Galaxy Under Siege

by Tristan Vick

  As if possessed by a spirit taking control of her body, Brei’s arm slowly rose up, and she pressed her own gun to the temple of her head. Brei looked over at Jegra, clearly terrified. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered.

  “Oh, and do be quiet. The adults are trying to have a conversation here.”

  She tried to speak again, but could only mumble through her closed lips, which would not open, no matter how hard she tried. Screaming into her mouth with frustration, she turned her worried eyes to Jegra.

  “Leave her alone,” Jegra pleaded. “I’m the one you want, not her.”

  “You know, Empress Alakandra, you’ve proven to be a much bigger thorn in my side than I initially assumed you’d be. I’m not often surprised, but I have to give credit where credit is due. You’ve upended my designs time and time again.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jegra replied.

  The Voice merely nodded in an amused manner, acknowledging Jegra’s little quip. “At first, I couldn’t figure out how you were doing it. You know, your influence over these simple-minded people,” she said, her eyes flitting to Brei’Alas and then gently settling onto Lance’s head. Looking back up, she continued. “Your influence seems to be every bit as strong as mine. But then it dawned on me. They...love you.” She balked as if the very notion of it was absurd.

  “Do I detect a hint of jealousy?” Jegra smiled brusquely. “Is that why you feel you must either kill all of us or force me to surrender to you? So that they will follow suit?”

  “I could no more be jealous of you than one could be jealous of an ant. But, when it comes to your ability to influence all the ants, well then, it seems I do have a problem. See, one ant is meaningless to me. But, as you know, when there is an infestation...well...an entire colony can prove quite the nuisance. So, consider this my one and only offering of the olive branch. You can have the peace you seek. The freedom you so desire. But you must swear your allegiance to me and me alone. Resist me, and you seal your doom and the doom of all of those you care about.”

  Jegra looked over at Brei, who saw the reticent look in Jegra’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Jegra said, and, with a lightning quick chop to Brei’s neck, she knocked the girl out. It was for her own safety.

  She caught Brei in her arms and gently set her to the ground, then, setting down her plasma sword, she picked up Brei’s twin blasters.

  “And what do you intend to do with those pea-shooters?” The Voice asked, watching Jegra with an amused half-smile.

  Without wasting her words, Jegra responded with action. She began blasting away at Azra’il Nun, who had no choice but to raise the glowing sword to deflect the plasma blasts.

  Steadily, Jegra marched forward, both guns blazing. As Azra’il Nun was fully preoccupied defending against Jegra’s onslaught, Lance Bishop slipped to the ground and rolled away.

  “Get her out of here,” she shouted, nodding at Brei’s unconscious body lying on the floor.

  Lance nodded and rushed over and scooped the girl up into his arms, flinging her over his shoulder. He looked back at Jegra one last time, but she was focused on her battle.

  When the coolant cartridges ran dry, the indicator flashed red and the gun bleated at her in an agitated tone that relayed it was spent. She tossed the guns to the floor and then charged Azra’il Nun like an enraged bull.

  Azra’il was panting heavily, and sluggishly raised the heavy sword. Not wearing any power armor, however, she was barely able to hold it up. She backed away from Jegra, the sword crackling menacingly on the cool air.

  “Stay back,” she warned, “or I will be forced to kill you.”

  Jegra laughed. “Let’s drop all the unnecessary pretenses. You were already going to kill me anyway. My bet is you’d have ordered Brei to do it so that I wouldn’t fight back or harm the person attacking me. Make it so I sacrificed myself to save her. Then you’d just off her too. See, I know what being a heartless monster looks like. It’s the ugly shadow I see looming over my shoulder every damn day. The part of me that wants to be unleashed. The part of me that would just be so relieved if I just set it free to run wild.”

  Azra’il smiled. “And why don’t you let it loose?”

  “Because,” she replied, “then I’d be just like you.”

  The Voice flicked off the plasma sword, set the blade town, resting the tip on the floor, and looked deep into Jegra’s eyes. The golden halos flashed brightly in her own eyes and her lips parted in a seemingly affronted grin. She huffed. “And what, in your infinitesimally limited understanding, do you think I am?”

  “A being completely incapable of love.”

  Azra’il Nun threw her head back and cackled. The cackle turned into a deep, throaty and demonic sounding laugh, and when she looked back at Jegra, the two halos were spiraling around her black eyes like a couple of rings of fire.

  “Why, Jegra? Why do you do it? Why do you continue to resist me, continue to fight? Is it because you believe you’re fighting for something? Is it for peace? For freedom? Or for something as mundane as survival? Could it be for love? You say I am incapable of love. But let me fill you in on a little secret, my pet. Love is an illusion. It’s fleeting. Impermanent.”

  Standing nose to nose, Azra’il reached up and gently ran her finger down the bridge of Jegra’s oily nose. Then, rubbing Jegra’s oils between her white fingers with a slight look of repugnance settling across her face, she continued on with her speech in a manner that did little to allay the disgust in her voice.

  “It’s but a thousand unseen chemical reactions of a flawed physiology playing out in predictable ways. It may feel real, because you’re a slave to your biology. But it’s not real. The universe is indifferent to your pathetic concepts of love. Like your fleeting existence, in the grander scheme of things, it’s all meaningless. Only oblivion is certain. And you, the only one to stand up to me in over seven millennia, put your faith in something as fleeting and insipid as love?”

  She balked, disgusted by the mere thought of entertaining a notion as absurd as love. Waving her hand, she brushed it aside for the moment.

  “When your existence ends, so too will your precious concept of love. But I am the End of Days! I am the one who will be there at the end of time to watch the universe blink out of existence. Oblivion is the only real truth, not love. Love has no place in this universe. You must be able to see it by now, Jegra. This universe was an accident. Like your existence, like love...all accidents, random convergences of nothingness. All of them ultimately meaningless. So, why? Why do you persist?”

  Jegra smiled and, taking a deep breath, replied, “Because I have felt love and I know it’s more powerful than even the darkest abyss. And regardless of what some seven-thousand-year-old alien thinks, perhaps it’s something worth fighting for. Maybe, as farfetched as it sounds, the universe came into existence so that love, however fleeting, might be possible.”

  “Unlikely,” the Voice interjected, a nauseated look settling upon her pale face.

  “More importantly, though, since you asked,” Jegra reminded her, hoping to fend off any more interruptions, “I resist you because I may be the only one in this entire stinking universe who can. Nevertheless, it’s a charge I gladly accept, because even if it’s all meaningless to you...it’s not all meaningless to me. So, let me ask you something, H’aaztre, Embracer of Oblivion. Knowing that I’ve been able to resist you at every turn, what makes you think that I care one iota about your idle threats? You want to come after me? Fine. You want to come after my friends? I dare you to try it. But every single time I defeat you, and I will defeat you, remember my words. It’s because of love that I will win. And it’s because of love that you will lose.”

  Jegra reached up and gently caressed the side of Azra’il Nun’s face, returning the delicateness of her enemy’s previous touch with one of her own.

  “And it’s because of my resolve that I will look into your eyes as I am doing now, and I’ll deny your evil to continue.
”

  “Then we are of like minds,” the Voice said, smiling as though she’d won some kind of wager.

  “Yes. It appears that we are,” Jegra replied somberly. “And that’s what scares me.”

  She knew what she had to do but did not like it. She knew that a mother bear would kill to protect her cubs. She knew that people would help a loved one to die, if their pain and agony was so great that death was the only reprieve. And now, she found a new reason: to prevent genocide on a galactic scale.

  In a split-second, Jegra’s hand was wrapped around Azra’il Nun’s face, her fingers bearing down onto her flesh as though she were palming a basketball. A quick flick of the wrist later, Azra’il Nun’s neck snapped with a hideous bone shattering crack that reverberated off the walls and the bulkheads of the corridor.

  The golden halo of light faded from Azra’il Nun’s eyes and, just like that, The Voice of H’aaztre had been silenced.

  She relinquished her grip upon Azra’il Nun’s body and let it collapse at her feet. Yet Jegra, feeling terrible for having been left no other choice but to kill the being Azra’il had once been, could not simply discard her enemy as though she were unwanted refuse.

  Instead, she gently scooped the lifeless form up in her arms and carried it back toward the rendezvous point.

  After all, the fact remained, Azra’il Nun was also a victim of H’aaztre’s minacious influence.

  Before he’d sunk his manipulative and direful hooks into her, Azra’il Nun was a hero. It was Azra’il Nun’s actions at the battle of Sector B-13 that had saved everyone. She’d sacrificed her life to save Jegra’s and all the others. That wasn’t something which Jegra could ever forget.

  And it was of Jegra’s mind that that’s how this great woman, this noble warrioress, ought to be remembered.

  Jegra cradled Azra’il Nun like a sleeping child in her arms and carried her back toward the rendezvous point. As she strode gracefully forward, several Knights of Caelum, returning from their mission of planting bombs throughout the ship, met her in the corridor.

  They paused, exchanging glances, and then opened their helmets. As they gazed with sad eyes upon Azra’il Nun’s dead body, the knights slowly stepped to the side and let the empress pass. They all saluted, one by one, as she passed them and continued on her way. Once she was at the head of the pack, she sniffled and let a single tear trickle down her cheek.

  The battle was won, but the war was far from over.

  Compassion and turning the other cheek weren’t enough to fight an evil of this magnitude. Monstrous, devouring beasts didn’t care if you ran or hid. They simply wrought destruction and misery wherever they went, littering the centuries with the blood of innocent victims.

  It was clear to Jegra that true evil needed to be combated.

  And, feeling the portentous dread steadily growing in the pit of her stomach, she knew that they needed to regroup. H’aaztre, the baleful and self-proclaimed Enemy of Love and Embracer of Oblivion, would be coming for her. And she was fairly certain that the next time he wasn’t going to be pulling any punches.

  Next time would be all-out war.

  41

  In honor of Jegra’s great victory over Azra’il Nun, The Voice of H’aaztre, Dakroth ordered a celebration to be held on Dagon Prime. Not only had the Empress of Dagon returned sovereign rulership to their world, but she’d broken the enemy blockade, destroyed a large portion of their fleet, and sent them scurrying back home with their tails tucked between their legs.

  The message was clear: the Pearl of the Empire would not give in without a fight. And, after the past three years, one with a foreign ruler, one with the emperor missing, and one with Jegra in a coma, the people of Dagon Prime came out en masse to celebrate a return to greatness—a return to purity. If not in blood, then certainly in spirit.

  “Noble women and men, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you my wife, the woman who brought us back from the brink of darkness and showed the galaxy why Dagon Prime is the sparkling Jewel of the Empire! Our enemies are vast, but our resolve is unwavering. We will not go into the night to embrace oblivion, no! We will stand steadfast next to our protector, our hero, the Mother of Dagon, Jegra Alakandra Rhadamanthus!”

  The Lord Emperor stepped away from the podium, which was being broadcast live on all the televid screens in the Imperial Square, in the arena, on all the digital billboards throughout the metropolis. At the same time, the Needle stream was being cast across the entire Commonwealth and beamed into every home from here to the Outer Rim colonies.

  His coup de grâce, however, was that he’d had deep space relays set up to boost the signal so it would find its way all the way to Nyctan, just to rub their victory in, and maybe deal a critical blow to their religious-born certitude that their Gilded God was impervious.

  The roar of applause was deafening. It rose up from the city center and spread out in waves across the quaint townships and farming villages, from every hamlet to every mountain top, the cheers rippled all the way to the seaport and back down the populated beaches until arriving back at the palace again.

  From sea to shining sea the people cheered with one voice—the voice of triumphant. At last, when the roar of the crowd seemed to lull, Jegra stepped out and took her side next to the Lord Emperor, and the rush of four billion voices swelled to a deafening ovation.

  Dakroth smiled and placed his hand on the small of Jegra’s back, his blue fingers delicately settling onto her bronzed skin of which the open back dress left on display. As she moved, the burnt umber dress hugged her every curve like wet, glistening mud, and shone with a reddish metallic gleam that made it truly something to behold.

  Jegra wore her hair up in traditional ceremonial fashion for this momentous occasion, and her blue eyeshadow matched the hue of Dakroth’s skin; her purple eyeliner made her brown eyes pop. Her lipstick was a rich burnt umber that nearly matched the dress she wore, and her earrings consisted of two, elongated sapphire crystals the shape and length of an Arkadian goose feather. She was glorious to behold.

  Something new in Jegra’s glittering attire was the sapphire and diamond studded pendant she wore around her neck. The deep blue of the sapphires complimented her dress and her dark, sun kissed skin. If this wasn’t eye-catching enough, Jegra’s newly pierced nipples drew lots of eyes as well, especially since the studs were prominent through the tight-fitting dress.

  The gathered masses began chanting, “Speech! Speech! Speech!” in unison, and Jegra nodded graciously at Dakroth then stepped up to the microphone at the podium.

  She cleared her throat and the chanting simmered down as the audience waited with bated breath for her words.

  “I am but a foreigner in a foreign land. Many of you are aware of my backstory, but let me share it with those new faces I see out there in the crowd. Let me tell you in my own words the trials and tribulations I went through to get here.”

  She paused and smiled, waiting for the cheers to die down before continuing on.

  “I was abducted by poachers, sold into slavery, and eventually wound up in the gladiatorial matches. That was a dark time in my life and, if I’m being honest, I was not strong or courageous back then. I had all but given up any hope of living and told myself to get comfortable with the fact that I was most certainly going to die. Then fate intervened.” She turned and smiled at Dakroth, taking his hand for show. “And I was given a second chance at life.”

  Cheers rose up again and Dakroth, holding her hand in his left hand, reached up with his right and waved at the audience.

  “Not wasting this rarest of gifts bestowed upon me by the powers that be, I fought with everything I had. I became a champion. It wasn’t easy. But it sure as Helios beat the alternative.”

  She paused once more and drew Dakroth’s hand to her lips and kissed it. She smiled at him, he smiled at her, and for a fraction of a moment, it really did feel as though they were in love again and not just pretending.

  He squeezed her han
d, then waved again to the crowd. After his show of gratitude, he returned her affection and brought her jewel encrusted hand to his lips and kissed it. The crowd went wild with roars and applause.

  Jegra turned back to the podium, took a deep breath, and continued with her speech. “I’m not one for making speeches, but ever since accepting the dutiful role of being the Lord Emperor’s queen, I seemingly have been put on the spot at every opportunity.”

  A wave of laughter reverberated through the crowd on the lawn of the palace where she was giving her speech and she was sure it got a chuckle elsewhere as well.

  “The truth is, I was ill suited for such a position. There were far better, more capable women than I. Women of pure, noble blood and breeding. Beautiful Dagon women who could please the Emperor in every possible way I could only dream to aspire to. But, love is a fickle thing. And, like the bold spirit of your emperor, it knows no bounds and has no limitations. So, I accepted the responsibility, as daunting as it seemed. I may have struggled at first. But like my first time surviving a bout in the arena, I knew what a precious gift I’d been given and that I’d be crazy to waste it.

  “My victory over the Nyctan-Nephilim Fusion and their false god, whose name shall not be mentioned, is the proof that I am worthy to call myself your Empress. I’ve earned it. And if you still don’t agree—then feel free to join me upon the battlefield in the coming war. Bleed with me, so you know what it means to sacrifice for something you believe in. Die with me, if necessary, to prove that what you’re fighting for is worth any price. But spare me your petty criticisms and your negative gossip, because unless you’ve fought and bled alongside me, then your spirits are not pure. Though to some, my lineage may appear disgraceful, my spirit is the purest of the pure—of that I promise you. And love me or hate me, that fact will never change, I am your empress! I am the Mother of Dagon.”

  If the thunderous applause could shake the palace, rattling the glass window panes, she knew that the sound in the city square must be deafening, down amongst the throngs of spectators. In fact, when she looked over her right shoulder at the valley, the cityscape rising in the distance, she saw a flock of birds take to the sky, startled into flight by the uproarious cheers and applause.