The Last Blade

by Sarah Hawke

  The legacy of the Seraph flows through your veins.

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to swallow. My knees went weak, and I wasn’t even sure I could move until I felt Raxyl put his hand on my arm.

  “Come,” he said, his scales smeared a sympathetic red. “It is time to leave the past behind us.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “I do not know,” he admitted. “We will find out together.”

  Interlude

  The command console beeped softly when Cole’s Valkyrie surged out of the hangar, and several warning lights began flickering when the assault shuttle detached from the hull. Wynn Mosaad couldn’t actually read most of the displays—Tareen ideograms were so convoluted they were almost impossible to decipher—but he had seen enough Convectorate tech over the years to understand the basics. He only needed a few seconds to activate the steering HUD and plot a new course.

  Once everything was locked in, he slumped deeper into the chair and watched as the shuttle and the Valkyries accelerated towards the Vantrax. A swarm of drones attempted to intercept them, but Cole and Raxyl had no trouble carving a path to the hangar.

  “May the Seraph guide your blades,” he whispered.

  A gargling groan from the deck caught his attention, and he glanced down just in time to see a red claw emerge from beneath the shattered console on the other side of the bridge. Admiral Ferron slowly dragged himself free of the rubble, though it was clearly taking all of his willpower just to stay conscious. The heavy scales around his shoulders were cracked and hemorrhaging, and he scowled at Mosaad through bloodshot orange eyes.

  “Hello, old friend,” Mosaad said. “You’re just in time for the celebration.”

  The Tarreen swept his gaze around the bridge until he spotted Falric’s corpse. “Rasska,” he hissed. “Treacherous dreega filth!”

  Mosaad chuckled bitterly until the laughs transformed into coughs. “He beat you at your own game,” he whispered. “He beat us both.”

  “I warned them about the Spiders,” Ferron seethed. “I told them it was a mistake from the beginning.”

  “They should have listened to you. But by the time they realize what’s happening, it will be too late.”

  “No,” Ferron said, slapping his tail against the neck and hoisting himself up into a crouch. “When the Hierarchy learns the truth, they will purge the treasonous filth from our ranks. They will send our fleets to your ‘Core’ and burn every dreega world to cinders!”

  “And who is going to tell them?” Mosaad asked. “This ship will never send another transmission, and neither will your forces on the station.”

  Ferron glanced back out viewport to the sprawling superstructure of the shipyard directly in front of them. “Your pilots flee the field,” he said, glaring at the small blip representing the Vantrax as it moved across the tac-holo. “The battle is over.”

  “The battle might be, but the war…” Mosaad smiled. “You have no idea what’s coming for you. You have no idea what’s about to be unleashed.”

  The admiral’s eyes narrowed as he belatedly realized they were drifting towards the shipyard. “No,” he rasped, clawing at his belt for a weapon that wasn’t there. “I will not allow it!”

  “It’s long past time you answered for all the deaths you’ve caused,” Mosaad said, hovering his hand over the engine controls. “Maybe it’s long past time since I answered for mine.”

  He touched the console. The Avernal Fury’s engines roared to life, and he smiled as the shipyard grew larger and larger in the viewport.

  “For the Seraph.”

  Epilogue

  Deep Space

  Varsellian Sector, Far Rim

  1101.8

  “We just intercepted a whole package of transmissions from that Kreen scout ship,” Shandris said as she scrolled through the holographic data feed hovering above the Vantrax’s com station. “They’re not just annoyed—they’re livid. The Kreen government has already lodged a formal protest against the Defense Pact, and the news hit the sector Holosphere this afternoon.”

  I leaned back in my chair and nodded. “It’s a start, at least.”

  “A huge start,” Shandris corrected. “It takes a lot to get my people’s government to protest anything publically. A dozen of the border worlds have already been clamoring to pull out of the Convectorate for years—an illegal shipyard secretly built in their backyard could easily push them over the tipping point.”

  “Then it’s working,” Cobalt said. “It’s actually working…”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I warned. “We still have no idea what’s going to happen. For all we know, this will blow over in a few weeks.”

  Morningstar scoffed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Now there is the cynical, bitter skeptic we all know and love. And here I thought the nicer, more personable version was here to stay.”

  I snorted softly. Almost a week had passed since our frantic escape from Nelphari, but whenever I closed my eyes I could still see the afterimage of the shipyard and the Avernal Fury exploding behind us. Though sometimes—usually when the lights were off—I could see my father’s smoking corpse instead.

  Everyone and everything was here on the Vantrax: the Valkyries, the Gazack, the pilots…we had completely packed up the base on Maz Sepa and taken to the stars instead. Morale was a hell of a lot better than I expected, especially after the initial shock had worn off, and Selorah had made considerable progress repairing all the damage. We were as safe and secure as we could reasonably expect given the circumstances.

  The problem was that we were also directionless.

  “Master Mosaad believed that destroying the shipyard would send a message to the galaxy,” Kaveri whispered from her perch near the viewport. “He wanted everyone from the Rim to the Core to know that the Wings of the Seraph were back. And soon, they will.”

  “Yeah, well, I won’t hold my breath waiting for an invitation back to Keledon…or anywhere else, for that matter,” Morningstar muttered.

  “All revolutions have to start somewhere,” Shandris said. “It’s been a long time since anyone stood up to the Vecs.”

  “Maybe, but we still have a long way to go before we get invited to the good parties.”

  “All the more reason to get started sooner rather than later,” Blackstar said from the back of the bridge.

  I sighed and closed my eyes. This time, the image of my father’s smoking corpse was there to greet me. I’d had plenty of moments of weakness over the past week, and almost all of them involved second guessing myself and my choices on the bridge of the Fury. Sometimes I scolded myself for boarding the ship in the first place, but of course then my father simply would have killed Kaveri and Mosaad and captured everyone else. At other moments I regretted grabbing ahold of him while Raxyl fired that gun, but that scenario didn’t play out any better. Deep down, I think I knew I had done the right thing…but somehow that knowledge still hadn’t seared the image of my father’s corpse from the back of my eyelids.

  The legacy of the Seraph flows through your veins.

  A few months ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue what that even meant…and honestly, I wasn’t convinced I did now. Growing up on the Rim, I had never bought into the mythos of the Seraph as a righteous revolutionary who had liberated the galaxy from the yolk of the old Tarreen Empire. The people out here saw little difference between humans and the Tarreen. They felt like had merely traded one set of interstellar despots for another, and for most of my life I had more or less agreed with them.

  Then I had met her.

  I stood and walked up behind Kaveri. My arm slid easily around her waist, and I held her in silence for a long moment as we watched more and more news feeds stream across the holo-projector. This story really was taking off faster than I’d expected; the Rakashi seemed every bit as livid as the Kreen. Individually, their governments were little more than a blip on the radar, but together…

  “If any of what my fa
ther said is remotely true, then this is only the beginning,” I said. “The Widow has been gathering psychic adepts across the galaxy to build a new Seraphim Order from the ashes of the old Dominion, and the Hierarchy has no idea what’s coming for them. We may be on the cusp of another war.” I squeezed Kaveri more tightly against me. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have no interest in sitting this one out.”

  “What does that mean?” Cobalt asked.

  “It means there are lot more Seraphim out there who need our help, humans and nonhumans alike,” I told her. “If we do nothing, we’re abandoning them to the Widow and her Spiders.”

  “Okay, but it’s not like we have any reliable way to find them,” Squeaker pointed out. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have a fleet at our beck and call, either.”

  “We have a ship, we have Valkyries, we have pilots…” I smiled at Kaveri. “We even have a Blade of the Seraph. What else could we possibly need?”

  “A few dozen battleships would be nice,” Morningstar muttered as he glared at his protein malt. “Though at this point, I’d honestly settle for some real food.”

  They all shared an anxious chuckle. But awkward snickering aside, they were all waiting for something—or rather, someone. I had felt the pressure building ever since we had escaped from Nelphari, but until now I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. A part of me had been hoping for someone else to step up and take the reins. Blackstar, Nova, pretty much any of the senior pilots in Seraph Squadron…they had all far more experience than I did. They had all known each other far longer than they had known me. Hell, even Raxyl had been an actual Wing of the Seraph at some point, and he was a lot older than the rest of us.

  But for some reason, none of that seemed to matter.

  “Well, we can’t stay out here forever,” Shandris said. “We have to do something.”

  “If my father had gotten his way, we would all be soldiers in a new Dominion army,” I said. “We would be every bit as brutal as the old regime, and we would validate what half the galaxy already thinks of psychics in particular and humans in general.”

  I took a deep breath and turned to face them. “As much as I hate the Tarreen, I have no interest in watching a new group of thugs rise in their wake. I say the time for Hierarchs and Emperors is over. I say it’s time for something different.”

  “Nice speech,” Shandris snarked. “But what does any of that actually mean? What are we going to do?”

  “We save psychic adepts whenever and wherever we can, and we do our best to prove that we aren’t like the old Dominion,” I told her. “We honor the real legacy of the Seraph and liberate people from here to the Core.”

  “Sounds nice, but there’s just one big problem: where do we possibly begin?”

  Kaveri squeezed my arm supportively. I kissed her softly on the lips then returned to my chair.

  “Where else?” I asked, smiling. “We go home.”

  Cole, Raxyl, and the girls will return next year in a new series, Legacy of the Seraph!

  For updates about new releases, you can follow Sarah on Tumblr (https://hawkenovels.tumblr.com/) or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Sarah-Hawke-607848309369374).

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  Also by Sarah Hawke

  The Amazon’s Pledge

  Huntress: Origins (a prequel!)

  The Amazon’s Pledge

  Mark of the Huntress

  The Black Mistress

  Daughter of Destiny

  Legacy of Winter

  Wrath of the Inquisitrix

  The Elf Slave Series

  Slave to the Empire

  Unbound

  Unchained

  Unbroken

  Unleashed

  The Spider Queen Collection

  Web of the Spider Queen

  Slaves of the Spider Queen

  Bound to the Spider Queen

  Vengeance of the Spider Queen

  The Dragon Bride Chronicles

  The Dragon Bride

  Dirty, Filthy Fantasies

  The Priestess’s Gratitude

  The Headmistress’s Punishment

  The Ranger-General’s Submission

  The Ranger-General’s Submission

  The Ranger-General’s Submission: Knightfall

  About the Author

  Sarah Hawke lives in New England with her two cats, a horse, and a car that actually functions now thanks to the generosity of her readers!