Warp Wraith, page 2
Malik crossed his arms, recalling the bitter arguments and final break that had led them all to this point. The so-called Rebel Stars claimed to be fighting to restore the old Empire. In reality, they seemed to do little fighting, except amongst themselves. But they’d been the only faction standing up to the Theocracy and the cadre and ships that made up his Revenants had come from them, so this point deserved careful attention, indeed.
“We’ve always been on our own, Commander,” Malik rumbled in reply. “To answer more directly” he paused, let a bitter note enter his voice that he hoped his mask didn’t totally obscure “the Revolutionary Council favors more cautious strategies.”
Murmurs passed around the chamber.
“So, on our own,” Callisto concluded, then hastily added, “Sir.”
“They’ll be watching our progress closely.”
“To see which way the wind’s blowing,” Callisto retorted.
“The Anea System is far from Theocracy power,” Malik spoke up over the rising voices, with force that caused the amplifiers of his mask to crackle. “Success here will create a reaction. We will force the Rebels’ hand.”
Silence answered that. But Malik could sense the storm beneath it, through the Flux, through each of their auras feeding it. It was out fully now; the Revenants had mustered at his call, as they always had. But always there had been the assumption of moving with a broader movement.
“This is the plan,” he declared. “We are committed. Are the other questions?” He looked around, meeting as many stares as would look back at him. Silence remained the only answer. “Good.” He turned to Everild. “Admiral.”
“We estimate real-space reentry in forty minutes,” Everild spoke up in a business-like tone that belied the severity of the moment. “You should all have time to return to your ships and make any final preparations.”
All eyes were still on Malik.
“The Flux moves with us, my friends,” he intoned solemnly. “Good luck to us all.”
The Revenants broke up without further formality, rumbling like pack animals clearing from a carcass picked clean. Callisto was muttering to one of his squadron commanders. Ingrid lingered a little longer, eyes upon Malik, perhaps calling to him. But there was no time for that now. Grudgingly, she followed the flow out of the conference room, leaving Everild, staring through the bluey glow of the hologram.
He deactivated it with a click of a control, leaving nothing between them. “I can have words with Callisto.”
Malik waved dismissively. “Leave it.”
“He’s always been a favorite of yours, but in front of the others—”
“Leave it, I said.”
Everild nodded grudgingly. “We...left a great many things out of that briefing.”
“We did.”
“People will come to understand the entirety of it, once we’ve succeeded.”
Malik ran a hand across his bald, scarred scalp and sighed through his mask. “And why we have done things will matter less, then, than success.”
“If you say so, Lor—” Everild winced, then tried to smile. “Sir.”
Malik chortled. “You are a good friend, Dom.”
“I presume you will lead the strike teams on Malvik?”
“You presume correctly.”
The Admiral squirmed at that, muttered to himself before snapping, “And I also presume it’s pointless to try and talk you out of that?”
“Completely.”
“If we lose you—” Everild paused, glanced towards the hatches exiting the chamber to make certain none lingered in earshot “—the whole thing falls apart.” He clenched a fist, shook it before him. “So far, the galaxy has bought into this Warp Wraith mythos you’ve built up. But if that’s shattered...” He trailed off, shaking his head. “What becomes of all these people? All this work?”
Malik considered the man before him, who’d been at his side longer than most—and knew far more of him than most. “The Warp Wraith is an idea; not one man,” he told him. “The Cause will carry on.”
Chapter 2
HOVERBIKES HOWLED OUT of a Circe night.
Edie Sundown couldn’t help the maniacal grin working its way across her lips as she gripped the handlebars of her ride and goosed the anti-grav throttle hard enough to make it scream. Flecks of snow stung off her exposed cheeks like icy bullets. Wind lashed through her leathers to sting the bones. And death waited ahead of her in the dark.
But she was alive now.
There was no sense in stealth now, racing up the Kraggar Pass into the Magvar Mountains. Her Hardcases followed her in a squalling tide, dozens of hoverbikes—two and sometimes three to a ride—armed and racing into the fight. The village of Reyes, perched near the high point of the pass like a fishbone in a throat, could not possibly miss their approach.
Blaster bolts, stitching cyan hatch marks down the pass at them, confirmed that an instant later. Blinding and thunderous, one of them found the bike to her right, struck its undercarriage with an actinic flash that suddenly became a fireball. The spindly frame of the bike flew apart, raining itself and a pair of pinwheeling bodies across the countryside in a curtain of blazing splinters.
Bad luck, that. Edie clenched her teeth and juked to the left to evade another bolt and a similar fate. She thumbed a handgrip control with her right hand. Targeting holograms painted across her goggles as the bike’s single, underside heavy blaster mated its software to her helmet. A halo scrawled into being around a highlighted figure, rushing to the edge of the village. She pulled the trigger.
Bluey fire scoured out towards Reyes. A blister of flame rose where it touched, burst in orange-red ugliness that tossed parts of a spread-eagled form skyward. She stroked the trigger again, hosing out staccato streams of energy. Firefly patterns of similar blasts spat from the other bikes, now filling the pass and lighting up its forested sides like momentary daylight.
A crescent of explosions walked along the village’s perimeter. Barricades and a checkpoint at the single military road running through it fluoresced as blaster beams smacked into them. Fire light illuminated more figures, spilling from bunkers further in, some emerging from the block-buildings common of settlements in this area.
Edie nosed her bike lower as her eye caught a pair of armored runners carrying a long, tube-shaped weapon between them. She was nearly on top of the barricades now, engines wailing, hurtling too fast, too close to pull out now. She held down the trigger, punishing the night with her blasts, but more to keep heads down than to hit anything.
“Heavy weapon!” she hollered over her shoulder as she pulled the bike’s forward hover pad frame up to carry it over the barricades.
“Got it!” the Hardcase clinging to her back, Moff, replied.
The little man pivoted rightward to bring a blaster rifle to bear as Edie took the hoverbike squalling over the checkpoint and its running, panicking guards. He stroked out tight, controlled bursts in threes that stitched across rushing forms. The pair hauling what became apparent as a heavy blastcannon tumbled to the ground in flames.
But they’d worn bulky crimson armor—not the ratty, hodgepodge fatigues and plates of Collaborator soldiery.
“Shock Troopers!” Edie snapped to Moff. “Shit! What are they doing here?”
Cyan brilliance scoured through the night after them. With a wince, Edie steered her bike to the left to avoid one of Reyes’ few three-story buildings and nosed it down into an alleyway to avoid the chasing fire. Ferrocrete walls lashed by to either side with the deafening echo of anti-grav howl. A dog-like animal darted low. A more human shape stepped out from a door before ducking instantly back in.
A main street opened up ahead and she hit the brakes with reversal of gravity fields that set the bike’s engine to screeching in protest. Leaning left as the vehicle’s tail slewed out from behind to the right, she let physics finish the turn for her before goosing the throttle again. Moff squawked behind her and held on desperately to her waist as the bike shot forth again, up the new street.
Drawing back on her handle bars, Edie nosed them for the sky. The bike shot up above racing roofs before she leaned them into a leftward arc, back towards the village’s south side. Fires spread from the periphery, walked up streets as Hardcase hoverbikes strafed. Blaster bolts chased these fitfully, but the defenses were already clearly breached.
“Shock Troopers!” Edie called into the mic of her helmet. “We’ve got Shock Troopers in the mix! Watch for them!”
As if to punctuate her point, one of the hoverbikes, rising just above the rooftops as it peeled back towards the barricades, caught a stream of blaster bolts at its midpoint. Trailing smoke, it careened back down for the streetside, coming apart. A stuttering crash sent metal and flesh flying, followed by a final plume of fire rising over the village.
Edie wrenched her bike back for the source of the bolts. She found it quickly, aided by the flashing pointers of her goggles: the cupola of a dome close to the checkpoint. The barrel of another heavy blastcannon was swiveling towards her from its vantage point, a Shock Trooper tensing behind its firing grips.
Moff was hollering something at her ear, but Edie ignored it, steering straight for the cupola and crushing down on her trigger. Blaster fire streams crisscrossed against the sky and she felt the artificial lightning burning past. But hers found its mark first. Masonry shattered and a gout of flame spat vertically with a roar Edie heard over the wind and din of the battle.
Shooting through the column of smoking rising above the battered dome, Edie turned them again, this time to the right. This gave her a view of the town without having to dodge ground fire. Hardcase hoverbikers were screaming this way and that overhead, an angry, metallic swarm, picking at the bones of the settlement. Blaster beams still flicked into the sky after them, but most of the fire was down in the streets.
The barricades burned and by the light of that conflagration, bikes were landing to disgorge passengers. These fanned out, probing wreckage and bodies with testing blasts, taking up positions to secure the checkpoint. From behind them, down in the pass, came the rumble of heavier engines.
Out of mist and flurries came a motley collection of hovertrucks. Some of these were armored; refurbished from stolen Collaborator models. Others were civilian models with ablative plate welded on and overhead blaster turrets improvised with sheet metal. Most had the fist-clenching-a-stake symbol emblazoned on their flanks.
The crest of the Circe Freedom Brigades—driving a stake through the heart of the bloodsucking Theocracy.
The trucks poured into the village from the north, side doors cracking wide to spill more Hardcases out into its streets. Blasterfire increased tenfold as the newcomers unleashed with pent-up nerves. Shouting from cadre leaders thinned that out, but not before they’d ripped a swath of wanton destruction into the lower fifth of the settlement.
A twinge went through Edie at that, knowing many of the buildings aflame or beaten down into rubble would have contained villagers, simply cowering and trying to survive yet another calamity on Circe. But the Hardcases didn’t get their names euphemistically; most had been in the fight to free their world for as long as they could remember. And it had been a savage one.
“Sundown!” a voice crackled in her ear from her helmet commlink. “This is Vasilache! Got holdouts at the city square!”
“Got it!” She touched a fingertip to the microphone stem protruding from her helm liner, a pattern to change the channel to the comm’s general address frequency. “Hardcases, this is Sundown; the bloodsuckers are falling back to the cathedral! Biker teams, pen ‘em in there! And watch that ground fire!”
The hoverbikes swirling over Reyes lurched inward for its heart. Edie steered her own into a warbling turn that drew a grunt of protest from Moff behind her. Dipping low, she followed one of the streets running out from the village center like a spoke. She caught snatches of rushing shadows out of the corner of her eye, but saw only Hardcases when she looked; probing down side alleys, kicking in doors, jolting out occasional flashes of cyan.
The fight for the village was already nearing its end.
That end was reaching climax at the spired building smoldering at the center. Originally a temple to Circe’s animist pantheon of nature spirits and ancestor-worship, Theocracy domination had converted it to a garish, black basalt cathedral. Looming over the squalor of Reyes around it in lugubrious splendor, it was the perfect analogue for their entire order; finery and glory for the life-draining oligarchy at the top—blood and misery for the rest of Circe, and the galaxy.
But the Hardcases were putting paid to that now. Blastcannon chattered from hoverbikes as they whined round and round the cathedral’s four spires, powdering ebon stone and blowing out stained-glass windows. More of the bikes were setting down at the edges around the central square, releasing passengers to attack on foot.
Pulling back on her handlebars and throttling down on her bike’s anti-gravs, Edie followed their example. Moff leapt off the back while they were still a couple meters from the street, whuffing with relief as he landed. Spindly landing gears groaned beneath her as Edie settled the bike to the crude paves and keyed her commlink again.
“Ground teams,” she called, “I need heavy weapons at the cathedral, now!”
Moff had joined a trio of Hardcases at the edge of the square in the rubble of a fallen-down storefront. They pecked away at the smoldering windows of the cathedral, occasionally drawing return fire. But the firefight swelled as shouts rose from their left and they turned their attention that way.
A clot of figures burst from a side street, sprinting for the cathedral. A howl rose from the Hardcases as they saw their gray fatigues and hand-down gear. Blaster fire swelled, tearing into the vainly fleeing troopers. Covering fire from the cathedral spat forth vainly, but the distance was too long and too open and Hardcase blaster bolts mowed them down.
Edie’s lips drew together into a hard line. Shooting a man in the back—even Collaborator infantry, who’d mostly be local conscripts—sat poorly with her. But they’d made their choices. And the Hardcases were making theirs, now.
“Here, Sundown!” a voice hollered over the din from behind her.
Turning, Edie found a quintet of Hardcases scrambling up the street behind her, hugging its side. A pair brought the long tube of a rocket-launcher and its spare, three-round clip. The others scanned windows and rooftops with their rifles as they settled into place around Edie’s idling bike. Their leader, a huge brute with the hand-cut and -sewn chevrons of a cadre leader—sergeant—grinned out from a grimy face at her.
“Got the dogs on the run, this time,” he called. “Nice change of pace!”
Sliding off her bike, Edie pointed to the front of the cathedral. “Gonna need a rocket put into that door, Isaak!”
The big noncom pointed to the missile team, who immediately took up a position behind a slab of crumbled façade, one man hefting the launcher to his shoulder while the second loaded it.
“All teams near the church,” Edie called into her helmet mic, “we’re going to crack this egg!” She reached for her blaster rifle, side-slung in a saddle holster, and pulled it free. “I want covering fire on the windows and upper floor when the door bursts. Everyone else moves in!” She didn’t wait for acknowledgement, turned to Isaak and the missile team and nodded.
The man with the launcher stood from behind his cover and took aim. A blaster bolt from the cathedral kicked up gravel and sparks near his shin, but he didn’t flinch. An instant later, his launcher jerked with an eardrum-punishing whump and sent a vapor trail ripping forth.
The missile’s tiny motor hardly had time to light, crossing the open square, but it didn’t matter; the antimatter warhead that tipped it did. Striking the heavy, brown-black panels of the double door, the tiny seed of antimatter cracked, mixed with its surroundings, and became instant annihilation.
Edie felt more than heard the explosion, jolting bones and jellying her innards with its ferocity. She saw its flash, even through clenched eyelids. Then it was over, and everything was debris clattering down, a piece of it ringing off her helmet.
Lurching from behind her bike, she hollered into her helm mic. “Go! All teams, take the place!” Then she was running.
Blaster fire hammered the steaming front of the cathedral as she exploded out into the open. The missile had left only glowing shreds of the doors and blackened the arched frame. She sprinted for the opening, just to its right. Footsteps scrawled rubble behind her, shouts following. She reached the lower steps, vaulted up them in two strides.
Energy bolts clawed out from the fuming dark beyond the wrecked doorway. Edie ducked to the right and slammed in tight against the side. She could feel warmth from still-glowing stone. The smoke pouring from the shrine hurt her lungs with its abrasive heat. Coughing, she waved to Moff, rushing up to join her as more blaster fire licked out from within. A gesture towards the grenades hanging from his belt drew a nod and he set down his blaster to paw one free and prime it.
Across the way, on the other side of the door, Isaak was doing the same while a handful of Hardcases waited behind him. At a furious jabbing motion from Edie, both men leaned slightly out and threw their explosives, then ducked back. A wham-WHAM followed, jolting sparks, splinters, and wild vortices of smoke forth from the cathedral’s innards.
“Go-go-go!”
Edie was in motion, even as the words exploded from her throat. A vague ache of fear slowed her motions. But she couldn’t not be at the front. She’d been out in front of the Hardcases ever since she’d joined them.
A shape staggered from the fumes within and Edie put a blaster bolt through the center of its mass without hesitation; there’d be nothing friendly—or innocent—left in here. The Shock Trooper—an arm gone at the scorched shoulder plate—flopped back in a spray of sparks. She juked behind a pocked column as an answering shot strobed from within the smoky gloom. Her goggles highlighted figures rushing to-and-fro behind the shreds of wrecked pews. She stroked the trigger, brought a second Shock Trooper down.
