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Knight Adrift

By Zatarra L. Vulpe

Squad Primus was in low orbit when the comms notice came. The men of the first company space knights would nearly hit the ground by the time sergeant Thalos would finish reading it. The company ship, the Declaration of Dominance had picked up fluctuations in the gravitational and dark matter in the sector. The pattern was familiar to Thalos. It meant one thing: Dark Legion.

Squad Primus' orbital drop pod slammed into the ground with enough force to crater a mountainside. Thankfully on the blasted hell scape of the planet Agamemnon 3, this was not an unusual state of affairs. When the drop pod opened in the midst of the superheated glass and char, the space knights stepped out. Each weighed roughly a ton, bodies entirely encased in the humming, hissing Vigil Twenty Three configuration powered armor, each with an individual fusion reactors just to move, venting radioactive exhaust that could melt skin within a meter of the shoulder mounted ports. Nearly three meters high at the shoulder, each had their customary Ender Rifle, throwing 120mm plasma slugs at near-c, or practically the speed of light. Their visor slats glowed as though containing a conflagration and many of these warriors would make such a catastrophe seem preferable to their enemies.

As sergeant Thalos crested the edge of the newly created crater, he could already see signs of the enemy. The roiling dust had long patterns etched in the barren rock, meant specifically to tap into otherworldly and unholy energies that could rip a man asunder before he could blink. If they were so bold as to place them where the Space Knights would commit to a drop, they will have dotted this particular globe with them. His readouts were not picking up anything close to a life form, and they likely would have seen the beating of a fly's heart at a mere 100 meters.

"Shvathus, Urien, reconnaissance formation sixty-seven, as the Regulis dictates."

"We hear and obey sergeant."

"Kathas, Mynos, Enders ready."

"With all haste sergeant."

The four of them were roughly orbiting their commander. Their hard, steel colored armor was easily visible against the harsh green sun and the vacant, blackened landscape. The wavering heat mirage was nearly palpable to Thalos, though that might be the suit's air filter acting up again. Not that it mattered, the scourge of the Dark Legion could not be allowed to exist. The Immortal God-King would not be allowed rest until his enemies were slain, though their number grew every day and Kingdom Of Man worlds fell nearly so quickly. Thalos was never once uncertain of victory, of course; to do so was treason.

"Sergeant, I have spotted the remains of what appears to be Dark Legion encampment."

Hypnotically reinforced hatred boiled in the Sergeant's voice. "Lead us there, we shall have them slain yet, fellows. Assault pattern delta!"

The other four fell behind him in a fan that resembled a loose triangle. Their armor would crack ground and crush boulders with every stride, but when needed the space knights could find speed. They ran, nearly so fast as one of their own hover speeders, with nary a drop in grace. The only panting was from their exhaust ports and the whining of servos that moved the slates about their form that weighed hundreds of kilos. They stood in the midst of the camp in moments, having run nearly a mile in several bionically driven breaths.

"Search with care, fellows, the enemy is surely near."

"As you say Sergeant."

The weathered space knight knelt before the remains of a fire pit, burned on what looked like some foul smelling alien-chemical, and recited a prayer to the God-King. His fellows simply pushed their way through the very temporary emplacements of the Dark Legion, ignoring the twitching and twisted remains of Legionary cultists embedded into the framework. Their formerly Kingdom sigils were darkened with blaspheme and profanities in the shade of foul copper rather than customary Kingdom gold. There were whole holo-platforms and data slates with key locations left within these places, glowing with sigils profane enough to snap a mere mortal's mind as a twig. They were purged without comment, though the waste of a plasma-shell came with a small prayer to their God-King for forgiveness. The force of the shell's impact moving just below the speed of light was enough to explode apart the buildings the knights stood in, much less the ensuing plasma explosion. The guns shook enough to throw off the righteous soldiers' aim by a centimeter, the sun-hot plasma blast nearly singing their armor. This was done before the Sergeant's prayer was finished.

It was then that another plasma shell went off. Unlike the knight's trademark blue, this was a deep red with black contrails.

"Fellows! Defensive protocol one hundred and thirty five!"

The God-King's warriors made a tactical withdrawal around their commander and took knees, glancing at the source of the bolt.

They were Legionary, certainly. Their armor was warped and bulging with whatever wretched creature still lie within. The Dark Legion's armor was a mockery of the Space Knights, tarnished to blackness by the stench of their own failure and traitorous squalor. Every one of them was a shame to the Space Knights and a personal affront to the God-King of Man. Though their equipment was often fouled by runes of the Demon Lords, it was often deadly enough to claim countless fellows.

The leader of this particular war band seemed most foul, a half exposed face molded over the helmet and wept with some unknown, black liquid. It moved in a sort of half-rictus with a terrible twitch about the eye. His voice sounded of steel against bubbling sludge.

"Hail, Space Fools! You have wandered onto mine personal domain, your reputation for idiocy precedes you!"

"It is only those who face the God-King's chosen who are fools, for their ends are generally short and agonizing."

"I would say the same of my own little Legion, but much less fortunately for you the ending of those on the wrong side of my own rifles are generally much, much longer. But worry not, they shall be no less agonizing, extended by every second you beg for us to kill you."

"The only begging you shall hear will be from your own throats before we destroy you, Demon Worshiper."

"Enough of words, there must be action! Die loyalists!"

The traitors were in greater number, but the knights were better trained. They carefully placed shells into the chests and heads of oncoming Legionnaires. They burst in clouds of bone fragments and seething blue plasma, easily killing several at a time. The weapon's effectiveness was such that a traitor shell ripped through the massive shoulder plate of fellow Mynos and blew off his arm, he adjusted to his left and continued to fire. None of the knights moved from their assigned spot, as is written in the Regulis. The glassed and churned dust only settled after the Sergeant himself had landed a cannon shell straight into the lead traitor's ribs. He fell, ribcage shattered off.

Thalos stalked up to the plateau the traitors had been using as a fire base. He stared into the eyes of the war lord's eyes as life was leaving them. His blackened fluids were staining the ground red.

"So.. you think you... have won."

"I am most certain of it, traitor, may you rot in what terrible place your soul belongs to."

"Only... if you... join me."

Sickening, prismatic lightning arcs danced from the dying man and shot into the knight's armor, tearing through weapon and servo alike, shooting into flesh and vanishing the knight with a heavy snap of light and the air. The other knights were baffled, but maintained vigil.

-

Timmy was playing with his train set, trying to get the blue train to crash into the red train with as many sound effects as possible.

"Woah, oh no, they're gonna cra-ash! Everbody run! Ooooh noooo! Errrrk, reee, reeeeurrr."

That was when the back yard boomed.

"Woah! That sounded like a fire work!"

Timmy ran over to the clear door. It was better than the other doors because he could stick his face against it and the neighbors would see. It was hard to get open though, he would have to pull really hard.

What Timmy saw was Sergeant Thalos clad in what remained of his powered armor. He was on hand and knee. The planet's gravity wasn't strong, but something nauseated the warrior, a truly alien sensation to a specially bio-enhanced and cybernetically reinforced Space Knight such as himself. Something was wrong, something about this place felt different to Thalos. He'd felt the touch of fel energies before, but never had its effect been so strong. It was as though this reality itself rejected him.

Timmy saw a big shiny suit. It looked like a space man. It must not have been a good space suit 'cause it had lots of big holes in it. He looked like he was in trouble though, that or maybe he wasn't really a space man. Maybe he was a space dog! Timmy got really excited. Timmy had never seen a space man, and here comes an extra super cool space dog he can hang out with and maybe be its owner. He could ask mommy and daddy later, right now he wanted to go play! He tried getting the door open, it was pretty hard, but it moved.

Thalos knew not where he was, but it was... fresh. The air in his lungs tasted fine even without the filter of his helmet. The ground was covered in real grass, there were shrubs planted in a row against the admittedly weak looking domicile. It was as many paradise-worlds the God-King had set aside for his own pleasure, but everything was... natural. Surely an abomination or trick to deceive Thalos into dropping his guard. The knight reached for his Ender Rifle and found himself bereft.

And worse, felt himself... shift. His armor felt strange to him now, rubbing in the wrong ways. Considering Space Knights were practically grown into their armor, he found this most troubling. His hands couldn't quite manipulate the gloves anymore. He thought it might have been blown off or eaten away, but he felt no pain.

It's when the rest of him slid back into the chest piece that he grew concerned.

His helmet slipped off of his head. He shrank to a mere two meters in a second, then felt queasy again. He turned around in his armor, feeling rather cavernous around him. His implants were gone. In their place was shifting, roiling flesh. His fingers tightened, thumb shrinking away, behind his wrist. He tried to cry out but his voice was garbled, caught up in a long flap of some sort. He panted, trying to turn around, and tasted the impossible inner workings of his armor for a second. His flesh prickled and warped over shrinking bones and comparatively tiny muscles.

"Doggy doggy doggy doggy doggy!"

Timmy poked his head into the rim of the armor's gorget. Thelos was marveling over his muzzle, the tail pushing out of his backside keeping him off balance.

"Doggy!"

Thelos didn't know what the little human was saying, but it was certainly incessant, nothing at all like The King's Speech. He frowned at the little noise and drew in with his lungs. He let loose with a terrifying... Bark.

Thelos tried again. He yipped and yapped, panting tiredly from his changes. Timmy reached in and picked him up in his hands. Thelos was utterly powerless to resist, missing the ground as he was. He also passed quickly into sleep.

-

Thelos jumped up with a start. He landed on all fours. Thelos looked down. He was covered in fluff, small, he felt strange, as he did in his early youth, from the times before his service as a Space Knight. Those memories were hazy at best, but they were returning to him in a murky way.

The house was dark. He could see, but there was little color to his vision, what was there was very muted, but it reminded him of his helmet's own vision slat. He scrabbled forward across the doughy surface of the carpet, pouncing onto a hardwood floor with a clack and bumping promptly into a table leg he wasn't focusing on. Thelos promptly sat back and shook his head, mouth open as the spot on his head throbbed. Thelos had probably not felt pain from an injury in centuries. It jarred him to full alertness even as something pulled him along. A scent, ingrained into his mind: grass.

It didn't take long. It rest on the other side of a clear, mildly reflective boundary. Unfortunately it contained some kind of strange, warped creature, fuzzy and transparent. He lowered his front and barked at the creature, his little brain working hard to fend it off so that he might make his way through this barrier.

"What's this? A dog? What's a dog doing in the house?"

"I'm not sure, maybe it got in through the basement? It looks awfully young dear."

"Hmm, must be lost."

Timmy woke up and poked his head out of his room. He wasn't supposed to leave the race car bed after ni-night, but it involved his new friend Checker, so he thought mommy and daddy would be okay with it. That and they were up so he could get permission.

"Checker what are you doing?"

"Checker?"

Timmy stopped and put his hands behind his back and looked down like he did when he did something bad. Mommy put her hands on her hips and looked down at Timmy. "Where did you find 'Checker?'"

"In the back yard, he was in a big space man suit."

She looked to daddy. He shrugged "Probably a trash can."

"We need to start putting a child lock on this door."

"What, and look paranoid? You know Dave likes to come over to watch the game."

"Well 'Dave' can knock on the front door like a normal person, we can't have our son playing in trash with strange dogs."

Thelos had missed every word of it. He stared at them with a renewed interest. They were all far larger than he was. He was usually the one that dwarfed others around him.

"Well, he is just so cute, I suppose we can hold on to him, just until we find his owner, but we'll have to train him."

"We, who's we?"

"You and I, unless you think you can handle, things, by yourself for a while."

"Alright, alright, you and I."

"We'll get him a little cage tomorrow and make sure he can't run around barking and causing trouble. Did he even have a collar?"

"How should I know?"

"We'll have to go look in the morning, for now we'll just have to keep him somewhere he won't stain if he has an accident."

"Bathroom?"

"Hmm... I can't imagine he has anything he could tear apart in there."

Mommy picked up Thelos, easily cupping him in her palms, then gently rest him in the bathroom, leaving the light on. Thelos was livid. He jumped and screeched and clawed and barked but when mommy shut off the light Thelos kind of felt the fight drop out of him. He couldn't see, and very well couldn't make an attack against the many surfaces in this room if he kept bumping into them. That and it hurt.

Thelos resolved to do in the morning and simply lay down, biding his time with small noises and keeping warm against something that felt like his old armor. It kept flipping up and down with a comforting metal on metal 'clang' when he stepped on a certain lever. Thelos curled himself alongside it and resolved to stay awake. This vigil lasted until his first yawn.

-

Thelos was awakened by the door being opened. Mommy picked him up in a hand in an instant and smiled at him, he was certain he was about to be eaten by these people. This wasn't unusual when the people of the Kingdom of Man were found starving. That was until he felt some kind of infernal thing placed around his neck. A long lead connected to the collar. It jangled.

"There we go, how about we head out before you cause an accident, huh?"

Her words weren't familiar to him, but they certainly didn't sound like any war cry he'd heard of. She did remove the clear barrier, he darted into the grass and jerked her along by her hand.

"Woah there Checkers! Don't want to choke yourself!"

Thelos kept hearing certain sounds, ones he was pretty sure referred to him, but he paid them no mind, he needed to get to his armor at least. He pulled her along toward a spot behind the tree, where the steel assembly likely still-

It was gone.

His armor was gone, as though it had never existed in the first place. The green wasn't even disturbed. Thelos felt something sink into his small stomach. Not that he knew anything of heretical Dark Legion sorcery. Likely he would be trapped here for however long he had left. Fortunately his fellows would remember him.

"Come on Checkers! Go potty!"

Thelos looked back at the woman, shaking his leash and speaking to him in such a way. It certainly didn't sound threatening, but she seemed agitated. This is when Thelos felt a strange twinge, as though something were trying to burrow its way from him. His body seemed to know what to do, approaching a tree. As a Space Knight, this sort of sensation was unfamiliar to him, and almost entirely maintained by his armor.

"Good boy! Good doggy Checkers!"

After he'd finished she pulled him close and lowered her hand unto his form. He thought it would be to finally end him, but the fingers brushed through his fur and scratched at a certain part behind his ears. He admitted it was very pleasurable, his right rear leg began to twitch and thump against the ground as his little curly tail wagged. When she stopped he rather quickly realized what he'd just been doing. Somehow these natives must have some sort of dark tricks that can subvert even Regulis standard psycho-conditioning.

Thelos felt a need to lash out, but his spacio-motor awareness was still developing. The desire for combat translated itself into a gut reaction to take a quick run around his owner that got the leash tangled against the tree in the yard.

"Aww, sounds like someone's got a bit of energy to burn huh? Let's try taking you for a walk, that sound good? You like that?"

Checkers jumped and barked at the infernal woman. She would not win him over as of yet, even if her voice did sound nice. Unfortunately Checkers was having a hard time remembering why. He'd been here all of a day and felt his life as a Space Knight growing distant, echoes drowned out by the small impacts of his individual paws padding across the ground. The concerns of his... his... previous owner? Were fading, besides, where were they? He needed some kind of help... didn't he?

Mommy decided to break his introspection by tugging him around toward the front yard, through the fence and onto the lawn, by the drive way. She waved to Dave's wife as she headed down the street. Their little cul-de-sac wasn't the Boardwalk of the monopoly game that is life, but it was better than most.

Checkers found it hard to think. He was keeping up with mommy and then pulling her along and then still pulling her along. His thoughts receded back into his head somewhere, bouncing around behind the major concerns like 'pant' and 'keep running.' For mommy it was small, but for Checkers it may as well have been the size of... of... something really big he used to know about. The d... the dec... the something or other. It was a big thing with lots of people in it that he used to live on but doesn't anymore. It was kind of boring. It didn't have as many smells as wherever they were now.

When mommy made it to the end of the street she saw a few other people, though she probably couldn't name them. They had dogs though, the kind that Timmy liked to say were passing by in a way that let mommy know that he wanted to pet them. Checkers trotted over to them and was sniffing them a little, he was a bit jumpy but he didn't seem to bark or yip, if anything he seemed oddly calm.

"Didn't know you had a dog, neighbor."

"We found him, we're trying to locate his owner, but until then we're taking care of him."

"O-oh, well that's good, sounds like you're some really good Samaritans... Say, aren't you Dave's bud's wife?"

"Yes, we've been together a while now."

"Well that's nice, I hear he's got a killer television and some great burgers."

"Now now, I wear the apron in the family, he can say what he wants but he couldn't save his life with a grill."

"Really? I might have to see that for myself. We're having a cook out for my grandson's birthday this Saturday, maybe we can make it a neighborhood thing? Maybe this old dog can learn a thing or two, swap some recipes and let the kids burn off some of that youthful energy huh?"

"You know, that sounds like a good idea, mister..."

"Fairbrough, we're down on Holly boulevard, big blue house, can't miss it."

"Alright Mr. Fairbrough, we'll see you then, I'm sure Timmy would love to meet your grandson."

"Certainly, though it'll be nice meeting you too, Dave's friend's wife."

Checkers didn't know what they were saying, but it was enough for him to grasp that they were okay. The other dog was okay too, he was a little big but he was nice, he had a long pointed face and big ears. He was brown though, and he had a big muzzle. Something about him seemed nice, even sniffing him all over seemed to only garner a few sniffs back.

Crackers kept going. The houses were big, a lot of them looked like Timmy's house, but none of them had the same smell. Mommy was trailing along behind him, giving him a little tug when he would stop and sniff at a spot where he thought another dog had been. He kept trying to eat things and that made mommy make sounds that were a little less happy, but some other trail would catch his attention or he'd jump from the soft green stuff to the hard gray stuff.

They continued like this for a while, until the scents became familiar again. Checkers could smell Timmy inside, and saw him bouncing around.

"There's my little man, and look who's ready to see you?"

"Checkers! Did you take him for a walk mommy?"

"Uh huh, and he was such a good boy."

"Can we keep him mommy?"

"Well... We'll have to see if his family doesn't come for him, Checkers might have his own family at his own home."

"Okay... But what if they don't find him mommy?"

"Then I guess we can make Checkers part of the family, huh boy? Would you like that? Huh?"

Checker's mouth hung open. Mommy made such nice sounds. His tongue flopped a little as he panted after that long walk outside.

"He likes it he likes it!"

"I think so too, maybe we can think about training him pretty soon huh? Would you like that Timmy?"

"Uh huh! We can tell him to sit and beg and fetch!"

Mommy reached down and unclipped the leash. Checkers took off, scrabbling on the floor for a second before he would sprint down the hall and into the living room. Timmy laughed and it echoed throughout the house. Mommy and Timmy followed their new dog and thought of all the cute things he would do.