Peter Evans: Angelus

The sky was dark, and death was in the air.

The Father could smell it, taste it on his tongue. The sun was high, but he couldn’t see its light — the clouds of smoke and dust were too thick. A sluggish, sickly night-time was sprawling towards him from the far horizon, lit with stuttering flashes.

Those sparks were getting closer, he knew. Some of them were lightning, static electricity ripped from the skies by all the particulates in the air. But many of them, the brighter, straighter ones, were not electricity in any form recognized by nature.

They were anger, those lights. They were rage and revenge, and they were directed at him. For what he had done.

He turned away. He had a cloth held to his mouth to keep out the worst of the stink, but the miasma of burned rock and roasted flesh was getting too strong. The last city had been immolated just minutes before, the bright beams lancing down from the sky to lay open its protective mountain and boil what lay inside. How many of his children had vaporized in that searing attack, he wondered? A hundred thousand? More? It was impossible to tell. He had spent a year in that city and had never explored one tenth of it.

There would be no more exploring now. The city didn’t even exist as rubble any more, its citizens could not even be called corpses. They were dust and smoke and a foul taste in the air, and that was all.

He would be next. The beams were getting closer.

The attackers had shown not the slightest trace of mercy, not a second’s hesitation. There had been no attempt at communication, no warning, no negotiation. They didn’t want anything from the planet or its people, they simply wanted them gone . And they had gathered all their energies to that one end, and sent them stabbing down from orbit in a storm of light.

The planet had fallen in hours. There was no defense. The people had relied on their mountains to protect them, had hidden their great works underground for millennia. The cities had sprawled under the hills and the cliffs and the great peaks, unseen, for thousands of years, and it had been enough.

But this was a new enemy, sending down their fire from heaven, and stone was no match for their weapons.

A beam snapped down a kilometre away, the sound of its passing a horrid ripping noise, deafening even from this distance. The Father felt the heat of it, the sizzle of its electricity over his skin, and it nearly knocked him off his feet. As he stumbled, he saw, briefly, the circular hole it left in the clouds, before the beam cut off and the smoke roiled back in to close the gap.

Where the beam had touched ground, a cone of grey was rising.

A thousand tons of pulverized rock and soil spat up into the greasy air, the initial blast from the beam’s transfer of energy. It came up in a tall narrow fountain, almost smooth from this distance, regular, until the upper edges of it slowed to a point where they began to surrender to gravity. But even as the cone started to unravel, light was growing at its base. That gush of powdered rock was little more than a cosmetic effect. The beam had penetrated kilometers down into the planet’s crust, and a powerful reaction was growing there.

Behind him, another beam speared the clouds and violated the world. And another.

There was no chance he could get to his sanctuary now. The facility was too far away, over the next hill, and it would take too long to prep the starhopper anyway. The machine had slept for too long. He had never even been sure it would still work.

He hadn’t expected to need it.

He steadied himself, ready for the end.

Where he had seen the beam strike, a sphere of light was rising, swelling, insanely bright. Mass became energy in the centre of that sphere, matter ceased to be. Hell was being born in front of his eyes.

Finally, the ground itself reacted to the light, and heaved, rippled into a titan blastwave that erupted outwards from the sphere, hid it in an expanding disc of flying rubble. It spread terrifyingly fast, the heat of a new sun driving it onwards.

The Father knew it was going to kill him. He spread his arms in the face of it, his eyes open, daring it to take him.

The sound of it was thunder, battering his ears.

And the rolling blastwave seemed to shrink back from him, to coalesce, its edges solidifying and hardening into planes of dark gold. The sky above it turned black, the ground beneath it shrank away. The entire scene focused and attenuated and became metal.

He was inside the starhopper.

He stared, blinking into the darkness of space. The optic portal was set to full transparency, and a panoramic starfield surrounded him. Above his head and to either side, status boards pulsed calming mandalas of data, while the controls under his fingertips were slightly warm; the subtle exchange of energy between his body and the mechanisms beneath.

The screams of burning children, the thunder of the beams, all were gone, stilled. He was alone.

He raised his hands from the controls, ignoring the hopper’s gentle complaint, and turned them over. They were as they always were — the lines across his palms, the whorls of his fingerprints, all as they should be. But the transition from the dream to reality, the unbidden jump from a slaughtered world to the still womb of the starhopper, had jarred him terribly. The vision of the dying cities had been so real, and waking up hadn’t felt like waking at all. Had he really been asleep so long?

How, indeed, could he have slept at all, with the cries of his people so fresh in his ears?

He looked over to the storage alcove, where his visios hung from a levitation clamp. The mask seemed to glare at him, accusing, the glossy gold reflecting his own face as he studied it. The empty eyeholes gaped, lifeless. When he reached out to touch the visios , it felt cold enough to burn.

As his fingertips met the metal, the control board began to chime plaintively for his attention. The proximity alarm was sounding.

There was another ship approaching. They had found him.

He laid his hands flat against the vector cascades, and thought the starhopper’s drives into searing life. As the acceleration pushed him back into his throne he concentrated on the sensors, ordering a tactical map onto the portal. Threads of light appeared in front of him, sewing themselves into twists and skeins, globes and planes that rotated dizzyingly in the air above his hands. And there, finally, in the midst of those dancing graphics, a pulse of brilliant white, shining like a jewel.

His objective. At last, that which he sought was drawing near.

Hope rose in him, for the first time in as long as he could remember. Perhaps, if he was quick enough and strong enough, he might survive.

Whether he lived or died, he decided suddenly, he would go to his fate appropriately dressed. He snatched the visios from its alcove and settled it onto his face, felt the cold metal hug his skin. His gaze narrowed behind the eyeholes, and he returned his hands to the controls, spurring the hopper to maximum speed. It resisted for a moment, then leapt forwards.

Weapons fire erupted from behind him, scoring the hopper’s phase-shield. But the little ship was already opening up a hole in the dark, its hyperdrives reaching out into the night and wrenching spacetime open in a burst of silver-blue light.

The hole billowed in front of him, filling the optic portal. Putting all memories aside, he let it envelop him, knowing that his pursuers would be close behind, but somehow at peace with that.

The jewel on his tactical display still pulsed. Atonement was within his grasp.