The Phoenix Reckoning (The Phoenix Conspiracy Series Book 6)

by Richard Sanders

  “Not Imperial,” said the Supreme Proxitor. “Polarian.”

  This sent a shock throughout the room, except this time, rather than stunned silence, the chamber broke out into a chaos of panicked murmuring.

  “Silence!” ordered the Acting Speaker. The chamber fell quiet.

  “Where are these Polarians and how many are there?” asked the Committee President. “And can you provide us with your intelligence that supports this claim?”

  “I can and I will,” said the Supreme Proxitor. “To answer your other questions, it is a very large Polarian war fleet.”

  The feeling of fear was almost palpable. The Rotham had committed many atrocities against the Polarians during the Great War; Alex suspected that most Rotham, be they old or young, often had nightmares that one day the Polarians would come to return the favor. Had that day finally come?

  “How large? One hundred ships?” asked the Committee President. “Two-hundred?”

  The Supreme Proxitor hesitated before replying. “Our best intelligence indicates…it is the Dread Fleet, sir.”

  One of the senators could not help himself and actually screamed.

  “Silence!” the Acting Speaker demanded once more. Everyone was hanging on the Supreme Proxitor’s every detail.

  “The ultimate destination of the Dread Fleet is unknown, but it was last seen in Gemini System.”

  “Gemini…that’s a Polarian System, is it not?” asked the Committee President.

  “It was. The entire planet and all structures were razed and methodically burned. It is doubtful there were any survivors.”

  “No survivors? They would do that to their own system?” the Committee President asked incredulously.

  “Yes, and it is not the first. There have been several star systems that have fallen completely silent, each along a winding path that leads from the Polarian core worlds all the way to Gemini,” said the Supreme Proxitor.

  “They are slaughtering their own planets?” again the Committee President sounded darkly astonished. And he wasn’t the only one who looked confused by this revelation.

  “We are working to confirm this,” said the Supreme Proxitor. “But that appears to be the case.”

  “Damned barbarians…” someone muttered from the stands above Alex’s head. He wasn’t sure who, but he didn’t fault them the sentiment.

  “Where is the Dread Fleet headed now?” The Committee President asked the question they all were dying to ask, but afraid to know the answer to.

  “It appears to be currently headed toward…”

  Here it comes, thought Alex. The announcement of their doom. The Dread Fleet is headed toward Ro, isn’t it?

  “…human space,” said the Supreme Proxitor, to everyone’s surprise. “It is following a serpentine path, seeming to target star systems with large populations. By now, the Dread Fleet has likely entered human space.”

  There was a feeling of palpable relief that flowed through the room, though Alex remained tense. Serpentine path…targeting highly populated worlds…a willingness to torch their own people…he put it all together and realized that no one was safe. The humans might be the first on the chopping block, but they were in no position to stop the Dread Fleet—not after their bloody civil war. And when the Dread Fleet was finished with Capital World and the Corridor, and wherever else, those marauders would no doubt be on their way here. To Ro. To the Republic. And after our losses at the Battle of Thetican System, when the dying star wiped out nearly an entire Rotham fleet…we won’t be ready, he realized. They will come for us too and we won’t stand a chance. Will we? Suddenly, he had to know.

  “Good, let the humans deal with them,” said the Committee President, and the Supreme Proxitor did not disagree.

  Alex listened to what he could as he made his way hurriedly toward the exit. By the sound of it, the consensus was for the Republic to do nothing, to let the humans and the Dread Fleet wipe one another out. Some of the voices even seemed to suggest that this was a blessing.

  This is no blessing, thought Alex as he reached the chamber’s exit. He flashed his credentials to get past the guard. This is only a delayed death sentence. If I’m right. And, sadly, I usually am…

  As he raced toward the nearest intelligence center, he thought of the Dread Fleet laying waste to human systems, what the slaughter would look like. It made him think of Calvin and the others on the Nighthawk and, although he’d betrayed them his share of times and they him, he still felt a measure of compassion toward them. They and theirs didn’t deserve the merciless wrath of the Dread Fleet any more than a Rotham world did, or even a Polarian one for that matter.

  This is exactly the kind of bullshit you get when you mix technology with fanatics undeserving of it because they insist on living by their dark age values…

  ***

  “Ithcar! Rythu!” One of the lycans knelt over the bodies of their fallen comrades. Others were beaten up, bruised, bleeding, some even had major-looking wounds, but only two had been killed. Shen looked down at them, surprised that the grisly sight of torn flesh and crushed bones didn’t affect him more. Perhaps he had become desensitized to it, what with all the slaughtered corpses strewn about, shredded and torn remains of the nightmarish Type I Remorii.

  “We have to go,” said Tristan sternly. “Move out. Now.”

  “But these…these are our brothers,” said the kneeling lycan, seemingly stupefied by grief.

  There was no doctor in their party to make an official death declaration but, given the gruesomeness and brutality, the amount of the blunt force trauma the two lycans had endured, the situation hardly called for an expert to certify that the journey, for these two at least, had come to its end.

  Sleep Peacefully, thought Shen, invoking the common phrase etched on so many tombstones it had become a cliché. He took in the macabre sight in all its horrific detail. The lycans’ bones had been cracked, much of their skin and hair chewed off, and, most disgusting of all, their faces had been so profoundly smashed that Shen could not honestly say how one could be identified from the other. Their shredded clothes were soaked in their quickly drying blood, and they lay as if still in agony, with joints broken and displaced, limbs out of socket. It was a terrible sight to look upon, and yet Shen did not blink nor could he force himself to look away.

  “We will mourn them properly later,” said Tristan. “But now, my brothers and sisters, we must hurry! We cannot allow the Enclave to activate it first!”

  With that, the group ran. Although the lycans could have transitioned into their more canine-like state and used all fours, no doubt moving much faster, they instead chose to remain bipedal. Perhaps that is for my benefit, thought Shen, as he sprinted around a corner and down another corridor; not out of kindness though, his thoughts continued. They need me to be their alarm system because I can tell them where the other Remorii are.

  He wondered why that was, how he had known there were Type II Remorii on the transports attacking Aleator, and how he had known that a swarm of Type I Remorii was about to ambush them. He supposed it was yet another strange side effect of whatever poison had entered his body when he’d last been here and was bitten, but that still did not explain why he felt no discomfort around Type III Remorii, such as Tristan. Well, no physical discomfort. He supposed the ability to sense the other Remorii was something the original scientists had put into their designs, in order to help the monstrous creatures find one another and then see what sort of communal behaviors that wrought, and maybe the newest Remorii—the Type III—had never been encoded into it. Whatever the case, he could do nothing about it now. And so he ran with the others, winding through rooms and corridors, following Tristan and the Calling. It was like a rope tugging him forward. A winding, bending, urgent rope yanking him, and with every step he felt more powerless to resist it.

  “Why the hell are we here anyway?” Shen asked Tristan, who ran beside him.

  “What do you mean?” asked Tristan. “You said you felt
the Calling too.”

  “I do,” admitted Shen, but he didn’t feel like it was an adequate explanation. “I mean, what are we being called here for? You said you are seeking a home. What does that have to do with godawful Remus Nine?”

  “Godawful Remus Nine, as you put it, is home. After all, this is where we came from in the beginning.”

  “Maybe you did,” said Shen. “I’m from—”

  “Stop right there,” said Tristan. “Before you name Capital World, or Brimm, or Lamdosis, or wherever the hell you used to be from, remember this: you’re one of us now. You were reborn on Remus Nine when that Remorii took a bite out of you and you lived to tell the tale. That makes this planet your home same as the rest of us.”

  “Like hell it does,” said Shen. “I may have to follow this Calling to see what it means, but don’t expect me to live here.”

  “No one will force you to,” said Tristan. They turned another corner and sprinted down a long passageway, ever alert to the possibility of another ambush.

  “So, what is your game, then?” asked Shen. “You’re just going to gather some timber, set up a village, and hope the Type I Remorii don’t slaughter you in your sleep?”

  “There’s no game,” said Tristan, he flashed his teeth and they seemed almost to shine in the dim lighting.

  “Then this whole enterprise is hopeless. No matter how good a fortress you make, there will be no stopping the hordes once they find you,” said Shen, starting to seriously question why he’d come along. He had felt compelled to do so, that he knew. And Tristan had walked him through the landing plan, how they would reach the surface and get to their objective, but he had been elusive as to what exactly the objective was. Shen had assumed Tristan was as mystified by the Calling as Shen was, and that was why he had held his silence, but now, as he looked at Tristan, the werewolf seeming so cocksure, Shen knew Tristan had more information than what he was sharing. “Go on,” said Shen. “Spill it. Why are we here? Why risk everything to be here?”

  “From the beginning, the lycans, my people, have wanted a home of our own. We were promised one, that much we have always sensed. Yet when the time came to get one we were betrayed,” his eyes glowed red momentarily at the mention of that. “But, no matter,” he said, again calm. “For you see, while we always knew we were destined to have a home of our own, we always expected it to be somewhere else. But now, now that we sense the Calling, now we know that our destiny is here, just like it always was. This planet is supposed to be our home.”

  “And how do you propose to deal with the Type I Remorii?” asked Shen, thinking back on not five minutes before when a group of them had slaughtered two lycans and nearly made mincemeat out of several more. The planet was full of Type I Remorii; even if all the lycans in the galaxy settled here, they would ultimately be overrun. In fact, as Shen recalled, that was why the lycans and Strigoi had fled the planet in the first place. So that meant something had to be different, something had to have changed.

  “The Type I Remorii are a simple problem to solve,” said Tristan, flashing his trademark smile of jagged teeth. “Now that we know how to solve it.” They rounded another corner. Shen had to pause briefly for breath and then they continued onward, again at a run. Obviously in a great hurry to get somewhere before it was too late, but Shen could only speculate as to where. Perhaps they are afraid of another ambush before we get there, he thought.

  “How do you solve the problem of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of feral, powerful, increasingly clever Type I Remorii roaming the planet you wish to call home?” asked Shen. He was intrigued, but also skeptical that Tristan had such a plan—and, if he did, Tristan seemed the type to hold his cards close to his chest and not reveal it. Which was why Shen was so surprised by what happened next. Tristan opened up about everything.

  “Do you know the story of Remus Nine? Of what happened here and how it got started?” asked Tristan.

  “Well, yes. From what Calvin told me anyway,” said Shen. “A bunch of scientists set up shop there, started doing illegal experiments on humans, including creating the Remorii, then the government shut them down, surrounded the planet with mines, and left the scientists to fall mercy to their own monstrous creations.”

  “Monstrous is a bit harsh,” said Tristan. “But, essentially, yes. But it wasn’t a bunch of mad scientists, it was an entire institution with vast wealth and resources, and surprisingly more means than you ever would have guessed. After all, where do you think all these buildings and labs came from? They didn’t just spring up overnight.”

  “Okay,” admitted Shen. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You see, when the government sealed off the planet, surrounding it with mines, leaving the scientists to fall mercy to their own creations…those scientists were not so helpless and insane as you might have imagined.”

  “Explain.”

  “They had a plan. A plan that would save their lives. It’s called the Phalaxium.”

  “The Phalaxium?”

  “Yes,” said Tristan. “Essentially, it was a means of using the planet’s existing terraforming infrastructure to release any of three carefully designed toxins into the atmosphere, planet-wide.”

  “Three toxins,” said Shen thoughtfully. “As in, one for each type of Remorii?”

  “Hey, look at you,” said Tristan. “I guess when Calvin told me how smart you were he wasn’t completely pulling licorice from his own ass.”

  Shen wasn’t sure whether to take that as a compliment or an insult, so he remained silent.

  “Why didn’t it work?” asked Tristan. “Come now, you must be wondering.”

  “The question did cross my mind.”

  “Simple, they never got it finished. They were close. So damn close. They very nearly saved their own lives. They got the Phalaxium calibrated, they got the terraforming units online and linked. All that was needed was for the toxins to be perfected, tested, and then distributed. Do you know how far into that process they got?”

  “Surprise me,” said Shen.

  “All the way. They were in the process of activating the Phalaxium and distributing all three toxins when there was a minor malfunction; they were overrun and killed before they could get it going. Tragic, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” said Shen, wondering if any of this was true.

  “Wrong. Serendipitous! Those dumbshit Type I Remorii overran them and slaughtered them, probably converting many of them to the feral husks that you see, and all before they could get the Phalaxium fully repaired and the toxins released. Astonishing, isn’t it? They so very nearly saved their own lives through sheer ingenuity, using the same systems they had put into place to terraform the planet. Despite the abandonment of their own government, and being trapped by a minefield, these humans figured out a way to survive and very nearly managed to do it. Incredible!”

  “So, if this Phalaxium exists, why are we going after it now? I assume that’s where we’re going,” said Shen. “That is where the Calling is taking us?”

  “Well, to be honest, when we left the planet the first time, escaping away past the mines and into the galaxy, back when Strigoi and lycan cooperated—before the bastards betrayed us—we had no idea about the Phalaxium. Or that it had very nearly been used to wipe us out. There was a rumor of some kind of cure, some kind of solution, but we didn’t have the time, or the means, or even the knowledge, to begin investigating it. So we plunged into the unwelcoming depths of the dark galaxy to learn everything we could, and for us lycans anyway, try to find a home. That, uh, that didn’t work out.”

  They exited the building and continued their mad dash forward, toward another building, somewhat in the distance. It was raining now, heavily, and Shen nearly tripped on the cracked pavement as he tried his best to keep up.

  “Oh, easy there,” said Tristan.

  “I’m fine,” said Shen. “So how do you know about the Phalaxium now?”

  “Well, after we were be
trayed and forced to live in exile, hunted by all the major races, we remembered the rumor of some cure that could purify the planet. So we’ve always had a few searching the world, never in large groups, and of course always at great risk, but we never gave up the search. And, not long ago, we found it. And, thanks to what we have since learned about science and technology over these many decades, we know how to fix the Phalaxium and deposit the toxins.”

  “Won’t that just kill you, though?” asked Shen.

  “No, of course not. We deposit the toxins meant to kill Type I and Type II Remorii, the third toxin, the one meant for us, we destroy it. The process will take time, but once it is complete, we will finally have the planet that was meant for us. The planet that was promised.”

  “How does that help me?” asked Shen. By now they’d reached the next building and Zarao and two of the others set about forcing the steel door open.

  “I was bitten by a Type I Remorii,” said Shen. “Hell, you said that I even smell like them. Won’t releasing their toxin just kill me?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Tristan. “That human doctor—the one with the red hair—she did something to you…made you something…different, somehow. I doubt the toxin will be able to affect you. If anything, it may even cure you the rest of the way.”

  Shen took heart at that thought. It would mean he could be with Sarah, for real and true, no longer a monster. But then again, could he trust Tristan? Besides, how could Tristan possibly even know that was the case? No, more likely he was lying to Shen to elicit his cooperation. Still, if the chance existed that he could be normal again, he felt compelled to take it.

  “What if you’re wrong?” asked Shen. “What if it doesn’t cure me? What if it kills me?”