figure at the back. A few heads turned to look.

  “I suffer no illusions that I made it out of that place because I’m God’s gift to the Republican Army. I’m a soldier. I did what I was told. I ran forward until there was no more forward.” He shrugged. “And I got lucky in places. Just like all of you. Likely, the Brood drone that would have killed you was killed, unbeknownst to you, by the bullet of another dead brother behind you. God only knows how many times the dead saved our lives.”

  There were a few nods.

  “The Visquain have asked me to reorder Gold Wing out of who we’ve got here. Now, looking at all your files, I see I have an eclectic mix.” Lyokh tried on a smile here. “All of you are veterans of other wars, some of you are fresher than others, without the kind of training that could be afforded in years past, when we had a little time between battles to breathe. So I’ve got less than three weeks to build unit cohesion.

  “What do I mean by that? Well, you all developed relationships with your lost brothers, you had a common language, you understood each other’s movements, got to where you could almost read each other’s minds. It made for fluidity of movement and tactics. That’s unit cohesion. Lieutenant Lucerne was big on that. And we need to establish that between ourselves at once. Any questions so far?”