by S. L. Dunn
“So you are telling me your strength—whatever its scale may be—is inherent? You were born with the ability to destroy cities with your bare hands and sustain gunshots to the chest?”
Vengelis nodded.
“That doesn’t seem possible. You were . . .” Kristen looked at him uncertainly. “Born, right? You have a father and mother, et cetera? You aren’t some advanced experiment—or a machine yourself?”
“No. Everyone of my race, to greater and lesser degrees, was born with this power.”
“How?” Kristen asked as her face filled with awe.
Vengelis said nothing.
“So this extraordinary strength is contained in your genes. That’s the Sejero genetics referenced in the report, I take it?”
“Yes, that is safe to say.”
“If you want me to help you, I need to know everything about Sejero genetics. They are the only concept referenced in this research synopsis that are a mystery to me.”
The statement seared an opening of fury into Vengelis’s consciousness so overwhelming that he nearly reached out to throttle her by the neck. She was casually demanding to know everything about the source of power—the very lifeblood—of his race. Kristen Jordan was nonchalantly asking for a simple explanation of the Sejero strength which waylaid the merciless technology of the Zergos: an alien race so powerful, cold and cruel that should the two become acquainted, the human civilization and all of Filgaia’s natural world would only know a single fleeting moment of horror and flame before they were gone. The lack of decorum was astounding, and the insult to his illustrious inheritance nearly too much to bear.
“Sejero genes,” Vengelis said, closing his eyes and holding back his fury. “Are what separate me from you. They give rise to unlimited power. If life itself was first sparked out of some dead primordial sea, then its grand pinnacle is the power within me. A power over all else.”
Kristen waited for him to continue, but when he did not, she furrowed her brow. “Well then, one thing is absolutely certain. If the Sejero genes are a part of your race’s genome, then the Felixes certainly retain the traits as well.”
“Yes, well—”
As Vengelis spoke, a distant screeching sound followed by a distinct explosion sounded from somewhere in the city. Kristen’s eyes widened in distress and Vengelis returned her look with a slightly confused expression. He looked to the windows, suddenly aware that Hoff and Darien never responded to his call.
“Stay here,” Vengelis murmured. He turned and walked across the shattered glass on the floor to the air drifting in through the windows. Pulling the Harbinger I remote out of his armor, he looked up and down the long avenue of tall buildings and billowing flags in the direction of the curious explosion. His order to Hoff and Darien had been to cut off the bridges. The sound of the explosion was of an airplane or helicopter crash. Vengelis raised the remote to his mouth. “Hoff! Darien! What are you two doing? What was that explosion?”
No response.
Vengelis glared into the distance above the teeming frenzy of the avenue. He turned back into the ballroom, his agitation growing. The pathetic manner in which the gawking audience was now staring at him suddenly kindled infuriation, but he quickly quelled it. He steadied himself and calmly walked back onto the stage.
“What was that?” Madison asked him.
“I don’t know.” Vengelis shook his head.
“Look. There’s nothing I can do for you,” Kristen said with an unruly tone. “There is nothing anyone can do. If there isn’t a technology that can inflict damage to your flesh, then there certainly isn’t a technology that can damage Felix flesh.”
“There are a few hundred pages to Pral Nerol’s research document.” Vengelis handed the remote back to Kristen. “By all means, you may begin reading it in its entirety.”
“But that’s not going to change anyth—”
“Enough!” Vengelis snapped. “And you better hope you don’t succeed in convincing me there is nothing you can do.”
“I-I . . . okay. I’ll read through it, but it’s going to take awhile.”
“I’m not unreasonable. Take your time, I wouldn’t want you missing any minute detail.”
“So, for the record, you are looking for a structural weakness? A physical deficiency of the Felixes you can personally manipulate? Something along those lines?”
“Now we’re on the same page. Yes, that’s exactly what I seek.”
Kristen looked like she was about to protest, but evidently thought better of it. Instead, she brought her gaze down to the Harbinger I remote and began reading the translated report. Vengelis let out a deep breath and leaned down, taking a seat at the end of the stage. He quietly watched Kristen read Pral Nerol’s report as he mindlessly polished the Blood Ring and pondered his plight. He longed desperately to be away from this primitive and underdeveloped place. The notion of a world without Sejero blood was disconcerting to him. The men and women surrounding him lacked any sense of higher order and balance. They didn’t even try to defend themselves against him; they just acquiesced. Vengelis was ashamed to even share so similar a likeness in appearance to them. When the Felixes attacked his world, children rallied for the cause, standing against the Felixes alongside the strongest of the world’s warriors. He turned to the audience to see that most of them were now simply weeping into cell phones.
“Needless to say, you should be thinking out of the box,” Vengelis said, more to himself than anyone else.
“Yeah. Thanks for the tip,” Kristen said sarcastically and looked up at him for a moment with a scathing hate. Vengelis held her gaze until she looked back to the remote. He turned to Madison, who said nothing.
After several strained minutes passed, Kristen seemed to be well into the research paper’s introduction when the remote in her hands crackled with an incoming transmission. She looked up to Vengelis, but he was preoccupied with his thoughts. He was thinking about Master Tolland. Was it possible that his teacher—and perhaps Pral Nerol, too—knew of this Vatruvian technology? Did Master Tolland know Vatruvian technology existed on Filgaia, and send him here for that reason? As logical as that seemed, it could not have been possible. There had been no correspondence between Anthem and Filgaia in four years, since Pral Nerol’s ship made the one-way journey. Master Tolland could not have known. The more Vengelis thought about it, the less sense it all seemed to make.
“Um. There’s something up with this thing. It’s making noise,” Kristen said to him.
Vengelis sat up straight. “What?”
Another static filled noise came from the small speakers of the remote.
“E-e-emp.” A voice spoke.
Vengelis leapt to his feet and ripped the remote from Kristen’s hands. He pressed down on his transmission button. “Come in!”
“Emp . . . Venge . . . Vengel—” The unmistakable voice of his Lord General Hoff moaned unsteadily.
“Hoff!” Vengelis said. “Why have you not checked in? I’ve been trying to reach you and Darien! What the hell is going on out there?”
“I . . . I d-don’t . . . ” The Lord General’s words came in short labored breaths. “Darien . . . defeated.”
“What?” Vengelis said.
“I—d-dying . . . he . . . killed . . . m—”
“Who?” Vengelis shouted furiously. “Hoff what the hell are you talking about? What is going on?”
“I’m s-s-sorry, my lord. I . . . can’t . . . breathe. . . . ”
“Speak! General Hoff, I order you to speak! What has happened to you?”
A long silence ensued. Vengelis stared expectantly at the small remote. Kristen and Madison quietly watched his body language and listened to his foreign words with a concerned lack of understanding. Then, Lord General Hoff’s final crackling transmission came through with a hacking, terrible wheeze followed by a death rattle.
“N-N-Nerol. Nerol is here.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Vengelis
Ven
gelis held the remote close, glaring at the stage floor as he tried to wrap his mind around the impossibility of Hoff’s words. A sensation of frustration and alarm traveled down the length of his spine. After a prolonged moment of stillness, he suddenly shouted, fully knowing there would be no response.
“Pral Nerol is dead, Hoff. The Felixes killed him in Municera. He’s dead!”
Another silence.
“What is happening?” Madison asked him nervously.
Vengelis held up a stern hand to silence her. Madison and Kristen exchanged a look of subtle concern at his abrupt volatility. Vengelis thought back, recalling the video feed of Nerol’s death in the Municera laboratory when the Felixes had been awakened. Vengelis watched the male Felix, Felix One, kill the old scientist. Or had he? Vengelis’s face contorted with concentration as he racked his memory in an attempt to recall every minute detail of Pral Nerol’s laboratory video.
“Should I start reading the report again?” Kristen asked.
“Be quiet,” Vengelis said, desiring only silence. He held his hand across his forehead and closed his eyes, trying to focus on visualizing the video he had watched so many times aboard the Harbinger I. It came back to him vividly. After the Felix had awoken on the steel laboratory table, the machine had proceeded to kill one of the assistants and the warrior Von Krass. Pral Nerol had hit the security alarms just before the video feed went black.
Pral Nerol had not been explicitly murdered.
Everyone who had subsequently watched the feed had assumed it, but there was no footage of it. The old man Nerol could still be alive, though it was tremendously implausible. Municera had been utterly leveled, and everyone in the city slaughtered. Vengelis recalled the heat and stench of the burning city with unpleasant clarity. When he had burst through the cloud cover, he had thought the once metropolitan and sparkling Municera to be a vision of hell, destruction incarnate. If Pral Nerol had somehow managed to escape the city, surely the old man would have presented himself in Sejeroreich to aid in Anthem’s defense? And even if Vengelis was to make the assumption that the Felixes somehow spared or overlooked Nerol during their rampage, it still did not explain why Pral Nerol would be on Filgaia or how he got there. It also failed to explain why he would have a motivation to murder Hoff and Darien, or, for that matter, how the aging man would even be capable of defeating two of the strongest soldiers in the Imperial Army.
One thing was certain: if Pral Nerol was alive and on Filgaia, he was going to pay dearly for the slaughter he unleashed upon Vengelis’s people and proceeded to flee from. There was no choice; Vengelis knew he had to investigate this at once. He turned and looked to Kristen and Madison, who each looked troubled by the sudden severity of his expression.
“I have to leave for a moment,” Vengelis said, his voice distant.
“What?” Kristen asked.
“Something has come to my attention. I need to check on it immediately.”
Kristen’s gaze flickered momentarily to the shattered windows and street beyond. Vengelis glared at her, guessing her intentions of escaping the moment he was not there to hold her and the rest of the convention.
“If you try to escape and slip into the evacuation out of this city, my solution will be to indiscriminately slaughter the migrating masses. Do you understand me, Kristen Jordan? If you choose to take your chances and flee from this room, you will be gambling with millions of lives—including your own.”
Vengelis reached out and pulled Kristen close to him by the collar of her shirt. “That means stay. It’s a command a dog can follow. Let’s hope a scientist can, too.”
“Fine,” Kristen said, straining her head away from him in disdain. “God! I’m not going anywhere!”
“Where are you going?” Madison asked.
“I need to check on something,” Vengelis looked out the windows and began to walk toward the empty panes. “You have no excuse not to be here when I return. If the doors to this room are pried open and you two are ordered to evacuate the building by some sort of authority, refuse them. This ballroom is in the only safe building in the city, and—for now—I would like to keep the both of you alive. If you leave, your lives will be in jeopardy. I should be back in a minute.”
With that, Vengelis turned from them and accelerated through one of the tall window frames and into the open air and sunlight of the street. There were crowds raging everywhere along the avenue. With all routes off Manhattan destroyed, the would-be evacuating masses were festering and boiling over. Under the imposing overhead displays depicting a decimated Chicago, chaos alone reigned.
Floating over the street, Vengelis stared at the screen of his Harbinger I remote and tracked the linked remotes of his Lord General and Royal Guard. Darien’s was not being detected anywhere, but Hoff’s was blinking from several blocks to the north. The dot of the Lord General’s remote remained ominously stationary as Vengelis stared at it indecisively. He ignored the multitudes on the streets and flew north a few hundred feet above the avenue, periodically looking down as he moved toward the flashing location of Hoff’s remote. Vengelis did not know which was more concerning, the stillness of Hoff’s blinking dot or the total absence of Darien’s.
Vengelis soared past a lofty office tower, his lithe reflection moving swiftly across the darkly mirrored windows. A peculiar sight met him from below, and he straightened as he looked down upon the scene of the street ahead. There was a crowd of people huddled around a shadowed mass on the pavement. Vengelis looked back to the monitor in his hand. The flashing location of Hoff’s remote was directly where the circle of people had gathered. He glared and cautiously moved forward, his attention darting about the surroundings.
Men and women pressed and crowded around the motionless mass, and as Vengelis neared, he saw it was a prostrate body. With a stunned breath he recognized the unmistakable glint of Imperial First Class armor. It was the lifeless body of Alegant Hoff. Someone had killed his Lord General. Vengelis glared down at his fallen subordinate before quickly raising his vision and squinting sharply into the bright skies all around him. There were just clouds, steel spires, and the wind. The attacker had left in a hurry, whoever it was.
Nerol. Why had Hoff said it was Nerol?
Vengelis descended and touched down on the pavement beside the bruised and bloodied corpse of his highest-ranked general. There was an upsurge of screams and trampling of feet behind him as the men and women watched him descend from the sky. Vengelis stood beside Hoff and looked at him expressionlessly for a long moment, unable to keep his wits afloat in the growing confusion. He glared at the giant’s battered backside as he kneeled down to his motionless body and saw the Lord General’s armor was cracked and broken in places. Someone had fractured his ribs. Vengelis ran his fingers down Hoff’s back and saw evidence of a brutal liver strike—the killing blow. He frowned and let his hand rest on Hoff’s lower back. Whoever assaulted him had done so with technical and practiced precision.
People were shouting, though Vengelis was so lost he took no notice of the insurgence encompassing him. With both hands, he reached down and rolled Hoff over on the pavement, pushing the giant Lord General onto his back. Below the thick bristles of Hoff’s heavy moustache, a streak of red-brown blood spread across his wide chin and neck. The Lord General’s lifeless eyes stared vacantly into the sky.
“Nerol couldn’t have done this,” Vengelis murmured under his breath and shook his head. Whoever did it was strong, very strong, and certainly not an old man.
A prickly feeling rose on the back of his neck and Vengelis turned, once more searching the brilliant sky above him. He half expected to see the grim outline of a woman floating between the two tall buildings and smiling down at him with blonde hair and blue glowing eyes. Vengelis quickly shook the notion of Felixes from his mind and grabbed hold of Hoff’s enormous forearm, pulling the Lord General onto his own shoulder and easily lifting off the ground and ascending gracefully to the top of an adjacent building. He let Hoff’s body
rest against the backside of a stone ledge. One more Primus life claimed without any semblance of validity or commemoration by this nameless struggle. The last Epsilon placed a hand on his Lord General’s shoulder and allowed himself a moment’s silence before lifting back into the sky.
Vengelis was actually surprised at the anger he felt over this crime. He tore off the rooftop and flew high into the air over the city, scanning the entire surrounding area. His gaze traced the horizons of endless blue ocean to the east and flat meadowlands to the west. The bright roof of the world was dotted only with the scattering of thin clouds. He looked into the expansive and empty horizons and decided that whatever killed Hoff was surely still in the city, so he brought his gaze back to the rooftops of Manhattan.
Vengelis found himself in a dilemma.
On the one hand, it was his desire—no, his responsibility—to determine what killed Hoff and where Darien was. On the other, it was unbelievably dangerous to leave the one and only sliver of a hope he had at defeating the Felixes, Kristen Jordan, unattended to. He looked down and carefully scanned up and down each avenue and street below. Noxious black smoke rose from one intersection, where the mangled wreck of a helicopter smoldered into the pavement. Where the hell was Darien? Surely he had fought alongside Hoff against their enemy? Vengelis pulled out his Harbinger I remote again and scanned for a location on Darien’s remote. The monitor flashed, no readings in proximity.
As Vengelis glared at the message, something caught his attention momentarily above the city to the south. It had been nothing more than a dark dot against the light blue backdrop of the sky. He snapped his head up and stared intently in the direction of the movement, hair blowing across his forehead in the breeze. In his peripheral vision he had seen something soar above the buildings and rooftops.
Without another moment’s consideration, Vengelis pocketed his remote and erupted toward the collection of skyscrapers to the southwest.
