Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Stealing Constructs

The beam of void energy lit the night with a glowing orange pulse cutting straight up the center line of the Empyrean. Adam shouted inside his helmet but his voice was lost in the silence of space. Ahead of him Sunny and Celex paused to gape in horror. When the light cleared, Adam expected the worst, he had seen that void beam tear apart a moon, so what might it do to the Empyrean.

The light was gone, and Adam blinked more spots from his vision. He felt his heart flutter in a mixture of relief and panic as he saw the Empyrean still standing. Her hull crackled with tongues of orange energy fizzing and sparking like a drop o water on a hot pan. A few holes had been torn through the upper spine of her hull, but even from this distance, he could see a net of delicate golden threads where the shilds hat knit the hull back together.

The Empyrean's hull was not organic, but after a bit of investigation, Narobi reported that it was self repairing.

That would have been great, but to repair damage of that magnitude would take the ship weeks.

Its patches in the hull were simply cosmetic dressing to keep the air in. Adam felt his throat tighten, there was no way that everyone would have managed to survive that.

The two void ships could be seen attempting to pull a flanking maneuver on the wounded Omen , but the ship continued to turn, keeping them both at bay. So at least the pilot was still alive.

"Ramirez, come in, do you read me."

The following pause went on for a horrible moment, and Adam watched as the ship began to turn, golden shields pulsing with an unusual intensity.

And then a voice came over the comms, "Still, here, but the empyrean is reporting casualties."

Adam felt his throat constrict even further.

"Not sure how we survived that."

"Ramirez."

Overhead the omen cut behind the empyrean and then vanished into the debris field. Simon was using the destruction for cover, and it was a good idea. Her control of the omen was impressive. Even he would have had to try hard to make the Omen move with such agility.

"Yeah?"

"Make sure that doesn't happen to the omen. If they hit Simon, she's done for."

"Agreed,"

"And Ramirez?"

"Yeah."

"When the architect asks why we scratched the paint on his ride, I am blaming you." Ramirez gave a grim laugh that Adam shared with him. He knew he was using the humor to hide, but what else was he supposed to do.

"Well now would be a good time to stop chatting and get those damn guns up and running. If you don't than both Simon and I are toast.'

Ramirez had a point, and Adam grudgingly forced his attention back to the issue at hand pushing forward with Sunny and Celex to the edge of their little rock platform.

The gravity was wrong, Adam could feel himself being pulled from all sides with varying degrees of power. Ahead of him, the shattered moon was a landscape of suspended floating stone hanging above Irus in a surreal landscape of slowly cooling molten stone crackling with void energy. Irus's green moon had been a primary center for their orbital defence system, and even now, Adam could see chunks of Rundi made structure still adhered to the rock.

If the buildings were pressurized, it was possible People could still be alive inside, but even from this distance he could see the swarms of void creatures crawling over and through the buildings like ants crawling through a hive, and he knew that that was unlikely .