Chapter 24: Fugitives
"'Your assistance is unnecessary' the gall of that thing," Hoove hissed, almost inaudible amongst the dry winds scouring the yellow canyon, "Denebria is ours." His subordinates, a commando of rough warriors in patchwork armor, simply checked their weapons in silence. Fen slipped the battery casing on her shock-spear home with a satisfying click, a smile making her scarred face seem a little kinder.
Mom! Havna, her daughter, had clung to her leg, thin face full of reproach, grimy fingers squeezing the polymer-mail of Fen's battle-skirt. Stay! It had hurt like setting a broken bone to leave her.
"Fen!" Hoove's compound eyes reflected her a dozen times as he scowled from beneath his black kabuto helmet. "You lead Dref and Five-Eye in first. Find the outlaws and wait for me, Uggo, and Brova."
"Six on five, boss?" Fen stood and rested her shock-spear on her shoulder. "Sure you don't want us to skragg one of 'em if we can?"
"No deaths," Hoove snorted, "none, get it, soft-skin? When that thing sees I've collared his prey, I want to drive the point home." His double-jointed finger stabbed a jaundiced claw at her. "No deaths!"
Hoove, unpleasant as the long-toothed mutant was, commanded the fighters of the Regula mountain ranges. His warriors were housed in the high ruins, far above of the fetid burg of Quagmi, where the stink of the sunset gases didn't reach. Havna's lungs wouldn't last in their muggy hovel but if Fen could find favor with the mountain warlord, her daughter wouldn't need to breath anything but clean air.
"Live and squirming," Fen nodded, bored eyes flickering to movement over Hoove's right shoulder, "be back in a…" Fen's mouth fell open, Hoove's flat nostrils flared once.
"Back in a' what?" He turned around and hissed, the green skin of his forearms bunching with angry muscles. "Vat-grown trash."
A figure in white ascended from the canyon floor, looking like a phantom as the wind flapped his white robes. However, gray winged symbol of Horde Prime on his tabard was all too real. Delicate hands drew back the white hood, slim green eyes, lacking any kind of pupil, roved over them, Fen shuddered a the serenity on its batlike face. The same face it shared with a billion copies and the master of the universe.
"Hoove of the Regula Mountains," the clone had a seasoned killer's gentleness, "I informed you that your help was not necessary. Why have you come here?"
"Cloned scum," Hoove whispered, sibilant with his disgust, then, raising his voice, replied, "these mountains have been mine to protect for nigh on fifty years, Horde, and I intend to keep them free of criminals. I will see this through."
Fen wondered idly if Hoove's pride would get her killed today, but she remembered Havna's coughing fits each morning and took her place at her leader's side, spear-butt touching the ground and tip crackling with electricity. The clone gave them all another blank look before lifting his hand to the clear blue sky in a strange beckoning gesture.
"Very well," the clone said, unperturbed, "I have no time to make you leave, as it is, for I must depart this planet by nightfall. Your assistance, and disobedience, will be noted in appropriate measure." Hoove gargled and spat a gob down into the canyon, nodding.
"We'll get mucky," Hoove jerked his head towards Uggo and Brova, "stick with them two, Master Horde, and lets-FLOGG'S TOENAILS!" Hoove sputtered when whole world shook and a cloud of powdered rock burst forth from behind the whiteclad Horde clone. Fen cowered back and flipped her faded blue halfcloak over her face. The brief wind settled, and she beheld a spike of white steel driven deep into the rocks not ten yards away.
A long umbilical cord of smoke spiraled up into the sky, vanishing beyond sight at the highest point, before the wind dispersed it. The Horde clone moved his sharp fingers across a a part of the surface and the spike hummed softly.
"They'll know we're here!" Hoove coughed from the lingering dust.
"It will not help them," the clone replied, Fen blinked at a little burst of green light above the ground in front of her. Her head reeled momentarily at the appearance of a tall, ivory android with a single triangular green eye. Its left arm flattened outward like a diamond shield and the right ended in a fierce steel claw. The machine marched smartly to an apparently random spot behind the clone.
"Stars," gasped Five-Eye, "look at that…"
Two dozen flickering green lights later and a small platoon of sleek Horde automatons stood silently at attention. Fen, who'd seen a bit more than her comrades, still gaped like a landlocked fish at the display of technological power. Those bots had come down from some unseen ship or station via a teleportation string, connected between the spike and its launching point.
Unfathomable distance covered in an instant. She thought of the long trip into the low canyons, the nights she slept with her back to the rocks to avoid a dagger in the dark. The long days her Havna had to cook her own meager supper and go to sleep with no story to help her forget the mean world for a while.
Her mind wandered further towards the dehumidifier she'd scavenged and repaired with a whole summer's wages of spear-work. The loud, weak machine keeping her daughter's bad lungs from sickening in the humid marsh. The pain in her fingers brought her back to the present, aching from how they tightened around her spear shaft. Envy and hate and desperation all bubbled inside her like the tar pits that inched closer every year to Quagmi.
The Horde had given them this suffering and, old gods forgive her, they were also the only chance to escape it.
"You shall lead the attack," the clone told Hoove, pulling its hood back up over its slicked-down shock of white hair, "and demonstrate this Denebrian talent for violence that so many, apparently, fear." 'Not us' was the Horde clone's unsubtle message. The Horde ruled supreme. As they had long before Fen was born and would long after her little Havna was an old grandmama.
Horde Prime was immortal. A living god some said. Fen didn't know about that, but he certainly never lost a fight. Or a war come to think on it. Not her worry. She didn't daydream of power anymore. And had no ambitions beyond her daughter's future.
"Of course, I'll lead," Hoove grunted, "these are my mountains."
"On Horde Prime's planet," the clone said with no more inflection or concern than Fen had heard from any of the white-robed creatures in her life. The battle-bots fell into perfectly synchronized step behind their organic master, making Hoove's band of ragtags look even worse by comparison. Overwhelming force and limitless resources. Fen had the awful vision of a million such machines, led by a thousand clones, burning the marsh while her Havna clung to her in some dank hiding place. Choosing between facing their weapons and risking the black nightmare of the swamps.
"Move it," drool leaked around Hoove's over-large teeth, "or are you backing out, Fen?"
"Lead the way, Glorious General," she mumbled, "onwards to legend."
"Shut up," the mutant flipped his cloak aside and drew a much-maintained blaster that he held with the barrel pointed to the morning sky. His commando of hired killers walked behind him, overlapping the Horde clone and his small detachment of robots to approach the lowering mountain.
Abandoned rails, their crossties long disintegrated, snaked outwards from the yawning mouth of the old mines like pair of thin, metal tongues. Hoove waved Fen in front of the commando with an impatient gesture of his blaster. The prime position with most reward and, it followed, greatest risk.
"Gonna tell us who we're chasing?" Hoove's teeth made the question mumbled as it carried over his shoulder to the clone.
"Fugitives," replied the unseen face beneath the spectral hood. Fen wanted to stand on her dignity as a veteran soldier. No-one in their right mind goes into a fight blind.
But then no-one in their right mind badgers a Horde clone.
"Flogg save Denebria," Hoove grunted, "go, Fen." She crackled the air with a press of the button on her shockspear, testing it one last time before the fight. "Nothing fancy, heartbreakers, but don't be sloppy either. We want them alive."
Fen advanced, the band across her helmet flickering into a forward light as it sensed the passage from day into darkness. A pair of beams from Hoove's kabuto expanded visibility by another hundred yards without casting Fen's shadow. The high winds had gone from overbearing to hair-raising as they faded back behind her and turned shrill. Ghosts wailing after her, cursing her or warning her.
"You're sweating, Fen," Hoove hissed every 's' in his words, "you've gotten soft since that brat came along."
"Ask Uggo how he manages with a pack of a dozen," Fen replied, "I've just gotten more careful, Hoove. Which we could all learn to do." She did not want to think about Havna right now, to picture her waiting for mama to come home and being alone forever. As Fen had been when her father left on spearwork long ago and got himself killed.
"Getting old then," Hoove said, his lights climbing into an open cavern ahead of them. He gestured for the halt. "Uggo." Fen glanced to her left as the violet mutant shuffled forward. His mandibles clicked around a few words to Hoove and he slithered his left arm, which ended in an octopus tendril, into the haversack on his broad back. He withdrew a large, egg-shaped object that began to blink on the top.
"They're here," Hoove sniffed the stale, still air of the old mine, "they're waiting to surprise us." Uggo buzzed a countdown.
"One skull-moon, two skull-moon, three skull-moon." Dref, an off-worlder descendant like Fen, settled next to her left shoulder to fix a jagged knife onto the barrel of her lovingly painted scattergun. Thorned plants from her own homeworld and a name in a language nobody else in the commando spoke.
"Don't shoot me this time," Fen whispered, "I'm still carrying some of it in my backside." Dref's mohawk was a shark's fin in the darkness as she turned a smile on Fen.
"Wide target," she teased, "hard to miss." Fen founder herself smiling too. Before Havna and after her father, this was the closest she ever came to family. These beasts and their weapons. "Don't die, Fen."
"Well, now that you've told me not to…"
"Shut it," Hoove said, not harshly at all, "and get on with it, Uggo."
"Ten skull-moon!" The egg-shaped explosive sailed out of the lights and into the darkened cavern. A bubble of orange energy expanded across the tightly packed group of warriors, pulsing from the wristcuff Brova, the third and final of the non-mutants in their commando, had raised high like he was calling down a god's power.
The explosion was silent. The shock barely there. Inside the bubble, Fen could hear her own heartbeat loud in her ears.
"Ten more seconds," Five-Eye grumbled, "this takes forever."
"You build the party-favors next time," Uggo's mandibles snapped.
"Quiet," Hoove crooned, "quiet now, heartbreakers, we've almost got them."
They crouched there for a thousand years while the smoke dissipated.
"Go!" Uggo's had put a spiked ball on his tendril to make a morningstar out of his arm. "Go! Go!"
Brova's shield vanished, letting in the long, earth-delving echo of the explosion to buffet them and the acrid salt-peter taste of the air slip inside their mouths. Fen shot forwards off her back foot, headlight carving the darkness and vanishing smoke. Two lights joined hers, Uggo and Dref at either hand, like always.
"Hex on you!" Dref filled the main mining spiral with her scream as they charged. Fen's spearhead crackled as she waved a wide arc through the dust clouds the bomb shook loose. She jabbed for whatever stumbling shell-shocked creature might first enter her reach.
Nothing stirred within the upward drifting smoke, the commandos stood on long platform that hung halfway out into the nothingness of the primary shaft. It was an enormous elevator meant for moving seismic tons of ore up from the depleted mine. Their headlamps scoured every railing, every decaying pile of ancient machinery, and found nothing.
No fugitives. Not a one.
Save for the distant rattle of chains as the shockwave of the explosive ran up and down the inside of the mountain, the spiral was undisturbed. Metal groaned overhead and Fen looked up to see a sliver of daylight between hangar-doors rusted half-shut in disuse. In another age, when hope and possibility still existed on this blighted world, or in the whole blighted universe, ships had hauled ore in and out through those doors to soar low above the mountains day and night.
When her eyes adjusted, she glared at any obvious hiding places around the platform. A silent jab from Dref's elbow directed her to caged housing around the main lift controls. They approached in the shape of a wary scoprion. Dref's scattergun on point, the knife-bayonet as a claw, and Fen's shockspear poised to pierce and debilitate like the stinger.
They stepped around the last blind section of space, tensing briefly before seeing the caging empty aside from a foot of accumulated dust. Fen blew out a lungful of air, planting the butt of her spear hard against the platform. She felt slightly foolish.
"Well," Uggo burbled from the other side of the platform, "I'm starting to think we're alone." Hoove made a non-committal attempt at silencing him and turned his glowing eyes on the old landing pad. Fen nudged Dref forward, ignoring the protest that nothing they couldn't see by now would be there.
"Humor him," Fen grumbled, "or we won't get paid." Five-Eye and Brova dipped their headlamps into the shaft itself and described a collection of underhanging catwalks that must've been used for maintenance storage. Hoove barked an order in their direction and considered the entrance. Fen could feel their leader debating how to address the clone after this failure.
Dref strolled towards the landing, not bothering to keep her complaints to herself.
"A wild yark chase! There had better be some coin at the end of this-"
Her next words cut off in a heavy, metallic clang that rang off into the high shadows of the shaft and left behind a low groan muffled by Dref's hands. Her scattergun dropped from her hands to hang her waist, tapping against her hip. Fen watched in bemusement as her old friend hopped from foot to foot squealing.
"Myb nobe!" She spun about and confronted Fen with teary eyes widened by shock. "Therb sobthig!" Fen reached out with her spear, gasping when it burned the off of some invisible energy field. She caught a glimpse of white metal that disappeared.
"A cloaking device!" The rest of the commando hurried over to them. Uggo and Five-Eye began to wave their scanners and the cloaking shimmered. An outline formed against the empty air but vanished as quickly as it appeared.
"We've got nothing new or powerful enough to decloak this thing," Hoove snapped before directing them all into a loose semi-circle, "keep your eyes on it and the clone will have to send in one of his droids." There was an eager cruelty to the mutant's voice. "We've got them."
Fen took some cotton from her pouch for Dref. Her comrade jammed it up both of her bleeding nostrils with a wet snort and they fell back into the scorpion-stance. Brova and Five-Eye flipped an old table with an enormous bang that set Fen's heart racing. Uggo hovered at Hoove's shoulder, mandibles clicking in excitement. They all held their weapons close, falling into old tactics that split them into two sets of four and one set of three.
Fen blinked.
One set of three?
The cloaked old man standing behind Brova and Five-Eye leaned around their broad profiles to stare curiously into the empty air. Fen made a hiccupping noise and pointed. Dref sputtered. Hoove growled inquisitively. Brova glanced their way and then shrieked in surprise as he saw the oldster.
Fen crossed the floor in three long strides to rest her shock-spear an inch from the old man's long white beard. He turned in her direction, a curious frown under his gray moustaches, to search her face with a little twitch of bushy, gray eyebrows. His long hair, white like his beard, was held back with an old, sweat-stained strip of red cloth.
Fen looked him over for a weapon and her mouth fell open in shock at what she saw. In his arms, pillowed by his overlong sleeves of brown rough-spun, was a small collection of rocks. Half a dozen at least. The old man made a noise and bent forward, Fen thought momentarily he was bowing to her but he instead cocked his head like he was listening.
Listening to the rocks.
"Oh, they want to be introduced," his voice was reedy, friendly, and a million miles away from the dark mine shaft filled with armed warriors, "yes, of course, my friends. This is X8-3JK8." He nodded at one of the rocks. "Next to her is Perseid 1-4-3. Over here is The Hundred Year Herald of Grozin. These two at my elbow are the Royalties Prophesied. Twins, if you can believe that! And this shy one here, the little one, didn't get a name that I know of, but he likes to be called Robert." He introduced the rest of the rocks. The old man smiled happily at Fen. "They're all very excited to meet you, my friend!" He had a slight lisp that added a silliness to each word. Fen couldn't tell if she was being mocked or if the man was simply mad.
"Are we all just standing here?!" Hoove's huge teeth clicked as he yelled. "Brova! Cuff the outlaw!"
"Oh my, an outlaw?!" The old man turned around and cringed backwards. Fen whipped her spear away and nearly subtracted from Five-Eye's nickname by one. The mutant hissed at her, and she was too busy catching the man to defend her honor. The oldster cradled his rocks protectively and barreled past her with a surprising strength. "Oh! Oh, everyone! These fellows say there are outlaws in this place! Quick, back on the ship! ROBERT!" He squealed the name of a rock as it tumbled from his arms.
"Dref!" Hoove ordered her into action. Fen's battlemate tackled the man at the waist and he wailed inconsolably as his rocks went scattering across the platform. The commando crowded around the old man in an instant, babbling questions and demanding answers. Fen felt the barest twinge of sympathy as the elderly fool put his wrinkled hands to his ears and shouted at his rocks that they should not be afraid, that he'd not let them get lost.
Uggo's bellow of warning cut through the din to tell them that the cloaking device had suddenly turned off. It had left behind a sleek, white Horde starship. Fen stared at it slack-jawed, wondering how it ever could have gotten inside past the broken doors. Light that had bent around the hidden ship now gleamed from its dagger shaped body and glinted along the black metal outlining landing gear and hatches.
The fugitives had stolen a Horde starship. Who were they fighting? She nearly laughed in shock upon realizing that the crazy old man with the rocks was part of this ambitious find. How could he have…and just like that Fen felt cold dread run down her back.
"Where's his crew!" It was not a question so much as an alarm that burst from her lips. "His crew! Where's the rest of his crew!"
"Call the clone," Five-Eye shouted.
"Shut it!" Hoove wrestled the old man to his feet, taking fistfuls of his robe to shake him like a dog with a rat. "And you! Where are your friends?" Hoove rolled his glowing eyes as the old man pointed to the floor. "Not the rocks, you buffoon! Tell me where the other fugitives are or I'll…ah!" The old man had slapped at Hoove's face. The mutant shook him into stillness. "Someone find the rocks! See if he likes watching them go falling down the mine shaft!"
"No!" The old man's slim coherence grabbed onto that. "No-no! Don't you dare!" He wriggled and kicked his grimy, bare feet. "Don't you dare! Leave my friends alone!" He yelled names all at once. "Herald! Perseid! Help! They're going to hurt the others!"
A strange taste materialized in Fen's mouth as the man shouted. His voice changed somehow, picked up a secondary tone, and the dread in her surged all at once. She yelped as something slammed into her shoulder. A second something skimmed sparks off Hoove's helmet and made him reel away from the old man.
Their captive wriggled between Brova and Dref to freedom. They were busy covering their faces in pain as the two somethings banged off their foreheads. Fen followed the objects with disbelieving eyes as they clattered to the metal platform.
Two of the old man's rocks. They trembled where they sat and rose swiftly into the air to circle each other in an expanding orbit that drove the commando back with cries of terror. It was Uggo, in his burbling voice, that spoke a word that was half-awe and half-terror.
"Magic!"
The magic rocks zipped at them like angry swamp-wasps. Five-Eye yelped, clutching at his groin. Dref squealed and shook her fingers as the other rock punished her for going for her scattergun.
The old man had vanished. Fen backed away, searching for him, determined to make him stop his spell. Flying rocks. It was too much to wrap her head around and it made her angry. Angry was good. Angry would save them. She ducked a rock that buzzed by her ear with alarming speed.
The others were improvising shields from bits of machinery. Brova swung hard with an old railing strut and cracked one of the rocks like a stickball batter. The rock sailed into the darkness and Brova's roar of triumph ended in a nauseous groan as it soared right back out at the same speed to catch him in the stomach.
Fen shook off her wonder and spied the hunched form of the old wizard. A wizard! A real-life wizard like in the old times! Havna would be so jealous. She'd never forgive Fen for not taking her along to see him. Fen gave a cry of effort and launched herself forward off her back foot.
She reached for him, her shock-spear held in her off hand, ready to grab him by his white hair. She reached, reached, and would have lost her entire hand when the sword fell, if she hadn't tripped lightly on something. One of the rocks skittered away from under her boot. The old man chased it with a cry of 'See, there's your twin! It's alright, my friend!'.
Fen lay flat on her stomach, neck arched away from the edge of a single-sided short blade that had appeared before her, sunk halfway into the metal of the platform. Her face stared back at her from the flat, terrified. She'd have sliced her shoulder open on it if she'd moved forward a few more centimeters.
A second reflection appeared past her own to approach with a ghost's silent steps. She saw a flash of red, dark umber, and a splash of blue. The sword was wrenched free, slicing off a few strands of her hair as it passed, and Fen closed her eyes. The blow she expected never followed. She turned her head upwards and looked on a figure like death itself.
Monster's feet, she thought at first, boots she realized a moment later. Chitinous red skin with bright white talons, matching vicious, clawed gauntlets on either hand. A maroon tabard worn over dark, wiry muscles tattooed in white hieroglyphics. Featured prominently was a three-pronged shape that matched the symbol on his tabard.
A grim set to his clean-shaven jaw, made worse by the blank, bowl-shaped black glass eyeballs of his red helmet. It was the head of the creature that had provided his gauntlets and boots. A half-skull strengthened with riveted metal slats and all painted red. Wires ran sleekly along the sides, vanishing into what must've been a complex HUD.
His sword was already sheathed over one shoulder. He was that quick. Fen raised her free hand in supplication.
Then, she snapped the shock-spear forward with the other. She was fast and he wasn't faster than her, she was sure of that, but still, somehow, he caught the haft of her spear, just below the deceptive point where the shock did not reach, as if they'd rehearsed it a million times. As if he'd seen her fight a dozen battles and knew her every trick.
He pulled the weapon from her limp fingers and gave her single, sharp kick with his taloned boot. She came off the ground to sail another ten feet before slamming against a railing, coughing against the pain, curling inwards on instinct.
Uggo rushed the new enemy and the red warrior turned fluidly to first jab the mutant with the stolen shock-spear then slap him down with a deft flourish of the wrist. All with one hand. The red warrior turned away to walk for the entrance.
Uggo was mewling and twitching on the ground as Brova leapt over him, swinging his makeshift bat down at the red warrior's head. A clawed gauntlet caught Brova's belt and wrenched him out of the air straight into the ground. The red warrior's stride never broke, and he stepped down hard on Brova's wrist as the bounty hunter sprawled, sending a crackling noise into the air that preceded a wail from Fen's comrade. With that, the red warrior tossed her shock-spear away like a flimsy toy. It felt like mockery as it landed before her.
The red warrior did not fight. He simply did not allow anyone to be his opponent. Fen pulled herself up and grabbed her spear. Rage and fear working to eclipse the pain. The stranger paused at the entrance and stood with his feet shoulder-length apart, arms folded. Fen roared her challenge and the stranger cocked his head to one side.
This was to admit one of old man's rocks so it could slam Fen's forehead at top speed. She reeled like she'd drunk too much, and someone caught her in a hurried embrace, laughing through a vocal modulator.
"Easy, buddy," the voice buzzed, "that one got you good, huh? Listen, he's doing you a favor. You don't want to get involved with that guy when he's in a mood. Which is pretty much always. Let's steady you." Fen gulped down a wave of nausea as she was put to her feet. Hoove, Five-Eye, and Dref were making a lot of noise somewhere. Brova and Uggo were still on the ground. This wasn't the old man.
The face that greeted her was grinning with a mouth mostly filled by bright, shiny metal teeth, and one or two real yellowing ones. A stubbled chin, a bent nose, and the bottom of scarred cheeks offered a human counterpoint to the rest of his non-existent face. His head came to a point. A rust red pyramid bolted to his crown and bearing huge, oversized triangular glasses that protected bloodshot eyes, one of which was nearly blind with cataracts. The glass darkened until her own surprised reflection twinned.
"I know," he buzzed with a roguish lilt, "you've never seen a man so handsome." Fen glanced down to see he was a little shorter than her, garbed in a set of faded blue coveralls, modified here and there with metal plates. She saw two fingernails that were steel. She didn't see a ring finger on one hand. She saw enough to understand this was a cyborg. She saw the scratched portions where the Horde's brand of ownership had been filed off after he'd escaped.
She drove a knee into his groin and from the noise he made, Fen knew he was still somewhat human. The man doubled forward.
"Oh, cheap shot!" He gulped as she grabbed either side of his metallic upper-head and twisted it sharply to the right. The crackling noise she heard was not what she expected and when she yanked to finish the job, she fell right onto her backside. His head was in her lap.
Oh gods, she was going to puke. She'd pulled his head off.
"Oh, man," he said with a burst of happy static, "I don't know what you did exactly, but my neck feels so much better!" She looked down at the head in her lap. The head grinned at her again, with genuine chumminess. Her nausea did not recede, but the head did.
It jerked away from her on a long, titanium cable that connected his head to his body and snapped back into place. He rose with a wince from her low blow and patted the spot where a neck should've been. Had she thought he was mostly human? She was very wrong.
"Anyway," the cyborg said, "unless you wanna try that again I think now's a good time to-"
"I can't find Robert!" The old man slammed into the cyborg. "I can't find him!"
"Uhh," the cyborg's mouth quirked down, "Zagraz, I get you're upset but the big guy is already pretty sore over the kid letting you slip out. You seen her?"
"Robet is fragile!" Zagraz, the old wizard, moaned.
"He's…he's a rock, bud." The cyborg shot Fen a little shrug as if to ask her what could anyone do about lost rocks. Fen turned and crawled for her spear, nearly laughing to herself as her mind broke a little bit. Cyborgs. Wizards. Warriors who couldn't be harmed. It was a dream. She was a having a bad dream was all.
Dref slammed to the floor next to her coughing and holding her ribs. Hoove and Five-Eye were fighting somebody. A dragon knowing their current luck. Fen grabbed her spear and helped Dref to her feet to form the scorpion again, this time with a real target. Fen glanced at the red-warrior. The moment her eyes found him, still standing at the entrance, the clone arrived.
The white figure paused at the entrance, surprised perhaps by the chaos he found. Behind him, the steady, unified steps of the robots approached. Fen clung to the reality that they outnumbered their foes by impossible margins. The red-warrior lifted a hand to the clone and flexed his gloved fingers, each one decorated with claw, in a come-here gesture. The clone stared from under his hood and, all at once, a telescoping glaive was in his hand, white metal keen.
Fen and Dref focused on the cyborg ushering the old man towards the starship.
"He's…he's strange," Fen warned.
"This whole place is strange!" Dref's nostrils bled freely. "I'm retiring after this!"
"One last kill?"
"Let's go," Dref licked blood from her upper lip and spat, "let's go!"
They advanced as one. The cyborg complained that they weren't fighting fair and pulled a horrible looking weapon from the heavy leather toolbelt cinched at his waist. It was a mace that crackled with green energy. Nastier stuff than Fen's shock-spear, crafted from Horde technology instead of a cobbled thing like her own weapon. He tossed it from hand to hand.
"Ladies," he said, the word drawn out at the end with a long static buzz, "I really don't like fighting all that much. I'm a maker by trade. How about we have an engine-repair contest instead?" Dref's scattergun snapped up to aim at his head. She fired.
The cyborg's head popped five feet into the air and whipped to the side on its cable to dodge every pellet.
"I hate this job," Dref groaned.
"Let's see him dodge this," Fen jabbed forward into the metal panel on his shoulder. A terrible jolt shot through his body and the cyborg seized in place before toppling over.
"Ooooooh!" He convulsed. "Ooooh! That's awful!"
"Finish him," Fen barked at Dref.
"Hey!" Yet another new voice bellowed. "I got a fist of rules and protecting my pal is number 1." Fen's thought process, well stalled on that statement, was interrupted further as someone flattened her and Dref with a blow from a huge metal object. She rolled onto her feet, aching all over, to find a new cyborg facing her.
This one was not visibly as far gone as his the other, with a human head of fiery orange hair and a bristly beard to match. A single strut of metal was riveted to his right temple. The rest of him was human save for an outer brace on his left knee, bolted into the joint straight through the purple material of his coveralls. The sides had the same filed-away Horde markings of an escaped slave.
A tattered cloak hid his right arm entirely, there was no sign of the weapon with which he'd hit them. His leathery, tan skin told of unforgiving sun and blistering heat. Scars creased the laughlines at his brown eyes. This new cyborg flexed as if to attack and, suddenly, slapped himself on the forehead.
"Fist and foremost," he said, "I have a list of rules and protecting my buddies is fist and foremost. It was right there!" He covered his face in a dramatic gesture of shame. "It was right there, and I missed it."
"You fist it?" The neck-cyborg offered from where he dragged his limp body up from the ground. Fen's shock-strike had worn off.
"No verbs," the new cyborg snapped, looking up, "that can go too many weird places."
"Kill him," Fen gulped, "kill him, Dref, or I swear I'm going to go crazy. I'm barely sane at this point." Dref aimed her scattergun. The cyborg reacted helplessly and reached with his covered arm as if he might push the scattergun away. His hand under the cloak grabbed the barrel, Fen resisted the urge to look away from the resulting horror.
She'd needed have worried. The sound a dozen ricocheting bullets was anemic compared to the normal crashing blast of the scattergun's firing. Metal shrieked as the cyborg squeezed the barrel and its bayonet into a mishappen mess that he pulled from Dref's trembling hands. He held the mangled gun high, and the cloak fell away.
His right arm…was not there. Instead, an enormous metal construction in the vaguest shape of an arm emerged from his torn coveralls.
It was painted halfway down in similar shade to the sleeve rolled up his human arm. An enormous filing mark marred the side where the Horde symbol had once branded him as slave. The cyborg tossed the ruined gun away and flexed four squarish metal fingers.
"Beat you to the punch," he smirked, "now, how bout you both put your hands on your head and-"
"Run, Dref!" Fen shoved her friend aside and lunged. The man caught her spear but, unlike the red warrior, fell right into her trap by grabbing the head. She sent a lightning bolt into his hand, heartbroken when the metal arm spasmed and broke her trusty weapon. The man fell convulsing and the other cyborg ran to help him. Fen tossed away her broken spear and knelt to draw her longknife from her boot.
She left the cyborgs to regroup with Dref, who was unsuccessfully trying to wake an unconscious Five-Eye. The mutant's namesake eyes were all swollen, from one of the metal-armed man's punches, Fen guessed. Hoove was concussed and there was a large dent in his kabuto to explain that, but he fought down the pain and grabbed at Fen.
"The red warrior," he hissed, "that's the one we want to kill first. The rest we can take with numbers." The red warrior. Fen turned to find that terrible enemy fighting the clone.
No. Not fighting.
Defeating.
The clones of the Horde were each worth at least twenty-five seasoned warriors. Fen had seen that bloody math prove itself on three occasions. Faster, smarter, and less merciful than any creature in existence. Save perhaps their imperial father.
Yet, her eyes insisted upon seeing the red warrior stepping lightly around every graceful slash of the long white glaive. Greenish blood stained the flowing white robes, dripped from the corner of a grimacing, sharply-fanged mouth. The clone had not scored a single hit yet. He slashed with a shortened grip, changing his strike to catch the red-warrior's bare thigh. A red, clawed boot kicked up to bat the blade aside and he responded with a sharp slash that opened the clone's robes to pale skin, four deep gashes splitting into green mouths.
The Horde droids had arrived at last, adding their noise and lasers to the confusion. They fired at the cyborgs, sending them squawking for cover.
"Robots!" The red warrior's yell was so sudden that Fen jumped. He had an unplaceable accent to her mind, and she was able to tell most regions of space apart simply by the speech.
"On it!" A deep voice bellowed in reply. This one, she knew, for it was the harsh city-brogue of Rintor. Then she saw the owner charge forth into the center of the platform and, for once, she knew exactly who it was. Hoove made a choked sound.
"That's-that's the old Arena Champion!"
"It can't be…" Fen shook her head. Even the weak signals from Rintor's distant, bloody arena had given enough hints to match the warrior charging a line of Horde robots by himself.
He was five-feet tall at most and at least that wide. A blood-red leather skirt slapped onto tree-trunk legs in green pants, tucked into black-steel boots. Arms thick around as a pair of bridge cables pumped, supporting enormous steel pauldrons, and a squat head incased in a barrel helm decorated with two curling, titanium ram's horns. A pinched, walnut colored face bared huge white teeth under fierce black eyes.
"Ram Man," Fen said.
King of the Ring. Champion of Rintor. Chief to Beat in the bloody games that took place twice a year. Monsters, machines, and warriors of all kinds had been broken to ragged pieces by the short man rushing past the red warrior and the bleeding clone. He'd vanished five years ago and there'd been no end to the rumors over how and why. Here he was, in an abandoned mineshaft along with escaped cyborg slaves, the red warrior, and a bunch of angry magic rocks.
Fen had to be dreaming.
Ram Man's legs tensed at the last moment; arms crossed to guard his face from the lasers. She recognized the maneuver from a hundred victories. He leapt forward with all the coiled power of his legs. Metal shrieked, lights died, and the robots crowding the entrance had a hole punched in their ranks like they'd been hit with a cannonball.
"The red warrior!" Hoove yanked Fen to her stumbling feet, swaying a little as he got his bearings. "Fen, let's get into this fight!"
Fen grit her teeth and fury raced into her heart. Wizards. Cyborgs. The Champion of Rintor. They couldn't be permitted to defeat them all with so little to show for it. Battle-rage descended on her. They had to take one of them down at least or they couldn't call themselves Denebrian brawlers. The smug, silent red warrior would be their kill, their last desperate defiance. Havna did not exist for her at that moment. This was the feeling Fen had lived close to long before her daughter was born. The thrill of the fight.
A final, infuriating wrinkle dropped down from the ceiling to frustrate them. Not tall nor short, not heavy nor thin, not male nor visibly female. They were a strange sight in a day of strange sights. They wore a pristine orange hazard suit. Their head was encased in a bulky helmet, face hidden behind a smoky visor. They stretched out their arms, their hands formless inside black mitts, to make a living barrier.
"Wait!" They had a soothing voice, one not interrupted by the static or muffled mics of a normal hazard suit. "Please! No more violence! We have no reason to fight!" Fen slammed into them and jammed her knife into their stomach. Heavy arms embraced her, and she pulled her knife back to plunge it home for good measure.
Something snapped.
She drew back a hilt with a broken centimeter of steel.
She investigated the smoky visor. A stone statue's face stared back at her, it's expression blank under eyes with no pupil. The unseen mouth sighed.
"Please," they said, "let's not fight."
Hoove whipped the butt of his laser pistol into the side of the creature's helmet, and they released Fen. The hazard-suited creature cringed away, limbs sluggish and heavy, grinding loudly with each movement. A person made of stone. They slapped the pistol from Hoove's hand, but he drew a wicked gutting knife just as quickly.
Fen watched, as she tried to stop shaking with adrenaline, as the creature's movements flowed and quickened. They ducked, somersaulted, popped up onto their palms to move in a half-cartwheel. The acrobatic movements ended when they came back on their palms to kick into Hoove's stomach with both feet. The mutant fell heavily, his knife sliding away into the dark.
Fen dove for the abandoned pistol and turned to fire once into the air as the leaping creature landed on top of her.
"Enough!" They shouted in desperation, visor before her face. Fen started screaming. Behind the smoky plastic was not a stone statue. It was the simian face of a jungle-beast. A red, upturned nose, fierce yellow eyes with black pupils, and a mouth of huge teeth. She shoved them away and they grabbed her ankles in a nimble monkey's grip.
The grip shifted; Fen fought to get away. The hands on her ankles gripped differently now, with a steadily increasing pressure like a machine warming up.
"Please," they begged, "please, stop fighting us!" She looked back. Glowing blue lights for eyes, a metal slab for a face, but the voice was the same. They saw her staring and, slowly, began to release her. "See? I'm not dangerous, I promise." Their robotic face shimmered and for a moment…
…Fen saw herself staring back at her.
"I understand," the creature began to say, "I can feel your pain, Fen, and I only want to help you-"
Fen shoved them back with her foot and squealed in terror. Hoove was up again, and he grasped the sides of their helmet to wrench them away.
Hoove pulled Fen to her feet and they both turned into time to see Ram Man, the Arena's Champion, charging them. Soot marked his helmet, bits of white metal clung to his clothes, and behind him the robots lay in heaps of ruin. Fen held her breath as a man she'd cheered on with every other kid crowded around the screens in their swamp hovels came to take her life.
Ram Man skidded as he threw an open had out towards them. It wouldn't kill but it didn't have to. Hoove took the brunt of it on his chest and slammed them both backwards into a railing too abused to support their weight.
Weightless, suddenly, Fen felt the railing snap and the long fall behind her. She stared at the bizarre scene that leapt from an unsuspecting afternoon. Ram Man, her childhood hero, reaching for them with a look of horror melting onto his face. The hazard-suited creature who could change their face scrambling to their feet and shouting 'no!'. The cyborgs corralling her commando into one corner of the platform. The old man looking up from where he'd found another of his rocks.
The red warrior digging his clawed glove into the clone's stomach and the clone collapsing to his knees, glaive falling from his nerveless fingers. The red-warrior's hand making one smooth movement to draw his short sword and swinging it down. The clone collapsing to the platform.
Havna. Her face before Fen's eyes. Smiling at her to see her home again.
I love you, baby girl.
The catwalk caught her like the palm of a giant.
"Aaah!" Hoove's heavy body drove the air from her, and she wrestled out from beneath him to gulp down breath. The mutant was fairing not much better, squeaking with every inhale, and clawing at his chest where Ram Man had struck him.
"Fen," he gargled, "help me up."
"We're alive," Fen gasped. The catwalk was one of several in this underspace where the tools and spares where kept for lift maintenance. It was a dark, grim place and the most beautiful sight in the world to Fen at that moment. She sniffled at the realization she'd see Havna again and when she did, she'd never leave home for anything. She'd make it work somehow. She'd take them away somewhere else if the air was bad for her lungs.
So long as she could hug her and kiss the top of her head. Tuck her in and listen from their shared wall at the soft, little snores of her baby sleeping soundly.
"Fen!" Hoove reached out. "Please…"
"R-right," Fen groaned, "hang on, I've got you." She slipped her arm under her commando leader's armored back, and they rose together. The process was slow and painful, but a minute's passing found them leaning against each other and the catwalk railing. Hoove waved his pistol in a drunken attempt to scan for enemies.
Overhead, the sounds of battle were fading like an old man's last heartbeats and Fen found herself wondering if the fugitives would accept their surrender. Her pride was gone and good riddance to it. Maybe it made her a coward. Maybe it made her a bully. The short fall where she'd expected death had slapped her awake from the dream of the hunt.
Fen wanted to go home and see her daughter. They'd build a life somehow, together, and she'd do it without killing. Melancholy descended on her then in a sudden rush of shame with a lingering sensation like the feeling of the creature's hands on her ankles.
Fen of Denebria. She'd dreamed of being a hero once and had hunted the Horde with her friends in the swamps. Ambushing imaginary armies until the toxic waste made the mangroves rankle and the waters empty of life.
"What is it?" Hoove hissed at her. "Why are you crying?"
"I-I'm not!" Fen cuffed at her eyes. "I'm not…"
Her protests ended with the sound of a something clattering further down the catwalk, in between the shelving.
"Someone's here," Hoove growled and took aim, "come out with your hands high, or receive instant death!" Fen mumbled and he turned a glowing eye on her.
"Maybe we just run," Fen said, "get the others away and leave these people be."
"The clone is dead," Hoove had turned his attention back to their unseen enemy, "and the droids are destroyed. Our only option is bringing back something, Fen, or we're all dead. You, me, the others, and even down to that kid of yours." Fen felt herself nearly sobbing again, despite herself. It was all so cruel and so needless. There were other ways, weren't there? The universe was not only darkness and fear. There was light. There was hope.
"Let's just leave," Fen insisted.
"Get out here, now!" Hoove roared over her. Fen heard more noise and hoped beyond anything a rat would scuttle out and this nightmare would end. Her emotional state was that creature's fault, somehow, but she couldn't even bring herself to hate them. They had more than one chance to end her life and she'd been spared. That meant something.
Didn't it?
"Hoove-"
The mutant shoved her away and grabbed the railing for support, limping forward with his pistol leveled and barking orders again. This time, to Fen's surprise, a voice responded. A young, female voice. A voice her daughter might have in a few short years.
"Alright," the voice snapped, "alright, I'm coming out. Don't shoot." She sounded annoyed rather than scared and when she emerged, Fen's heart broke for her. She had to be fifteen at least. Not more than a year older at most. Young, still a little gangly in her arms and legs but clearly growing into a tall, confident young woman.
She met Fen and Hoove with fearless silver eyes and a quirked sneer emphasized by coal-black lipstick and eyeshadow. Her skin was pale but seemed warmer by the ivory white eyebrows that were pinched with anger. Her hair was the same shade of white, sweeping back down her neck and kept out of her face by a violet bandana patterned with black shapes. Either hand, held up above her shoulders as she'd been instructed, was decorated with a few small rings and a pair of tarnished silver bracelets. Her skinny arms were bare to the elbow and displayed what looked like hieroglyphics drawn hastily in black marker.
And there was the marker, Fen noted, in the breast pocket of a purple-and-black flannel shirt worn atop the kind of plain gray undershirt used by starshippers. Dangling at her waist, like an overskirt, was the top half of a black flightsuit, zipped down to reveal the waist of worn, gray jeans.
"What now?" The teen's voice was deeper than she expected but carried a slightly petulant immaturity. Fen didn't want Hoove to hurt her.
"I won't if she cooperates," Hoove snapped. Fen covered her mouth in the realization she'd voiced her fears. "You're going to pieces, Fen, what's the matter with you?"
"Manny touched her, I bet," the teen said, "he makes people feel all sad and wholesome for a bit after he takes their face."
"What? Take my face?" Fen touched her cheeks in horror, tempted to feel that her eyes and nose and mouth were all still there.
"Learns it," the girl rolled her eyes, "don't be so literal."
"Turn around," Hoove said, "and get on your knees. Slowly." The teen glanced at the bottom of the overhead platform.
"Awfully quiet up there," she mused, "someone will be down any moment to check on me, y'know." Hoove blasted a red bolt of energy into the dark mining shaft and the girl cringed. "Relax! Fine! Have it your way." She turned, showing them her back, and sank down to the catwalk, hands held up.
"Fen," Hoove grunted, "I'll cover you. Grab her."
"N-no." Fen backed away. "I won't do this. It's wrong." The hatred in Hoove's eyes, when he turned on her, left Fen expecting to be shot out of hand. The mutant simply hissed some sibilant insult and turned back to their prisoner.
"Your friend is right," the teen said in a sing-song warning, "touch me and you're dead, mutant."
"I'm terrified," Hoove snorted, he grabbed the girl's left hand, "do I as tell you and you won't get hurt-"
"Freeze!" The girl's shout made Fen jump. The air around them displaced, then swept Fen down with a wind so frigid, so unforgivingly cold, that she was already shivering before she hit the catwalk. Her fingers were stiff, her lips and eyelids were numb. Ice crystals twinkled on her eyelashes, creating stars against the dark shadows of the mining shaft.
"H-hhhhh-hoooove?" Fen rattled out between her chattering teeth. Her joints protested as she squirmed onto her back and clawed her way up the railing. Her hands were curled inwards with the cold, her fingers aching and frostnip white as if she'd been outside in dead winter.
Magic. More magic. She had the realization before she saw what had become of her leader.
Hoove's black cape flapped over his shoulder above a reaching arm and held itself in the air as if Fen was watching a paused recording. A sheen covered his clothes, his pistol, and even his green skin. She was freezing down to her bones.
Hoove had been frozen solid.
"That stings!" The teen hopped to her feet and shook her left hand. "Stupid spell! Ouch!" She squeezed life back into her left hand with her right. The marker drawings on her left arm were vanishing from her skin. Fen's eyes slipped to the marking on her right arm and her shivering intensified as fear joined the terrible chill inside her.
"P-pp-pp-pp-please!" Fen cowered in on herself. "L-l-ll-let me….g-g-g-o."
"Why should I?" The teen glared at her hand. "Would you have let me go if the situation was reversed?" She flexed her fingers and, satisfied with the movement, tilted her head to look at Fen. "The others say we should show bounty hunters mercy when we can. But why bother? The clones. The robots. They're just tools. You scum? You choose this." A cracking sound filled the air.
Fen looked to Hoove, hoping he'd break free of his icy prison and save her life. The teen, startled as well, watched in fascination. Hoove trembled in a way that Fen knew living things did not tremble. Her stomach clenched sickly as she watched a crack form along his cape that grow down the length of his arm until it reached the end of his pistol.
"Marvelous," the teen whispered, her breath a visible fog so close to the frozen mutant, "I wonder if he'll really-"
Hoove collapsed into a pile of icy chunks. Fen threw herself away from the nightmare and crawled for safety. The teen chased her with a nasty burst of laughter, vaulting herself over Fen's prone body using the railings for support. She squatted down to grin at Fen and waggled the fingers of her right hand in her face.
"So how about fire for you?" Fen shook her head, tears freezing on her cheeks. "No? Lightning then?" White sparks flashed in her palm, tinging the air with ozone. "I haven't tried just blowing someone up yet…"
She reached for Fen, drawing back and then darting closer in a fit of terrible cruelty. Her eyes glinted and her teeth seemed longer up close. She was a child without mercy. Fen buried her face in her arms and simply screamed.
"Havna! Oh, Havna!" She sobbed her daughter's name over and over. How could she ever have left her all alone in this cruel, uncaring universe? She was the worst mother who'd ever lived and now she'd never get a chance to be better.
Cruel fingers yanked at the hair poking underneath her helmet, then drew back with a yelp. The edge of Fen's helmet was freezing. The teen shook her ice-burned fingers but the brief reprieve was nothing. The girl grasped Fen's jaw instead, fresh rage and injury contorting her young face into a hideous mask.
"Fire," she growled, "it's fire for you, scum."
Fen closed her eyes.
The girl cried out.
The hand moved away.
Fen blinked up at the red warrior, at the droplets of green blood dripping from the end of his tabard and saw where he'd seized the girl's wrist.
"What do you think you are doing?" His harsh, accented voice made the question into an accusation. The girl's trapped hand struggled ineffectually and closed into an impotent fist.
"I got one," she said, "now let go!"
"Get back on the ship," the red warrior thundered without needed raising his voice, "and look after Zagraz."
"I locked his door," the girl's voice turned petulant, "I locked his door and he still got out. That's not my fault!" The red warrior shook her arm once and the girl gasped.
"You've disobeyed me once too often," he said, "now go, child, before I lose my temper." The steps of the catwalk twanged as the creature in the orange hazard suit hurried down the far side. They made a startled, sad noise upon seeing what was left of Hoove.
"Oh, Lynn," they moaned, "oh, child, what did you do?"
"Protected us!" Lynn barked at the red warrior.
"Do not shout at me," the red warrior released her arm and Lynn drew back like an angry cat, "and get back on the ship."
"P-Please…" Fen chattered.
"It's alright," the creature knelt before her, "here, poor thing, you're freezing." The mitted hands embraced her tightly to the bulky plastic on the chest. They rested their visor against her forehead. Fen trembled in their arms, staring at the space where a face should be.
Fire bloomed there, a merry orange flame that made the outline of a head. Her fear vanished as the warmth spread down their body and into her own. Her fingers were riddled with pins and needles as the feeling returned to them. Her lips, an alarming blue in the visor's reflection, pinkened. Water trickled off her armor as the ice melted.
"Who are you?"
"Names are tricky," the fire spoke back to her gently, "but a wise wizard once called me Many-Faces." Fen collapsed into their embrace as her joints unfroze. "My friends started calling me Manny. I like that name."
"Thank you, Manny," Fen said, "please, don't kill me."
"No, Fen," Manny said, "I don't want to hurt you at all." When she'd become warm enough for the creature….for Manny's liking, they carried her up the stairs, their face returned once more to a robot's, their movement stiff but strong. She was deposited gently next her surviving commando in a circle at the platform's center.
Brova was curled around his own shattered wrist. Five-Eye tended to an unconscious Uggo. Dref threw her arms around Fen. No one asked what happened to Hoove and Fen didn't know how to tell them.
The shattered robots were being piled by Ram Man and the one-armed cyborg. The strange cyborg who's head could come off was picking through the crushed, battered wreckage of them. Manny stepped to the body of the clone and searched vainly for a sign of life.
"I'm sorry," she heard them whisper. The red warrior emerged from the starship, his helmet gone to reveal a thin face and a shaved head. A three-pronged hieroglyph like the shape on his chest decorated his forehead. His eyes, deep amber, seemed less forgiving than the black glass of his helmet. He approached them without making a sound.
"You will be allowed to leave," he announced. Dref whimpered in relief against Fen's shoulder. "But you will leave behind your weapons, such as they are, and any communication devices you've brought with you." The commando did not cheat him or try to trick the man. They each divested themselves of the objects he'd forbidden. Five-Eye stood surety for Uggo and, Fen guessed, hoped that nothing remained to incite the warrior's anger.
"You have your lives," he said, "live them better than you have." He pointed towards the entrance.
888888888888888
The bounty hunters scurried away like rats and that made her so angry she was halfway to making a fireball in her right hand. Zodac had hurt her wrist grabbing her, she was furious. He could kill the clones all he liked but she wasn't allowed one little chance to revenge herself? It was unfair. It was stupid.
It wouldn't stand.
"Evilynn?"
Zagraz. Again.
"What?" She grunted. Then, remembering what she owed the poor, damaged man, she breathed out some of her venom and turned to face him. "What is it, Zagraz? You really need to go back to bed. Ok?"
"It's just," the old man's hands flapped towards his little room down the corridor of the starship. "Robert is still missing!"
"I'll find him," Lynn lied.
"Bless you, child," the old man took her hands in his own, "I won't forget the kindness. In fact. Our next lesson will be Advanced Wards. I think you're ready for them."
"I am," Lynn gritted her teeth, "I have been. I was ready for them when you taught them to me four months ago. And three months ago. And when you taught them to me last week."
"I…" Zagraz's face creased with confusion, "I taught you…what? Oh. Did I forget? Or…well…hmmm." His eyes took on a lost, vaguely alarmed quality that she could not deal with right now. It was infuriating. It made her want to cry somewhere deep down.
She should've burned that sobbing bounty hunter to a pile of ash.
"Zagraz," Lynn took him by the shoulders, "we're going to your room now. Ok?"
"Robert-"
"I'll take care of it!" Lynn snapped. The old wizard winced. She squeezed his shoulders. "Sorry. I'll handle it, ok? Just…go to bed, teacher, you need your rest."
"Yes," Zagraz nodded, "rest…rest is good. Only. Find Robert. Robert's special."
"Sure," Lynn rolled her eyes safely out of sight, "they all are." She steered him into a cabin cluttered with boxes, books, and, most of all, rocks. Rocks of every size and shape. Each one, so Zagraz claimed, an interstellar traveler carrying power and secrets. Some, she knew, were the real thing.
Most of them were just rocks.
Meteors were rare to find anywhere but in space, but Zagraz, once mighty and wise, had collected them. Whether his confusion about the duds was worse after the injury or not, Lynn hadn't had enough time to learn.
She nearly twisted her ankle on one as she fixed the sheets on his small cot. She picked it up, made to throw it across the room and, on a moment of inspiration, turned to find Zagraz picking through the multitude. She held it out.
"Found Robert," she said. Zagraz smiled and plucked the rock from her hand. He cooed at it, weighed it in his hands and then, to her utter stupefaction, frowned severely at her.
"Lynn," he chided in his piping voice, "now this isn't Robert and shame on you for saying so! Glonaons-869 is very sensitive. They remembered your name. Can't you remember theirs?"
Evilynn glared at the rock in his hands as if she could will it to shatter. Not a spell she knew yet. Her eyes fixed onto the books with equal fury. So much knowledge. So many spells. And only crazy old Zagraz could read any of it. It wasn't fair.
Her life, she was certain, was cursed.
"Right," she turned on her heel, "sorry, how could I ever have mistaken it?"
"Oh, that's fine," Zagraz said, "just try harder next time. That's all." The words made her slam her palm against the doorframe.
"Try harder," she repeated. "Zagraz?" The old man made a noise. "What day is it? What year is it? What did you have for breakfast?" She looked over her shoulder. The old man's face fell again, and he searched the air to his left with a mute movement of his lips. "No? Oh well, guess you're not trying hard enough." She stepped out into the hall, closed and locked the door, then nearly walked right into Fisto.
"Little mean to make fun like that, kid," the cyborg filled the hallway enough normally, now he was widened by an armload of mechanical scrap, "I get that you're frustrated but still, the others hear that they'll be pretty upset."
"They can babysit him then!" Her face heated up and the shame running through her made her angrier. "He's not getting better. He's getting worse."
"I know," Fisto said, "I know he is. You're a good person for looking after him." Lynn scoffed.
"Then what's with all the grief I keep getting for it? 'Lynn, Zagraz needs watching.' 'Hey, kid, Zagraz broke all the plates again, clean it up, huh?' 'Child, you neglect your duties!' 'Lynn, you gotta be more patient!'" The cyborg nodded along with each one of her imitations.
"You do a pretty good Zodac," Fisto said, "but your Manny could use work."
"Bite me," she snapped, "and get out of my way." Fisto pressed himself to the wall and Lynn sidled past.
"Go back out there and Zodac will really hit the roof."
"It's a mountain," Lynn shot back, "there's no roof to hit!"
Manny and Zodac were by the clone. The face-changer held its head between his hands and mumbled softly. Lynn strode right up to Zodac's side to grin brazenly down. She never tired of seeing dead Horde clones.
"I get the next one," she declared, "I'm ready for them."
"You are not," Zodac replied simply, "Many-Faces, what have you learned?" Manny drew back like he'd been burned. His face contorted into the fanged, long-eared white visage of their enemies and then faded.
"Sorry," Manny said, "they didn't know for sure it was us. This one was scouting a likely position. But they're close. Could be within the system soon…ah." Manny shivered. "I hate being them. They're always so lonely."
"This one isn't," Lynn kicked its arm, "he's joining a few million brothers no one will ever miss."
"Do not mock the dead," Zodac pushed her back with finger, "particularly do not mock the dead you did not defeat, Evilynn."
"You're welcome, by the way," Lynn sneered, "that one I got was their leader."
"Do you want to talk about it?" Manny rose and put a hand on her shoulder. "It must be a heavy burden. Are you feeling alright?" Lynn shook his hand off.
"I'm fine, Manny, I'll be fine too," she smirked, "it's not the first bounty hunting scum I've crossed off."
"Thatsa ugly thing to boast over, kiddo," Krass trundled by, his horned helmet under one huge arm, "don't start doing it."
"Ok, mother," Lynn said.
"Lynn," Manny chided.
Evilynn backed away and threw her arms out wide.
"What?! Who else has something to say? Hey, Mekanek!" The cyborg's head rose on its cable to look over the pile of bodies. "You got any words of wisdom for me? How else did I mess up? How else am I letting everyone down?" The cyborg's head rotated to Manny and Zodac before going back to her.
"Well," his voice buzzed, "you did leave a towel behind the sink in the bathroom and it's getting kind of mildewy. Maybe get on that?"
"Leave without me," Lynn stomped away, "go ahead, I'll face the other clones when they come looking. Dying fighting them has to be a better life than that cramped ship and you old people."
"You will apologize now," Zodac said, "and return to the ship."
"Make me," Lynn sat heavily on playform, hugging her knees. Zodac's face did not change as he strode towards her, and Lynn held out her right hand. "Don't think I won't blast you, Zodac! Don't touch me!"
"Easy!" Krass hurried over. Mekanek's body stood up to meet his head and he hopped over the robot pile. Manny cut off Zodac with a whispered plea. Krass confronted the Last Warrior of Zur. "Zodac, I'll make sure she's back onna ship soon, ok, boss?" Zodac stared into Lynn's face and, without extra comment, announced that they would be leaving in ten minutes.
Lynn clapped slowly.
"And Ram Man wins again." The hugely muscled man frowned at her.
"Kiddo, ya make it hard to take yer side, y'know dat? Even if yer right. Ya think yer being cute sneaking off the ship like ya done?"
Lynn rested her chin in either hand and grinned.
"It's part of my charm," she said, "and so what? Yeah, I snuck off the ship. I needed air. I needed to stretch my legs. We hadn't landed anywhere in five weeks." Krass scratched his sweat-flattened hair.
"Y'know yer smart enough ta know why that was a stupid idea, kiddo."
"I feel like a prisoner in that thing." She glared at the ship. "We were supposed to find a place months ago." Krass shrugged shoulders wider than she was.
"Yer young," Krass said, "and maybe cuz yer young ya think we gotta get it done right this very minute. We been running a long time, Lynn. Some o' us longer than ya been alive." Lynn gasped in mock awe.
"Really? No one ever tells me how lucky I am! How could I have been so ignorant? Don't. I feel ashamed! And ungrateful! And everything else Zodac says to me constantly!" Krass lifted his hands in defeat.
"Cool off," he said jovially, "and stretch yer legs."
"Sure," Lynn shrugged.
"I mean it," Krass chuckled, "ya win, kiddo."
"Does that make me Arena Champion?" The smile melted from his face, but he didn't snap or get mad or anything like that. He offered a weak little laugh.
"Got me again," he said. His shoulders hunched as he walked back to Mekanek. Lynn felt the apology in her throat and swallowed it down. Yeah, he hated being called Ram Man. Yeah, Mekanek and Fisto were so messed up by the slave-pit smiths that neither of them remembered their real names. Manny was hunted everywhere he went. Zagraz was losing his mind every passing minute. Zodac was the last surviving warrior of the Zur.
Enough messed up stuff happened between them to fill a dozen dramas. Lynn glanced at her right arm. At the line of symbols scarred onto her skin beneath the marker runes she'd never gotten to use.
Her price. She'd been a cheap buy. If they'd known she could use magic back then…
They were all damaged. It was old news by this point. The whole universe was one giant shared trauma. She had to get over her own problems in face of their shared responsibilities, right? Tend to Zagraz, don't get anyone killed, and be grateful. Her 'chores' on Starship Freedom, next stop: 'it'll be soon, Lynn, be patient'.
Why? Just cuz they saved her? She hunched in on herself. Just cuz she got Zagraz into the fight that broke him?
Zodac could vent his anger on the clones. Krass could rip apart robots with no moral dilemma. Manny got to play therapist and busybody. Mekanek and Fisto? They washed down their memories with a laugh and a bottle of some horrible concoction of spirits and motor oil. Zagraz? Zagraz couldn't remember his pain half the time.
Evilynn. Kiddo. Child. She had to be better than them. She couldn't lose her temper. She couldn't do what she wanted.
It wasn't fair.
Neither was your parents' selling you to a slaver so…what good was thinking about what's fair? She smudged a rune here and there, disabling any spellcasting for the moment. She really wished she'd crossed off that bounty hunter now. With nothing else to occupy her time Lynn observed her comrades out of the corners of her eyes.
Mekanek broke the robots down with bare fingers that could pull bolts and loosen screws better than any tool. Fisto lumbered out to sort the pieces into what was needed and what would go into storage. What they could not use they would pawn. Lynn's stomach rebelled at the thought of any more of the century-safe canned foods they'd been eating for two weeks.
Fresh fruit. Clean vegetables. Meat that wasn't half rotten. All of them were daydreams.
Krass wandered about the platform and examined it like he had any clue about the construction or upkeep. Lynn frowned at his broad back, silently urging him to go back into the ship. Why pretend he knew anything outside the Arena?
Zodac emerged to announce the five-minute warning. Lynn glanced away quickly to avoid any further grief, seething with embarrassment at how much the warrior scared her. After all, who wouldn't fear one of the Zur? One of the invincible soldiers.
He still wouldn't tell her what Zur was exactly. Simply that its destruction had cost Horde Prime such losses that his expansion efforts were still stalled a decade later. A planet she assumed. What good was being secretive about it if it was all gone? It was stupid.
Fisto used his cyborg arm to pull Mekanek to his feet like he was made of plastic. Krass helped collect the last heap of scraps, offering his opinion on the mine as being 'well put together'. Lynn muttered under her breath as they vanished into the starship.
She breathed in deep and shut her eyes, imagining she was by herself, in her own lair, with no-one to give her orders. The loneliness of it, enhanced by the echoing darkness of the mine shaft, thrilled her for a moment before deep, abiding peace settled in its place. Whispers of dead magic tickled the back of her mind. Denebria had power, once, that now had been siphoned away like every scrap of energy Horde Prime found.
Like she, Zagraz, and Many-Faces would be siphoned if the Horde ever caught them slipping.
"I hate everything," she mumbled. She rose to her feet and idly toyed with the idea of searching for Zagraz's rock to grab a few extra minutes of solitude. Zodac wouldn't allow that, most likely, and she didn't want to push her luck.
Of course, the universe being unfair, she tripped over the object in question. Her ankle twisted a little and she stumbled to her palms. The skin on her hands stung worse than the pain in her ankle and the smallness of the non-injury only made her more embarrassed. She glared at the stupid, charcoal black rock where it wobbled on the platform.
She was going to throw into the mine shaft.
"So long, Robert," she spat, "you can pretend to be a meteor since you're probably just a-"
The moment her stinging right palm touched the surface of the rock, her mind went white. The light that spilled into her eyes destroyed her and when it finally built her back into shape, she was floating in a starry void around a newborn solar system.
A bolt of blue energy crackled by her ear, racing towards a small core of metal floating in a debris field of unmade worlds. The bolt lanced into it and stretched long, blue fingers around it like a grasping hand before vanishing. The spinning metal core moved faster and faster before Lynn, the stars wheeling in and out of place, winking away forever even as new pinpricks flickered into existence.
The angry red sun cooled into a rich orange that crowned itself with a halo of golden light. She felt tears run down her face as the spinning core, bathed in the sun's maturing light, grew into an enormous globe of solid rock.
The rock spun in place even as it continued its orbit, even as the stars danced their lights into the sky. Uncountable years raced along before Lynn's weeping eyes. Now the planet roiled with magma. Now the magma hardened and the black surface of the world was obscured with the gray blanket of a thousand storms, their whirling eyes a pattern on the swaddling cloth of the world. Threads of blue lightning, the distant descendants of that first bolt of energy, appeared between them.
The storms coddled the planet for a dozen orbits of the star, to recede upon a world bathed in blue water. The waters rippled and from them emerged great blank masses of land that bleached in the sun and rippled with mountain ranges as the tectonic plates shifted like the bones of a living being.
The lands became so many colors. So many beautiful colors that Lynn wept openly now. Green seas. Wild riots of plant life in purples, verts, and soft reds. Sands tanned into deserts. Mountain ranges whitened into snow. The clouds grew thin and gentle to frame the planet beneath them.
The energy formed an enormous, cerulean outline about the world.
And burst!
The wall of energy touched everything in the universe as it expanded outward past the sun, the solar system, and the distant stars. Lynn waited impatiently for the wall of energy to meet her floating body. It towered, then titaned, and then was so large before her it was no adjective or comparison.
It was, to her small eyes, the universe itself.
The energy touched her at the moment her eyes opened.
"Lynn?" Manny was the at the doorway. "Oh, you've been crying!"
"I'm fine!" Evilynn hated how her voice trembled with emotion. "It's nothing." Her fingers were numb where they clutched Robert. The rock. The meteor from that strange, beautiful place. "It's nothing," she repeated.
And that was a lie.
For that planet was her destination and she would do anything to find her way there. Evilynn, the small sorceress, got to her feet and explained she'd found Zagraz's missing rock. She rolled her eyes at Manny's praise for her attentiveness and hid her further emotions behind a lie about feeling slightly forgotten.
Manny promised they could talk all she liked after take-off.
"Oh joy," Evilynn said, unable to hide a smile. A smile she was happy to let Manny mistake. Robert, she kept in her hand until risk of suspicion drove her to replace it in Zagraz's room. She found a spot on one of his shelves that would let her retrieve it easily enough.
The wizard slept soundly, unaware of her discovery. A brief flash of jealousy made her wonder if she should keep it hidden on her own person. If Zagraz found out what it was…but Zagraz was fading and Evilynn would not be telling anyone her secret. She'd leave the rock for now and come back later to investigate.
That was only fair.
888888888888888
The academic implications for what he felt would've been enough to keep the Unified Colleges of Sorcery busy for a hundred years. It would have also drawn the clandestine eyes of the Imperial Thaumaturgy Conference. The dragons of Darksmoke might've even been tempted to leave their sanctuaries simply to offer their opinions.
But most of all, infuriatingly, it proved Marlena and that little, gibbering fool Orko correct. Eternia had needed extended solitude to be reborn to her former glory and restore her planetary health. His rebellion had been in the wrong. Randor had chosen correctly in turning his back on him.
The schism in the guard was unnecessary and the deaths had been for nothing.
That blockheaded brute She-Ra had died for nothing.
He himself had died for nothing.
The pain and heartbreak and betrayal were all meaningless.
He'd cry if he still had tear ducts. Alas, he had to settle for rage. Set on a cushion of his own grimy, deep purple cloak on an outcropping in the stygian darkness of the bottomless moat, the skull wrenched up its jaw and screamed.
The metallic ringing of his newer, inhuman voice gutted the silence and faded with a stubborn echo that ran up and down the darkness. The emotional outburst was pathetic, and he scoffed at himself.
"Fool," he said, "why waste the effort."
Now, his tantrum passed, he could think upon the possibilities. And, oh, they were each of them marvelous. The magic of this world, reborn as it was, presented limitless options for his next step. He glared eyelessly at the darkness around him. As soon as he escaped this pit anyway.
The flicker of displacement he'd felt could be his answer. Or more appropriately, the skull rattled in place with excitement, the presence he'd felt inside the moment. A mage of not inconsiderable power, but negligible instruction, stumbling upon a revelation of this world.
Of his world.
Of Eternia.
"My Eternia," the skull tittered, "my kingdom."
He'd been crowned and his name had been recorded in the Imperial Historic Tabula. It was law. His kingdom awaited him at the top of the moat and he had his anchor point to drag himself to the surface at last.
Evilynn. He had her name. He had her height. He had a rough estimate of how well she brushed her teeth. The small, untrained witch was without any protections against a senior sorcerer with his amount of knowledge. He was her superior in a hundred different ways and that meant he had an avenue of control.
His mind, such as it was, latched onto the place she'd had existed in the timeline of the planet, drawn there by the memories of a piece of Eternia herself, lost in the depths of space. Time was nothing more than a flimsy dimension and Marlena had proven it no greater obstacle than a ladder made of height.
At least she wasn't here to gloat. The skull clicked its teeth. No. She'd glared at him out of teary, furious eyes. What had been her last words? 'I swear if you touch Adam or a Adora I'll…' Kill hadn't been the next word. It was something more specific.
A grunt of effort drew his attention to the edge of the outcropping. Clawed, furred hands emerged from the darkness to drag a muscled body up onto the stone. A loincloth was the creature's only clothing save for a basket fashioned from a gigantic insect carapace tied to his broad shoulders with animal ligaments. The russet orange monster huffed and held his head in one hand as the tremors of thought raced through him.
"M-master?" He swallowed. "What…what is wrong?"
"Other than being trapped with you, Beastman?" The skull chortled. "Oh, very little." The skull rocked on its mandible. "You have found more bones, yes? Show me! Quickly, you orange boob!"
Beastman turned his face up and showed tired, yellow eyes under a frontal lobe that hadn't been there at the beginning of his life. The first hundred years of their shared imprisonment in the bottomless pit had taught the skull he needed to speak to someone or the madness lurking at the edges of his mind would overwhelm him. Forcing evolution was an interesting experiment at least.
For Beastman, it had been agony. The skull satisfied himself that it was worth the pain. Though the brute had become so melancholy and bitter, he sometimes considered rescinding his gift.
Beastman upended his basket to spill an enormous selection of bones. The skull vibrated with joy at first and, after a second of searching, trembled with rage.
"These…these…"
He sent a thought Beastman's way. The creature foamed at the mouth, clutched his forehead, and bent backwards at the waist until his high, pointed ears almost touched the stone. His muscles bulged against the exquisite pain raking across his nervous system.
"Do these look like my bones, you imbecile?!" Long claws. Crooked back legs. An enormous, wedge-shaped skull sporting fangs the length of a shortsword. "These are the bones of a simple-minded animal much like you are!" Beastman choked out a plea for mercy and the skull clicked its teeth. "Perhaps I have not been clear enough when I say that until every sliver of femur, every splinter of metacarpal, and each mote of vertebrae are gathered together we will not be leaving this place."
And, oh, how it infuriated the skull to say it. For every instant that passed was another chance for the boy to deny his vengeance forever. The wretched child had the escape hatch of all flesh, mortality. The sole contender left for his throne. The rat-eater of a princeling.
Adam.
Adam would pay. For a thousand years times a thousand years Adam would pay for killing him and condemning him to this darkness. If he had to satisfy himself with the dust of the boy's bleached bones, fine and well, but while the chance for revenge on living, soft skin, the chance to see little blue eyes alight with real terror, existed the skull would not rest. Could not rest.
He didn't sleep any longer. How long until the madness fully took him? Had it already? Interesting questions. Beastman keened and reclaimed his attention.
But revenge couldn't happen, he was reminded, while his only ally was this oafish, incompetent, and utterly useless…
The skull released Beastman all at once and focused his efforts on the collection of bones. He ignored the whimpered apologies and, to his delight, discovered that the skeleton, while not his own, was whole. The dark, old magic sustaining him crept over the bones to find hints of what kinds of muscle once encased them. What kind of brain burned inside the wide, sleek predator's skull.
"A panthor? Yes. Yes. That will do quite nicely, I believe."
The skull hissed softly and from between its exposed teeth emerged a dark, slithering fog to lurk slowly about the piled bones. All there. All intact enough. Good.
Perfect.
Power smoked from the skull's eye sockets in growing circles of ghostlight to cast great, baleful corona about the enshrouded skeleton. The lights dug, dug, dug, dug. Dug as the first dark thing had dug, dug, dug, down into the heart of Eternia when it had fallen to the newborn world eons and eons ago, forever marking the swirling font of power with a single smear of shadow.
It found, inside the bones of the panthor, the flickers of memory. Reflex instinct. The sheer, razor's edge of the primal mind. A lifetime of hunger, blood, and conflict blazed through him until it settled on a final image.
The skull began to chuckle. The skull began to laugh. The skull looked upon the scared blue tiger cub, defenseless before it's slain mother, and the hugely muscled warrior leaping from the walls of Castle Grayskull to save it's pathetic, worthless life.
It saw the dying sight of the panthor as warrior knelt to harvest its violet pelt, his calloused hand eclipsing the sun forever. The boy wore a tunic very similar in color. The skull, lost in the depths of the bottomless moat for nearly one thousand years, cackled.
And spoke.
"KARAK NUL."
The green ghostlights and black fog leapt onto the bones and dragged them to stand upon their claws. Tiny, naïve spells drew close to investigate a mage's call and tried to flee far too late. They were twisted, broken to the skull's will and made to violate the law that dead things remain dead.
The fog clung to the bones until it was black, rancid meat. Tendon, thew, and shifting muscle. The bones were a dim reflection of the grown Panthor's size. He was magnificent. A beast fit for a king's heraldry. The skull vibrated with glee as the ghostlights filled the empty eye sockets with murderous, corpse green intelligence. The great, exposed teeth parted to show a gullet black as the abyss about them.
The skull cried triumphantly in time with Panthor's resurrected roar.
"We will have revenge," he cachinnated, "revenge on the boy and the warrior! Revenge on all flesh! I come into my kingdom, mighty beast, and you will assist me." The corpse-beast rippled with a final wave of dark power, bursting with matted violet fur, badly tailored to the flesh beneath.
Its mind bent so easily to the skull. It looked over Beastman with a baleful eye and padded to the edge of the stone and sniffed deeply at the air. The head darted downwards to the left and it gathered its hindquarters up for a leap, seams of furred skin splitting around the black meat slapped onto its yellowed bones.
"Yes!" The skull shook. "Yes, Panthor, go! Find me! My pieces! Find it all! Oh, yes, oh marvelous! Go, creature. Your master commands you!" The Panthor darted down out of sight with a soundless bound. Beastman curled in on himself to weep in agony.
The skull laughed and laughed and laughed.
High above them, where sunlight dared the edge of the moat, an old falcon watched the purple fields beyond the gray castle. She cocked her head to hear the distant echo of the skull's metallic laughter.
Something stirred in her brain. A memory of a time before. A memory of a laugh like that. And the falcon felt something that she hadn't in a very long time.
Dread.
It was there and gone into the back of her brain, leaving her stuck in the mind she'd inhabited for ten centuries. It awoke an instinct in her that she couldn't ignore and with a single flap of her proud wings, she soared down into the keep, over the statue of the warrior, and up into a forgotten room above a door that lead nowhere.
Find your Adora.
Words in her mind. Words that meant something.
The falcon did not remember.
But in the moat, the skull remembered very well.
The skull would never forget. He remembered and knew, with the Panthor's help and Evilynn's sudden appearance, and even what few uses Beastman could provide…
…the skull knew his time was coming soon.
