“Yes,” Howard interjected, when he saw Lilia’s mouth bunch up for a scream. “I trust Machaeus. When it makes a threat, I trust that it intends to deliver.”
“We left my brother alone at their stronghold!” Lilia screamed anyway. A single tear beaded from each eye as she clutched the throttling controls of the ship. The Cerberus ripped through the SkyLine at record speeds. Anyone outside the blue tunnel would see it as a flash of lightning screeching past. There were, however, precious few people out to witness it. The WCC had issued an emergency lockdown of all Protectorates since losing contact with several high-ranking Officers.
“Lilia,” Demi murmured, a hand on her shoulder, “I can never apologize enough for making you do that. I don’t deserve forgiveness for it.” Lilia loosened on the controls, just enough that the lives of those on board were out of immediate danger. “But…Marcus is off-grid. Many others of his rank are. The Dragons fled their base. Machaeus mentioned Mercury, which has no perceivable strategic advantage for them. It all adds up to something huge. We’re all that stands between that something huge and…everything.” Lilia sniffled and eased back on the controls to a speed just above legal limits.
“Then don’t apologize. Don’t try to explain it to me again. I’ll get us there,” she conceded and continued to fly the remaining crew to their destination.
It was a cramped ride inside Demi’s auxiliary ship for three people, but his was the only one left. Demi, Howard and Lilia flew down close to Mercury’s colorless surface. A brief life scan from the Cerberus had led them here, to a spot just around the bend of the planet from the blinding blaze of the sun. There was but one structure on all of the scorching gray marble of Mercury. From the skies, it looked to the Dogs of War like a shrine, but it was almost too ornate to be called a shrine. It was more like a miniature cathedral. Scalloped pillars held up a central, high-pointed roof and walls on two sides. A massive hole in the center of the ceiling let light in on a device and console the Dogs couldn’t make out from so high up, mounted on an altar. What had appeared to be dust from the Cerberus they now saw as hundreds upon hundreds of Faders. They lined up in ranks and files, each square unit led by a much taller Dragon general. At the sight of the auxiliary craft above, the army turned its collective glance up. In the center of it all were three figures at the entrance to the cathedral. A Dragon of ruby scales, a much taller one of teal crystal color and a single Fader with thicker hair than his lesser-ranked brethren.
“Are we connected?” Demi whispered inside his ship. Uncomfortable inches away, Lilia answered:
“Thanks to some upgrades from my old crew, we can aim the big one any time. It’s that one.” She pointed to a sub-panel wired into the main controls to the side of the viewing screen. Demi plucked it up and locked onto the three figures at the cathedral entrance.
“Let’s take her in. Remember: lesser generals first,” Demi reminded what remained of his crew. With that, he activated the turrets beneath his craft.
Demi’s auxiliary craft ripped across the star-splotched sky over Mercury. A rapid spray of Chrysum bolts spiked down into the planet. Two Dragon generals, then three, were incinerated before jaws filled with the silver fire of retribution. The Dragons spat giant orbs of Chrysum in arcs that sailed past the Dogs of War on all sides. Demi wove between each smoldering white comet. He returned fire to fling steaming bits of scaly muscle and insectoid claws in every direction below. Still, the three at the center of it all stayed calm. The armies never broke rank.
Demi dipped below an onslaught of silver heart-fire, just low enough to pick up a certain sound on their ship’s speakers. A high-pitched ring filled the ears of the three Dogs jammed in the craft, though not so distant and muffled as they’d heard it before. The triggers jammed under Demi’s fingers, entirely unable to fire.
“Is that…” muttered Lilia though a spiking headache.
“That’s the Chrysum-disruption frequency, but…I’ve never heard it so strongly before,” Howard struggled to say. It loudened enough to turn their whole Chrys
um-filled ship into a single note, shrill concert hall.
“The controls!” Demi shouted when he tried to pull up. The ship’s nose only turned further down, toward the planet. “I can’t…” He struggled to yank them up, along with Lilia and Howard together. Even six hands couldn’t unlock the navigation bars from their locked position now.
“But why… They…” Lilia growled. Then she saw through the viewing screen, the black mist that swirled through the armies below. Particles of darkness collected around each of the Dragon generals, shielding them from the frequency. “Machaeus…” Only then did a small group of Faders break form. Their unit parted down the middle to make room for Demi’s auxiliary ship. It slammed straight into the hard clay of Mercury.
Demi, Lilia and Howard were twisted into an even tighter human knot upon impact. The flare of heat from Chrysum ignition all around them chased them from the cockpit to the emergency hatch in the roof. The last to escape, Lilia thought to flip the distress switch for the supporting crew in the Cerberus above.
She emerged from the roof of the craft to a sea of glinting, plate-skinned bodies. The sun just barely peeked over the horizon of the tiny planet, lighting their ice-coated clay field in a sparkling flare. Without the fifty-eight days of shade prior, this temple might never have been built. Rows upon columns of Faders turned in to face the Dogs of War, covered in soot and battered by impact. They stared, silent. Over their heads, towering Dragons glinted gemstone eyes. All of them waited in the long shadow of their cathedral, for an order. A signal. It came when the lone Fader at the center of the cathedral lifted his beak-lips.
“Kree mo tak ma tabrah!” it screeched over the masses. At once, every Fader in every battalion took a single step in toward the Dogs of War.
Their first instinct was to close their eyes. To hide in darkness, until the ripping and tearing ended. Even Lilia, who held out hope that the supporting crew was taking aim from the Cerberus, clenched in anticipation of the end. She wondered how many pieces she would break into before awareness slipped away. She wondered if the pain would outrun the shock before it was over. Then a sound wave crackled through Mercury’s atmosphere. It was like a cosmic bubble - pop. The next second, a white column of light surged down from the Dense Fusion Cannon of the Cerberus. It blotted out the stars. Chrysum fountained down onto the planet, onto the three figures at the center of the army. The beam condensed, too bright to face directly. Their silhouettes were lost in the white waterfall as its pure heat tunneled twenty feet down into the crust of the planet. Then, all at once, the Chrysum beam dissipated.
The Faders froze, eyes trained at where their leader, Dormis, had been only a second earlier. Anything left of him scattered to rejoin the Universe at a subatomic level. So, too was the red Dragon known as Krystis dissolved beyond biology. All that remained in the twenty-foot crater was a floating egg of glistening black metal. The Dogs of War looked on, mortified, as the shell crumbled. from around the body of the teal Dragon, entirely unscathed. Each shard of his shield returned to black dust and swirled out over the crowds.
“Hello, Dogs of War. I am called Caullen,” declared the Higher Order Dragon in the tainted tone of darkness, like Sophia had in Deepcloud Pillar. At the sound of it, a collective wince spread through the bodies of every single Fader.
“Muto mar harest! Magrar! Magrar!” one of them shrieked. At the sound of it, all semblance of composure shattered. Faders turned to sprint in any direction they could, into one another, over their Dragon Generals, anywhere to get away from Caullen. “Magrar!” The word rippled and hissed through the scrambling crowd. The other Dragons, of which remained about ten, waded through them, toward the Dogs of War. Lilia, Demi and Howard readied their Chrysum rifles. They stood their ground on the island of wreckage from Demi’s ship, ready to fire.
“Should we call you Caullen or Machaeus?” Demi demanded. The nose of his rifle wandered from the teal leader to the other light-scaled Dragons closing in on them, unsure where to actually fire. He decided on a light scarlet counterpart off to the right, since the Cerberus’ Chrysum beam had hardly scratched Caullen. He fired a series of five bolts at the beast, all of which were swallowed by the black shield of mist that swirled out from under its scales.
“Whichever you prefer,” said Machaeus, through Caullen. “It’s time for the Dragon’s age of darkness to end. No more hiding. This shrine will be the first of a thousand. Not only will the Faders worship us as Gods, but all who have what we need. What we want… That’s what Caullen would say. It’s what he thinks, what he clings to, in his little box inside this body.”
“Focus fire on the red one, on the right,” Demi whispered to Lilia and Howard.
Three rifles converged on the scarlet Higher Order Dragon. Each of them jammed down the trigger, and held it until their gun clicked empty. The Dragon lumbered on toward them, against the tide of Chrysum storm. It paid no heed to the dissolution of its black shield with each impact. It took three full power cells, but one of the last bolts did finally burn through the blackness and the Dragon skull behind it. Caullen hardly glanced as his underling fell limp. The other nine would surround the Dogs before they could reload.
“What Caullen didn’t know was that there is an Almighty evil in the Fader religion, too,” said Machaeus, through Caullen, “One that far predates their saviors, the Dragons. An empty existence before the ridiculous notion that everything must be filled. That everything must have meaning and purpose. It was right under him all along, and now it’s inside him. Now it’s come to return things to the way it was. The way it was meant to be, long before you or Dragons or anything.”
“Return it how?” Lilia demanded. She snapped open a Chrysum knife and handed a rod to Howard as the Dragons closed in around them. With the mass exodus of the Faders nearly complete, it was only the circle of the Higher Order around the Dogs of War by the cathedral now. Demi, Lilia and Howard turned their backs to one another, a shell of hopeless defense.
“The same way you do with any program that’s developed glitches. You reset,” Machaeus explained. He pointed back to the altar of the cathedral behind him. “You put it back the way it started.” Lilia watched in frozen terror as a rod spiked up from the device on the altar.
“The sun… What are you going to do?” she screamed. She poised her knife ready to stab at one of the Dragons that neared her. Just before she had to, a wave of pressure descended over the Dogs of War from above. They and the Dragons alike stared upwards into the jets of a personal craft.