Ferrum Corde

by Richard Fox

  “Yes,” Stacey said as she struggled up the first step. “Yes, it is here, just as I hoped. Just as I prayed.”

  “I assumed a command bridge would be on a ship,” Morrigan said.

  “No!” Stacey waved a hand excitedly. “No, don’t you know what that is? It’s a probe. A Qa’resh probe. It can transfer my mind out of this metal and back into my body. It could be the last one!”

  She started up the stairs, struggling to find a gait over the too-tall steps.

  “Marc Ibarra had the fragments of one in his cell,” Roland said. “He told me they all deactivated after the Ember War.”

  “My Lady,” Martel said, putting a foot on the base of the steps, “perhaps caution is warranted.”

  “This ship changes everything, my knights. I’m done waiting!” Stacey made it to the top, and white light reflected off her shell, like motes of falling snow. She reached a hand to the probe but stopped short of touching it.

  “But we’re not here for me,” she said. “We’re here for the Nation.”

  She bent her fingers to the throne and it glowed from within.

  “Yes…yes, let’s get to the point.” She hefted herself up onto the throne and put her hands onto the armrests, nearly stretching to fit the frame of the being the seat was meant for.

  The floor vibrated against Roland’s sabatons. He turned away from Stacey and backed against the bottom of the stairs with his lance.

  “It’s…it’s incredible.” Stacey’s head tilted to one side and light built around her from within the throne. “This ship’s been here for thousands of years…waiting…waiting for its master to call it back to—”

  She shook her head quickly then tried to lift one hand off the throne, but her shell wouldn’t budge from where it met the crystalline material, as if it were locked in place.

  “Something’s not right.” She turned her gaze to the floating probe.

  “My Lady?” Roland began up the stairs slowly.

  “Who…who are you?” Stacey asked the probe.

  Thick, dead-gray vines crept around the back of the throne and wrapped around her wrists. She struggled forward, but a vine gripped her around the neck and yanked her back.

  “No!” Roland bounded toward her.

  The probe’s light went from silver to a fiery red.

  “Don’t! Don’t do this to me!” Stacey shouted.

  The probe hinged a tip toward her chest and shot into her heart.

  Stacey screamed. Her voice pitched higher and higher until she froze, head locked back in agony.

  Roland’s armor froze mid-step. He tried rebooting the neural controls, but his HUD went red with errors. Stacey’s scream came through his plugs and his mind went white with pain.

  ****

  Stacey emerged from white so intense, it drowned out all other sensations. The light dimmed and she felt cool rock beneath the palms of her hands. She breathed and blinked hard to push away the afterglow.

  “What is this?” she asked…and felt her mouth move. One hand went to her face and she felt the give of flesh. She touched a loose jumpsuit on her arms and ran her hands down her flanks, marveling at the sensation of being in a flesh-and-blood body.

  She was in a small, oblong room made up of pitted rock, like the inside of a lava tunnel. There were no markings anywhere, but she realized where she was.

  “Oh, no…no, this can’t be.”

  There was a rustle behind her.

  She turned slowly and found a man sitting on a bench carved out of the wall a few yards away. A glowing line in the floor separated them both. The man was hunched over; oily black hair hung down around his head and pale skin stuck out from beneath the strands.

  Stacey touched the wall, feeling the tiny ridges cut against her skin. The pain didn’t wake her up from what was an old, recurring nightmare.

  +You know him.+

  The voice came from nowhere, old and kind.

  “This is a lie. It is a lie because this is the past, and I will not—”

  The man looked up. Once-handsome features were slightly elongated, twisted into an almost demonic mask. His eyes were dark pits that stared into her soul.

  “Say my name,” he rasped.

  “Let me out!” She banged a fist against the rock. “Let me out or—”

  The rock enveloped her hand, locking her in place. The floor flowed over her feet and ankles, nearly crushing them with their grip. The cave billowed out and snagged her other arm, then flowed around her back and over her body. Only her face was left exposed.

  The man stood, his limbs just long enough to register as wrong, as inhuman.

  +You know him!+ a new voice shouted, and Stacey winced.

  +He is in your mind. In your matrix. Name this being,+ said another new voice.

  “No…no, you’re not real…” Stacey struggled as the man stepped over the line and went to her.

  Black talons morphed out of his fingertips and he caressed her face.

  “I would have burned your worlds,” he said. “Why? Why would I have done this? I am love. I am the light. I am the peace that all life deserves.”

  Stacey’s mind went to where she heard those words and the cave wavered, shifting into a Qa’resh structure.

  The man looked over one shoulder.

  “My people…my people live?” he asked. “Their emissary gave us nothing. Tell me more, child. Tell me my name. My true name so that my children can know who redeems their souls.”

  Stacey focused on the twisted face, keeping her mind still. Whatever had her was reacting to her thoughts. She needed time—time and a bit of breathing room.

  +SPEAK!+

  Stacey gasped in pain.

  “Malal!”

  The cave vanished in an instant and she fell. She didn’t feel when she hit a basalt floor, but the air chilled and her breath fogged.

  A thick line of blood ran across the floor and over her hand.

  +She is here. She is always here.+

  Stacey pulled her bloody fingers into a fist, feeling the warmth and slickness against her skin.

  “No, no…please, not this.”

  A bare foot with uncut nails set down next to her hand, blocking the flow of blood.

  “So much pain,” Malal said. “So much fear. Why don’t you come to me? I will take it all away.”

  Stacey looked up and saw the body of a woman with black hair crumbled on the deck of the Crucible’s command center. Blood soaked through her uniform from a bullet wound, the pool of red growing with each heartbeat.

  “Stop.” Stacey tried to look away, but Malal grabbed her by the collar and lifted her up like she weighed nothing at all. He carried her to the body and rolled it onto its back with his foot.

  Stacey—a mortally wounded Stacey—flopped to the deck. She mouthed words as blood trickled from her lips.

  Stacey stared down at her dying self and all the suffering of the day she died came back to her.

  “Give us what we want,” a woman said.

  Malal put Stacey’s feet to the ground and wrapped an arm around her throat, the smell of ammonia and decaying flesh filling her nose. He whipped her around and a middle-aged woman of mixed descent approached, a smoking gun in one hand.

  “Where is Malal?” she asked. Stacey knew her, knew her well. The woman had been in her grandfather’s employ for decades and had been close to Stacey, almost like an aunt.

  “Shannon,” the gun-wielder said. “Shannon killed you. No one…no one can save you here, little girl.”

  Shannon pressed the muzzle against Stacey’s chest, just over her heart. Flesh seared and Stacey cried out in pain.

  “You want this all again?” Malal whispered into her ear. “You can have it. For eternity. Over and over again. You’re in our world now, Stacey Ibarra.”

  “No! You can’t—you can’t have him!”

  +GIVE HIM TO US!+

  The gun fired.

  Malal’s grip vanished and Stacey collapsed. The basalt of the Crucibl
e was gone, replaced by the alabaster of Qa’resh material.

  Gold and glass struts rose out of the floor and up to a platform. She remembered a view port to one side but didn’t look to it. A portal, one big enough to let a Mule fly through it with room to spare, glowed on the platform.

  A humanoid alien, its head equine but with the mandibles and multifaceted eyes of an insect, stepped around the portal.

  “This…this is the last place you saw the redeemer,” the alien said. “But…you’re fighting the memory. Stopping us from seeing where he is.”

  “What are you?” Stacey struggled to her feet, her gaze locked on the alien, the only Qa’resh she’d ever laid eyes on.

  “We are Malal’s children,” Malal said from behind her.

  “We have been waiting for him,” Shannon said as she blinked into existence at the base of the stairs. “Waiting to be carried to paradise, just as Malal promised. We gave our souls…but we must have been unworthy, impure. Where is the redeemer? Where is our reward?”

  “I wanted this,” Malal said, looking to the portal. “Why? What did I need there?”

  Stacey looked down at her hand and saw the blood—her blood—on the fingers. She flexed it open and the stain faded away.

  “I’m in the probe…aren’t I? Grandfather described it like this,” she said.

  “I did?” Marc Ibarra—clad in his silver body—touched her chin. The cold numbed her skin and she sneered at him.

  “I need…you need to see something,” Stacey said. “Very important to understand why Malal…found you unworthy.”

  +WE ARE WORTHY!+ a chorus of voices shouted.

  Reality fizzled around Stacey and she went to her knees, her mind ablaze with incoherent noise and images.

  She braced against the floor, nothing but an invisible wall over infinite darkness.

  “You need…need to see,” she managed. The blackness morphed into white sand and she gripped it in her hands, concentrating on the sensation of the grit between her fingers.

  She looked up to a sapphire sea with waves locked in mid-crash. She turned her head to a towering suit of armor standing guard in front of Trinia, the galaxy’s last Aeon. She focused on the armor, and the insignia changed.

  +WHERE IS MALAL?+

  The words rocked Stacey and she doubled over, her arms over a now bleeding wound in her chest.

  “Let…stop hurting me!”

  +SHOW!+

  The hot knife in her breast receded.

  Stacey shuffled through the sand, stopping to rest against the armor. She looked up at it, changing the helm’s shape to match a non-Ibarran design.

  Noise rose in her mind, a background rumble of thousands upon thousands of voices. One word jumped to the fore over and over again.

  Geist.

  “That’s who you are?” Stacey wiped blood from her mouth. It froze against her silver shell and snapped away as her knuckles flexed.

  “We are his chosen people,” the Malal apparition said. “Geist. Our purity will join his perfection.”

  +GEISTGEISTGEIST—+

  “Please…” Stacey stumbled, but there was no pain this time. Sand cracked as the cold of her body froze it against her bare feet. The memory of flesh was gone, only the purpose she knew from the prison of her mind remained.

  “Too strong.” Malal reached toward her and his arm stretched with nightmare logic.

  Stacey grabbed him by the wrist and resisted his pull.

  “You want answers,” she said. “You’ll have them.”

  Malal vanished into smoke.

  Trinia knelt to one knee, her face still and lifeless. A necklace of jade flakes dangled over her collarbone.

  Stacey squeezed the center flake between her thumb and forefinger. The golden lattice of Qa’resh language formed a wreath around the necklace.

  “What are you doing?” Malal leaned over Stacey’s shoulder.

  Stacey pulled on the necklace and it came away from Trinia’s neck. Stacey backed up, her eyes locked on Trinia and the Armor with Terran Union markings.

  “Help,” she said, gripping the flake in her hand, and the lattice flared.

  “Lies.” Shannon stepped from around Malal and aimed the same gun that mortally wounded Stacey years ago.

  “Stop the Geist. Help me!” Stacey snapped the flake in half and reality crumbled.

  ****

  Roland’s HUD flickered on and off and his optics cycled through different spectrums. His hands went to either side of his helm, trying to stop the spinning he knew existed within his own brain.

  Stacey was in the throne, the vines still gripping her in place. The probe slid out of her body and hovered in front of her face, emitting a riot of color that reflected off her silver shell.

  “What…what was that?” Morrigan asked. “You all felt it? Saint Kallen was with us. She…”

  “She needs our help.” Nicodemus started up the stairs toward Stacey. “These Geist…must be who has our Lady.”

  “No.” Roland put a hand out to stop him. “You saw what she—the vision. We can’t help Lady Ibarra yet. You all saw Trinia, didn’t you?”

  “On Ouranos,” Martel said. “I saw one of us with her.”

  “It wasn’t us.” Roland touched the Templar cross on his breastplate. “Fleur-de-lis.”

  “Iron Dragoons,” Nicodemus said. “Terran Union armor. Why would Saint Kallen show us that?”

  “Because the Terran Union—because Gideon—has Trinia,” Roland said. “They’re on the Kesaht planet, all under siege. She wants us to…” Roland hesitated, unsure if now was the time to tell his lance the truth about Saint Kallen and the visions. The others’ faith was stronger than his, untainted by knowledge.

  Nicodemus, Morrigan, and Martel, warriors he respected and had fought beside, looked at him, and he knew what he had to do—even if it meant betraying them.

  “Saint Kallen wants us to rescue Trinia,” Roland said. “Bring her here and free our Lady from whatever prison she’s in.”

  “Trinia knows Qa’resh technology,” Morrigan said. “That’s why we went to Ouranos to get her in the first place. There’s no one else in the whole galaxy.”

  “The Union’s fighting for its life against the Kesaht,” Martel said. “In the time it will take us to get there, it might all be over.”

  “We are Armor,” Nicodemus said. “We act. We seize victory. We do not hesitate.”

  “The fleet in orbit,” Martel said, looking up. “If we send it to rescue Trinia, the legions will be vulnerable. The world was dead when we arrived…something’s awoken.”

  “I can convince Makarov,” Roland said. “Besides, what risk wouldn’t they take to save our Lady?”

  “Trinia,” Martel said, leveling a knife hand at Roland. “She is your mission. Not the Union soldiers.”

  Roland tilted his helm to one side ever so slightly.

  “No.” Martel snapped his hand into a fist. “Saint forgive me, I’m wrong. Trinia…and whoever you can save. We are Templar. That the Union hates us doesn’t change that they’re human.”

  “Who stays?” Morrigan gestured to Stacey. “Who goes?”

  “If Gideon does have Trinia,” Nicodemus said as he tromped down the steps, “then we should send those he’s most likely not to try and kill on sight. No matter if we come to rescue him or not.”

  Roland looked to Morrigan, Gideon’s old lance mate and the one who shoved him into an escape pod and ejected him onto Ceres when the Ibarrans first defected. Nicodemus and Gideon had already crossed blades once, and Nicodemus had lost that fight. Martel was the head Templar, and a lightning rod for everything Gideon considered treason.

  Roland…he had beaten his former commander and left him helpless.

  “No good options,” Martel said. “Roland. Nicodemus. Go. Return with the Aeon. You will not fail.”

  “Sir.” Roland beat a fist to his chest and went to the disk.

  Morrigan and Martel extended the blades of their swords and jabbed
the tips into the floor. They took up the honor guard position at the base of the stairs, just like the armor that guarded Saint Kallen’s tomb on Mars.

  “Good luck, boy-o,” Morrigan said. “May the blessing of light be on you—light without and light within.”

  The disk moved and light enveloped Roland and Nicodemus.

  Chapter 13

  Within one of innumerable small temples surrounding the Ark, a glow rose from the metal vines covering the inner walls.

  Vines snaked out, coiling together into a sphere of moving threads. The vines retracted, leaving a dull humanoid shape behind. Red lines glowed across the body’s skin and it tightened into well-defined male form and a face with sharp features. Ruby eyes opened.

  Doors on opposite sides of the chamber opened, and two Geist arrived, both with female proportions.

  “This…” the male said, reaching forward with one hand, “this is a step backwards from perfection.” The filaments making up his body flexed and reshaped, adding lines of muscle and protruding veins.

  “Malal tests us again, Pallax.” One of the females approached and ran a hand across his chest as her body resolved into nude curves.

  “We abandoned the flesh, Seru.” He took her by the wrist and stared into her pale-blue eyes.

  Her mouth pulled back into a smile, and the tiny wires shifted, revealing clenched teeth that didn’t move as she spoke.

  “But not its pleasures, my love.”

  “The human-not-human in the temple,” the other female said. Her body was slimmer, with hair that spouted off her scalp and bent into locks the width of a pencil. “This Stacey Ibarra…her mind is damaged. We should have been able to draw everything from her once she joined with the emissary.”

  “She’s strong enough to keep the emissary from flaying her mind.” Seru swiped a finger across Pallax’s mouth. “Capable and willful. I hate her already…but I can break her mind. Won’t take long.”

  “The others will awaken soon enough,” the slimmer of the two females said. “They were promised paradise upon awakening…not replacement bodies. The thralls will be difficult to manage.”

  “Malal tests us,” Pallax said. “He sent a final test to us. This is truth. The minds of the others will accept this. What are the humans doing now, Noyan?”