Read Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming Online
Authors: Van Allen Plexico
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure
His eyes widened.
“Ah. Those. Yes. I do know.”
He laughed then.
“Point of fact,” he said, “you might be surprised, I think, about the level of demand for those stones. Quite surprised.”
That puzzled me. Was Buchner merely trying to drive up the price? Did he honestly think I’d believe that anyone else could be interested in them? Impossible.
“I do not know what you see in them,” he was saying, “those ugly red stones.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and dug around in it a bit, finally withdrawing a small cloth pouch.
“Ah.”
From the pouch he drew out a dark red crystal, about the size of a grape, and held it up to the light.
“Here we are, yes,” he said, handing it to me.
I gazed into the crimson depths of the crystal and allowed myself to feel a measure of true happiness for the first time in quite a while. Within the particular structure and properties of this gem, and those others like it in Buchner’s possession, dwelt the possibility of hope for my cause. These small stones gave me the opportunity to shake the foundations of the Golden City, and to force Baranak and the others to respect my might.
Buchner had not discovered the gems, for that was not his specialty. No, he was no discoverer or inventor. Nothing original had ever come from him or his organization. His specialty lay in the field of storage. He lived to acquire things and hoard them away. And what he kept, he kept safe and sound for as long as desired, with very few questions asked. For many in the Outer Worlds, and some in the Alliance itself, Buchner represented the best option for securing valuables and protecting them from any sort of loss—theft, disaster, invasion, or simple disappearance. It seemed that valuables kept elsewhere had a nasty tendency to disappear, but items stored on Candis—and especially within Buchner’s facilities—always remained safe and secure. Few understood why this should be so, but after centuries of mysterious disappearances of valuables all across human-occupied space, the wealthy and the near-wealthy had learned it was worth the exorbitant rates charged by Buchner and his competitors to stash their most precious belongings away on Candis.
Not so coincidentally, Candis, of course, happened to be the one inhabited world where we gods could not force open portals from adjacent dimensions. As I said, things tended to remain safe on Candis that inevitably and mysteriously vanished when kept elsewhere.
“Yes,” I breathed, nodding slowly as I gazed into the stone’s sparkling interior. “This is the one. I believe, when we discussed them previously, you said you had a private stock of at least sixty or seventy of them on hand.”
I handed the crystal back to Buchner and smiled flatly.
“We also discussed a price, should I decide to buy.”
A pained expression crossed Buchner’s face. Dropping the stone back into the pouch, he walked back around his desk and sat down.
“Ah, my boy, that is a problem,” he said at last. “Yes, a most vexing one. For, you see, I cannot sell you those stones.”
Anger flared within me instantly. My fists clenched and I forced myself to relax them. Glaring at Buchner, I managed a low, even voice.
“And why, might I ask, would that be?”
I leaned over the desk, closer to his face. My voice was nearly a whisper.
“Are you attempting to raise the price on me?”
The guards around Buchner had subtly come to greater alert during our conversation, and now they all moved a step closer. Buchner waved them off.
“My lad, I would sell you these puny rocks if I could. Believe me, I have no use for them, and they merely take up space in my vaults that could be put to more profitable use.”
“Then why?”
“Because,” he said, “they have already been sold.”
I froze. My mouth actually hung open for an instant before I forced it closed. The ancient grandfather clock across the room ticked once, twice, three times, its sound now like thunder. I breathed in, out. Buchner’s eyes met my own. The moment hung a second longer. Then I straightened myself up and stepped back from his desk. The guards, Evelyn, and Buchner himself all appeared to relax a bit.
“So, you see, I have no choice in the matter,” Buchner was saying, though I was scarcely listening. “I cannot sell you what I no longer possess.”
“Who?” I asked simply.
“I cannot tell you that,” he said. “You know this. It is private.”
“Why would you sell them when we had already—“
“We had discussed, yes, informally, a possible sale. Some time ago. But my buyer was definite, and had the money on hand. He made a very reasonable offer and I felt I had no choice but to agree. Anyone would have done the same.”
I breathed slowly, in and out, again.
“Now,” he said, smiling flatly, “if that is all of your business with me, I am afraid that I have other things to do, so—“
I raised a hand, cutting him off in mid-sentence.
“No one else would have wanted those stones, Buchner. There has to be more to it.”
He flared. “Is no more to it! Another buyer came and offered a generous sum! They are gone! Now leave!”
The guards moved forward, some of their hands reaching for us, others reaching for sidearms.
I reached out myself, metaphysically, took hold of the Power, and drew it into myself. My hands, now raised palms-outward to shoulder level, blazed with blue flames, and a shimmering sphere formed around Evelyn and me. The guards, startled, pushed up against it and were forced back.
“What is this?” Buchner demanded. He stood behind his desk, his face flushing bright red. “Again? Some kind of weapon is brought into my office? Impossible!”
I heard every word of that exclamation, and things began to add up for me. “This is not the first time you have encountered such a display, is it? Here, in your own office, despite all your safeguards and scanners.”
Buchner glared at me, saying nothing. The guards looked to him for instructions, but he ignored them. Long moments passed.
Carefully I allowed the crackling, blue energy sphere around us to expand, overturning furniture and forcing the guards back further. In front of me, the sphere pushed up against Buchner’s desk, which in turn started to slide back into him, forcing him back into the wall. He cried out in surprise and sought to crawl out from behind it, to no avail.
“You have seen this sort of power before, have you not?” I asked again, my voice booming within the enclosed space of the office.
“Yes!” he cried. His face was a mask of anger and bewilderment. “Yes, from the one who bought the stones.”
“Who was it?”
I forced more energy into the sphere, pressing all of the others back harder into the walls.
“Who?”
“I do not know his name,” he hissed. “But he was a big man, muscular. Very rough, very tough individual.”
“Baranak,” I whispered. Evelyn met my eyes and nodded. “He had a beard, right?”
“Not precisely, no,” Buchner replied through clinched teeth. “A—um—a goatee. Yes.”
“A goatee?” I frowned. “Was he blond?”
“No… The goatee was dark. But otherwise, he was… quite bald.” He gestured at the blazing sphere of energy that pushed against him. “He could do something like this, as well. What is it with you people? But it was red. Red fire.”
“Red,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
He groaned as the desk pinned him tighter to the wall.
“Please—?”
“Oh.”
I relaxed the flow of the Power and the sphere around Evelyn and myself shrunk down until it only just surrounded the two of us. My mind was racing.
Him
.
What possible use could he have had for the stones?
The guards picked themselves up from the floor and glared at us, but hesitated, awaiting some definitive signal from Buchner. Angrily he gestured for them to push his desk back into place, and then climbed slowly back into his chair. He straightened his dark suit, and fixed his eyes on me.
“He took them all,” I said flatly.
“Yes. Well, not all, actually.”
Buchner fished the pouch out of his pocket.
“I kept three for myself. I wanted to find out what was so special, so valuable, about them.”
I was eyeing the guards. They seemed to have relaxed a bit, having received no attack signal from their boss.
“And what did you find?”
He shook his head.
“Nothing.”
I opened a hole in the sphere surrounding Evelyn and me and extended my hand toward him. He looked at it, glared at me again, and handed me the pouch.
“Are you robbing me, then?”
“I will transfer the funds to you when I get back to the ship,” I told him. “Based on the price we discussed before.”
He said nothing, merely continued to glare at me.
I turned and started for the door. My mind was filled with conflicting emotions.
So close
.
I had come so very close to possessing armaments capable of enabling me to storm the City. Now, that was gone.
I looked down at the pouch, squeezed it.
Three
.
Only three crystals. No more. Thus had my crates of weapons become useless junk. I wanted to scream, to rage in fury, to tear Buchner’s place down around his ears.
“We have no further business here,” I said, my voice tight.
Buchner glared at us, made a quick gesture, and the guards moved out of our way.
When we reached the other end of the room, the door slid open and we passed through it.
As we walked down the corridor toward the hangar area, we heard Buchner’s tortured voice echoing from behind us, shouting the question that would surely haunt him the rest of his days:
“Who are you people?!”
CHAPTER TEN
“He could have been another one of your people,” Evelyn was saying as I piloted the ship up and away from Buchner’s compound.
The escorts that had followed us in had emerged behind us again during our departure, but this time they kept a respectful distance, and soon enough they turned back.
“He is a powerful and well-respected man within his field, yes,” I said, accelerating up through the atmosphere’s edge and into space.
“No, I meant he was pretty strange,” she replied. “Eccentric.”
I considered this for a moment, then shrugged.
“You have a valid point.”
Evelyn was reclined in the copilot’s seat, a set of magnifying goggles on her head and one of my pistols disassembled in her lap. One by one, she picked up each piece, brought it close to her face, and studied the components in detail. When she was finished, she reassembled the weapon with remarkable dexterity and speed. I doubted I could have done it any faster.
“It took centuries of research and experimentation,” I told her, “before I found the right combination of ammunition and firearm to do the job.”
She took one of the three priceless red gems I had acquired from Buchner from the pouch and studied it with the same attention she had given to the pistol.
“And these are the key, right? The ammunition.”
“Yes. They possess the unique ability to both drain the Power from a god and deal some degree of damage to him.”
“Like with Arendal.”
“I am not certain,” I replied, after a moment’s hesitation. “My pistol seemed to cause a greater injury to him than it should have, even with my own Power augmenting it somewhat. I still don’t quite know what to make of that.”
She nodded as she continued to examine the gem.
“What material is it?”
“I don’t know. It is unique. I happened upon one of them during my many years of searching for weapons that would be effective against my colleagues, and I discovered its properties. Eventually I acquired some dozens of them, using them to equip my assault force for the rebellion. But they were taken from me after the battle. Only by luck did I later learn that quite a few of them had come into Buchner’s possession on Candis.”
She pulled off the goggles and glanced over at me.
“Why didn’t you buy them from him then?”
I sighed.
“Because, honestly, they were safer with him than with me on Mysentia. Any of the others could have taken them from my palace with a little effort, but Candis’s properties tend to prevent my brethren from stealing things there.”
I shook my head, the anger still alive within me.
“I never dreamed he would sell them. I never dreamed anyone else would want them.”
Evelyn continued to nod as she slid the gem into the chamber on the side of the pistol.
“And that’s all there is to it, right? Just pull the trigger.”
“Yes.”
She looked at me, then back at the weapon.
“How many times will it fire with one crystal?”
“I don’t know. Numerous times. I believe it uses the target’s own energies against him, so it could conceivably last forever.”
Evelyn slid the chamber closed with the gem still inside and set the pistol down on the deck next to her feet, beside a duffle bag she had retrieved from my storage.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll be keeping it, for now,” she answered. “And I don’t think you’ll object.”
I studied her face a moment, then nodded once.
“Yes. You’re right. That’s fine.”
She hefted the pouch with the two remaining crystals, then lifted her duffle bag and dropped the pouch inside. I saw two more pistols in the bag.
“The other two we can give to Cassidy and Kim,” she said.
I hesitated again.
“If you trust me with one, you’ll trust them as well. They’re my crew,” she said.
“Alright. Fine.”
She nodded, zipping the bag.
“If we find them,” I said.
“When we find them,” she countered. Her voice carried cold steel.
I nodded. “As you say.”
We flew on a bit in silence, the gray sphere of Candis slowly shrinking behind us.
“They’re not entirely unique,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“These crystals. You said they have unique properties. But that’s not entirely true, is it?”
“What are you—oh.”
I realized then that she had to be referring to the silvery metallic trees we had encountered in the sandy, bowl-shaped world before.
“That is true. But the effect was quite different, with the tree material. There was no controlling, no focusing the flow of the Power. Those trees are like sponges, somehow. Unlike anything I have ever seen. Very dangerous. I was fortunate to escape the effects of the piece that ensnared me.”
I stroked my chin, considering.
“They might well have weapons applications in the future, yes. But I doubt they could be used as ammunition for my guns.” Smiling, I added, “But it is a pleasant enough thought.”
She eyed me warily.
“You have an odd idea of what makes a pleasant thought.”
I snorted.
“And here,” I said, “is an extremely unpleasant one: Aside from these three pistols, we are now carrying a cargo of worthless weapons. And that is a thought so exceedingly depressing as to make me want to drop a thermonuclear bomb on Buchner’s headquarters.”
She glared at me.
“Just a thought,” I said, waving dismissively. “Just a pleasant, pleasant thought…”
The violent jolt shook us both out of our relaxed states, and nearly shattered the ship around us. Alarms wailed and lights across the console changed from green to red.
“Someone’s firing on us,” Evelyn said instantly, her instincts honed via years of experience on warships kicking in.
She brought up the tactical display and studied it as I executed a rapid series of evasive maneuvers.
“A ship—a larger ship—just behind us and closing fast.”
We shook again as another blast deflected off the shields and armor. I grew deeply concerned—my ship was tough, but not designed for heavy combat.
“I’ve seen that ship before,” Evelyn said suddenly. “Yes. It’s the same one that attacked us on the way to Candis.”
“Great.”
I keyed in a string of navigational commands even as I continued to jerk the ship around in as unpredictable a course as I could manage without killing us myself.
“But who?”
The barrages of fire forced me to alter our course to such a degree that we were soon headed back in the direction of Candis. By the time I figured out what was happening, of course, it was too late.
“Can’t you open us a portal out of here?”
Evelyn’s voice carried considerable strain; she had studied the tactical displays and knew what I was rapidly discovering for myself: that the other vessel had us completely outgunned and overpowered.
Even as I sought to summon the Power and do precisely what Evelyn had suggested, I looked up at the forward display, saw the growing circle of Candis just ahead of us, and felt my heart sink.
“No,” I said. “I cannot.”
She looked up then, too, frowning, and then remembered what I’d said and understood our situation. She groaned. For Candis, and the space surrounding it, held no access points for those such as me. We were reduced to what the ship could do for us.
The communicator crackled to life.
“Lucian,” the voice said, deep and rich but very feminine. “I know you are there. You cannot escape. Do not attempt to do so.”
Evelyn looked up at me as another volley of fire rattled off the hull; not a full barrage, but just enough to remind us that we were in the gun sights.
“Who was that?”
“That was… not good,” I replied. “Give me all the power you can spare to the engines.”
Evelyn manipulated controls on her console and I punched the acceleration. My ship roared forward. Immediately, vastly increased weapons fire from the other ship hammered on our hull, shaking us violently.
“So,” Evelyn said, “I take it your relationship with Ms. Not Good is… not good.”
I executed another torturous series of maneuvers, dodging most of the fire, but not nearly enough of it.
“I will take it as a very positive commentary on the state of my relationship with her,” I said then, “if she does not completely riddle us with energy blasts within the next few moments.”
She riddled my ship with energy blasts. Try as I might—and try I did—I could not avoid even a fraction of the barrage that came our way. Though it seemed like hours, surely only scant seconds passed before every warning light on the display boards flashed red, flames sprung up from under the consoles, and finally whole pieces of equipment broke lose and tumbled to the deck. My ship did not have much life remaining to it, and that fact saddened me—though not as much as the possibility that Evelyn and I might share that condition with it.
“Hold together!” I begged, struggling to work the nearly powerless controls, fighting to steer us away from Candis—and knowing we were not nearly far enough away yet.
“Where’s the escape pod?” Evelyn cried, clutching the duffle bag containing the weapons.
“There is no escape pod,” I replied, smashing a fist down on the console in frustration.
She gaped at me. “What?”
The ship disintegrated around us and we were flung into the void.
# # #
At previous points in my life, I had generally enjoyed the vantage of open, empty space. To stand in, say, an observation dome aboard one of my larger vessels, leaning back in a cushioned chair and gazing out at the infinite blackness… losing myself in it, feeling at once godlike and yet tiny to the point of insignificance… for whatever reason, always this appealed to me.
Until now. Now I hung weightless in space, a miniscule speck adrift in the void. Beside me floated the human woman who had followed me this far. She still clutched the duffle bag, something I was glad to see, at least for her sake. With each of us experiencing some degree of shock, we both breathed rapidly, which was not good, considering we had a very limited amount of air to work with. Surrounding us, at a distance of about twenty feet in any direction, a blue sphere of energy blazed, keeping the scant atmosphere in and the vacuum out. My outstretched fist clenched from the effort, I willed the sphere to remain strong and solid, and hoped beyond hope that nothing distracted me from that effort.
Nothing such as, say, a massive gunship, swooping in to stop a mere hundred yards away from us, ports open and weapons ready to fire.
Evelyn glanced at me, at a momentary loss for words, then blinked and reached down to her belt, the belt of the flight suit she had borrowed from my ship’s locker. She activated the small, mobile communications unit attached to it. It crackled to life, and a voice emerged from it.