Warp Wraith, page 17
The demon keened and rushed him again.
Still grinding the disembodied claws into the pavement, the Wraith pivoted to face it, slightly off-balance, but with the force sword thrust out before him. The demon plunged straight onto the plasma-charged point of the blade and kept going till it burst out its smoldering back. Squealing now, the demon stiffened for an instant, impaled. But the skull-grin widened once more and it reached out with its surviving hand for the Wraith’s masked face.
The Wraith cocked back his free left arm and slammed the fist into the demon’s face. Bits of splintered fang splattered from the blow. Bone crunched as a second punch landed, knocking the skull back. Taking advantage of his foe’s distraction, the Wraith wrenched the force blade free of its torso and dropped low, spinning at the hips into a disemboweling reverse swing. His blade whipped about and sliced through the demon’s spine, parting its hips from its torso cleanly.
Still, the demon struggled, now in squirming pieces on the street. Legs pumped uselessly, trying to kick at the Wraith, who sidestepped them with ease. With his sword point aimed down, he circled the squirming torso until he held the weapon poised over the creature’s skull.
“Begone,” he intoned, almost reverently.
Stabbing downward, he drove the point into the demon’s forehead. The separate pieces of the creature spasmed as one, then went still as a dazzle of purple sparks puffed from instantly-charring bone and sinew. With a scream that faded to a warble, the demon dissolved at the Warp Wraith’s feet.
With a jerk of the wrist, the Wraith yanked his blade from the scorched pavement where the entity had left a filthy smudge-outline. Scarred brows crinkled in what Edie guessed must have been a scowl under his bestial mask. A flutter of ember-like light caught in his eyes and she was no longer certain it was a reflection of the blazes surrounding them.
He looked up, locked gazes with her—and she was sure it hadn’t been.
Faint screams carrying through the front doorway of the cathedral snapped his stare that direction. With a swirl of cape, he was gone, streaking across the square with speed Edie had only ever seen fighting against an Immortal. He was up the steps and through the entrance, leaving only vortices of smoke swirling in his wake.
Another scream lilted out into the battle-ravaged night, freezing Edie’s blood in the veins as she recognized it. Greta. A glance at the shadow scorched into the paves reminded her just what had brought that hellish thing into the world. And scrambling to her feet, she knew exactly where the Wraith had gone.
Stumbling steps became running ones as she ripped her blaster from its holster and lurched after him.
FOOLS!
Malik needed no guide to find his way through the darkness and damage of the cathedral. Flux swirled from somewhere below, drawing him down toward it like a ship deliberately steering into a maelstrom. He leapt a wrecked pew and sped for the right apse and the basement door in its corner. He swept through this and down the stairs beyond.
They play at games they are no longer wise enough to understand!
The Entity he’d faced above had been a thing of pure Flux, a denizen of that alternate reality fed by the life energies of his own—but also replenishing it in turn. Things dwelt there, in the Beyond; things of intelligence inscrutable to a mind born of the world of the living. The Immortals reviled such things, would have no communion with them. But witches, the Sisters of Circe, had once specialized in the contact with and ensnarement of such creatures.
That they’d kept such here was undoubtable.
Reaching the bottom of the steps and racing up across a low-ceilinged chamber with the winds of the Flux literally blowing into his face, Malik had no doubt they intended to release more. And these they will have even less control over.
The scream from down the dark corridor beyond the chamber confirmed that control had already been lost.
Malik released mind and body to the Flux, surging down the hallway, cloak snapping out behind him, force blade in one fist, blaster drawn out in the other. The battle in the streets of Reyes above were suddenly an afterthought; were the horrors in this deep place allowed to fully quicken, even the vampires would be a secondary concern.
He erupted into a narrow chamber, lined on either side by alcoves. A woman barely more than a girl knelt between these, on her knees in freezing, centimeter-deep water, hands clenched together, white-knuckled in some kind of prayer.
But there was nothing prayerful about the things emerging from the alcoves. Wreathed in a spreading purple glow, corpses sat up from funerary slabs, some of them were already aflame with the powers of the Beyond, fully inhabiting the ensorcelled bodies and hungry to hurt those who’d dared ensnare them in rotting flesh vessels.
The white-spark gazes of all of them settled upon the girl in their midst—before lurching up as one to glower at Malik.
“Hold,” he commanded them and held his blade out before him, panning its point from one side to the other, as though to hold them at bay. “You don’t have to do this,” he declared, trying to meet each’s infernal gaze. “You can go.”
They paused like predators circling a meal, but startled by a strange rival’s presence. The girl in their midst shivered and sweated under a battered jacket too baggy for her emaciated form. That they intended to devour her was clear. That she would not be their last victim was equally clear.
“You don’t have to be destroyed,” he told them, taking a step closer to the girl, who didn’t appear to know he was there, though her eyes stared at something. He looked around at the things, five in all; four already off the slabs and shedding smoldering twists of funerary wrap, a fifth still writhing its way out of its mummification. “I understand your rage. They held you here, trapped.” And they would have remained much longer, had this silly kid not disturbed their bonds. “But you can go.”
The demons ignored the girl who’d freed them, positioned themselves about Malik. Fanged faces grinned hungrily and they hissed like a bag of snakes cast open onto a floor. He stood his ground, barring the way out of the catacombs, forcing himself not to wilt before their combined malice.
“Abandon these dead husks,” he tried one more time, and pointed his blaster pistol as one of the entities attempted to sidle around his left side. “Seek freedom and release in the Flux.”
A warning tingled in Malik’s blood. The Flux showed him death.
One of the creatures lunged in on him from the right. He sidestepped, raking his force sword across the charging demon’s emaciated midsection. Demon-matter sizzled before the plasma-charged crystalline edge, became a screech as it sawed across desiccated meat and bone. The demon bisected as Malik ripped the blade out through its back, the right arm, shoulder, and head tumbling off into the ankle-deep water.
He spun back to face the others, frozen as they were, crouched to leap, but each gauging the others’ reactions.
“I guess not.”
The Flux twinged in his left arm, guided muscle and nerve to twitch the blaster that way and fire—just as the demon there launched for him. Shattered skull bits sprayed across the side of his mask and scalp, fragments leaving hot marks on exposed skin. He backpedaled as the spasming, headless corpse landed at his feet.
The retreat gave him room to swing the force blade again, a wide slash from low-right to high-left, cleaving a hand from a wrist as one of the demons darted for him. The entity flinched back with a yowl, clenching at the stump while its companion rushed by, both hands outstretched. This one Malik took with an overhand chop, straight through its forehead, and sent the flaps of its skull splaying out to either side.
Claws pawed for his calf. He lifted the foot and stepped aside from the headless demon—still apparently animated enough to follow its basic killer instincts. A blaster bolt into its back stilled it. Malik strode up to the last alcove, from which the final demon was still disentangling itself, and pumped a blaster shot into its brow, rocking it back onto the slab. A final thrust of his blade ensured that the hunk of long-dead meat gave up the entity that had been trapped within it.
A sickly yellow-purple fume boiled out into chamber from the disintegrating form as Malik ripped his weapon free. More of it was swirling around his shins as the other demons dissolved and he was grateful, for once, for his mask, keeping what had to be hideous odor from him. A sense of calm settled upon him, as the Flux quieted in his soul.
It didn’t last long. His gaze settled upon the little witch, now folded over in the icy water, her shoulders shaking. Rage rekindled in Malik’s chest and he strode to her side until he towered over her. But what became apparent as sobs chilled it. Sighing, he holstered his blaster and shook his head.
“Young fool,” he rumbled. “They taught you the summoning, but not the control.”
The girl’s sobs ceased. Slowly, she looked up at him from between soaked, ragged twisted of black bangs. Her sliver-blue eyes widened and her lips trembled with terror.
“You are him,” she began to say.
“Stop!”
Malik flinched back from the girl a half a step, blade at the ready. At the entrance to the catacomb, another woman in the fatigues of the Freedom Brigade stood with a blaster aimed at him. Knuckles creaking about the handle of his weapon instinctively, Malik realized that made the situation even worse—realized then, too, how things had looked; him standing over the kneeling girl with his sword poised.
“Stop, I said,” the guerilla repeated, stepping into the chamber. “Step back from her.”
Malik relaxed his grip and complied. Shock spread through him as he met the stare of the newcomer. He knew she was the soldier the demon had stalked in the street. But looking at her now, with both eyes and senses honed to the Flux, he saw her completely.
He saw a woman-child stumbling through a fiery night, a night of portents and horrid crimes.
Malik froze in place.
He saw his vision.
Chapter 10
CALLISTO’S SLAYER THRUMMED around him faintly as its anti-matter engines carried it further into the gulf between worlds. Boredom weighted his thoughts. His patrol—the entirety of First Squadron—was nearly two hours out from Circe, now, spread into six pairs with their sensors wide open.
And they were finding nothing.
“Think we drew the short straw, DC,” Kreeve’s voice crackled in his earbud. “The bloodsuckers aren’t coming from this direction.”
Callisto smiled. “This axis is the shortest route from Bahamut.”
“Hey, maybe they’re not coming, at all, then!”
“Ha,” Callisto snorted. “Wishful thinking, Kreeve. Theocracy’s not just going to give us the time to consolidate our hold on Circe.”
“That’s really the plan, then?” There was unease in the other pilot’s tone. “Take and hold a whole world?”
“You were at the briefing.”
“Yeah, but there’s things said in public; and things said otherwise.” Kreeve’s hesitation was almost audible. “And everyone knows you’re tight with the Wraith.”
Callisto smirked. “Tight enough to know that he isn’t changing his mind.”
“Why this place, though? It’s a backwater of backwaters.”
“And one protected by a garrison and a fleet,” Callisto replied, tiring of this topic quickly. “You wonder why that is?”
“I am wondering, buddy,” Kreeve said ominously. “The mudball I grew up on barely merited an occasional visit from a survey cruiser. What makes this place so special?”
Callisto glanced through his canopy to starboard, where Kreeve’s Slayer hung against the star-speckled darkness. He couldn’t see the other man at that distance, but could feel him staring back.
More, he remembered Everild’s stare, that shivering, fatalistic intensity. He remembered their conversation. And Dee Callisto shuddered slightly, for the first time in years uncertain of the path he’d been so focused upon.
“I don’t know, Kreeve,” he replied, at last. “I just know the Wraith’s calling the shots; and he’s never led us astray before.”
A blat from his sensor panel came almost as a relief, compared to the dread-laden silence that settled between the pilots. But that feeling shriveled as crimson icons speckled Calisto’s long-range hologram.
“Contacts!”
“I’ve got them, too!” Kreeve replied.
“Whole pack of Orloks.” Callisto counted as they materialized, at least eight pairs—a full squadron—and already moving to consolidate from the wide swipe-pattern they’d been flying. “Coming on fast.” He tapped his helmet mic stem to cure up the squadron channel. “Slayers, this is Callisto! Party-crashers on their way. Form on First Flight, soonest!”
The widely-scattered blue icons of the Slayers rushed to join Callisto and Kreeve. They’d been dispersed to cover as much space with their sensors as practical. That had allowed them to see the Orloks before they slipped by; but it also put them at a disadvantage if they were seen first.
“They caught us strung out,” Kreeve growled. “Those guys are going to be all over us before help arrives.”
“Maybe we’re not going to need the help, Kreeve,” Callisto drawled, blinking as sweat greased the inside of his helmet and formed a bead that slipped down to sting at the corner of his eye.
“Hey, I’m good, sure. But eight-to-one is starting to look lop-sided.”
Callisto forced a grin as he opened the throttle to feed power to the antimatter engines. “Stay on me.” The Slayer began to shiver with the intensity of its thrust. “We’ll keep their attention on us till the others arrive, and they’ll jump ‘em.”
“On your wing.”
It was an adage of dogfighting, going back millennia to the earliest airborne flyers, that the fight often went to who saw who first. The Orloks clearly embraced that, bunching towards Callisto and Kreeve and putting on speed. Two pairs grouped directly into their path, aiming to overwhelm them with firepower. The other pairs flanked to either side, anticipating their likely evasion paths—and perhaps mindful that these Slayers wouldn’t be on their own.
Callisto needed to disabuse them of that.
“I’ll draw blood,” Callisto told Kreeve. “Then we break right. First Orlok who flinches is yours.”
“Can’t wait,” Kreeve replied through audibly gritting teeth.
Distance ripped by across the tense seconds as Callisto watched the Orloks rush at them on the long-range display. Thumbing the weapons selector to torpedoes, he set the first to charging in the tube. He waited for the targeting reticle to materialize on his heads-up display, then drift till it acquired the closest foe, then crimson as sensors got locked onto its drive signature.
Flecks of light that weren’t stars glimmered off the Slayer’s nose as the oncoming Orloks reached the extreme of visual range. The reticle twitched and settled. Callisto squeezed the trigger and the Slayer chugged with the release of the plasma torpedo. A lance of hazy blue-white shot across the void.
Cyan streaks ripped back for Callisto, the Orloks opening up a second later than him. It cost them. The Orlok at the center of the middle quartet reacted too slowly, the pilot likely over-focused on firing their own weapons. The plasma torpedo took the fighter squarely in the cockpit bulb, splitting it down the center in a silvery flash.
A blaster bolt crashed off Callisto’s forward shields, enough energy getting through to buck him forward into his four-point harness. “Break right!”
Kreeve was already wrenching into the turn to starboard as energy beams sliced the darkness all around them. Callisto followed, his Slayer shaking with another hit—a damage alarm beginning to warble as a system readout blinked warning yellow by his left elbow. He ignored it, clenching his teeth as g-forces got through the Slayer’s inertial compensators to grind down on him.
The Orloks in the middle of the formation had been coming on too fast to instantly react, streaking past them to aft. But the pilots were quick enough to spin on their y-axes and send blaster bolts chasing after the pair of Slayers. And the Orloks that had flanked to starboard were arching after them, now.
“Seems we got their attention!” Kreeve called out.
“Right,” Callisto replied, eyeing the pair coming on hard to port. “Are we going to do something about it?”
“Brake and peel off to port,” Kreeve answered. “They’ll either have to split up or follow me.”
“Right!”
Callisto slammed down on his maneuvering thrusters, at the same time bleeding power from the throttle. As power rerouted with a howl, he slammed the control stick to the left, putting his Slayer into a veer to port. Kreeve rushed on without him, with the Orloks still in pursuit.
Wrenching the stick back the opposite direction, Callisto goosed the throttle again. The violence of the turn flung him sideways into his restraints, then backwards into his flight couch, armpits pinching where the straps had bit him. But the maneuver put him on the tails of the Orloks chasing Kreeve. Waiting for the reticle to steady on the trailing fighter, he couldn’t believe the Theocracy pilots were allowing him this close.
The trailing Orlok put on a sudden lurch of speed, juking out from the outline of Callisto’s targeting halo. Suddenly, the fighter’s tail was slewing out from behind it as it veered to starboard, swinging it around in a side-slip to Calisto’s upper right quadrant and bringing its guns to bear.
Oh, damn!
Blaster fire sprayed into Callisto’s path. His only course was to turn into it, try to cut inside the Orlok’s already tight turn. A bolt mashed into his port shield as he veered to starboard. Another skittered across his ventral deflector and the squalling of damage alarms doubled in his cockpit.
Unable to maintain the tightness of the turn, the Orlok sailed by, beneath the Slayer, rattling the hull with its passage. Callisto knew he had maybe seconds to react; this close, the Orlok’s higher maneuverability gave it the advantage. Killing his thrusters, Callisto yanked back on the stick, flipping the Slayer upside down and leaving it hurtling on, inverted from its original orientation and backwards.
