Raystar of Terra: Book 1

by Kurt Johnson

  She’s faking fear! My heart beat faster as adrenaline surged through me. Why was she acting?

  GNN drones swarmed around us, vying for the best angles. Out of the corner of my eye, I witnessed the auto cannons on the force fence swivel as they tracked each drone.

  “Nem’ is under the care of Jurisdictor Xzaris Alenion, of Broodmother Krig,” Freela continued. “I will say this once, Godwill, or whoever you are. Stand down. Command your”—she looked at the NPD soldiers—“troops to drop their weapons and surrender.”

  Godwill laughed, his lips peeling back like a receding tide to reveal a red mouth and glistening teeth. In the silence, broken only by the wind and a thousand kids breathing, his laugh carried threats and cruelty.

  I looked at Entarch. She was sweating. The mask of false panic she’d worn earlier had been replaced by the concentration of a performer waiting for just the right time to act.

  I caught Godwill giving her the slightest nod.

  She shifted her hands in the folds of her robe, and as they moved, they revealed shapes. I recognized them from our kitchen this morning. Her hands closed around them.

  No.

  “Principal Entarch–!” I screamed.

  Kids shrieked and crawled, hopped, flowed, flew, and ran in all directions. Godwill’s closest troops turned to me, to us, rifles lowered. The Jurisdictor pulled a long, sleek pistol from his suit and sighted it at Mieant’s parents in a relaxed shooter’s stance. Mieant’s parents heard my shout and got a step away from the principal.

  Entarch drew two swords. My dad’s swords! It could not be. How did she get them? Question after question overwhelmed me as the scene unfolded in excruciating, slow-motion detail.

  The principal raised her hands above her head like a bird poised to fly, angling the swords downward at Kaleren and Freela’s backs. I tried to move towards them, but my mind hadn’t left the question of what happened to my father. He was my rock. What if he was gone? I stood rooted and straight, oblivious to the tumult around me, and watched as the Asrigards tried to take a second step away from danger, each looking over their shoulder, their eyes widening.

  The principal began her downward lunge. The swords lit with blue electricity.

  “MOM! DAD! NO!” Mieant yelled, his voice cracking with sheer panic. Nonch and Cri grabbed him around the waist and ankles.

  With Entarch’s reach, there was no missing. Her downward arc slid the swords through Mieant’s parents so they protruded, glistening, from Kaleren and Freela’s stomachs. Blue sparks erupted from their bodies, and they arched their heads toward the sky. Their arms fell back, and their hands froze into talons as the current flowed through them. Like falling trees, they collapsed, forcing Entarch to release her hold on the swords.

  Those sparks. They looked like….

  A few of the Asrigards’ troops turned inward to give aid to Freela and Kaleren, and their action broke the interlocked force shield.

  Something ripped the air like fabric, only a million times louder. An orange plasma bolt lanced from Godwill’s gun and impacted Principal Entarch in the chest, carrying her ten meters back into her security. Her troops lost their resolve, dropped their weapons, and ran in the same direction as the kids. Which was anywhere, and everywhere.

  Mieant’s parents were shrouded in blue microsparks that looked exactly like what I’d manifested two days ago. Only IT-ME had similar powers, and more concerning than that—if it was the same nanotech as mine, it could do ANYTHING.

  Like eat the Co-Governors!

  I gritted my teeth as Cri’s words from this morning penetrated the chaos of my thoughts. What can happen? The sparks that crackled over Mieant’s parents were definitely similar to what I had seen, what I had done. Which meant I was probably the only one who could do anything about them. But questions about Dad had to wait. I needed to act NOW.

  “Go!” I screamed to my friends, pointing at the school exit. Then I turned and ran toward the fallen Kaleren and Freela.

  “Weapons free!” Godwill commanded. “Take them!” Who he meant by “them” wasn’t readily apparent, because while most of his soldiers began to open fire on the Quadrant troops, the remainder seemed bent on attacking anything running and not lying prone on the schoolyard. Unimaginable streaks of sound and light raced between the elite troops. For a moment, the Asrigards’ team had the advantage. Their training and their equipment showed as they blazed into Godwill’s legion.

  Which was three times their number.

  I dove toward the Co-Governors and slammed myself facedown on the ground. Both sides were firing at point-blank range. A ceiling of energy bolts tore back and forth at waist level, above me. I was in the midst of covering my head and spitting grass out of my mouth when Mieant grabbed my ankle.

  “I’m coming with you!” he yelled through the howling fire. I had no idea what I was going to do. I only knew the direction I had to crawl toward.

  “Stay down!” I shouted back to him.

  As I turned my head, I caught sight of why Gleans and Crynits are such terrifying soldiers. Cri rolled underneath two guards’ rifles and stood between them. Unarmed, she ripped the plasma cannons from their grips with two hands; with her other two arms, she grabbed the soldiers and flung them into their squad members. She repositioned the confiscated guns without blinking and started shooting at the feet of Godwill’s troops.

  Nonch curled into a ball and took a direct plasma bolt to his carapace. He uncoiled and sprung in a three meter arc over several NPD troopers’ heads. When he landed, he drove his blade arms through their armor and into their legs. Invisibly fast, he grabbed a rifle from a downed trooper and twirled it like a staff. He cracked faceplates, knocked troopers over each other, and paused to fire only when necessary. Soon, he had four rifles. His remaining arms were cutting and whacking as he and Cri fought their way to the school’s doors.

  I scrambled forward on my stomach, somehow managing to squeeze between a Quadrant trooper’s feet, until I reached the Co-Governors. My father’s swords crackled and hissed with microsparks. Mieant’s parents were paralyzed, their backs arched and their hands frozen into claws. They were alive!!

  The arcing electricity reached tentatively out to me, and I felt a tingle. My body recognized it as familiar. This was uncontrolled nanotech, Human creations looking for a master.

  “Do something!” Mieant shook me.

  My hands simultaneously closed around each sword’s leather pommels. Energy coursed through me. I ignited in a blaze of white-blue light that cast eerie shadows off the soldiers, the students, anyone standing nearby. The flash of my light stopped the running students, soldiers about to fire, and everyone who saw me. Everything froze, for the briefest second.

  Pressure built, like I was holding my breath for too long, and then blasted from me with a deep bass thrummmmmm. An invisible force rushed out in an expanding circle from the epicenter. Me! Anyone within ten meters was thrown backward and to the ground. Experian drones exploded or were thrown from the sky. They clanked off the troops’ armor like giant hail balls. Kids who were further away reeled into each other as my power plowed into them.

  With newfound, fear-driven strength, I pulled the swords from Kaleren and Freela and dropped them in the grass. Mieant’s parents slumped and then writhed in shock, their hands on their wounds. Microarcs cascaded from me into the grass.

  Mieant, his eyes wide in fear, crab-walked backward, away from me. My glowing nimbus of electricity reflected in his blackness, casting him and the surroundings in cool, blue light. What was I?

  Across the playground, Godwill stood, observing the chaos, observing me. He laughed, madly. “YES!”

  Control screens slid over my vision. I still couldn’t understand what they meant. As before, I was hungry, but unlike before, I was not angry. The soldiers around me moved in slow motion while I moved at regular speed. They flickered green and red, depending on whether or not they were shooting at me. Mieant’s parents were shrouded in a green glow, with
glaring red slashes where the swords had cut into them. My singular thought was: Save Mieant’s parents.

  Make something good happen.

  I put my hands on their injuries. My displays shifted as profiles of their bodies floated in front of me. My reflexes knew what to do and channeled my energy into their wounds. They could be healed. I closed my eyes, concentrating, willing their flesh to come together. My nano arced and danced through them, mending Freela’s internal damage first and sealing her flesh so there was almost no trace of Entarch’s surprise attack. She flickered entirely green. My cloud of shimmering dust motes rose from Freela and settled like an iridescent fog over Kaleren.

  I WAS healing them!

  A weariness that had crept into my awareness when I’d finished with Freela turned into excruciating pain as I applied my energy to Kaleren. It felt like the aches I’d had in my shins when I was much smaller. Except it was in all of my bones, a deep agony, so far inside of me as to be unreachable, despite how much I massaged my arms and rubbed at my legs. Weakness sapped my muscles. The energy needed to stop Kaleren’s bleeding and repair his torn muscles and organs pulled from me more than I had.

  I was consuming myself to create the energy needed to heal Kaleren.

  I will do this, I thought to myself as the pain made me grimace.

  “The Human!” Godwill bellowed. The last of the Co-Governors’ elite Quadrant troops smashed to the ground not a meter away from me, taken down by blaster fire. I looked into the soldiers’ anonymous reflective faceplates and saw my purple hair and glowing purple eyes, crackling with sparks and energy. I was terrifying. In the faceplates’ reflections, I saw a corona of nanosparks around me. I saw Mieant’s grief, terror, and surprise as he dragged himself away from me, unsure of my part in either helping or destroying his parents. Great nova and gravity wells.

  Godwill’s remaining forces leveled their plasma cannons at me. And opened fire.

  The swirl of micro-sparks around me coalesced into a hard shell that glowed bright and fierce upon the plasma bolts’ impact. The first shots filled me with energy, which I directed to Kaleren. His wound closed.

  But the full onslaught of the remaining troops’ blasts was too much to absorb. Pain was running like fire through my bones and my nerves, and it pounded on the back of my skull. I was going to explode—I couldn’t contain this much energy. My cursed, unreadable displays were turning red. The energy I was taking in from the plasma fire was going to erupt from my chest. One of these flipping controls had to be an overflow type of thing to get rid of excess energy, I thought. Unless of course some moron Human weapons engineer had, in a fit of perverse humor, camouflaged the overflow energy button.

  Displays that pulsed with each plasma bolt certainly were correlated to my pain. One tendril of my sparks snaked through the air toward a fallen guard, who, in my overlay, glowed soft green. The dead guard’s body was fuel. My nano wanted to use that organic material to replenish me, to convert his biomass into a more useable form. His suit was nanoenergy; his body was made of organic replacement parts I could use to reconstruct Mieant’s parents. I remembered how I’d taken energy from IT-ME during our encounter. If I didn’t take it from this soldier, where would I take it from?

  It made sense.

  NO! Architect, what was wrong with me? I was not going to EAT someone in public. I WAS NOT EVER GOING TO CONSUME SOMEONE! I stood to run and tripped on Freela’s leg. Plasma bolts thundered against my shield, pounding me to the ground with sledgehammer force. The grass around me burst into flame, and I staggered with each impact. My hands skinned on something hard as I fell to my knees. My arms were weak, my elbows gave out, and I crashed, face first, into the hard dirt of the school playground.

  Light around me flickered. My corona died.

  I’d healed Kaleren, though.

  “Hold!” Godwill shouted. Footsteps approached. Combat boots stepped into my field of vision. I tried to be angry, to feel something. My sparks, my energy, whatever it was, had departed. The boots disappeared, until I felt one across my ribs, lifting and flipping me over like a sack of wet ’natch.

  Godwill’s emaciated face appeared. “Raystar of Terra,” he said, smiling through his NPD helmet. “Destiny awaits.”

  His rifle’s butt hovered above me. It was covered in blood, grass, and dirt. My eyes focused on “Made on Solium4” engraved on the metal. He crushed it down. I saw stars.

  Then, blackness.

  32

  “Unexpected. Irresponsible,” a bass voice on my right rumbled each syllable with precision. Ponderous. Deliberate.

  My brain pounded against my skull, attempting to beat its way out. Where it would go? I don’t think it cared. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed. I tasted blood in my mouth. My face hurt. My hunger was agony, something multipronged and sharp twisting in my gut. I deduced that I was lying on a table. The air tasted faintly chemical and familiar. I must still be at school.

  “The Asrigard threat is eliminated. I have their spawn. We have YOUR challenger’s daughter, and the Broodmother’s heir. It is what Humans would call a triple play,” said a voice above me and to my left. After a pause, I felt a hand, palm down, pat my stomach. “And of course, we have our key objective. The others are the perfect hostages if the 301st Battle Group arrives before the 98th.”

  I struggled to remember while trying not to give any sign that I was awake. Principal Entarch had tried to kill the Asrigards. Nova. With MY DAD’S swords! How did she get them? Were my parents OK??? Flip. I had to think rationally—with my brain, not my heart. But I KNEW the Asrigards were alive. At least, I knew they hadn’t died from the swords. I’d saved them.

  “Your love of these creatures’ expressions is not something I understand. Nor do I understand why you sound so pleased.” I knew that tone. Someone was about to be grounded. Right-Ear Voice continued, “It seems to me that were you in control, were that even REMOTELY the case, today’s events would NOT HAVE BEEN VISIBLE TO THE PLANET’S NEWS AGENCY! No. I believe you are obsessed with these Humans and….” A sausage-sized finger nudged my head, and my headache fell from the shelf I’d put it on and shattered into a billion icicles of pain. “Your obsession is becoming a deficit.”

  Meaty fists pounded the table by my head. The hand was removed from my belly.

  I heard a groan to my right and turned my head, slowly.

  Darkness turned to shadow, which morphed into grey, fog-shrouded shapes. The lumpy blur on the table beside me was Mieant.

  Left Ear Voice dropped to a furious whisper, “I, despite what you believe, do not work for you! YOUR attitude will not please the Empress. YOUR premature presence on Nem’ has only flipped our plans into the gravity well! Why you are EVEN in Blue River instead of your embassy is beyond me!”

  “That fool of a principal had too much information.” Left Ear continued, “She is eliminated. We even used the Commander’s swords as the murder weapons! The Human’s friends are children! THEY will be eliminated. And what did the newsies actually see?” Left Ear wasn’t whispering anymore. “They witnessed this Human finish off the Co-Governors with her Human nanotech after they had been impaled!” With each syllable, a slimmer finger poked my other shoulder.

  Poking a Human is apparently proof that you’re saying something important.

  “We have hostages,” Left-Ear-Voice continued, “We have footage showing a Human planning and attacking the government, and now that we have the Co-Governors, the Integration Party is leaderless.”

  “You try to make gold out of gratcher excrement,” Right Ear Voice said. “Your Empress does not inspire fear anymore. Lethia is not the power anymore, and every Lethian should be terrified of what is really coming. Inside the Convergence, war gains a grip it will not release. Outside, in the darkness of the Core, we face extermination,” Right Ear rumbled. “I GIVE YOU TWO DAYS to douse the chaos you have created with order. I want THIS population ready for MY occupation. We must be in place to have control before the 98th Bat
tle Group arrives. Stop playing with children. Despite my reluctance to involve you, your Empress convinced me that you have the skill needed to achieve our plans.” Right Ear Voice poked my shoulder. OW. “Children take no skill.” Right Ear Voice’s tone dipped low. “I will occupy this miserable planet. Or I will destroy it. Pick carefully where you are at that time.”

  Heavy footsteps thudded away. A door whooshed open and closed.

  Nova. This was more confusing by the minute and more dangerous by the second.

  Warm breath touched my cheek and I shivered in surprise. “Your kind,” Left Ear whispered, “is a plague!” And then, Left Ear flicked my forehead. Right between the eyes. You only flick someone out of spite. My headache flared. I saw red. I scrunched my face and curled around on my stomach, the position of my birth. Again, doors whooshed open and closed. Mieant and I were alone.

  Get up. Ungh. Yeah. That was what I needed to do.

  I uncurled and forced my eyes to open. My sight came back to me like when you have your eyes open underwater. I recognized the cold, metal counter across from me, and a plain and empty blue desk. The nurse’s office. I swung my feet down, fighting the dizziness that rose from my belly to my throat. The doors whooshed yet again. In slow motion, I turned my head to the sound. Dizziness spun me as I lost my balance and cracked my head against cold metal.

  As I fell off of the bed, I said things my parents say when they are angry. I landed on my side and elbow. My hands scrabbled for purchase as I pulled the thin bed sheet down over me, a ghost in hiding.

  The door whooshed closed.

  Someone was in there with us.

  33

  “Raystar, poor dear. Let me help you,” a modulated female voice said as a coil wound around my good arm like a tourniquet. The tentacle’s band cut into my muscle and lifted me effortlessly toward the black orb floating in the center of the office.