Chapter 8

“Interstellar travel would be entirely impossible without the use of null-space. The distances involved in travel between stars without its use would require vehicles to travel in excess of the speed of light—something that has not yet ever been achieved through conventional modes of acceleration. The use of null-space is widely accepted in both teleportation and portal-based magic, both of which tie directly into the methodology of transporting ships and indeed fleets from one system to another. Yet there are times when free access to any part of the universe must be prevented. To this end, a specific spell is often employed, known commonly as interdiction. In the area surrounding the caster, travel into or out of null-space is blocked. Null-space itself is unaffected, as is normal space, so ships might still traverse the region at normal speeds or pass through the interdicted territory without interruption, but the act of transitioning from one to the other is prevented. In this manner are most planetary defense systems founded, with a system of interdiction to prevent the immediate arrival of invading forces without any opportunity for defenders to intervene.”

—Interdict Early: Interstellar Range Combat, Boden Fairhammer

Hector had vanished from the cockpit as they’d engaged the fighters, but he was back now, and the difference in him was startling. Usually, he wore the most casual clothing anyone could imagine, but here he was strapped up in tactical combat gear. Rania stared at him for a moment, puzzled, as he came in. He brushed some imaginary lint off his shoulder. “Just in case Sylvas decides to shoot me at somebody.”

The thought had occurred to Sylvas. They may not have been able to use teleportation to board the enemy ships, but Ironeye’s old lightning spell had worked perfectly, and both Kaya and Hector could be launched without needing Sylvas present to hold their hand through breaching shields or hulls. Retrieving them would be tricky without being able to teleport, but that didn’t mean it would be impossible. And having a couple of warships under their control in addition to the Folly might make their attempt to break through the battle lines a lot easier.

Coming up large and vast was the rear side of the closest warship, and Sylvas had no intention of leaving it at their back to unleash a firestorm after them after they’d passed. It had to die, just like the fighters it had deployed to intercept them. The fact that destroying it might help whatever Empyrean forces were being brutalized on the other side of the battle was just a happy coincidence.

With a smaller ship as his target, Sylvas might have used a gravity shear, turned the Folly into a bullet, and fired it right through, but there was too much mass in the ship ahead of them to be sure that they could punch all the way through without getting stuck, and the last thing that any of them wanted was to be lodged in the rear end of a Dominion warship. Malachai’s magic was lethally effective, but only within a limited area, and only once while they had the element of surprise on their side and countermeasures to a necromancer hadn’t been assembled. 

He couldn’t envelop a whole warship in a wave of death, or even multiple waves of death. They could take out the bridge crew if they positioned themselves properly, but the brief window of opportunity that might present them with wouldn’t matter when there was still the rest of the fleet to deal with. Likewise, launching any of their covenant mages as living weapons would definitely be effective in taking out the enemy ship, but it would take too much time for them to fight their way through it. The last alternative was to unleash their firepower on it and hope that their tiny ship could somehow deal more damage than whatever ships of the line the Empyrean were already deploying against it.

Which is, of course, when my genius has the opportunity to shine at last. Your new spellbook is still under construction, but we do have some charming little spells encompassing the full spectrum of magic that should punch through their defenses as if they aren’t there. Not to mention that delightful etherium-seeking explosive that uses their fuel to burn them out and… well, let’s just say that I’ve really outdone myself this time.

It was not an appropriate time to chuckle, so Sylvas bit that response back and lined up the weapons arrays with the center of the warship. 

Some diligent fighters from the ships nearby had started firing in their direction, so he had to seize control of the Folly and jerk it sideways, the same way he would have flung his body aside if this were regular combat rather than nonsense in space. The whole ship was suffused with his mana. It was essentially his body in this moment. 

Without even thinking about it, he had been manipulating its weight and gravity, not just to fling it around, but to make it lighter so that the engines could push it that much faster. The ship was his body, and a new idea was starting to form.

Darling, I know I told you last time not to even think about venting yourself into space to fight separately from the ship and that did somehow result in success, but this time, I have to reiterate what I said then. Don’t even think it.

Fragmenting his mind in two, Sylvas set both halves to casting instantly through his eidolons. A dazzling barrage erupted from the front of the Folly, and Malachai leapt back from the console he was meant to be channeling his own spells through as the tidal wave of mana and spellforms passed through its circuitry, making it shriek from the abuse.

Something as simple as an arcane arrow could be infused with an obscene amount of mana with the new structure that Mira had designed for it. There was a perfection to each one of the new spells that Sylvas had never seen matched in any of the government-mandated ‘acceptable’ spells that the Empyrean and the Ardent had handed out. 

A purity of design and purpose that he felt could only be explained by the idea that the combined spectrum of magic was meant to be used together as one force. That the words of Aion, the shapes that made up the internal world of the eidolons, were meant to be combined together into spells like these.

The blinding white light lanced out from their ship, shining like a star as it crossed the distance and hammered into the shields that were meant to protect the engines of the warship. It shed its outer layers as it tore through the shields, the parts of it that were protected against being left behind, but the chaotic remnant exploded the moment it made it inside, ripping the superstructure of the Obsidian Dominion’s ship asunder. 

That great crescent shape that made up the warships was now split into two smaller semi-circles. The shields that had stopped the worst of the first spell’s magic getting through lost cohesion and alignment as the halves drifted apart, before collapsing back in on their casters. The rest of the barrage hit in that moment.

What he’d done to the warship yesterday had been a warm-up for this. All of the spells working together in harmony to chase the first lance of white through to the structure of the spaceship, to shatter and rend it. It took all the mana he had in him to cast, but without the Crimson King trying to steal all the mana flowing back into him through the World Soul and instead taking what it was given like a good little pet, he was replenished almost immediately.

Once again, the cockpit of the Folly was filled with cheering, almost all of it coming from Kaya, though to Sylvas’ surprise, Rania was there at her side and cheering at the top of her lungs, too. Hector had his arm around Saizen’s shoulders, though whether it was a celebratory hug or to stop the man from falling over as they went through some extreme evasive maneuvers wasn’t clear.

With a single shot, they had not changed the tide of the battle, but they had entirely changed the Dominion’s approach to them. They had been a nuisance to be ignored, a gnat to be swatted away with some fighters so that the warships could focus on the task at hand. Now, they had the Dominion’s full attention.

Every warship in the veritable wall of ships pivoted on the spot to face them, but before they could complete the turn and open fire, Sylvas slammed forward once more, driving the Folly into the dubious protection of the ruined husk of the warship they’d just destroyed. Enough of its mass had been obliterated by the detonation of its etherium supplies that he was only really dodging flotsam and scrap instead of the solid mass of ship he might have expected to encounter, but even that required considerably more attention than he really had to spare.

Beyond the Dominion line, he could finally make out the Empyrean ships that were fighting back. They were a hodgepodge mixture of freighters, fighters, and ships that had clearly seen better days, all retrofitted with whatever weapons could be strapped onto them and then deployed in the Dominion’s path. 

It wasn’t a dramatic last stand like he’d read about in the history books; it was a prolonged suicide attempt. They had no hope of stopping the Dominion rolling forward; they were just trying to stub the giant’s toe as it stomped through their home. To make themselves feel as if they had done something, instead of just letting the invaders take over. They were fighting a battle for extra time, with no good plan for what to do with that time, even if they won it. They’d come to die, and the arrival of the Folly was throwing a wrench in that plan.

Without even an effort on Sylvas’ part, another inverted gravity spike pulsed out from the Folly. It blasted apart the twisted metal that had once been a warship, launching it out as shrapnel in every direction. The other Dominion ships would have opened fire on them soon enough anyway; the limited cover of the dead ship would have been washed away. Better to use it while they could.

It pattered hopelessly off the big ship’s shields but sent the descending swarms of fighters into a frenzy of dodging that resulted in some collisions. Still, Sylvas pushed them forward, faster and faster. They were through the enemy line now, shooting out into the warship’s field of fire with no plan beyond going as fast as possible and hoping not to get hit.

Stop thinking about it; it is a bad plan.

Sylvas used his two eidolons and his split consciousness to cast two gravity shears around the ship, encompassing it in an oval of warped gravity in the desperate hope it would be enough to hold off the worst of the enemy’s firepower, but within a moment of him raising that shield, the bombardment began.

He had held off a single warship’s power on his own just the day before. But that was the destructive capability of a single warship, not an entire fleet. The torrent of spells struck against the shield he’d raised, and almost immediately, the shears began to falter. Overlapping the two hemispheres had resulted in a band where all the spells hitting them on both sides were flung together and detonated. 

The resultant explosions rocked the Folly endlessly, even as he poured more mana into keeping the shears in place. He could recognize his mistake now. His plan to protect them had been fine if they were only suffering a single strike at a time, but there was a relentless tempo to the Dominion’s bombardment, and the shears were not up to the task. 

Twisting them through every evasive maneuver he could concoct, Sylvas desperately sought open space. Just a moment’s reprieve from the bombardment would give him a chance to cast a better shield that might actually protect them. But they were not going to get that moment.

The others could see their plight, and they were frantically working just as much as Sylvas. Kaya was manifesting steel right out into the space between the ship and the shield, creating an ablative armor that was keeping them alive, even as the spells detonated all around them. Malachai was firing off shots back along the line of attack of each of the warships in turn, trying to kill enough of the casters to ease the weight. 

As for Hector, he was casting something vast and complex, more like a ritual than a simple combat spell. Sylvas had never seen him do anything like that before, but there was some familiar signature to the spell that let him know he had seen it in action, just not from up close.

They reached the middle of the battle. The dead center of no-man’s land between the Empyrean and Dominion armies. With the distraction of the Folly interrupting the Dominion’s attack, the Empyrean were crowding in, trying to push their advantage. They were targeting the warships that were trying to take out the Folly while they were distracted. 

If they had more substantial firepower at their disposal, it might have made a difference, but Sylvas wasn’t convinced that whoever was taking shots at the Dominion had even completed their circles. The universe was not filled to the brim with mages obsessed with reaching the height of their powers — that was just Sylvas’ closest circle of friends — which meant that when conflict did arrive, the obsessed had a serious advantage.

If just one of them could start landing some blows powerful enough to punch through the Dominion shields, it would give Sylvas and the Folly the time they needed to reconfigure or escape, but for now, they were stuck riding it out as best they could. Another explosion rocked the ship. The best they could do was not going to be good enough.

“I have an… option.”

Everyone in the cockpit jumped at the sound of his voice, at the fact that he was back in his body long enough to talk. Malachai was the only one composed enough to ask, “What is it?”

He had dumped Mira into the ship’s systems to control their flight, but she lacked his panache for piloting. The impacts racking the ship were getting more frequent as she failed to dodge more and more hits. “I can get us behind the Empyrean line, but it’s… risky.”

Hector abandoned whatever he had been casting and shook his head. “You might be able to make a null-space jump that short without error, but the Dominion are still disrupting…”

Sylvas cut him off. “No null-space required.”

“You want to ride the lightning again.” Sylvas was startled by Rania’s voice. She’d been sidelined in all of the fighting to the point that he hadn’t even realized she was on the bridge of the ship. He shouldn’t have been surprised that she was the one to work it out, though. His friends were all brilliant in their own ways, but their own ways were specialized on their own affinity and magic. Rania was the only one who was more interested in what everyone else was doing.

“I can take the whole ship and all of us, transmute everything to lightning, fire it through the gap in the…”

“Hard no.” Hector snapped. “I just got this baby back, and now you want to blow her into lightning?!”

“Having experienced the spell for myself, I’m inclined to agree with Hector.” Malachai didn’t even look ashamed at his betrayal. “I do not believe that it will work on a vessel.”

Kaya and Rania both looked at each other and then nodded, Kaya voicing their agreed thoughts. “If Sylvas says it’ll work, it’ll work.”

They had two votes for using the spell and two votes against. All eyes turned to the only other person in the room. Saizen had been clinging to the doorframe throughout most of the battle, as if he couldn’t decide whether it would be safer to run or stay. Probably remembering what had happened to his brother when he strayed too far from the cockpit of their own ship. He scowled, “Me?”

“You’re part of this crew, apparently,” Hector conceded. “So what is your decision?”

He’d accepted Saizen too readily, obviously expecting the man to make the choice most likely to save his own skin. Unfortunately, he was gambling with the wrong information. The Saizen that he had met before would have chosen whatever was safest in the short term, but this Saizen had watched his clone die less than a day ago. This was a Saizen on the edge, who had seen feats of magic performed by Sylvas that nobody was meant to be capable of. He nodded his shiny bald head at Sylvas. “Do it.”

Sylvas didn’t need to be told twice. With fragments of his psyche upholding the shielding, he turned his attention to casting the spell. It would be vastly more complex than the transportation of two living bodies, and the distances involved were far greater than anything he’d ever attempted before, but Mira was there in his mind doing the calculations along with him.

This is among the worst ideas you have ever concocted.

Together, they pieced together all of the data they needed to formulate the new version of the spell, and with some rapid-fire contortions of the eidolon within him, it was cast.

All of the converging fire of the warships that had been pounding at the Folly’s shields suddenly passed through empty space, the magic roaring silently in the void as it encountered nothing. Spell-forms destabilized and melted away as they exceeded their range. 

But from those dissipating clouds of magic, a storm began to gather. Electricity that had been blasted apart in all directions danced through the void of space, gathering together into a crackling mass of static before lancing as a bolt of lightning through space, traversing the rest of no-man’s land in an instant before rebounding off one of the Empyrean ships’ shields and reforming back into the Folly.

They thumped back into their physical forms to a cacophony of alarms. Rania was covered in a thin rime of frost, having reformed a fraction of a second before the ship around her, Malachai was halfway across the room from where he’d last stood, Kaya was up to her ankles in the floor where it had reformed around her, and Saizen was lying face down on the floor, with a single thumb held up to let them know he was alive. 

From all of the systems around the rooms, more electricity crackled and sparked around, dancing along each line of metal before finally gathering together with a thunderclap, dropping Hector back onto the deck, gasping for air and looking much worse for wear. As soon as he got a breath, he shouted out to Sylvas, “Never again!”

“Wasn’t that bad.” Kaya groaned as she plucked herself free of the floor with a screech of twisting metal.

Rania threw up all over the console she was clinging to for balance. Saizen saw her throwing up, then turned around to throw up outside the cockpit. Malachai walked across the room like a zombie, very deliberately not looking at any of the rest of them. His skin had taken on an ashy tone. Sylvas let his mind slip back into the ship and peered out to see where they’d arrived.

They were in the midst of the Empyrean’s battle line, and as the Folly’s systems came back to life inch by inch, they were being bombarded with messages from what felt like every ship in that fleet, most of them politely asking who the hell they were. Sylvas tapped into the communications system to answer, “This is the Empyrean Intelligence vessel Ironfist’s Folly, reporting for duty.”

The Empyrean ships hadn’t stopped their bombardment throughout the flight of the Folly to their side, and they certainly weren’t stopping now, but without the distraction of the extra front for the Dominion to fight on, their rate of success had plummeted back down to nothing once more. Spells hit the enemy shields and dissolved away to nothing, while every returned shot seemed to set a whole ship on this side scrambling to repair the damage before they were destroyed. 

Sylvas couldn’t extend a gravity shear wide enough to cover the whole fleet, or even much more than his part in it, but what he could do was punch through the enemy defenses in a way that nobody on this side could. An illusion of one of the other Empyrean captains flickered to life in the periphery of Sylvas’ vision. “Welcome to the war, Folly. We have reinforcements inbound, but they’re being blocked by enemy interdiction.”

“Do we know which ship is generating the…”

One of the warships lit up on his display. It was near to the center of the enemy line, so he hadn’t realized that it was being specially targeted. Particularly given how scattershot the Empyrean attempts at bombardment had been. Sylvas lined up the Folly with the ship and began casting. In the defensive line of the Empyrean fleet, behind the overlapping shields of the bigger ships, he didn’t have to dedicate so much awareness to avoiding the enemy’s attacks. All he had to do was cast.

The full-spectrum white blast shot out first to punch through the enemy shields, followed by the chaotic flood of other spells that rushed in to target specific parts of the warship. They had been connected to the inter-ship communications network of the fleet. Patched in remotely, since their own comms console was currently being covered in vomit. So they got to hear the hooting and cheering of the various captains and crews as the ship was taken down.

Yet that excitement had nothing on the immense uproar that followed a moment later when a fleet twice the size of the Dominion one dropped out of null-space right behind the line.