Chapter 16

Lucas slowly opened his eyes – his body throbbing with fatigue – and the first thing he saw was the headless corpse, drifting slowly by. The blood that still globbed from the severed neckstump was floating in a glittering trail of wobbling, spherical stars. They were a medtech, and they were otherwise unharmed. It was almost cartoonish – save for the hideous stink of it. Lucas wriggled in the life support webbing he was caught in and started to hear the other sounds: The alert bleets, the ... the siren ... the klaxon. The unmistakable klaxon of an breach.

He looked around the room and saw that he was in the medical bay. Several beds had people strapped in, people with far worse injuries than him. Their life support webbing flared orange and green, with some sliding towards red as their indicators flatlined. They were the lucky ones. Three beds had been turned into a fine spray of scrap metal by a single railgun slug that had gone through one wall and out the other. That had been what had taken off the head of the meditech and ... if he didn’t miss his guess, had aresolized the other.

These thoughts, these rational and semi-coherent thoughts, did not come to him at first.

They came later, after he pieced together the hacking, sobbing, coughing, vomiting mess he became as he wriggled out of the life support webbing and swam through the air, fumbling and grasping for the brightly lit emergency patch kits on the walls. The lights around them strobed green in the dimness of the room, and his long training – even on the moon, in his comfortable apartments, he had been trained hard on decompression drills – guided him to the kits. Then the kits to the two holes. The Enterprise was, at the end of the day, a warship. The skin had been penetrated, but the backup webbing had deployed, and the air that escaped was only a slow hiss, not the furious roar that the full railgun shot would have left behind on a civilian ship.

Lucas slapped the patch down after a few moments of desperate fumbling, fumbling accomplished as he slowly rotoated on three axii. Once the patch was down, he looked up – across – the room to the other hole. It meant he’d have to get close to the slowly expanding cloud that had been the other medtech. Lucas, who had already vomited, clenched his jaw and kicked off hard on the wall. His nose flared as he breathed in short, shallow pants. He didn’t want to. But he had to.

When the second patch slapped down, the klaxon ceased and Lucas could think of something other than his drill. Unfortuantely, that something was the fact that his face was now smeared with blood, and a tiny chip of bone had caught in his short, kinky hair. His clothing was soaked with his own vomit and he had snorted up something that left his nostrils stinging. He coughed and scrambled along the wall until he was in a part of the room that was near the emergency vents. One of the canned air tanks blew fresh oxygen into his face and he started to think halfway clearly.

They had gotten through the battle. But the Enterprise had taken hits.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, okay, okay, uh ... check the wounded.”

He carefully finger walked along the wall until he came to the main console in the room. Punching in the activation key, he was able to bring up a simple daignostic system, and saw that the two people who were redlining had been hit by the flucuation in pressure – they were already sliding back from the red to the orange. Everyone else seemed stable, save for those unlucky bastards who had gotten mashed by the railgun slug. But as he started hunting around for some kind of a communication system, a small text box popped up in the center of the screen.

BRIDGE: Medbay, come in.

Lucas breathed out a sigh he hadn’t realized he had been holding. There had been a part – a tiny part – of his brain that had been idly wondering if he was the last person in the last room of the ship. There were more than a few nightmare inducing horror survival movies about a striken starship and the only passengers being left in a single pressurized room, surrounded by the vacuum tomb of their ship. Hell, he didn’t even need to look to films for that. The good Glorious Prince of Heaven or whatever the fuck he was called these days had been stuck in that exact situation when the Chinese ship had blown halfway to Arcadia.

Lucas shook himself and typed back a response.

MEDOPS 1: This is Lucas Sibusiso, Logistics Officer. Both medtechs are dead, we have a patch, but it’s fixed. Three other KIA, the rest of the wounded are stable. What’s the situation in the rest of the ship?

He punched down the enter key.

BRIDGE: This is Captain DuBois, Lucas. Sorry to break it to you, but we’re in a bad way and we need your help.

Lucas clenched his hands. Great. Just great. He typed back.

MEDOPS 1: What’s the sitch, DuBois?

Hey, he thought. We’ve been through so much shit, if he can call me Lucas, I can leave off the captain. Right? Right? He stated to get nervous as no response came – whatever hacked together communication system they were using didn’t have any ‘person is typing indicator.’ Lucas was still trying to kick himself for feeling awkward in a ship that was riddled with railgun impacts when the wall of text arrived.

BRIDGE: We took fifty eight railgun shots, most of them through the habitation sections and the fore. Our lasers are down, most of the tubes are smashed, the reactor has a breach, our remass tanks are holed, two of our three radiators are so much paste, and the only thing that’s keeping the ship together is her supersturcture. We’re currently following Ceres out of the SOL system and unless we get a rescue boat in the next few days, the surviving crew is fucked. But none of that matters because the enemy has a laser frigate in orbit around Stark – and they’re firing on our ground forces every other hour. Our forward telescope is still working and we got a shot of them – they’re angling towards the ground and getting remass from the other ships in the enemy fleet. My astrogator and I agree: They’re preparing for a ship drop. If that ship drops onto Europe, it’ll add another fifty million people to the casualties and that’s not going to happen on my watch. We have one missile tube left, but the firing control from the bridge to it is down. With our marines on Stark, we’re down to whatever we can scrounge: You are within two corridors of an emergency vac suit. From there, you can reach the secondary firing control systems, program in the launch trajectory, and blow that frigate out of orbit before it kills half of Germany and wipes our invasion off the planet. No presure :)

Lucas read all of that with mounting horror. A laser frigate was between ten to twenty thousand tons. If it hit an arcology even a galancing blow, especially if accelerated to max speed ... then he realized that it was far worse than it normally would have been. The laser frigate wasn’t just a ship. It was an undead ship, raised by magic. It could only be destroyed by holy or purified weapons – meaning that the heat friction that would have turned a laser frigate into a tumbling mass of wreckage shortly after hitting the atmosphere would pass through it harmlessly.

It would have a full extra half hour to accelerate – less, as it would be accelerating the whole time. Each minute spent burning at two gravities, emptying its remass tanks, increasing its velocity, going faster and faster, then getting faster at going faster...

Lucas shook himself, then typed back.

MEDOPS 1: Got it.

He started by rummaging around through the medical bay, finding one of their face masks. He tested it, then slipped it on over his head, breathing through it quickly. He found a dosimeter watch – they were designed to both act as a personal radiation checker and as a way to check around a corner to see if rads were being pumped out of a breech. But the problem was that checking a corner would take unspooling the sampling cable and thrusting it out past the bend. That was fine, if you had the hours that were normally expected during normal damage control procedures. Due to the glacial speed of space travel and space engagements, any repairs requiring less than a few seconds were all assumed to take hours.

He didn’t have hours.

But Lucas had watched a truly preposterous amount of garbage spec-fic with Helen – Helen, who was down there on the planet, fighting her way through the legions of the undead. And in several episodes, he had seen people jerry rig more complicated stuff than a fucking pole. And when he started thinking like that, Lucas found it remarkably easy to break the arm off one of the articulated aid stations, strap the dosimeter watch to it by the wrist band, then hold it infront of him as he came to the door. He paused only to do what he could, binding his arms with gauze, sticking his hands into surgical gloves, then taping those shut. He wrapped his ears with more gauze after plugging them with cotton wadding, then turned back to the rest of the room.

The paitents were all still out cold – sedated by their life support units.

“Sorry, everyone,” he called through the mask. “It’ll just be a second!”

The door refused to open, at first. He had to punch in the secure code that the captain had sent via the text message, then override the safty systems. Then the door whisked open and wind roared past him, pushing him through and into the vacuum of the corridor. The door slammed shut after him and he knew that the interior of the room would be refilling. For his sake, he was glad that he was inside – even if he was in a vacuum now. Vacuum was a remarkable insulator, and while his skin began to prickle and bruise as capillaries burst, he could ignore the pain of it as he breathed through the mask.

He hoped that the gauze was at least doing something to protect him from the lack of pressure.

Lucas started to push himself down the corridor, forcing himself to ignore the floating bits of scrap in the air, the corpses that had been bisected by said fragments, and the eerie, pounding silence that filled his ears. It was hard to not rush as fast as he could, hard to stop himself at the corner and stick the watch out, angling the pole so he could see the rad count – not dangerous. He rounded the bend and saw the emergency vaclocker.

It had been hit, directly, by a railgun.

The hole beyond opened into a vast, starry sky, shockingly cold and distnat.

Lucas punched the wall and closed his eyes. His skin was prickling beneath the gauze – he felt the aches and the pains growing more and more intense as the liquid in his body began to try and escape through his pores. The gauze was definitely not enough. Lucas forced himself to begin pushing forward. The path to the firing control room was past this point – he could make it. He’d have to make it. He stuck his watch around the corner again – and again, no deadly radiation flares. Lucas dragged himself around the corner...

And saw Isabella, the elf.

She stood in the corridor, as if the whole ship was still spinning, her hands on her hips. For just a moment, Lucas felt a frisson of horror burn through him. He didn’t want to see the fiesty water wizard get reduced to ... to ... he blinked as he saw that Isabella was perfectly fine. She was, in fact, surrounded by a shimmering cloud that roiled and rippled, as if constantly blowing away from her, then being refreshed. Isabella had her back to him. Lucas reached out with his hand, tentatively, and stuck half his arm into the cloud – and felt the cool brush of air against his skin. He pushed himself forward without a pause, and his body screamed in relief almost as loudly as it had in pain. He stood right behind Isabella, dragging his mask as she turned and smacked him in the face with an open palm, her eyes wide.

“Isabella!” Lucas squaked, his hand going to his cheek. “What the fuck?”

“I thought you were a monster!” Isabella said, her voice shocked. “Lucas? What in the name of the gods are you wearing?”

“The world’s shittiest vac suit,” Lucas said, wincing as he started to flex his fingers, the joints aching. “Fuck.”

“Hurm,” Isabella said. “You have magical talents, Lucas. Do you not remember even the basic water cantrips I showed you?”

“No,” Lucas said, honestly. His head was beginning to pound. “Isabella, we need to get to that door there...” He noticed that while she was standing casually, he remained floating and had to keep jerking his arms to keep them inside of the sphere of magically generated air that she had wreathed herself in.

“Why?” Isabella asked. “I’ve been trying to find anyone else since the battle, but ... well...” She shrugged one shoulder. “Most of you are dead. Is this really what wars on Stark are like? It seems terribly wasteful – even the worst battlefields in the Sur, most of us survived to fight again.” She shook her head. “Though, I will say, at least it is quick.”

Lucas shook his head, then grabbed onto her shoulders, curling his legs up under him. Isabella made a little snorting sound, as if she was offended by being used in such a fashion. But she didn’t shake him off and she did begin walking down the corridor, coming to the emergency ladder shaft. Once the door opened and they both looked down it, Lucas frowned as he took stock. The ladder would lead to the core of the ship. Once there, they just had to crawl along it to come to the nose, where the tube firing controls were located. Easy. But the ladderway had been struck several times, leaving jagged rents in the ladder and the wall alike. Lucas looked at Isabella. “Can you adjust the bubble?”

“Yes,” she said, casually. “Do you want me to fill in the ladder?”

He nodded.

“It shall be only a minor expenditure of mana for a hydrosphost of my skills,” she said, then began to incant. Her fingers moved and the bubble of air expanded past Lucas and into the pipe. A shimmering cloud marked each hole – the place where air was sublimating out into space. Lucas tried to not think about the matter being added to the universe. How much had to be added before the future of space time was utterly twisted. Current astrophysics said that the universe was set to continue to expand outwards, losing energy over time until space-time ripped apart. But if you had elven wizards running around, dumping mass into the universe by summing it from nowhere, how long before that gravitaional destiny got flipped around and the universe instead headed for a big crunch?

Lucas realized he was stalling.

Every time he had passed a corner, he had needed to steel himself for the red light on the watch going off. Now, he had to do it six times in rapid succession. Great. Great, really great.

He stuck the watch out. It flickered, but did not flare. He was able to slip past one hole – gaping into a wild profusion of cables that had been left to flip and twist in the microgravity, some still sparking silently in the vacuum of space. Then he saw the watch flaring bright red as he came to the next hole. “Fuck fuck fuck!” He hissed. “Double fuck, can this magical air get irradiated?”

“What’s irradiated?” Isabella asked.

Lucas looekd up at her. “Can elven magic cure cancer?”

“Cancer?” Isabella asked.

“A lump that grows. Makes you vomit and kills you really fast?” Lucas asked. “Uh, sometimes it appears on breasts or testacles or-”

“Easily!” Isabella said, sounding offended.

“Fine!” Lucas chucked the dosimeter out through one of the holes that opened into space. The watch tumbled away, flashing intermittently red – black – red – black as the face tumbled away from him. It was being bathed in cosmic rays, and was receiving information that, a century before, would have been of vital, groundbreaking scientific purposes. Now, it was merely beaming the information to a vast, disinterested universe due to a fit of pique. Lucas took every worry he had about bleeding out of his anus and coughing up his own teeth and jammed it into the back of his brain. Instead, he started to drag himself forward.

And yet, when he most wanted to think of the miraclous powers of medical technology as shown on Star Trek, his brain instead decided to dredge up one of the few spec-fic shows from the vast catalog that had gotten something even halfway right about the future of space travel. No matter how many times Lucas thought to himself how incredibly un-useful it was for his brain to fill his thoughts with mental images of James Holden slowly liquifying from radiation exposure, the images from The Expanse did not fail to leave him, all the way to the firing control computer.

Once there, Lucas half expected to find the computer gutted by a railgun shot, just like his last few hopes. Instead, the computer was waiting inside of the cramped, single person room. The shot had, instead, gone through the body of whoever had been staioned here to operate the system in case the bridge was hit. The gore that caked the walls had dried to a fine, gritty powder in the hard vacuum and the stringy bits of uniform that hadn’t been sucked out with the upper half of the torso spread across the dooorway like a spiderweb.

Lucas, by now, had managed to get used to seeing what high energy weapons did to human beings who chanced to be between them and the barrel.

He still didn’t sit in the chair. Instead, he leaned in, wincing as his elbow brushed against some bleached white bone, jutting into the air. His fingers shook as he punched in the numbers that Captain DuBois had sent him – and then whispered, softly. “Bombs away.”

He thumbed down the launch button.

The ship around him juddered slightly.

Outside, the missile left the tube, flipped around with a spray of cold gas from its RCS, then triggered its engine. It streaked off at an ungodly speed, whipping through space towards the laser frigate. The warhead had been blessed by an elf, an elf that was likely dead now, an elf that may have been lasered to death by the very frigate it flew towards. The missile was too stupid to appreciate the thought. But Lucas did.

It reached ten kilometers of the laser frigate, which was angled towards Europe and preparing its engines, before the frigate even seemed to notice its approach. Maybe the undead crew, driven by the orders of their master, could not spare the mental energy to check for incoming missiles. Maybe their undead telescopes had been damaged during the fast pass. Or maybe they had yerned for some excuse to avoid mass slaughter – even at the cost of their own unlives. The missile exploded and filled the space ahead of it with a shotgun blast of kinetic projectiles, which spread in a narrow cone. They turned the laser frigate, in the space of a few seconds, into a rapidly expanding loud of debris.

And somewhere between the surface and low orbit, a very tiny dragon remained hovering in the air, panting softly.

“Well, dang!” Hua squeaked to no one – his voice thin and attunated in the near vacuum he flew through. “They stole my kill!”

The Berlin Arcology rose in the distance – a monument to the splendor and artistry of an entire planet. It was burning. Smoke rose from the sleek, almost organic sides of the structure, and the scrambled airforce of several nations and several epochs dueled in the sky. Across Europe, the European Union’s defense forces had scrambled to try and resist the undead conquest of their small patch of the world. While many had been hacked from the sky or shot where they stood, others had managed to pull the same trick that the Americans had of falling back to the wilderness. In earlier eras, this would have been hard to pull off, with the density of Europe’s population. But with the great concentration of humanity into the arcologies, green had returned to Europe’s shores, and in that green, attack planes, helicopters, tanks, had managed to squirrel themselves away and wait for the signal.

They had joined the column as it drove on Berlin and the home of Reinhardt Hydrich.

Annie sat on the edge of a tank, riding on it without a worry for the bullets that stitched across the armor plating from time to time. Several zipped into her shield every few times the tank was sprayed down by the infantry that tried to block their way. The field ahead of them was grassy and littered with the burning wrecks of several dozen Soviet tanks that had been dragged from their graves in the deserts of Afghanistan, with a pair of 21st century Abrams retreating backwards, their main guns speaking almost as fast as the tank she was riding.

Annie saw one such shell – a dart of depleted uranium glowing with eldrich light – zip in a shallow arc and plunge through the armored hull of the tank fifty yards to the left of hers. The turret ripped off with a roar and a flare of smoke that circled into the air. The tank Annie sat on turned its turret and fired back – the impact of their armor piercing shell on the rear of the Abrams could be traced by the sudden explosion of smoke and the half bent projectile, whipping into the air and away. She pointed at the tank in question as it continued to drive – albiet slower now – towards the trees that provided a break around the arcology.

“Nope,” she said.

Her finger glowed and a bead of red light shot from the tip. It lobbed in a higher arc and came down on the top of the undead Abrams. The fireball flash was bright enough to make her wince and look away – and she felt a momentary flare of irriation with herself. The fighting was only going to get worse as they had to abandon the tanks and start cutting their way through the arcology itself. But she still felt the uncoiling snake of cold satisfaction as her ride drove past the smoldering ruin of the Abrams. Then they were through the trees and in the broad, flat walkways that led to the Arcology herself.

The defenders here were even fiercer and even more well dug in. Coal-miner helmets and brown khaki both showed on the skeletons that manned the anti-tank guns and the machine gun nests – bullets sparking and clanging off the tank around her. Annie saw the APCs emerging in a wide ring. Now was her moment to shine. She floated off the tank that had been her ride from France to here and landed on the ground, her palms spreading out as she gathered magic into herself.

The anti-tank guns spoke, tongues of flame roiling from the barrels. The projectiles struck the air fifteen feet ahead of Annie and several hundred to the left. The air rippled and the explosions bloomed, like roses, and the APCs that had been their targets were able to open up with their turret mounted machine guns. Flechettes filled the air with a wine and hiss, like swarms of furious bees. Skeletons came to pieces, and their anti-tank blast shields shredded under modern weapons. The undead started to fall back into the arcology properly as the marines in the APCs emerged from the backs and unhooked themselves from the sides.

Mixed among the marines were elves – elves that charged with a bellow, swords drawn. Annie was about to call out to them – but then they were at the doors and in. Gunshots and hisses and screams filled the air, but the silence came shockingly fast. The marines, their rifles at the ready, advanced in a more orderly fashion.

An elf stepped out – a red headed elf with a golden blade – and then cried out as blood exploded from her shoulder. The marine that had shot her snapped their rifle down, and despite having a face mask covering their face, managed to look horrified.

“Gods!” The elf sobbed and screamed at once, clutching her shoulder. Annie flew forward, her feet skimming across the ground. She landed beside the elf and saw the rifle’s bullet had mangled her somewhat badly. Blood pumped past her fingers in great gouts, but she was still alive. Annie let her magic crackle through her fingers and touched them to the wound, which knitted, then closed. The elf, her teeth clenched so tightly that Annie could hear them groaning and creaking, sagged with relief as the marines advanced – and then she snarled. “The entryway is fucking clear, you Starker bastards.”

The marines and Annie confirmed that a few seconds later. The elves had taken two casualties: Without open fields and without time to sight and aim, the undead had been cut down by elven sword and impaled by elven spears. Annie looked over the carnage in the antechambers into the main habitation levels of the arcology with slow wonder. “Elves...” She whispered – and then yelped as the blunt faced, tough as nails Glorious Prince of Heaven stepped up beside her and added his own two cents.

“I suppose they have been practicing for this for a while,” he said, dryly. Annie clutched at her chest, then turned towards him as the elves and marines began to break off. The air was thick with the scent of smoke and rang with the wailing alarms of the arcology. Millions of people lived in the massive structure – and now, their whole lives had just become a battlefield. The undead outnumbered them in staggering numbers, and more were being brought in by every method that Heydrich had available to himself.

They only had a narrow winder to cut to where he was located and kill him and end the nightmare.

But before Annie could force herself to push on, she noticed something. “Where’s your dragon companion?”

Qasim shrugged one shoulder, his face unreadable. “On his way back. Someone killed that frigate. I sent him after it. Seems like he did his job – but if I can, I want to end this before he had to see any more danger.”

Annie nodded. “Come on.”

She and he started to float forward. Annie had been given a communicator – keeping her head solid enough so the communicator didn’t fall out took a constant, minor effort. She heard the reports from the rest of the marines. The undead were numerous, and they fought hard. But the marines had power armor and were trained in this exact kind of nightmarish fighting. They used every trick and tool they had learned – some that would have been impossible in Stalingrad. Attacks from below, attacks through walls, circumventing avenus of defense by abusing the metro and sewage system. All towards the aim of narrowing in on the command center of the whole arcology.

Annie and Qasim found a squad of marines at a hard point – a corridor that had been locked down using the riot response programs and armed with ghostly Great War machine guns, machine guns that chattered remarkably slowly compared to the sheet-cloth ripping sounds of later guns. The marines were returning bursts from their rifles, while their officer – a naval Lieutenant in lighter exo armor – spoke on her coms. “They’ve welded down the access hatch? Blow it the fuck open.”

“There are civilians hiding in the room, ma’am,” the gruff voice over the line said. “We blow it, they get blown.”

“Well f...” The officer paused as she saw Annie – who stepped around the corner without a care. Bullets whiffed and zipped through her ephemeral body as she glared at the skeletal figures crouched behind their machine gun. They paused as they saw the lack of an effect.

“Hey guys,” she said, then threw out her hand. “Sorry about this.”

Beads of white light shot from her fingertips – zipping out and impacting the skeletal figures, striking their chests with unerring accuracy. They swelled outwards and exploded each of them into a spray of fine dust. The dust settled to the ground and Annie kept going forward. “Come on!” She called over her shoulder. “Are we going to end this or not?”

“ ... hot,” the officer whispered.

“Quiet, Helen,” Qasim said, not bothering to pitch his voice down.

Qasim had expected the battle through Berlin to be a hellish slog. And, in one way, it was. Time crawled by on hands and knees as he and the marines around him fought their way past undead hardpoint after undead hardpoint. They took casualties – bullets found chinks in armor and the undead began to get more and more desperate as they fought closer and closer to their leader. They began to drop from the ceiling with knives, not caring if they would be blown to pieces, so long as they could find a weakness in their enemies armor.

Qasim picked up a knick here, a scratch there. But he kept going, doggedly, as Annie DuPont made the enemy before them melt away into nothingness with magic, with a pointed finger, with a word. And that was where the battle shifted for Qasim – shifted to something that felt like a guided tour, rather than a battle. Annie used magic with a proflegate, almost careless amount. Her body crackled with black lightning and her fingers sparked and flared as she blew apart monster after monster, striding forward, glaring after the smoldering ruins she left behind herself.

And finally, their reduced group penetrated into the large, broad interior room that served as a reminder of the pleasures of civic life to the citizens of Berlin. In the center of it, rising out of the ground like a building within a building, was the government center. It had some name, some obscenely long name, but all Qasim knew it as was where the Dark Lord was lurking. The Dark Lord that he had come so far to finally put down, to end this prophecy and...

Well.

And could wait for later.

The field between where he stood and there was covered by dozens of machineguns, manned by hundreds of dug in skeletons, all of them hardened veterans of the greatest wars that humanity had ever fought. He frowned, slightly, then looked back at the rest of the marines.