by Paul Tassi
“We shared many common interests and goals, yes. Physically, we would have made a better pairing, as well, than our assigned matches. Light coloring is a good indicator of fertility and quality genetics in females. And I have never seen anyone with a coat as pure as hers.”
“So you thought she was cute.”
“You have a way of simplifying things to the point of annoyance.”
The hangar doors were starting to open.
“Well, you know,” Lucas said. “Her treason has probably freed her from her obligations as well.”
The thought struck Alpha like a silent thunderbolt, but after pausing briefly, he resumed his duties at the controls.
“Just something to think about on the way,” Lucas said with a masked smile.
“You may want to find a seat,” Alpha said, motioning toward one of the two smaller chairs that were on either side of him. Lucas saw that Maston had occupied one already. It was comically oversized for his frame, meant for an eight-foot-tall Xalan. Lucas walked toward the rightmost chair.
“He’s not authorized to—” Maston began. Alpha held up his metal claw to silence him.
“I require his presence on deck. Secure your restraints and cease verbal communication.”
Alpha answered to no one here. It was his ship, whether Maston liked it not. Realizing that reality, he did as instructed with a scowl.
Vibrations.
Tunnel.
Daylight.
Elyria.
Blue sky.
Black sky.
Stars.
Planets.
System’s edge.
The blue-green haze of a space-time wormhole.
No matter how many times Lucas made this kind of journey, it would never fail to take his breath away.
9
Lucas stared down at the pile of vomit he’d just created on the floor of the poorly lit storage room. He heaved again, but found himself choking and coughing this time instead of evacuating.
Maston wasn’t joking when he said the Guardians were perfect physical specimens, and trying to live up to their level of strength and vitality seemed like it might kill Lucas before they even reached their destination. The ten pounds he’d gained sampling all of Sora’s finest delicacies before shipping out certainly hadn’t helped matters, but in the past few weeks he’d lost all that and then some.
His body had endured hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and pain out in the wilds of a ruined Earth, but what they were putting him through almost made him miss the wastelands.
“Again,” said the instructor in front of him, a dark, towering man roughly the size of a Volvo. Today was Fight Day. It was exactly what it sounded like.
“Just give me a—”
His plea was interrupted by a seismic slam to the face that propelled him back against the wall of the fiber cage.
It was like this every Fight Day. Lucas was thrust into a makeshift pen and got his ass kicked by Guardian after Guardian. He’d fought Axon, the man in front of him, a few times now, and it had always gone something like this.
Another lightning jab, this one to his twice-broken ribs. Pain at this point was becoming as commonplace as breathing, which was one of the purposes of the exercise, he was told. They’d patch him up with tech that allowed him to heal at ten times the rate of any medical supplies on Earth, but all it would do would be to get him healthy enough to be destroyed again.
Though his trainers consisted of both male and female Guardians, he was kept separated from Asha for practically all hours of the day. The reason given was that they couldn’t become reliant on each other; they first had to draw only on themselves in order to learn to become a solid member of an ironclad team like the Guardians.
“Get your goddamn guard back up!” Axon bellowed at him.
Lucas raised his forearms just in time to deflect a tree-sized arm flung toward him, but couldn’t react in time to catch the surprise follow-up knee to his kidney.
There were also Survival Days, something Lucas thought he should excel at due to his past few years on Earth. But they were more daunting than he anticipated. During one he was forced to tread water in an unfiltered tank for hours until he lost consciousness. After he did so, he found a Guardian dragging him out of the drink and expelling the water from his system with a hearty slap on the chest. They’d test his mind by locking him in a storage crate for what felt like eons, alone with only his thoughts and without the ability to move, see, or hear.
Lucas’s favorite were Marksman Days, as they were the only ones without physical abuse. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. Using a variety of energy weapons, including Natalie, which he had been approved to equip, he shot at jury-rigged moving targets in the galley for hours. Each miss was noted and various punishments would be added on to Fight or Survival Days. Another few hours in the box. Another opponent in the ring.
Today there was only Axon, but that was enough. He might as well have been two people.
Lucas sidestepped an uppercut that would have likely taken his head off. He countered with a high spin-kick that caught Axon on the cheek. When that didn’t faze him, he looped around and tried for another strike at the back of his right knee. This time, Axon caught his leg and jabbed his elbow into Lucas’s thigh. He was far too hoarse to cry out, but below the impact point, he could no longer feel a thing as his overloaded nerves simply shut down.
There was almost never a time of the day where Lucas wasn’t in agony. The line between training and torture was a fine one, but Lucas was determined not to show weakness by complaining to Maston. He would survive. He would become one of the monsters if it killed him.
And it might.
Axon raised both his fists clasped in an axe handle and attempted to smash Lucas’s head down through his neck. He rolled out of the way and hit Axon with a hard cross that actually made him stagger. Using the rarely seen opening, Lucas lunged off his good leg and flung him toward the cage’s cables. Axon staggered backward for a moment, but suddenly planted his foot firmly in the ground. He stopped moving, Lucas didn’t. He flew up and over the man’s shoulders and came crashing down on the outside of the ring. He landed with a crack on the metal floor. He resisted the urge to puke again.
“Enough for today,” Axon said. “Get him wrapped up.”
A familiar tuft of red hair bobbed its way around the side of the cage. A familiar frown followed it. Kiati was assigned to keeping Lucas alive through this, and he’d discovered she was actually a practicing silvercoat in addition to her regular duties of death and destruction. Silo had been assigned to Asha’s training squad, as Maston had deemed him too “friendly” with Lucas based on their past interactions. Kiati had no such conflict of interest.
“Hold still,” she said as she jerked his arm toward her. She sealed a gash with a hot liquid that solidified within seconds. Hiking up his shirt without permission, she sprayed him with a stinging mist that would reduce his abdominal bruising significantly by the time he hit cryo that night. Sleep. It was the only thought driving him most days. He got twelve hours in his frosty cryochamber each night, with the twenty-five that followed spent almost entirely in hellish training.
More liquid was poured over his tattered knuckles, which had gotten the worst of their limited interaction with Axon’s face. Kiati shone a piercing blue light into his eyes that somehow alleviated the nearly constant headaches he suffered on account of repeated blows to his skull. The feeling was starting to flood back into his dead leg now, but it felt like a thousand fire ants were attempting to burrow their way into his bone marrow.
Kiati always went through these motions as quickly as she was able, and she hadn’t warmed to him any in the past few weeks. During their little recovery sessions like these, he’d been able to extract exactly three pieces of information from her: her birthplace (Gahren, off the Shining Coast), her length of service (twelve years so far), and the cost of her “kit,” i.e., the pool of custom-tailored genes used to create nearly all Guardian
s. She rang in at a cool 42.8 billion marks, as the intelligence required for master medical training cost extra. All of that was spent on utility, with little going to inconsequential things like cosmetic appearance. Her severe features and pale skin reminded Lucas of the intimidating statues that stood guarding the Grand Palace promenade back home. She wasn’t unattractive, but was certainly no Asha or Corinthia Vale. If she could ever hear these sorts of thoughts, she would likely beat him so badly even she wouldn’t be able to put him back together again.
“Done,” she said flatly as she finished wrapping a numbing bandage around his forearm.
“Hey,” Lucas said as she turned to leave, curious to get at least one more piece of information out of her, “how long have you known Silo?”
She stopped and considered whether to answer or keep walking. She usually chose the latter whenever he asked her anything.
“We were in the same graduating class at the academy. We ran the Cell together.”
The Cell was the place where Guardians were normally trained on an off-world moon, and pieces of the program had been replicated on the Spear, which was what Lucas was currently enduring.
“Was it this bad? Honestly?”
She scoffed.
“Worse. Gravity is 1.1 there. Imagine doing everything you’ve done here with twenty pounds of allium attached to each of your limbs.”
Lucas wasn’t sure what allium was, but he got the point. Just when he thought Kiati was being unusually chatty, she was already walking out of the room.
He struggled to bring himself to his feet. The treatments wouldn’t really start to subdue his pain for another hour or two.
With all the battles he’d won over the past few months and years, it had been easy to feel almost invincible. Like there wasn’t anything he couldn’t beat with enough firepower, luck, or skill.
He didn’t feel that way anymore. Despite being treated like a god on Sora, he had now been thoroughly reminded of how mortal he truly was.
After comparing bruises and war stories of the day with Asha over dinner, which consisted of an amorphous, protein-rich goo said to help muscle regeneration, Lucas searched the ship for a quiet place to do his homework in the precious two hours he had before cryosleep. The after-hours work assigned to him was mostly technical, like how to hack a virtual lock or understand the various readouts on his power armor.
He’d been exploring the ship a lot recently, and was interested to see which sections had been stripped and retrofitted for Sorans and which had been left in their original Xalan state. The craft was far larger than the Ark. That ship, though a trusty steed, had been a junk heap of a transport, while this was one of the finest weapons in the Xalan arsenal. The difference in quality from materials to design was very noticeable, and when he could, he talked to Alpha, who loved to explain all the detail that had been packed into the ship at the hands of his father. Lucas didn’t understand half of it most times, but it was clear he was residing in the pinnacle of Xalan ingenuity. It was shockingly advanced for a race barely ten thousand years old.
The room Lucas stood in front of today was on the highest level of the ship, and the holocontrols informed him that it was restricted. Every inch of the ship had been searched by the Sorans, so the lock was crafted by them, rather than being of Xalan origin. Lucas got an early start on his homework by cracking it in a matter of minutes using a circuit overload technique and soon found the metal barricade sliding open in front of him.
Like many of the areas of the ship, the room was all but empty. Everything from foreign technology to harmless decoration had been stripped away and was likely currently housed in either a museum or a laboratory, much like what had happened with their own ship after they arrived. The only objects that remained here were a large metal desk fused to the ground and an attached chair, a wall-mounted Xalan sleeping pod, and a mural that could not be removed, as it was carved into the surface of the far wall.
Lucas knew where he was.
The figure depicted in the image was unmistakable. It was Commander Omicron, clad in his slim armor, one arm raised to the heavens, the other clutching what appeared to be a dead Soran. Beams of light, or some other energy, were being emitted from his triumphant form, and Lucas could translate the inscription above it.
HONOR. COURAGE. POWER.
Quite the egoist, Lucas thought to himself as he ran his fingers over the grooves of the mural, which he could now feel was carved an inch deep into the surrounding metal. He supposed Omicron wanted a permanent mark on his flagship, and what better place to put it than in his private quarters?
Lucas kept tracing the curves when he felt one of the standalone pieces near Omicron’s kneecap click. It was a subtle, momentary feeling, but pressing his face to the wall, he could see that the piece was just slightly more indented into the surface now. He tried to push it in further and pull it back out to no avail. But it had moved, he was sure of it.
He started scanning the mural for more individual pieces that might also move. There were a large number, as the picture was an exceptionally detailed carving. Some were a few inches thick, others merely millimeters.
It took him a half hour to find the next one, buried in a cluster near the dead Soran’s shoulder. Twenty minutes after that, he found another in the gravel beneath Omicron’s feet, and again, a familiar click could be felt. Eventually, he had to grab a nearby storage cube to stand on to reach the top of the mural. There was one in a particle of an energy ray, another nestled in the creature’s breastplate. Lucas found a final switch in the seemingly obvious location of Omicron’s eye. He pressed it, and heard five other simultaneous clicks. Looking around, he could see that every switch had reset.
Shit.
Every piece he’d found had popped back out, and he’d almost lost track of where one or two had been. He stopped to think.
There must be an order to them.
Six switches. Six ways he could press all of them. He brought up his wrist readout and quickly calculated that there were hundreds of possible combinations. It was strange to see a manual lock in a world where almost everything was secured electronically, but he supposed in many ways this was far more secure. And what the hell was it guarding? Surely the sweeper team had missed this when they stripped the ship. Lucas ignored the pain of the day’s training wracking his body and set to work.
Gravel. Knee. Breastplate. Eye. Particle. Shoulder.
Click click.
Gravel. Knee. Breastplate. Eye. Shoulder. Particle.
Click click.
Gravel. Knee. Breastplate. Shoulder. Eye. Particle.
Click click.
Each time Lucas recorded the sequence on a scroll so he wouldn’t repeat it. What was apparent was that this was going to take a very long time.
Lucas eventually stopped looking at his wrist; he didn’t even want to know what time it was anymore. He was dreading dealing with a Survival Day on nonexistent sleep, but he’d become obsessed with the puzzle before him.
Particle. Eye. Knee. Gravel. Shoulder. Breastplate.
Click click.
Particle. Eye. Knee. Gravel. Breastplate. Shoulder.
Click click.
According the scroll, this was attempt number 435. He had gotten the movement down to a science over the past few hours, hopping up and down the storage crate to monkey around to the various areas on the massive mural. It had become both a mental and physical workout, and the constant pumping of his heart was expelling blood from a few of his wounds from earlier in the day.
And then—
Particle. Knee. Breastplate. Shoulder. Gravel. Eye.
Click. KA-CHUNG.
Lucas almost fell backward off the crate as the entire wall sank backward a solid few inches. Every piece he’d pressed remained fixed in place. This was it.
He stepped down and put his fingers in the grooves of Omicron’s leg armor. He pulled hard to the left and the metal plating groaned as it slowly shifted sideways.
Before
him was a series of glass cubes that protruded from a metal wall a foot or two behind where the mural had been. It wasn’t a vault, but appeared to be a display case of sorts. Each glass box had an object floating inside it and a Xalan number above it. Underneath “1” was an ornately painted gold-and-black musket pistol unlike any Lucas had seen in Earth’s history books. “2” was a sharpened stone axe held together by fine leather strips with long red feathers dangling off the grip. “3” was a curved hand scythe with what appeared to be a solid diamond blade, while “4” was the broken head of a ridged bronze spear. “5” was an obsidian ceremonial knife with a human skull as the pommel. “6” sat vacant. Lucas tapped on the boxes, but if there was a way to open them, he couldn’t see it. The weapons looked permanently encased inside.
After a minute of delirium due to a lack of sleep despite utter exhaustion, he suddenly understood what was before him.
Trophies.
The five items had to be from the colony worlds Xala had conquered and occupied over the years. Judging by the fine design of each piece, a great warrior had likely wielded each of them at one point, defending their planet from the Xalan horde. Either Omicron had taken these personally, or he’d collected them. Surely he wasn’t old enough to have traveled to each planet himself.
Earth’s “6” box sat empty, but Lucas had a feeling that, had the fight aboard this ship gone differently, it would have been Natalie encased in the clear material before him. Three more numbered boxes sat underneath the first six. Never hurts to plan for the future, I guess.
Below them all, near his waist, was one more fixture on the wall. It was a single small pane of transparent glass propped up on a pair of small hooks. Lucas took the object into his hands and turned it over. It was completely blank and somehow felt smoother than glass. Soft, almost, yet simultaneously solid. After sliding his fingers across it with no response, Lucas attempted to put it into his pocket. The lack of sleep was now affecting him deeply in the ghostly hours of the night, and it slipped across his pants and clattered to the floor. After a second of his stomach being flipped upside down, it was apparent that the object hadn’t cracked or even suffered a scratch, despite being exceptionally thin. Lucas breathed a sigh of relief. He turned to the display case and pulled the metal mural over it, leaving the trophies to sit idly in the darkness, trillions of miles away from their vanquished owners.
