by Sarah Hawke
“They could be unconscious.”
“If they’ve been unconscious this long, they’re almost certainly dead,” Natalya said more forcefully this time. “Three more Convectorate ships just jumped into the system, and they’re already landing ground troops. We need to leave before they spot us.”
Mosaad dragged himself to his feet and clutched at his wounded chest. The medical drone would have scolded him if he hadn’t already ripped out its speech unit. “Ferron must still be out there somewhere,” he said. “We have to find and board his ship.”
Natalya rushed over and grabbed his arm to help steady him. “Wynn, sit down. There’s nothing else we can do here. We have to fall back and—”
“Fall back to where?” Mosaad growled. “Fall back with what? They’re dead! They’re all dead!”
Any other soldier under his command would have shriveled beneath his glare, but not her. She looked him straight in the eye, her face creased with anger, sorrow, and grim determination all at once.
“If we stay here, we’re going to die with them,” she whispered.
“Then we’ll die,” Mosaad said. “As long as Ferron dies with us, it doesn’t matter.”
Natalya’s eyes narrowed. “You would do it, too, wouldn’t you? You would charge aboard his ship and get yourself killed for no reason.”
“We are Blades of the Seraph. Our sacrifice brings glory to Her name.”
“That planet is littered with the corpses of our friends, and their sacrifice didn’t do a damn thing for the Seraph or anyone else!”
Mosaad’s lip twitched. “We can’t let them die in vain.”
“They already died in vain! Nothing is going to change that.” Natalya released his arm and scoffed. “You’re not interested in sacrifice. You just want to run off and fall on your sword because you can’t stand the pain. You’re a coward.”
Mosaad whirled towards her so quickly the gash in his stomach reopened. The pain anesthetized his fury, and he eventually slumped back down on the med-table and pressed his eyes shut as the medical drone leapt back into action.
“I’m sorry,” Natalya whispered. “It’s just…”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. She didn’t need to say anything at all. The truth was hanging there in front of them as clearly as the pile of broken scrap outside the viewport. They hadn’t just lost a battle—they had lost everything. And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
“We can worry about avenging them later,” Natalya whispered as she took his hand. “Right now we just need to survive. There are plenty of others who will oppose the armistice, especially when they learn that Falric signed the treaty before this battle. They won’t want to let the Convectorate get away with this massacre.”
“We were betrayed,” Mosaad whispered. “The sensor buoys didn’t detect their fleet, and the shields failed the moment they attacked.”
“Yes, I know. But we don’t have time to sit around here figuring out who or why.”
“There’s only one answer to both.” Mosaad bit down on his lip as the drone injected him with another painkiller. “Falric must have ordered one of his men to sabotage the beacons and lower the shields.”
Natalya pursed her lips. “I have as much reason to hate him as anyone, but even I don’t think he would go that far.”
“That’s because you don’t know him as well as I do. You didn’t see the look in his eyes on Keledon—you didn’t see how much he hated the Blades.”
She remained silent for a long moment. “If you really believe he’s responsible, then there’s only one way for us to get revenge. You heard what Lady Trell said—Falric has a bastard son. He could have survived the attack for all we know. There were hundreds of children on the last transport. If we catch up to them, we could—”
“I don’t care if he had a hundred bastard children with a hundred different whores!” Mosaad growled. “The next time I see him, I will drive my blade through his heart.”
“Even if you could kill Falric and Ferron tomorrow it wouldn’t change anything. The war is over, Wynn.”
“Nothing is over!” he snarled. The medical drone warbled a warning when he tried to sit up, but he slammed it with a wave of telekinetic force and hurled it across the infirmary. The pain speared back into his chest, but this time he forced himself to endure it. At least when he hurt he knew he was alive. That was more than he could say for the others…
Natalya swallowed and shook her head. “We have to start thinking about the future. There are others who will oppose the armistice, but they won’t support us unless we can undermine Falric’s authority. His bastard child could make all the difference!”
“No,” Mosaad said. “No more scheming, no more politics. We could have attacked Garicron a week ago with the forces we already had, and our victory would have rallied loyal warriors across the Dominion to our cause.”
“Or Ferron’s fleet would have crushed us right then and there.”
“Then at least we would have died fighting.”
Mosaad dragged himself to his feet and braced his hand against the viewport. He glared at each and every piece of scrap that drifted past them, and instead of trying to ignore the psychic echoes he opened his mind to every scream. They deserved to be heard. They deserved to be avenged.
And he would be their avatar even if no one else would.
“You’re right that others will oppose Falric,” he whispered, “but I will no longer placate fools who crave only power. We are Seraphim—we are holy warriors who have been chosen to protect this galaxy from the Tarreen. And that is exactly what we are going to do.”
Mosaad reached up and activated the com on the wall. “Send an encrypted message to Admiral Grayson,” he said. “He needs to know that we’re alive…and that we have been betrayed.”
Chapter Three
Maz Sepa
Varsellian Sector, Far Rim
1101.7
“I see the two of you have been training hard.”
My eyes fluttered open, and I grunted and rolled over onto my back. Kaveri was sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed and her eyebrows arched. Shandris was still lying next to me, though she was in a far less dignified position. Her long blue hair was spilled about so wildly it almost concealed the fact her face was completely mushed into a pillow. I was honestly surprised she could even breathe.
If she had been one of the other pilots, her fatigue would have been a symptom of linking with the Valkyrie…but that was definitely not the case here. Shandris had been perfectly energetic when she had dragged me into the room, crouched on the bed, and begged me to mount her. I had pounded her for almost an hour straight before we’d passed out.
“We have been, actually,” I rasped.
“Uh huh,” Kaveri snickered as she idly dragged her fingernail’s down Shandris’s naked back. “How many ice cubes did you go through?”
“It’s not like that. I took her up in the Valkyrie.”
“Joyrides don’t count.”
“It wasn’t a joyride. She was the one flying.”
Kaveri paused. “Really?”
I nodded and cleared my throat. “She picked up the basics almost immediately. Between her powers and the Valkyrie’s sensors, she was able to learn almost everything she needed straight from my brain.”
Kaveri smiled and ran a strand of thin blue hair through her fingertips. Shandris didn’t even budge. “That’s amazing.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there myself. She doesn’t have the raw piloting experience yet, obviously, but controlling the Valkyrie is the hard part. If we can just get her in space a little more, I think it will all come together.”
Kaveri continued smiling at the other woman, her luminous eyes glittering. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was proud of her friend or debating whether or not she should flip Shandris over and eat her quim in celebration. With a Succubus, anything was possible.
“The downside is that
we don’t have a whole lot of time,” I said. “The latest scouting reports—”
“I heard,” Kaveri said, her tongue still pressed into the side of her mouth. “We’ll have to push hard, but Master Mosaad is convinced we’re almost ready.”
I nodded and frowned at the same time. “You two were gone for quite a while. What was he teaching you this time? Another sword trick?”
“Not exactly.” Kaveri finally dragged her eyes away from Shandris, and her expression shifted from “sex-starved succubus” to “deadly warrior” so quickly it made me dizzy. “We were planning our strategy for the battle.”
“By yourselves?”
“We are the only Blades of the Seraph,” she said matter-of-factly. “It will be our responsibility to board and sabotage Admiral Ferron’s command ship.”
I finally leaned up all the way. I had been so focused on getting everyone ready for the assault that I’d barely had time to think about how we were actually going to pull it off. Blackstar had been throwing around general ideas for several days, but he had never mentioned anything about sabotage.
“Please tell me the two of you aren’t planning on boarding a CDF battleship all by yourselves,” I said.
Kaveri shrugged. “We do not have any other choice. Even with the Vantrax, we probably won’t have enough firepower to destroy the shipyard outright. Selorah’s simulations are very detailed.”
“I’m sure they are, but there has to be another way. What you’re suggesting is a suicide mission.”
“For anyone else, perhaps. But we are Blades of the Seraph—we will do whatever needs to be done.”
I opened my mouth but held my tongue. As usual, I couldn’t even pretend to share in her fanatical devotion to a group that had all but been destroyed twenty years ago. But I didn’t doubt her sincerity in the slightest—she meant what she said, and she earnestly believed that she and Mosaad could overcome literally any obstacle. She had always believed that, right from the beginning.
The problem, put bluntly, was that it was crazy. And if we had any chance of actually destroying the shipyard, we were going to need a lot more than blind faith and a misplaced sense of righteousness.
“Blackstar and Master Mosaad are already planning a final mission briefing,” Kaveri said after a moment. “Raxyl wants to take the new pilots up as many times as he can before then. We need to launch in fifty hours.”
I nodded and did my best to swallow my doubts for the time being. Debating this with her wasn’t going to accomplish anything anyway. I needed to take my concerns right to the top.
“Given how fast she learned yesterday, I bet we can get Shandris into shape by then,” I said, gently slapping the Kreen’s bare red ass. She still didn’t budge. “We should probably start teaching the others how to handle the Vantrax.”
“Some of them will be disappointed,” Kaveri said. “I know Grinner in particular was looking forward to this.”
“He’ll get over it. Besides, I know they can all shoot better than they can fly, and once Selorah has finished with her upgrades that boat will have plenty of guns to spare.”
Kaveri nodded, and her tail started playfully curling around Shandris’s leg. “If you want to shower, I’ll go ahead and wake her up.”
I grinned and leaned over to give her a quick kiss. If we weren’t in such a time crunch, I would have been seriously tempted to help out. But for once I really did have more important things to do.
“Just be gentle,” I warned. “She had a rough night.”
“I know,” Kaveri said coyly. “I can’t wait for her to tell me all about it.”
Chuckling, I slowly brought myself to my feet and stumbled over to the shower. I cleaned up as quickly as I could, and I was genuinely surprised when the girls weren’t still on the bed when I finished. Apparently Kaveri was actually serious about getting back to work. If we were somehow fortunate enough to survive all of this, we really needed to plan a long, leisurely hyperspace trip somewhere halfway across the galaxy…
I made my way towards the transport where we had converted one of the rec-rooms into a makeshift galley. Most of the other pilots were already scrambling for food, and they all looked as sleep-deprived as I felt—with the notable exception of Raxyl, of course. Our new timetable was probably going to push right up against his next hibernation cycle, but I had no doubt that he would try to delay it as long as possible.
“It would appear that Doctor Krall has even more skills than we realized,” he said as he nibbled at some of the disgusting grubs he liked to eat. Ten years ago, the mere sight of them had made me nauseous. Today…well, today the sight of them still made me nauseous, but I’d learned how to hide my disgust better.
“Psionic technology is pretty unbelievable,” I said. “Though I suppose you know that better than anyone.”
“Even twenty years ago, few pilots learned to control a Valkyrie in less than an hour,” he said, a smear of blue rippling up his neck scales. “However, your mother did teach me the basic skills fairly quickly. I admit, I am not familiar with standard Dominion training techniques. Maris did not often speak about her time at the academy, and obviously I never attended one in person.”
I nodded distantly. In the rare moments when I could actually accept that Raxyl had once been a Wing of the Seraph, I couldn’t believe that the Dominion had refused to officially train him. What kind of idiots willingly turned away that kind of talent because it was covered in scales?
Maybe they just didn’t want their recruits gagging every time he ate in front of them.
“Well, I guess we all get to learn on the job, teacher and student alike,” I said, waving around the mess hall. “We have two days to get ready.”
“And we shall do so,” Raxyl said. “I had planned to take Cobalt, Morningstar, and Squeaker up again in about an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” I told him. My eyes drifted past his when I saw Master Mosaad flit inside the room long enough to whisper something to Blackstar before he vanished again. “But first I need to have a long overdue chat with the boss.”
Raxyl’s scales rippled a deep, curious blue. “About what?”
“About all kinds of things,” I said evasively. “I’ll be back in a few. Please try and finish eating before then.”
“I will not make such a promise,” the Kali replied, his scales rippling an amused shade of purple as he cracked open another can.
I caught up with Master Mosaad in the captain’s quarters at the front of the transport. Like everyone else, he had lost most of his personal possessions back on Varsus, and the white walls were as bare as the rest of the ship. He didn’t seem particularly annoyed about it, though. I got the impression that the Blades of the Seraph were a fairly ascetic order even in the heyday of the Dominion.
“Do you have a moment?” I asked, wrapping my knuckles on the door. Knocking seemed like a rather pointless ritual when you were visiting a telepath, but I figured it never hurt to be polite.
“Outcast, good, I was hoping we’d have a chance to speak,” Mosaad said, beckoning me inside. “Or perhaps you prefer to be called ‘Emperor’ these days.”
“Definitely not,” I muttered. “The sooner everyone forgets that little detail, the better.”
“I wouldn’t count on that anytime in the near future. To steal a proverb from that ship of yours, you can’t simply stuff a gazack back into its hole.”
“Yeah, probably not,” I conceded. “But it never hurts to try.”
Mosaad chuckled softly as he folded his cape and carefully slung it over a chair. He looked far more drained than Kaveri, though that wasn’t particularly surprising given their age difference. He was still pretty damn vigorous for a fifty-something human man.
“On that note, actually,” I said, taking another step into the room, “after everything that’s happened, I admit I expected your reaction to my parentage to be a little more…dramatic.”
Mosaad smiled. “You thought I might drop everything and bow at your
feet?”
I pursed my lips. Despite the levity in his tone, I could hear the echo of bitterness behind it. “I don’t know what I expected. I just figured it would be a much bigger deal.”
“It’s a huge deal,” Mosaad said. “The mere mention of your existence could throw the galaxy into chaos. The Emperor-Regent, the Seraphim Council, the Convectorate War Ministry, even the Widow…if they knew you were here—if they knew you existed—they would mobilize fleets and burn entire worlds to find you.”
“Yet you don’t seem care in the slightest.”
“I have bowed before emperors before. I promised I would never do so again.”
I studied his silhouette while he continued fiddling with the cape, but as always his stoic façade was annoyingly difficult to crack. The bitterness still marred his voice like an old stain, though, and I knew this might have been the only chance I’d ever get to unravel it. No one else could tell me what had happened after the massacre at Talasea.
“Raxyl said that you and my father weren’t exactly best friends.”
Mosaad’s bearded cheek twitched so slightly I almost didn’t notice it. “We were not.”
“Can you tell me why?” I asked. “I still barely know anything about him.”
“In many ways, you’re better off for it.”
“Maybe,” I murmured, leaning my back against the wall, “but I’d like to hear your side of the story regardless.”
Mosaad drew in a long, slow breath, and for a fleeting moment I could have sworn he looked twenty years older. But then his posture abruptly stiffened, and I could tell he had been preparing himself for this moment ever since Raxyl and I had told him the truth about our own identities.
“Of course,” Mosaad murmured. “What would you like to know?”
“I suppose Talasea is the obvious place to start,” I said. “One way or another, we all seem to be trapped in the echoes of that battle.”
He grunted softly. “It was the day that changed everything and nothing all at once.”
“Raxyl told me that you and the Blades were planning a major offensive when my father signed the Keledon Accords and ended the war. He said you thought the armistice was a betrayal.”