Celacor X was a distant white orb, with faint patches of bright azure streaking through it. Gray clouds swirled about its atmosphere, flashing with lightning. Every so often, the bolts seemed to light up a scowling face in the clouds.
Everything told Jace to run away from this place.
“Frosthold City,” Kinfild began. “That is the only large settlement on Ten, and outside it, we will find the communications outpost.”
They approached the planet’s light side. Jace couldn’t see any sign of inhabitation, but he didn’t know exactly what to look for, either.
Kinfild continued, “Celacor is an unusually large star system. Its star, a yellow giant, is massive enough to swallow up the entirety of most normal systems.” He adjusted the engine telesignal, and the starship slowed down. They curved downwards, streaking towards one of Ten’s edges.
Jace nodded. “And…does that help us?”
“That means it will take a long while for Stenol’s Kobolds to make it through the entire star system.”
A clatter came from the engine room. Jace spun around in his seat. The door hissed open, and Aur-Six emerged from the steam, chattering and screaming in his mechanical tones. Jace feared for a moment that the kyborg had switched personalities and was coming to attack him, but Kinfild asked, “The scanners? What’s wrong?”
Aur-Six nattered out a set of clanks.
“Hyperspace shadows? Are you sure?”
Again, the kyborg clanked.
“Mr. Baldwin, check the scanners,” Kinfild instructed.
Jace searched the control panels of the starship with his eyes, hunting for any sign of the scanners—hopefully, they looked the same as they did on the Koedor-Terginian dropship. He found a round screen embedded in the center of the dashboard, but instead of the display he was hoping to see, there was only static. “Uh, Kinfild…”
Kinfild leaned over, then tapped on the screen with his knuckles. The static didn’t fade. “Aur-Six, the scanners are still recalibrating after our hyperspace jump. We can’t see anything.”
“What’s a hyperspace shadow?” Jace questioned. He looked out the viewscreen, but saw nothing except the planet.
“When a large starship is about to emerge from hyperspace, it leaves a shadow in the natural auras of the universe.” Kinfild returned both hands to the control yoke. “Sometimes, kyborg brains—which includes the scanner—can detect it.”
“That has to be the kobolds, then.” Jace gripped the seat’s armrests tight. The Luna Wrath was slowing down, and he could feel himself slipping out of the seat. The churn of the thrusters wasn’t as loud as it had been moments ago when Aur-Six was fuelling the ship with starcoals.
“Aur-Six, what are the vectors?” Kinfild demanded.
In a set of higher-pitched clanks, the kyborg chirped angrily.
“Right on top of us, then.” Kinfild gripped the control yoke and pushed it abruptly towards the planet. The Luna Wrath obeyed. “I need maximum speed. Caution won’t do us any good if they blow us out of the sky.”
Aur-Six scurried away on his tracks and snatched up his shovel along the way. He returned to the engine room, and the door hissed shut behind him.
Jace leaned forward as far as the crash harness would allow. He tried looking back, observing the void where they had just been. At the edge of the viewscreen, he caught a flash, then the bow of an enormous silver starship emerging from the void.
It was slender, with a sharp prow that curved out the bottom of the starship like a chin. Along its spine, four smokestacks belched gray clouds into the void, and enormous spars reached out its sides—they were not, however, equipped with any solar sails. The vessel had to be a kilometer and a half long, at least, and it was prickling with weapons. Casemate turrets peered out its flanks, and a pair of massive batteries clung to its upper hull. It wasn’t flying any flags, but Jace was almost certain who it belonged to.
Immediately, a pressure set down on Jace’s core, and his stomach churned. The battleship contained an immense spiritual presence, and a pulsing, terrible aura that made him want to rip his hypercore out of his stomach.
“Kinfild…” Jace warned.
“I am aware. They brought the queen-core.”
Jace narrowed his eyes. Small, davit-like cranes hung off the massive starship, holding onto a small spattering of starfighters.
“Can you tell if they’ve spotted us?” Kinfild asked.
Jace thought he saw something that resembled a command bridge near the battleship’s prow. It was wide, and its windows glimmered with white light. He couldn’t see what was happening inside, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to. But the starfighters hadn’t yet been deployed.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Jace responded. “But if they do…”
“We’ll get to the surface before they do.” Kinfild gripped the power shunting levers and pulled them all down, then flicked one back up. The cabin lights shut off, as did the whirring ventilation system. The thrusters, however, screamed louder than ever. Twisting the control yoke, Kinfild directed them straight at the planet.
The Wrath entered the atmosphere with a shudder. Flames licked across its viewscreen, lighting up the dimmed cabin. Jace couldn’t see anything outside. But…the ground had to be approaching fast. He clenched his teeth and readied himself for a hyperdash—he could leap out of the starship if needed.
Stolen story; please report.
After a minute, though, Kinfild pulled back on the yoke. The flames withered, then disappeared entirely. After levelling out just above a barren, snowy plain, the Luna Wrath shot over the tip of an ice-shrouded mountain.
They raced along parallel to the planet’s surface for a short while. A thick layer of snow buried most of the crust, and only the tallest mountain ranges peered out from beneath the glaciers. Every few thousand miles, a swath of pine trees with pale blue needles peered up from beneath the snow, but there was no other vegetation or life. A bank of snow and fog hung over the horizon, and seemed to consistently travel with them—he guessed it was early morning, and the sun hadn’t yet burned the fog away, if it ever would.
The city appeared on the horizon. A massive mountain of dark metal, glimmering with lights and surrounded by sprawling, utilitarian suburbs. It was in the center of a massive, open tundra that stretched as far as he could see. At least, towards the roiling storm clouds in the north and the fogbank to the south.
The Luna Wrath passed around the towers of the downtown area and continued…east, as best as Jace could tell.
Nestled into a copse of blue pine trees just beyond the city outskirts, the walled outpost stood only just above the rest of the buildings. Its star-shaped walls housed stout buildings with peaked roofs—barracks—and a single tower. Unmanned artillery poked between the merlons, but the fort looked otherwise unarmed. Nobody hailed them on the telesignal as Kinfild approached, and no one attempted to stop them when the ship set down on a landing platform just outside the main tower.
“Wait for us here,” Kinfild ordered Aur-Six, throwing off his crash harness and climbing to his feet. “Keep the ship running.”
Jace followed the Wielder to the main hold and boarding ramp, then sprinted out onto the landing platform. It was frigid outside, and he pulled his coat tight around his neck.
They crossed the concrete walkway between the landing pad and the control tower. A lone soldier—[Level 9 Yellowcoat]—stood guard just inside the doorway, but the man made no move to stop them. He wore a yellow field jacket and a white pith helmet with an ornate band around the brim. He stepped aside to allow Kinfild and Jace through the door, plasma rifle clattering as he moved. “Thank the Split you’re here, Wielder,” he said.
Something was wrong.
A set of stairs spiraled up the center of the tower. Jace and Kinfild took them two at a time until they arrived at the top floor. It was a single, crowded room. Yellow-coated officers stood at holoscreens, and any space that wasn’t occupied by a humanoid creature had a glowing-red heater.
Countless voices shouted orders, but most fell upon deaf ears as the officers and soldiers scurried around. Jace ducked past an officer and turned himself sideways to avoid a frantic aide, then decided that speed was more important than tact and plowed through a pair of soldiers. He emerged in front of a table at the center of the room.
Kinfild approached the closest officer and tapped the man’s shoulder to grab his attention. “What’s going on here?”
The officer spun to face Jace and Kinfild. He was a young human, no older than Jace. “Are we…getting reinforcements? Did the distress signal get past their telesignal jammers?”
“For now, we’re all you’ll get,” said Kinfild. “Who’s in charge here?”
“Ten’s thegn deserted once they started jamming us. H—he’ll be halfway to Eight by now! Commander Handsyn is in charge.” The officer pointed at the only man who didn’t wear a pith helmet.
The helmet-less man delivered a quiet instruction to an aide, then shouted, “Could anyone get ahold of the admiral?”
Jace turned to Kinfild and whispered, “We need to warn them about what they’re up against.”
Kinfild slammed his staff against the dark metal floor. When he spoke, his voice boomed. “Enough!” The room quieted. “You are under attack. An army of kobolds is coming to wipe out this outpost. We must defend it.”
“What do you know about your attackers?” Jace asked, taking advantage of the quiet.
“The warships aren’t flying any flags or any known signals,” the lieutenant grunted. “But the warships aren’t descending—only landing craft. We couldn’t tell you who they are.”
The lieutenant barely finished uttering the sentence when a harsh moan vibrated through the room, followed by a rustle that sounded like fluttering paper. Starship thrusters. Jace’s head snapped towards the windows. Dark specks approached in the distance, prowling above the southern fog. They dipped down and disappeared into the mist.
Once the rumbling had subsided, a humanoid creature with four, chitin-covered arms and an ant’s head raised a hand. He didn’t wait for permission to announce, “Their descent path puts them a few kilometers from here—away from the city and our artillery, that is. They’ll march toward us and sweep the entire city in a single wave.”
They could have landed in the city, Jace thought. But the landing craft had looked pretty big, and such a disorganized landing would make the city harder to sweep.
“How many soldiers do you have?” Kinfild asked. “Are there any left?”
“We have five hundred still in the outpost.” The lieutenant tapped his fingers on the table. “Enough to fill the ramparts and crew the artillery. Defense is the only option.”
Jace gulped. He had seen how many kobolds there were. Their numbers alone would overwhelm a meagre force of five-hundred soldiers. “You’re facing an army of kobolds. Starving kobolds, by the sound of it. You won’t defend this outpost for long, let alone protect the city.”
“We must send word to the Starrealm,” Kinfild said. “Activate the long-range telesignals and request aid from all the nearby systems. Can you get past the signal jammers?”
“With enough power, our wireless telesignal array could likely overcome whatever temporary jamming setup they have,” an officer said. “But the wind-dams flooded when we evacuated the city workers, and the gale knocked out our main starcoal furnaces—we’re burning wood in the furnaces just to keep the lights on.”
“Do you have no emergency furnaces?” Kinfild demanded.
“There’s a rusted out faesion reactor in the tundra outside the city,” said the lieutenant. He pointed out the windows, and to the south. “It doesn’t need any starcoals, but it doesn't provide enough power to keep everything running anymore. Turned it off a few decades ago when Aes shortages began.”
“Would it be enough to get a wireless telesignal out past their jammers?”
“If we can jumpstart it, yes. We’ll scrounge any Aes fuel-cells we can and try to get it running again.” The lieutenant tapped the holographic map on the table with his finger, pointing to a plain of snow and ice outside the outpost and city. “But whoever’s out there will reach it before we can get it on.”
“Not if we get the soldiers out onto the tundra,” Jace said. He pushed through the crowd and rushed to the window. He didn’t see any sign of a reactor, or anything at all, but he trusted that it was out there. “Divert the kobolds off before they reach the reactor. Make a wide line, and hold them off for as long as you can.”
He turned back to the crowd, then gulped, aware of what he was asking. He wasn’t anybody important—at least, not in a recognizable uniform. But he travelled with a Wielder of the Crimson Table, and it seemed that was enough to make them listen. But was it enough to make them act?
He needed to take a leap himself.
Sure, going out there would give him hundreds of kobolds. Easy targets, and plenty of Aes to harvest.
But more than that, there was something to fight for.
“I’ll go as well,” he said. For what good it did. “I’ll help.”