by M. R. Forbes
“Disterium plume? I thought you said the Nephilim didn’t use disterium?”
“Nephilim shipbuilding resources are limited and tightly controlled,” Keeper replied. “And centuries of war have diminished those resources even further. Most of the starcraft you will see have origins in the Seraphinium.”
“Seraphinium?”
“What they call your galaxy.”
“I hate it.”
“As do I.”
“Good. Call it the Republic while we’re here.”
“Aye, Queenie.”
“How recent is the plume?”
“One Earth Standard hour.”
“Can you track the ship that made it?”
“We will need to get closer.”
“Do it. No. Wait. Nerd?”
“Aye, Queenie?” Erlan said, turning from his place at the command station.
“Can you set a course for the disterium plume and get us in motion?”
“Let me see.”
He turned back to the station, his hands moving in front of him as he manipulated the projections there. A few seconds later, she felt the slight sense of a momentum change as the Covenant got back under way.
“I’m impressed,” Abbey said. “You’ve learned the system pretty quickly.”
“It isn’t much different than Republic controls. It also helped a lot when Keeper translated the text to our language.”
“We should reach the disterium plume in a few minutes,” Keeper said.
“That fast?” Abbey replied. “We aren’t in FTL, are we?”
“No. Thirty-percent light speed.”
“Gant,” Abbey said.
“Aye, Queenie?” he replied.
“What’s the status on the teleportation platform?”
“I still don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Does that mean you can or can’t get it to work the way we discussed?”
“I don’t know.”
Abbey lowered her head. His lack of self-confidence was getting under her skin. “You do realize what the likely outcome will be if you aren’t at least mostly certain, right?”
“You’ll end up trapped inside the hull of a starship or floating in space. Yes, Queenie. I’m doing the best I can, but I don’t know if-”
“Yes, you are.”
“Ruby would be a better choice to do the calculations. I can’t be sure they’re precise.”
She didn’t want to ask Ruby or Keeper to check his math. She told him she believed in him, and she had to stick with that.
“You’ve done great so far.”
Gant grumbled something that couldn’t be translated.
“In that case, I’m on my way down. Imp, Ruby, prep the Faust. We need to be quick and clean with this.”
“Aye, Queenie,” Bastion replied.
“Yes, Queenie,” Ruby said.
“Nerd, you have the bridge. Keeper, with me.”
“Aye, Queenie,” Erlan said.
Keeper followed her off the bridge and down the corridor to one of the transport chambers inside the ship. They had restored half of the teleporters that allowed fast travel around the Shardship, replacing the spent cells with fresh fluid from the Focus.
Abbey paused at the control console, switching the destination to the central hub on the opposite side of the Covenant’s hemisphere. That area led out to the main laboratories, as well as the primary teleportation platform. According to Jequn, it was the device the Shard had used to travel instantly from the Shardship to the Seedships, regardless of the distance separating them. Despite having the Blood of the Shard within her, she couldn’t do the same. They had disconnected the link between the Covenant and its satellites to prevent Kett from trying to use the Focus and risking recontamination.
That didn’t mean they couldn’t use the device at all. Uriel had been helping Gant demystify the technology, and he was pretty certain he could adjust it to function similarly to the Seedships, where an object could be beamed to a given destination on a one-way journey through time and space. He had mentioned something about quantum physics and chaos theory, but she hadn’t really understood.
The difference was that she didn’t want to beam to a specific destination, she wanted to beam to a moving target.
If they wanted to move freely among the Nephilim, they needed to look like Nephilim. To start, that meant gaining control of a Nephilim starship.
Abbey smiled at the thought. There was just something about the idea of being a pirate.
She stepped into the teleporter, coming out in the hub at the other end. Keeper remained right behind her, and together they crossed the central shaft, through a pair of blast doors and into the remains of the labs. The scientific center of the Covenant had been laid to waste by the Asura, all of the equipment broken and mangled and currently inoperable. Keeper had described the place to her, though. This was where humankind had been created, along with the other races that now composed their end of the universe. It was incredible to think about and incredibly sad to look at, knowing what had happened since.
Keeper wanted to repair it all. It was in its directives to want to clean it up and put it all back together. It had to wait. Preparing to return to the Republic was more important. She could tell the order had pained it, but the imperative to obey the Chosen seemed to override the instruction to maintain the Shardship.
They passed through the area to a second set of blast doors that gave way as she approached, revealing a small room with high ceilings and a raised, round platform in the center. An access panel was open at the base of the platform, and as she entered Gant’s head appeared in it.
“Queenie,” he said. “I’m not in the mood to kill you today.”
“You aren’t going to kill me,” she replied. “I believe in you.”
“That makes one of us.”
“I liked you better before you got so nihilistic.”
“I liked me better, too.”
He closed the panel, walking over to a long console to the side of the platform. Uriel was already standing there, looking down at it.
“Once we get a lock, we should be ready to go,” he said.
“Keeper?” Abbey said.
“We have nearly reached the disterium field,” Keeper said. “I’m sending the path estimates based on the dispersion pattern to Nerd.”
“Thank you. Did you pick up the target?”
“Not yet. Standby.”
Abbey approached the teleportation platform, climbing the four steps to the top of it. It had the appearance of a circuit board, with a smooth surface busy with thousands of lines embedded into the surface, crossing one another in a pattern that was both chaotic and definitive. Ten smaller rings were obvious on the surface, along with one larger, overlapping ring in the center.
The renewed fluid of the Focus moved in channels along the outside of the rings, glowing with a soft, white light. As Abbey stepped onto the platform, she could feel the naniates within her react, drawn to the system.
She traversed the platform, coming to a stop in the middle of the center ring. She put her hands down, able to feel the connection between the Gift inside her and the Blood in the teleporter. They were one and the same, and they would all bend to her command.
Gant went to stand beside Uriel, hopping onto the console for a better view of her. Keeper remained in place near the entrance, so still it was as though it had abandoned its shell. And maybe it had.
“Target identified,” Keeper said after a few minutes had passed. “We’re in luck, Queenie. It is a trading vessel.”
Abbey nodded. “Pass the positioning data to the teleportation console.”
“Already done, Queenie,” Gant said. “We’re locking on now. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“Yes. Imp, is the Faust ready?”
“Aye, Queenie.”
She was tempted to tell Bastion to come and look for her if she didn’t respond after the teleport, but she didn’t want to giv
e Gant any indication she didn’t trust him. She did, mostly, but his lack of confidence was making it harder to keep the faith.
“We have a lock, Queenie,” Uriel said.
Gant stared at her with adorable, frightened eyes. “Good hunting,” he said.
Abbey kept her hands down to her sides, reaching out to the Blood around her. It began to rise from the channels, flowing upwards, a tight web of white light connecting the trillions of naniates as they wrapped her in a blinding cocoon. Her entire body tickled, the Gift within her completing the link. She couldn’t feel the machines picking her body apart atom by atom. She had no sense of the time or motion as they carried her out of relative space and time, transporting her across the universe to the calculated position, where it had already been instructed to reassemble her.
She felt cold, and when she looked down she was naked, but only for an instant. The Shardsuit reappeared around her, the white light fading, sinking in toward her center.
Her eyes regained their focus. She was in the corridor of a ship. Not the Shardship. It was much too small and dimly lit. It smelled like blood and sweat and shit. She ducked to the side, behind a narrow bulkhead.
“Gant, it’s Queenie,” she said, whispering into the comm. “Teleport complete.”
“Oh, praise Gantrean,” he said.
“Imp, prepare to launch on my mark.”
“Roger. Ready and waiting, Queenie.”
Abbey leaned out from her position, her eyes tracking down the corridor. There was no sign of anyone nearby, but she could hear laughter further ahead.
It was time to meet the locals.
15
Abbey started walking toward the source of the laughter. Whoever or whatever was creating it; there was a certain dark quality to it. She didn’t want to label it evil, but it carried a feeling of malice that immediately made her angry.
“Psst. Hey. Hey, you.”
The voice came from her left, somewhere in the shadows. The words were spoken in Seraphim, translated for her by the Gift. She paused, turning her head and squinting her eyes. It was so dark she hadn’t noticed she was walking amidst a row of cells, composed not of an energy field but of metal bars, spaced too tightly for more than a hand to fit through. A shape moved behind the bars, a small face emerging from a dense jungle of dirty cloth and flesh.
“You,” the individual said again, pointing a long, narrow finger at her. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Abbey heard the laughter stop. A murmur rose up from the cell in front of her, and another from behind. She put a finger to her lips. “Shh. Damn it, don’t give me away.”
“Is that Malina?” someone said. “Did she come to take us to Abaddon?”
“What’s all the fragging bitching back here?”
Abbey looked back to the corridor. A massive shape ducked through the forward hatch and into the hold. It was easily the size of a Trover, with a row of spikes on both arms, and a pair of horns extruding from its forehead. Jequn had called it an Executioner, a creation of the Nephilim. This one was smaller than the one she had seen in Republic space, its boney protrusions less pronounced. It was still terrifying to look at.
“Who the frag are you?” it coughed when it saw her. She couldn’t have stood out more, her silver hair and white Shardsuit a stark contrast to the grimy darkness of the trader.
She should have asked Keeper what it was trading.
“Surrender your ship,” Abbey said. “And I won’t kill you.”
The Executioner laughed. Of course, it did. Why would it be afraid of her? “I don’t know how you managed to stow yourself on board, but now you’ve got two choices. You can get yourself into one of these pens with the rest of the meat, or you can go out the airlock. Which one do you want?”
Abbey noticed motion behind the creature. Three more of the slavers had joined it, and she could see guns hanging from their large hands.
“You want me to go in there?” she asked. “Put me in there.”
“Gladly.”
The Executioner moved toward her, much faster than she was expecting. She took hold of the Gift, bouncing away to avoid its grapple. She needed to end this quickly.
She landed a few meters back, reaching to the Shardsuit and removing a pair of Uin. She kept them closed as the slaver charged her again, a fast, heavy punch directed at her head. She ducked below it, sidestepping its secondary attack, bouncing sideways and spinning as she rose to the level of its head. Its eyes grew wide as the Uin whipped around in her grip, flipping open, the blade slicing cleanly into its skull.
She felt the weapon pause as it caught in the Executioner’s thick bone, and she cursed as she let it go, landing away from her opponent. The slaver bellowed in pain, reaching up and grabbing the weapon, tearing it away and tossing it aside.
“Frag this,” he said, drawing an ugly sidearm from his hip. “Kill that bitch.”
The other slavers followed his command, leaving her caught in the middle of them. She closed her eyes, feeling the Gift flowing within her. She glanced sideways, to the small face at the front of the cell. The slave looked frightened for her.
She smiled.
The lead slaver fired first, the sound of his gun deafening in the small space. A jagged shard of metal launched from the weapon, heading directly for her chest from only a few meters away.
She saw it as though it were moving in slow motion, turning to the side to avoid it, and at the same time taking hold of it with the Gift. The naniates pushed against it, changing its trajectory, and an instant later it sank into the eye of one of the enemies behind her.
“Frag, my eye,” that one shouted, while the one beside him shot at her.
Abbey bounced forward, the makeshift rounds passing within a hair’s breadth of her body as she charged the target. She didn’t make the same mistake with the Uin twice, this time lining the edge of the blade with the Gift and triggering it to burn. She hit the Executioner in the chest with her feet, balancing there for an instant. White flame ran along the edge of the Uin as she brought it around, sinking it into the slaver’s neck and easily cutting all the way through.
She shifted her weight, somersaulting back, turning in the air toward the first target. The slaver had dropped the gun and replaced it with a jagged knife, and he tried to hit her with it as she came down in front of him, ducking beneath the blade before lashing out, cutting his gut open from one side to the other, digging in deep with the flaming weapon. He looked down, his hands going to the wound in an effort to keep his insides from tumbling out.
Abbey didn’t see him collapse. She had turned again, and she raised her hand as the third slaver fired. The bullet stopped half a meter from her chest, holding in midair. Then she flicked her wrist and it reversed course, sinking into the enemy’s remaining eye, passing through and into its brain. It collapsed in front of her, joining the others.
Abbey straightened up, extinguishing the Uin, folding it and returning it to the Shardsuit. She started to rotate back to the cell when a sudden pain knocked her from her feet.
She stumbled to her knees, clutching at her head. She closed her eyes, a blinding white light appearing there, angry and cold.
The Light of the Shard. It had integrated with her, becoming a part of her. It couldn’t speak, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t express itself. She had taken the Gift it had cleansed and used it for violence. She had used it to kill.
It wasn’t happy.
“Get off your fragging high horse,” Abbey said, clenching her teeth against the pain. “If you want me to stop Thraven, then this is what needs to be done. This is what needed to be done thousands of years ago when you let that asshole Lucifer cut you down and frag up the entire universe.”
The pain didn’t subside. It intensified. The Light was vying for control.
“You chose me for a reason. Not because you wanted me, but because you knew I would do what needed to be done. That I would do what you can’t. I won’t let you keep me from sav
ing Hayley.”
She pushed back against the pain, her body shaking as she fought to regain her hold over the Gift. She had tried to do it his way. She had accepted the reduced power of his Gift in exchange for stopping her from becoming a literal monster. But the Gift didn’t decide whether it was used for violence or not. It didn’t get to pick and choose what part of her will it would respond to and what it would acquiesce to doing. She was the Chosen. She was the host. It was her call. Maybe the Seraphim hadn’t been made of the right stuff to understand that part of it.
She was, and she did.
“You gave me this, you son of a bitch,” she growled. “Now you have to deal with the consequences. So fragging deal with it!”
She shouted then, howling like an animal, pushing back against the Light.
The pain subsided as quickly as it had come.
“Hey. Hey, you.”
Abbey was on her hands and knees. Her entire body hurt, but she knew she had to get up. Were there more slavers on the ship? There had to be a pilot at least. Did he know what had happened back here?
“Malina. Get up. Please get up.”
Abbey turned her head to the small face. He wasn’t a child like she had originally thought. He was humanoid, maybe even human, but smaller than a normal human.
“Get up,” he said again. “You can do it. Please, Malina. The others are coming.”
Abbey blinked a few times, trying to clear her head. She heard the commotion now. Boots on the metal floor. She looked ahead, finding the slaver’s large gun resting beside his corpse. She reached out, using the Gift to bring it to her, hefting it easily with the strength of the Shardsuit.
A slaver ducked into the corridor, freezing at the sight of the dead. He joined them an instant later, a heavy slug of metal punching through his chest.
Abbey sprang past him before he reached the ground, bursting into a larger room where a table had been hastily abandoned, a game of some kind spread out on it. Three more slavers were pouring into the room, trying to get into some semblance of organization, maybe thinking the prisoners had revolted.
She tore them to pieces, rounds from the gun punching into them and leaving them staggering, sudden sharp claws reaching up and slashing across their necks. She landed on the table, spinning slowly, waiting for the slavers to get up.
