by Paul Tassi
Silo. Lucas remembered something. He dug through the pack attached to his stealth suit and, moving aside Omicron’s square, found what he was looking for. Silo’s Final. Lucas placed the chip in the palm of his hand and tapped it. Immediately an interface popped up, a list of names. “Madi, Rula, Koto, Velia, Kiati.”
Lucas tapped the first one. A three-dimensional image of Silo appeared before him from the chest up. His hair was longer, he looked at least a few years younger. Lucas wondered how often these were recorded or updated. As Silo spoke, Lucas felt his blood go cold.
“Sa Madi,” he said, smiling widely. “I hoped you would never have to watch this, but in my line of work, it’s bound to happen sooner or later.”
Holographic Silo paused to take a breath.
“I’m sorry this had to happen the way it did with Padi, with Brota. I can’t imagine how much your heart must ache now after all this. Just know that you’ll see us again in the Forest one day.”
Lucas paused the video. He hadn’t spoken of it, but it seemed Silo was religious enough to believe he was headed to a better place. This Blessed Forest Maston had told him about. Lucas wondered if it was controversial for a Guardian to have a Fourth Order tattoo. Even if the sentiment was a good one, the group that had adopted the name was bloodthirsty, ruthless, and the most destructive force on Sora.
Lucas hovered over the pause button, but didn’t resume playback. This was private. It seemed the video was for his Madi, mother, he assumed by the reference to “Padi” as well. Lucas looked down at the other names. Brothers? Sisters? Friends? He stopped at the one he recognized, Kiati. Just a few seconds can’t hurt.
“Kiati,” Silo began, “who knows if you’ll outlive me, but I bet you will. You were always the smarter one with your fancy medical package and those record-setting cog scores.”
Silo still smiled, but looked pained.
“I’ll always remember that week of shore leave after Golgath. I don’t care that you told me to forget it. One of these days you’ll come around again, but if you’re watching this, maybe it’s too late for us. You were the best thing I found in this dark storm of war. I know you’ll go on to do great things, and someday, I’ll see you in the Forest. I’ll save you a spot. I know you don’t believe, but you’ll see. You’ll see.”
Silo briefly looked off camera, then turned back.
“I hope you never see this. I hope we made it through.”
That was enough for Lucas. He deactivated the chip and slid it back into his pouch. He pulled up his wrist display that showed a pulsing green dot labeled KIATI back at the underground village. She’d returned from a rescue mission of her own, saving one of the other stranded Guardians. Lucas was not looking forward to telling her how Silo died, nor giving her his Final. There had indeed been something between them once, long ago. The knot in Lucas’s stomach that had formed when watching the video had not yet gone away. Silo was a good man. Lucas had seen too many of those die these past few years.
The remainder of their trek through the jungle was uneventful and they took no further breaks. Either the Desecrator had lost them, or simply stopped pursuit. Toruk frequently let out a low sharp whistle that blended in with the rest of the forest’s noises, and Lucas thought he knew the purpose. He was trying to call his bloodwolf back to him, but there was no way the creature could have survived his attempt to stall the Desecrator. The bones they saw of much larger creatures the monster had killed were proof of that. Each time his whistle was met with silence, Toruk seemed to grow a little more despondent.
The entrance to the village was actually a narrow holographic stone in the earth that didn’t warrant a second glance. The illusion was perfect. They passed through the image and down into the cave system unseen and, after a short trek, came to the underground lake and the settlement itself.
There was no parade to greet them, only a worried-looking crowd of Oni wondering why so few had returned. He watched Toruk regale his people with tales of his warriors’ bravery as they faced down the terrible monster in the Dead City. Lucas had the unfortunate task of relaying to Zeta the news that her entire team had been killed in action.
“It cannot be,” she exclaimed, her pale face growing whiter. “All of them?”
Lucas nodded.
“They were such fine soldiers! I have known Corporal [garbled] for nearly a century. The man has survived more battles than I can count.”
Lucas glanced over at Alpha.
“He’d never fought anything like this before, I’ll tell you that.”
“You said it had wings?” Alpha asked, curious more about the discovery of the Desecrator than the death of those who fought him.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “A dozen feet tall, claws like scimitars, and it was red. Blood red. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor have I,” Alpha said. He looked worried.
“No psionic abilities, so far as I could tell,” Lucas continued. “If it is a Shadow, I don’t know what kind it is.”
Alpha sifted through some data on a scroll.
“The Shadow transformation process is meant to spark premature evolution in our species. Perhaps through a different sort of experimentation, this Xalan went down a … different path. One I have certainly never seen replicated.”
“Well, you can dissect it after we kill it,” came a voice from behind them. Lucas knew who it belonged to from the first word. He turned around, already smiling.
Asha stood in the doorway of the hut clad in a torn stealth suit with her trademark sword crossing her back. Her hair was wild from the humidity and her skin had darkened in the sunlight to the point where she almost looked like a native. In her right hand she held a familiar object, the white null core they used to travel to distant star systems with relative ease. It was shaded, but still illuminated the room. She dropped it on the ground haphazardly, causing Alpha to cringe, but before he could chastise her, she was already across the room with her arms wrapped around Lucas.
She gripped him so tight he thought he’d rebroken a rib, but the happiness he felt seeing her alive outweighed it. All the anger he’d felt toward her on the Spear and afterward was erased in an instant. She was here. He hadn’t lost her. Not yet. She pulled back and wore a wide, bright smile. One he hadn’t seen in far too long.
Alpha said they needed to talk further later, but he allowed Lucas some reprieve to recover from his recent outing. He and Asha made their way to the edge of the lake and sat perched on a ledge about a dozen feet up from the crystal clear water. Colorful fish could be seen swimming in schools below, while light shone in from the openings in the roof of the cave. Toruk had told him upon their return that those gaps were also covered by holographic images meant to look, from the outside, like the forest floor. Though he had called them “fool shields,” as it was the best term he could come up with.
Asha attempted to tame her hair as she told Lucas the story of her own awakening in the jungle. She pointed to a bandage around her arm and said that, while she hadn’t run across any Xalan search parties, she was forced to battle a lizard-like creature the size of a pickup truck that wasn’t terribly pleasant. Fortunately, like Lucas, she’d slept with her weapons inside her pod, which had greatly increased her chance of survival right off the bat.
The search team eventually found her, but she wasn’t borderline psychotic the way Lucas had been after his Moltok sting, and she had remained conscious for the return trip. She peeled the bandage back to reveal a few swaths of skin missing in jagged patterns that were obviously bite marks. She’d wanted the bring the lizard’s head back with her as a trophy, but it weighed far too much to be worth carting around in the heat.
On the way back to the village, her group of Guardians and Oni ran across a large chunk of the engine bay of the downed Spear. After clearing out a few enemy Xalan troops attempting to comb through the wreckage, she spotted the white null core, detached from its housing and barely visible in the mud. Understanding its usefulness, she
brought it back with her, much to Alpha’s delight. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked, she said.
The two of them sat with their feet dangling off the edge of the precipice, watching the fish swirl below them.
“Well, this is a goddamn disaster,” Asha said, echoing Maston’s earlier sentiment. It was a relief to have a conversation in English again. “We lost most of our escort and our ship and the thing that’s hunting us happens to live next door. Fantastic.”
“It is less than ideal,” Lucas said, staring out at the opposite wall of the enormous cave a few thousand yards away. “But at least we’re still alive.”
“Seems to be our curse,” she said distantly.
“It won’t last forever.”
“What the hell motivated you to go back out for Maston? Especially after all that shit with Silo and your fever? If anyone deserved a break, it was you.”
“You were right,” Lucas said. “He’s an asshole, but a useful one. If we’re going to figure out a way out of here, a plan is better with him than without.”
Asha turned to look at Lucas.
“About Vitalla …” she began. Lucas waved her off.
“He told me,” he said. “All of it. And you think this is a disaster. I can only imagine what Sora was like when that happened. No wonder they were so happy to see us. Lord knows they could have used a bit of good news right about then.”
Asha scoffed.
“Yeah, because we’re being terribly useful so far. We got half their nobles blown up, I was kidnapped, and now we’ve stranded or killed most of their finest soldiers an impossible distance away from home.”
“Well, we found Zeta,” Lucas said.
“Ah yes, the great ‘White Spirit,’ huh? And what exactly is she doing that’s so helpful? I don’t hear Alpha Senior’s message being broadcast around the galaxy yet.”
Lucas shook his head.
“I don’t know what the plan is anymore. Something must be wrong.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” Asha said.
There was a commotion from back at the village and Lucas stood up to look down at what was going on in the square. A large group was gathered, watching a bloodwolf limp its way into town. Its pace was a crawl, and it was dragging both of its hind legs. Lucas was too far away to get a proper view, but he could see enormous gashes on the creature even from this distance. Toruk burst forth from the crowd and wrapped his arms around the bloodwolf’s neck, and other Oni rushed toward him with what looked to be medical supplies in hand. A few other smaller bloodwolves emerged from nearby huts and ran to greet their lost pack leader.
“Well, how about that,” Lucas muttered to himself. “Tough old bastard.”
That the animal survived its encounter with the Desecrator was a miracle, though to expect the wolf to have killed it was far too much to hope for. But still, it was a heartening sight. The brave beast taking on the supposed pinnacle of evolution, and surviving.
“What’s that?” Asha asked, also rising.
“Hope,” Lucas said.
15
Lucas rose the next morning after a mercifully dreamless sleep. He was in a hut close to the bank of the lake, and as he sat up he could hear the bustle of the village outside. Underneath him was a stretched skin coated in a striped fur, pulled from the local fauna, no doubt. Light crept in through narrow windows cut into the sticks that made up the forward wall of the enclosure.
He looked down at Asha, her bare skin still pressed against the fur. They’d stayed up half the night talking about what had happened back on the Spear. Silo, Kiati, Maston, all of it. Asha admitted Maston had a cruel streak, but Lucas had to admit in turn that he was an effective commander. Lucas had learned the hard lesson Maston was trying to teach when he found Silo wounded in the forest. Asha recognized that some part of her still felt trapped on Earth, where instinctive killing was second nature. It was why she was willing to execute Kiati when the moment called for it. They’d come so far, but still held on to pieces of their old selves, for better or worse. But they realized that, whatever their lingering issues, nothing had broken between them, they spent the other half of the evening not talking much at all. In the end, there wasn’t much time for sleep.
Lucas noticed a pulsing light from the sleeve of his crumpled stealth suit. After crawling over to it, he realized Alpha was pinging him to go to Zeta’s hut. Time to figure out just what the hell they were going to do now.
He sat down on the fur floor and tried to nudge Asha awake. On the third try, she rolled over and grinned sleepily at him. She stretched her arms overhead and the morning light bathed her body in such a way Lucas forgot about how tired he was. Alpha could wait a few minutes longer.
They arrived at Zeta’s a while later to an annoyed Alpha expressing confusion that he had requested their presence some time ago. Zeta quickly shushed him and attempted to veer him back to the task at hand. Lucas was puzzled to see that Alpha looked wet, his gray skin glistening. Also present in the room were Maston, who now wore a pressurized bandage over his shoulder, and Toruk, who was idly thumbing through his claw necklace.
“Now that we have all managed to respond to my summons,” Alpha said as he cast an eye toward Lucas, “we need to discuss present circumstances.”
Zeta spoke next out of another translator collar, though this one looked more hastily improvised then her first, now lost in the Dead City around the neck of the Corporal’s headless corpse.
“I regret to inform you that the action you seek, to disseminate this message to all Xalan systems, is not possible from our present location.”
“What? Why not?” Lucas asked.
“Since your arrival, a void veil has been dropped over this entire planet. No communications in or out. Or even between installations on the planet itself. Nothing is allowed other than the singular military channel, which still allows access to the troops directly. The general populace is simply in the dark. The Council knows what you are attempting to do and is taking drastic steps to ensure you cannot achieve your ends. I cannot even broadcast the message to this entire planet, much less all the colonies from here.”
“A ‘void veil’?” Asha said. “How the hell do we lift that? If they can just shield entire planets from communication, there’s no way to even accomplish what we’re trying to do with the message.”
“You’re going to love this,” Maston said from behind her, his arms crossed.
Zeta continued.
“The only way to disrupt the veil is to trace it to its origin.”
“Xala,” Lucas said breathlessly.
“Correct. It is also the only location where I can ensure I am able to broadcast the message to every colony, every citizen at once. Otherwise, broadcasting to select groups would just make each a target as the Council seeks to contain the fallout.”
“Contain with mass murder,” Alpha muttered. Zeta nodded.
“In our present circumstances, there is simply no other method of mass delivery that would be viable other than broadcasting from the veil’s point of origin itself, central command on the home planet.”
“We have to go to Xala itself ?” Asha asked, incredulous.
“Yes, but you also have to take me to Xala itself. Though I have been able to create the necessary broadcast algorithm, I am the only one with the knowledge to implement it into the Xalan galactic network.”
“You can’t do this?” Lucas said, turning to Alpha.
“I could attempt to do so,” Alpha said, “though Zeta has a dramatically better chance of completing the objective, as she has had intensive experience with the system for decades. She actually built most of it. I am no match for her prowess in this area.”
Lucas walked over to the metal desk in the center of the room and sat on the edge.
“We seem to be fast-forwarding here. How are we supposed to do any of this when we can’t even get off this planet?”
“There is … something I must show you,” said Alpha. Lucas gla
nced at Maston and he shrugged with his bandaged shoulder.
Alpha ushered them out of the room. Toruk crossed in front of Lucas and was muttering something to himself.
“What did you say?” Lucas asked.
“Broken chariot,” replied the chief.
Lucas followed him out into the village square, and Toruk began speaking to the Oni nearby.
“Holoi ba’to suuta. Ba’to suuta.”
Some of the Oni whispered to each other while others raced to nearby huts to spread the message, whatever it was. Soon there was a large group following them. Even a few of the rescued Guardians were now with them, moving with the growing crowd down to the shore of the underground lake.
When they got there, Lucas looked around and saw that Alpha had disappeared entirely.
“Where the hell did he go?” he asked Asha. “What’s going on?”
“I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head. “But knowing him, I’m sure it’s something insane.”
The Oni were all staring at the vast lake in front of them. A hush fell over the crowd. Maston and the other Guardians were scratching their heads and looking around.
Zeta stepped forward to stand next to Lucas.
“I never thought this day would come.”
“What day?” Lucas asked, but before she could answer, he felt the ground start to vibrate. Dark silt slid toward the water, and ripples scattered across the normally tranquil surface.
From under the water, a spectrum of white and blue orbs shone up from deep underneath the surface. The Oni let out a collective gasp, and Lucas took a step back in amazement.
The lights grew brighter and brighter until, finally, what they were attached to broke through the surface of the lake.
“What the …” Asha’s voice trailed off.
It was a ship, assuredly of Xalan origin, but far older and boxier than the models Lucas had seen over the past few years. As it rose out of the water, seaweed hung off it like wet hair, and there were hundreds of barnacles attached to its hull on all sides. Lucas actually saw a large rainbow-scaled fish flopping around on top of one of the engine mounts before it managed to dive back into the water.
