End Game Charlie: The Dragon Mage 12, page 7
“I think you’re right.”
Daisy opened her comms link. “Freya, Korbin, we found only one of their nasty little trio down here at the compound. The other two have to be in ships near you.”
“Oh, I do not doubt that one bit,” Korbin grunted, pushing hard with his power, barely negating the massive spells bombarding his ship.
Freya swooped past, unloading a spray of railgun sabots at the larger of the Urvalin ships, hoping to distract the caster undoubtedly aboard. Her ploy worked, and Korbin was granted a brief reprieve, but the overlapping casting of the Urvalin would shift back in his direction soon enough.
“Any time now would be great,” he said just as the barrage began again.
“Working on it,” Daisy replied as she and Amazara ducked behind cover.
“He is straining his power,” Amazara said. “We need to act quickly.”
“What do you think we’re doing? This ain’t no picnic,” Daisy said. “Hey, I think there are weapons and money in that building,” she called out to the nearest mercenaries.
The men and women hesitated all of a second before charging ahead toward their new objective with greedy frenzy.
Amazara cocked her head with curiosity. “How did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“Hell, I could have told her that,” Sarah said.
“You lied to them.”
“Or not. Who knows? Might have been a lucky guess. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. Now’s our chance. Just like we planned. On three.”
The caster had shifted her focus to deal with the sudden surge in enemy combatants on her left flank, leaving her open, relatively speaking, at the center and right. Daisy drew her pistol and let off several rapid-fire shots. The protective detail had been so focused on Allpower defenses against the tech-lacking mercenaries that, as Daisy had hoped, they had grown careless with their tech defenses.
The shots took down three of them and wounded a fourth. Amazara took her cue and charged, guiding even more troops ahead of her as she raced toward the caster on the left.
Her flanks both at risk, the Allpower user shifted tactics, drawing power from her linked casters for a moment rather than feeding her own Allpower to them, casting a massive stunning spell in all directions. It took down several of the attackers and one of her own guards, but it did the trick. The enemy was shifting direction. All but one, who had seized the distraction to come charging at her straight down the middle.
The Urvalin almost laughed. One lone woman against her? And wielding nothing more than a sword? She would enjoy this smiting.
Or so she thought.
She cast hard, a killing spell of significant force, but the sword somehow deflected her spell. Her eyes went wide. This should not be possible. She pulled more power from her colleagues and cast again even harder, but Stabby had taken a lot of Allpower already before this fight and was more than ready for the challenge.
Daisy struggled forward as her sword and the caster were locked in a battle of will and power. She could feel Stabby’s thirst for more Allpower growing with every second. He was fighting the caster, but at the same time, in his blood-rage, he was also fighting Daisy’s control. But the Urvalin was so strong they were locked in place. It was looking like the sword and Urvalin were relatively evenly matched. Something had to be done.
Daisy was close, but not quite close enough, so she shifted her stance, locking her elbow into her hip and bracing her sword so she could try to draw her pistol and take the shot. But the spells were too fast, too strong. If she let go with one hand, Stabby would come loose.
“He’s slipping!” Sarah warned.
“A little help here!” Daisy called out over comms. “I’m not kidding. I need a hand!”
The sonic boom had only barely reached her ears when Freya swooped low and strafed the area with surgical precision, missing the friendlies and forcing the caster to shift some of her power to defend against non-magical attacks. It was just enough to break the stalemate.
Stabby took full advantage of the tiny break, shifting his angle for a practical attack. Daisy leapt forward and swung hard, but the Urvalin caster dodged them, pivoting aside. Stabby had managed to make some contact, however. A small cut, but blood had been drawn, and the sword’s white blade had already absorbed it like a vacuum cleaner desperate for more.
The caster realized this was the woman she’d been warned about. Her and her terrible weapon.
“Please, mercy!” she said. It was a terribly un-Urvalin thing to do, but not everyone welcomes death when push comes to shove.
“Lower your spells and tell your men to stand down.”
“Stand down,” she called to her forces.
Daisy smiled, the tension in her body relaxing just a little. “Good call. You know, we have a lot to talk about—”
Without warning her sword yanked her forward, nearly pulling from her hand, embedding himself in the caster’s chest and drinking deeply. The light ebbed from the woman’s eyes in mere moments as he took all of her power.
The troops saw what happened and attempted to rejoin the battle, but without their caster they were slaughtered. Up above the battle broke as well as the other two casters suddenly lost their third, all of their spells dropping in potency immediately as a result.
“Stabby, what the fuck?” Daisy blurted. “She surrendered.”
The sword ignored her, reveling in his newly acquired power like a petulant child with a stolen toy.
Daisy stared at the blade a long moment. “This isn’t good, Sis,” Sarah said. “Seriously, no bueno.”
“Gee, ya think. What the hell was that, Sarah?”
“Beats the hell out of me. But we’re mid-battle here. We can figure it all out later.”
“Right,” Daisy agreed, keying her comms. “How we doing up there, Korb? We took out the caster on the ground.”
“I can tell,” he replied a moment later. “The Urvalin are scattering. And better yet, one of the boarding parties seems to have managed to capture one of their officers.”
“No suiciding?”
“No. They utilized Amazara’s new stun spray with great success. He’ll be out for hours. More than enough time for us to put measures in place to prevent his taking the easy way out.”
“Good, because we need answers,” Daisy said. “Where they’ve taken Visla Palmarian, for one.” “And I need to find a way home.”
“We’ll keep trying, Daze. I know we’ll get home eventually,” Sarah quietly replied.
* * *
The cleanup went quickly, not so much because of the urgent need to vacate the area quickly before the defeated Urvalin had a chance to return with reinforcements, but because the mercenaries were a competitive lot and had stripped the entire site clean of anything remotely of value in a flash. With that done, all that remained was to head to the rendezvous point.
“Hey, there you are!” Olo said when he saw the victorious crew arrive. “We were placing bets on whether or not you’d come out of it in one piece.”
“I bet on you,” his drunken friend Tym slurred. “Now pay up, Olo.”
“Later, Tym. Later.”
Korbin strode up to the men, accepting the beverage offered and quaffing it in a single gulp. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and let out a satisfied sigh. “What of my friend? What of Visla Palmarian? Any news on your end?”
“Well, we didn’t find where he is, but we did learn something interesting,” Olo replied. “It seems all of the captured vislas are being moved around constantly. Always shifting their locations and support craft from system to system. Sometimes even between systems. There’s no telling where those ships will be next.”
“Don’t forget the other bit,” Tym reminded him.
“I was getting to that. There’s one thing that seems to be constant. A dedicated secondary command ship that is always with the one carrying the vislas. From what we’ve been able to gather, they’ve not only locked the casters into a triumvirate, but they’ve also got a kill switch ready to put down any rebellion.”
“A kill switch?” Amazara asked.
“Yep. They’ve collared them.”
Korbin and Amazara flinched. Daisy looked at them with a curious expression, unfamiliar with just how serious this was.
“For a visla to be collared,” Korbin began, “well, it is the worst thing that could happen to one. To be forced to use your power for someone else’s plans. It is absolutely horrible and wrong.”
“You can say that again,” Tym said. “But it looks like they haven’t figured out how to make the kill switch latently embedded in the collars themselves. It’s not their magic, after all. They borrowed it from our world. So now they use their own tech as a backup.”
“You’re saying they have to be close to trigger the kill order?” Daisy asked. “How close are we talking here?”
The drunk shrugged. “I don’t know. Within the system, I’d guess. It’s all so new, I’m not really sure.”
“How did you ever get all of this information?” Amazara asked. “Did you torture someone?”
Tym let out a barking laugh. “Me? Torture? Oh no, it was far more pleasant than that. It’s amazing how much people talk after a few drinks. And I am a most generous table companion, am I not, Olo?”
“That you are, my friend.”
The group looked at one another as they took this new information in. If this was true, it added a whole new wrinkle to the power user issue. They could be hard to control on a good day, but with a collar around their necks? Well, anything was possible.
“If they’ve actually got these people working on their side, the Urvalin could be impossible to beat,” Sarah said.
“Trust me, I know. Vislas are tough bastards, as we experienced firsthand.”
“Ugh. Malalia.”
“Yep. But at least that one is locked away on a remote world, never to be seen again.”
“And thank God for that. We’ve got enough problems as it is,” Sarah said. “And you know what else? After this defeat, I think the Urvalin are going to be pissed.”
Chapter Twelve
Commander Prin strode through the smoldering ruins of what had been one of her key outposts in this section of the galaxy. It was overseen by some of her finest casters and supporting dozens of ships as they staged for her ever-expanding conquest.
And yet, here it lay in ruins.
She stepped over yet another body. One more fallen Urvalin stripped clean of all but his uniform. The savages who had defeated her forces here had left nothing of value behind. Bodies were robbed, the compound pillaged and plundered. Even the floating debris still lingering in orbit had not been spared. Whoever did this had been as thorough as they had been brutal.
She paused, looming over the fallen form of a slender woman she had once considered a little more than a friend. Ahnlata was her name, and she was a caster of significant Allpower. Or, more appropriately, she had been.
Prin bent down and tore open her clothing where it appeared a blade had pierced her chest.
“Such a waste,” she said, looking at the cold flesh she would never again feel pressed against hers. Then her attention sharpened as she began taking in the details of the wound.
Ahnlata was a strong caster, and for someone to actually get close enough to strike her down with a blade meant just one thing. An even greater Allpower was wielded against her. Had her body borne the telltale char marks of pulse fire, or perhaps a projectile of some sort, it would have been an easier pill to swallow. But for someone to have overpowered her? This did not bode well. And it made Prin all the more eager to avenge her.
“How did this happen?” she growled at the few battered survivors who had been left alive.
“They were Allpower users,” one bloody man said. “Mercenaries by the look of them. No uniforms, no strict command structure we could see.”
“Mercenaries? You mean to tell me a bunch of hired goons eradicated one of our outposts? Killed our skilled casters? Are you saying she wasn’t up to the task?”
“No, Commander. That is not at all what I mean.”
“Yet you make excuses that in no way lessen your dishonor. Defeated by mercenaries? Unlikely.”
“There was another,” said an Urvalin woman with a bloody bandage where her left arm had once been. “A different kind of warrior entirely.”
“Different how?”
“A woman wielding not only a sword, but pulse weapons as well. And she was good with them both. Very good.”
She knew who this sounded like. A name she had learned early on in her relatively short time subjugating this galaxy.
“Her sword. Was it white?”
“It was, Commander.”
“And is that which claimed your arm?”
The woman held back her tears. “Yes, Commander. Sliced it off so easily I did not even know it was gone for a moment.”
“The one called Daisy,” Prin growled. “It had to be her. And was there a ship? A strange, technologically advanced ship?”
“There was. It was engaging both our fleet in space as well as our troops on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
There it was. Confirmation that the woman from Earth’s galaxy who had been unintentionally stranded here was proving to be far more of a thorn in her side than she’d ever have imagined possible. Daisy, along with her little band of resistance fighters, had been wreaking havoc all over the galaxy, and so far her forces had been unable to stop her.
Prin looked at the handful of surviving troops and raised her hand.
“Did you give the enemy any information?” she asked.
“No, I did not,” the woman replied. Each of the others responded in kind, all but the one who seemed either comatose or shell-shocked. In any case, that one would not be speaking to anyone, let alone the enemy.
“You put yourself in the position to inflict harm to the Urvalin cause. To divulge details of our forces.”
“But we did not—”
Commander Prin cast the trigger that engaged each of their suicide spells. The survivors dropped to the ground. More bodies for the fire and nothing more. She slowly gazed at the workers cleaning up the mess.
“This is what happens to those who do not fulfill their duty. Urvalin do not fear death. We welcome it. And to show weakness in the face of the enemy is the ultimate betrayal and will be dealt with accordingly.”
With that she turned and strode to her shuttle craft and lifted off. From the air the scope of the carnage was more apparent. The enemy had managed to pin down key elements of her forces, then overcame their defenses on the flanks. The number and position of bodies made that much clear. By the time her dear Ahnlata was engaged she would have already been outnumbered.
But to overcome her Allpower? That was more worrisome than she was willing to let on.
Prin arrived back aboard her command ship and headed straight to the command center, taking her place on the casting podium. She took out the glowing Vikann stone pendant connecting her with the other commanders from within her tunic and reached out to them across the galaxies.
“What news, Prin?” Commander Torgus asked.
“Yes,” Fraxxis chimed in. “Are you making progress?”
She hesitated. “There has been a development. A bad one at that.”
“Oh?” Torgus replied, a rare hint of concern in his voice.
“The woman called Daisy. The Earthling with the smart ship we have heard so much about. She was here.”
“You have been searching for her for some time now, Prin. This is a good development,” he noted.
“She was here, and she killed Ahnlata. Wiped out the entire outpost. Ships were destroyed, troops slaughtered, their equipment stolen.”
A long silence hung in the air, and it was not one caused by the billions of light years separating the three Urvalin leaders. Finally, Commander Torgus spoke.
“This one is proving to be far more of a pest than you said she would be, Prin. You had said it was just a matter of time before you had her removed from the equation.”
“And so I believed, but she and her cursed ship are becoming quite a problem. And worse, the way she killed Ahnlata. A sword through the heart.”
“She got that close to her?” he marveled. “She has to be working with a visla. No Earthling possesses that power. None but Charlie and Rika.”
“It is worse than that,” she continued. “I examined the wounds, and it was readily apparent, Ahnlata’s body was sucked clean of her Allpower.”
At that the other two commanders felt a flare of something quite unusual. A pang of fear.
“You made an error not focusing on eradicating this problem when we first learned of her,” Torgus said.
“I had not anticipated tech weaponry of that caliber being present in that system when we executed our plan. But this? Stealing Allpower? This is worse than simple weaponry.”
“Calm yourself,” Fraxxis chided. “She is a problem, yes, but she is also cut off from all of her friends in her home galaxy. It is but a matter of time before she makes a mistake, and when she does, you will eliminate her.”
“Of that you can rest assured,” she replied. “But what of your troubles in our home realm? What of Charlie and Ara, Fraxxis? Do they still evade you?”
He was not happy about that matter being brought up, but, compared to Prin’s failure, his inability to capture or kill the human paled by comparison.
“Still evading capture,” he said. “And his pesky rebels are capturing more ships and equipment in the process.”
“But we have plans for that, yes?” Torgus asked. “To eliminate the threat of our own vessels being used against us?”
“We do.”
“Good.”
“And what of your travails, Torgus? What of Earth?” Prin asked.
He smiled to himself, standing tall on his command podium aboard his mighty ship. “It is proving a difficult nut to crack. The planet is defended by some impressively powerful individuals.”
“Oh? Is this also becoming a problem?” Fraxxis wondered.
