Luke Chmilenko
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Starbreaker: Volume 2 - Chapter 35
🕑 Added 2025-01-17 17:00:02 +0000 UTC“When you serve, your time is not your own. It might seem like it belongs to you, but you handed it off to the Ardent the moment that you signed up. And one of the first and hardest lessons that many learn as they train is that their time, however long or short it might be, is entirely out of their control. And quite possibly outside of the control of those commanding them too.”
—Keeping the Peace Among the Peacemakers, Gorgan Wartback
The klaxons had him upright and armed before he even knew what was happening. That in itself wasn’t terribly surprising. They had practiced for this back on Strife. The night alarms meant an Eidolon attack. But there weren’t liable to be any eidolons in orbit, so as the others pulled themselves upright, Sylvas staggered over to the inbuilt slate and tried to pull up information on what was happening. A white shield took over the entire screen before he could do anything.
“Report to docking bay 3 for immediate deployment.”
“Deployment?” Ironeyes groaned, from level with Sylvas hip.
“The holiday is over, folks.” Sylvas shouted over his shoulder, to a chorus of groans and moans. Yet despite all of the complaining, there wasn’t a single one of them still in bed, or out of uniform. Some were still tying on their boots, but for the most part, the whole place had been stripped bare of any sign that the Ardent had been here at all. “Docking bay 3.”
A quick glance along the beds gave them a headcount. Gharia groaned. “We’re missing Anak and Orson.”
“Any ideas?”
“Orson was seeing some girl from the Greyhall.” Luna offered. “Dunno about Anak.”
“Okay Harvan, can you take a run around the top deck and see if you can spot our missing fiend?” He wasn’t sure why he’d automatically fallen into the role of bossing everyone around. He supposed it was because nobody else seemed to be all that bothered that they were two soldiers down and about to be deployed into combat. “Luna, you good to fetch Orson?”
Both of them gave him a nod and set off, “Everyone else, we’re at docking bay 3, where we arrived. Move out.”
On the way out of the door, he fired off a sending spell to both of the missing troops using his sluggish gravity mana. He’d don his new gauntlet on the way to wherever they were going to be fighting.
He found that he liked Onslaught Citadel a lot better in the early hours of the morning, when even the most dedicated drunks had found their way to bed. It felt like the temple down on the surface, but without the cloying red dust getting everywhere, peaceful, and designed to echo every sound back and forth about the place with the deliberate curvature of every passage.
Footsteps echoed everywhere they went, but the klaxon that had roused them wasn’t playing throughout the entire station. Whatever was happening wasn’t happening here, to these people, and Sylvas felt a little twinge of relief at that. They weren’t his people, and he didn’t care about them the way he did the other recruits from the Blackhall, but if something bad had happened, he would have been saddened by it. He probably would have felt the same way about anywhere he’d spent more than a minute, as desperate as he was for any sense of home, but he liked to think that he was a little more rational, and that his sorrow would have come from the fact that despite misunderstandings, potentially lethal competitors and his own inability to relax, he’d managed to make some good memories here.
It may very well have been the same shuttle that brought them up from the planet that they were now pouring into, highlighted with that same glowing aura of illusory magic that the Ardent used so often to guide their troops around. That same light brought exactly the same people that he’d shipped up to Onslaught with to the same location, but he waited before boarding, stretching his senses out through the station in search of Anak and Orson. The latter was easy enough to spot, being dragged along behind Luna with his trousers only pulled halfway up, but tracking Harvan through the station with the way he phased in and out of existence was hard enough at the best of times, and with his gravitational sense distorted the way it was up here, seeking either him or Anak out was incredibly tricky. Turning his attention down, he left the upper floor in their competent scout’s hands and searched below. Nowhere in the bottom deck of the station was there any hint of the fiend. Orson and Luna loaded themselves on the shuttle, and the pilot was glaring out at Sylvas, as though he was the one causing the delay. Cursing under his breath, he cast another sending to Havran. “Come to the shuttle.”
But it was only then that he finally took a proper look at his slate, and the list of troops assigned to his craft. The shuttle didn’t have Anak on its registered passengers. Nor did Sylvas squad, not anymore. Digging into the central records down in the Blackhall revealed that Anak was no longer in the running to become a member of the Ardent. He’d quit, taken what was left of his wages and jumped ship while he was off-world. While he could do it without having to face the people who’d thought they were his friends. It sunk like a lead weight in Sylvas’ stomach, but he set it aside for now. There was a fight to be won. Deserters could be dealt with after.
The human mage he’d been sending scurrying around on a wild goose chase dropped into the docking bay through the roof at a reasonably paced plummet that would likely have ended in a broken leg if Sylvas hadn’t already disrupted the local gravity at the moment Havran appeared. The mage seemed as nonplussed about the situation as usual. “What, are we going without our horny little mascot?”
“He quit.” Sylvas didn’t have time to debate this any further right now. “Get on board.”
“He what? Wait… what’s happening?” Sylvas took a hold of the back of Havran’s uniform jacket just an instant before the full pull of the artificial gravity returned, taking enough of the strain that the other man didn’t stumble, then he used that grip to shove him up the ramp.
“Ready.” He gave the pilot a nod as he headed for the last remaining seat. Second to last remaining seat. They were going to be one man down for the operation. Why hadn’t Anak said anything? If he had just spoken to any one of them, they could have given him advice, helped to make his life in the Ardent easier, all that he had to do was talk to them. Sylvas pushed it aside for now. I’m not exactly the poster boy for talking things through either.
The shuttle lurched into motion as he slumped into the seat and pulled on the restraints. Some of the others were giving him quizzical looks and Havran was gossiping away like his life depended on it. They had more important matters to attend to than one little soldier running away in the dead of night.
The illusion blossomed to life in the middle of the cabin.
“Mournhold Citadel, largest of the orbital stations surrounding Strife, has fallen into the hands of an enemy force. Your duty is to penetrate the defenses of this station and destroy the power source animating the enemy. Your secondary objective is to retrieve important files stowed on Mournhold for the Ardent intelligence service.”
“Opposing forces: you can expect to encounter a necromancer in full control of the undead constructs that populate the station and its automated defenses. In addition, other teams have been deployed to the station. Some will be operating with the same parameters as you, others will have their own agenda, other groups will be operating as allies of the necromancer. Providing an additional degree of realism in this exercise.”
“It’s a culghing exercise!?” Kaya roared.
Bael seemed to have turned his anguish at their holiday ending early inwards instead, replying to the illusory mission plan with a sarcastic, “Chaos, how delightful.”
“You will be deployed onto the lower ring docking bay, and the station has been provided with a breathable atmosphere in all accessible areas. This does not mean that all life support systems will be active throughout the exercise, as that is not representative of a Citadel under siege. While the layout of this Citadel is comparative to that of Onslaught, Mournhold is built on a larger scale, serving as the primary station in the orbital defense array of the planet, it has also undergone considerable modification in the time since it’s construction, so it would be inadvisable to make any assumptions based on prior knowledge.”
Bael had already conjured up his own illusory map of Onslaught Citadel which he now dispelled with a huff. The image hovering in the middle of the shuttle was of the exterior of Mournhold. Given the name and the necromancy, Sylvas had assumed that there might have been a bit more bone-based decoration, but it looked much like Onslaught had, with the same four outer pylons curving around the layered circular decks at the middle. In addition to being larger overall, it also appeared to be taller. There were additional decks in the central block, but given what he’d seen before, Sylvas was still willing to bet that the power source was going to be somewhere central and low.
“If a member of your team is eliminated in this exercise, leave them where they fell and they will be retrieved at a later time by medical staff. In all other cases, treat this as a live drill and expect to face lethal force. Do not damage the station, do not interfere with any functional life support systems, do not attempt to leave the station before the exercise is complete, do not attempt to circumnavigate the station by exiting into space with the belief that you can gain access at another point. Mournhold is to be treated as a live, hostile enemy emplacement with point defense systems on the exterior. While they will not actually be active during this exercise, you will be removed from the exercise as if they were should you break these parameters.”
“Someone tried to space-walk this before.” Gharia chuckled. “Funny, that was my first idea too.”
Sylvas ran through his available troops in his mind. Luna, Orson, Havran, Gharia, Ironeyes, Kaya and Bael.
Kaya and Ironeyes would be extremely important on a space station, their affinities lending themselves well to the situation. Luna and Orson would be the least useful, they hadn’t even manifested their affinities yet. Gharia and Havran lingered around the middle of the pack, in certain situations they could prove absolutely vital, in others, utterly useless. There was no real way to tell which it would be until they arrived. That just left him and Bael. He had no idea how useful he himself was going to be to their mission, but Bael was going to work wonders as he always did. He had a grasp of archaeology and architecture, not to mention deep-space construction, that would make navigating this Mournhold much easier. Not to mention his ability to translate different languages, and systems of magic, into something usable. Bael would probably prove to be the most useful of them all, if decision paralysis didn’t cripple him so often, Sylvas would have said he was the natural choice to lead them. That, and the fact that everyone was already looking to Sylvas for answers before the briefing was even over.
The shining representation of the station that they were approaching remained glowing in the middle of the shuttle as arguments and debates began to break out amongst the Ardent. While they’d all faced constructs before, none had any experience fighting the undead, which meant that while they all debated and yelled, Sylvas dipped into his boundless memory for anything that he’d read about Death Affinity and the forces it could produce.
For a brief and glorious moment all fell silent as he closed off his senses and focused on incorporating all that there was to know, but scarcely a moment later, the shuttle jolted. The pilot let out a frightened yelp from his cockpit. That… probably wasn’t a good sign.
Sylvas eyes snapped open. “What’s happening?”
The pilot, a Najash woman as dark as Gharia was pale hissed between her teeth, “We’re under attack is what’s happening.”
“How?” Kaya wrestled, trying to free herself of her restraints before realizing that they were made of metal, and casting a quick spell to warp them out of her way. She stumbled to her feet, and then on into the cabin. “The point defense systems on Mournhold aren’t active.”
“What are you doing?” The pilot snapped, jerking the controls of the shuttle and sending it into a spin. “Get strapped in!”
Kaya, being Kaya, flung herself into the empty copilot seat and tied the belts together around her middle. “Is that a culghing skeleton!?”
Sylvas couldn’t see it, but he assumed from Kaya’s tone that it was in fact a culghing skeleton, which meant that whoever was serving as the necromancer defending Mournhold was taking a proactive approach. The pilot groaned, “They’re coming out our docking bay.”
Impact after impact struck the shuttle, a steady patter of solid objects hitting them, and in itself, it wouldn’t have been all that troublesome, but the things that were hitting weren’t simply rebounding off. Even through the thick hull, the sound of scraping metal could be heard. The skeletons were trying to dig their way in.
The pilot shouted back over her shoulder, “We’re pulling out. There’s no way to make a safe landing.”
Sylvas surprised himself, shouting back in an authoritative tone that he’d never heard coming out of his mouth before. “Then make an unsafe one.”
“You want me to…” The pilot let out a noise somewhere between a choke and a sob.
“Metal is harder than bone, crush them.” Sylvas reiterated. “Get us on that station.”
The other recruits had fallen silent since the first impact, giving each other meaningful looks as the scratching on the outside of their shuttle went on, but now all eyes turned to Sylvas, who’d assumed command and was choosing to risk their lives without even consulting them. He met their stares, not with defiance, not with apology, but with his own certainty. They were not losing this exercise without even putting one foot onto Mournhold.
There was considerably more argument going on in the pilot’s cabin, but it ended abruptly when Kaya manifested one of the long metallic blades that her new embodiment had granted her. “Do what the man says.”
“This is stupid.” Was all the pilot replied.
“Stupid and brave are the same thing. The only difference is if it works.” She looked from the razor edge of her blade to the pilot. “Make us brave.”
The smooth landing on Mournhold was not to happen today. Enough skeletons were boiling out of the docking bay that avoiding them was entirely impossible, so the pilot did as she was told and rammed right down the center of them. Some of the skeletons already clinging to the outer hull of the shuttle were dashed against their own reinforcements, both sides were mangled together in a tangle of bones and dust. They hit the deck of the docking bay in a skid, with no traction thanks to all the undead under the landing gear, but they did stop before crashing into the inner wall, so it appeared that today’s maneuver was in fact brave rather than stupid.
As soon as the ship stopped moving, the restraints released, and Sylvas was on his feet. “Fire and light affinities are the strongest against the undead. We’ve got neither. So far, we’ve only run into melee combatant constructs, so let’s assume that is what we’re dealing with as we clear this room, we’ve got a perfect choke point at the shuttle’s door, so let’s use it, we don’t spread out into the room until we’ve burned through most of the attackers or we encounter some sort of ranged attacks. Luna and Orson, you’re shielding. Ironeyes, Gharia, spread the hurt. Kaya and I will hold the line. Havran and Bael, I need you dealing with anything unexpected. Bael, this is our first look at how the necromancer is running things, if you can start working out a counterspell, that would be… beautiful.”
Outside the shuttle, the assault had begun in earnest, clawed bones raking at the metal, trying to pry open the door. Trying to open up the can to get at the delicious meat inside. Kaya stood alongside him at the top of where the ramp would deploy and manifested her blades. For his part, Sylvas equipped himself with everything that he had in Cold Storage as fast as he could, and started fragmenting off his mind to prepare three gravity spikes and an inversion. He drew in one quick cycle of mana to make sure the gauntlet was doing its job, let his orbitals drift out into formation around him, then gave the spooked pilot a nod. “Pop it.”
