Shadow Stars (Universe on Fire Book 2)

by Ivan Kal

  He returned their salute and then smiled at them as they relaxed, small smiles gracing their hard faces. It was such a rare thing, to see them smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be resting?” Grimm asked.

  Remi shrugged. “We are Dragons,” she said, and Grimm nodded in understanding.

  They were not ordinary; they would never be ordinary. “How are you feeling?”

  Ethan blinked his eyes several times, and Grimm caught the glint of his optical mods reflecting light. His face was covered in script, around his eyes down the side of his face, next to his ears. He knew that it continued all over his body. Remi was the same.

  Even now he couldn’t quite believe what they had done to them. Ethorrians never implanted their spellscripts into the body. For one, it interfered with other spell casting—a mage with an implanted spellscript could not cast other spells as easily. The Ethorrians also just hadn’t had the technology to accomplish it, not like Earth did.

  “Fine, the brain mods are a bit weird,” Ethan answered, and Remi nodded in agreement.

  Grimm understood, as he had a brain mod as well. It served as an addition to his own brain, a place to store data, memories, or information. It had taken him months to get used to it. Somehow he doubted that it would take them long.

  “You’ll get used to them,” Grimm said. It was not an encouragement, but a fact, and he knew that the two understood his meaning. They were trained to pick up on the smallest cues, which was why he was also pretty certain that they knew he had something to hide. Still, they hadn’t confronted him about it yet, which worried him. They had all been told that they were orphans, but Grimm realized now that that story would not fly with Dragons. They had been trained, augmented, pushed, to be more intelligent than ordinary people. They had to know that it was only a cover—but there was not much that Grimm could do about it.

  He thought himself a good judge of character, and he knew that the Dragons were good, moral in their own way. He had seen their humanity and knew that they would be Earth’s perfect protectors. If the price for that was his life, if they deemed they required it, he would gladly pay.

  “You were told about Jerome?” Grimm said, to take his mind off the train of thought it had been following.

  “We have,” Remi said. “We knew that it could happen. We will remember our brother.”

  “Yes,” Ethan agreed.

  “Good. You should remember him,” Grimm said. “He died on his path to becoming a protector of humanity.”

  The two didn’t react, but Grimm could tell that they were considering his words.

  “Did you get to try your spellscripts yet?” Grimm asked.

  “No, Commander McCullagh said that we need to wait several days before we are allowed,” Ethan answered, just a moment too quickly.

  Grimm nearly smiled. He was not new to this game. The Dragon had given him the cue on purpose—nothing a Dragon did was accidental. He wanted Grimm to notice, or he was testing him. One never knew with them. “You’ve already used them, haven’t you?”

  Remi’s lips curled upward and she glanced at Ethan, who looked disappointed.

  “Ah,” Grimm said as he realized. “You are using them right now.”

  Ethan smiled as he turned to look at Remi. “Told you he would figure it out.”

  Remi rolled her eyes. “Fine, you win.”

  Grimm shook his head, but didn’t tell them to stop. They knew how much their bodies could take, far more than anybody else. They were unique, the first of their kind. “The eyes?” Grimm asked.

  Ethan nodded. “It’s a spellscript which allows me to see more colors than a human eye is capable off. I believe it is called the dragon’s eye spell.”

  Grimm laughed at the word play. “And you?”

  Remi tilted her head and show him her ear. “Sound amplification. I can hear what is happening around us beyond this room.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “McCullagh is coming. He does not like it when you interact with us,” Remi told him.

  Grimm shook his head. “He doesn’t matter anymore. He was your trainer, but the moment you got those augmentations you were no longer under his authority. You answer to the Council now.”

  The two Dragons nodded.

  “Well,” Grimm said, “I’d better leave, then—I don’t want to make McCullagh even more angry than he perpetually is. I’ll speak with you soon.”

  ***

  “You do realize that this plan is completely insane, right?” Admiral Shane Eliot said as he gestured with a tablet.

  Grimm agreed with the man, but he also knew that it was a good plan. “The Dragons don’t make insane plans. It only seems that way to us because we don’t think like them,” Grimm said.

  “There is no way that something like this could work, is there?” Admiral Eliot said, but Grimm could see him wavering.

  “If they say that it will work, then I believe them,” Grimm told him.

  “Still, this is all hypothetical. We are not going to actually go through with this, are we?” Eliot asked.

  “Of course,” Grimm answered.

  It had been five weeks since the last of the nine surviving Dragons had woken up from their surgery. McCullagh and the rest of their teachers and trainers had started putting their skills to work—training situations only. For now, at least. Their augmentation had been their graduation. Now they were operatives—Dragons—and that came with a rank equivalent to Captain. That irked McCullagh, as he hadn’t been aware that the council had decided to give such power to those who were in his mind still kids. At least the man hadn’t realized that some of the Dragons were his biological children. Having him be one of their trainers was a risk, but they needed the best available for the job.

  For his part, while Grimm had the power to revoke that particular decision, he didn’t want to.

  The nine had also signed the Articles, a series of legal documents which gave them power and authority, along with responsibility. While people like McCullagh had been tasked with making the children into super soldiers better than anyone else, others had been tasked with shaping their minds. Those in the council who knew and had agreed to the project knew exactly what they had created—you couldn’t virtually create a new race of people, make them smarter than you, and then force them to do your bidding. Even upbringing and social programming wouldn’t work on them forever. The Dragons had been taught to act always in the service of humanity as a whole; but smart people, like Grimm himself, those who worked with operatives and soldiers in the past, knew that the worst thing they could do for super soldiers like the Dragons was take away their ability to choose.

  And so they had debated for months, years, until they came to a solution. The Articles, a legal document outlining the Dragons’ relationship with the UTS. They were granted rights as sovereign entities within the UTS, with the right to secede if they so wished. It was a risk, but when they had envisioned them they hadn’t only wanted super soldiers to do their bidding and protect Earth—they had wanted to create an organization powerful enough to be a check on the council’s own power, to be there to make sure that corruption did not take Earth on a wrong path. They couldn’t risk it, not when they had the evidence of what could happen.

  The Val’ayash and the Zhal’Qash were the council’s greatest fear. No matter what they said to the Qash’vo’tar, no matter the denying of their similarity with Val’ayash, they were very much aware of the truth. Humanity celebrated its diversity, but in that there was always the risk of something like what had happened to the Val’ayash occurring. The Dragons were there to make sure that humanity never becomes what the Val’ayash had.

  “But seeing this… It scares me. I look at these plans of theirs and I ask myself, can they really do it?” Eliot shook his head.

  “It is what we have made them to be,” Grimm told him.

  “And it doesn’t keep you up at night? Knowing that we violated children in order to make the Dragons?” Eliot asked quietly.r />
  “Of course it does. But it helps that I have made peace with the fact that I will have to pay for it someday. It allows me to sleep.” Grimm gave the man a cheerless smile. “Some nights.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Aiko and Kane walked together into the large restaurant and were immediately met by an alien who showed them to their table. They had been frequent enough customers in the last few months—they had been using this restaurant to conduct many conversations with the Illos elite—that they were recognized on sight. The two of them were not really all that important on the planet, of course, but the fact that they had secured an invitation to the auction had intrigued a few people. It had made for good opportunity for them to gather information and make connections. They were still acting as Earth’s agents, after all, even though it might not look like it if one saw the luxurious way they had been living while on Illos.

  After taking their seats, the server left them alone so that they could choose what to order. Kane glanced across the table at Aiko, who was scrolling through the holographic menu built into the table. He took a moment to just take her in. She looked gorgeous in her dark blue cocktail dress, with her hair pulled back. Over the last few months they’d had quite a few occasions to dress up, even though the effort might’ve been a bit more appreciated if it had been in human company—but they had at least managed to intrigue the aliens they interacted with.

  Today, however, was not about that. Today was just about them: a date, without alien intrigue, without the need for them to listen closely to what was said and attempt to gather more information. A night out, just about them and nothing else.

  Ever since they’d come to Illos they’d lived almost a different life, even more so than they had been when acting as a mercenary crew on the Prometheus. This was so far removed from the lives they had led, before they had fought off the Qash’vo’tar. Aiko had been serving on the carrier Yasnaya, while Kane had been training with his squad on Ethorria, the two of them seeing each other only when they both had leave time. It all almost seemed like another life. Now they were always together, and everything that they thought their lives would be had been turned on its head. They had no military structure anymore—a necessity of the mission they were given, but they were still their own commanders. It spoke of the great trust that Earth had in them, but it also put them in a quite a difficult position. There were moments when Kane forgot that he was still a part of the military, when he thought of himself as only a mercenary traveling in his ship.

  Aiko noticed him staring and quirked an eyebrow at him. “What is it?” she asked with a smile.

  Kane smiled in return. “I’m wondering what I ever did to deserve you.”

  “Let me know when you figure it out,” Aiko said cheekily.

  Kane shook his head gently. He really didn’t deserve her. He then turned to his menu and looked through it, before finding the section with the food he was capable of consuming. Almost every race and star nation in this cluster of stars used the same system to mark food, such that every race could know at a glance what they could eat. Kane and his crew had been the first humans to actually be tested when the Prometheus first arrived at Jar Allera, but since then humans had been added to the database. The database was updated regularly via data dumps from ships that traveled from system to system.

  Humans, as it turned out, could eat quite a lot of the food available. Out of eleven color-coded categories, humans could eat four—which was, as he had been told, the second most. There was only one race which could eat food from more categories, and then they could actually consume food from one more category than humans. Kane had never encountered any person from that race, however, as they lived on the other side of Zhal Confederation territory.

  The two of them ordered through the menus, and then a few minutes later their orders were delivered. Kane ate his in silence, his mind wandering.

  “Kane.” Aiko’s voice brought his eyes up to meet hers. “What are you thinking about?”

  He didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he looked around. The restaurant was on the top floor of one of the tallest buildings in the city, and they were sitting just next to the window. Below them stretched a different world, filled with lights and glowing lines, with the transports moving all over the place making it look like some kind of luminescent hive. Others still were traveling toward the sky, to and from the city.

  He looked back to the restaurant, seeing the other customers. They were surrounded by aliens, some of which Kane had never seen before. All of these different races, sitting here in the same place as he was, as if that were normal. And he guessed that it was—they were on an alien world, eating dinner, surrounded by aliens.

  He turned to look back at Aiko, who thankfully hadn’t tried to rush him. It was one of the many things that he loved about her, the way she would always let him gather his thoughts before responding.

  “Look around you,” Kane said. “Do you see where we are? Did you ever imagine our life being this?”

  Aiko did as he asked, her eyes falling on the alien sights around them, foreign sights which somehow still looked human. “No,” she responded, turning to look back at him. “I never imagined our life would become anything like this.”

  Kane nodded. “The last few years have made me think a lot about the future. Our future. Our time in the military will end, and we will need to make a life for ourselves.”

  Aiko turned to look back at the tables surrounding them. “Somehow, I can’t imagine us going back to Earth. Not after living out here.”

  “I feel the same,” Kane said slowly. “We haven’t talked much about this. And I think that it’s time.”

  “I…” Aiko paused. “I think that I like this life—the life of a mercenary, I mean.”

  “Me too,” Kane told her. “So is that what we are going to do? Once our time is up, we buy a ship and then do the same thing we have been doing these past few years?”

  Aiko turned to look back at him. “I would like that. But I want more—we’ve talked about having a family. Children. I want that, too.”

  They had talked about that, true, but those conversations seemed so far in the past that he couldn’t quite be sure that they had happened. But Kane did agree with her, he wanted to have children as well. “Raising children on a ship?”

  Aiko shrugged. “Why not? A lot of people out here do it.”

  Kane looked through the window at the sky. He didn’t know how he felt about raising children away from Earth. It was such a foreign idea to him. But somehow, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to live on Earth ever again. Not after being here, after he had tasted food that no human could even imagine, when he had seen sights unlike anything an average man could even dream of.

  “I can already imagine a little you running around the ship getting in all sorts of trouble,” Kane said with a smile.

  “Or a little you doing the same thing,” Aiko replied warmly.

  “I don’t think I would like a little me all that much,” Kane said as he remembered the few instances when he had gotten in trouble back home when he was young.

  Then a realization came to him.

  “Magic,” Kane said, and looked at Aiko.

  “What?” she asked.

  “If what the Ethorrians told us is the truth, any children of mine will have a large chance of being capable of magic.”

  “Oh,” Aiko said. “But you would be there to teach them.”

  “I guess,” Kane said, trying to imagine what a teenage tantrum would look like when one added magic into the equation.

  “We don’t have to worry about that for a while yet. For now, we need to make sure that we accomplish our mission, and give Earth the tools to survive out here,” Aiko told him.

  “You are right, of course, as you so often are,” Kane said with a grin, which she returned. “We will have the time to plan a family later.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, until Aiko leaned in. “I love you.” />
  Kane met her half way and gave her a short, sweet kiss. “I love you too. Whatever comes in the future, we will face it together.”

  “Promise?” Aiko asked softly.

  “I promise.”

  He hoped that his words were true, even though both of them knew that they might not get to live long enough to see if they were. They were both optimists, and there was no point in dwelling on what could happen—yet for the rest of the night Kane couldn’t turn his thoughts away from the idea of having a family, of having children. Something to continue on after he was long gone. He had never been one to think about a legacy, yet ever since they had come to Illos, he had been thinking on it a lot.

  They finished their meal, and then returned to their suite at the hotel. There, Kane went to sleep thinking on the future.

  INTERLUDE II

  Darko Kovac paced inside his room. Eight steps from one wall to the other, and six steps from the doors to the last wall. He knew this little room by heart. It had been his home, his prison, for at least two years. He didn’t know exactly how much time had passed, as he had not been kept up to date by his captors, nor did he have any other way to tell the passage of time. The room was comfortable enough, he supposed: a bed with a table where he could eat food, a small area that served as a bathroom—or as close as an alien bathroom could be relative to what he was familiar with.

  Kovac’s steps echoed softly in the room as his mind worked tirelessly, attempting to find a solution to his problem. It had been a long time since he had been released from the medical room and given quarters in the large Val’ayash complex. It was a research center of some kind, on a station orbiting one of the system’s two planets, a large gas giant.

  He had free rein to walk around as he wished, but he had orders not to leave the complex. That made his captivity seem wicked. It was almost as if he had defected, become one of them, and he cursed them for that. He walked among them, spoke to them daily, learned about them.