Chapter 12: Attack on the Lotus

Thoughts bounded through Sonny’s mind, causing lurches in his stomach every time he ended up with the same conclusion. They had to have known. It was too aggressive an action for just the planet. They had to have known. Or, at least, someone did. He wiped his eyes and then glanced out of the window of the glider as he made his way back to the yacht.

The neon signs flashed in front of him, but he didn't read anything, he didn't see what they were showing. All he could think about was the conversation that he had just left. His attempts to tell Victoria that they would have this in hand, while his heart thumped uneasily, knowing that he didn't know that at all.

Regardless of what he had just told Victoria, taking Yeley was a promising strategy to get the rest of the independent planets in the area, but it was not what he thought was happening. It wasn't enough. It didn't match the ambition of the Autarch. It didn't even match the ambition of the Dorlec.

Why the Dorlec, he thought, again.

Even if this was an operation for the Houses to gain more control in independent space, why choose the Dorlec to run that operation? They were, first and foremost, a people of science. An empire built on the idea of achieving perfection by any means. An entire empire built on experiments and genetic alteration. Surely the plan would not be to poison the food that Yeley provided to the rest of the independent planets?

He felt a haptic buzz behind his ear and knew that Jax was pinging him to see if he was finished or not.

“All good?” he said into his comm.

“Everything is fine,” she said in a slightly strained voice, “We have some lurkers on the platform, they have been organising the same crates for a while now, and two of them do not look like they belong here”

“Alright, apples, I’ll be there in five”

“Got it”, she responded without question, responding to one of their fruit-based codes. ‘Apples’ was 'leave and wait for my call', the most common code that Sonny used. The sinking in his stomach worsened.

“You can drop me here, thank you”, he said to the driver, and was shortly standing in the street looking around him. He was close enough to the port now to walk, but also didn't like the idea of springing a trap for the sake of it. If it even was a trap. No, his own current paranoia aside, Jax had good instincts.

“What the actual fuck is happening right now” he said to himself as he waved off the glider down the street. Thankfully, due to the port he used being closed off to the public, this close to the city walls, the tunnel was empty. He searched around him, trying to focus on the sounds around him, and away from the buzz of celebration in the city itself.

After not hearing anything in particular, he put his hands in his pockets and walked towards the platform. As he made his way through the tunnel, he saw them, silhouetted against the backdrop of space through the port. Like usual, Jax’s instincts were spot on. They were not here for the crates.

Three men, two in overalls and one in a black waistcoat with a white shirt, began to peel off from the crate they were standing around.

He analysed the group. They walked separately, at an odd distance from one another, occasionally glancing from one to the other as though to see what each was going to do next. So, they weren't familiar with one another, which was telling. A group that had been put together for just this, or rather, activated, he thought.

He had stopped now and allowed them to walk closer, and once they were around ten meters away, they staggered to a stop, again waiting to see what the other two would do, reinforcing Sonny’s thoughts that they were not familiar with one another.

It appeared as though they were taken aback by their target being himself, Sonny Matise, House Head of the Artelis. At least two did, the one on the right in overalls looked excited at the prospect of taking out a prominent figure.

“Gentlemen”, Sonny said, coming to a stop in front of them. He didn't recognise any of them.

The two dressed in overalls looked like dock workers, both brawny and tough, but not soldiers. Both bore all the hallmarks of fear. The one on the right, wearing the waistcoat, had an arrogant look about him and was by far the most menacing of the three, with a malicious glint in his eye. He had a thick scar that ran down the side of his face, and a silver tooth that glimmered as he smiled.

Very opportunistic, Sonny thought. Each of them must have been embedded in the Lotus somehow. Two dock workers who would have been activated, and then a croupier from one of the casinos?

Sonny found his thoughts jumping to the worst-case scenario. They were already here, they were activated because of his arrival, and they arrived at a non-operational dock. Ortu? No, couldn't be, not with everything else that was happening now. These weren’t fanatics of the old-god emperor, but perhaps it was being made to look like it.

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He watched one of the brawny dock workers, this one in the middle, pull something from his tool kit behind him, a small cylinder, and he began fidgeting with it, while nervously looking up at Sonny, who kept his eye on the dangerous man on the right. Sonny stepped forward, holding his hand up to tell the man to stop what he was doing, when three quick shots came from behind him.

He immediately pushed his resonance, strengthening the barrier around him and slowing time around him. He felt the three bullets strike the invisible barrier with dull thuds. They stopped a meter and a half away from him before they began to orbit him in his gravitational barrier.

A fourth shooter? But he didn't have time to focus. He saw the waistcoat and silver tooth hurtling towards him. The croupier was flying towards him with a knife in his hand and madness in his eyes. He moved quickly under Sonny and thrust upwards with his knife, but it was futile. Sonny’s gravitational barrier slowed the man as he got close, bringing him to almost a complete halt, and with a flick of Sonny’s wrist, the bullets that were orbiting his barrier flung around him at an incredible speed and plunged into his attacker. Sonny watched as each bullet penetrated the skin. One shot in the arm, and two in the left leg. He saw it happen slowly in the time dilation caused by being at the centre of his barrier. To the thug, it would have been instantaneous. He moved the man off to his side, suspending him in the barrier as he glanced up at the other two.

He didn't waste any time, and he thrust his hand out and pulled at the dock worker in the middle who was holding the device, even as he heard another three bullets hit the outside of his barrier. The dock worker flew into his outstretched arm, and Sonny saw immediately that he had made a mistake. The other one, he thought. As he pulled the one dock worker in, with the bomb in his hands, he saw that the other already had his hand firmly set on a switch that was already triggered.

“Shit” he said to himself as he released the pull from the man that was now flying straight towards him. They both have a dead man's switch on this bomb. Sonny pulled his arm back and, in a panic brought on by his mistake, thrust his hand out again, this time feeling the catalytic surge of energy in the palm of his hand as he turned his gravity from pulling to pushing. He immediately knew that he had used too much force.

There was a sudden crack in the air as the initial push on the air by his gravity forced air molecules to squeeze together too quickly. The air displacement caused a high pitched, piercing shriek followed by a thunderous roaring as Sonny pushed against the man and his bomb. He watched as the man's body hurtled away from him. Then came the screech of the air, as it was compressed too quickly, desperate to escape the confined space. It created a vacuum, and the walls of the tunnel bowed inwards and then ruptured, shattering and breaking apart by his thrust. The gravitational shift had been too fast.

He caught a glimpse of his attackers being broken apart by the force of it, before the bomb was forced to explode, with the added force of Sonny’s attack. The blast was accelerated. The compressed air burned too fast, and within a fraction of a second, the bomb transitioned into a plasma state. There was a rapturous flash of light, and an immediate rise in temperature as the blast blew from the ship like a roar of fiery breath from the port of the Lotus, only finding an escape once it blew past his yacht and out of the suspended atmosphere of the ship, pulling the lining of the tunnel with it.

Sonny strained to keep his barrier strengthened enough to hold himself from being pulled into the vacuum, feeling it warp and pull under the force. He watched as the structural integrity of the thick glowing metal walls waned as debris flew out towards space, through the now open mouth of the Lotus.

The cry of gravity withered, and the cracking of the ship around him came into existence. Steel bars and plates were bent and alight with the heat of the tunnel. He watched the blast fly through open space, as the suspended atmosphere around the Lotus began to easily melt back in on itself, closing the hole that he had caused.

The gravity in the tunnel was once more regulated, and everything that was hanging from the tunnel suddenly dropped to the floor, clattering and crashing around him.

He took in a deep breath, ensuring to keep his barrier up against the ship's burning red walls and settled himself. He looked to his side at the man with the waistcoat that he suspended in his barrier and saw that all that was left was the forearm. The rest of him that was not far enough into Sonny’s gravity had been blown away with the rest of the shattered tunnel.

“Fuck sake” he held his eyes closed for some time and gave himself a moment. He didn't even have anyone to interrogate. He looked behind him to where he suspected there had been a fourth shooter, but saw that everything behind him had been ravaged by the vacuum as well. They were either long gone or had been pulled into the blast without his noticing.

He placed his hands on his hips and raised his head to the ceiling. He had messed up big on this. He hadn't used his primer abilities like that in a long while, and it showed. He was out of practice, and he panicked. He shook his head. Jax was going to have a field day.

He could suddenly hear his comm going berserk in his ear. Both Cotton and Penna were trying to reach him.

What the fuck was that? A fucking attack in broad daylight without a single word spoken? He scanned the area for any clues, but he had just broken the place apart.

“Sonny, was that you? Are you alright? Sonny!”

“Yeah, it was me, I’m fine”, he said, holding his head to the ceiling with his eyes closed. He felt embarrassed that he had just done that.

“What was that? Are there more?” Sonny could now hear the claxons going off and the sirens of the Eshara police on their way.

“No, I dont think there will be any more”, he said, opening his eyes to the bolt of fire that he could still see moving through space. Around him, the tunnel was destroyed, ripped out. The twisting metal and fragments of what was once the port now showed only an open view to the galaxy. “I’m going to need a lift, though. I just shot my yacht into outer space”

He didn't hear Cotton’s response, his mind already whirling with what had just happened. The Ortu always announce themselves, they give out some cry to the old god emperor before they do anything. They didn't do that. It wasn't the Ortu, but it was perhaps made to look like them. He took in another deep breath, accepting that this was somehow connected to all the shit with Yeley somehow. He closed his eyes tightly. Did it? Was that what it was?

What the fuck was happening?