Bloody Knuckles (And Other Tales) Read online

  The Fire Adept’s face went pale. “You dare to attack the Aden’than?” she hissed.

  He stood, blade raised. “We are finished.”

  Her eyes blazed then, and waves of Fire shot out from her and encased his body. He could not see the weaves through the haze of green flame that rose up from his blade and covered him in a protective shield. He grunted with the effort, pushed back, and stumbled to one knee as a fist of Earth came crashing in from his right and smashed against his shoulder. Then from above, a crushing pocket of Air. He groaned, sword roaring with green flames in front of him, and cried out as the skin on his right cheek began to burn.

  A hand grasped his right shoulder through the flames, a hand covered in crystals and rock, protecting it from the flames, with a grip that could break bone. Ian gave a shout and swung the blade blindly. The dark metal sunk into flesh with the meaty thump that he remembered, and there was a harrowing cry as the Earth Aden fell to the floor. The flames burned hotter around him, and the vision in his right eye blurred as the skin charred with the force of Air that fanned the flames from above. He screamed and pushed against the force of the gale, stumbling forward once, twice, and then three steps as he followed the weave of Air. He brought the sword up with both hands and all of his might and the gale disappeared with a gurgling whimper.

  Fire pressed down, robbing the air from his lungs. He gasped and pushed his own flames outward, bringing Freya into view, hazy through his one good eye. He gave a gargled cry and brought his blade down with both hands as he took a single step forward. The flames disappeared with a shrieking cry as Freya’s left arm was cleaved from her body, and she fell to the ground, clasping her stump as she cauterizing the wound with her powers.

  Ian stood there, shirt collar smoldering, hair singed, and the right side of his face a burned ruin. He pointed the sword down at the Adena on the floor in front of him. “We are finished!” he shouted.

  She sneered up at him. “We will never be finished with you, Jarkath. You will pay for this transgression, and we will be sure to—”

  He cleaved her head from her shoulder with one smooth movement. It fell to the floor with a wet thump. Her body followed shortly, slumping over that of the fallen Earth Adept.

  Ian could hear the cries from below as the tavern’s common room emptied out, people in a panic over a commotion that they had heard, but had not seen. He sheathed the blade, grit his teeth against the pain and reached the bed, picked up the necklace. The mienatha that would save his life.

  He spent several moments making sure the relic touched all three of the bodies on the floor. To those who would come later to inspect the death of their own, they would see trails of Sunarian magic on the bodies of their friends. He almost grinned at the irony of it, thought better of it against the pain of his burned face. Once he had discovered the powers of the relic, he had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Freya was going to use the medallion to kill him and steal his blade, masking the theft as being the hands of Sunarian spies. It was only fitting that he return the favor.

  He took the back door into the alley. All of the patrons were out front, milling about in a panic at the disturbance upstairs. He leaned against the wall and took a deep breath, looked up at the stars with his one good eye. He was finally free. They were finally free. This time, he smiled despite the pain, and made his way into the night.

  The Spectres

  By T.W. Anderson

  Spectres was a story I wrote on spec for a sci-fi MMORPG that never made it past the idea stage. I spent a good six months as the only writer working directly with the creative director sometime around 2010. This scene was written to showcase the suits that were the main part of the concept behind the game.

  Lightning snakes across the sky, the forks of light reminding me of claws reaching down towards the ground, fingers splayed wide, searching, clutching. The thunder is slow in coming. Once, I would have prayed for rain, but these days storms are anything but benevolent. The lightning could be from a dozen different sources, and none of them are things you wish for late at night. These days, I look towards the sky and pray not for rain, but that the storm will pass us by. I pray for anonymity. I pray for the survival of our settlement.

  I do not believe in gods, but I pray anyway.

  There are creatures in the storms sometimes. Specters, riding the lightning. My father used to say that lightning was simply a natural reaction of electrical charges between the ground and the sky, a discharge of energy, but that was before. Now, we watch the skies and we wait. Hope that the storm is simply a storm. A Specter is never easy to face. I have killed many in my time, taken their power for my own to use against the next attack, but it is never easy.

  The twins, Malin and Raish, have faced Specters alongside me hundreds of times. The first was maybe eleven years ago, or was it twelve? So easy to lose track of time. It doesn’t matter. They are both good men, and looking out towards the storm building on the horizon I take comfort in the fact that at least there are a few who have the strength to stand, just in case. We watch the horizon, and we wait.

  A quiet beep on the comm. I keep my eyes on the lightening. “What is it?”

  “There’s a disturbance in the southern valley.” It was Laina. Her voice is slightly tinged with worry, but otherwise calm.

  I turn my head in her direction, but it’s impossible to see anything in the darkness of night. A brief flash of lightning illuminates the entire landscape for an instant, but I still can’t make anything out other than the outline of trees and the ridge-line etched into my short-term memory from the flash of light. The settlement is below, tucked away in the confines of a small valley. We have been here close to two years now, living in the safety of the Tilifin Mountains. Two years, and not a single incident. I concentrate, and feel the familiar tingle at the base of my spine as the nanobytes in my suit rearrange themselves, working their way up my spinal column to the ocular nerves. The ridge comes into focus, bright as day. I can barely make her out within a small copse of trees, nothing more than a blurred outline almost indistinguishable from the undergrowth. I would have missed her if I didn’t know she was there. She’s putting all her suit energy into stealth functions. “What exactly did you see?”

  She points towards the south, and I follow her arm with my gaze. “I’m not sure. If you look there, at the valley floor, where the Horse and the stream meet the trees….” She trails off as… something… flickers between the trees, just beyond the rock formation we have come to call the Horse. A shadow, dark even against the darkness of night. I curse under my breath and turn towards Malin and Raish.

  “You two stay here.” Both of them nod. All of our suits are keyed to the same channel, so there is no need to explain the situation to anyone. I turn back towards Laina. She is roughly three hundred meters away from me, and at least a hundred meters up the ridge among the trees. I make the adjustment, feel the tingle course its way down to my legs, and I jump. The first leap gets me roughly halfway, and I almost lose my footing on the side of the slope before I make the second jump, landing just outside of her position among the trees. The lowest branches scrape against my suit as I duck beneath them, the smell of earth and leaves heavy on the air. I lie down beside her and focus my vision once more, the familiar tingle nothing more than a background function, like drawing a breath or blinking my eyes.

  “Any change?”

  She shakes her head. She has modulated the tone of her suit to match the trees and dirt, and I do the same. “Whatever it is, it’s keeping to the shadows. I can’t make anything out.”

  “You’ve checked the all the visual spectrums?”

  She doesn’t bother to respond, merely grunts at me.

  “Right. Sorry I asked.”

  I can’t see anything down in the trees where the shadow had been moments earlier. I strain, but I can’t pick up any sort of energy signal, heat signal, or otherwise. I know I have better vision enhancements than she does, but I still can’t see anythin
g. “Stay here. I’m going to get a closer look.”

  I keep the color of my suit dark, and I set the dampeners to mask my heat signature. It won’t protect against something seeking outside the thermal ranges, but the chances of something that powerful being out here in the middle of the mountains is fairly slim. Still, one can never be too cautious. I take a few moments to survey the landscape, plot my course, then I cautiously make my way down the side of the ridge towards the valley floor.

  The stream is our main water source. It lies a few hundred meters down a side valley from our encampment, but the disturbing part about whatever is lurking around down in the trees is the simple fact that the valley is a dead end. There is only one pass in and out, watched at all times, and I know of only two people who have enough flight modifications to make the change to winged form and come in over the mountains. Knew one of them, anyway. Rumor had it that Klethal had been missing for at least four years.

  I am almost to the Horse formation when I see the anomaly again, black against the shadows of the trees under a starless sky thick with cloud cover. I transfer more of the energy from the dampening on my suit to my vision, but whatever it is slides away from my sight, like oil slicking the surface of water. And then I see it. A distortion near one of the trees, the lower limbs swaying gently in the direction of the shadowy distortion, bending as if by some unseen force. I curse, audibly.

  I open the main channel so everyone can hear. “Laina, take the twin’s place. No matter what happens, keep an eye on the storm. Everyone else, back to the settlement. Now. We’ve got incoming.”

  A distortion can only mean one thing: a rift.

  For years, the only portals the Specters stumbled through were the ones established by the bombs the day the world fell, but in the past decade random rifts have been opening up all over the world, always in the vicinity of those wearing suits. Some of our brighter minds have suggested that the energy we collect from the Specters and contain in our suits is somehow tied to the rifts, and that they act like a sort of homing beacon for the stronger Specters, which is why we watch the skies so closely every time there is a storm, but we have no choice. The nanosuits are the only protection humanity has against the Specters, and until we can find a way to push them all back through the rifts and close the portals, they are our only line of defense.

  Random rifts used to be rare, and while I have only witnessed them three times in my life, all three of them in the year before our move to this valley. The last one saw most of our settlement wiped out, and was the reason behind our move deeper into the wilderness in hopes of establishing a new home, far from the cities where the majority of the Specters roam, latching onto the largest energy signatures left over from the war.

  We are supposed to rebuild here. We have two teenagers in the camp, and two newborns. I grit my teeth. Not tonight. Not this time.

  I feel a sudden gust of wind rush past me, pulled inwards towards the trees. The rift is growing stronger. There is a sudden series of loud popping sound as some of the smaller trees give way under the weight of the gravitational pull, and the familiar flickerings of energy are beginning to crackle within the thicket, centered around a small pool of darkness no larger than my fist. It surges suddenly, expanding to nearly three meters in all directions, then shrinks to the size of my fist again. I do not wait to watch the formation, nor do I risk getting pulled through myself. I transfer energy to my legs and I run for the settlement.

  Lightning streaks across the sky as I run, dirt and gravel churned up beneath my feet and thrown backwards with enough force to punch through an inch of carbon steel. Every spare nanobyte in my suit has been transferred to my legs, and I run as fast as I have ever ran before. The rocks and trees blur, and I leap the last hundred meters up the slope, landing hard at the top of the incline where the valley levels off just outside of our settlement, my feet sinking several inches into the dirt with the impact. Stefan and Clare are already there, their suits skin-tight and dulled, barely reflecting the distant flashes. I take a deep breath and turn, looking back down the path. There is nothing yet, but we all know what will come when the portal is formed.

  Specters. They are always there with the rifts, pulled through into our world with the gravitational disturbance, whether they like it or not. Some are benign. Most are not.

  Stefan has some of the best defensive mods in his suit I’ve ever seen, courtesy of one of the Specters we faced down during the last encounter with our settlement, just over two years ago. We may have lost a lot of lives that night, but we had at least gained one small advantage that would help us on the line tonight. Whatever we face, Stefan will be at the front line. He has already adapted his suit, and his entire body is covered in thick scales that can shed flames, bullets, energy, and more. He nods at me as I clasp his shoulder, his breath a rumble that I can feel beneath his suit.

  “How long do we have?” Clare is ice, her voice flat, emotionless. She is ruthless precision. Where Laina is our recon scout, with some of the best stealth mods at our disposal, Clare is our marksman, a steady hand with any longe-range energy weapon. Where I am fast, as swift as the wind, she is bottled aggression, tightly controlled and lethal when pointed in any one direction. She never misses.

  “Maybe two minutes. It was ripping trees up just a moment ago, which means the distortion is almost complete.”

  Stefan grunts. “It won’t get past me.” His voice is a low rumble, stone grating against stone. He rarely speaks, but it is clear how much of a change the nanosuit has made. The energy levels of his armor are far beyond the last time he had pushed this hard, to have his voice change that much along with the physical appearance. He is closer to a full physical transformation than I thought.

  Our nanosuits were designed by the scientists of my father’s generation to collect the energy from the Specters. It is how they protect us. Every Specter is different, and not all of them share the same attributes when they come through the rifts. The suits are our only way of shielding against the energy that the Specters use when they attack. None of them have ever been able to make a physical transition through the portals, but their projections are deadly nonetheless. The nanobytes within our suits are designed to latch onto the quantum gravity fields surrounding the Specters and, if timed properly, we can manipulate the quantum fields to reverse them, literally stripping the essence of the Specter from it, taking it into our own suits. Over the years, the suits have collected energy like continually-growing battery packs, every successive wearer having access to the energy and mods from the previous wearer, but unable to wield it for a time until a proper bond with the suit can be made. When that happens, a change occurs.

  Some Specters are fast. Others wield energy like a blade, forging weapons from electricity, or from quantum strands. Some take on a more physical form, like the one we last faced, armored with scales, and looking like something out of an old children’s tale or one of the old holovids my father used to show us when we were children. Dragons, I believe they were called. Others can fly in various forms. Our suits adapt depending on the types of energy we have collected over the years, stolen from the Specters themselves to use against them.

  If enough energy is collected one can manipulate the nanobytes within a suit to make a physical transformation, taking the molecular restructuring to another level. Where we can normally use specific energy types to increase strength, augment speed and sight, or buffer against energy weapons, if enough energy of a certain type is gathered, a corporeal change can occur. The suits can recreate the molecular structure of our bodies, allowing for a person to sprout wings and fly, to cover their bodies in scales and take on the form of a beast, hide in the shadows of a tree in the form of a field mouse, or to run like the very wind itself, nothing more than a wisp of energy streaking along the quantum streams.

  My father could make the change. Out of the eight of us left now who wear the suits in our settlement, only Stefan has reached the first stage and can adapt his armor phys
ically. I am close behind him. One must manage to kill a great many Specters, or the most powerful, in order to achieve that level of energy, not to mention reach a level of attachment with the suits that takes years to obtain. Sometimes, when I put every single ounce of energy into my speed, I can feel something happening, a strange tugging at the base of my spine, a tingling that goes beyond the transition of nanobytes throughout the suit and my bloodstream. It is almost as if I can feel the very flesh of my body melting away, turning into pure energy. I no longer feel the ground beneath my feet, or the wind against my suit. It is almost as if I am a knife, cutting through the air with no resistance. A blade, thin and deadly.

  Soon, I will have reached a level of bonding with my suit to be able to make the change.

  The twins appear suddenly, their suits crackling with flashes of deep purple and flickering shades of blue and green energy as they emerge from the shadows. These two share a strong bond between them, but it is one that none of us really understood. Normally a suit only meshes with one owner, the nanobytes linking to the specific DNA of the wearer, but with them it is something more. They share a connection somehow, and when they are linked it is deadly. They can tap into the quantum fields and harness electromagnetic energy, and when they unleash their combined might it is a terrifying sight to behold.

  The beep of the com is a muted echo as the twins take up flanking positions on either side of the path heading down to our water source. “Go ahead.”

  It is Marshall. He and Riean are married, going on forty years now. They are guarding the pass today. “We’re two minutes out.” His voice is slightly breathless. He is in phenomenal shape for a man pushing ninety, but age is slowly beginning to creep up on him. Still, Riean had just given birth earlier this spring to their second child, and she is eighty seven. They both have at least another thirty or forty years in them, if they are lucky. If a Specter doesn’t kill them first.