Raystar of Terra: Book 1

by Kurt Johnson

  Sarla was a giant, sinuous black form that wove and snaked behind him.

  My parents would not reach us before they did.

  My kid hands bled as I gripped stone and dirt and hauled myself to my feet. I poofed purple strands of hair from my face. I wasn’t sure what would happen next, but being sprawled on the ground wasn’t going to help.

  Godwill, striding over debris, was at Cri’s side in another eye-blink. He grabbed her ear and pulled her to her feet. She screamed, her four hands on his one that held her suspended, and her legs kicked wildly. Godwill made eye contact with me. In slow motion, he dragged his tightly held gun barrel from Cri’s neck to her collar bone, tracing where the tattoo rested. She groaned, as much out of anger as of pain.

  He smiled, daring me to come a step closer, as he pointed the gun to my sister’s head and looked at her tattoos.

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  “Clever,” he leered, “Clever, indeed.” Godwill leaned toward Cri’s face, and his pistol dug into Cri’s collarbone as he lowered her back to the ground. She whimpered. “I know you can hear me, Nent. Sathra,” he said, smiling calmly, looking at me as if he were sharing a drink with a friend at a cafe. “Nent, you missed defending your wife, years ago. Now you’re letting your daughter die. Expensive lessons, Commander.”

  His words didn’t make sense. Lightning cracked and clouds frothed as if a giant were blowing into them with a straw. The Storm Wall? I’d lost track of the days while in the camp. It couldn’t be today. That would be BAD. In my state, the headaches probably would kill me. But this close to the Mesas, unshielded as we were, we’d be blended into mush by the swirling debris, tossed by gas giant-force winds, and fried by lightning. Or Godwill would kill us.

  At least we had options.

  I shook my hands out like an athlete and flicked them with a twist toward the ground. Blue lightning crackled around my fingers and coalesced into fiery orbs in my slightly curled palms. With my anger and fear, my active fight against Godwill’s injections, and whatever AI had done, I could access my power more easily than ever. Energy surged through me. Control screens superimposed themselves on my surroundings, on me. But my displays were lit up with red instead of blue—it had to be the infection. My augmented vision showed the energy cell in Godwill’s gun glowing like a small star.

  “GODWILL!”

  Ray! You can’t do this! AI yelled in my head.

  We are here because of me. Our circumstances are my responsibility.

  I spared a glance at my friends. The active batteries on their collars also shone like stars.

  Tiny, explosive stars.

  I unclasped my broken collar. Godwill watched me, his eyes widening and his smile cracking, as I hurled the band toward the right side of his head. He was holding Cri with his left arm, and I wanted to keep his body between the collar and my sister. I flicked my hand, pulsing nanoenergy at the device. Godwill pivoted gracefully to the side. The collar exploded with a flash larger than its size would have indicated. Godwill’s body armor protected him, but he’d had to release my sister in his dodge. She fell, writhing and holding her neck and her ear.

  Time blazed by, but for me, everything was slow motion. I pivoted toward my friends, concentrating, and spread my hands wide. Lightning arced from my fingers to the bands of fire around their throats. I had a guess that my power was directed by my intention. Help my friends. The intensity of that thought gathered in my mind. My aura, now swirling around me, dissolved the collars’ energy sources. Their circlets popped and fell from their necks. I felt a small rush. I should have received huge energy from their collars’ batteries, but I only felt a trickle!

  Godwill surged toward me and caught my shoulder in a vise-like grip. His armored fingers crushed against my tendons and bones. “At last!” he breathed, foul and deadly.

  Free of her collar, Cri rose and kicked at his back. His power armor protected against energy attacks, but not kinetic blows. Cri’s foot connected, and her strength became evident as he staggered forward, nearly dropping me.

  Sarla rose behind Cri like a curling cloud of black smoke. The enormous Crynit’s hide reflected the orange and blue of the fires around us, and she paused only briefly to point her five blade claws at Cri’s back before falling into a strike, like a whale launching itself from calm water and then crashing down with inevitable certainty.

  A smaller, midnight-blue form ghosted in front of my sister and intercepted the giant Crynit. They collided with a force I felt through the ground. Nonch’s mandibles folded around Sarla’s midsection, and his six arms kept her five longer blade arms from impaling Cri from five different, messy angles. Cri got the fraction of a second she needed to roll sideways and face Godwill from a new position.

  Somehow, we’d become a team. Cri didn’t even question that Nonch had her back; she focused on her target and assumed Nonch could do his job.

  With Godwill’s attention on Cri, Mieant attacked from his rear, striking the arm holding me. Mieant’s knee came up as his elbow came down, meeting simultaneously at Godwill’s forearm, above the armor encasing his fist. Something snapped. Godwill roared and released me—I collapsed. Mieant retreated in a flash as the wounded Jurisdictor spun to face him. Cri launched herself into a great arc, her lower hands and upper hands meshed together. Dual hammer strikes thundered on Godwill’s back, whipping his head and audibly cracking his armor as he fell to one knee, then clumsily rolled aside into a crouch. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Mieant and Cri circled on opposite sides of him, looking for an opening.

  Our anger unleashed, we fought silently with the synchronicity of a pack of leggers. One of us distracted Godwill, the other attacked, then retreated out of range, while another darted in with a strike.

  We were amazing. It was not enough.

  Sarla simply dwarfed Nonch. Her hind tail pincers arched over her head to grasp him behind his first set of claw arms. Nonch hissed as Sarla, who, with a twist of her sword arms, ripped his front claw arms off and threw them into the flames surrounding our struggle.

  Fury…cold, consuming, overwhelming, erupted in my heart. There was no going back. I streamed RIVERS of lightning at her. Waves of blue lightning, tinged with orange, washed over her so she was a black shape held in the light of my energy. Any restraint I had vanished at the sight of my friend getting hurt.

  STOP! Raystar! Stop! The yellow light of AI’s fear was lost in the orange and black of the fires around us. I don’t have enough power to protect you! He shouted.

  Augmented vision showed me Sarla’s heart, brain, and vital organs. I saw into her body, where I needed to focus my attack. My first stream of nano knocked Sarla back, reigniting my hunger. This was GOOD. She was big. Convert her, and I wouldn’t be hungry anymore and would have more than enough power to protect myself. But I frowned. My nano was orange, not blue or white as it had been.

  I wasn’t getting energy back like I had with Nurse Pheelios.

  Sarla moved toward me. I jumped toward her, newfound strength sending me in a high arc. I concentrated my lightning in my fists as I landed and simultaneously punched. The Crynit was thrown through the air, landing and lying motionless fifteen meters away. That wasn’t what I’d intended. My hunger was raging. I’d intended to devour her.

  My power wasn’t regenerating.

  Godwill moved between Sarla and me. He spread his arms, creating a glowing shield around himself, and then reached out to me and grabbed my corona, my aura. And began to feed off me. I staggered and dropped to one knee.

  The air around us was on fire, and the smell of burning chemicals was nearly overwhelming. Storm Wall thunder cracked, and bolts of lightning licked the ground like hungry leeches. Everywhere, the camp was in flames. In my peripheral vision, one of the tall, ancient spires tipped in slow motion, crashing to the ground with the scream of a million kilograms of metal twisting out of shape. Through the roaring of collapsing buildings, flames, and winds emerged the low thrum of approaching antigrav engines.

  Sarla
wasn’t moving. She lay on her side where she’d fallen, amidst the scrabble of rocks and smoldering buildings. She was a distraction.

  Godwill was the threat.

  I reached into myself. There was power enough. My lightning claws extended, I lunged at Godwill, angling my blades slightly outward, funneling him toward my center. He grinned and lowered his shoulder into my charge. I brought my fist in with an uppercut at the moment of collision, hoping to drive my claws deep. We hit with a mini-nova and a billion-decibel screech as our energies collided, each trying to protect and destroy. I was flung six meters toward the approaching battle tank. Somehow, I landed on my feet and a knee, fist down, ready to charge again.

  Blood gushed from my nose onto my hand, its electricity coursing through each splatter in an outline of white light. The red heat of my life. Godwill rose, gripping his ribs where my fist claws had torn the armor from his body. His bones were showing—white, pink, bloody. He looked down in wonder at his wound.

  It should have been a mortal wound.

  Sarla had been thrown, too. The giant Crynit warrior was lying off to the side, some five meters from Godwill. Her armor was cracked. She moved slowly, disoriented from the clash, her sensor stalks waving randomly as she tried to get her bearings. Mieant and Cri lay still on the ground where they’d been flung. Mieant had somehow wrapped himself around my sister protectively. Nonch had been tossed onto his back and was flipping over to his feet, although he looked disoriented from the blast, and I supposed the pain of having his arms pulled off. I snarled with my nano flaring to life around me.

  Thunder roared just overhead.

  Godwill looked up, stared hard at the sky, and laughed. I suspiciously followed his gaze skyward. Blood shone on his lips as, despite his wound, he struggled to his feet, threw both arms wide, tilted his head back, and screamed hysterically—defiantly—at the heavens.

  Those weren’t clouds.

  He met my wide-eyed, open-mouthed gaze and activated his own nanotech. Lightning formed in the curl of his fingers. Still screaming, but now with laughter, he flung an orange bolt at my face.

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  Godwill’s blast flower-petaled around my shield, incinerating the grass on either side of me and flaring upward like a wave crashing over a rock.

  I staggered from the impact and was thrown on my back. Sucking in a breath that didn’t have enough air, I blinked furiously and struggled to rise. What I saw above laid me flat again.

  Realization paraded through my consciousness as my brain attempted to understand what my eyes were showing me. The Storm Wall towering up into the heavens surged and boiled around an impossibly large shape, striking it with lightning so fast that the “thing” was silhouetted in a coruscating, jagged cloud of blue light. Nem’s Storm Wall hammered at the shape with such fury that thunder rolled constantly. The THING got larger, and I realized it was descending through the clouds! Steam billowed from its armored hide. Near to the center of the unimaginably large mass, kilometer-long blue flashes of electricity snaked across its belly.

  It was a ship.

  Static electricity danced over everything now: the Ruins, the wings of the starbats, ourselves. I readjusted my perspective dizzily as the behemoth oriented toward its final position over the Mesas.

  It was so large, I felt like I was falling UP.

  Clouds of dust streamed from launch ports and arced toward Blue River. Except that wasn’t dust—those were ships! With their atmosphere drives lit, they looked like swarms of tiny blue fireflies against the sky’s grey and the gigantic ship’s black underbelly. Another swarm descended toward us, growing from dust to dots then to actual shapes. Thousands of ships.

  The 98th Battle Group had arrived.

  The invasion force was here. NOW.

  “Raystar of Terra,” Godwill said, as his grin wrapped around his emaciated head and bulging eyes. I rolled to my stomach, getting my knees under me, and scrambled to my feet to face him. Microsparks poured over his body. His ribs were healed. He dragged Sarla behind him like she was a rolled carpet. Her body bent uncomfortably in the wrong direction. Her limbs waved; I could tell she was still alive, but that large chunks of her shell were missing. The proud, terrifying Crynit was a sack of wreckage.

  Godwill was converting her essence to heal himself. He was consuming her.

  “You have lost.” He then leered at me and released Sarla; the part of her he’d been holding thudded to the ground in a cloud of dust. In two strides, the Lethian closed the distance between us. His nano snaked out in iridescent, airy tendrils of orange that circled my body and pulled me toward him.

  AI? I called out for my friend twice and was greeted with silence.

  Godwill grabbed my face, holding my cheeks in a vise-like grip and forming my mouth into fishlips. Only Mom did that. I swung, but my fist bounced harmlessly off of his forearm with a dull thump.

  And then tentacles of nano formed a cloud around me. I tingled, I stung, and then I started to BURN as he sapped my energy until my corona sparked once and faded. He held me by my face as I writhed. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nurse Pheelios. What terrible power my ancestors had created!

  Godwill pulled me close, an insane snarl turning into a victory grin. “Who needs the solvent when I can consume you like this?”

  The stinging was turning into fire. He was eating me.

  White lightning streaked across my vision, slashing the ribbons of his nano that were consuming me.

  Free from his grip, I dropped, gasping, and rolled away. Against the orange fires, black smoke, and dark sky, IT-ME—uh, Artem—walked toward us purposefully, his Humanoid form shrouded in a dense, white-gold clouds of sparks. The swirls of energy spun wildly before coalescing into comets that snaked in orbit around Artem’s upper body.

  Artem swung his arms forward as if he were in a pool trying to splash someone. His comets streaked toward Godwill.

  “RAAAAYYYYYYYYYSTARRR,” Artem grated, raising a hand toward me. There was a flash and a wall of force that crushed me like a blindside tackle on the playground. I tumbled away from Godwill. Where were my parents!?

  Their tank was plowing through the Ruins. It would not arrive for another few seconds, an eternity.

  “No,” Godwill muttered. “NO!” He took a step toward the silver figure and lifted his arm, palm out. His other hand reached behind him and made a grabbing gesture toward Sarla. Nano flowed between them and, upon contact, she writhed. I could see her matter flowing to him. I knew how that felt.

  “407, I will have you this day!” Godwill shouted, releasing a torrent of silver energy that slashed toward Artem’s comets. The two streams of light crashed into each other, largely cancelling each other out. Artem’s halo flared into a bubble shield, but the force Godwill had released passed through its shimmering defenses and coated Artem’s body.

  “I AM NOT FOUR-OH-SEEVEN! I AM ARRRRTEM!” Artem screamed in his scratchy, bass-computer voice, flinging both arms toward Godwill. Lightning arced from Artem’s fingers and stabbed at Godwill, who staggered, his own shields glowing, under the onslaught. Sarla remained prone; whatever power Godwill was throwing around came from her essence.

  I felt fevered, empty, hollow. Exhausted.

  Deep inside, though, I had a spark. A little left.

  I touched my power, and energy coalesced around my hand. Red flashes mingled with my blue lightning. There was a war within me and a war outside, and I was losing the internal struggle. Concentrating, I balled my energy into an orb so bright it hurt to look at it.

  Artem had reached Godwill and was trying to push his hands through his former tormentor’s shield. Godwill was trying to do the same.

  Revenge versus pride. Could either actually win?

  Godwill’s hand penetrated Artem’s shield, sending ripples over Artem’s defenses like a rock being thrown into a pond. The Jurisdictor’s armored hand wrapped around Artem’s neck and lifted him. For a moment, I saw the Human boy who had once been as he dangled in the Lethian’
s grip. Artem writhed, but Godwill was now consuming his essence and growing more powerful each second.

  I released my energy, my last bolt of life, into the ethereal link Godwill had created to consume Sarla. The nano reacted instantly, connecting Sarla to me. Godwill shuddered, released Artem, and turned, his eyes wide. I pulled, using EVERYTHING I had to rip energy from him.

  The injections he’d given me limited my ability to consume energy, but this particular power wasn’t mine to take. I concentrated on flowing it through me into Sarla. HEAL, I thought, much as I’d done with Mieant’s parents.

  I wasn’t going to consume anyone.

  Artem took advantage of Godwill’s focus on me. In a blur, he lifted Godwill above his head and hurled him ten meters into one of the camp’s flaming buildings. He followed up with streams of glowing plasma, pulverizing the building as he marched toward the inferno and Godwill.

  My connection with Sarla and her energy shattered. I staggered and dropped to my knees. I bowed my head, purple hair flowing over my face. I panted. So tired, I just need a moment. A few breaths. I looked up.

  The swarm of dots from the Dreadnought grew into a squadron of sinister assault ships. They would be here any moment. I looked around and realized that I was most likely going to die. We all were. So much of this was due to the genetic power I’d simply inherited. I was bone tired. Godwill had said that if I was dead, my DNA would be rendered useless. Maybe that was the way to end this. To save everyone. Die. I thought these things in a blink.

  And then realized my death wouldn’t solve anything. Not so long as that nanocontainer in the Vault existed. If that truly was the culmination of 1,800 years of “harvesting,” then it needed to be destroyed.

  Yeah. Nova and great gravity wells. I had enough life energy to do that.

  It needed to be destroyed.

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