Broken Worlds- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  Darius reached for the door handle with a sweaty palm. His heart beat like a drum in his chest...

  The door was locked, but Darius rattled it on its hinges, not willing to give up yet. The door popped open, and the whispers abruptly stopped. An old metal deadbolt fell to the floor with a ringing sound.

  His palm felt slick on the cold metal handle of the door. He hesitated, terrified to open the door further, but something compelled him to go on. Darius pushed, and the door creaked loudly as it swung open.

  A long hallway appeared ahead of him. The wind howled. Open windows lay along the length of the hall. Moonlight sparkled off broken wedges of glass on the dusty stone floor. Darkness pooled at the end of the hallway. Darius peered into it, and an echo of the whispers returned, urging him onward.

  He crept down the hallway, broken glass crunching under foot. Beside each of the windows were small rooms with beds and wooden chests inside. The doors were either missing, or splintered open. A few of the rooms held child-sized skeletons, covered in rags and papery bits of skin. The smell of death hung in the air. Darius grimaced at the sight of the bodies. They looked like human skeletons, except for their elongated heads and three-fingered hands.

  Keth children, killed in the Revenants’ attack? Darius wondered if they were what he was supposed to see, but the darkness at the end of the passage still beckoned, and the whispers returned each time he looked down that way.

  As Darius reached the end of the hallway, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he saw a vast circular chamber with no windows or doors. A pool of water gleamed in the center of the room—a well or reservoir of some kind.

  More whispers.

  He walked up to the edge and peered into the water. Nothing but his own reflection stared back at him in the glassy pool. About to turn away, a gust of wind slammed into his back, carrying a glowing cloud of... Sprites. The tiny, luminous symbionts zigged and zagged in a random pattern resembling Brownian motion, and the whispers became deafeningly loud.

  The previously darkened chamber now danced with glowing white specks. The Sprites coalesced into a shimmering ball of light, and as one dipped below the surface of the pool.

  Darius peered into the pool once more, and this time he saw something besides his reflection.

  Dead bodies were chained to the bottom of the pool. Darius flinched in horror at the sight of the upturned faces, some of them human faces, with drifting mops of hair, others covered in fur or wrinkly hide. There had to be a few dozen people down there. The sprites dropped below one of the bodies, traveling down the chain. The chain abruptly snapped, and that body came rocketing to the surface with the Sprites on its heels. Darius rocked back on his heels and leaned away from the pool just as the body broke the surface. The Sprites burst out a second later and hovered over a woman’s face.

  Darius blinked in shock at the sight of her staring gray eyes. Long dark hair splayed the water around her head. She had a prominent brow, a strong jaw, and long, regal features. There was no mistaking who this was. It was Samara Guharin, Tanik’s wife.

  Darius stared in shock. The sprites drifted down and hovered just above her chest. There, a heart-shaped golden locket floated around Samara’s neck. The whispers returned, but softly now. A split second later, the ball of sprites dispersed and went whistling by him on another gust of wind.

  Darius awoke blinking rapidly and rubbing bleary eyes. They were just now making atmospheric entry over the day side of Ouroboros.

  As the Osprey shivered and shook around him, Darius thought about his dream. But had it been a dream? Or was this another vision? Dreams were rarely so tangible, let alone so orderly and specific. A vision seemed more likely, but what did it mean? Clearly Samara wasn’t dead. They’d met her, alive and well! But maybe this was a warning that she was going to die?

  Or maybe it really was just a dream. Darius’s mind flashed back to the heart-shaped gold locket around the dead Samara’s neck, and he wondered if she owned such a thing. That would be the easiest way to determine if there was any truth to what he’d seen. If she owned a locket like it, then this couldn’t be a dream. How else would he know about the locket?

  Something else niggled in the back of his mind. Who were the others chained to the bottom of the well with Samara? He recalled that there’d been a few dozen of them. A few dozen.

  Between the Acolytes, Marines, and Vulture pilots on their way back to the castle right now, there were a few dozen of them, too.

  That hit Darius like a splash of cold water to the face. Maybe Samara wasn’t the only one who needed to worry about what he’d seen.

  Chapter 13

  “We’ll take you with us to the depot. You can hitch a ride with someone else from there,” Trista said.

  Gatticus stood behind the pilot’s seat, staring into the featureless white eye of a warp disc. He marveled that although they were traveling many times the speed of light, there was no sensation of acceleration or movement—a convenient by-product of warp physics. Alcubierre-Kaminski (Alckam) drives didn’t propel vessels through space; they compressed and expanded the space around them in a warp bubble. The bubble moved, while the vessel itself remained stationary within a tiny universe of distorted space-time. The flat white circle of light in front of them—the warp disc—was the only sign that the universe beyond even existed.

  That was how Gatticus felt: trapped in a bubble, unable to see out, the blank sectors in his memory the only sign of what lay beyond. Fortunately only his most recent memories had been lost. His long-term memories were distributed throughout his body with several layers of redundancy.

  “Hey, metal head!” Trista said. “Did you hear me?”

  Buddy, her pet Togra, sniggered in the copilot’s seat beside her.

  “Yes, I heard you,” Gatticus said. “But I wonder if I could change your mind. I’ll pay you well to take me back to Earth.”

  “I can’t risk it. If someone finds out I’m carting an Executor around, my freelancing days are over. I’ll have to sign on with the USO fleet just to stay alive.”

  “No one needs to know. You would be taking no additional risk over what you are taking at this very moment. In fact, you could take me straight to the Union Palace on Earth. No one there would even bat an eye at seeing me step off your ship.”

  Trista rotated her seat to face him, and fixed him with a dry look. “Yeah, and what would my excuse be for going to the palace in the first place?”

  Gatticus shrugged. “You could say you had a contract to deliver a shipment of foodstuffs.”

  “Let’s say I do that. There’s another problem. It’s over two hundred light years from here to Earth.”

  Gatticus nodded. “How fast is your ship?”

  “She’ll make point four light years per hour if I push it.”

  Gatticus grimaced. “That’s it?”

  Trista’s eyes flashed. “This is a civilian transport, bolts-for-brains, not a Union cruiser. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, can you pay?”

  “How much are you asking?” Gatticus replied.

  “My fuel draw is just under seventy creds per light year. You’ll have to at least double that if you want to make it worth my while. Say... thirty thousand.”

  “Done.”

  Trista blinked, and her copilot spun around to face him, too. His furry jaw was hanging open and his big brown eyes were bulging out of his head.

  “Just like that,” Trista said. There was a gleam in her eyes that Gatticus didn’t like. “What’s the catch?”

  He decided to level with her. “I woke up on a Union vessel with a hole in my head. The ship’s logs showed no sign of a fight. They indicated that I was launched from a Colossus-class carrier with the autopilot set to take me as far as possible before running out of fuel. No destination was set. Logically, that means whoever launched my ship wanted to get rid of me. If it were not for my ingenuity in fashioning a comm probe, they would have got it right.”

  “So?” Trista
asked.

  “So, I was launched from a Union ship in a Union ship. If the intention was to get rid of me, I am left to question who in the Union would want me gone, and how they might respond to learning that I am still around. I would like to learn the answer to that question before I hitch a ride on the nearest Union vessel.”

  “Aha. I get it. You want to travel incognito, and that means you’ve got to slum it with the civvies, but since you’re an android, they all hate your guts.”

  “Yes. Except for you.”

  “No, I hate your guts just fine,” Trista said. “But I like your creds, so it evens out. Price just went up. Forty thousand to take you to Earth. Plus the five promised for your rescue.”

  “What?” Gatticus blinked. “You already stated your price. Raising it now would be unethical.”

  “Said the android whose job is to sentence innocent people to death.”

  “We don’t like our role in the Union any more than you do,” Gatticus replied.

  “So quit.”

  “We can’t. Androids are not allowed to do anything else, and opposing the Union or its laws is futile. The system of tributes and designated hunting grounds is the only thing that keeps the Cygnians from committing wholesale slaughter. If we ever succeeded in overturning that system, the Cygnians would go back to hunting everywhere, not just on designated worlds. It is a necessary stopgap to ward off a superior foe.”

  “Yeah, whatever lets you sleep at night, Executor.”

  Gatticus frowned at the double-meaning behind her use of his title. “I do not sleep,” he pointed out.

  Trista waved her hand at him. “It’s an expression. Why don’t you go find a charging port or something? It’s a long way to Earth, and the less we see of each other the better.”

  * * *

  Two Ospreys and a pair of Vulture fighters hovered down near the castle. It castle loomed large before them, cast in jagged shadows by the mountain it was built upon.

  Darius climbed out of his turret just as Samara climbed down from hers. She jumped off the access ladder and landed beside him with a ringing bang. Darius glanced at her. No sign of a heart-shaped locket hanging from her neck. He was just about to ask her about it when Tanik came striding out of the cockpit with the rest of the Acolytes.

  Samara folded the access ladder back against the ceiling and Tanik breezed by them on his way to the airlock. Darius caught Cassandra’s eye, and walked with her to the airlock.

  Darius noted that they hadn’t brought any supplies with them, and asked about that while they were waiting for Tanik to cycle the airlock.

  “The other Osprey has everything we’ll need,” Tanik replied as the outer doors slid open. He jumped down and started across the landing pad.

  Darius and Cassandra followed him out with the others. Marines streamed from the Osprey beside theirs, while the two Vulture pilots hopped down from their fighters on landing pads beyond that.

  Everyone met up on the steps of the castle. The Marines took up defensive positions at the doors and windows while everyone else walked inside.

  Darius marveled that the Marines automatically knew what to do. Their training was programmed by neural mappers, not by drills and real world experience. Just a few weeks ago they’d been frozen in cryo tanks aboard the Deliverance, all of them terminal patients from the twenty-first century who’d been waiting for cures to their diseases. Tanik had cured them all with Cygnian nanotech, but gratitude didn’t properly explain everyone’s conformity with their assigned roles.

  It was tempting to believe that these people were still being controlled by Tanik. Why else would they go along with his orders? Carry a weapon, wear your armor, go to the castle, guard the castle, protect the Acolytes....

  It seemed like there should be more questions flying around and a lot less military discipline.

  Tanik and Samara stopped in front of the fireplace and turned to address the group. Two pairs of Marines came in carrying metal crates and set them down to one side.

  “Welcome everyone,” Tanik said. “This is going to be your home for at least the next two years while you train to become Revenants.”

  A snort of derision echoed from the back of the group, and Darius spotted Blake Nelson standing there in his flight suit with his helmet off and tucked under one arm. Of course, he would be one of the Vulture pilots Tanik had chosen to join them at the castle. The other pilot standing beside him was Veekara, the Vixxon from Hades.

  “Is something wrong, Blake?” Tanik asked.

  “Well, yeah. I keep hearing about the Revenants, and the zero point field, and all that other kak, and I just don’t buy it. Besides, what’s the point? So you train them, then what? How’s that going to help us get out of here? I thought the problem was we don’t have enough fuel to fly around the Eye, and that we don’t have enough firepower to get past the ships guarding it. Sitting around in some alien monastery for the next two years isn’t going to help us. All that does is give the Cygnians more time to find us.”

  Murmurs of agreement rose from the Marines who’d brought the crates in from outside. Darius saw a few of them turn from their guard posts to peer in on the gathering. This was what Darius had been expecting. Despite the confrontational nature of Blake’s objections, he found it reassuring to hear people thinking for themselves again. Maybe Tanik wasn’t controlling them after all.

  Tanik gave a twisted smile. “You mean the Revenants,” he said. “The Cygnians aren’t the ones looking for us on this side of the Eye.”

  “Whatever,” Blake said. “It doesn’t matter who’s out there looking for us. The point is, sitting on our kakkers is a great way to let them find us.”

  “And what do you think we should be doing, Blake?”

  Blake turned to address the others. “We should be sending out scouts to neighboring systems! Looking for fuel that we can steal so we can get the hell out of here. We’re in the middle of a war zone. Let’s go somewhere else and find some other planet to colonize. Somewhere far off the beaten track.”

  Heads bobbed and Veekara murmured her agreement.

  “That, or we find our way back to the Union and immigrate—or whatever it is that we have to do. You said it would take three years to get to Union space if we don’t go back through the Eye. How much fuel would that take?”

  “More than we can possibly carry on the Deliverance.” Tanik replied. “Besides, you can’t go back to the Union now, not after you attacked the Crucible and the Cygnians. You’d be marked for death and sent to the nearest designated hunting ground. Unless you mean that we should go back so that we can join the Coalition and the fight against the Union.”

  Marines and Acolytes traded worried glances with each other.

  “What about us?” Arok demanded. “We didn’t fight them. We could go back to the Crucible and surrender.”

  A few of the Marines voiced their agreement. Many of them hadn’t actively fought against the Union yet.

  “You Acolytes would be trained as Revenants, and then pressed into the war with the Keth. And as for the rest of you—” Tanik’s gaze fell on the nearest Marine. “Assuming you won’t be grakked by association with the rogue ship that dared to attack the Crucible, you’d be tested for your affinity to the light, just like any other tribute.

  “Four out of every five people return from the Crucible with the seal of life. I see eight Marines here, so it’s likely that one or two of you would be sent away to be hunted by Cygnians. I wonder who the unlucky ones would be?” Tanik asked, as his eyes roved over the group.

  Silence fell, leaving nothing but the sound of feet shuffling restlessly and the whistling wind.

  “We’ve been over this already,” Tanik said.

  That was news to Darius. Then again, he’d been unconscious for several days after the attack on the Crucible, so he had probably missed a lot.

  “It’s time we moved on to more productive conversations, don’t you think?” Tanik asked.

  “Two years,” B
lake said quietly. “Then what?”

  “Then, we execute our plan to defeat the Union. Darius, why don’t you tell everyone what that plan is?”

  Darius swallowed nervously as all eyes turned to him. There didn’t seem to be any good place to start. Taking a deep breath, he explained how he supposedly had the potential to become the next Augur, and how Tanik had foreseen him sitting on the throne of a new Union with the Cygnians as their slaves. That explanation met with skeptical looks from everyone, including and especially the other Acolytes.

  “You’re basing all of this on a vision?” Blake scoffed. “How is one man going to somehow defeat an interstellar empire of blood-thirsty aliens?”

  Tanik spoke next. “By defeating the Augur. I already told you that the Augur is the one controlling the Cygnian Royals. When the Augur dies, they’ll snap out of it, and the Union will erupt in civil war. That is when we will make our move.”

  “What move?” Blake demanded.

  “We’re going to turn Cygnus Prime into a cloud of dust.”

  A low growl sounded from Gakram, the Banshee Acolyte in the group, but everyone ignored him.

  “You mean figuratively?” Blake asked.

  “No, literally.” Tanik went on to explain about zero point energy bombs and his plan to steal them and use them against the Cygnians.

  Silence reigned in the castle once more, but for Gakram’s growls.

  “So the Cygnians are just going to surrender after that?” Blake asked.

  “My people will never surrender,” Gakram replied, baring his long gray teeth at them and hissing. “For every one of us you kill, we will kill thousands of you.”

  “We’ll keep destroying your worlds until you do surrender,” Tanik replied.

  Gakram let out a thunderous shriek, and lunged. Tanik held out a hand and the Banshee stopped, hovering in mid-air, growling and thrashing against unseen forces.

  Exclamations of shock and confusion rose from the group. For many of them, this was the first time they’d witnessed proof of Tanik’s abilities.