ΔV Pt. 14

The skeletons started into the factory.

"What in hell?" Madeleine hissed.

Lata stood, with effortless grace. She held her rifle to her chest and jerked her head. "Come on!" She hissed -- and the partisans followed after her, loping after Lata while Cinder forced herself up and started forward. Cinder didn't know how to use a magjile -- which was why Kaleb was certainly better with a rifle than her. So, instead, she primed one of her spells, whispering the first few words of an incantation, to bring the spell to her palm. There, she let it hang, a sizzling bead of white light at the tip of each of her fingers.

There were twenty undead in the factory now -- but they were focused on their task. Ten skeletons were unloading heavy satchels from the wagon they had dragged to the factory, while the other ten were within the factory proper. All of them snapped their glowing eyes up as gunshots began to ring from the line of trees, Lata being the first to drop into a kneeling position. At the range she had picked, she couldn't have missed, and the spray she fired took three skeletons apart. The real strength of the bullets she fired wasn't in their kinetic damage, as there was no flesh to rip or tear through. Instead, it was the spell that Cinder had carefully placed on every rifle.

That spell flared golden, and when the light faded, the skeletons were crumbling to ash, their cries of alarm dying in their undead throats.

Two partisans rushed for the front door and one fell, blood exploding from his chest, his rifle clattering to the floor. The skeleton that had shot the ghosts was standing in the doorway, his SMG in one hand. He was wearing an armband, Cinder saw -- but she had no time to think. Instead, she thrust her fingers at him.

Three darts of light shot outwards and slammed through his skull at the same moment he pulled the trigger. The SMG kicked and a trio of flchettes thunked into the tree beside Cinder, quivering, the bark splintering and spraying her with a fine patina of wooden chunks. The skeleton dropped, but the partisans were none too eager to enter the factory proper. Cinder let the spell in her hand fizzle out, then began to hiss and whisper. Her palms touched together and she breathed out an growling snarl. Golden flames exploded from within the factory, the unmistakable light of holy wrath.

The skeletons sprinted out, several of them screaming. The withering crossfire of the partisan's hunting rifles caught them, hung them in the air for a single hideous moment, then let them drop upon the ground, their bones turning to ash and blackness. Panting, Lata stepped away from her firing position as the flames winked out.

"What was that?" she asked.

"You're not a paladin, Cinder," Kaleb said, chuckling. "Or did you get religion when I wasn't paying attention?"

"Illusory images are easier to conjure than actuality," Cinder said, breathing a slow, shuddering sigh out. Then she shook her head and ran towards the man that had been shot in the chest. She frowned -- but he was already dead. In the darkness of the forest, she could hear someone being noisily sick. Madeleine stepped over to whoever it was, touching their back, murmuring softly in French outside of the ring of the translation spell.

"Are the fuckers fighting each-other now?" One of the partisans asked.

Lata, wordlessly, knelt beside one of the satchels. She yanked it open and frowned at the collection of cans and wires within. "This is a jerry rigged explosive -- fertilizer, common chemicals. They'd need, well, that whole wagon to bring the factory down." She frowned, hard at the door, as if she was expecting the factory to answer her questions. Cinder shook her head.

"This doesn't make any sense," she said.

"Well, it seems that me and my ancestor have more in common than I thought," Madeleine said, stepping over to the skeleton that Cinder had killed. She yanked the armband off and held it up, pinched between two fingers, as if it was particularly distasteful and she didn't want to touch it more than she had to. She held it out and Cinder looked, without comprehension, at the crimson color and the faintly Vedic symbol that was crudely daubed on with black paint.

"Fascists?" Lata asked. "The Dark Lord doesn't talk like a fascist on his propagandist. He talks more like a communist -- even if he's bringing it with the barrel of a gun. His skeletons wearing a swastika makes as much sense as him blowing up his own factory." She stood. "Cinder, you know the undead. How would this happen?"

"It shouldn't," Cinder said, walking slowly towards the factory. She furrowed her brow as her eyes swept around the interior -- she could see the daubed patterns of magic on the floor, the ceiling. She may have been a simple sellspell, but she could tell the gist of what the arcane rituals within were meant to do. And seeing them made her stomach tighten. She chewed her lower lip as Lata stepped up to stand beside her -- then Lata shoved her back and snapped her rifle up, one handed, in the same movement. Cinder stumbled and almost fell onto her ass -- while Lata barked.

"You! There! Out! Hands up!"

When Cinder peeked around the door, she saw a pair of shimmering, ghostly hands thrusting out from through a closet doorway. A few seconds later, a ghostly woman stepped through the door. She looked as if he was a step or two above the completely mindless undead...but there was something very unusual going on with him. Cinder tried to place what exactly it was as Lata and the rest of the partisans moved forward, ringing the ghost with firearms rather than taking him and trussing him up. Kaleb helped Cinder right herself somewhat, and Cinder leaned slightly against him as she thought.

Then it clicked.

The ghost's eyes lacked any sign of submission or control. There was only the raw, animal terror of...

Well, a human being whose coworkers had just been shot to death and who was now surrounded by a gang of ruffians with guns. She looked as if he had been flung from the fire to the frying pan, and Lata did not look like she was ready to be gentle. "Can you speak?" she asked, her voice flat as she slung her rifle over her shoulder, the strap hanging tight to her. The ghost nodded, mutely. "What are you doing here?"

"I-I'm...my name is...I have a name," the ghost whispered. "My name is Belinda. I died in 2101, in a car crash. And I was set to make this factory run itself, with magic. Well, that's what I think I was doing. But then there were two voices in my head, then one voice, and it said something about how I was free, but also, to be wary of...and then the voice went away, and then there were the skeletons, and they were shooting..." The ghost was starting to hyperventilate, despite the fact that she was dead and didn't need to breathe.

Lata turned to face Cinder. "How would someone take control of the undead from the Dark Lord?"

Cinder chewed her lower lip. "By claiming his phylactery. But that would..."

The pieces clicked into place.

Her eyes widened.

"They'd have to kill him."

***

Annie paced back and forth. The song of the undead was gone -- there was just herself, in her head. And the wait. Reports were coming in to the shambles of the undead administration that Dale and her had made. She had freed each of the generals that had been chained to her and spoken to them earnestly about what needed to be done...and to her shock, almost every single one had decided to stick with her. She still felt like every time she turned around, they should have all fled, having come to their senses. Instead, they were organizing the disparate, confused masses of the undead that were still under her control.

The undead she had freed.

Mordechai watched her pace. "You did the right thing, Annie," he said.

"Oh, yeah, the right thing," she said. "I just threw a wrench into our logistic organization at the same time that an evil Nazi is trying to claim power. And people are scared and they're confused and I don't know what to tell them." She put her hands over her face. "And it should only take eight minutes for the response to come back from the fucking fleet, why haven't they sent a response yet?" She turned to the ghostly, vague figure that hovered in the corner of the room. "You sent them the message, right Sukhdeep."

Sukhdeep was the strangest ghost that she had ever met. Most ghosts were more...present. But there was a vauge, half-there quality to him, even after she had breathed some necromantic energy into him. The bands of magic that would have transformed him from a ghost to a revenant or something similar had instead skidded off his shoulders and left him just as he was. And his communication was always distant and twisted, as if it was bouncing through a corridor of mirrors, rather than whispered merely from beyond the grave.

But he was still willing to work with Annie. At least...

She thought that he was.

She was pretty sure he was nodding.

"I do kind of wish you hadn't fucked things up in the first place..." She muttered softly as she turned away from Sukhdeep.

"You know, it is entirely possible that the fleet got the message and simply has not yet decided how to respond. It is three, four fleets out there, with who knows how many admirals. Have you ever heard how too many cooks can spoil the pot?" Mordechai suggested.

"I know, I-" The computer in the center of the room flared and bleeped and Annie screamed with delight, running over to it as she leaned forward -- and the screen flicked on. Several people she didn't recognize were there: Three admirals (she recognized the uniforms), some Chinese guy in a fancy costume with what looked like a fucking dragon on his shoulder, and several elves. But most importantly, sitting there at a place of moderate importance, was her father's sister's widower, Captain DuPont.

Annie felt a...shivering disconnection between her old life and now. The gulf stretched out before her and for a few seconds, she barely heard what the American admiral, who was the first person to speak, said. Annie blushed silver and tapped at the reverse button, to replay the message that had been dumped into her lap back at her.

"Miss DuPont, we have received your laser communication," he said. "And you can understand how and why we'd be highly skeptical of your claims. We have discussed the magical ramifications with our magicians, and while it is possible that such a disruption of control exists, they have pointed out that at the end of the day, it does not matter whether you are telling the truth or not. You have engaged in an act of war against the entire human race, and put the future of two solar systems at great risk. We are returning to Stark "

Annie put her hands over her face. "Ugh!" She groaned. "Fucking...of course, they're not going to be reasonable."

"It's eminently reasonable to see a conquering army as something to be a little upset about," Mordechai muttered.

"Don't fucking sass me Anielewicz!" Annie thrust her finger at him. "This is your fault."

Mordechai shrugged one shoulder and went back to fiddling with his phone. He had been in his twenties when he'd been killed in the Warsaw Uprising -- it had taken him less than a month of being raised from the dead to become as addicted to his phone as most people. He pursed his lips slightly, then said: "Again, you're the one who raised the fucking SS."

"I..." Annie put her hands over her face. "Fine. But we need to move past blame and onto fixing this."

"Then give yourself up," Mordechai said, looking up at her. "If the rest of the human race wants your head, and you want to end the war, then you have to face up to your crimes."

Annie turned her back on him, her arms crossed over her chest as she glared at the computer console. She clenched her teeth and felt tears pricking at the corner of her eyes. She clutched at her shoulders, then hissed. "No," she said, then turned, glaring at Mordechai. "I wasn't wrong. I did the wrong things, Dale and I did, I mean, but we weren't wrong. Stark, Arcadia, shouldn't be chained to the old ways of doing things, not when there's a better way." She stuck out her chin.

Mordechai pursed his lips -- his thumbs pausing in his cellphone tapping. "And the Nazis?"

"I'm going to kill the fucking Nazis!" Annie snapped, then grabbed onto the webcamera that was attached to the console. She held it up and spoke into it, not trying to use the stilted, official sounding language that she had used with her first message. Instead, she just laid it out. "Listen. Right now, the guy who fucking orchestrated the holocaust runs a good chunk of the fucking planet and he owns the entire orbital fleet. I can pin him down for you, but I won't unless you recognize and accept the terms that Dale and I have set out: That magic and technology need to be used to make the world a better place. And if that takes power out of the money grubby oligarchs that our countries, then fuck em."

She scowled. "Right now, you don't exactly have a choice. If you show up in orbit and take them out, you still have a huge ass planet to try and track him down -- and each day we fucking waste is another day for Heydrich to..." She trailed off. "I don't need to paint the fucking word picture for you."

She put the webcam down.

***

Qasim tapped his fingers together and listened to the Admirals muttering to one another. Captain DuPont was looking...

Amused.

"She's your niece?" Qasim asked.

"Yeah," DuPont said, his voice growing soft as he shifted his seat a bit closer to Qasim. Hua nosed at him and DuPont, with the casual expertise of someone who had been interacting with Hua for any length of time, batted his head away. Hua giggled, softly, as DuPont continued. "She was always listening to leftist podcasts and every Thanksgiving, when I was in Earth orbit for the holidays, she and I would get into an absolute screaming row about military policy..." He sighed, slightly. "I miss her. I hope the rest of the family is doing well..." His face fell, thinking of some loss that Qasim was not about to pry into.

"She's right, you know," Qasim said. "I spent my entire youth cutting down trees and burying them in a salt mine while people like her..." He nodded to Admiral Wei Xu. "And the higher ranks in the Neo-Maoist party could make all the decisions in my life. I don't even know if they were the right decisions or the wrong ones. They never told me. They never had any accountability." He shook his head. "And it's just as bad on Arcadia as it was back during the Qing dynasty -- with Emperors and illiterate peasants. The fact they're red and horned doesn't change that."

"Radical," DuPont said.

"She's a traitor," Admiral Zakaroff snarled. "She sold the whole human race out to an goddamn necromancer."

"We haven't gotten any credible reports from the Earth about her supposed reforms," Admiral Cho said, shaking his head. "We have to assume, for the moment, that she's lying-"

"Fuck her reforms!" Zakaroff's face was turning red. "If you give a man a fish, he'll lay on his back and get fat. We saw that in the 20^th -- she's talking about hamstringing humanity's future so lazy children never have to grow up." He was turning purple now.

"For the moment," Admiral Cho said. "Miss DuPont, the Dark Lordess, or whatever we want to call her, has one thing that we cannot argue against. Heydrich has control of the orbital lanes and a hundred ships and we need to still-"

Qasim sighed, then stood up. His palms slapped onto the table. "Everyone, shut up," he said.

The Admirals gaped at him.

"The fast pass is merely an excuse to get me in the same room as the Dark Lord," Qasim said, frowning. "Taking out the fleet is important only if the Dark Lord is not dead. But the Dark Lord is already dead -- and the undead are still there. But if we can kill the fascist, then those who have been controlled by him will be free to turn their backs on him. Even if that still leaves large chunks of fascist skeletons running around, that doesn't matter if we control the orbit. Admiral Cho, how many American astro captains are fascists?" He pursed his lips. "How many Chinese, Admiral Xu?" He shook his head. "If we take out Heydrich, then those hundred ships become our ships. Or, at worst, Annie's ships. And she's already proven willing to talk. So..."

He frowned. "Send her a message that we agree to her terms. If you want to renege on them and nuke her, do it at least when a fucking madman is not running two thirds of the planet."

Qasim sat down. He could feel Hua swelling beside him with pride.

And then the shouting began.

***

Ceres was going a rather terrifying speed by the time it approached its flyby. The fleets in orbit had the entire strategic and tactical doctrine of every single human astroforce to draw upon, and were guided by the mind of a hardened member of the SS. While Reinhardt Heydrich didn't have any particular skill or training in the fields of orbital mechanics or orbital combat, he had a sense for tactics and organization. He knew who to listen too. And, while the idea of a dwarf planet being used as a protective shield had never been considered by any of the great powers, there had been ideas floated about in each military about using cold, black mirrors.

The idea behind a CBM was that a large, cold mirror could reflect any part of the sky at the telescopes of an enemy fleet. In theory, you could hide a ship behind it and 'sneak' up to someone -- doing what Ceres was managing with stealth rather than mass. But the CBM had never been built, because the astroforces of each Great Power had rapidly become so diffuse that no mirror could be angled to completely cover the thrust plume of a nuclear thermal rocket. And, what was more, said thrust plumes were rapidly found to be far too long to be covered -- diffusing out into a massive cone that could be detected.

In the end, stealth in space remained an impossibility.

But Ceres had never been about being stealthy.

And the strategies to shoot at someone through a CBM had been fished out. Missiles, lobbed at extreme range, were programmed to zip past Ceres, then immediately act inwards and detonate, to take advantage of the proximity of the ships moored against Ceres to rip as many of them to pieces with every blast. But thanks to the angle of Ceres and the restrictions of the missiles and the orbital pathways, the orbital fleets could only fire the missiles at a narrow angle, and couldn't spare the reaction mass for much maneuvering.

It was almost still good enough. The first wave of missiles approached and the ships mounted near the lip of Ceres' curve -- specially placed to put their laser turrets out of the shadow -- began to fire their weapons. UV, X-ray, infrared lasers, each of them narrowed and angled on the missiles...and none of the missiles dissolved or flew apart. The telescopic sights showed that the missiles were each strange -- they didn't return more than faint indications on radar or LADAR, and nothing at all on infrared. Fortunately, the elven mages were able to puzzle out a modification to the spell that could enchant a rifle or a sword into killing an undead -- or, well, rekilling -- into enchanting the lasing chambers of the turrets. With that enchantment, the missiles began winking out.

The orbital fleet responded by increasing the number of missiles -- but with the predictable routes, the lack of maneuverability, the sheer number of lasers, and the massive protective shield that could absorb any direct, straight shots, the end result was that the missile fleets of spectral warheads were picked to pieces, with greater and greater ease as they came closer and closer. Aboard the ships, the elven mages, the elven warriors, the marines, all of them gathered on Ceres, in the flimsy domes that had been inflated and warmed to serve as ritual chambers. No where else was larger.