* * * * *
Vaikyur woke up in Command Central, his arm pinned beneath some collapsed part of the ceiling. Whatever had caused the large bruise on his head had kept him out for perhaps an hour. There was little light in the room, but most of the vidscreens were still working.
To the left on the vidscreen linking them to Headquarters, he could see a still figure lying across a desk in a pool of his own blood, crushed by the weight of the ceiling. The Fer-innyera had appeared during the final battle to enforce his orders; apparently, Ezáitur hadn’t been as lucky as Vaikyur.
Not many people were alive. Vaikyur gazed around sadly at the ahksos under his command, all equally motionless. The room was rife with electrical shorts, lethal doses of current sparking from live wires that had been broken, performing an eerie and triumphant dance, buoyed by their own energy release. Isolated fires broke out but fizzled out everywhere as they ran out of combustible materials in the metallic complex.
His good friend Senka Kalear was dead beside him. Vaikyur leaned forward to check his pulse, but there was none. He tried to push a large piece of the fallen ceiling off his own arm, but only a little would move, and it was too heavy for his loose hand.
He had no choice but to yank it, scraping away the surface skin in the process, his arm awash with dark blood. He tried to raise it of his own accord and realized that his shoulder was dislocated, and that his arm was fractured in several places with shards of bone broken through his uniform.
Remarkably, he felt no pain, only a strange surreal delirium.
After bidding Kalear a farewell and stopping to give a solemn salute despite the circumstances and his arm’s condition, Vaikyur then headed down the stair to inspect the bodies for survivors. Miran Olevin was still alive but dying. Vaikyur stopped to comfort him, and Olevin’s fingers flickered with life, reaching out to touch him. Vaikyur sat down for a moment beside him, grasping his hand until the grip went slack.
Then he heard a shuffling noise and turned to see one of his ahksos moving about on the dusty floor, trying to get to his feet. Vaikyur headed in his direction. The ahkso, Kilder, was panicking and near-hysteria when he saw his friends around him. Vaikyur grasped his shoulder and gave him a stern glance before holding his chin even to look into his face.
“We’re going.” He said forcefully, and the Ahkso nodded. It was a difficult process, weaving through the rubble-strewn and blocked corridors to the outside world, and it took them twenty minutes.
Kilder slumped to the ground, in deep shock, unable to care whether he lived or died once they were sitting on the steps to the Command Center. Vaikyur found a large piece of metal that had been blown off the building and instructed Kilder to come to the side and lie still. He did so reluctantly, and Vaikyur gave him the metal sheet to hold over himself in order to stay hidden until the nightmare was over.
A few others were coming out now, but they didn’t want to stay around and headed for safer ground. From his vantage point, Vaikyur could see a company of Orian soldiers on foot making their way towards them. There was someone familiar among them, a blond man trying to catch up.
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 88
