Hellfire - Tyranny

Chapter 1-2

Once Jacobs had left Drake poured himself a glass of too rough whiskey and sat down at the desk in his cabin. He wasn’t sure if gunshot victims were supposed to drink alcohol, nor did he particularly care. He needed a drink so he was damn well going to have one.

The problem Drake faced now was what to do next. The Commander was gone and so was the bomb he’d smuggled aboard and used to blackmail Drake into following his insane mission. A mission Drake had only learnt the full details of towards the end of their relationship.

During his time aboard the Commander had been chasing after a very specific hellship. Ironically he’d thought he was chasing the Azimuth when the whole time he had been aboard that hellship. Drake would have laughed at that if the situation hadn’t ended so badly.

Finding the hellship the Commander was hunting proved to be tricky. In the end they’d captured some Dark Acolytes, the strange fanatics that chose to worship hellships, and from the information aboard the Acolyte ship they’d identified possible locations for the hellship.

As the pressure of the mission built the Commander finally let slip to Drake what the mission was really about – he and the Phoenix Conglomerate he was part of believed the hellship they chased was creating new hellships!

More than that, the Commander wasn’t hunting down the hellship to destroy it, to prevent it creating more of its kind. Drake would have been fully behind the Commander if that was the case. He’d sworn his life to hunting down other hellships, to ending the misery they caused, both to fulfil a promise to his dead sister and to satisfy his own thirst for revenge.

But that wasn’t why the Phoenix Conglomerate sought that hellship. They didn’t want it to be destroyed. The Commander even vetoed destroying the mind of the hellship but leaving its structure intact. His goal was to capture the hellship, to somehow subdue it, and then to learn the secret of how it created new hellships.

The Commander hadn’t explained why the Phoenix Conglomerate wanted that information. In fact he panicked when he realised he’d revealed as much as he had, but to Drake the answer was obvious. The only possible reason they could have for wanting to learn how hellships were created was so they could create their own, ones crewed and controlled by their own people.

In a strange way the attraction was obvious. Hellships were tough and difficult to defeat just taken as starships, but there was another element to them. How that element expressed itself varied greatly from hellship to hellship, but it involved abilities and attacks science could not explain and in many cases couldn’t defend against.

Drake disliked the term magic, he felt it didn’t convey the danger and horror of those attacks sufficiently, but the abilities were often described as magical. Any ship with those powers would be valuable indeed, though Drake knew only an i***t would believe they could control a hellship and bend it to their will.

He had to laugh at himself at that thought. After all, he was in control of a hellship, but that was a very different situation. It hadn’t been by design. In fact the hellship had hunted him down and had been trying to subject him to the same harm and control as the rest of its crew when it miscalculated badly.

While he hadn’t known it, Drake was one of those rare individuals known as an immune. Immunes couldn’t be controlled by hellships, couldn’t be overwhelmed by their influence. They could still suffer physically at the hands of a hellship, but the hellship would never gain control of their mind or their soul.

Drake also hadn’t known when a hellship took a captain it poured far more into the link than for any other poor unfortunate member of the crew. A captain suffered far more deeply even than normal crew on a hellship and their soul was bound even more tightly to the hellship.

There was a lot Drake hadn’t known, including what would happen when a hellship tried to make an immune its captain. The Azimuth certainly hadn’t known that either or it would have made damn sure Drake wasn’t an immune before starting the process.

Drake suspected no one had known what would happen. Maybe the situation had never arisen before. Once the procedure was started the hellship had managed to forge a connection to Drake despite him being an immune, but the connection did not bring Drake under the Azimuth’s control. Being an immune seemed to make that impossible.

Instead the hellship had tightly bound its soul to someone it could not control, and in doing so had ended up being controlled itself.

That was information Drake didn’t intend to share with anyone else. He wanted to see hellships wiped from the universe, not brought under the power of humans and their governments. He was as careful as possible to avoid any of his crew falling to the hellship’s influence but he had no doubt others would be much less scrupulous.

Slavery wouldn’t begin to cover it. Entire crew’s souls and minds would be stolen from them. They’d be tied to the hellship and its human controller until they died and would quickly be replaced with new victims when they did. The thought of anyone else learning Drake’s secret was horrendous.

As for the Commander… he had been proved wrong on many counts in the end. For a start the hellship he’d tracked down was not the Azimuth. Of course Drake had known that from the beginning, seeing as they were on the Azimuth already.

Putting that aside, the hellship they’d tracked down hadn’t been an ancient and canny ship creating more of its kind as the Commander had believed. Far from it. The hellship they encountered was newly born itself.

It had been tentative and uncertain to begin with, so much so Drake and the Dagger had been able to neutralise it despite it being a much larger ship. With the hellship stunned Drake had led his troopers aboard to try and reach its mind.

They’d failed. The hellship had recovered while they were aboard and started to learn its true power. Drake had managed to flee with most of his troopers, though several didn’t make it off the hellship. Drake at least had the comfort of knowing each had been put beyond the hellship’s ability to revive, bullets to the brain ensuring that. The crew he’d left behind were much better off dead than living under the control of a hellship.

The Commander had violently disagreed with Drake’s decision to leave and had attempted to destroy the Dagger. But by that point Drake was able to disable the bomb, making the Dagger safe. Shortly after that the Commander, knowing his mission was a failure, had agreed to go to Drake’s cabin. When Drake revealed they were actually on board the Azimuth it had been too much for the Commander who shot Drake and then himself.

Now Drake wondered whether the Commander had been wrong about something else as well. The Commander and apparently those he worked for were convinced the new hellships were being created by another hellship. Yet Drake hadn’t seen any other hellship nearby when they’d attacked the Dark Destiny. What he had seen were Dark Acolyte ships.

That might not have set him wondering but he’d realised the new hellship was a vessel he had encountered very recently, and at that point it had only been a Dark Acolyte ship.

That encounter had taken place far from normal routes and the ship which would become the Dark Destiny had been surrounded by other Dark Acolyte ships arranged in a very precise pattern.

Throw in the fact the area had been one of those where space felt strange to Drake and an idea began to form. Was it possible no hellship was involved in creating a new hellship? Was it possible that the hellships came purely from the Dark Acolytes’ efforts?

It was a huge leap to make, one he’d never even heard hinted at. The Dark Acolytes were a major nuisance and fanatical in their worship of hellships, but the hellships never seemed to return their attentions. Could it be possible the Dark Acolytes were responsible for new hellships? Drake didn’t know and he couldn’t think of any way to find out more.

‘I could tell you.’

The message insinuated itself into Drake’s mind, bringing with it an oily texture which made Drake shudder. He pushed the voice away, not wanting to even begin to engage with the Azimuth anymore than he could avoid.

The fact it had spoken to him, found a way to slip the message past his barriers, worried him. Normally he managed to keep himself completely separated from the mind of the hellship, a trick he had learnt soon after becoming captain.

The message getting through was an indication recent events had loosened the barriers. Drake hoped it was temporary… he certainly didn’t want that voice in his head all the time. Or at all!

The voice didn’t return but it had planted the seed. If Drake truly wanted to know where hellships came from then wouldn’t the Azimuth be able to tell him? He shook his head. Even if he went that route, even if he lowered his guard enough to ask the question of the hellship, how would he know if it answered truthfully?

He thought he’d be able to tell if it was outright lying, though he wasn’t sure, but even that allowed for huge areas of half-truths and misleading statements.

It wasn’t as if the Azimuth wanted to be helpful. It hated and loathed him with an intensity beyond human understanding. He caught the edges of those feelings occasionally, felt them bleeding through his link to the hellship, and knew it hated him as much as it hated the fact it was subject to his control.

No, there was no point going down that route. The potential dangers were too great and the benefits would be non-existent. If Drake wanted to find out for sure where new hellships came from he would have to do it another way.

He wasn’t even sure he wanted to find out. The knowledge he had gained so far was putting the Dagger and its crew in enough danger. That said, if the knowledge gave him a way to prevent new hellships being created would it be worth him finding out and not letting on to anyone else?

Yet again he seemed to have all the questions but none of the answers. Fine. Knowing the questions was a start. Now he just had to roll up his sleeves and find the answers.