Specter, p.19
Specter, page 19
His shoulder crashed into her arm. Her pistol went clattering – but before either of them could do more than stumble, the entire room shook. Screaming drow and shouting high elves both almost lost their feet as rumbling explosions rocked the building. Da’kota couldn’t see what was happening out there, but Zaline was more than happy to educate him.
“Our fleet is opening fire on yours!” Her knee drove into his stomach. “You monsters are finally going to pay for your crimes!”
Da’kota staggered backwards, his belly throbbing. Mana pulses and magic missiles were sizzling as more drow guards and star knights were rushing in. But also, now that the initial surprise had been cast aside, the drow nobility were showing some of their mettle. Many had fallen in the first moment, but those who survived had drawn ceremonial weapons – humming monoblades crashed against bone-carved scimitars, and ululating cries from the high elves mixed with shouts of ‘for N’loth!’ and ‘for the Empress!’ Da’kota dodged left and right as Zaline swung her own bone-knife up in a curving slashing pattern that nearly slit him open half a dozen times. Her blue eyes flashed with fierce hatred as she drove him backwards, almost tripping him on the body of General Darkshadow.
“What crimes!?” Da’kota asked.
A corner of the Emperess’ court exploded outwards as a missile streaked from someone’s launcher. The night sky glittered overhead – seared with the pulse beams of macro-scale mana cannons and the pinprick bright flares of metafireballs in orbit. It looked like the entire drow home fleet was at war with itself...
No.
At war with the Moonshadow contingent.
“You shattered the world! You and your false spider-fucking god!” Zaline said, thrusting her knife. He dodged aside, parrying – and found that a flash fabricated mono-knife split like butter before the curved edge of whatever weapon a high elf used.
“Hey, I wasn’t even born yet!” Da’kota said, clasping his hands together. Magic flared as he drew energies from the planes of positive energy and fire. A scimitar made of pure crackling fire burst to life between his hands – just in time to parry and turn aside the knife thrusting at her. “Most of us weren’t.”
“Six centuries, I’ve served the last God,” Zaline growled. She stepped back, then thrust her left palm down. Glowing darts of acid magic flickered around her fingers as he regarded him. “And you’re not going to fuck it up, you... you... male.”
“And I thought drow were meant to be the misandrists,” Da’kota said, then lifted his own hand, finger spreading. Rather than using a magical shield, he used the simpler and easier telekinetic cantrip to haul General Darkshadow’s body up. The acid thudded into her armor and Da’kota mentally apologized to her – but he also knew that given the cold blooded, pragmatic streak that ran through all drow, she’d have appreciated it. He flung her body at Zaline, who leaped over it with a fluid backflip. By the time she had landed, he was on her.
Their blades met, flashing and crashing together as, overhead, the battlefleets tried to organize themselves. Chevrons of drow fighters, needle thin and swift, darted between one another, and magic missiles the size of small houses were flung back and forth. A drow battlecruiser – the IDS Obliteration is the Triumph of Fools – was speared through with a spinal scorching ray that boiled one side of the hull, then burst from the other side, leaving a single massive glowing hole that bled atmosphere, bodies and molten metal into orbit. They were not the only ship to be stricken – Moonshadow vessels were working together, while the other drow ships were still trying to figure out what had even happened, and who to shoot at.
“So, what was the plan? Hmm? Arrange war between dwarf and drow, then take advantage of the chaos?” Da’kota growled. “You’re just improvising now, aren’t you?”
“My masters had their goals – but they’ll take a vented Webheart, even as consolation prize,” Zaline shot back. Her knife flashed and his sword sparked again as he stumbled backwards. In the melee, she had cut him half a dozen times, each a narrow miss that he had evaded by the skin of his teeth... but even a miss with a knife left red blood flowing. Da’kota wondered how many more cuts he could take before adrenaline would stop carrying him.
Then what she said hit him, like a sledgehammer.
“Vented?” he whispered. “Webheart has twenty million people on it!”
“Twenty million drow,” Zaline smirked. “Do you think I wouldn’t sacrifice ten times as much for a single high elf?”
“You’re insane!” Da’kota said.
“No, simply righteous.” Her left hand had dipped from his sight – and it came up, crackling with a field of blue mana. A conjunction spell! Da’kota twisted, but before he could yank his hands away, she had closed her fingers around the roiling flames of his summoned sword. Her fingers clenched and the blade shattered with a spray of sparks. Disarmed, he had no choice but to give ground as she drove her knife at his belly, then backhanded him with her palm. The blow sent him sprawling.
Da’kota skidded on the ground. He thrust out his hand, shoving his palm into a dimensional pocket. He yanked it back – but before he could do anything more, Zaline slammed her heel down on his wrist. She held the knife in her other hand, her blue eyes flashing with triumph.
“Unless that’s an inferno grenade,” she purred. “This is the end of you, spider fucker.”
“No, it’s much better,” Da’kota grated out. His fingers opened.
Revealing a lock of bright red dwarfish hair.
Zaline blinked down at him, baffled.
“Sympathetic magic,” Da’kota said. “Fastest, cheapest, best way to send a message in the galaxy.”
The flash of two dozen ships exiting from FTL directly into orbit strobed into the room.
And there, hovering in attack formation, was the entire Clan Xonuk battle squadron, like a school of hammerhead sharks. The wailing sound of Webheart’s evacuation sirens became the background song to every single spinal passwall gun and lightning cannon going off at the same moment. A Moonshadow cruiser caught in the exact wrong spot was peeled apart from stem to stern by blue waves of lightning, while two Moonshadow battleships were caught in raking fire that blew their engine cones apart while their bridges exploded outwards as the passwall shells exited, leaving their long hulls as nothing but floating scrap and mangled corpses.
“No!” Zaline screamed.
Da’kota swung his leg around, catching her in the back of the knee, tugging his wrist free. Her heel still took a chunk of skin out of him, but he ignored it as she crashed to the ground. Da’kota flung herself onto Zaline, trying to grab for her – but she managed to get a foot between her and him and shove him backwards. She yanked a glittering red gemstone from one of her pockets, holding it up.
“Retreat!” she shouted.
Then she crushed the gemstone.
Da’kota reached for her.
Heat. Blindness. Pain. Da’kota stumbled backwards, his eyebrows singed and smoking, and his head ringing. When he was able to see again, Zaline was gone and the only sign she had ever been there at all was the stink of ozone. Dozens more flashes filled the air, some producing cries of shock and alarm. Dozens of high elves and dozens more drow lay on the ground – many dead, many wounded and groaning. But Da’kota had no time for any of that. With his hand still clutching onto Ada’s hair, he focused and sent a message to her.
“Tell Grimstern to not follow that fleet! Launch all fighters! Now! Now! Now!”
He felt confusion.
The Moonshadow fleet – the surviving ships at least – turned and began to accelerate away from Webheart. They had left the drow fleets in shambles and done good damage to the Clan Xonuk ships, even with the dwarf’s surprise. But then he saw it: a half a dozen tiny pinpricks flashing to life as the Moonshadow ships left behind their final vicious message. Had the dwarf ships scrambled after them, then they would have been unable to do anything but watch.
As it was, they were arrayed between the fleeing high elves and the vast structure of Webheart as nearly four dozen thamonuclear torpedoes plunged towards the civilians that were rushing towards shelter before. With the station’s shields already in disarray from the near-miss mana blasts and the detonations of crashing starships against her hull, those missiles had nearly nothing between them and the home of the drow... save for a few thousand dwarfs.
Traceries of auto-crossbow bolts stitched through space, forming lines of fire that intersected and turned plunging missiles into expanding clouds of scrap. Beams of mana-pulsed energy stabbed out again and again, peeling apart the armored missiles and knocking them off course. Still, the missile fleet came on, as Da’kota felt a warm form press against his side. Ophelia, her arm snaking under his arm, holding him up, clinging to him as they watched, unable to do anything but pray to whatever gods might be listening.
Da’kota figured Jesus Christ and N’loth were good choices.
Before his eyes, the XCS Righteous, the ship that flew the flag of Admiral Grimstern, accelerated forward with a lurching sputter of magical energies. The hammerhead shape of the vehicle seemed to loom overhead as it placed itself between-
The two brilliant flares of white light were almost blinding. Da’kota lifted his hand, wincing, and then lowered it as he gaped. The thamonuclear detonations rippled outwards around the stricken ship, which had fires pouring from dozens of decks. The entire ship heeled hard to the side, like it was a seagoing windjammer caught in a terrible northwestern blow. Thrusters along the undamaged side burned as escape pods by the dozens were launched away from the vessel. And still, her point defense crossbows and mana cannons swatted those missiles that shot past her down.
The last missile, though - despite it all - rushed through.
It grew impossibly fast, screaming straight towards the palace.
Da’kota laughed, softly.
Ophelia clung to him.
The missile crashed down, right onto the vacated throne, smashing it apart with a sprat of splinters and shattered stone. The entire court – those that had stayed – froze, as if they thought they would have time to tense for the killing radiation of a thamonuclear weapon. Da’kota, though, was standing up and shaking his head slowly. “It got into my range just in time,” he said, tapping his temple. “They didn’t change the security codes.”
Everyone blinked at him.
“Have I mentioned you’re amazing?” Ophelia whispered, her entire body going limp as she sprawled herself onto her belly. “Put baby in me right now.”
Da’kota hesitated.
“No, wait, don’t put a baby in me yet!” Ophelia scrambled to her feet. “Healing magic! I have healing magic!”
She rushed for the wounded.
Da’kota smiled. That, honestly, was a big reason why he very badly wanted to put a baby into her.
***
“And, for your valor and heroism in protecting an empire not your own, I must grant to you the greatest gift that we, as drow, can provide,” Empress T’zan Tzmarkiz said as she stood next to the bed where Admiral Yanni Grimstern lay, her body almost entirely covered in bandages and healing sigils to reverse the damage caused by radiation exposure, fire, magical frost, acid, and hard vacuum.
“Mmph!” the admiral said around her facial mufflings. Da’kota, being quite good at reading dwarf cues by now, was fairly sure that that was: Oh great, some drow perversion.
“After consulting my finest advisors,” the Empress continued. “I have decided to bequeath you this troupe of twelve nubile, highly trained drow lovers, all volunteers from my own personal harem, and one ton of gold-infused, magically-enchanted heroin, to be delivered to your ship once she had emerged from drydock.”
Admiral Grimstern’s eyes widened behind her bandages and she let out a muffled ‘mmhmhm!’ which Da’kota was fairly sure meant: Oh, maybe you drow aren’t so bad after all.
“And yes, as a concession to your culture - whose modes and views are as alien to ours as it is possible to be - the drow males are all under five feet and the women have the largest cup size we could secure,” the Empress said, managing to not add ‘you barbarian lech’ to the end of her sentence, either verbally or via tonal implication. Da’kota was impressed by her decorum.
Though he was still not entirely sure how one infused heroin with gold. And, honestly, he was happier not knowing for now.
“I helped with that part,” Da’kota said, grinning as he did so.
The admiral nodded to him.
Da’kota and the Empress strode from the hospital room – past the chambers were the hundreds of dwarven warriors who had been wounded in defense of Webheart were being given the finest treatment the Empire could provide. Her fingers touched one another as she steepled her hand, her voice growing soft and grim. “Da’kota, I do not know what we can give you, after all you have done for us. You have already been given the highest honors that we can offer any woman, let alone a male. And you’ve turned a good chunk of them down!”
Da’kota smiled, wryly. “I’m not entirely sure what I’d do with a solid gold manor, nor a hundred members of a harem. I mean, heh, I’m not sure I have the stamina for that. Nor the attention.” His smile faded. “Nor the time.”
“But it is what you deserve – your actions have saved the Empire and revealed a danger we didn’t even know existed!” The Empress shook her head.
The two of them emerged onto a viewing balcony. There, the Empress’ guards had made sure to keep everyone away, giving the two a chance to speak – a sur’drow and a lur’drow, one of them the most powerful woman in the empire, one of them merely a man from another world. Da’kota leaned on the railing, looking out at Webheart. Even unsuccessful bombardments had still done serious damage to the space born habitat, and thousands of worker bees and small shardjammers were buzzing around, many of them using magic to repair the damage left by crashing ships, shot down fighters, and missed mana-blasts.
“I will at least have you be played by T’karus Spiderblood,” the Empress said, firmly. “When they make a moving tapestry of all that happened here.”
“Quite an honor,” Da’kota said. “But this isn’t over.”
The Empress frowned. “The other houses have chased the Moonshadow fleet out – and several house armies have captured their asteroids. Not every member of House Moonshadow was a high elf in disguise – most of them were drow. But now a great deal of House Moonshadow’s internal security measures do make more sense. They were, in effect, keeping their highest women in charge while ensuring no new blood could creep up to the top and discover their secret. Diabolical.”
Da’kota pursed his lips and chose to not follow that up with his immediate reaction. Instead, he said: “But the fleet wasn’t destroyed?”
“No,” the Empress said, her red eyes – they were nearly purple in this light, Da’kota noticed. The sur’drow and lur’drow had once been marked as two different ethnicities by their skin tone and their eye color, but the red eyes of the lur’drow were significantly more dominant, even in those sur’drow that retained the very light gray skin of their ethnicity. Da’kota frowned and said what they were both thinking.
“They serve what they think is the last of the surviving gods,” Da’kota said. “Relict had powers I still don’t quite know the limits of. He was able to squeeze a cyborc’s internal components from a galaxy away. He could wipe her mind and her memory cores. And if the stories the dwarfs have been sharing are even close to true, that’s just a minority of his powers. But there’s something more.”
The Empress frowned, not tearing her eyes from the cityscape and the repairs going on.
“When we fought, Avenger Zailine said that all this was a consolation prize. Her masters wanted the drow and dwarfs at war, the vampires and the drow at war, Project Soulbound canceled, all for something. Until we know what and why and how to stop it, then the Empire can’t possibly rest.”
“Our fleets are in disarray. We’ll be hard pressed to keep our borders safe, let alone chase the Moonshadows across the galaxy, into hostile territory.” The Empress hesitated. “But we cannot ignore this.”
She turned to face Da’kota, taking his hands in hers. “General Darkshadow is dead. She was my champion – able to requisition and direct any forces she saw fit to enforce my will. Had she not been slain, it would be her, now, taking to the stars to chase down this threat.” She lifted her chin. “But you stand here, in her place. The most spectacular male to have been born since the Age of Legends – a true inheritor to the tales of Izzit To’durden.” Her lips quirked in a wry amusement. “I name you my champion. Any ship, it is yours. Any servant of mine, is a servant of yours. All that I ask in exchange is that you find Avenger Zaline and her minions, her master, and her schemes and bring them to a complete, conclusive end.”
“Your wish is my command, your imperial majesty,” Da’kota said, bowing his head to her.
Empress T’zan Tzmarkiz turned back to the city, watching the blazing red sunlight shining down on it. Da’kota, knowing when he was dismissed, turned to go.
“And Da’kota.”
Her voice jerked his head around.
“When you come back, you will absolutely destroy my imperial ass with that big black cock of yours and put a baby inside me,” she said, matter of factly.
Da’kota coughed. Even now, he could be taken aback.
“Of course, your majesty.”
Even with her facing away from him, he could see the hint of her smirk.
“Go.”
He left.
***
