by Ashanti Luke
—Worse than Hell. The abyss is nothing. Oblivion. Complete separation from everything. If you focus on that which would devour your very soul, it will tell you something about yourself, and sometimes, you may not want to hear it.
—So maybe the heroes in history are the ones we agree with, and the monsters are the ones we don’t, because you can’t really be those guys without being a little monstrous. And the only thing that can tell us is our own soul.
—And unfortunately, whether it’s deckwork getting erased or people losing their lives, when the abyss stares you in the face and checks the level of your keel, the only comfort you will have is whether or not, at the end of the day, you can leave your monstrosity in the abyss where it belongs.
• • • • •
When his pupils finally expanded enough to allow light into them, it felt as if the light would laser-cut two holes in the back of Euston’s head. It was as if his entire head had been put in a pincer lock while he was unconscious. And the alarms did not help. His arms were wobbly as he lifted himself from the ground. Moony, Capshaw, and Scalia lay before him. Capshaw was moaning, but the others seemed completely insensate. Euston stood, and as the blood pounded through his temples, and the base of his neck pulsated like a rioting throng, he steadied himself against the wall to let his body adjust.
Now that he was up, he realized he was in pain. He pushed away from the wall and felt the frustration of being in the same position once again. He felt the stiffness in his elbows and knees washed away with impulse. This had happened one too many sunfried times, and he would be damned to the wastes if he let that houndspawn get away with it again.
Fortunately, he had an idea where the scientist was going. Most of the soldiers here with the same vertices only knew the Knight of Wands as another wastebaked leader of the Apostates, who claimed, impossibly, to be the father of the Sword Scourge. But Euston knew how he had gotten to Asha, and if this man had organized an ill-laid escape from a military installation, albeit lower vertex security, without even talking to most of the punting headgamers in his crew, then it would be a safe assumption that he didn’t select the Orbital as a meeting place for the beautiful starscape.
No, as far as Euston knew, the Flame Knight’s claim of reverse pedigree was probably true, and because Euston knew where he had come from, and given the fact that the Paracelsus had completed launch preparation this very day cycle, he knew where he was most likely going.
Uzziah moved in closer to the black vehicle Jang had placed on their course marker. The holographic imagers showed it closer than it looked in the shrouding darkness of the Miasma. Without warning, a light flashed on the ship they were following. A yellowing flame danced around the back of the ship and briefly lit up the craft to reveal the large gun that was firing at them. Bluish and orange sparks began to play across the windshield of their lev in sync with the flickering muzzle flash on the enemy craft. The astrapi shield that surrounded them caused any material below a certain mass and beyond a certain velocity to disintegrate before impact, and kept the gunfire from penetrating the stolen Echelon craft.
The Echelon had not hesitated to open fire. These men were under the same restrictions as the men from the Scar—which meant this was going to be nothing like their escape from Eurydice.
But they had all prepared for this. Uzziah slowed their fighter and rose a few meters. Two more fighters appeared on the imager, closing in from the opposite side of the craft they were pursuing. According to Jang, those two crafts, which were piloted by Apostates, should be visible on their own imagers but invisible to the Echelon. It was an unorthodox approach, but it would maybe buy them enough time for their plan to work. No doubt, the Echelon ship had already sent word that it was under attack, but it needed to be taken out before more fighters could scramble. The imager was zoomed out almost to its maximum, but the two fighters opposite them still moved across the image at a blinding rate of speed. They were small, two-man fighters, piloted by Norrin of Pentacles, and the Apostate’s best pilot, who the Apostates only called the Ace of Wands. The two ships rolled and spread out in the imager as the gunfire buffeted the shield and Uzziah continued to close the distance.
And then, when the signal was given by the Ace of Wands over Uzziah’s earwig, Uzziah activated what Jang had called his special sauce—a modification that had been achieved by removing the heat limiter on the thrusters. This allowed them to achieve a massive burst of speed for a brief moment. It was only good for about three uses, as it irrevocably damaged the thrusters themselves, but as it launched Uzziah up and over the speeding Echelon craft, he hoped he would not have need of it a second time.
Cyrus could not keep his hair off his brow and hold the Agamemnon unit at the same time. His hair was mottled and sweat dripped from the ends. He had not sweated this much since the day they had escaped the Archon building. By this point, it would seem that his nerves could not be rattled any more, and yet he could not shake the feeling that the luck he had experienced up until now had been used up, the last of his nine lives spent. He was sure that when the bell tolled again, it would be for him. He stood in the main hall of the Paracelsus contemplating his next move. What the Agamemnon unit lacked in volume it made up for in density, and it began pulling his arm into the floor. Cyrus was tempted to radio Jang to lower the gravity settings on the ship, but that would have been too complicated a process just to appease his laziness. Besides, the sooner he got his monkey ass out of here, the sooner he could set this thing down.
But he couldn’t leave. Tanner hadn’t had his z-axis properly set since they had entered the underground city. Just getting this unit back to the Xerxes and retrieving the Ark would not guarantee Tanner’s mindset would improve. Cyrus knew parts of Tanner’s past were sordid, and that his faith had kept him from degeneration into whatever dark reaches his soul had passed through. Tanner was a grown man, and was responsible for his own sanity—Cyrus knew that—but Tanner was the dearest friend he had left, and if his dear friend’s grip on his sanity was not strong enough to stand fast without help, what good would all the information on Asha or Earth do for Cyrus? He could not stand to lose another person close to him at this juncture.
So he set the Agamemnon unit down in the hallway and headed toward the living quarters. If Tanner’s Bible was the hoist that had pulled him from the troubled depths of his own soul before, perhaps it could provide the same ballast on this barren rock.
“We can’t blow the charges until you get back to the ship,” Jang’s voice was calm, but was of little help. He must have noticed Cyrus’s locator moving in the wrong direction.
“I don’t think I’m coming back to the rendezvous point,” Cyrus said, moving into a run.
“Just to let you know, the Echelon is going to be beating at the jetwalk any minute now. That bulkhead isn’t going to hold them much longer.”
“What the hell am I doing?”
“I don’t know, and now I’m a little worried because I was hoping you could tell me,” Jang’s reply startled Cyrus as he was not aware that he had said it aloud. It had probably been under his breath, but the nerve signals had been enough to send the subvocal communication across the network.
“Just leave without me,” Cyrus added, speeding around the corner to Tanner’s room.
“And exactly how do you plan to get planetside?”
“I’ll take this thing.”
“Not sure exactly what you mean by that, but it doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
“What about this entire idea has been good?”
Septangle Marv Talladega tried to keep the mounted auto-cannon trained on the fighter that had aggressively approached his crew. But suddenly, the craft moved much quicker that it should have to have been able to—he knew because he had been assigned to that very craft twelve Dhekads before it had been stolen. He continued firing in hopes the astrapi shield might flux and he would hit something vital, but the ship went up and over them faster than he could even follow it w
ith his eyes. The vibrations from the gun rattled the bones in his wrists, and his hands and palms were beginning to itch in his gloves. And then the air shook the craft as two much smaller fighters screamed past without warning. Nothing had appeared on the gun’s targeting gram at all. Suddenly there was an audible pop from both sides of the fighter that sounded like electromagnetic countermeasures, exactly like the ones used to scramble the navigation systems of missiles. But that was awkward, because as far as he knew, no missiles had been fired, and no one had even seen the fighters coming. The fighters most certainly did not show up on his holomonitor. Then, when the imposter ship settled in front of them, too close for missile fire, Septangle Talladega heard the sound of the imposter’s auto-cannon, and it became painfully clear what those fighters had done.
The Echelon fighter that Six had acquired had proven indispensable. Jang, Doree, and Aerik had been able to recalibrate the electromagnetic countermeasures to interfere with the frequencies of the astrapi shield so that, with precision flying, a burst from two fighters on either side of the craft would render the shield sporadic for ten seconds—enough time for an auto-cannon at point-blank range to turn the nose of the craft into a sieve.
The composite windshield of the craft shattered in tiny rivulets, and the Echelon fighter dipped violently as the driver, either shot or caught off-guard by the sudden loss of shielding, overreacted. The nose of the craft dug into the ground and bounced, and one of the men inside fell through the windshield, but he was caught by someone inside. The Echelon ship was taken off-guard, but now the distance between them had increased. Toutopolus fired another burst of auto-cannon fire into the front of the ship, but only sporadic bullets actually hit the craft as the partially restored shield flickered randomly in and out. The earwigs Toutopolus had in each ear were synced to the cannon, allowing them to cancel the overbearing report of the mounted gun, but it was still difficult to hear. Milliken tapped Toutopolus on the shoulder and then, when he continued firing, shook his shoulders vigorously to get his attention.
Toutopolus stopped and Milliken subvoced through the earwig, “Stop this ship. Now!” The command, filtered by the earwig network, was calm, but Milliken’s face was not.
The two glints of silver and orange inside the Echelon craft stole Milliken’s breath from his body. He could not even find the words he needed to get Toutopolus to stop shooting. He had shaken him, and when he had stopped, Milliken had barely found the faculties to subvoc to Uzziah to stop the ship. Milliken planted his feet beneath him and unlatched the safety on his rifle as the damaged ship came at them like it was dragged by some ominous, unseen hand. Milliken braced himself, prepared to fire, and hoped that training in Earth’s gravity in the rumble room had worked the way Tanner and Cyrus had planned.
Toutopolus had no idea why Milliken had asked him to stop firing, and then had asked Uzziah to stop the ship. As the fighter behind careened toward them, Toutopolus saw the Echelon soldier inside rear his arm back to throw the silver egg, and it made even less sense. And then, the most confusing thing of all happened—just before the nose of the Echelon fighter smashed into the flatdeck of their own, Milliken took a running leap through the windshield firing his weapon and screaming as if he had lost whatever tenuous link to reality that remained.
When Milliken flew through the windshield of the craft, he expected to be knocked right back onto the flatdeck. The other half of him expected to be dead by the time he landed. Both halves agreed, however, that this was the single stupidest thing he had done to date; but he couldn’t just sit there and wait to be disintegrated. He squeezed the trigger of the assault rifle as he cleared the shards of clear composite framing what was left of the windshield. The muzzle flash caused some of the obscured figures inside to recoil, but the one rearing back to throw the silver egg fell in their midst as tiny, dim sparks danced across his chest.
Milliken landed on his butt on the console of the ship and his momentum carried him across the console and knee-first into the face of the pilot. The pilot slumped over the controls, raising the nose of the ship behind Milliken, which dumped him deeper into the craft as the figures inside moved away from him. He continued to fire the assault rifle into the mass of men inside the craft, but something was odd. Even though at this range there was a high chance the bullets would penetrate the Comptex or hit with such force there was serious internal damage, Milliken’s presence did not seem to elicit the undivided attention one would expect.
And then he realized what had their attention—the armed, and now lost, Squib.
In his moment of hesitation, the rifle flew from his hand as something smashed into the inside of his wrist. And as he drew his hand back into a defensive stance, the ominous reality of the position in which he had placed himself became lucid, and the sharpening incline of the floor reinforced his realization. He was standing in the midst of trained killers, whom he had just single-handedly put in mortal danger—and he was alone. But he would be damned to the lowest coward’s cage in hell if he would let any one of these men, killers or not, take him without him taking some of them with him.
Jang watched as Cyrus’s ‘C’ blip stopped in a room in the living quarters of the Paracelsus. He moved his eyes down to the corner of the holomonitor where the eight other miscellaneous blips hovered around the bulkhead blocking the hall leading from the airlock to the jetway. They had been there for an uncomfortably long time, and pretty soon Cyrus’s path of egress would be swarming with them. Being compressed in the small compartment had made Jang’s toes numb earlier, but now the heat of anticipation filled his body with warmth and forced blood into his extremities. He had seen the ‘S’ next to his own compartment on the screen, but his heart still jumped into his throat when something banged against the compartment door.
“We’re running out of daylight!” Six’s muffled voice was loud enough to penetrate the wall of the compartment even though the computer compensated for the rise in his voice.
“Cyrus went back for something. He said we should leave him,” Jang was still subvocalizing, even though at this point it was not necessary.
“We’re not leaving without him!” the message came in through the wall of the compartment and the earwig in bizarre stereophonic. Jang had already internalized this information, but what to do about it had not quite registered.
“If we’re going to ride your Earth ship down, we had better get moving.”
“I hate to add chatter, but it takes three untrained people to land that ship, and it takes five minutes to power up the re-entry systems,” Uzziah’s voice interjected from the network.
Jang set the self-destruct sequence on the explosives Fenrir and Aerik had set up inside the compartment, because when this was over, the Echelon would tear this ship apart looking for leads. Jang typed a sequence into his datadeck and pressed the button that opened the panel. Six was pulling him out of the compartment as soon as the door slid open.
“Old boy is going to get us killed,” Six said as Jang landed on his feet.
“Luckily he has as much of a knack for getting out of these situations as he seems to have getting into them.” Jang adjusted his glasses and they moved toward the jetway to the Paracelsus.
When they rounded the corner to the jetway, they could see the glow from the laser-bit as it completed a ragged square in the bulkhead. As they entered the jetway, they heard the loud thump of the excised piece of bulkhead hitting the ground. Six paused for a moment as if to turn and face the men pursuing them, but Jang grabbed him by his collar. “There’s a better way,” Jang said. “Voice Command:” he reported through the microphone, not bothering to subvocalize. “Drop bulkhead BF-49.”
He paused, and then as he and Six cleared the opposite side of the jetway he belted, “Confirmed,” his calm disturbed by the echoing footfalls of the Echelon. There was a metal slam behind them as the pressure change seemed to give them a push forward.
“That will buy us some time,” Jang said, subvocalizing again, “bu
t we need to get to the command center.” The network parsing system filtered out the anxiety in his breathing. “Cyrus, I hope you have something magnificent planned to get us out of this debacle.”
Cyrus rounded the corner empty-handed. It had not been fully articulated, but after the Echelon had broken through the initial bulkhead, and Six and Jang had moved to the bridge, there was now only one way out of this—which meant Tanner’s Bible could stay in his room for now. Jang’s last words rang through Cyrus’s head as bile rose into his throat. He was endangering people on a whim, and it sent cold stilettos through his veins.
And then, something, magnificent or not, did come to him. “Jang, are you tapped into the Paracelsus base system?”
“We need the Agamemnon to cross reference the functions, but I’m already reconnecting it through comm-sat. But I’m gonna need no less than four to five minutes to drop this thing without burning up.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll buy us the time. When you get it back online, I need you to do three things. Close all the external vents from the waste processing center except the one that leads into the jetway. Then, get yourself and Six bolted in, and when I give you the word, cut the gravity.”
“Okay, so what are you planning to do in the meantime?”
Cyrus arrived at his own room just as Jang’s word came over the earwig. He slid his door open to find his staff leaning against the wall, exactly where he had left it. “I’m going to be a good host and meet the Echelon at the door.”
Toutopolus tried to subvoc to the others but found himself screaming, “We have trouble back here!” as the nose of the Echelon fighter recoiled from its contact with the flatdeck and rose, pulling it into the air. Toutopolus craned his neck, debating whether or not to fire at the Echelon fighter with Milliken in it.
And then his question was answered for him.
A tiny glint, like a new point of starlight in the Miasmic sky, streaked over the edge of the black craft and fell toward him. Instantly he knew what it was, and he didn’t need to see the bluish aster, as the egg moved slow enough to penetrate the electromagnetic membrane that protected the ship, to dive from the seat of the auto-cannon to avoid the destruction.
