Chapter 35

“The problem with Aion defenses is that they’re always an outside context problem. They’re never straightforward or easy to navigate. They always have to be approached with a novel solution because it seems that the Aions were allergic to doing anything straightforward at all. You have to approach them with the mindset of a philosopher and scholar instead of a tomb-robber, which was probably on purpose, but it is still a massive pain in my ass.”

—Selected Daybook Musings, R. Clarendon

There was no dawn in null-space, or in space in general, but nonetheless, when the time he’d usually call dawn came around, Sylvas awoke feeling surprisingly well-rested. Mira had been keeping herself busy in his absence, filtering through all of the files that they’d retrieved from the Consortium, constructing a full report on their illegal activities, and cross-referencing everything the ship’s archives had on Aion vaults, shikari, the Cantobus system, and the region of space that they were headed for. It had an old star compared to the younger, fresher ones closer to the galactic core, and by the estimations of the computer, the colony had only become properly habitable recently, on the geological scale, as that sun cooled.

She had also been working on a full spellbook of war affinity spells.

They aren’t strictly war affinity, as the majority of them will be combining with your gravity affinity mana, since the two are essentially blended at this point. There are only a few that are war-exclusive, just as there are a few that use gravity exclusively.

“Mira, this is… amazing.”

Yes, darling, I’m absolutely spectacular as I always have been. Nice of you to finally notice.

Hector ambled into the cockpit about an hour later as Sylvas was still familiarizing himself with all of the new magic that Mira had come up with. The basic forms of many of them were based on all of the other elemental affinities, and towards the end, Mira had also started blending some of those additional affinities into the mix. War and fire. Gravity and ice. He carried very little of those other mana types with him, but it was enough to cast one of these spells apiece before he refilled them. “Morning, kid. How far out are we?”

“A little over an hour.” Sylvas didn’t even have to double-check; the countdown was constantly ticking away in his mind. “I’ll bring us in at the edge of the system in case there have been any dramatic changes, or they scooped the place without updating their records.”

“Alright, enough time for coffee, that’s the main thing.” Hector ambled back out but stopped in the doorframe. “Hey, kid, about last night…”

“Don’t worry about it.” Sylvas forced a smile. “I understand what you were trying to say. I might not agree with all of it, but I understand.”

Hector rubbed at the back of his neck and headed off.

To be on the safe side, Sylvas pinged an alarm throughout the ship to wake up the other two, and they came tumbling along the corridor, hopping in Kaya’s case, to see what was happening. Despite him having a one leg advantage over her, Kaya still made it to the cockpit ahead of Malachai. “Who’s culgh am I kicking?”

“We’re about an hour out.” Sylvas smiled back at her. “I thought you might want to get dressed.”

“Stanzbuhr, we spent a year getting dressed in thirty seconds so we could run to classes. You really think I need an hour to pretty myself up?” She threw her detached leg at him, striking him across the back and shoulders. Then she hopped over to retrieve it, grumbling all the way.

Malachai was a good deal more gracious. “Thank you for the wake-up call.”

“Any time.” Sylvas smiled back. Mostly to annoy Kaya.

He returned to his studies. They had no idea what they were going to find when they arrived, so he tried to prepare for every situation, which essentially meant garnering a piecemeal knowledge of a wide variety of things rather than being able to focus on any one area and develop something resembling expertise.

If you need something specific, I can always give it to you. There is no point in trying to familiarize yourself with it all when you have me.

Thank you, and I know…I just need to be busy for a little while, Sylvas said as he kept on reading anyway, Mira giving him the mental space to do so.

All four of them crowded into the cockpit as the end of the hour approached, the coffee put away, their clothes firmly on, and every one of them as revved up with tension as Sylvas was. They stared out into the black nothingness beyond the windows as if they could see what the future held.

Whatever you’re hoping that I’m able to predict, I can’t. Everything is too chaotic I’m afraid.

That probably wasn’t a good sign.

With the completion of the spell, they were launched back into normal space, and the Cantobus system spread out before them. The old cooling star still seemed bright enough to Sylvas’ eyes, and the third planet out, the one that they were heading for, looked like it was intact. A trio of moons spun around it in elliptical orbits, and the surface was an even mixture of blues and greens, like Croesia before it fell, albeit a little brighter and considerably less mountainous.

“Nice looking place.” Hector smirked. “Less completely destroyed than I was expecting.”

Malachai was surrounded by a nimbus of cold light as he gazed beyond the veil of death. “The ambient death mana surrounding the planet is relatively low. It would seem that there hasn’t been a mass slaughter by shikari recently.”

Kaya was quick to correct him. “Or the colony was too small for it to register.”

“A possibility I will concede.” He nodded, stymying Kaya’s attempts to start an argument for her own amusement.

Sylvas began to bring them closer when something on one of the consoles pinged. He glanced up from his work. “Another message?”

Hector brought it up. “It’s a beacon, repeating signal. It says… Oh no.”

The three moons in their elliptical orbits had pivoted around with a speed that defied all gravity and sense to face towards the approaching ship. What had appeared to be spherical stone products of nature were in fact elongated ovals and smooth beyond the point that any naturally occurring object in space could be. Light ran across the Aion script on their surfaces, and a massive buildup of magic washed over Sylvas, almost knocking him out of the sensory apparatus of the ship, even though no weapon had been fired yet.

“It’s an emergency beacon!” Hector was shouting and running for battle stations. “A distress call from the colony, and a warning about the Aion defense platforms surrounding the planet going live after being inert. That’s why there was no second Consortium raid. Nothing coming close to the planet survives.”

“Aren’t we coming close to the planet?!” Kaya yelped as she caught on and took off towards the engine room.

Sylvas flung the ship sideways as the first of the weapons platforms activated. A single blast would have been avoidable, given the skill and speed with which he could move, even a single homing blast like this platform had launched, blinding white and searing lines across his sight. But the platform did not launch a single spell at them. It launched a hundred. Constellations of destructive force erupted from the closest of the platforms, heading straight for the Folly.

“Go! Go!” Hector bellowed through the ship’s intercom. Sylvas went.

Flinging the Folly into a spiral and throwing it aside allowed the first wave of the spells to pass them by, but apart from a few outliers closest to them that detonated, rocking the ship with concussive waves, the rest of the homing shots made a slow curve around to come swooping back in towards their back. The next platform fired its volley. A pincer movement of the first and second barrages closed in on them.

Sylvas couldn’t escape both. He cast a gravity shear ahead of them, hoped that the two lethal bombardments would intercept each other, and threw them forward with all force.

The shear succeeded in flinging the projectiles that they were plunging into aside, but he hadn’t accounted for them exploding on contact with it. The ship itself wasn’t hit directly by a single one of the hundred tiny stars of explosive mana that they were slamming into, but each individual concussion washed over the ship and set alarms blaring.

Ablative armor is gone. The starboard engine is out of action. That was not a good idea.

He flinched at the brightness as the third platform launched its payload at them. “Someone, give me a better idea!”

He threw all the power that he could into the remaining engine, increasing their speed to the limit of what the ship could tolerate while trying to keep the other side’s thrust balanced by throwing raw magic and will into the equation. They were still being pursued by the first platform’s attack, the third platform’s attack was now headed for them, and they were all recharging to cast again. The whole ship was shaking from what Sylvas initially took to be the damage, but he realized as dead and black parts of the consoles around him lit up, that he was actually experiencing Kaya’s frantic repairs. She had the engine on the starboard back up to its minimum output again and now was working frantically to replace the ablative armor. 

Malachai’s magic was essentially useless here with nothing alive for him to kill, but Hector was hard at work. Instead of trying to throw up a shield and have them caught in the blast when it inevitably failed to stop the spells bearing down on them, he was deploying his own missiles as a sort of chaff, intercepting the shots chasing them as fast as he could cast. In the moments since the second platform had fired, Hector had already burned through a solid half of the missiles pursuing them.

He could cast at the speed of thought, and he had infinite mana. They could win this if they could take the platforms out. Sylvas adjusted his course, heading for what he’d mentally labeled Platform One. It was surrounded by a crackling defensive field that he sincerely doubted anything they had available would penetrate, but that didn’t mean that they were without options. The platforms were still in motion, lining up for their shots, but trying to close the distance, too, to ensure that their prey had less chance of escaping. Sylvas twisted the ship through another gut-wrenching spiral as he came in as close as he dared to the platform about to fire, then killed all momentum. The third platform’s barrage and the remains of the first platform’s shots were closing in on them, guided by whatever nature had been woven into the spell. There was no rational thought in them, so it was entirely possible for them to be tricked. 

Sending the ship into a sudden spin, Sylvas began casting a teleportation spell. The whole ship would be flung back out to the periphery of this system, the shots trying to intercept them would collide with the platform. He completed his casting just as the first blast was about to detonate.

Nothing happened.

Or at least, the ship did not slip out of reality into the safety of null-space. Instead, some vibration, like a gong being silently sounded in space, was set off in each of the platforms. Something attuned to teleportation spells. A dimensional anchor, sealing reality against them tearing out of it. Sylvas’ mouth fell open when he realized that even he didn’t have the raw power to overcome it. “No.”

The combined barrage of the first and third platforms hit the ship. Connected to it so intimately, Sylvas felt the damage as pain to his own body. He dropped to his knees, screaming as the sensory overload rushed through him. Darkness swallowed him for a moment as he struggled to draw breath, to think. He forced himself back to consciousness.

Smoke filled the air of the cockpit, alarms blared from every console, and the air was thinner than it should have been. Their hull had been breached. The atmosphere inside the ship leaked out into space. Kaya had resealed the openings, but now her work seemed to have come to a dead stop. Hector’s casting had stopped, too, and Sylvas had a moment to consider the possibility that the two of them were dead before the platform that they were sitting nose to nose with fired.

There was no dodging it, no option at all except to throw the ship away from the barrage with all the force that he could muster. They were outpacing the blinding white wave of shots by only just enough to avoid detonation, and the blast was accelerating the farther it went. Spinning the ship, he poured all the mana he had into the engines, overloading both of them but continuing to pour more magic into the spell constructs all the same, hauling with all his will to outpace the blast that would surely end them all. It kept on accelerating, and there was nothing that Sylvas could do to make their ship go any faster. “Mira, take control of the ship.”

She leapt from his hindbrain onto the spell forms that let him interact with the ship’s systems, continuing the desperate bid to outpace their death, and Sylvas was free to think, to breathe, to cast. He cast a focused gravity spike, many times the size of those he usually conjured, and many times denser, too, out behind their ship and stripped the Folly of all weight so that it wouldn’t anchor them there, too. The sudden gravity well springing into existence out of nowhere drew in the barrage, colliding the individual shots in a catastrophic explosion that once again blinded Sylvas to exactly what was happening. 

Dropping back into control of the ship, he flew hard for the third platform, already knowing that the second would disgorge its murderous payload before he could reach it. He pushed the ship past its limit, the scant plates of ablative armor that had survived the impact of the spells flaking off as he exposed them to forces beyond their limited capacity to absorb.

Little Miss Runemaul appears to be alive and making repairs.

He felt the clenched fist around his heart loosen, ever so slightly, as he continued diving towards the third platform, even as the magic gathering around it was prepared to loose. Platform Two unloaded its payload. The spells replaced the barrage from Platform One that Sylvas had managed to stop with his spike.

The last platform loomed large in his vision, growing larger and larger still until it filled every panel of the windshield, and then he cast.

Opening a way into null-space was impossible with the platforms active, there could be no escape, but null-space wasn’t Sylvas’ only option, not by a long shot. With a massive surge of gravity mana and a strain that made his head pound, Sylvas opened up Cold Storage and dropped the whole ship in.

The blinding lights arrayed across the smooth surface of the platform ahead blinked out, along with all the stars. They were no longer there. They were no longer anywhere. He counted in his head, as the moments ticked by, as the cold swept over the surface of the ship, the absolute vacuum. He looked out into the darkness, and he saw some of the sand from Strife floating by. His orbitals would be in here somewhere, too. His old slate was probably adrift somewhere in the endless nothing as well. He held them there in his little pocket dimension for as long as he could bear the weight, and then he tore his way back out.

The platform that they had been nose-to-nose with was still as solid as it ever had been, the sigils of Aion text strewn across its surface still glowing, but it took Sylvas a fraction of a second to realize what was different. The field that had surrounded it, the crackling distortion meant to protect it from attack, was gone. It had been knocked down by the bombardment of the other platforms colliding with it.

On the periphery of his awareness, he could feel the other platforms pivoting towards them now that they had returned, taking aim at their back, but there was an opportunity here that Sylvas had no intention of wasting. This was a battle, even if their opponents were long dead, and those brief moments in Cold Storage had given him a chance to rage at the unfairness of it all. They had come so far, they had defeated such impossible odds, and now they were going to die to some randomly activated ancient defense net built so long ago that nobody even knew it existed.

The eidolon, Strife, roared within him, and he cast Gravity’s Arrow.

It surged forth from the front of the ship, a pinprick in the face of the vast grey stone platform hanging before them, but it flew true and hit it squarely in the center of one of the vast cryptic designs in the Aion tongue. Where it touched, it cut, and from that point, the destruction rippled out. Cracks spread across the pristine surface, and everywhere a word of Aion was intersected, the light within it blossomed out like a solar flare, all of that power gathered over the millennia these rocks had hung dead in space unleashed.

The blast knocked the Folly out of the sky. A cataclysmic explosion of such proportions that even if Sylvas had been able to throw up a shield in time, it wouldn’t have helped. He was blinded by the explosion, not just his eyes, but all of his senses, overwhelmed by the intensity of it. Like opening his eyes on the surface of a sun.

Then there was nothing but the scream.