“No!” Darius screamed.
The shields failed with a spectacular burst of light, and a massive explosion consumed the carrier. By the time the light faded, there was nothing left. The Harbinger had been utterly vaporized, just like Darius’s arm.
“The Harbinger is destroyed, my lord. One of our ZPF warheads got through.”
“Good,” Kovar said, his mouth gaping so wide that he could have swallowed Darius whole. “Now we’re even.”
Darius’s entire being burned with a fury that he couldn’t contain. It surged from deep inside of him like a living thing, and burst from his lips with an inarticulate roar. The deck and the holo panels shook violently, and a blinding light filled the entire bridge. Kovar hissed and covered his sensitive eyes with one arm, staggering away. Darius brushed aside the invisible forces holding him against the wall as if they were nothing more than cobwebs and advanced on Kovar.
He took advantage of Kovar’s temporary blindness to snatch away the Ghoul’s swords. They remained glowing and shielded even as they flew out of Kovar’s hands. Somehow Darius was shielding them without physically touching them.
“What is this?” Kovar asked, squinting at his floating swords. The other Cygnians began stalking toward Darius with their weapons raised. Darius sent Kovar’s swords sailing toward them at a high speed. All three of the blades were still inexplicably shielded, and impossible to stop. Darius ran the Cygnians through, one after another, burning gaping holes in their chests. Some tried to dodge or swat the weapons out of the air, but they were moving too fast. All eleven Cygnians died in seconds, leaving Kovar alone to face Darius’s wrath.
The Ghoul’s eyes darted around the bridge, finding the severed torsos and hollowed out chests of his crew. “No one is that powerful,” he whispered; then he turned and ran.
Too angry to be smug, Darius sent Kovar’s own swords chasing after him and used them to lash the Ghoul like whips. Kovar cried out as each impact left a patch of char-blackened skin in its wake. Darius was determined to make him suffer.
Kovar waved the doors of the bridge open and ran through. The Cygnians standing guard outside the doors turned to face Darius, and he sent two of Kovar’s three swords flying through their necks, vaporizing their heads in a fiery burst of ashes.
“Where are you going, Kovar?” Darius bellowed as he ran out after the Cygnian.
Dyara ran up beside Darius, wincing from the blinding light radiating from him. “Just kill him already!” she said.
“Not yet,” Darius growled. Up ahead, Kovar disappeared into an elevator. Reaching out with his Awareness to get a sense of where the Ghoul was going, Darius caught a glimpse of the inside of the elevator. Deck F05 was lit up on the panel. The flight deck. Kovar was trying to escape.
Darius left his stolen swords floating in front of the elevators, waved open the nearest one, and physically snatched one of the three blades from the air with his left hand, leaving the other two floating in the corridor for Dyara to grab. Not waiting to see if she followed him into the elevator, he telekinetically punched F05 on the control panel. Just as the doors were sliding shut, Dyara careened in with the other swords.
“You need to stop and think,” she said. “Kovar could be leading us into a trap. There are four thousand more Cygnians on this ship.”
“Let them come,” Darius said.
Their elevator opened into a dimly-lit corridor, flashing red with emergency lights. Kovar was nowhere to be seen. He’d camouflaged himself, using his species’ innate ability to blend with their surroundings. Darius could still sense a faint presence, though, as the Ghoul ran down the corridor some twenty meters away. Reaching into the ZPF, he pulled Kovar back. The Ghoul’s mag boots lost their lock, and he came sailing down the corridor. Darius held Kovar in mid-air and turned the Ghoul to face him.
“You killed my daughter,” Darius said slowly.
Kovar bared his jagged gray teeth in a snarl. “I only regret that I couldn’t kill her myself!”
Darius stepped up to the Ghoul. Holding him paralyzed in mid-air, he sliced off Kovar’s remaining arms, one after another. The Ghoul screamed and hissed, baring and snapping his teeth in defiance. “You are a fool! The Keth will find you and kill you!”
Darius nodded agreeably and sliced off Kovar’s legs, leaving nothing but a floating torso and a gaping mouth full of snapping gray teeth. Kovar let out a long, chilling scream.
“I should leave you like this,” Darius said once Kovar’s energy was spent from screaming. “To die slowly from sheer agony.” The stumps of his severed limbs were cauterized from the heat of Darius’s blade, so there was no chance of the Ghoul dying from blood loss.
Kovar was in too much pain to reply. Darius released him and watched as he thrashed in agony.
“Just fekking kill him and let’s get out of here!” Dyara screamed. “His fleet is busy slaughtering ours! Every second you delay is another second that our people are out there dying!”
Darius scowled at her, but she was right. Gripping his sword in a tight fist, he walked up to Kovar. The Ghoul was sobbing, his shoulder stumps shaking violently. But as he drew near, Darius realized that Kovar wasn’t crying at all—he was laughing.
A frown wrinkled Darius’s brow as Kovar spun back to face him. The Ghoul’s eyes were wide and dancing with glee. “You’re dead!” he crowed, spraying glittering globules of black blood into the air.
Before Darius could decide what Kovar meant by that, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise in warning, a premonition from the Sprites racing through his veins. In the next instant, the muffled boom of an explosion rumbled through the ship, and the deck jumped beneath their feet.
“What was that?” Dyara asked in a quavering voice.
Another explosion followed the first, this one much louder than the last. A wall of fire appeared, racing toward them from the end of the corridor. In that instant, Darius realized what had happened: Kovar had initiated the ship’s self-destruct sequence. Turning to Dyara, he lunged to reach her and wrapped his arms around her. He poured all of his strength into shielding them as the ship cracked apart in a roiling sea of fire.
Chapter 11
Cassandra’s rose petal lips were turned down in a frown, her bright blue eyes pinched with concern. “What... what’s going on?” She stood on a flowing green field that glistened with fresh drops of rain. A huddled group of hairless white humanoids with elongated skulls and fierce, glowing eyes stood behind her. Tanik was there with them, standing between them and Cassandra.
Cassandra glanced behind her to find Tanik standing in front of the Keth. She jumped with shock. “Tanik?” She started toward him, but Darius grabbed her arm to stop her, his own arm whirring with a mechanical noise as he did so.
She rounded on him and glared at his hand. “Ouch! That hurts.”
“Sorry.” He’d obviously grabbed her too roughly in his hurry to keep her away from Tanik. “I had an accident and lost my arm,” he explained, flexing his hand with another mechanical noise. “I’m still getting used to the replacement. Is it really you?”
Cassandra nodded slowly, uncertainly. “Is it really you?” she countered.
Darius’s brow furrowed. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“No.” She began backing away from him.
With her admission, his heart felt like it might shatter into a thousand pieces. He knew the Sprites had taken a toll on him physically, but somehow he hadn’t noticed the changes in his appearance from one day to the next. Cassandra saw four accumulated months of physical deterioration all at once. “It’s me,” he insisted.
But she just kept backing away, unwilling or unable to believe it.
Darius woke up with a painful knot in his throat. He forced his eyes open and drew in a deep breath. A slow rhythmic beeping gave a clue to his surroundings. Glancing around, he saw that he lay strapped to a bed. The room was empty, but he recognized it well enough. He was in the med bay of a Colossus-class carrier.
&
nbsp; “Hello?” he called out. His voice sounded scratchy and raw. How had he ended up here? The last thing he remembered was... dying in an explosion aboard the Nemesis.
Except he wasn’t dead. Somehow he’d survived long enough for someone to recover him. Did that mean Dyara was alive, too? He hoped so.
Memories of the battle aboard the Nemesis came back to him in flashes and snippets. He remembered losing his arm. He glanced to his right and found his arm lying flat beside him, miraculously restored. He raised it with an accompanying whirr of servomotors. That explained the miracle. Medics had replaced his missing limb with a prosthetic covered in synthetic skin.
Darius struggled to rise against his restraints. They were unyielding, but after a moment, he figured out how to release them. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he aimed himself toward the door and pushed off, drifting through the room to reach it. Just then, the door swished open, and a familiar man walked in.
“Hello, Darius.”
“Tanik?” Darius used the ZPF to stop himself in mid-air. “How did you... where did you go?” he demanded. “After starting this war, you went AWOL and left us to fight on our own!”
Tanik slowly shook his head. “You can thank Admiral Ventaris for that. He didn’t want you and I to take over his fleet and cut him out of the loop, so he made me disappear. He locked me away in a cryo tank below decks. The recent battle damaged the cryo room enough to wake me. I was lucky to escape before the Harbinger was destroyed.”
“The Harbinger was...” Darius trailed off, only now remembering how Kovar had deliberately targeted the ship in order to kill his daughter. Tears welled in Darius’s eyes, and he slowly shook his head. “She can’t be dead!” he screamed.
“I’m sorry,” Tanik said. “But her death was not in vain. You succeeded. We now have control of both Revenant fleets. I convinced Kovar’s captains to join our cause after he died, and we overwhelmed Hagrol’s defenses together. The planet is gone. Now, with so many ships under your command, it should be easy to destroy the remaining Cygnian worlds and hunt down the other Luminaries.”
“They’re already dead,” Darius murmured. “Kovar killed them and consolidated their fleets into his.”
Tanik did a double-take. “Are you certain?”
Darius shook his head. “Who knows. That’s what Kovar said. I don’t know why he’d lie.”
Tanik nodded slowly. “Then all that’s left is to defeat the Cygnians. The war is almost over. Congratulations, Darius.”
Victory felt empty without Cassandra. Every ounce of his being felt hollow and weak. He couldn’t even think straight. Now he had nothing and no one. Almost.
“Did Dyara...”
“She’s fine. You saved her. I picked you both up at the same time. She’s in the room next to yours, recovering from her injuries.”
Darius nodded. That was something at least, but not enough to diminish the suffocating horror and despair burning in his chest. The Cygnians would pay. Darius tried to picture Cassandra’s face, and an image from his dream flashed through his mind’s eye. He started at that. He’d been dreaming about her just before he woke up. But was it a dream, or a vision? And who were those strange beings standing in the background behind her?
“What if she’s alive?” Darius asked suddenly. “I saw escape pods fleeing the ship before it was destroyed. Maybe someone rescued her.”
“Darius...” Tanik trailed off, shaking his head. “None of the pods made it. The Harbinger was destroyed by a ZPF warhead. The blast vaporized everything within a two hundred klick radius.”
“Then why did I dream about her?” Darius demanded. “I saw her, right there in front of me. You were there, too. And some... some species of people I’ve never seen before.”
Tanik’s eyes widened. “That’s an odd dream.”
“A vision,” Darius insisted. “It wasn’t a dream. She’s alive, Tanik. I can feel it. I can feel...”
“She’s dead. You need to accept that and move on. All you can do now is punish the ones who killed her. Wipe out the Cygnians. Finish what you started.”
As Tanik spoke, Darius could tell he was lying, he could sense it and see it in his yellow-green eyes. He was hiding something, a terrible secret.
A doctor walked in behind Tanik. “I see that you’re finally awake. Good. You suffered some serious injuries from exposure to vacuum, not to mention your missing arm. It’s incredible you were able to survive at all, considering your ruptured suit. You’re very lucky that Mr. Gurhain was there to pick you up before you could sustain any...” The doctor trailed off as he noticed the deadly look Darius was giving Tanik. The doctor’s eyes darted to Tanik. “Is everything okay in here?”
“Darius?” Tanik asked, deferring the question.
“You’re lying,” Darius spat.
“What are you talking about?”
“I can sense it,” Darius went on. As he said that, he probed Tanik’s mind, sifting through his thoughts to find the truth. Tanik slammed a mental door in his face, but not before Darius found what he was looking for: he saw Tanik rescue Cassandra’s cryo pod from the Harbinger and send it floating through a shimmering portal to a grassy green field, surrounded by familiar-looking trees with spiky, cone-shaped leaves. The dark blue sky and the glaring blue sun confirmed it. Cassandra was alive, and she was on Ouroboros.
Darius leveled an accusing finger at Tanik. “She’s alive! You opened a wormhole and took her to Ouroboros.”
Tanik took a quick step back. “What? How did you... Someone has been getting much stronger,” Tanik replied, his voice all but purring with smug amusement. “That’s unfortunate.”
Darius reached for Tanik’s mind again, trying to take control of him directly so that he could sift through the man’s thoughts and memories at will, but it was impossible. Tanik’s thoughts were reachable, albeit vague and shielded by a psychic wall. His will, however, was untouchable.
“Is something wrong, Darius?”
“You’re immune.... you’re a Luminary, too.”
The doctor’s eyes darted from Tanik to Darius and back again. “I think... I’ll come back later,” he said, and fled the room.
Tanik drew his sword, and it immediately began to glow in the light of a shield.
Darius had no weapons of his own, not even a pair of mag boots to keep his feet rooted to the deck, but he didn’t need either. He used the ZPF to pin his feet to the deck.
“Your usefulness has come to an end,” Tanik said. “I had hoped you would find a way to kill the other Luminaries. Unfortunately, I was also counting on you to get most of the other Revenants killed in the process. Now the easiest way to exterminate them is to take control of them and make them all fly into a sun... or something more creative, perhaps.”
Darius couldn’t believe what he was hearing. None of this made any sense. “You want to kill them? Why?”
“Because they slaughtered my people!” Tanik roared.
“Your people?” Darius echoed. “The Cygnians attacked Earth, not the Revenants.”
“No, not humans—the Keth,” Tanik said. He went on to explain that he wasn’t the real Tanik Gurhain, but rather an orphan of the war, raised by the Keth, and steeped in their culture. He explained how he’d killed the Augur personally, and how he’d manipulated Darius to destabilize the Union from within.
“It worked,” Tanik said. “And it would have worked for a lot longer if you hadn’t gone poking around inside my head.”
“But what about Cass? You saved her. Twice! Why would you do that if you’re working for the Keth?”
Tanik smiled slowly. “I didn’t save her twice. I was the one who convinced her to negotiate with the Cygnians. I allowed her to become poisoned by one of them, and I made sure that the only possible antidote was destroyed with the Nomad—but not before I took a sample of it for myself.”
“You have the antivenin?” Darius’s outrage momentarily disappeared in a flash of hope.
“Yes, but I won’t need it
anymore. It was a contingency, in case you got out of hand and became a threat. Don’t worry, I won’t let her suffer. I’ll pull the plug and let her fade away quietly. I’d give you a quiet death of your own, but something tells me that you’d rather fight.”
Darius gaped at Tanik. Something dark and terrible was surging inside of him again. “Take me to her.”
“You seem to be confused about who’s in charge here.”
Darius let the monster out, and the room swelled with a blinding flash of light. Tanik staggered back a few steps in spite of himself, wincing against the glare. “What...”
Reaching out with his mind, Darius wrenched the sword out of Tanik’s hand as if the man had the grip strength of a child. “Take me to her,” he ground out. “Now.”
Chapter 12
“Impressive,” Tanik said, while shielding his eyes with his hands. “You’ve been using, haven’t you? Admiral Ventaris obviously didn’t warn you about the risks.”
“He did.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t killed everyone around you in a homicidal rage.” Tanik’s voice was laced with derision, and something else... jealousy?
Darius shook his head. The only thing that mattered now was finding his daughter and saving her. “If you don’t take me to Cass, I’ll do to you what I did to Kovar. I’ll cut off your limbs one by one until you’re nothing but a pod.” Darius shook Tanik’s sword in his face to emphasize his point.
Tanik crossed his arms over his chest, unimpressed by the threat. “And then what? You’ll kill me? Go ahead. Do that, and you’ll never see your daughter again.”
Darius almost removed Tanik’s head right then, but he managed to restrain himself. Barely.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Tanik said. “I’ll cure your daughter and reunite you with her, but first you need to surrender the Revenants to me.”
“So you can fly them all into a sun?” Darius demanded. “I don’t think so.”
Tanik shrugged. “Then your daughter dies. Even if I don’t kill her myself, her cryo pod won’t keep her frozen forever now that it’s cut off from the Harbinger’s power grid. She’s going to wake up soon, and when she does, she’ll need the antivenin or else she’ll die. It’s up to you, Darius. Save twenty thousand strangers who’ve all done their fair share of killing, or save your innocent daughter and go live out your lives in peace. This isn’t your war.”
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