Hyperlinks in the text are intended as supplemental material, discussing elements of the science behind the science fiction. They are not intended as required reading for the story. Hyperlinks will be provided at the point in the story where it comes up, but all the links will also be collected at the bottom of the post for easy reading.
“You know,” Amara yelled as she ducked beneath a casteless’s cleaver that had been aimed for her head, “I’m beginning to suspect that Sarcand is aware of our escape attempt.”
“If the remaining casteless are being allowed up into the ship proper, then he definitively has,” Thia responded back, sidestepping a lunge that resulted in an unarmored Kthid slamming straight into a wall face first with enough force he all but flattened his snout.
“Better them than the warriors!” Amara responded while nailing a reposte, driving her blade forward at the awkward speed that allowed her to slip it through an Aegis but still delivered enough force to slide it between scales.
The impact of a HEF volley against the Aegis shields shook the ship as they pressed forward with Thia’s makeshift Queensguard fighting flanking them, fighting and offering supportive fire as they battled the rampaging Kthid. Thia would block an attack and then said attacker would take an energy blast at point blank range to the face for his troubles. There were plenty of them here down on the lower levels where most of the slave quarters were, and they needed to fight through the group to make headway. Amara was thankful for the space battle raging outside… if most of the ship’s attention was not focused on that then they would have been hopelessly swarmed with hostiles, mostly armored warriors. Chaos and warfare lent them a… kind… of subterfuge, yet it also meant that speed was of the essence… this situation would not last.
“Hugfh!” Amara grunted out as she stabbed forward with the sword Nameless had given her, skewering the offending Kthid right through. Thia was much more economical with her motions, using a simple swipe of her blade to sever one of the long, sensitive arteries beneath the scales of their thighs. Both reptiles hissed and snarled as they collapsed into bleeding, dying cadavers — their green tails flapping around like large swooshing whips striking side to side. Despite everything, Amara found it oddly euphoric to be fighting back again, to be resisting… it felt alive. Despite the jury-rigged construction of the blade, she found its edge sharp and its weight balanced perfectly. After a few swipes and flicks of her wrists, the Captain’s old fencing instincts had been surprisingly quick to come to the fore… her time in the gladiatorial combat had ensured she didn’t get too rusty. So far, neither blade nor instinct had failed her, and that was good… the success of their escape would depend on both of them holding up.
“Warriors trying to push through, my Queen!” one of the rifle-armed Faliran warriors exclaimed as another torpedo shook the Dreadnaught’s hull, momentarily turning all of their postures unbalanced. “From the starboard tunnels.”
Princess Thia paused for a moment, her eyes going slightly distant as she searched the hive mind for information and clearly didn’t like what she had seen. She gave her human companion a stern look. “If we’re going to save these people, we need to move quicker,” she said.
Amara wasn’t going to argue. It had been her idea to try and rescue as many people as they possibly could. She knew that she was endangering the lot of them by pursuing this course of action. Yet it was simply something that her heart demanded doing. Having suffered for so many years within this ship of evil, she simply could not allow others to be left behind and continue this gauntlet of torments. Nobody deserved the agony that the Kthid inflicted. Nobody.
With the path temporarily cleared of enemies, The ex-Captain of the Midgar-6 took off running. Thia and the Falirans hurried after her, the Princess having enough faith in Amara to see this plan through. She just prayed that the Lealings ship would be able to house as many people as they were able to set free. During the battle, the majority of slaves were kept stored away either in the cabins of the warriors that owned the Heitera, or in the slave pens… and both sections of the ship were reasonably close together, but not in the same place. As Amara and Thia and her Queenguard arrived at a fork tunnel, their goals were located to both the left and the right.
“We need to split up!” Amara exclaimed.
“…Agreed,” Thia responded hesitantly. Then she nodded, and with a gesture half of her Queensguard detached themselves from her to follow the Terran woman. “The warriors will tell you where we meet up.”
“Convenient communication,” Amara muttered. Then the two parties dashed off in different directions. In the vast spaces of the dreadnaught’s interior, the two of them were soon far apart.
“It’s in here!” Amara exclaimed.
She slammed her palm into the button and immediately the double doors parted wide. An unlit abyss of darkness yawned beyond the gateway, and into that blackness the former Captain immediately ran. The chamber’s lights flickered to life deactivated lamplight flickered into life as the soles of her feet hit the ground therein. A vast cage-filled chamber was revealed to her eyes. It was almost like the storage area of some zoo, except unlike any Terran zoo the Kthid allowed their “animals” to go mixed.
With the onrush of illumination into the room, the collected slaves began to move. One by one, prone or kneeling slaves and Heitera rose within their cells and looked up to see what was going on. Practically without variation, these captives were stark naked… most of the clothing and jewelry used to mark the status of a Heitera was reserved only for favored slaves, and most of those would be in their owner’s quarters. Here were mostly the cast-offs, those out of favor or serving other purposes, and legion upon legions of Arane slaves not in use. They had been packed into their cages far too tightly to be comfortable, forced to stand or kneel shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, or lie partially on top of one another… given no personal space. Humans, Nys, Faliran, Alician, and thousands upon thousands of Arane… members of every single species that Sarcand’s fleet had enslaved were represented herein. Amara had entered a room that contained restraints, naked female flesh, and practically nothing else save for several dark chutes that lead down into the casteless areas of the ship… there where the slaves could always see them, an ever-present threat.
Amara grabbed onto the wall as the ship shook with the impact of the HEF munitions against its shields. “You four, stay here and keep watch of the doorway!” Amara swiftly ordered the Faliran soldiers with her. “The rest of you, come on, help me get these slaves out.”
A confused babble arose amidst the slaves at the sight of Amara, a rising buzz of overlapping conversations that formed a maze-like susurration. As they left areas behind, the lights there went out as they passed them and new lights let up in the new section. It was disorienting enough that it took most of the slaves a moment to realize that armed slaves were freeing them, and once they realized what was going on reactions were… mixed. Some of them rose and began shouting, yelling, pumping their fists against the steel of their restraints. Others, however, yelled out of panic or terror instead of joy. Years of trauma and abuse had taken its toll. Almost to a one the Arane and the Nys flinched back away from their rescuers, more fearful of angering their masters than they were of missing an opportunity for escape. Amara wanted to weep for them… she knew all too well that the Kthid’s brutal slavery caused damage every bit as mental as it was physical.
The restraints here were not exactly high-tech… Mere padlocks kept the doors shut, and shackles kept prisoners in place. These could easily be severed by a blade or blasted apart. The Kthid didn’t need any security more advanced than this… after all, it wasn’t the strength of the locks that was preventing slaves from escaping. It was fear. The fear of what would happen whence they were recaptured again. The restraints were more about degrading their captives and dehumanizing them than it was about actually keeping them in one place. It was humiliating… but it was to Amara’s advantage right now.
Directing the Falirans to spread out, Amara Black bolted to the nearest pen. Several of its inhabitants recoiled away from her as if she brought them poison or doom instead of freedom. Those in the back were pressed against the bars so roughly that they cried out in agony. That whole mass of people looked like strands of grass swaying backward from the wind. “We have a ship! We’re going to get you out of here!” Amara promised as she raised her blade high, aimed, and brought it down on the lock’s shackle with all the strength she could muster. The metal was cloven right through, and the door swung open… yet inside, the rebellious Heitera saw nothing but terrified faces. Only the Faliran within moved to be helpful, and not even all of them… not even their Queen’s psychic beseeching through the hivemind could override all of what they had suffered.
“Damnit!” she wheezed, wondering what to do. If she couldn’t get through their reluctance and trauma then this would all have been for nothing. The Queensguard was having similar results… they blasted apart locking mechanisms, yet few of the captive women dared storm out. When dealing with a crowd during a crisis, it was pointless to call out the whole crowd… she had to focus on an individual. What she needed was an…
Example.
Amara frantically scanned, looking for someone she knew… and found a familiar, dark-haired woman in a nearby cell. Heading over, she cut open the door and entered, pushing her way past cowering women to the woman with sunkissed skin. Martina looked worse for well… her curvaceous body and firm breasts made her a favorite for the Kthid to torment and the Lieutenant Governor of the colony-that-never-was was covered in welts and bruises. Amara had always found the woman arrogant and demanding but little of that attitude showed on her now… instead, her eyes were wide, on the verge of panic.
“Governor Barzola!” Amara blared, pointing with the sharp tip of her raised blade.
“M-Me!?” the Hispanic woman incredulously exclaimed, pointing at her own chest.
“Yes, you!” Amara said. “You are in charge of these people, are you not?”
Her eyes someone how wider, her expression flabbergasted. “Wha-”
“Status comes with responsibility,” Amara said, keeping her tone firm and commanding. “You wanted to be in charge? You don’t get to cower. We have a ship… We can finally get out of this goddamn hellhole but I’m taking everyone with me… so start organizing these people for a retreat—”
Martina backed off, trying to vanish amidst the sea of bodies. Her fellow inmates weren’t being very helpful and so Amara managed to dash in and clasp her before she had managed to conclude her getaway. The moment Amara’s fist clutched against her shoulder, Martina shrieked as if she had been grabbed by one of the Kthid. “No! Not me, please, I beg you… the Masters will punish me!” Martina yelled, whining like a hysterical woman. “I don’t want to I don’t want to I do-”
“God damnit Martina! Were you supposed to be a Lieutenant-Governor or not!?” Amara growled, glaring the cowering woman down.
Martina’s eyes leaked helpless tears. “Y-Yes!” she peeped.
“And isn’t a Lieutenant-Governor supposed to protect her commune during times of danger?”
“Y-Yes!” Martina answered with the same cloy subservience that she would when addressing one of the Space Dragons. She turned away, and Amara Black slapped her civil superior across the cheek. She didn’t hit her hard… she kept her wrist unlocked, going for maximum sound without too much power or sting. She snapped her eyes back to Amara, and if possible they were even wider.
“Then. Start. Getting. These. People. Out!” the Captain growled at her.
Still shaking, Martina straightened her back. Staring into her eyes was like staring into pools of insentient terror… but somewhere beneath there there was a growing knot of… anger. Amara didn’t even care if it was directed at her… she could work with that. “Get. Moving. You fucking coward!”
Martina swallowed, hard. “Damn you, Captain,” she whispered. “This is all your fault.” Then Martina spun around and started talking. “Alright, listen up all of you!” she began to say. Amara aided her speech by giving several prisoners helpful shoves off towards the door, just so that they would get it. The fearful faces in the crowd began to look doubtful, but at least that was a step up from terrified.
Amara didn’t have time to sit around and wait. Having completed her first prison break, Amara double-timed towards the next padlock in need of cracking. Once again she raised her hands high and prepared a mighty downward swing to shatter the shackle, but a quick scan of the occupants of this cell caused her to pause her swing in surprise. “Lylyssa!?” she stated upon noticing her fellow Heitera. “What are you doing down here in the communal pens?”
“That concerns you not, property of Sarcand,” the Nys High-Priestess said with forced grace and assuredness. “What concerns you is your own sin. The Kthid are gods… you have no right to disobey them.”
Amara flinched back from her words like she had been struck. Looking around, Amara noticed that there were actually tons of Nys in these cages… Lylyssa must have decided to come down here to be with them during the battle. To the captain’s horror, however, some of those Nys were grabbing at the other woman that the Faliran and Martina were trying to get organized and get moving, frantically holding on to them, screaming, and telling them that they had to stay. There was fear in their miserable expressions but not the same kind of terror that the other women showed… this was a more zealous, more stony-eyed form of fear. Fear of failing. Their faces showed fatalistic resignation mixed with a kind of frenzied determination. Even though the Nys had suffered more under the Kthid as least as much as any of them, the poor peoples’ sense of religious filiality made them even more unwilling to escape than the rest.
“You can’t be serious right now, Lylyssa!” Amara begged. “We have a ship! We have a—”
“I know your ilk very well, Earthling. The Kthid cannot be defied… to try is death. Many unbelievers such as yourself attempt to defy them but—”
“Oh yeah?” Amara interrupted. “Well if the Kthid are so god-like and almighty then why can’t they prevent me from doing this?” she said and then completed the herculean swing of her blade, smashing that padlock into tiny detritus.
Lylyssa’s face darkened. The Nys’s eyes narrowed. Through her abject nudity, she retained the aura of a high-ranked cleric. Then she leaned forward, her voice low. “They will not heed you, Terran. They cannot,” Her eyes twinkled with sadness, her eyes momentarily downcast. “You would be wise to go without us.”
Amara blinked at the sudden change in mannerisms, the contrast between her words and her body language. “Lylyssa, this is a chance to escape! If you tell them to go-”
“Then they will disavow me rather than obey,” the High Priestess said sadly, but quietly. “And then I will no longer be able to provide them any help, any solace… shield them from Sarcand’s rage. And they still will not go with you. I will not, Heitera.” Then she lifted her head and raised her voice once more. “You think yourself wise, Amara the Blasphemous, Amara the Betrayer of God, but you are not. Oftentimes the Star-Gods provide us lower-born things a chance to resist. Sometimes they tempt us even with minor victories. All for naught. These are all mere tests of our worship, and false hope for them to extinguish. No victory can be won against the Gods. You should know that well by now. What you’ve accomplished here today is a mere pretense of resistance willed into existence by our Masters.”
Amara was nearly gobsmacked at what she was hearing as Lylyssa continued her delusional rambles. When she had championed this rescue, she had not been expecting to deal with this kind of religious insanity. The sheer wrongheadedness of what the Heitera was saying had left the naked human stunned… all the more so because Amara felt confident that Lylyssa didn’t actually believe any of it. Her people, however, did… and the Heitera was dedicated to their protection. She wasn’t going to abandon them, and they wouldn’t leave… How was she supposed to convince a bunch of fanatics who had justified their own misery and abuse through the lens of worshiping cruel gods that their whole creed was one of falsehood and lies?
Lylyssa’s eyes suddenly went wide and she went silent. Her eyes flicked toward the entrance before returning to Amara’s, then they closed. “I’m sorry, Terran. It seems that your Gods have elected to render your fit of rebellion a short one,” the High Priestess proclaimed with graveness as if presiding over a wake.
Swordarm ready, Amara turned, looking into the dim light of the slave chambers back towards the entrance just in time for the bright muzzle flash of plasma rifles discharging as the Faliran warriors engaged something in the darkness. Shapes moved, quickly, followed by shouts of alarm. Then, all too swiftly, the shooting game to an abrupt and final end. Amara heard it as the final rifle clattered to the floor… then what light there was over there went out, casting the shadows into absolute darkness.
Everyone in the room seemed to have noticed what was going on. Everyone ceased moving and all chatter died down into baleful silence. Those whom Martina had been organizing all froze as if rendered immobile by some petrifying basilisk. Only Amara moved as she hurried across the room, pressing her back to one of the cages and getting low… her blade up in a high guard, ready to duel.
“Interloper!” one of the Nys yelled.
“Rebel heathen!” said another.
“Watch all of you!” said a third, voice raised as if speaking to a congregation. “Let this Earthling’s worldly error be a lesson. Resistance against the might of Gods brings only worse misery. Those who are faithful and wise know that it is our religious duty to surrender.”
Amara didn’t answer. Her heart raced as she waited, staring into the darkness, waiting for the enemy to appear… and then, moving across the floor and into the light with the eerie ease and silence of a phantom, Harvestmaster Sarcand stepped into view.
Every pen-bound slave within the chamber gasped so vigorously that they lost their breath. Amara took several steps backward, her guard turned shaky. Those outside their cages were so terrified that they didn’t even think to run back in again.
The warlord entered the room calmly, moving incredibly silently for one so vast. The room was nearly silent, yet Amara could not even hear the padding of his feet. In comparison, Amara’s entry had birthed a contentious clamorous calamity across all of the pens. And yet even despite this, it was his entry that proved to be far, far more dramatic. The villain whose cruelty had ensured all of their deplorable fates had now entered the chamber. He had come alone… and the Harvestmaster was prepared for war. Shining silver armor adorned his scaled form, the nearly-invincible powered armor of a warrior clinging to him like a second skin. The green giant had equipped himself with a blade that by Kthid standards would probably have been considered a shortsword, but even so, it was longer and broader than Amara’s own and it shone with the light reflected off of fresh flood, slowly sliding down the blood grooves bored in the metal. He didn’t wear a helmet, however, and Amara could guess why… he wanted to be instantly recognizable. He wanted exactly the response the other slaves gave him.
“Shit,” Amara wheezed, keeping her blade up while retreating another step.
Sarcand looked left and right, his crimson eyes scanning the frozen slaves. His jaw let out a low, furious hiss, and his armored tail swiped left to right. of his tail from left-to-right. “You know,” Sarcand spoke quietly, calmly, which nearly beguiled his reptilian tenors. “The Huntmaster who elevated me, who took me under his wing, taught me much. It was from him that I learned that the rebelliousness in a Kthid’s Heitera is not only necessary but desirable. That it keeps the hunt fresh… and that without it, you’re merely playing with a cadaver, toying with your food. I’ve never had cause to doubt him. Never once have I regretted making a strong woman a vessel for my seed. But now… I am beginning to think that I might have found Heitera whose rebelliousness makes her more trouble than she’s worth.” Slowly brought his blade from his shoulder into a neutral position. This mere movement of his deadly weapon sent a gasp of fear running through the multitude and people recoiled where they stood.
“Thia has proved an endless source of problems,” Sarcand continued, stalking a single step forward. “When I plucked her from the ruins of her civilization and away from those who would have claimed her, I had such high hopes for her. That she would be my route to ascension. That once I broke her, and forced her to reveal how to make more of her sisters into Queens, that the Sunbreakers would be forced to permit me into their ranks, no matter how angry some of their ruling members became. Yet she never did… Years and years and years passed, and she remained every bit as stubborn as ever. Falirans… curse the worthless lot of them. Of course, it was they who would rise up in the middle of my glorious battle.” He took another step closer. “But then I found another opportunity when your sister fell into my lap, and delivered your people to me. Then I didn’t need her anymore… and I found you.”
His lips pulled back over his fangs. “At first, I thought Thia was the ringleader of this little rebellion. But somehow, seeing you here, I think you more the culprit.” Sarcand’s voice remained uncharacteristically calm. It was frightening. It wasn’t the braggart, or the warlord talking… it was the warrior who spoke now, deadly calm and ready to kill.
Amara’s mind scrambled through all the stratagems of war. It was time for the one feat of heroics that Amara Black had wished to avoid during this escape attempt. To duel the Devil King of the Death of Hope himself. She only had an aegis and her blade, and from what she had seen she was not as skilled with a blade as Sarcand was, even before she considered he was armored in an impervious shell and had two feet of height and probably at least 400 pounds of muscle on her. His potency in killing had been imprinted upon her through all these years of slavery. She needed to find some other way of besting him. Some ploy to see him defeated.
“I have your people. I have Thia’s people. And there will be more Heitera,” he said softly. “I haven’t decided yet if you are going to live or not, Amara.” Sarcand pinched the tip of his blade with his free arm as if testing out its sharpness and springability. “I suppose that I’m going to need to decide quickly here.”
Amara dug her heels into the ground to keep her posture steady. His talking, his way of drawing the moment of combat out, it was unsettling all of her much-needed nerves. He had defeated Miranda… something she had never once managed. Was she really going to do this? Would the battle for her life and liberty come down to outdueling this monster?
“I have to admit, you have gotten further than more. You’ve vexed me, taking me away from the command of the battle,” he frankly admitted, continuing his speech. “I suppose that is the one factor that is weighing heavily towards killing you. The sheer black anger I feel over that,” he stated, finally letting his sibilant voice harden just a bit. “But then I suppose there is another factor vying to keep you alive. And that one concerns my unborn son still growing within your womb. And the satisfaction I would feel from seeing him born screaming upon the ruins of Earth,”
A pulse ran through Amara’s belly at the mention of that hideous fetus. She had to girth teeth just to hold back the loathsome onrush of emotion. Even as she would be fighting Sarcand, another part of him would be nurtured by her within her womanhood. She had tried so hard not to think of it during these eventful and faithful days, yet in her uterus it lay.
“Hmm… I suppose I could just cut your belly open if you were to die—” he mused.
“Your filth will be cut out of my belly,” Amara stated and switched her posture into an offensive one. “But not by you. It will be my decision. Whence I attain my freedom.”
Sarcand’s lips broadened until they divulged a wholly draconic leer. “Oh, will you?” he softly mocked. The warrior was brutal in bed, and subtle in battle. Amara’s pulsing will to fight reached a boiling pitch. She elected to repost and counter upon the psychological field.
“You never broke me, remember that…” she stated with a deadly edge even sharper than her blade. “All that time you thought I was broken I was merely faking it. The codes for the Midgar-6? The only reason I surrendered those was to slow you down and give Earth more of a fighting chance. That makes you a bit of a weakling under the gaze of the Dark Star, doesn’t it? You’ve failed, master.”
The Harvestmaster slapped his armored tail down on the ground once. “Well, that gives me more reason to keep you alive, doesn’t it? To save you for that one moment where you finally do.”
A shudder ran down her spine. Amara would have preferred wrathful anger as a response in favor of a cool promise for further torment. “And what will the slaves think of you now? What will the Sunbreakers?” The Captain spread her arms wide, making a show of her nakedness, the paltry collection of weaponry she had. “The brave warrior Sarcand, so threatened by a naked slave that he abandons his responsibilities to the fleet and confronts her armed and armored to the teeth?” She sneered at him. “‘This is the warrior who leads us?’, they will say… so threatened by one of the humans that he was frightened to fight her. That he hides behind his shell and his warriors. ‘Perhaps someone else fought in his place behind the armor?’, they will say… and I will smile, master… knowing that even from beyond this life I will destroy every ambition you have.”
The Harvestmaster’s eyes were narrowed in a glare. She wasn’t manipulating him, she knew… he was completely aware of what she was trying to accomplish with her taunts. Sarcand wasn’t fooled. The problem was that she was right, and he knew it. His position was precarious enough after the difficulty the Harvest Fleet had already encountered, and Amara knew well from the meeting with the Sunbreakers that he had enemies and rivals that wouldn’t hesitate to eat him alive if given an opening. He really couldn’t afford to look anything but strong.
With a snap and a hiss, his armor released. The armor seemed to fold back, opening up from the front, allowing him to almost step right out of it, leaving it standing behind him. “I needed no armor to take the one you call Sister. I need no armor to defeat you.”
And with that, the quiet moment before their duel was over. Both combatants made last adjustments to their postures, and then Sarcand rushed forward far too quickly for a being his size, and there was no more time for talk.
Many of the alien spectators screamed in insentient panic as the Huntmaster and his Heitera clashed swords. The metal clang was followed by several others. None of them could fully follow or even understand the swordplay involved. Within seconds Amara and Sarcand had been engaged in a series of attacks, parries, and ripostes.
The opening seconds of the battle alone nearly killed Amara. Sarcand moved like a flash… Amara knew, intellectually, that he had been training at the art of war many times longer than she had been alive, but knowing it and feeling it was completely different. He closed the distance between them in the blink of an eye and stuck, weaving through a rapid series of slashes broken by the occasional thrust that moved like lightning. Before Amara’s mind had caught up to what was going on he had sent two dozen lethal attacks at her, and only Amara’s rapid, steady, retreat enabled her to survive.
The cuts and parries came so swiftly that Amara could hardly see through them. Sarcand’s assault was unrelenting, aggressive, and deadly precise… the attacks slammed against her upraised weapon so hard that she felt the shock all the way to her shoulder when they hit, and she couldn’t hope to oppose them directly… she needed to slide the blade to the side. Each one nearly battered through her defenses and ripped the weapon from her grip, and they were, by far, the simplest attacks to defeat. His sword thrusts, by comparison, slithered forward like the strike of a snake, smooth and precisely fast enough to penetrate the Aegis shield without being stopped, but fast and unpredictable. She had to catch each one as it came in, but only responded with the most conservative of counters before the next attack came.
She missed the next thrust and had to spin to the side, arching her back out and letting it slide by her. She felt the kiss of steel against her bare skin, the way the cold metal slid over her. Amara needed to attack back if only to force him to be wary and not spend all of his effort on attacking, so despite the danger of exposing herself she took advantage of the missed thrust and pressed him with a three-strike combo. Every swing came tantalizingly close to cleaving the scales that protected his neckline, but nothing touched him… and he struck back. Even that weakness had been a ruse, a ploy to make Amara overcommit. When the third blow failed, he retaliated, and Sarcand’s swing came a whole lot closer to opening her up than any of hers did. Amara was placed on the back foot, all of her weight off the balls of her feet, and forced to give ground rapidly with each attack just to keep a step ahead.
When he kept on attacking, she was forced to hop, cartwheel and roll backward like a gymnast to avoid his charge. “I’m curious… How do you plan to get off my ship? Some sort of escape vessel, I take it?” Sarcand asked mid-battle, spinning around so as to swipe his tail at her. Amara somersaulted above its scaly ridge. She was too preoccupied with surviving to engage in banter. “Thia’s scheme, no doubt,” he mused. “The Faliran hive mind is ever a source of problems. I will need to hunt that ship down when I finish here.”
He attacked again and again until Amara saw another opening to attack… but her first attempt had taught her better. That was another feint, she was certain… and if she had launched her own attack in instinctive retaliation she would have paid with her life. Sarcand surged forward again, and it seemed to Amara that he was attacking quicker than the Aegis should allow… perfectly angling to the blade to keep its tip moving below the maximum allowed velocity while in range, and repositioning with none of that restraint between blows. Amara took a small, genuine opening to strike back, heading forward and inside of his latest attack, going down low in hopes of slashing at his undefended underside. Instead of leaning down to block her, Sarcand simply side-stepped the charge. Despite his size and bulk the Kthid’s agility and foot speed were extraordinary.
Sarcand’s sword descended like a hammer, a powerful downward swing that felt like it was going to crush her down to the deck. The Terran woman felt its killing shadow above her, and did the only thing she could… she lifted herself up, right into its path on the most oblique angle possible, despite every instinct she had screaming that she was putting herself in the way of the blade… and her gamble paid off. The increased speed caused by her heading towards fouled the perfectly calibrated speed and raised their relative velocity above what the Aegis would permit. His sword recoiled, slowing enough that she could raise her own blade to lock with him and deflect the descending edge away from her.
The slamming impact caused the bones of her arms to rattle, her guard threatening to falter and allow a new death blow to be launched. “Oh come now,” Sarcand hissed while trying to twist his body and drive forward with the sword. The position was terrible for leverage… for this one moment, his advantage of strength meant as little as it was possible to mean. “Your sister put up a more spirited battle than this. Don’t make me regret my decision to throw her to the dregs instead of you,” he mocked while bringing that blade ever closer.
Master and slave were locked in a contest of strength that the Heitera could not possibly triumph in. Sarcand made it a slow, dramatic affair, a spectacle for the many onlookers to watch with dread in their belly as he slowly untwisted his posture, got the balls of his massive clawed feet back beneath him, and began to be able to leverage his muscle and weight again. Sweat poured down Amara’s visage and she grimaced roughly as that weapon drew ever closer, its glint now shimmering right above her face. He could have driven right through her then, probably, but he was enjoying this… enjoying seeing her strain against him, enjoying that the slaves of his ship watched the fight with rising horror.
Then the moment she had been hoping for happened.
Another HEF missile detonated against the ship’s Aegis, shaking it. As the floor wobbled, both their postures momentarily became ungainly… but with his weight pressing down on her, his balance was the more disrupted. Amara took advantage of this state of chaos to slide to the side, letting his blade slide down hers to strike the ground with a spray of sparks and smash upward with the pommel of the blade. Everyone in the room heard the loud, hollow thump as that metal knob impacted against his thick skull. Sarcand staggered, his brain rattled by the creative attack, and Amara had to sidestep to avoid being crushed by his careening bulk. He didn’t fall, however… and a moment later, as the dreadnaught stopped shaking and his feet were underneath him again he shook his reptilian skull, refocusing his blurred gaze. Amara had a bare moment of opportunity and she lunged at him…
Not quickly enough. Sarcand recovered far quicker than she would have hoped, and while his sword was on the wrong side of his body to parry he had other options… pushing himself just far enough to the side that her blade flashed against his scales and slid off. Then his fist rose up from low, and for her desperate lunge, Amara was repaid with a breath-stealing punch to the gut that sent her tumbling backward across the deck.
Amara struggled to get her hand back under her and push herself up, gasping for breath. “Not bad,” the warlord mocked quietly with wry confidence. He tilted his head to the side once more, working soreness out of his neck. “Not bad at all. Miranda would have been proud, I think. But you will not get that sort of opportunity again.”
The auburn-haired woman couldn’t quite hide her damage or fatigue as she rose onto two feet. She could taste blood and bile inside her mouth, and a boulder of despair splashed within Amara’s stomach. Everyone watching had seen her gain a nearly magical advantage for an instant, only to lose it just as swiftly… her opening for a hope for victory had been snuffed out as soon as it had appeared.
“You know,” Sarcand taunted as he began to slowly stalk back towards her, “that by trying to save these people you’ve just caused them further torment? I promised you before, Amara… I will destroy everything you care for until there is nothing left.”
Amara spat a blood-red wad against the floor. “All… the more… reason… to fight back,” she remarked, forcing herself to raise the sword again, and attacked.
The Harvestmaster allowed the battle to progress slowly as if wanting to demonstrate to his menagerie of slaves that Amara’s momentary advantage truly had been a meaningless fluke, and true to his words she did not regain such an opportunity again. The next time the ship shook he was prepared for it, ready, and she gained nothing… even the tiny advantage she had managed to glean counted for nothing. Amara continued to battle with all the spirit of her heart, yet for every second that passed her technique became more desperate, her technique more and more flawed as she grew tired. Sarcand was larger, stronger, and more athletic, and, as the contest was proving, both tougher and more skilled. Once Amara failed badly on a swing and he passed up a perfect opportunity to end the duel, just to display to them all that he could have… The Huntmaster was now toying with his food.
She’d come close. She’d had an advantage for a few moments… it was better than most had managed. It just wasn’t enough.
“Feel that, female? That’s the specter of death, hanging over you.” Sarcand lashed out with a combination that drew her sword up uselessly high and then struck with his fist again into her defenseless belly, smashing alien muscle into Amara’s stomach and then her thigh. The escaped slave made a cry of anguish and then collapsed onto one knee. She even needed to use her sword arm to support herself. Amara coughed with pain, bitterly aware that her body was reaching very real limits. The bitterness of defeat, real, true defeat, stung her flesh and psyche together.
Sarcand snarled and primed his arm in a stabbing stance, and then something hit him from behind… dropping onto the Harvestmaster’s shoulders and fouling his intended thrust. A gray arm wrapped around his throat, another over his shoulder, another underhooking his armpit. Then the glint of a minute shiv appeared in a fourth hand and stabbed straight towards his jugular.
“RRRIIIAAAAAHHH!!!” Sarcand roared like one of Earth’s predators, a furious howl of rage from lungs far too large to be human. His mouth fully opened, exposing neat rows of razor-sharp teeth as he stomped forward, his hand pawing up towards his attacker… shaking and thrashing his upper body like a mastodon trying to dislodge some predator stuck onto his back. Even his tail tried flapping upwards. In the tumult, the malachite giant exposed his rear towards Amara. She gasped in disbelief. “N-Nameless!” the Captain exclaimed, watching the slim figure of her handmaiden as she clung to the Harvestmaster, gripping onto him despite the vigor and silence with which he tried to fling her off of him.
Throughout the jostle, Nameless’s knife kept stabbing. It was a small blade, too small to have much chance of getting clearly through his scales much less hit much vital, but nevertheless their duel enslaved every eye in the room. The bravery of that taciturn, anonymous woman to try and assassinate the lord of this ship was inconceivable. It was like seeing a fly fighting against the Devil himself. Amara forced herself to her feet, lifting her weapon, and attacking the distracted Kthid.
This was the opening Amara had been waiting for, the best one she was ever going to get.
The redhead didn’t hesitate. Even as Sarcand became aware she was coming for him and tried to fight his battle on two fronts, Amara closed, sword extended. His sword came up to a ready position, seeing to the Captain to be moving in slow motion, another howl of feral rage erupting from his throat as he stepped forward into her, raised to riposte.
Amara angled her sword upward as she spun, deflecting his sword high and to the side as she stepped into his body, so close that the Aegis would do almost nothing to protect him… by the time her sword was moving fast enough to be stopped by the Aegis it would already be inside of it. Her body moved with automatic precision, letting her weight drop, dodging beneath the next attempt as a parry and angling her body beneath Sarcand’s easy reach… and then she snapped her arm forward in a lightning thrust, just ahead of Sarcand’s next attempt to counter.
Her sword sank through scales with effortless ease. Sarcand gasped, and Amara could for one instant feel the motion of that breath through the blade she held. His counterattack slid by quick and just as effortlessly, her body tugged along with it… Then a sharp pain followed as Sarcand brought his foot up and kicked her.
Amara went sprawling away, tumbling end over end. She tried to scrabble up, to get back into the fight, to press the advantage, but her body just… wouldn’t obey her commands. She couldn’t lift herself off the floor. She coul-
Amara caught a glimpse of her sword, still embedded in Sarcand’s stomach… about thirty feet away.
Her arm was still holding it.
The redhaired Captain blinked several times, trying to process what she was seeing. Then, brain slowed by shock, she slowly managed to turn her head enough to look down at her own body where she lay. Sarcand’s counterattack had caught her arm just below the shoulder… a clean cut. She saw no torn flesh or muscle sticking out of the wound, and felt almost nothing: the arm was just… gone. It was only after she saw the brutal amputation that her mind began to catch up to the horror of what was in front of her and her nerves finally processed the damage, cutting through the stunned unreality of it.
“Get. Off. Me!” Sarcand howled, and in the flurry of murderous activity, the Kthid warlord at last managed to seize one of the Arane’s arms near the shoulder. With a heave, her heroic struggle was no more. The Harvestmaster simply ripped the woman up and over his body, swinging her almost like a club through the air in a downwards strike that ended at the deck, the six-armed alien smashing to the steel before him with a chorus of wet, cracking sounds. Her back twisted, and Nameless coughed blood all over herself. A baleful black fury twisted his reptilian visage, and he unleashed a stomping kick at the grey-skinned alien that send her flying into one of the cages. The sickly sounds of snapping bones resounded throughout the chamber, and Nameless hit the ground in a motionless heap.
Sarcand grimaced as he reached down and clasped the sword in her chest, ripping it out of him. Only trickles of blood oozed out, forming tiny crimson rivulets that trailed down his malachite scales. His muscles were clearly squeezing as hard as they could, his body doing a far better job of staunching the bleeding from his wound than Amara’s body was. She felt reluctantly sure that no mortal injury had been achieved. She had gotten in a good hit, but Sarcand’s scales were simply too thick and his body too tough for her thrust to have achieved a fatal penetration, not unless she had hit something vital. Nameless’s knife had done even less… mere trickles of blood seeped down his shoulders.
Sarcand snarled, then dropped her sword to the ground with a ringing clang. “I have decided that you will live, Amara,” he growled, his free hand clenched over the injury in his belly, working to help stem the blood loss. “Do not thank you. The rest of your life will consist of little but pain. In the end, every alien ever to step foot on my ship will hear your name and cringe from the memory of what was done to you.” The Harvestmaster took off towards her in an ominously deliberate stride. “In the end, fear of what was done to you will prove the greatest lesson you could teach.” Amara didn’t move as he approached her… she couldn’t. The fight was over, and she knew it… she didn’t even have access to the blade to use to cut her own throat anymore.
Then another alien stepped into the path between the two of them. Amara stared, wondering if her shock and blood loss were resulting in her seeing things.
“Lylyssa!?” the Harvestmaster snarled, swinging his tail in furious anger. The identity of this interloper was as shocking to Sarcand as it was to Amara. “Get out of my way, or share her fate!”
The stern-eyed Nys high-priestess moved not even a little. She was the complete opposite of the usual cloy, servile, fawning persona she displayed to him. Though unarmed, she stood firmly, confidently before him. “And then you will have killed all your Heitera in a single day. I wonder what Voerash would be able to make of that? A god, fallen from grace.” Her face twisted in a sneer, contempt written plainly across her face. Amara noted that her own people were staring at her with even more surprise than Amara herself was. “But then, that was never the case, was it?” the words spilled from violet lips. “Gods do not bleed.”
With a caiman grunt the Kthid backed up a step, and Amara noticed something that she had not earlier. Her eyes tracked where his went… to the slaves surrounding him. All of the Nys were gathering around, breath heaving, snarling. The Faliran slaves from the cages were stalking forward, their most heavily-chitined castes in the lead. Even the humans, led by Martina, were crowding around him… fueled by the growing sense of rage and confidence that only a mob could provide. And there were more than a thousand of them.
Amara had forced him to take off his armor to face her, but he hadn’t needed it. Sarcand, like the rest of his people, was armored in fear… their terror was their weapon and shield, the sense of invulnerability breeding invulnerability in truth. Amara and Nameless hadn’t managed to kill him.
But they had dealt that armor a lethal blow.
Sarcand looked angrier than she had ever seen him. “Has a Kthid ever been torn limb-from-limb by an army of slaves, master?” Lylyssa remarked in mutinous tenors. Around her, slaves lifted what weapons they could find… mostly cut through chains from when they had been freed, but a few had picked up the Faliran Queensguard’s weapons, and even as she watched one of the Nys picked up the still-bloodstained sword that Amara had stabbed him with from where he had tossed it. “I can think of no better time to start a trend than now,” the alien priestess finished.
The Harvestmaster quickly cast his eyes to the left and to the right, taking in the odds against him. In seconds he would be surrounded completely… and he was hopelessly outnumbered. If he couldn’t break their spirit to fight in just the first few seconds they would tackle him and drive him to the ground with the sheer weight of their bodies if nothing else, and after that, they would drive what weapons they had into him again and again until he was dead… one warrior simply could not fight so many, and despite his rage, he was too experienced of a warrior to think otherwise.
And then the commander of the Kthid Harvest Fleet took off at a run.
“Stop him!” Lylyssa commanded harshly. Several aliens dashed after him before she had even begun the command. Those who had taken the Faliran rifles shot but they hadn’t managed to aim, and too fearful of hitting their fellow slaves the shots went high. One Nys briefly managed to block his path and was hammered out of the way as he ran for the edge of the room. “Do not let the false God escape!” The priestess commanded as the mob chased after him. It should have only been a few seconds before they caught and cornered him, but the Harvestmaster chose a strategy that Amara hadn’t even considered… Instead of trying to outrun the mob or make his way back out the entrance, he dropped down one of the chutes leading into the casteless burrows. There was one swift sliding noise of his scales on metal, and then he had vanished.
Second later, Lylyssa was crouching over Amara. “Shit…” she muttered, taking off the decorative fabric and chains she wore as Heitera and beginning to tear through them… working to tie the things around the stump of her severed arm. “Shit, shit… bring one of those rifles over here!”
“Did… did they go after him?” Amara asked as Lylyssa squeezed painfully down on her arm.
“No… I wouldn’t let them. We’ll never find him down there. Ah, give me that!” The priestess lifted the rifle and began to discharge it over and over above one of the metal plates of the cages until it was glowing with heat. Then, without warning, she pushed Amara’s stump against it.
“AAAAGH!” she shrieked as her arm burned. The sizzling sound and the smell of burning meat made her want to vomit as her blood turned into smoke… but at least it was sealing the wound.
“Sorry…” Lylyssa said softly. “Got to keep you with us.”
“I know,” Amara hissed between clenched teeth. “I… understand…”
The priestess looked sympathetic. “You said there was a ship?”
Amara coughed. “Yes… talk to… the Faliran. They can guide you. I don’t think… I can… right now…”
Lylyssa nodded. “Alright. I’ll handle the organization of the escapees. You can count on me,” she promised as another torpedo hit rumbled through the dreadnaught.
As the blue-skinned alien walked off to do just that, and as her loud voice rang out Amara’s mind was snatched away towards another individual. Slowly, she managed to push herself up to her knees. Crawling with only one arm was hard, made harder for the exhaustion and pain and weakness and blood loss, but she was determined… moving slowly forward towards the motionless tangle of grey limbs that had saved her.
Nameless’s fallen frame was broken. A few other people had crowded around her, but as Amara arrived they dispersed, letting her through. The woman, she saw, wasn’t completely motionless… she was still alive. “Hey! Nameless! Don’t die on us now, you brave idiot…” Amara whispered as she sank down over the supine alien, clutching the back of her skull with her remaining hand and raising it lightly. “Please… stay with us.”
As Amara looked down the Arane’s body, however, her heart sank… she was almost certain all her begging was for nothing. Blood flowed freely from her lips, and Sarcand had all but completely crushed her chest. The bones in her ribcage must have pierced her lungs… it was a miracle she was still alive right now, and Amara had no reason to suspect she would remain so for long.
“Di-Did,” the fallen servant sputtered, blood oozing out of her mouth. “Did we get him?”
“You got him,” Amara whispered. Stubborn tears filled her eyes, new wet trains streaking down her dirt-smeared cheeks. “You got him. You did it. Sarcand’s gone… all because of you. You saved me. You saved all of us.”
A slight smile appeared upon the dying woman’s tortured visage. Even as her pupils went glassed and unfocused, her lips exposed bloodstained teeth in a burst of happiness. “Gooooood…” she whispered softly. The strength of life rapidly was draining from her eyes.
The answer to one question suddenly blazed desperately within Amara’s chest. She patted the Arane’s face lightly, trying to make the dying alien cling to life a little longer. “Hey! There is one thing I still need to know. You never told me your name?” she asked with an earnest urgency to know.
“I… uhh… I…” Nameless stammered. She looked not only on the verge of death but also confused, as if not truly understanding the Heitera’s words. “I’ve never had one,” she at least responded through a death-strained throat. “No one ever gave me one.”
“Then I will,” Amara responded with heartfelt love for the poor creature. “I’ll remember you as Hope… for the hope you brought me when I had none.” She brushed a lock of her hair out of her face. “I promise you, Hope… your people will be free of the Kthid. I swear it.”
The smile on Hope’s lips widened as far as it could. “I… like that…” She maintained this expression of joy even as small moribund coughs overtook her throat and blood poured past the corners of her mouth. Amara lay her down so that she was able to rest flat on the floor, even while watching the light of life vanish within her eyes.
Hope died upon the deck of the Death of Hope… But she died a free woman, having wrenched that freedom back from generations and generations of servitude… and she had brought hope back to those who would escape. It would have to be enough. Amara allowed a few more tears to shed as she dragged her palm over the Arane’s face, closing her many eyelids forever.
Somehow, Hope had been a woman that she barely knew in life, and yet in that dying moment, was also a woman that she knew even more intensely than she knew herself. Without wiping away tears, Amara lay there until a pair of Faliran warriors arrived to lift the weak, injured human to her feet. Then Amara let her consciousness wander as she was carried off with the other refugees, finally allowing her world to go dark.
Comentários