They’d escaped Ouroboros together, and months later, they’d found their way back. Sitting in the ashes of their world, surrounded by the corpses of their people, they’d plotted their revenge. Tanik had planned to use his fake identity to infiltrate the Revenants and find a way to destroy them from within.
The Keth had always said he was destined for greatness. Tanik had never understood why they’d said that until this moment. Now, after twenty years of plotting and striving to tear the Union apart, it was all finally coming together. They’d finally done it.
“Tell me, Tanik,” Feyra said in a whispering voice. “Did you succeed?”
“I did. The war has begun. Darius destroyed the Cygnians’ homeworld. The Revenants had planned to cripple them in one blow, but I managed to stop them by letting the Cygnian Revenants escape and warn their people.”
Feyra’s dancing eyes widened and she smiled. “Darius destroyed their world? He has come a long way since you chased him off that cliff. It’s a good thing I put him back together again.”
Tanik nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“But I wonder, why bother? Why him? Why go to so much trouble to make him feel special?”
“Because he is special,” Tanik said.
Feyra arched an eyebrow—a human gesture, one of many that she’d picked up from him. “But you didn’t need him to do any of this. You have the same power to influence other Revenants that he does. You could have done it all on your own.”
“Yes, my love, I could have, but then I would have to be the one fighting with the Revenants, risking my life to tear them apart from within. This way, I’ve trained someone else to take up the crusade for me, which means we can be together while the war runs its course. The galaxy will burn, and our people will rebuild.”
“Yes...” Feyra replied, smiling blissfully. “It’s all happening just as you said it would.”
“More or less,” Tanik agreed.
“But why lure the girl to her death?”
Tanik smiled. Feyra had always been good at reading his mind. It helped that she was just as gifted with the ZPF as he.
“Darius needs a reason to make this war personal,” he explained. “Now he has one. And besides, she’s not dead.” Tanik reached into his jumpsuit and withdrew a vial of clear liquid.
“What is that?” Feyra asked.
“Antivenin. From a Ghoul’s venom sac.”
“The one who stabbed her?”
Tanik nodded.
“You extracted it so that you could save her? Why?”
“Insurance. Darius is very powerful. We may need leverage someday.”
Feyra looked dubious. “There has never been a Revenant as powerful as you.” She rubbed his arm appreciatively and licked her lips with a bright pink tongue. Her sparkling eyes widened, and her mouth parted with a mixture of awe and adoration—or perhaps that was lust. It had been a long time since they’d last seen each other, let alone had time to themselves.
“I am not a Revenant,” he chided. “Just because I took his name and look somewhat like him, does not mean that I am him.”
“No, you’re right,” Feyra replied. “I am sorry. Speaking of your namesake...” She pulled an ancient-looking necklace from a pocket in the loose-fitting white tunic that she wore. It was the heart-shaped locket Darius had seen in his vision. “You’re very lucky that no one opened this,” Feyra said. She flicked the heart-shaped pendant open with her thumb, and a life-sized hologram of two people wrapped in each other’s embrace flickered to life.
“It still works?” Tanik asked, blinking incredulously at the sight of the hologram. One of the two people was Samara—the real Samara, not Nova—while the other was Tanik Gurhain, her husband.
“We do look a lot alike,” Tanik mused. “But these scars are a convenient disguise,” he said, while running a hand over the raised lines running across his face. “Without them, someone who knew Tanik well might have realized that I’m not him.”
“If they had, I’m sure you could have disposed of them quietly. Did anyone recognize you?” Feyra asked.
“No. Not even Nova, and I allowed her into my head.”
“Yes, it is remarkable that you could hide your true nature from her and still give her some measure of control over you.”
Tanik sneered. “She never had any measure of control over me. I was the one controlling her from the moment we met.”
Feyra’s eyes widened and she grinned. “You are unstoppable, my love.”
Tanik smiled and wrapped an arm around her shoulders to draw her in for another kiss. “Yes,” he murmured against her lips. “The Augur was the only one who could have stopped me, and we took care of him.”
Feyra’s eyes sparkled with delight. “Oh! I still have his head mounted on the wall.”
Tanik blinked in shock. “In the castle? I thought I told you to get rid of that!”
“I did. I moved it to our cabin in the valley.”
Tanik’s nose wrinkled. “I find your taste in artwork disturbing...”
Feyra laughed. “Says the one who cut the head off and gave it to me. You shouldn’t have done that if you didn’t want me to keep it.”
Tanik snorted and shook his head. He turned Feyra by her shoulders to look over the forest valley. The sun was setting, lighting the sky on fire. “Beautiful,” he murmured.
Feyra laced her fingers through his once more. “Now what?” she asked.
“The other Revenants are still out there,” he said. “Trapped on this side of the Eye with us. I think perhaps it’s time we re-opened the wormhole so they can go join the war.”
“Good idea.”
“I wonder whose side the other Luminaries will join? The Cygnians’ or their fellow Revenants’?”
“Does it matter?” Feyra asked. “One way or another, they’re all going to kill each other.”
Tanik laughed at that. “Yes, I suppose they will.”
Broken Worlds: Civil War
(1st Edition)
by Jasper T. Scott
JasperTscott.com
@JasperTscott
Copyright © 2018
THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS
FOR THIS BOOK
Cover Art by Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com
Content Rating: PG
Swearing: made-up euphemisms
Sex: mild references
Violence: moderate
Acknowledgments
Editing is the least satisfying part of writing, and it also happens to be the part where I need the most help. As such, I’m grateful to have such a great group of editors and advance readers. Among the former many thanks go out to my editor, Dave Cantrell, my volunteer editor, William Schmidt, and to my proofreader, Ian Jedlica. You guys are amazing.
As for the advance readers, I’m always amazed how each and every one of them finds something different. I can go through a dozen sets of feedback, fix a hundred typos, and somehow advance reader number thirteen will still find something new to fix. It’s a case of the more eyes the merrier when it comes to editing, and my heartfelt thanks go out to: B. Allen Thobois, Chase Hanes, Dave Topan, Davis Shellabarger, Donna Bennet, Gary Matthews, George P. Dixon, Gregg Cordell, Harry Huyler, Ian Seccombe, Jacqueline Gartside, Jeff Belshaw, Kenny Harvey, Lisa Garber, Mary Kastle, Michael Madsen, Paul Birch, Peter Rouse, Ray Miles, Raymond Burt, Rob Dobozy, Ryan Nelson, Shane Haylock, and William Dellaway—you all make me look good!
To those who dare,
And to those who dream.
To everyone who’s stronger than they seem.
—Jasper Scott
“Believe in me / I know you’ve waited for so long / Believe in me / Sometimes the weak become the strong.”
—STAIND, Believe
Dramatis Personae
Main Characters
Darius Drake “Spaceman”
Human male
Cassandra Drake “Cass” / “Cassy”
Human female
Tanik
Gurhain “Scarface”
Human male
Dyara “Dya” / “Hottie”
Human female
Acolytes
Thessalus Ubaris “Arok”
Lassarian male
Flitter
Murciago male
Seelka
Vixxon female
Gakram
Banshee male, deceased
Secondary Characters
Trista Leandra
Human female
Buddy
Togran male
Gatticus Thedroux “Slick” / “Metal
Head”
Male android
Admiral Ventaris
Human male
Blake Nelson
Human male
Yuri Mathos
Lassarian male
Minor Characters
The Augur
Human male, deceased
Feyra
Keth female
Vartok
Keth male
Kovar
Male Cygnian (Ghoul)
Previously in the Broken Worlds Series
Broken Worlds (Book 2): The Revenants
After the battle at the Crucible, Darius and his daughter, Cassandra, are stranded on the other side of the Eye with the crew of the Deliverance, and their enigmatic leader, Tanik Gurhain.
While stranded behind enemy lines, Tanik trains Darius and Cassandra, along with a handful of other Acolytes rescued from the Crucible, to become Revenants to fight the Cygnians and defeat the Union. Darius learns that he is special, a so-called Luminary, whose powers can influence other Revenants.
While Tanik trains the Acolytes on Ouroborous, a planet long-abandoned by the Keth, he is reunited with his long-lost wife, Samara Guhain.
Darius begins to suspect that Samara isn’t who she claims to be. He begins to have visions that lead him to discover the truth: she isn’t Tanik’s wife, but rather Nova, the new leader of the Revenants. He further learns that she is using her abilities to control Tanik.
Nova foresees the same thing Tanik has, that Darius will someday defeat the Cygnians and depose her as the leader of the Union. She tries to kill him before her visions comes to pass, but he escapes.
Darius learns that Nova has taken control of everyone on Ouroborous, including his daughter, and she has brought her fleet of Revenants to support her.
Darius slips into the old fortress where everyone has been training, and manages to kill Nova, thus releasing her hold over Tanik and the others. Darius and Tanik convince Nova’s fleet to join their war against the Cygnians and the Union.
While preparing for their war, Darius has visions of Cassandra being killed by the Cygnians while negotiating for peace. When he finds out that his daughter and Tanik are in danger, he uses his powers as a Luminary to force the Revenants to go after her and attacks the Cygnian fleet preemptively.
Darius arrives too late to save his daughter from being poisoned by a Cygnian, and the only antidote dies with the alien. With no immediate way to save her, Tanik freezes her in Cryo.
Blinded by rage and a thirst for revenge, Darius destroys the Cygnians’ home world with a ZPF bomb, but he has to force a young pilot to sacrifice his life to do so. The decision leaves him feeling guilty and conflicted. He struck a deadly blow against their enemy, but at a terrible cost.
Unknown to Darius, Tanik returns to Ouroborous and his real wife, a Keth woman named Feyra. We learn that Tanik was an orphan of the war between the Revenants and the Keth, a human boy stranded on Ouroborus and raised by the Keth. Like Darius, he is also a Luminary, and he was only pretending to be under Nova’s influence. We also learn that Tanik is an assumed identity used to infiltrate the Union as part of a long-term plan to avenge the Keth.
Tanik secretly obtained the antivenin to cure Cassandra and intends to use it to control Darius when the time is right. In the meantime, he and Feyra plan to enjoy a well-deserved break from war and fighting while Darius unwittingly pursues their agenda of defeating the Cygnians and destabilizing the Union.
Broken Worlds (Book 1): The Awakening
In the year 2045 AD, Darius Drake and his daughter, Cassandra, were put into cryo-sleep to await a cure for Cass’s cancer. They expected to sleep for fifty years, maybe a hundred, but instead awoke fourteen centuries later, and not on Earth.
They found themselves aboard a giant spaceship, the Deliverance, with hundreds of other cryo-sleepers, and in orbit around an unfamiliar planet, Hades.
The ship’s biological crew were all dead, ripped apart by vicious alien predators called Phantoms. Only Gatticus, an android, survived the slaughter but with most of his memory corrupted.
Gatticus helps Darius and the others solve the mystery of where they are and why. They learn that Hades is a hunting ground of the Cygnians, which turns out to be the proper name for the Phantoms.
Cygnians hunt humans and other species for sport, and they do it with the approval of the Union, an interstellar government formed to keep peace with the Cygnians. The Union sends criminals and innocent children to designated hunting grounds.
Children from every species are sent to the Crucible when they come of age. They have no memory of the experience, but each receives a mark on the underside of their right wrists: the seal of life, or the seal of death. Those with the seal of death are sent to designated hunting grounds, such as Hades, while the ones with the seal of life are returned to their parents. A small percentage of children never return and are presumed dead—they are known as Revenants.
Hades is populated with those sentenced to be hunted. A society has formed on the planet and does its best to defend against Cygnian hunting parties. Darius and some other cryo patients go down to the planet to find fuel for the Deliverance in the hope of escaping the system before the Cygnians show up again.
But they’re too late. The Cygnians arrive. Cassandra is captured, and presumed dead, while Darius and the others are forced to flee with the help of a man named Tanik Gurhain—an exiled war criminal with mysterious powers.
After leaving Hades, Tanik assumes leadership of the band of survivors and declares his plan to use the Deliverance and its frozen cargo of patients to fight a war against the Cygnians and their empire—The United Star Systems of Orion (USO). He wakes all of the cryo patients and cures them of their various diseases using nanites.
Darius is surprised when the entire group agrees to go along with Tanik’s plans. He learns from Dyara Eraya, Tanik’s right-hand, that she has misgivings about him, and that Tanik might in fact be controlling the recently-awoken crew by supernatural means.
Dyara and Darius seem to be the only ones able to resist Tanik, so they plot to overthrow him. The coup fails, and Dyara is arrested.
Gatticus learns that Tanik had a role in the death of the Deliverance’s original crew, but before he can warn the others, Tanik disables him and sends him into deep space on a transport ship to cover up his actions.
Tanik doesn’t arrest Darius for plotting his overthrow, because he believes Darius is the key to defeating the Cygnians.
Believing his daughter to be dead, Darius only cares about revenge and wants no part of Tanik’s war. He changes his mind when Tanik tells him the Cygnians actually took Cassandra to the Crucible to be tested and marked like all of the other children.
Clinging to hope, Darius joins forces with Tanik to find and rescue his daughter from the Crucible. They succeed and manage to rescue a handful of other children as well, none of which had been marked. The Crucible is heavily defended, and the Deliverance is forced to flee. Tanik takes them to an abandoned world to hide and reveals the true purpose of the Crucible. It’s part of a eugenics program, designed to breed more Revenants for a war against an enemy called the Keth. The children returned to their parents show signs of being able to breed new Revenants; the ones marked for death are sent to designated hunting grounds to prevent them from propagating, and the ones who never return are conscripted and trained to become Revenants
.
Tanik says he’s going to train Darius, Cassandra, and all of the children they rescued to become Revenants, but not to join the war against the Keth. They’re going to fight the Cygnians instead.
Darius isn’t pleased about joining a war with his twelve-year-old daughter, no matter how good the cause, but with no fuel and the way back to Union space blocked by Cygnian patrols, he has little choice but to go along with Tanik’s plans.
Part 1 - Destroyer of Worlds
Chapter 1
Dark blue lines spidered the day side of Gaharr’s rocky gray surface, while the dark side of the planet gleamed with the lights of its ten billion residents. It was the fourth Cygnian world the Revenant Fleet had attacked in as many months.
So much for ending the war before it began, Darius thought. After they’d vaporized Cygnus Prime, the Cygnians hadn’t been frightened into submission. If anything, they were more hostile than ever.
The bright silver hulls of Cygnian warships gleamed against the dark side of Gaharr. Darius smirked at the sight of them. By now the Cygnians knew what they were up against. Word of what had happened to their last three planets had spread far and wide. But it didn’t matter. These Cygnians had never encountered Revenants before, much less a whole fleet of them.
“Commander, are you ready?” Admiral Ventaris asked from the command station beside Darius. “Our fighters will arrive any second now,” Ventaris added.
Darius tore his gaze away from Gaharr and nodded to the admiral. The hint of a smile tugged at the corners of Ventaris’s lips, and the skin around his eyes crinkled.
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 65
