The admiral had been Darius’s mentor for the past four months, ever since Tanik had mysteriously disappeared. Darius had learned a lot since then, both about his powers, and the galaxy that he’d woken up in. At first, he’d been horrified at having sent a man to his death to win the battle at Cygnus Prime. Now he realized that it had been a necessary evil, but he was in no hurry to turn anyone else into a suicide bomber. Fortunately, there were other ways of defeating the Cygnians.
Darius closed his eyes and relaxed against his acceleration harness. He opened his mind to the zero-point field and used his Awareness to find the commander of the enemy fleet.
It didn’t take him long to zero in on a particular bright and shining presence aboard one of the Cygnians’ three ring ships. The commander was a Ghoul, as usual. Darius zipped inside the alien’s mind and took over. The bridge of the alien ship snapped into focus. He saw a dark, gleaming deck surrounded by curving panoramic viewports arrayed in a circle around five command stations. The Ghoul commander’s station lay in the center of the other four. Banshees, rather than Ghouls, sat at the other stations, recognizable from their smaller size. Darius raised all four of the Cygnian commander’s arms and flexed giant hands with wicked gray claws. He felt an insatiable hunger gnawing inside of him, along with an inexplicable need to rip something apart with his teeth, to feel hot blood spurting into his mouth and running down his chin...
This was what it felt like to be a Cygnian: always hungry, always burning with violent, blood-thirsty desires. It was almost enough to make Darius empathize with them. They couldn’t help being the ruthless predators that they were. It was part of the Cygnian condition. All the more reason to exterminate them, Darius decided.
One of the Banshees growled something urgently. “King Dahgurr, enemy fighters just jumped in at a high velocity on the far side of Gaharr! Should we send our squadrons to intercept?”
“It’s a trick,” Darius growled back, speaking in Cygnian. “Let our ground defenses deal with them. We have to focus all our forces on keeping the enemy fleet away.”
“But master, what if they have their secret weapon aboard one of those fighters?”
“Do you really think a weapon capable of destroying an entire planet could be carried aboard a fighter?” Darius countered.
“I do not know, master. Surviving witnesses from the prior attacks were unable to determine what caused the destruction. Perhaps we should send a few squadrons of our own to intercept them to be safe.”
“Are you challenging my orders, Keeper?” Darius said, pouring as much malice into his voice as he could.
The Banshee’s four black eyes widened and slowly blinked at him, first the upper set and then the lower. “No, Master.”
“Perhaps you think you should be the one to lead us into battle!”
“I meant no disrespect, My King.” The Keeper inclined his head in a gesture of submission.
“Good, then let me know once our fighters reach the enemy fleet.”
“Yes, master.”
Darius watched the Revenant Fleet through the Ghoul King’s eyes—all four of them. He counted eighteen capital ships, although at this range they were barely larger than pinpricks and much duller than the average star.
“Our fighters are ten blinks from firing range with the enemy fleet,” the Keeper announced. “The enemy does not appear to have launched any fighters to defend themselves. It will not take us long to devour them.”
Before Darius could reply, the Revenants’ ships all went from a dull gray to shining brighter than the stars. The Revenants had just begun shielding their vessels with the zero-point field.
“Something is wrong,” another Banshee growled. “The enemy fleet is radiating some kind of energy in the visible spectrum.”
“It is the Divine Light,” Darius mused, to which the four Banshees on the bridge began muttering and growling amongst themselves. The Divine Light was the deity that all Cygnians worshiped. It was just another term for the zero-point field, or ZPF, but no Cygnian this side of the Eye had ever seen physical proof of it before. To physically see it for the first time, and to find it accompanying their enemies, must have been a shock.
“How do you know this?” the Keeper asked.
“Because I am a Revenant,” Darius said, and bared the Ghoul King’s jagged gray teeth at the Banshee.
The Keeper stared uncertainly at him, even as the other three glanced his way.
“A Revenant, My King? You are one of the children who never returned from the Crucible? We have been with you for many orbits. Why are you only revealing this now?”
“It was not important until now,” Darius explained. He detected ripples of shock and fury roiling just beneath the surface of the Ghoul King’s thoughts. King Dahgurr was resisting him, but without the strength of a real Revenant, he stood no chance of breaking Darius’s mental hold on him.
The Banshee held his gaze a moment longer before turning back to his displays. “Our fighters have engaged the enemy fleet, My King.”
Darius waited a few seconds, already anticipating the exclamations of shock and disbelief to follow.
“Our weapons are having no effect!”
Darius smiled inwardly. “It will take time to break their shields. Keep firing!”
“Their shields, My King?”
“They are using the Divine Light to shield their vessels. That is why they are radiating light.”
“Such a thing is possible?” one of the other Banshees asked.
“Yes,” Darius replied. “Keep firing.”
“The enemy fighters we detected earlier have just reached the surface of Gaharr. They are also radiating light. Our ground defenses are proving ineffectual against them.”
“They will not last long,” Darius assured them.
The next few minutes passed in silence, followed by: “The enemy fighters are withdrawing to orbit, and their fleet is turning to leave!”
“Chase after them!” Darius growled.
“We are getting strange readings from Gaharr,” another Banshee said.
“What kind of readings?” Darius demanded.
“Thermal. The planet is—”
A flash of light interrupted the Banshee, and Darius felt a brief wave of searing pain. Suddenly he was back on the bridge of the Harbinger with Admiral Ventaris. He blinked his two human eyes open and stared into the roiling fireball that had been Gaharr.
“Another planet down,” Admiral Ventaris said. “That’s four.”
“Five more to go,” Darius replied.
“Enemy fighters are breaking off!” Lieutenant Hanson called out from Flight Ops.
“Sensors, get me a tally of surviving capital ships in the Cygnian fleet,” Admiral Ventaris said.
“There’s... none, sir,” the officer at the sensor station replied.
Ventaris flashed a wicked grin. “Then their fighters have nowhere to run.” Cygnian Blade fighters, unlike the Union’s two-man Vultures, did not come equipped with warp drives. “Flight Ops—launch our fighters to intercept, and have the squadrons returning from the planet join them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How many of those fighters survived?” Darius asked.
“All pilots accounted for, Commander,” Lieutenant Hanson replied.
Ventaris turned to Darius. “It seems you were right. This is better than using suicide bombers.”
Darius nodded stiffly but gave no reply. It wasn’t common knowledge that he’d forced an officer to sacrifice his life in order to destroy Cygnus Prime. The official story was that the pilot and copilot had both volunteered for the mission. Darius preferred not to talk about it for fear that one of the bridge crew might reveal the truth. That would be particularly bad for morale. The Revenants all knew that he could take control of them, since he was one of the so-called Luminaries who could influence the minds of other Revenants, but so far none of them had reason to suspect that he might have actually used that power.
Darius
gave the admiral a tight smile. “Do you need me for anything else, sir?”
Admiral Ventaris shook his head. “You are free to retire to your quarters. I’ll contact you if we need you for anything else.”
Darius released his acceleration harness and stood up. His mag boots clunked resoundingly on the deck as he went. The marine corporals sitting to either side of the bridge doors saluted him as he left.
Darius’s quarters were on the command deck along with the bridge, so it didn’t take long to get back to them. Once there, he walked straight over to the glowing blue cryo tank standing along the far wall. He placed a hand against the frosted glass and scraped away some of the ice to see his daughter’s face. His hand lingered on the freezing glass, as if to cup her cheek. Waking her was out of the question. She was frozen on the brink of death, with enough Cygnian venom buzzing through her veins to stop her heart in seconds upon waking. He’d spoken with every medic on the Revenant fleet about her condition and had them run tests, but none of them had been able to offer any encouragement. Without a sample of the venom from the particular Cygnian who had poisoned her, they couldn’t synthesize an antivenin, and that Cygnian was long dead.
Darius scowled and removed his hand from the cryo tank. Walking over to a particular storage compartment he opened a drawer and withdrew a transparent flask of luminous water, alive and dancing with glowing specks of light—the Sprites. Living water, that’s what the Revenants called it. It was teeming with the symbionts that gave Revenants their powers. Gazing into the tank, Darius warred with himself, but only briefly, before raising the flask to his lips and depressing the button to release the contents into his mouth. Cold water coursed down his throat, leaving his tongue and the inside of his cheeks tingling, as if he could actually feel the incessant scurrying of the Sprites.
Darius’s eyes drifted shut, and a sigh escaped his lips. A world of tension and exhaustion faded away, replaced with a feeling of raw power. It was a feeling of security and safety, the banishment of restless fears and anxieties. If only he could live on this high all day long.
This must be what drug addicts feel, Darius thought. That was a good analogy. Admiral Ventaris had told him that repeated dosing with Sprites would make him stronger, but that it would be addictive, and that if he took too much, too frequently, it could literally disintegrate him on a molecular level. Darius likened it to heroin. He wasn’t sure if they still had that drug on Earth, but it seemed to have all the same properties: euphoria-inducing, addictive, and deadly if overdosed. The difference was that Heroin didn’t confer supernatural powers to its users.
Darius walked back over to his daughter’s cryo pod and clinked the flask of living water against the glass cover of her pod. “Cheers, Cassy,” he said, and released another stream of the luminous water into his mouth. By the time he lowered the flask his head was buzzing, and he was smiling in spite of himself—smirking, perhaps. “I know you wouldn’t approve, but I’m making them pay for what they did to you.” He took another sip from the flask and sighed with pleasure. The sense of euphoria the Sprites conferred on him was so compelling that he almost got carried away and finished off the entire flask.
With a physical effort, he lowered the flask from his lips and returned it to the storage compartment. It wouldn’t be a good idea to overdose now. As long as he had a shred of hope to someday revive his daughter, and as long as there were still Cygnians to kill, he still had a reason to live.
A knock sounded on the door, and he waved it open without bothering to check who it was.
“Darius?”
He recognized Dyara’s voice and turned to face her. She startled at the sight of him, and a wary look flashed across her face. She must have seen the Sprites dancing in his eyes.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll come back later.”
“Wait!” he said. She jumped at the volume of his voice, and fear replaced the wariness in her eyes. “Sorry,” he added. That was another problem with dosing on Sprites—increased aggression.
“We can talk tomorrow,” Dyara said. “When you’re feeling more yourself.”
“Dya...” he took a few steps toward her, but she retreated quickly into the corridor and disappeared from sight.
He scowled, wondering if he should make her come back. It was infuriating that she reacted this way when she knew that the only reason he was using the Sprites was to win this war faster and save more lives. He was literally sacrificing himself for the good of others. She should be grateful, not treating him like a leper!
Darius’s hands closed into fists, and he lashed out at the nearest wall with a kinetic attack. The storage compartments buckled and crumpled inward with a metallic shriek. The compartment with the flask of living water in it popped open invitingly.
Maybe just one more sip. He’d earned it.
Chapter 2
—TWO WEEKS LATER—
Hagrol was a beautiful world, green and blue with streaks and swirls of white clouds. It looked a lot like Earth but for the shape and number of its continents. No wonder they call them terran-class worlds, Darius thought.
This was the fifth Cygnian planet they’d visited. It was almost a pity they’d come to destroy it, but once the Cygnians were all gone, they’d be free to explore and colonize the Galaxy. There’d be many more worlds like Hagrol.
“Admiral, the enemy fleet is setting an intercept course,” the officer at the sensor station announced.
“Make a show of trying to go around them, but without getting too close,” Admiral Ventaris replied.
Not getting too close was key. They couldn’t afford to get caught in the blast wave when the planet disintegrated. The Revenant Fleet had yet to lose even a single capital-class vessel in the fighting. Better to keep it that way.
Darius smirked. The war had devolved into a boring routine. The outcome was never in question from the moment they arrived to the moment they left.
“Commander, are you ready?” Admiral Ventaris asked, glancing at him.
Darius nodded. “Yes.” He relaxed into his acceleration harness and allowed his eyes to drift shut. Casting his mind out into the swirling energies of the zero-point field, he soared through space in his mind’s eye, to a gleaming fleet full of bright and shining lifeforms. They were all Cygnians from the size and shape of their bodies—four arms and two legs, or six legs, in the case of the Banshees.
There were also a few dozen smaller ships crewed by smaller beings. They were lurking on the far side of the planet, hidden in its shadow. Darius frowned inwardly at the sight of those ships and drew closer for a better look. They weren’t Cygnian vessels. They were Union ships, and some of those crew looked... human.
These people were much brighter presences than the Cygnians, some of them so bright that they shone like miniature suns. Darius felt a mind reaching back for his, seeking to take control of him. He recoiled from it and blinked his eyes open. Suddenly he was back on the bridge of the Harbinger, trying to decide what he’d sensed. There was only one possible explanation for it.
“The other Revenants are here,” he decided. “Someone re-opened the Eye to let them through.”
Admiral Ventaris turned to him with glazed eyes and an unsettling smile. “Are you sure?”
Before he realized what was happening, Darius’s acceleration harness crumpled in around him, constricting his ribs and chest, making it impossible for him to breathe. He gasped for air and reached into the ZPF to push back. He pushed as hard as he could, and the acceleration harness exploded, sending pieces of it clattering to the walls and ceiling of the bridge. Sucking in a hasty breathe, Darius leapt out of his chair.
“All ahead full!” Admiral Ventaris yelled. Darius barely had enough time to register those words before he went flying backward, sailing toward the doors of the bridge.
He pushed back with his powers just as he would to survive a fall in gravity. That cushioned the impact, but he still heard and felt the bridge doors shudder like a drum as he slamme
d into them. He lay against the doors, dazed and pinned by five Gs of acceleration. White-hot rage sang inside of him, making his whole body tremble. Clearly, there was another Luminary in the system, and he’d taken control of the admiral—perhaps the entire bridge crew. The question was how? Tanik had shut the Eye. There was supposedly no way for any of the other Revenants to follow them.
Darius saw the Admiral’s chair rotate, his sidearm drawn and aimed. Darius summoned a shield just a split second before the barrel of the weapon flashed. The laser bolt splashed harmlessly off his shield, the energy dissipating with a hissing roar.
“Kill engines!” Admiral Ventaris said in a strained voice.
The immense pressure pinning Darius in place suddenly lifted, and he gasped. “Who are you?”
“I am Kovar,” Admiral Ventaris replied. “You must be Darius Drake. I have seen you in my visions.”
Darius gingerly probed his aching ribs with his fingers, wincing at the sharp stabs of pain that action provoked. He rolled his shoulders and drew on the ZPF to deaden the pain. “Kovar. A Luminary?”
“Yes,” he said and released his acceleration harness to join Darius in standing.
The rest of the bridge crew slowly rotated their chairs to watch the growing confrontation. Their eyes were all glazed, just like the admiral’s.
“How did you get here?” Darius asked.
“We came through the Eye,” Kovar said as if the answer should have been obvious. “Is that not how your fleet came to be here?”
“Yes, but we shut the Eye after we flew though from Revenant space.”
“You mean Keth Space,” Kovar said, while casting about. “That’s an interesting story. The wormhole wasn’t shut when we arrived, but I don’t sense that you are lying. That is troubling.” Kovar’s gaze fell upon the weapons locker beside the bridge doors, and he thrust out a hand toward it. The locker flew open, revealing seven gleaming black swords on a rack. All of them leapt out of the locker, and the crew raised their hands as one to receive the weapons. Hilts found waiting palms with a quick succession of meaty slaps. Two swords sailed into the Admiral’s waiting hands. One of those weapons belonged to Darius.
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