Riker thrust up his hand next, followed by Ra, Veekara, and Ectos. But Lisa, Blake, and Gatticus did not raise their hands.
“Why should we throw our lives away in some blasted crusade?” Blake asked. “Hiding is underrated.”
Lisa nodded slowly. “I agree. There’s too few of us. How many Phantoms are there? Billions?”
“Trillions—quadrillions, in fact,” Gatticus said.
“Then whatever we do, it’ll never be enough,” Lisa added, shaking her head.
Tanik’s yellow-green eyes glittered and he smiled, but his scars twisted half of that smile into a snarl. “You think we’re the only ones who’ve lost people? Everyone has! If we can give them hope, then we will spark the blaze that will light the entire galaxy on fire, and it will burn the Cygnians alive. It will become their funeral pyre. They may be many, but we are many many more, and if we all decide to fight back at the same time, then they will be the ones who need to run and hide!”
Lisa glanced at Darius. He stared grimly back, and she slowly raised her hand. Neither Blake nor Gatticus joined her.
“If we decide to do this, there’s no going back,” Gatticus said, with his eyes on Lisa. “There’s still a chance for you, Lisa, and for you,” he said, nodding to Darius. “Anyone who was in cryo and isn’t marked yet could still be sent to the Crucible and come back with the Seal of Life.” He used his teeth to roll up the sleeve of his remaining arm, revealing a glowing triangle with an eye inside of it.
“Or the seal of death,” Ra added, brandishing the glowing sickle on the underside of his own wrist.
“Or you might simply never return at all,” Tanik put in.
“The decision is yours; for those who want to leave, you are welcome to do so. Those who want to stay, may stay.”
“I didn’t agree to give command of this ship to you,” Gatticus said quietly.
“Perhaps not, but it is not yours to give, and the majority has already spoken. Captain Riker?”
The burly man turned.
“With your experience, command should be yours. I will rather assume overall strategic command of our forces, if that is okay with everyone else?”
Heads bobbed throughout the bridge.
“Based on what qualifications?” Blake demanded.
“Based on the twelve years I spent leading the Coalition fleet.”
Part Three - The Coalition
Chapter 30
“You are the Dark Revenant,” Ra said slowly.
Tanik nodded. “Yes.”
“I thought he was killed.”
“I’m sure the Cygnians would like you to think that, but no, I’m not dead. Well, not yet,” Tanik replied, smirking.
“Hang on,” Blake said. “You led the Coalition fleet?” Tanik nodded, and Blake looked pointedly at Ra. “You said they were convicted criminals.”
Ra rocked his head and rolled his shoulders. “They are. I did not know that their crimes were political in nature.”
Tanik raised his arms and rolled up his sleeves, one at a time, first revealing a glowing Seal of Life on the underside of his right wrist, followed by the scythe-shaped Seal of Death on his left. The other four humanoids standing behind him did the same, revealing they had both marks as well.
“I don’t get it,” Blake said.
Tanik nodded. “We each received the Seal of Life first. We acquired the Seal of Death later on, when we were convicted for our crimes against the Union.”
Blake shook his head. “No, I mean, you were safe. You could have lived out your lives in peace. Why throw all that away? Why join the Coalition?”
“Do you have children?” Tanik asked.
Blake winced. “I used to, yeah.”
“Then imagine how you would have felt if they were taken from you by force and subjected to an alien rite of passage that ultimately killed them.” Tanik’s eyes glittered with fury. “What would you do next? Wouldn’t you fight the ones responsible? Wouldn’t you do everything in your power to make them pay?”
Blake said nothing to that, and no one else spoke for a long moment.
Eventually Ra broke the silence: “What do we do next?”
Tanik’s blazing eyes turned to Ra, then to Gatticus. “We wake the others you spoke of, tell them everything that’s happened, and convince them to join us.”
“And what if they don’t want to join?” Blake asked, smiling lopsidedly. “Are you going to make them?”
“No. They will be allowed to leave with you and Gatticus as soon as we come within range of a suitable USO world.”
“We’ll convince them,” Darius said in a hoarse whisper.
“I like your optimism. Perhaps you should be one of our recruiters. Your story could be inspiring for others.”
“I’m not going to sit on the sidelines,” Darius said.
“I didn’t say you would,” Tanik replied. “No one who joins the Coalition ever does. You’ll pick a crew position and train for it along with everyone else.”
Darius shook his head. “Give me a gun. Or a ship. I used to fly planes on Earth. Put me in a fighter.”
Tanik nodded. “Assuming you pass the aptitude tests, you can have a whole squadron of fighters.”
“Good.”
“And me?” Lisa asked. “What should I do?”
“Your aptitude tests will tell us what to train you for.”
“I thought we could just download stuff to our brains now?” Blake asked. “What’s the point of aptitude tests and training?”
“Knowledge is easy to impart. Natural ability is not, nor is muscle memory. There is no substitute for real experience,” Tanik said, and ran a hand along the longest of the scars on his face. “Veterans are made by wars, not by neural mappers.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Darius asked. “Let’s get started.”
“I like your enthusiasm, Darius,” Tanik said with a snarling grin.
“How do you know his name?” Lisa asked.
“Someone must have mentioned it.”
“We did not,” Gatticus replied.
Tanik shrugged. “No? Are you certain?”
“My memory never fails.”
“Not counting the amnesia, right Slick?” Blake asked.
“Corruption of old data does not affect new data. The first thing I did when I woke up was to isolate and repair the damaged sectors. There is nothing wrong with my memory. None of us mentioned Darius’s name in front of Tanik.”
“Then perhaps one of the Revenants whispered it to me.” Tanik shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We have more important things to focus on. We have just twelve hours before this ship drops out of FTL, and I’d suggest we use them to eat, rest, and prepare for waking the others. Tomorrow will be a very busy day.”
* * *
Tanik led them through the Deliverance to the mess hall. He seemed to already know his way around the ship.
Darius followed along in a daze. His entire body felt numb. Lisa walked beside him, but made no attempt to offer solace. She seemed to realize there was nothing she could say or do to make him feel any better. Darius still refused to believe Cassandra was dead, but denial was only getting him so far. Every now and then, naked horror would punch through to the surface and leave him breathless. His eyes burned with the constant threat of tears, and his chest ached as if all of his ribs were broken.
They’d come so far together. It just didn’t seem possible that this was the end. Death had haunted Cassandra’s every step for as long as Darius could remember, and she’d cheated it more than once, so it was easy to believe that she’d somehow found a way to cheat it again.
Which was exactly why he needed to get in the cockpit of a ship—or at least get the training he needed to fly one of the Deliverance’s transports back to Hades. Cassandra was still alive. Somehow, some way, she hadn’t died with those missiles.
They reached a cavernous room with row upon row of tables, but oddly, no chairs. “Welcome to the mess hall,” Tanik said. “O
r have you all already been here?”
“Briefly,” Lisa said.
Blake nodded. “Yeah, but we were surrounded by dead bodies and their frozen guts at the time. Kind of an appetite killer.”
“Well, you must be hungry now,” Tanik said.
“Starving,” Blake agreed. “Where’s the food?”
Tanik nodded to a long table along one side of the mess hall and led the way there. It was a kind of buffet counter, but each of the dishes was sealed under a transparent lid, and the food inside was vacuum-packed in individual portions. Darius peered through the lids and read the digital labels on a few of them.
Boiled Garlic Potatoes
Dried Berries
Chopped BBQ Steak
Potato Salad
Tuna Salad
Mashed carrots
Mashed potatoes
Flour Tortillas
Refried Beans and Beef
Darius shook his head. “These foods are all from Earth.”
Gatticus nodded. “Of course, the Deliverance probably just came from there. It likely re-supplied while it was loading your cryo pods.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Blake said. “How do we eat this stuff?” he asked, swinging open one of the lids to peer inside.
Tanik reached for a pair of scissors clipped to a rack behind the food compartments. “With these.” He withdrew a package of dried fruit and carefully sliced open the top of the plastic packaging. Then he reached for a spoon, and carefully spooned out a portion of the berries. “You have to be careful,” he said, slowly turning the spoon over, first one way, and then the other. “All of the food is prepared so that it sticks to itself and to your spoon, but that won’t stop it from flying off your utensils if you aren’t careful.”
“So?” Blake shrugged. “A few runaway berries aren’t going to hurt anyone.”
Tanik regarded him coldly. “No? Wait until you’ve been in space for a year and you’re on half rations because you’re running out of food. The only way to re-stock is to pirate passing food shipments headed for USO worlds, and someone always dies in one of those attacks. So, yes, I’m afraid a few runaway berries will hurt someone, because you never know how many people will have to die to replace them.”
“And there’s another good reason not to join the Coalition.”
“It is easy to find reasons to be a coward; it is much harder to find reasons to stand up and fight for what you believe in.”
Blake snorted. “You’re like a fortune cookie, Scarface—full of hot air and useless advice.”
Blake caught a few angry looks from Tanik’s comrades in arms, but he didn’t seem to notice. One of them was a beautiful brunette human woman, but she didn’t look angry. She looked wary.
Tanik ignored Blake and said, “Everyone grab what you like, and let’s find a table.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll take my leave now,” Gatticus said.
Blake arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re not planning to cut and run without us, are you, Slick?”
Gatticus shook his head. “I cannot leave the ship while it is in FTL. Besides, it would be better to wait until we come within range of a USO planet. I will let you know when I am ready to leave.”
“All right, so where are you going?” Blake asked.
Gatticus swiped his hand through the empty space where his other arm should be. “I’m going to re-attach my arm.”
“Right,” Blake said. “Good luck with that.”
“I will not need luck, but thank you.” Turning to Tanik, Gatticus nodded. “Mr. Gurhain, I assume I can trust you not to do anything that would compromise the safety of the ship or its crew until everyone has decided whether or not to join your cause.”
“You have my word.”
“For whatever that is worth,” Ra muttered, and Ectos hissed.
Darius glanced at each of them, and then back to Tanik, wondering what kind of history they might share.
“You cannot force people to fight for a cause they do not believe in,” Tanik said with a snarling smile.
Gatticus frowned. “I will see you all later,” he said; then turned and strode for the exit.
Darius watched him go, wondering about what Tanik had just said. Technically, it was possible to force people to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in. Conscription was a perfect example of that.
Darius frowned and shook his head. It didn’t matter. He and Cassandra would be long gone, on their way to the nearest USO world by the time Tanik hatched his plan. Let the tyrants and heroes kill each other. Someone’s got to be around to rebuild the galaxy after the smoke clears.
Chapter 31
The lack of chairs in the mess hall was not an issue, since standing or sitting in zero-G was basically the same thing. In fact, standing was actually more comfortable and a lot easier to accomplish.
Eating from vacuum packs with a spoon was more complicated than Tanik had made it look. He was dead right about food floating away if they weren’t careful. Blake lost a piece of boiled potato and a piece of beef almost immediately, and Lisa lost a chunk of cheesecake, which she’d decided to eat as an appetizer. Everyone lost something with every other spoonful, but it turned out that it didn’t really matter. One of Tanik’s companions was a crouching, winged Murciago who could dart around in zero-G as easily as a fish through water. He flitted around collecting all the scraps of food that escaped the table. It would have been amusing to watch if Murciagos weren’t so utterly revolting to look at. They had a wrinkly white skin that hung in flaccid folds from their hollow bones. Their faces were vaguely human, but with two black slits for a nose, two large black eyes, and a pinched black orifice of a mouth with a sticky purple tongue that they used to snatch insects—or in this case, drifting bits of food—from the air.
The Murciago’s purple tongue lashed out to snatch a piece of beef that had yet to fly free of Blake’s spoon. Blake’s face screwed up in disgust, and he tossed his spoon at the creature. “Hey, Batman! Fek off.” The Murciago ducked, and the spoon bounced off an exposed pipe in the ceiling.
“Tik, mind your manners, please,” Tanik said.
“Tik? That’s your name?” Lisa asked as the Murciago landed in a crouch beside her, a feat it accomplished by flapping its wings in reverse and re-engaging its mag boots with a soft clu-clunk.
Tik replied with a series of high-pitched squeaks that reminded Darius of a gopher—or a bat, he supposed.
“What did he say?” Lisa asked.
“He said, yes, and what is your name?” Tanik replied around a mouthful of potatoes.
“Right, we forgot to introduce ourselves, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but somehow Scarface knew Darius’s name anyway,” Blake said while sipping a flavored isotonic beverage through a straw. He released the reusable flask after a moment and left it floating beside him.
“Someone must have mentioned my name,” Darius explained.
“I’m Lisa.” She patted her chest while nodding to the Tik. Then she nodded to the other strangers. “What are all of your names?”
“I, Ikatosh,” a large, white-furred humanoid said, pointing a fat thumb to himself. He looked like a polar bear standing on hind legs with a flattened snout and a permanent smile on his bluish-gray lips. “You may say Ike for short way of saying.”
Darius recognized the species as a Korothian.
“I’m Dyara,” the brunette Darius had noticed earlier said. She was stunning: petite, with ample curves and a small waist, rich brown eyes, and a perfect porcelain skin.
“Nice to meet you,” Darius said.
She smiled. “And you, Darius.” Then her smile faded. “I’m sorry about your daughter.”
Darius nodded, and looked away, down to his food. He spooned out some mashed potatoes and looked back up just in time to see Lisa send Dyara a warning look. He frowned, wondering what that was about. Then he remembered how Lisa had grabbed his hand after he’d said goodbye to Cassandra, and he noted her proximity now�
�standing at the table beside him, physically between him and the only other human woman at the table. Coincidence?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe she was jealous, or at least guarding her interests, but he couldn’t bring himself to care one way or the other. He’d never had much luck with women. Cassandra’s mother, Claire, was testament to that. She’d abandoned them soon after Cass had been born, and when Cassandra had been diagnosed with cancer, she hadn’t even bothered to visit, or call. Claire had always been easier to define by what she wasn’t than what she was—an absence, not a presence.
The only woman in Darius’s life who’d ever stuck around or mattered was Cassandra, and that wasn’t about to change.
Darius shook his head to clear away those thoughts. Lisa and Ra took turns introducing the people Darius had already met, but when they were done, there was still one stranger left at the table.
“What about Flipper?” Blake asked, jerking his chin to the one who hadn’t been introduced.
It was another of the willowy, hairless amphibians from Walros. Darius winced at the memory of the Dol Walin guardian of the Grotto. Tita was probably dead now.
No. Darus shook his head. She wasn’t dead. She would have found a way to get the kids closest to her to safety. Especially Cassandra, who was supposed to be sleeping beside her.
Darius missed hearing the Dol Walin’s name, but Blake didn’t. He paused in mid-chew of a piece of bread. “Kithy-a-what?”
“Kithisiosakata,” he said in a watery voice. “Kithisios for short.”
“You call that short? Let’s stick with Flipper.”
“You are referring to my hands?” Kithisios asked, and fluttered three broad, flipper-like fingers.
“Hey what do you know, your name is Flipper and you’ve got flippers for fingers. That’s some kind of coincidence.”
“My name is not, Flipper,” Kithisios said.
Blake nodded agreeably. “Whatever you say, Gills.”
“I do not possess gills. You are an annoying person, Blake. I do not like you.”
“That’s a shame, Flip, and here I was hoping we could be friends.”
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 18
