Last of the Immortals (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 3) (5 page)

“She is a bull in a china shop, Brand,” Loncar snarled quietly. “She needs to be removed from command before she does something terrible. If she was insubordinate with me, she will be all the more so with the Senate. She must be stopped.”

“And that is the end to which we are working. But one does not simply remove the First Lord of the Fleet without a very good reason and a great deal of support. Nils Kasum is even more popular than Jessica Keller.”

“Then find that reason, Brand,” Loncar said flatly. “Before it is too late.”

Chapter V

Date of the Republic May 29, 394 Fleet HQ, Ladaux System

Auberon was still hours from departure, even with every systems and weapons tech available on the station hastily stuffing the great carrier to the gills with supplies. Jessica figured that Denis could handle that. He certainly didn’t need her looking over his shoulder every five minutes.

Mendocino
had already backed away from the station and started her sail out. She wasn’t going to be pushing her engines as hard as the rest of the squadron, since she could contribute nothing useful to the fight. Her job was tending to the survivors.

If there were any.

The Fleet Replenishment Freighter would meet them on the other side. Whether that was across the long jump to
Ballard
, or the River Styx, remained to be determined.

Jessica passed the time at the small workstation in her cabin, studying old battles the Republic had fought against Emmerich Wachturm. Everyone had done that at the Academy and after, but rarely had anyone done so with this degree of determination.

He was one of the greatest commanders in centuries of interstellar warfare, a man who made the impossible look easy, who found unexpected angles of attack that were plainly obvious in retrospect. The man who was probably personally responsible for the fact that the
Fribourg Empire
was currently winning
The Endless War
.

And she had to beat him.

Simple as that.

He had a battleship. And a battlecruiser. And a whole raft of smaller escorts.

And his legend.

She had a battlecruiser as well. And war–borne destroyers. And
CR–264
to protect them.

It wasn’t enough.

She had Moirrey Kermode. And
Mischief
. And the element of surprise.

The Red Admiral had to know that, had to have planned for it. Much of what still remained classified were simply extensions of previous gimmicks, obvious if you spent time asking how to take it to the next level.

It still wasn’t going to be enough.

They were going to ride to
Ballard
’s rescue, proud and gleaming knights atop valiant steeds.

But this wasn’t going to be Agincourt.

It was going to be Thermopylae. She was going to take the Three Hundred into battle against the Persian Emperor and an army that shook the very earth when it marched.

The heroic Greeks would most likely die, perhaps having bought enough time to save the woman around whom all of this rotated, the AI named Suvi.

Jessica growled under her breath as she watched a projection of the Blackbird slowly rotate in space before her.

Wachturm did not get to win. It was Ian Zhao all over again. And Jing Du.
Corynthe
.

It was going to take everything she had. But they did
not
get to win.

Jessica stretched by rotating her shoulders ninety degrees each way. The clock on her desk surprised her when she glanced at it with a yawn. She had been awake for around fifty hours at this point, cat–napping twice for maybe thirty minutes at a stretch and surviving by pouring coffee tastelessly down her throat.

It had finally caught up with her.

Jessica checked for messages once more and then moved from her desk to the bed. She took a moment to take off her slippers and her tunic, stretching out on the rack in just her undershirt, pants, and socks. The chances of an emergency in dock were slim, but they were habits that would stay with her until she died, most likely.

She turned the lights down to a very dim setting where she could sleep peacefully, but where Marcelle could still navigate the room if she came in.

Briefly, Jessica wondered if Marcelle had put something in her most recent coffee to make her sleep. She wouldn’t put it past the woman, whose primary job was taking care of Jessica.

Her eyes grew heavy. She had been burning every candle at every end, these last two days.

And she would need the sleep. She still had to face The Red Admiral at
Ballard
.

Ξ

The air was suddenly warm, almost sticky. Her shirt was plastered to her back.

Jessica found herself standing in a small punt, a flat–bottomed boat, poling herself along what could charitably be called a swamp. The bottom was close enough under the muck that she could push herself along, somewhere.

Around her, trees were slowly being strangled by some sort of airy moss that hung like vines and spider webs, every way she turned. Reeds seemed to suggest a shore somewhere close by, but it was invisible from this distance. Bark on the trees was so gnarled with time that she imagined faces staring back at her, haunted, or alone, or lost. Exotic birds hid in the darkness and shade. They chittered and squawked in the brush, a cacophony of sound in the otherwise silent scene.

There was an open path before her through the trees, water lazily drifting towards some unseen and unknown sea. Jessica paused in her poling to look down at her reflection in the still water.

She wore all black. Everything black.

Tight pants tucked into thigh–high leather boots with flat, heavy heels. A long scarf tied around her waist, trailing nearly to her knees on her left side. A jacket–like tabard, almost a long–coat, but slashed to the base of her ribs on each side for easy movement. The sleeves down barely past her elbows, tucking tightly into a pair of soft suede gloves so black as to absorb life.

It was the sort of outfit Moirrey might have cooked up for her, had she evinced a desire to attend an All Hallows Eve party dressed in gothic darkness. Certainly, nothing one would find in her closet.

At least, she hoped not. This was a dream, she hoped. Anything was possible.

Jessica rarely dreamed. She knew that science said she did dream, and just didn’t remember it on waking, but she could remember very few dreams in her life.

Always living in the future, not the past.

The dream insisted she pole forward, deeper into the swamp. Jessica was never one to shirk her duty, so she put her back into it, easily balancing the punt as she pushed off.

It turned into a clearing. Or whatever the right term was when it happened to a swamp instead of a forest. She made a note to look the term up later.

If she remembered this dream.

The trees had faded back from the water’s edge slowly. Where it had been dreary, almost oppressive, now the sky opened up, a gap of several hundred meters across, with her in the middle.

The heavens were red.

Not the burnt orange of a lovely sunset back home when she was a little girl. No, this was the color of blood. The sun was either a brighter red, or hidden behind blood–red clouds, filtered but not lost. It had the dim quality of sunset, even as the sun approached zenith.

The silence had become oppressive. The waters were utterly still except for little wavelets she sent out as she balanced the punt. The bottom of the swamp was still close, but she could feel energy building, like an impending lightning strike.

Jessica shifted her grip on the pole, intent on using it as a spear if necessary. The day had that feel.

Ripples started around her.

Something
emerged from the water like a snake, poised as if sniffing the air.

Another joined it on her left.

And then a third to her right.

She heard the splash of a fourth behind her, but could not look back without bracing the pole for stability.

There was enough sun to identify them now as they came towards her.

Tentacles.

Their skin appeared blue. Bright azure. Arms as thick as hers, probing, tasting.

Seeking.

They found the boat.

Latched on carefully.

Jessica considered striking at them, but they were not moving, once they found the wood of the punt.

Just holding on.

A larger splash to her right drew her attention.

An eye, larger than a dinner plate, staring at her from a mass of flesh larger than the boat she rode.

It had that baleful stare. She expected it to blink once at her, ominously.

Instead, the tentacles all torqued at once, spilling her out of the punt.

Jessica found herself falling.

Ξ

Jessica landed in the center of a perfectly flat black plane that seemed to go on forever. The sky was the gray of ash. There was no sun, the little–enough light filtered in from somewhere to see.

Jessica still wore black. Everything was dry, as if the swamp had never happened.

She supposed that it hadn’t, dream physics being something she had never considered before now.

A sound turned her head to the right.

The great blue creature with the tentacles was there. If a squid could swim in air, and reach a mantle length of six or seven meters, it would have appeared thus. It was a rich, royal blue in color, banded at the ends of the tentacles with maroon, right where a human might have a wrist.

One eye tracked her.

Jessica was close enough for one of the tremendous arms to embrace her, but they pointed off to one side, as if the creature was swimming in a sea she could not fathom.

Just the baleful eye.

It did not speak, so Jessica remained silent as well.

They watched each other for seconds, minutes, eternities.

The creature began to change.

It was a subtle shift. Fading, morphing, altering.

Becoming.

It resolved itself finally into a shape Jessica knew well.

A beautiful woman with blue skin and long black hair, dressed entirely in black. She had four arms, double–shouldered front and back, with the rear arms much longer than the front ones.

In her hands a saber, a
main–gauche
, a severed head, and a floating planet.

Kali–ma
.

The Goddess of War.

She resolved herself fully material, glowering down from a height of nearly five meters.

Jessica glowered back. Just being a goddess wasn’t enough to intimidate her. Not anymore.

The woman smiled down at her knowingly and began to fade. She did not move, but seemed to recede to a great distance.

The goddess began to transform at the same time, flowing subtly into a new shape, heavier, broader, bulkier. The shoulders widened, the arms on each side merged, the face changed.

In moments, Jessica found herself facing a new creature. This one was shaped like a man, but again five meters tall. The creature’s skin had changed to red, the hair brown.

He wore red and assumed a human form. One Jessica knew.

Emmerich Wachturm, if she had hired an artist to draw him as a horned daemon from the darkest hell imaginable.

The monster snarled down at her with a howling laugh that was painful to endure.

One arm reached down, a hand as big as her chest threatening to engulf her.

Jessica sidestepped the attack, blocking with the
main–gauche
she suddenly found in her right hand.

The monster took a step forward as she moved.

Jessica slashed with the saber abruptly in her left hand, felt it ring solidly off the creature’s flesh without drawing blood.

The daemon could not be killed with steel.

She blocked his other clawed hand and danced backwards as he growled and tried to grab her again.

Emmerich Wachturm. The Red Admiral. Daemon made flesh.

Jessica growled back at him.

He was not allowed to win.

Simple as that.

Jessica swung her second right hand forward, aimed at the daemon with the short rifle she held and fired a blast.

Second right hand?

The flesh on her arms had turned bright blue.

The rifle was a fléchette, firing a handful of explosive darts that tore the monster’s flesh when they hit.

The howls of rage turned to sudden cries of agony.

In her second left hand, Jessica held a beam pistol unlike any she had ever seen before.

She laughed at the fiend as she aimed. Jessica felt herself growing in stature as she did, until she met him eye to eye.

Time slowed down.

He tried to rush her as she aimed the pistol. The shot was brighter than the non–existent sun in this dismal place. It struck the daemon square in the center of his chest and bored straight through. The pistol ejected a spent cartridge and cycled another power disk into the chamber.

It looked like a tiny little miniaturized Primary generator, but Jessica knew instinctively that it was normal sized, and the two combatants were the size of starships.

The shot slew the daemon.

A hole opened beneath his feet, sucking him back down into whatever hell had spawned him.

A claw grasped at her ankle before she could evade him.

Too quick to react, Jessica found herself drawn into the hole as well.

Jessica fell.

Ξ

Jessica awoke with a cry of terrible anguish. Falling had been a surprise, but Jessica knew that many dreamers awoke from falling.

“Nightmare?” Marcelle asked quietly.

Jessica was back in her cabin. Marcelle was sitting in the comfortable chair in the corner, reading a book of some sort and keeping watch over her sleeping charge.

“Of a sort,” Jessica replied, trying to breathe.

“Need coffee?”

Coffee. The cure for almost everything.

Almost.

“No,” Jessica said, rubbing her face to wake up. “Juice, please?”

“Coming up.”

Marcelle closed the book and rose in one fluid motion, exiting the cabin in three long strides and leaving Jessica alone.