Warp Wraith, page 31
The impact flung Callisto first into the left of the cockpit—striking hard enough to dent the systems readout panel—then bouncing off the right. Pain roared from his bruised shoulder, but the unhealthy judder of the spaceframe worried him more. Every alarm in the compartment wailed and he could see nothing.
Flames and debris whirled away to aft as the Slayer punched clear of the fireball. Azure lances scrawled the space ahead of him and he instinctively veered to starboard. The Slayer responded with a hint of sluggishness suggesting damage, but the maneuver carried him clear as another Orlok lashed by to port. He sawed the stick back to the left, hoping for a shot, then yelped as another shape lashed across his nose—one of his comrades in pursuit.
“Dammit!” he hollered to no one in particular as he banked again to starboard, narrowly missing the other Slayer. “This isn’t working!”
Space was littered with rock and dust clouds and explosions amongst them. Starfighters wheeled through these, firing wildly, flying blindly. It was the kind of frenzied melee were reflexes and luck counted more than skill. And the Orloks could afford a lot more bad luck than the Slayers.
“Kreeve?”
“Still with you, DC!”
Wheeling around a lump of asteroid, Callisto found the young pilot skidding in along his right flank. Their reunion was interrupted a second later, though, by a splatter of cyan bolts that sent them forking away from one another. An Orlok dived upon them from high and front and sliced between them. The pilot hadn’t judged his attack well; clearly intending to cut around on their tails and pursue, he found, instead, the asteroid they’d just passed. Collision vaporized a fifth of the rock and all of the hurtling starfighter.
“This is insane!” Kreeve yowled.
The insanity was intensifying. Restoration was pushing her way through the belt, followed by the slower, but still nimble Mauler. That both were using their speed to get around the flank of the main Theocracy force was clear. The light cruiser’s anti-starfighter flak batteries went to work, spraying the space around her in an intense tracery of plasma. Orloks shredded before that and a gap in their swarm opened up.
Callisto flew into that, putting on a burst of speed that added a new note to the alarms still warbling through his cockpit. With a swipe of his left palm, he killed them, then ground the control stick to port with his right, turning back into the main fight on the Theocracy’s flank. He had a moment to eye the damage display and saw splotches of red on the right wing and over one of the shield generator coils.
Tremendous flashes pulled his gaze up from that. One of the Manglers was peeling away from the Ravager, cutting between patches of space rock to angle into the path of the Revenants’ flank attack. Turbo-blaster pulses peppered Restoration as she shot across its nose, though missed Mauler as the torpedo frigate curved around to its left. The lighter vessels suddenly had the heavier one in a crossfire. A stream of silvery pulses ripped across the Mangler’s shields as a salvo of Mauler’s quantum torpedoes slammed into it.
“Job opportunity, Slayers!” Callisto called out as he touched the icon of the Mangler on his sensor panel, sending out a pulse to alert anyone who was left to his intent. “Kreeve?”
“I didn’t go anywhere!”
The Mangler’s course had presented the Slayers a perfect approach, with its whole right flank exposed. More, taking fire from front and left, its captain would have to respond by rotating deflector power to reinforce those directions. Attack from a third direction could overwhelm that.
Whipping past an oblong of space rock, Callisto straightened his approach, engines thrumming up through the hull into his spine. He reached out with his left for the shield controls and rotated all power to the forward bank—knowing that would leave his tail exposed. A glance at his sensors showed him Kreeve and another three blue icons closing to aft. They had some help, after all, and also someone to cover them as they plunged for the battlecruiser.
“Break hard to port after your runs!” Callisto told the others as blue-green flak fire started lashing out towards them—the Mangler’s gunners beginning to take notice. “Any other way puts you in that fire zone!”
“Not taking a bolt from our own guys!” Kreeve agreed through audibly gritting teeth.
A droplet of sweat tickled on Callisto’s chin, vibrating in time to the fighter’s engines, then dropped free. He thumbed his weapons selector to plasma torpedoes and waited as the targeting reticle materialized over the Mangler’s profile. A thrill went through him at the perfection of the target. And the battlecruiser was already in trouble, bleeding atmosphere from rents torn in her opposite side by Mauler’s torpedoes.
Flak fire intensified to a storm as Callisto and his wing mates swept in. Lightning splattered across his upper left shields, rattling the control stick in his hands. But the coherent barrier held, was still there as a second strobe dashed it directly ahead, momentarily blinding Callisto. He came out of this to see the reticle red and blinking with lock. But he held on longer, needed to make it perfect.
“Orloks!” Kreeve called out. “They’re on us!”
Callisto ignored the warning, focused only on the buzz of his targeting alarm and the bristling wall of durasteel rushing for him. More sweat itched down the sides of his face, stung in his blurring eyes as he clung to that flashing holographic halo. He could see the details of hull plate joints. There!
A stroke of his trigger sent the silvery smear of his plasma torpedo coursing loose. Callisto didn’t have time to follow its course, wrenching the stick to port and held on as the Slayer shuddered into a turn away from the Mangler. His timing had been on—barely—as the starfighter streaked past the battlecruiser’s thruster package and coasting on into the bluey glow of its wake.
A flash and a jolt chased Callisto. To aft, his torpedo pounded the Mangler’s starboard shield. He let out a yowl of triumph as energetic fields unraveled and secondary explosions rippled back along its flank. A massive fireball joined them as Kreeve’s torpedo punched through now-stripped shields to vaporize a crater from the durasteel hide and send innards venting into the void.
“Get clear!” Callist hollered, knowing what came next and red-lining his thrusters. “Get clear!”
Another salvo of quantum torpedoes from Mauler rained into the battlecruiser’s now utterly-exposed hull. Silver energy spears buried themselves deeply, releasing their destruction within tightly-packed compartments. Durasteel bulged out from the inside, then split at the seams to let flames gush free. A gout of fire burped out through a thruster nozzle. Then holocaust followed as the entire thruster section vaporized itself in a miniature star.
Shockwave rattled Callisto’s Slayer. The rattling didn’t stop as it subsided and the Mangler’s demise faded to a cherry red cloud of cooling gases to aft. The starfighter had taken a beating.
But looking across the vast expanse of the fight, he saw its work couldn’t be done yet.
“Kreeve?”
“Always here!” the younger pilot crowed. “Is that two battlecruiser kills I get to notch up on the register?”
Callisto chuckled, but it was short-lived. Of the three others who’d followed them into the run on the Mangler, only two remained. “You had a little help, I think.”
“Aw.”
“Where are those Orloks?”
“Didn’t come out after us. I think they ate the Mangler’s fire.”
“Too bad.”
Callisto angled across what was becoming the rear of the fight. The Revenants had stalled both wings of the Theocracy fleet at the belt and were working around its left flank. The Ravager-class rode straight into the middle of it, undaunted, starting to take fire from multiple directions as its escorts were drawn off or died. But it was beginning to jolt out its truly monstrous broadsides and its target was clear; Vengeful, the only Revenant vessel close to its equal and crossing in front of it to present its own broadside.
“Calling all Slayers,” Callisto said into his helm mic, keying the squadron general address channel. “This is One-One. Primary target, here.” He touched the icon of the Ravager on his sensor panel. “Anyone who can get through, follow me in.”
He got a couple pings in response, but no voices. Everyone was fighting for their lives, or had already given them up. A sick weight settled in the pit of Callisto’s stomach. They were literally throwing everything into this fight. And the bloodsuckers were still coming.
“You know anyone with a Ravager decal on their kill list, DC?” Kreeve asked.
“Never heard of it,” he replied, trying not to let it sound ominous.
“You will in a minute.”
Callisto grinned and forced down the sickness as he gunned his engines.
THE CORRIDORS AND CHAMBERS of the Citadel throbbed around Malik with nightmarish familiarity. He could almost feel himself being dragged to fresh torments, years before. It took a physical shake to fling the memories away.
“Are you alright?” Ingrid whispered at his back.
He ignored her, lurching on ahead to a hatch he remembered well. Its control panel blinked feebly, hanging slightly askew and leaking smoke into the air. He holstered his blaster pistol and reached for the gap between door and frame, found a grip with his finger and hooked them in. With a growl that was as much release of inner tension as it was effort, he dragged the hatch open.
Jostling forward, Ingrid aimed her blaster down another corridor, this one hexagonal and slightly narrower than its predecessors. Smoke choked the air and the by-now-expected bodies heaped along its floor. Shock Troopers and Citadel Guardsmen tangled together with dead in the drab coats of Servitors. Ingrid glanced at Malik, daring him to comment on her defensiveness of him.
“Runs into the Core,” he told her and pushed ahead past her.
A pallid, exposed torso twisted in amongst the corpses caught his attention. Guts knotting up to the base of his throat, he lunged in, gripping a dead Guardsman by the shoulder and flipping him off the shirtless body. Malik knelt and more gently touched the whitened form, gripping a bony elbow and tugging the still form over.
He swayed as he beheld the face. Pinched in death and prematurely aged by abuse and malnutrition, the hairless man’s features were still vaguely familiar. Malik would have known them anywhere. He’d known everyone in the Band—had known everyone he’d left behind here.
Ingrid gasped behind him. “One of...yours...?”
Malik nodded. “Corvus,” he whispered. Eyes stung as they scanned the blaster burns across the dead man’s chest and abdomen. There’d be no return from death here. Nausea rising, Malik eased the body back to rest facedown, once more. “He was ranker. Would have made centurion had he...not been up on as many charges as he had citations.”
Breath lodged in Malik’s throat. Words caught. The mask suddenly did him no good, was a strangling weight about his face. He reached for it, but his hand paused, clenched and unclenched futilely. None could see. None would want to see the scars left by his time in this place—this hell. But, damn it, his throat was closing up.
“My Lord...?” Ingrid started to say.
Malik stood abruptly—too fast, and he swayed for a moment, before an elbow to the wall propped him up. Corvus. It had been him. So many had perished during Malik’s incarceration, and so many more during his breakout. But at least he knew, now, for certain that some had survived it and all the years since. And Corvus hadn’t been twisted beyond recognition, like those other abominations. He’d still been...as human as any of them had once been.
“Leave him as he is,” he rasped, starting forward. “Forward to the Core.”
Blaster damage from within had left the next door partially open. Sheathing his force sword over his shoulder in its baldric, Malik re-drew his pistol and kept it at the ready as he sidled past the jammed panel. The next space was a blaster-marred, smoldering space of more corpses—these all black-clad Guardsmen. Malik pressed on to the curving hallway running left and right beyond the antechamber and made a left turn that brought him to a quick flight of stairs down a level.
That he knew every step of the way probably should have bothered him. But he’d lived with these memories carved as savagely into the tissue of his mind and he had the scars over his body.
A long curve of corridor that Malik knew circled an interior shaft of turbolifts, cells, and power conduits brought him to an intersection branching left. He followed this, stepping over a slain Shock Trooper, and prowled up a short corridor to another open hatch—this one wedged open by a corpse in the orange tatters of prison overalls. A glance confirmed he knew the dead woman—Tatyana; another of his rankers, and one of Band who’d enjoyed their deadly work a little too much. She stared back at Malik with dead, accusing eyes.
He moved past her, out into the Core.
Part of the Citadel’s lower levels were a durasteel foundry worked by its prisoners. The Core opened up to the slag pits below, which ventilated skyward to shafts unseen in the gloom above. The heat of the still-molten slag gave the air shimmer, as well as an infernal hue.
A conveyor belt ran around the central shaft of the Core, pocked, stained rusty black, and currently inoperative. Malik stood unevenly upon it; he’d never once in his time here ever seen it not in motion. Panning his gaze across its breadth, he recalled its dimensions; roughly five-abreast. Enough for the denizens of the Citadel to crowd it without stopping.
Many of those former inhabitants carpeted the immobile belt now. Heaped close to the exits, where they’d forced their escape, scattered further out from the center, a few half-dangling off the edge of the belt. Blaster wounds smoked from most. A few bore the cauterized gouges of force sword swipes. A red-armored arm protruded from under a pile of the dead—overrun where the Shock Trooper had stood.
“We weren’t given cells,” Malik thought out loud, unconcerned that he’d be heard. “We lived on the Belt.”
He knelt beside a body. Privation and gray hair made it harder to identify the man. But Malik knew him after setting his palm about his stiff back. Centurion...Raval. He stood and found Ingrid standing behind him. At her back, a mix of Furies and Hardcases emptied out onto the Belt, weapons at the ready but slowly dipping as they realized the fight had long since left this place.
“We had to keep moving,” Malik told Ingrid—hating the way her face pinched in pity. “Anyone who stopped was shot from above.” He nodded up at the railed balcony level overlooking the Belt. “We learned to sleep propped up between each other. The only time they let us out was...” He trailed off into a tangle of hideous memories and shivered.
“This started long before we got here,” a voice spoke up into the quiet. It was Edie, checking a fluttering display panel near the door. “They lost control of the population.”
“Starfighter strikes crippled the main power to the Citadel,” Malik said with a nod. “They would have been running low on their backup batteries, by now.” He looked around; there had still been some power. “Something else must have happened, though.”
“What the hell...?”
Malik whirled to the source of the yelp.
The nasty little Hardcase often in Edie’s company had knelt beside one of the slain prisoners and peeled them partially over. What that revealed to him was an emaciated face, twisted in the throes of its finally agony, and with lips peeled back from vampiric fangs. Malik winced under his mask, as much in recognition of the dead woman’s face as by what had just been revealed.
“Political prisoners, my ass,” the man let the corpse slump over once more and stood, shaking as he glowered at Malik.
“Moff...” Edie growled by way of warning and started to step between them. But the glance she cast Malik’s way was limned with uncertainty.
“Who were these people?” Moff demanded, starting towards Malik. “What were they? What in the living hell was going on in this place?”
“That’s enough, Moff!” Edie stepped into the little man’s path, restraining him.
Malik saw the looks from the other Hardcases, and he saw Ingrid flinch. Erstwhile allies stood tense on the Belt, eyeing one another, a few fingers twitching near triggers. Uncertainty crackled on the edge of violence. Edie half-turned from Moff, while still keeping a hand up to his chest. It wasn’t uncertainty in her eyes, now; it was accusation.
With a dip of his scarred head, Malik sighed. “They were the Sacred Band.” He looked up at all of them. “They were my Band.”
“Your Band of vampires!” Moff snapped.
“Dhampirs,” Malik corrected him with a voice gone surprisingly unsteady. He could feel Edie’s eyes upon him—the eyes of that girl in the burning village. “Half-mortal, half-immortal; the products of a union between the living and the damned.” He shuddered. “All of them.”
“Witch-hunters,” Edie hissed bitterly.
Malik winced. “They were the elite, anti-Thaumaturgical strike force of the Theocracy.” He bowed his head. “We were. But it wasn’t just Flux-users we pursued; we did all the Theocracy’s dirty work.”
“And you want us to free that?” Edie asked, barely above a trembling whisper.
Malik made himself look at her. “We were betrayed. I never fully understood it. Maybe we got too powerful for the comfort of one of the factions of the Pentarchy.” He shrugged. “We were thrown into reckless fights, over and over again, and whittled down. And then, here on Circe, the Theocracy turned on us. They killed any who resisted and imprisoned the rest. Here.”
Edie snorted. “You came here to literally get the Band back together.”
Malik looked at her, then around at the dead. Dizziness nibbled at the edges of his balance and darkness clouded his vision. Silence evaded him, overwhelmed by the swirl of memory and emotion and the jabbering of a thousand voices—all of them accusing him, screeching to him from the Beyond to save them.
But he couldn’t. He hadn’t.
“You said dhampirs—or whatever,” Moff growled, beginning to shake. “You said they were yours.” He had both hands on his blaster. “That means you’re—”
