Spacer Clans Adventure 2: Naero's Gambit (49 page)

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The enemy
’s advanced ion batteries turned on her in panic.

She became an energy being at will.

All of the enemy firepower combined barely scratched her gigantic, swelling berserker fury.

Using their own
strategy against them, she quickly drained their massed fleets of power. Adding it all to her own.

Her
own battered merchant fleet stumbled and pulled back, limping and towing their stricken ships far away to refit and regroup. Trying their best to clear out of the way.

Naero
located the enemy flagship.

The
cloaked one that had urgently attempted to jump under the screening cover of all the rest.

She had hoped to s
eize the Dakkur hordeship.

Yet it
must have already fled.

She melted every Ejjai
on the flagship into molten puddles of metal, plasteel and bubbling grease, wherever they stood.

Thousands.

Locating Master Vane’s body being held in stasis only took seconds.

She
could not concentrate and remain rational much longer.

She stuffed
Vane’s stasis container into a life pod.

J
ettisoned him toward her fleet.

Alala and Tye
raced in to intercept the pod.

Naero
’s last conscious act of sanity.

She could no longer focus her will, her thoughts.

She nearly blacked out at that point, as her Dark Beast tapped in the energies she channeled and took full roaring control.

The
n the real slaughter ensued, first among the drifting enemy fleets directly before her.

She vaguely recalled Om
’s voice pleading with her, but could not reply.

She could no longer listen.

Like one of her nightmares come to life, Naero felt herself swell up to a huge, vast size, bloated with Cosmic power. She broke some of the enemy warships open as if they were toys. Like cracking poultry eggs.

She spilled their
dying crews out into space. Laughing in glee like one completely mad.

WIPE
THEM ALL OUT!

Then s
he formed a pinpoint of impossibly, ultra-dense, Darkforce energy. Surging, racing toward critical mass in seconds.

Concentrated p
ower that laid waste to anything it touched.

The nano-singularity
became a massive blinding orb of black disintegration. It pulled in all light.

The resulting
Darkforce blast went far beyond any mere explosion.

It
became a cataclysm that reduced all of the enemy fleets to ash and disintegrated any remnants to incinerated Cosmic dust.

Naero
vaguely sensed cheering coming from her fleet and the allied forces still arriving off in the distance.

Until
they attracted her leering attention.

Her Dark Beast
swung around ominously.

Sweeping straight
for them next.

Then
everyone noticed something missing.

Naero vaguely noticed it too.

Planet Janosha simply wasn’t there any longer.

No debris. Nothing. Completely gone.

As if it never existed.

The vast beast she had
become gloated drunkenly at them all, as one entirely devoid of any shred of sanity. A mindless thing, solely bent on oblivion.

Then a powerful sensation overtook her.

A glittering multitude of tiny shining lights enveloped her like a swirling nebula.

And for just
a moment, the Dark Beast that she had become drew aside, transfixed and distracted by them all and their fluctuating glitter and shifting, shimmering movements.

She
could not attack them.

They were nothing.
No threat to her at all.

Far too small. Just tiny glittering flashes of bright light.

In her twisted, tormented heart and soul, Naero thought for certain that she heard the song of the Tua. Rejoicing and calling to her.

Yah-duu Ah Shah Lah! Shah hah lah shah-dae! Yah Jhah Vah Shah-Lae. Ae duu vah. Ae duu vah shah lah!

In the prison of her own dark soul and mind, Naero sobbed in the depths of her own self-inflicted torment and broke down, as if weeping. She tried to sing in answer with the Tua voices, but her slack mouth only worked and croaked like that of a mindless lunatic.

Yet
the tiny shining lights and their swelling song somehow released her.

The
ir lights showed her a way out of her dark prison.

The
y helped set her free from the trap of her own flaws and imperfections, her own folly and madness.

Her Dark Beast lost its hold entirely
, swept away by the torrent of light. All of its immense destroying power vanished and drained away into naught.

Om
did something too. She knew not what at first.

Yes, h
e wrestled with her directly at last, for control of her very mind. He screamed at her, only she hadn’t been able to listen before.

Now she choked.

Air. Om cut off her air.

She could no longer breathe. There was
n’t enough oxygen.

She felt herself weaken and shrink down exponentially, losing her grip on the
energy she’d stolen from the Janoshan cosmic flows.

But w
ith the planet inexplicably gone now, the immense energy flows were suddenly gone as well. She could no longer feed and sustain herself. Replenishing the vast amounts of power the Dark Beast craved and fed upon.

As her po
wer ebbed away, the fickle Beast could not grow any longer. And so it betrayed her again, slinking back into its dormant state to lick its wounds and bide its time deep within herself.

Abandoning
its control of her. Beaten down.

L
eaving her to perish all alone if need be.

Naero should have a
sphyxiated in space and died.

Parts of her mind
begged Om to let her die that way.

But he ignored her, as usual, and activated her Nytex suit programming
with teknomancing, pweaking up a bubble helmet and giving them a few precious minutes of air.

Until her friends
from her fleet swept in to scoop her up.

In a haze, she thought she saw Saemar
’s face through a glifter facemask, gathering her in gently, and sweeping her onboard
The Dagger
as it pulled up and opened a cargo bay
.

*

Naero awoke in a medical bay containment cell on board her own small flagship,
The Flying Dagger.

Zhen, Chaela, Saemar,
Tarim, and Shalaen crowded together in her area, fidgeting and waiting for her to come around.

She sat up so suddenly she startled them all.

“What’s happening?” she demanded. “How’s the fleet? How many people did we lose in the battle? How many ships?”

Her friends p
laced their hands on her. Weeping with joy and relief to see her awake and sane once again.

“O
h, sweetie!” Saemar sobbed, getting down on her knees and sobbing and blubbering over her.

Soon Naero found herself in the awkward position of patting Saemar on the back and comforting her.

“Get off of her,” Chaela finally said. “Haisha! You’re a captain, for the love of the bloody stars. Get a hold of yourself!” But tears streamed down her face as well.

“D
on’t worry about the fleet,” Tarim said. “Our losses in the end were extremely light.”

She stared at them
, hesitant to ask. “Did I…did I kill any of our people?” She really could not remember if she had or not.

Shalaen and
Zhen both bit their lips and put both of her hands on Naero’s.

“N
o, you did not,” Shalaen told her.

“I
t never came to that, En,” Zhen added.

Naero frowned.

This time.

She looked at the cell door.
“So, how many Intel and Mystic guards are out there to keep watch over me, in case I lose it and turn into a monster again?”

Tarim shook his head.

“Not a one. They have ships watching us, but when they suggested some crap like placing guards on you, we told them all to go straight to hell.”

Chaela snorted
, rambling on. “We told them the same thing, when next they demanded that we turn you over to them. That other General Ingersol is a total dumbshit too, just like his twin brother that got himself arrested. Ordering us to hand you right over to him. Immediately. Intel my ass. How come Shadowforce didn’t know about these damn attacks in the first place? None of this should have ever happened.”

“Y
ou did them a big favor, sweetie.” Saemar snapped her fingers. “Look at you. Rescued the High Master and wiped out a bunch of alien clone fleets. All by yourself. That was…quite a show you put on. Haisha! What the bloody hell are those Mystics teaching you anyway?”

“T
hey ought to be thanking you,” Tarim said. “Not treating you like some kind of menace.”

Naero covered her face with her hands.
“I am a menace. I…I think I may have vaporized and entire planet. I…I might have killed everyone. Guys…I guess I am a monster now.”

Nobody knew how to field that
for a long moment.

“N
one of us know what happened to Janosha,” Shalaen said flatly. “Not even me. I was as surprised as much by the planet’s sudden disappearance as everyone else. Yet it is not clear, Naero, that you had anything to do with it.”

Naero leaned forward with her forearms resting on her thighs and knitted her fingers together nervously. She covered her face.

She attempted to laugh. “Yeah, sure. Whole planets just vanish like that all the time. Guys, I’m serious. Maybe you should turn me over to the authorities.”

“N
ow I know you’re crazy, sweetie.”

Saemar felt her forehead.

Zhen closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. “Un-frickin’ believable. It’s not like she’s sick. She doesn’t have a fever, you moron!”

“H
ow do you know? I think she feels a little hot.”

“Y
ou two stop before I clobber you both,” Chaela said. She turned back to Naero.

“T
ell us what really happened, En?”

“I
t’s a pretty long story,” she said.

Zhen looked around
at the others. They all looked back and nodded.

“W
e’re not going anywhere for a while.”

“H
ey, I am beyond incredibly famished,” Naero told them, her empty stomach churning. “Can we…get something to eat?”

They ended up in
The Dagger’s
galley.

How ironic that an interstellar menace
–a monster such as herself–would take time to cook chow for her mates.

Naero made grilled hooma bread sandwiches
for them all with micken eggs, thick slices of Spum, tart red-violet sevari tomatoes, purple lettuce, and green durro cheese.

She gobbled down three of the
sandwiches herself.

How good did that taste?

Without warning Naero launched into her story.

Four hours later, they were all crying with her, and sitting on the floor of the galley together getting drunk on a case of illegal Cymbellin scotch.

By then t
hey were all out of Spacer poteen.

Naero wiped her face dry with her hands and took another belt.

Her speech slurred. She probably couldn’t stand.

“N
ow you guys know what happened, and how completely messed up I truly am.”

“S
weetie, you didn’t do anything the rest of us wouldn’t have done in the same situation.”

Zhen touched her arm again.
“You’re still a good person, En. You are.”

Even Shalaen protested.
“It isn’t your fault you haven’t finished your Mystic training and learned to control your powers yet.”

Shalaen was the only one still sober. No matter how much she drank, the booze
simply didn’t affect her.

Tarim got a call on his com. He
hit the button on the fourth attempt, listened quietly, and then signed off.