Primal Darkness

by Ryan Kirk

  “Sir, Hellbringer is pulling away. Both dropships are in pursuit, and they are going to dock in the next few minutes.”

  For the first time, she heard Derreck’s voice. “What are they up to?”

  Absalon responded. “I’m not sure. Your XO decimated half of their attacking force with her damn antics, and although I am going to kill her for using her defense systems inside my ship, I can’t deny it was effective. The other half is making their way through the ship, but they are taking heavy casualties, and Hellbringer looks like she’s abandoning them.”

  “There’s no way they would just retreat. Not after sending a force like that after us.”

  “I agree. That’s why I’m concerned.”

  There was relative silence for a few moments before Absalon continued. “Spool up the jump drive. I want all non-essential personnel to go under, now. How long until the assault force breaches the bridge?”

  Another voice called out. “At current rate of advance, maybe about ten minutes.”

  From the tilted helmet perspective, Kindra could see Absalon looking at Derreck. “You’ve jumped once without drugs, right?”

  Kindra didn’t hear Derreck respond, but she assumed he was nodding. Her ears perked up. She had always heard rumors that he had done it once, but it was something he refused to speak of. “If I jump this ship, will the assault force be able to reach us before we wake back up?”

  Derreck’s voice was soft. “It took me days to come back to myself. If they don’t kill themselves first, we’ll be able to clean up easily.”

  “Good. We’ll pull the same trick on them they tried to pull on us. Who do we still have out there?”

  In the corner of her viewscreens, Kindra saw the order come through her own terminal to prepare for jump. It was a strange experience, to be present, albeit virtually, as the orders were given, and then see them come through her screen.

  Her attention was drawn back to the report Absalon was getting, “... only unit left is Derreck’s guarding the bridge. All others have been eliminated. We are getting readings that indicate a battle is still in progress on deck four, where the first assault force came up against Aki. There’s only one suit that’s still mobile, but we can’t communicate with it. It’s registering as the alien’s though.”

  Kindra almost fell into her viewscreen. Tev was still alive, fighting the assault all on his own. But they were going to jump, and he didn’t have any way of knowing. She wanted to scream, but no one would hear her.

  Another voice called out on the bridge. “Sir! Torpedo tubes are opening on Hellbringer. I’m reading four nuclear signatures, sir!”

  Kindra didn’t think her stomach could drop any further. No one fired on a jumper. If it happened, the offender would be pursued by everyone in the galaxy. There wouldn’t be any safe harbor. Nick had seemed like a reasonable man, and she couldn’t understand why he would go to such ends to make sure they didn’t get to Tev’s planet first.

  Absalon’s voice was cold, a side of him Kindra had never seen before. She knew he was a war hero, but she had never seen this. “How long until estimated impact?”

  “Assuming typical launch sequence, four and a half minutes, sir.”

  “Set jump timer for three minutes, ensign. Make sure everyone knows that’s all the time they have. Everyone’s going under.”

  Kindra could see the timer start in the corner of her own viewscreen, but she was focused on the drama happening on the bridge. Derreck and Absalon were standing chest to chest, and from Kindra’s perspective, all she could see from Derreck’s helmet camera was the sleeve of Absalon’s uniform.

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  “And I wish there was another way, but if we don’t jump, this entire ship dies. Come on, Derreck, you know this is the only way.”

  Derreck swore, but he took a step back. Kindra was able to see more of Absalon, and she could see the emotion barely contained on his face. The two men didn’t say anything else, and for a whole thirty seconds, they stared at each other. Kindra watched the countdown clock nervously. She’d need at least a minute to get from her seat to under sedation, but Derreck would need more. There wasn’t any way he could warn Tev though. There wasn’t any way any of them could.

  “Torpedoes launched, sir. Four nuclear signatures.”

  Kindra couldn’t believe it. They were under nuclear attack.

  “Get under, Derreck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Derreck turned and started running. Underneath her the gravity shifted as the Destiny started a hard burn away from the torpedoes, trying to give themselves as much time as possible. The last words Kindra heard from the bridge were a question from captain Absalon. “Are they going to be in our jump field?”

  She didn’t hear the answer as Derreck tore out of the bridge to the nearest bunks.

  Kindra looked at the clock. There was only a minute and a half until jump. She needed to get going, too. Eleta had already followed the orders.

  Her mind raced. There had to be some way of warning Tev, but her mind was frozen in place, focused only on the numbers counting down in front of her. She swore, feeling a sudden cowardice. She stood up and sprinted towards her bunk. As she ran, some part of her mind was trying to think of how to save Tev, but nothing came. She could only save herself.

  As she lay down in her bunk, Kindra hated herself. She felt the needle penetrate her skin, and she took one last look at the clock. Fifteen seconds until jump. The drugs took an average of five seconds to flood the system under emergency dosages. She had made it, but Tev wouldn’t.

  Kindra raged against life as her world went black.

  Tev was just about to sprint back out into the hallway when blue lights flashed in the halls. The event halted his motion. Blue lights meant that the ship was about to jump, but that couldn’t be right. Why would the ship jump when it was under attack? If everyone was so scared of it, they’d want to wait until they were safe in their bunks, wouldn’t they?

  Tev didn’t have time to worry. The lights only flashed a few minutes before the jump, so he knew there wasn’t anything left to do. Whatever everyone was scared of, he would face it, and he’d face it with the courage of a hunter.

  When the Destiny jumped, Tev didn’t feel any physical sensations. But it felt as though his mind and spirit were torn out of his body, thrust onto their own journey. He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing to vomit, no food to regurgitate. He didn’t understand what was happening. It was the worst feeling, but a part of his mind recognized that it was only a feeling, not rooted in any physical experience.

  Time ceased to have any meaning for him, but a small voice, something in the back of his soul, screamed at him. It felt as though he was digging, digging to find a truth hiding beneath the surface. When he pulled the voice out of the dirt, its message was as confusing as everything else that was happening to him.

  You’ve been here before.

  Tev didn’t understand. He was in a space that couldn’t be understood. But then his perspective shifted, as though he had turned just a fraction of a centimeter to the right, and suddenly, something resembling order came to his disjointed thoughts.

  He was standing on top of a high place. Perhaps it was the highest place. It certainly felt higher than any mountain he had ever climbed on his own. A cold breeze cut through his body, slicing through his skin as though it was nonexistent.

  A memory of a dream shot through Tev’s consciousness. A flash of recognition. He had been here before. He turned, and the woman was there, just as she had been the last time. Lys, goddess of the hunt.

  Her lips didn’t move, but Tev was assaulted by sounds, indistinguishable. He saw a ship moving through space and found that he had the language to describe what was happening. It was the Destiny, floating in space, and suddenly, it seemed like it was the most important thing that had ever happened, the most important ship in the history of humanity. Tev shook his head against the onslaught of emotion. It was just a s
hip, but it wasn’t. It was the piece on which the future of all people rested.

  Tev forced out words, an almost physical effort. “I don’t understand.”

  Lys’ lips didn’t move, but her voice rang through Tev’s mind, crystalline in its clarity.

  “You do.”

  Tev looked down and saw a planet underneath him. It was familiar, something else he had once seen. Was it the planet he had come from? He had only seen it the once, when he had flown away from it with Kindra.

  The planet fell away from him, and again Tev fought the battle between the physical and the imaginary. His mind screamed that he should be feeling vertigo, but there was no sense of movement, nothing at all.

  It wasn’t something he saw, so much as it was something he felt. As the distance increased and Tev could see more and more stars, he understood. The clans were spreading. They were hopping from star system to star system, no longer limited to their home planet.

  When he thought of a home planet, his stomach twisted, as though it was wrong. Deeply wrong.

  He was back on the mountaintop, and Lys stood by him, beautiful and deadly. With just a glance, Tev knew that her bow was stronger than his, that she never tired of the chase. She was the perfect hunter, the best that had ever lived.

  “What do I do?”

  She turned to him and smiled, a smile that pierced him and brought him to his knees. No woman would ever match Lys’ beauty or attraction. All others were just pale reflections of true beauty, and Tev’s heart broke at the sight.

  Lys leaned over him, and Tev was intoxicated by every part of her. She exhaled softly, and her breath smelled like a spring morning in the woods. Her lips moved, and this time, it was more personal, more meaningful than anything he had ever encountered before. It was as though she was actually there. He could feel her breath, hear her words in his ears, not in his mind.

  “Hunt. Farther than you ever have. Better than you ever thought possible. Hunt.”

  Echoes of the past crashed against his mind. It was similar advice to that he had gotten last time.

  Lys stood up, and her sudden absence nearly destroyed Tev. He couldn’t stand to be more than a few centimeters away from her. It was cold, as cold as death.

  Tev’s world shifted again, and he felt as though he had been slammed back into his body. He looked around, the effort causing him to almost scream in agony. He was back in the hallway of the Destiny.

  Reality was difficult to return to. For the first few seconds, it hurt to move any part of his body. It was a difficult feeling to describe. After most jumps with drugs, it felt as though you were reconnecting with your body, where everything was just a moment or two behind your command for it to move. This was like that, but worse. He would command his arm to move, and it seemed like it took a minute or two to move. Inside the suit, it was even worse.

  Tev didn’t know how long he took to struggle back to his feet. In so many ways, everything was the same, but Tev felt that he was a very different person than the one who had been present before the jump. He didn’t have the words to describe it.

  He heard a rifle go off in the hallway adjacent to him, dragging him back into the present moment. Tev peeked around the corner. He counted eight suits moving. Six of them were normal, and two were heavy. One suit fired at another, and then there were only seven. Tev waited, but although they were moving, they didn’t fire anymore. They might not have the mental ability to do so.

  Tev was driven by something stronger than him, something larger. He moved quickly, his motions as smooth as they had ever been before. He turned the corner and locked on to one of the mostly immobile suits and pulled the trigger. The suit stopped moving. Tev kept moving, mentally pulling the trigger every time his reticle passed over one of the moving suits. He climbed up on one of the heavies and shot a round point-blank through the driver’s compartment.

  Behind him, Tev heard movement. The last remaining heavy was moving. It staggered as though it were drunk, but some part of the pilot had recognized a threat and moved to deal with it.

  Tev was moving even before his brain recognized the danger. It was a good thing, as a row of large shells ripped up the heavy he was standing on. Tev got out of the way just before the shells cut his suit into ribbons.

  Tev’s mind raced, a liquid calm settling over him. He’d never experienced anything like it, a calm deeper than any he had known. He tried to bring his left arm up, but the pilot had seen what Tev had done. He rotated his torso, so that Tev didn’t have a line-of-sight on the cockpit. Tev held his fire. If he couldn’t break through, there was no point in firing. He wrenched his right arm up and over and pulled the trigger, just to keep the other pilot aware of his presence. The shells tore up armor but did no real damage to the heavy suit.

  He wouldn’t win this way. More shells tore through the space around him, another one striking his right arm. The shell tore through his armor and injured arm, rendering it entirely useless. The pain was incredible, and Tev almost lost control of his suit. It also meant he had lost his best weapon for close range.

  Tev debated running for cover, but he knew he would never make it. The shells continued to chase him as he circled the heavy in the hallway, and if the heavy had even a second to catch up to him, Tev wouldn’t make it. His only chance was in his greater mobility.

  Tev launched himself at a wall, kicking off it with a force that caved it in. He redirected his speed quickly, allowing himself to fall to the ground and slide to the opposite wall. As soon as he wedged his foot into the corner, he launched himself up and over the heavy, which was still trying to turn fast enough to track him. The heavy tried turning back again quickly, but Tev could tell the pilot was disoriented.

  Tev came up right in front of the cockpit, placing his hand against the shell. The pilot of the heavy paused, knowing in his last moment that there was nothing he could do in time to stop what was about to happen.

  Tev pulled the trigger, and the hallway went silent.

  The silence was eerie. Like everyone else, he had never been on a ship so soon after a jump. To the best of his knowledge, he was the only one alive and awake on the ship. He wandered the hallways, lost in thought and shock.

  The men he had just fought against didn’t have a chance. The pilot of the heavy, maybe, but he had taken life that didn’t pose an immediate threat to him. He had never done that before, and he found that it didn’t bother him. That in itself bothered him most of all.

  He didn’t understand the vision he had seen. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. There was no telling if it was even real of not. He was lost.

  His arm hurt, fires of agony shooting through his body every time he moved. Finally, he stopped. There wasn’t any place for him to be. He sat down in a random hallway, one that looked to his sight the same as any other. He didn’t plan to, but he fell asleep quickly, exhaustion and blood loss finally overcoming his will.

  When he woke up, it was to the helmet being pulled off his head. He startled, but he saw Kindra’s face in front of his, and he immediately settled down.

  Their eyes met, and Tev knew that something had changed for Kindra. For the entire journey, she had been torn in two about her decisions. But now her eyes were clear. She had made a decision and had figured out how to live with it.

  Tev didn’t have words, his mind, body, and spirit spent beyond endurance. Kindra’s hand lifted up his head and his gaze, and she spoke calmly.

  “Don’t worry, Tev. I’ll take care of you.”

  Tev smiled and gave in to exhaustion.

  They were all, including Tev, bandaged and broken, gathered in the Vigilance, one jump away from Tev’s home planet. If all went according to plan, Destiny would jump in about eight hours, and shortly thereafter Vigilance would pull out of its berth and take Tev back to the home he had left long ago.

  This time they were gathered because Kindra had called them together. Ever since their final battle with the Hellbringer, Kindra had been thinking abo
ut one problem, and one problem only. How could they save Tev’s people?

  She thought she had a solution, but it would require the cooperation of everyone. At some point in the future, it might even require mutiny. Kindra was willing to pay the cost, and she thought the others would as well, but she had to know.

  Alston, as she would have predicted, was the first to speak up. “So, why are we here today? What vague sedition do we have planned this week?”

  Kindra heard the loving sarcasm in his voice and was surprised. She still didn’t know what drove their geologist, but it was clear he was just as invested as any of them.

  Kindra’s response was given in kind. “You’ll be happy to know, Alston, that this time I called us together, and I have a very specific sedition in mind.”

  Alston raised an eyebrow in interest, and Kindra continued.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do for Tev and his people. Eleta has finished decrypting the colonization plans, and they are a good news-bad news situation. Fleet is certainly considering colonization, but any action is years away. But I think all of us understand that no matter what happens, Tev’s people are in an unfortunate situation. They are sitting on one of the most habitable planets we’ve ever found in the galaxy, and they don’t have the ability to defend it. No matter how benevolent Fleet is, the temptation is too strong.

  “Believe it or not, I think the best solution is to let Fleet’s plan go ahead.”

  There were several intakes of breath around the table, but Kindra charged ahead. She had suffered countless sleepless nights considering the problem, and she was certain her idea, while certainly not ideal, was the best way forward.

  “Look, there is a historical precedent here. A very long time ago, back on old Earth, countries on the continent of Europe explored and conquered much of the globe. One of the reasons they were able to do so easily was because they had better technology than most of the rest of the world.