A Flight of Broken Wings, page 10
part #1 of The Aeriel Chronicles Series
Ruban glanced sideways at Ashwin, taken aback. The Zainian never failed to surprise him, somehow, and for some reason he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something he was missing when it came to the other man; something important.
Ashwin’s questions seemed to have taken the scientist’s mind off the shortcomings of the various professions, at least. Instead, his face lit up as if somebody had breathed new life into his overtaxed lungs. “More effective?” he exclaimed, looking at Ashwin incredulously. “This formula will not just make sifblades more effective, dear sir; it will change the application of sif as we know it permanently. It will herald a new era in humanity’s war against Aeriels.”
“I’m sure,” said Ashwin patiently. “But how?”
Visht took a deep breath, leaning back into his chair. “You understand how sifblades work, right? The basic principles of how sif operates. Its properties?” He squinted doubtfully at Ashwin.
As Ruban watched, Ashwin’s eyes went wide, his face overcome by a look of innocent confusion. By now, Ruban knew that helplessly bewildered expression for the fishing tactic it really was, but he kept his mouth shut anyway. It was always a good idea to keep your sources talking. The more they spoke, the more likely they were to say something useful without realising it.
Dr. Visht sighed resignedly. “Aeriels are energy beings. That’s why regular weapons don’t work against them. While they share quite a few external physical characteristics with humans, biologically speaking, they operate on entirely different principles.” Ruban felt as though he was back in his first year at Bracken, sitting impatiently through the introductory lectures, waiting desperately for the real combat training to begin. Ashwin looked interested, though, and he supposed there wasn’t any harm in letting the doctor warm up to the meat of the matter. He didn’t want to rush him, lest he leave anything important out. “Unlike humans, Aeriels do not need food or water for sustenance. While it is not impossible for them to eat, they sustain themselves primarily on energy derived directly from the sun. In that sense, I suppose you could say they’re more akin to plants than to humans.
“Anyway, because the energy they consume is more direct in nature, it grants them greater physical prowess and accelerated powers of healing. Practically, this means that flesh wounds do not affect them as they would a human, thus rendering conventional weapons useless.
“Sif, as you know, is the world’s greatest and fastest conductor of energy. It’s the only substance on earth that can sap an Aeriel’s energy faster than its body can replenish it. Sifblades kill Aeriels not by means of any physical wounds, but simply by drawing the energy – their life-source – out of their bodies faster than they can recharge their batteries.
“But of course, in order to accomplish this, you need a significant amount of sif to first enter the Aeriel’s system; enough to overcome its natural processes and sap its energy to the extent that its body shuts down entirely. This is why sif cannot be used in bullets. A bullet couldn’t carry enough sif to stop an Aeriel from absorbing energy at a rate fast enough to replenish lost power.
“Well, it couldn’t yet,” Visht said, a triumphant glint in his eye. “Reinforced sifblades are made from enhanced sif ores that have passed through extensive induced pressure to make them better conductors of energy than regular sif, several times over. A tiny amount of the reinforced sif can do far more damage than twenty ordinary sifblades taken together. Even glancing contact with a reinforced sifblade would fell most normal Aeriels. A single stab wound would kill an X-class in a matter of seconds. Once this formula has been perfected, the tides in this age-old war will turn so quickly, it would be as if centuries have passed in the blink of an eye. If everything goes according to plan, there would be no Aeriels left on earth by the turn of the century.”
Ruban knew all this already, of course. Subhas had explained the practical implications of the formula to him and Simani during their meeting on Emancipation Day, if not all the technical details. But as the doctor spoke, he couldn’t help but feel his heart hammering in his chest, his blood buzzing with anticipation in his veins at the thought of having such a weapon in his hands. Of holding it between his fingers as he drove it through the heart of an attacking Aeriel, watching the creature crumple at his feet like a discarded rag doll.
Glancing sideways at Ashwin, he saw that the younger man had gone a little green around the gills. Well, he supposed even seasoned fighters could sometimes be made uncomfortable by cold-blooded descriptions of graphic violence, and the Zainian was barely more than a kid, for all his secret Aeriel-killing techniques. Turning his attention back towards the doctor, Ruban frowned. “Everything isn’t going according to plan, is it though, Dr. Visht? The Supreme Court itself has ordered the IAW to look into the rumours of an impending Aeriel attack on SifCo. It can’t all be nothing,” he said, deliberately goading.
Visht snorted. “Oh please. People who say these kinds of things are half-witted idiots that don’t know what they’re talking about.” He stood up and walked over to one of the wooden chests, withdrawing a jingling bunch of keys from one of its drawers. Walking back to his table, he chose one of the keys and used it to open the bottom right drawer of the desk. When he straightened once more, Ruban saw that the doctor had a small black disk in his hand, a little under the size of his palm. This he put on the table before his visitors, leaning back into his chair with an air of satisfaction.
“This is the disk containing the formula. And if it were to be stolen or destroyed – which is very unlikely, considering our security measures – I daresay we would face some minor problems, a little delay in the inevitable, perhaps. The formula will still be there. It is stored, in fragments, in various locations and systems across the country. It would take some time to reassemble all of that and start work once again from where we left off, as this is currently the only full copy of the entire formula in existence.
“But the thing is, even if somebody did manage to steal it, this disk would be less than useless to the thief. The formula in it is buried under layers upon layers of encryptions and codes, created by different programmers working for various organisations across the world, most of whom had no idea about the existence of any of the others. Only about five or six people at the topmost echelons of the government and of SifCo itself have the key to decrypt even part of the code. And the thief would need at least two of them to cooperate with him in order to recover anything of value from this disk. Now, short of a hostile Aeriel takeover of our government within the next few months, I don’t see how that could happen. Do you? So, you tell me, Mr. Kinoh, why would anyone go through that much trouble to get their hands on what will essentially be a useless scrap of metal outside this building?”
Before Ruban could answer, however, a searing flash of lightning cut across the stormy sky outside, followed by an ear-splitting crack of thunder. As the trio looked out of the window, momentarily distracted, a fireball from the heavens seemed to crash into the smaller west wing of the facility, escalating into a deafening explosion followed by the horrified screams of those in the vicinity.
Before he could even properly register what was happening, Ruban was on his feet, running towards the exit, his sifblade in his hand. As Ashwin rose to follow him out, Dr. Visht called after them, his voice fearful: “Is it Aeriels?”
“Yes,” Ashwin replied.
“It was a distraction,” Ruban breathed as Ashwin came up behind him, skidding to a stop a few yards away from the west wing. He looked up at the devastation wrought on the topmost floor of the structure. It was immediately obvious to both of them, however, that the attack had been random and unplanned, with no specific target. A section of the uppermost balcony had been shattered and bits of concrete littered the landing below, while others hung precariously off the jagged edges of what remained of the veranda. But the attack had been too shallow, the devastation it had wrought limited largely to the outer edges of the building. If it had been meant to target the people working within the walls of the structure, it had been singularly inadequate an attempt.
That had never been the point of the blast, though, and Ruban knew it even as he whipped around and started running in the opposite direction almost instinctively. It wasn’t here that the actual target lay.
Bursting through the doors to the ‘Restricted’ room they had just left, the first thing Ruban noticed was the light. The second was Dr. Visht’s prone form lying unconscious in a corner of the room.
Letting the same instinct that had been driving him for the past few minutes take control of his body, Ruban lifted his hand and threw his sifblade almost blindly just a few inches in front of the streak of light that he had first noticed upon entering the chamber. It was an Aeriel with its wings outstretched, heading towards the only window in the room – the one overlooking the courtyard with a direct view of the wrecked west wing.
The blade reached the window just as the Aeriel made to fly out into the open, shattering the iron window-sills as if they were made of cheap plastic. The weapon connected, however, pinning the creature by its wing to the wooden frame surrounding the glass window-panes. The Aeriel let out a strangled cry, trying weakly to break free even as light poured out of the injured appendage. Ruban leapt forward, pulling the blade out of the creature’s wing and with one swift motion slashing its throat before it could take advantage of its freedom to fight back.
As the Aeriel’s body crumpled at his feet, Ruban caught the all-too-familiar glint of a building energy-shell through the window, shining ominously against the thunderous sky. Adrenaline coursing through his veins, he jumped back into the room just in time to avoid the blast that ripped through the outer wall of the building, almost annihilating not only a good portion of the wall itself but also many of the metal cabinets that had stood against it.
When the air had finally cleared of the concrete-and-metal particles that were all that was left of the beautiful glass exterior of the east wing, Ruban could make out the vague silhouette of an Aeriel floating mid-air in the gap now created by the destroyed wall. His vision was still too fuzzy to clearly make out the features of this new monster, but he could see the only thing that mattered: three tiny red marks emblazoned against the silvery whiteness of the creature’s wings, the tips almost glowing crimson.
Tauheen, the last Aeriel Queen – Ruban thought deliriously. That mythical creature that they had all read about in textbooks, but that had never actually been seen in living memory. His mind felt dazed, and for a brief second he thought he could feel himself shaking.
Then the moment passed, and he straightened, leaning slightly forward into the combative stance he would adopt before launching into any fight. At least this time he had his sifblade in his hand. He could feel Ashwin tensing behind him. Just this once, he almost sympathised with the foreigner. Ruban could hardly imagine a situation tenser than this one.
As they watched, Tauheen moved. And though Ruban knew it was physically impossible for her to have done so, it seemed to him almost as though she had teleported from her position near the destroyed wall to within an inch of his face.
With movements so swift he could barely follow them with his eyes, the Aeriel reached out and wrapping pale fingers around his throat, lifted him into the air as if he weighed no more than a child’s toy.
Ruban gripped his sifblade and swung it at his attacker, but Tauheen dodged easily. Leaning back slightly to avoid the blade by mere inches, she threw the Hunter against the nearest wall with enough force to knock the wind out of his lungs. Ruban tried to keep his feet but his knees buckled, unable to hold up his weight. The sifblade fell out of his hand, clattering to the floor with a sound that rung like a death-knell in his ears.
Tauheen fell to her knees beside him, reaching out to touch the side of his face almost gently. “You really are something, aren’t you my boy?” she whispered sweetly in his ear, leaning forward so that her breath brushed his skin. For a moment, his heart stopped at the sight of her eyes – dark with flecks of iridescent silver. He had never seen anything like them.
If Ruban hadn’t been fighting to stay conscious – his head throbbing painfully from where it had hit the wall – he might have laughed at how surreal the situation was.
“You’ve certainly given me more trouble than your life is worth, these last few years. But no hard feelings,” she smiled, wrapping her fingers around his throat, this time hard enough to make him arch up into the air, trying to breathe. She just pressed harder, the serene smile never leaving her lips, relentlessly squeezing the air out of his lungs.
He almost wished she would get it over with already. He had no doubt that she could kill him with a single flick of her wrist. But she seemed to enjoy drawing it out; almost as though she were making a point.
“I intend to repay all my debts in kind.”
In Ruban’s (admittedly limited) experience, eloquent victory speeches should always be reserved for after your enemy is safely dead. Because while long-winded pre-murder tirades might sound cool in principle, they were never quite worth the sheer awkwardness of having your victim escape at the end of it, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless.
Not that he wasn’t glad Tauheen hadn’t gotten the memo on that one, as Dr. Visht’s large mahogany desk came flying out of nowhere to slam against the Aeriel’s side.
For less than a moment, his assailant lost her balance, her hold on Ruban slipping as she tried to steady herself on her knees. That was all the time Ruban needed. He leapt out from under her, seizing his blade as he rose to his feet and jumping back as far as he could manage without falling out of the gaping hole in the wall. He cursed under his breath, trying not to trip over any of the toppled furniture. To say that he did not like having to fight the bloody Aeriel Queen in a space as confined as this one would be to make the understatement of the century.
Tauheen, for her part, had forgotten all about Ruban for the time being. Instead, she had turned around and was now staring at Ashwin, whom she seemed to have noticed for the first time. Ruban realised then that it must have been the young Zainian who had swung the table at Tauheen while he was busy getting strangled. He spared a moment to admire the sheer audacity of the act before readying himself to jump to the boy’s defence when the Aeriel finally attacked him.
Instead of trying to kill Ashwin, however, Tauheen let out a surprised laugh, never taking her eyes off the Zainian. The air vibrated with her mirth, and Ruban could feel his own confusion – and fear – growing with every passing second. The adrenaline rush that had kept him going for so long was now starting to fade and Ruban had to fight to keep his vision from swimming. His head felt like someone was hammering at it with a million mallets and he knew that if he didn’t end it soon, he would have no hope of winning.
Not that he had much of that anyway.
The Aeriel was talking again, seeming to have gotten over her giggling fit. “By Zeifaa, it really is you,” she was saying, looking into Ashwin’s eyes. She chuckled. “I always had high hopes for you, my love. You’re wasted back at home. Earth is where you should be, where we should be, not hiding like cowards out of mortal reach. Safaa doesn’t have what it takes to sit on the throne, she never did.”
Before Ashwin could make a reply – though Ruban couldn’t think what on earth Tauheen had expected him to say – he threw his sifblade at the Aeriel’s back. Tauheen sensed it coming and flew up into the air to avoid the attack, just as he had expected. What he hadn’t been so sure about was the second part of the plan, since he had had no time to discuss it with the Zainian beforehand.
Ashwin didn’t disappoint. As the blade flew past the spot where Tauheen had been a moment ago, its target having disappeared, the young man reached out and seized the weapon mid-air, flipping it in his hand and leaping up onto one of the chairs they had occupied earlier during their meeting with Visht. Now almost level with the floating Aeriel, he struck with a speed that could rival Tauheen’s, almost plunging the blade into the Aeriel’s heart. At the last moment, Tauheen moved sideways, causing the weapon to strike her shoulder instead, but the damage was severe nonetheless and Ruban heard the sound of bone cracking under the vicious assault.
Light flooded the room as Tauheen stumbled back a few inches, wearing an expression of shock.
Seizing the opportunity, Ruban rushed forward and kicked the Aeriel behind the knees just as she was about to land, knocking her off her feet. Then, catching the blade that Ashwin threw back at him, he raised his hands to finish the creature off once and for all.
With Ruban standing over her and the sifblade barely an inch from her throat, Tauheen’s wings flared. And with the preternatural speed – even by Aeriel standards – that Ruban had seen glimpses of before, she all but disappeared from under him in a rush of wind and silvery feathers.
She reappeared near the destroyed wall and leaned over the dead Aeriel’s corpse. For a second, her hands moved searchingly through its feather-cloak. Then she leapt off the edge of the landing into the cloudy sky beyond.
As she rose higher into the air, her humongous wings forming a halo around her receding form, she turned to look one final time at Ruban. Her unnatural eyes burned with something he couldn’t define.
Then she was gone, and all that remained were the damaged buildings and the faint screams filling the air around them, almost drowning out the distant sound of emergency sirens.
Chapter 5: Hiya
“Baan!” the little ball of fiery delight burst through the doors of the stately residence. Skipping over the scrupulously tended garden, she threw herself at the Hunter the moment he had stepped out of the sedan.
Even as Ruban picked his ten-year-old cousin up into his arms, the passenger door clicked open to reveal Simani. She held herself a little stiffly and moved with a tad more caution than usual, but apart from that there was no indication of the injuries she had suffered only a few weeks ago. She smiled at the little girl in her partner’s arms and with a conspiratorial wink, whipped out a large pack of Dairy Milk chocolate from somewhere within the folds of her multi-layered tunic. The girl squealed, wriggling in Ruban’s arms to get within reach of the gigantic candy bar.
