Villain

by Ivan Kal

  He had been content with delaying them, letting them take the planets and other points of interest while he slowly retreated and consolidated his forces, while they drained theirs. For each point of interest they took, they would need to leave a guard force, fracturing the great fleet. In the end, he would’ve outnumbered them, and had been able to counterattack and crush them quickly.

  But he had changed his mind. He had been injured twice by Anessa, and he needed to strike back, to hurt her and her fleets. His Overseer breeds had been watching over the fleets, listening, looking for patterns. They had identified ships that they believed housed the commanders of the many fleets, and Doranis was going to smash them to pieces. He was focused on the most advanced of the fleets, and one of the ships on his target list was the one where Anessa retreated to. He didn’t know if she herself was commanding this force, but smashing that ship was going to be satisfying.

  He was just about to start putting things in motion when he felt something. In the deep Sha a tendril reached out to him and he allowed the connection.

  “Loranis?” Doranis asked as he recognized her. “Didn’t we agree not to use the amplifier to communicate? The children of Axull Darr could detect the conversation and track it back to the core.”

  “It no longer matters, Doranis. A force has arrived in the core, and the battle has just begun.”

  “What? But they couldn’t have managed to gather a force large enough to threaten you without us knowing!”

  “And yet they did. The forces of the Custodian AI are here; Aranis believes that Adrian’s personal AI somehow took over. The machine ships and the Black Swarm are here, along with a massive force of Krashinar and the Nomad Fleet.”

  “Can they get to the Conduit?”

  “We don’t think so, and we will be ready to fire within days. The Conduit is finished. We are waiting for the necessary power to reach the level where we can trigger it,” Loranis sent.

  “Damn it,” Doranis said, realizing that the force that was attacking him was probably only a distraction preventing him from going to the core and help. They had used their own tactic against them.

  “Can you come? We do not believe we are in danger, but having more forces will not be unwelcome.”

  Doranis sighed. “I believe that we have been played. My system was attacked as well. I suspect that was because they wished to prevent me from coming to your aid.”

  “The force they were gathering in Sol,” Loranis sent.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then they have planned well. Three of their Sha users are here,” Loranis sent.

  “Three? How can that be? One of them is here—Anessa,” Doranis replied.

  “One more person achieved the Sha state: Ryaana, daughter of Anessa and Adrian. The last person is the Lurker of the Depths. I have clashed with him already. He is not as powerful as we, but he is skilled, terrifyingly so, as you have told me.”

  Doranis grimaced as he remembered his clash with the Lurker of the Depths. “Do not underestimate him. He is dangerous.”

  “I know. We will just have to prevail without you.”

  “I might be able to crush them quickly. I’ve been playing with them so far, letting them scatter their forces across the system.”

  “You might not make it in time even if you began the journey this instant,” Loranis told him. “That force there might be keeping you from helping us, but the reverse is true as well.”

  “It was by design. I would bet everything on it,” Doranis sent.

  “It matters little now. The cards have been shown, and the only thing that is left is for us to see how this all ends,” Loranis sent him, and he felt her draw back for a moment. “I must go. The Lurker of the Depths has noticed our communication and is testing me. Try to deal with them and come—even if you don’t make it in time it is better than staying there. Holding that system no longer matters.”

  Doranis felt her end the connection before he could respond. He leaned over the table in his sanctum, looking at the ships of his enemies. He felt as if everything that he had been doing since his change had been taken from him. These people here had tricked him— now the final battle was happening elsewhere, and he was not a part of it. The fate of the universe was about to be decided, and he wasn’t even there.

  He felt rage seep into every part of his being, and the only thing he wanted to do was destroy. He looked at the ships marked out on his holo, the ones carrying commanders of the many fleets that were part of the greater whole. These people were in his way, and it was their fault that everything was falling apart. Their disregard for the natural order, their need to push and take and meddle with things they didn’t understand.

  A part of him understood that the ultimate blame lay with the People and their idiotic decision to seed the galaxy with life. They had subverted the will of the Universe, had accelerated nature past what it could handle, and now all existence would suffer unless they stopped it. Still they wanted to fight, still they wanted to prevent the Enlightened from righting what was wrong. They were children who did not understand responsibility. They called the Enlightened monsters, named them villains. Well, if the price of saving the universe was being called a villain, then Doranis would gladly hold that title.

  The time for holding back had passed. It was time for them all to learn the true power of Doranis of the Enlightened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Year 718 of the Empire — Josanti League Territory

  Adrian watched the battle as it developed, the machine ships took the forefront of their formation, firing their missiles against the Enlightened ships. The enemy fired back in kind, both by missiles and their long-ranged access-point weapons. The countermeasures had been deployed, so the enemy weapons had limited success, and the long-range weapons of his ships were discharging across massive distances to strike at the access-point platforms. The Black Swarm moved among the fleets, obscuring them from view and protecting them. He saw the massive molecular-disintegration cannon form in the middle of the swarm, then three more on its outer edges.

  Iris charged the massive cannons. The power requirements for it were insane, but the Swarm had massive power-generating drones hidden deep inside of it that provided that power. One cannon fired, a beam wide enough to wipe out several ships at once. The energy flashed across the system, hitting several ships at once, consuming them completely. The target of the beam were the two Living-ships in the orbit of the planet with the weapon. Iris’s attack reached for them and was met with a planetary shield that extended all the way up into orbit, enough so to cover the fleet of ships stationed there.

  Adrian cursed—he should’ve known that it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. Iris tried again, firing several shots into the shields before deciding that it was pointless. She then turned her weapons to other targets in the system, thinning the enemy forces.

  After a time, one of the Enlightened fleets came close enough that both sides could use more weapons, and the battle heated up. Adrian saw the machine ships covering the Enlightened as they moved to engage. He turned his eyes away from the battle—he trusted the Seventh and didn’t need or want to look over his shoulder. Adrian’s task was something far different.

  He studied the planet. The massive structure and the smaller ones were all over the planet: the power-generating stations, the stations that seemed to tap into the black star itself. He looked at it all, zooming in the visual scans, studying the sensor returns, everything, trying to find anything that could be of use. He noticed the shield emitters all over. The Enlightened had protected their weapon well. And it was no wonder—they’d had countless ages to create it.

  The long-distance scans of the structure and its composition indicated that it was incredibly dense, far more so than anything they had ever encountered. The matter was compressed on a scale that was completely mind boggling. The structure itself had to have a gravity field as powerful as a planet itself. It would’ve probably ripped that world apart, or
threw it into the black hole long ago, if not for the presence of the powerful gravity fields. The source of those fields was several thousand points on the planet, and was probably necessary just to hold the structure, which he was now certain was the firing mechanism of their weapon.

  Adrian still didn’t know what it did or how it did it, but the Enlightened had scattered relays all over the galaxy. His belief was that they would somehow link those relays together with this structure, and fire the weapon. The manner of how it would kill all life he didn’t know, but in the end it didn’t matter. They had to stop it.

  He was looking for anything, really, trying to find any weakness, any point of entry. Firing weapons on the structure was going to be fruitless; if the weapon of the Black Swarm, which was several times more powerful than a Star Guard defense station couldn’t punch through the shields, then he doubted that anything else could. Even Moirai, for all her power, couldn’t produce more power than five of the Black Swarm’s md cannons. But shields weren’t unbeatable, and bending space would circumvent the shields.

  Adrian could perhaps teleport there, if they got a bit closer and if he worked with Ryaana, Lurker of the Depths, and Moirai. There were too many ships there, though, and even if all of them worked together, they wouldn’t be able to take many ships of their own with them, and he didn’t know for how long they could survive there.

  Their enemy’s goal was to protect that planet and the weapon. They were not going to let them get close. Adrian was thinking about what they could do, but it seemed that the only way was to draw as many of those ships away from the planet. He doubted that Aranis would leave it unprotected enough that a couple of ships could get in and survive long enough to damage that structure—if it could even be damaged. Something with such compressed matter might be nearly impossible to damage.

  But Adrian had another plan, a trick up his sleeve. They just needed to thin the defenses around the planet enough, and if they did, he knew that they would be able to get to the weapon. So far the battle had been raging with the ships only. Aranis hadn’t shown himself after that first meeting, but Lurker of the Depths and Loranis had been lightly sparring, each trying to mess with the other’s forces. So far they hadn’t gotten into a more serious battle, but as they continued deeper in system, as they got closer to the weapon, Adrian knew that the Enlightened would respond.

  And he planned on being ready. He joined his mind to Moirai—she was in the middle of the Krashinar Old Hunters pack, firing her extreme-long-range weapons. She was far more reserved now. She had grown since the last battle she was in, and she was taking the lead from the Old Hunters. Being patient, she fired only when she had her target locked in her sights. She didn’t ask to go in the midst of the battle, didn’t relish the fight. He could still tell that she looked forward to the battles ahead, but she was no longer blinded by that desire.

  It was a good thing, as he hadn’t really known how to teach her restraint. The Old Hunters were far more familiar with the concept. Moirai was the most powerful great beast, bar none, yet she was allowing the Old Hunters to teach her even though she could crush them easily.

  He hated keeping her contained, but he needed her rested for when they faced the Enlightened in a true battle. She was his trump card. She and Iris, his inseparable companions, his friends, his family. He would’ve never reached as far as he had if it wasn’t for them, and now they were about to take on their greatest challenge: a fight against beings far older than them and far more powerful, all so that they could save a galaxy that would’ve allowed the Enlightened to kill them without even fighting back. Such arrogance—he would never understand other people and their ability to look the truth in the face and ignore it.

  But he put such thoughts out of his mind. He was here, he was fighting, and that had to be enough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Year 718 of the Empire — Josanti League Territory

  Urvu’ri watched over the battle. Most of her forces were en route to one of the stars of this system, the one that had the access point, but the Enlightened forces had been harrying her ships the entire way. Currently they were in high orbit of one of the planets, a poisonous waste that had little value even to the Enlightened—they hadn’t had any forces near here to defend the planet. Most of the Enlightened forces had changed their courses over the last day, and Urvu’ri was suspicious of that sudden change. So far the Enlightened had been fighting to retain every piece of territory they held in system, but yesterday they seemed to have abandoned that path. Almost all of the Enlightened forces in system were now converging on her force. It left some of them terribly exposed, enough so that she had ordered the forces she left at the gas giant to strike at their backs.

  The Enlightened didn’t seem to care that they were losing ships, which was a dead giveaway that something was not as it seemed. Urvu’ri had studied the previous encounters against the Enlightened in depth, both the battle of the last Grand Fleet as well as the attack by the Josanti League and their allies. The Enlightened in charge of this system was the same as the one from those battles, and he had demonstrated a preference for using his power to strike from unsuspected angles. Because of that, her entire force was constantly sweeping the area around them, and she even had Suvri stealth ships all over the system looking for any signs of the Enlightened’s kinetic ammunition already prepared.

  All the ships in the Grand Fleet had programs that constantly analyzed sensor data for any irregularities, any signs of the Enlightened. So far, with the interventions by Battle Master Anessa, they hadn’t had much issues from the Enlightened. From what she could tell, the Battle Master had even won those exchanges, which made her more confident that they could take this system.

  The battle had never really come to a halt, and it hadn’t since they arrived. The enemy had its access-point weapons all over the system, and they were constantly firing, just as the ships from her fleet returned fire. Both sides were constantly losing ships, but when there was so many of them… It would take a long time for either force to be crippled by their losses.

  The battle raged on, missiles flying from both sides, and her less advanced ships fired their kinetic weapons. They had proven to be deadly, if they managed to hit. But they were just too defenseless, and a single strike from even a less powerful weapon could lead to their destruction. It was why the Rimward Alliance’s drones and fleet-killer ships were trying to screen them, but still, some were unlucky.

  As she watched the holo she couldn’t help but feel the absurdity of what she was doing. She was looking at the blips on her holo and watching different-colored ones opposing it. It was so easy to forget that every single one of those dots was a ship filled with people. Every time a dot disappeared, thousands of lives were lost. It was terrible, abhorrent even, that she had to put that side of herself aside. She couldn’t think about the people, not when she was fighting on this scale, with this many ships. Every decision she made cost more lives than some races had in their entire fleets. It was too much to handle for anyone—but they had no choice.

  Just a few decades ago, it had been a completely different world: a world where wars happened rarely in the core, where battles were far smaller, when they seemed so preoccupied by things that now almost didn’t matter. The Enlightened had changed things, had brought the galaxy together. The fact that a race outside of the core had reached a level of respect and power in only a few short years… It had never happened before. She had never imagined that it could happen. And yet here she was, leading the greatest fleet ever assembled, and the ones who had assembled it were not a core power.

  She had been set in her ways for too long, thought that the universe was one way when in truth it was completely different from how she’d thought it was. Urvu’ri was the first to admit that the core had stagnated, that they were no longer the most powerful nations in the galaxy. The Rimward Alliance was the proof, and soon she knew that the entire galaxy would follow. They only needed to win this battle, to c
ripple the Enlightened, and they would have a chance to see it happen.

  Her holo started updating. Ships were being destroyed, and she frowned as she realized that most of them were flagships of the fleets. Her eyes widened as the holo updated—the sensors had picked up the Enlightened, who had started attacking the command. She was just about to order a message sent to the Battle Master, when the holo updated with her appearing among the ships.

  Urvu’ri shivered at the idea that her life could be decided with no say from her, that beings which so much power could rip her ship in half before she could even know that there was a danger. Today they were fighting the Enlightened, a force that wanted to wipe out all life, but she couldn’t help but wonder what would happen tomorrow if they won. Would the Rimward Alliance use their people to rule them all? Would others rise up with the same power, and would the galaxy be ripped apart by beings beyond her understanding?

  There were no answers to be gleaned from such thoughts. So she turned her eyes to toward the holo and watched a battle between two beings that could kill her with barely a thought.

  * * *

  Anessa didn’t feel Doranis’s initial attack, as she had been resting. There had been no sign of him joining the battle in several days, and she had started to wonder if perhaps he hadn’t been more injured than she thought. She wondered if perhaps she should’ve followed, attempted to kill him. And so, when he attacked, she had been asleep. An alarm woke her up, but not before Doranis had destroyed several of the Josanti League’s ships.