Aces III
The battlecruiser was kept ready for launch, its lethal length vertical in relation to Coldhold's icy face, a monstrous mountain of black titanium rising like a dark tower towards the stars. It bristled with guns, primary, secondary, tertiary, and standing in its long, sword-like shadow I felt dread.
Brennan met the five of us beneath the fragile crystal dome of Coldhold's Transport. The leopard looked tired but his uniform was crisp and his black boots were polished and glossy.
I could tell the other aces hadn't escaped the sphere unscathed. Shard's face was stone while Walter looked thoughtful. Taylor kept sneaking glances at me.
Cheryl though...she was the picture of calm, stood with her paws clasped behind her back and just the hint of a smile.
She's the strongest, I thought, knew it without a doubt.
Rumor had it she was a veteran fighter pilot of Five, had rejoined the air force when Six started. I wondered what she had seen in her long career, what she had been through that could give her the kind of armor that could resist the sphere.
For my part I was shaken and I was sure my mask was slightly askew, but it hadn't slipped.
I missed Rick. Worse, I felt like I had betrayed him somehow last night when I had been with Taylor, even though I hadn't seen the wolf in years, even knowing...
"Welcome to the surface," Admiral Brennan said, returning our salutes. "Time is critical so we're going to skip the formalities. Secrecy is also paramount, which is why you've all been lied to. I won't be briefing you. You're going before the Nine themselves."
Cheryl's ears went back. "Sir that's-"
"The law's been waved this time," Brennan interrupted, his green eyes glinting. "They want to meet TA, and they...trust your discretion. Your two newest pilots will have to receive Nullifier implants, of course, but that would have happened in any case. In addition, your entire team is scheduled for additional augments after the briefing. You'll understand why soon enough."
Cheryl bared her teeth and the vixen's luxuriant brush twitched ever so slightly. "How bad is it, Jack?" she asked softly. "I know you know. They wouldn't be doing all this if they expected us back."
The leopard looked away. "I'm sorry Cheryl." He paused, studied the ceiling as if dark angels were listening. Maybe they were. "The loss of Earth has changed the war. That's all I can tell you."
She glanced back at the four of us, her eyes sad. "Follow me," she said.
-
Rick and I went back to the ridge a few days after the first time we fucked. That day there was a storm on the horizon, darkness warring against light there in late summer. The wind smelled like rain and the air had a dread weight, a heaviness that raised the hackles. Something seemed to gather in the humidity, a hidden something that made me feel hunted.
This time he was on the Corvette's hood, wearing nothing but a pair of socks. I gave him a blowjob as it started raining, steam rising from the car's warm shell. It was the first time I sucked dick. I liked it, and for awhile I didn't worry about being gay or feel the guilt I usually wore like a cloak. I was just a fox in love and fuck my life, fuck the world.
The end was thick and oily and whimpers. I knew what good cock suckers did and I didn't pull away.
Neither of us noticed the shit-brown F-150 with the Confederate plate bolted to the grill that was parked in the faraway trees, the steely glint of battered binoculars behind the foggy glass of a battle scarred windshield.
His name, I learned later, was Brian. The hound was the son of the mayor of Brunswick, a small town which was nearby. He was a real grass roots canine, you could say. He didn't wear a cowboy hat that day, he was in a grey hoodie and he had an axe he had been cutting wood with.
The pint of Jack Daniel's was mostly empty when he got out of his truck and entered the story, step by step in surplus combat boots through mud and fallen leaves. He circled the hill so we wouldn't see him, with all the bloodthirsty cunning of a classic Viking.
We had just put our clothes back on when Brian slipped stealthily out from behind the Corvette's back bumper. The rain had gotten heavy and all of a sudden there he was, a hooded wraith in the storm. He looked at us both with pure hate, with fear as naked as something skinned, his face twisted into a snarl of black murder.
"Fucking faggots," he whispered.
I don't know where Rick got the tire iron, how he knew. The axe carved air with a hiss and there was a clang as Rick blocked its swing. Brian didn't bother raising it again, he twisted on his heel and smashed the haft into the wolf's temple.
The glimpse I caught of Rick's eyes as he fell was strange, both the yellow one and the blue seemed to glow for a split second before the light in them dimmed. Time seemed to slow as the iron bar spun from his paws, slithered through the soaked grass and came to rest at my feet.
I picked it up, adrenaline roaring through me. I was back in the crack house, back in the trailer as mom came at me with a knife big enough to stab a world to death. Her face had been just like Brian's that day, and-
"Come on," Brian said with a bitter laugh as he rushed me, his fangs glinting as lightning flashed and thunder crashed. The axe was a wet blur of lethal arcs, everywhere at once. Somehow I dodged them all. Then the blade slammed into the tire iron in a shower of sparks and a stone turned under my foot. I fell, the muddy earth rushing up to meet me.
Up Prince of Troy, or let a stone take my glory, I thought insanely.
"That's right bitch," the hound rasped as I rolled, streams of rain coursing down his face like tears. The axe was rising, its head huge and dark against the clouds. I was dead.
A blinding burst of violet light flared and the hound shivered into a swirl of ash and embers. A molten lump of metal landed in front of me, liquid fire that steamed and spat in the torrent. The smell of burning engulfed me, a reek of smoking weeds and incinerated bones.
I looked up and saw Rick leaning against his car, the side of his face slick with blood. The driver's side window had shattered and around him was a shimmering, a force_. I couldn't meet his eyes. They were too bright, blazed like the sun. One of his paws seemed in the midst of a violent convulsion, a crazed palsy like Japanese counting or a flag flapping in a hurricane._
"That was close," he said softly. "You okay?"
There was this movie I saw once, three hundred years old now, yet every now and then you could still find it on television.
I had a vision of a black robed wizard called Voldemort, pale face glistening in the driving rain, a warped wand glowing a gangrenous green in his long, spidery fingers as he spoke the spell that would rip me to ruin in the sibilant tongue of a snake.
"Yeah," I said. I wasn't, but then...when was I ever?
-
The goliath warship's gravity adjusters were on. I experienced a disorienting sense of walking up a wall for a second as the five of us entered, and in a sense, because the battlecruiser decks were at a 90 degree angle in relation to the moon's surface, this was true.
There's no real direction in space, just a sphere of possibilities where up and down, left and right, depend on where you choose to believe common ground lies. My sort of place, I guess. Even gay foxes can find straight lines sometimes.
A weasel adjutant closed the hatch behind us. "Welcome to the Deathdream," he said as the door sealed with a hiss. A patch of gray felt covered one of his eyes. The other was hazel, shiny in the soft light. "You're expected immediately. This way please."
We followed him down a long, grim hall that was tight and metallic. Bars of blue light lined the walkway, loaning the blank plating of the walls and ceiling a ghostly glow. I felt like I was walking through the heart of a glacier or the mind of a machine, every angle sharp and logical, every surface frozen order locked in a state as lifeless and sterile as winter. The air was cold and dry, reeked of rubber and electricity.
At length we came to a big blast door edged in black and yellow. There was a glowing green pad on the wall next to it and the adjutant put his paw on it.
"Welcome Colonel Parsons," a pleasant female voice announced, the door rising. I recognized it as the same voice from the Steam Rooms on Freestar. Did every warship computer in the fleet use it?
Beyond the great door was a world apart from what I guessed was the rest of the Deathdream. Diamond film tiled a huge lobby with finger deep crimson carpets trimmed in gold thread, carpets that were islands forested with rich furniture. Holopaintings depicting epic battles, serene wildernesses and galactic vistas shared the walls with priceless tapestries and novelty artifacts from ancient times.
The weasel called an elevator, turned to Cheryl. "This is as far as I can go, of course." He touched a paw to his ear. "Yes sir," he said to his cufflink. "ETA of TA is one."
The vixen looked at him curiously.
Parsons shrugged. "They're readying the cruiser for launch. The time table is quite strict."
As the elevator arrived the weasel saluted us. "It was an honor," he said shyly but sincerely. "Good luck."
-
The inside of the elevator was mirrors, all four walls, even the floor and ceiling. A soft luminescence like candlelight emanated from seemingly nowhere.
I'd never been in a place I hated more. Everywhere I looked I saw my reflection and those of my team, multiplied into dizzying infinities.
Someone once told me that if two mirrors with not a speck of dust or a single flaw faced eachother it would open a doorway to somewhere else, that something grotesque could escape from some bizarre parallel universe if this ever occurred. I tried not to think about that too much.
Taylor's paw was warm when it found mine. I almost pulled away, afraid the others would see, yet when I looked into his eyes I knew he needed that contact, needed it as much as I did.
There's a reason no one living has ever seen the High Nine before. Looking on a member of the Council's face is against the law. Invariably the sentence for breaking that law is death. The Nine had named their flagship well.
The ride to the bridge lasted less than a minute, yet it felt like forever.
I was surprised when Shard spoke. The bear was leaning against one wall, eyes closed. "This is fucked up," he said quietly.
Cheryl sighed and Taylor squeezed my paw.
"Haven't you studied history?" Walter asked airily. "Rulers always try to impress with huge spaces. What's bigger than eternity, hmm? What sends a better message, even if it's just a bunch of mirrors? Just think of those Old World bumper stickers. They go something like Nice truck, sorry about your small-"
Shard chuckled. "Thanks, cat."
-
The elevator doors open and beyond us there's a vastness that has a floor of slick obsidian, a sleek, dark plain flecked with rainbows. Like the universe it defies understanding, seems sickeningly infinite. In the distance are nine thrones.
Rolf...the flies in my head, they've grown huge! Snitter says as he looks up at the helicopters, the oiled cap the whitecoats have stitched to the Terrier's head gleaming in an English dawn.
Yes it was sort of like that, sort of like that moment in 'The Plague Dogs', when two fugitives lost in a world beyond their understanding stood upon the soft loam of a moor and reality closed in with all of humanity against them, when Socrates came to the realization that all he knew was Nothing, when the first Light Drive was created by Sinjin and the raccoon proved forever that space, time and energy were one frightening thing.
I see a dais that rises up in a twisted spiral to a lofty pinnacle, brilliant and runed. Upon its peak are the Nine. Each has a seat and each is a side of the gem that is the best and the worst in all of us.
One is an enormous wolf all muscle, a giant who wears a web of leather straps and lounges on a throne made of chains. Beside him a lion, insanely fat, fills a palanquin wreathed in silk and studded with gems, a sumptuous feast before him. Next to the feline, sharing his table, a skeletal coyote in a colorless cape picks gleaming teeth with a slim bone upon a seat of raw meat, his hungry eyes never still, and his neighbor is terrifyingly protean, then a panther, now a dolphin, before a cheetah. A fox lord in drag, an opulent cross between king and queen, wears a crown slanted and sparkling, is seated beside a being whose only fixed form is wildness, is Origin, when four legs and fangs ruled the earth before the coming of man. There's a hyena warrior brooding beside this mystery, chin on his fist, wrapped in a trench coat full of guns and blades, his perch of sparkling granite wet with gore. The leopard to his left reclines lazily, her eyes far away, an empress clad in a crush of alluring crimson on a throne of cut crystal whose glassy depths imprison countless worlds.
Yet it is the Ninth, the one in the center on the dais' dais, that first catches my attention. The red dragon is twenty feet tall, a tower of muscle and teeth, his great, gold skinned wings spread archly to frame the others. This figure is statue still but for the lazy tendrils of smoke that rise from his smoldering scales. His eyes are as orange as a planet core, burning, unblinking, entrapping the wisdom and madness of millennia.
So it's true, I thought.
I had to prove it to myself. I held my paw up, envisioned a white rose. I didn't dare do more, afraid I would provoke them.
The thorns of the flower were sharp pain as my fist clenched around its stem. I felt something like vertigo, this world that wasn't a world a gentle, nauseating spin.
"Yes," the dragon said, amused. His laughter rolled like thunder. "You're a quick one, aren't you? All you have heard is real."
"Then why do you need us?" I heard myself say.
The Ninth's eyes narrowed. "Here we are what we should be...beyond this place though, well..." he fell silent, looked at Cheryl suddenly. "You. You're the leader?"
The vixen started to salute, then stopped herself. "Yes," she said simply.
There was a pause. Then the dragon folded his wings, cool air washing over us in a crisp rush. "You are very skilled, mortal. Your memories are impressive. It takes much to impress me."
She waited. While she did, it dawned on me the dragon had read our minds, that all of them had read our minds. I felt numb. They knew everything.
"She's patient," the leopard in crimson purred idly, with just the specter of respect.
"I'm not," the hyena warlord snarled. "Enough intrigue. The mission is simple, instruct them and be done. The sight of the short-lived makes me sick."
"Nonsense," the gaunt coyote said breathily, his gray eyes sparkling with a rapturous fascination as he leaned forward, watery trickles of blood oozing from his throne of flesh as he shifted his weight. "Watching their cells divide is soothing. They should stay for a...a banquet, yes."
The immense lion giggled like a school girl at this statement.
"Enough," the dragon said quietly, dangerously. "On behalf of my fellow Councilors I apologize." His voice was full of regret, had the tone of a trusted friend who had made a mistake and wanted nothing but to make up for it. "We so seldom have visitors, have spent so long among ourselves worrying about the course of the war that we've lost touch. That, in part, is why we wanted to meet you."
One of the vixen's ears twitched. The movement was so slight I wondered if even the Nine had noticed it. "And the rest?" she asked.
"Learn" was the word the dragon spoke. It was what the five of us were shown that meant so much more.
-