“Pull our forces off this world.”
Cygnus stared up at the sky, where yet another huge invader juggernaut was splashing through the sky. Wind screamed around them, and static lightning crawled across bottoms of the clouds.
All around him, ships roared to life, scattering for the faint safety of the sky. He wished them luck and watched them go, reverse-comets, shooting up into the sky, through the clouds and friction-lightning and into the black beyond.
“Sir, we need to get you out of here!”
Cygnus didn’t know his name, but the aide who shoved at him to get him on the ship seemed kind. A touch against his mind confirmed that thought, and Cyg shook his head, but managed a smile.
“Get out of here,” he commanded, and turned his full attention on the great ship, which very soon would be low enough to destroy the planet, and everyone still on it. “That’s an order.”
“What about you?” The aide was scared. He should be. Cygnus was scared too, but he was also angry, and more than that, he had a way to share that anger with the invaders.
“I am going to buy us time,” he replied, and walked forward towards the ship. Wind caught his cloak and billowed it back from his shoulders. “When you get to the command ship, find Andra. Ursa knows who she is. Tell her I’m sorry.”
She would be furious with him, but the lives of so many fleeing refugees were worth his. He hoped she would forgive him eventually.
Not that it would really matter if she did. He was very probably going to die before ever seeing her again.
It was time to show these aliens who they were really up against.
He raised his hands to the sky, all his focus condensed to one single purpose.
Once, long ago, he shattered a moon, just to prove that he could. While he drew breath, that ship would not move one inch farther.
The juggernaut fought him when he grabbed it, engines blazing as it struggled to break free of him and resume its terrible decent into range. No matter what it tried, he held on, his mind a wall that it would have to break before they could continue.
The concrete around Cygnus shuddered, and splintered as he braced himself against the world itself, and refused to let go, even when a trickle of blood ran down from his nose, and his mind trembled under the strain.
Ships screamed past him, escaping the planet in swarms, and he took strength from them.
Humanity might be on the run, but they weren’t beaten. Not yet.
And then the juggernaut fired its massive engines, and Cygnus strained to hold it back as all that energy blasted against his telekinetic hold.
For a long minute, he struggled, straining against enough power to jump a ship the size of a city across the galaxy.
But no one, not even him, could keep that kind of force back for long.
Like a wire snapping across skin, Cygnus felt his grasp on the ship break, stretched far beyond his ability to hold it.
The ship roared overhead as it resumed its attack on the planet. The shockwave as it hit the lower atmosphere very nearly blasted him to the ground.
Cygnus fell to his knees, straining against his own limits as he tried to catch the ship again.
A small hand, strong hand slipped into his, rough with calluses and mechanic scars.
When he looked up, it was into Andra’s eyes.
(Together,) she said into his mind, and pulled him to his feet. (Let’s show these guys what we can do.)
(We can’t hold against those engines,) Cygnus said grimly, although he let her pull him into syzygy. Her mind was like cool water where he had strained himself too far, battling against the ship above. (They’re too strong)
Hard satisfaction rippled across her mind and into his.
(We’re not going to hold them back,) Andra said viciously, and wrapped his sheer power around her iron control with an ease most would envy. (We’re going to wreck them. They can’t drop their bombs if we tear them apart.)
(Remember how easy it was to break my ship?)
Memories flashed from her mind to his, of crushed screws and paneling torn off, twisted beyond recognition. The accidents wrought with the smallest bit of misplaced power.
Ships like the destroyer above them could take any amount of damage from the weapons aboard a starship. They could hold off a dozen human warships and never take a scratch.
But they were never meant to take on a pair of furious telekinetics who had only one goal.
To cause as much destruction as they possibly could.
Andra threw their shared mind upward, her mechanic mind picking apart the ship. It was the failing of any structure as big as the destroyer. There were always places where a fingertip of power could get in. If they could get in, they could rip something off.
The ship, which came to kill a planet, came apart in pieces , slowly at first, and then faster as they tore away plating, wires, and everything contained within.
And then there was resistance. Not enough to stop them, or even slow them. With the resistance came the brush of another mind, completely inhuman, and outraged at their defiance.
If he had been alone, Cygnus might have tried to reach out. Tried to speak with that alien mind. Tried to learn about it, and about why these invaders wanted them all dead.
But he wasn’t alone, and Andra seized the mind in a ruthless grip even as it projected wordless alarm along with the outrage.
(This is for Asteroid Base 42,) she snarled vengefully to the presence, which struggled in their grasp, and tried to sink psionic fangs into their minds. (And every other world you took from us!)
With one final twist of pinpointed intent, the ship burst apart. The mind, trapped by theirs, shrieked, and died.
For a long time, they stood there, wrapped together so tightly neither of them were sure which mind ended where.
Cygnus offered up a wordless apology for not telling her what he was doing, and felt the champagne glitters of forgiveness skate from her mind into his, tinged with faint purple annoyance. If she wasn’t allowed to go down fighting, neither was he.
He shimmered unrepentant green amusement back at her, and felt her laugh.
Finally, reluctantly, they began detangling themselves as a ship, one of their own, skated down through the clouds.
(Now they know we can fight back,) Andra said quietly, almost a whisper across Cyg’s mind. He wrapped his arm around her as exhaustion swamped them both. (Maybe we have a chance after all.)
Andra was a mechanic and a pilot with nothing but an old, battered ship to call her own. Cygnus Volans is the most powerful psion to ever live. They were on opposite sides of a messy revolution, until a shared vision of the future brings their two warring sides together against a much greater threat.
