Kali (or The Needle and the Skull)

Fritz yelled.

Ibrahim stood up from Tatyana, her android body still now, the biological parts dead.

“What?” Kurt asked.

More B’dr’rak ghosts appeared in the room.

Aki screamed.

Helenne didn’t know why she got up and ran out, no weapon in her hand. She saw Aki crouched about twenty meters away, lying behind a scorched and chipped rock. She picked up the gun she’d dropped in the doorway. Shouts, retorts, echoes, filed the air. Her hair sizzled, standing up in the ionized air. She looked quickly around the corner. A landing boat zipped past, flying low, spitting fire; she ducked. A pillar disintegrated into dust and shards.

Helenne bit her lip, and then ran heedless across the open ground, armed only with a med. She slammed into the ground behind Aki and rolled to a stop, surprised to be alive. He had a bad burn on his leg, skin peeling back, but cauterized by laser fire.

She opened the med kit, but he pushed her down. The boat was coming around again. Little flashes of light marked the muzzle of firing weapons.

Path announced.

The landing boat lit up like a star. It blinded her. The sound of its detonation coming seconds later, when her face was already buried in the ground, a purple flash still fading on her retina.

She struggled back up and saw a fireball coming down, a white flame curving impossibly over the terrain. The ball of fire turned yellow, then orange, flying parallel to the ground, heading for the group of Bismarki troopers that still pinned them down. The fireball’s passage ignited mountain vegetation, and a dark smoke trail followed, swirling in the wind. The fireball stopped dead, hovering over the now fleeing troopers. Four red-hot arms, at least ten meters long, flashed from the sides of the glowing orb. The arms plucked the soldiers from the ground and they began to scream in high-pitched squeals as they were crushed and scalded and then flung broken back onto the rocky ground. Helenne vomited. The sounds of shooting soon stopped, the echoes faded and all she could hear was her own rasping breath and the hard beating of her heart.

* * *

Ibrahim demanded.



he answered.

the bottled personality demanded.













Ibrahim warned. <Path, can you store this entity?>

the ship replied.

CHAPTER 10: Chaos in the Aftermath

Kurt struggled to his feet and walked through a gesturing B’dr’rak apparition. It was a mess. Path was burning off heat, cooling as fast as the starship could, but it would still be minutes before they could get onboard. The Bismarkis were all dead. Shot, burnt, crushed bodies littered the ground. Ibrahim carried Onaris on one shoulder, Tatyana on the other. Helenne was working on Aki’s leg. Kurt spat blood. He thought he would be fine in while, but he’d already consumed three thousand calories of food bars and his healing body screamed for more. The smell of roasted flesh from Tatyana’s leg was appetizing on some deep level, but he ignored it. There was something strange about her. He had been right about that. Ibrahim wouldn’t tell him right now, but it would come out soon.

Fritz kicked up some rocks, starting mini-avalanches as he came down from his firing perch above the shrine, looking unscathed but frazzled. He pointed at the line of dead mangled and burnt troopers. “Now that really creeps me out,” he said.

Kurt looked at the dead, killed by Path’s landing pods, living metal morphed into killing claws, that were now just innocent pylons landing: “What? You’ve killed many people than that, with much less justification.”

Fritz nodded. “Yeah, but I’m not twenty meters tall and full of antimatter.”

The moment that Path told them it the airlock walls had cooled enough, they rushed Onaris and Aki into the ship, setting them in the dual bays of the ship’s autodoc. Aki would be fine, but Onaris was bad. Fortunately, Karl had bought another autodoc, in anticipation of this level of mayhem. The captain asked Path to power up that second medical unit still down on the lower cargo deck, still half in its packing crate. Kurt and Ibrahim rode down the freight elevator in silence and he let himself get tucked into the upper autodoc bay. Ibrahim placed Tatyana’s body, dead flesh over motionless metal, into the lower unit and sealed it.

Kurt felt the ‘doc’s mechanical arms peal back his ruptured smartsuit and work on him, but he refused anesthetics and ordered the bay kept open. “Who was she?” he asked.

Ibrahim tilted his coopery head and asked, “Have you or your cousins ever wronged the Divinity of Aurgeus in any way?”

“Aurgeus?” Kurt shook his head. “No, never been there. Not even Fritz. That’s hundreds of light-years.”

Ibrahim’s metallic face betrayed no expression. “Then it is strange that an avatar of one of his Emissaries would be here.”

“Trying to seize the Kali?” Kurt suggested.

“That would have some logic to it,” the Machine admitted. Ibrahim walked away.

Kurt would have continued the conversation, but the autodoc was pushing needles deep into his chest, and it was distracting. Grimacing, he relented and allowed the medical machine to administer painkillers.

He laid there for an hour, his cousins updating him by comm. Path had really annoyed traffic control, but the locals had no method of enforcement, so they were fine for the moment. At the height of the suborbital power-dive, Path had skirmished with an orbiting frigate, maybe the same one from Daklaru but identification was sketchy. The damaged ship had quickly retreated back down onto the planet, over ten thousand kilometers away in northwest Pandya. So there were still Bismarki out there, almost certainly.

Fritz had gone back up to the shrine to belch at the B’dr’rak ghosts.