Warp Wraith, page 9
“Not sure what good it does,” he replied. “Aleister’s defenses are on full alert. Nothing’s punching through to them now.”
“All in good time.” Malik stared at the young man who’d been the closest thing he’d likely had to kin—to a son—and could no longer resist the warmth in his chest. He touched Callisto’s shoulder gently. “I’ll be seeing you.” He turned to go.
“Don’t suppose you’ll tell me the whole thing, will you?” Callisto called after him. “Don’t suppose you’ll ever fully trust anyone?”
“Trust is a luxury,” Malik countered with a hint of humor, though the metallic rasp of his mask-voice likely hid it.
Callisto neither followed nor pressed further, left Malik striding towards the arched entrance to the central dome alone. Its ruddy stone bore scorch marks and signs of recent repairs. What looked like a secondary building off one side of it was collapsed in rubble that had never been cleared. Like much of Circe, very little was left un-scarred by Theocracy cruelty.
Guards flanking the entrance brandished their blasters and stepped into Malik’s way as he approached. Both wore faded camouflage fatigues that looked like they’d come from an ancient Imperial surplus cache. Their armor and weapons were a hodgepodge of the same. But their eyes told the tale of long, hard struggle.
Struggle collapsed as they got a good look at the Warp Wraith, though. A nudge through the Flux added a hint of menace to their minds—probably unnecessary; they’d heard the stories. And now, seeing it in the flesh, they shrank back from the doorway.
Malik swept through and strode down a long, poorly-lit corridor. Voices and thumping echoed into his face. Though his mask did little to aid his ruined sense of smell, he could still imagine the musky reek of packed bodies. This was a place of governance, such as Circe had had, independent of the Immortals. This was a place of politics.
“—still waiting for someone to explain why they’re here at all!” a wispy, yet piercing voice carried over a rumble of discontent as Malik reached the end of the corridor.
“The fight for Circe belongs to all Circeans, does it not councilor?” a sharply female voice responded.
Malik emerged into a broad bowl, more like the floor of a coliseum. Another pair of guards turned at his entrance, then instantly fell back from him as he surveyed the scene. Folk in attires and styles ranging from urbane and clean to crude and countryside arrayed in the seats looking down. Argument or encouragement rang down from them as they followed the contest on the floor.
A huge holographic projector had been erected and splayed a glowing map of the northern part of the continent of Dracon; from Malvik and the Ethyrian Mountains, down across the plains, to south of the Magvars and Aleister. Silhouetted against this, several dignitaries—made obvious by their above-average attire and loud voices—gestured and prowled and argued.
“We’re going to sit here and pretend they’re even Circean?” the man with the wispy voice hissed, pointing a finger at a woman leaning on an intricately carved and polished staff.
“Tread carefully, Iurie,” the woman warned, brushing a white strand of hair from her aged, yet still sharply-defined face. “Matriarchy ruled Circe before ever did Emperor or Immortal.”
“Your threats mean nothing here, hag!” the man, Iurie snapped.
“Councilor Cretu,” another man stepped in between them, clad in an olive and brown uniform not dissimilar to the Revenants’. “Lady Bauer!” Trim and fit, despite obvious later middle-age, the officer held up hands to either side, the motion causing a clenched fist pin on the brown beret perched atop his short-cropped hair to glint—the emblem of the Freedom Brigades.
“It might not be wise to come between us, General,” the woman growled.
And Malik could sense the truth of that as he strode across the floor. Flux crackled about her, barely suppressed under the surface. She’d woven it around herself, a cocoon of obfuscation and menace. The uninitiated would mistake unease as their own, instead of planted there by her machinations. She was a practitioner, an artist.
A Witch.
And she sensed him now, stiffening and turning to face him, knuckles blanching around the staff. Her presence instantly blanked, shrouding her aura and her mind. Her eyes narrowed, maybe even glowed for a malevolent moment.
“You would be...the Wraith,” she said with a subtle upturn of her left lip.
“I would,” Malik replied coming to stand with the rest of the Circeans. “And I apologize for the interruption.” He looked around, noting that the entirety of the coliseum had silenced. “This has all the sound of a spirited debate.
“No debate,” the General—Esli Vier, Malik knew from holographic briefings; commander of the planet’s guerilla movement. “Just old business.”
“Old business.” Malik nodded. “Old business must be put behind us now.”
“All business on Circe is old business,” the Witch declared, fingers working at her staff. “And you’d be the one to tell us what our business is?”
“Magda,” Vier sighed.
“I thought he and his henchmen came as allies?” the Witch retorted. “Or is this more deception on the part of the Freedom Brigades?”
“Magda,” Malik tried the name out. He knew of her, of course, from the same briefings that told him the names of all the leaders and factions in Circe’s rebel government. “Magda Bauer.”
“You know her?” the politician gawked.
“I know her as well as I know you, Councilor Cretu.”
“It’s parlor tricks,” Magda hissed. “His intelligence network has been on-planet for a year. He would know of all of us, Iurie.”
“And if you are of the Circe Sisterhood,” Malik said, fixing her with his stare, “then you would be able to sense of my aura, now, and know how I truly arrive at my knowledge.” He held his hand up to either side, meekly, daring. “Go ahead. Sense of me.”
Utter silence clenched the dusty air beneath the dome. Onlookers froze or leaned in closer, depending on their nature. The Councilor and the General exchanged an uncertain look, the former’s throat bobbing.
The Witch glowered back at Malik. He felt the faintest brush of her mind upon his, but no more. “Your skills with the Flux are known to us, Wraith,” she snorted. “But do not expect us to be impressed by them.”
“Sir,” General Vier said after a noisy clearing of his throat, “the difference of opinion now is the focus of the campaign to come.”
“I should think that was already settled.” Malik half-turned to the holographic map and gestured. “Hold the Magvar Mountains. After that, we topple Aleister.”
“Aleister is a worthless symbol,” Magda spat.
“It is the center of Theocracy administrative and military control!” Cretu countered.
“Which they can move to any common spot on the planet.” Magda hobbled forward to the hologram, leaning hard on her staff—which Malik saw through as an act instantly. “Vosmus,” she declared, jabbing a finger towards the western part of the continent. “That is where the destiny of the Circe and of the galaxy will be decided!”
The point in question winked at her gesture. Nestled in a low river valley, whose tributary emptied into the sea, the city in question was far off from the immediate theater, nearly a thousand kilometers west of Aleister, though certainly more exposed than the capital. Judging by the iconography of the map, though, it wasn’t a city, at all.
“Vosmus is a ruin, Magda,” Vier responded with a weary note, as if this point had been one argued many times before. He hurried to wave a hand dismissively. “And, yes, I know of the significance of it to the Sisterhood.”
“So, too, do the Immortals!” She stamped the floor with the point of her staff. “If we don’t get there first, they will assuredly seize it and take advantage of the...the propaganda value of it.”
Malik picked up the momentary stumble in her words, the brief unmasking of her intents. “Which is?”
She shot him a look limned in hatefulness. “You pretend to be learned of the Flux and, yet, to not know that.”
“I am quite learned.” Malik folded his arms. “But educate me, nonetheless.”
“Supposedly it was their capital,” Cretu put in snidely, “when they ruled.”
“When an Order attuned to the will of the planet and the Flux ruled!” Magda declared and received a grumble of approval from the watching crowd.
Malik noted that, remembering that the old folk-religions of the planet had all been influenced by the Sisterhood. For all Councilor Cretu’s bluster, it was clear he felt threatened by Magda’s political power. And Vier clearly didn’t discount it. Have to tread carefully here, indeed.
“The Empire left things be,” Magda went on, “knowing there was balance. But the Theocracy razed Vosmus to the ground and slew any who tried to get near it in the years since.”
“Likely they knew the trouble it had posed,” Malik said drolly.
Her eyes did flare now, though the others likely thought the luminescence just reflection from the hologram. “You suggest the Theocracy is an improvement?”
“Aleister and its environs are our target,” Malik replied without addressing her point. “Just as it is with the Immortals, breaking their power on Circe needs a decapitation strike.”
“The Freedom Brigades stand ready to support that,” Vier declared, sounding very ready to move past this.
Magda snickered. “If they can get themselves organized.”
“I wait to hear what the Witches promise to contribute!” Vier retorted.
“How soon before you can reinforce the blocking forces you’ve established at the mountain passes?” Malik asked, raising his voice to overpower any further bickering.
“Some are already on their way,” Vier replied and pointed to the map. An icon winked. “Reyes in the Kraggar Pass is the most vulnerable. It’s the furthest from here, over the roughest of terrain. I’ve sent some of our best to hold it, but the Theocracy certainly knows of its importance.”
“We will reinforce,” Malik said. “I will. In the meantime, you must get all forces moving southward as soon as practical. The Theocracy must not break through the gaps to the plains.”
“That is the plan, sir.”
“My teams will support with technology and troops.”
“And what unique troops, they are, indeed,” Magda muttered.
Cretu shot Vier a look—the latter decidedly avoiding his or commenting. “What’s she talking about?”
Malik narrowed his eyes at the Witch, at the same time pressing out with a surge of the Flux, a telepathic nudge to let her know to back off. Her smile in return told him it had registered, but stung, too, with the note of her nasty, little victory.
“No doubt,” he said, “the good Sister Magda refers to the lycanthropic nature of many of my Revenants.”
The quiet of the watching crowd went suddenly icy. Whispers lilted through it. A few of the onlookers shifted uncomfortably.
“Were-folk?” Cretu gasped.
“Indeed,” Malik replied without hesitation. He raised his voice, the mask amplifying. “Ours is a pan-galactic movement,” he said, half-turning so that his gaze swept the crowd. “There are members of my forces of even less human nature than that. Would you turn that help away because it doesn’t meet some strict standard of what you consider ‘human’?” He turned fully now, boosted his voice so none could miss. “Would you?”
None answered. None met his blazing stare.
Malik whirled back to face Magda and Cretu. “Then let us speak on such topics no more. Our enemies are the Theocracy and the Immortals sitting at the top of its hierarchy. Our enemies are enemies of life throughout the galaxy. The undead.” He clenched a fist before him, shook it. “The unliving.” He lowered it slowly.
“Let us try to remember that.”
Chapter 7
RINGING PIERCED THE comforting red-black depths of dormancy and the sluggish dreams of Vondrak’s life before the Hunger. There had been a human woman there, and a child. He had given them up. He had sacrificed them, for power, for the Hunger. But rivers of blood had not drowned their memory.
The ping drilled through again.
Vondrak opened his eyes to the interior of his casket with a growl. A light on the inside of the carefully-sealed, carefully-warded, and thoroughly-armored sarcophagus pulsed. Muttering a curse, he shoved the lid open and sat up groggily. The air stank of old, rotting blood. A glance to one side revealed a slain Servitor, sprawled in a pool of her own gore, throat ripped open carelessly. Vondrak hadn’t remembered the Feeding—probably had done so out of fury, rather than need.
The ping bit the air a third time. Vondrak smacked the control panel on the inside of the lid. “What?”
“My Lord,” one of his aides spluttered. “I apologize.”
“What is it?”
“We have established tachyon link with Bahamut, sire.”
Vondrak tensed and threw a leg over the side of the coffin, hoisted himself up out of it. “Transmit it into my chambers.” He stepped over the corpse and descended the three tiers of dais upon which his casket sat. “I will take it here.”
“Lord.” The connection cut with haste that was not hard to imagine.
Vondrak’s sanctum occupied one of the highest towers of his palace, looming dark and foreboding over Aleister. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered wide views of the capital’s pollution-gloomed skyline. But shutters clattered automatically across these as he approached the black-marble plinth at the center of the chamber, leaving him in near-darkness. Of course, such was a relative term to an Immortal. Dark was more welcoming than the late-afternoon sun’s glare.
Touching a finger to a light blinking from the plinth’s control panel, Vondrak fell to one knee, dipping his head as holographic brilliance dazzled forth from the projector crowning the stone. Motes of light wove together, knotting into an image of a sneering face—always sneering.
“My Sire,” Vondrak intoned with long-practiced reverence.
“This is dangerous,” Count Ruthven, Lord of all the Anea Star System snapped. “With the right equipment, even a tachyon pulse can be traced.”
Vondrak looked up at the artful, slender face, framed by a mane of richly black hair. Against alabaster skin, opulent lips showed brightly red, the point of a fang protruding from one corner, hinting at the vampire’s anger. The stirred-coal blaze of Ruthven’s eyes did more than hint.
“I would not have risked without great need. We’re under attack.”
Impatience marred the cold loveliness of the Count’s brow. “I have received some word of this already.”
“It is an invasion,” Vondrak pressed. “The locals have risen in support. The off-worlders are already landing.”
Ruthven sniffed. “Your defenses?”
“Kyth got himself surprised permanently.” Vondrak allowed himself a moment to enjoy Ruthven’s flinch of surprise before rising to his feet and clenching a fist before him. “I need Sestus. The invaders don’t have many ships. The main fleet could overwhelm them.”
“But you are holding your own?” Ruthven queried disdainfully, as if the topic were already starting to bore him.
Vondrak seethed within, had to marshal his patience to keep his body from trembling with it. He hated his Sire. He hated that he could look upon him and both despise and desire the being who had been his Father in Undeath. Vondrak thought of that woman and child from his dreams again, knowing what he’d given up for that desire.
“It’s a whole planet, My Count!” he exclaimed, some of the anger sneaking out despite his self-control. “I can hold, but we likely don’t have the resources to dig the rebellion out. Not supported with off-world tech and weapons.” He paused, wondered how much further he should go. “And more.”
Creases pinched at the corners of Ruthven’s eyes. “More?”
Vondrak hesitated again. But there was no sense not saying it. If he was right—about many things—the time for many sorts of reckonings had come. “We believe it’s the Warp Wraith.”
Ruthven’s nostrils flared and his lips pressed into a line like a scar. “You know this?”
“It’s consistent with his organization and tactics,” Vondrak replied, then dared more. “And you know my suspicions about him.”
Ruthven scowled and shook his head. “There’s never been any proof to back your paranoia, Vondrak!”
“I may undercover some of that very soon.”
“And if you do, then—only then—will I entertain your nonsense,” the elder vampire snarled. “In the meantime, crush this rebel incursion.”
“My Count, I already told you—”
“You will have Sestus!” Ruthven snapped, waving a hand annoyedly. “I will contact him. But you can’t have the entirety of the main fleet. We can’t leave Bahamut uncovered. If it is the Wraith, the Rebel Stars may pounce, too.”
“The Rebels haven’t been active in this region since the Battles of Cardalon,” Vondrak countered. “This has the feel of something independent” he paused for effect, arching his eyebrows “something personal.”
“Enough of that,” Ruthven rumbled with menace Vondrak could feel, even across fifty light minutes. The force of the elder vampire’s personality—his eldritch power over his own Get—was enough to compel obedience, if not respect. “I will send Sestus personally,” he resumed sneeringly. “He will bring enough to extract you from your peril, Vondrak.”
“My Count.”
But the hologram had dissolved from the air before the words were fully from Vondrak’s mouth, leaving him in poorly-lit silence. Nostrils crinkled, both in rage and in disgust with the rotting blood stink of the chamber. It had caked his overcoat on the right shoulder and down his sleeve when he’d latched onto the Servitor. No doubt Ruthven, who enjoyed the finer things, disdained his appearance. Pomp and ceremony were a shared love of his and Sestus’.
Scowling, Vondrak stabbed a finger at the comm control to link to his aides again.
