Warp Wraith, page 6
Malik sidestepped left and hacked his force sword right at hip-height. The snarling blade burned through empty air as the solid blackness shot under the stroke and unfolded directly in front of him. He got his blaster up, fired. A pallid, clawed fish lashed out, knocking the weapon from his fingers, but not before it sent a bolt through the nearest technician perched at the detonator. The human flopped aside in a splatter of sparks.
The vampire—likely the installation’s commandant, left here because only an Immortal would be trusted with the post—lunged for Malik’s neck. Impact carried them into a bulkhead that rang with the collision. Malik got a palm up and stiff-armed the bastard’s jaw and gnashing fangs back. Locked like that, he lifted his right foot, put his bootheel to the vampire’s midsection, and kicked out.
The Immortal flew backwards from him and glanced off a bulkhead, himself. Malik raised his force blade as the thing gathered itself for another leap. The remaining tech had a finger extended for a red key on the timer.
Malik threw, sending his sword pin-wheeling across the tight space. The tech looked up in time for blue-white to reflect in his wide eyes. Spark and flame enveloped him as the blade sliced through his collarbone and carried the rest of him slamming into the wall at his back, pinning him there.
Again, the Immortal launched forth.
Malik skipped left and struck out with a right high block. His wrist smacked into the vampire’s outstretched arm below the shoulder and sent him hurtling to Malik’s right. Malik spun on his right heel, sending a left jab crunching into the Immortal’s ribs, then a second. He felt a warning twinge across the Flux and ducked.
The vampire lashed out with a swipe of his right hand. Claws raked through the air and skirled through another bulkhead, taking twists of metal and hurtling sparks with them. These speckled the back of Malik’s bare neck as he came up into a right roundhouse swing that took the Immortal in his jaw, rocking it aside in a spray of gore and sending the monster staggering backwards.
Malik balled his fists and spread his feet as the vampire righted itself with composure and balance no mortal could have managed after blows of such force.
“I guess we’re going to do this the old-fashioned way.”
The Immortal worked his dislocated jaw back into alignment with a pop and spat blood and fang fragments onto the floor between them. His ruined face would otherwise be pretty enough to make artists weep, framed by blonde curls. He was a young vampire, Taken only a few years, with the quivering lack of control of a neophyte. The Hunger was everything at that stage, the desperate fury.
Vampire eyes narrowed and flared. “What are you?”
“A reckoning,” Malik replied, smiling under his mask, “for all of you.”
The young Immortal spat blood again, then flung himself forth. Malik barely caught him by the wrists before clawed fingers got at his eyes. He and the beast crashed together again and now the Immortal brought the entirety of his preternatural strength against him, flinging him backwards onto a control plinth near the plasma shaft.
Controls crunched behind Malik as the Immortal folded him onto it. He brought a knee up, slamming into the vampire’s midsection, pulping ribs. But with the beast’s undead resilience, those would simply knit back together. Malik needed a more permanent solution. The crackle of the plasma core, thrumming only a meter behind them suggested one.
But the vampire was grinding through Malik’s resistance, edging its talons ever-closer to his mask. The hook of one snagged its sealed edge and tugged. Malik tensed as a jet of panic entered the struggle.
“What prettiness do you hide under here?” the Immortal cackled.
With a surge of Flux-boosted adrenaline, Malik pushed the hands back and folded the vampire’s wrists together, at the same time twisting in his grasp until he had him draped over his shoulder. Before the Immortal could struggle free, Malik bent at the hips and flung him head over heels into the cyan glare of the core.
It was hard to know what was louder; the scream of flesh flash-boiling, or the Immortal’s shriek of agony. The plasma shaft fluttered wildly as bone vaporized. Fumes of the foulest sort blackened the air. The vampire writhed as everything from the hips down simply vaporized.
But even that was not enough to finish the job. The Immortal slopped free of the shaft—at least his legless upper torso did. Feebly, he pawed at the grates of the floor, dragged the smoking stump of himself away from the blue-white fire.
Malik stepped forward, know that the creature could survive even such ruinous damage, given time and a Feeding. Gripping a handful of that curling blonde, he lifted what remained of the Immortal one-handed and dragged him back to the energy shaft.
“What...what are you?” the creature gasped again. “Not...human...”
Malik winced under the mask. “Not much of one.”
He heaved the obscene, undead sack into the coursing plasma.
With the dying squeal of the vampire in his ears, Malik strode to the far corner of the shaft and found the countdown device. Gathering it up, he ripped the conduits free with a crackle of frying circuitry. For a moment, he considered the recklessness of that; whatever explosives they’d been wiring to blow might have triggered. But he cast the detonator aside with a shrug.
Had that been so, at least it all would have been over.
Blaster fire erupted above, bolts crisscrossing the core for a furious moment before cutting out. Footsteps rang on the walkways. Commlinks crackled from helmets.
“My Lord?” a voice called.
Malik winced again. “Down here. Get a demolitions team. They were trying to booby-trap the reactor. There may be more.”
“Sir!”
While the Furies scrambled to do his bidding above, Malik adjusted his mask, ensuring the fit remained tight. Reassured, he keyed the commlink tied to it with finger tap to its underside. A crackle sounded in his inner ears, carried to the implants there from the mask. Then a ping as the comm found its channel.
“Skraar, did you manage to avoid dying?”
“Always, sir.”
“Good. I need long-range relay.”
A pause. “You have it, sir.”
The staticky whine in his ears changed as the transmission passed up through the Scorpiod’s communications suite; from there to be beamed off the planet. A ping sounded as it acquired connection with Vengeful.
“It’s done?” Everild’s voice asked without preamble.
“Malvik Station is ours,” Malik replied. “We have our hole. When the fighters are ready, they have their targets. Send them down.”
Chapter 5
KRITA MABUSE FLUNG Laysan from her savagely as the girl fumbled to help her button her uniform tunic. “Fool!” she snapped. “No time for that!”
Mewling, the slave scuttling back from her to the huge bed where Indira waited. They squirmed together in the rumpled bedsheets, shivering at their mistress’ agitation. Doe-eyed and raven-haired like many Circe natives, they shared pale complexions and peasant-like features. They could almost be sisters, though Mabuse knew they weren’t.
She had many perversions, but that sort of thing wasn’t one of them.
Scowling at their whimpers, Mabuse recalled with disgust how she’d been like them once, a slave, a plaything of the Gods. But she was a God, now, favored by the Immortals, and after unspeakable services and suffering, given the Eternal Kiss, at last. She’d played upon the sympathies of Baron Vondrak in ways these simpering slave girls could not possibly fathom. Oh, the depredations, she’d subjected herself to...
But it had been worth it, she knew, as she stepped out onto the balcony outside her quarters and into the gray light of dawn. Vondrak had favored her with more than the Kiss; he’d favored her with real power.
Spread out in the fields below the cottage she’d acquired as a headquarters, the vehicle laager for her First Shock Armor Battalion rumbled with activity. Spade-shaped hulls of ZX-11 medium hovertanks—Bludgeon-class—kicked out donuts of dust from their skirts as anti-grav motors spooled up to lift them from the ground. Towering over these, the high-cupolaed, hexagonal bulges of Behemoth-series heavy hovers grunted like great armored beasts as their fusion reactors lit, shivering their mass, the ground beneath them, even Mabuse’s bones at a distance of nearly half a kilometer away.
A ping that she could barely hear over the cacophony sounded from the false ruby uniform pip at her high collar that doubled as a commlink. She touched this and waited as the jewel projected a hologram into the air before her. From this scowled her Sire, Vondrak’s face narrow, hard-boned, and sour, with lips stained by recent and fumbled Feeding.
“My Lord,” Mabuse intoned with reverence that wasn’t totally forced. “The First is mustering as we speak.”
“Malvik has fallen,” Vondrak replied without acknowledging her words.
Mabuse sucked in a breath. “This is confirmed?”
“We’ve already tried probing to the north with rocket-propelled artillery,” her Sire replied. “The station fired upon them.”
Mabuse considered this with uncertainty of a very unwelcome sort nibbling at her innards. “That means the Revenants can land north of the Magvars with impunity.” One of those teeth of anxiety got a grip and tore. “That’s why the uprisings have focused on the gaps!”
“It appears so.” Vondrak’s eyes flared to crimson, anger there, as well as warning to her to control herself. “The First’s target is the Kraggar Pass. We have reason to believe Reyes is in rebel hands.”
Mabuse pursed her lips, then asked guardedly, “No word from Kaizynn?”
Vondrak’s expression pinched with disdain and his voice rang drolly. “Your concern is touching.”
Kaizynn had been a recent indulgence of the Baron of Circe’s and Mabuse would not pretend to be displeased. The neophyte had been another of Vondrak’s mortal favorites, foppish, charismatic, and flattering. Gathering lovely things was always a hobby of the Baron’s; but not granting them the Eternal Kiss. The recklessness of adding more Immortals when the stock on Circe was already thinned by decades of privation, predation, and war went without saying.
That such thoughts made Mabuse—who’d been the product of similar indulgence—a hypocrite did not bother her.
“We can reach the Kraggar Pass in two hours,” she told the hologram. “Nothing can stand before us.”
“The Third and Fourth Armored are on their way to the other gaps,” Vondrak went on. “But you are the fastest.” He scowled through the hologram, gaze blazing nearly as brightly as the dawn breaking across the laager from the east. “You are the best, Krita. Force us a hole and we can break through to plains and end this farce in a night.”
Mabuse smiled back at his image. She was still his. And all the years of submitting herself, degrading herself were worth it because he had made her a Goddess amongst cattle.
A rumble built from the north, beyond the uneven blue-black band of the Magvars to the north. At first, she thought it was the sound of more long-ranged artillery, from Aleister to the south and hefted on rockets into the stratosphere to fall towards Malvik. But the roar continued to build and air horns bawled across the laager, sending maintenance teams scurrying from the tanks and crews buttoning themselves up in them.
Air raid? Mabuse stiffened where she stood, brows furrowing as she strained her eyes. Dawn was a drain on her vampire senses. Ancient mortal myths perpetuated the falsehood of Immortal weakness to sunlight, but certainly it was not the natural time of her kind, nor a comfortable one. Here?
“What is that...?”
Another hologram superimposed over Vondrak’s, flashing red, hatch-marked characters of sub-orbital coordinates spooling out while a voice hollered, “Inbounds! Contacts inbound! Engine signatures consistent with—”
Twin flashes bright enough to leave even sunrise pale in comparison smote the edge of the hovertank laager. These became double explosions fuming skyward and sending one of the Bludgeons upending like a kicked toy. Lances of azure walked through the still-settling fireballs, birthing fountains of flame and debris at each touch, or gouging slag from ablative tank armor.
The source of these torments arrived with the full roar of their antimatter thrusters. Mabuse caught the path of one as it ripped by overhead, a hawkish silhouette against a still-brightening sky. Slayer-class, she recognized in a jolt of fear. The shriek of another’s engines straining as it dipped in low drew her gaze back across the laager.
A second starfighter cut through the smoke columns left by the first, stirring them into wild vortices behind it as it cut straight over the tank park. Its underside reflected the glare of heavy blaster bolts showering down into the helplessly immobile armor. The Bludgeons could shrug off a direct hit from heavy blaster cannon, but not several. A second of the medium hovertanks blew apart, just as it was reaching the fortified perimeter of the laager, a spout of blinding gasses flinging its turret whole into the sky.
“Bastards, nooooooo!!!”
Mabuse screamed into the explosions and squall of speeding starfighters. Rage—not terror, but searing, irrational rage—erupted from her. She’d schemed and scrimped and, aye, even slew to gather this force. The First had been slated for the spring offensives in the north, to stamp out the Freedom Brigades, once and for all.
Now, in a few seconds of blaster fire, it was all turning to slag.
“No...” Mabuse leaned forward to grip the balustrade of the balcony, then froze as the second Slayer ripped by and a third descended, even lower than its predecessors, its nose levelling for her like a bird of prey diving for its meal.
Ground fire spewed up at the Slayers, at last, daisy-chain patterns of blaster bolts kicked out from cupola-mounted weapons atop the hovertanks. Wildly-hosing fire converged on the third fighter, snowing over its shields in a flurry of actinic white pulses. It veered out of its plunge, thrusters howling—but not before a jolt of fluttering cyan streaked for the ground.
Mabuse had her fanged mouth open for another scream.
The plasma torpedo plunged into one of the Behemoths. Its armor was no match for something capable of crippling a starship. A blister of yellow-white inferno swallowed it, kicking out a blizzard of shredding metal in every direction.
Something ripped through Mabuse’s left shoulder a fraction of a second before the shockwave struck, flinging her backwards to the floor to slide nearly to the opposite wall. She could hear the girls screaming from the bed over the roar in her ears. She could hear her own. And everything was suddenly pain, pain!
A look left at her shoulder brought a wave of nausea and panic. She saw red ruin and yellow-white wink of bone. The arm was nearly off at the joint and when she tried to sit up, the rest of it stayed on the floor.
Slumping back, she could feel the Flux rushing out of her with the crimson flood of her blood—of blood she had taken. No, a desperate corner of what remained of a soul bleated. Not like this! A vampire’s powers of regeneration were great, indeed, but she knew from the terrible pool of crimson she now sprawled in that they wouldn’t be enough—on their own.
She turned her gaze weakly towards the girls, watching her from under the bedsheets. She locked gazes with Laysa. The girl stiffened as the wave of her mistress’ telepathy washed over her mind. Mabuse raised her right hand feebly, twitched fingers. The young woman started to rise from the bed, sleepwalker-like, caught in the influence of the Flux. But something—a shred of her own self-preservation or simply Mabuse’s weakness from wounds—held her up. She flinched back in the sheets, shaking her head frantically.
Mabuse clenched her fangs and reached out again with the hand and her mind. The strength to do so was ebbing fast. She already felt Laysa’s stubbornness matching her own willpower. With a desperate grunt, she stretched for the girl. But the pain was overwhelming her.
Indira grabbed Laysa by the shoulders. At first, the other girl didn’t seem to understand what her bed-mate was doing. But as Indira dragged her from the sheets, she exploded in a storm of struggles, beating at the older girl, cursing her, pleading with her in ever more shrill notes as she hit the floor.
It really was too bad, Mabuse thought as she strained to reach for the struggling Laysa. She’d gotten them at the same time. She’d even harbored fantasies of giving them both the Eternal Kiss, after enough time had passed and she mustered enough power to survive the Giving.
But Mabuse had to survive now.
And Indira had always been the stronger, proving that now as she scissored the other girl’s wrists together and wrenched her to her knees, almost presenting her to their mistress. There was hardly a flicker of remorse on her face as she dragged back on Laysa’s hair to present Mabuse the girl’s throat.
Mabuse touched Laysa’s cheek and the fight collapsed. The huge doe eyes widened again, limpid and dull as Flux blanked out thought. Mabuse cupped her fingers behind her head and drew her in.
And bit down.
Red exploded through her universe. Then power. She latched on, forgot the sensation of flesh rent beneath her fangs, felt only the rush, the glorious, infusing rush of the girl’s lifeforce. At the same time, it banished pain, brough back vitality. She knew the sinews and bone of her wrecked arm were knitting back together. She knew that when she sat up again, she’d rise from the floor whole.
Releasing Laysa’s limp form, she was, and did.
Casting the body aside, Mabuse staggered to her feet, flexing her rejuvenated left arm. Her uniform was heavy and tacky with blood. The air was thick and coppery with it. But stumbling towards the balcony, hot wind and stink of seared metal banished it.
She glanced once back at the girls. Indira had folded up on hands and knees, forehead pressed to the floor in supplication. Laysa sprawled on her back, as pale as a pile of bones, those doe eyes staring at the ceiling without life.
Mabuse turned back to the holocaust of the laager below her and surveyed what was left of hers.
