This Bloody Game Read online

  Orion took a deep breath and used Memory’s Prism to recall the files he had memorized. That would be Grand Queen Lob reclined on a huge velvet cushion, her wrinkled flesh bedecked in a pale pink silk gown, her many articulating limbs clad in matching gloves and glittering jewels. To her right stood Princess Swada, a prominent tabloid socialite. The black corset tied across her bust had been ripped, her long black mane of hair looked disheveled, and one of her earrings had gone missing. In her arms, she cradled her battered husband, a sephilon musician named Tivian who was famous for his ability to play four guitars at once. Orion thought that he must have fought back — his face wore swollen bruises and cuts that seeped light-blue blood, and at least two of his long spider-limbs had been broken. As for the other six sephilons cowering behind fine leather couches and strangely shaped gaming tables, Orion figured they must be minor nobles of some kind to still be alive.

  The old queen spoke first, her six violet eyes narrowed to a squint. “You don’t wear the robes of the fanatics,” she said, her voice measured and calm.

  Orion shook his head, embarrassed that he’d been staring at them with his mouth agape. “Yeah, I mean no… I’m here to rescue you.” He cringed as soon as he had said it.

  The other sephilons looked at the queen, their long limbs shaking, seemingly afraid to hope for hope after 18 days of captivity. “Are you, now?” said Queen Lob, a weary twang to her voice.

  “Yes ma’am,” Orion said as he approached. “I’m Orion Grim—”

  “Ew, ew,” cried Princess Swada, rearing back and jostling her groaning husband in her arms. “You smell so bad! What are you? Do all of your kind smell so bad?” Her often-photographed face contorted in a grimace, and she reached up with one of her long legs to cover her mouth.

  Orion stopped in his tracks. “No, that’s because…” He had again forgotten the stench clinging to him. “I’m a human, from Earth, we don’t…” He shook his head and addressed the queen again. “Look, your brother Commilo hired me.”

  The queen seemed to think for a moment. “Commilo is as dumb as a mule with a nail through his head.” She gazed at Orion suspiciously. “That leads me to believe that he did something right by accident.” She thought for a moment more, looking Orion up and down while everyone else in the parlor held their breath. “So, you are a… Union Legionnaire?”

  That’s what she had been looking for — the Galactic Union’s spiraling insignia. “No ma’am. And though I may not be Special Forces, I’m special.” He forced a croak of a laugh at his own joke. “Your brother called rank, ‘right of a sovereign planet’ and so forth. Hired me and my crew to step in and fix what the Union couldn’t.” He offered a slight bow. “And rightly so. I’m going to get you out of this, no worries.”

  The drooping expression on the Queen’s face gave him all the retort he could ask for, but Princess Swada burst into tears before the old monarch could offer an actual response. “My child, my baby,” she wailed as the tears streamed from her large violet eyes. “You have to get her back!” She dumped the dazed musician on the ground and reached for Orion with arms and legs. “You can have anything if you get her back, anything you want!”

  While much of the civilized galaxy would be delighted to have the famous tabloid princess grab them with such passion, Orion had to fight instinctive terror. “Don’t worry, Miss.” He wriggled free from her many hands. “The extremists are bold, but my team is better.”

  Grand Queen Lob rose up on her cushion, peering over Orion at the parlor doors. “And where is your ‘team,’ young human?”

  “In position, ma’am.” Orion smiled. “Aurelia and Kangor are just waiting for my signal.”

  The parlor went silent for a moment. Then the queen cleared her throat. “Do you mean to say that there are only three of you?”

  Orion glossed over this point with a mumble about support staff and whipped the frightened sephilons into motion. An earl of some sort helped Swada carry her unconscious husband, and Orion led them down the hall to the Grand Queen’s library. The old monarch pointed the way through the long shelves of the towering room to an iron vault meant to preserve ancient scrolls and delicate pieces of parchment. Orion ushered them in quickly, promising the queen they would be safe until he returned victorious, and he was off.

  Again he became a Sliver of a Shadow and slunk through the halls, banquet rooms and lounges of the second floor. He climbed a long, swooping staircase, the pale marble steps smooth with the footfalls of centuries, and finally he arrived at the Great Painted Dome. Quickly, he tucked himself behind an ivory-white pillar and peered out at the expansive throne room. A singular masterpiece of stained glass arched high above, a great mosaic of dizzying geometric shapes and colorful religious icons. The white floor gleamed with the watercolor hues of the colorfully cut light, and large stone statues carved in the images of sephilon rulers lined the long path to the throne. The snob in him appreciated the beauty of the architecture, but it didn’t hold his attention for long.

  Nine Dawnstar terrorists in white-and-gold robes stood spread across the floor. In addition to military-grade lightshields and pulse weapons, the men and women carried sickle-like blades and short swords just in case their enemies had lightshields as well. The group included a few more four-armed poxgane, a handful of feline temba nubu, and one red-skinned durok man with twisted horns sitting on a bejeweled throne at the far end of the room. Orion saw no sign of any sephilon baby. He did, however, see one atomic bomb. The fat, jury-rigged warhead sat beneath the center of the cathedral-like space with the burnt-yellow streaming sun of Dawnstar painted on its side. Hunching behind the pillar at the edge of the vast space, Orion closed his eyes and listened, thankful for the throne room’s echoing acoustics.

  “I am ready,” said the pensive durok sitting on the throne. Orion heard the others snap to attention, robes whispering, pulse weapons and blades clinking. The durok rose and stalked down the aisle, and Orion merged the memory of the man with the sound of his steps. He was broad-shouldered and fit, well over 200 pounds with a deceptively long reach. Some kind of body armor clinked beneath his coarse robe. His footsteps continued until he stopped in front of the ovoid warhead in the middle of the room.

  “I am ready to give my testimony,” he said.

  Orion risked a peek around the pillar. The durok stood with his head bowed in prayer in front of the atomic, while his henchmen arranged themselves around him and deployed a single floating datacube. A blue light flashed to signal the datacube was ready to record, but the durok raised a hand. “A few words for you, my brothers,” he said gruffly. “The Union pigs will not bow to our demands, nor will they let us walk out of here alive. But there is no death for those who walk the Luminous Path. And for these last 18 days,” he said, his voice getting louder and deeper, “we have commanded the attention of the galaxy, and shown them that they must fear Dawnstar.”

  His people cheered, but the durok patted the air with a wide red hand to silence them. “We will make one final transmission. Then,” he said, turning to lay a hand on the fat warhead, “we will step into the light hand-in-hand with this royal child, a symbol of the Union’s decadence.” Again his troops cheered, and again he silenced them as he looked into the blue eye of the floating datacube. “Begin.”

  Orion ducked back behind the pillar, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. They must have strapped the infant to the bomb, and they planned on broadcasting the detonation across the galactic datasphere. He had to act, now, before the zealots vaporized the Great Painted Dome and turned the sephilon palace into a crater.

  “We are Dawnstar, followers of the Luminous Path,” began the leader. “We have come to cleanse the stars of all who reject the Luminous Path, and this is only the beginning…”

  Orion lifted his gauntlet-clad hand and looked at the red veins glowing in the chrome fist, the captured essence of the terrorist life he had taken. Opening his spiked
fingers, he concentrated on the terrorist datacube and whispered a simple word. “Disrupt.”

  He peeked around the pillar and saw the datacube blow out its lens with a limp shower of sparks. “In the name of the Kalifa,” growled the durok, his curving horns tilting down at his surprised minions. “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said one of the temba nubu. “Something malfunctioned.”

  “Quite obviously, you stone,” he bellowed. “Get another one in the air, now! I won’t have our journey down the Path delayed any longer.”

  This was the moment, and Orion felt his spellblade lust for blood. “Link to crew,” he whispered to the brass-plated datacube clenched in his fist. “Aurelia, you’re on.”

  The words had barely left his lips when a gale of emerald energy shattered an aircar-sized hole in the Great Painted Dome, showering the throne room with colorful shards. A green-skinned woman floated in, her curvaceous body wrapped in shimmering purple silks, white-green fire crackling all around her. She drifted toward the center of the room and descended until she was just above the bejeweled throne, and then she spoke with a voice that was both beautiful and malevolent at once.

  “Behold, lesser carbons,” she said, her eyes flashing with jade light as a wicked smile bent the bow of her lips. “I am Aurelia Deon, Fifth Order Sentinel of the Jade Way, Adept Magi First-Class, Sojourner of the Velvet Rift, Siege Breaker of the Holy Emerald Stronghold. I am the Exile!” She screamed these last words, throwing her head back and gushing a bright swell of light that cowed the fanatics back with religious terror.

  “She’s one of the Green,” cried a burly poxgane.

  “You’re up, Kangor,” Orion said to his datacube. “Let it rip, brother!”

  A controlled explosion splintered a second hole in the stained-glass ceiling. A tinkling rain of glass came down with a cloud of smoke, followed by a growling, beastly creature. When the smoke cleared, Kangor Kash rose on his shoeless feet to his full height of seven feet tall. The huge, muscle-bound humanoid had clawed hands and feet, gristly tufts of orange fur sprouting from gaps in his boiled-leather garb. His wolfish head had a pair of ember-orange eyes and mighty jaws with dagger-like fangs. The vycart were nearly extinct in the galaxy, mostly appearing in tales meant to scare children, and Kangor Kash looked every inch the storybook monster. Kangor roared, the sound echoing off the stone floor and pillars, and it began.

  Orion conjured a long, curved katana from his gauntlet and charged out of the shadows. With every step, his mind fell deeper into the White Room, a kind of meditative trance that would suppress his conscious thought until all that remained was the slowed-down mechanics of battle. As he and his companions converged on the robed figures gathered around the bomb, the panicked fanatics drew pulse pistols and fired blue bolts from their rifles. Yet these first few knots of energized atoms fizzled harmlessly on their lightshields, and Orion, Aurelia and Kangor kept coming. Though their shields’ charges would not last for long, it was ample time for Orion’s team to close in and take away the advantage of ranged weapons.

  The terrorists tried to draw the scimitars they carried for under-the-lightshield combat, but they quickly found themselves outmatched. Orion stabbed and slashed with graceful movements of his long katana, penetrating alien organs and opening critical arteries. Kangor wrestled thick poxgane thugs to the ground and snapped their limbs with his huge hands like an angry child breaking his toys. Aurelia Deon lit several terrorists aflame with handfuls of emerald fire before reining in her ostentatious display and lancing the durok leader through both hearts with a pair of pencil-thin green beams fired from her outstretched fingers. After a few brutal moments the room fell still, and Orion’s bloodstained katana returned into the palm of his gauntlet like a silver snake disappearing down a hole.

  “How do you like the Luminous Path, boys?” Aurelia laughed as she strolled down the aisle between the stone statues and dead bodies. “You were right.” She turned her eyes to Orion, her irises fading from neon green to the same deep bronze color that marked her short head tentacles. “They weren’t so tough.”

  “Nice light show,” Orion said, shaking his head to climb out of the White Room. “You really put the fear of God in them.”

  Aurelia flashed a dazzling white smile. “It was mostly empty sound and fury, but it worked.” She shrugged. “Just like you said it would.”

  Orion grinned. “A superstitious lot, and so forth.”

  Kangor spat blood from his mouth and rumbled with a deep laugh of his own. “I’m sorry I doubted you, little friend. That was easy!”

  The vycart strode toward Orion, his long arms open wide. He had earned a long slash across his chest from a flailing sickle that had snuck under his lightshield, plus a burn on his leg from a pulse bolt that had reached him after his lightshield had run out of charge. But the big vycart’s clusters of undifferentiated cells looked to be hard at work, closing the wounds with rock-hard scar tissue that bubbled crimson and thick.

  “You are a master of a different claw,” Kangor crowed as he enclosed Orion in a crushing hug. “Though you stink to the Moons of Hell and back.” He wrinkled his beastly face as he caught the lingering stench of the waterway with his acute sense of smell. “What have you stepped in?”

  Orion struggled against the big vycart, straining for air. “Kangor… the child… the bomb…”

  “Yes, what of the child?” Kangor asked as he released Orion, his snouted face smiling wolfishly. “I thought… I thought there was a child to rescue?”

  Orion pushed Kangor away and sprinted down the aisle, away from the tall throne and toward the bomb. He understood now — the royal child wasn’t a child in the human sense at all. It was a white egg spattered with violet ink blots, the little world in which sephilons spent the first year of life. The terrorists had strapped the embryonic life form to the side of the bomb with crude tape, right in the middle of a stenciled-on, burnt-yellow sun. Yet before Orion could free the egg, he saw the display and control pad affixed to a pried-open section of the fat missile’s hull.

  Though he couldn’t read the shifting, coded symbols on the display, Orion could guess that they reduced with every change. The durok leader must have started the countdown before his attempted transmission, and that meant Orion had minutes, if not seconds, to disarm the bomb. His mismatched eyes raced over the device, following crude wires from the slapdash detonator to pried-open panels as his friends followed. Kangor thundered up on his clawed feet, and Aurelia Deon crept near with steps as quiet as a fairy.

  “Hmm, I see,” Kangor said, nodding. “Well…” He looked down at Orion, a slight smile curling his lip. “Thank you for freeing me from the fight pits, little friend. These last years have given me purpose. It is a fine day to die.”

  “I disagree, Kangor,” Aurelia said as her bronze eyes went wide. “But it is a fine day to narrowly escape a nuclear blast.” She clamped a firm hand around Orion’s arm and tried to tug him away. “Orion, we should go.”

  “Shut up and let me think,” Orion snapped as he shook her off. Muttering under his breath, he reached up and gently — but quickly — peeled back the adhesive that held the egg in place. As he cradled it, he found himself surprised that the egg felt as hard and heavy as a stone. He handed it to Aurelia and spun back to trace the maze of wires.

  “Really?” she sighed. “You know I don’t have a maternal molecule in my body, right?”

  “Come here, little one,” Kangor said as he reached down and scooped up the sephilon egg in his powerful hands. “I’ll hold you through the fire.” He closed his thick arms over the pod and held it against his chest.

  The shapes on the display continued to tick down, and Orion tried to call on his training to defuse the bomb. His teacher had told him that all things would open themselves when viewed through the lens of Blooming Flower, but Orion couldn’t still his mind against the thought of immi
nent nuclear annihilation. An insane idea flashed across his mind — should he guess? Should he start ripping out wires at random, because doing something was better than doing nothing? The display had ticked down to a single, changing symbol.

  Taking a deep breath, he looked around the throne room. Red splatters dripped from the throne and the sephilon statues, pools of poxgane and temba nubu blood mixed on the floor, and red veins glowed brightly in his silver gauntlet. The fresh violence provided ample fuel for his spellblade’s magic, but would it be enough to contain a nuclear blast? Orion held out his open right hand and thought for a sliver of a moment, trying to pick just the right word. “Neutralize,” he said, laying his armored fingers on the bomb.

  Pale fire washed over the bomb, and Orion could feel the absorbed life essence of the terrorists flowing through his spellblade, a sensation both exhilarating and sickening. After a few seconds, the pale fire receded and the transformation revealed itself. The bomb, the wires, the display, the detonator — all of it had been turned to pure, dull lead. Orion looked down at his gauntlet to see the red veins drained dry.

  Aurelia stepped up to help support him as he staggered back with exhaustion. “By the Jade Way,” she whispered.

  Still holding the egg tenderly, Kangor laughed. “An impressive weapon. Demon metal, but impressive all the same.”

  “It’s not a weapon,” Orion said, panting. “It’s a tool.”

  “Hopefully we don’t run into another nuke we can’t disarm,” added Aurelia.

  Orion stepped back, body trembling, and let the spellblade gauntlet flow back into his silver tattoo. “I consider it a spell well spent.” Disrupt was the word he should have saved for later, he thought as he silently kicked himself. “If this comes up again, I’m doing something wrong. Now, we—”