“Lady Dynamo.”
The firm voice of the Praetor of the Guard turned me around just after the roar of exclamation as Red MJ finished her final opponent, a furred Feralian berserker with a shiny silver greatsword who’d attacked with a great deal of ferocity and skill. He’d gotten himself Intimidated, lost his berserker rage, and she’d trounced him pretty quick.
We’d made some damn good money betting on her to beat them all, of course. MJ’s own Galactic Credit account was doing pretty good, and she and Sonja were now officially famous in the Shi’ar Galaxy.
I was only happy for her.
Gladiator looked kind of odd with the white t-shirt on over his red and blue uniform, but Dealer had put his symbol square in the middle on the front, and even shaded the arms and sides to match him. For some reason, it made him look festive, and yet totally not. He just carried off the Officer In Command vibe so well.
Of course, only three people at this feast had endured Combicha Five publicly, so there was that.
“Praetor?” I asked calmly. “How can I help you?”
“The Consort indicated that you might be interested in a light distraction, and the Majestrix concurred.”
His tone indicated the distraction was something else. Stark was already off kibitzing again, having even more money to throw around now. The girls had largely been snatched up to learn Shi’ar dancing in the mass dance lesson occurring next on the main floor by eager imperial citizens of multiple races, while I held down the table.
I rose to my feet alertly. “I trust the Imperial Guard is capable of handling nearly anything,” I told him professionally. “What, oh, manner of distraction?” I inquired in interest.
He was mollified somewhat by my attitude. “We have tracked the agent who was to have spiked the Dealer’s meal to the underspans.”
I glanced her way; she felt my attention, turned, and just clenched her fist. “Right, then.” I reached out, touched his chest, and the t-shirt flowed off of him and folded itself smartly. “We wouldn’t want this getting spiked, now, would we?” I asked rhetorically, handing it back to him. He tried REALLY hard not to smile as he took it back. Burning his Combicha Three shirt ceremonially as Dealer gave this one to him had likely been one of the few fun things he’d done in days.
“Certainly not,” he answered professionally, motioning over one of the many soldiers standing silently at attention about the place, to make sure it was delivered to his quarters.
“You know, your next meal of combicha should be at Four, not Six,” I informed him as we walked away towards one of the side doors.
“Oh?” He seemed surprised.
“Each level of combicha has its own tastes and surprises. Being able to eat it at a high level is impressive, but one’s favorite tends to be lower down.”
“So, I should also try Levels One and Two?” he asked, interested.
“Yes. I don’t know how it reacts with Strontians, but I doubt Five will be your favorite. How did it compare to Three?”
His description wandered through six alien languages, dominated by Ciegramite, whose hedonistic culture had puh-lenty of vocabulary to describe culinary indulgences. He was a little surprised when I understood it all without using a translator.
“My guess is you’ll enjoy Four the most, but we’ll see. Some people really do like the higher levels...”
---------
I was already in uniform, and simply hooked into the telepathic coms their telepath, the current Oracle Guardswoman, was using.
The Imperial Guard was different from a super-team on Earth, who tended to be a bunch of independently adept types working together so they could take on bigger challenges and more powerful or numerous enemies.
The Imperial Guard, however, was a military unit. The ‘names’ of the Guardsmen, translating to Oracle, Mentor, Neutron, Titan, Smasher, and so on, were actually positions in the Guard, assigned to the most adept soldiers who possessed the relevant power sets, often tied to a specific race and so representing their people and homeworlds. Properly, the main group were the Superguardians, while the trainees, replacements, and reinforcements were the Subguardians, and the Guardians who didn’t serve the throne directly on Chandilar here were the Border Guardians.
It was naturally much more structured than back home, but then, we didn’t have whole planets of races of beings who all possessed super-powers innately to draw lots of recruits from, either. They were soldiers who’d been working together for a long time, and I was naturally the odd person out.
The details of the tower level we’d be assaulting were transmitted to everyone, their Mentor arranging the assault plan. I was going along as an ‘interested observer’, and they all knew I was totally capable of taking care of myself, if not to exactly what extent. Smasher and Neutron didn’t doubt me at all, of course.
They all had anti-grav packs and could fly without issue, so there was no need for a transport. The tower to hit was less than ten miles away, and we’d be there in minutes.
Which hardly meant I needed to wait around that long. “Praetor, I’m going to get into position and make sure none of them escape while the rest of you make your way over.”
He was about to say something when the air popped and a faint line of lightning extended off into the distance, shocking them all with my speed.
Gladiator could follow me, of course, and was certainly able to match my flight speed if he cared to... albeit he’d generate a lot more shockwaves than I would. Air Elemental Command slid me frictionlessly through the air, turning the sonic boom of my passing into no more than a breeze, and the long sparking trail only flashed for a second, making people wonder if they’d seen anything at all.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
I ended up invisible outside the tower base, which by the registration was some sort of factory for grain-based breads, crackers, and similar products. The Shi’ar paid close attention to their food supply, so messing with it would have triggered all sorts of alarms, but such places were ubiquitous and found everywhere. This place was just one arm of a multi-city business run by a neutral Shi’ar family under one of the more boring Shi’ar noble clans, who were mostly concerned with supplying decent food for the Empire as part of their long duty and tradition.
I pulled out Function, flicked open the base, and a Baneskull floated out while I scanned the tower.
It was definitely thick enough to block normal scans of Detect Evil... but not Detect Evil at IX+1.
Understand the Heart of Darkness swelled up before me, ignoring mere material constraints as it painted everything within a thousand feet, and the sins of all mere mortals who didn’t have a full Astral Bar or the equivalent were laid bare before me.
=============
Alas, such spells work not in real life!
If you're not reading this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief. Please read it in its original home, it's still free! You get the foreword and afterword, author comments, and comments from people with questions! I have not given permission for this story to be posted ANYWHERE ELSE.
=============
I began to grimace as I did. The Baneskull on Function lit up, and greenish flames burned softly over it... invisibly, however. I hooked my Detect Evil into them, and watched the crimson-purple images burn green.
-Oracle, could you relay to your team that you’ve got a Dire Wraith infestation here, to the tune of seventy-three individuals on my scan,- I /relayed to the telepath coolly. -I’m sure you have a protocol for this, but in my experience Dire Wraiths don’t necessarily slay and replace entire families, because they memory-steal and don’t have to cover for themselves. Your Hobgoblin or one of the trainees for the position is probably compromised, however.-
-Dire Wraiths!- she /replied, in some disbelief. -Are you certain?!-
-One HUNDRED percent. I am looking at them now.- Brain-eating bastards that they were. Detect Bane at IX had been very pricey to put into Function, but it was worth it, in the end. Their normal defenses, magical or scientific, weren’t quite up to dealing with it, and the Detect Shapechangers also identified what kind of Shapechanger extremely accurately if I’d run into them before.
Or, like in this case, was using a Skrull skull for the Baneskull, and the Dire Wraiths were an offshoot of them.
-Attack plan has changed. We are teleporting into assault positions!- she /sent back to me a moment later. -Shi’ar infantry are being moved into positions to lock down the area, and deep genetic scanners are being moved into place!-
They’d probably find a lot of stuff they didn’t want to, but the Dire Wraiths would also be spread out over the planet, and it would take time to scan the entire place, especially with the multiple layers of shields and blank spaces they were bound to encounter, and which the Wraiths would be taking full advantage of.
Millennia-old empires have a lot of resources, and defenses against subtle infiltration by enemies was going to be one of them. They’d ruthlessly scan the whole planet before they were done, and likely a lot of illegal aliens and stuff were going to pay the price for it.
------
The crackles and pops of the teleporters doing their job would no doubt alarm the Dire Wraiths, but I was feeding the locations of all of them into their telepathic web, and the attack of the Imperial Guards was very precise and quite overwhelming, buttressed by Subguardians and normal infantry troops being moved into position... after being carefully scanned first.
They hit the factory from all directions, exploding right through the walls, and mercilessly began to sweep up the ‘Shi’ar’ working there. Realizing they were totally blown, the Dire Wraiths reverted to their normal forms and tried to use their magic to save themselves, which didn’t get too far against the overwhelming power arrayed against them.
Gladiator rampaged through the place with impunity, looking for and making sure there were no self-destructs or anything ready to go off. A dreadnought was actually stationed overhead in orbit and prepared to atomize the entire spire to stop such an event, despite any innocents above or below us.
I didn’t make any direct contributions beyond fingering every single Dire Wraith in range. Whole legions of intelligence workers were sussing out the families of the lower-caste Shi’ar replaced by the Wraiths, their connections, and the like, attempting to find other Dire Wraiths who weren’t working out of the facility.
Naturally, having this many Dire Wraiths here meant they were working on something, and when the power surge came up from the depths of the building, I knew it was time for me to get involved.
I shifted through the place at Mach 10, zipping through the carnage and making it to a chamber festooned with magical chambers, a lot of necromantic power, the withered carcasses of hundreds of various undercitizens of the Empire, and something big and ominous that was definitely going to blow up now, with its Seals damaged and broken.
“Ho, would you look at that. A necromantic planar rupture ectosphere. Send the whole capital into the underworld or something,” I mused into the voices of the panicking Imperial Guards trying to figure out what to do with this, their Caster Mystique unable to make hide nor hair of what was happening.
“What will happen if we Pulsar Cannon it?” Gladiator asked me urgently, waving the others to silence.
“It’ll go off, and the reflex action will probably supercharge the Portal and send the entire planet into Hell.” I waved him off absently as fine arcs of metal and crystal zipped out of my Masspack and began to assemble into a particular configuration.
“A Stargate!” Mentor blurted out as he arrived on the scene. “You... carry around a portable Stargate?!” he exclaimed in disbelief.
“Well, yes and no. A Stargate is a technological device, this is Alchemical. Also, no intrinsic power source, so the range is highly variable based on the amount of energy available.” Which, since I had IX’s, basically meant unlimited range, but hey, no need to worry them. “No need to worry. I’ll just contain the explosion, vivisize it, and drain it off to an underspace capacitor, no muss, no fuss.
“You might want to take the opportunity to see which people are trying very desperately to get out of the city right now, however.”
Mentor paused, and then urgently bent to his communications, giving telepathic orders as fast as he could devise a net to catch the rats.
========
Author's Notes:
The Ciegramites are the hedonistic best brewers in space, snail-people who made a brew that Galactus Himself could enjoy (named after Seagram's Brewing, of course!). Made famous in the original Hercules future miniseries, and never seen elsewhere. Probably great friends of Laxidaizian Trolls...
Strontium is two elements past Krypton on the Periodic table. No, no, he's not a Supes expy, nope, nope. He's a grown-up Superboy expy. Legion of Superheroes, remember!
Dire Wraiths were made famous in the Rom: Spaceknight series. They are the magical offshoot (then retconned to have an Inhuman offshoot) of the Skrulls, who embraced science and hunt them mercilessly as well... and later imitated their ability to take the memories of those they imitated.