by Amie Kaufman
“Look out!” Finian roars.
“Please lower your voice,” Zila says, twisting her flight controls. “Increased volume does not equate to increased piloting aptitude.”
“Well, pardon me all to—”
“Finian, shut up!” I shout.
Zila is hunched over her pilot’s console, her fingers moving in a blur. Fin and I are behind her, sitting side by side at the auxiliary stations, with holo displays of the ongoing battle floating above our consoles. Our ship is flying close to the Weapon, far back from the bloody, shooty outer periphery of the battle, but to be honest, it’s a miracle we’re still flying at all. The air is swarming with fighters, and Zila’s flying on the defensive, not shooting back at anyone who opens up on us, hoping the thousands of ships out there will be more interested in killing something that looks remotely dangerous. But our luck is gonna run out sooner or later.
The Weapon sort of…flickers. It’s done that once or twice now, and none of us are sure why. It’s like a flashlight in the dark, like a crystal heart beating amid the carnage. And the carnage is getting worse.
“You think Auri is okay in there?” Finian whispers, gazing at it.
“I hope so,” I sigh.
“Please fasten your safety harnesses,” Zila says.
“Are you joking?” Fin scoffs, glancing at her sidelong. “Zila, if my harness were on any tighter, I’d be married to—”
Fin shrieks as Zila slams on our thrusters, pinwheeling away from a spray of railgun fire. A missile explodes soundlessly off our wing, another right in front of us, the inertial dampeners that provide the gravity around our little ship struggling to compensate as Zila throws us into a spiraling dive. Glancing at our scopes, I realize we’ve picked up pursuers—TDF fighters, snub-nosed and angry-looking. I can’t blame them for shooting at us—we’re wearing Unbroken colors, after all. But still…
“Four bad guys coming in fast on our bow,” I report.
“Stern!” Fin winces as another missile explodes. “That’s the stern, Scar!”
“Dammit, I told you I don’t know anything about spaceships!” I shout. “They’re on our ass, okay? Four very shooty ships on our very shapely asses, Zila!”
“I see them,” Zila replies. “Hold on.”
“Shapely asses?” Fin mutters.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, de Seel.”
We weave and roll through the chaos, the black outside us lit up like fireworks on Federation Day. And Zila is putting on an impressive show, no doubt, but she’s not an expert pilot by any stretch, and even with auto-guidance assisting her, I wonder how long all this can go on. Outside our forward blastscreens, the black is red with fire and blood. Earth is throwing everything it can at the Syldrathi fleet, but these Syldrathi are Unbroken. Trained every moment of their lives for battle. Fanatically loyal to the psychopath leading them—so much so that they were willing to sit back and applaud as he destroyed their damn sun.
And my heart is slowly sinking in my chest, because the thing of it is, we’re part of a moving battle here. Charging right toward the heart of the Terran solar system. We’re already past the Kuiper Belt, closing fast on Neptune. And I don’t know what the range on the Weapon is, but every minute that goes by, the Unbroken fleet draws closer to my homeworld and the sun it orbits.
The sun they’re going to destroy.
The Weapon flickers again, lit from within, as if there’s a heart made of pure light pulsing inside it. The glow comes from the rear of the ship, but the whole Weapon responds, lighting up like a length of crystalline optical cable.
“Why is it doing that?” Fin whispers.
“I don’t know,” I reply.
“It’s kinda scary—”
I gasp as I’m slammed back in my chair, Zila performing a barrel roll that sends us spiraling up and between two Syldrathi cruisers. The TDF fighters on our tail have picked up pursuers of their own, and two of them break off to engage. But two are still back there, chasing us like we stole their lunch money.
The Weapon pulses again. If I squint at it, the light seems to be gathering at one end. Those strange, abstract shapes at the bow (Ha! See, I can be taught!) look like they’re glowing brighter with every pulse.
“We need an alternative strategy,” Zila declares, twisting us through the firestorm.
“You mean a Plan B?” I ask her.
She glances over her shoulder and nods. “And we need it now.”
“What makes you so sure?” I ask.
“I am not. But the Eshvaren Weapon is clearly accumulating power.”
“Zila, we have eyes,” Fin says. “But that doesn’t—”
“Perhaps your eyes noticed the positions of the Unbroken vessels?” she asks. “The way their formation is shifting?”
A near-miss missile blast rocks us, and I nearly swallow my tongue. But squinting at the holo displays, the readouts from our tactical computer, I realize…
“The Unbroken fleet is moving out of its way.”
“They have been vacating the Weapon’s forward firing arc for the past three minutes,” Zila reports. “They clearly know it is preparing to fire.”
“Shit,” I breathe.
I look at our scopes, the holo displays of our little solar system. The gas giants of Neptune and Uranus. Saturn with its beautiful rings of ice, Jupiter with its great red storm, which has been raging for the past seven hundred years. Beyond the asteroid belt is Earth’s first planetary colony—the red orb of Mars. Then on to our pale blue dot, Earth, the planet where I grew up, my home, my world. Past that, scorching Venus, where it’s so hot the skies rain molten lead. Last of all, Mercury. And at the center of it, of all of this, these billions of lives, this history, this civilization, a small yellow sun. The star at the heart of my solar system.
The star Caersan is going to slay.
“What can we do?” I ask. “How can we stop it?”
“This vessel lacks sufficient firepower to damage the Weapon,” Zila says. “But we are flying Unbroken colors. We can get close to it.”
Fin blinks. “How close?”
Zila glances at him, twists her controls. “Very close.”
The Weapon pulses again. The light gathering, twisting inside it. It’d be beautiful if it weren’t so awful. An ending, all the colors of the rainbow.
“You mean ram it,” I breathe.
“This ship weighs over two hundred tons,” she says. “It is capable of achieving six-factor velocity with sufficient acceleration time. If we collide with the Weapon at top speed, we will impact with force equivalent to several high-yield thermonuclear devices.”
“But we can’t destroy the Weapon,” I frown. “We need it to beat the Ra’haam.”
“We cannot hope to destroy it,” Zila says. “It is too large. But an impact of that magnitude should hopefully be enough to damage or at least misalign those lenses. Perhaps buy Aurora more time.”
Finian looks at me. Back at Zila.
“That’s some Plan B, Legionnaire Madran.”
“If you have a better one, I am willing to entertain it, Legionnaire de Seel.”
And then it hits me.
There in that firestorm, with TDF fighters and Syldrathi cruisers and Betraskan dreadnoughts blowing each other to pieces around us, with the fate of my world, my entire civilization, and maybe the whole galaxy besides hanging in the balance…I remember.
I remember!
I fumble inside my uniform, Finian watching as I fish around my cleavage.
“Um…,” he says.
“Dammit, you could lose the Great Ultrasaur of Abraaxis IV in here,” I growl.
“…Scar?” Fin asks.
“Aha!” I cry, my fingers closing around a length of silver chain. I drag my prize out from my tunic, hold it between thumb and forefing
er in triumph.
A silver medallion. A medallion that waited eight years for us in that Dominion Repository vault. A vault that was coded by the commanders of Aurora Academy to open with my DNA, years before I ever joined the Legion or they had a chance to meet me.
On one side, it’s inset with a rough chunk of diamond. On the other, engraved in a curling script…
“Zila?” I say.
“Yes, Scarlett?”
“Go with Plan B.”
“You have given me your best, little Terran. Now I will give you mine.”
The chamber shakes.
The Waywalkers above me scream.
My father raises his hand.
A sledgehammer of psychic force slams into Aurora, sending her skidding back across the Weapon’s heart. Shards of crystal fall like rain, glittering in her wake. Her face is twisted, mouth open in a silent cry, skeins of midnight blue and burning red crackling in the air around her.
The wall I am pressed against reverberates, the power of their exchange coalescing in the crystal around us. Every time Aurora and my father strike at each other, the Weapon pulses brighter, the air grows thicker. It feels like a coiled spring, like clockwork wound too tight, strained to breaking. I can tell it is almost ready to fire, overflowing with the barrages of energy they throw at each other.
Spirits of the Void help anything in its path when it is unleashed.
Aurora strikes out again, a ribbon of force cutting the air, knife-sharp and silver-quick. My father raises his hand, almost lazily, as he would when I was a child striking at him beneath the trees on Syldra. He never failed to press the advantage back then, despite his size, his strength. Punishing every flaw, every misstep, every error, sending me to bed bruised and beaten.
He does the same with Aurora now, and I watch, helpless, as he pierces her defenses and sends her flying. She collides with the wall again, the crystal cracking beneath the force of the blow.
Aurora falls to her knees. But she stands again a moment later, power flowing off her in waves as she drags her knuckles across her bleeding nose.
“Nice shot,” she murmurs.
I did not wish it to be this way.
Aurora surges across the room, seeming almost to flicker inside the rising storm. Her eye burns like a sun, matched in intensity only by his own. I can see how hard she struggles, pure and formless. But though my father is less than she is alone, he is not alone. He draws on the power of these poor souls imprisoned around us.
He strikes again, again, a crimson blur, moving so swift he leaves an afterimage in the air behind him. Aurora sails upward, shattering the ceiling. She falls among a rain of glittering crystal, and with a flicker of crimson power, he is there beneath her, lashing out again. She is flung across the room, limp and boneless, tumbling across the crystalline floor, rainbow colors crashing like waves on a sunset shore. The Waywalkers scream once more. And though Aurora rises again, fists clenched, she moves a touch slower than she did a moment ago.
They collide like powder and flame. He towers over her, drawing the power of the multitude around us into himself. Her face is a mask of pain and blood, her eye gleaming in the dark. She seems small then. And looking at her, she who was my all and my everything and is now perhaps my nothing, I know the truth.
I told her before she came here, after all.
I cannot fault her for hating me. I never should have lied to her, or to the rest of them. But I warned her not to come here. I wished to deal with this by myself. My shame. My blood. In my veins and on my hands. I thought perhaps to topple the giant. Slay the monster I remembered from my childhood, the man who laid those bruises on me and my sister and my mother alike.
But as soon as I saw my father, I knew he had become so much more, and so much less, than he ever was before. I thought to wait. Perhaps as he prepared to use the Weapon, he would be distracted enough for me to strike at him. Or perhaps after he had fired it, he might become weakened enough for me to cut him down once and for all. I had no real plan, save to spare Aurora this struggle.
My deception and my devotion. Only one of them for her.
But now…
Now.
I look around me at the Waywalkers, pinned in place against the curving crystal walls like insects upon a board. Their eyes are open, but they do not see. Syldrathi men and women, even children, the Waywalker glyf—an eye, crying five tears—marked upon their brows.
The same glyf my mother wore on her brow.
There is no love in violence, Kaliis, she would tell me.
I reach down to the floor beneath me. My fingers search the shattered crystal broken loose from the wall. I take hold of a shard—long and pointed, like a dagger. And I look at these poor wretches my father draws his power from. The crystal slicing into my palm as I clench it tight.
It would not take much to end them. Cut them loose from this life, and from him. Weakening him. Perhaps enough to topple him?
Mercy is the province of cowards, Kaliis.
But no. That is a choice he would make, not me. And if I am to step out from this shadow at last, I cannot do it by walking into darkness. I am not my past. I am not he who made me. I must stand in the light of the sun.
No matter what it will cost me.
I steal across the trembling floor, the crystal dagger in my hand, struggling through the storm of power building around them. My father and my be’shmai are locked together, the Weapon around us trembling now with tectonic violence. Blood drips from Aurora’s nose, her ears, her eyes. Her arms shake. Her knees buckle.
She cannot win this alone.
But the truth is?
She was never alone.
I loom up behind my father. Like a shadow. Like the past come back to haunt him. Like the voices of ten billion souls gone to the Void, my mother among them. And I wrap my arm around his throat and plunge the crystal blade toward the sweet spot between his fifth and sixth ribs.
The crystal pierces my father’s armor, and for a brief and beautiful moment, I feel the flesh parting beneath, the blade sinking toward the heart I can only assume he still owns.
But then it stops.
I feel his grip on my wrist, though he does not touch me. I feel his hand at my throat, though his own hands are still locked with Aurora’s. I struggle, powerless, gasping as his hold on me tightens. He glances over his shoulder at me, his eye burning like cold flame.
“Tsk, tsk,” he says.
With a toss of his head, he slams my be’shmai backward, sending her skidding across the floor, bleeding and gasping.
And then he turns to me.
I am held in place. Suspended three feet above the floor, utterly still.
He looks at me, the storm raging all around us. He is so changed now. Severed from the ties that once bound him. But I look deep into his eyes, and I think I see something left of what he was. Something of the man I feared and loved and hated.
“So,” he says, disappointed. “You are still your mother’s son.”
And though I cannot move to strike him, though I can barely muster the strength to breathe, still I draw enough to speak.
“I am n-not yours.”
His eyes narrow. The storm wind rises around us, the Waywalkers begin to scream, and I look to the girl who was my all and my everything, watching as she raises her head and looks at me.
“K-Kal…”
“Be’shmai,” I whisper.
And then I feel my father reach into my mind.
And he tears me apar—
Auxiliary power has been restored to this section of the ship, and Saedii and I are charging toward the escape pods in the dim glow of the emergency lights. I presume the TDF marine squads are still looking for us back on the detention level, but the Unbroken attack seems to be occupying most of the crew’s attention. The decks are a hive
of activity: marines, techs, repair crews, pilots all flooding to their battle stations, the ship shaking around us as the conflict rages through the Fold.
The reports we’re getting over the headsets in our stolen helmets aren’t so good. Turns out Saedii and I were both wrong—it’s not an Eidolon hitting us, but four Banshee-class Syldrathi cruisers. The ship we’re on, the Kusanagi, is a heavy carrier, but Banshees have cloaking tech that makes them almost invisible to conventional radar—probably how they snuck up on us in the first place. That means the Kusanagi’s gunners have to target visually, which is hard to do when your opponent is moving a couple of thousand klicks a second. All this is to say that even though the Syldrathi ships are smaller, it’s still gonna be a brawl.
I honestly have no idea who will come out on top.
Another blast rocks the Kusanagi, sending Saedii stumbling into me, and me stumbling into the wall. Half a dozen Terran techs dash past us, and the alarms continue to blare as I haul myself back to my feet.
“Just for future reference,” I ask, steadying myself, “if you’re falling and I catch you, are you going to knee me in the groin again?”
“Be silent, Tyler Jones,” Saedii sighs, staggering forward.
Maybe I should just let you fall right on your arrogant ass, I think to myself.
I heard that, comes her voice inside my head.
“FIRST ENEMY VESSEL DESTROYED,” the PA reports. “CRITICAL DAMAGE TO SECOND ENEMY VESSEL. KUSANAGI HULL BREACH ON LEVEL 4, PORT BATTERIES DISABLED. TECH CREWS REPORT TO LEVEL 6, CORRIDORS 6 BETA AND EPSILON, IMMEDIATELY.”
“The escape pods should be just ahead,” I report.
“I see them,” Saedii replies, charging on through the gloom.
A TDF carrier has escape pods on every level—one-person units, independently powered in the event of catastrophic reactor damage. I can make out a bunch at the T-junction ahead—a few dozen hatchways set into the wall. Their operating mechanisms are basically big red buttons behind panes of glass marked BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY—they’re made to be easy to operate, even in a disaster scenario. If our luck holds, we can b—
