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Three hundred and sixteen arks. More than ten percent of her fleet, either destroyed or crippled. Antipatra had ordered her people to scour the wreckage of the destroyed arks for any sign of survivors—especially Violeta or her Strategoi—but so far, few had been found, and no one of note.
It was humiliating and almost unbelievable. Yet, it was reality, and Antipatra had not gotten to where she was by denying reality. The mongrel, descended from whores that lay with beasts, had gotten the better of her, somehow.
And she certainly demanded to know ‘how’.
“Their jump drives are superior to ours,” Aristarchos stated, his voice echoing in the largely empty room. His projection flickered slightly as Antipatra’s attention settled on him.
“I hope you’re not just stating the obvious and have something of use to say?” She tried to keep her tone even, but she knew it still came off clipped. Given what had just happened, however, she didn’t think anyone would make that great a deal out of it. Aristarchos didn’t even blink, and neither did the projections of Eirenaios or the other ten Strategoi. Only Damon, who was the only person physically with her, looked slightly offended.
“Their charge time is quicker than ours,” Aristarchos continued. “Their dreadnoughts can jump again after only twenty-eight minutes. Their carriers are slightly faster. Their engines are more powerful, too. We were easily outpaced. Going over the damage reports shows us that their weapon systems are largely on par with ours, save for the cannons on their dreadnoughts and destroyers—and their older-pattern arks around and including Storm Herald.”
“Is there anything we’re better at?” Eirenaios asked somewhat sarcastically.
“I’m sure there is,” Aristarchos said, his tone hardly changing. “I would have to acquire one of his arks to find out for sure.”
Antipatra leaned forward, steepling her fingers on the table she and the others were ‘sitting’ at, though most of them were mere projections. “I need solutions. Find me—”
The doors on the other side of the room slid open, and Makarios hurried inside. He didn’t break stride even as he became the center of attention.
“What did you find?” Antipatra demanded before he’d even taken a seat.
Makarios answered as he sat at the seat furthest from her, “The illusory arks were projected from a complex enchantment on the demiplane’s surface. I don’t pretend to know how he figured it out, but one of my enchanters said that it was inscribed more than a week ago.”
“Who is your enchanter?” Eirenaios challenged. “Who is he that we should take him at his word?”
“A man I have entrusted with my life on multiple occasions,” Makarios answered testily.
“That happens regularly, then? I’d have never thought you were so wise and experienced in the ways of war given how you cowered in the rear the moment that the enemy of all mankind appeared!”
Makarios glared at Eirenaios, frost gathering on the table around where he sat from his killing intent. “My arks charged the illusions before it was known what they were. We weren’t able to turn around in time when Leon Raime appeared behind us.”
“How convenient for you,” Eirenaios continued. “You made it out with hardly a single scuffed hull plate.”
“And how convenient for you,” Makarios retorted, “that one of your rivals for your Basilissa’s attention has gone to her gods.”
“Enough!” Antipatra exclaimed, slamming her hand down on the table, sending cracks spiderwebbing across the surface. She allowed such exchanges only in moderation—enough that her people could get out some of their frustrations and air their grievances, but not enough for bitterness to develop.
After a moment of silence, which she spent glaring at both Makarios and Eirenaios, she asked, “Was that all you found?”
“No,” Makarios said. “Those bombs. We found several others floating in the Void. The enchantments malfunctioned. It seems they were designed to go off when they sensed the spatial fluctuations of a nearby ark.”
“‘Spatial fluctuations’?” Antipatra asked, but Makarios only shrugged.
Aristarchos stepped in. “Even without jumping, arks can have subtle effects on the Voidspace around them. Subtle enough that few mages untrained in spatial magic can sense it.” He paused long enough to stroke his chin in thought. “Having these distortions be the trigger for an explosive was bold… It’s understandable that some failed to detonate.”
“What was in the explosives?” Antipatra asked, her patience, already frayed to almost nothing, now nearing its end. “They incapacitated most of the ark crews that were hit and even killed many low-tier mages amongst my arks.”
Makarios grimaced and averted his gaze for a moment. Antipatra almost shouted at him to answer, but fortunately for him, his hesitation lasted only a second.
“Some alchemical… thing. I can’t say what it is. Only that once the explosive containers were opened… I have never felt closer to death than when that aura reached me.”
“I doubt that says much,” Eirenaios grumbled. “You’ve never gotten that close to death in your entire life.”
Antipatra turned her burning gaze to Eirenaios and quietly but intensely said, “Hold your tongue. You don’t dishonor him alone with such talk.”
Her Despot visibly paled despite being just a projection, and for good reason; Makarios had fought alongside her at one point, and she certainly didn’t shy away from battle.
After a silent moment, Antipatra leaned back and turned back to the matter at hand. “I understand your fear of whatever substance that is. When it detonated, I felt it seek out my soul realm. Had I been weak, it would have poisoned me to death. It did poison thousands of my voidfarers. Everyone below the fifth-tier aboard my ark died when that explosion rocked us. Many of those in the sixth and seventh-tiers are still recovering.”
Her words were grave and hit the group hard. The explosions hadn’t been that large, relatively speaking, and had been entirely confined to Antipatra’s part of the fleet. It was easy to write them off without knowing the damage they’d truly done.
“I would like to see these explosives,” Aristarchos said, drawing confused and questioning looks from everyone but his own Strategoi.
“Why?” Antipatra demanded, no one else willing to say anything to the Despot.
“To study,” he replied calmly. “We failed to capture even a single ark from our quarry. This is the only one of his weapons that we now have. We should know our enemy’s capabilities.”
Antipatra was tempted to deny him. She had to suppress a shiver at the thought of such insidious magic crawling through her body, reaching with fell tendrils toward her soul realm… But if it meant that she didn’t have to feel such a thing again, she was willing to let the man study his toy.
“Makarios, send him those explosives.” Her command brooked no argument, and Makarios offered none; he simply nodded.
“Now,” Antipatra said, “I will review the total damage done to us later; I already have a good idea of it now. Instead, I would turn our attention from what just happened to what is about to happen.” She paused for effect, making brief eye contact with everyone else waiting for her to finish. “We need to pin Leon Raime down and squash him like the insect he is. Let his foul blood be incinerated, as the Great Lord has commanded us.”
A murmur passed through the others, repeating her final sentence. Eirenaios, as she’d expected, was the first one to offer her an option after the murmur.
“He will continue to attack us. So, instead of waiting for him to do so, we need to find him first. Though it might seem like our previous strategy failed, it must be said that it successfully brought us to our prey.”
“It led us into a trap,” Aristarchos said, his customary flat tone breaking into something angrier and more frustrated. “I am not eager to repeat that experience.”
“A trap, yes,” Eirenaios conceded, “but he was still here. My point is that if we want to remain in this cluster, then we should continue with that strategy. Our mistake came in not adequately preparing for potential ambushes, not in how we found that location.”
“If,” Makarios whispered in a bold interjection. “You would suggest abandoning my cluster?”
Eirenaios grinned at him like a wolf eyeing a newborn deer all alone in a forest. “There is little here worth defending,” he said to Makarios’ face. After a silent moment to drive his words home to Makarios, he turned to Antipatra and said with greater seriousness, “Being on the defensive doesn’t sit well with me. We have diminished his conquests in this cluster, evicting him from all population centers. Let him scurry in the dark here; let us venture into his planes and set them alight! Let us force him to come to us, instead of waiting for someone to find a lead, all while he retains the initiative!”
Another murmur passed through the Strategoi, this one of muted agreement. All of the eleventh-tier mages seemed to like Eirenaios’ plan—all save one, at least.
“I bowed to you,” Makarios said to Antipatra, his face twitching from the effort to stay neutral, “to defend my holdings. Was I wrong to do so? Will you abandon my planes to the depredations of a ‘mongrel’, as you so aptly term him?”
Antipatra smiled thinly, disliking the way he’d phrased things to deliberately pressure her to do what he wanted. But just because she recognized the manipulation didn’t mean that he was wrong—she’d given him her word, and the Great Lord had specific things to say about oathbreakers, things that mostly concerned the right way to put them to death.
“We will continue with our current strategy,” Antipatra said after several moments of thought. Her glaring eyes didn’t leave Makarios, however, even as she gave voice to her decision. “These planes are under my protection. That means something. That is no empty promise. Reorganize, and begin your search anew. Leon Raime is hiding nearby, within this cluster. I can feel it. And Makarios?”
The man himself met her gaze without any obvious fear.
“I’ll have you out there, too. Since this is ‘your’ cluster, I’m sure you know it better than anyone here. Give us those hidden spots in this cluster, places like this dark plane below us. Anywhere Leon Raime might sequester his fleet for protection while we maintain our search.”
Makarios thought for several seconds, then said, “Given how he’s operated so far… a few places come to mind already.”
“Don’t play coy, then,” Antipatra lightly chided. “Tell us where these places are.”
Makarios spared the time to glance around the table before answering. With only a trace of hesitation, he said, “These planes were once a Thunderbird Clan domain. Little remains of that ill-fated Clan, and the reason for this is simple: this cluster was ravaged by the internecine conflicts that broke out amongst the Clan’s holdings after the death of Jason Keraunos. Several planes in this cluster were destroyed outright, while others were lost when their stars were extinguished.”
“Extinguished?” Eirenaios interjected skeptically.
“Extinguished…?” Aristarchos asked with a rare smile, his interest piqued.
“There are planes-that-were here,” Makarios pressed on, hardly acknowledging either of the Despots. “And dark planes. Some that might have resources he could tap into. Others with potential defensive advantages.”
“Why are you waiting until now to bring this up?” Eirenaios asked with scorching heat.
“And what has been found of the old Thunderbird Clan?” Aristarchos inquired. “What became of those extinguished stars?”
“I did not wait,” Makarios shot back. “Little has been found of the old Clan. A few stories, a few broken stones. Nothing of practical value. As for the stars… were the dark planes themselves not left, along with obvious signs of war, I wouldn’t have believed those stories. The extinguished stars are simply gone, no trace that they were here remains.”
Aristarchos looked disappointed, but Eirenaios scowled and demanded to know, “Why are we only hearing about this now?!”
Antipatra smiled with muted amusement as Makarios answered, “You betray your own lack of preparedness; I reported everything here to all of you. You simply had to read the report to know before I brought it up here.”
Eirenaios glared at him, but he couldn’t rightly respond, especially not in front of the Strategoi, several of whom were his own. So, he scoffed and let the matter go.
“Which of these places would you flee to if you were Leon Raime?” Antipatra asked, eager to get back on track. To his credit, he didn’t even flinch at her wording.
“This was one,” Makarios stated. “I’m not surprised you found Leon Raime here, even if it was a trap. From here, with my own arks, I could reach most of my planes in only a single jump. Several other, more centrally-located places might be good staging grounds.”
“How would the beast even know about them?” Eirenaios challenged, smiling again as if he’d found the flaw in Makarios’ suggestion. “Have you been betrayed, Strategos?”
Makarios met Eirenaios’ glare with one of his own and answered without a shred of shame, “Yes, I have been.”
Eirenaios clearly wasn’t expecting that response, as he didn’t immediately respond, which allowed Makarios to continue.
“Leon Raime came to despoil my planes. His first fleet penetrated deeply and was only defeated by the support of the honorable Basilissa Antipatra. My planes were recaptured, but by then, some had fallen under our foe’s control for months. When Leon Raime came here to avenge his defeated fleet, he captured Urnos for a short time. There are plenty of old records he could have found to give him the right locations, and we know that he questioned my people about such locations. It seems clear to me that I have been betrayed by at least one of my citizens. Once Leon Raime’s head is on a spike, I’ll see to uncovering who sold us out and see that they come to the same end.”
“That is the right thing to do,” Antipatra said. “Betraying us is a betrayal of humanity itself.”
Agreement passed through the others like a wave. She knew that all at that table were loyal to Khosrow—or in Makarios’ case, to her.
“Send out the scouts. When we find Leon Raime’s hiding place, we will crush him. But we will not rush into this; we will prepare properly and break him like a defiant horse. When we are finished, all the blood he has spilled will be avenged. We can put the souls of our slain comrades to rest. I know that Violeta would want as much.”
If all went well, she knew that she might have a possible location for Leon Raime in mere hours. However, her fleet had just suffered a significant defeat, and morale was low. It would take a few days at least for her people to go from mourning and healing to righteous wrath and zeal.
Such was the burden of leadership, she’d found. As much as she might struggle to keep others from killing her people, she struggled just as mightily to keep her people from destroying themselves. And she wasn’t going to fly straight into Leon Raime’s beastly jaws until she knew her people were ready.
She dismissed the meeting, and her people went off to see her will done. Aristarchos wasted no time, waiting only just long enough to remind Makarios to bring those explosives to him. Eirenaios waited for even less time, only long enough to give Makarios one of the most hateful looks Antipatra had ever seen from him.
‘I’ll have to discipline him,’ she noted. ‘Antipathy like that will only hinder us in the long run…’
Damon and Makarios left, and when the door shut behind them, she was alone with her thoughts. Alone, with nothing to distract her from her mind asking her how she had gotten this duty, how she was having such trouble when, by all accounts, Triton had put Artorion to siege with minimal losses.
‘Probably hiding his losses,’ she thought dismissively. Still, as difficult as she was finding this job to be, she decided that it was worth the frustration. Triton might seize his city, but she would have the prestige of taking the last Thunderbird’s head. Kamran had set that cursed Clan’s fate into motion, but hers was the hand that would deal the final blow. And that was honor enough for a lifetime.
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