Masters of Fate

by A. K. DuBoff

  MASTERS OF FATE

  DARK STARS TRILOGY: BOOK 3

  A.K. DuBoff

  MASTERS OF FATE

  Copyright © 2018 by A.K. DuBoff

  All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews or promotions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Developmental Editor: Jim Dean

  Special thanks to Beta/JIT readers:

  Kurt Schulenburg

  Randy Barber

  Troy Mullens

  Eric Haneberg

  Pam Haneberg

  John Ashmore

  Charlie Obert

  Diane Smith

  Leo Roars

  Nick Rayl

  Publisher: BDL Press

  Cover Copyright © 2018 A.K. DuBoff

  Cover Illustration by Marko Stankovic

  Copyright Registration Number: TXu002121107

  First eBook Edition: 18 October 2018

  To Jim,

  for helping me to elevate my vision to realms I never before imagined

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Key Terms, Cast, and Locations

  Book Two Recap

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Also by A.K. DuBoff

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  KEY TERMS, CAST, AND LOCATIONS

  Key Terms

  Crystalline network – A series of special crystals scattered across the known worlds; unique properties allow the crystals to record the physical state of reality at set moments in time, enabling “resets” to past configurations

  Darkness – An alien weapon spread throughout the crystalline network, which transforms and shrouds the infected worlds in shadow

  Hegemony – The collection of settled worlds in known civilization

  Master Archive – A central repository of all backup data from the crystalline network; seems to exist outside of normal space and time, accessed on the planet Crystallis

  Reset – A roll back to a previous physical state of reality from a past moment in time; resets can be on a local scale within a specific crystal’s zone or on a universal scale

  Dark Sentinel Team

  Elle – Point-of-view character, wields the Valor sword artifact (strength focus); also exhibits traits from Spirit and Protector (magic and defense) focus areas

  Kaiden – Spirit caster (magic focus) with Spirit circlet artifact, agriculture background; Elle’s romantic interest

  Toran – Protector (defense focus) with Protector gauntlets artifact, engineering background

  Maris – Spirit caster (magic focus) with restorative and defensive spell specialization

  Ship Crew

  Commander Alastair Colren – Captain of the Evangiel and Hegemony representative

  Chief Taminoret (Tami) – Head engineer and maintenance tech

  Locations

  Evangiel – Hegemony ship that serves as a mobile base

  Capital – Seat of the Hegemony government and records repository

  Crystallis – Planet containing the Master Archive, the backup for all reset crystals

  Erusan – Elle’s homeworld

  Dunlore – Toran’s homeworld

  Falstan II – Kaiden’s last world of residence

  Windau – The first world infected by the Darkness

  Yantu – Maris’ homeworld

  THE STORY SO FAR…

  No measure is too extreme in the frantic fight for survival.

  Elle and the Dark Sentinel team—Kaiden, Toran, and Maris—know the next phase of an invasion is coming, but they still haven’t identified the origin of the alien menace. In an effort to get answers, they embark on a dangerous mission to Windau, the planet first infected by the Darkness.

  While on Windau, they nearly succumb to the twisted vegetation and wildlife, though they are ultimately able to interface with the planet’s primary crystal. They discover a strange signal may hold the clues they’re looking for.

  Once back on the Evangiel, Toran identifies a set of coordinates embedded in the signal, and the Hegemony prepares to confront their would-be invaders. Upon traveling to the indicated location, a hyperdimensional anomaly appears, and out of it comes the first of the alien ships. However, before the Hegemony fleet can mount an assault, a single alien ship destroys the fleet with a weaponized black cloud that disintegrates everything it touches. With the battle lost before it had rightly begun, Commander Colren orders a risky universal reset—the only chance to try again and avoid the devastating loss.

  Elle and the rest of the Dark Sentinel team come to their senses the moment after sealing the Master Archive with a strange feeling of déjà vu. In time, they remember about the alien attack and take measures to ensure a more favorable outcome. However, when they arrive at the anomaly site, the alien fleet is already waiting; apparently, the aliens have clear memories the events from before the reset, unlike the Dark Sentinel’s scattered recollections.

  Before initiating a second universal reset, the team devises a strategy to carry over specific memories through the reset, hoping it will be enough to gain an upper hand next time; this time, Colren joins them at the locus of the event to hopefully make him remember, as well. They reset to a slightly later point and are able to remember enough of the previous encounter to devise a new strategy.

  Knowing they only have one chance to try something new, the Dark Sentinel team boards the alien ship while it’s still forming in the anomaly, to plant a spatial disruptor—a bomb capable of spanning dimensional planes. Using their magical abilities, seemingly augmented by proximity to the spatial anomaly, Elle and her friends fight their way to the center of the alien ship and deploy the disruptor.

  With moments to spare before the scheduled detonation, the team retreats to their shuttle. However, before they can dock, and the Evangiel is forced to jump away and leave them behind. The Dark Sentinels focus their magic energy on Elle’s sword to create a bubble around their shuttle and ride out the spatial disruption wave.

  The Evangiel returns to retrieve them, finding that the anomaly has been destroyed and the immediate invasion threat averted. Though shaken from this encounter, now they know how to hurt the aliens, and it’s time to fight back.

  THE STORY CONTINUES IN MASTERS OF FATE…

  1

  Practice combat wasn’t the same as a real fight, and I had a thirst for battle.

 
As I twisted and flipped around the mock battlefield with my three friends, I couldn’t help but wish that we were on a world fighting creatures born from the Darkness rather than attacking rocks on an uninhabited planet.

  Envisioning a shadowcat in my mind, I lunged to the side while swinging my sword in what would be a decapitating blow. I landed lightly on my feet then spun around to spot my next target.

  “Nice move,” Kaiden complimented.

  I grinned back, still poised for action. “I can’t wait to take them out for real.”

  The planet Commander Colren had selected for our exercises was one of the least interesting places from our travels to date. Rather, it was beautiful—impressive mountain peaks and expansive forests—but it wasn’t… magical. I craved for the intensity of the crystals on Crystallis or the hum of the Darkness signal in the background. To be on a purely ordinary world felt like a part of me was missing.

  Toran sighed, heaving his broad shoulders. He lowered his fists. “If our attacks are focused on individual creatures, we’re going about the war all wrong.”

  “That’s true. Any word on the larger strategy?” asked Kaiden, bringing his staff to a resting position on the ground.

  Toran shook his bald head. “My conversations have been about the technical nature of the Darkness and the potential form of the aliens. We haven’t gotten far enough to know how to take them out for good.”

  “Are you ever going to figure it out?” I asked, realizing only after I’d spoken that it sounded whiny. But, in the days following our engagement with the alien ship at the anomaly, Toran and the other scientists had concluded that the signal’s origin wasn’t nearly as clear as they’d once believed. It was coming from a specific location, and they knew where that place was, but there didn’t appear to be anything there.

  “It’s a complex situation. There are forces here beyond our current understanding,” Toran replied.

  Maris tightened the ponytail holding back her dark hair. “Because it’s magic.”

  “Just because we don’t yet understand it, that doesn’t make it magic,” he retorted. “Frankly, some theories the Hegemony’s science team has presented are pretty exciting.”

  “Because they’re magic,” Maris insisted.

  “No, just higher dimensional sp…” I faded out, not remembering the term Toran had used yesterday.

  “Hyperdimensional entities manifesting in our plane,” Toran corrected. “But that’s only one hypothesis. They just as easily could be beings that have learned to control matter using whatever mechanism the crystals use for resets.”

  “Regardless of what they are, we need to figure out how to stop them,” Kaiden stated.

  Torn inclined his head. “Which is what we’re trying to do. But, it’s difficult when we don’t rightly know what they’re after.”

  “I still say it’s matter—or dark matter,” I posited. “All of the worlds infected by the Darkness were hollowed out.”

  “I still don’t believe that’s the case,” Toran countered.

  “Then what—” I was cut off by a chirp in my ear from the embedded comm.

  “Dark Sentinel team, return to the Evangiel,” Colren instructed.

  “Is everything okay, Commander?” Kaiden asked.

  “New information. Meet in the conference room,” he replied, then cut the commlink.

  I looked to my friends. “Good information or bad information?”

  “That tone didn’t sound good,” Maris observed.

  Kaiden let out a deep breath. “Looks like you may soon get your wish for a proper fight after all, Elle.”

  “We’ll see what the commander has to say.” Really, it wasn’t that I desired to be at the center of the conflict, it was that I hoped for an end to the madness that had been our lives for the past several weeks. I wanted to put a face to the enemy who’d forced me away from my family and made so many people suffer at the hands of their planet-killing weapon. I didn’t want to confront them because of bloodlust—rather, I wanted to end the war so we could return to our loved ones and once again have control over our own lives. Though my future path was now unclear, not having the threat of an alien invasion hanging over my head would certainly make matters easier.

  The four of us hiked back to our shuttle in a grassy field two hundred meters from our practice area. My chest was tight with eager anticipation to hear Colren’s news. The commander had been strangely silent in the four days since our near-death encounter with the alien ship, so I looked forward to a face-to-face meeting to assess his current frame of mind. I could only imagine he was as anxious for the conflict to be over as I was—maybe even more so, having been in the thick of it for a longer time. However, he was our connection to the rest of the Hegemony, so I wanted to make sure he was still on our side. After all, he’d already left us to die once, when he jumped the Evangiel without us.

  After a brief shuttle ride, we docked in the hangar and made our way to Central Command on the upper deck of the Evangiel. Colren rose from his seat at the center of the bridge and motioned us toward the glass-walled conference room.

  “How was practice?” the commander asked as we took our typical seats.

  “Good,” Kaiden replied.

  I nodded. “We feel prepared, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It was,” Colren said. “So, there shouldn’t be any issue with carrying out our new orders.”

  Toran’s brow knit. “The Hegemony has made a decision?”

  Colren nodded. “We’ve been ordered to mount an investigation of the world where the alien signal is originating. Since nothing is showing up on long-range scans, we have no option other than to get closer.”

  My stomach flipped as I thought back to the last time we’d gone to an alien-controlled world to investigate the Darkness. I hadn’t experienced it in this timeline, but my memories from the previous-future had become clearer with time. The multiple independent timelines with their own sequences of events wove through my mind; I couldn’t tell quite how many resets we’d been through, but there were at least three clear versions of events where we hadn’t stopped the alien fleet. In those timelines, worlds infected by the Darkness had proved almost deadly. I could only imagine a journey to their central hub would be the most dangerous of all.

  Kaiden caught my eye from the seat next to me. He cracked a subtle smile, knowing how much I had been asking for a direct alien encounter over the past several days. However, in usual fashion, those aspirations sounded a lot crazier to me now that we were up against that reality. Our brush with death following the spatial disruptor had shaken me, and I suspected my friends had also been changed by the confrontation with their own mortality.

  Still, sending the Hegemony’s flagship into enemy territory… my own nerves aside, that sounded reckless.

  “The Evangiel is going?” I asked in response to Colren’s orders. “I mean, I know we’re on board and our team is the most logical choice to check everything out, but isn’t a ship this size a little… obvious?” Since Colren had always been surprisingly accommodating with answering our questions and us challenging his orders—at least when we were in good favor—I figured the best way to test his current regard for us was to needle him a bit.

  The commander seemed ruffled for a moment by my question, but the cloud passed from his face almost immediately. “Yes,” he admitted, “only larger vessels are capable of executing a jump of this distance. This crew has come closer to the enemy than any other. We’re the best choice in a number of ways.”

  A thorough, on-topic answer. That was certainly a good indication that we hadn’t permanently been relegated to cannon fodder status. “I’m up for the challenge,” I replied, though my new nerves hadn’t subsided.

  “Good, because I mean it quite literally when I say that everything is riding on this mission,” Colren continued. “The aliens could be back at any time with greater numbers. We got lucky you were able to get onto that sh
ip and plant the disruptor, but those strategies only tend to work one time. To end this war, we need to go after the core of their civilization and do everything in our power to make sure they don’t ever come looking for us again.”

  “No argument here,” Kaiden said.

  Colren folded his hands on the tabletop. “This will need to have a final resolution unlike any other conflict we’ve faced. If we’re successful, it will mean that the war effectively never happened.”

  “We’ll reset,” Toran stated.

  “Exactly,” Colren acknowledged with a nod. “We need to figure out how to defeat them and then reset to before the Darkness ever arrived on a Hegemony world.”

  “Attack them before they can attack us,” I mused.

  “Yes, but they’ve demonstrated that they maintain awareness of other timelines through the resets,” Kaiden pointed out. “Won’t they be expecting us to do that?”

  “Almost certainly, which is why so much is riding on this next mission,” Colren replied. “The way I figure it, we have one shot to find their weakness and go in for the kill.”

  “That’s not the right approach.” Toran shook his head. “If we reset to before the Darkness arrived, there’s no telling what will happen to us. We can’t rely on deploying an end game strategy after a universal reset—though we got lucky last time, that was only going back a week. But months? To before we were transformed? I worry this whole mess would start all over again.”

  Colren frowned. “What other options do we have? We need to restore the corrupted worlds.”

  “Yes, but we should have full reset controls once we un-seal the Master Archive,” Toran countered. “We can initiate the reset after we’ve defeated the enemy.”

  “But then they’ll just come back…” Maris said, casting him an exasperated glance.