After the battle, the many stims I’d taken had run their course and I was dragging myself around on inertia, relying more on my suit’s musculature and fine-corrections from its computer than my own brain’s sense of balance and weight.
Eric was just as exhausted, dragging himself around on lethargic limbs. I supposed the toll from stopping an IED at point-blank range had taken its toll on him, that and the battle. I hadn’t seen him for most of it, but I wasn’t ready to believe he’d just hidden in a bush somewhere for the bulk of it. For one thing, there weren’t many bushes around. For another, he clearly wasn’t averse or unable to defend himself. I’d probably be tired too if I had to summon literal lightning bolts from my fingertips.
Larsen was in much the same state as I was, though perhaps she’d fared a little better. She always had been more gifted physically than I was, if only by a little. I had nothing but myself to blame there though. She devoted herself to exercise and combat readiness like a pious priest. I, on the other hand, met the standards and then some, but absolutely smashing them was rarely a top priority for me.
The weather had turned from a punishing flood of rain to sun and clear skies in a shockingly short amount of time and dawn was well and truly upon us. I hadn’t registered it during the battle really, but with all the excitement over with I had the time to process it. As I tracked our prey, it took about five seconds for me to determine there was nothing much left for us here, unless we wanted to stick around and play with scavengers or whatever vampire came to check on their dead pet, I suppose.
I looked over the many footprints buried in the mud. They glowed a brilliant orange. The brighter and more intense the glow, the greater the chances were that they belonged to Davian. Several different scanners colluded to accurately pierce the visual and physical clutter to define sets of footsteps.
I had gotten a general description of Davian, and we’d definitely picked up his trail a few times in recent hours. We’d been pursuing him for a while and though it was extremely CPU-intensive, I’d had a program running in the background to build a profile for him. I had zero tracking skills of my own, so I’d set the program to run on a whim.
Footprint depth, the width, even the length between footprints were all factors considered. Extrapolating a rough profile from a few days of raw data wasn’t a silver bullet by any means, but it was enough to heavily stack the deck in my favour. If you’d asked me right then and there what I thought about adaptive algorithms, I would’ve told you they were the best damned thing since sliced bread.
I set my suit to scanning, ruling out a south-easterly swath of the compass bearing. He’d clearly headed off in a certain direction.
It took me almost seventeen minutes of wandering and walking around to get a good scan of the area and fine-tune the algorithm I was using, but really it wasn’t too difficult. As I wasn’t trained to track, I was leaning on my algorithms more than I was comfortable with, but the software I’d selected was both well-tested and relatively accurate.
Marines were generally called upon to engage in boarding actions or guard a ship from attack, but they were the more mobile, versatile and technologically-superior force to complement the regular Army and so we saw action on the ground as well.
That was good for me. It meant the tracking wasn’t going to be hamstrung by a lack of data to work with. I did find myself hoping that Eric could do something, but I doubted it.
“I know you said the magic here was muddled, but is there any chance you could track him down? Any chance at all?” I asked.
“No.” Eric said flatly, clearly displeased. “I wish I had something to offer, but it’s quite impossible for me to track through this mess with magic. You two may not have dealt with a lot of magic during your fight, but I witnessed at least a dozen attacks from two mages.”
“Two?” I asked. “I only saw one.”
“There were at least three then, potentially more. I expect most of them were held back and only committed themselves after you made it clear that you weren’t bothered by so many mundane men. Their magic will have fouled his trail. I’m sorry, I know it’s not the answer any of us would like to hear.”
I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. We deal with the world we have, not the world we want.”
“Wise words.” Eric said.
“Something my grandfather used to say.” I nodded.
In the end, after lots of high-tech educated guesswork and conversation two different tracks stood out, one heading almost straight east, the other in a more northern direction.
I would have to see about learning to track at some point. I could think of too many instances where having such a skill would be invaluable. I wasn’t Force Recon, a Marine Raider or any sort of highly trained badass. I was just a grunt. Well-trained and experienced, to be sure, but still just a grunt. As a rule, we didn’t get specialist training unless we requested it and passed selection for the class. Of course, with all that had happened I’d been kicking myself about not pushing myself to get a slot in some kind of specialist training program.
After another moment’s examination I decided on the more northern set of footprints, hoping that they weren’t some kind of magic decoy or just the wrong set to follow.
“Proc, focus on that set of footprints only.” I stared at the footprints for a few moments.
“Acknowledged.” The rest of the glowing orange footprints faded and a single, fragmented set lead off into the north-west. I began dutifully tracking them, with Larsen and Eric not far behind me. If we were wrong about which prints we had to follow… well, I tried not to think about that.
“He went this way. These prints are his.” I said with a certainty I only half-felt. It was always possible my suit could be wrong, but the seventy-two percent accuracy rating of this particular trail reassured me somewhat. We’d had the opportunity to pursue Davian’s prints for hours at this point, a decent had helped provide a very strong baseline to compare against.
The imprints in the mud were a mess, but they all averaged out to point in a westerly direction as one set of prints broke off from the rest.
“Are you sure?” Eric asked. He frowned at the mud.
“Can’t you tell, with your magic?” I asked.
“No. This place is a mess. It’s not an easy task for me to sense a specific flavour of magic, even under ideal circumstances.”
“Good thing I’m here then, isn’t it? Want me to take point?” I said, glancing around at the carnage we were leaving behind.
“You’re welcome to, I doubt I could fight off an ant in my present condition.” Eric snorted.
“You’ll be okay when we catch up to this guy, right?” I asked.
“I will be fine in a few hours.” Eric confirmed.
“Maybe let me go first? I’m not the one with a damaged suit.” Larsen asked over a private channel. I nodded, sending her the tracking algorithm I’d been using. I stepped aside and gestured for her to lead the way. I still maintained the tracking program myself though. Having two reference points would make it go faster, maybe not as much as I’d like, but every bit would help.
Larsen set a moderate pace, probably because Eric looked like he’d appreciate a more relaxed speed. We were all feeling the fatigue given how little rest we’d had, but he was the only one of us who showed it, seeing as he wasn’t clad from head to toe in powered impact-resistant armour.
I had a contingency plan for the fatigue situation, mostly. I wasn’t quite ready to use it though, so I held off on mentioning it to Eric. That same plan had probably already crossed Larsen’s mind and she was just waiting for permission to use it, knowing her.
With Larsen taking the lead and Eric behind her, I took up the rearguard position and got back to what amounted to paperwork and… well, more paperwork. At least it was useful paperwork, though. No requisition forms or anything bureaucratic, but actually important stuff we’d need later.
The briefing I was putting together was the star of the show, but I had a number of things that didn’t really fit in it that I wanted to follow up at some point. I was very curious to know about the cultural attitudes towards women here. It wasn’t an immediate concern, but it was something I needed to know. If we had to visit a place that was matriarchal or somewhere that would see Larsen crucified, well, I wanted to know ahead of time.
There was a massive amount of information that I had to gather to even begin answering all my priority questions, to say nothing of everyone else’s. Cultural norms, social faux pas, Ebonwreath’s system of governance, their attitudes towards women and the power structure of their government, their martial doctrine and recent military history. It was a mere handful of questions among many more, but exploring them was both going to be necessary, and time-consuming.
I needed to build a picture of the world we’d been stranded on, not just the planet itself, but the people who’d built their lives and identities here. How would they react to us? What made them tick? How could I twist their arm if I needed to?
The thing at the top of my list right now was figuring out how my new allies thought and governed, because that would tell me how they’d fight. They seemed a practical people, competent in battle and lacking in stupidity. However, I was well aware that I’d only met two of them and that their entire military could be a stark contrast to Eric and Lilith. I just didn’t know, so that was a priority.
I fed my voice through the external speakers at a higher-than-normal volume.
“Are we going to be sprinting madly across the plains for hours, again?” I asked.
“Unlikely. Our suits weren’t really designed for this work. We’re not operators so twenty klicks an hour is about the best I can do. Hours? Sure. Sprinting? Probably not. Any faster and I’ll lose the track. He didn’t take the time to conceal them from the looks of things, must have figured they’d get lost in the battle.”
“Lucky us. Usually, he’d be right.” I admitted.
“How are you tracking him?” Eric asked. “It’s not by magic.” He stated, the unspoken question painfully obvious to me.
Eric’s voice sounded fuller and like it was directed at me with pinpoint precision. I got a strong impression that the distance between us or the speed we were moving wasn’t a factor in his speech being audible. Magic was at work, obviously.
“We’re tracking his footprints.” I explained.
“His footprints? How can you be sure these are his? I could barely see them back there.” Eric scowled.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Direction of travel, the general area you sighted him in, a hundred other odd things adding up. We have our own tools, the same as your magic. It would take a while to explain, just trust me.” I implored him.
“Intriguing.” Was all the reply I received.
One of the recurring thoughts that kept surfacing in my mind was that my team was almost down to nothing but knives, if you counted Carver and Chen. Larsen and I were down to knives. The other two weren’t going to come to our rescue, they were too far and we didn’t have the capability to reach them via radio.
I hoped that we didn’t run into too much more trouble, but if I was honest with myself, I knew that was far too much to ask for. We still had a manhunt to finish, after all, and I doubted it would be finished with knives and fists alone. I’d figure that particular problem later, as I didn’t have many solutions right now anyway.
According to my dead reckoning systems we were moving at somewhere around nineteen klicks an hour, with occasional bursts of speed putting us as high as twenty-six. It was practically a crawl compared to our earlier speeds. It wouldn’t do us much good to go faster though, not if we didn’t know where we were meant to be going.
We’d left Eric’s horse behind a while back when he’d had his encounter with an IED. I’d dragged him out of the area, wanting to be clear of the danger more than I wanted to retain his transportation. That was something of a double-edged sword. We couldn’t move as fast anymore, but we also didn’t need to at the moment. I hoped our luck held in that regard.
With nothing much to occupy my mind but the flat land around us and the horizon of an alien world, my mind wandered for a while. My thoughts drifted towards home for a little bit before I pulled myself back to the present.
“Where do you think he’s running?” I asked Eric.
He shrugged. “Perhaps a safehouse, or a hideout of some kind. There are few cities, a dozen at most and they are quite far apart. I know of none in this direction.”
“He wouldn’t be trying to meet up with a group of mages? Maybe one belonging to this faction he’s a part of that wants to attack the city?”
Eric shook his head. “That is not our way here. A large group in the open like that would eventually draw attention and lead to more and more attacks. Monsters can smell magic, much like a bloodhound can smell blood. It is more likely Davian is retreating to a safe location where he has set up a portal network. Then he can safely make his way to wherever he and his ilk call home.”
Interesting. I mentally added that tidbit about ‘smelling magic’ to my briefing.
“How far do you think he’ll go?” I asked.
“Not far. I could be wrong, but I doubt it’s too far away from a major city. Perhaps an hour, three at the most. He will get there before us, but we will have to hope that whatever gateway he has constructed is not beyond my abilities to repair. I expect he will attempt to destroy it before we arrive.”
“You can do that? Repair runes?”
“Runic inscriptions are not eternal.” He chuckled. “They require maintenance like everything else, albeit very rarely unless they are damaged. More regularly, they require recharging. I will be able to ‘taste’ the magic he has used to create his portal and deduce where he went. It’s not a practice that’s unheard of but I have only done it once before under very controlled conditions.”
“Once? That’s not going to be an issue right? You can actually do this?”
Eric laughed. “It will be a bit slow and there is always the chance that I will fail, but have faith. I am not where I am solely because of nepotism and it isn’t a completely unknown skill. I would prefer it if we arrived as soon as possible however. It would make things easier.”
“I’m going as fast as I can.” Larsen pointed out.
“And for that, you have my gratitude, I did not mean to slight you.” Eric said. He went quiet for a while, then spoke again. “I can sense the presence of his magic now, but I see nothing and I certainly could not provide us a direction. Your ‘tools’ as you say, are impressive.”
“Thank you. Your magic is as well.” She said simply.
“Agreed.” I added.
I cleared my throat, though the noise was likely lost in the wind, even at the sedate speed we were going. “If we have a while before we catch up… I’d love to get to know more about magic, considering we’ll be going up against it soon. We don’t even know how it works.”
“Prudent. Ask your questions, but be warned, there are some specific things I am neither willing nor able to speak of. I will be able to answer most of your questions, though. What do you wish to know?”
“Specific things?”
“I can’t name them.” Eric stated firmly.
“Fair enough… I suppose I can’t exactly hand you my secrets either.”
“Thank you. Perhaps when we know each other a little better.” Eric said simply.
I thought about how to phrase my question. There was a lot I wanted to unpack, but a specific question would give me a specific answer and vice versa.
“How does magic work?” I asked after a moment.
“That’s… a broad question.” Eric said. “What specifically about how magic works?”
“Well, how do you do it? Did you have to learn or was it something you could always do? Pretend I know almost nothing about any of it—because I don’t.” I chuckled. “For all I know you do it by speaking wishes to a magic lamp.”
Eric echoed my laugh. “You’re not entirely wrong, but there’s more to it than that. We don’t ‘wish’ things to happen. We project.”
“Project?” I asked. “Like Astral Projection?”
Eric looked over at me with an unreadable expression, silent for a few moments. “I have no idea what that is.” He put a little more power into his voice, or so it seemed to me, and began to speak in a bit of a lecturing tone.
“Projection is a mage’s intent and focus, manifested as a real and physical action, usually. There are more esoteric forms of magic such as telepathy but much of that kind of old magic is lost, no longer understood or very difficult to master. Most of the time, for more complex or powerful feats of magic, we use runes.”
“And how do these runes work?” I asked, dutifully making sure this was all recorded in my suit’s internal storage.
“There’s an… alphabet, I suppose you could say. It spells out words, phrases, statements that create certain effects or accomplish certain actions. Think of it like a series of logical statements to arrive at your intended result.”
“Shit. I was never very good at languages.” I joked. “Larsen, you’re smart right? You speak Russian and a few other languages?”
“No, I’m a complete dumbass and I only speak Portuguese.” She snorted. “I speak some Russian and Danish, and a few other things, yeah.”
“Then… you should probably be the one to ask Eric about this language stuff. You know me, I don’t know the difference between a diaeresis and a… vowel?” I shrugged, as much as one can while running, anyway.
“Am I going to learn this magic language now of all times? It sounds more like programming than an actual spoken language, anyway.”
“Well, maybe you’re right but I was going to ask-“
“Excuse me.” Eric interrupted. “What in the gates are you two arguing about?”
Larsen answered for us both. “We want to know how this language works. More than that, we want to learn it. Or I guess, I do, since ‘Corporal Crayon’ over here only speaks English.”
“You want to learn… the entire runic alphabet?”
“Look, it can’t be any harder than what I’ve already managed to learn—except Mandarin, fuck learning that again.” A sharp exhale reached my ears. “That’s a yes, by the way, Eric.”
“I see.” Eric said, contemplating that for a short while. After a moment, he spoke up again. “You do understand this isn’t a spoken language? More of a… system of writing.”
Larsen was silent for a moment. “I get it. I won’t promise to understand these runes right away, but I want to get the ball rolling on the basics. I feel I need to know at least the simple stuff if I’m going to be fighting people who are using runes against us.”
“Ah, I’ll keep it simple then. Edward, are you going to learn as well?”
“I’m listening. I’ll hear everything Larsen does, and vice versa, naturally. We’ve got time to kill and we need to know this stuff. I’ll take notes.”
“Your armour, I presume?” He asked. Without any kind of visible writing implements or magic, it was the only reasonable explanation.
“Correct.” I stifled a sigh. “I’m going to try and conserve my energy. I don’t know about you two, but I’m pretty fucking exhausted.” I responded.
Eric chuckled. “I’m a little better off than you two it seems, but I’m not invincible. We’ll find somewhere to sleep soon, I promise. We can spare a night to rest, even”
“Great.” I said, more than a little relieved.
“Feel free to include details, though I can’t promise to remember everything. I will be taking notes, though.” Larsen told him. “Carver will probably want more information than you can give me though.”
I could feel the disbelieving silence, then the begrudging acceptance. If not for the fact I knew we had the ability to record data in a dozen different ways I would’ve felt similarly doubtful at the prospect of teaching someone an entire written language, or at least a sizable chunk of it while running side by side. It wasn’t the ideal classroom environment, but you didn’t need one for the basics of most subjects.
“As you say, then.” Eric said. “Put simply, there are eighty-four different characters and thirty-six different connectors that make up Runic Script which can be arranged in various ways to form a runic matrix describing the function of a spell. Unless it’s designed for it, or damaged in some way, a rune matrix is almost always reusable and must be recharged with a mage’s energy regularly.”
“So it’s kind of like programming? If-then and for-each… nested loops all that jazz? Except if that programming was battery-powered, I suppose.”
Eric said nothing for a moment. “I have no idea what you just said.” He burst into laughter.
Larsen shook her head slowly. “Don’t worry about it. Keep going.”
“What might be especially interesting to you two is that Runes are technically possible to work with if you are a mundane, despite the fact that charging requires a mage. Are you following me so far?”
“I’m with you so far, yeah.” Larsen said.
They went on for a while trading questions and explaining things to each other, but I wasn’t entirely cognizant of most of it, especially since I was more focused on the trail that we were following. I paid attention to about half of their conversation, but especially the part where Eric warned us that without the benefit of magic of our own, we would be unable to directly protect ourselves from attack. I wasn’t so sure of that, but I held my peace.
We made our way through the countryside with little difficulty. Davian’s tracks glowed still, unfailingly clear. I wasn’t sure if he’d tried to conceal his trail, but given our slow speed he would get wherever he was going well before we got there and have plenty of time to prepare for our arrival. Unavoidable though it was, the thought gnawed at me.
I was beginning to get sick of running for hours on end. I think I honestly preferred the sheer adrenaline and terror of combat to the monotony of cross-country bounty hunting, even if the fatality rate was likely to be far higher. Not that it was anything new, of course, I just didn’t find it terribly interesting.
After a while, we fell into a comfortable but vigilant routine with Larsen guiding us to our quarry as we each took to our own activities. We tracked Davian’s trail into the foothills at the base of a small collection of mountains. The jagged rock loomed in the distance like a dozen giant knives jutting out from the ground.
We followed Davian’s footprints to the mouth of a cave. There were no torches, lights or other signs of life, but unless he’d teleported out, he was still inside. That was, from what Eric had been explaining, entirely possible.
I crouched down by the entrance, peering into the gloom. Rock, nothing but rock and darkness. Still, but not silent.
“Any idea of what to expect? You’re the expert.” I asked, as Eric stood next to me, likewise looking into the darkened cave. I pitched my voice low, to keep noise to a minimum.
“I don’t know their numbers, but I would expect at a minimum that he has a gateway that feeds into a trap for any unwelcome guests, various traps and likely at least six guards.”
“How do you figure?” Larsen asked.
“It’s what I’d do.” Eric shrugged.
“What about in the cave?” I peered into the gloom, but could make nothing out except, well, a cave.
“The usual defensive runic matrices, I’d expect. Mines, alert spells, perhaps illusions but that is a rather difficult type of magic to work with. Few can manage it without some degree of power, or extensive runes, but from the impression I got, Davian works with them often.”
“We should expect them, right? This Davian guy has power, backing and if he works with them often he would probably make use of them here.”
“I would agree with that assessment, yes. Illusions are to be expected. It’s what I don’t expect that worries me.” Eric admitted.
“These illusions, what are they exactly? How do we fight them? Can they fight us?” Larsen asked, as she settled in beside us, watching behind us.
I crept forward, glancing behind me as I made my way into the cave. An augmented view of the cave gave me the ability to see through the translucent cave walls, it was like every twisting tunnel and expansive chamber was made of tinted glass.
I felt something, not some magic sensation or a warning from some sixth sense or anything quite so worrisome. This feeling was an old friend. Some had called it bloodlust, others said I was unacceptably impulsive, or reckless when it took me.
Truth is, it was probably some combination of all three. I expect it was the reason I’d never managed to make it to Colonel. My record was impressive, but so were all my demerits and reprimands. More than a few had been because of a fight I couldn’t pass up.
I was still that same stupid kid looking to fight the whole damned world, even after all these years. That same desire to prove myself had pulled me into the service in the first place. That was probably the safest place for a kid who wanted to fight everyone, even the people he really shouldn’t.
And now, just like the day of my enlistment, the promise of something new and challenging had my blood boiling. I so badly wanted to see how I’d stack up against Davian and his band of mage-terrorists. Sure, he was the enemy, but that didn’t mean I hated him.
To me, he was a means to an end, a way off this rock. More than that though, he was a challenge, a mountain to climb. I tried to reserve hatred for when it was personal.
Maybe it was the thrilling idea of pitting myself against the likes of someone that no one from the Commonwealth had ever had the chance to face, or the knowledge that I was going up against someone else in a battle of wills, wits and firepower, winner-take-all. Or… maybe I was just an addict for the fight. That would explain how I’d enlisted.
Regardless, the mounting anticipation in me snapped like an overstressed guitar string when the cave’s half-opaque walls were replaced by… snow?