Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

  Or they would have, if he hadn’t returned fire with the force of a volcano. His twin cannons spat in alternating bursts, each hit leaving gouges that gleamed with molten edges. The kickback would have leveled a smaller man but, muscles taut, Eton steadily strafed back and forth, disrupting the concentration of their firepower. Stray shots that hit his shield flickered and went out like raindrops on a fire. A maniacal glee entered Eton’s eyes.

  “That’s it, you insect sonzabitches,” he taunted. “Not so fun when someone in your weight class picks on you, is it?”

  One of his blasts caught two guards, and their body parts tumbled in different directions. Another blast leveled the container two others were attempting to hide behind.

  But they were Bladeguards, and instead of scattering, they rolled out of the way into new crouches, bringing their weapons to bear. Another Bladeguard appeared in the doorway, in armor I didn’t recognize. Heavier and thicker, it was a dirty bronze-blue with a cloak attached at the shoulders. A hard rectangular helmet with three long vertical slits glared at us.

  Whoever it was, they were an effective leader. The figure made a quick motion, and the Bladeguards reacted as one, even as they split in two. Half of them surged forward, and the rest…turned and ran straight for the wall behind them.

  “Eton!” I shouted. “They’re going to use mag-gloves to get above you!”

  Sure enough, with the grace and intent of spiders, the Bladeguards scaled up the hangar walls at a shocking pace. That was the beauty of mag-gloves: they not only magnetized the user to whatever surface they wished, they disrupted his gravity as well, making climbing even easier. The Bladeguards fanned out and reached the ceiling in seconds.

  “Keep those on your side suppressed with your rifle,” Eton shouted back. “I’m going to take care of everyone else.”

  Take care of them he did. With nimble manipulations of the controls in his hands, the arm of one cannon came to life, unhinging from its position and swiveling to point toward the ceiling. The rate and type of fire changed; the plasma blasts became smaller, less powerful. But they left in a furious stream that was almost uninterrupted. The other cannon continued its barrage on the troops on the floor, and somehow, Eton kept both cannons aimed and firing at once. He moved like a dancer, not the walking embodiment of death and terror. Laughter began to escape from deep in his chest.

  I suddenly recognized him. That light in his eyes, that impossible grace, the crazy laugh. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before—but I’d been so young at the time. Teveton Gregorus had been all over the media in the years prior to my time in the Academy as one of the most gifted and iconoclastic students. The crags in his face and his graying facial hair had helped hide it, but still. He had been a celebrity for his genius in battle simulations. He’d disappeared after graduating, and I’d always wondered what had happened to him. Everyone had thought he was going to be a hero.

  Instead, he was here in a damaged hangar, single-handedly fighting off a squadron of the most elite troops in the systems—troops that could have been his comrades in arms. He was a hero, just not in the way anyone had expected.

  I did my best to defend him. The rifle felt heavy in my hands, and guilt tore at me. No one was shooting at me, and yet I trained the glowing sight of my weapon on human beings I no doubt knew by name. Still, I fired, hitting arms and legs, trying to disable them and knock them off the ceiling. As they crawled on, faster than I could track, I realized it was a fool’s game. Heart pounding, I took deadly aim, trying to convince myself this wasn’t real.

  I had never taken a human life before. Now that the time had come, how could I possibly bring myself to do it? Could I really cross that line, or did I simply think I could because I’d watched others do it?

  I began to fire. Some Bladeguards were mowed down by Eton, their shields and armor futile against his barrage. Some fell to my shots, dead or alive, I didn’t know.

  But one made it through.

  He dropped from the ceiling above Eton, his blade flaring. He landed directly on Eton’s shoulders, and yet the big man stayed standing. As his knees flexed, his hand flickered and his subcompact whipped up to the Bladeguard with impossible speed, firing as it went. But the Bladeguard brought his sword up just as fast to shield his face. The white band in the middle disappeared in a brilliant burst as the photon blasts hit it…and just as it turned blue.

  Squinting in an attempt to sight the attacker, I found his blade melted to nothingness. But it had done the job; Verta’s cannons winked offline, as did Eton’s other weapons.

  Everything happened at once. The Bladeguard leapt away, throwing a knife at Eton, just as Eton tossed a grenade high into the air. Reacting without thought, I fired straight into the Bladeguard’s chest.

  The grenade went off, blue lightning cracking out in a single sharp blast, my vision disappearing in the brilliance.

  I didn’t feel a thing. I blinked to clear my eyes.

  The Bladeguard lay sprawled out on the floor, dead, the hole in his armor smoking, while Eton, with a grimace, pulled the dagger out of his leg. He fell to his knees. Blood immediately began to pool on the ground beneath him.

  The grenade had been an EMP. It had fried every other type of weapon and device in the hangar, including the mag-gloves of the Bladeguards, who now rose from where they’d fallen—some stiffly, others only halfway, but still too many.

  That is, it had fried every type of weapon except one.

  Lines of light flickered across the darkened expanse. One, then two, then thirteen, gleamed to deadly life.

  This was it. The moment where I learned how far I would go for what I believed in—for whom I believed in.

  “Eton.” I dropped my rifle and brought my hands around my back. My blades appeared in my grip in twin flashes of light, flaring in answer to the ones around us. “It’s my turn now.”

  Shouts echoed behind Basra and me, more voices than just Nev’s and Eton’s, followed by gunfire, but I didn’t turn back. If I hadn’t already been used to the sensation of things tearing me apart both inside and out, leaving them behind with the Kaitan would have brought me to my knees. As it was, I felt a distant twinge, gritted my teeth against it, and tried to focus a different sort of sense, on what I could feel rather than see.

  Arjan. He was close, somewhere in these labyrinthine halls and rooms. I hadn’t been able to feel him before through all the Shadow muddying my perception, but I’d cleared a lot of it out.

  …Along with wiping out many, many lives. I couldn’t think about that, any more than I could think about abandoning my ship and half my crew to whatever was behind me. I had to find Arjan. He was all the family I had left.

  No, that wasn’t true, because the crew was my family too. Nev…Nev was also more than a friend to me, more to me than I even wanted to admit to myself, especially now that I was leaving him.

  But Arjan was my only remaining kin, and our blood was apparently a rare and endangered substance. I didn’t care how many people wanted it or how much; nobody was going to take my brother from me while I could still draw breath. I would gladly die to get him out of here, and I would take Arjan into oblivion with me before I abandoned him to further torture.

  Oblivion. It almost sounded nice right now, like a peaceful, never-ending nap. My ancestors believed our spirits returned to the Shadow grounds around Alaxak when we died. I wondered if mine could make it back there if I was killed on the other side of the galaxy, or if I would just drift on the wind, lost. Or if there was only bottomless darkness waiting for me once I closed my eyes for the last time.

  My vision shuddered, rippling like a dark pond. The walls seemed to be flexing and pressing in on me, and only the Shadow I’d drawn inside me seemed to keep them, or me, upright. I knew Shadow existed in my flesh and bone, but I’d never pulled more of it into my body before. I wasn’t sure how I’d done it, or what would happen to me once I let it go.

  I might just kill myself before anyone else could. B
ut so be it.

  Basra walked with the same air of finality, the photon rifle held ready in his hands. He clearly knew how to use it. As a trader, especially one with his skills, I imagine he’d gotten himself into some sticky situations. I’d always sensed something capable and unflinching in him, something dangerous. I’d been expecting his relationship with Arjan to drive the two of us to conflict, not into an alliance against one of the most powerful royal families in the galaxy…and likely a suicide pact.

  If Nev couldn’t be at my side walking into this with me—and he only wasn’t because he was guarding my back, my ship, and the rest of my crew—then Basra was the next best option. I was grateful to have him, whether or not his “secret weapon” amounted to anything. He felt like a secret weapon himself, here with me now.

  “Thank you,” I said, as we slipped down a darkened hallway. Only one light flickered at the end, sending spastic pale flashes over the expanse. The walls were cracked, and not just in my mind. I wasn’t sure if the drone had done such damage or if I had. In any case, Arjan was in this direction.

  “Just focus,” Basra murmured, “and find him. Then it will be me thanking you.”

  I was focusing so hard that I nearly walked into a pair of guards as we turned a corner.

  Basra’s rifle was up so fast that a burst of white-hot light hit one in the chest before I could blink. The guard went down in a sizzling heap while the other whipped up his rifle.

  I was faster than Basra this time. I flicked my fingers in his direction, and then the man was crawling in purple fire. He opened his mouth to scream, but the flames dove in before he could make a sound. His eyes fell away first, then the rest of him, until all that remained was black dust and silence.

  “So that’s what happened to all the others,” Basra remarked without feeling, and then stepped over the man he’d killed.

  No, woman. Her blank eyes stared at the ceiling as if in surprise. I wasn’t sure why I was surprised, other than the fact that most of the troops we had faced had been men.

  The walls shifted around me again, and I leaned against one of them, trying to get my breathing under control. “That was a woman,” I said, mostly just to hear my own voice and make sure it was still there—that I wasn’t dissolving in Shadow like the man had.

  “All the same to me,” Basra said, only pausing a moment while I regained my feet, and then he continued down the new stretch of hallway.

  We had less time before the guards found us this time. Either they had heard the rifle shot, or they were responding to the much greater commotion far behind us. We hadn’t been too subtle with our entrance, after all. Five of them raced around the next corner.

  “Down!” I shouted, seizing Basra’s collar and dragging him to the ground as energy blasts went zinging over our heads, crackling in the air and raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

  I put out my other hand to brace my fall. One second, it was just my skin against the stone floor. The next, purple fire rippled around my fingertips and lanced down the hall. There were screams this time, and even Basra flinched at the sight of the inferno at the other end.

  But when we passed the very spot a moment later, he stepped over a single charred boot and the fragile remains of a charcoal rib cage—all that was left of the five—just like he had the other guard, with his eyes straight ahead. Nor did he flinch away from me when I stumbled and caught his arm to steady myself. I distantly appreciated it.

  There wasn’t much else he could do to help me, though, since the floor was shifting and splitting under my feet. Basra didn’t seem to be having problems with it, so it was obviously all in my head.

  “How are you holding up?” he murmured.

  “Not…well,” I gasped. “I’m hallucinating. I don’t know how much more I have in me.”

  His cool, slender hand found my cheek, bringing my gaze to his. “Just a little bit farther, Captain. You can do it. I know you can.” His eyes were filled with so much warmth, suddenly, with belief in me. The gesture felt motherly.

  I swallowed and nodded. “He’s close.” I took a shaky step away from him, and even closed my eyes. Behind my lids, I could see other shapes in the darkness, instead of only feeling them. The collection of light that was Arjan was only another few hallways down. But it was odd; there was interference, and not just from what remained of the citadel’s huge caches of Shadow. There were other lights, frameworks, like Arjan’s. They were weaker, but I could sense them.

  I leaned up against a thick metal door that hid one of them. “Basra, I think there’s someone…someone like me and Arjan in here.”

  “We’ll free them on the way back, if we can,” he said with barely a glance. “Save your strength. Arjan needs it.”

  With a grimace, I straightened. He was right.

  When we came to Arjan’s hallway, I stopped Basra with a hand. I didn’t recognize any other aspect of it; it looked the same as all the others. They’d moved him from wherever the both of us had been held before. These rooms were still intact.

  “He’s…he’s here,” I whispered, without getting too close to Arjan in my mind. I didn’t want his pain to affect me. I needed to focus.

  “Any guards?”

  I squeezed my lids tighter shut. “I can’t tell. I can only see others like me. I would have to reach out with Shadow, use it as my eyes, and leave my body…and I don’t know if I’d be able to find my way back to myself if I did.”

  Basra lifted his photon rifle. “Let’s try the standard approach, then.” Before I could stop him, he leaned into a crouch, aimed around the corner, and fired two rounds. There were shouts, and he pulled back, flattening himself against the wall. “Five outside the room—four now. I missed one.”

  Several crackling shots, accompanied by the squeak of boots over the floor, answered his volley. They were coming.

  This was it. I had to do this. I shoved Basra behind me and, acting on instinct, lifted my arms. A stream of fire rose between my hands, then flared into a wall that I sent ahead of me as I stepped around the corner.

  Energy shots rippled against the flaming barrier like they were extinguishing themselves in strange, purple liquid. Then the wall of fire began to hit the bodies. Agonized faces shone through like specters—teeth here, flaring nostrils there, wide holes where eyes had been—before they vanished. When the flames dropped, we were alone in the blackened, smoking hallway.

  Basra only coughed and wiped his watering eyes on a sleeve. I doubted he was crying over anything other than smoke irritation. My knees threatened to buckle.

  “Think you can manage the door?” he asked.

  We were close, so close. I could manage.

  But it wasn’t as fast as I would have liked. The flames didn’t come as quickly when I reached for them, and for a moment, the line of fire flickered and almost winked out as I staggered. The door eventually caved in, a glowing, molten outline around it. Still, it took long enough that whoever was behind it was able to prepare themselves.

  Rubion Dracorte II stood behind a table, from which he’d dragged Arjan. My brother was barely standing, still hooked up with needles and tubes to whatever equipment they were using to monitor him—only his restraints appeared to have been hurriedly removed. His one eye rolled in his head.

  Basra made a strangled sound next to me, but I couldn’t turn from Arjan.

  The sight of him still took my breath away, even though he didn’t look much worse than when I’d last seen him. I’d been drugged and half delirious then. Even if I was half delirious now, his wounds were perfectly clear, sharp enough to feel like cuts in my own skin. I actually saw my skin peeling away, but I didn’t think anyone else could.

  “Arjan,” I rasped.

  Rubion held a plasma pistol up to Arjan’s head. “We don’t have to do this, Miss Uvgamut.”

  “Oh, we do,” Basra murmured, sighting Rubion through the doorway along his own rifle. “And she’s not the only one you have to worry about.” He took a step toward
the doorway.

  “And I’m not the only one you have to worry about,” Rubion rejoined.

  Basra barely dodged the Disruption Blade that came singing along the other side of the door. I realized it hadn’t quite missed him when I saw red begin to seep along his sleeve. A little slower, and he would have lost an arm. He would have lost his head too, if I hadn’t engulfed the Bladeguard in flames.

  I didn’t have the strength to char the man to ash, and he fell to the ground screaming. Basra silenced him with a photon blast. Even the motion of pulling the trigger cost him, judging by the wince that twisted his face. The stain was spreading, blood beginning to drip from his sleeve, but he didn’t lower the rifle.

  In fact, his mouth twitched in a half smile. “Never play your hand too early,” he said.

  Rubion hardly paid him any mind. He was looking at me with a hungry light in his eyes. “So, this is what you can do.” His reasonable tone was as perfectly smooth as before. “How about we all lower our weapons, you step inside, and we—”

  Basra barked a laugh. “You want to try to bargain with me? Fine. How about you shoot the other Bladeguard in there, and then we’ll talk.”

  I had no idea how he knew, but it was obvious he was right from the look on Rubion’s face. He glanced to the side with a disappointed twist to his lips. “Lower your weapons and stand down,” he said to someone I couldn’t see.

  “Tell them to kick the weapons into the center of the room,” I said. Never mind that the room was flowing and cracking so much, like molten earth, that I wasn’t sure I would even be able to see them.

  Rubion hesitated, the pistol still against Arjan’s head, and then nodded. The dim shape of a gun and then the white gleam of a Disruption Blade skittered across my vision.

  “What if there are two swords?” My voice sounded too drunk for my liking, though there wasn’t much I could do about it. “Nev has two.” A hazy memory surfaced of him wielding one in either hand.

  Rubion blinked in surprise. “Blademasters are rare among Bladeguards. Nevarian is the youngest in an age—I assure you, it’s not commonplace.”