by Jacob Holo
Seth let a grin slip onto his face. “Is it now?”
It’s only natural, he thought. She’s out there alone. Of course, I’m worried about her.
But Seth knew that was only half true. As it often did, his thoughts of Tesset drifted to memories of Quennin. Pilots didn’t choose their partners. The Choir of Aktenzek did, and he and Tesset had not been paired under the best of circumstances.
The logical part of Seth understood why. The talent to pilot a seraph was one of the most precious abilities in existence, and science could not copy it. It was hereditary, but not genetic. Only through the natural breeding of pilots could the next generation be born, and the Choir chose those pairings with great care.
After her injuries, the Choir had forced Quennin into exile, and Tesset was her replacement.
That didn’t mean Seth didn’t love her. Despite her youth and the way they’d been forced together, he really did care for her. She was special in so many ways: a unique woman he’d grown fond of. Talented. Energetic. Loving.
But she will never be Quennin.
“Sir?” Jared asked.
“Hmm? What?” Seth asked, breaking from his reverie.
“I just said that Tesset has landed.”
“Ah, yes. Sorry. My mind was wandering.”
It didn’t take long for Tesset to reach the command center. She stepped in, still clad in her i-suit. Seth found himself smiling. Tesset always looked frail to him, even though she wasn’t. Her build was slim and athletic, her blonde hair short and attractive.
But it was the blindfold that made her look frail. Stripped of her sight as a child, raised in secret as an experiment by the Original Eleven, Tesset could see the world in powerful and unique ways. Her latent chaos talents had manifested at a young age, allowing her to sense the world around her with surprising detail.
Only empty sockets and scar tissue remained of her eyes, now concealed behind her blindfold: a green band of cloth woven with a subtle stepping pattern of darker and lighter shades.
Tesset perceived Seth’s smile and returned it warmly.
“How did your recon flight go?” Seth asked.
“Uneventful.” Tesset walked over to him. “Outcast pickets remain mostly unchanged, and the Wise Counsel’s new arrivals still haven’t been fully crewed. I already gave my report to the Choir.”
Seth nodded. “So nothing to change the timetable.”
“Not that I saw, and I got pretty close to the depot,” Tesset said.
“Any chance you were spotted?” Jared asked.
“Of course not,” Tesset said. “I’m too good for that.”
Jared grabbed a d-scroll off his desk and opened it. “What about their archangel deployment? Any changes in total strength?”
“Same deployment as before. You could tell time with their patrols, they’re so regular.”
Jared opened the d-scroll a little more. “Any throne sightings?”
“None. Same as before.” Tesset made a subtle move with her eyebrows and mouth that gave a vivid impression of rolled eyes. Jared didn’t see it.
“What about the command ships?”
“None.”
Jared looked up. “Did you happen to notice… ahh…”
Tesset glared straight at Jared. For someone without eyes, this was quite a trick, but she pulled it off convincingly.
Seth cleared his throat. “Jared, perhaps you should check on your squadron. I think Tesset would like to speak to me alone.”
“Right, sir…” Jared grimaced at being stared down by the girl with no eyes. “I’ll, uhh, I’ll go do that.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” Seth said once they were alone.
“Well, I can’t help it. I missed you.” Tesset put her arms around him and rested her head against his.
He held her close, fingers stroking her hair. “I missed you, too.”
“I received some news from the caretakers while you were out,” Tesset said.
“Really? About what?”
She giggled. “About Saera, silly!”
“Well, I know that. I meant what kind of news.”
Saera—Tesset’s daughter. His daughter. Pilots didn’t raise their own children, at least not until they also became pilots. The Choir would never waste an elite warrior on something as mundane as childcare.
“Did you know?” Tesset asked. “She’s two years old today!”
“Already? Huh. Time just flies by.”
“They think she’ll grow up to be a very strong pilot,” Tesset said excitedly. For such a large chunk of her life, pilots had been distant heroes, people to be revered and respected, lofty models for all Aktenai to follow. She often said she’d never truly gotten used to being one.
“You should be very proud.” Seth ruffled her hair playfully.
“Hey! Quit it!”
Seth just smiled.
Tesset smoothed out her hair as she stepped away. “I’m not a kid, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.” Tesset adjusted her blindfold. “Say, are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since heading out on my recon flight, so I’m famished.”
“Well,” Seth glanced over at the nearest wall screen. His neural link triggered it to display the current time. He frowned. “I still have some business to attend to.”
“Is Jack due to call in?”
“Yeah. Hopefully within the next hour. I should be here to receive his report. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go on ahead without me.”
Tesset shook her head. “No, don’t you worry. I’ll wait for you to finish.”
***
Seth sat down at one of the command center’s desks and thumbed through Jared’s d-scrolls. He couldn’t help feeling a little sad for the young man.
Jared was an exceptional field commander, where his powerful chaos talents came to the fore. All pilots experienced heightened reflexes in combat, but Jared was unique in that his mind also accelerated.
In a seraph, Jared was brilliant. Outside one, he merely remembered what brilliance felt like.
Idling the time away, Seth signaled one of the wall screens to pull up the galactic layout. Three locations glowed prominently, represented as triangles of differing colors. There, in the lower left, the twin system of Earth and the fortress planet Aktenzek. Seth tried to remember the last time he had visited his home. Two years ago? Three?
I can’t even remember, he thought, shaking his head.
In the upper right, a triangle pulsed red: the fortress planet Zu’Rashik, lair of the Original Eleven and base of operations for the Dead Fleet. With its automated industries and robotic fleets, it represented a threat equal to Aktenzek’s power.
But that was not the limit of the Eleven’s power. They had crafted their own versions of the archangels: anti-seraph humanoid weapon systems or, as Jared liked to put it, seraph-lites. They were superior to the Grendeni originals in almost every respect and nearly as plentiful. The Choir’s analysts still didn’t know how the Eleven had accomplished this.
And, of course, there were the thrones.
But Seth found his eyes drawn to the third location: a flashing blue triangle dangerously close to the front.
The Gate to the Homeland…
Seth was convinced this was the Eleven’s goal. It had taken years and hundreds of Alliance ships to secure the Gate, but the prize was worth it. The Gate represented the deepest cultural aspiration of every Aktenai citizen: the redemption of their Exile into this cursed universe.
The return to paradise, to the Homeland: their reward for vanquishing the Bane.
And now the Eleven would try to seize it from them, spending their Outcast allies in the process.
Seth looked at the map once more, his eyes drawn to a large red circle representing the Glorious Destiny, mightiest of the Outcast command ships. The Glorious Destiny had moved towards the front in the last few days. Its new position placed it danger
ously close to the Wise Counsel.
Alliance intelligence always knew the Glorious Destiny’s movements with great precision. Seth had to admit Jack was very good at his work.
Jack and Seth shared a tumultuous history, filled with battles where they had both tried to kill the other. And yet, five years ago, the two pilots had accomplished the impossible together. They had killed the Bane, a creature thought to be unkillable.
The price had been terrible. Seth’s son was dead by Jack’s hand, Quennin was nearly killed by the Bane, and yet… Jack had been right. He had almost single-handedly rid the Aktenai people of their greatest sin. The twenty-thousand-year-old Great Mission had been fulfilled, and the Gate to the Homeland was now being stabilized. Against that achievement, any sins could be forgiven.
The result of Jack’s actions had been a triumph beyond compare, but the guilt of his transgressions weighed heavily on his tortured mind. Despite the man’s crude Earther habits, Jack had made a pledge in the strictest of Aktenai traditions.
On bended knee, Jack had declared an oath of fealty to Seth and Quennin. He would serve them in whatever capacity they wished until they declared his debt paid. This was the deepest act of penance any Aktenai could commit, and from that moment on Jack became a warrior-servant, bound by his word and driven by the hope of reclaimed honor.
Seth closed his eyes and let the wall screen switch back to its original data metrics.
It was then that he became aware of a slight static at the edge of his senses, like the voices of a great crowd, but distant and muted. The din rose and then quickly fell, vanishing into nothing.
Seth frowned. He tried to call up a recording of the incident, but as before, his neural link confidently stated that no sounds had been recorded or transmitted. A trickle of fear ran through him, and he wondered if these episodes might be symptoms of a deeper problem.
He queried his neural link and ran a diagnostic. As before, it replied with no detectable problems. All systems green. Seth made a mental note to have his link looked at more closely. The last thing he needed was for it to malfunction in the heat of battle.
He put the episode out of his mind when Jack called.
“Hey, Seth,” Jack said over a speaker. “How’s it going?”
“Well enough. Yourself?”
“Things have been a tad exciting on the Glorious Destiny. They’re gearing up for something. Not sure what.”
“Any ideas?”
“Not really. I’m sending a log of the messages I’ve monitored. Maybe the Choir will have better luck.”
Seth checked the incoming burst of recorded hypercast transmissions. As usual, Jack had collected a huge amount of raw data. Seth forwarded the data burst to the Choir for further analysis.
Hypercast worked in a similar fashion to fold engines, except that the hypercast arrays shunted energy instead of matter instantly from one point in the universe to another.
That made hypercast virtually unblockable and perfectly secure. The signals did not actually traverse the space between two ships. There was no signal to intercept or block. And yet, somehow at short range, Jack could “see” hypercast transmissions, an ability he now shared with the original Bane. He described the messages as resembling long thin lines of zero length.
Seth found the description completely incomprehensible.
He sat up in his seat and skimmed the raw data. “That’s almost twice the usual traffic.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “That concerns me, too. Like just before they took down those two schisms.”
Seth sighed, recalling the battle and the faces he would never see again.
“Say, have you had any problems with my seraph lately?” Jack asked.
With a mental flick, Seth pulled up the incident log. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Nightmares again?”
“Yeah. I had a real bad one last week.”
“And it seems we did have an incident during that time.”
The Alliance kept Jack’s seraph onboard the Resolute, stored in a specially constructed cryogenic cell that kept the monstrous machine sedate and under control. Most of the time. Every so often, it would become wild and try to break free, slamming into the walls of its cell like a crazed animal. And then, after perhaps an hour of frantic madness, the episode would end, and the seraph would become inert once more.
Jack’s unique bond with his seraph made the machine extremely protective. It was, in many ways, an extension of Jack’s own body so closely melded that the line between the two became indistinct, even when separated physically by light-years.
“It says here the whole carrier was shaking,” Seth said.
“That bad, huh?”
“At least it didn’t get off the ship like that one time. The new cryogenic cell definitely helps keep it under control.”
“You’re welcome.”
Seth couldn’t even begin to guess how difficult those plans had been to procure. The cryogenic cell on the Resolute matched those used by the thrones in every detail.
“Anything else to report, Jack?”
“Well, besides the spike in traffic, the Glorious Destiny got a shipment of fresh archangels. And some new style of throne.”
“A new class of throne?” Seth asked. “That’s not good. We can barely handle the current models.”
“I don’t think it’s an entirely new class. More like a revised propulsion shunt design. I sent you a video of it.”
Seth called up the various data folders in Jack’s burst transmission, then sent the throne recording to one of the wall screens. Seth stood up from the desk and walked over to study the crystal clear image.
Whereas a seraph could be considered roughly humanoid in dimensions, a throne appeared very human: slim and sleek with male-like proportions and clean white armor. Each possessed a halo-wing half again as wide as the throne’s shoulders. When in flight, the halo-wing spun rapidly, glowing hot blue along its inner and outer edges. No physical connections existed between the wing and the throne’s torso.
They always struck Seth as more dynamic than their seraph counterparts. More alive.
Less like machines.
Physically, the seraphs and thrones matched each other well, being roughly of the same height. Both drew in chaos energy through a trans-dimensional bridge and dispersed it through shunts on their torso, forearms, legs, and wings. But the similarities ended there.
Throne defensive barriers measured a whole magnitude stronger than even the best seraph pilots (excluding Jack, who was a case study in and of himself). They were faster, stronger, and absolutely vicious in combat, literally ripping opponents apart in berserker frenzies.
This new throne came equipped with two halo-wings, the second one smaller and offset further back from the torso. Both wings were filled with white and black patterns of circles and semicircles, arches and rings, all fitted neatly together. The same pattern followed alongside its chaos shunts.
A white mask covered the throne’s head. Its smoothed features and barely-there smirk gave an impression of smug arrogance.
“What do you suppose the wing markings mean?” Jack asked. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say some Aktenai pilot had customized it to his liking.”
“That’s Veketon’s heraldry,” Seth said. “He must have a keen interest in this throne.”
“Why would he do that? We’ve never seen evidence of the thrones having pilots. And besides, Veketon is dead.”
“That doesn’t make him any less dangerous.” Seth called up the map again. The Glorious Destiny was heading towards the Wise Counsel. “Looks like we may have to face that new throne sooner than I’d like.”
“One of these days I’m going to find out what makes their thrones tick.”
“I hope you do.”
With piloting being a hereditary talent that could not be artificially produced, the Eleven’s archangels and thrones confounded analysis. How could they share Jack�
�s chaos frequency when Jack had never sired offspring?
Seth switched off the map. “I heard some interesting news from the EN Fleet. It looks like they’re almost finished with the Mark II.”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me. I thought they were years away from a solution.”
“Apparently not.”
“Has anyone told them what a terrible escalation that thing is? What if the Outcasts or the Eleven decide to retaliate in kind and fire something similar at Earth?”
“Or Aktenzek.” Seth imagined the destruction of his home with his mind’s eye.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“The Sovereign has tried, but you know how stubborn you Earthers can be.”
“Hey, now. I almost took offense at that.”
Seth permitted himself a chuckle. “For the time being, the EN Fleet only plans to deploy it if Earth is directly threatened.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever. Like that won’t change if the war drags on and we continue to lose. Can they make it work without me?”
“No, though they’ve tried. I understand a few of their pilots were cooked alive during tests.”
“Lovely. Well, I’ll help them, but only if you tell me to.”
Just one half-crazy seraph pilot required to make your doomsday weapon work, Seth thought. There couldn’t possibly be any problems with a safeguard like that.
And thinking about half-crazy…
Seth found his mind drawn back to the voices he’d been hearing lately. He wondered if the episodes were linked to piloting the seraphs, particularly at high coefficient levels like Jack experienced.
“Hey, Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a personal question for you.”
“Umm, okay. Go ahead.”
“Do you ever… hear voices?”
“Sure. All the time. I just ignore them.”
Seth grimaced. “Please tell me this is just an example of your bizarre Earther humor.”
“Not at all. Sometimes I have to yell at them before they go away, but I haven’t had to do that in a while.” Jack said this as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “They’ve actually been pretty quiet recently. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Do you think that’s related to you being a maturing bane?”
