"Firebirds, deploy!" Emet said. "Defend those Rawdigger cogs!"
Years ago, at great expense, Emet had installed hangar doors on the Jerusalem's port side. Now those doors opened, and his starfighters emerged.
They were small, agile ships, a single pilot in each. The Inheritors had named them Firebirds, modeling them after Earth's ancient starfighters. Emet had studied the starfighters featured in the Earthstone, had done his best to emulate those old designs. The modern Firebirds were refitted space-racers, purchased from a defunct racing guild. They were weaker than their golden age counterparts. But they were still faster than any other Inheritor ship.
And now the Firebirds roared toward battle, guns firing.
Fire filled space.
The strikers released a barrage of plasma. Blasts hit the Firebirds. One of the starfighters shattered, and the pilot flew from the ship, torn apart. Emet knew that pilot, had watched that pilot grow up. Another Firebird careened, then slammed into a frigate. The smaller ship burst into flame.
"Surround the freighters!" Emet shouted. "Protect the Rawdigger freight—"
Before he could complete his sentence, an electromagnetic barrage hit the Jerusalem. His monitor crackled, died, then turned back on.
The monitor now displayed a message. A message from the scorpion fleet.
Watch, pest. Enjoy the show.
The message vanished.
The strikers turned toward one of the three Rawdigger freighters, ignoring the human starships.
The strikers—a dozen or more—opened fire.
Their plasma bolts slammed into the Rawdigger freighter—a ship with human refugees inside.
The freighter had a thick iron hull. For a moment, it withstood the barrage. Emet shouted, firing his cannons, and managed to take out a striker, but the rest kept bombarding the freighter.
With an explosion of fury and a million shards of metal, the freighter shattered.
Its hull fragments flew through space, some chunks the size of men, others smaller than coins. The debris slammed into the Jerusalem, into the rest of the Inheritor fleet. A Firebird burned. The crate of diamonds shattered, and a rain of sparkling stones filled space like a flurry of snow. The diamonds peppered the Jerusalem, embedding into the graphene hull.
Emet stood on his bridge, staring, for an instant frozen, as the human refugees spilled out from the shattered freighter.
Hundreds tumbled into space. Some in rags, most naked. All thin. All dying. They flailed in the vacuum.
We have time, Emet thought. We can save them.
"Get them into our ships!" he shouted. "Firebirds, get—"
But the strikers fired again.
Plasma washed over the hundreds of ejected refugees.
In space, they burned. In the darkness, they died.
Emet howled and fired all his cannons against the strikers. Around him, the rest of his fleet fired too. Shells slammed into the enemy. One striker shattered. A second. A third. Emet plowed forward, and the heavy Jerusalem slammed into a striker, knocking the enemy ship aside.
The Jerusalem jolted. Emet nearly fell. The striker slammed into its neighbor, and both enemy ships cracked open, spilling scorpions. Firebirds swooped, firing machine guns, tearing the scorpions apart. The beasts' exoskeletons shattered, and their gooey innards leaked out.
Terror pounded through Emet. His hands began to shake around the yoke.
Again he was back there. A younger man. Again he saw the strikers descend. Saw the scorpions emerge. Saw their emperor, the great crimson beast Sin Kra, tear his wife apart.
Emet growled, refocusing on the battle.
There were still two Rawdigger freighters, each transporting human refugees from Hierarchy territory. He had lost hundreds. He could still save the others.
"Inheritor ships!" Emet said. "Surround the remaining two Rawdigger freighters. Focus all firepower outward. Form a defensive sphere and escort the freighters back into Concord space. I am Emet Ben-Ari, descended of our Golden Lioness. I fight with you. For Earth!"
Many of them had fallen. But many still answered his cry. "For Earth!"
The Inheritor fleet surrounded the two remaining freighters. They blasted out a sphere of firepower, slowly moving back toward the Concord. Every kilometer, the enemy struck them. Plasma bolts took out a human warship nearly the size of the Jerusalem, slaying the fifty Inheritors aboard—men Emet had known for years. Another Firebird burned, dived through space, and slammed into the Jerusalem with roaring fire.
More strikers kept emerging from the darkness. Dozens. Then hundreds. They filled space, countless shards like a rain of arrows.
This is a Ra damn disaster, Emet thought, chest constricting.
"Make it back to Concord space!" Emet shouted. "Don't engage them! Fly!"
The Heirs of Earth fled. Surrounding the two remaining cargo freighters, they raced back toward the Concord, cannons blazing, desperate to hold back the strikers. Another Firebird shattered. A warship cracked open, spilling warriors.
When they finally made it back to Concord territory, they were limping, bleeding, decimated.
The surviving human starships turned back toward the strikers. The enemy warships formed a wall in space, hovering before the border yet daring not cross it. Hundreds of strikers flew there.
They dare not invade the Concord, Emet thought. They dare not even fire into Concord space. But for how long will this invisible wall hold them back?
Emet stood on the bridge of the Jerusalem. He stood with only a handful of ships around him. A tiny fleet. From a distance, the Heirs of Earth would be nearly invisible by the might of the Hierarchy.
One of the strikers moved ahead, its prow grazing Concord space. It was a full-sized dreadnought, larger than the other strikers. It dwarfed the Jerusalem, easily twenty times the size. Most scorpion ships were black, but this one shimmered with deep blue shadows, and its portholes were searing white. It seemed almost a living creature, predatory, crouching and ready to pounce.
Aboard the Jerusalem, the communicator crackled.
Duncan turned toward Emet, frowning. "They're calling us, lad. Don't answer."
But Emet needed to see them, to hear them, to stare into his enemy's eyes. He hit a button, accepting the call.
His monitor crackled to life, revealing the striker's bridge.
It was like gazing into hell.
On the inside, the striker mimicked a desert. Rocks and boulders surrounded sandy pits that spurted fire. The scorpions had evolved on a nightmarish world full of volcanoes, canyons, and endless dunes, and their starships brought that world with them. A hundred scorpions filled the bridge. They clung to the walls, perched on boulders, and hissed on the ceiling. A handful huddled on the floor, tearing into a shrieking alien mammal.
There were control panels, but unlike anything human. Huge gears hung on the walls, and scorpions grabbed them, turned them, piloting their machine. Other scorpions tugged pulleys and chains. Some moved levers topped with human skulls.
A boulder jutted up in the center of the bridge, taller than a man. Upon it rose a throne upholstered with human skins stitched together, eyeless faces still grimacing upon them. Other human skins lay draped around the boulder, lurid rugs, some with boneless hands still attached. Emet knew that scorpions flayed humans, stole their skins to coat their dens, but he had never seen the atrocity. His stomach churned.
But more than the hundreds of scorpions, the massive gears, or the flayed skins, it was the figure on the throne that shocked Emet.
She was a woman.
A human woman.
She reclined on her throne, smiling crookedly, one leg tossed across an armrest. Her skin was unnaturally pale, as white as milk. Her hair was long, smooth, and glimmering blue, shaved down to stubble along one side of her head. On that side, cybernetic implants were bolted into her, flashing with blue lights. They reminded Emet of spark plugs. The woman wore an outfit formed of black webs, and steel claws tipped her boots. In
one hand she held a blade shaped like a scorpion's stinger.
Is she truly human? Emet thought. Some kind of cyborg or android? What the hell is she doing on a scorpion dreadnought?
"Greetings, pest!" said the woman with blue hair, staring into Emet's eyes through the monitor. "I wanted to look at you. To see the pest whose skin will drape my new throne."
Around the woman, the hundreds of scorpions cackled, shrieked, and raised their claws. Several bowed before her. Others reared, climbing the sides of her throne. The woman placed a hand on one scorpion's head and stroked it. She gave Emet a lopsided smile and raised an eyebrow.
"I'm not very impressed," she said.
Emet clenched his fists. He took a step closer to the monitor. "Who are you?"
"The one who will break you," the woman said. "The one who will flay you. The one who will savor your screams as you slowly die, skinless at my feet. Remember my face, Emet Ben-Ari. You will be the last human to gaze upon it."
The transmission died.
The dreadnought spun around, then burst into warp speed, vanishing back into Hierarchy territory. With a thousand blasts of light, the other strikers followed. But Emet knew they would return. He knew many battles awaited.
Duncan barked a laugh. "The cowards flee! They dare not invade Concord space."
"Not yet," Emet said, voice grim. "We won this round. But we lost many warriors. Too many."
The grief nearly crushed him. Across their empire, the Skra-Shen commanded countless strikers. They had billions of warrior scorpions. Barely any humans remained in the galaxy. Most were refugees, exiles, cowering and weak. Only a handful were fighters. Each of their lives was precious, irreplaceable.
Had they truly won this round?
"Come, Duncan," Emet said. "There are refugees who are ill, who are perhaps dying. We're going to bring them aboard. They'll need you."
Duncan suddenly looked a decade older than his sixty years. But he straightened his back and raised his bearded chin. He was one man—a vet by training. He had hundreds of refugees who needed care. And Emet knew that he would go day and night without rest to tend to them.
"Aye, lad." Duncan nodded. "I'll treat each one as if they were my own blood."
"Thank you, Duncan," Emet said. "We did well here today. This is a victory."
They worked for hours, using their shuttles to transport refugees from the Rawdigger freighters into the Inheritor ships. They had lost two hundred refugees in the battle, but they had saved four hundred—smuggled out from Hierarchy space, pale, starving, weeping.
Emet stood in the shuttle bay, welcoming a hundred refugees into the Jerusalem, as many as the old frigate would take.
The refugees limped, shuffled, and crawled aboard. Mothers clung to starving babies, their breasts wilted. Young men stared with sunken eyes, their ribs visible in their thin chests. A naked old man approached Emet. It was hard to believe he was still alive; he looked like a skeleton draped in skin. He dropped to his knees before Emet, hugged his legs, and wept.
"Thank you," the old man said. "Thank you, lion of Earth. Thank you."
Other Inheritors joined Emet in the airlock. They all wore the group's uniform: brown trousers and blue jackets. They helped the survivors toward the hold, where Duncan was moving between them. Across the rest of the fleet, other airlocks were open, and shuttles were ferrying refugees into other ships.
When finally the refugees were all aboard the Inheritor fleet, the Rawdigger freighters turned to leave. Back in Hierarchy space, the alien starships halted. Looking through a viewport, Emet saw the Rawdiggers themselves emerge from their ships. The arachnid aliens floated through space in metallic suits. They ignored their own dead, which still floated among the debris of the battle. Instead, they began meticulously collecting the scattered diamonds.
This is what makes humanity special, Emet thought, watching the Rawdiggers work. We care for one another more than for wealth. Aliens think that makes us weak. But it makes us strong.
As the Inheritor fleet flew deeper into Concord territory, Emet walked among the refugees. He poured water into thirsty mouths, stitched wounds, comforted children. Two refugees died before help could reach them, finally succumbing to weariness or starvation.
A young starfighter pilot approached Emet.
"What happened to them?" the pilot said. "They look like ghosts."
One survivor rose to her feet. She was a dour woman with sunken cheeks, wispy black hair, and large black eyes. She held an emaciated baby.
"The scorpions destroyed our villages," the woman said, gazing into Emet's eyes. "Burned them to the ground. They murdered those who tried to fight. We saw them round up humans, shove them into cargo ships, and take them off into the distance."
Another survivor—the same old man who had hugged Emet's legs—approached too. "They harvest us for skin," he said. "The scorpions. They use it for their nests. They take us to places we call gulocks—great prisons on rocky worlds. Torture us. Flay us alive." He fell to his knees again, weeping.
"We fled them," said the dark-eyed woman. "We joined an underground resistance. Other survivors too. Rawdiggers helped us at first. For a long time we were on our own, wandering across rocky worlds, finding what transport we could. Many of us starved. On one world, the scorpions caught my group. Only I escaped." She tightened her lips and held her baby close. "I found another group. We traveled the underground railroad between the wormholes until we met more Rawdiggers. By then, so many of us had fallen—to starvation, to disease, to scorpion claws. My husband. My sisters. My eldest son."
She turned away. She walked toward a porthole. She stood in silence, staring into space.
Emet didn't know how to comfort her. How to comfort any of them. Every man, woman, and child here had lost so many loved ones, had suffered so much. Some were beyond healing. Some would not last the night.
"Did you see a woman?" Emet asked a few survivors. "A woman with white skin, with blue hair, with implants in her head?"
A bald man cowered. "The ghost."
An old woman looked away, trembling. "The Blue Witch."
"Who is she?" Emet said.
But they would not answer. They wept and prayed. It seemed like mention of this woman terrified them even more than scorpions.
Duncan placed a hand on Emet's shoulder. "Drop it for now, lad. They're too hurt right now. We'll get our answers. Not today."
Emet nodded, gazing at the misery around him.
We have it bad in the Concord, he thought. But we live in paradise compared to humans in the Hierarchy.
Weeping filled the hold. Praying. Despair.
But fury filled Emet.
Fury against the scorpions. Fury against ten thousand other alien civilizations who treated humans like vermin. Fury that Earth had fallen, that David—his best friend—had stolen the Earthstone. Fury that even now, after so many years of fighting, they did not even know where Earth was, if they could ever find their planet again.
Fury that his wife had died.
Fury that Bay, his only son, had left him.
Fury at himself, at his weakness, that he commanded only a few old tankers that had barely survived a skirmish.
A handful of strikers almost destroyed our entire fleet, he thought. How can we survive? How can we find our way home?
Emet worked throughout the night, doing what he could to clothe, feed, and shelter the survivors. He took a shuttle and traveled from ship to ship, letting the other survivors see him, hearing their stories.
Once we were mighty. Now we are this—broken, dying, the last sparks of a great flame.
Yet that fire still burned. The torch of humanity had been passed down for thousands of years. It was Emet's duty to keep carrying that torch. To take his people home.
A few hours later, he was back aboard the Jerusalem, still moving among the survivors, when an old bearded man began to sing. His voice was hoarse at first, then grew stronger. The woman with black eyes turned away from the
viewport. Her eyes were now damp, and she added her voice to his. Emet joined them. Soon they were all singing, and through the communicator, Emet heard them singing on the other ships too. The Heirs of Earth flew through space, lost in darkness, alone in shadow, but their song was loud and pure. A song of Earthrise. The song of humanity.
Into darkness we fled
In the shadows we prayed
In exile we always knew
That we will see her again
Our Earth rising from loss
Calling us home
Calling us home
CHAPTER FIVE
Bay Ben-Ari flew his clunky starship across space, and the living asteroids charged in pursuit.
"This is Ra damn mucking great," Bay muttered, shoving the throttle down. "I just had to play Five Card Bluff with smugglers." He groaned. "Never play Five Card Bluff with smugglers!"
He glanced at his rear-view monitor. Three asteroids were tumbling through space after him, leaving fiery wakes. But these were no simple rocks. These were grugs. Living asteroids.
Long ago, according to legend, grugs had been simple rocks, no different from ordinary asteroids. Their molten cores had churned for eras, rumbling with energy, evolving into a life of stone and magma. Holes appeared on their craggy surfaces, blazing with fiery lenses—eyes that could see far. Cracks stretched beneath the eyes, revealing gullets full of molten stone—jaws to devour prey. Today the grugs roamed the galaxy, traveling from star to star, always hungry.
Still, despite looking like ancient volcano gods, they were mostly harmless.
Bay didn't fear the grugs, these imposing yet dimwitted boulders. No. Grugs were not a problem. It was the creatures inside the grugs that wanted Bay dead.
Lights flashed on Bay's monitor. Ringing filled the cockpit.
"Um, dude?" his starship said. "They're calling you. Want me to answer?"
Sometimes Bay regretted installing speakers on his starship. The vessel was named Brooklyn, and she had an accent to match. Bay found it incredibly annoying.
"Do not answer," he said.
"They keep calling, dude."
"Ignore them!"
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