by David Beers
Another transport waited in the distance. One that looked like all of those he had just destroyed, but humans flew in it instead of the artificial intelligence that had just so woefully failed. The people who were in charge, having come to kill him. And behind them? David saw larger transports, huge things, each holding many, many more people.
He couldn’t reach them from here; they needed to come closer, and then he would show them how foolish they were.
David saw her in his peripheral vision.
He turned, his eyes ablaze and continually shooting out webs that climbed the air around him.
David’s head cocked slightly. The girl stood next to him. The one that he’d sent Rhett to find. She looked back at him, her head mimicking his. Then, she turned to the sky and watched as two more ships lost control and tumbled through the hot air, falling thousands of feet until they smashed against the rocks below.
She didn’t look back to him, but her eyes went up, to where the mixture of flames, metal, and lasers still warred with one another. She wasn’t fully there, but ephemeral. David could see through her, see the building behind her—yet, she still stood next to him. Short, blonde hair. He could see her dark green eyes, her thin body. Not quite boyish, but not showing many women’s curves. Pretty, elegant, if not beautiful.
She’s watching me now, he thought. David wasn’t afraid of it, because he was in his element. His God’s power filled him and no woman staring at him or the things he did could cast doubt. Not at this moment. David didn’t know how she was here, but he also didn’t know anything else happening on that side of the world.
It’s not important. Let her watch. Her fate will be the same.
David turned back to the floating transports. Could they see the girl? He doubted it. The two of them were similar, perhaps in some twisted way they were brother and sister. Those people hundreds of yards from the compound? Floating with their weapons and hate? David had no similarity with them.
“Come then,” he whispered. “Come to me.”
“Come then. Come to me.”
The words whispered by Raylyn’s face as if someone inside her transport spoke them.
“What the fuck was that?” Lynda shrieked.
But Raylyn knew the answer. Everyone inside the transport did. Because they had watched the man’s lips move. They had watched him talk on the screen in front of them, and then his words filled their transport.
Somehow, through all the distance between them, he spoke … and they heard.
“Go,” the Disciple said. “Send everything.”
Raylyn swallowed, commanding the screen to zoom out. “Look at that. Look at what he just did without even blinking.” The transports were still falling, the AI malfunctioning and no longer able to keep them flying in the air. Fire burned, the self replicating nano no longer focused on an enemy, but its programming ruptured so that it attacked whatever was near it. “I’m not sending men in there to die. I’m not sending us in there to die.”
She turned around so that she could look at the Disciple’s face.
He was staring forward at the screen, intensely studying the man on the platform.
“Is there someone else with him?” Lynda asked.
Raylyn whipped back around, having seen no one there moments before.
“Corinth! What is that?” she cried.
The electrical webs had spread further, and now they appeared to be forming around someone else, though Raylyn couldn’t tell much. The web revealed a human-like figure standing next to the demon.
“We’re going to him,” the Disciple said. “Now.”
“Rogan, no.” Raylyn didn’t look away from the new figure, it only cementing her desire to stay where she was. To retreat.
“This is a direct order from the First Council. If you deny it, you will face their judgment when you return.”
Raylyn dropped her head and closed her eyes. She knew it was true. The First Council wasn’t to be denied—it would be like denying Corinth Himself.
Raylyn nodded, opening her eyes and looking back to the transport’s screen.
Go, she told the transports behind her, the ones holding soldiers that were probably still watching the first battalion of ships fall from the sky.
It took the larger transports a few seconds to begin moving, but they went forward, flying above Raylyn.
“Now us,” the Disciple said.
Their transport started moving, too, and Raylyn prayed for what she was sure would be the last time.
The girl remained next to David but he paid her no more mind. The transports were coming now, both those carrying warriors, and the one bringing the leaders.
The electrical webs had spread far now, 30 feet in all directions, and David stood fully in his power.
The transports were moving toward him, slower than the smaller ones had flown. Their weapons could be used from further out, though, and he saw them engage on the transports’ outer shells.
Lasers fired, but not at him this time. They shot at the building, and David understood what they were doing. Trying to weaken the structural integrity, pummeling it until the entire thing simply broke off and fell to the depths below.
He watched as green bolts shot against his building, his home.
Rocks tumbled down behind him, but David didn’t turn around.
The compound’s defenses activated, ClearViews flying up and down the building’s exterior. The transports kept advancing, their lasers larger—more powerful, though slower to fire. They let loose again, and David’s ClearViews fired back, a hundred shots for every one the massive transports mustered. The ClearViews’ red lasers intersecting the green, bolts of both colors bursting into the air as they collided. The sky crackled, but less strikes hit the building behind David. Less stone fell to his platform.
The transports continued forward, and just before they were within range for David to reach out and destroy them, men propelled from the tops. They flew out, hundreds at once, launching through the sky wearing armor and helmets and holding weapons that David didn’t recognize. They wore packs on their backs and air propulsion jetted them forward, flying through the sky as if superhuman.
ClearViews fired on them. Some were tagged easily, their bodies set afire and their propulsion dying. They fell through the sky like insects, going down to meet the transports that had come first.
There were too many for the ClearViews to fully handle, though, and David knew it.
They swarmed down to his platform, landing en masse. David kept his arms at his side, but motioned his hand outward.
The gray web moved, all of the complex shapes it had formed rushing out at once, climbing through the air like a rabid animal. The webs spread across the men, even as they tried firing their weapons. The gray static clung to their faces, hands, guns—everything. The firepower trying to escape their weapons found itself enveloped in the same static field, unable to move and exploding nearly the moment it exited the chamber.
The static swam forward even as more men landed—an almost endless supply. David didn’t move at all. He didn’t even look away from the single transport that still held its cargo. It was slightly further back, but David could see inside. Three people. All watching their soldiers die.
The static ate at the shields, the armor, the headgear. It spread across and then sliced through whatever barriers separated it from the flesh beneath.
Screams ripped through the sky, creating such a cacophony that it even drowned out the ClearViews’ constant firing.
The transport sped up and David understood it was coming for him now, that this game was over. They saw their people dying and knew that whatever last weapon they had, it must now be used.
David felt the transport pass within his grasp and he took hold of it, squeezing hard enough to make the metal creak inside. He brought it down to him, past the larger transports, past the men trying to fight off the endless spiderwebs. He carried the ship to his platform.
Its door opene
d.
David didn’t reach inside for anyone. He would let them come as they were ready. Gray webs hung through the air, leaving no room for anyone to walk, but David cleared a path between him and the transport door. He didn’t know if the girl was still here watching him. He no longer cared. It was these people he’d been born to destroy. Them and everyone like them. Those that killed Abby and Veritros, and had done their best to keep the Unformed from recognizing Its place in this universe.
And now they were here, ready to kill him.
A man stepped from the transport.
David looked at him, seeing him clearly. The man held no fear despite the maze of electrical webs around him, the men dying across the platform—their bodies being sliced to pieces, their voices drowning in their own blood.
The man appeared to see none of it.
He’s calm. Perhaps calmer than you.
A grin appeared on David’s face. Even now, faced with fate, the True Faith’s arrogance knew no bounds.
“I have the option of taking you in alive,” the man said. His voice was low, slightly above a whisper, and he made no effort to call above the noise surrounding him. David heard him, but only because the webs brought him the words. “Lie down and end this, and I’ll bring you to the First Council unharmed.”
David’s smile grew.
A single, last man shot from one of the large transports, probably one that had been hiding, trying not to face death. Perhaps he thought David and his webs were distracted, or perhaps the transport ejected him without his approval, but the webs reached up into the sky and obliterated him before he touched down. Blood exploded from his wrapped body, and then the webs got a stranglehold on everything, disintegrating him to nothing but a bloody mist in seconds.
“Did you bring anyone else?” David asked.
Raylyn saw and heard everything.
She heard the last soldier’s shriek as those dynamic webs wrapped around him, then heard it end as those same webs squelched all the life in him.
The Disciple didn’t move.
If they had any chance of surviving, it was in this showdown, yet neither man appeared scared of the other.
“Use it,” Lynda said. “Grab his goddamn nanotech and rip it from his body.”
Raylyn said nothing. She only listened.
“Did you bring anyone else?” the gray-eyed demon asked.
“Lie down,” the Disciple repeated.
The electrical webs moved across the platform, slowly, not swarming as they had against the soldiers. The webs seemed to be curious, wanting to watch these two play their macho stare down game. They stopped a foot from them, surrounding both and putting them in an electrical cocoon, more coming behind and piling on.
“You have no nanotech,” the Disciple said, his voice still calm.
“FUCK!” Lynda shouted, tears pouring down her face.
Raylyn’s hands shook, but she wasn’t crying.
“I wasn’t born here,” the gray eyes said, that sick smile still covering his face.
Yet, the Disciple seemed okay with it all. Perhaps there was something he could do, even without nanotech assisting him. He had to know something Raylyn didn’t, because he’d made them descend to the platform. He’d hopped out of the transport without hesitation, even after they lost control of the damned thing.
He’d gone toward this monster, and so that meant he had to know something they didn’t. It meant he had to have power over this situation.
Raylyn watched as the Disciple moved forward, darting with speed she hadn’t known possible. He seemed to fly, to cut through the air as if he was a part of it, just another particle. Raylyn’s eyes could scarcely keep up as he obliterated the space between the two of them.
Hope rose inside her, growing higher than the fear and desperation, wrapping its lovely and gentle fingers around her heart. Because nothing moved like this Disciple. Nothing could move with such speed, grace, and yet danger.
The webs reached out. With maybe only a foot separating the Disciple and the demon, the webs reached for him. All at once. They collapsed, turning the lithe figure into one of gray static, and Raylyn finally saw emotion in the Disciple. Finally saw something besides settled calm stretch across Rogan’s face.
Unbridled fear.
His mouth opened to scream and Raylyn would never be sure if she actually heard a sound, or if it was only her imagination.
His mouth opened, but that was the last graceful movement he ever made.
Blood hung in the air where the Disciple used to stand. Blood and tangled electrical currents as the body they had attacked disintegrated.
“There are two of you inside. Come out.”
“NO!” Lynda shouted. “GO! GO, RAYLYN! GET OUT OF HERE!”
Raylyn’s body was shaking too badly to move, let alone gather thoughts and command the transport to leave.
“RAYLYN!” Lynda shouted, spit and snot flying from her face.
Raylyn heard the webs grab hold of the transport, her eyes flashing to Lynda’s side. The webs cut through the metal door as if it were water, not rushing on Lynda as it had the Disciple. Their thin fingers reached out and grabbed her wrist and ankles, blood spurting from Lynda’s flesh immediately. Raylyn listened to her friend’s scream, Lynda’s left hand reaching out to grab hold of her boss.
Raylyn moved back, reflexively, fear and revulsion taking hold. She didn’t reach forward, didn’t try to grab Lynda, because the webs had her, and Raylyn knew there was no coming back from them.
The electrical currents wrenched outward, powerful, smashing Lynda’s body first into the door, then using her to rip it from its hinges. The webs lifted Lynda into the air, though they quickly cut through her wrist and ankle, her body falling.
More webs caught her in a hammock, and Raylyn watched as her friend quickly burned alive. Her blood sizzled as it dropped to the platform beneath.
“One more,” the man outside said. “Come out, or I’ll come in for you.”
Raylyn didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what she was looking at. She didn’t know anything about what was happening around her. She had lost all ability to function.
Yet her feet moved. The same part of her that had backed away when Lynda reached for help—the reptilian piece of her mind that only knew to keep living … it knew what to do. Her feet followed the same path as the Disciple had minutes before, and then she was standing outside the transport and facing the man she’d come to kill. Besides a few tumbled stones, his compound stood and his people were safe above.
Everything Raylyn had brought with her was destroyed or dead. Everything but her and the transport she just exited.
“Keep coming,” the demon said.
Raylyn’s feet did as he commanded. Electricity moved through the air, static filling her hair and causing it to frizz upward. She felt heat, though from the fire she had brought or that which this demon created, Raylyn didn’t know.
“You understand what I am, don’t you?” the man asked as Raylyn finally reached him. His eyes were instruments of terror, gray things that flickered as no human’s should. They were the stuff of ghosts, of the dead, of that which could not exist but somehow did.
Raylyn nodded.
“The weapon, right? That’s what you call me?”
Raylyn nodded again.
“I am the Prophet, and I bring death for you and all of your kind. You came for me and you sent men to kill me. You will live so that you can go tell your priests the truth. Their time is over. Tell them they can bow or die, but they rule no more.” The man leaned close and Raylyn saw sparks flying from his eyes. Constant, minuscule arcs of electricity. “Do you understand?”
Raylyn nodded.
“Go then, back to your false god, and tell him his time is at end.”
Twenty-Four
Nicki understood little of what was happening around her, and none of how it happened. She watched the man with gray eyes destroy an armada—though that word wasn’t even hers. I
t was someone else’s inside of the war she watched. Another person had called the ships an armada and Nicki merely latched onto the word.
She stood next to the dark man. Before he had watched her, but now it was her turn, though she didn’t know where she was. She looked around, sure this was another ministry. The one underground, because she stood on a platform at the top of a building, but yet everything else was above her. An all encompassing light filled the surface overhead, something that stretched forever; Nicki had heard the word whispered before: the SkyLight.
She looked at the man next to her and saw him staring back. Heavy metal objects were falling in front of the platform, fire gusting off them and creating a wake of hot air behind.
The man stared at her, and she had heard his name whispered before, too. Perhaps not his, per se, but his kind. The weapon.
His eyes glowed gray and for the first time Nicki understood something about that, though in the moment, she couldn’t say what.
The two saw each other and …
There was kinship. She felt that true, because the electrical webs spawning from his eyes spoke to her. They didn’t dare reach for her, because they knew their master, but Nicki felt their power … perhaps even their longing.
The dark man turned to look out from the platform, for more people were coming toward him. All of this, the armada in the sky, it was for him—people wanted him dead just as they did Nicki.
For the same reason? she wondered. She couldn’t answer the question, though, because she didn’t truly know why people wanted her dead. Because she had the sight? Because she could see this platform, though she was across the planet?
Is that any reason to die?
And if not, is the reason they want to kill him any better?
The man summoned the last … transports. That was the word, though Nicki knew it didn’t originate in her mind.
He was willingly going to war with them.
Nicki looked out at the transports, larger ones than the wrecked ships falling in front of her.
