Untitled (39 page)
Authors: Unknown Author
Davage approached them and with his Sight, freed them from the black.
Their faces, their eyes told the tale of the torment they were experiencing.
"I'm so sorry …" he said.
And he killed them, offering as merciful a death as he could.
His fury then turned to the Dark Man—this beast, this henchman and craft of the Black Abbess. "You wanted me, Abbess—
here I am!"
He blasted the hardest Sight he'd ever tried, a cone of golden light, and he melted the innards of this thing, this Dark Man. He could hear it roar in pain, and he was delighted. Feel a bit of it, you bastard—taste it yourself!
He blew a hole in its belly, and he could see out into needly cityscape of Metatron far below. He turned his gaze upward, hoping to burrow up into its brain, hoping it dreaded every moment. He could feel it capering about, feeling its death near.
That's when his Sight faded, the Nyke poison inflicted by the Hulgismen robbing him of the strength to use it any further.
* * * * *
"It stomped on something!" Dieter said from his Sensing position.
"Who do you think it just stomped on?" Syg wailed.
She stood, near panic. "I'm Wafting down!" Syg screamed. "I want down there! I'm going to help him! I'm going to stand at his side!"
"You can't Waft, Syg, the Sisters have Wafting locked so that we can't get boarded. It's standard procedure," Kilos said.
"Then tell them to turn it off!" She turned to one of the Sisters standing near. "Turn it off!" she yelled.
The Sister looked at her dangerously and shook her head.
Kilos thought for a moment that Syg was going to do something drastic; she thought she might hit the Sister. And even though her relationship with the Sisterhood had greatly improved over the weeks, hitting a Sister would be a bad, possibly fatal, move.
Fortunately, events on the surface caught everyone's attention.
The Dark Man began exploding in light—a cone of gold came bursting out of its huge belly, reaming out a large, gory hole. He staggered about.
Dav—he was inside it hitting it with Sight. And it was staggering.
The Bridge cheered—crew, Ki, the Sisters, Syg, and all.
* * * * *
Davage plummeted out of the hole in the Dark Man's belly and fell to the surface. His strength was nearly gone, the Nyke flowing through him.
He managed to soft Waft down and he lay there, unable for the moment to get up.
The Dark Man blundered about, trying to recover from Davage's attack.
Ahead, the Silver Temple had managed to get about five hundred feet off the ground, the Shadow tech tether stretching but holding. All around, transports occasionally fired, and shortly after came crashing down, blasted by the
Seeker
. Apparently the Sisters couldn't break the Cloak, and Ki was using triangulation to locate them. Effective enough: to fire their cassagrains meant certain death.
The Dark Man recovered and continued on his way toward the temple, and this time Davage had no Sight to confound him with.
He wrung his huge hands, ready to dig into the silver temple.
One of the fake Silver tech ships crashed into him with a splashy thud, sending him reeling. He grabbed it and began trying to pull it apart. It stretched and gave, like silver taffy.
It then exploded, taking half his dark head and part of his chest with it. Syg—good one! The monster fell, again taking a block or two of Metatron with him.
The temple gave a groan. Its engines were apparently beginning to falter. It needed freeing, and it needed freeing now.
He concentrated. He concentrated hard …
* * * * *
"Was that Dav?" she said, knowing how poor he was at basic telepathy. "Syg, did you get that?"
"Yes. It sounded like him!" she said, excited.
They turned their attention to the Silver Temple. They could see it was aloft. It was slowly spinning, slowly gaining altitude, but it seemed to hang there at about five hundred feet.
A black, twisted cord shackled it to the ground.
"What's that?" Ki asked.
"Shadow tech," Syg said. "A lot of it."
"Canister control!" Kilos yelled. "Fix coordinates on that Shadow tech cord and set dispersion for minimum radius!"
A moment later a canister missile shot out, snaked toward the target, and exploded.
The flash cleared. The cord was still there, still holding the temple in place.
* * * * *
Davage seethed with frustration. He saw the
Seeker
fire a canister and hit the tether, but to his horror, it was still there, still refusing to release its grip. He could hear the temple's engines starting to fail under the great strain of this protracted gravity launch.
The second fake
Seeker
skittered out of its meandering flight and dived down from the heights.
He saw it. Syg was going to crash it into the tether and explode it. Maybe that will do it. Maybe that will free the temple.
Maybe they will be free. Maybe they will triumph.
Only a bit longer, Drusilla. He could still feel her lips on his mouth.
When it was only a few hundred feet from the target, the Dark Man again!
He had sprung and intercepted the craft.
* * * * *
They watched the Dark Man, like a championship athlete, spring and grab Syg's Silver tech ship out of the air and fall to the ground with it. Almost comically the Dark Man twisted and spun about as he tried to hang onto the buzzing, careening vessel as it twisted this way and that.
"Syg, can you break it free?" Kilos asked.
"I'm trying. He's got it tight."
Kilos turned to Saari. "Helm, bring us down, five hundred feet, holding positive trim. And baffle those exhausts—we don't want to deafen the Captain!"
Saari pitched the wheel, and the ship dipped down. Immediately there was a crash as they slammed straight into a Cloaked transport, which spun down in flames and twisted metal and sunk.
Saari yelped and white-knuckled the wheel again.
"Don't worry about that," Ki said. "You just Slapped your first vessel, albeit accidentally, but no matter."
At five hundred feet, the ship leveled out and Kilos gave the order. "All Battleshot batteries, open fire!"
* * * * *
Davage watched the
Seeker
roar down from about two thousand feet to a very low, very noisy five hundred, Slapping a cloaked Ghome 7 ship along the way and bringing it down in a burning mass—more tough going to the citizens of Metatron.
At five hundred feet, he could feel the ground shake as the
Seeker's
Battleshot batteries opened up, raking the Dark Man with withering, explosive fire, making that deafening "Buurrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" sound.
A leg and foot—the one he was going to stomp Davage with—flew off. His genitals disappeared in a cloud of exploding shot. What was left of his head stretched out and then vanished, and his hands caved in, releasing Syg's silver ship.
Smoking, the
Seeker
turned to port, stopping the shot, batteries overheating in the long barrage, a swung stump from the Dark Man just missing it.
Deformed by incidental Battleshot hits, the silver ship—Syg's laughably bad attempt to re-create the outer appearance of the
Seeker—
tumbled in the air for a moment, righted itself, picked up some speed, and hit the black Shadow tech tether square in the center, where it exploded in a silver flash.
He cheered. When it counted most, Syg's little silver ship performed brilliantly.
And the Black Abbess's leash snapped with an audible
twang!
The temple was free.
But his joy was short-lived. The temple still hung there, slowly, painfully clawing for altitude and speed. It rose as lazy as a balloon on a still, windless afternoon.
And the Dark Man wasn't done—not by a long shot. A shotriddled, beheaded, emasculated relic, he stood up on one filthy leg, rising into the night air like a stinking slag heap. In the stumps of his arms, he held his leg that had just been blasted off. He raised it high into the night, and he was going to use it to club the temple back down to the ground for good. It was right in his wheel-house, where he could really lay into it. There was no way he could miss.
Davage watched in horror.
* * * * *
Ergos appeared to Davage just then, standing there in the plain.
He waved his arms, and as if shot from a cannon, the spinning Silver Temple, flush with new energy, rocketed into the sky, shone there as a silver star for a moment, and was gone.
The hammer blow from the Dark Man missed, his leg and foot slamming into a block of dark buildings, leveling them. It rose up in froth; first it shall destroy the dammed starship and then it will flatten Metatron. Nothing will live after it was done. And then it will kill this Davage; slow and hard.
* * * * *
Nobody on the bridge could really believe what they were seeing. Headless, legless, armless, the Dark Man just kept on going. The Sisters were trying to dispel him as they would any they ordinary bit of Shadow tech, but he wouldn't go.
The door to the bridge opened.
"Sisters," came a musical voice, "will you please suspend the Waftlock for me?"
* * * * *
Someone Wafted onto the plain where the temple had been. Davage watched the person appear, astounded that the Sisters had dropped the standard Waft-lock. That was something they never did for fear of being boarded.
The Dark Man saw the person. Someone small and weak. This person will be the first to die, then the ship, then Metatron, then Davage.
All will die.
All will die.
The Grand Abbess looked up at the Dark Man, utter contempt on her beautiful face.
She listened to it rage for a moment. Without a mouth, its ragings sounding like the pipings of a broken steam whistle stuck open.
"And let it be gone," she said with a wave of her arm.
The Dark Man cried out in surprise and agony. For once in its evil, wretched existence, it felt fear—the fear it had so joyously inflicted on others.
It fell back. It felt itself being torn apart.
It exploded in a cloud of soot. Soon, not even that remained.
14
Davage watched the Grand Abbess destroy the Dark Man. With a simple wave of her arm, all that darkness was gone.
Always at the last moment, he mused. Who says only the Black Hats have a love of theatrics?
Despite all the things he had learned about secret agreements and abductions and all that, he still felt an unending love and admiration for the Sisterhood. They had earned it.
He felt his strength slip again. He found he could no longer hold his CARG—it was so heavy. How had he ever been able to use this thing?
He dropped it, and it clanked into the dust. The Nyke was getting to him.
The
Seeker
wasn't far. With the Waft lock down he could simply Waft into it—but he couldn't Waft.
All he could do was stand there, alone. Soon, he couldn't even do that. He fell into the dust next to his weapon.
Poof!
Syg appeared in a Waft cloud. In a panic, she scuttled about, her blue shawl flying this way and that, her sandals flapping.
"Dav!" she screamed. "Dav!"
She was so panic-struck, she looked right past him.
"I'm here, Syg," he said weakly.
She turned, eyes a-light.
She flew into his arms. "Dav, Dav!" she sobbed. "My love, my darling, are you all right?"
She covered his face in kisses. "I've been so worried about you!"
He tried to tell her that he needed a Sister, but she was in such a state, she wasn't listening.
Holding him by the shoulders, she looked him over. "Nyked! You're Nyked. Why didn't you tell me you were Nyked?" she said, incredulous.
Dav went to answer but the fluttering Syg cut him off. "Can you Waft?"
"I don't think so."
"I can't Waft two. I will go and get a Sister. Don't move … don't move!"
She kissed him. "Don't move!" she said again and was gone.
The landscape of Metatron spun. He didn't think he had much longer.
Poof! Poof!
Syg returned, with a Sister—the one who liked him—at her side.
"Here, here he is!" Syg said to the Sister, though she could see him perfectly well.
The Sister approached Dav, sat down next to him, and looked him over. She propped him up and hugged him.
"Ohh …" she said, startled, detecting the Nykes, and began working on him.
She laid her hands on him, and smoke began pouring out of Dav's wounds, from dozens of them. Dav could feel the Nyke nested in his body, dug in, beginning to fade. He could feel his strength returning.
The Sister, her winged headdress bobbing, spoke silently to Syg. Horrified, she put her hands to her mouth.
"What is it, Syg?" Davage asked. "I'm already feeling better."
"Dav," she said, nearly in tears, "the Sister says these Nykes were set to kill immediately. You should have been dead the moment you were poisoned."
She made to embrace him, but the Sister, still working, kept having to push her away.
After a bit, the Sister smiled and adjusted her headdress back a bit. She put her hands on his face. "You … tough … Captain …"
"Pardon, Sister?" He remembered her hitting him with her thoughts in his office … and winced.
The Sister turned to Syg, who was pacing about and looked like she was close to hysteria. "She says your Gifts saved you, slowed the Nyke down, kept it from working like it should."
After a few minutes more, the Sister smiled at Dav and kissed him on the cheek.
Syg watched her dubiously.
"Thank you, Sister," Dav said. She kissed him again.
She stood, curtsied, and began walking away, pushing past Syg.
She turned and looked at Syg.
"What's that mean?" Syg asked as the Sister Wafted away. "What's that mean?"
"What did she say, Syg?" Dav asked sitting up.
