Tanik had a lot of explaining to do. That was part of the reason they were landing on Cratus now. The other part was to see his daughter, if only through the frosted glass of a cryo-pod. They also had to gather supplies from their abandoned camp and figure out what to do next.
Darius knew what he wanted to do. He was going to find some way—any way—to make the Cygnians pay. If they could kill a twelve-year-old girl after she’d tried to save their lives, then they deserved to die too.
Tanik landed his Osprey on a flat grassy plateau above the camp. Dyara’s fighter set down to one side, and Darius’s to the other. The subtle jolt of landing skids touching down jarred Darius out of his thoughts and brought him back to the moment. He wasn’t wearing his helmet or oxygen mask anymore—he’d turned them into a snotty mess and had to remove them—so he simply pulled the release lever for his harness, opened the canopy, and jumped down. His legs collapsed under him, but he picked himself up and ran to Tanik’s Osprey.
The airlock opened just as he arrived, and a cryo-pod floated out ahead of Tanik. Darius peered into that pod as it settled in the grass at his feet—
And saw Cassandra’s face.
It was true. He placed both palms against the icy glass. The steady hum of the pod’s cooling systems shivered through his bones.
“I did everything I could to save her,” Tanik whispered.
Darius rounded on him and grabbed him by the collar of his flight suit. “What were you doing on the Nomad in the first place!? Did you take her there?”
Tanik shook his head. “No. She went on her own. I followed her. When I found out that she’d gone to join Gakram on the Nomad, I went after her to bring her back.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There was no time, and because I knew that the admiral had sabotaged the Nomad’s Alckam drive and rigged it to blow when they jumped. Telling you that would have been an act of treason.”
“The admiral did what?”
“When Cassandra refused to come back with me, I was forced to reveal the sabotage, and the Cygnians arrested me. I later broke out, but by the time I got to Cassandra it was already too late.”
“I sensed you both fighting together on the bridge...” Darius said. “You said you were separated when she got poisoned.”
Tanik nodded. “We were. It happened before I arrived. It took a few minutes for Cassandra to succumb to the venom, and by the time I realized what had happened, we were already on our way to the hangar.”
Darius glared at the man, not ready to give up, but he was out of accusations. Pushing Tanik away, he turned back to Cassandra’s cryo-pod.
Dyara approached them, long grass rustling against her legs. Darius noticed the grass, as if for the first time—green grass, bowing in the wind; then a sound reached his ears—running water. He looked up and saw that Tanik had landed them beside a rushing stream. To one side, jagged black cliffs, to the other, a thundering waterfall with a scraggly black tree beside it.
Darius gaped at the scene. It was almost identical to the landing zone on Ouroboros, and it definitely matched his visions. Darius barked out a broken laugh.
He saw Dyara shoot him a bemused look as she came to stand beside him. She was probably wondering what he had to laugh about. Maybe she’d never suffered enough to know that madness and laughter were a refuge from sorrow.
“This is it,” he whispered, smiling like a maniac. “It’s all come true!” He slowly shook his head and laughed again. “I guess we may as well have the funeral then, right? It’s what the Sprites have been showing me all this time, so it must be what they wanted!”
“They didn’t cause this,” Tanik said. “But perhaps Cassandra’s fate was inescapable, and the visions you saw were destiny, not foresight. The Sprites may have been showing you in advance to help cushion the blow.”
“Fek you, Tanik!” Darius spluttered with tears leaking from his eyes once more.
Tanik held up his hands and took a step back. “Perhaps I should leave you alone.”
“Wake her up!”
“If I wake her now, her heart will stop. She won’t even be able to say goodbye. She’s unconscious. There’s nothing we can do for her, but if you want to have a funeral, then I suggest you do it soon. We don’t know how long we’ll have before Admiral Ventaris finds us here.”
Darius lashed out, shoving Tanik back with a kinetic blast; then he mentally picked up Cassandra’s cryo-pod and sent it floating ahead of him toward the river. He set the pod down on the riverbank beside the thundering waterfall, and glared up at the sky. “Is this what you wanted?” he roared. “Well you got it! You killed her! Are you happy now?”
Tanik walked up beside him. “Who are you talking to?” he asked quietly.
“The Sprites! You said they’re everywhere, right?”
“Yes, but they’re not god, or gods. As I said, this isn’t their doing. They’re not intelligent. They have no will of their own.”
“So they can predict the future, but they can’t tell us how to stop that future from coming to pass?” Darius demanded.
Tanik shrugged, but offered no reply.
Darius smirked and looked away, staring at the racing rapids before the waterfall. A few moments later, Dyara walked over carrying two handfuls of the red rose-petal leaves from Cratus’s trees.
“I thought...” she trailed off uncertainly and hefted the handfuls of leaves. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying. “Can we open her pod?” Dyara asked.
Darius’s mind flashed back to his vision, to seeing Cassandra lying inside her cryo-pod with her head and hair surrounded by red flowers. He’d never related that particular detail to anyone. Maybe this really was destiny at work. Darius’s lip curled. Fek destiny.
Dyara took his nod for permission, and asked Tanik to open Cassandra’s pod. He did so, but didn’t go through the proper warming cycle first. Frosty white clouds swirled out of the pod as the lid swung open.
Dyara sprinkled the flower petals inside and then stepped back.
Darius’s legs shook as he walked up to the side of the pod and peered in. Cassandra looked just as she had in his vision—her face relaxed in sleep, her skin pale and ice cold as he brushed it with his hand. Crimson flower petals lay around her head.
He looked at the horizon, to the thundering waterfall and the scraggly black tree clinging beside it. The sun began to set, splashing the sky with fire.
“They killed her,” Tanik said. “She tried to negotiate with them, and they killed her. This just proves that there can be no negotiating with the Cygnians. The only way we’ll ever have peace is to kill them all, or subjugate them, as they subjugated us.”
Tanik’s words were identical to the ones Darius had heard time and time again in his visions. Looking back to Cassandra’s pod, he brushed her cheek once more and slowly shook his head. He opened his mouth to say something, but his mind blanked, so he fell back on his own lines, words he’d foreseen himself speak so many times that he knew them by rote.
“First we’re going to slaughter them,” Darius said. “Then, when there’s only a few of them left, and they’re on their knees begging for their lives, we’ll show them mercy, but only to prolong their suffering. We’ll enslave them just as they enslaved us.”
“Yesss,” Tanik rasped in an euphoric whisper. “That, would be justice.”
There was a bitter irony in giving Destiny its way. So why had he? Why not say something else? Something to prove that this hadn’t all been scripted from the start by powers unseen. Something to prove that he could have changed the outcome, or that it might still be changed, and that Cassandra might somehow rise from the dead.
Yet there was no such proof, no stray detail of his vision left unaccounted for. Darius stepped forward and pressed a button on the side of Cassandra’s pod. The lid swung shut, and he extended a hand toward it, sending it floating up over the racing rapids above the waterfall.
He hesitated, bl
inking hot tears from his eyes, and then dropped his hand to his side. The pod fell with a loud splash. It ducked briefly under the water, and bobbed back up a split second later, only to be whisked over the cliff amidst sparkling curtains of spray.
A heavy hand fell on Darius’s shoulder. “Come,” Tanik said. “Night is falling.” That hand left Darius’s shoulder as Tanik turned and walked away.
“That’s not your line...” Darius whispered.
“I’m so sorry!” Dyara sobbed, not hearing his protest. “I should have listened to you! I thought they were just dreams! I had no idea....”
Darius barely registered her words. A spark of hope bloomed inside of him. He reached out in the ZPF and found Cassandra’s cryo-pod bumping and bobbing down the river some eight feet below the plateau where they stood. Thankfully the falls weren’t higher, or she might have suffered injury when she went over them.
Darius brought the pod back up to the cliff and set it down in the field beside that scraggly black tree with a thump.
Tanik turned to look, his brow furrowing at the sight of it. “You brought her back up?” he asked.
“That’s not your line!” he shouted.
“What are you talking about?” Tanik shouted back.
“Come, night is falling—after that you’re supposed to say the Cygnians will be out to hunt soon. And then I say, let them come! But there aren’t any Cygnians here, and neither of us said that!”
“Darius...”
“It’s different,” he insisted. “Something is different. This isn’t Cassandra’s destiny! This future wasn’t cast in stone.”
Tanik strode back to Darius. “Maybe not, but how does that change anything? You’re not going to be able to bring her back just because the Cygnians aren’t here.”
“I don’t know how it changes anything,” Darius admitted. “But Cass has been in Cryo waiting for a cure before, and she can do it again.”
Tanik arched an eyebrow at him. “Darius, the Cygnian who stabbed her is gone. He died when the Nomad was destroyed.”
Darius shook his head. “So? We’ll find some other way. You said she’s still alive.”
“Yes, but we can’t wake her without an antidote!”
“So we won’t. Not until we find one.”
Tanik considered that with a deep frown. “You’re in denial. Holding onto an impossible hope isn’t going to help her—or you.”
Darius ground his teeth. “I’m not giving up on her.”
“Very well. Take her with you wherever you decide to go next. It’s none of my concern. And where are you going to go next? Have you given that any thought?”
Darius had given it plenty of thought. He was planning to go slaughter the Cygnians, just as he’d said while quoting his vision a moment ago. The only problem was, he didn’t know how to do it. Dyara appeared beside him, staring at Cassandra’s cryo-pod-casket in a daze.
“What about your plan?” Darius asked.
Tanik’s eyebrows floated up. “My plan?”
“Yes. Your plan to threaten the Cygnians with ZPF bombs.”
“Oh. Well, we can’t possibly destroy or threaten all of their planets at once. Not anymore. We’ve lost the element of surprise.”
“Then let’s do it one by one,” Darius insisted.
“It won’t be easy....” Tanik said. “I suppose we could jump back to Cygnus Prime, but they’ve got the numbers there to intercept any missiles we shoot long before they reach the surface. There is a sure way, but you won’t like it. It’s how the Augur delivered ZPFs to Keth worlds.”
Darius nodded for him to go on. “How?”
“He’d take control of a Revenant pilot and make them crash their fighter into the planet. The bomb would go off in the explosion.”
Darius blinked in shock. “A suicide run? Why kill the pilot?”
“Because it’s the only way to shield the bomb. You can’t shield something that you aren’t physically touching, so the pilot has to remain in his seat, and the bomb in the fighter.
“You could take control of one of the Revenants, even from here, and make them sacrifice themselves for the greater good.”
Darius shook his head. “I won’t do that. There has to be another way.”
Tanik sighed. “We could carry a bomb down ourselves, and leave it somewhere on the surface with a timer set to detonate it after we’re gone. But, we’d have to risk our own lives to do it, and the chances of sneaking both ways past the Cygnians’ fighters are dismal at best.”
“Dismal will have to do,” Darius decided.
“Revenge won’t fix this,” Dyara said quietly. “You won’t save Cassandra no matter how many Cygnians you kill.”
“Maybe not, but it will give them something to think about. Maybe they’ll think twice before they prey on innocent children again. Tanik?” Darius turned to him. “Are you coming with me, or do I have to do this alone?”
Tanik appeared to consider the question. He eventually gave in with a nod. “I’ll come, but we should take one fighter, not two. Our shields will be stronger if we can combine them.”
“Fine, but I’m piloting. Dyara, you stay here with Cass. If we don’t make it back, promise me you’ll look after her.”
Dyara’s eyes searched his. “If you promise me you’re not going to get yourself killed.”
He shook his head. “Not on purpose.”
“What about the Revenant fleet? If they come back here—”
“You can explain yourself,” Darius said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You can say I had you under my influence the whole time.”
“And if the Cygnians come?”
“They won’t,” Tanik said. “They’ll stay close to home for a while.”
Darius nodded. “Stay hidden, anyway. If we’re not back in a day, you should probably leave.”
“No, what I should do, is go with you. You could use a wingmate.”
Darius shook his head. “Someone has to stay with Cass. Promise you’ll keep her with you until you find a way to bring her back.”
Dyara bit her lower lip. “I promise.”
Darius flashed a tight smile and pulled her in for a kiss. Her lips moved feebly against his, and he lingered for a few seconds before breaking away.
“Tanik?” he prompted, casting about to find the other man. Tanik stood with his back politely turned, watching the sunset. “Let’s go!” Darius said, and began stalking back to his fighter.
It was time for the Cygnians to get a taste of the death and destruction that they so happily dished out to others.
Chapter 46
—TWELVE HOURS LATER—
The warp bubble dispersed with a flash of light. Chimes sounded furiously from the contacts panel, and Darius glanced at the nav to get a feel for the disposition of enemy forces around Cygnus Prime.
Surprisingly the Revenant Fleet was still there, locked in a furious battle. Their capital ships were holding off, out of range, while their fighters dealt with vastly superior numbers of Cygnian Blades.
“They’re trying to get through to deliver a bomb to the surface...” Tanik said from the co-pilot’s seat. “It’s not working,” he added. “Hopefully we can succeed where they’ve failed.”
Darius sneered and checked the nav to make sure none of the Cygnian fighters were heading their way. They weren’t. Darius blew out a breath. He had the fighter’s stealth mode engaged, but that did nothing to diminish the flash of gamma rays that appeared when they’d exited warp. Hopefully no one noticed their arrival.
“Well, we’re here,” Tanik said. “What’s the plan, Darius? How do we get to the surface?”
He considered that. They were cruising at over a hundred kilometers per second, having entered warp at that speed. The planet lay just over forty thousand kilometers away. ETA six minutes. If they cruised the rest of the way in stealth mode and without lighting their engines, the Cygnians wouldn’t have much time to spot and intercept them. Yet they had to ignite their thrusters to s
low down. If they hit the atmosphere at this speed they’d be vaporized instantly.
Another idea occurred to Darius. “What if we fire a ZPF missile from here? We could dumb fire it. Drop it without lighting its engines. At these speeds, the Cygnians won’t have long to detect and intercept it.”
“Long enough,” Tanik replied. “They’ll be watching for something like that, and maximum range for heavy lasers in space is over three thousand kilometers. At our current velocity that will give them at least thirty seconds to react to the threat.”
“But if the warheads are as powerful as you say, won’t they destroy their own fleet? What’s the blast radius on a ZPF?”
“In space? Just a few hundred kilometers. There’s no atmosphere to carry the effects.”
Darius considered that while staring at the mottled brown and red orb of Cygnus Prime. “How many ZPF warheads do we have?” he asked, wondering if they could afford to spare some as decoys, or to take out enemy capital ships and fighters that got in their way.
“Two,” Tanik replied.
Scratch that idea... Darius’s veins buzzed with adrenaline, demanding quick action. It was a physical effort to slow himself down and think. “Don’t you have any ideas?” he asked. “You’re the one who has all the combat experience.”
“I told you how the Augur did it. Take control of a pilot, and force him to make a suicide run.”
“If that would work, then we should be able to make it to the surface, too.”
“It’s one thing racing down at top speed with a bomb ticking in your hold. It’s much harder to make a safe landing, leave the bomb on the surface, and then escape.”
“I’m not going to kill innocent people!” Darius insisted.
“Innocent?” Tanik scoffed. “The Revenants all have plenty of blood on their hands. None of them are innocent. Besides—you’d kill one Revenant to save a thousand. It’s excellent math. If you’re going to rule the Union someday, you’re going to have to learn how to do a little evil to do a lot of good. Famous generals and rulers have been making those kinds of trade offs since the very first wars,” Tanik said. “Now it’s your turn. Destroy Cygnus Prime, and repeat the process. You could win the war, just like the Augur won his.”
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 62