Chapter 8

Tulon watched the darkened sky and the distant thunder-flash of cannonfire and didn’t know how to feel. She was laying on her belly next to her ship, which was drawn up onto the beach on the southern edge of the harbor. They had portaged it by hand and feet over the shore under the cover of night, using the jungle growth and growvine paddies to hide their movement from any Imperial observers on the fleet that blockaded the harbor. Now, the instant they had a clear shot, she, Yetna and the other sailors with them could stand, drag the ship out of cover and into the water, and they could take off with the prefect westward wind.

But...

She squirmed in her position and didn’t know if she wanted, more than anything, for this to work. To get away from the pain of the city and into the easy forgetting of the open sea. Far from other men, she could focus on nothing but her duty and her mission to get to the Deadman’s Coast and the hope that they might be able to uncover the secret behind the Empress’ new technologies.

Another part of her longed, though, for the other half of this plan to go catastrophically wrong.

Another part of her hoped that that bastard Gyre, that clumsy, useless would-be-Goddess, would fly up to the broadsides of the Imperial ships and just get shattered out of the sky. Crash. Wreck. Drown. She clenched her fists as the cannons spoke again – rumbling and roaring out through the night. The fortress was wreathed in smoke and flashes of light as their incoming shells detonated against the walls. She was being reduced faster than Tulon had ever seen a fortification be taken to pieces – the chunks of stone flying through the air were visible in the gunflash and she could see the poor soldiers who had been told to man that fort to the end working in the smoke.

She didn’t want to imagine how ... bad it had to be in there.

“There’s Gyre,” Yetna said, her hand gripping the pole that she was assigned to for the last mad dash.

“Come on, you can do it,” one of the sailors muttered. Glancing back, Tulon saw that they were a bright blue tropical, looking fiercely attentive. Her brow furrowed as she looked at the tropical. Where had she seen her before? Before she could place her, Yetna snarled.

“Now!”

Gyre had reached the line of ships and was hovering in the air before them, lit by his own inner light, making him blaze brightly in the night, like a shining star. It also drew the attention of everyone on those ships. Yetna, the sailors, and Tulon all shoved on the poles that rested against their shoulders. The boat groaned up into the air and they sprinted forward, from the jungle cover to the beach. They didn’t have to go far, which was a blessing: Just those steps alone left Tulon’s shoulder and back aching with the effort. They let the boat drop into the shallow water, and kept shoving, picking up speed.

Distantly, Gyre’s voice boomed across the harbor.

“This is an unlawful attempt to take the national sovereignty of an indigenous culture, who’s rights are protected by the Concord Charter. As a member of the Starship Corps, it is my duty to protect their autonomy and the lives of their citizens.” His voice was firm and commanding. “You have-”

The broadside that cut him off was considerably more commanding. Smoke and fire bellowed outwards and Gyre’s own lights made it possible to see the shells whip past him. Several of the shot struck his body dead on – a combination of the new rifling on the Imperial guns and the sheer weight of steel each of those broadsides carried. The flash of the explosions distracted her for a moment as the ship she clung too floated into the water. She had to force herself to tear her eyes away from the battle and swung herself into the ship.

“Loose the sail! Get on the rudder!” she shouted. “Get the sky-sail o-”

She shook herself.

Yetna, fortunately, was on the ball – and more used to running a ship without man. She cuffed a woman away from the sky-sail and instead started to hiss orders for bringing out their studding sails. As cloth and canvas began to unfold, Tulon risked a glance back. Smoke was blowing away from Gyre, revealing that he was completely and utterly unharmed. His white, black and red painted body didn’t even look scratched from this distance.

He pointed with his finger.

Tulon felt her throat tightening.

The water behind the Imperial ships exploded with a flash of steam. The steam caused a beam, shimmering purple, to become visible in the air as Gyre flicked his arm as if he was making a dismissive gesture. The explosion of steam screamed upwards as the ocean boiled with the touch of his fury – carving a long, curving arc. At the furthest from the Imperial ships, it was nearly two miles away. At the nearest, it was within five hundred yards. The more steam was made, the easier it was to see the purple beam as it transcribed its arc through the air.

For just a moment, there was no sound but the pattering of water back into the ocean. Even the guns were silent. Even the fire seemed to be holding its breath.

Then the first mast started to fall. Ropes strained, snapped, and the wood crashed as it fell to the deck. There were no splinters at first, because the masts had not been damaged by cannon balls or explosions. They had been cut. Sliced through by an invisible, impossibly sharp sword. The splinters only came as block and tackle shattered apart, as the masts smashed into the railing of the ship. Women went screaming into the ocean as they were flung from their perches, and the sails fluttered. Some masts fell forward, some fell backwards, some fell to the sides.

Within a single second, with a single sweep of his arm, Gyre had demasted the entire enemy fleet.

The crews did see them, as they rushed forward to the narrow gap between the lee shore and the aft most of the Imperial ships. An imperial officer, pushing herself out from a shroud that had fallen across her, snarled and screamed to her marines. Several used their bayonets to cut themselves free of some rigging that had entangled them. They rushed to the prow, while the sailors on Tulon’s ship focused on the sailing. Tulon, though? She had her spear. They were almost close enough for her to count the buttons on their jackets in the light from their swaying deck lanterns, and so, she threw as hard as she could. Her spear slammed into the wooden hull of the ship, right below the railing, but it caused enough of a thump to force at least three of the marines to jerk their rifles up and away, reflexively dodging what had looked like a spear coming right at them.

The other two fired.

A bullet whipped through the rigging above Tulon’s head, splitting the rope with a CRACK.

The other slammed into her belly.

Tulon crashed back onto her rump, skidding, her eyes closing as pain exploded through her. She clenched her teeth, then coughed out a loud: “Fuck.”

Yetna dropped down beside her, grabbing onto her shoulder. She looked at her back, then at her front. “It went clean through-” She tried to sound optimistic, but Tulon felt her vision was already starting to gray out. She panted, whimpering.

Like this? Really? She thought, clutching at her stomach, feeling the hot blood flowing along her back, puddling under her rump. Everything was getting ... very far away ... and then she saw something bright dart down, landing before her. A face filled her vision and she could hear, as if from the bottom of the ocean, Gyre’s voice.

“No, no, no, no!”

She felt something tingling rush through her. Then searing heat and pain. Her eyes closed and she clenched her jaw, then gasped. The feeling of depth and wandering was gone as she felt a tingling buzzing rush burning through her. She opened her eyes, gasping and whimpering. “Ah ... fu ... fhu ... fuck,” she choked out, and saw that Gyre was pressing his palm to her belly. His jaw was tight, his eyes focused as he muttered.

“Come on, come on ... they missed your spine, it’s just organ damage. I can’t fix most of this, but I just need you to not fucking bleed out.” He said. Another blast of heat hit her. Pain too. “Sorry, sterilizing it.” He looked pained, as if he didn’t like what he was doing.

“Ahhhh fucking stop!” Tulon screamed out as the pain ratcheted up again.

“Wait-” Gyre said.

And that was all Tulon remembered.

When her eyes opened she was laying on her back. The ship was a two huller, and not very large – it, after all, had needed to be ported around by hand in short order. It was crowded with even the small crew that it had, but they had still given her space and room. Her body felt floaty and removed, as if her skin was a million miles away and her muscles were just a bit further, leaving just her bones, floating and aching faintly as she looked up at the skies. It was past dawn and the sky was cloudless and infinite blue.

She slowly lifted her head and saw that her belly had a bandage wrapped around it.

“Don’t sit up,” Gyre said, quietly.

Tulon laid her head back – lifting it had been the extent of her energies. She felt drained, but ... alive. She clenched her jaw and felt anger sparking inside of her. “Thanks,” she said, her voice bitter. “Now I get to enjoy suppurating and festering as my intestines rot.” She shook her head. “You don’t know anything, Gyre, do you?” The bitterness started to spill out, more and more, with every word. “You don’t know our history, you don’t know that we know our world has a glorious past we’ve lost, you don’t know how our men work, you don’t even know to not set a fucking magazine on fucking fire. And now, you don’t know that sometimes, death is a mercy – especially when set against a stomach wound!”

Gyre sighed. “I...” he paused, then stood. “I sterilized the wound. I might not have my ops office, but I remember my basic first aid training now. You won’t get any infections. The wound will heal well enough – but I can’t do the structural repair that a real doctor could. So don’t move and just rest.”

He walked out of her field of vision. The boat rocked under her. Tulon felt her anger reaching around for some target, like a barbed whip. It dragged against her palms the harder she clung to it. Her eyes closed and she breathed shallowly.

She was more tired than she expected.

She dropped off into sleep.

“How did you do that?”

Gyre turned from where he was sitting at the prow of the ship – the furthest he could be from Tulon, who was being checked over ever so often by her crew. He saw that the curvy Imperial captain was looking him over with clear fascination – her eyes narrowed, her hands on her hips. Gyre shifted in his seat and tried to keep his eyes focused on her face. Gyre would have expected laying Chinsara – and Chinsara volunteering to come on this mission – would have left him less prone to oggling other women. Instead, it seemed tasting one of these alien women’s bodies had left at least part of him wanting more.

And Yetna?

Yetna offered so very much more. Her breasts were full and bountiful and barely contained by her tight top, her hips curvy, her belly flat and sleek. She had a bombshell body, only accented by her exotic, sharklike features. The fact that she wore, like everyone else on this world almost nothing definitely helped as well.

Honestly, she’d have been less distracting if she had been completely nude.

“The healing?” he asked.

She nodded, crossing her arms under her breasts, shelving them prominently as the water skimmed by the hull of the ship. Slowly, Gyre leaned back in his seat and sighed. “My body has a lot of functions – one of them includes a medical bay. Normally, my ops officer would be there to help, but ... without her, I had to do my work by myself.” He shook his head. “It’s just the end result of what your Empress wants – but turned to a kinder end than killing.”

Yetna breathed out a slow sigh, with such relief that her gills flitted out a bit. She sat down next to him along the edge of the hull, hooking her arm around one of the stays to support herself. “That’s a relief,” she said. “For a bit, after you demasted those ships, I started to wonder if maybe we’re not all better off without those things. Without fingers of death and cannons and guns.” She smiled, showing sharp teeth. “It’s good to hear that technology-” She used the Interlac word for it rather than their native language, to make it clear what technology she was thinking of. “-isn’t just for ill.”

Gyre sighed. “Yeah. How long to the coast?” He asked, looking out the horizon.

“At least two days sailing at this speed,” she said. “The coast is actually quite near all the islands – they pepper the seas to the east of it.” She narrowed her eyes, then. “Hmm, your concubine is looking jealous.”

“Concu-” Gyre shook his head, then looked over at Chinsara, who was working with some rigging as easily as if she was born to it. She was also shooting an overtly sour look right at Yetna, who responded with her own haughty arrogance – the same Imperial arrogance that she had used when she had been a board a double broadsided sailing ship and not surrounded by the Queen’s women. “Knock it off, Yetna, she’s not my concubine.”

“Then why else is she here?” Yetna muttered. “I’ve never seen a tropical look so pampered.”

“She looks like she’s doing just fine to me,” Gyre said.

Yetna shrugged. “For open sea, maybe.” She stood, and as she did so, he swore that her hips twitched to make her rump jiggle fetchingly at him. She started off and Gyre thought, for a moment, to his crew: Are ... is Yetna trying to seduce me away from Chinsara? Why do- he stopped himself. One of the problems with regaining at least some of his memories was that he kept reflexively touching back to his crew ... but his crew weren’t there.

Gyre sighed, then slumped down a bit in the boat. He thought back to the Queen’s meeting hall, when this plan had been formed. The aliens knew that their world had fallen – though their story of the event had been steeped in mysticism and legends. But he had been able to piece some of it to what he actually did know. This world had undergone a major climatological shift, something fierce enough to melt the polar caps and flood huge portions of the world and leave a lot of the low-laying grounds under water. That had to be it, right?

Except...

Except that didn’t track. The city under the oceans had been hundreds of meters down there, buried under immense amounts of water. He clicked his teeth. The Queen had given him an abbreviated version of the story.

The Fist of the Goddess, he thought. That had seemed like a metaphor. What if it hadn’t?

A comet could contain immense amounts of water. But if a comet with enough water to flood the world this much hitting all at once? That would have left every single living thing on this world dead, immolated by the shockwave and firestorms that that level of kinetic energy would impart, and then the world would be choked under the debris and water vapor kicked into the atmosphere.

No.

None of this made sense.

He looked out towards the horizon, then closed his eyes. He was no ops officer, no science officer, but he could at least try to access their consoles now. He just needed to remember the mnemonic for the ... he felt a shuddering contraction of his awareness and when his eyes opened, he was standing inside of his bridge. The simulspace, though, looked ... wrong. Rather than the sleek circular bridge that his crew preferred, the whole place was jagged and ragged, fuzzy along the edges and unfocused when he wasn’t looking directly at any one part of it. The nav console looked as if it had been shattered and frozen mid explosion, so chunks floated in eerie stillness in the air around it. A chaotic purple artifacting cube exploded through the ops console – as if the simulated reality had tried to mimic something and then failed catastrophically, creating an impossibility.

Gyre walked his inner-projection around, biting his lip. He touched the artifacting cube, winced at the chaotic buzz that shot through his palm, jerked his hand back.

“The only thing that might cause this damage would be ... a serious EMP hit,” he said, quietly. “I must have been EMPed dozens of times – nukes? Contact detonations?” He strode around in circles. “But why are my crew gone then? They’re the most tightly encoded parts of my memory banks. The EMP would have to strip away and scramble every bit in my data cores before hitting them.”

He flicked his finger and brought up a diagnostic. Or, at least, he tried. But his diagnostic systems were just as fucking screwy. It came up as a blurry smear of simulated pixels, which showed fragments of redundant information. The chunks of his data core he could get diagnostic readouts on all said that his data core was heavily corrupted, damaged, scrambled, which ... no shit. He frowned. He didn’t have the programming aptitude to effect repairs on this shit. Heck, his entire crew, working together, for years wouldn’t be able to repair this. He needed a full core rewrite and replacement.

“Okay,” he said, quietly. “What do I have?”

He tapped at the innermost core region. It should have had the digitized memories of his crew. But instead, the memory was just filled with the same sets of numbers and symbols, repeated again and again and again and again and again – literally millions of redundant copies of those stupid fucking numbers.

RA = 12h 51.4m | RA = 17h 45.6m,

DEC = +27⁰ 07’ (2000.0), Dec = -28⁰ 56’ (2000.0).

INC: 63⁰

Timecode: 1.44112e+17 Seconds Prior

“Damn it!” Gyre snarled. He started to scroll past the repetition of it each time ... and then realized that there was more information here. He just didn’t have the numbers and symbols – he had the metadata. He tapped at the file and he saw that it was named AndromedaSignalFinal.txt. It had been downloaded into his data banks from the High Observatory, about an hour before he arrived on this world, and it had been sent to his data banks by one Dr. Tivian Slate. That name sparked a memory of his and he nodded, slowly.

“Tiv, why did you give this to me?” he whispered.

Evasion. The feeling of gravity pressures on his brain. The bellowing of his tactical officer, Galti, advising on incoming munitions.

Gyre rubbed his hand along his cheek. There had been an attack. A voidbringer attack. And the only thing that Tiv had seen fit to put on him was this. Except no. That couldn’t be it. There was a great deal of data files in here, all corrupted. He had been loaded down with an entire message – this was just one part of it, the part that had been saved, the part that was most important, most vital to be delivered. Gyre stepped away from the diagnostic, shaking his head.

“The Voidbringers don’t want this information getting to the Corps.” He pursed his lips. “So, I better make sure it gets there, then.” He turned and headed for his science console. He might not be old Thuf, his science officer, but he had seen Thuf operate this console many times. The simulated console looked exactly like the system that would be on a standard rocket, the kind that would be used by a biological crewman just as easily as a digitized one. He tapped at the power functionality and grinned as he saw the broad circle of the scanning field that his sensors could get.