Warning: Enemy weapons within CANVAS REACH of HFS Grimoire

  “Trust the magic old man.” Obelisk read again aboard the HDF stringent leash. He had ceded access to the missile systems and watched as the remote hacker exploited it to gain control of more of the fleet's systems through his flagship. The staffers he had tasked to check the work struggled to keep up with it, or her, if he guessed right. The memory of a little girl with blonde, twin pigtails and a brilliant smile played through his mind again. “Trust the magic old man,” that's what little Sara had said back then, and that trust had paid off. Seeing his emotionally withdrawn cadets rising to new heights, changing the culture of the academy by working more closely with the civilian populace of HFS Sardonyx. No one ever gave the little Michalson girl credit for pulling those three out of delinquency. She wouldn't want them to anyway, always hiding behind his pant legs when attention bore down on her.

  Magic is just unexplained science, or, on an individual level, magic is just something you can't understand. Like a card trick that is mundane to the magician who knows the secret of how they drew your card, and leaves you amazed.

  Sadly, so often the tricks the magician performs are dull to them. Only the works they make, the reactions they illicit, and maybe the credit for what they did replace the reward for the simple acts they perform.

  Everything that followed was for a girl like Sara, simply mundane. A dull string of codes, calculations, and intuition, but in that moment, something only she could do.

  ***

  It was absolute focus for Sara, every scrap of attention focused across dozens of spots in space, managing hundreds of groups of ships, missiles, and communications. She missed the big picture of the massive space battle, barely registered the significance of Toga, Jiro, and Taro, broadsiding the Black Dreadnought out of nowhere. Only the math of the extra variables the Chukotka class heavy freighter brought to the fight subtracted from her attention.

  Across the battle space, human missiles, only made to intercept individual missiles one at a time, danced to her tune. Instead of swarms of simple computer brains wasting hundreds on a single incoming missile, they split off in groups of no more than 5. Humanity had never fought a battle like this. Their munitions were woefully unprepared for such an engagement. The sudden coordination of networked missiles talking to each other through a unified system wasn't just magic. It was a miracle.

  To Sara, it was a headache, dull pain she pushed aside as she exercised in hard-earned skills in a way that only her data tail implant could let her flex. The tail always made multitasking asy, but for the first time, she felt like she was spinning plates on sticks, almost dropping them every few seconds. Her tongue poked out of the side of her mouth. Dull, distant sounds of yelling in the CIC were like waves crashing against a rocky beach, but she wasn’t focused on the beach. She was swimming through the deep black ocean of space, touching code, creating and adjusting subroutines to help her manage the defense. She ransacked ship libraries from across the fleet, yanking out old, buried combat doctrines of a humanity as old and far gone as their ancestral home. Storing whatever she couldn't use for later study, and applying what she could to the now.

  As she mashed and bent the network to her will, she didnt register the napkin wiping the blood dripping from her nose. One of the staff members was working with discretion, helping her hide her overtaxed body. The more Sara worked inside the fleet's system, the more she gota feel for how things worked. Year of useless information, listening to her three friends prattling on and on and about fleet doctrines, ship types, tactics stirred in her, churning into something usable in this trial by fire. She started making course adjustment suggestions, tightening target vectors, all while newtroking clusters of ships to work more effectively together. Every new suggestion was still the decision of the fleet or its individual pilots or crews.

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  Sara felt detached, not from her body, but from the conflict around her. She wasn't one to use flowery descriptions or fantastical comparisons, but in some ways, that was the best way she could describe how her data link at this scale felt. Dancing over the battlescape didnt come close, but it was close. She felt mildly omniscient, only limited by the systems she could multitask. Everything else tugged at the back of her mind, and she was learning how to let those tugs draw her attention where she needed to most. Still, the more she multitasked or split her attention between dozens of problems at a time, the more her headache grew. If she kept this up, she was liable to pass out again. The thought of her tail being banned again didnt sway her this time. She would push and strain to her very last, even if it killed her. The fleet needed her. Everyone needed her.

  Approximately 10 minutes ago, when there were 60,000 km until CANVAS REACH.

  The thing they called a demon wiped the blood from its hooked knife. One of the mercenaries lay dead at the feet of the remaining human mercenary. The fast tempo drip of the Chirp’s blood was distracting. It had cut the cartilage joint of its beak, leaving it to hang from its leathery face when he hadn’t stopped shouting at the human mercenary who was divulging choice tidbits of information.

  The thing they called Razgriz hated the name they had given it, but in some way, the demon comparison fit. It didn’t want to live. It wanted to die, but was cursed with an unwillingness to end its own life, so it kept on living. Completing its tasks until one day it might be struck down by another. It excelled in violence if it was a must, but it detested it all the same. That's why it would keep them alive, not just for more intel, but because they were no longer a threat.

  If it were to believe the last human mercenary, these were the last of them. The lull in violence relieved it of its detached state of mind, making way for the pressure at the back of its neck. Like draining a pool of blood from where its soul had been submerged, it let go of the cold, malicious, calculating nature it had donned like an uncomfortable glove that fit so well on him. As uncomfortable as it made him, he was damn good at using its brutality.

  An old familiar noise of clamping feet, slowly approaching the room, stopped the drain, filling him back up with cold disassociation. The noise made his blood boil, his anticipation frothing over.

  Running his bloody hand through his short brown hair, the man they called Razgriz laughed. “You forgot to mention that you had a Tinman with you.” His deep blue eyes regarded the whimpering mercenary, his eyes splotched with red, threatening to consume the whites of his eyes. The glee in his voice didn't sound right to him, as if in a detached way it were something not his own.

  The man grinned as he submerged himself in the metaphorical pool of blood, accepting the cold logic that had kept him alive all these years. Maybe a demon is what was always needed to kill monsters like that thing. Of course, a miracle would be nice. He thought.

  He, or rather, it growled in that metallic tone through the jet-black visored helmet, “Too bad I’m only human.”

  Its heads-up display outlined the mercenaries in red and its environment in yellow, helping it navigate despite its deteriorating vision. It stepped towards the door just as a metal spear bolted through the wall. If the attack had been meant for it, the Razgriz would be dead, but instead, the two surviving mercs were impaled to the wall by a structural pole improvised as a spear. The human and Chirp died, bound and pinned to the wall. But the thing some called Razgriz was already out the door, rocketing to play with the monster it loathed.

  Nick was a good man, in fact, he still is, but the molestation of war, and the mind-numbing years of fighting had malformed the 16-year-old boy into a tool. Nick “Canine” Jerik's last resort for anything was unadulterated, unforgiving, hyper-violent savagery. He is the sentinel in the storm, the guard dog of the innocent, even a blinded bird that rises after every fall. Above all else, despite himself, he was still the little boy, only buried in the mire of a bloody hell.

  Until men united wield a hallowed sabre