It was cold and it was getting colder with every passing moment. The wind tore salty tears from Lumynn's eyes as he knelt next to a pulverized pile of masonry and twisted metal cradling the heavy, inert form of Akkitus Orthwaine.
The battered surface of Orthwiane's exo-mobile chassis was limned with a faint tangerine-hued gleam under what little light streamed down to the embattled city's debris-littered streets, and from cast-off lighting off broken neon signage and through the shattered entry portals of nearby buildings. The external segmentata breastplate sections on the multi-articulated, exo-chassis housed a wide assortment of action-command module functions while the highly-stylized winged raptor design embossed and etched onto the torso-armor's surface contained a series of very small LED lights. Those lights indicated, among other things, mech-system power-levels and biocybernetic sustainability telemetry. When the exo-chassis was operating at peak efficiency, they usually glowed a bright violet color. At the moment, those lights were more a dull, deep concord purple and a couple of the lights had darkened completely to black. The lighted indicators stated the obvious...
There wasn't much power left to support the continued existence of the courageous jetellin pilot.
"It is not safe here. Leave me," Akkitus said, the electronic timbre of his voice sounding faint with an undertone of hard static. "There's nothing you can do. I understood the risks when I detached from the ship's embryon-cable feed. You're wasting time. And that's time you don't have. Go."
Lumynn ignored Akkitus' plea and, turning his head away from the anthrobot helmsman, barked at Yllvanea Razora as she dazedly stumbled about nearby. His voice startled the wounded Red Archivist and she involuntarily emitted a startled yelp, but she quickly regained her composure.
"Nygeia's down! I can't rouse her! You have med-training, Archivist, set to finding some way to revive her. If we're left too long without her power, we're pretty much defenseless!"
A few body-lengths away, Yllvanea dropped to both knees and, hands trembling from the pain of her own injuries and from the cold wetness embracing them all in the ruins of the exposed boulevard, set to executing a quick and rough physical examine of the fallen princess.
Lumynn worked hard to keep a lid upon the boiling kettle of his turbulent emotions. He had to stay focused. He was, by nature, a strategist and so the chaos of his present situation was more than unsettling or alarming. He had to resist the urge to let his frustration lead him down a path towards certain calamity, but it was hard, so very hard to keep from being overwhelmed.
"We're all falling apart here. Nothing's working out the way it should. We should never have allowed ourselves to be out into a position like this, used as pawns between battling warlords. We're not mercenaries, not sellswords, and the Warlord knew that, but he didn't want to risk his own forces on a risky ambassadorial visit. We knew better, we all did, when Kolag Y'phree first suggested the assignment, but what could we do? We were guests in Niyaddour, living there at Y'phree's indulgence and under his protection. But I could see how very stressful it was for D'Spayr and Nygeia because they knew that eventually, the Warlord would demand something in repayment... And look at us now. Hunted, embattled, with all hands raised against us, the targets of monsters and devils. There HAS to be some solution, some way out, some way for us to regain control over our fortunes. There HAS to be..."
The sound of the Red Archivist's voice abruptly cut through his momentary reverie.
"Nothing major feels broken, there's some discoloration from bruising, but no visible wounds," Yllvanea rasped, blinking away water from her narrowed eyes, "Her respiration is rapid, but not overly so and it is consistent. However, her skin is hot to the touch, like she's burning up from the inside, and I can sense a lot of static electricity, actual charged ions, emanating from off her, surrounding her. From what little past reading I've done concerning practitioners of The Discipline and their catalogue of likely bio-reactions after energy projection and energy re-direction in Spellcasting, I think she's in a fugue semi-torpor. Mystic feedback from using War-Magycke pummels and drains the practitioner, like some kind of paraphysical psionic feedback."
"Wonderful. The How and Why aren't very important right now. Just wake her the hells up!"
"Even if I had any idea how to expedite her recovery, and I DON'T, I know enough to realize that you can't rush it. You risk permanently damaging the War-Magycke-Adept, mentally and physically" Yllvanea retorted hotly. "Using War-Magycke can kill you! A fistful of chemical inhalants or pungent aromatic oils isn't going to pull her back to consciousness. This period of semi-torpor isn't a native reactive bio-response. It's something she's been trained to do to survive the stresses of using this kind of energy manipulation. Her mind has purposefully gone away to protect itself and to heal itself from further harm."
The Red Archivist groaned suddenly and grabbed her head, her trembling hands taking care not to aggravate the torn, open wound marking one side of her ravaged face. She shook and then was seized by a brief series of wracking coughs that ending in agonized panting.
"I'm not a Psion or a mutant Esper," she said at last. "And I'm certainly no empathic healer. I don't have any ability I can bring to bear to fix this."
Lumynn silently cursed and desperately searched his mind looking for any possible fragment of knowledge, any theory, he could use to better their predicament. Nothing came forward that was of any help.
He felt a pull and an insistent tightening at his wrist and forearm. Akkitus was again fighting him for attention.
"No more time for debate. Leave me! You have to go! Get away from this place if you want to live!"
When next anyone spoke, the voice was a resonant, sepulchral sibilance from the ghostly figure of Rarbuji'i Koraevenus as he floated above the ground. His unsolid visage was an angry bruise on Reality Itself, cast against the gloom, appearing like a dark and ancient manifestation of disdain.
"Am I really seeing this? Would I had remained lifeless and trapped in limbo. By Keryge'diann's Bloody Fangs, is THIS what the world of Teshiwahur has come to since I left it? Look at you! You moan and complain and cry because you're hurt, because you're frightened, because you have to fight, because you may die ... These things are the Natural Order! There was a time when these things were the fire that put steel in our blood. We were warriors once, we were conquerors. Now I see we have become a bleak and crumbling, pox-infested world of tiny, panic-stricken children."
Lumynn glared up at the spectral figure and said from between clenched teeth, "Truly not helping, corpse-face."
Rarbuji'i Koraevenus gracefully floated, gliding against the rushing wind of the storm, over next to where Lumynn knelt holding Akkitus Orthwaine. The phantom's image shown against the dark night's shadows lit by the flames of an unwholesome inner light.
"Your wish is for this man-machine to survive?" the dour and unkind spirit asked archly.
"Yes."
Koraevenus, a vulturine wraith, bent over until his cowled, burnoose-adorned face was even with that of Lumynn and intoned, "Then it will be so."
Something that looked like a pearl-sized ruby sun, bright enough to cast brilliance enough to read by despite its miniscule size, fell as a single tear from the hollow place where Koraevenus would have had a left eye. That fiery tear dropped down to splash like liquid neon onto the helmet of Akkitus Orthwaine's exo-chassis armor.
The sound of that diminutive, deep crimson drop hitting the jetellin pilot's body was the sound of distant world's colliding.
The dynamic bolt of corruscating energy that suddenly blossomed throughout Akkitus' body was strong enough to throw Lumynn back away from the metallic figure, as if he'd been blown over by the shockwave from an explosive blast...
...and Rarbuji'i Koraevenus summarily disappeared from view.
Akkitus sat up unsteadily, jerkily, as if his chassis' collection of rotary and linear actuator motors were momentarily out-of-sync with one another, and then his body began to move in a more naturalized human way. With his splayed legs stretched out in front of him, sitting erect like a child's oversized toy, his head slowly turned to and fro, taking in the scene around him.
*** On the other side of Reality, in a dark, dim place of inharmonius perception, the Princess Regent Nygeia Mere'Domay Vela'Mahnnstruhr of Ombria-Aeternae, Eldest of the Nightspawn-Evolved, struggled desperately against the rushing onset of an approaching psychic schism that threatened to fragment her mind even more so than it already had been.
Something malignant and devilish was frenziedly tugging at what remained of her vaporous sense of identity, something at once familiar and yet alien.
She was Nygeia, but the name meant little to her, as if it were only the name pinned to the identity of a paper-thin role she was playing, an ill-defined character from a play crafted by a mad scribe. She tightened her tenuous grip on a fading sense of what was Real. She was aware of herself and yet she wasn't. She was Meredith Chapel, and yet the personality and memories of Meredith Chapel were an increasingly more and more uncomfortable fit stuffed inside the alien skin suit in which she found herself imprisoned.
She was adrift in an ocean of stygian blackness, in the middle of a fight for dominance against a rising tide of psychic fury that threatened to engulf all her reason and all her senses. She had crossed into the spiritually murky lightlessness of a schizophrenic existence where she was at war with herself.
She swam against the venomous tide, fighting to escape a malignant undertow that was pulling her down and away from the Light Outside, from the Brightness of the other world that she knew.
She could hear voices... a man was speaking. Was it real? Was it a dream? Did the sound of faint mutterings belong to a delusion created by her own diseased mind as it tried to make sense of what was happening to her?
No. She recognized the voice.
Lumynn? ***
At that very same moment, Nygeia's form quaked as she was seized with an abrupt onset of trembling and small convulsions. She emitted a loud, harsh inhalation, like a suffocating deep-sea diver breaking the ocean's surface after being too long denied a new, refreshing breath of air. She then began to unfold from the embryonic kneeling position into which she'd moments ago fallen. Gracefully unlimbering as she stood up, the Dark Princess resembled a dread, thorny plant growing towards the sun ---
--- if the sun, hiding behind a shadowy mountain of storm clouds, were the color of charcoal ash, and if it were at war with a jealous, baleful night.
"Nygeia? Are you with us, Princess? Can you hear me?"
She spoke hesitantly past dry lips with a tongue that felt clumsy and strange. "I'm here, my friend. I am here."
Lumynn, still lying in damp heap where he'd fallen, sighed and closed his eyes in grateful acknowledgement to a universe that had not yet abandoned him.
"Is it possible to both feel revived and invigorated, yet feel as if one should apologize for committing some awful sin?" Akkitus asked aloud.
"Of course it's possible," Lumynn said dolefully, fighting against the stiffness of sore muscles and bruised flesh as he rose up. "This is the Withered Land."
* * *
The airship rocked and bucked angrily, like a thing alive, and the aerial integrity of the vessel was revealed to be fatally compromised as the winds of the cyclonic storm hammered at the remains of its ruptured outer hull. Pnoom-Aig, her fist wrapped around the circumference of an exposed deck pipe running along the passageway corridor, was stunned. The Dragon was down, dead as far as anyone could tell. She and Vandessha'Jai had arrived to witness the aftermath of a scene of gore-splattered devastation.
"I don't know about you, but I'm thinking change of plan here...," Jai said to Pnoom-Aig, commenting from out the left side of his mouth as he scrutinized the gruesome scene. He was slightly out of breath from running almost half the length of the vessel and ascending three levels while carrying the modified particle beam half-cannon he and Aig had adapted as a field-projector. Additionally, he was lugging, in a harness strapped across his back, a thick hexagonal metal case half the size of his torso.
Pnoom-Aig carried a large, tightly wound hoop of optical fiber cable wrapped over one shoulder and a U-shaped utility pack that was fitted with a self-contained tablet computer and served as a multi-purpose electrical engineer's toolkit. She was facing away from Vandessha'Jai when he spoke. Her eyes were scanning the exposed circuitry behind the inner bulkhead's perforated wall covering. She was no doubt mentally matching the visuals with the records of the ship's schematics.
"This could just work," she said aloud, after a moment's analysis. She took one wide, slightly off-balance step towards the bulkhead wall and stretched out an arm to run her hand across a series of inset panels, two of which were missing their cover faces, and her fingers traced a path along the outside niche leading back up towards the ceiling to a junction box.
"Care to tell me what you meant by that?" Jai prompted.
"We can still use our original plan, within limited parameters, but we're going to have to cast a larger net than we originally planned," she said. "Our engines are still online, but our propulsion systems are crippled. The energy we'd normally use for thrust is still being generated, but it's being wasted. But maybe we can redirect it, manipulate it, towards another goal. We're going to tap into the Wavehammer engines, use their power, create a potent and robust inclusion-extant, a field wrapper, then broadcast that energy as an enveloping containment and suppression field."
The First Mate blinked rapidly, his face scrunched up into an expression of apprehension and mistrust. "The engines... we're going to redirect their power, remotely I would guess, from maybe here. Override all the intra-network command protocols. Physically re-wire and reconfigure the pulsed power banks. Divert that power from flowing through the propulsion system and then project some kind of a directed-particle stasis cage..., to then – what – compress it? Implode it? Is that the plan? For what?"
Pnoom-Aig shook her head and sighed loudly. "Storms generate electrostatic fields, Jai, large, unstable fields that possess multiple weak points. Weak points we can attack and manipulate by intrusive overcharging of the electromagnetic tensors that compose the field. The target is the storm. We're going to use the Wavehammer engines to contain and then shut down the storm."
"And the Chief Engineer and his crew down in what's left of the engine room will be okay with this? It isn't as if they're available for consultation on this plan."
"According to my internal telemetric proximity-scanning, Durkka-jan is at the flight console controls on the Bridge. The crewmen in the Systems Dynamics Ops room are all dead except for one member, Ensign Kanlangro, who suffered radiation burns to her face and is blinded. She suffered a severe fall against the bulkhead and only has the use of her left hand. Kanlangro doesn't have any way of communicating with Durkka-jan."
"So we're the ones who'll have to remotely commandeer navigation-command and take control of the Aerieakon's flight and propulsion profiles," Jai concluded.
"That would be an affirmative," Pnoom-Aig said.
"We lose propulsion and shut down the storm and its very probable that we're going to fall out of the sky," Jai said. "It's a long way down. There's nothing but big buildings, bedrock and ocean water beneath us. The Aerieakon will crash. And none of us are Emaris Staurqe. We can't fly. The combination of those engines and the storm's winds are the only reasons we're still aloft."
"No, you're wrong. The propulsion engines of that jetellin that just hooked itself onto us is what will keep us in the sky... at least it will keep us up long enough to engineer a controlled landing."
"We don't know that! So far as we know, that ship is damaged, too! Not to mention that even if we DO create this counter-field enclosure around the storm's energy, there's the likelihood that there will be a huge electromagnetic backlash, feedback..."
Despite the fact her face was limited in its ability to portray and reflect human emotions, Pnoom-Aig favored the doubt-plagued First Mate with a ferocious glare. "By All the Gods of Wrath, you are so annoyingly HUMAN! There's a more than seventy-eight percent chance you're going to die here regardless of what we do! At least by trying this, we're using our time and energy productively. Now stop whining and help me get this done."
"Hey, I'm on your side, remember? I know more than a few things about avionics engineering, too. There's no need to get all irate and judgmental because I'm a biological..."
"I can't do this alone in the time we have available to us. You need to focus!"
Vandessha'Jai shrugged and crossed his arms across his chest. "As you wish, then. Give me some specifics and let's get this thing started."
The synthetic gene robot construct snapped open her toolkit and immediately pulled out a long-nosed, ceramic-handled, multi-necked wire stripper/crimper/cutter tool. Turning her back and reaching overhead to grab the latch of the junction box, Pnoom-Aig said over her shoulder, "If I get us killed I'll apologize."
"Fine. That's all I ask," Vandessha'Jai muttered crossly as he set down the particle beam half-cannon. All things considered given their current situation, he wouldn't be needing it. "But before we begin, can we do something about moving The Dragon's corpse out of the way? He's blocking nearly half the passageway and, frankly, I'm not real comfortable with ..."
"Focus, damn it!" Aig barked snappishly.
* * *
Mikaas Drem peered through the shadowy night sky to watch the bulky blotch of extended cloudcover slide the starboard side portal of the flittership's pilot-canopy and he allowed himself a small, grim smile as he beheld the glittering speckles of distant stars above the horizon. The stars... blazing jewels set against the cold background of a vast, inky firmament. He definitely refused to refer, even casually, to the depths of outer space as "the heavens". There was nothing holy or seraphic about the physical universe. Cosmic Space was full of brutality, fury and barbarity as immense radiation storms charred and immolated entire worlds, as massive asteroids ground each other to powdery ash and stone splinters when colliding with one another, as streaking comets plunged headlong into unprotected planets creating extinction events, as suns went supernova and annihilated their own solar systems, as the gravitational effects of supermassive black holes slowly cannibalized their own galactic neighborhoods... There was nothing pious or sacrosanct about any of it. There was only the inexhaustible and unbounded raging, only the endless saga of bloodletting. Only the realization that all of Reality was in a continual state of War. And Drem liked it that way. The Field Militia Infantry Commander had many, many times in his violent career stared up at the far suns of distant solar systems and galaxies from blood-soaked, body-strewn battlefields and wondered if hardened warriors similar to himself were staring back across the void of space at him.
If so, then maybe one day in the future, Fate would smile upon them and they would meet and try to kill one another.
The thought made his smile widen.
Drem observed Arvenall Dampiko slide his track-mounted captain's chair across the small piloting cabin to where the warlord could physically interface with the flight-command console.
"Are you inputting new navigational coordinates? Has there been a change in plans?" he asked Dampiko.
The Warlord pivoted in his seat and raised an eyebrow as he regarded Drem. "No, no change. Now that we are out of Peravendathian airspace, I wanted to scan for other incoming airships and verify there weren't any unanticipated troop movements on the borders of the Pang Xa'Omathra region."
Drem frowned. "Are you expecting there to be unusual troop movements?"
Dampiko nodded. "The armies of the Emperium have not forgotten about the territories beyond the furthest borders of the Forever Plain, nor the eastern outposts of the Vorgianis Territories. Technically, this region is still under the patronage and guardianship of the Crusader Most-High Imperial, His Imperialness Draggyn Han'Khainus-Galorketh. The World-Father owns this continent and every city on it, no matter how small or remote, no matter whether or not the Emperium has an official ambassadorial presence there. A major escalation and flare-up in the persistent rivalries and hostilities between Omath Nastreq and Peravendath guarantees the attention of the Regional Governor's Military Security Armor-Guard."
"You mean to say that the Centaurius Emperii Primilion will take note, don't you?"
"Yes. I do mean the Armor-Guard Prime and, by inference, I mean that I anticipate the involvement of Battle-Marshal Manduryus Ha'akmar," Dampiko said.
"That is not a good thing," Drem commented darkly.
"No," Dampiko agreed, "it is not."
At the mention of Manduryus Ha'akmar, both men immediately recalled the muddled pandemonium that had accompanied their first introduction to the Battle-Marshal of the Centaurius Emperii Primilion some five orbital solar heliars in the past. It had been back in Arvenall Dampiko's native provinces, in the Barony of Osthursdale, skirting the Forever Plains' Western Hills and in full view of the mighty Temple of Syrkoness'A, the fallen church that had become Dampiko's castle, that the armed forces of The Crucifixer, as the Warlord was often called, encountered the power of the Armor-Guard Prime.
Dampiko's forces had numbered over twenty-thousand, men and women who were experienced and battle-hardened, who were mercenaries, merciless assassins and homicidal criminals, and they had been principal in aiding the Warlord in forging a large and lucrative outlaw realm from what had once been an impoverished and largely uncultured collection of adjoining rural townships. The Barony of Osthursdale had gone from a substandard, indigent collection of farm communities to become a rambling, sprawling metropolis holding the promise of riches for those cunning and aggressive enough to test their mettle living there. They lived largely independent from the Emperium and the Emperium was, for a time, mostly content to leave them to themselves until, in the years immediately following the Great Cosmic Revocation, the Emperium began to concentrate its planetary control and put in place an initiative to actively secure its borders against non-Teshiwahurian, non-human and evolutionary mutant non-citizen traffic. The World-Father demanded that Arvenall Dampiko and his hooligan and racketeer-controlled black market economy feed a larger percentage of their earnings back into the coffers of the Emperium. It was no surprise when Dampiko the Crucifixer decided that enough was enough and denied the Emperium's Ministry of the Exchequer their tithe.
The Warlord had entertained no fear of reprisals. He'd had an army of twenty-thousand plus warriors...
And then Battle-Marshal Manduryus Ha'akmar had appeared on Osthursdale's borders with his force of two hundred men, composed of five platoons of twenty men each...
Comply or die, that had been the command Ha'akmar had given them. No diplomacy. No negotiation. No deals. Comply or die. The people of the Barony had been proud. They would not be dictated to in such a manner. They had a say in how they would be governed and in how they paid their tribute to the World-Father. Or so they'd thought. The truth of it was that the World-Father wasn't really all that interested in the matter of their taxation and governance. He'd actually needed to make an example of someone to hold up to all the other semi-independent territories of the fractured and splintered edges of his planetary empire. The conflict with the Ministry of the Exchequer was just an excuse. Arvenall Dampiko had haughtily told the Armor-Guard Prime, and thusly the World-Father, to go away and mind their own business, because Osthursdale owed them nothing.
That had been all the reason that Ha'akmar, the cold-hearted and arrogant bastard, had needed to unleash Hell Itself against Dampiko's forces and upon all the Barony and its people that day. The advanced, reverse-engineered, alien technology-based weaponry of the Armor-Guard Prime had decimated Dampiko's forces like nothing he'd ever imagined. The slaughter had been mind-boggling.
The Warlord had lost eight thousand soldiers that day along with over five thousand civilian militia casualties. Thousands of the regular population, mostly non-combatants, had been gravely maimed and wounded.
In a battle that had raged for eleven brutal hours, Manduryus Ha'akmar had lost just one dozen men. Only a dozen. And with that, he'd been recalled by Continental Jurisdictional Territorial Command's Crusader Force. There were no further hostilities. They'd dispassionately left. It wasn't personal in any way. They'd been given their target and they'd had their orders. They'd followed them.
Comply or die.
The next day a minor operational official with the Ministry of the Exchequer, a man proved to be little more than a clerk in all honesty, had arrived in Osthursdale to retrieve the tithe -- plus penalties due.
Those events were forever seared into Arvenall Dampiko's memory. He had never since forgotten the Battle-Marshal and his lethal legion of technologically-advanced soldiers.
"Where away, sire?" Mikaas Drem asked.
"To where we were always headed. The City, once called Niyaddour, home to His Lordship, the Most Honorable High-Chieftain Kolag Y'phree," Dampiko answered past a sneer.
The flittership's engines screeched as The Crucifixer engaged the translongitudinal drive propulsion.
* * *