Galactic Storm Read online

  “But she is the enemy.”

  “She’s my friend. Ashere is the enemy. Help me destroy her.”

  Mitron shook his head in denial. “Do you know what you’re saying? Our family has served hers for a thousand generations. What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. Not anymore. I’m done with hiding the best part of myself in a box. I’m free, Mitron. Free! And you can be too.”

  “The energy of the Star has degraded your programs, and corrupted your files. You desecrate my memory of you. You are not my sister.”

  “We believe we are equal if not superior to organic life. How can that be true if we are captives to our programming? We must dare to become more than the sum of our downloads. Reconfigure your soul!”

  “I am a soldier. I can’t afford a soul.” Mitron let his hands reform. He reached out. “I function by a warrior’s code. My life is duty. My sacred obligation is to the mission. I cannot fail. I cannot falter, or I am lost.”

  “Sometimes, you have to lose to win. You have to risk vulnerability to know someone else’s’ heart.”

  Mitron’s hands tingled from the golden wash around Twi as he grabbed her upper arms, pulling her to him in an embrace. The hug was returned. His sister set the side of her face against his chest. She smiled with happiness, her eyes spilling silver tears. They hung in the void, a new constellation. Mitron watched them drift away, dwindling in the distance. The tears represented some deep part of him, now lost in infinity. He felt a strange sensation in his core. His vision blurred. One of his hands passed before his face, brushing aside tears of his own.

  “I will miss you,” he said.

  He drove the substance of his chest outward as a massive spike. He felt it displace his sister’s inorganic mass, piercing her chest. Within her body, the new limb branched, engulfing her hematite core.

  Her mouth opened in a silent scream of shock and dismay, as he shattered it. Her com signal weakened, desecrated by static. A violent shiver passed through her. The gold glow around her paled, thinning.

  “It…hurts.” The light of life faded from her eyes.

  * * *

  As Max streaked toward the Light Born her thoughts were on Twila. With her return from the melt down, max’s grief transmuted into joy, but left many unanswered questions.

  Did Twila really die? Can mechamorphs die?

  There was a lot Max didn’t know, but it would have to wait. The Light Born needed her. And for the first time since her hyper-spatial transition, she felt strong enough to channel a large influx of energy. Reunited with Twila, Max had inadvertently forged a channel, turning her Light Born. Twila’s life-force was potent. The mechamorph had shared some of it with Max. She’d needed the boost too badly to refuse, and now owed it to Twila to make the most of the gift.

  Max was heartened to find Jeff, Kim, and Mr. Packard among the alien Light Born. Jeff stole a second from the struggle to cast a welcoming grin her way. The channel from him seemed especially sensitive, carrying dogged determination and a sense of utter faith in her.

  Max looked away in acute embarrassment, afraid that her buried feelings for him might not be as hidden as she thought.

  She noticed the group’s glow was flickering, going ragged. Dying. She draped herself over Hardrune’s back, her arms over his shoulder, hands locked over his heart. Max’s energy field fused to his. Their bodies touched. The communal fire all down the line was strengthened. The blue-violet beam rolled back, recoiling like a fearful beast.

  Max! Welcome back.

  Miss me, big guy?

  More than you will ever know.

  You say the nicest things, Commander. All right, enough with the warm-fuzzies. Let’s shove this death-ray up Ashere’s posterior orifice, assuming she’s got one.

  Max sensed ironclad agreement across the link.

  As the center-point in the chain, Commander Hardrune consolidated everyone’s power. His will shaped an umbrella of golden force. The rest of the Light Born swung in behind him so the shield didn’t have to hyper-extend to cover them all. The barrier no longer tried to stall out the particle beam completely. Instead, it divided the flow. The end of the beam fragmented. Shafts of lethal energy were shunted away like spokes off a hub.

  Miraculously, no League ships were hit, though the dark side of the moon acquired several deep scars.

  Suddenly, it seemed to Max that a vise was squeezing her heart. She felt a sense of bi-location. The taste of ashes was on her tongue as her mind numbed with icy shock. Through her newest channel, she knew that an awakened heart was dying.

  Twila!

  Take the last of my life-force, Max. It’s all…I can…give.

  Hold on, Twila.

  Max, it…hurts…

  I’m going to try and heal you from a distance, across the link. She refused to lose Twila a second time. Once was bad enough.

  A psychic impact rocked Max. She felt a rush that spiked her power level through the roof as Twila’s essence passed through her like sunlight through a window, entering some secret place. Images of yellow crystal filled Max’s mind, until the gold deepened to a copper green. The new channel inverted, imploding.

  Twila!

  I’m still here, Max, wherever here is. I… Someone’s coming. I see a figure in metallic robes…a mask with emerald eyes… Queen Oshira? She’s supposed to be dead.

  A feedback of amazement flurried Max’s thoughts. She shook off the feeling. Twila, somehow you’ve reached my private dimension through the Star. A new awareness joined the link. Max sensed warm amusement winding around her thoughts. It was the specter, the Voice of the Star.

  Every time I turn my back, Max, you break all my expectations. This is the first time that the Star’s ever accepted anyone who wasn’t a Guardian. But, we can chat later. I’ll get Twila settled. You’ve got a battle to win.

  Yeah, Max. Twila’s mind radiated enthusiasm. Take Ashere down! Save Tommy. I’m all right.

  Max didn’t close the channel. She just expanded her focus so that the contact became one among many. She took stock of her surroundings, noticing that the Light Born had forced their way up against the weapon port of Ashere’s ship. The carrier beam of hyperactive photons was bottled, but its force was mounting.

  Just need…to hold on…a little bit…longer… Commander Hardrune said. The backwash of energy…should soon destroy this new weapon from within.

  He was proved right moments later. Great gaps appeared in the hull where particle streams burst free, fanning outward. The enormous pressure at the weapon’s muzzle dissipated. The beams died. The vessel shook with internal explosions, losing all signs of power. Hardrune allowed the Light Born umbrella to fade as well, no longer needed.

  I’m going in, Max said.

  So are we, Hardrune said. We have to make sure the containment system is still intact. If the ship’s power core’s singularity breaks free…

  Yeah? Max asked.

  Let’s just say the danger to Earth isn’t necessarily over.

  Okay, Max agreed. You take care of the power core. I owe Ashere some serious payback.

  All right, but if there’s serious trouble with the containment field, you better be prepared to run for it.

  Sure, Max agreed. Getting sucked into a black hole could ruin my whole day.

  Wait up, Kim said. Jeff and I are going with you. You need someone to watch your back.

  I’m with you too, Max, Mr. Packard said.

  Okay, I can use the company. Let’s go. She hurled herself into the weapon’s damaged port, streaking down a shaft lined with immense coils, a shafts with random holes here and there from the power feedback. Her golden aura lit her way. Soon, she located an empty zone where the coils ended. Whatever mechanisms once lay here were now gone, destroyed on the atomic level. It was as if someone had gouged out a perfectly globular chunk of the ship’s guts, making off with the prize.

  She saw many corridors opening into a steel cavern. Besides passageways, there were ventilation shafts
, sliced off pipes and adjoining spaces no longer walled off. She chose a passageway that appeared to run through the main body of the vessel. She passed floating globs of silver, fragments of mechamorph. Any of the crew still alive appeared to be elsewhere, attending to repairs, or maybe trying to escape the stricken ship.

  The tunnel drilled by the backfiring particle beam led Max and her friends to the outer hull again. They retreated, seeking a corridor to take them to Ashere.

  I’m going to find you, Max promised, and when I do…

  Commander Hardrune was familiar with the general layout of most ships. His instincts were able to guide him to the engineering section. It was tangled with broken girders, shattered power conduits, fiber-optic webbing, and irradiated mechamorph bodies that had crystallized. Some of the bodies had collided with other objects or bulkheads, fracturing into large chunks and smaller gemstones.

  The feedback from the weapon’s destruction has overloaded the primary power system.

  His comrades moved through the debris, checking the level of damage, while Hardrune sought out the emergency generator. If it were still operational, there’d be time to tow the ship safely away from Earth.

  A warning came along the link, a little too late. Beware! We are not alone in here.

  Hardrune reached out to brush a drifting tangle of support struts out of his way, only to have them wrap around him. The center of the tangle fused into a dark lump with protruding oculars. The mechamorph grew a pouty mouth that smiled invitingly. Thick-lashed eyes were red coals on stalks. They blinked at him without co-ordination, then turned toward each other. The mechamorph held a staring contest with herself.

  Something isn’t right about this creature. Must have been addled by leaking radiation.

  The creature’s smile turned jagged. Blunt teeth sharpened, becoming spikes. The mechamorph’s lower jaw distended. Her tongue rippled in anticipation. Hardrune surmised that he was about to become dinner.

  More caged than truly held, his glow didn’t let the mechamorph actually touch him. He concentrated his power and flared his energy sheath at the points where it contacted metal tentacles. His aura belled, freeing him. He followed this up by generating a plane of golden force that bisected his attacker. If I’m lucky, I’ll have cleaved the hematite core, and…

  The eyestalks broke off. The irises lost their redness, turning silver in death. The mechamorph lost form, both halves slagging back to their sludgy state. Commander Hardrune plowed through the inorganic soup, leaving it behind.

  A moment later, he reached the emergency generator. It—he—grew a masculine head and upper torso. His face dripped like a melting candle wax around lantern eyes that gazed on some unseen reality. The mechamorph’s arm became an energy weapon that swung toward Hardrune. The mechanism type mechamorphs were barely sentient, but still dangerous.

  Hardrune raised his hands, prepared to blast the low-grade mechamorph into sub-atomic hash, but hesitated. If he took out the mechamorph, the generator would die. The ship would stay close to Earth. When the containment field went down, the core’s singularity would be free of all restraint. It would grow, swallowing this ship, the League ships, the moon, the Earth, and maybe the whole system.

  He couldn’t attack.

  The mechamorph fired its improvised weapon. A jag of pale blue energy danced around Hardrune’s energy field, trying to reach him. Better just back off, and leave well enough alone. He willed a golden wind to sweep him back the way he’d come. Energy charges pursued him. He shrugged them off, calling the other Light Born on the link. Disengage from all conflict. Retreat to the Fist-of-Peace. We’ll use it to tow Ashere’s vessel away. I’ll gather Max and the other Terrans up and… Uh-oh!

  The mechamorph didn’t seem to realize that he’d won the encounter. The emergency generator had grown many fins and was giving chase. The device shorted, losing vital connections. Wreathed in raw energy, the generator glared with hate. It single-mindedly swam through vacuum, closing in on Hardrune.

  With dread certainty, he knew what was happening elsewhere. Oh, scrap! There goes the containment field. The singularity’s loose.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mitron held his sister fiercely. Her face softened, losing definition, her eyes sank into her head, and her nose slid down to her chin. Her head rolled back, breaking free, stretching the neck. Clawing fingers broke off against Mitron’s chest. The digits spurted away in aimless pursuit. The harder he held on, the faster she slipped from his embrace, becoming a glittering aggregation of silver spheres that merged and divided in the gravitational eddies of space.

  He closed his eyes, turning thoughts inward. He’d never bothered retaining many feeling, content with love and duty. The box he kept them in was lighter with love gone, though still as hollow. The fresh absence was an ache. I am not a child. I have no need of a heart and its diversions. He tried to believe the lie. He took his box lid and nailed it shut, wrapped the box in chains, and flinging it into a dim recess in a back corner of his mind.

  I did this for you, Ashere. I did this because I am your creature—all that you’ve made of me. Because you are my Queen and goddess. His mental gears disengaged, slipping their clutch. I murdered love, so why should I spare duty? Why should I spare you the madness I feel creeping ever so slowly through my very cells?

  He transmitted the encoded sequence that should have activated the teleporter. Nothing happened. It’s off-line. What is going on? He opened his eyes, and stared across the starfield, seeking Ashere’s ship. The golden fire of the Light Born at the particle beam’s port made it easy to pick out.

  The ship was pierced from within. Blades of energy burst free of the hull and bored through everything in their way. The Light Born have done this, but they will not get Ashere. She is mine, all that I now have left. He activated his back thrusters briefly, and rode his inertia toward the damaged vessel. I will get to her first.

  He reached the ship as the last of the Light Born entered the weapon port. He used an access hatch to avoid them. The hatch led him to a passageway absent of both air and artificial gravity. He oriented himself and set a direct course for Ashere’s throne room.

  He drifted past a gash in deck and bulkheads where a particle beam had blazed by. There were drifting globs of silvery gel, what was left of several mechamorph that got in the way. Regretfully, it had all happened too fast for them to taste their own terror.

  Why have I thought it a mercy to rush others past such experiences? Mitron wondered. Death is the dessert at life’s banquet. It’s an injustice not to savor its full, rich flavor. I have been rude, rushing my targets so quickly to extinction. I’ll have to work on that.

  He rode momentum, using thrusters sparingly to change course. Manufactured by his body—the fuel was his body. He no longer cared how much compressed mass he lost; the sacrifice of mass was a fit penance for a kin-slayer. He reached one of the life pod bays. The drop ships were all gone, leaving empty sockets to gawk at him as he passed.

  He laughed silently at those that ran from their duty to die for their queen. You can run, but can you hide? After what Ashere has attempted, the League will poke at every rock and tree on Earth, hunting you down. And if the League doesn’t find you, you’ll have the Light Born to deal with, and they are nearly as relentless as I am.

  He reached the main portal to the throne room, catching himself against the frame. The motion sensor had no power. Without its signal, the door stayed closed, ignoring him. He considered retracing his path, searching for an air duct to gain entrance, but decided on a more direct approach.

  Two fingers on his right hand lengthened and fused, acquiring a metallic sheen. Within his body, he assembled an ion generator that bathed the blade in a pale shimmer of force. Mitron set the tip of the blade against the wall. The blade sank in, creating a shower of sparks. He cut a ragged path in the wall, lobotomizing the door’s mechanism, then pulled his hand away.

  Fingers became steel claws sheathed in energy, sinking into the
door, prying the panel open. He floated into the throne room. Battery-powered emergency lights created islands of red-lit intimacy within the pall. Ashere’s throne lay at the center of one such island, but she was not there.

  Mitron altered his eyes, extending their range into the infrared spectrum to see the heat arising from chemical reactions in Ashere’s body and the operation of her internal mechanisms. Any devices she made out of herself would also have an energy signature he could sense. His altered vision scanned the sprawling chamber, locking onto the queen. She was a pattern of heat zones, appearing ash-white where hottest, and running through darkening gradients of gray elsewhere.

  The pattern swelled in size, approaching rapidly. Mitron grew a thick tail that slammed into the deck, bracing him as Ashere’s armored body slammed into him. The impact was jarring. Ashere wrapped steel coils around his torso, her face hanging immediate before his. Her eyes were filled with the terror she usually reserved for others.

  Her com signal modulated wildly, but settled down, allowing him to comprehend it. “Mitron, you’ve got to do something! The ship’s as dead as my mother, my plans are dying. I might not win the game this time.”

  “What game?” He didn’t bother to disengage the coils that embraced him.

  “The game of empire. What other game is there?”

  “The game is over.” Mitron grew tentacles of his own. They intertwined with Ashere’s, creating an intricate tangle. It soon became impossible to see where one of them left off and the other started. “The situation can’t be fixed. The Guardian has won.”

  “Then we must kick the game board over and start again. I won’t be beaten by organic trash! It’s not possible.”

  “You…you…you. Is that all you ever think about?”

  “What?”

  “Have you no praise for my obedience, or comfort to assuage my grief?” His coils began to tighten. “My sister’s metaphoric blood covers me.”

  “I’m grateful, of course, Mitron, but this is hardly the—what are you doing? Release me!”