THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 42: What Has Been
“It’s not until we face death that we truly live.”
– Duaal Sinnay (234 PA)
Logan didn’t remember when he lost the spear. He lifted his glass arm and parried a thrust upward. The blade missed his heart, but the point stabbed through the muscle of his shoulder. He gripped the haft to keep the Arcadian from ripping through to his neck and kicked out. His legs were longer than the knight’s and Logan’s kick landed solidly against his groin. Xartasia’s fairy fell back, staggered but protected by his armor. Logan yanked the spear blade from his shoulder, but the bloody glass slipped through his fingers and fell. As the knight reached out to recover his weapon, Logan grabbed his glass helmet and twisted with all his strength. Something in the Arcadian’s neck cracked and he fell to the ground.
Logan staggered away, ejecting the spent battery of his Talon-9, and slid in his last one. Anthem wasn’t far away and the knight’s armor was streaked with even more scarlet than the usual Cavainna colors.
“How many made it?” Logan asked.
Anthem’s expression was sad. “Seven. Only four still fit to fight, including myself.”
He swept his wing across the underground plain. None of the glass sparkled anymore. It was all covered with blood and dust and mud. Bodies lay strewn through the dirt.
“What about the Devourer?” Logan asked.
Ballad landed hard. He was limping badly and a cut on his scalp sheeted blood down the side of the young fairy’s face.
“Duaal got it,” Ballad said. “But it got him.”
He pointed through the shadows to where Xia knelt in the mud. The Ixthian doctor had her medical bag open and worked frantically, wrist deep in Duaal’s abdominal cavity. Not far away, Gripper pulled on his long ears. Big, glistening tears rolled down his dusty cheeks. Xia didn’t look up.
“Don’t stand there staring,” she told him. “Make Duaal’s sacrifice worth something. Keep moving!”
“Silver…” Gripper said, but the Ixthian shook her head and the young Arboran turned away.
Dhozo stood at the edge of the crowd. The aerads gathered around the ancient Projector in widening concentric circles, all kneeling in the blasted dust of eons. Years and disuse had buried the Waygate, of course, but Dhozo and Orix made short work of the layered dirt and stone, even the ancient metal and ceramics of their own long-lost cities. Within minutes, they had blasted a deep crater into Axis’ surface. And at the center of it stood the Waygate.
It was here on Kahazzek, the Glorious homeworld, that Dhozo’s species had built the first fully functioning device. From here, they had swarmed out into the galaxy, past the furthest colonies, taking what they needed from the worlds they found and built the greatest empire that had ever existed. Glorious.
Xartasia had frowned at Dhozo as he and Orix had demolished their own history to reach the Waygate. The little aerad queen had no appreciation for history’s proper place. She wallowed in her past instead of using it.
Now the Projector rose up on its white ziggurat, a multi-colored ring on top that shone with blue light like hot, low-burning flames. More than ten thousand Arcadians swayed in ordered, widening circles around the towering stepped pyramid, all singing together as their queen stood before the first Waygate.
Dhozo had long since turned off his swarm’s translation of the triumphant song. It was almost over now.
The Waygate pulsed with azure light as it sorted through the jumbled memories of the gathered Arcadians. Next to Dhozo, Orix paced like a caged beast. The closest ranks of fairies hesitated, their song turning sour as they recoiled from the angry young Devourer. One of Xartasia’s knights warned Orix back in lyric Arcadian, but the Glorious tech snarled at him.
“Orix…” Dhozo warned.
“No!” Orix snarled. “No! Your precious little slave queen is down there, doing just what she’s wanted all along. And she’s given us nothing, commander!”
“Enough. We wait, Orix.”
“We’ve waited enough!”
“Age flavors the meat,” Dhozo said in their own language. The nanites didn’t translate for the aerad knight still pointing his spear at Orix. “You’ve yet to learn focus, lieutenant.”
“And your focus got Tarno and Bizax killed! Your own people are fighting up there,” Orix shouted. “For what?”
“Xartasia’s work down here is delicate,” Dhozo told him. “Easily interrupted. That’s our technology she’s using.”
“How long will you wait?” Orix asked. “Until she’s knifed you in the back like she did to that old human man? No, I’m not waiting anymore!”
Another knight was approaching, drawn by the angry voices. Her spear was leveled at the two Glorious and Orix whirled, easily swatting the glass blade aside. The first knight hissed something in Arcadian and slashed out with his own weapon, gouging a faintly glittering line into Orix’s black armor.
Orix roared in rage. His nanite swarm swirled around his huge hands, coalescing into a pair of glowing red lasers. He raked the beam over one of the knights. The glass armor dispersed the worst of the laser — until it reached his face. The aerad had no time to scream before the lasers boiled through his skull. Orix’s nanites reformed into barbed black chains that lashed out, wrapping around the other Arcadian.
A third fairy knight was flying toward Orix, spear outthrust and glowing blue in the Waygate’s light, but a razor-bladed line of his nanites slid behind the knee of her armor and blood spattered the ground.
“Orix!” Dhozo growled.
The other Devourer had already torn the feathered wings from the grounded knight’s back. The aerad’s armor dripped with blood and he screamed in pain. Orix’s swarm curled in around the fairy, devouring flesh and bone and glass within swift heartbeats. Dhozo bounded forward, his own nanite swarm forming a long, saw-edge blade that extended from his right hand. He sliced through the hook-covered black chains that held the remaining knight bloodily captive. Dhozo’s sword sheared through the nanites, but they didn’t require a physical connection to Orix to carry out his commands and the midnight chains tightened around Xartasia’s knight.
“Let them go,” Dhozo ordered.
Orix’s expression was invisible behind the smoky cloud of his armor, but Dhozo heard the rage in his voice.
“No!” Orix roared.
Dhozo leapt on him, pinning Orix’s thrashing limbs with barbs and blades. The other Devourer howled deafeningly and thrashed against Dhozo. Orix wrenched himself off of a black spike driven through his shoulder, tearing bone and muscle. Orix’s stormy black armor drew together and lashed out at his superior.
“Command override,” Dhozo said.
The nanites halted their attack, swirled like leaves in the wind and then abandoned Orix entirely. They floated gently to Dhozo and joined his own swarm, leaving Orix naked and bleeding on the ground.
Dhozo flexed his expanded nanite swarm and then tore into his lieutenant. The Arcadian knights scrambled back as bone snapped and flesh tore, but not a single drop of blood spilled into the dirt.
With his meal done, Dhozo straightened up. Xartasia’s knights remained gathered around him, all gripping spears tightly. Dhozo turned away, ignoring them. He magnified his view of Xartasia. The White Queen stood in the circle of the glowing Waygate, her arms thrown wide as though to welcome a lover. Blue light rippled like water over her, but turning a poisonous-looking indigo at the edges.
Orix was right. Dhozo hadn’t killed the young tech because he was wrong… The Glorious had waited long enough. Now it was time for Dhozo to take what he needed from Xartasia. And with the rest of his squadron dead or fighting far away, the knowledge would be his alone. Only Dhozo would have the power to use the Projectors. He could open the way to every edible world, every time, and he would have the best of every meal.
And Xartasia was going to be the first course. Dhozo strode past the knights and toward the White Queen.
A winged shape shot like glittering white laserfire high over the torn crater of the Waygate, black hair streaming behind her. The song wavered as the Arcadians filling the artificial valley gasped. It was the other princess, Maeve Cavainna, dressed in gleaming glass armor and clutching a spear. She soared through the shadows in the direction of the white pyramid and the Waygate on top. Xartasia didn’t move, but stood unflinching in the Projector’s shifting glow.
Dhozo brought his arm up, aiming a rapidly assembling particle beam at Maeve, but several more armored Arcadians poured over the crater’s edge, followed closely by a blond human.
They all charged at Dhozo. Power signatures identified a hand-held energy weapon and cybernetic body parts. One of the degenerates of Anzhotek cowered behind the human. Dhozo was unsure how one of them had escaped the burning of their planet, but his lips curled in a snarl and the Glorious commander promised himself that none of those disgusting herbivores would survive.
“Gripper, go help Maeve!” the human shouted. “Get her to the Waygate!”
The Arboran nodded and ran, scrambling away as the human covered him. Xartasia’s knights launched themselves into the air, spears flashing and wings filling the air with feathers. The human raised his laser and fired at the aerads fanning out to surround him.
Dhozo’s computer monitored every position, feeding the data directly into his thoughts. He saw everything and his swarm reacted immediately to the laser, forming a reflective barrier to minimize the loss of nanites, but the human shifted his aim and fired again. Dhozo’s computer analyzed the shots and found no pattern. His armor swirled in confusion.
But Dhozo had just commandeered Orix’s entire nanite complement. The random shots might have been enough to overwhelm a confused single swarm, but the resources of two was more than equal to the task. Dhozo coalesced a thick but flexible layer of black armor against his skin, but there were more than enough nanites left to attack. He raked at the human with huge serrated claws. The man threw himself back and Dhozo sent barbed spikes darting out from the cloud after him. One of them slashed a deep, bloody wound across the human’s thigh.
Dhozo’s swarm showed him two aerads breaking off the fight against Xartasia’s knights. They attacked from above, spears thrust out toward Dhozo, but they were slow-moving and easily predicted. Nanites deflected the attacks and lashed out in response, forming the swarm into a seething urchin of thrusting spines.
One of the aerads — a male with frayed golden braids — jumped away, but the other wasn’t fast enough. Dhozo knocked her clattering to the ground. She raised her voice in an urgent song and flame roared up between them. Dhozo smothered the fire with his swarm, devouring the flammable oxygen, then poured nanites between the glass plates of her armor, eating the flesh inside.
The human male rushed in again, firing his random shots into Dhozo’s doubled-up swarm. The shots were wild, but they didn’t miss. Dhozo charged at the blond man. His armor extended into a bladed spike longer than the human was tall. Dhozo shifted to bring the most heavily armored parts of his body into their attacks and slashed his blade in a flat arc.
Another Arcadian had joined the remaining knight, this one younger than the first and wearing black leather beneath his glass armor. The aerad in black jabbed his spear into Dhozo’s shoulder. His nanites swarmed up the glass and carbide haft, devouring the minerals, but the sudden thickening of his armor around the joint pulled Dhozo’s attacking blade to one side. The gleaming obsidian edge threw sparks from the side of an ancient building and Dhozo’s swarm yanked the spear from the younger Arcadian’s grasp. The fairy grinned and jumped back, raising balled fists covered across the knuckles with gray strips of fibersteel.
The human with the cybernetics fired several shots into Dhozo’s swarm and the older aerad stabbed his spear at the Devourer’s neck. Dhozo melted back, extending arms that bristled with sharp, hooked blades to slash at both aerads. The one in black raised his forearms and fists to parry the blows, even as Dhozo’s nanites left brittle, cloudy streaks in his glass armor. The force of Dhozo’s blows drove the knight down to one knee on the ground, but before the Glorious commander could complete his kill, the human stepped in his way.
His primitive laser raked the uneven ground on high output. It drained the power quickly, but the crumbling floor of ancient walls and roofs disintegrated and one of Dhozo’s legs punched through, catching in the hole.
Dhozo growled and pulled his swarm into tentacles that heaved him up out of the ragged gap. One of them swept the human’s feet out from beneath him and then shoved him into the hole he had just created. The long-haired aerad leapt at Dhozo, whirling his spear and carving glittering grooves into his armored skin. Dhozo swiped with a huge claw and snapped the weapon in half. Broken pieces fell into the dust as the aerad in black grabbed the human’s hand and hauled him up out of the ground. All three spun to face Dhozo again.
“You hungry, hawk?” the young Arcadian asked.
“Always,” Dhozo snarled.
The trio of smaller aliens surrounded him, jabbing and slashing and firing. The aerad in black ran at Dhozo, leaping into the air and beating his wings hard to throw punches and jabs at the Devourer’s face. With each blow, Dhozo’s nanites stripped away more of the glass and fibersteel armoring his hands until blood streamed down the aerad’s arms, but the little winged slave wouldn’t stop. A punch shattered Dhozo’s nose and red ran down his face, into his mouth. The Devourer tasted his own blood and his stomach growled. He licked his lips.
Dhozo grabbed the Arcadian boy, growing twisted claws that bit deeply into the fairy’s flesh. Dhozo opened his mouth. He was going to bite the aerad’s head off, glass helm and all.
“Logan!” the aerad gasped. “Now would be good!”
The human aimed his ineffectual laser and fired a single shot into Dhozo’s open mouth, through his skull and into his brain. His swarm’s computer superimposed medical readouts and triage information onto Dhozo’s optical centers, clinically notifying its master that he was dead.
Ballad fell to his knees, blood pouring from his lacerated arms and hands. Anthem took Eranna’s spear from the bloodstained ground as Logan helped Ballad to his feet. The Prian fairy wrapped ribbons from Anthem’s shattered spear over his wounded knuckles. Logan raised his Talon-9 and checked the battery. The power was low, but there were a few shots left.
“Can you still fight?” Logan asked.
Anthem and Ballad nodded grimly.
