He considered opening a portal to Ouroboros now, but how many Keth would he have to fight through on the other side in order to reach her? He couldn’t hope to defeat them all by himself, and if he brought an army with him, they’d probably just spook the Keth into fleeing.
Darius weighed his options. Tanik didn’t know that he’d learned how to open wormholes from Feyra, so that gave Darius the advantage of surprise. If he could figure out how to create a wormhole to reach Ouroboros, and sustain it while his soldiers executed an attack on the Keth, he would be simultaneously protecting his fleet and bottling up the Keth at the same time. At the very least he’d be forcing them to escape by conventional means, aboard whatever starships they had at their disposal.
Yes... Darius nodded to himself. That would be the fastest way to get Cassandra back. The question was, could he master the necessary skills in time to save her?
Darius shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Reaching out with his awareness, beyond his fleet, beyond the Hagrol System and neighboring stars... he cast his mind far beyond that, imagining he could see the entire galaxy in his mind’s eye. With that godlike view, he fixed Cassandra’s face in his mind’s eye and tried to find the familiar tone and texture of her presence....
It didn’t work—either because she was still in cryo, or because she was dead. Darius chose to believe the former. Reaching out once more, he tried to find Tanik this time. His presence was faint but detectable. Darius honed in on it, racing past countless stars and their planets until he saw a familiar green and gray world pocked with blue lakes and rivers that meandered across the surface like the veins in the whites of an eye. Darius cast himself down, racing past clouds in the atmosphere of the planet, until he was standing on a grassy green field, staring into a dark, brooding forest not far from Tanik’s location.
There he tried to follow the vague ideas he’d plucked from Feyra’s mind and imagined himself peeling back the fabric of space-time to physically reach the location where he’d mentally pictured himself.
Hearing a gentle humming noise, Darius risked cracking his eyes to slits to see the result.
A shimmering portal had appeared there in the middle of the corridor with a grassy green field and a brooding forest on the other side.
Darius couldn’t believe it. His excitement and anticipation soared, interrupting his concentration, and the portal vanished. He felt tired and energized at the same time. Opening a portal was not easy, but at least it was possible, and now that he knew what to do, he could do it again.
Darius used his ESC to comm the bridge once more. “Dyara,” he said. “There’s been a change of plans.”
“I’m listening,” Dyara replied.
“Have the fleet move into a tight formation with the Deliverance. Pack our ships in as close as possible. Meanwhile, I need you to mobilize every able-bodied soldier on the Deliverance and have them all join me in the aft hangar. That includes you.”
“Packing our fleet together would leave us vulnerable to another attack,” Dyara pointed out. “If the Keth or Tanik manage to board one of our ships and steal a ZPF bomb, they could take out the entire fleet in the same blast,” Dyara said.
“They’ll be too busy defending themselves to worry about attacking us,” Darius replied. “And I know how to defend us from their wormhole-attacks now. Gather the fleet around us and meet me in the aft hangar.”
“How can you defend us?”
Darius took a moment to explain what he’d learned from Feyra, how to create wormholes, and how to defend against them.
“Jumping to warp prevents them from using wormholes to reach us? Then why don’t we just do that?”
“Because we can’t stay in warp forever,” Darius explained. “It’ll be safer to kill Tanik and the Keth.”
“If we can, you mean,” Dyara replied.
“We can. We outnumber them. Meet me in the aft hangar bay, and I’ll explain everything.”
“All right...”
Darius shut down the connection and turned and ran for the aft hangar bay. He needed to open another portal soon, before Tanik tried to open one of his own to get Feyra back.
Chapter 18
“It’s that easy to open wormholes?” Dyara asked, while gazing into the shimmering portal that Darius had summoned.
“It is for me,” Darius replied, and turned from her to watch as soldiers streamed into the hangar by the hundreds. Before long several thousand were gathered around them, all staring at Darius’s wormhole with wary awe.
He turned in a circle to address everyone in the hangar. Using his ESC to access the ship’s intercom system, he configured it to amplify his voice through overhead speakers. “As you may know, we’ve recently encountered your old enemy. It seems that the Keth manipulated us into starting a war with the Cygnians in the hopes of weakening us. They used an undercover agent by the name of Tanik Gurhain.”
Shock and outrage rippled through the group as they processed that news. Many of these Revenants had met Tanik.
“Tanik hid his true intentions from us, just as he hid his true nature. Not long after he learned that I killed the last Luminary, he revealed to me that he is another one, and he tried to kill me so that he would be free to take control of the Revenants himself, and lead you all to your deaths! I defeated him and chased him back through a wormhole to Ouroboros.”
Darius went on, “Tanik manipulated us into a war with the Cygnians in order to destabilize the Union. He and his Keth allies hoped that war with the Cygnians and with each other would get most of us killed without them ever having to fight us themselves.
“As I speak, Tanik and the Keth are on the other side of this portal, laughing at us as they rebuild their home! They think that their plan has worked, but I’m living proof that it has failed. They never expected any of us to be able to open a wormhole back to their corner of the galaxy. Now that we have, we have an opportunity to launch a surprise attack and finish what the Augur started all those years ago. It’s time to wipe out what’s left of the Keth. Only then will we be free to establish a lasting peace throughout the Union.”
A rumble of disagreement spread through the crowd, and a nearby Revenant raised his voice to express his objections: “We followed you against the Cygnians because we disagreed with the Augur’s war against the Keth, and now you want us to take up that same cause again?”
Darius shook his head. “Don’t think about the Augur who enslaved you to fight in a war that you never really understood. Think about all of your friends and relatives who died fighting the Keth! Think about the Keth agent who we recently captured aboard this ship, who was trying to sabotage our munitions store and kill us all. Don’t fight for me, or for the Augur’s enigmatic reasons, fight for your own survival. The Keth won’t stop plotting against us until all of us are dead. It’s kill or be killed, and right now we have the element of surprise. That won’t last forever. As long as I’m holding this portal open, Tanik won’t be able to open a wormhole to help the Keth escape.”
“How do you know that?”
Darius explained what he’d learned from interrogating the Keth agent they’d captured, and silence rang in the wake of those reassurances.
“They could still escape aboard their starships,” Dyara said from beside him.
Before Darius could come up with a reply for that, someone else answered: “They don’t have any. Until we came along and diluted their power base, they used to travel between their worlds via portals just like this one. They had no need to build interstellar vehicles, and their empire was never very large to begin with.”
That news took Darius by surprise, but it was a welcome surprise. A small smile graced his lips and he nodded. “There you have it,” he said. “So it seems we are poised to wipe out the Keth once and for all. Let’s make it happen.”
Heads began bobbing around the hangar. It was obvious that he’d convinced these soldiers to fight for him. He could have forced them all to follow him into battle, but ke
eping the portal open to Ouroboros was hard enough without having to expend additional energy to subdue the wills of several thousand soldiers at the same time.
Darius drew his sword with a metallic shriek and held it high. Sucking in a quick breath, he let it out in a roar: “Death to the Keth!”
“Death to the Keth!” the assembled Revenants thundered.
“Death to the Keth!” Darius said again, pumping his sword in the air like a fist.
The Revenants took up that cry once more, and then Darius turned and led the charge through the wormhole.
Chapter 19
It was disconcerting to go from standing in the hangar one minute, to a rippling green field the next. A gust of wind blew Darius’s overgrown hair into his eyes and swayed the umbrella-shaped tops of nearby trees. A rumble of thunder sounded, and fat rain drops began pelting down.
Booted feet came thudding out of the portal behind him in a never-ending stampede. Darius turned to watch his army assemble in the field. Before long people were forced to elbow each other out of the way as they crowded through, and Darius had to back up to make room for all of them. Dyara appeared, picking her way through the crowd to reach his side.
In a matter of minutes, all two thousand Revenants from the Deliverance had assembled on the field, and they were all looking to him for orders. Their gazes were fraught with suspicion and resentment. Darius wasn’t the leader they would have chosen. He wasn’t the most experienced in battle, or even the most competent when it came to tactics or strategy, but sticking close to him was the only chance any of them had to protect themselves from falling under the sway of other luminaries—luminaries like Tanik, who would like nothing more than to get them all killed.
“By now the Keth must have sensed us coming,” Dyara said, glancing behind them to the shadowy forest.
“Maybe,” Darius agreed. “Even if they have, it’s too late to stop us now.” Raindrops seeped into his jumpsuit, chilling him despite the warm air. Another peal of thunder boomed. Darius waited for it to die down before addressing his army. Even so, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the rain. “If you’re standing directly beside the portal, you get to stay here and guard it. Everyone else, summon your shields and follow me!” Darius pumped his sword in the air and cried, “Death to the Keth!”
A scattered echo of that cry reached his ears, taken up by a few of the Revenants, as he turned and ran for the tree line. Dyara kept pace beside him.
“Can you sense Cassandra from here?” she asked. They entered the forest and what little light was filtering through the storm clouds disappeared, filtered out by the dense canopy above.
Darius reached out with his awareness and immediately found a group of about thirty alien presences and one human further up ahead. The human was Tanik, if the familiar darkness of his presence and thoughts was anything to go by. But Darius couldn’t sense Cassandra anywhere. “No, I can’t,” he said as he leapt over a fallen log and then ducked under a low-hanging branch. “It’s probably because she’s in cryo.”
Dyara nodded but said nothing. She didn’t need to say it. Cryo could be the reason they couldn’t sense her. Or else it was because she was already dead.
“When we find Tanik, we’ll find her,” Darius said, more to reassure himself than Dyara.
Footsteps thudded along behind them in a steady rumble that competed with the thunder. Tree trunks blurred past them as they ran. Within just a few minutes, another grassy clearing came peeking through the trees—along with something else, a log cabin.
Darius could sense and vaguely see, aliens gathered together in the field up ahead. The Keth weren’t running. They’d decided to stand and fight.
That gave Darius pause, but it was too late to stop and come up with some cunning strategy now. He barreled out of the forest and into the clearing with Dyara. Revenants poured out of the forest on all sides, encircling the huddled group of ghostly-white aliens in the center of the field. Tanik was nowhere to be seen, but Darius could sense him. He gripped his sword in a tight fist and started toward the Keth. Dyara kept pace beside him as he went. Meanwhile, the Revenant army was busy circling around through the trees to cut off any possible retreat.
Darius stopped walking once he came within a dozen meters of the Keth. “Where is Tanik?” he asked.
The group of aliens parted, revealing a knot of huddled children in the center of their circle, along with something else—a glass and metal cylinder gleaming with raindrops. Cassandra’s cryo pod. Tanik Gurhain stood beside it, leaning heavily on a pair of wooden crutches.
Darius’s heart leapt into his throat at the sight of the cryo pod. He reached for it with his mind, trying to carry Cassandra safely out of the Keth’s midst, but they resisted him, collectively holding her in place.
A boom of thunder split the air, and a jagged fork of lightning flashed down between the trees not far from the clearing.
“Give me my daughter, Tanik!” Darius demanded.
Tanik dropped his crutches and came floating out to greet him, his feet hovering a full foot above the ground. Both of his legs were encased in crude-looking splints.
“Why would I do that?” Tanik replied. “As soon as you have what you want, you’ll kill us. Besides, you have someone that we want, too. Return the Keth woman you captured, and we will return your daughter to you. That’s a fair trade.”
Darius snorted. “You’re outnumbered and surrounded. We could simply kill you all and take Cassandra back by force.”
“Not before we could kill her,” Tanik replied, and gestured to the aliens gathered behind him. The crowd of Keth parted just a little more to reveal an adult Keth holding a glowing sword poised above Cassandra’s cryo pod, ready to plunge it through the fragile glass cover and into her chest.
A rising murmur sounded from the soldiers gathered behind Darius. One of them shouted out, “Darius doesn’t speak for all of us! Let’s just kill them all before it’s too late! Death to the Keth!”
“Death to the Keth!” the others shouted. Before their collective voices even died away, Revenants came pouring into the clearing on all sides. Their footsteps made the ground tremble, while their glowing swords and shields peeled back the gloomy twilight of the storm.
Tanik gave a twisted smile and called out. “Amara! Kill the girl if even one of them engages us in combat!”
“No!” Darius shouted, and simultaneously reached out to subdue the minds and wills of every single soldier he’d brought with him. He forced them all to freeze right where they were. Suddenly the thunder of footfalls ceased, and all was quiet but for the actual thunder, and the rain slanting down in a steady roar. Darius listened to raindrops hissing as they hit his shielded sword and those of the soldiers in the field.
“Well?” Tanik demanded. “Are you ready to talk terms?”
“Darius...” Dyara whispered in a warning tone.
He hadn’t bothered to suppress her will, since she hadn’t joined the charge against the Keth. He shot her a dark look and shook his head. “Not now, Dya.” Turning back to the fore, he started toward Tanik, covering some of the distance between them to make it easier to talk over the rain.
“I have your wife,” Darius said. “If you kill Cassandra, I’ll kill her.”
“My wife?” Tanik laughed, and a ripple of alien warbling rumbled through the Keth. “She’s hardly that, Darius. And not irreplaceable. My people aren’t nearly as sentimental as yours. Why do you think we sent her in the first place? Because we could afford to lose her.”
Darius peered at Tanik through heavy curtains of rain. The field was turning to mud and puddles, washing away under the assault. He struggled to decide if Tanik was bluffing. He remembered what he’d seen in Feyra’s mind. She and Tanik had grown up together, and as adults they’d certainly become more than friends, but there was no way for him to know just how deep their bond was without going back to take another look inside her head. He reached out for a glimpse of Tanik’s thoughts, but the man wa
s shielding them too effectively.
“You’re bluffing,” Darius said.
“No, I’m not, but we’re not entirely without sentiment,” Tanik replied. “We’re willing to agree to a trade: your daughter for Feyra, and the guarantee that we will be allowed to leave Ouroboros in peace.”
Darius shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then we’re at an impasse. You can kill us all here and now, but you’ll lose Cassandra in the process. You have to decide what’s more important to you. This victory, or her life.”
Darius ground his teeth together. “If I let you go, you’ll only try to kill us again later.”
Tanik shrugged, and his smile grew. “Try? Yes. Succeed? That’s up to you. At least now you know how to prevent us from transporting ourselves directly onto your fleet. You also know that our numbers are few and that we have no advanced technology to use against you. It’s thirty of us against twenty thousand of you. The odds are in your favor, and you’ve already proven that you can defeat me all by yourself. I’m the best that my side has to offer, so what do you have to fear?”
Darius felt like he was being manipulated again. Tanik was too smug, too confident. He had something in mind, some yet-to-be-revealed new plan or avenue of attack that was sure to take Darius by surprise.
He took a stab at what that plan might be. “The only way I can protect everyone is to keep them close and to keep a wormhole open somewhere nearby, indefinitely. I’ll grow tired and weak eventually. When I do, you’ll come and assassinate me, and then you’ll kill everyone else.”
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 74