“Damn it,” my mother cursed. “Another Warlord? They had another Warlord at their disposal?”
I stared at her and saw her eyes widen.
Was she listening to a voice carried along by a Fragment Link?
My mother and the man she supported shared a long look.
Then she faced me and spoke solemnly. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
Her words elicited a snort from me.
I was about to retort further when I heard Maya’s thoughts on the Fragment Link.
*Caprice, Rina—can you hear us?
*Maya, I cried out. *What happened?
*They took us down, and then they left. They went right by us. But they left in a real hurry like their butts were on fire. What’s going on out there?
*Something’s attacking the Crimson Crescent ship. It looks like the Crescent team can’t escape now.
I almost felt like laughing.
After their dramatic entrance was there to be no dramatic exit?
With troubled looks, my mother and the man she supported gazed up through the transparent ceiling.
I looked up too, just in time to see a narrow beam of golden light rake the reaction field protecting the ship’s portside. The field rippled and I saw the air shimmer hotly.
Then from somewhere to the west, a beam of azure light lanced across the sky and connected with the darting humanoid fighter. The Warlord immediately began dancing a zig-zag pattern, avoiding many of the subsequent beams of light that chased it across the sky. I watched it juke and jink about, then suddenly disappear from view when it rocketed somewhere to the south.
Sparing my mother a glance, I risked walking quickly over to the cafeteria’s southern windows and looked up into the sky.
Some distance away and high above the habitat’s buildings, two humanoid shapes – two of these Warlords – drifted several hundred feet apart.
They were like two opponents sizing each other up after the initial flurry of flying fists.
I watched them with a mixture of exhaustion and confusion.
Without warning one Warlord charged the other, and a fierce aerial dogfight broke out in the sky within the habitat.
Chapter 25 – Ravana.
(Caelum)
I floated in a sea of white nothing.
There was no horizon, and there was no sense of up or down.
I remembered a similar sensation during a school trip where the class visited a pilot training center. There was a chamber utterly devoid of artificial gravity fields, so once inside you felt completely weightless. The lack of gravity affects the liquids inside your body. I remembered feeling initially nauseous, but I didn’t barf up like some of my Regular classmates did.
It was the same inside the Vault. I felt weightless and lost because there was no point of reference to gauge my orientation.
But what really bothered me was the whiteness of the place, though I guess black would have scared me to death.
And yet, somehow I sensed that this emptiness wasn’t really empty.
I could feel my Awareness being brushed by objects floating in the nothing along with me.
What the Hell could they be?
Celica had explained the Vault was used for storage, and she’d said there was something inside she needed to retrieve. I had already surmised it was the skeletal armor she’d summoned moments before tossing me into the Vault. But going by its name alone, I had to figure this Artifact was used as a vault, and important items were placed inside.
Huh…important items.
I could only think of two things – Fragments and Artifacts.
So then why the Hell had Celica tossed me in here?
Why did she want me floating around with the other pieces the Prides had recovered from inside the Hurakan Nebula?
Didn’t she say you needed a connection with something outside in order to get out?
But I wasn’t a Fragment or an Artifact, so how could I have a connection to something outside?
Then I thought of Caprice, and Simone, and…Haruka.
Could they be my connection to the outside world?
Those three are so much trouble. I’m all over the place when I think of them.
I grabbed my head then ran my fingers wildly through my hair.
It was getting long. I’d need to get it cut…if I ever got out of here.
I looked myself over.
Strange, I can see my body and I have tactile sensation.
And I’m breathing too.
I hadn’t even noticed that I was breathing until now.
How could there be air inside the Vault?
I looked around, turning my body but everything was just white so I had no idea how large the interior could be.
And then I sensed the objects again, lurking around the peripheral fray of my Awareness.
I concentrated on them, and pictured myself moving toward them.
They moved away, scattering like a school of fish before a shark.
Damn.
Wasn’t there anything inside here that could help me? Anything at all that I had a connection with? Maybe there was a Fragment or Artifact I could call out to. Maybe I could bond with one and use it to force my way out.
I closed my eyes, welcoming the darkness, and concentrated on what I could feel around me.
One object hadn’t moved away.
It hadn’t darted about like a frightened fish.
In fact, it was almost as though it was…watching me.
Or was it waiting for me?
I focused my Awareness on it for a moment, then opened my eyes.
I was certain I was looking in its direction.
I pictured myself surging toward it, flying like a hero character would in a children’s holovid drama.
Again, it was strange to think of myself as moving but I knew that I was moving.
It moved toward me.
I stopped, and it stopped.
I opened my mouth and shouted, but no sound came out.
Instead, it felt like I was shouting inside my mind.
Hello? Can you hear me? Can you help me?
The object didn’t move.
Then I sensed other objects around it, and I felt as though I was being caressed by invisible fingertips. It was such an incongruous sensation, especially in a place like this.
Then those fingers penetrated by skull, and a sharp headache struck my brain.
I groaned and grabbed my head but it wouldn’t go away.
It felt as though my eyeballs would burst.
I screamed in agony and the pain moved down my body.
Now I really screamed in agony.
It felt like every cell in my body was being squeezed and stabbed at the same time.
Was I going to rupture? Would I suffer an aneurism and die here, forever floating inside this sea of nothing?
When the pain disappeared it took me a long while to realize that it was gone. Every inch of my body ached, and my ears rang in the silence that followed.
I was too late to notice the object interested in me was now racing toward me, while the others stayed behind.
I was too late to do anything about the wiry mass heading in my direction like a writhing silver cloud.
I opened my mouth to shout at it.
It plunged down my mouth and into my esophagus.
I choked – fear and desperation making me jerk about violently.
I tried grabbing the silver, wiry mass of thread but it was frictionless and slipped easily through my fingers.
And then it was all inside me, burrowing into my body not unlike how the Symbiote would spread through to every corner of my innards.
It burrowed into my brain, and I quickly lost complete control of my body.
I could feel my limbs moving as though they were being tested out.
Then I felt my body run through various contortions that were painful at best.
My spine felt like it would snap, and my insides rupture, but my
body held.
It felt as though a hundred fingers were massaging the inside of my head, feeling about inside my mind.
Then the sensations faded away, and I noticed I could move again.
I was back in control.
But I was still stuck inside the Vault, and now I had this unidentifiable silver thread inside my body.
Did my situation just go from bad to worse?
Without warning, the white space around me turned dark. I was reminded of when I attended a public screening at holovid center. The theater would go dark, and then holovid would start.
But in this case…the holovid was all around me.
And it wasn’t a holovid.
It looked real. It sounded real. It felt real.
I was floating high above the ground with a massive cityscape stretching out below me to all four points of the compass. Clouds floated above me, and the sky was full of objects zipping about like mosquitoes. Thousands of mosquitoes.
But they weren’t mosquitoes.
They were fighter craft of some sort.
Agile, nimble instruments of destruction, chasing each other down, hunting for new prey as soon as they made a kill.
Thousands upon thousands of them. Some of them would dive low to the city, and dogfight in the canyons formed by the immense buildings. The populace ran, looking no larger than grains of shifting sand.
I looked up and saw a number of massive, cylindrical objects hanging in the sky, well below low orbit. They resembled dumb bells though the weights at each end were long and tubular. Surrounding the center bar, and connected to it by numerous arms, were six to eight pods reminiscent of corn ears.
Are they starships or carriers of some sort?
I’d never seen a design like those but I wasn’t all that knowledgeable about starships in general.
But from the way the dark mosquitoes emerged from the corn ears, I had to assume those ships were indeed carriers and loaded with thousands of fighter craft.
But who are they fighting? Are they an invading force?
I looked down at the city, and noticed several dozen large airships floating above it. They reminded me of the images of zeppelins I had seen in the history archives of ancient Earth. But these things were enormous, and they were launching fighter craft as well.
My Awareness screamed at me.
A squadron of mosquito fighters was headed my way, lighting up the sky around me as they approached. But I was unharmed by the incoming fire, and when the fighters swung by I raised an arm that clearly wasn’t my own and blew them apart with beams of crimson light.
Drones. Those mosquito fighters were drones. And they hardly resembled mosquitoes at all.
I understood that now, but I also realized I was attached to some kind of black and white skeletal biped with limbs shrouded in angular armor. My legs and thighs were encased in thick leg armor that attached to the biped’s thighs, but the rest of me was free to move about unhindered, including my arms. I had the unshakeable sensation that I was growing out of this machine. Suddenly a mental image of what I was wearing flashed into my mind and I could see it clearly. Its limbs were connected to a rigid spine by a number of chains that resembled interlocking chevrons. Hanging off the back of the machine were seven wedge shaped wing-vanes that reminded me of giant leaves. They attached to the rigid spine by more of the chevron linked chains.
The arm I had moved and aimed at the drones belonged to this machine, and I saw a pair of angular, narrow vanes attached to both forearms. It was from these vanes that the crimson light beams had emitted.
What the Hell is this?
*Ravana.
Huh? I blinked and realized something had spoken to me from inside my head.
*Warlord, type Rho-Khan…Ravana.
A flurry of information flashed through my head.
Hah. So that’s what this is. How could I have forgotten what it was…?
I frowned to myself.
Wait—how could I have forgotten any of this?
This city. This world. This battle.
How could I have forgotten what all this meant to me?
In the distance, near the center of the city lay an enormous palace – a gleaming white fortified citadel that was kilometers in diameter and thousands of feet high. Smoke billowed upwards in various places along the base of the citadel. It exchanged fire with the carriers hanging below low orbit – bright bolts of crimson light dotting the sky like perforations on a sheet of paper. One of the carriers flashed brightly and smoke broke out along the length of its hull.
I watched the vessel slowly lose altitude. In minutes it would crash to the ground, and tens of thousands of people would die.
I focused on the distant citadel.
How could I forget where I needed to go?
She was there in that palace – the seat of power for the Human Empire. The last bastion of their resistance.
Before I knew it, I was flying toward the palace.
I had to get there in time.
I had to reach her in time.
I had to move faster.
Clenching my jaw, I willed Ravana to fly at greater speed, and soon I was cutting a fiery path across the sky, blazing away at any drones that crossed my path, heating up the atmosphere as drag built up around the effect-fields protecting the Warlord.
Onward to the citadel I flew, and soon I was oblivious to battle raging around me.
I had only one goal in mind – to save her.
#
(Celica)
She was fast.
So very fast.
I was over-clocked and pushing the envelope of what I could achieve.
Yet I could barely hold my own against her.
A Shar-Khan against a Seer-Khan.
Warlord against Warlord.
Familiar against Familiar.
Around me the habitat spun crazily as I rolled and twisted the Black Camellia out of the line of fire. My wing-vanes oriented and re-oriented by the millisecond, altering the shape of the levitator fields; narrowing and angling the inertial fields.
The Black Camellia felt like it was gripping the very fabric of space, pulling it and twisting it for purchase as it darted about the inside of the habitat.
She entered my field of vision, and I fired upon her again.
And again, my quantum reaction fire warped around her.
Damn her inertial field was strong.
She was warping space to protect herself beyond what effect-fields and reaction barriers could achieve. It was one skill I hadn’t mastered.
I knew there was a lot I had yet to master.
During the month I’d spent with Crescent, the month during which my team was held captive while I played the part of Falken’s mistress, I had practiced piloting the Black Camellia. Crimson Crescent wanted to observe what the Warlord could achieve, so I operated it for them. Thinking back now, it was unbelievable that Falken and Crimson Crescent would place so much trust in me. At any time I could have used the Camellia and escaped at my leisure. Even if it meant leaving my team behind, the mission priority had been the Camellia. Everything else was a secondary concern.
Yet I hadn’t left.
I couldn’t leave.
I was falling in love with him.
I was willing to betray my precious comrades and my superiors for him.
If my team members hadn’t decided to fight their way out, Falken would have released them eventually. He had already agreed to do so. All I had to say was ‘yes’ to his proposal.
And I did say ‘yes’.
But then it all went to Hell, and I had to use the Camellia to secure their escape. I had no choice but to leave with them.
No, I did have a choice, but I couldn’t leave Caelum behind. I wanted to take him with me. Even if he hated Crimson Crescent and the Aventis, I was certain I could make him understand. I was certain I could ease his hatred.
So that’s why I returned home to Pharos.
That’s why I betraye
d Falken, for the sake of my family.
But learning I was pregnant changed everything.
Now it wasn’t just Caelum that was my family.
Now I had a baby inside me to consider.
I blinked.
Over-clocked or not I could hardly afford the distraction of reminiscing through painful memories.
Four beams of golden light razed the space I’d occupied a moment ago. They struck ground and burned away a large apartment complex. I didn’t have time to wonder if it was occupied, but I glimpsed people running on the street and emergency lev-vehicles shepherding them.
I shot upwards, aiming for the habitat ceiling. I needed to draw her fire away from the habitat buildings.
The habitat interior had a peak height of two thousand feet. But there was a gap in the middle between a thousand and sixteen hundred feet where the artificial gravity was almost non-existent. Induran had made use of this gap in the gravity fields, keeping airborne with ease, while diverting power to its effect-fields and whipping up a storm about itself.
As I raced for the ceiling, I glimpsed the starship descending toward the academy buildings. It needed to descend low enough to pick up my teammates. With the Avienda distracted, this was Induran’s chance to recover them.
Flipping end over end, I aimed the Camellia’s feet for the artificial sky above me. In several areas, the mimetic field projectors were damaged, so there were swathes showing the rock ceiling rather than a blue sky broken with puffy white clouds.
I was upside down now, flying feet first toward that sky. The Warlord’s feet touched down on the rock ceiling, landing between an ensemble of gantries and walkways hidden by the mimetic sky field. These walkways were used by maintenance staff to gain access to the light rigs and the mimetic sky projectors. With the Black Camellia standing upside down on the ceiling, its legs thigh deep in the sky field, I felt I was standing in a pool of shimmering blue water.
I looked up, or rather down at the habitat cityscape above me.
The Avienda cut a path across the sky, angling toward me.
I aimed all eight of the Camellia’s quantum reaction cannons at my opponent, but I held my fire when she veered away and chose to land on the habitat ceiling a couple of hundred feet away.
The Black Camellia recognized the Seer-Khan as the Avienda. It was stronger than my Warlord. Faster too, and its pilot knew how to draw out its potential.
Pride x Familiar Page 44
