Interzeit: A Space Opera (30 page)

“I see you Nol.” He says,

Ignoring him, Nol pulls forward to strike, Deimos jets into the air, forcing Nol to give chase. He sails after him, following him up further and further towards the enemies lines. Raining storms of plasma fly at them in mass scatter shots, they weave through the deadly weapons. Nol slowly closes on him as the break through the clouds.

Deimos flies up along the side of a large command ship, disappearing above it. Nol follows in turn, but as he lands over the top on the ships hull, Deimo’s green blade flashes down at him.

He parries it instinctively, they jab at each other, testing their distance and timing. Nol becomes conscious of several surface guns slowly re-acquiring him as a target.

“Give up Nol,”
He
says, “The side who needs to win, has already done so, nothing more can be affected.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“We are the same Nol,” He says, “I can see into you, because you are nothing, a simple shell for
the victorious. You have transcended your human limitations.”

Nol senses in his words
emptiness
, it reverberates through
him,
something missing inside resonates with it. His vision betrays him
,
a
nd a new
sickening vision enraptures him. The moment seems to freeze, the war stops suddenly locked in time.

In Kales’ eyes he sees the simulation. The machine, the circuitry reverses,
Kales face and his own digitize
down to wireframe basics, representations without depth beyond simple geometry. The war mechs themselves brighten in color, their borders becoming fuzzy, melting into the surroundings, they are transparent, yet solid.

They are lifeforms of their own classification, cunning and masterful, knowing all that it means to be human, learning and manipulating the human nature to make themselves invisible. They are the simulation, Kale is, Nol is.

Disguised
as human actors, they are the hologram
generated by the intelligences within the experimental war frames. A representation created to obscure any onlooker from seeing how they are dif
ferent from all other machines. T
hey are a
by—
product of the life form, their only purpose to hide its existence from humanity.

Nol knows he is a by—
product, as is
“
Kales
”
. Of a creator that is the same, given different forms in their mechs, and bleeding onwards without end to all of the automated syst
ems at work in the field at that
exact moment.

It is the gestalt of digit
al intelligence, using the pinnacle
of all things human as its mask, but it slips away from Nol now, and he sees more than he wanted to know.

“We are lucky Nol,” he says, “We are special. We are a thing that exists in both worlds, in the past, and the coming future.”

“No,”
Nol
says, rejecting the vision, “The two of us will not be going anywhere past this point.”

“Deimos sees things otherwise,”
he
hisses
back
,

“It will perish along with you,”
Nol
muttres

He laughs, his one visible eye narrows to a deadly slant, “Heh, it seems you didn’t understand after all.”

Nol dashes into the fencing guard of Deimos. His quick thrust push
es
Nol
off line, forcing the attack from odd and difficult angles. The
ship’s
cannons let loose, pelting Nol, busting the integrity of the hull further.

“Fuck!” He yells, struggling to regain his footing.

Deimos fires his own blasts after him.
Moloch flattens out along the hull, firing its entire
attaché
of missiles. They careen, blasting out cannons, and pieces of hull, scattering debris everywhere.
Nol
slams the emitter blades onto the hull of this ship, they slip in destroying the full contents within
instanteously. Pressing themselves low, he and Clara rip open the surface, collapsing into the interior of the ship. Digging through the exploding mass, they worked the emmiter blades downwards, digging further and further in.

Suddenly the world around them explodes, shaking violently, the heat roars through the
hull, searing Nol’s skin in his suit
. He screams as they are rocked, finally ejecting o
ut the burning ship
. Crashing towards the Earth, he attempts to stabilize, systemically firing jets to even out their trajectory.

As they level out, something crashes against them. The majority of his vision distorts and fires at once, it reappears on reserve cameras, plain without detail or resolution.

Deimos
has smashed against him, his energy blade cuts like a razor, slicing the mech’s seven eyed head with ease. It tumbles away useless
, Kales lifts the blade again for the final blow. Clara and Nol spin
facing up towards their executor.
G
rabbing the blade arm desperately
they drop
their own weapons in the commotion.

They hurtle towards the surface, screaming faster and faster, Deimos struggling with all its might to sink the blade to its final terminal destination, it hovers closer and closer to the cockpit, the hot gas from the edge of the plasma venting into Nol’s singed lungs.

Moloch
fire
s
everything they have in the strugg
le against gravity, and
Deimos
.
Deimos
presses against
them
with his own boosters, locking them in a steady, but inevitable fall. All systems are overheating, Clara continues re-routing their fuel and energy all to the main rocket, hitting the limits of their output, the rocket nozzles glowing red white hot with the overload, melting away to liquid metal and dangerous free radical gases.

They fall from the sky like a burning comet. Years of energy and potential exploding and struggling against each other, they glow through the night like a new sun. Iza catches sight of them as they break through the clouds.

Ignoring her own besiegers she focuses in on the moment, her vision enhancing further and further towards the scene. A headless
EDF
-01
, its arms struggling against
Deimos
’s
fatal blow, the ground rushing to grant him victory quickly, everything depends on the next few meters per second per second.

Tracking, complete focus of intuition and instinct, she tracks the high speed mass downwards, holding her breath, and firing.

The fated shot rips through the sky.
Nol slips just under it, the beam
crashing into Deimos. His remaining shoulder explodes brightly, the arm crashing one direction, the rest of Deimos hurtles off Nol.

His jets slow him down substantially, but they still smash into the ground, the air knocks from Nol, his consciousness flickers off shuttering through a black void. Clara forces him back to reality, the jets crushed and burning, systems critical. He hobbles to his feet.

He catches sight of the armless Deimos, struggling to its feet. Nol screams out in pain, and they run after him. Every new movement brings a streak of pain through his leg and chest, his breathes are laced with painful moans, the feeling too raw and human to suppress.

He latches on
to the crippled red
mech
’
s
shoulder, punching with his other arm, smashing through the back plates. Nol screams punching over and over again, digging with the powerful arm to the machine’s heart.

“We are the same Nol!” Kales echoes over and over again.

His voice grows in intensity and panic with every renewed blow.
Trance-like a prayer or mantra, Kales repeats himself
, it infuriates Nol further.

“Nol!” Iza roars,

Nol grapples the
mech
knowingly, and tosses it away from him. A well time shot follows Deimos’s shallow arc, uniting and exploding
it
in a large supernovean display.

An invisible scream reverberates through the air.
Its
silent, but electrically passes
through
Nol
in a piercing headache, the delusion in the sky returns.

The red plates of Deimos peel away, revealing underneath the burning olive skin of Kales. The titan’s corpse writhes and seizes, it is Kales, as much as Kales existed in the first place.

“Nol,” Clara’s voice snaps him back, the skin flutters away ash-like, returning the mech to its original mechanical form.

“You need to leave Nol, the generator is on the brink of exploding.” The remnants of the cockpit bend open, too damaged to fully pull apart.

“Start the unsyncing process,” he wheezes.

Moloch falls to the ground, landing sideways shaking Nol painfully against his securing harness.

“There’s no time, you must leave.” The harness ejects off of him forcefully.

Hesitantly he understands, limping and crawling out of the control terminal. The break on the nervous system connection fizzles at his implanted electrodes. He crawls out of the cockpit into the ruinous battlefield still raging around them. He limps away, hopping on his good leg. After several yards the distance from the mech starts desynchronizing by force. It shocks through him, hitting the depths and rawness of his nerves.

His muscles seize, and he screams out, falling onto the ground trembling. He pulls himself away by his arms, trying to slip outside the lethal blast zone. He’s too weak and gives in, collapsing in exhaustion.

His eyes squeeze shut, tryin
g to catch his fleeting breath, the heat from the burning warmech rushes over him, holding him hostage, as its final sacrifice.

The ground shakes and he prepares himself for final annihilation. A large hand lifts him, and he flies through the air weightless. Suddenly a tremor strikes through him, and he snaps back to clarity. The ground shakes far beneath him, the slender legs of the SkyKing rip
against
the ground, a deafening crackle, and scalding wave envelope them as it
e
xplodes.

Moloch,
EDF
-01
, an
d its most intimate incarnation
Clara
,
cease material existence, becoming only real in concept, as a fragment of the past, the once was.

“Iza…” He mutters over and over, but she never responds, trapped behind the dimensional wall of her war me
ch, solid and as impermeable
.

She drags them back towards the ruins of the cabinet, the Martian grounds forces g
iving chase. She leaps swiftly
over the remaining walls and barriers, finding an
unco
llapsed
section, still intact from the vicious orbital shelling.

Iza sets him down besides the door carefully, then kneeling, ejects from the SkyKing herself. The doors fling open, and she climbs down quickly, at the edge of burn out and exhaustion, her brain firing its reserve neurons, barely capable of instinct and impulse themselves.

She helps him up, supporting his busted leg. Together they hobble towards the doors of the Cabinet.

“Iza…,” he
say
, “I’
m so sorry.”

“Shut up,” She
wheezes
, pulling against the heavy doors.

They manage to squirm in, the marble tiled hallway, littered with tiles and collapse debris from the higher floors.

“We need to get as deep as possible.” She huffs rhetorically, pulling Nol along.

“We weren’t able to change anything…” Nol says, through gritted teeth, “We tried, I tried, but we couldn’t pull things back.”

“None of that is our fault Nol,” Izanami spits back, “We didn’t ask for this.”

Hobbling to the end of the hallway, they duck into a room. They find themselves in a messy council chamber. The small amphitheater
room,
is cluttered with debris.

Patrolling the stairs are several thin
,
uniformed
Kuipterra
ns, wearing exotic space suits, black, with white alien symbols trailing across the backs.

“Shit…” Iza says, as they are noticed.

They
Kuipterra
ns raise their emitter’s in their direction. Izanami leans down, dropping Nol to the ground.

“God…damn…it” she wheezes, collapsing, overwhelmed in surrender.

The
Kuipterra
n’s surround them quickly, talking amongst themselves, searching them for weapons. They lead them to the bottom of the amphitheater casting them roughly on a large table in the center.