Shadows of the Son

by E L Strife

  “Forgive me while I learn how to use this.” Bennett stood beside Amianna over one screen of many in a circular table, which rendered a colorful three-dimensional schematic of Agutra’s orbit around Earth in the air over its center. Atana couldn’t help but notice how often Bennett stretched his back and rolled his shoulders. His fingers were hesitant, Amianna’s more confident as they spun the graphic. The two spoke quietly between them.

  Red and orange floating orbs represented satellites. They faded and flickered out of view on the dark side of Earth. Earth’s technology didn’t have the signal strength or quality of Suanoan scanners. But Bennett and Amianna had filled the gaps in the schematic, their modified collectors showing up green.

  Stepping back from the screen at Miskaht’s request, Bennett turned to the gathered leaders. “The fleets are making final preparations on Station Hope now.” Meeting Atana’s eyes, his posture straightened. She wanted to smile, give him some motion of encouragement, but couldn’t bring herself to—not tonight.

  He cleared his throat and spoke stern and with confidence. “We do not wish for any friendly fire or missed shots to make contact with Semilath. However, I cannot account for individual pilot decisions. This has to be a team effort. No matter what differences we may think we have, we are united in this battle against Suanoa.”

  Paramor tapped a screen, illuminating two carmine bubbles around Agutra. “We have repaired the lower shields damaged from the blast. We plan to initiate them after your departure. But I fear they are not immune to Kyra plasma.”

  Amianna pointed to a spot in the hologram of stars that wavered like an inflamed cut in the warp-threads of space’s fabric. “If all else fails, we think having Agutra near this Slashgate might give us a chance to escape. All available Prims have volunteered to assist with propulsion and jump requirements.”

  “We’ll use the collector shield in front of your position until you can make it through,” Bennett added. “If it comes to it.”

  “Max of eight minutes plasma deflection before the pilots die,” Atana reminded them.

  A perimeter guard gestured out the window at the blue planet beneath them. “That would leave Earth undefended.”

  Miskaht leaned forward to rest on the circular table. “Yes. Earth is aware and willing to fight. We also have three space buses evacuating known royals as we speak. They’ll be out of the system before this meeting is over.”

  Atana stammered. No one had said anything to her about it. “Out where?”

  “A safe zone,” Hyras said.

  “Yeah?” Bennett snapped. “Do you know for sure? You just put all of Earth’s most important people in one place!”

  “Well, three places, but yes,” Miskaht clarified.

  Bennett sighed, expressing the irritation Atana felt.

  “Why didn’t we use the space busses to move those on Agutra somewhere safe?” Bennett asked. “Why not even mention we had these?”

  “You had your job sergeant. Command protects the people. Sergeants fight the wars. We have our tools, and you have yours.”

  Paramor cleared his throat. “Can we discuss this later? Our royals are in position to lead assaults. They await updates.”

  Atana sidled up beside Azure, concerned by his lack of input. He lethargically tapped through programs and settings on his screen, and triple checked the position of their forces in space. He paused as she neared his side.

  Bennett lifted a finger. “Agutra is our sleeping lamb and needs to play innocent in this. You still have useable crops and innocent workers. Hopefully, the Suanoa will find Semilath valuable.”

  A Picree guard stepped into the light of the table, exposing the lacework of flesh which protected his head. Antennae sprung from every joint in his body like translucent whiskers. “And if they have too many fighters and we are overwhelmed? What are we to do? We have lost many.”

  Bennett pinched the space between his brows. “Here’s the thing. We’re already outnumbered. But maybe instead of each pilot taking out three ships, they take out five or eight.”

  Azure broke his silence. “Or more, because many will not make it.”

  “Let’s try to be optimistic,” Hyras said.

  “That is not realistic,” Azure chided.

  Atana placed a gentle hand to Azure’s back, trying to comfort him. But he jolted and shifted away to another screen. His upset was clear, and Atana considered he might need space to focus.

  “I appreciate your honest contribution, Azure. It is something we must consider,” Bennett said, throwing her a confused look.

  Growing uncomfortable, Atana swiped through the screen’s options in front of her and decided to check on the efficiency of the propulsion systems.

  Please don’t touch anything, Azure warned without losing focus.

  Atana closed the window and stepped back. His temperamental behavior had grown tiresome. Sorry.

  “Has anyone considered the possibility of other ships showing up?” Cutter asked through the coms. “If we have a downed Agutra ship and three Kyras, that’s a high concentration of Suanoan vessels in one place. Are they going to have any others with them: tankers, surveillance drones, other supply ships? What about Linéten vessels?”

  “I saw nothing in the code,” Azure said, throwing Atana an apologetic glance. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.”

  Bennett released a frustrated grunt, his eyes casting golden light across the floor.

  Rounding the table, Atana pretended to look at the screen in front of Bennett. Beneath the volume of murmurs spreading through Agutra’s leaders and Command, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Headache came on fast.” Bennett rubbed his forehead. “There isn’t enough time left to make major adjustments to the plan. We’ve done the best we could with the time we had.”

  It was only a twitch of a grimace, but it was all Atana needed to know Bennett was biting back a lot of pain.

  Bennett blinked slow and wavered.

  Atana urgently braced his arm. “Bennett?”

  “One more thing,” he pleaded.

  He was fading fast, but Atana relented. “Okay. Hurry.”

  Drawing in a shaky breath, he tried to steady himself on the console. Tapping the com link to every ship, he said, “We may be at a major logistical disadvantage in terms of knowledge and armada. But our fight means more to us than survival. It comes from a weapon we have that they do not.” Bennett wheezed, doubled over, and braced his head. Azure, I need your help to finish.

  “Jameson?”Atana collected him, helping him stagger out into the hallway. She grabbed fistfuls of his jacket, catching him as he fell sideways, thudding against the wall before crumpling to the floor.

  He groaned and banged his back against the wall. His fingers clawed up in his hair.

  Bracing his forearms, Atana studied his twisted face. Disturbing flares of dread made her pull her contingency plans back into mind. Though his eyes closed, she could see his radiant irises through the skin. This was more than a headache.

  Bennett muttered as his body rocked back and forth. This fight is about more than us.

  Through the open doorway, Atana heard Bennett’s thoughts as spoken by Azure in the command center. “It is a defiance of the Suanoan Empire by and for all species who have suffered under their reign. Our cultures and morals and species may be different. We don’t have to be the same to value the same things: comfort, peace, family. We must protect compassion and freedom or fall victim once again to the savage ways of our enemy and our past.

  “Remember the ones who cannot fight back, those who have already joined the stars. Their sparks support us today as ours will bolster those of the future. We are more than this battle. We are fate. This is our chance to show Suanoa they will not rule us again! Let us make them pay with blood and bone!”

  Atana braced Bennett’s flaccid cheek in admiration. It was abnormally cold.

  His breathing was heavy, and his eyelids locked shut. After a faint exhale,
Bennett sank limply into her arms.

  “Jameson?” Panic struck her. She shook him, patted his face, pinched the skin over his sternum—nothing would wake him. The pulse in his neck slowed with every passing second.

  “No—” Atana repeated the word until her lips quivered, and she lost herself in his vacant expression. Don’t make me hunt you down when we’re so short on time.

  His condition showed no promising change.

  Atana lowered her head near his. She could get stuck in Ether with him. She could miss a critical window of opportunity in the war. She could die if whatever gripped him was contagious.

  Forgive me, Azure. Atana closed her eyes and made the connection.

  Chapter 38

  TRAILS OF ORANGE MISSILE FIRE broke up swirls of black smoke. Cries of dying shepherds and Agutrans echoed around Bennett—the endless off-key melody of war. Fragments of metal and frozen bodies sprayed out into the pitchy void. Explosions rattled Bennett’s skull. He moaned and pressed his palms against his temples, trying to shove back the pain.

  Tender warmth slid up his neck, tugging Bennett close to the realm his body was tucked up in. Her voice was a sweet song amidst the sounds of battle playing between his ears. I’m searching for you. Talk to me, Jameson. Guide me to you.

  He couldn’t lift his eyelids to look at her or move to brush her, anything to give him a clue where she sat so he could push her away. The heat of her fingers spread to the sides of his face. A prickling wave of pain rippled through his brain.

  He struggled to pry himself free of the vision, return to reality, and the battle he needed to prepare for. But searing fingers dug into the back of his brain like an invisible puppeteer, forcing him to watch—to obey.

  The ship was the same as before: walls of black fire adorned with ancient symbols, cloaked in shadows. Windows swept across the helm in an arc, exposing the stars and ships beyond. Except this time, Cutter did not stand by his side.

  Bennett heard Atana grunt, and to his left, saw her stumble through a portal of orange flames in the clouds behind him. As she steadied her feet on the deck, she scanned the destruction through the helm’s windows, body locked from shock.

  “Welcome to Hell.” Massaging his aching forehead, Bennett returned to the raging war. Blue and red shields flickered, enduring strings of detonations from silent needles zipping through the endless night sky. Torrents of debris encircled Earth, making it look like the universe had marked it a failure for termination

  “Cutter asked about other ships.” Bennett felt the heat of her body intensify as she moved closer. “I never considered it before.”

  Her shoulder brushed his chest. “They all appear familiar—what we expect anyway.”

  “I can’t say it is visually different. It was more of a feeling which compelled me to search.”

  “Sometimes you have to let life happen the way it needs to, instead of trying to control every single component,” she said.

  Bennett studied her, wondering why she was standing so close. The lines of her face had smoothed, and he felt his headache soften. Sparks of orange danced on her irises—a reflection of the battle outside. It was unlike her to forgo control for fate. “Even if it means we lose tomorrow?”

  Water shimmered in the rims of her eyes as she tracked discharged payloads across the sky, hacking collectors and bombers into plumes of shrapnel and meat. “No one wins in war.”

  Anger and hopelessness were at odds in Bennett’s chest. He slid a hand around Atana’s waist and drew her against him, needing confirmation he wasn’t alone.

  “This is our future?” She looked up at him, silent prayer in her gaze, begging him to say no.

  “Nakio—” Bennett clenched his teeth, chewing over his response. He wanted to tell her anything but the truth.

  She slid back from his grasp. Teal light from her eyes refracted in tears as they crested her lashes. “I don’t believe you. This has to end!”

  “Everything I have seen since I transitioned has come true. I told you that when I saw Home Station’s bombing.” Bennett returned to his patrol of the skies. “I’m sorry. I cannot see how this is an exception.”

  It was unusual to him how much tension left his body when he said those words.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again when she didn’t move. Having her look to him for the answers induced a sense of responsibility for her greater than that of co-shepherds.

  Her shoulders lifted with a stifled cry. Atana glanced outside, covering her mouth.

  He hated seeing the fear in her eyes. “Death is fate for all of us, whether today or in two hundred years,” he offered. “At least we have a chance to die with purpose.”

  Atana wiped her nose on a sleeve. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s head back. I think we’ve seen what we need to see.”

  She fell against him, burying her face between his pecs. “Is anyone left out there? I can’t look any longer.”

  Bennett wrapped her in his arms and scanned their broken army, loving and loathing the moment. “Some will live.” It was more a hope than known truth.

  Her hands grabbed fistfuls of the leather jacket at his sides. Just as she touched her forehead to his to return to the waking realm, Bennett caught movement in his periphery and looked.

  Bennett awoke to a glower on Atana’s face, her eyes shades of violent blue. The change was so extreme, he braced himself on the floor, wondering what he’d missed. “I didn’t want you to see that,” he blurted.

  Shield, Atana commanded over her shoulder. Sapphire light spread around them. Bennett knew Azure had joined them in the hall. They now had privacy to talk without others interfering.

  “Why did you try to search consciously?” she asked. “You collapsed. It’s clear you aren’t ready for that level of connection to Ether.”

  Bennett’s throat constricted against the swollen knot tied in his vocal cords. Her sudden change in demeanor confused him, but he wagered it had something to do with Azure that he’d missed. “Every time this happens, I feel I’m losing a piece of myself. But when I fight it, the lines blur until I can’t control or comprehend anything.”

  Atana’s focus darted back and forth across the floor as if rereading something to make sure she’d understood it correctly.

  He felt like a fumbling adolescent. “I don’t want to be the universe’s channel. I want this.” He tapped the tattooed UP shield on his chest, hiding beneath his jacket. “I want to be a shepherd and go back to the way life was before, protecting my team and you. I hate seeing the future.” I repeatedly stare death in the face when I close my eyes.

  A muscle flexed in Atana’s jaw, but her eyes softened when they met his again. You think I don’t? All the people I couldn’t save in Testing? All those who died here from ongkrat?

  “I have the power to change it,” Bennett contended. “I just don’t know how or which actions will cause us to slip into the same pattern. I don’t know the deciding factors. I feel like I’m losing my grasp on reality and on myself.”

  She took his hands in hers. “Remember what I said when we sat inside the memory of your burning house? You just needed to find something to ground yourself here, in the present. A reference for where you are in the universe.”

  Bennett looked off down the hall, through Azure’s scintillating blue shield. How a Prospector could hold so much power and feel so helpless, Bennett didn’t understand. But it was destroying him.

  “At the end, I saw what I was searching for, Nakio. I saw—it.”

  Chapter 39

  A BARRAGE OF MISSILES had whited out the sky, silent as its victims.

  Bennett wondered if he’d made a mistake describing it to them. It was a colossal miscreation of serrated metal and fragmented glass with crimson stripes that dripped like blood from torn skin. It stretched the Slashgate.

  Atana paced the hallway inside Azure’s bubble, hands on her head.

  Azure looked annoyed.

  “So it’s like another Kyra, but larger?”
she asked.

  “It could just be a disintegrating diachrysm meteor since you apparently have that in this galaxy.” Azure offered, resting a foot on the wall behind him. Atana threw him a glance, which suggested otherwise. “Either way, it’s not something we have spare resources for.”

  “A meteor doesn’t open Slashgates.” The visions haunted Bennett with flickers of flashbacks like little alarms shouting to get up and do something. But what? “We’ll have to play dead. It’s the only chance we have that they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Suanoan scanners will pick up if there is life,” Azure countered.

  Bennett slumped. “We don’t have any other option but to play the unassuming victims. I’m hoping they’ll look at us as too scattered and broken to be of any viable threat.”

  A puff of air rushed out of Atana’s lungs. She raked her long bangs back, stopping between the men. “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  Paramor appeared down the corridor outside Azure’s sapphire bubble. His body cast shimmering silver light over the walls. “May we have a moment?”

  Azure dropped his shield without a twitch. His control made Bennett jealous.

  The light that surrounded Paramor left, making Bennett wonder if their shields filtered reality, exposing different dimensions occupying the same space.

  “For right now, let’s just focus on what we know we can do something about.” Azure pushed off of the wall. “Otherwise, it’s wasted energy—worrying.”

  Paramor tilted his head toward the door. “Bennett and I will join soon. They have an update on the Kyra positions.”

  Atana and Azure slipped past Paramor without hesitation and disappeared into the conference room.

  Using the wall as a brace, Bennett got himself to his feet. Every muscle pulsed with energy yet throbbed with weakness. “Where are they now?”