Quill

R.L. Carmine

Shockwaves from the blasts half a city away fractured the weathered old cathedral walls, transported in blocks from Earth on the colony ship during the Leaving. The air from the wash was hot and round, not abrupt, not sharp; it shattered the windows and rolled through the building, kicking up dust in little whirlwinds that twirled across the room and between the pews around her, lifting from her shoulders the heavy locks of red hair and flipping them about her round and ashen face. There as she peered over the back of the pew he found her, slamming the door behind him and moving in on her, every step the metallic jingling of a hardware store tilted on end; buckles, zippers, and chains rattling against each other every time the heel of his boot struck hard the marble floor. When it stopped, with his good eye, the other long since covered by a patch, he stared down at her and she up towards him, reaching outward with small soft fingers when the doors burst wide.

Vic spun around, pulling his nickel-plated forty-five from his waistband and tight across his chest, the light through the broken stained glass windows glinting off of the housing. For an instant it looked to her as if it should have been a painting. Beautiful and horrible all at once, half-thoughts no child should have about her father. Things no daughter should see. This she felt, even at eight. Even after all the other things she had seen over the years, there in the cathedral that day, on the failed colony world turned Allied Families outpost of Curve, Quill Storms knew this thing, and she knew part of it was within her.

Without blinking, without pause, he fired round after round as the K’Raigan soldiers stormed the cathedral, knowing full well that the heavyworlders could take far more punishment than that, but it would hurt them. Most certainly it would hurt them, even if for some it did not even puncture their tough skin to get to the dense weave of muscles and thick bone structure beneath. But their eyes were vulnerable, and the sensory tendrils -- the thick meaty appendages that that hung from the sides of their bald mocha-toned heads –- those were obscenely sensitive.

On their own world the K’Raigans used edged weapons, a law established in the early years of the industrial age when their warring nature, with slug-throwers and bombs in hand, nearly destroyed them as a people, but as a space-faring race the energy weapons they used off-homeworld were second perhaps only to the Prath, for whom violence and sex had been elevated to a religion, and an art form. These hulking figures she’d once thought comforting, as there on Curve her father had employed one as captain of his warship, the Richmond, while another, a half-breed named K’Nitra, had been a frequent visitor on behalf of the Sainin Hunter’s Guild. These ones, though, terrified Quill. They, for the first time, showed her what an overwhelming force the species presented. Never before had she thought of the two she knew as frightening people until that very moment when others of their kind were sweeping the streets in armed detachments and bombing the city.

The replication clip did him well, but five hours of constant fighting had just about run down the power core and he knew that soon he would be out of ammunition. In the meantime he used it for all it was worth as he yanked his daughter up from the floor between the pews and against his chest. Low and fast he went, paying no heed the course ahead as down through the center of the nave he went, firing back over his shoulder and catching an only briefly surprised K’Raigan officer in the eye. Sweet spot; the bullet ricocheted around inside the thick cranium, burning holes across his brain this way and that until he crumpled sideways, making the troopers with him pause long enough for Vic to be up over the stairs and to the Southern door of the Sacristy.

Eyeing down the length of his forearm behind him, he gave his wrist a quick flip to check the charge at the base of the clip before bringing it around against his back as he shoved Quill through the door with his free hand. Sternly he stared into her eyes, blue like his, unlike her older sister or her brothers whose eyes matched the brilliant green of their mother. “Stay down.” The K’Raigans sprayed the crossing with weapons’ fire, the ambo exploding in fine splinters of wood, striking the chancel floor and sliding across towards the altar as he closed the door.

Short seconds passed before even with the heavy slab of wood between them she heard her father inhale deeply and then exhale with twice as much force as he pushed upright. Cracking the door she peered through the sliver of space in time to see him turn on his heels and draw forth the blued forty-five from his leg holster whilst he stalked across the chancel and stopped before the stairs down to the nave. “Your Alcitt Xirrae masters have led your houses astray.” Two plasma rounds ripped through his chest, the heat cauterizing the wounds as they went through his body and out the back, ripping to shreds his navy blue leather jacket and lifting him from his feet.

Crashing to the ground, he lay there crumpled, the fabric of his shirt burning, smoking off of the little embers as the K’Raigans made their way in, checking down rows of pews for others as they went. And then onto his back he rolled, and sat upright. In a strained oldworld dialect of K’Raigan he had picked up a couple of centuries before, he cut his one good eye in their direction and rasped without the benefit of lungs. “Okay, now I’m gonna fucking kill the lot of you.” Grabbing hold of his pistols he stood up and shook himself off in the moments of shock the K’Raigans took to try and figure what was happening. The chattering went back and forth in their native tongue as they debated genetic engineering, androids, even medical nanotechnology, all in the twenty seconds it took him to reach his feet. Had he not seen it enough over the years for it to become monotonous, he might have pitied them the waste of time. “You people drop your hardware and I’ll just kill you. You, your troops, the crews on your ships in orbit, the fighters in my skies, you’re all walking, talking dead.”

“But,” her voice came from behind them, the doorway, and the word itself was like a beautiful note, delicate to be heard; a child’s joy in essence, light and devoid of dark things that come with the stealing of innocence. Her ashen face and form fell no more than partway into her teens, not seemingly old enough to have birthed a child of Quill’s age, and yet it was as much so as the weapons that had been brought to bear on her.

“Hey,” his voice boomed. “Trust me, if you shoot my wife with your happy little energy beams, I’m so gonna rain all sorts of hell down on you.” The K’Raigans turned back and forth with rifles in hand for a moment before half of them stayed focused on him, and the other half took aim on her.

From between pale lips she continued, “should you wish to maintain this foolhardy path, killing the pets my dearest husband considers friends, upsetting him and thus me, we will take a classic page from your book and when we are done here purging our space of your kind, we will travel to your world in hundreds upon thousands of ships, and we will walk upon your streets, and we will enter your dwellings. Every home of every individual who has taken part in this affront, every relative you have, every brother, every sister, your parents, your children.” A thin smile crept forth and her brilliant green eyes came alive with a sort of giddiness that brought out nothing but unease. “Even the smallest of babies I shall tear from their mothers’ wombs and take them by leg to beat upon the walls.”

And then it happened. One of the K’Raigans fired his weapon and laid low the woman at the door, and for Quill’s father, all bets were off. His wife too would rise as he had, this he knew, but there were lines with him, lines that in his own hypocrisy he demanded not be crossed by others, though in the case of those poor damned souls, both he and his wife possessed the ability to force the point, fair though it may not have been.

It was a poetic dance, even to Quill, as she watched from the room as her mother came upright and her father sprung from the chancel almost in unison. Luminescent, distended ovoid shapes of superheated plasma bursting forth from the gunmetal gray housing wrapped about the barrels of the K’Raigan rifles, blowing through the tops of pews and pulverizing marble columns on impact into fine white clouds of dust. Vic’s muscular form moved with a grace developed only by years of such battles during which time a style of motion, a martial art in its own right and unto he alone, had been given birth. He ducked and spun, the end of every motion the start of another, with gunfire accenting the arcs in which his hands traveled.

His love, the woman known as Pandora, was more direct in action. For him it was a game, and so too for her, but for lackeys such as these, she had little tolerance. Shot after shot she received upon approach to the K’Raigans, never falling after the one that first laid her low had prepared her for the impact.

Together they were upon them at nearly the same time, and from the large forms came distinctly K’Raigan screams. Howls that even across the cathedral seemed to send weighty vibrations through the organs wrapped within Quill’s chest. These things that so frightened her, so changed her youthful perception of K’Nitra and the captain, seemed so unbeatable as they marched through the streets, yet broke so easily in the hands of her parents. A collision and ensuing collapse of so many bodies behind the pews, from her angle cut from view save for a flailing arm here and there. Then came the scratching skittering music of a million rats trying to scramble up sheet metal and the shadows came alive with twisted forms of deep black wrongness. Sometimes she recognized the parts, sometimes she didn’t. So many screams and so much blood, and sounds not unlike that of an egg with a thick-thick shell slowly cracking.

And then from over the tops of the pews came a crest of red-spiked hair, red like hers, and Vic stood, his face cross-splattered with fluids. In the fight the remains of his jacket had been shredded and there he was in his tattered sleeveless shirt, and a pair of long red gloves she didn’t remember him putting on that morning. It took her long enough to complete the thought before she realized that what she believed to be gloves ran nearly to his shoulders, and dripped at the fingers.

“Dad!” through the door followed by two Allied Families lieutenants came Quill’s older sister, the word shaking her focus and drawing the young girl’s eyes up. “Dad, mom...Jesus.”

“Not in this house.” Shaking off his hands, Vic moved through the remains and retrieved his pistols from where they had fallen, before making his way back over to Pandora and tapping her on the nose to leave behind a smear of red. She smiled and reached up, drawing her fingers down the sides of his face, streaking the slickness there before he pulled away and set eye on his eldest. “Where the hell were you?! Quill was here alone when I found her.”

Before Ishtar could even speak, defensively or otherwise, one of the men flanking her brushed by and set himself in front of Vic. “Back off, we just lost eight people out there, and...”

The shot was loud. It seemed louder than any of the others, probably because it had been wholly unexpected. The lieutenant jerked forward clutching his chest, and turned to give way to Ishtar holding her gun. “You don’t talk to my father like that.” And she put him down with a round in his head. “I’m sorry dad.”

Shaking his head, he brushed his fingers back through his hair and sighed. “I should have sent her offworld with her brother, they belong with each other.”

Moving in close, Ishtar gave her mother a less than daughterly kiss, and then wrapped her arms around her father and repeated the act before laying her head against his chest, unconcerned with the mess that might be absorbed by her otherwise pristinely curled and styled hair. “Where is she?”

Cocking his head, he nodded towards the Sacristy, “watching from back there instead of staying locked in the room where I put her.”

“It’s in her blood, this thing.” Ishtar smiled crookedly. “The grand horror.” Stepping back she straightened herself and reached up to make sure her hair had not fallen too much out of place during the show of affection. “You have holes in your shirt, dad,” she noted offhandedly as she tied back a loose lock of hair before pressing her finger against the new flesh.

“They shot me. Can you believe that shit?” He gave a half-shrug. “No respect anymore, these people.”

“They, my love, are beasts, and beasts only know that of which they are frequently reminded.” Pandora locked eyes with him. “We have been here in this place, silent too long. Their kind are dim-witted and have forgotten, so for a time to break the monotony, let us perhaps remind them?”

Vic nodded. “After we’re done killing the fuckers here.” He gestured to Ishtar. “You get Quill to the Richmond; we’re gonna go off us some bad-ass warrior folk.”

Ishtar smiled.

At the far end of the cathedral, Quill trembled.