The Sons of Sora

by Paul Tassi

  Alpha had, in addition to watching it unfold live. The archived video was chilling. In it, Lucas walked through the army of Xalans as they all were sliced to pieces around him as if by invisible blades. The camerabots’ feed was cut before the death of the Archon himself, so that remained a mystery to most. But not Alpha; he’d seen the creature fall.

  “The man was afflicted with powers no mortal being should ever know,” he said. “That is behind him now.”

  Alpha didn’t know how to rationalize Lucas’s story about the Circle of Shadows, including Omicron, the Desecrator, and Mars Maston appearing to dismantle the Archon and his army. He wasn’t sure Lucas knew what to make of it either, and some doors were better left closed.

  “But you have been monitoring him?” An older, wrinkled Xalan with violet rings in her eyes spoke up from across the table. “He has stabilized? He is fully cured?”

  “The data shows nothing out of the ordinary,” Alpha reassured his audience. That is not strictly true, he thought, but even he didn’t understand certain fluctuations in Lucas’s biological readouts. But for all intents and purposes, his friend was himself again. There is still blue in his eyes, Alpha thought, thinking of the bright, microscopic flecks drifting in pools of gray. But again, there was no need to raise alarm, not given the task Lucas had been assigned now, in any case. It was too important, and no one was better suited.

  “We are coming to the end of our session,” Alpha said, eyeing a holographic time readout. “Damage assessment updates will be on the docket first thing tomorrow morning. I am postponing settlement transport conflicts until the following day.”

  That brought a loud chorus of annoyed groans from the room, and Alpha simply shook his head and waved his claws. The holographic table shut down and slowly the makeshift government stopped griping and moved toward the exits.

  Alpha felt a claw on his shoulder, and turned to find Zeta smiling with her soft blue eyes.

  “You are doing your best with them,” she said. “It is all that can be expected of you.”

  “This damnable string of crises will never end,” he said, sighing.

  “It is a welcome substitute for war,” Zeta said. “No one dies from arguing over trade disputes or settlement integration procedures.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Alpha said. “In any case, hopefully matters will normalize by the time our daughter has grown.”

  “Or perhaps our son,” Zeta said, placing a claw softly on her protruding abdomen. Alpha put his lone organic hand on top of hers.

  “Yes,” he said warmly. “Indeed.”

  “Have you heard from Theta?” Zeta said, her tone tinged with worry.

  “A week ago,” Alpha said, surveying the darkened room and Sora slowly spinning outside. “She says they will return to Earth soon, though she failed to mention where she was presently. Naturally, she has blocked her tracking signal. I have taught her too well.”

  “She is just experiencing life, I suppose,” Zeta said. “We should at least allow her that, after all she has endured.”

  “I would prefer her to experience life in the company of someone less foolhardy,” Alpha grumbled. But he looked at Zeta, round with child, bathed in the glow of Sora, and couldn’t be anything other than content.

  —

  “Can you still hear me?” Theta asked. Even in the middle of the club floor with deep bass pumping all around him, her voice was still deafening in Erik’s ear.

  “I said yes,” he said, clutching the ear painfully. “I told you, I’ll signal you when I’m at the door.”

  Erik muted her to avoid any further damage to his eardrum and kept pushing his way through the lively crowd. His face was lightmasked; a holographic image covered his features thanks to a small piece of metal clipped to his hairline. It would have been conspicuous if nearly everyone else in the club wasn’t wearing something similar due to the theme of the night. “Glowface,” they called it, and it was supposed to be delightful when you were buzzing on a cocktail of alcohol and Paradise.

  But Erik was stone sober.

  He shoved his way through writhing bodies until a flailing pair of girls blocked his way. Their dancing was occasionally rhythmic, but disjointed enough that the influence of narcotics was obvious. One with neon pink hair, wearing little more than silk bandages and lightbands, caught him by the shoulder and started gyrating in his direction. She peered into his brightly lit face, her nose an inch from his own.

  “Heyyy,” she said slowly, peering into his eyes. “Aren’t you—”

  “Busy,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders and herding her in the direction of her equally scantily clad friend.

  Finally, Erik reached the edge of the dance floor and ducked behind the main stage, where performers were waving their hands through the air, playing various virtual instruments that produced the music of the evening. Elyria was no more, but its nightlife scene had moved across the border to nearby King’s Falls, a waterside metropolis guarding the largest river on the continent. It had taken him a long time to find this specific club, but he wasn’t interested in the party downstairs.

  “I’m here,” he whispered into the air, shoving a door open. The hallway was brightly lit compared to the dance floor, and it momentarily burned his eyes. His right one was still light sensitive a year later; he’d had to get it regrown after it had been gouged by a rogue Xalan claw in Rhylos. It was a more painful process than his fingers had been, and the socket still itched terribly.

  “There’s a problem,” he said, eyeing a rather large pair of men standing next to a rather large pair of metal doors at the end of the hall. “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone down here.”

  “It must be an unscheduled change,” she said. “Perhaps he is paranoid.”

  Or just smart, Erik thought.

  “You sure the cameras are looped?”

  “They are … now,” she said. And that was good enough for him.

  Erik adopted a drunken stagger and stumbled toward the towering security guards. The man on the right held his hand up even as he was still twenty feet away.

  “You can’t be in here,” he said through the grating of a metal helmet. “I’m going to have to ask you to exit the way you entered.”

  “I saw her come thisssway,” Erik slurred, looking around confused. “She wasss coming home wit’ me.” A fake hiccup followed.

  The other guard approached now and the two took him by either arm.

  “Come on, lighthead,” one said. “I’m sure you’ll find another one out there.”

  “Your armor is so smooth,” Erik said, falsely delirious, widening his eyes and running his palm across the plated forearm of the taller guard, sliding it toward the pistol attached to his ribcage.

  “Don’t—Hey!” the guard exclaimed as he realized what was happening.

  Erik had grown four inches the past year. He was taller. Stronger. Faster. And this was far from his first fight since the war ended.

  In a split second, the pistol was out, and the first guard crumbled after a stun round pierced his helmet. At close range, the protective metal did nothing. The other guard drew his weapon, but Erik slammed the butt of the pistol into his wrist, which caused him to lose his grip. He reached for the much larger rifle on his back, but Erik shot him in the leg, making his armor seize up and lock tight. The guard cried out as he stumbled to the left against the wall, and Erik blasted the side of his head with another blue flash of light.

  “No one saw that, right?” he asked the air. No alarms were sounding at least.

  “No one except for me,” Theta said. The metal doors opened, and there she was.

  The white Xalan had also grown, nearly reaching seven feet now. The cameras had better be looped, Erik thought, since you don’t get more suspicious than a snow-white Xalan wandering your back hallways. He trusted her word that security was down, and there were no more guards coming out of the woodwork to apprehend them. She had a full view of every hallway on a scroll in front of
her, and nothing was amiss despite Erik’s colorful entrance. He joined Theta in the lift. She had rigged the controls with an electronic crack, and soon they were rocketing up to the restricted penthouse floor. She’d entered through the fifth subbasement, where the security junctions were housed. It was a bit less obvious than moving through the dance floor. Erik had confirmed with enough of the patrons that he was indeed there. Supposedly he’d thrown a massive party in the suite barely twelve hours ago.

  Retirement suited Madric Stoller.

  The door opened, and four armored guards in the hallway turned to see the First Son of Sora and a pure white Xalan standing in the lift. Before one even uttered a syllable into their comm, Theta opened her claw and out sprang four small silver discs that whizzed magnetically to the breastplates of each of the guards. In half a second, their armor was completely locked down from a fizzling electric pulse, and the discs had drilled micro-holes through the plating to deliver quick puffs of naxgas inside the suits. All fell together in unison.

  “I designed those myself,” she said proudly as she casually strode through the contorted bodies. “They will not wake for hours, and will have to manually pry themselves out of their armor.” Her translator made a noise that might have been a giggle.

  Be that as it may, Erik didn’t want to take more than a few minutes.

  A larger disc with a lockcrack inside opened the final set of doors, and they strode into a dark, lavish penthouse suite that had a gorgeous view of what used to be Elyria, but was now cluster of craters formed out of the ashes of the dead.

  Theta found the data core almost instantly, a small but elaborate piece of machinery.

  “I shouldn’t have brought you,” Erik said, looking around the empty suite cautiously.

  “This is why I am here,” Theta said firmly. “His financial security measures cannot be compromised remotely.”

  She knelt in front of the core and began furiously typing into the holographic controls. She bypassed the login instantly, and began to dive deep into the annals of the core.

  Erik walked around the common area of the suite, almost tripping over empty bottles of enormously expensive vaporwine. On every flat surface lay at least a handful of vials used to ingest any number of illegal substances, and there wasn’t a piece of furniture that wasn’t stained with some kind of liquid. Erik stared at the craters through the thirty-foot windows. They were lit by excavation crews, still digging for charred bones a year later. And they were still finding plenty, the Stream said.

  “Where am I diverting the funds, again?” Theta asked, her face lit up by the glow of the core.

  “Dump everything into the Reconstruction and Restoration Fund,” Erik said. “Make it from a few thousand sources, though, and impossible to revert.”

  “Everything?” Theta said, gold-ringed eyes wide.

  Erik grinned.

  “Well, maybe carve out a bit for us too.”

  Theta nodded.

  “Will a hundred thousand marks suffice?”

  Erik cocked his head.

  “Let’s make it an even hundred million. That still leaves a few trillion or so for charity.”

  Theta tapped a few more keys, and Madric Stoller’s accounts, legal and illegal, evaporated in microseconds. Sorry about your inheritance, Finn, Erik thought. But I have a family to support.

  He’d go back to Earth soon, he thought. He just had to take care of this first. The money would do wonders for the new colony, his children. All the children. That much he could give them, at least, though he knew it would be some time before he could truly become a father. If ever, he thought. They’re better off with Noah.

  “You’re running,” Noah had told him when he left. “The war is over.”

  It wasn’t. Not for Erik. One more guilty party had to pay. After everything Madric Stoller had done, Erik knew it was up to him to be the hand of fate, rebalancing the scale.

  He started walking up the curved glass staircase in the foyer.

  “Erik,” Theta hissed through her translator. “Don’t. The funds are disbursed. We can depart without issue.”

  “You can,” Erik said, looking down at her. “I can’t.”

  He tried to ignore the sadness in her golden eyes.

  Entering the suite’s bedchamber, he gingerly stepped over a naked girl on the floor, lying next to a drying clump of vomit. She was breathing, but unconscious.

  The second girl was nearly enveloped in the folds of Stoller himself. He lay on the bed like some fleshy, cancerous tumor. Mercifully, a robe the size of a tent covered most of him. He’d practically doubled in girth since his last public appearance, gorging himself on every pleasure imaginable, if the disaster of the hotel penthouse was any indication. He snored through his thick mustache, and his gold-rimmed glasses were askew on his face. The girl had tan skin with thick black hair, and Noah counted more than a handful of bruises across her face and chest. A distinctive sunburst tattoo on her collar indicated she wasn’t a mere partygoer, but had at one point been the property of a Solarion trafficking gang.

  Noah drew the heavy pistol from under his long-tail coat. It was practically a relic, rusted and worn, but it still worked. Tannon’s father had carried it to war and back, as had he. Now it would avenge him, along with all the crimes that had been carried out against Lucas, Asha, Alpha, the Earthborn. And her. Especially her.

  She didn’t love you, a voice said in his head. Not like she loved him.

  It doesn’t matter, he told himself, and cocked the gun. Pale red lights came alive on either side of the metal.

  “It’s time,” Erik said out loud. Stoller stirred, and then woke, blinking sleepily through heavy lids. His eyes widened, seeing Erik standing over him, pistol raised. He adjusted his glasses instinctively.

  “Erik?” he said, alarmed. “How did—? Guards!”

  No one came. No one would. Even the girl nestled in his armpit didn’t stir as he bolted upright.

  “What do you want?” Stoller asked, realizing what had likely befallen his security detail.

  “Justice,” Erik said through gritted teeth. The gun was heavy, and it drifted a foot from Stoller’s bloated face.

  “This is a misunderstanding,” Stoller said, instantly on the verge of tears. “Is this about the girl? The clone?”

  That earned him a sharp rap with the butt of the pistol, which broke the bridge of his stubbed nose and snapped his glasses in half.

  “She had a name,” Erik said as Stoller wailed, clutching his bloodied nose.

  “Please, son!” he cried. “The war has ended!”

  “So they keep telling me.”

  “This is a time for peace, forgiveness!”

  Erik glanced at the bruised sex slave next to Stoller, who was still motionless. It didn’t look like the events of the evening had been very peaceful.

  “I am not your son,” he said coldly.

  “You are not,” Madric Stoller said, his tone darkening after seeing the look in Erik’s eyes. “I would never allow a son of mine to carry on with a wretched, soulless, cloned whore!”

  “She had a name,” Erik said flatly.

  The flash of the barrel lit up the room, but the sound still didn’t rouse the unconscious figures sleeping in shadow.

  Theta greeted him with a grim look as he came back down the stairs. But he caught a gleam of triumph in her eyes.

  “Is it done?” she asked, her question answered by the flecks of blood on his clothing. He nodded.

  “Where to now?” he asked, wiping off his face with a discarded shirt hanging off the back of a chair.

  “Anywhere,” Theta said breathlessly, turning pale pink in the darkness. “Earth?” she suggested.

  “Earth can wait,” Erik said, looking out into the night sky over the Elyrian craters. “Zaela says SolSec is trying to take back the station. And I hear the Fourth Order has reformed in the north of Rhylos.”

  “Old enemies,” Theta said.

  “New battles,” Erik s
aid, arms folded, staring at the stars. “And someone needs to fight them.”

  —

  Bali was beautiful.

  The island chain was one of the first to reappear as the oceans slowly filled in after months of targeted torrential downpours on Earth. The terraformers were slowly reshaping the planet, and they’d been assured that the water level would rise no further in this area once called “Indonesia” before the planet’s destruction.

  The new colony had been planted on the top of a burned city, now leveled and cleared away. The palm trees were small, but growing quickly thanks to genetic enhancement, and soon the jungles of the island would be lush again. Someday, perhaps the same could be said of the rest of the planet.

  Noah had healed as well, after spilling a worrying amount of blood in Rhylos before the SDI crushed the last of the Archon’s forces. Noah’s arm had been torn up with shrapnel, but all of it had since been removed and his marred skin regrown. By twist of fate, the injury was also on his burned side, the injury he’d carried with him since his initial escape from Earth as an infant. But now all those scars were finally gone, the area smooth. The new skin still felt stranger than the deformity. He’d borne that mark a long time.

  Noah walked through what had been developed as a town square in their little micro village. Though there were only a few more than thirty of the original Earthborn, there were now nearly three times that many human children there as well, rescued from Colony Two, with a few more born in the year since. Gone were their Soran caretakers, as they were all considered adults now. Here they grew their own food, completed their own chores, and did so using only minimal amounts of machinery. It was a more primal sort of life than they’d been used to, but Noah was relieved to be picking fruit instead of crushing heads with his hammer. The weapon hung over the mantle of his small wooden house, and he hoped he’d never wield it again.

  Not to say there was no conflict. There was still an arena in town where the Earthborn would spar for fun or to settle disputes. With Erik gone, no one had broken any bones to date. Noah had been challenged a few times, but remained resistant to the idea for a long while. Finally, a few weeks ago he allowed Wuhan to pull him into the ring for old time’s sake. An hour later, both were bruised, exhausted, and laughing painfully through aching ribs.