Elementis 1: The Heir to the Stone (23 page)

The sounds of war vibrated through the air; screams of death, commanding officers shouting instruction, the rolling tracks of armoured vehicles and the swooping of energy propellers in the sky. As they ran, Spectrum saw a half-burned fantom from the ancient race of aden rolling from side to side on the ground. He moaned as his metal flesh melted away from his bones. Spectrum stopped, took aim and blasted away his pain. Although Spectrum had often thought that war was exhilarating, life-affirming and heroic, he added to that the thought that it was also the most unpleasant of things, the most needless of things. He stopped thinking and ran on catching up to Jonas and the group hiding behind a chunk of metal wall. They watched the Guard running and diving down into a trapdoor entrance a short sprint away.

"That's it," said Spectrum to everyone, "The Utopious is inside."

"Well, what are we waiting for?" said Jonas, firing off his blaster to the side as he ran towards the hole. Flares of enemy laser fire shot in front of him, behind him and above him. The others watched, short on breath until Jonas jumped into the safety of the trapdoor.

Spectrum followed after him, and Goldheart grabbed Lynk under his arm and ran behind his leader, dodging the cross fire in his path. Calyx, Willow, Menace and Cortex sprinted across the firing range.

"Why is everyone always trying to get me killed?" Cortex remarked, watching laser bolts fly too close to his head.

"I'm pretty sure you do that all by yourself, Lucas!" Menace shouted, shooting past him as she jumped into the cellar entrance where a metal staircase led inside.

The soldiers of the Guard continued to flood into the hole after the protectors, leading down the stairs to the underground hangar where the Utopious had sat for centuries in retirement. Jonas didn't rush onto the ship with everyone else, the sight of its decagon structure reminded him of the story that Witakker had told so well about the escape of his people over a thousand years earlier. Witakker was dead now, Jonas knew that much. He walked along side the ship stroking his fingers through the dust on its shell as if it were a living thing and in need of a comforting touch. The faded,  black carbon-hex surface of the ship felt as smooth as a baby's skin and looked as though it had been welded with the love of ten thousand men. The Utopious had once saved the cytherean race and laid home to Jonas's ancestors for three generations before their return to Aquilla. And here she was—the heroine once again.

Enemy fire shook Jonas's thoughts back to the present. Fantoms clunked down the metal stairs shooting at the boarding Guard. They returned fire to halt their advance, sending soldiers tumbling down the stairs. Above Jonas's head, the hangar roof began to slide across with the creaking sound of an old man's bones waking from an untroubled sleep. Jonas shot a helix stream into the attacking soldiers and ran up the ramp covered by the blazing fire of the Guard. Once Jonas was on board, the ramp retracted with the last of the surviving Guard backing up along the walkway onto the ship.

The cockpit data-scans alerted Goldheart to the large number of fantoms approaching the ship. He directed a couple of blasts from the ships guns into the rocky walls above the hangar entrance. The wall sides crumbled and slid down on top of the fantoms and blocked any further invasion of the underground landing bay. Goldheart gave himself a satisfactory smile for his quick thinking.

Jonas took his seat in the cockpit just as Goldheart thrusted the ship from the ground. The stone walls of the hangar looked as if they were falling downwards until the Utopious rose up into the daylight of Aquilla. The junior Guard and the angel's gunships swooped inside an open docking bay on the lower decks of the Utopious. The docks doors closed up after them, and they prepared for high-speed space travel.

Lynk plugged himself into the ship's hard drive feeding the directions for the ice planet into the navigational system. A white globe spun up on the data-screen. "Destus" flashed up underneath the image.

Jonas stared at the wintery planet. "Planet Destus!" he said. "I hope this necrofac's right!"

Goldheart moved his fingers, pressing a sequence of buttons. "We’ve got incoming and they’re in a hurry!"

"Are they chasing us?" asked Jonas.

"They’re moving too fast," said Goldheart, still tapping keys on his dashboard.

The flash of a ship sped past the windshield. Jonas made out the shape of a narrow front with staggered levels growing larger to the back. It looked to him like a rugged spiral arrow spinning through the air.

"Get a reading," said Jonas.

"I’m on it," said Goldheart, pressing one last button and sitting back to analyze the ship that appeared on the data-screen. "It’s the Nangus—3,000 mega-tons, 20,000 dydrid capacity. Calculated destination, the Mhydra star system," Goldheart paused for a second. "Planet Destus!"

Goldheart looked at Jonas. His face flushed with anger. Jonas stormed into the passenger hold, wrapped a hand around Willow's throat and lifted her out of her chair and against the wall of the ship. Willow kicked Jonas in the stomach. He flew back as she dropped to her feet.

Without pause, Willow drew Skull from the sheath on her thigh, pointing the sword towards Jonas. "You touch me like that again and I’ll tear out your bleeding heart," she said, showing anger for the first time in front of Jonas.

Spectrum and Menace drew their blasters and Cortex activated his pulsar-blades holding both energized points facing towards the princess.

"You told the location of the Elementis to your beloved Zohr," Jonas accused, not withholding his disgust.

"Why can’t you trust me?" Willow said.

"How else would he know where the Elementis is!?" Jonas accused her further.

Calyx stood up having stayed silent in his seat while the drama unfolded. "Put your weapons down, there's no point blasting holes in the only ship we have," he said.

Spectrum and Menace replaced their blasters and Cortex de-energized his swords, sliding them behind his back.

Willow locked eyes with Jonas, still holding Skull in her hand. "You must trust me, Jonas," she pleaded.

Menace rolled her eyes and stared hard at Willow. "She’ll kill you, Jonas. She shouldn’t be here!" she said.

Willow gave a fleeting look to Menace and stared back at Jonas. "If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. I want to help you, you must see that!"

Jonas intensified his gaze into Willow's eyes and spoke so that no one else could hear, "Do you mean it?" he said into her mind.

Willow looked at him with the same intensity. "I want peace Jonas—you must believe me!"

*

King Uly's body lay naked, floating inside the clear liquid of a healing capsule. The hairless skin of his body, face and head looked as fresh as the day he was born. His wounds were cured and his burns had cleared. Breathing pipes fed from the capsule's control unit into his mouth and nose, and Mak stood beside his king, peering into the liquid.

Qotu walked over, standing beside Mak to observe the king. A tan-skinned humanoid with a long jaw and flattened nose, Qotu was of airqian descent, a somewhat neutral race that had secretly agreed a trade alliance with the cythereans, offering sanctuary to the king in a situation of war in exchange for all of the pure oxygen they required for their planet.

"Uly will be fine, he is strong," said Qotu, with a deep, smooth voice.

"Thank you, Qotu," Mak said to the leader of the airq. "This is more than kind of you," he finished, unaware of the trading treaty between the two nations and humbled by being in the presence of two of the most influential leaders in the entire galaxy of Iopa.

"How much damage has Enterra sustained?" asked Qotu.

"Almost nothing is left," Mak said.

"Your king is too…" Qotu paused to find the right word. "…humanitarian for his own good. Gets himself into too much trouble."

Mak returned his eyes to Uly. "It's not an easy job," he said.

"We have ships and armies—they are not cheap, but your nation would not be poor if you won this war. I insist they are yours," said Qotu.

The king burst into a struggle, he pushed at the sides of the capsule, he was caught in the nightmarish heat of a blazing explosion yet felt a wetness and weightlessness surrounding his body. Qotu moved to the control pad to press the release button. The liquid drained away as the roof of the capsule slid aside. Uly shook, twisting, clutching his chest as he shivered on the capsule's glass bottom.

Qotu grabbed a blanket from the side, threw it over Uly, leaned in, and restrained him, sliding out the pipes from deep inside Uly's mouth and nostrils. "King Uly, you are safe now," Qotu called out, speaking to the king's consciousness.

Uly's struggle lessened. He opened his eyes. "Where… am I?" he strained, his jaw shook as much as his body.

"You are on planet Atar. You were hurt, but you're okay now." Qotu told him.

The king grabbed around the back of Qotu's neck and pulled himself up close, "The Elementis! We must go! We must…" he murmured, before dropping down to lay still once again.

Mak and Qotu looked at each other. "I’m no king, Qotu," said Mak, "but we’ll need those ships—whatever the cost."

*

The internal structure of the Utopious was magnificent. Jonas wandered the corridors imagining the lives of those living here in the times when Valdoor had saved them, all those years ago. The ghosts of his ancestors seemed to line the very fabric of the ship with their souls; the feeling was warm, almost homely. Not a feeling with which Jonas was overly familiar. Witakker had told Jonas that the Utopious was originally built for transporting grain and crops to nearby planets but was duly adapted in the Valdoorian times to sustain long-term space travel. Lasting survival was made possible by the ships garden's, the ecosystem of which had grown into a world of its own, having hardly been tended to at all since the ship was grounded a few hundred years ago.

Jonas asked Calyx to join him in the gardens. It was time he got to know a bit more about his brother, and to know a bit more about his father as well. Alone for the first time together, the two brothers strolled without speaking down a path of overgrown weeds that crunched beneath their feet. Jonas unzipped the cotton section of his uniform beneath his neck line to release the warmth that was building up between his hot skin and his armoured suit. The required atmosphere of the gardens raised his temperature a few degrees higher than the perfect room temperature of the rest of the ship. He felt the sweat building up on his neck, and he found his mind flashing back to the last time he had felt this hot, sharing a vacuum chamber with Hok. He remembered the day all too well. His life had never been the same since and it would never be the same again. Only time would tell if this would be for the better or for the worse. But right now it wasn't looking too promising, he mused.

He looked up and out through the branches of the trees and onward to the stars above a giant roof of glass. He and Calyx could well have been taking a late-night walk in the forests of Aquilla, but as it was they were on their way to planet Destus to retrieve the most powerful creation any man had ever known.

Calyx snapped a leaf from a plant he walked past. He tore the leaf in half and rolled the piece between his fingers. He threw the rolled leaf aside before tearing another piece to keep his fingers busy. He threw that piece aside, and he was done thinking what to say. "You’ve led an interesting life brother. Will you return to Rilk if we survive?" he said to Jonas, breaking the silence.

"There is no going back now," said Jonas.

"No, I suppose stealing cargo is hardly the game for a prince," Calyx said, reminding Jonas of his unlawful past.

"I had to get by, somehow," Jonas replied, reminding Calyx that his life hadn't been so easy.

"I did enjoy the fight before your imprisonment. Red-Badges weren’t they? Law keepers of Rilk?" Calyx said, continuing to eat into his brother's patience.

"They killed my friend," Jonas said, looking over to his twin and standing on the spot in disbelief that Calyx had brought up something of such a sensitive nature.

Calyx stopped and turned to his brother, engaging his eyes. "And you tore them apart for it!" he said, letting Jonas know that he had seen everything. "I don’t blame you. Vengeance is all we have left sometimes."

Jonas wanted a change of subject; his brother was pushing too far. "Did Father never mention me to you?"

Calyx laughed with one outward huff. "Our father was interested in nothing but protection, protection, protection. I had no idea my dreams were another life."

"You were never happy, Calyx, I could feel it," Jonas said.

"How could I be!?" snapped Calyx. "All my life our father let me think I was the one who killed my mother, I was overwhelmed with responsibility and never loved for it. Happiness was not part of my training," he moaned.

Jonas stared into his brothers silver eyes. "I am sorry—how things have turned out," he sympathized, feeling the hardship flowing within his brother.

"We are not at the end just yet, dear brother," Calyx said, brushing away his brother's sentiments.

"Will we ever have peace?" Jonas sighed in a rhetorical fashion as he broke away eye contact and carried on walking.

Calyx took a deep breath, considering the question of peace in his mind. "As long as the Elementis exists there will always be something to fight over," he said.

Jonas wished to have his brother's thoughts on a certain princess who had been playing on his mind. "Willow believes we can live in peace," he said, watching Calyx's reaction, except there was no physical reaction. The monochrome eyes of the dydrid rarely gave away any emotive response.

"If you think you can trust her, your judgement is as weak as your mind," Calyx noted, with a double insult.

"I have a different feeling towards her," said Jonas, shaking his head in disagreement with his brother.

Calyx set a deep stare on his brother, "I am sure you do, but do not let your feelings interfere with your task. Willow is more dangerous than you imagine," he said, sounding much like their father.