by Paul Tassi
Lucas nodded.
“Yeah, I was with him. I … did it, actually.”
“You did what?”
Lucas sighed.
“When I reached him, the bastard had taken out a full Xalan recon squad with a wooden spear. But they messed him up bad. Paralyzed. I couldn’t move him, couldn’t let him be captured alive. I … I killed him.”
Lucas fought back against the lump rising in his throat. He wanted to avoid giving Maston yet another reason to deem him weak.
Maston simply stared at the fire.
“You understand the lesson then. Why sometimes we must be willing to kill even those who … do not deserve the fate.”
Lucas shook his head.
“It wasn’t like on the ship.”
“Perhaps not, but both triggers took strength to pull. At least you managed to get it right the second time.”
“What do you know about that kind of sacrifice? I can’t imagine there’s a person alive you wouldn’t kill in a second if you had to.”
Maston’s eyes flashed with anger.
“Why do you persist to presume to know me?” he spat back at Lucas. “You kill one friend and believe yourself worthy of pity? I have done things that do not just eat at my soul, but feel like they have erased it entirely.”
“What have you done?” Lucas pressed.
“You want to know?” Maston snarled in the firelight. “You want to know what happened at Vitalla?”
Maston spoke. Lucas listened.
14
“Rhylos had it rough from the beginning. Fifty thousand years ago, before anyone invented so much as a light switch, they constantly found their land pillaged by their neighbors who were after its abundant resources. They were once a peaceful people, but were forged into warriors over time. Much of it was against their will, of course, their populace ravaged by conquering armies, but they grew stronger with each new generation.
“They held fast to their faith. They always maintained that Kyneth and Zurana had revealed the Tomes of the Forest directly to their ancestors. They believed the pair kept them safe from harm, but after enduring so much, it’s hard to believe that idea persisted. Again they were razed during the Sacred Wars and had to build themselves up from nothing. They were largely spared during the machine uprising, but suffered huge losses in the next war when the first-gen Xalans took up arms. Years after that, they were hammered by the first of the homeworld strikes in the Great War. And, to top it all off, a massive earthquake shook the life out of them barely a century ago. Heartache was simply a way of life even as the rest of the world thrived around them.
“When we discovered Vitalla nearly a century ago, it was our first reason to celebrate in a long time while the Great War droned on. It was a planet far more hospitable to life than any we’d discovered to date. Sure, we’d built bases on moons and extra-solar planets, but they were always domed colonies surrounding by inhospitable landscapes. Vitalla was different.
“It wasn’t filled with lush greenery, but it was rich with rare minerals and had enough surface water to sustain life. The weather was too severe to allow for anything larger than microbes to exist. But with some modifications, we believed we could artificially raise the temperature enough for a colony to thrive.
“Once we started talking about a settlement, a spark was ignited inside Corinthia. Her sole mission in life became to ensure the colony went to Rhylos. She’d been doing aid work on the continent practically her entire life, and she pleaded with her grandfather Varrus to allow the Rhylosi to be the ones transplanted there.
“It was a hard argument to dismiss. Rhylos was now little more than a wasteland, its people only surviving on the charity of other nations. They were a resource drain on the entire planet, and the idea was that on Vitalla they could be put to work farming and mining resources to be shipped back to Sora for the war effort. Hex Tulwar, then Grand Cleric of Rhylos, happily agreed to the bargain with Varrus, and Cora’s idea, much to her delight, was approved. Though she was young, she threw herself into the project, spending almost every waking hour planning the details of the voyage and eventual colony.
“The discovery revealed further good news: Vitalla was in the opposite direction in the galaxy from Xala. It was unlikely they could even reach it. But regardless, the exact coordinates of the planet were trusted only to a select few. Even Cora and myself didn’t know precisely where it was. In spite of all of this, a military escort would be required to ensure the millions reached the destination safely. The escort would be made up of a large portion of our forces, but at that point our homeworld defenses were strong enough to hold off a direct Xalan assault, at least temporarily. We’d spend a year going there and a year back, leaving behind what personnel we could spare to guard the colony.
“I’d just been promoted to Varrus Vale’s right hand. He wanted to personally be a part of the mission, and said it would be ‘unifying’ for the planet to see him go and ensure the future prosperity of the least fortunate of our people. His advisers protested the decision, but he always was quite the stubborn old fool. We boarded his flagship, the SDI Nova, and began the journey alongside the largest migrant fleet ever assembled.
“Much can happen in a year, and much did. I’d grown up with Cora, as our families had been close for generations, though our interactions had usually been at a distance. I’d always viewed her as something of an entitled prat, and the rumors of her genetic price tag in the trillions certainly didn’t help that perception. But to see her so passionately involved in the plight of Rhylos, and trying to ensure a future for its citizens, erased any previous notions I had of her. There was a great deal of good inside her. Far more than there was in me.
“For as long as I’d known her she’d been linked to the rich and handsome of Sora’s elite. A baron here, a duke there, all arranged by her mother, all of which bored her to tears, she later told me. This trip was the most exciting thing her family had ever allowed her to do, and fortunately for me, there wasn’t a duke or prince in sight.
“I don’t know what Corinthia saw in me, but I didn’t care. Every eye on a ship full of thousands was on her whenever she passed, and somehow, some way, she’d chosen me. I’d been with my fair share of Sora’s most beautiful, but Cora was in a class all her own. At times she barely even seemed Soran, like some sort of celestial being that had graced us with her presence.
“We made plans, big plans. After Vitalla had been settled, we’d return to Sora and buy a home in Landrift Valley in the Sorvo Republic. She’d help another impoverished people, and I’d be with her whenever I wasn’t out on assignment with the SDI. I imagined if it was anything close to what that year had been like, I could live the rest of my days as the most fortunate man alive.
“We finally reached Vitalla, in all its gray and brown glory. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Rhylos had, and it could be fixed up into something that wasn’t half bad at all. Advance construction crews had flown out years earlier to set up the framework for the colony. Cities were already built, waiting to be populated. Mining tunnels were dug and the equipment was all laid out to ensure the new Rhylosi economy could be up and running right away. The images we were sent from the advance team made it look like a rather fantastic place.
“I never got to see it. I was stuck a few thousand miles out in orbit aboard the Nova to keep an eye on things while Varrus took a shuttle down the surface. The christening ceremony was the whole reason he’d come, an attempt to look like some benevolent ruler by providing the poorest among us their very own planet. Cora wasn’t with him; she stayed on the Nova with me. Despite all her work on the project, she wasn’t there for the glory. She’d given the send-off address and was content to let Varrus have his moment, not to mention her mother absolutely forbade her from stepping foot on the rock. There was real work to be done after all, and she was busy mapping out the daunting process of getting the population settled in the colony over the next few weeks before we returned home.
“They waited
until the moment they knew all of us would be watching. Right as Varrus finished his blustering speech, they emerged from the dark side of the moon. No one knew how they’d discovered the place or how they’d gotten there, but it didn’t matter. The Xalans had found Vitalla.
“It was mass chaos. They split their forces in half, and cleaved us in two. They landed ground troops on the surface and flooded the now-inhabited cities with soldiers. The bulk of their fleet turned their attention to us, the military escort, in orbit. There were more missiles in the air than stars, and we lost a worrying percentage of our capital ships in the first few minutes. The Nova was wounded, but could fly. I tried to coordinate Varrus’s orders shouted from the ground as best I could, but Xalan forces were quickly closing in on his position.
“Scrambling through the monitors of the battle, I saw we had been boarded. The enemy troops were already ravaging the lower decks, and we had to divert all attention from the war outside to our own more imminent threat.
“I hid Cora away in the floor paneling between decks and raced down to the armory, where the fighting was the fiercest. When I arrived, I found dozens of bodies, both Soran and Xalan, and the failing gravity drive of the ship was causing pools of blood to periodically rise into orbs all over the room. Each time the drive kicked back on, they’d drop to the floor and splatter. It was a scene that will never leave me.
“When the ship stabilized, I crept around a stack of bodies and saw the lone survivor of the conflict. Well, ‘survivor’ isn’t the right word. He was tall with black skin and haunting eyes of ice. This was one of the mythic Shadows I’d always heard about. And I was now just another soldier who would never live to tell the tale.
“And yet, I did. I barely remember more than a few seconds of what happened next. The lights were flickering on and off, and as we fought we were repeatedly hoisted up into the air by the sputtering gravity drive. He wasn’t one of the new-era psionics, but he was one tough son of a bitch. Fast. Strong. It was unreal. More than once I was saved by a power fluctuation or a random jolt from the drive that sent him flying off me. In the end, I’d been shot twice and gored more times than I could count. He somehow ended up with a knife in his skull. Later they’d tell me that 70 percent of my body was covered with scar tissue. I had to grow an entire new skin suit for transplant. I only saved one wound as a reminder, a slice on my neck that would have been the end of me if gravity had remained intact for another millisecond.
“A group of soldiers found me, and a team of medics patched me up as best they could before they hauled me back to command. If I was conscious, I was still in charge. We’d fought off the boarding party, but by the time I reached the bridge it was clear we had to retreat or else we’d lose the entire fleet. The intact half of our ships followed the Nova to safety the next planet over while the remaining Xalan ships locked themselves in a ring around Vitalla, with a hundred million Rhylosi and our High Chancellor in their clutches.
“It was an hour before the executions started, beamed to our ship through the very broadcasting equipment that was supposed to stream the christening. The soldiers who accompanied Varrus on the surface were forced to kneel on stage as, methodically, their heads were turned to ash by energy blasts. These were men I knew. Men I’d fought with. Most met their fate with stone jaws and steel hearts, but a few died screaming.
“I finally managed to get a wormhole comm line open to Talis, now acting chancellor with her father captured. She informed me that I was the highest-ranking officer still alive, and the remnants of the fleet were mine to command. As we talked through rescue strategies and escape plans, they were now killing civilians by the hundreds across the other cities of the colony. Soon it became thousands. Their goal was clear, even if they couldn’t verbalize it.
“‘Come save them,’ they seemed to be taunting. ‘Or watch them die in agony.’
“It was too much to bear. The Rhylosi died on our viewscreens burning, melting, or choking on gas. After another hour, they detonated the first city from orbit. A hundred thousand gone in an instant. Cora was sobbing, my men were screaming in my ears to attack; to save them.
“Talis saw it differently. Why would they taunt us like this if not to bait us into a trap? Who was to say that there wasn’t another hidden fleet somewhere in the system, waiting to pounce as soon as we moved back into range?
“The risk was too great. If we lost what was left of the escort fleet in a misguided rescue attempt, it wouldn’t just be disaster at Vitalla; it would take us years longer than it already would to rebuild the ships and retrain the men we’d lost. The Great War could slip from our grasp, and Xala might finally have the opening they needed to make a final push into Sora once and for all.
“As Talis told me this, we saw onscreen they had identified Hex Tulwar as a leader in the christening crowd. They dragged his family up on stage. A beautiful wife, two sons, three daughters, not one over ten. I’d never seen a man fight so hard for anything. He killed the two Xalans guarding him with his bare hands and raced toward his wife and children, but a Shadow commander tore his chest open before he could reach them. Just before he lost consciousness, he watched his family obliterated by a hail of plasma.
“Cora screamed and screamed, pleading with me to help. But I saw the truth in what Talis said. We could lose everything. I wanted to make sure this was what she was telling me to do.
“‘What about your father?’ I said to her. I heard her choke back tears. And after a long while she whispered, ‘Sora will survive.’
“And so, on the orders of the acting High Chancellor, I told the escort fleet to leave. As our cores spooled up to make the leap out of the system, I could see the Xalans figure out what was happening. They dropped a cascade of antimatters across all the outskirt cities, killing millions in an instant. A last ditch effort to provoke us. But we continued our escape.
“Then they brought Varrus on stage. He stood defiant right until the moment his head came off. It was the last thing we saw before the cores activated. Vitalla had fallen. We survived.”
Lucas stayed silent when Maston finished his story, awestruck by what he’d just heard. The night chirped away and Toruk was still above them in the trees somewhere. Maston spoke again.
“Cora couldn’t even look at me after that. Even though her mother had given the order, it was me she had watched carry it out, and she’d hold me responsible in the years that followed. She wasn’t hostile or cruel, but after what we had, her indifference to me was crushing. I became like a stranger, allowed only small waves and polite smiles when the situation called for them.”
“What happened to Hex Tulwar?” Lucas asked.
“What exactly happened to him? I’ve no idea, but eventually he and a small band of Rhylosi escaped Vitalla and made it back to Sora in a half-destroyed transport. Knowing what I know now, that was probably when he made a deal with the Xalans for Talis’s head. He blamed the Vales and me for the massacre of his people and family. It didn’t take him long to whip up support for a revolution once he returned and explained how the fleet had abandoned them.”
Maston threw a leaf into the fire and it vaporized.
“In the Tomes of the Forest, the First Order is to serve the gods. The Second is to revere the planet. The Third is to resist evil. The Fourth Order is to protect the weak. I forget the exact wording.”
“Forsaken are the strong who do not protect the weak,” Lucas interjected, remembering what had been tattooed on Silo’s chest. His friend had been religious, though not a zealot it seemed. Maston nodded, ignoring why Lucas would know the phrase.
“Tulwar made sure the entire world knew how we’d broken the Fourth Order, and so his movement had a name.”
“And you’ve been fighting them ever since,” Lucas said, many things now coming together in his mind. “Was there ever a second Xalan fleet? Would you have been wiped out if you tried to save them?”
Maston stared into the flames.
“I ask myself that every si
ngle day. I imagine Talis Vale does as well.”
“Why’d you tell Asha that story?” Lucas pressed.
“Your counterpart is a rare creature,” he said. “She possesses many of the same qualities as Cora, incredible beauty paired with an unconquerable spirit. She is an echo of the woman I once called my own.”
Lucas began to feel his blood simmer a bit, but Maston continued.
“Treasure her,” he said sternly. “Know how fortunate you are to have someone so exceptional at your side.”
Lucas relaxed. Maston wasn’t competing for her, then, it seemed.
“You’ve proven yourself capable as well,” he said. “You have a talent for both ending and saving lives. Not many would have braved that city and that creature to rescue someone they couldn’t stand.”
“Well, I’m hoping you can help get us out here,” Lucas said.
Maston nodded.
“Perhaps I can.”
Rising to his feet, he spoke to Lucas without looking at him.
“That is the last time you question what I know of sacrifice.”
After Toruk came down from the trees, it was Lucas’s turn to try to grab a little rest. But as he sat on a pair of branches staring at Mol’taavi, none found him. Maston’s story was incredible, horrifying. Lucas had killed many bad people to stay alive, but few good ones. His own experience executing Silo had shaken him, so he could only imagine how Maston felt with the lives of untold millions latched around his neck for the rest of his life. And losing Corinthia the way he had. Perhaps the man had earned the right to be difficult and hostile, but at times he had seemed borderline psychotic. The man did have him beaten half to death onboard the Spear, after all. Another of his “lessons” perhaps, as Asha maintained? He did finally appear to be coming around to Lucas as an ally rather than an adversary. Lucas had risked much to save him, and perhaps staring into the burning eyes of the Desecrator had melted Maston’s frozen soul just a bit. Too bad Silo wasn’t here to see his commander finally come around and embrace the wretched Earthborn.
