by Chad Queen
Liam nodded, meeting her eyes. “She threatened to tell of my deal with the Wraiths. That I allowed them to take the cities of Chalice.”
“You didn’t…”
“Love comes at a price,” he said, expression cold.
Ashlyn felt numb. All this time, she had no idea. She looked at Elon, her face smoldering with rage.
A Skex approached Ashlyn from the entrance and raised its energy rifle.
The king frowned. “Wait. That is not part of the arrangement. I am granting these two passage back home.”
A rifle blast sounded from a Skex that stood behind him. Ashlyn’s eyes met her father’s. His eyes were wide with shock as he fell to his knees. He looked one last time at her, helpless, and collapsed upon the floor of the bank.
“Move!” yelled Elon, who was once again out of her wheelchair, pushing Ashlyn out of the way of another blast from an advancing Skex.
Ashlyn snapped out of her stupor and encoded with the tungsten ring she had been given. Elon had been able to procure her a full complement of rings from the armory, though hers were more fashionable than the utilitarian ones she had seen Cade wear.
The ring, pressed tight against her hand, did the trick. It dissipated the energy upon impact. Warmth coursed through her body, and even though she felt a little shaken, she was no worse for wear. She did find the ring’s tight grip on her unsettling, but Cade mentioned she would get used to it in time. “Think of the material as an extension of your body. It is becoming a part of you,” he had said. It still didn’t make her feel any better.
Rolan’s instincts flooded into her mind, and she let them take over. It dawned on her why she had become so good at Bearing. Rolan must have been a Bearer himself, and she was benefiting from his experience.
After the first wave was shot down by Ashlyn and Elon, the Skex began to adapt to a new strategy. They discarded the energy weapons and switched to melee tactics.
The sisters continued fighting, back-to-back, turning away every Skex that descended upon them. They conserved their ammunition, only resorting to casters when they were in danger of being overwhelmed.
Ashlyn sidestepped an incoming Skex claw and dropped a diamond-assisted elbow onto the claw, shattering it. She grimaced. Even encoded, that had hurt. She wished she could encode more than one ring at a time. Cade had told her multiple encodings needed multiple phantoms, and even then required many years of training to be proficient at it. She wondered if Rolan knew how to do it. She wound up with a diamond-assisted punch and flared tungsten before connecting, puncturing the Skex’s armor and catching her arm inside the creature. It fell to the ground and took Ashlyn with down it. She struggled under its weight but managed to wriggle free. She stood, panting. She looked around and was surprised to see no more challengers. She turned to Elon, who was grinning. Somehow, they had done it.
The room trembled as a hulking creature at least twenty feet tall, stooped down to squeeze into Prime from the vault entrance. A Skex brigandine. Ashlyn had heard of these rare Skex but had never seen them in person. It stepped upon the puddle of cooling molten metal on the floor but did not seem bothered by it. The other Skex had avoided the liquid metal. Ashlyn checked her caster. One shot left. She leveled her caster at the beast.
“Brigandine armor can deflect caster bullets!” Elon yelled to her. “They can only be shot in the back of their skulls!”
“Hells,” cursed Ashlyn. Rolan didn’t seem to have known that, either.
Prime, while a large room, felt small with the massive Skex brigandine filling a substantial portion of it. It was nearly as tall as the room itself, and its gunmetal skin was somehow fused with what appeared to be a patchwork of thick metal plates. And like other skex, its head was encased by an odd-shaped metal mask. There was no visor for the creature to see, yet it did not seem to need eyes. The brigandine swept its trunk of an arm toward Ashlyn. The corner she was trapped in didn’t have enough space for her to dodge, so she encoded tungsten hard as the arm crashed into her. It sent her flying to the back of the room, slamming her into the inner wall of the vault. She shook her head, her vision blurry. Any ideas, Rolan?
Elon took the opportunity to position herself behind the brigandine with an assisted jump and raised her caster toward it. It turned, anticipating her move, and brought its other hand down in an overhead smash. Elon must have still been encoding diamond, because she rolled off to the side, dodging the blow by inches. Using the momentum from its last swing, it followed up with another. It found its mark and sent Elon sailing into the wall near Ashlyn.
Ashlyn ran to Elon, who rolled over and groaned. Ashlyn looked up to see the brigandine almost upon them. She heard an energy blast contact with the back of the great beast, which caused it to stumble forward. It turned around, looking for its new target.
Her father, who had propped himself up on the wall, gripped a Skex rifle in his bloodied hands.
The brigandine turned around, lumbered over to him, and raised its fist high above the wounded man. The creature brought its arm down with tremendous force. Ashlyn felt a strange sensation and noticed Elon was no longer beside her. She looked up and saw Elon had moved clear across the enormous room, and was now in front of the brigandine, blocking the strike that had been intended for her father. Elon was straining against the brigandine’s strength, but her eyes blazed with determination. Gripped in Elon’s other hand was the Vissera diamond. The brigandine roared in anger but could not escape Elon’s phantom-assisted grasp.
Ashlyn didn’t waste the opportunity. With the brigandine’s back turned to her, she raised her caster and fired a shell into the back its head. The brigandine disintegrated without a trace.
Elon fell to the floor, her legs no longer stable. Ashlyn had heard of teleportation like this. When a Bearer reaches Affinity with a phantom, time stands still for everyone but the Bearer. Affinity meant the phantom’s purpose is fulfilled, and the phantom travels to the Ascent. “Mother…”
She hurried over to her father, still sitting propped against the wall of the room. His chest rose and fell in short breaths. There was so much blood, she was amazed he was still conscious. He looked at her affectionately.
“I have missed you so much, my dear Sashion,” he said.
Sashion…her mother’s name. “Father?” she said, unsure.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You were right all along.”
Her father clung tightly to her. “It’s okay. It’s over now,” she said, trying to calm him.
“I thought I could be more. That I could protect the people. Make a sacrifice…for the greater good.”
Ashlyn just sat in silence, her eyes welling up in tears.
“In time…I hope you will forgive me, my queen,” were her father’s last words. He slumped down onto the cold floor. Elon had pulled herself next to Ashlyn. Elon put her arm around Ashlyn, who rested her head upon Elon’s shoulder and cried.
43
Sacrifice
The nature of the Skex has led to many theories on how the creatures function. While they do not seem to possess verbal communication, their advanced coordination demonstrates communication is happening, albeit nonverbally. More fascinating is that the more of them there are together, the better the coordination, which is opposite of what common sense would suggest.
—From First Contact to First Combat: The One-Month War
“They’ve been gone a long time,” Jace said to himself, wringing his hands as he paced outside the ship. Ashlyn and Elon had left him to go to the bank, and his small army of Skex gave him little comfort. The wait was agonizing. He had finally done it. He had found the Nexus, and the ship. If it weren’t for being surrounded by tens of thousands of Skex about to be unleashed upon the city, he’d have been giddy with joy.
Jace rubbed his temples. His head ached. He touched his fingertips to his lip and noticed his nose was bleeding again. He heard a low, rumbling sound, and he turned to see Skex pouring in from the bay doors and toward the Exilia.
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The purple orb he had set down on the cart began to glow, and the inert Skex he had positioned lurched to life. “No. No, no,” he said, reaching for the orb.
A voice leapt to life in his mind. You have returned. His Skex froze once more. The slavers are trying to take us back.
What would you have us do? the orb queried.
Jace, through the eyes of his Skex battalion, watched as the hordes of mobilized Skex from below marched toward the ship.
“We need to buy some time.”
Jace clutched the orb in his hands and commanded the Skex to pull the caster bomb off the cart and haul it into the rear bay of the ship. They were at the pinnacle of the Nexus, the great tower of Rynth, and he already had to leave. He had a Skex carry him inside the ship itself. He had a difficult time trying to use the orb and do something else at the same time. He could only really do one or the other.
The orb was a remarkable find. He’d never experienced anything quite like it. He could make them move, jump, and, he hoped, fight. But he didn’t have to tell them how to walk. They just knew. And when he made an order, they all fell into place, exactly as he would expect them to. He began to understand how the Wraiths had been able to coordinate the Skex during the war.
Once he was inside, her heard Eos’s voice inside the ship. Opening bay doors. He looked at the main screen and could see the tip of the great obelisk that was the Nexus begin to unfurl like the petals of a flower. All this time, he had been right. The Nexus wasn’t just some monument of the Ancient civilization. It was a gift. A gift that would take them to the stars.
All they needed now was power, and they’d be ready for takeoff.
He took a deep breath and held the orb once more. “I’m sorry, guys. We have to hold them back as long as we can.” He shook his head. He was asking them to fight their own. Their own who were under the control of the Wraiths.
Understand. A voice echoed in his mind. We fight.
He braced his Skex as the streaming mass of enemy Skex converged upon the ship. Jace’s team obeyed his command and rushed headlong into the fray.
44
Express Train
It is apparent the Ancients had a great need for the small devices we know as chipcoins. An archaeologist cannot explore a region of Chalice without discovering a cache tucked away, with thousands of the coins stacked high. I can assure you they had some greater purpose than currency, though we possess no evidence yet as to their true purpose.
—From Chalician Archaeologist’s Quarterly, Vol. 1
The train was gaining momentum. Cade was starting to get the hang of it. He pulled to one section of track, then to the next, propelling him forward.
Too slow. I need more, he thought. He closed his eyes and reached for more of the netcores. He visualized the connections in his mind. More. The strength of his phantoms surged with every connection.
The wheels of the old train were turning so fast they began to slip, screeching across the surface of the track as hot sparks showered their path. He urged them on, adding even more netcores. Every second mattered.
His head ached. So many phantoms. Too many. They picked at the scab of his wounded psyche, vying for control. Cade shook his head. He needed to hold on. It wasn’t much farther now.
The wheel slip started getting worse, slowing his progress. The wheels were wearing fast, and they were starting to tear up the track. Cade cursed under his breath. Even at full speed, it was too slow. He closed his eyes. He encoded out through the train. He could feel it, every car, every wall, every rivet. Rooted with the encoding, he became part of the train itself.
Faster. His eyes snapped open as he pulled the engine and its cars off the tracks, eliminating the drag from the tracks. The engine car had grown hot, though Cade could not fathom why. They began picking up speed, and the wind from outside beat against the window on the front of the train until it shattered. Bits of glass shot by and glanced off his face. Unflinching, he bounded forward as Rynth hurtled into view.
Just outside the city’s perimeter, Cade saw long trails of railbuses crowding Rynth’s central station. Skex were already swarming the area, chasing the citizens of Rynth who hadn’t yet taken refuge.
The cars of his train were no longer in a line; instead they swirled behind him as if caught in the grip of a powerful tornado. He didn’t turn around to look, but he could feel their movement. Some of cars had started to buckle under the force of the encoding.
The heat in the engine room was nearly unbearable. He felt more and more chipcoins he had connected to slip from his reach. He felt their power leave him, bit by bit, but he was unsure why. It was the end of the line; he would have to leave the train behind to make it to the bank.
He pulled against the train as hard has he could one last time, sending them hurtling into the other railbuses littering the grand station. He severed his encoding and launched himself from the engine car.
The maelstrom of hot steel behind him crashed into the station, sending bits of twisted metal and Skex flying.
45
Holding Fast
General Stront, the top general of the Chalician military, had never lost a battle until the One-Month War. When questioned about his earlier victories, he stated, “It is foolishness to start a fight unless you already know what the outcome will be. To do otherwise requires either great foolishness or a lack of any other option.”
—From First Contact to First Combat: The One-Month War
“Ashlyn,” said Elon. “Ashlyn, we need to keep moving.” They both sat in the wake of the battle that had taken place within the bank. Ashlyn, drying her eyes, nodded. She picked up her sister and put her on her wheelchair. She cast one last look at her father before turning and pushing her sister out to the main door of the bank.
They peered out the door and saw even more Skex flooding the streets. Even though the underground access ladder they needed to get back to Jace was just across the street, it may as well have been in another city.
“There’s no way we’re getting out of here, is there?” Ashlyn asked.
Elon face was grim, and she shook her head.
A bright light flashed, followed by the roar of an explosion. Debris and bits of Skex flew toward the bank, shattering the windows in front as Ashlyn and Elon took cover behind the door.
They looked at each other, dazed, and braved another look out the door. Squinting though the fog of smoke, they made out the outline of a masked young woman armed with an odd-looking weapon. The woman scanned the street, raised her arm, and motioned a group of armed men forward.
“Who is that?” asked Ashlyn.
The woman turned to them and halted. She shouldered her weapon and clapped as she rushed over to the bank’s entrance.
“I have no idea,” said Elon.
The woman pulled off her mask, revealing long blond hair and striking silver eyes.
“Faye!” Ashlyn exclaimed as she hugged Carlon’s agent. “We thought you were dead.”
“Going to take more than a few Skex to take me down. Besides, if I get killed by one of those bugs, Carl would never let me let me hear the end of it.”
As if on cue, a strange armored cart wheeled down the street. An artifact, not unlike the one Jace had overloaded in the forge, seemed to propel it forward. The main platform of the machine bristled with all manner of mounted weaponry. Manning the barrel of what looked to be a large cannon was none other than General Carlon Stront.
The man smiled broadly and leapt down to them.
“I see we have another recruit,” he said as he looked at Elon, grinning. His smile faded as he turned to Ashlyn. “I hear the underground team didn’t make it.”
Ashlyn shook her head. “We were too late. I’m sorry.”
The large man sighed. “None of this is anyone’s fault. All we can do now is stop the bugs and the Acolytes here from taking the city.” He looked around. “Where’s Cade?”
“He is…was at the Thread. He’s on his way.”
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br /> Carlon frowned. “That would take a day, even by train. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, gesturing to the dark street, “…but the power has been cut off. No trains are getting here anytime soon.”
“He’ll be here,” Ashlyn said, holding her ground. “We just need to wait a little longer.”
More Skex began pouring onto the street before them. The clamor of their claws scraping the gravel streets made Ashlyn’s skin crawl. Carlon climbed back atop the armored metal carriage, a chimera of Ancient artifacts, old and new. He barked orders to his men as they loaded another artillery shell into barrel of the main cannon. “Fire!”
A cluster of Skex scattered from the blast, but they were soon reinforced as more spilled into the street. “We can’t hold much longer. There’s too many of them. We have to fall back!” Carlon yelled to his fighters.
The Skex swarming their position hesitated, turned, and skittered away.
“What’s happening? Are they giving up?” Faye asked, confused.
Ashlyn looked at the retreating Skex. They were headed in the direction of the train station. She held fast to a glimmer of hope.
“He’s here.”
46
Arrival
Most people don’t realize that we’re all Bearers. We all bear our own phantom. In Coda, we call that part of yourself the Song. Your Song is your imprint upon the world, familiar yet unique. Its power stretches through the plains of existence, and I believe we are only scratching the surface of its potential.
—Dol Requiem, Grandmaster of Coda
Cade flew past the buckling cars of the train. There were still a few chipcoins within his reach. He encoded to the street, pulling himself down fast. He flared tungsten as he crashed down, the stones of the street spraying like shrapnel through the station.
