Chapter Eleven: Paths of Glory
Kat moved across the grey, featureless landscape as quickly as she could, which considering her twisted ankle wasn’t very fast at all. The pain slept for now, but it would return, with fangs.
She looked up at the starry tapestry above her. It glinted and gleamed like a thousand chandeliers hanging from the roof of an oil-drenched sky. She had never just looked at the sky before and appreciated its beauty, its essence; the darkness was always a thing to be feared and avoided at all costs.
She looked up again at the great black crab, then at the star lion nebula. The stars had always been her guide, they had allowed her to escape the extractor and others like him a year earlier and they were helping her now. By using their signposts, she could avoid the most densely populated mute areas, as well as many other likely ambush spots. They also allowed her to navigate her way home. If she was correct, her current route should lead her to the perimeter of Labour Camp Flaxion and then a rendezvous with the extractor. But not for revenge on this occasion; the hate that she felt for him, for what he’d done to her and to many others, had only led to her getting captured, sexually assaulted and almost killed last time. Now I just want to escape and leave this place of sadness and tears behind, that’s my true revenge… moving on with my life.
A bright light speared the centre of the galaxy above her, before burning up in the upper atmosphere. She closed her eyes and made a wish. It was the one she always made every time she saw a shooting star: to leave this place of nightmares and to go back to her true home and be with her friends again. She smiled at the idea, her first since her apprehension and incarceration, and then kept on trudging over the dark, dreary landscape. Everything is going to be alright… she said to herself… Everything is going to be alright.
Kat evaded the first perimeter wire easily enough, though several more remained. If it wasn’t for her body’s natural ability to turn invisible she would have been picked up by the sabre-dog patrols a long time ago. Even so she moved slowly, methodically, used every inch of cover she could. This was made easier by the fact that her ankle had swollen to the size of a small football, with sharp pains shooting up her leg every few paces. She couldn’t go any faster if she tried. Her stomach rumbled noisily too. She hadn’t eaten in days, and her only water had been the dank contents of a stagnant stream. She almost wretched just thinking about it.
Kat thrust down on the petrified log that she was using to support herself and clambered over the wire. Two down, ten more to go. This was going to be a long afternoon.
Her ankle burning like the sun that heated the other half of her world, Kat clambered over the last perimeter fence and squeezed against a brick wall. Search lights twirled around the labour camp like demented fireflies.
She waited outside the six-inch-thick cast-iron doors, trying to keep the pain at bay, for thirty minutes before a troop of guards stomped past her and wrenched them open. She hobbled after them, feet noisily splashing against the slick stone floor.
She heard the first screams a few feet further down the corridor.
The extractor and others like him were conducting their experiments, torturing her people, stealing the energy that allowed them to turn invisible. Amongst other things. Anger fluttered inside her chest for a moment, then sputtered out. She was past that now, she was past a lot of things. Grimly, she staggered on, pain lancing her whole leg, trying to push the cries, the screams from her mind. She had to get this over with. Had to.
Kat somehow made her way up ten flights of stairs and down several corridors before she finally found herself standing outside his room. She thought that after all this time the extractor might have moved rooms, changed his habits, but he was as immutable as the weather. She could hear him inside with another one of his victims. The young girl’s cries resounded around Kat’s head like thunder. Tears streamed down her cheeks like a river in flood. She felt the door. It wasn’t locked. She gave it a shove and then stepped inside.
The young girl – she could be no older than twelve – was strapped to a rickety bed, the extractor stood over her, his right fist arcing towards her head.
Despite her ankle, Kat moved with rapid pace, crossing the stone floor and catching his fist with her left hand. Her right moved like a battering ram and thudded against his jugular, almost breaking his neck. His head fell with a sickening crunch against the wet cobbles, face set in a rictus grin.
“Oh no you don’t!” she yelled, jumping on top of him and grabbing him roughly by the collar. “There’s no easy way out this time.”
As if on cue, the extractor’s eyes flicked open, his grin wider and toothier than ever. Kat slapped him hard across the face. Still he grinned, face like a hyena. She raised her hand, ready to hit him again, but stopped. No, she had tried that route before. That way had led to anger, despair and imprisonment; it was time for something different.
“Where is the device?” she asked, as quietly and as politely as she could manage. “The…”
Laughter.
“Is that why you came back?” he wheezed, his pea-green skin slimier and more onerous than ever.
“Yes,” she said, raising her hand again. “I need it…”
“To contact your spaceship, to talk to… Jack?”
Kat paused. “Jack… how do you?”
“Know about him?”
Kat nodded. Feebly this time. Something was off, not right.
“Easy,” he said, his teeth greener and moldier than ever. “I contacted the spaceship.”
“You… you spoke to him?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Again, that wild cackling grin, those mocking eyes. She hit him hard across his face. Slap.
More laughter.
Another slap. His nose erupted in a riot of red.
“Why are you laughing?” she shouted, shaking his head, crashing her fists against his face and neck.
“Is that why you came back… for this?” He pulled out a small, black pebble-like device from his pocket.
“Yes,” she said, scrabbling for it, only for his fingers to close over it like a vice. “Give it to me.” She punched him in the mouth, fingernails gouging into his skin.
He was laughing louder than ever now. “Why are you laughing?” she shouted again. “Why?”
“See for yourself,” he said, releasing the pebble from his grip. “It’s the first video file on there. I saved it especially for you. I always knew you would find your way back here somehow, and the camp’s new infra-red tracking system allowed me to follow your every movement, from your escape to your arrival here. You can’t outwit me Kat; you’re mine, always have been.”
“I…” Kat fingered the device clumsily. Something was wrong, she knew it. He was too confident, too in control of the situation.
A video of the spaceship ballooned up before her eyes. It looked like a huge silver tear dangling in the cosmos. Even now it was a calming influence on her, a repository of hope. There was a huge black hole on the horizon, it looked like a giant purple wart, its mouth busily devouring thin tendrils of gas. One of these was wrapped around another much smaller silver craft. It looked like it was being sucked into the black hole.
“Who is in that ship?” she asked, not daring to hear the answer.
“Who do you think?” wheezed the extractor.
“But that’s…”
“Impossible?”
Kat nodded feebly, frozen to the spot.
“Listen to the recording the new owner of your spaceship sent me.”
Kat listened then. More intently than she had ever done in her life.
“I love you,” Jack said to Vyleria with all the passion and intensity of a star. Vyleria returned the favour, heart breaking like a piece of porcelain. The black hole took him then, wholly and without mercy, his silver pea of a spaceship shimmering out of existence on the threshold of the chasm.
Kat collapsed to the floor, trembling violently. Dimly, she felt the extractor’s hands close aro
und her. She didn’t fight back, couldn’t. She was beaten, for good this time.
Chapter Twelve: Blood Brothers
They ushered him through a dark tunnel that stank of piss, sweat and blood. Feces coagulated around the living and the dead. A few shafts of light pierced the ceiling, jabbing away at half-averted eyes and twitching mandibles. The air was stale and heavy, a few Xenti had collapsed from a lack of oxygen. The heat rose like a fever. In the distance someone was crying, a child perhaps.
The guard shoved him in the back with something heavy and blunt. He staggered forwards. When had he last eaten, drank? He felt weak, dizzy, nauseous. He could hear the voices now, like a billion snakes hissing at once. Drunk on blood and violence. For the first time in what felt like forever fear gnawed away at him. He had been blind, arrogant, and this was his sentence.
The two cast-iron doors were thrust open in front of him, bathing him in a tide of golden light. The crowd erupted, a hurricane of hisses swarming all over him. He pressed forward, only to stumble, sway. He steadied himself, then carried on, out into the middle of a vast amphitheater, its yellow sands dyed black with a billion gallons of Xenti blood.
He stood there, pulse racing, feeling sick and dizzy and tired for what felt like forever before the arena’s doors were thrust open, a tall dark figure emerging soon after. Like a dust devil in the middle of a sprawling desert, the figure strode over to him, getting closer and closer, until eventually they were only inches apart. His blood-red eyes burned with fire, teeth bared like razor blades, mandibles twitching hungrily.
“Xylem.”
“Are you sssatisssfied now Grunt? Do you have your revenge? Have you ssslaughtered enough?”
“I… I was wrong.”
“Yesss you were,” hissed Xylem, swinging something at Grunt’s head. “YESSS YOU WERE!”
Grunt parried Xylem’s sword with his own, deflecting it from his chest. The vibration almost broke his wrist. His sword felt so heavy, his body so weak.
“Xylem! Wait, let’sss talk,” he hissed, barely recognizing the sound of his own voice.
Xylem answered with steel, thrusting violently at his sternum, then his ribs. Nothing but the sound of metal on metal. Sword music. Harsh. Discordant. Constant.
“Xylem… pleassse.”
Pain jagged up Grunt’s shoulder as Xylem’s sword struck his right arm, blood spurting about the arena. From somewhere far off, in another place, in another time, Grunt could hear the hisses rising, rising, rising…
Still the dance continued, blow after blow after blow. The blood was flowing from his arm in a torrent now, the pain like an inferno. His mouth and throat were dry, getting weaker and weaker…
Then his stomach screamed with agony as a three-foot-long sword pierced his ribs, punching out the other side.
Grunt collapsed to his knees, blood pooling over his hands, down his abdomen and onto the blood-black sands.
He looked up to see Xylem raise his sword and bring it down towards his head. He would have cried out, tried to defend himself, but his eyes were filled with tears.
Chapter Thirteen: The Watcher
The girl who was not a girl felt weak, impotent. She had watched them come aboard first as strangers and then as crewmates, friends. She had grown to like and respect them as they discovered the secrets not just of each other, but also of her ship. Because that’s what she was – the ship. Her consciousness, if not her body, pervaded every circuit and system. She existed everywhere at once. There to serve, there to obey. And now…
Now there was nobody.
Her corridors were silent, her rooms unused, her engine in perpetual stasis. No one wanted her.
Except them.
The Scourge.
They had murdered her old family and now they were going to kill her new one too. They were coming aboard even now, bodies constructed of dark matter, their slaves a perverse combination of metal and tissue. Vyleria was with them, though you could barely tell it was her with that face of warped steel. She was nothing more than a walking zombie now, her friendliness and laughter lost to the stars. Anger surged through her. She wanted to resist, to fling them into outer space, to fill her halls with vacuum, to sonic cannon their leaders, to destroy...
She couldn’t even heal Vyleria… If she could just reach out and touch her everything would be alright. But she could do nothing without her crew. She had helped Ros before and given him the synaptic upgrade that he needed to fight Ren. His subconscious mind had called out to her in his distress and she had responded appropriately. But that was permissible only because he was alive and on the ship. Her programming expressly forbade any unilateral actions on her part; she was a servant, not the master. But now there were no masters, only tyrants and the slaves who would do their bidding. What could she do?
Nothing but watch.
She looked on as Lava man took control of the spaceship and star-jumped to one planet after another. All of them shared the same fate: destruction and enslavement. Her weapons systems levelled city after city, burning fields and towns, puncturing crust, piercing mantle, wiping out populations in their thousands, millions, billions. And if that didn’t subjugate them then her planet killer did. She watched as one planet exploded like a burst football, a trillion trillion tonnes of rock and water scattering into space in the blink of an eye. Billions of years of evolution and planetary formation extinguished in moments. And after that there was the black oil, where entire planets were consumed by a deluge of dark matter. What the Scourge couldn’t use they terraformed, and what they couldn’t terraform they destroyed. It was an eco-Armageddon and at the forefront of this process were the dreadnuts. A tide of cybernetic dead. The whole galaxy reeked of them; they were relentless, unstoppable. She felt sick, useless. And she could do nothing but watch.
Always watching now.
The last of the alliance was withering before it had even had a chance to grow: The Milky Way, Andromeda, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, M-32, Segue 1, all were falling under the Scourge’s shadow. How long before the rest of the universe was subdued? Was there any hope? Had there been any in the first place or was all this just futile, meaningless?
The next star-jump answered her question.
She looked out first at a small red planet, its face scarred by a series ancient impacts and floods, then she skimmed past a grey, cratered moon and a glittering hive of satellites and telescopes, turning towards a blue and green planet, its atmosphere streaked with a mixture of black and grey rain clouds.
Earth.
Dimly, she felt her sonic-cannon juddering into action, saw the bright flares as the rounds thudded into bridges, roads, office buildings, malls, parks… homes.
The last battle had begun.
Chapter Fourteen: The Last Living Boy in the Universe
The boy floated on a black sea. A squid-shaped nursery of stars as large as a hundred solar systems burned like a torch behind him, casting his face in a fiery glow. At the end of each tentacle of gas a new star was ushered into the universe, surrounded by a super-hot halo of dust. In time, gravity would sever this intergalactic umbilical cord, before the star drifted off to bring new life into the cosmos as its accretion disc coalesced over billions of years into planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and then finally life.
All around him a plethora of planets throbbed with life. Tides oozed in and out, mountains rose and fell, continents collided and broke apart, creatures took form, evolved, died. He saw it all: the march of nature on a universal scale – eternal and unconquerable; no force could stop it.
The boy was happy, content. He had everything he had ever wanted: a peaceful existence, a life amidst the stars. What more could a boy ask for?
A long sharp sound pierced his skull like a dentist’s drill.
“We should wake him; he’s slept long enough.”
The boy ignored the buzzing noise and continued looking at a pair of comets as they twirled in and out of the solar system, their intricate dance mesmeri
c, eternal.
“Just a little longer. He will see.”
Their tails sparkling like diamonds, the two comets circumnavigated a brown dwarf star, its surface mottled with solar flares, before heading back out into interstellar space. Something about them seemed familiar: alien and yet recognizable. He followed them through a cloud of frozen rock and ice, willing himself forward, his body a speck of light on the solar wind. The comets soared across the pitch-black canvass, their flight unimpeded, until a great black hand scooped them up and crushed them, their silver entrails dangling amidst the cosmos. Then the night itself seemed to come alive as whole solar systems were eclipsed by the darkness. It was an extinction on an inter-galactic scale; no planet was immune. One by one, all the lights in the universe began to wink out, snuffed from existence. Then the hand turned towards him.
He flew as quickly as he could, faster than light, but it was no use, the hand followed him wherever he went. There was no place to hide now, no planets, no moons, only an infinite sea of black.
It pounced.
The boy felt every bone, tissue and organ in his body squashed flat in a micro-second. Pain flared suddenly and then was gone.
Then just as quickly it was back again: his body, his soul, even the entire universe. The darkness had completely disappeared.
“What was that?” he asked out loud.
“That was what was,” chimed a voice.
“And what will be,” said another.
“Who are you?” he asked, staring into the vacuum.
“We are what went before.”
“And what comes after.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” said the boy, squinting in the gloom. “It’s not linear.”
Jack Strong and The Last Battle Page 4
