art by Prince Satyrn
The creature, red and clumsy like a lobster, bucked against her in vain. Ariachne applied just enough pressure to let it feel the chitin bend just so, pushing against the soft mesh of tissue that made up its body. Its remaining antenna wriggled uselessly against her palm, the stub of the other one shivering and spurting green ichor. Pivoting one hand on her thumb just so, she wrapped three fingers around the antenna and bent it just enough to drive her point home.
"Tell me, or I break the other one."
The Shaum stopped moaning and stayed perfectly still. Slowly, it stopped clattering its claws and let out a long, slow hiss just so the woman would know that he was beat. The woman had descended on them with a pack of Hounds, broken the assembly lines, and caught the conspirators in the act of loading the Voidcraft carriers bound for off-world.
The Shaum foreman fought and ran. After all, he bore the secret knowledge of every base—the rough position of every single insurgent encampment—inside his tiny mind. When cornered, he attempted to take his life like a good soldier. But he had been broken, just like all the rest.
"Ostaneeesss—" the foreman hissed through the pain. Ariachne bent the stalk further, to make sure. The foreman squealed like a larva, repeating the name over and over.
Ostanes, the prison planet. The place where the unwanted of the Dominion were sent to toil and scheme in the shadow of the Sun, packed tightly near the planet-core, doomed to live out their days in maddening proximity without hope of escape.
From the thoughtscape of the Other, a new image emerged, unbidden. An image of the newborn homunculus, bursting from the clay top of the hissing tabernacle, smooth skin dripping with bile, his forehead wreathed in Azoth-flame. How appropriate: the Red Lord, cast in Sol's flame. Despite herself, the woman trembled with newfound delight, without any urging by the Other.
"Lady Logos?" the Alpha of the escorting Hounds stammered. "How shall we proceed?"
"Burn this place. Burn him as well," Ariachne said, shivering with delight even as she snapped the foreman's antenna in a single motion, tossing it without a second thought over her shoulder.
"And find me a sun-barge."
Hopping from an inter-system trireme and commandeering an officer's quarters in the Dreadnought Radetzky, the woman flashed her credentials at a greenhorn captain of a Novarra-class prison transport Voidcraft that made the routes from Vemana to Ostanes. The man looked her over, half-recognizing her from the Imperial stills but mostly wondering about her purpose out there, at the edges of the Empire, the place where only the mad and the terminally unwanted would ever dare to go.
For two weeks, Ariachne subtly glided through the prison ship. To pass the time, she suffered the company of political dissenters and free-thinking zealots on their way to their off-world gaol, before making planetfall. From there, clad inside an asbestos-lined exo-suit, she walked the short distance from the Hellmouth that led into the prison-hive all the way to the Zenta Basin where the sun-barge had waited, according to her instructions.
No sentries had been posted around it. No effort to secure it had been made. The golden, refractive surface of the barge shone like a newborn star, reflecting the scorching rays of Sol above. Even through her protective gear, the woman could feel her perspiration turning into vapor in a matter of moments, fogging up her visor-slits.
By the time she had finally trudged across the hard earth, the sand long since fused to black glass along the shore of what a billion years ago had been a sea brimming with life, Ariachne's skin had become red and raw in places. Inside her helmet, her hair had become cracked and ashy from loss of moisture.
To keep herself busy during the launch and the slow trek as the sun-barge prepared to slingshot the perihelion, she allowed herself the pleasure of wading into the Other's borrowed memory. They no longer fought each other for this privilege. Now that the traitor was at hand, they had little left to fight over.
In those long, quiet moments of perfect melding, Ariachne and the Other realized that they weren't all that different, after all. Trapped in the same body, they had both somehow learned to love the traitor; sharing the same mind, they had both also come to hate Him with a similar, fiery intensity. In this compromise, they had negotiated the specifics of their hate. The Other hated Him for abandoning her, for leaving her to be broken and twisted into a weapon that his enemies would drive into his heart and destroy Him forever. Ariachne hated Him for his hubris, the waste of his godlike potential. For this, they would kill Him.
The chymical reaction had finally settled, their Rebis achieved—alchemical matrimony—binding them together until the end of time. Under the rosy glow of the sun's rays, filtered through the tinted glass of the sun-barge's cockpit, Ariachne Logos was reborn. She was a gestalt born from hate, its veins bubbling with bile. Together, they had blossomed into a wolfsbane configuration. Glowing in their shared malice, their every pore fit to bursting with poison. But the best dosage, the smooth stinger that would fell the Red Lord...this, they had planted in the most vicious of places.
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Part VIII, the conclusion of
Part VIII, the conclusion of
by Konstantine Paradias & Edward Morris
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Fantasy and Science
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