Raven Tide

17: Chyani (Raven Tide)

Fire consumed the sky.

The muffled squall of Chyani cursing rang out from the cloaked hovering transport ship as I guided it out of the hangar and moved it stealthily into an innocuous clearing.

"She'll resent me forever for this, but at least she'll be alive and free to eventually forget me."

The large stationary cannons rotated on their towers and took aim at the fiery serpent descending through the atmosphere. They were fully charged and ready to fire as soon as the abomination came in range.

The defense array wouldn't do any critical damage, but that was irrelevant. They were only necessary for luring the Graven to the surface. If Chyani left now, I risked the beast seeing the wake of her ship and following.

I hated deceiving Chyani.

All the ships were ready to go the second we arrived, and it took less than a minute to initiate the auto-pilot. If my final long-range scan hadn't detected the Graven, I would have gladly joined her in jumping back to Sahei.

There were many new songs I hoped to share with my brother.

But Chyani's best shot at survival required waiting for the Graven to trip the sensors and then launching her ahead, alone into the hands of Jahaa members better equipped to protect her.

The sound of fists slamming on the hatchway door reverberated from the cloaked transport.

"Man," I shook my head, chuckling. "She didn't waste any time. Good thing I melted all the door handles and dialed up the security lockouts on all control systems."

It sucked that our decoy failed, but on the upside, Venom Heart was hopefully intact.

At least I didn't fuck up everything.

I suspected it was never the ships that the Graven was tracking. After all, it positioned Gar'mol in our path beyond an entire jump point.

More plausibly, the Graven cast out a wide net of faithful chumps from the start, with the intention of snagging us in any direction that we ran.

"I don't know what you want with Chyani," I snarled and stomped over to a cache of razkur weapons I collected from the Defense Ops armory. "But you'll never come near her."

I claimed a retractable slayer-resistant force shield, and a spear tipped and embedded with tech specialized for penetrating the corrupted.

"See me!" I roared in fury at the burning sky. "Fight me and together we will behold death!"

The Graven shrieked as it breached the artificial atmosphere barrier, then it was drowned out by a cacophony of cannon fire when the automated turrets let loose on their target.

The Graven screeched and spat streams of fire at the towers.

A thin blue force shield dome flickered and deflected the flames.

The shields would eventually fail, but the bombardment of the plasma artillery was plenty to attract the Graven into the central courtyard and away from the empty quarry where I was hiding Chyani.

Yes, come this way. Look only at me.

The Graven dispensed with its space-traversing serpent shape and returned to its gangly terrestrial wolfen formation, but it kept the long swishing reptilian tail.

It ignored the hailstorm of plasma fire and charged at me.

TTTUAAATTHHHHAAAAA!!!!!

The Graven rattled the ground with a tumultuous bellow that I assumed translated to 'I'm going to kill you!'