The Sword in the Stone - Part 4

  Mishka swam through the murky darkness of the subterranean cavern, propelling herself with strong even strokes through the cold, frigid water. Even if the whack on the head hadn't killed most people who'd suffered the same fate as her, the freezing water would certainly have finished them off.

  But most people didn't have a bracelet with a kinetic shield that, while not military grade, was more than capable of stopping the worst of a blow to the back of the head, to say nothing of the thin yer of air that covered her like a sheath and kept all but a little of the frigid moisture off her clothes and skin.

  Despite all that, however, Mishka was not comfortable. Because although she had only a few real fears, thassophobia, the fear of open water, was one of them.

  Of course, she was an Ursun, and fear was not an acceptable trait for an Ursun to have. So, when they'd found out, shortly after her thirty seventh, when she'd still been a cub, her instructors at the academy had made her swim in open bodies of water specifically picked to elicit her fear response every single day. A shuttle would be there when she woke at the crack of dawn, ready to whisk her off a few hundred or perhaps thousand kilometres away and come to a stop twenty or so meters above the surface. The first few times she had refused, sobbing and crying and begging like any normal child when confronted by their worst fear.

  Her instructors had pushed her.

  She'd swum in freezing gcial kes, in deep and fast flowing rivers, in heaving oceans kilometres deep that she knew were filled with predatory creatures as big as houses, and even, once or twice when they were feeling creative, subterranean caverns like this one. The seas had been the worst, especially when the shuttle cloaked and she was left alone in the waves without even a hint of nd in the distance.

  It was horrible; it was how things were done in the Ursun Ascendancy. Warriors couldn't be weak, warriors couldn't show fear, warriors didn't get to be cubs, and everyone had to be a warrior.

  How else could they protect themselves from the 'foul aliens?'

  Mishka still felt the fear, of course, there in the back of her mind. That there might be something with teeth and slimy skin that could suddenly, without warning, bite her from beneath, or touch her leg, or pull her under. For all their brutality, the Ascendancy hadn't managed to entirely shatter that part of her mind.

  But she swam on through it, on and on and on in the direction she'd seen the shape, her mind reassessing the size of the thing again and again and again until her fingers banged against something hard and metal in the dark and she floated to a stop.

  She hadn't used any light out of general Ursun paranoia that her attackers might snuff out their torches and wait to see if she was still alive. But after twenty minute and not a sound she risked casting a spell to detect nearby lifeforms.

  Plenty, it told her – but all beneath her.

  Crimson light fred into existence a moment ter as she conjured a small swirling point of energy above her to reveal the rge metal curve of what was clearly a voidship. When she pced a hand against it, it was totally still and dead, without even a hint of vibration or warmth. Stone cold, the same as everything around her.

  There was no rust on it around or below the waterline, indicating that the metal used was either enchanted or some advanced alloy. Definitely not indigenous to this world.

  She tried to interface with its systems with her bracelet, but there wasn't any kind of active database at all. For want of something better, she began to slowly swim back and around it, trying to take in its shape and features.

  Above the water the visible section formed a slightly elongated semi-circle of silvery metal, which immediately ruled out particurly primitive species that just tended to strap flight systems and air-shells onto their old maritime designs, but didn't give her a hint about what species it might be. That, and the fact it had almost certainly dispced itself into this cavern, ruled out a whole lot of species that might have resembled the creature in the pictures that she could think of that might use a ship like this.

  A circuit of the section above the water revealed nothing that remotely resembled an entrance hatch, so with a sigh Mishka steeled herself and dove beneath the water.

  She increased the intensity of her warelight as she plunged downward, a thin membrane on air clinging to her entire body courtesy of her bracelet's reactive air-shell. Despite the red glow, the water grew murky and was impenetrable after half a dozen meters, and Mishka's eyes kept on flicking about as her mind conjured phantasms and shadows that weren't there.

  "Focus," she muttered to herself, her voice bouncing around in her shell of air. She began to go through the breathing exercises that she had learnt as a cub, pushing down and through her fear. She wasn't a cub anymore, and although she didn't use those powers, she was a trained Ursun battlemage. She was far scarier than whatever lurked in these depths.

  At least, that's what she told herself. She kicked harder, diving down into the darkness and spiralling around the ship. Or rather, spiralling around what turned out to be just an engine nacelle of a very rge ship. From what she could gather, it used some kind of fairly advanced looking impulse engine, which immediately ruled out even more species. It wasn't anywhere near her people's whisper-quiet engines, but it was still pretty advanced. More advanced than most lifeforms in this sector of space, even.

  Sketching out just how rge the vessel must have been in her mind, assuming it was symmetrical told her that this water was deep – kilometres deep, and without her bracelet it would have been utterly impossible to free-dive to the main hull of the vessel. But she had her bracelet, and needed to figure this thing out for Astrid, so she ignored the back of her brain that was gibbering in terror and swam downward, following the rge, tens of meters thick pylon that presumably connected the nacelle to the main hull.

  Some shapes moved in the darkness, and golden light crackled around Mishka's fist as she reacted on instinct. But it was just a small school of fish, and they immediately fled before the surge of light.

  Mishka continued on, watching the depth tick past on her bracelet: one hundred meters; two hundred meters; three hundred meters; four hundred meters; five hundred meters. Finally, at five hundred and forty-three meters down she spotted the main hull. It was difficult to be sure, but it looked to be the side of the ship, where a retively small trench, some thirty or so meters wide, or high when the ship was turned over like this, made of darker metal and filled with various systems and parts that were too vulnerable to be exposed on the main, armoured section of the hull, but also needed to have unimpeded contact with space.

  She kicked out, away from the nacelle's pylon, out over the darker metal trench, looking for an airlock. As pylon faded from view and into the gloom behind her she saw a massive dark shape in the water above her, and immediately swam down to the trench, peering out into the darkness as her heart hammered in her chest. But whatever it was, it must have decided she wasn't worth it, because she didn't see it again as she slowly began to move along the trench.

  Here and there she began to see, what looked like scoring and damage, in some pces quite bad. At a gnce it seemed to have come from some kind of disruptor weapon simir to what her people favoured – packets of hyper-entropic magical energy that ripped apart matter at the molecur level.

  On and on and on she went until, finally she reached some kind of hatch. It was as unresponsive to her bracelet when she tried it, and but whatever wards had been on the lock had long since lost power, and although the mechanism was rather heavier than the church's front doors had been, she still managed to get it unlocked with a spell.

  Before opening it, however, she took the time to conjure a very thick and durable force-field over it, carving rge runes into the metal hull with a conjured bde of psma. She very much doubted that any airlock would still be powered, and this far underwater the water pressure would be violent, and she didn't really feel like testing her bracelet's kinetic barriers against such a thing.

  Getting the door to actually retract required a bit more brute force, and the internal gravity enchantments were dead, meaning that what should have been a narrow room turned into a plunging vertical shaft.

  It took her a while to find where she had stowed her four hundred feet of rope, but she eventually found it in one of her cloaks many pockets, and affixed it securely to the open door before tossing it into the dark interior.

  Water wicked away from her damp skin as she passed through her barrier, and her full, unbuoyed weight returned. It was dark and silent inside the ship but compared to the terror of the depths beyond her shield, it was far more comfortable. Yes, give her silent dead ships over kilometre deep water anyway.

  She shimmied down the rope, looking left and right as she moved through a room filled with lockers which were, from her perspective, horizontal. Everything had been made for a rger species than her short and stout kind; rge enough to have accommodated Baelgoroth, if the paintings were to be believed. This must have been his ship, although… it was rather too big for just one person. Where were all the others?

  Mishka moved on through the dark, eventually coming to a rge intersection with hallways that had walls which in this orientation would serve nicely as floors. She swung herself back and forth a few times before jumping. She nded lightly on the mostly ft wall, and peered at a piece of script that looked like a sign.

  Her transtion symbiote, however, failed to make much sense of it. A few snippets of meanings, but nothing comprehensive, which told her that she was dealing with a mostly dead nguage. It did, however, remind her a bit of the sigils that the priests had worn on their robes. Interesting…

  She continued onward through the gloom, pausing every time there was some kind of script or marking. She came to another corridor and needed a running start to make it across the wide chasm. It was eery, making her way through the darkness of the long dead ship. The air was stale and dead – sterile, and she reactivated her air-shell after a little while.

  She reached another chasm-like intersection, and shortly after it, found her first door. It was easier to open than the airlock had been, and revealed a retively small room that seemed to house some kind of ship system.

  Mishka cmbered in, swinging herself across from the door to where there was a desk with an inbuilt console, nding on the support of a rge swivel chair and rotating it around so she could sort of perch on the seat's side and backrest.

  Like the rest of the ship, the console was dead, but spluttered back into life as she channelled some mana into it. A mana-screen flickered on, side on from her perspective, revealing a fairly simple looking user interface in the unreadable script.

  Still, Mishka had dealt with many database systems, and most had a few commonalities. What was more, it didn't seem to be locked at all, and after a few minutes she managed to interface her bracelet with it, and download several of the most recently logged aetheric-engrams, which her bracelet determined after a few moments were audio-visual recordings.

  Mishka's bracelet projected its own mana screen, and she began to watch. They showed what might have been the ship's bridge. There were several towering red and horned, Baelgoroth-like figures standing or sitting on the bridge. One of them on a raised dais was barking orders, and even as Mishka watched the ship shuddered.

  Through the bridge's gss view-screen, there was a massive explosion, and there were shouts of dismay from the red-skinned aliens as what was presumably one of their sister-ships went up. The captain barked more orders, and the bridge shook as the view-screen was briefly turned white as whatever defences it had turned aside some kind of weapon.

  The light faded, revealing the star-field beyond, but only for a moment, because then a massive shape swept into view, and in the depths of the long dead ship Mishka froze. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and her mouth went dry.

  Because she recognised that ship design.

  It wasn't like the 'body and nacelle' design of the red-skinned aliens. It was a rge, from this angle, fat disc, with seven bulbous half-spherical protrusions on the underside that bristled with weapons ports. The hull was a distinctive brassy hue, and the powerful azure shields effortlessly batted aside the red-skinned aliens' weapons-fire.

  Mishka knew that ship.

  She had served on one of those ships.

  An Ursun Dreadnaught.

  Mishka shut the file off, and ran a diagnostic on her bracelet, asking it to determine how long ago the aetheric-engram had been encoded in the database.

  315 years.

  Mishka knew what species Baelgoroth was. He wasn't a 'demon,' he was Straevenox.

  She'd discounted the soul-eating aliens because she'd thought they were extinct, but it seemed she'd been incorrect, and now that she knew what he was everything made perfect sense. The name of the Kingdom, 'Strevenix,' was even close enough that a few centuries of vowel shift in a broadly non-literate culture could account for the difference – that was why it had seemed familiar.

  The Straevenox had the distinction of being one of the very few aliens in the past few thousand years to have attacked her people. Usually, it was the Ursuns who decided that one of their neighbours, or perhaps not even a neighbour, was getting to uppity or close or advanced, and decided to bomb them back into the stone age and contain in a single system.

  The giant red, horned people were almavores – soul eaters, and came from a world some ten and a half thousand light years from Ursulon Prime. They were a few techno-arcano developmental rungs down from Mishka's people, primitive enough that the Ursun Ascendancy's paranoid High Command hadn't really been bothered with them, but strong enough that they had carved themselves out a little empire in the space around their home world.

  And if that had been that they probably would still be around, merrily conquering and subjugating other more primitive worlds in their little corner of the universe as the more advanced races around them danced their diplomatic dances and admonished them and tried not to attract the gaze of Mishka's people.

  But they weren't around anymore, because their government had decided, in their infinitely limited wisdom and with a seemingly pathological aggression that rivalled her own societies', to unch an attack on an Ursun deep space training facility. The Straevenox had thought, perhaps, that because of their prodigious natural magical abilities, and their ability to devour souls, that they were a match for the 'small, cute, bear-eared people' with their 'funny saucer ships' that they 'seemed to have hardly any of anyway.'

  The Straevenox's opening attack had been a disaster that had seen them routed by a bunch of Ursun cadets, and Mishka's people's resulting fury at someone having the audacity to attack them had turned what would have normally been a 'containment campaign' into a xenocide. She'd been a lieutenant at the time, in the marine corps, serving aboard the Fifth Legion's fgship – the Hopebreaker.

  If Mishka closed her eyes, she could still see the portal forming above the Straevenox home world, the rippling aperture that had gleamed like oil on water before it had connected with its sister portal in the heart of the system's star, and had unleashed a terrible wave of gravity and stelr-psma that had evaporated the alien's home world in an instant.

  Tears fell as Mishka lowered her head, and her chest heaved with sobs. Part of her was delighted at the idea that even just one of the Straevenox had survived, but it was overshadowed by the crushing guilt, the reminder that she had committed crimes that she could never atone for, no matter how long she lived.

  Nothing she ever did could make up for what she had done, nor bring back all those whose lives she had taken as part of the Ascendancy 'Defence Force.'

  Slowly the tears began to come slower, and Mishka wiped her eyes. She couldn't afford to wallow in self-hatred and self-pity. She had to save Astrid. She had promised, she had a duty of care. And, somehow, she had to find a way to do it without killing Baelgoroth, if she could.

  She saw how it all fit together now. Learning that the 'demon' was no such thing, but rather Straevenox, a species of almavore – soul sucking, vampiric life-form, made it all so obvious she felt like an idiot for not having realised sooner.

  The 'Sword of Kings' wasn't a sword; it was a straw.

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