Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (123 page)

He reached for her and called her name.

Amhrán

~ * ~ * ~

Galactic Standard Date:  152,324.02 AE

Haven-2

Supreme Commander-General Abaddon

Abaddon

She was a valiant ship, eager to take on their enemies despite the crushing damage to her wing. Now-General Abaddon, if he was still even officially a general, pressed his hand against the wall and whispered to the ship which had been his first great love.

“Soon,
gorm beag
,” he whispered to the
Jehoshaphat
. “Soon I shall let you pay back the dragon for the damage he has wrought to you.”

As if she had heard him, the
Jehoshaphat
trembled beneath his touch, eager with anticipation of the foreplay to come. He caressed the wall, attentive to her every sigh. They were two old warriors, him and her, both scarred and in less than top condition after their recent scuffle with Shay’tan. But just as Sarvenaz had refused to let
him
go, so would he not let the engineers who complained they were short on supplies, or time, or authorization from Parliament to make repairs, dissuade him from getting his Little Falcon back into fighting condition.

The trembling grew louder, and then it settled into a rhythmic hum. His comms pin chirped.

“Sir?”

“Yes, yeoman?”

“The antimatter induction ports have just been realigned.”

“I know,” Abaddon said. He caressed the wall. “Will it hold?”

“I have no idea, Sir,” the Flight Engineer said. "She should go forward just fine, but if we need to maneuver in battle, I can't promise the supports we jury-rigged to stabilize her hyperdrives will hold.

Abaddon closed his eyes and focused on the way the vibration rumbled through his rapidly regenerating feathers. Slow. Steady. Reliable. Bloodthirsty. Yes. The
Jehoshaphat
would fight.

"We only need to go in one direction, yeoman," Abaddon said to the engineer. "Straight ahead."

"Yes, Sir," the Flight Engineer said.

Abaddon glanced up at the officers who had gathered in his war room, both in person, and also on flatscreens all around the room. They were good men. Men he would trust with his life.

"The moment we cross over the border," Abaddon's expression was grim, "there will no going back. Not just for me, but for any of you. If you have any doubts at all that this course of action is the right one, now is the time to bow out and join Re Harakhti's fleet. As you all know, Lucifer is dead, Parliament is a mess, and the Emperor has not had the
magairlí
to seize back control of his empire."

Abaddon watched the faces on the screen, searching for signs of doubt or fear. He found none. Most of these commanders had human wives of their own, and of those who didn't, they had lower-ranking members of their crew who either did, or desperately
wished
they did because they were the last of their bloodline.

He glanced over at Captain Shzzzkt, his Mantoid communications officer and third in line to take control of the bridge. The Mantoid species had absolutely no problems reproducing.

"You sure you want to do this, Shzzzkt?" Abaddon asked softly.

Captain Shzzzkt touched his voice modulation box.

"When I was born, there
was
no Emperor," Shzzzkt said. "Only a Parliament which refused to grant our planets admission. All the time our planet has belonged to the Alliance, it was Lucifer we looked to represent us, not the Emperor or Parliament. And he looked to you, Sir, to uphold the letter of his law."

The Mantoid lifted his hard outer wings to expose the soft, gossam
er wings below which enabled their species some semblance of flight, not true-flight, but close enough that they'd been able to take up some of the slack caused by the Angelics dropping numbers.

"The newer sentient crewmen all took a vote, Sir," Shzzzkt continued. "We will serve the Emperor and Parliament as much as we can, but as far as we're concerned, until somebody can produce Lucifer's body, we shall follow
your
orders, Sir, and not the petty bickering of politicians."

A lump rose in Abaddon's throat. He had been less than enthusiastic when a young Lucifer had proposed the audacious plan to allow the newer sentient races to earn their Alliance citizenship by serving in the military. Only recently had their homeworlds been granted full Alliance status, Lucifer's plan all along. The snub was recent enough that the newer races held no illusions that they were anything but second-best citizens.

"Thank you, Captain Shzzzkt," Abaddon's lip twitched with suppressed emotion. He turned towards the other commanders. "I presume the same is true on all of your ships?"

"Yes, Sir," the other ship's commanders all answered.

"You all know the plan, then," Abaddon said. "Re Harakhti has amassed a sizeable flotilla of Leonid and Centauri battlecruisers along the border closest to the place where Shay'tan ambushed this fleet. As we speak, he has authorized his fighter pilots to fly sorties along the edge of Sata'anic territory, just enough to antagonize the dragon and keep his attention
there
."

He pointed to a holographic map of the Milky Way galaxy.

"So far as we can tell, Shay'tan is completely unaware we've amassed this second fleet in a stellar nursery at the opposite end of his empire," Abaddon said. "The radiowave disturbances caused by the dust cloud renders our navigation equipment useless for jumping into subspace until we get at least 300 light years inside the Sata'anic border, but it also means Shay'tan won't see us until we drive right past him."

"Why here, Sir?" the young Leonid First Lieutenant who commanded the tracking ship
Invincible
asked. "Why are we crossing the border here?"

The
Invincible
was a small ship with a large deep-space radar, exactly the kind of ship Abaddon needed to calculate these jumps. It was piloted by a vigorous young Leonid who wasn't entirely certain he wanted to tag along on this mission. How could he convince his men that a small, non-descript bird had landed on the Eternal Tree while he'd been dead and sang a mournful song for a broken seed which had become lodged in a branch which looked remarkably like the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm?

"This is the last place the
Eternal Light
was seen before it disappeared into points unknown," Abaddon told them the only truth that might make sense. "Somehow, the Emperor
knew
humans still existed before Lucifer pulled his coup d'etat, and somewhere in the galaxy, there are 99 ships under the command of the former Supreme Commander-General's lover, most likely searching for the same planet that
we
are."

"What should we do when we run into Shay'tan's forces?" one of the Angelic commanders asked.

"We hit them hard and keep on going," Abaddon said. He pointed to the place where their instrumentation would enable them to use the
Invincible's
deep-space radar to calculate a jump beyond the borders of the Sata'anic Empire, into territories which were almost completely uncharted. "But while we're on our way through, if we
do
hit Shay'tan hard, it would not aggrieve me to cut the dragon back down to size."

He flared his wings, prickly looking with their immature grey pinfeathers, but already the quills had begun to flesh out. If he kept progressing at the same rate of healing, by the end of the week he should be able to fly once more.

The other commanders gave him a salute and grinned. What doubts they might have harbored had been dispelled by none other than his own miraculous recovery from the dead.
They
viewed it as divine provenance of She-who-is, but Abaddon knew it was the remnants of his Seraphim genome, his latent ability to heal restored thanks to the unpolluted potential in Sarvenaz's human genes.

Abaddon resisted the urge to scratch his arms and legs. His face had been the first to slough off the scar tissue and leave him looking no older than before, but every
other
square inch of his body peeled healing skin like a Sata'anic lizard molting their skin. The itching was driving him nuts!

"You know the drill," Abaddon told the commanders.

"Keep low, move fast, kill first, die last," they recited the familiar Angelic battle prayer. "One shot, one kill, no luck, pure skill."

Abaddon gave them a hawkish grin.

"Just follow my lead."

He killed the flatscreens, and then signaled Captain Shzzzkt to go and carry out his orders. There was only one last order he wished to relay, one he had discussed with Sarvenaz just minutes before he had come up here to launch this latest mission.

"Major Pharzuphel," he said. "One moment please?"

His  second-in-command paused, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.
He
had survived because her lover had risked his life to run into the collapsing cave and shove him into an ancient cryo-chamber. Lieutenant Valac hadn't been so lucky. While he
had
survived by diving underneath the cryo-chamber, his legs had been crushed by a falling stalactite and the lack of oxygen in the cave had caused significant brain damage.

"Sir?"
Pharzuphel spoke with a disheartened voice.

“How is he, Major?”

Pharzuphel’s snow-white wings drooped with dejection.

“He still hasn’t woken up, Sir,” Pharzuphel said. “And even if he does, the doctor fears he may never regain full use of his legs.”

Abaddon’s expression softened.

“Keep talking to him,” Abaddon said, "even if he cannot answer you. Because on some level he can hear you, and so long as he knows you haven’t abandoned him to die, he will fight to stay with you. He will fight until he doesn’t have a choice, and even if he loses that battle, know that he will wait for you just but on the other side.”

“How can you know that, Sir?” Pharzuphel sobbed. “How can you know the legends are not a lie?”

“Because I have seen that place,” Abaddon said, "and because I have, I do not fear death, for whether or not I am killed, someday my wife will reunite with me there.”

“But if Valac does not fear death,” Pharzuphel said. “Then how can I convince him to stay?”

Abaddon gave her a rare smile.

“Tell him that if he pulls through, I shall join your hands together in marriage
myself,
” Abaddon said. “And not only shall I declare you husband and wife if that is your wish, but I shall order you be assigned quarters together, to raise your son together the way a family
should
be raised.”

Pharzuphel's expression brightened for the first time since she and Sarvenaz had pulled them out of the ice cavern.

“Valac would like that. I will tell him as soon as we have achieved this objective.”

Abaddon strode out onto the bridge and settled into his commander’s chair, scanning the men and women who had served under him for many long years. Major Pharzuphel trailed behind him and took her mate's former station, the weapons console, the first person who would fire upon an enemy ship.

Abaddon tapped his comms pin to make the announcement to the crew to engage, and then thought better of it. He settled his almost-healed wings against his back and pointed at his former peace-dove of a second-in command, the member of his crew who had always ordered restraint.

"Would you like to give the order, Major?" Abaddon asked.

Pharzuphel nodded, her blue eyes still red-rimmed from tears. She pressed the broadcast button on the fleet-wide intercom.

"Attention all crew," Pharzuphel said. "Let's go grab the dragon by the tail."

~ * ~ * ~