Chapter 5: Tyrant and Destroyer
Jack’s smoothly curved white seraph passed through the intra-gate and slammed full-force into the atmosphere of a planet.
A sonic boom crashed out. He flared his wings and gained altitude, rising above the barren gray crags below. Outcast machines crawled over the surface, their metal skins gleaming in the heat haze as they slowly consumed the world. They looked like fat mechanical caterpillars, each half a kilometer wide.
Tesset’s green seraph pulled through, her vents burning brightly. She rose, following his trajectory over the wasteland. Her craft faded from view, but a hypercast link kept Jack appraised of her position.
Jared Daykin’s metallic gray EN seraph and Yonu Nezrii’s smoothly curved blue Aktenai seraph followed. All four seraphs formed up and flew towards the Fellerossi aerial fortress Vigilant Sentinel.
Their target loomed over the horizon like a spindly five-point star. Four warships were docked on the tips of the star.
“The Sentinel’s gravity blades are active,” Jared said. “It’s ascending into orbit. Estimating twenty-eight minutes before it reaches the planetary fold envelope.”
“Crap,” Jack said. “We have less time than we thought.”
“Shall we abort?” Jared asked.
“No,” Jack said. “I can be in and out with time to spare.”
“Just make sure you’re clear before it reaches orbit,” Yonu said. “We don’t need to go chasing you all over Fellerossi space.”
“Again,” Tesset added pointedly.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said.
Four warships disengaged moorings and floated away from the Sentinel, their sleek, reflective hulls bright against the clear blue sky. Drive blades engaged, and the four ships sped out to meet the approaching seraphs.
The three closest ships were frigates, each armed with a centerline fusion cannon and dual torpedo tubes. They targeted Jack and fired in unison. The trio of blinding plasma spears struck his barrier and splashed off like water.
“Why, hello to you too!” Jack lined up his own forearm-mounted fusion cannon. The weapon loaded a warhead into the focusing chamber and drank in power from his barrier. It was only one-fiftieth the size of the frigate’s main gun.
He fired. The beam blared out the barrel and stabbed into the frigate’s reflective armor. Sun-hot matter ate through the whole ship and punched out the drive blades on the far side. Secondary explosions erupted from the ship’s center. The gutted warship dipped its nose down and crashed into the sun-bleached rocks below.
Jared and Yonu reached over their backs and retrieved their long-barreled rail-rifles. Chaos shunts on either side of the barrels glowed hotly, and the two pilots unleashed a rapid-fire barrage. Accelerated bolts crashed into the bows of the remaining frigates with all the kinetic force of nuclear weapons.
Two more Fellerossi frigates plummeted out of the sky.
But behind them was a dreadnought: a half-kilometer-long behemoth armed with three centerline fusion cannons, twelve torpedo banks, scores of point defense railguns, and a heavily compartmentalized hull.
It would take time to kill. Time they didn’t have.
A trio of dreadnought beams etched scorching lines across the blue sky. One of the beams slammed into Jared’s seraph. For a moment, his seraph appeared cocooned within an orb of red glass: the visual manifestation of his chaos barrier.
With reflexes only a seraph pilot could have, Jared dodged beneath the beam’s fury.
“Gah, that stung!”
“We don’t have time for these idiots,” Jack said. “Tesset, take it out!”
“Moving in!”
Tesset flew underneath the dreadnought and dropped her stealth field. Her seraph carried a slender bandolier of mnemonic armor with six innocuous canisters hung from it. She retrieved one and slapped the grenade against the dreadnought’s flat underbelly.
Tesset reengaged her stealth field and darted away. A hypercast countdown reached zero, and the grenade’s containment field collapsed. Carefully sealed anti-hydrogen ice met an equal quantity of hydrogen ice. A flare of purest white erupted underneath the dreadnought, equivalent to five thousand megatons of TNT.
The dreadnought became a black silhouette for the briefest of moments, then vaporized. A small sun birthed over the wasteland.
A shock wave struck the Vigilant Sentinel. The tip of one leg blackened and shriveled, but its armor held, even at this close range. The aerial fortress continued its ascent.
“Close in!” Jack shouted.
Dense streams of defensive fire flinched out of the Vigilant Sentinel, but its weapons were designed for interdicting warheads or boarding craft, not fending off seraphs. Railguns fired hundreds of thousands of needle-like flechettes that simply bounced off their barriers. Lasers licked across space, reflecting off the seraph defenses wherever they hit.
Only the tactical seekers and fusion torpedoes were any real threat, and each seraph carried a store of countermeasures in their conformal pods for diverting them.
Except for Jack.
He flew straight in, the eruptions of fusion torpedoes marking his terminal trajectory. He impacted with the Sentinel’s spherical core above the equator and sank giant feet and hands into it. Reflective armor warped, buckled, and shattered. Several minor explosions popped off from within the fortress.
Jack segregated his mind from the seraph and became aware of his true body within the pilot alcove. With a mental flick, he signaled the cockpit open.
The seraph did not accept the order.
A wave of concern struck him, and Jack couldn’t help but smile.
“Hey, buddy, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
The seraph’s concern faded but did not completely vanish.
The cockpit opened, and Jack stepped into the twisted ruins of several corridors, now all compressed and melted together. Jack ignited his chaos sword, cut two diagonal slashes through the debris, and forced his way through the still glowing armor.
Klaxons blared, and lights flashed. Large groups of Fellerossi in black-and-orange uniforms ran through the corridor, many of them carrying equipment in their hands or on their backs. Jack engaged his stealthsuit and slipped past. He made his way through the tightly packed jumble of narrow passages typical of Outcast vessels.
Jack could taste the hypercast chatter in the background. It was a talent of his he’d never truly understood. Vierj had possessed it, but what hypercast and chaos talents had in common remained a mystery to him. Still, if he concentrated, he could feel the hypercast links between one ship and another and could even touch them, laying their contents bare in his mind.
Hypercast traffic filled the Vigilant Sentinel, and Jack zeroed in on the largest source.
“Crap.” He started running. “Guys, you’re not going to like this!”
“What’s wrong?” Jared asked.
“Most of the traffic is coming out of the center, but I need to get closer. Heading there now.”
“We’re clearing out the Sentinel’s defenses,” Jared said. “If need be, we’ll push this hulk into a lower orbit to give you more time.”
“Good thinking.”
Jack made his way past the outer layers of the Vigilant Sentinel’s hull and found himself in a wide arcing thoroughfare. Despite the damage caused by his seraph, this part of the fortress was untouched.
Aircars flew past in ten continuous lanes, each vehicle hovering close to the ground. Most carried dull metal crates, possibly taking munitions and supplies out to the fortress’s docking legs. Empty aircars flew in the opposite direction.
Jack took a long look at the cars speeding by. They were moving awfully fast.
“Why do I keep volunteering for this garbage?” He dropped down to the street. “Running through traffic in an invisible suit. Coming on, Jack. Don’t think! Just go!”
Chaos energy surged through his veins. He sprinted across, running and dodging faster than any of the vehicles moved. He neared the far side, but the congested traffic served to block his line of sight.
A heavy aircar flew out of his blind spot. He crossed his arms and tensed every muscle in his body. Flows of chaos energy distorted around him, forming a perfect sphere of blue light.
The aircar crashed into Jack at top speed. Its power plant crumpled against his barrier. Rear-loaded cargo broke free, and huge crates tumbled out. They bounced off Jack and struck the ground, warping the metallic decking.
Two more aircars piled up behind it before everything in the thoroughfare came to an emergency halt.
Jack hadn’t moved an inch. He looked around cautiously. The cargo boxes next to him looked terribly heavy. Alarms blared and red lights flashed above the thoroughfare.
“Guys, they know I’m here.”
“Do you require extraction?” Jared asked.
“Not yet. I’m going to press my luck. Here goes!”
Jack broke into a run. He found the exit, dashed through, and took the passage deeper into the fortress. He hurried past a group of Fellerossi heading for the crash, then crossed a bridge spanning the next thoroughfares.
“I’m definitely getting close,” Jack said, feeling the hypercast chatter tickle his mind.
“What about warriors?” Tesset asked.
“Haven’t come across any.”
Jack cut his way through a sealed security door and pushed the glowing edges aside, revealing a wide domed space. A control tower sat in the middle and merged with the high ceiling above. A barren metal field separated him from the tower.
Turrets sprouted from the tower and the dome walls in metal blisters. A dozen armored aircars hovered nearby. Hundreds of Outcast warriors in assault armor crouched behind heavy barricades or levitated around the tower with flyer packs. They carried everything from anti-personnel carbines to high-powered anti-vehicle lasers.
Every gun was aimed at him. The Outcasts knew exactly where he’d go.
“OH, F—!” Jack began.
Twenty-seven crimson lasers and over two hundred projectile weapons fired at once. The security door melted like wax. His barrier shimmered around him as explosions flung him back.
Jack struck the far wall and fell into soft, heated metal. He dashed to the side, desperate to put anything between himself and all that firepower. The shooting stopped as soon as he cleared the now-oozing doorway.
“I can’t … believe … I’m alive!” Jack panted. He shook molten goo off his hands.
His stealthsuit was a charred mess stuck to his skin. Blood trickled from the old wound over his eye, and he wiped it away before it blinded him. His blood glowed bright blue.
“Jared, a little help here!”
* * *
“Coordinates confirmed.” Jared pulled above the Vigilant Sentinel. He flared his wings out and rocketed down, crashing feet first into the rounded surface.
Particles of red energy gathered in front of his fist and coalesced into a solid blade of energy. Jared stabbed the chaos dagger into the Sentinel’s outer hull, jammed his free hand into the glowing tear, and peeled back the armor.
Smart keels within the Sentinel’s hull attempted to maintain the fortress’s structural shape. They fought vainly for a few seconds before Jared ripped a patch of reflective armor completely off the hull.
Jared checked his targeting coordinates and re-verified Jack’s position. In direct contrast to most seraphs, and especially the standardized Earth Nation designs, Jared had customized his with two forward-firing railguns mounted in the head. He armed these now and selected ammunition types and firing parameters for maximum penetration.
The twin railguns spewed a continuous stream of hyper-dense kinetic bolts. These projectiles pierced through corridor after corridor, armor layer after armor layer, each bolt crudely drilling towards Jared’s intended targets.
Two hundred bolts per second blew through the roof of the control tower dome in a continuous metal sleet. The stream of fire shredded turrets, troops, and vehicles with indifference.
Jared adjusted his angle, raking the Outcast lines with fire.
“Goddamn, that’s loud!” Jack said.
“Incoming archangels!” Yonu shouted.
Jared ceased fire and looked up. Twelve fold points spread out far above the Vigilant Sentinel, each a delicate ring of refracted light. At the heart of each ring was an archangel, reflective plated armor gleaming like silver, chaos shunts burning with blue fire. They spread their large twin wings and dove towards the planet.
“Jared, I can handle what’s left!” Jack said. “Don’t let those archangels get close!”
His accelerated mind analyzed the surviving forces. Over a fifth remained.
“You know your own limits.” Jared pushed off the Vigilant Sentinel and flared out his six wings. “Tesset, keep close to Jack. We’ll handle the archangels.”
“Understood.”
The edges of Jared’s wings blurred with red light, and he shot up through the wispy high-altitude cloud cover. Yonu fell into formation, and they both sped towards the approaching archangel squadron.
Beneath them, the Vigilant Sentinel’s massive frame broke through the same clouds, continuing its slow ascent.
“Jack, we’re running out of time,” Jared said.
“I’m working on it!” Jack shouted. “Whatever happened to pushing this piece of junk out of the sky?”
“That was before archangels started showing up. We need to deal with them first.”
The squadron of archangels broke into two groups of six. One group held back with rail-rifles drawn. The other drew their chaos swords and charged straight at Jared and Yonu.
Jared docked his rail-rifle and retrieved a double-edged sword from the opposite wing cluster. The edges ignited instantly with red fire. Yonu pulled her own sword out and lit it with blue energy.
The archangel gun-line fired a continuous salvo of high velocity projectiles at the two Alliance seraphs. Several shots hit, striking Jared’s barrier in brief flashes. Each impact sent a jolt of scorching pain through his mind.
Jared reared back with his chaos sword and sped straight at the lead archangel. He and the archangel swung almost at the same moment, and their swords met in a snap-flash of competing energies.
The archangel’s blade shattered, and Jared cut through its chest, liquefying the reflective plates. He pulled the sword out the archangel’s back, leaving two uneven sections in his wake. Thick blue fluid pulsed out of its wounds, slowly turning black as the fluid’s absorbed chaos energy dissipated.
The clash had taken only a fraction of a second, but to Jared’s chaos-infused mind, every microsecond had been a separate discernible incident, and he was capable of comprehending and reacting to each of them almost instantly.
Two more archangels swooped down on him, their swords held high. Jared shot up with a quick burst of speed, flew past one, then swung into the second archangel. Their blades met, but this archangel’s weapon held.
Jared jerked to the side, spun, and slashed through the archangel’s wrist. Fluidic transfer lines, artificial musculature, and endoskeletal struts offered no resistance, and he pulled his sword free with a spray of hot conductor fluid.
Jared hewed the archangel’s chest with a quick diagonal stroke. Another archangel came at him from behind, and he dropped down faster than the archangel could track and fired his forearm-mounted cannon.
The beam of white plasma cascaded off the archangel’s barrier and threw it into a wild spiral. Jared swooped up, cleaving through the archangel’s waist as he flew past. Legs and torso floated lazily away from each other. He looped around and headed for Yonu.
She floated amongst a sea of severed limbs, shorn wings, and expanding fluid clouds. Her unblemished seraph dueled with an archangel, their swords clashing and spitting energy.
Jared pumped a cannon shot into the archangel. His beam pierced its barrier and struck one of the wings. Armor melted and the wing warped, sending the craft into a wild tumble.
Yonu cut it down. She formed up with Jared, the archangel splitting in two behind her.
Another rail-rifle volley sparked against the two seraph’s barriers. Jared grunted from the sudden feedback. In the cockpit, burns formed on his true body’s skin.
“Close and engage.” Jared and Yonu sped towards the last six archangels.
Unlike the first group, these were armed with rail-rifles, fusion cannons, and conformal missile pods. They still had swords, allowing them to engage seraphs at close range, but that was not their primary function.
So it surprised Jared when they turned and ran. Veketon’s archangels did not feel fear as far as anyone knew. They fought hard and fought intelligently, but they did not run from a fight.
Not unless ordered to, Jared thought. His overactive mind worked through the possible explanations.
“Ahead of us,” Yonu said. “Second archangel squadron folding. Looks like they’re trying to link up.”
A fresh squadron of twelve archangels pulled away from their fold distortions and shook out into a line abreast.
Jared checked their entry coordinates. They’d entered the system safely clear of the planet’s gravity well. Too safely. If the enemy wanted to aid the aerial fortress, they would fold in as close to the Vigilant Sentinel as possible.
Therefore, that was not Veketon’s goal.
Jared nodded grimly.
“We’re being led away from the Sentinel,” he said. “Fall back to it, now!”
Jared turned around and accelerated towards the planet surface. Beneath them, the Vigilant Sentinel rose through the rapidly thinning atmosphere.
“Jack, the Sentinel is going to be fold-capable soon. What’s your status?”
“Delayed! It’s taking me a while to kill all these jerks!”
Jared detected several long range threats in addition to the eighteen archangels above them. Twelve orbital weapon platforms were shifting their orbits and converging on the Sentinel’s expected position.
“Things are getting worse out here, Jack. Hurry it up!”
“I’m trying!”
A pair of fold points spasmed open halfway been Jared and the Vigilant Sentinel. Ripples of light expanded around two lithe human shapes, one nearly all white, the other nearly all black. Instead of wings, large halos spun behind their backs at high velocities, disjoined from the main body. Patterns of arcs, circles, and moon phases scrolled up the legs, forearms, sides of the torso, and within the halo-wings.
“Thrones!” Yonu shouted. “THRONES!!!”
Veketon’s white throne descended towards the Vigilant Sentinel. He held a portal lance in his left hand, the shaft’s continuous script burning with blue fire.
“Jack, incoming throne!” Jared shouted.
“Well, crap!”
Quennin’s black throne turned towards Jared and shot straight at him. She held a long chaos glaive with both hands, her vent-like shunts radiating black energy with a ghostly green nimbus.
“Deploying reinforcements,” Seth said, his voice impossibly calm.
An intra-gate formed near the thrones, and seven seraphs poured through, Seth in the lead of Knight Squadron. Almost immediately, another two full squadrons of archangels folded in and swarmed over Knight Squadron. The other eighteen archangels waiting above now dove into the atmosphere, heading for Jared and Yonu.
“We need to regroup with Seth,” Jared said. “Follow me!”
“Right behind you.”
Quennin flew out to interdict them. Yonu fired her fusion cannon, but the beam splashed off the throne’s barrier.
“Run home little seraphs,” Quennin said.
“Traitor!” Yonu spat. “We’re not leaving until Veketon is dead!”
“And I will not let you harm him!” Quennin flew straight in, chaos glaive at her side, black armor gleaming in the sunlight.
Jared charged her and swung with all the speed and power at his command. She countered, glaive clashing against his sword in a flash of black and red energy.
Blistering pain danced up Jared’s arm. Transfer lines overpressurized, bursting armored skin open and leaking fluid into space. Yellow warnings lit up in his mind, cautioning that his forearm’s main endoskeletal struts were cracked in three places. Internal systems closed off the ruptured lines and bypassed the damage.
Jared pushed the pain out of his mind and raised his arm for another strike.
Quennin slashed across with her glaive, and Jared barely brought his sword down in time to meet the attack. Sword met glaive with terrible force, and he tumbled back from the throne.
Yonu dove in. Quennin drew her glaive upward, and the two smashed against each other. The impact threw Yonu’s arm wide, and Quennin sliced across, cleaving through her forearm and clipping her shoulder.
“Yaaahhhhh!!!”
Yonu’s horrible scream filled his ears. But even as pain must have wracked her mind and burns savaged her body, she did not lose discipline. She pulled away with a burst of speed, granting Jared the time he needed to come to her aid.
Quennin saw him coming and spun her glaive, blocking the attack and forcing his sword high. With her free hand, she lunged with long talons edged in chaos energy.
Three fingers struck his chest, cutting shallow grooves through his armor. In the cockpit, three lines sizzled across his true chest. His i-suit reported deep burns and automatically extended nano-cilia to repair the wounds.
Jared jerked away and crash-launched every munition in his inventory. Thirty fusion torpedoes and sixty tactical seekers blasted out of his conformal pods in one tremendous salvo and detonated.
The ordnance bloomed into a small sun and flung Quennin back.
Jared and Yonu regrouped, keeping their distance.
Quennin emerged from the fading explosion, her throne undamaged.
“Those archangels are getting close,” Yonu said, her voice quiet and shaky.
“We still need to reach Seth.”
But despite their weakened state, Quennin did not attack. Instead, she turned sharply and accelerated towards the Vigilant Sentinel, the edges of her halo-wings burning with urgency.
“Someone get over here!” Tesset shouted. “I can’t stop them on my own! They’re going to kill Jack!”
* * *
Jack cut through the Outcast warriors in a whirlwind of sword swipes and crackling blue energy. He sprinted past them, their hewn bodies still slumping to the ground. He didn’t have the hypercast buffer because there was no buffer! The hypercast traffic of the entire fortress had been faked!
Vek beat us again!
“Tesset, what’s your status?” Jack shouted.
“Not good! Get out here NOW!”
Emergency airlocks had sealed off his seraph’s “dock.” Jack cut through one and pushed past it. Air blasted into space. Once free of the door’s wreckage, he ran past mangled sections of the hull and climbed towards his seraph’s perch.
Out here, huge sections of the hull were missing. The blackness of space gave way to the wide dome of the planet below and the long lens of the galactic core above.
In between those two visual cues, a white throne flew straight at him.
“There you are,” Veketon linked.
Jack tried to shout an obscenity, but his lungs were empty.
Veketon landed on the Sentinel, sending a tremendous shudder reverberating through the fortress. Jack grabbed hold of a twisted section of wall to regain his balance. He stared into the throne’s face, into the eyes of its white mask.
“A pity it ends so simply.” Veketon raised his portal lance. The tip shone with terrible blue light.
But before he could plunge the lance into the fortress, Tesset materialized behind him. She raised her rail-carbine’s bayonet and brought it swiftly down on Veketon’s primary halo-wing.
The blade sparked against the halo-wing as if it were a grind stone, throwing Veketon’s thrust off course. The portal lance stabbed into the Sentinel several decks below Jack’s position. Veketon pulled the lance free and swung his weapon in a wide reaching arc.
Tesset dashed back, but the tip of the lance grazed her rail-carbine. Arcane energy flickered outward, and the rail-carbine blew apart in her hands.
Tesset! Jack’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Veketon thrust sharply. The portal lance skewered her hand and bored through her arm, scattering pieces of armor, artificial musculature, and energized conductor fluid into space.
“Aaaahhh!!!”
Jack heard her scream over their hypercast link, and he wasn’t the only one. Seth broke off from the archangel swarm and dove towards the Vigilant Sentinel, but there was no way he would make it in time. Veketon reeled back for a killing blow, even as Tesset’s seraph faded from view.
But before Veketon could strike, Jack’s seraph tackled him from behind, shocking Jack and everyone else. He hadn’t had time to call it in, and yet the seraph was exactly where it needed to be, wrestling this terrible foe away from Tesset.
The white seraph held onto one of Veketon’s halo-wings and pulled him violently back, then grabbed the portal lance. Fountains of barrier energy erupted around both hands, and Jack felt his seraph’s pain as surely as if it were his own. He saw what it saw, felt what it felt.
The berserker seraph flared its wings, fired them at full power, and drove Veketon into the Vigilant Sentinel’s warped side. The immaculate white throne sank into the hull, halo-wings spinning and shredding through level after level. Veketon struggled to free himself from the wreckage.
Come on, buddy! Jack mouthed.
The seraph turned to him.
It smashed a giant white hand into the hull next to Jack, fingers digging through armor as if it were soft butter. Jack ran onto the hand, and his seraph pulled him to the opening cockpit.
Veketon freed himself from the Sentinel’s hull, drew his lance behind him, and charged. He swung, but the seraph caught it as Jack jumped into the cockpit.
The lines between seraph and pilot blurred. The discord between their shared minds and disparate bodies dimmed to nothing. They were one and the same. The seraph was Jack, and he was the seraph.
Jack held the portal lance tight, heat and pain scorching his palm. With his left arm, he summoned a long sword of blue chaos energy and slammed the blade against Veketon’s lance, knocking it away. With both arms free, Jack let the flows of chaos energy converge over his right forearm, forming a large kite-shaped shield of energy.
“Now now, Vek. Be a good boy and fight fair.”
Throne and seraph floated across from each other, circling above the Sentinel’s ruined core.
“You know, I actually prefer it this way.” Veketon spun the lance and readied it behind him.
“Then show me what you’ve got!” Jack charged. He slashed his huge energy sword down, and Veketon blocked with the lance. Wild energy sparked from the contact point. The two weapons ground against each other, neither possessing the advantage.
Jack pushed in and stabbed Veketon with edge of his shield, but only grazed the throne’s armor. Veketon rotated the lance in a tight arc, shoving Jack’s attack away and bringing the lance edge around. Jack fell back and blocked with his sword. The two weapons clashed again and released a powerful shock wave. Huge chunks of the Sentinel’s hull tore loose.
“Behind you!” Tesset shouted.
Jack spun around to find Quennin diving at him, chaos glaive held high over her head. He flared his wings and pulled away. The edge of her glaive ricocheted off his shield as she passed, and she landed heavily on the Sentinel before launching herself again.
“Stay hidden, Tesset. I’ll handle these two.”
“No complaints … here …” she said between pained breaths.
The two thrones circled him, and he fought to keep both in front. They clashed over and over again, each time releasing waves of energy that tore the Sentinel apart. Two of its docking legs cracked off and the once spherical core now looked like the remains of a hatched egg.
Quennin came at him from the right and Veketon from the left, their swift weapons turning into vivid arcs of light. Quennin’s glaive smashed against his shield, and Veketon’s lance crashed into his sword.
Jack shoved Quennin’s attack away, turned, and closed with Veketon. He bashed the lance high with his shield and drew his sword upward. The blade’s burning edge cut across Veketon’s chest, and he fell back.
Quennin came in behind him, and Jack spun around, raising his shield. Her chaos glaive skipped off in a spray of black electricity, and Jack reached out and grasped it tightly.
Armor on his palm melted and the musculature underneath crisped, but he pulled Quennin in by her own weapon and plunged his sword into her shoulder. The outer armor liquefied, and Jack forced the blade deeper into the throne’s flesh. With enough time, he knew he could cut her arm off.
But that was time Jack did not have. Veketon charged in and forced Jack to retreat. The three titans battled on. Jack fought hard and fast, adrenaline and the fever of battle filling him. He and two thrones flew about in crazy orbit, clashing and breaking and clashing again.
The rest of the battle continued to play out. Seraphs clashed with archangels as weapon platforms approached and Fellerossi warships folded into orbit. But that distant conflict paled in comparison to this clash of two thrones and one seraph.
Try as he might, Jack sensed no give, no weakening in his opponents. They made no fatal mistakes, and they fought just as hard and desperately as he did. They did not tire, did not lax, even as he pounded at their defenses and beat back every one of their attacks.
Worse, he felt his own strength waning, and he realized that, as powerful as he was, he wouldn’t win. Not alone. He needed Seth by his side. Only together could they defeat these two.
“Come on, Seth! Where are you?”
Jack opened a tactical view of the battle and found an open intra-gate high above the planet. The last seraph fled through, and the intra-gate winked out of existence.
He was all alone.
“Uh oh …”
“Jack, I’m getting you out of there!” Seth shouted. “Stand by for intra-gate!”
For long seconds, Jack was the only Alliance seraph still in the system. Then a flat white circle formed in front of him, and he sped through. It vanished as soon as he cleared it.
Jack let his sword and shield disperse into a shower of light. He stretched out his wings and floated lazily towards the others. It hadn’t occurred to him just how tired he was until that moment. His hands throbbed from their contact with the portal lance, and he looked down at the blackened, blistering armor over his palms.
The squadron was in tatters. Jared, Yonu, Tesset, and three members of Knight Squadron docked first, each needing medical attention. Nothing life threatening, but it had been over a year since they’d received a beating like this.
Tesset …
Jack opened her biometric readout in a corner of his mind. His wings twitched when he saw the huge splash of red. Tesset’s entire right arm would have to be reconstructed by the Judgment’s medical ward. The flesh was so ruined, her i-suit had actually amputated what was left and sealed off the stump.
“Hey, Tesset. You okay?”
It was a really stupid question, but it was only one that came to mind.
“I’m … okay … all things considered,” she said, her pauses caused by forceful breathing. “Painkillers are starting to work their magic. I love painkillers.”
“Yeah. They’re great, aren’t they?”
Tesset let out a long, slow sigh.
“I just want to say thanks, Tesset. You really saved me out there.”
“What are … friends for?”
“Yeah. Too true.”
Tesset’s seraph shut down, and she cut the channel. She was already inside the Judgment, being raised into her bay where a medical team no doubt awaited her arrival.
Jack approached the Judgment from underneath and flew up into his bay.
“You really showed a lot of initiative today, you know that?”
The seraph was silent.
“Yes, I know. We’ve worked separately before, but never anything too complicated. I mean, you grabbed Veketon from behind and threw him!”
The seraph said nothing.
Jack let out a content sigh, his thoughts falling on Tesset.
“You certainly know who to protect, don’t you?”
An emotion flowed from the seraph to his mind. The seraph did not speak, but if it had, it would have chosen the words: Of course.