by Ivan Kal
Anessa didn’t know what to make of them, but she had seen old data of their battles. These seemed like an updated design, similar, but with differences. The old ships had not been this fast, so she assumed that they were also better overall.
“Contact our allies, let them know that I want them ready for combat,” Anessa ordered.
The Tar’ferat, the Suvri, and the Afar fleets were all in one big formation, and the Rimward Alliance in another. It made sense for them to split that way; the core powers had more experience with one another the same way that the Rimward Alliance had experience fighting together—or in the Erasi’s case, against one another.
The problem that they had was that their allies were not under Anessa’s command, and she could only offer them suggestions. So far they had been happy to let her take the lead but she knew that as soon as the first shots got fired that could change. Her plan for now was to put some room between their forces and those of the Enlightened. The enemy force’s speed made that hard, but at least she could choose the battle field. Fighting next to a gas giant would’ve been a bad idea. With the numbers the Enlightened had, they would’ve been able to corner the alliance forces against the planet and surround them.
So she chose to fight in the open space. The enemy outnumbered them almost five to one, but Anessa knew that each Titan and Sovereign was individually worth more than a thousand of the Enlightened’s smaller ships, which reduced the advantage to somewhere around two to one. Not as bad of chances as her opponent probably thought.
Adrian was still on the planet, if he was even alive. When she had scanned the enemy force she had detected both him and another Enlightened—Vas, probably. They had decided not to use the Sha state while anywhere close to Vas, but after the new Enlightened’s force arrived, Anessa figured that there was no point in hiding anymore. She just hoped that Adrian was still alive…but she was sure that Iris would’ve informed her if something had happened. She was heading his way, but since the machine fleets and the defensive platforms had yet to move, she didn’t think that he would need much help. For now, she needed to prepare to meet the Enlightened. She opened a private channel to the Titan vessel Dark Waters.
“Yes?” the Lurker of the Depths answered via his telepathic communicator.
“Are you ready?” Anessa asked.
“I need some time to prepare. I do not want to make a mistake,” Lurker of the Depths answered.
“We can have the element of surprise only once, so be very sure when you do it,” Anessa said.
“Of course,” Lurker of the Depths sent.
Anessa closed the comm and turned to her holo. She leaned back and engaged the command interface, which started feeding information directly to her head through the implant. She adjusted the formations on her holo via her imp and then settled in to wait. She was going to run for as long as possible. They would let the Enlightened chase after them—she was not looking forward to this battle, but she would make it hurt. This was the first meeting between the children of Axull Darr and the Enlightened, and Anessa planned on making it a memorable one.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Year 714 of the Empire — the containment zone — control system
Adrian felt Moirai reach down to the planet, her mind meeting his own. In a moment, he felt her as he felt himself, and he knew her power. Without even a need for a thought, she knew what he wanted her to do.
Pinpoint weapons fire came down from orbit exactly on Aranis’s position.
Aranis reacted immediately, his shield spreading above him and protecting him. The beam of energy stopped and Aranis moved, flying away. Adrian followed and weapons fire came from orbit again. Aranis frowned and waved his hand in the air and the beams bent and flew straight for Adrian. Seeing and feeling what Aranis had done, Adrian attempted the same. He pushed his will on the Sha that was transferring the beams and bent it around himself. It tired him a lot, but the beams bent away and scorched the ground. Then the weapons fire stopped as Adrian and Moirai knew that it would now be pointless after Aranis had demonstrated that ability.
“A ship, Adrian, really? Is that the best that you can do?” Aranis sent as they floated in the stratosphere, the Sha filling them both and keeping them alive.
Adrian was feeling it tax his mind, but he could hold on for a while more. “Not a ship,” Adrian sent back as he and Moirai finally integrated their powers enough. At this distance, it was much harder to achieve.
Then Moirai formed and sent a massive kinetic wave from orbit. A wave of force smashed from above, blanketing the area around Aranis. The Enlightened put his arms up and his wings spread wide as he weathered the onslaught of the kinetic strike that crashed on him almost like a waterfall. He kept himself in the air and Adrian used his distraction.
He focused and charged the particles around them, blanketing the area. Aranis turned his head toward Adrian even as he fought against the wave of force, and he noticed what Adrian was doing. Not giving him a chance to do something about it, Adrian triggered his attack by forcing the particles to discharge.
Lightning discharged from every direction of the Enlightened as hundreds of bolts crossed the distance in an instant. Adrian saw them all impact against the Enlightened’s shields. The continuous assault of lightning forced Aranis to react. He moved his arms and the kinetic wave from Moirai sent him flying, the lightning following. Then Aranis’s wings folded around him and a wave of disruption exploded all around him. The lightning and everything else that his disruption wave touched disappeared. Moirai stopped her attack and Aranis swiped his hand after Adrian, sending a ripple of purple energy flying at him.
Adrian flew over it only to be met by another one. He put up a shield and the energy simply passed through, smashing into him and burning all of the clothes over his chest. Adrian screamed as his flesh burned—then Moirai gave him her power, and Adrian flashed a sphere of disruptive energy around himself. He was breathing heavily as he turned to look at his opponent. Aranis hadn’t attacked again, and was instead staying back, watching. Adrian was certain that he was surprised by what Adrian and Moirai had done together. The Enlightened was weary of him now.
Adrian knew that he couldn’t give the Enlightened the time to recover. He focused his mind and prepared. Then, just as Aranis raised his arms for another attack, Adrian and Moirai struck at his mind like a sledgehammer. Moirai couldn’t achieve the Sha state, but she had plenty of energy for using Sha. For Adrian, the Sha state eliminated the need for expending energy—he could do as much as his mind could handle, as much as he knew how to do. But there was something to be said about pure power.
Aranis rocked in the air, and started falling as he was shaken by the attack. They hadn’t tried to break into his mind; Adrian had plenty of experience fighting telepaths in their own heads to know that he did not want to do that against someone who was in the Sha state.
Instead, they had simply shoved as much telepathic power at him as they could gather, battering at his defenses. Keeping such barriers up was a constant drain on one’s will and mind. And, if powerful enough, an attack could even break another’s mind.
As Aranis was falling, Adrian extended his arm and formed a solid containment in front of his palm, then made an opening at the end, making it a tube, and started pulling and compressing as much of the atmosphere as he could. He watched Aranis as he fell through the air, looking for any sign that the Enlightened had recovered. Their attack had been a distraction to allow them to prepare their next attack. And then he noticed Aranis recovering as he caught himself in the air, and Adrian knew that they were out of time. They needed to attack, and sharing the burden with Moirai, he exerted his will on half the atoms of the compressed atmosphere inside the containment and reversed their charges.
Aranis had just recovered enough to turn his eyes up, searching the sky for Adrian.
Before Aranis saw him, however, Adrian triggered his attack. He pushed with all of his will, borrowing power from Moirai, and then he smashed
the two sides of opposing particles together. The resulting antimatter annihilation was a sight to behold. A bright light exploded out of the palm of Adrian’s hand, his containment channeling all the released energy forward. A lance of white light flew toward the Enlightened, sending waves of fire and heat around the beam. Aranis had almost no time to act. Adrian saw Aranis raise a hand and form a shield just moments before the lance struck.
Everything went white, and night turned into day.
Adrian sent his power to his eyes, healing them from the damage, restoring his sight. He blinked several times and looked in the direction of his opponent.
For a moment, Adrian couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Aranis was floating in the air, with half his body missing. A piece of his torso and an entire arm, along with a wing, were gone. And even as Adrian thought that he had killed him, he noticed the flesh of Aranis’s body start to grow from the wound. Adrian couldn’t believe his eyes, but he knew an advantage when he saw one. He called to Moirai to open fire again, but then the air around Aranis contracted with a snap, and he was gone. Adrian scanned the Sha around himself, searching for him. But he felt nothing. The Enlightened had run away.
A part of Adrian wanted to look for him to find him and finish him off, but he could feel the toll of their fight catching up to him. He flew downward, landing on the ground near the shuttle. As soon as his feet hit the ground, he felt the Sha state slip from his grasp, and he felt lightheaded as he stumbled forward. He caught himself on his hands and knees and took several deep breaths.
“Adrian?” a comm from Iris came through his imp.
“I’m…fine,” Adrian responded mentally; he had no strength to speak.
“I’ve been watching, Adrian. You need to get back to Moirai.”
Adrian looked at the shuttle in front of him, and struggled to get back to his feet. “I’m coming, fill me in.”
“Another Enlightened showed up in system with a force of 500,000 ships. Anessa is running in system toward us, but their ships are faster. They will catch up soon.”
Adrian managed to get to his feet and took a step forward. “What about the machine fleets?”
“They are unresponsive. They seem to be ignoring everything.”
Adrian made took another step. He wasn’t really sure why the machine ships would ignore everything, unless Ullax’s last order to the AI, which had isolated it, had something to do with it. Perhaps they couldn’t act without input, although he knew that they had some independent programming. It didn’t matter at the moment, however, so Adrian pushed those thoughts aside as he reached the shuttle and sent a command from his imp to open it.
He stumbled inside and fell on the ground. He felt the shuttle start to move as Iris took control of it and flew it up toward the ship. Adrian closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
Doranis jumped out of his seat as space bent in front of him. Aranis stumbled onto Doranis’s deck and fell toward the floor. Doranis jumped forward, catching Aranis in his upper limbs and looking at his injuries in disbelief. Never had any of them been injured like this.
“What happened?” Doranis asked even as he shared his power with his brother, helping him regenerate the damage faster.
Aranis groaned and his pained eyes looked with Doranis. “I…underestimated him.”
“Who?”
“Adrian…a child of Axull Darr,” Aranis bit out.
“How?” Doranis asked, stunned.
“He can enter the Sha state, and…he had something… I don’t know what it was. The ship in orbit, it isn’t a ship. Be careful—”
“I’ll rip him to pieces right now!”
Aranis grabbed hold of him with his surviving hand. “Don’t! We don’t know what that was, and they have two more people that can enter the Sha state. Don’t let them get close—we don’t know all that they are capable of.”
Doranis wanted to argue, but he was shaken. Seeing his kin so hurt had put his own power in perspective. There was someone out there that could hurt them. He lifted his brother and walked to one of the walls where his cocoon was. It opened as he approached and he put Aranis inside. He saw that most of his brother’s torso had already been regrown, but the arm had just started being regenerated. The cocoon closed around Aranis and Doranis felt him reach out with his mind.
“What is happening in the system?” Aranis asked, his mind clearly weak.
Doranis wanted to tell him to go and hibernate, but he knew that Aranis would refuse. Staying awake would slow his regeneration, but Doranis needed intel that only Aranis could provide. For a moment he almost suggested a mind transfer so that Doranis could learn all that Aranis knew, but his brother was too weak for that now, and Doranis was not going to add to his pain.
“I am in pursuit of the enemy forces. I have fifty command ships at my disposal,” Doranis answered.
“Be wary, their large vessels—Sovereigns and Titans—are fleet killers. Each could easily take on a thousand of our cruiser class vessels.”
Doranis frowned. “They are that powerful?”
“More, Doranis. They have very advanced technology—more than what the People had. They are a great threat. Do not underestimate them.”
“Very well,” Doranis said as he returned to the middle of the room and took a seat.
He immediately connected back to the amplifier and felt Aranis’s mind reach out as well. Doranis allowed him to join in on the connection.
“The machine fleets are not acting?” Aranis asked.
“No. I do not know why.”
“Perhaps because Ullax is dead?”
“It is possible, but I would rather not fight them and the children of Axull Darr. Especially if you say that they are so powerful,” Doranis said.
“They are,” Aranis assured him.
“Then I have less of an advantage than I believed.”
“We can win, but it will be costly. But we need to be on the lookout for their Sha users, they have three who are extremely powerful.”
“How could they have achieved such power?” Doranis asked.
“I am not sure. I believe that they are just that good. They have a few impressive people.”
Doranis felt a touch of something in Aranis’s words. “You admire them.”
“Yes. There are individuals among them who are exceptional.”
“How should we deal with them?”
“Stand back and kill them with ships. I still do not think that they are as powerful as us. What Adrian did against me was something new. He was weaker than me, until he had his ship join in… It felt as if the ship were alive.”
Doranis tilted barred his teeth. “Like our Living-ships?”
“No,” Aranis said. “It was more. They have made contact with a race which was not interfered with by the People, and they have evolved on a different path. Their ships are living beasts. I think that they shared that knowledge and made something new.”
“A race that was not interfered with?” Doranis asked, shocked. They had never thought that they would encounter something like that.
“Yes. It is a shame, really. Out of all the races in the galaxy, they alone deserve to live. Yet because of our mistake, we must kill them, too,” Aranis told him, and a wave of sorrow flashed through.
“The mistake has to be corrected, no matter the price.” Doranis agreed. Yes, a race that had been born because the Universe made it so was the only one with a right to exist, yet what the People had done had doomed them. The Enlightened would bear that price.
“Look there.” Aranis pointed out a development in the enemy forces.
“It seems that they have decided to fight.”
“Yes.”
Doranis entered the Sha stated and took charge of his fleets, spreading his mind through the command ships and then to every single other ship in his force, his mind easily controlling all of them at the same time. The crews of those ships were minimal, and while he could leave them in control, he didn’t
this time. He changed their formations and then, as the enemy entered the range of his long-range weapons, he opened fire.
* * *
Lurker of the Depths floated in the pool inside the sanctum on his Titan, Dark Waters. His crew was in charge of his vessel, holding it back and close to Anessa’s Bastion. Lurker of the Depths, meanwhile, had several access nodes all around him, and his tentacles wrapped around all of them. Unlike most of the Titans, his did not have the same kit. His had fewer weapons, more shields, and a far more powerful amplifier. The entire ship, in fact, served as one massive amplifier, and through it Lurker of the Depths had far greater reach with the Sha. An amplifier did not increase one’s strength, but rather a person’s range. With the Sha state, Lurker of the Depths could sense incredible distances, even across a star system—but that drained a person incredibly quickly. With an amplifier, that was not such a concern.
Lurker of the Depths watched as the Enlighteneds’ forces drew closer, and as Anessa arranged her ships for the coming fight. The three of them had spent a long time discussing and planning how to fight them. Their access to the Sha state made it so that they were the only ones who could match the Enlightened one on one, or at least they had hoped that they could.
Lurker of the Depths had received word from Iris that Adrian had been able to fight the Enlightened Vas, who had turned out to be Aranis, but she had also told him that Adrian had been weaker than the Enlightened until he fought with Moirai. They had expected that, which was why each of them had been training in a different way. Adrian had went the way of his great beast, creating a partner with immense power that could aid him and allow him to bridge a power gap. Anessa had trained in the more physical aspects of the Sha state, but it had also been decided that she would command their forces in space. They needed someone who could resist any attacks in command.
And Lurker of the Depths had focused on what he did best: telepathy. His ship had been constructed to enable him to utilize all of his mind’s potential.
