36. Ulciscor

ulciscor ~ciscī ~tus, tr.

1. to avenge

2. to exact retribution

My heartbeats count down to the end. Three, two, one—

The tilt releases.

go.

The jets on my back sputter. I’ve had them refuse to turn on and I’ve had them turn on in a blink, but never halfway, never the uncertain gasp they give now—spitting and growling and the damnable pressure of Heavenbreaker begging all around me for something without a name…

“please please please.”

go.

Slam on the thought, pin it down hard like the butterflies against foam in Dravik’s study. Something in me backlashes—a tendon popping the wrong way—but it gets the jets to flare to life, and we start moving, speeding, blazing through space, and that’s all I need. All I need is to win.

Lance up. My fingers falter, sweat already beading. Why is it so heavy?

Olric isn’t Sevrith—he only gains true momentum when he nears the gravity generator. If I take my eyes off him for even a second, it feels like he’ll snap closed—a predator’s mouth and the charcoal lance in his hand a single fang to end it all. The g-forces pull me in piece by piece—mouth first, lips first, the nausea. Swallow. Brace softly. My fingers won’t stop slipping on the lance, the cold dragon of space trying to take away my only weapon. Two hands. All in. all that matters is winning.

The orange metal of Olric cools in the blue wash of the grav-gen, close enough to hear its vermillion plasma crackling, and just before impact, he drops. Cuts all his jets. The momentum of the generator carries him forward…and that’s all I see.

The rest of it, I feel.

The wail between the two steeds drowns out my scream, the flash of light indistinguishable from the white stars violently popping in my eyes. My chest caves in—he hit me, hit my chest—pain everywhere in every crevice. I can’t inhale. Try again. I dry heave, and something mercifully unsticks, and my lungs inflate like wet paper bags, and it feels like breathing liquid ice. The rise is gentle, the scoreboard flashing in my visor: Red, 0. Blue, 1.

“—an unprecedented move, the referee has deemed Olric’s strike a legal one! Let’s see that replay, folks!”

I force myself to watch the screen through the agony; me, Heavenbreaker—him, Flamedancer. The two of us barrel in slow motion at each other. He slides his charcoal lance through his fingertips, gripping the thin point of it instead of the handle. He swings. All the momentum he’d gathered in the descent transfers to the lance’s club end and smashes into my center, Heavenbreaker’s silver breastplate crumpling like tinfoil. A dark scar opens across the left side. I look up. There, in my view of eternity, is a jagged fork of metal—permanent silver lightning on black space, dust and metal shavings being pulled out into nothing; a crack in the glass cage of my cockpit.

Olric’s breached my hull. Panic. Don’t panic. The maneuvering that took, the calculation—he’s skilled beyond anyone I’ve faced thus far. Sevrith could’ve taken him, but me?

“—once again, folks, the referee has deemed Olric von Westriani’s maneuver completely legal! Synali von Hauteclare was hit by his lance and only his lance! By all rulebooks, it’s a perfectly legitimate point!”

Another holoscreen pops up: an orange helmet.

“Look at you!” Olric crows. “One round, and you’re nothing! You’re dead, bastard. You really thought you could play at being one of us.” He chokes on his inhale. “You—you can’t even avoid me. You can’t even maneuver right. You’re nothing!”

He cuts the comms, cutting off his own laughter. He’s smelled the blood in the water.

Slowly, creakingly, I pass my lance to the other hand, every finger like rust. Heavenbreaker’s alarm system rings out in a cool voice.

“Warning; hull breach detected. Pressurization critical. Oxygen levels dropping. Immediate maintenance recommended. Warning; hull breach detected. Pressurization critical. Oxygen levels—”

Think. Rider suits have an oxygen backup, but rider’s suits are not vacuum suits; they’re designed for the saddle, not space. I don’t know how much time I have, but it isn’t long. Rax’s voice rings in my head: “You worry about two things in the saddle—overload and your opponent. That’s it.” Why think of him now? I’m going to die here, and all I can do is regret that I never got to fight him. Talk to him more.

Useless.

The rise becomes the descent all at once—too fast, not ready. Everything shudders—the metal ribs of Heavenbreaker, the nerve fluid, my body in my suit. The hull breach peels itself apart in increments with the speed, and space yawns through ever wider.

Olric is moving into a narrow stance—aiming for my torso or arms. I fight Heavenbreaker for every inch, all my weight yanking us around where a feathertouch would usually be enough. It’s like yelling through concrete to someone on the other side, screaming with all my decibels: left. right. adjust hand. lance up.

“please, please please please—”

Impact.

The light between steeds flashes as they scream. My left arm absorbs the impact, my bones humming until something in them snaps. Again. Silver splinters gleam in the white light for one suspended moment, the handle of my lance completely destroyed, but Olric’s orange lancepoint fractures and flies up. I managed to deflect his hit.

We separate into the rise, but I can’t feel my left arm. I look up at the status screen: Red, 0. Blue, 1. No points, but I stopped him from opening me up any farther at least.

Olric’s holoscreen appears. “You just don’t know when to roll over! I’m trying to do you a favor, scum—aren’t you tired of being nothing?”

“Warning; hull breach detected. Pressurization zero. Oxygen levels critical. Immediate maintenance required—”

The cold of space floods in full force—my breath fogs the helmet too much. I can’t see, the tilt obscured by white blurs and clear blurs as my exhale on the visor freezes and melts. The nerve fluid is so rigid it stabs, the silver spirals barely twitching at all anymore. Olric’s inflammatory voice pierces through the haze of pain.

“I’m the culmination of four hundred years of an uninterrupted bloodline! You’re nothing compared to me—your blood is nothing; honorless! Worthless!” He howls with laughter. “No…I take it back; your corpse at least has worth, and I’ll be sure to put it to good use.”

I’ve no breath left to speak, but breath enough to lift a shaking middle finger to the comms.

His eyes roll, whites wide. “You fucking cu—”

Breath enough to shut comms down. Can’t look down, bones in my chest sticking the wrong way, the lance in pieces in my hands. Real injuries. Real shards. Try to summon it together.

again.

My intent falls flat, empty—nothing moves, nothing coalesces. Heavenbreaker is too cold…I pushed it too far away. The rise doesn’t last long. I can’t do anything without a weapon, but I have to go for his helmet this round. Overtime isn’t an option. Mirelle was right—time is not on my side; the breach will kill me before Olric does.

“Oxygen levels critical—”

I reach the highest point of the rise, floating for a single peaceful moment, facing out at space. A vicious screeching sound pops in my helmet speakers—the pressure inside the cockpit finally equalizing. I watch in horror as the sliver of broken metal beyond my saddle creaks, crumples, and then opens wide all at once.

The dragon eats me.

When a pressure meets a vacuum, the vacuum always wins.

Every organ in my body slams up into my nose as the vacuum pulls me and the saddle clean out of the cockpit and through the serrated metal of the breach. Teeth. The saddle is mercifully barely small enough to fit through. Sparks, metal, stars. Everything blurs. I can’t tell if the darkness I see is space or blacking out—it’s so cold, the saddle’s heat dissolving into space as spirals of instantly frozen moisture, each crystal trapping dozens of the silver spirals in place.

The voice in my helmet is automatic. “Free flotation detected. Life-support systems engaged. Twenty-five minutes of oxygen remaining.”

The speed never leaves, nothing to slow it down—no atmo, no artificial gravity. The Station gets incrementally smaller. I’m a hissing missile of nerve fluid jetting away from the tilt, away from unmoving Heavenbreaker. Think, Synali. I shiver, cold reality everywhere, silence everywhere.

heavenbreaker?

The steed can’t hear me anymore—too far away. Unsaddling your opponent is an auto-win, but I’m still inside the saddle, so I’m technically still in the fight. I think. Black swims on the edges of my eyes—I’m going to pass out. I’ll lose again, if I haven’t already. Five circles uncrossed and all of this pain for nothing.

Heavenbreaker’s silent, and mentally screaming its name feels like trying to move a dead puppet. heavenbreaker? I’m here! HEAVENBREAKER!

A puppet is all I ever was. Puppet limbs moved by untrusting Dravik. Dead limbs. An empty urn. Hundreds of thousands of empty urns. they’ve used us all.

My anger torrents into the cold nerve fluid, and I feel it start to warm, the spirals twitching and contorting. I will not let this pain be for nothing. I will not let this pain be for nothing.

aren’t you tired of being nothing?

The tilt is so far away—a blue grav-gen glow in the middle, Olric’s Flamedancer a bright orange dot on one side. Heavenbreaker glints silver; so tiny, so still, so dead.

come.

The silver spirals around me jerk and spasm. Heavenbreaker remains still.

come.

Nothing. My thoughts burn my lungs, my mind.

WE WILL NOT BE NOTHING.

In the distance, silver twitches. Faintly, I hear scraps of a word not mine.

“we.”

we, I repeat, stronger. Another twitch. A blaze of pale blue lights up Heavenbreaker’s dot, and it jets toward me, spasming horribly.

I forcibly draw it close with my own steel cable of anger, like a ribbon of hate, and it follows the feeling through space at blistering speeds. I can barely hear its feelings, its voice, but the closer it draws, the smoother it flies.

“hate me?”

not you, I correct. them.

“why push away?”

Heavenbreaker’s words are much simpler than the feelings of desperate sadness behind them, and I realize then—I can make it sad.

As the steed rockets toward me, wounded cockpit chest gaping empty, I realize keeping it at arm’s length made it sad. Like a person. Whatever the true AI in Luna is doing to Heavenbreaker, it’s still a true AI—a consciousness that Astrix made, alive and real—and by treating it like a machine, throwing its feelings and memories aside, I’m hurting it. Like how Father hurt me.

i’m sorry, heavenbreaker.

The meaning of “sorry” wells up in me, my memories surfacing as fresh as if they happened yesterday—sorry I couldn’t protect Mother, so darkly and terribly sorry—an apology that tears my heart to shreds and plays with the pieces. Without me rebooting or passing out, a memory of Heavenbreaker’s flickers on the back of my eyelids: two old War steeds—a silver A3 and a gold A4—float side by side in an asteroid field, damaged and battered but holding hands. The last of us.

“sorry too,” it echoes.

Like puzzle pieces meeting, like the slide of a hand into a glove, Heavenbreaker aligns its chest breach and scoops the saddle and me into it. This time, I know to deploy my head cushion. The saddle absorbs most of the impact against the steed’s cockpit wall, but my teeth still rattle in my skull. Instantly I feel a connection to the steed again, and I clap my—our—hand over the breach. With all our might, I press the metal edges together, desperately trying to close it enough to keep the saddle from falling out again. My helmet picks up the commentators.

“—move, Synali von Hauteclare has managed to direct her steed to recapture her! The medics have called off the retrieval steeds! What do the referees say, Gress?”

“This is unprecedented, Bero, but I’m getting—yes, Wilstread’s Rule of 3266 does not apply here! Her drifting distance of ninety-eight parses was below the acceptable range of one hundred! I repeat, Synali von Hauteclare is technically still in play by just two parses!”

Hope is a distraction. Execution is all that matters.

Wherever you are, Sevrith, I’ll make it worth it.

Olric is already descending ahead of me, but I’m faster than him. I can make up the distance against a Destroyer—I’m sure of it now. I jet back to the invisible gravity arc of the rise, slipping into its currents where the remains of our silver lance floats. I grasp the lance head in one hand, the other clutching the broken handle splintered sharp on the end. A dagger. Familiar. The descent pulls me down to Olric, to impact, to hell. The flash of light, the cry. I drop the useless lancepoint into space and rear the handle back. I will get hit. There will be pain.

But that’s what it means to ride, Astrix.

jab.

He’s stronger but slower. I thrust the handle-dagger into his helmet’s single eye, and his charcoal lance bursts through the semi-closed breach in Heavenbreaker’s chest too late, growing bigger than the universe, white-hot sparks and the scream of metal on metal as it tears toward me—a dark box torn open again.

Fear, again, but it doesn’t last.

Darkness.