Authors: Saje Williams
Then she spotted Morrigan, engaged in a deadly dance in the midst of a large group of fallen soldiers, with someone she couldn’t quite make 274
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out. They looked fairly evenly matched, which led her to believe it was another immortal. It didn’t look like Odin, though.
Bryon appeared by her side and she jumped. “Christ! Don’t
do
that.”
“Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly contrite. “Who’s she fighting?” Then he went completely still, suddenly becoming as devoid of expression and body language as Raven often did. “Goban,” he hissed, eyes narrowing to slits. He started forward but she grabbed him by the back of his shirt.
“Uh-uh. She’s got him where she wants him. Even if he takes her down, which I doubt, there are still three more of us he has to face. Just wait.”
“I owe him.” He said it without emotion. It sent icy fingers up her spine. Morrigan
might
try to subdue him. Byron would kill him if he had the chance. So, for that matter, would Raven.
Val wanted answers more than she wanted his blood, but somehow she didn’t think either of the guys would see it her way. Bryon because Goban had killed him, and Raven because…well, because he’d kidnapped Val.
Speak of the devil. “Who in the hell is she fight…?—that’s Goban.”
His tone went cold and hard as the ice beneath their feet. “That sonofabitch…” He took a step forward.
“Dammit, Raven…No!”
“How in the hell is he fighting her? He’s just a mortal.”
“Apparently not anymore,” she said. “I don’t understand it, either.”
“Stop the fight,” Raven said. “Just do it. I want to talk to him.”
She shrugged and fired a single telekinetic punch at the back of Goban’s head. She didn’t put nearly as much force into it as she could have. Her power was still growing, she’d already realized. This battle, fierce as it had been, hadn’t even really winded her.
Goban went down like he’d been clubbed. Which, when you got right down to it, he had been. Morrigan kicked him once in the ribs for good measure and hauled him to his feet. She dragged his unconscious body over to where they waited.
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The surviving hybrids, maybe fifty in all, were moving among the wounded, tending to their fellows as best they could. A few of them had Cen first aid packs, which would probably making treatment a fairly successful proposition.
Tuck spoke in soft tones with one of the mustalids, a young badger, and then made his way over to them.
Morrigan tossed Goban at their feet. “Claw is dead,” she said. “I couldn’t save him.”
“I was too slow,” Raven murmured, crouching next to the unconscious Goban. “He was giving you a good fight, wasn’t he?”
“Too good,” Morrigan said, nodding. “Something’s not quite right here.” She gave a shrill whistle and raised her arm. Two black shapes descended from out of the sky and landed on the ground nearby, peering up at her with their black, beady eyes.
Val repressed a shiver.
“There’s a burned corpse just over the wall,” she told her two crows.
“Don’t let any of your kind near it. Claw deserves at least a decent burial.”
They bobbed their heads in unison and took to the air once again.
“I think the answers lie within the ship.” Raven turned his gaze to the towering shape looming over them. “Bring him. Tuck—you’re in charge until we return.”
“Where’s Cerberus? And the wolves?”
“I ordered Cerberus to stay back. He doesn’t have a lot of defenses against automatic weapon fire. I think Bridget and the wolves are still on patrol behind us. Tuck can fill them in when they get here. Cerberus can take care of himself.”
The tiger nodded. “Good luck,” he told them, as Raven thrust what appeared to be an empty hand at the crashed vessel. When he took a step forward and vanished, Val followed without a moment’s hesitation.
The initial plan was for the feline hybrids to accompany them, but the battle to reach the ship had made that impossible. The four of them 276
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stood in one of the long, curving corridors that ran around the outside edge of the ship. Raven had tried to place them as far up as he could get without getting too close to the bridge. He knew from his last visit that the upper reaches of the craft was completely laced with anti-transit wards.
He paused, sniffing at the air. He held up a hand in warning as Morrigan drew abreast of him.
“What is it?” she murmured softly, gazing past him.
“Something bad lurks ahead,” he replied. He didn’t know what it was, but it made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle defensively. The dry, reptilian scent that stung his nostrils was that of a dragon, but he couldn’t figure out how a dragon could be roaming the corridors of the ship. Even the smaller varieties would need more room to move than this narrow hallway.
He’d heard rumors of humanoid dragons—demi-dragons, they were called. Savage creatures by all accounts, barely sentient, but terrible foes.
A blast of sound like the whistle of steam engine shook the corridor and the sound of something heavy running toward them banged against the alloy of the deck beneath their feet. He holstered his pistol and drew his sword from its dimensional scabbard before striding forward purposely.
The creature rounded the curve and stopped, sniffing at the air, its large, bulbous eyes shining in the dim light emanating from the panels in the ceiling. A ceiling, Raven noted, that it had to crouch slightly to avoid.
Its large, pointed muzzle, vaguely reminiscent of an alligator’s snout, parted slightly, revealing rows of gleaming teeth, glistening with strands of saliva. It snuffled, edging forward, something deep within its tiny reptilian brain warning it of danger.
Its shoulders were massive, chunks of muscle to which were attached large, ropy, humanoid arms as large as a big man’s legs. Black claws as long as Raven’s own fingers tipped each four-fingered hand.
“Well, that’s pretty fucking ugly,” Morrigan said with a grimace.
“It is, isn’t it? Looks pretty dangerous, though.”
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“About as smart as a bag of sand, I’ll bet.”
Raven nodded absently. “Smart enough not to come charging at us.”
“Good point.”
“Are we going to just stand here staring at the damned thing?” Bryon growled from behind them. “Let’s go kick its ass!”
“You’ve been hanging around Morrigan too much,” Raven told him sourly. “I can’t believe you just said ‘kick its ass.’”
Bryon shifted the unconscious body on his shoulder and grunted.
“What—was the idiom incorrect?”
Raven sighed wearily. “This is most definitely not the time for this sort of discussion,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
He went to magesight just in time to catch Morrigan grabbing a passing strand. He reached out and caught her arm. “Don’t bother. It’s resistant to magic.”
“It’s what? You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“Nope. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway. You can try it if you want, but I’ll bet it’ll just piss it off.”
“Okay—so what the hell is it?” Val asked. “It’s not resistant to what
I
could do to it.”
“Probably not. It’s a demi-dragon, I think. Some wiseguy tinkered with dragon genes and some other sort of reptile—I’m guessing velociraptor or something of that nature.”
“Then step aside,” she suggested. “I’ll take care of this.”
“No,” he said firmly. “We can’t take the risk of you pushing yourself too far and not being able to dial up the power later. I can handle this beast.”
He charged, the wind bruising his face with the speed of his movement. He skidded to a halt just out of the creature’s reach, boots squealing on the metal floor, and thrust the tip of the blade at the beast’s long torso, aiming for where he thought the heart would be.
The creature vanished with a loud bang as displaced air rushed into the space it had vacated. He whirled, but the corridor was empty but for him and his companions. He knew he’d have to deal with the beast 278
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sooner or later. He would’ve preferred sooner, but the demi-dragon had obviously had other ideas.
“One thing’s for sure,” he growled, as he rejoined the others, “I ain’t going to run through this goddam ship opening doors like last time.”
Obviously remembering the experience as well as he did, Val chuckled and nodded.
He found that he was frowning at her and smoothed his face deliberately. As much as he enjoyed being with her again, despite the present circumstances, so many of her responses—ordinarily natural—
struck a note with which he couldn’t feel comfortable. She’d been through hell, and slain men en masse without a single expression of regret. Nothing about her going about her business as if nothing had happened rang true in his ears. Or in his heart.
He knew all too well that the guilt over something like that could hide deep within a person, and fester so far below the surface that it could blister and burst without warning. He caught her eyes and noticed nothing but her amusement and this, rather than easing his fears, made him smile sadly and turn away once more. “Odin is probably back on the bridge,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Morrigan?”
“How should I know?” she answered back, but he didn’t miss the tiniest hesitation before her response. She
did
more than she’d told them. No surprise there. “If he gets in our way, I
will
kill him, Morrigan. I hope you realize this. We can’t risk having this ship fall into the hands of the Cen.”
“So to speak,” Morrigan growled.
“So to speak.” The Cen didn’t have hands. Just tendrils. He switched back to magesight for a moment, intercepted a thread, and cast out a short range transit tube toward the top of the ship. “We’re not going to spend hours wandering around down here, running into whatever freak of science happens to pop out of its hole next. C’mon.”
He stepped into the transit tube, emerged from the other side, and moved out of the way. The others followed in rapid succession. “Wait here,” he directed, and let the darkness swallow him.
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Chapter Thirty-three
Raven melted out of the darkness to find Odin sitting alone in his captain’s chair, the flicker of a view screen the only real light on the bridge. “I’ve been waiting for you,” said the one-eyed immortal, not even looking up at him. His single orb remained glued to the flickering images in front of him.
“I thought you might be,” Raven replied casually. “Figured I’d find you holed up here.”
“I have apparently underestimated you from the beginning. I hardly expected you to be able to kill Tyr, of course, or to find your way to my sanctuary—not once, but twice. You are a most enterprising creature. I figured that by seemingly abandoning the ship the first time, you would take your spoils and leave. I hardly expected to see you back here.”
“This time it won’t be so easy to get rid of us, even if you
do
have Morrigan’s cooperation.”
Odin laughed bitterly. “You think I had her cooperation? She has about as much use for me as you do. I escaped her fair and square, though I must admit she didn’t put a lot of effort into finding me after that.” He shrugged, and swiveled his single eye toward the vampire.
“What I can’t figure out is why you’re back.”
“Because I’m not the only one interested in this ship, Odin. As you well know. You lied to me the first time, pretending to be uninvolved in the Church’s anti-magic activities. You still run the Church, don’t you?
You needed an army of mages to dig this vessel out of the ice, and didn’t want interference from any unaligned mages. You
knew
this world was on the chopping block, and just wanted a way to escape.”
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“One mage couldn’t do it,” Odin agreed, after a moment’s hesitation.
“But a whole group of them working in concert would be able to free the ship—at least enough for me to make any necessary repairs to get it space worthy again.”
“And then what? Were you just going to leave them here to face the Cen armies?”
“This ship doesn’t require a crew,” said Odin, with a shrug. “I might have brought a few along, but I prefer a solitary existence…for the most part. Since you killed my best friend, I have little use for any other company.”
“What about the monsters that roam the lower levels? Are they not company of a sort?”
“They’re an extra security measure. Nothing else. Tell me, is your friend Goban well?”
Raven frowned, a little surprised by the sudden change of topic. “Well enough. What’s it to you?”
The immortal’s smile was enigmatic. “Nothing in particular. I was just curious.”
“Curious, my ass. How’d you know his name?”
“The walls have ears, my boy. There is very little that goes on in this ship that I don’t know about.”
“That’s bullshit, Odin. You did something to Goban. I want to know what it is.”
“Moi?
I have done nothing, I assure you. Is he ill?” He was able to affect a tone of concern better than just about anyone Raven had ever met. But no one was that good of an actor. Not even the most subtle nuances of facial expression and body language was lost on the vampire.
He saw straight through such subterfuge.
Odin was toying with him. He knew a hell of a lot more than he was telling. “The last time we were on this ship, something changed Goban.
He kidnapped Val and tried to use her to form an alliance with the Church. At least, that’s what we
think
he was up to. I want to know how much of that was
your
doing.”
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“My dear boy,” Odin drawled, face breaking into a wide and insincere smile. “I had nothing to do with that. That was all
his
doing.”
Raven shook his head. The immortal wasn’t lying, precisely, but he was dancing around the truth. Odin seemed genuinely reluctant to lie outright, which puzzled him. If he had reason enough to hide the truth, why not simply lie?
Well, two could play that game.
Start with a little truth.
“You know your ship has been targeted, right?”
“By whom?”
“By the Cen,” Raven said casually. “Can you imagine what they could do with this vessel?”
Odin winced, shaking his head angrily. “Well, they can’t have it. I’ll blow it up first.”
Now
that
doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.
“You may not have time,” he said.
Odin, who’d been slouching in the captain’s chair, looking amazingly at ease up until this point, sat bolt upright, slamming one huge palm against the armrest. “What are you talking about?” he snapped, his eye blazing.
Now that he’s taken the bait, it’s time to set the hook.
“Haven’t you been paying attention? Where do you think all those animal hybrids down there came from? We managed to convince them we were working for the Cen too. That’s the only reason they were helping us. They see your Church as a threat—and rightly so. But not if they get here and take the ship before you can get a real army up here. Your five hundred-odd soldiers and Deacons weren’t enough to stop
us.
The next army will march right in and take this ship before you know what’s happening.
“Or do you think you can take on four or five valkyrie by yourself?
They’ve got an army on its way right now—two thousand cold-weather hybrids, led by a handful of faithful valkyrie. Even if you have more Church soldiers on the way, they’ll be entrenched before your men get here. And they won’t be anywhere near as easy to dislodge as your pathetic regiment was.”
“They won’t get my ship!” Odin roared, leaping to his feet. “Never!”
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“It may be too late to do anything about it. You can’t fight them off.
And neither can we. We were going to try to dig the ship out and take it somewhere else, but we don’t have time.”
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your friends and get off the ship. I’ll set the self-destruct and meet you out there. Will the hybrids attack us?”
Raven pretended to think about it. “How about we act as if we’ve captured you? They’ll buy that. You set the destruct and we’ll bring you out as if you’re our prisoner, to be turned over to the valkyrie when they arrive.”
The immortal was nodding, an evil grin spreading across his broad face. “You can send some of them in to ‘secure’ the ship…that way we can take some of them out at the same time we destroy it. And they won’t notice us leaving—or be able to do anything about it even if they do.”
“You’re good at this.”
“I’ve had lots of practice. You’re not bad at it yourself. I can’t believe you managed to convince them you were on their masters’ side.”
“Morrigan helped. She knows how the Cen mind works—she played up to that.”
Odin nodded. “She would, the sneaky bitch. All right. Come with me.
We’ll set the destruct sequence and meet up with your friends. I don’t like it, but I’d rather see the old girl blown to pieces than let the bugs get their filthy tendrils on her.”
“I understand completely,” Raven replied. “So what do we need to do?”
“Follow me,” said the one-eyed immortal, standing and striding from the room. Shrugging imperceptibly, the vampire followed. He was still a little surprised he’d been able to deceive Odin so easily. Then again, he wasn’t sure the immortal was playing with a full deck. Not only insane, but a bit ragged around the edges as well.
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wondering if there was a real psychological term for this sort of craziness.
One that only applied to immortals who thought themselves to be deities.
“He’s starting to wake up,” said Bryon, nudging Goban with the toe of his boot. The man groaned and raised a hand to his head. “Should I clout him again?”
“No,” Val told him. “I’m curious what he has to say.”
Morrigan gave her a strange look she didn’t bother trying to identify.
“If I were you, I’d want to club him again.”
“And you’d have to wait that much longer to get any answers,” Val said in response. “I don’t have that much patience.” She used just a touch of her telekinetic touch to lever Goban into a sitting position with his back against the interior bulkhead.
She crouched next to him and lifted his wobbly head with her hand.
“You with us, Goban?”
“Bitch,” he spat.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” She smiled grimly. “I think it’s time we had a chat. I want to know why you kidnapped me, Goban. Who are you working for and why did they want me?”
“I’m not telling you anything,” he growled in response. “You can just go to hell.”
“You already put me there, bastard. And if I can’t get anything useful out of you, there’s not much reason to keep you alive.”
“Then kill me.”
“Not yet,” she told him. “But it’s on the table.” She stood and gazed down at him. He didn’t meet her eyes. What had happened to him? This was
not
the man she’d met—the one Raven had described as one of the only ethical men in the Guard. She couldn’t read him at all now—what she couldn’t figure out was what had changed.
Something
had. Something important.
Her eyes searched Goban’s face. It had become thicker, wider, in the past several months, and he’d begun to grow a beard—which had started 284
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to silver around the edges. There was something disturbingly familiar about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
She honed her mind to a sharp focus and thrust it into his eyes. He screamed, and kicked his feet as if trying to dig himself through the wall behind him. She poured on the pressure, battering his shields, until pain spiked between her own eyes. She’d failed, but he’d nearly passed out himself. He lay there, on his side with his eyes rolled back in his head, chest heaving and moaning aloud.
“What the hell was that?” Bryon asked.
Morrigan tried to shush him but Val shook her head as she rose. “It’s okay. I was trying to breach his shields. I don’t understand where they came from, or why they’re as powerful as they are.”
Morrigan shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know shit about that sort of thing.”
“I do, and I have no explanation. Maybe Raven will be able to find something out from Odin—assuming the one-eyed prick is still aboard.”
“I need you to pull that lever over there,” Odin told Raven, pointing some distance away toward a bank of machines he couldn’t begin to guess the purpose of. They were large, and covered with little dials and buttons, but the lever hanging off the side of one was large, red, and unmistakably not something one pulled by accident.
Shrugging, Raven did as he was bid, walking over and pulling the lever down until it pointed at the floor. As he felt it click into place, he heard a heavy alloy door slam shut and he spun, expecting to see that Odin had locked him inside this mysterious chamber.
Which he had. But he’d locked himself inside as well. He stared at the vampire with a distinctly amused expression peeking out from under his bushy black and silver beard. “Thought you had me fooled, didn’t you, boy?”
Raven glared at him through narrowed eyes. “What are you talking about?”
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“I know you made an alliance with those hybrids out there—that they no longer serve the Cen. I know you’ve been working to bring my Church to its knees out there in the world. I am not as cut off from things as you thought. Nor am I gullible, or a fool.
“I agree with you that the ship has become a liability we can no longer afford. That is why we have set off the self-destruct sequence. I initiated the process before we left the bridge, but it was necessary to throw that lever to eliminate the final fail safe. Even now the engine’s core is heating up, preparing for a lift-off that cannot and will not happen. When it becomes apparent to the ship’s control system that it cannot vent the energy, it will attempt an emergency override, which has been blocked by the destruct sequence I activated before we descended.
Throwing the lever back up will do no good. Nor will trying to reach for mana. This room is shielded from all outside forms of energy.
“In less than twenty minutes, everything within a hundred miles of this vessel will be reduced to its component atoms and the ship will be out of the reach of the Cen forever. As a bonus,” Odin added with a mad twinkle in his lone eye, “I get to eliminate the ‘Redeemer’ at the same time.”
“But you’re killing yourself,” Raven objected, his mind desperately clawing at some way to escape this trap he’d into which he’d allowed himself to fall.
Fool! You thought you could play an immortal? So proud of
yourself, weren’t you? He was playing
you
the whole time.
“In a way, yes. This body will die. But I’ve already arranged for a backup.”
“A backup body? I don’t understand.”
“Several years ago I stumbled upon a way to project a part of myself into another being. I created a semi-autonomous collection of brain cells—self-repairing and semi-cognizant. I call it a mind-worm. If directed to invade a human host, it enters through a convenient cavity and burrows for the brain, where it takes up residence and starts to replicate itself. In a matter of days, it creates a subconscious version of my persona that can influence the host. In a matter of months, it begins to modify the host’s DNA to more closely resemble its own.
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“In less than a year, it turns the host into a copy of me and erases the last vestiges of the host’s own personality and self-awareness. It becomes something of an automaton—little more than a puppet I can direct from afar.”