Warp Wraith, page 8
“A prisoner, too,” Moff added, “that the bloodsuckers were keeping in the basement.” He pointed to a knot of stained white rags, and equally stained white limbs huddled slightly away from the others on the lowest of the steps.
And Edie froze as the waifish figure’s eyes rose to meet hers. Blue paled to the point of almost gray looked back at her, almost seemed to glow. Strands of black hair hung about pallid, narrow features, blemished with bruises. The shreds of the shift she wore barely preserved her modesty and she was cupping a hand to her neck. Blood was smudged there.
Edie couldn’t escape the sense that she’d seen the girl before.
The mob surged in on the Hardcases’ cordon of troops. A hollering man got close enough that Moff had to shove him back. “They want to lynch them,” he told Edie with a snort. “Can’t say I blame them.”
Edie tore her gaze from the prisoner, anger and sudden fear that things might truly get out of hand taking over. “We’re not having another massacre,” she growled. “Not here.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We’re not doing this.” She raised her voice and stepped over, in front of the collaborators, unslinging her blaster and settling it into her hands meaningfully. “Do you hear me? We are not doing this!”
“They drew as much blood from us as the Immortals!” A filth-smudged matron with sharp, skull-face features and gray whisps fluttering out from under a headscarf shoved to the fore. “They dined with them and cavorted with them” she wagged a crooked finger “and slept with them!”
The collaborators cringed into a tight knot, notably shielding a couple younger women who would have been pretty but for the terror graying their faces.
“Then they can leave here and rejoin them,” Edie hollered back, “for however long it takes us to clear the rest of the vampire-kind from Circe!”
The crowd jeered. Another piece of garbage—or worse; Edie tried not to imagine—flew past her ear. The matron shoved futilely to get past Moff in her mania, foam whitened her lips and flecking free.
“You’re going to let them go?” she shrieked.
A middle-aged man with missing teeth and old bruises forced his way to the fore. “Again, the special favors!”
“It’s no favor,” Edie retorted and pointed. “That’s a warzone to the south, now. They’ll be lucky to reach any kind of safety.”
The mob howled at her at that and began to press in. The Hardcases not only had to shove them back, they had the level their weapons. The villagers shrank back from the blaster muzzles, but were unrelented in their verbal punishment.
Edie gestured to a stocky, blocky-jawed woman in Hardcase olive with corporal’s chevrons on her shoulder. “Get them out of here, Kurki,” she told the woman. “Escort them to the edge of the village. No one touches them.”
Kurki nodded and waved to a pair of Hardcases, who set to corralling the collaborators away from the cathedral front and the mob. For all their bluster, the crowd didn’t follow. In fact, their ire seemed to have found a new focal point.
“Then you have to give us something!” the crone from before snarled. Her finger jabbed towards the rag-clad waif on the steps. “Give us her!”
Edie turned to the raven-haired girl, frowning as their eyes met again and the weird jolt of familiarity. “Who is that?”
“They had her in the cathedral catacombs, with a few others like her.” Moff said at her ear as the din of the mob rose again. “The rest are dead.” He winced. “Drained by that vamp.”
“Witch!” the gap-toothed man in the crowd bawled. “She’s no better than them!”
Edie had to hide a flinch at the word, spat with naked hatefulness. On Circe, the expression wasn’t just insult; it carried a very specific connotation. Edie knew—oh, how she knew. “Is that true?” she asked Moff.
“How would I know?” He nodded distastefully to the crowd. “They seem to think so.”
Edie’s gaze lingered on the girl a moment longer. “Bring her,” she decided and waved Moff to snatch her up and follow.
“Another one slinks away,” the gap-toothed agitator howled after them. “Will there be any justice? What do we get?”
Edie spun back to the crowd, anger boiling up. After all that had already happened, someone had the nerve to say that? “Freedom!” she snapped at the man, the force of her voice shocking him and the crowd into silence. “The Brigades are on the rise and this time they have help from off-world.” She looked around at faces unconvinced, but at least listening. “The revolution is here, at last!” She clenched a fist. “The Warp Wraith!”
“It won’t make any difference!” the crone howled. “One tyrant for another!”
Her rasping tones reignited the mob’s anger and its voice. The cacophony resumed and the villagers surged toward them again, barely keeping themselves from attacking the Hardcases barring their way.
“I’m not going to stand here, arguing with you people,” Edie hollered over their racket. “My Hardcases have a fight ahead of us.” She thumbed over her shoulder. “If you want to live, you’ll clear out to the north!”
At that, she turned and strode for the inn and the command post, Moff scuttling to pull the girl with him.
“One tyrant for another!” screeched after them.
Hardcases watching from the front of the inn scattered at the sight of Edie. She stomped up what remained of its front porch and into the great room. Hutch and the technicians looked up questioningly at her as she glanced about, found what she sought—a doorway to the inn’s cellar. Waving Moff after her, she marched to this and flung its loosely-hinged door wide, then descended into dank depths, smelling of rotten wood and clammy stone.
“Light?” Edie asked Moff as she reached the bottom of the steps.
Moff didn’t immediately answer. Dragging the girl to the bottom, he shoved her into a corner before producing a light wand that he activated. Its harsh light banished shadows to the corners of the stinking room and revealed barrels—mostly smashed and empty—that had likely once held ales or wine.
Unperturbed by Moff’s rough handling, the girl tugged at her rags to preserve her modesty and turned to face her new captives. Her eyes lit once again on Edie.
“You’re one of us.”
Edie went rigid. “What?”
“A Sister,” she replied with a strange, knowing smile. “Not of my Circle, no. But I sense your aura.”
Cold sweat prickled across Edie’s brow. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted Moff’s furtive glance her way. Forcing disdain, she asked, “When did you last eat?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t remember.”
“You’re delirious,” Edie said dismissively and turned to Moff. “See what food you can scrounge up.” When he hesitated, eyeing the waif, she raised her voice. “Find a jacket, too. Cold down here.” She waited until he’d gone up the stairs before turning back to the girl. “You’ve been bitten?”
That killed her weird, little grin and she cupped her hands to her neck and throat again, hiding welts and dried blood. “The beast fed upon my Sisters till they succumbed.” She visibly gulped. “I was the youngest, the least strong” tears jeweled her eyes “so they offered themselves before me.”
Edie grimaced. “Well, they’ve been avenged, at least.”
The girl shrugged, apparently uncomforted. “We were captured here, by the locals,” she told her with a sniffle. “Someone informed on us. The local collaborator authorities held us until the beast and his entourage arrived.”
Edie scowled. “Those ones we let go?”
“Maybe.” The kid shrugged again. “We never knew exactly who betrayed us. But it doesn’t matter.” She wiped the tears away and her strange grin returned. She locked stares with Edie and it spread to the corners of her face. “I’ve found what we came here to find.”
“Which is what?”
Her eyes shined with more than excitement or the reflection of the light. “You.”
Edie opened her mouth, but no words formed. Dread curdled like soured porridge in her guts and an old fear rustled in the dark corners of her soul. Years with the Hardcases had shown her horrors and fear aplenty. She’d almost embraced them, a blanket laid over older horrors. But this woman-child’s stare tugged at the corner of that blanket, threatened to pull it back and reveal the things left hidden beneath for so long.
With a snort, Edie unsnapped her canteen from its side pouch on her backpack, uncorked it and held it out. “Drink some water, kid; you’re out of your mind.”
“You’re going to stand there and tell me you know nothing of your past?”
“I know plenty of it,” Edie snapped. “I’m just not sharing it with you.” She shook the canteen and the girl sighed and accepted it. “What do I call you?”
“Greta, of Tribe Manskein.” She took a drink, then gulped greedily. Wiping her cracked lips as she finished, she held it back to her. “And you?”
“Edie Sundown,” she replied, pocketed the canteen again. “Captain, Fifth Irregulars of the Freedom Brigades—or, as a lot of people have taken to calling us, the ‘Hardcases’.”
“Sundown isn’t a name,” Greta said in a scolding note.
Edie arched her eyebrows at her in grim amusement. “It’s been good enough for me.”
“You know your real name,” Great murmured. “I can see it. And you know your real people. The Great Mothers told us we would find you here. They heard it on the Wind. Just as the stars told them the Wraith would come.” She held up her chin. “Your destinies are intertwined.”
The sourness of Edie’s stomach crystallized into ice. Snatches of memory intruded, images of thatched dome-huts, lightened by a dusting of snow up in the mountains. Firesides and stories filled her mind. Warmth and laughter and a purplish glow of power in the eyes of the women as they spoke.
She winced and shook her head. “You know, you’re right, kid. My mom used to spew drek like that, all the time.” She gripped her blaster rifle more tightly, didn’t totally understand the impulse. “Sometimes she even made sense, when she wasn’t hitting me.” She glowered at the kid. “A Shock Trooper raid put an end to all that nonsense.”
“It is you,” Greta insisted.
Edie snorted. “Those old crones, the ones who let my mom kick the hell out of me, were always whispering and signing and nattering on about destinies.” She knelt so she could glare straight into the girl’s face. “And they all ended up dead in a pile, barbecued by Theocracy blaster bolts.”
Greta winced before her fury and retreated into the corner she’d occupied. “Not all the Great Mothers follow the same path,” she murmured. “But you are still of the Sisterhood, Edie Who-Has-Taken-The-Name-Sundown.”
Footsteps clanked down the steps, interrupting their stare down. Thankful for it, Edie looked over her shoulder to find Moff there, holding a fist full of protein wafer-bars that the Hardcases had liberated at some point from a Theocracy supply cache.
“Find out anything interesting?” he asked hesitantly.
“Not a damn thing,” Edie snapped and stood from the kid. She stepped over to Moff and plucked a bar from his hand, turned and tossed it to the girl. “Eat something,” she told her. “Get your strength back. There’s a fight coming. You’re going to want to be out of here, before then.”
“I can help,” Greta replied, fingering the bar, but not yet opening it. “I’m Flux-sensitive, like all our kind, and a user of some skill.”
Edie arched her eyebrows at her incredulously. “Can you fire a blaster?”
“What I can offer is more useful than that.”
“Sure,” Edie snorted and started for the stairs, tossing over her shoulder to Moff. “Make sure we have someone to keep an eye on her.”
“The Wraith is coming,” Greta called at her back. “When he arrives, you will believe.”
The words seemed to creep like living things, up the steps after Edie.
MALIK STEPPED FROM the still-extending ramp of the Scorpiod into a churn of dust. The assault shuttle had landed outside the modest, walled settlement of Malvik on the plains somewhere beneath the station named for it. The air filled with the howl of anti-grav motors. Great shadows loomed overhead as fresh transports swept in from the skies. Hatches and ramps cracked open, spilling Revenants and equipment.
“There, sir,” a Fury perched further up the ramp called down to Malik. The young Fenreir was pointing into the near distance, to a curved structure at the heart of the village. “The old council dome,” the youth said. “They’re meeting in there.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” another voice called invitingly, outrageously from within the shuttle hold.
Malik turned fully at the bottom of the ramp and glowered up at Ingrid, leering at him from the top. “I need diplomacy, now,” he rumbled, “not dismemberment.”
That he was scolding her for her loss of control in storming the station didn’t appear to occur to the woman. She grinned down at him, maybe taking it as compliment. Or maybe not. She was quite intelligent. Maybe she’d just decided that him being unable to ignore her was victory enough.
A crash like Circe’s crust splitting sent them all into a flinch and a glare to rival the sun threw hard shadows on the ground.
Malik turned into time to have his eyes dazzled by a second flash, a second peal of thunder. Malvik was firing again, sending shafts of annihilation south across the sky. Likely, its targets were either surviving satellites, coming over the horizon, or more missiles lofted from Aleister. Whatever the reason, the anti-orbital station now served the Revenants, and would keep their skies clear.
Using the disturbance as an excuse to break off from Ingrid, Malik strode across the boot-hammered crust of the field outside the village. Baked-mud brick comprised most of its squat, angular buildings, which clustered like dun-colored creatures about the motherly bulge of the dome. Malik knew enough of Circe custom to know the locals built to such patterns, when they had time and could muster the resources. The dome signaled power in the same way gothic spires and black basalt did to their Theocracy overlords.
Malik passed a line of Slayer starfighters, landed hastily in the dirt. Dust kicked up around one as its pilot tested their engines, letting the antimatter thrusters spool up with a muted roar for a moment. He eyed the blaster wounds, black and scorched on the flanks of some of the fighters. He noted the squadron markings with a twinge of hope.
“I see your famous luck has held again,” a voice called at his back.
Smiling under his mask, Malik halted and turned. “The ignorant often confuse the currents of the Flux for luck.”
Callisto was stepping out from between the Slayers with a smile on his weary face. He looked like he’d sweated off kilograms his already lean form couldn’t afford. But he was alive and thrumming with it as he strode toward Malik with his helmet cradled under an arm.
“I see you’re in a good mood, too,” he quipped.
“Sore.” Malik worked his shoulders and his right arm, remembering the strain of the fight in the station reactor pit. “Not young anymore.”
Callisto laughed out loud. “I didn’t think you aged.”
“I age. Believe me.” He restrained the urge to set a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, knew that there were others watching. Instead, he folded his arms before him and looked the pilot over. “Does me good to see you.”
“And you,” Callisto replied. The grin faded slightly. “Have you reached out to the Admiral, yet?” A mischievous twinkle entered his eyes. “You know he’ll be insufferable till he’s certain.”
“He’s been made aware,” Malik groaned. “Your missions?”
“Complete, mostly successful—” he shrugged “—enough, anyway.” His humor darkened and his voice acquired a husky note. “We lost some good people.”
Malik nodded once, couldn’t let that enter his thinking any more than he could let onlookers nearby see how relieved he was to find Callisto alive. “They are one with the Flux now,” he intoned.
Callisto snorted. “I’ll remember that when the Theocracy reaction fleet out of Bahamut arrives.”
Malik stiffened at the words, returned to a businesslike note. “Any sign of them?”
The pilot ran the back of his free hand across his brow. “None, yet.” The weariness that Malik had seen pinching the corners of his face was in his voice, too, and marrow-deep. “But they’ll be along.” He thumbed towards the parked Slayers. “I’m only here while the squadron makes quick repairs and recharges their fusion batteries.”
“Then I’m keeping you.”
“Mal,” Callisto called as he turned away from him.
Tensing, Malik paused mid-step and glanced about before answering over his shoulder, “Don’t call me that.”
Callisto chortled incredulously and stepped around Malik, made him face him again. “You don’t expect me to call you Wraith, do you?”
Anger prickled the insides of Malik’s guts at the impertinence—the overfamiliarity. Maybe Everild had been right about the perils of favoring him so obviously. But looking at the young man, Malik couldn’t suppress the smile that rekindled under his mask, crinkled its way to the corners of his eyes. He still saw that kid he’d fished out of a burning Orlok, who’d proceeded to follow him across the stars.
“What?” he asked in exasperation.
Callisto’s grin reached irritating width before fading, along with his voice, into something more serious. “That special errand you had for me was successful, too. The Citadel’s cut off from the fusion plant and substations. Probably running on reserve generators now, and those won’t last long.”
Malik turned to stare south, past his companion, into the distance. At the same time, he turned senses attuned not to physical stimuli, but to the Flux. Even a practitioner of thaumaturgy far above his level would have found the churning mess of millions of auras stirred to war to be unnavigable. He found it simply telepathic white noise. And the Citadel would be hardening against his scrying by such experts.
Breaching it was going to have to be by brute force. And Callisto crippling its power supply was the first step in that. “Very good, my friend.”
