It felt like cold suffocation as his body temperature ticked down. His eyelids drooped,weighted by sandbags as his heart beat sluggishly in his chest. He didn’t even notice when the technician opened his mouth and measured him for the endotracheal tube, nor did he realize his restraints had been lifted as the team prepared to move him to his cryotube.
Shouting. Gunfire. It surrounded him in dreamlike immediacy as the monitors beeped steadily in the background. His perceptions shifted.
He was back at the Raging Front, the entire Fleet tuned in, the crackling static in his microphone hungering for his next command. The Dominion was pummeling their way through the Perimeter, the United Starways Coalition’s last defenses eroding. Retreat! his first officer screamed. All the odds were against him. No way out. The USC had been gambling when they put him in the hot seat. He fit the intelligence profile, and his service record was impeccable, but he didn’t have it, and the growing realization stung his belly as the little green ship markers faded into oblivion on the Fleet monitoring screens. He was a child psychology specialist, a covert operations acquisitions officer, and a winning strategist in the Endgame. But that was coincidence. A fluke. He wasn’t cut out to be CCO. It was the Coalition’s desperation, their last shot.
(They believe in me.)
The voice floated in from above. “Is he still alive?”
(Fools.)
“We don’t have time to reverse the feed. Let’s hope his Tarkn blood can handle it. Hold on, Admiral.”
(I am not who they think I am.)
Molten pain seared through his chest, kicking his heart into overdrive. His head split apart at the seams, stars of light exploding across his retinas.
“I’ve outgrown you.”
Urusous Li was only twelve years old, but he had mastered all the advanced training Damon could offer. The cold, hollow look in Li’s eyes revealed the soulless creature he had nurtured.
“Calm down!”
Hands pushed him against the stretcher as something pierced his forearm. He screamed as fire exploded into his limbs.
The Minister was younger, his beetle-brows black and thick, his waistline trim. “The problem is that commanders with too much humanity will hesitate,” the Minister said, his hands folded neatly behind his back as he circled Damon. “They will questions their actions, the morality of their choices. I don’t want a commander—I want a razor. I want someone who will be capable of making the toughest decisions without hesitation. Do you understand your orders, Captain?”
He looked down at the datafiles of the two remaining candidates: Tarsha Leone and Urusous Li. Both of them possessed the military acumen, but only one of them could be chosen. Just like the rest of the group, they had been bred to eliminate the competition, and neither would stand for the other’s existence.
“It’s your choice, Captain,” the Minister said, coming up from behind him. He laid both hands on Damon's shoulders, his fingertips digging in. “Let the best razor win.”
“Who’s Tarsha?” someone said. The voice was muffled, as if he heard it through a wall.
“Don’t know. That’s all he’s been saying.”
Overhead lights whisked by through a tiny slit above his eyes at regular intervals. His body was stiff and distant, but he managed to move his right hand. He was restrained inside some kind of box. A scream rose in his throat, but his vocal cords were encased in cement.
Coffin.
Tears rolled down his cold, waxy skin. The afterimage of Tarsha appeared before his eyes like a photonegative. (Don’t hurt her!)
“You’ve clearly grown attached to this candidate,” the Minister said. He was in the interrogation room, a solitary light shining down on the two of them. The yellow haze of Yarnni cigarettes stung his eyes as the Minister stabbed out the remainder of his smoke. “I can’t have that. I need your judgment.”
Pieces of his uniform were strewn across the room. It was everything he could do to stay focused in the intensified heat and humidity. They hadn’t let him sleep in three days, and his only meal had been rationed scraps. “She has empathy. It’s a valuable asset. She can anticipate the enemy. Read my report,” Damon said. His voice was younger, not yet scarred by cigarettes.
“I have, and that’s why you’re here. You’ve lost your focus. You’ve lost your objectivity. I know you’ve had contact outside the USC. I want answers.”
Protect his source. At all costs. He couldn’t lose his only friend.
“You’re paranoid.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about when we redline your files and call up all your contacts.”
He didn’t say anything. He had been careful. The Minister was most likely bluffing, but there was an outside possibility that Pancar could be traced. They had used a viral system code in routine net communications to relay messages to one another, but there was always residual data left floating in the wave network that could be retraced to his confidant.
“Remember,” the Minister said, leaning so close that Damon could smell his sour breath. “You’re replaceable.’
Blood rushed in his ears, the pressure in his skull building with every beat of his heart.
“We’re going to have to jump inside the perimeter.”
His body jolted to the left at the sound of an engine firing against armed loading locks. A dull ache spread across his side and branched out through the rest of his body.
“I don’t have time to make the calculations—”
(I can’t save her.)
“You’re not going to like what I have to say,” the image of Pancar said.
The Nagoorian was conservative and a supporter of the USC, which made his job a little easier. But his every move was being traced. The Minister knew but couldn’t prove it. Arranging a face-to-face meeting was impossible, and communicating, even in viral code, was now too dangerous. Damon knew that this would be his last message.
“Tarsha Leone’s listed parents, Gradivia and Xeodi, are not genetically related to her, nor are Urusous Li’s parents, Mi Xing and Tsaio Li.”
“What do you mean, Pancar?” Damon asked. But it was a recording. He bumped up the volume on the dataclip and pressed the bud embedded in his ear canal with his thumb. Whatever Pancar found out would be instantly erased when the message ended, so he had to be sure he heard every word.
“My labs were not sophisticated enough to decipher all the data, Damon, but it looks as though both Urusous and Tarsha have synthetic DNA. They were designed. It was as if someone had wanted to experiment with minor alterations to a specific genetic code.”
“Impossible,” Damon said. Urusous had minimal epicanthic folds, dark hair, and soft facial features—humanoid, almost Eurasian, with accents of outerworlder blood in the horned protrusions near his hairline. Tarsha was fair-skinned with angular features, the unusual black of her eyes differentiating her from most humanoids.
“I compared the other children with the samples you provided, with similar findings. There were always two versions of a genetic code, one male, one female.”
Pancar’s face changed. “This is nothing like what I thought, Damon. These children were specifically bred for command. If Urusous is as unstable as you say he is, you might want to find the source of his code.”
(What have I done?)
“Damon.”
Someone rubbed vigorously on his sternum. “Damon!”
He recognized the voice. He tried to open his eyes, but they seemed glued shut.
A hand gripped his wrist, feeling for a pulse. The voice was nervous: “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, Sir—he came out of it too soon. I don’t understand any of these readings.”
A shot of adrenaline hit him like a cannon blast. He gritted his teeth, muscles flexing impossibly, lungs screaming for air as he arched off the exam table. His eyelids peeled back, letting the tears drip down his face. Blurry images zig-zagged about as voices argued and shouted.
Suddenly, the tension eased and his
muscles relaxed. He sank down onto the exam table, exhausted, gasping for air.
“Damon, it’s me, Pancar. Can you hear me?”
“Pan...” his friend’s name came out in a fractured, garbled slur. Concentrating on his right hand, he commanded his fingertips to touch Pancar’s sleeve.
“My friend,” Pancar smiled, taking his hand. “It’s good to see you again.”
He could only think the words; his lips wouldn’t respond. He tried to lift his head up, but it seemed impossibly heavy.
“Don’t rush it. Your body needs time. I will explain everything.”
Damon could see a little more now, the blurry images organizing into concrete shapes. He recognized the facility markings on the support pillars and the language on the instruments. He was on Nagoor, and by the haphazard arrangement of equipment, in one of Pancar’s mobile operations facilities.
“I was contacted by Jaeia Kyron about your unfortunate circumstances, and with her help, we were able to evacuate you to here, to Nagoor, before they completed the cryofreeze process. With the Alliance’s defense network down, I think they have larger problems then trying to track us right now.”
Damon remembered. He hadn’t believed Victor Paulstine when he claimed to have designed the entire defense network for the Alliance, but when Li disabled their entire Fleet with a keystroke, he knew he had grossly underestimated his enemy—again.
“I didn’t... want to leave. I have to stay... fight.”
Pancar folded his hands together and leaned forward. “The last word I got was that Minister Razar had fallen into a coma from a slow intracranial bleed. If the bastard hadn’t frozen the Healer, maybe he’d be more than a vegetable right now. Wren’s leading the Fleet. He’s a good commander. Don’t worry, Damon. The war’s not over yet.”
Pancar left his side for a moment to electronically sign the documents one of his aides passed to him.
“I’m mobilizing the few units I still have working for me,” the Nagoorian said. “We’re trying to rally the General Assembly—or what’s left of it. Victor Paulstine has made many allies in the centuries he’s been around, and with Li’s popularity and defense against the Deadwalkers, the Alliance isn’t going to stay together much longer.”
“What?” Damon managed to say through cracked lips. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, and when he tried to swallow, his throat felt like sheets of sandpaper rubbing together.
“It’s our latest intel,” Pancar said, holding a projector over his chest. “My agents have been trying to find Paulstine for years since we traced a human flesh farm back to him, but he’s the most elusive Sentient I’ve ever tracked. When you told me he resurfaced and was interested in the Kyrons, I doubled my efforts.”
Damon tried to rise but found his body’s response was sluggish and weak. Pancar helped him raise the head of the bed before starting the clip.
“We found out that Paulstine makes regular visits to black market restoration clinics on Iyo Kono and Old Earth to have his body modified—muscle enhancements, cell retainers—you get it. Illegal, but not unusual. However, one of my agents managed to get a blood sample, and he tested off the charts,” Pancar said, pointing to the nucleotides swimming across the visual field. “It took me two months to figure out what the hell this was.”
“Smart... Cell...” Damon managed to say before his head dropped back against the pillow.
Pancar nodded. “Smart Cell Technology. Ancient. Banned. Can’t get this anywhere. I knew he was a relic, but we’re talking twenty-first century Earth—pre-war. He’s the only one left.”
Damon remembered his grandfather’s stories of privileged humans from twenty-first century Earth who purposefully injected themselves with the Smart Cell nanites that extended longevity. Josef Stein had originally designed the nanites to revive and regenerate tissue so that soldiers who lost limbs or organs during battle could regain damaged parts, but it was rumored that his rivals stole a nanite batch and turned it into a commercial product by tweaking the programming and selling it to high-paying clientele. However, after a few hundred years the nanites had unexpected neurological effects, and most of the humans who had injected themselves either went mad or committed suicide well before Damon’s time.
“My biggest concern is this,” Pancar said, pulling up a different file on the projector. The audio was grainy and laced with static, but Damon’s eyes grew wide as he heard the speaker’s agitated voice proclaim his madness in one of the root languages of Starways Common.
“We gather here because we are united for a common purpose: Earth. The human menace has desecrated her beauty since its very inception. Man’s wretched propensity for violence and self-indulgence has laid sickness down on the land. Now is the time to end this charade. Do humans deserve to live on the land they destroy? No. And it is our job to end our mother’s suffering.”
Pancar turned down the volume to the reel. “You’ve heard this speech before, yes?”
Damon nodded. He did his undergraduate work on personality disorders in military and political autocrats, and for his thesis he had studied dictators on alien worlds, specifically Earth. Ramak Yakarvoah was notorious, but many of the allegations against him had never been proven, demoting his status amongst the Starways’ most infamous dictators. One of the most serious had been that he had orchestrated the assassination of the United States President in 2052, but the evidence against him was dismissed when Josef Stein became the prime suspect.
Pancar leaned forward in his chair and spoke softly. “Once I knew his age, I had my teams look into his activity on Earth before the war. I had made a contact on Earth, a caretaker named Jade, and she claimed to have evidence of electronic correspondence between Ramak Yakarvoah and Victor Paulstine, but I haven’t heard from her in days now.”
Damon tried to sit up again, but Pancar pushed him gently down. “I know you share my worry. If Victor was a disciple of Ramak’s, then we may be in more trouble than we know.”
“The arch-apostle...” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He meant to say “the arch-apostle of bloodshed,” but his throat was on fire. Ramak Yakarvoah had been the leader of the “Doomsdayers,” a group that wished to end humanity, and he had influenced many political and military leaders during the last few years before the Last Great War, even launching the bioarms race by personally financing the research. The most famous of his disciples was rumored to be Josef Stein, but his ties to Stein during the War were never verified. Most records on Ramak had been destroyed or lost.
“You and I have been friends for a long time,” Pancar said, shooing out the remainder of the staff. One of the technicians whispered something in his ear, but Pancar shook his head and dismissed him. “And it’s been very difficult for me to keep some things from you.”
Damon spotted a thermos on a rolling cart next to Pancar and grunted. His hands, rubbery and numb, grabbed for it, and Pancar helped him hold the brim to his lips. Cold coffee dribbled down his lips as he sucked down its contents.
“I know these last few months have been difficult for you. I know you’ve felt responsible for Li. And Tarsha.”
Damon wiped his lips. His words finally came to him, although not as quickly as he’d have liked. “What... have you learned?”
“That last time we talked I told you that Urusous and Tarsha were brother and sister. Now I have to tell you something even harder to hear. I did some digging on the Alliance database when Victor deactivated the net defense system. I found that Razar ordered the Hub to run an aptitude and abilities comparative analysis just before the Command Development Program launched, including test scores from the Endgame and the Military Readiness Exams.”
Damon knew the rest of Pancar’s theory before he had explained it, and his heart sunk in his chest. A bad taste, worse than the aftertaste of the coffee grounds, singed the back of his throat.
“Razar ordered research teams to take genetic samples from the most capable candidates, both military and non-military alike.”
He was never supposed to be a chief commanding officer, but before the Kyrons, before Li and Tarsha, he had outscored everyone in the Fleet. He had just been doing his duty, for his family, for the Starways. He never thought it odd when they ran him through every single psychiatric and intelligence test the military had to offer. It was wartime, and they needed to find the best commanders. Nor did he think twice when they put him through rigorous physical exams that involved blood sample after blood sample. He was, after all, a Tarkn born of a human surrogate. There were always concerns, though unfounded, fueled by the racial purism that polluted the upper ranks of the old USC.
Damon Unipoesa offered his arm to Pancar. The Nagoorian took it firmly, wiping his skin with an alcohol swab before removing the syringe from his uniform pocket.
“I wanted to do this myself. That way there will be no mistakes, no more doubts. This will stay between you and me.”
Damon grabbed Pancar’s wrist just as the needle touched his skin. “This isn’t necessary. Both of us already know.”
Pancar gently removed himself from Damon’s grip. Damon closed his eyes, fighting the landslide of emotion crushing his chest. It had been years since he had cried. He almost couldn’t remember what it had felt like. As the needle pierced his vein pulling warm bloodfrom his body, he smiled, tears cascading down his cheeks.
JUMPING TO JUE HEXRON proved difficult with Li’s new army staking out territory along routine jump sites. Jetta made two extra jumps, one that barely avoided materializing into the gigantic basalt moons of Oraesis III, just to stay away from frequently trafficked areas. But then again, it didn’t really matter. She was expecting to get caught.
The stealth fighter’s cloaking ability enabled her to make it past the orbital perimeter, but once she hit the frequency-monitored airspace above the Holy Cities, her engine exhaust reacting against the nitrogen components in the air made her easily detectable.
Their instruments not yet able to pinpoint her location, the airspace patrol sent out a general broadcast along her trajectory: “Unidentified ship, please submit your license and registry to the airspace magistrate.”
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