The Last Cycle

by A. R. Knight

  Floating in front of it, barking orders at a trio of Flaum guards, is Ferrolite. Its last command, to send the guards back our way, dies as the door opens.

  I can imagine what the Flaum see as they turn our way: a trio of beaten, bloodied creatures from a new species, two holding miners and a third wielding a crude metal bar and what looks like a pearl sword with a single eye bobbing from it. Where that falls in terms of Flaum nightmares, I don’t know, but it’s strange enough that, instead of engaging, the three guards break from their frozen moment to dash to the shuttle’s loading platform and start ascending.

  “Cowards!” Ferrolite calls after them, and the Amigga starts to float their way, but its microjets, possibly damaged from our fight, putter too slow. The platform’s gone up and in before the Amigga gets there. “You’ll all die for betraying the Chorus!”

  “Aren’t you a little beyond those threats?” I say to Ferrolite as we walk forward in a line. Malo’s on my right, Viera’s on my left, both with miners raised. “I don’t think your Chorus is going to help you now.”

  Ferrolite rotates back towards us, and before it turns, I get a good look at the massive purple bruise across its back. Guess my strike did some work after all.

  “No,” Ferrolite says, and its synthed words are low-toned, somehow melancholy in their unnatural verve. “No, it won’t.”

  “Sounds like you’re giving up,” Viera cracks.

  “Aren’t I?” Ferrolite replies. As the Amigga speaks, the shuttle starts up a whine as its jets power to full life. “I’ve been abandoned by my own guards. I’ve failed to capture the allegiance of a new species. Even if I survive this day, I’ll be nothing to the Chorus. I’ll never get a place.”

  “If you’re expecting pity...” I’m almost within striking distance. Malo and Viera know to shoot if there’s a risk, but until then, I want the final strike. It’s my job, my duty as both Empress and ambassador, or so I tell myself.

  “Reality is what it is,” Ferrolite says. “For me, it is the end. For you, the same is likely true. If the Meridia is likely to fall, as inconceivable as that may be, the Vincere will raze it to the ground and burn your leaders alive in the process. Then, the Chorus will build a new one. The galaxy will remain the same.”

  “But you won’t be in it.”

  The shuttle begins to move, and as it does, the slate-gray wall to our left splits apart, revealing a view of space and the plenty of Vincere ships occupying it. A blue-tinged light washes over it, and I’ve taken off from enough space stations now to know that’s the magnetic shield, keeping our air, ourselves from getting pulled out into the infinite.

  I raise T’Oli, bringing its Ooblot-sword to bear. “Last words, Ferrolite.”

  The Amigga, with its broken exoskeleton still hanging around it, doesn’t have any eyes or arms, no mouth or shoulders with which to make known its emotions. Instead, it floats, still and ugly. “Kill me then. Do what you came to do.”

  Not long after I first found Ignos, I stood at the top of our tribe’s Tier. After all of the promises Ignos told me to make, my own people wanted me to plunge a black-glass knife into a a captive. Like Ferrolite, the captive was helpless. Like Ferrolite, who floats still in front of me, weaponless and without hope, the captive had accepted his fate. The Amigga has threatened us, has tried to force me to submit humanity to the Chorus’ will even after I’d changed my mind, and had done it all for personal gain.

  And yet.

  I couldn’t perform the sacrifice then, because I was too scared. Too new to the consequences of power and the terrible decisions that must come with it. Since then, I’d played the merciless leader. I’d executed my share of sacrifices and enemies alike because I thought such things were necessary. Such things were expected.

  But maybe it’s time for those expectations to change.

  A pop-bang sounds as the shuttle’s boosts out of the bay, and as it soars from the room, a bright red bolt fires from the sole cannon on the shuttle’s top. Compared to the massive light-shows put on by the Vincere’s larger ships, the flash here is small, targeted. It’s also enough, as the laser strikes the side wall of the back, to cause the magnetic shield to flicker. Sparks fly from the hit, and suck out into space as vacuum pulls at us for a moment.

  “Run!” T’Oli patters from my hand. “The shield is failing!”

  The blue tinge vanishes again as T’Oli’s words get my legs into motion and the pull jerks me back, towards black space. Whistling air blows my hair, pulls the breath from my mouth. Viera, closest to the door, gets close and it jerks open. We’re not trapped, yet.

  “Kaishi!” Malo shouts. “Your bar!”

  The warrior has it right - with the shield flickering, it’s hard to take more than a step or two at a time, but Malo reaches Viera’s outstretched arm and with his own right hand, grabs my left, holding the metal bar. Together, we pull against the failing shield. Closer, with every lunge, towards the door.

  Over the random pops, another whine makes itself clear, and against my own judgment I look and see Ferrolite’s microjets struggling against the vacuum’s pressure. With nothing to hold onto, the Amigga jerks back a meter or so every time the shield dissipates, and only manages to stop its momentum during the breaks. The Amigga’s going to get sucked out before too long.

  “You can’t save it,” T’Oli patters loud, its sole eye following mine at the Amigga.

  “No, but you can. Stretch, T’Oli,” I say. “Prove we’re not like them.”

  The Ooblot hesitates and Malo gets us another long step closer to the door.

  “Ferrolite isn’t the Sevora! The Amigga created us, and the Oratus. They can’t all be evil!” I shout the words, and Ferrolite twitches its towards me as it fights its slow suck into oblivion. I’m not sure my argument is all that good, but now, more than anything, I want Ferrolite to live, to understand how wrong it was. To accept, maybe, that humans aren’t the mistake all the Amigga seem to think we are.

  T’Oli, at last, buys into my wish. The Ooblot stretches itself out from my right hand, looping and hardening part of itself around my wrist and using the pull of a vacuum beat to fly like a thrown rope through the bay towards the Amigga. There, the Ooblot wraps itself around Ferrolite’s broken exoskeleton.

  “Pull, Malo!” I call to my warrior, and he does.

  Viera’s bracing herself against the door and together the four of us reel each other in one by one, with Ferrolite sneaking inside the door as the shield flickers and fails for what sounds like the last time. A brief alarm sounds and a harder, thicker slat slams down and covers the door we just came through, leaving us scattered around the center of the level. Safe, alive, and breathing.

  “You saved me,” Ferrolite’s monotone fails to send any gratitude, but I assume it’s there.

  “Why’d they shoot the shield?” Viera shouts when she gets her breath back. “What’s the point of that?”

  “Disobeying an Amigga means death,” Ferrolite replies, hovering just inside the door. “They likely thought killing me would spare their own lives. Now, I will enjoy taking each and every one of their souls, slowly.”

  “No,” I stand up while T’Oli untangles itself from the two of us. “You’ll do nothing except what we say. All the killing, the executions and the dominance, all that stops now.”

  Ferrolite doesn’t say anything for a moment, until Malo, Viera and I are all standing, all facing it. “You think, because you saved me, the Chorus will strike a deal with you? I am nothing to them.”

  “But you could be,” I say. “We’re going to win this war. When it’s done, the Amigga will need someone to speak for them. Someone who understands us, and who’s willing to work with the Oratus.”

  If there’s a key to this Amigga, it’s ambition. It’s the chance at glory, respect, and power. Now that I know how Ferrolite operates, I think I can work with it. Bas, Evva, and the others can too.

  Ferrolite, too, seems to see its path forward - it doesn’t object to my offer, a
nd with Viera keeping a miner leveled at it, the four of us return to the lift, and head higher.

  22 Paired

  He’s sent the message. Very soon, the entire galaxy is going to question its allegiances. The Vincere’s going to have a choose a side. Or, more likely, engage in a war with itself.

  “So many are going to die,” the First Chair crackles as its voice systems, apparently damaged, work to translate the Amigga’s thoughts into words.

  “So many already were,” Sax says. He’s stepped away from the terminal back over to the First Chair’s bunker, where he can keep a watch on the Amigga. “Only they didn’t know it.”

  “How many of them will you kill?”

  Sax looks at the broken creature in front of him. Those metal rings are twisted and snapped, the occasional spark bursting from a gouged microjet or a miner Sax bit in half. The First Chair, for all its position, for all its supposed power, is nothing but a blob. Entirely dependent on the systems it’s built. It’s almost pathetic, except Sax knows he’s just as reliant on those same systems. He might be a weapon, but he doesn’t know how to grow his own food, repair a starship, or colonize a world.

  “As few of them as possible,” Sax hisses finally. “Every death will be a failure.”

  The First Chair absorbs the words as Sax crouches and, wrapping his tail around his talons, sits next to the Amigga. It’s more comfortable this way, and Sax’s throbbing body feels better against the cool hard floor.

  “We started out that way too,” the First Chair says. “A noble species, and one not as helpless as you find us today. We had limbs once, bodies more suited to catching prey in our watery home.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “We learned how to store recordings long before we decided that knowledge was the only currency that really mattered,” the First Chair says, and Sax begins to realize he’s listening to a confessional for the Amigga as a whole. “You can watch Amigga from before, living lives impossible to us now. Before we changed our own genetic make-up, long after we subjugated the Flaum and pushed them into service. Once you have someone to lift a glass, fly a ship for you, why worry about it yourself?”

  “Or fight a war for you.”

  “Exactly. We chased after the one thing no other species could, and look where it brought us.”

  “You ruled everything. For a long time.”

  “And how many subjects would say we did a good job of it?”

  Sax looks at his claws, metal-made. Unnatural. His tongue brushes along the inside of his teeth, still his from birth. His eyes blink, turn towards the arcing red lightning fixed to the top of the Meridia, flashing against dark space and the popcorn explosions as Vincere ships swirl and fight one another. The message is getting through, allegiances are being forged and broken in blood.

  “I would,” Sax rasps. “We would not exist without your kind, and until you went too far, we served without question.”

  Across the room, a lift door opens wide and reveals someone Sax thought he’d never see again. Bas claws her way through the chamber with a pair of long leaps, landing next to Sax and with one of her talons pressing against the grounded First Chair.

  “Leave it,” Sax says. “The Amigga’s already given up.”

  “This one tried to kill you,” Bas hisses. “I have no mercy for it.”

  “I expect none,” the First Chair replies, its voice fractured now, broken as the technology driving its speech begins to fail. “You were made to be predators. Do not betray your nature.”

  The word that sticks with Sax, lying wounded and exhausted, is made. The Oratus were designed to be one thing, but if there’s anything Evva, Bas, and Sax have proved with this entire operation, it’s that they are more than what they were made to be.

  “Sorry,” Sax manages. “But Amigga taste awful.”

  “They really do,” Bas echoes, and a glimmer comes to those golden eyes of hers as she catches what Sax is thinking. “We don’t want to eat you.”

  “Mercy?” the First Chair says. “I would not have thought the Oratus capable of it.”

  “This isn’t mercy,” Sax hisses, air whistling through his burned vents. “You’ve used us for so long, now it’s our turn.”

  Evva is the leader of their uprising, her black and red scales the visage that drives their forces forward, that frames their vision. The First Chair is the same for the Chorus, a leader synonymous with a government. Taking, and making, the Amigga turn against its former allies and speak out against the Amigga’s endless cruelty, that is true justice, and for the First Chair, far from a merciful ending.

  But in its current state, with its rings lying broken on the ground, its microjets powerless and shooting the occasional spark across the floor, and with Bas sticking a talon right up against its rippled, gray body, the Amigga has no options. No choices. Just like the First Chair intended for the Oratus.

  “Time to go?” Bas says, her tail winding around and helping push Sax up until he’s standing on his talons, his own tail doing what it can to keep him balanced.

  “Yes.”

  Sax takes one more look at the Priority Beam as they head towards the lift down. It’s still lit, still pushing Sax’s message to the galaxy’s corners. Strange to see a mission accomplished that didn’t end in blood, destruction, or extinction. A feeling Sax could get used to. Some of the time, anyway.

  Bas carries the First Chair - the low gravity up here makes it easy to hold the Amigga in her claws, and the Amigga doesn’t bother protesting. Resigned to its fate, or accepting it. Not that it matters.

  For once, the Oratus are in control.

  23 The Last Cycle

  This time, the lift goes where I want it to; back to where I nearly sold out my species to the First Chair. To the top of the Meridia.

  We’re silent during the ride. Ferrolite floats towards the back of the lift with Viera next to it, her miner ready to fire should the Amigga feel like doing anything, anything at all. T’Oli’s riding my left arm, where it can monitor what the lift’s doing. Malo’s with me, his hand near mine but his eyes, like mine, staring ahead at the steel doors and his mind somewhere I can’t place.

  When we broke out of the safe room Ferrolite stashed us inside at the start of this, I had thought we’d be able to clear up the shroud around human history. I had thought that, by destroying our origins at the hands of a rogue Amigga, we’d be able to preserve some measure of dignity as a species. That maybe I wouldn’t feel like a pawn. An experiment the Amigga failed to throw in the trash.

  Instead we’d all nearly died. T’Oli had lost an eye. Viera, Malo and I are all hurting, and for what?

  “Don’t question yourself,” Malo whispers as the lift climbs.

  “How’d you know?”

  “You close your eyes tight when you’re doing that,” Malo says. “And, you’re kind of hurting my hand.”

  I didn’t even notice that I’d grabbed it. That I’m squeezing it tight.

  “I don’t want to be wrong,” I say, letting go.

  “No way to know for sure,” Malo replies. “I didn’t know if taking you from your tribe was the right move. The Emperor was the holiest person in Damantum. Someone claiming to hear from Ignos probably ought to be seen as a threat.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “The conviction.” Malo smiles, memories dancing around his eyes. “The way you spoke on the Tier showed you believed.”

  “Or that I could say what Ignos told me to.”

  “No Sevora could do that. Ignos may have given you the words, but you spoke them.”

  The lift slows, settles in for its stop. This high up, the gravity’s low and as the lift comes to its rest my feet bob ever so slightly off the floor.

  “I still believe in us, Malo,” I say as my toes touch the metal floor again. “Humans are the equals of anyone, everyone else.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. Conviction.”

  When the lift doors open and we leave, I’m smili
ng too. Small, determined, but a smile. One that vanishes as we enter the familiar ring around the Chorus chamber and see a trio in front of us. A Vyphen, looking battle-scarred and tired, a Whelk with what looks like a giant miner lancing straight out from its ruby-red body, and an ash-black Flaum that comes swirling back through deep memories to my mind.

  “Coorvin?” I manage to dredge up the creature’s name.

  Before I finish, the Whelk’s trained its miner on me. With the barrel in my face the weapon’s even larger than I thought it’d be at first, and now I’m getting nervous. If this thing’s a member of the Chorus, it might liquidate all of us before we even start to move.

  “Fire and the orb gets it,” Viera preempts any answer to my question with the threat from behind me.

  “Why should I care?” the Vyphen replies, the creature’s eyes moving from me over my shoulder, towards Ferrolite. “That thing isn’t any friend of ours.”

  I permit myself a half-sliver of calm. Only a half. I try looking non-threatening, spread my hands out wide, and say Coorvin’s name again. This time, I follow it up with, “Want to tell your friends that we’re, uh, friends?”

  The Flaum tilts his head at me, and I don’t see much kindness in that face. “Friends? Last time I saw your species, you were leaving Sax, Bas, and I to die as Cobalt fell apart.”

  Oh. Yeah.

  “That wasn’t my fault! The Sevora told me to do that.”

  Now the Vyphen and Whelk are glancing back and forth between Coorvin, myself, and the Amigga, their expressions saying they’re sliding towards shooting us all first and figuring out if we’re dangerous later. Coorvin, though, doesn’t let it get that far. The Flaum sighs, places a hand on the barrel of the Whelk’s miner and pushes it to the side.