Tanik answered that with a cryptic smile. “Patience, Darius. You’ll have your answers soon. In the meantime, why don’t you go down and wait for me in the entrance hall? I need to get dressed.”
Darius’s gaze lingered, but Dyara’s hand slid into his, and he felt her tugging him toward the door. “Let’s go,” she said. He nodded, and Cassandra went ahead of them, leading the way.
Whatever plan Tanik had in mind, Darius hoped it was good enough to convince the other Revenants. They needed help if they were going to defeat the Cygnians.
Chapter 29
It was standing room only in the entrance hall of the castle, but Darius had found his seat before all of the others had arrived. He was sharing an empty storage crate with Cassandra and Dyara, each of them sitting to either side of him. Besides the seven Acolytes, there were eight Marines, and thirty Revenant soldiers in their shiny silver armor.
Tanik stood at the center of the gathering, in front of the fireplace, dark with soot and coals. Like the other Revenants, Tanik was also wearing armor, but his was black power armor from the Deliverance, the same as the Marines wore.
“Now that everyone’s here, I can explain why you shouldn’t all go run and hide in Union space,” Tanik began. “The first and most obvious reason, is because whoever the next Augur is, they won’t let you go. They’ll come looking for you. You’ll be hunted and dragged back to the Crucible, having gained nothing for your trouble. And the second reason, is because we have a chance to take over the Union for ourselves.”
“What about the Cygnians?” one man asked.
“How many ZPF bombs do you have in your fleet? A hundred? A thousand?”
“More than a thousand,” a woman said. Darius recognized the voice. It was Lora Addison.
“And how many do the Cygnians have?” Tanik pressed.
“None,” someone else replied.
Tanik nodded sagely. “So we press our advantage. Threaten their worlds. Give them a demonstration, and warn them what will happen if they don’t respect the Union’s independence.”
“They won’t,” Lora said. “So you’re suggesting we commit xenocide.”
“If it comes to that, yes,” Tanik replied. “In a society divided into predators and prey, the rule is kill or be killed.”
“And then what?”
“Then, we install our Luminary as the new regent of the Union.”
Hushed murmurs spread from one Revenant to the next. Darius recalled that only Lora, Asha, and the other Acolytes knew about his potential.
“Darius, would you stand up please?” Tanik asked.
He stood, and offered a tight smile to all of the Revenants who suddenly turned to stare at him with a mixture of suspicion and hostility.
“We should kill him while we still can!” someone said. Heads bobbed, and someone started pushing through the crowd with his hand on the hilt of his sword.
A sharp jolt of adrenaline lanced through Darius and he raised his hands. “Wait. I’m not like the others. I have no interest in controlling anyone. I never even met the original Augur. Nova tried to kill me twice before I eventually killed her, because—”
“Because you wanted to take over as the next Augur!” someone accused.
“No! Because she’d foreseen me, sitting on a throne, ruling over a new Union with the Cygnians defeated.”
“That’s a lie,” Lora scoffed.
A low growl built into a roar from somewhere in the back of the room. Darius suspected that was Gakram, the Banshee Acolyte voicing his discontent.
“It’s not a lie,” Tanik insisted. “I’ve seen the same vision, and if you take the time to look into the future for yourselves, you will, too.”
“What’s the point? The future is too elusive to predict,” another Revenant said.
“It is elusive,” Tanik agreed. “But some things can be seen with certainty, and this is one of them.”
“Let’s say your plan works,” Lora said. “Why Darius? Just because he’s a Luminary?”
“Yes. He’s the only one whose visions can be wholly trusted, and therefore, the only one who can be trusted to guide the new Union safely through turbulent times.”
“We’ll never win,” Lora insisted. “Even if we defeat the Cygnians. The other Revenants will come through the Eye behind us and fight us for control of the Union.”
Murmurs of agreement followed that objection, and Darius had to admit she had a point. This was the argument that had given him pause and made him doubt Tanik’s plan in the first place.
Tanik raised a hand for silence. “There is one way we can stop them. We collapse the Eye behind us, trapping them on this side of the galaxy.”
“That’s impossible,” one man said.
But Tanik shook his head. “Wormholes are held open by exotic matter. The zero-point field is capable of interacting with that matter, and it’s possible to use the field to both open and close wormholes. One ZPF bomb, detonated in the right place, should be enough to collapse the Eye.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing. Wormholes are an enigma. No one knows how they’re formed or how they can be destroyed,” Lora said.
“You’re wrong. I know how.”
“Prove it,” Lora said.
“As you wish.” With that, he raised both of his hands, and a bright orb appeared, hovering above their heads. It expanded rapidly to fill the hall. Everyone gasped and leaned away from it, but Darius peered into it, watching as it went from an opaque ball of shimmering light to a translucent sphere.
Stars appeared, and in that instant a roaring wind whipped by them, blasting them from all sides and sucking them toward the light.
Darius wrapped his arms around Cassandra and Dyara and grabbed the handles of the storage crate they were sitting on, pinning them all to it. He felt his legs, suddenly weightless, drifting up toward the shimmering portal.
“Grab onto me!” he yelled as he felt Cassandra slipping toward the light.
But the wind died just as suddenly as it had begun, and Darius’s legs hit the floor with a thunk of mag boots on stone. Darius turned to look just as the room burst into heated discussion. Tanik gazed into the crowd with a smug smile, twisted into a sneer by the scars running across his face.
“How did you do that?” Lora shouted to be heard above the furor.
“I’m afraid that knowledge is too dangerous to share,” Tanik replied. “Suffice it to say, I know how wormholes are made, and I also know how they are unmade.”
“You said you need a ZPF bomb to shut the wormhole,” Darius said.
Tanik nodded. “I’m not strong enough to collapse a wormhole the size of the Eye by myself.”
“If you can open and close wormholes at will, how do we know that one of the Luminaries won’t be able to do the same thing?” someone asked.
Tanik waved that concern away. “If they knew how to open wormholes, don’t you think they would have done so to ambush you and take over the Crucible by now? Besides, opening a small portal for a brief period is one thing. Opening one large enough for starships to cross, and holding it open while they do so is much more difficult.”
Awe at what they’d witnessed set in, and a hush fell over the entrance hall.
“Why did we get sucked toward it?” Cassandra whispered.
“Because he opened the wormhole into space,” Dyara replied. “He depressurized an entire planet.”
Lora said, “This plan of yours might actually work. Regardless, I’m not the one you need to convince. We’re all Adepts here. The Advocates and Sentinels are the ones you need to speak to, starting with Admiral Ventaris.”
Tanik nodded. “I’m ready when you are, Adept.”
Chapter 30
—THREE DAYS LATER—
The nonessential crew cabins on the Deliverance were all large rooms with tiered rows of seating, arrayed inside a dome of holo panels. Each seat had its own acceleration harness and configurable holo display, while the holo panels around the cabin sh
owed the ship’s surroundings. Right now those panels showed the distorted region of space inside of the Eye of Thanatos as they crossed it on their way to Union space.
Three days ago Tanik had gone with Adepts Lora and Asha to give a demonstration of wormhole creation/destruction aboard the Revenant fleet’s flagship, the Harbinger. Admiral Ventaris must have been impressed, because immediately thereafter he’d given the order to evacuate Ouroboros. Now the crew of the Deliverance was back on board, along with a handful of Revenant soldiers. The Deliverance had joined the Revenant fleet at the Crucible, refueled, and then flown through the Eye behind all of the other ships.
Darius didn’t enjoy the return to a zero-G environment, but leaving Ouroboros behind more than made up for it. His vision of Cassandra’s funeral had shown a setting from the surface of the planet. The farther they could get from it, the better. As soon as Tanik shut the Eye behind them, there’d be no way to return to Ouroboros, and therefore, no way for his vision to come to pass.
Darius let out a shaky sigh and glanced around the crew cabin. Cassandra and Dyara sat to either side of him along the front row of seats, while the other Acolytes sat further down the same row. Everyone in the cabin stared fixedly at their holo displays, or at the holo panels on the walls. Anticipation and boredom mingled with hushed voices and fidgeting limbs. It reminded Darius of flying on a commercial airliner back in the 21st century.
“It looks like we’re almost through the Eye,” Cassandra said, studying a star map on her holo display. “Do you think they dropped the bomb already?”
Darius shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Hopefully it works,” Dyara added.
Darius nodded along with the sentiment, and reached for Dyara’s hand. She laced her fingers through his and smiled.
He smiled back. In the past three days he and Dyara hadn’t had much of a chance to figure out where their relationship was going, or what their expectations were, but they’d spent last night alone in her quarters, and this time they’d done more than just sleep. It had been an unusual experience in zero-G, but surprisingly not awkward. And since then, Darius hadn’t noticed any awkwardness or diminished interest between them, which he took as a good sign.
“Here we go...” Cassandra said.
Darius looked to the holo panels and watched as the star field seemed to invert and peel away from a backdrop of stars, undistorted by the warped space inside the wormhole.
He pulled up a star map on his holo display. Green blips appeared in a long line ahead of their position, while a cluster of yellow ones—the Cygnian Fleet, sat to one side, unmoving.
That was a good sign. It meant that so far Admiral Ventaris and the other Revenants were managing to do their part, exerting themselves to control the Cygnian leaders aboard their fleet. Darius wasn’t sure how much they knew about the Revenants and their war with the Keth, or for that matter, the real reason for the Crucible and their ritual of sending children to it. Now that the Augur was dead, the Cygnians were supposed to be in the slow process of coming to their senses—whatever that meant. From everything he’d been told, Darius suspected it meant that a bloody civil war was coming.
Darius watched on his map as they followed the Revenant fleet to a safe distance from the Cygnian fleet. The Deliverance was the last ship through the Eye, since it was Tanik’s ship, and he had to close the wormhole behind them.
As Darius watched their progress, he felt the Deliverance’s engines periodically engage, pressing him into his seat, or against the sides of his acceleration harness. Silence reigned in the cabin. Everyone watched their displays in breathless anticipation, waiting to see the Eye suddenly disappear.
“How do we know if it worked?” Cassandra asked.
“I don’t know...” Darius said. “Maybe I should try to contact the bridge for an update.”
Dyara’s hand tightened around his. “Wait,” she breathed. “Look.”
Darius glanced at her display. She’d zoomed in on the Eye. It looked the same as ever, a gleaming soap bubble bathed in stars. He shook his head. “I don’t see...” And then he did. The bubble was rapidly shrinking. “It worked!” Darius crowed.
Speakers crackled to life inside the cabin amidst a rising clamor of excited exclamations. “This is Captain Gurhain. The Eye is now collapsing behind us, and we are en route to the star system that will serve as our staging ground for the next six months. If you see the Cygnian fleet moving to attack us, don’t be alarmed. We won’t be in-system much longer.”
Attack us? Darius stared at his holo display. The group of yellow blips was moving, changing shape as the Cygnian fleet began inching toward them. The deck in the crew cabin began glowing faintly with the light of the ZPF, and in the next instant, bright green lasers flickered out of the void, lashing the Revenant fleet.
“Why are they attacking us?” Darius wondered aloud. “I thought the Revenants were controlling them.”
“They’re obviously not very good at it,” Dyara said. “Maybe Cygnians are harder to control than humans?”
“Or it takes a Luminary to control them,” Cassandra suggested. She glanced at Darius as she said that. “Maybe you should try?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to begin. Anyway, the Revenants are shielding us at the moment, and Tanik said we won’t be here much longer.”
Even as he said that, he saw the lead ship of the Revenant fleet jump to FTL with a corresponding flash of light. Consecutive flashes raced down the line of ships like a chain reaction, and in a matter of seconds the Deliverance was the only ship left.
“Why aren’t we jumping?” Cassandra asked.
But before Darius could venture a guess, the holo panels blazed a blinding white, and faded to black around the flat white circle of a warp disc.
The intercom crackled to life once more. “This is Lieutenant Fields from the helm—we have established warp and ceased maneuvering. You may now disengage your harnesses. ETA to our destination is twenty-one standard days. For updates please consult the nearest holo display. Fields out.”
Darius frowned, staring into the unblinking eye of the warp disc. Twenty-one days! It must be a long way to the staging ground. No wonder they’d refueled the Deliverance at the Crucible.
The sound of releasing harnesses and mag-booted feet shuffling filled the cabin, but Darius lingered in his seat, troubled by his thoughts.
Cassandra folded away her harness, stood up, and stretched. Dyara did likewise. “Are you planning to stay there?” she asked.
Darius belatedly released his harness and stood up, frowning at Dyara as he did so.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The Cygnians attacked us before we jumped. They attacked us despite the Revenants’ best efforts to control them.”
Dyara shook her head, not getting it. “So?”
“So, we’re going to spend the next twenty-one days flying to our staging ground, and after that, six months, doing who knows what while we prepare to face them.”
“I’m pretty sure Tanik plans to continue training us,” Dyara said.
“And while we’re off play-fighting with swords, what do you think the Cygnians are going to be doing in the rest of the galaxy? Now that Nova is dead, no one is keeping them in line anymore. If what we saw was a sample of their aggression in spite of the other Revenants’ best attempts to control it, then how many people are going to die while we sit around doing nothing?”
Cassandra frowned and shook her head. “Maybe nothing will change. They’re not all bad. Gakram is—”
“Just a kid,” Dyara interrupted. “And as far as I can tell, he’s unusually passive for a Cygnian. Darius is right. The Cygnians are probably slaughtering people as we speak. We should talk to Tanik,” Dyara said.
“Talk to me about what?”
Darius turned to see Tanik striding from the entrance of the cabin, walking against a steady outflow of crew. The other Acolytes were already on their way out, probably heading for thei
r quarters or the nearest mess hall. Darius spotted Gakram, the Banshee Acolyte, skittering along the ceiling on six legs to avoid the crowds.
As soon as Tanik reached them, Dyara asked why they were waiting so long to address the Cygnian threat and launch their coup.
Tanik gave a thin smile. “Six months is how long it will take for us to get our ships into position and simultaneously threaten all of the Cygnians’ worlds. Rest assured, we’re not delaying any more than we have to.”
“But you said we’ll be spending the next six months at the staging ground,” Darius pointed out.
“We will, yes. That’s because our target, Cygnus Prime, is closer to the Eye, and to the staging ground, than all of the other Cygnian worlds. We will remain there with the Deliverance and the Harbinger until all of the other ships reach their targets. While we wait, we will conclude your training.”
“I thought it takes two years to train Acolytes?” Cassandra asked.
Tanik inclined his head to her. “Ideally, yes, but we don’t have that much time anymore. And speaking of training, your next lesson starts in one hour. Tell the others. I’ll meet all of you in the aft cargo bay.”
Cassandra nodded.
“I have one more question before you go,” Darius said.
Tanik’s left eye twitched. “And that is?”
“Why couldn’t you and the other Revenants keep the Cygnians under control?”
“Only the Augur and the Luminaries are powerful enough to completely control another person’s mind.”
Cassandra nodded.
Tanik went on, “Our control over the Cygnians at the Eye was fleeting at best, enough to dampen their suspicions when we came through, but not enough to keep them in line after the Eye collapsed.”
“Why should they care about that?” Cassandra asked. “They should be relieved. Now they don’t have to send their kids to the Crucible.”
Tanik looked at her, his expression a mixture of amusement and strained patience. “The Eye is the symbol of their religion, the Church of the Divine Light. It’s their connection to the after-life, to their dead ancestors and to their children who never came home from the Crucible. They call those lost ones Gah’hussi, translated to mean Revenants. We know that those people never really died at all, but the Cygnians don’t know that, nor does the rest of the galaxy.
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 53