An End (33 page)

“Arch is hemorrhaging from below. We won’t be able to reach Light X until—”

“Launch slithers and lancets.”

“Done.”

“Do they have fighters?”

“Not many.” The angel looked over tactical monitors, holograph displays. “Earth orbital defenses must have taken out most of them.”

then why didn’t they make more?

“Three worldships on scope?”

“Three, yes. Pipeline has closed. Our boys are closing in.”

“Good... Good.” Pierce spun his chair to the comm panel, waved his hand before the display. Hundreds of slithers in fireworks formations dove at the enemy spheres, engaging the enemy fighters in orbit. Brilliant arcs of phase fire erupted from both sides. “Command to Tallis: We need attachment of catalyst tethers on those globes ASAP.”

The display split in half, revealing Tallis in the cockpit of his slither and giving Pierce a Tallis-eye-view of the action. “Understood. Attack One moving in for the kill.”

Pierce watched as ten of his slithers detached from the main firework and dove at the center enemy sphere. A swarm of enemy fighters immediately broke from combat to engage the Tallis squad.

“Watch it, boys. They’re on to you.”

“We see them.” Tallis threw his slither into a spiraling descent, phase licking out in all directions, tearing enemy fighters into light and boiling phase sludge. His squad followed suit, their vessels spinning off into an intricate, disorienting dance, weapons fire intersecting and diverging with startling precision, vessels flying through a grid of light that shredded the enemy fighters. Almost fifteen years of training had honed Pierce’s children into a brutal weapon of war.

“We’re clear. Moving in for tether placement.” His fighters moved in tight and close, swimming as a single organism to avoid fire from the worldship surface. One of Tallis’s men was clipped by phase fire, flew out of alignment, colliding with another friendly vessel. The squad moved quickly to compensate, reform. The surface fire intensified. Two more friendlies flared from existence.

“Windham to Tallis: Do you want Attack Two to cover you?”

Tallis raged in his cockpit. “We can do it ourselves, thanks.” More fire from below. Tallis flipped the tether control cover open to reveal the command pad encoded to his genetic signature. “Almost there.”

Pierce watched with dismay as the enemy fighters broke off their combat and converged on the central worldship. Attack One would never withstand the assault.

“Pierce to Attack One: You okay down there, son?”

“It’s getting a little hot.”

Hot was an understatement. Tallis was losing his men too quickly for the descent.

“Attacks Two and Three move to cover. We need that tether in place. Solid.”

“Copy.” Hunter’s squad dove through enemy fire, tearing them apart with light and silence. He could see Tallis and three others below, so close to the surface that their afterburners were leaving contrails in the residual atmosphere of the metal planet. He spun to look at the other, smaller worldships. They appeared dead in the aether. Waiting?

“Let’s make a hole.” Brendan’s voice was cocky over the comm channel. “Launching atomic.”

“Too close—You’re too close! Launch the tether and get out of there!”

“I know what I’m fucking doing!” but Hunter knew that Brendan did not. He was showing off for his troops. His troops were dying behind him, however.

Hunter watched Tallis swoop in toward the surface, dropping the atomic. The weapon itself was invisible, but the damage it did was not. The worldship surface rippled out as black became white, metal became plasma. Tallis’s slither began to spin, but this time out of control. Two more of his squad were consumed. Enemy fighters regrouped.

“Fucking hell.” Hunter was furious at the showboating. “Are you okay?”

Tallis was silent on the comm, but Hunter could see that his vessel was intact, just spinning out of orbit.

“Pierce to Tallis: What’s your situation?”

Static and silence. Pierce could see the vessel, but wondered if Tallis himself was intact in the cockpit.

“Tallis please respond.” Nothing. He turned to an angel. “Lifesigns?”

“He’s alive. Unconscious. Must have gotten banged around in the shockwaves.”

Five enemy fighters were closing on Tallis’s position.

“Eject him.”

“Yes, sir.” The angel’s too-white hand waved over the display and Pierce saw Brendan’s cockpit pod rocket away from his vessel, which was quickly consumed in enemy fire.

“Pierce to Windham: Take your squad in for tether attachment. Use the hole Tallis made.”

“Copy.”

So the pretentious bastard had been useful after all. Hunter signaled to his squad and dove for the atomic scar rent into the worldship mantle. He flipped the tether control panel open, firmly shoved his hand against the pad. The genetic sampling was painless. The pad withdrew to reveal a handle. Hunter grabbed it, let the onboard systems plot the target from his visuals.

He gunned the engine and flew into the atomic impact crater. The worldship was a monster, the edges of the crater dozens of fortified decks. Hunter noticed with a morbid fascination the tiny figures even now being sucked into the vacuum of space by the dozens. Hundreds. Thousands? The crater’s periphery was a ring of fire as the vessel’s atmosphere was vented. It was a green fire.

Hunter’s squad covered him from behind as he released the tether control. A phase slug rocketed from his slither’s underbelly, shielding a densely-packed core of human genetics. The tether exploded on impact, splattering a mile of coagulated “blood” on the worldship surface.

“Tether in place. Proceed with Catalyst injection.”

Pierce turned to his angels. “Is she in place?”

“Catalyst is secure in the firing chamber.”

He wiped sweat from his brow. A headache spiked from behind his eyes, and his chest felt tight.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“I’m fine.” His brown skin had taken on a gray pall. “Activate Catalyst when ready.”

“Understood.”

Pierce flexed his left hand. He felt a growing pressure, a tugging pain.

“Uncle?”

“I’m—” He cried out and fell from the vacuum chair, head that had once been crowned with salt-and-pepper and now crowned with pure white connecting solidly with metallish floor. All of the angels but one ran to him.

“Activate Catalyst.”

From the firing chamber, Fleur felt the vessel shift to vertical, felt the tube begin the resonance pattern. All became silence, all except the skittering click of her cardiac shield releasing, the sound of her own inhalation and scream of pain. Somewhere out there, they had attached a lump of human genetics to a target, and unshielded from her affliction, the silver within her exhausted body yearned to attack.

Hiss and release as the firing chamber opened, draining her atmosphere to the absolute zero of a combat zone without reason. A lifeline halo surged around her exposed body, giving meager protection from the cold, from the suffocation. Her hair flew into her face, obscured her vision of the target.

She was the center of the vessel, the center of her species’ vengeance. She knew that three worldships had been in pursuit. She knew that she would be used to destroy them.

Within this machinery of night, she felt the rape of her soul and knew that she would kill again.

“Silver on target! All vessels move to a safe distance!”

Attack Two withdrew from the combat area. Hunter was uneasy about the motionless second and third worldships. Most of the enemy fighters flew in confusion at the retreat of Hunter’s forces. They might have sensed the

silver

blinded Hunter with its intensity and that tugging that always accompanied it. He felt Lilith’s scream, watched the catalyst wave erupt from the center of the Archimedes, effortlessly cutting through enemy fighters in its path, boring into and through and out of the central worldship, rippling out and out. Metal became liquid, flesh became fire.

can it be this easy?

They’d destroyed planets with the Catalyst, eliminated entire civilizations along their target trajectory. The metal worldships were no match for the mercurial fury that Maire had bred into her unwilling daughter. The central vessel collapsed upon itself. The enemy fighters began to erupt with phase feedback, tiny dots of fire and then nothing in the vastness of this combat arena.

Hunter watched with a sinking feeling in his chest as the two motionless worldships began to emanate energy coronas. Weapons? His fear was allayed as the vessels slipped from space/time to Light X, escaping the silver of the Arch.

“They’re running! All vessels return to Arch and prepare for pursuit!”

Hunter gunned his slither toward home. The firing chamber was closing and realigning.

“Somebody tow Tallis in.”

The door alarm chimed. She sighed, activated her shield. “Enter.”

Hunter walked in, face still flushed from combat and

“What’s wrong?”

His mouth moved on words that he couldn’t speak. His hands writhed around themselves.

“Lock door.” click beep. She dropped her shield, walked to Hunter, wrapped her arms around him. “What is it?”

“No one’s told you?”

“No one’s told me anything. What happened?”

“Uncle...”

She saw the look, felt the touch of his mind. “No.”

“He had a heart attack. A fucking heart attack.”

Tears spilled over her cheeks. He pulled her close.

“What happens now?”

“Tallis is in command. He said that he chooses me for his second.”

“And we—”

“He wants to keep going.”

“But what if—”

“We have to keep going, Uncle or no.”

“Did I kill them all?”

Hunter shook his head against her face and hair. “We took out the biggest. Two got away.”

“What will—”

“They’ll head home. Try to warn them that we’re on the way. We can’t let that happen.”

“Would it be so bad?”

Hunter didn’t have an answer. “We’re having a service for Uncle in the launch bay. You should be there.”