B. Larson - The Empress

Then she turned her eyes back toward the badly wounded Empress. “We will care for you, and I’m sure you will regrow your faculties. I’ll send emergency forms to tend to your every need.”

The operating eye clusters stared at her venomously. The Empress reached out and tried to restrain the Parent, but she was too weak to exert her will physically. She was close to losing consciousness.

As she left the throne room the Parent ordered a dozen trachs to repair the Empress. The Empress shifted and flailed when she heard this-everyone knew hests were much smarter and more capable when it came to medical matters. Trachs were clumsy at best, and were as likely to pop an organ with their heavy, groping claws as they were to repair it.

“Can’t be helped,” the Parent said happily as she exited. “The hests are all needed elsewhere.”

The Empress released commanding scents-but to no avail. The situation was clear. The Parent was in charge.

The Parent left two killbeasts at the entrance, ordering them to prevent all visitors save for herself and trach servants. The first trachs to arrive she commandeered, using them to carry her sagging form down the tubes toward the command module. She realized as she left she was something of an assassin-but she reflected she was probably not the first one in the history of her species.

She soon reached the command module. There was little time to spare, if this campaign was to reach a successful conclusion. The nife had had the right plan after all, of course. He had nearly completed it, but the Parent had made his plans public and quietly sent hests to inform the Empress. The nife had expired soon thereafter, but the humans still remained and must be dealt with.

She would blast their entire city to dust. It was the only way to be sure. She would burn them and their army out of that crevice in the sandstone, and then this planet would be hers to rule. She had no qualms about disappointing the Empress by the loss of so much meat-the Empress was hardly in a position to eat it, anyway.

Garth and Ornth were both fatigued to the point of exhaustion, and now they worked in a semi-stupor. The labor became a fevered blur during the final hours. They’d slowed down, and begun to communicate less as time went on. They had no food, and the only droplets of water they consumed were those they managed to lick from the elbows of hot pipes.

We must make the attempt, Ornth said.

“The system isn’t ready. We have nothing like a full charge. No single vessel contains enough power to ignite the core.”

I know, Ornth said. But we must make the attempt before we lose consciousness and expire in this chamber. I’ve been monitoring your vitals-your core temperature is up to one hundred three degrees. We are burning up with fever.

Garth licked his parched lips. His tongue rasped over scabs. “All right,” he said, “we’ll try to open the lens.”

That will expose us to enemy detection.

“Yes, but if we can’t even do that, we have failed in any case.”

Ornth mulled this over. Agreed.

Garth half-slumped over the controls as he worked them. His fingers felt rubbery, and he could barely open the heavy valves. Perhaps Ornth was right. Perhaps in a few hours, it would be too late.

They watched the meters and gauges. At last, the system groaned and something huge shifted. Garth staggered as the vibration almost knocked him from his unsteady feet.

The vapor that had been rising around him for so long shut off over the next minute or so.

“It must be working,” he said.

Check the power levels. We must have at least six percent in a single cell to ignite the core.

Garth steered his eyes to the appropriate measurements. They displayed a capacitance. “We have just under five percent power.”

No! Ornth howled. Not enough! We have failed.

Garth wiped his face, but it was dry. He felt like sobbing, but no liquid came from his tear ducts, they merely stung.

Suddenly, he had an idea. He eyed the other coils, and their relative positions.

What are you doing?

“If we could short these leads together…” he said. “The first battery has five percent, the second has about three.”

Short them together? But how? We have no couplings.

“We have a conductive material at hand. But there will be some loss of power and the connection will be brief.”

What connective material?

“My body.”

The Tulk was silent for a few moments. I am willing to make this sacrifice.

“I am as well, because we are going to die here anyway.”

Garth set the controls to fire. The firing chamber filled with gases. After a minute or so, it attempted to fire, and a dry repetitive banging sound began. He knew that was the ignition system, trying to ignite the core. There wasn’t a sufficient charge-not yet.

Together, Garth and Ornth stripped down to their bare skin and placed themselves between the two hot leads.

You are the best mount a rider could ask for, Ornth said.

“And you are the bravest little devil who’s ever shared my skull.”

Garth laid his hands across the power leads. He found his personal oblivion a nanosecond later. He learned that for him, it was big, sudden, and blindingly bright.

#

A vast beam tore up from Nightside, blazing into the sky. Firing at a target so near the planetary surface, the angle of the projected radiation struck the crest of a frozen mountain. Nearly a second was spent burning through this obstacle, which was made up mostly of glacial ice. In that short time, the landscape of Nightside lit up with a brilliance the dark side of the world had never seen. Frost bats and iron-head owls fell to the tundra with smoking wings and steaming eye sockets.

The beam burned through the icy mountaintop and plunged onward through cloud cover and out into the open void. It had lost much of its power by then, and the cells were nearly empty, but still the beam lanced up into orbit. It was unstoppable. Gladius buckled and twisted when the beam struck. A hole a mile wide was driven through the waist of the ship. The energy did not dissipate until it had punched out the far side of the hull and left the vessel mortally wounded.

The great beam died, and the ship died with it. For nearly a minute, it drifted, a twisted hulk. Then came a secondary explosion. When the great ship finally blossomed white over Lavender City, thousands of eyes stared and thousands of mouths gaped. A few minutes later, they ran for shelter as burning debris came raining down. This new kind of bombardment went on for hours as the ship slowly broke up and fell in burning chunks to the ground.

Eventually, the survivors in Lavender City came to realize the enemy was gone from their world. There were final pockets of resistance, but these were quickly overcome. Without Parents churning out fresh replacements, each alien slain was a final death.

#

A long ten-day later, when victory was declared, Aldo and Nina fell to celebrating. Every standing tavern in the city opened its doors to the knights who had fought the enemy in these same streets. Everyone exulted in the expulsion of the aliens from Ignis Glace.

They lifted cups together and saluted the living and the dead alike. They felt joy in their hearts, but it was tempered by harsh facts. Countless victims had been dragged into the great ship above or slain outright.

Sixty-Two came to stand at the entrance of the ruined pub where the two humans celebrated. Lizett trailed him. Aldo called to them and asked if they would join them in a toast. They approached, but Nina Droad stood as they did so.

“I must see to my knights,” she said in a glum voice. She did not even glance at the mechs.

Aldo reached up and placed his hand on her wrist.