The beam of void energy lit the night with a glowing orange pulse cutting straight up the center line of the Empyrean. Adam shouted inside his helmet but his voice was lost in the silence of space. Ahead of him Sunny and Celex paused to gape in horror. When the light cleared, Adam expected the worst, he had seen that void beam tear apart a moon, so what might it do to the Empyrean.
The light was gone, and Adam blinked more spots from his vision. He felt his heart flutter in a mixture of relief and panic as he saw the Empyrean still standing. Her hull crackled with tongues of orange energy fizzing and sparking like a drop o water on a hot pan. A few holes had been torn through the upper spine of her hull, but even from this distance, he could see a net of delicate golden threads where the shilds hat knit the hull back together.
The Empyrean's hull was not organic, but after a bit of investigation, Narobi reported that it was self repairing.
That would have been great, but to repair damage of that magnitude would take the ship weeks.
Its patches in the hull were simply cosmetic dressing to keep the air in. Adam felt his throat tighten, there was no way that everyone would have managed to survive that.
The two void ships could be seen attempting to pull a flanking maneuver on the wounded Omen , but the ship continued to turn, keeping them both at bay. So at least the pilot was still alive.
"Ramirez, come in, do you read me."
The following pause went on for a horrible moment, and Adam watched as the ship began to turn, golden shields pulsing with an unusual intensity.
And then a voice came over the comms, "Still, here, but the empyrean is reporting casualties."
Adam felt his throat constrict even further.
"Not sure how we survived that."
"Ramirez."
Overhead the omen cut behind the empyrean and then vanished into the debris field. Simon was using the destruction for cover, and it was a good idea. Her control of the omen was impressive. Even he would have had to try hard to make the Omen move with such agility.
"Yeah?"
"Make sure that doesn't happen to the omen. If they hit Simon, she's done for."
"Agreed,"
"And Ramirez?"
"Yeah."
"When the architect asks why we scratched the paint on his ride, I am blaming you." Ramirez gave a grim laugh that Adam shared with him. He knew he was using the humor to hide, but what else was he supposed to do.
"Well now would be a good time to stop chatting and get those damn guns up and running. If you don't than both Simon and I are toast.'
Ramirez had a point, and Adam grudgingly forced his attention back to the issue at hand pushing forward with Sunny and Celex to the edge of their little rock platform.
The gravity was wrong, Adam could feel himself being pulled from all sides with varying degrees of power. Ahead of him, the shattered moon was a landscape of suspended floating stone hanging above Irus in a surreal landscape of slowly cooling molten stone crackling with void energy. Irus's green moon had been a primary center for their orbital defence system, and even now, Adam could see chunks of Rundi made structure still adhered to the rock.
If the buildings were pressurized, it was possible People could still be alive inside, but even from this distance he could see the swarms of void creatures crawling over and through the buildings like ants crawling through a hive, and he knew that that was unlikely .
Celex held up a hand and the two of them paused.
The ribbons had retracted back into his body, so he appeared mostly human. His wild rainbow hair billowed around his face in line with the confusion of competing gravities.
With one large leap Celex sailed out into the gap between the broken chunks. He sailed forward for a good few meter before being tugged sideways and then down. Adam watched his trajectory in fascination as he landed heavily on another large rock. There was no time to comment on the strange mode of travel as a swarm of void creatures spilled forward towards Celex. He blasted the first wave with a discharge of golden energy, but his glow was left dim afterwards as he began to recharge.
The swarm did not wait.
Without conscious coordination, Adam and Sunny linked arms, leaping together into the void between the rocks, and for a moment their feet were suspended thousands of Kilometers over the glassy blue surface of irus and her thousand-mile deserts of waving blue dunes.
Adam's stomach lurched as the second Gravity well caught them, and they floated down into the midst of a full raging battle.
Celex took a blast of void energy to the upper arm just as they got there. The clothing he wore on that side singed away, and a black mark was left momentarily on his skin crackling with orange energy, but he waved it off, roaring as he ran into the crowd.
At this close range Adam had his spear out, and together with Sunny, they crashed into the flanking lines at Celex's back.
Adam skewered one of the creatures through the chest.
It clawed at the shaft of his spear, beak opening and closing rapidly before falling away.
The creature flopped slowly to the ground to be trodden on by its fellows as more came forward.
Adam could see what remained of the Kree in these void creatures. They had beaks and feathers and wings, though they didn't use them for more than short periods of time, but that was where the resemblance ended.
Somewhere along the line the void sickness had taken them and now, shards of bone grew from their bodies cutting into their skin and sticking out of their backs in strange looking spines. Some of them were missing eyes, while others were growing a confusing array of horns that made no logical sense, or followed any natural pattern.
One lept at his face, and Adam speared it through the guts. Something hit him hard from the side, and Fealty hummed in anger. He lashed out with his right leg catching the second Kree that hit him in the sternum with a powerfully placed kick. He ducked to the side as void beams blazed around him. Overhead two jets cut by trailed by several void fighters. The silent vastness of space was interrupted by thousands of beams of burning gold and orange light.
Celex ran ahead of them, and Sunny and Adam followed, leaping to the next platform where the void creatures were already waiting. They had cleared much of the upper platform of the void creatures, and Sunny was just finishing off the last one . She raced forward pulling her spear back with one hand and skewering it through the chest, at some point during the movement, she had also retrieved a hatchet from the front of her armor.
Adam didn't know when she had gotten that weapon, either she had made it, or she had built it.
From the flash he got before the blade met flesh, he could see shining silver steel, and pulsing blue power running along the end of the blade.
It came down on the void creature's neck severing its head clean from its shoulders with enough power to send the head spinning upward with enough velocity to escape their gravity. Adam watched the head spin a few times, before it was caught by another gravity well, falling and bouncing twice before rolling across the underside of another large chunk.
The headless body slumped on the end of Sunny's spear, and she withdrew it with some measure of contempt, spraying the ground with crackling orange void juice.
Adam was about to say soemthing.
When It appeared.
There was no sound to alert them to it's presence, so one moment nothing was happening, and the next the creature leaped down from a fallen chunk of debris and latched itself onto Sunny's shoulders, bashing its fists against her visor in a desperate plea to break it. Adam yelped in shock and lifted his firearm taking the creature straight through the brain.
It went limp and fell from Sunny's shoulders onto the ground where it twitched once and then died. The three of them stood there for a moment, examining the corpse of the thing as Sunny shook her head a few times like a dog prodding at her visor with one hand to make sure there was no damage.
The creature wasn't a Kree, that was for sure, and it took a moment before Adam could identify it.
And when he did he pulled back in surprise and disgust.
Tvek.
But, how was that possible?
The GA had been monitoring the Tvek home world since Adam helped to save their planet from a destabilized core. The Void shouldn't have been able to get to them. Adam bent closer to examine the bone protruding from its body, the large cranium, the small humanoid sort of chest and body.
It was indeed a Tvek.
But as they stood there, the group of them watched in surprise as the body began to sizzle, and then shrivel. Adam stepped back in surprise as the void light in its body died, and a corpse was left in its place.
"The void light must be keeping it alive." Celex said behind down to roll the creature over, "Look here, this bone would pierce straight through its primary liver. It shouldn't be able to function." Celex glanced up at Adam, "The Void is using void light to power the architect's corrupted constructs."
Adam felt his hands grow cold, "But why?"
Celex shrugged, "They needed soldiers, but in my experience the void takes, and destroys, it does not create. It likely couldn't make any constructs on its own to power the void energy, so it had to find hosts and corrupt them instead."
It made a little too much sense, and Adam did not like it.
"As interesting as that is, we don't have time to speculate."
Sunny had already made it to the edge of the next cliff, and with one powerful jump she was away. Adam and Celex were only seconds behind her. The next rock they landed on had more gravity, and Adam could feel it in his knees as they touched down, hitting the ground hard as they pulled up to the next fight.
There was a large building on this bigger chunk, and even more enemies.
A hord of void Tvek raced towards them their mouths open and gnashing, their tiny hands reaching out for soemthing to grab. Celex, now recharged, blasted an entire row of them into vapor. Adam finished off the last tw with his weapon before the Kree line came. One of them dropped in on Adam from above, and he turned throwing it off the ledge and out into another gravity well where it was dragged away.
He turned back to the fight collapsing his spear into a shorter more manageable length, and fought with two weapons in tandem, the spear on his left the gun on his right. Fealty helped to partially coordinate his movement assisting him in aiming the weapon at marked targets.
Perhaps some might have called that cheating, but Adam would have reminded them that humans are terrible at multitasking. He speared another creature through the chest and spun.
Something in his vision blinked, and he turned his attention towards fealty's marker.
He was just in time to see one of the facility doors opening, and a hulking shape step out.
"Shit."
The creature roared, but Adam was unable to hear it. Six arms waved in an uncoordinated jumble. Heavy black armor glittered in the light of Irus as orange void light pulsed in the creature's chest.
"Shit." Sunny echoed, and together the three of them formed up as the void Drev raced forward towards them.
Four of its hands had weapons while the two extra hands did not, waving uselessly at its sides.
Adam ducked out fo the way of one of the bludgeons shooting the thing twice, but the armor deflected it. Celex let off a burst of energy that momentarily stunned the creature long enough for Sunny to slip in and stab it under one of its arms. The Drev howled and reared back hitting Sunny so hard she was thrown back.
Adam snarled and raced forward jumping up onto its back and wrapping his arms around it's neck. The Drev bucked and clawed wildly. Adam wrapped his arms around the creature's chest. A knife retraced from the side of one of his gauntlets and he stabbed the void Drev in the place where it's shoulder met its neck.
It spun in a circle trying to throw him off, but he didn't let it instead tightening his legs even further. The Steel eye leg whirred, and Fealty crowed in joy as the pressure increased. The Drev threw itself to the ground to try and dislodge Adam, but he was still hanging on tight. His entire right side ached with the pain of it but he kept going, squeezing and squeezing until there was a sharp pop that reverberated through the Drev's body and into Adam's armor where the vibrations became audible. Adam's leg moved from straining to collapsing inward as something in the Drev's body broke. The Drev thrashed and then slowly went limp.
Adam was left lying on the ground wrapped around his prey like a constrictor snake .
Sunny looked down at him from above her head tilted slightly to the side, "Brutal." Was her only comment.
But from her that was usually a compliment