But the preservation of the eight races was perhaps the most screwed up factor of all. It allowed inveterate invaders like the Cartaxians to destroy whole new cultures simply because they knew the Great Universal Body wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them.
The humans had a thing for tradition – especially some of the more ancient cultures.
Tradition often had an important place in society.
But tradition could also be used to protect existing social structures. It could be used to justify and uphold social inequities simply based on the reason that things had always been done this way.
Such was the inequities of the ancient eight races.
If you came from one of those races, well done, the universe would hand you protection on a silver platter. If you didn’t, just like Kim? You had to forge your own path.
Which was precisely what Kim was going to do on behalf of Earth.
As soon as the armor had finished disrupting the Cartaxian’s body, Kim reached in, disabled the auto-destruct, and pulled out the Q crystal. He pocketed it, stretched his shoulders, jumped out of the burning car, and turned for the next fight.
His phone was still in his pocket, and he was still using it to remotely connect to the Army and police.
Though at first, they’d ignored his orders, they’d seen his one-man fighting routine, and they’d started responding.
Did they trust Kim? Hell no. He imagined that right now some General in some safe base somewhere was hatching a plan to capture him. But that wasn’t the point. Humans, despite their many foibles, are creatures capable of seeking out opportunities.
And everyone could tell that if they wanted to save Seoul, their only way to do it was with Kim’s help.
So Kim lifted a hand and waved as a group of three soldiers on the other side of the road cheered.
Then he put on a burst of speed, again throwing his endoskeleton into full throttle as he watched two Cartaxian warriors streak down from the clouds above.
“Legionnaires, ha? Finally getting the mothership’s attention, am I?” Kim commented as he shifted his shoulders back and forward. The 15 or so Q crystals he’d managed to scrounge from the obliterated armor units clattered in his pocket. As both legionnaires landed and tilted their heads toward that very same pocket, Kim shook a finger in front of them. “Finders keepers,” he muttered.
The legionnaires moved, the thruster strips on the backs of their armor sets pulsing white-blue as they powered forward too quick for humans to see.
Kim could see just fine, and a split second before they reached him, he pivoted on his foot, fell down to his knee, and threw his other foot up. He caught one of the legionnaires as it shifted past, altering its momentum and sending it slamming straight back into the burning car beside him.
Kim was a lot of things, and his armor was a lot more, but there was one fact germane to all armor technology throughout the universe. It ran on power. And when that power ran out, you needed to find an alternate source.
When Kim had grabbed the Q crystal from the assassin who’d tried to kill him, he’d ascertained it would allow him to run at close to full power for years to come. But here’s the thing. The fight had been brutal, and Kim was running through energy quicker than usual.
Though his endoskeleton could run on Q crystals, it wasn’t designed to. It was designed to run on far more energy-rich substances like marax ore.
He’d have to switch out soon. Maybe in a half hour, maybe in an hour – maybe he’d even be able to stretch it to a day. But at some point, he’d have to stop his frenetic battle, open his chest cavity, and stick in another crystal.
And at that point, he fancied the Cartaxians would throw everything they had at him.
For now?
Kim cracked his neck and threw himself at the legionnaires.
He was determined to make as much trouble as he could.
Chapter 20
Hena
She arrived over London.
It was a battleground, the war now in full swing.
Though she was high up in the stratosphere, away from the prying sensors of the Cartaxian ship, that did not dent her own senses at all.
She could track the desperate human soldiers and law enforcement officers rushing through the streets, trying with all their meager might to win a battle they were destined to lose.
Her fingers threatened to pulse in, to curl so hard against her palms, she would scrape the light from her skin.
But she stopped herself in time.
For, you see, there would always be another battle.
Every Peacekeeper knew that.
The universe was too large and full of too many races to ever hope that one day peace would be found on every single planet in every single star in every single galaxy.
War would mark the fabric of reality until the day the universe ended itself.
So the mark of every great Peacekeeper and the central philosophy of her race was to wait. To be judicious with force. To save when, and only when, it would make a difference.
But did that make it easy to watch? Did it make it easy to float there, thousands of kilometers up, watching this unfold?
No. It made it harder.
And the harder it became, the closer she got, floating down through the clouds and tumultuous weather patterns that were reacting to the transport gate and the Cartaxian ships. Down and down, closer and closer to the horror.
It felt as if someone had tied a chain around her, and there was nothing she could do – no reason that would stop her from falling down to Earth.
Peacekeepers very rarely had a sense of destiny. They had something far stronger. A sense of duty.
And though, try as she might, Hena could not extinguish hers.
It called to her to do one thing. Intervene before it was too late.
As she descended, her fingers curled, pressing against her palms, reacting to her light form, making it spark and leap around her, making it pulse with light, making it shine with hope.
But it was a hope she would ultimately have to push away. Hena knew her place. And if she forgot it for an instant, the Cartaxians would remind her of it.
So she closed her eyes as she descended down into the horror.
Chapter 21
Linh
“Dammit, he’s gonna get himself killed. They’re sending the gate ship to South Korea,” Linh spat as she curled a hand into a fist and slammed it against the armrest of her command chair.
Harry jolted on the opposite side of the room. His knees groaned, the joints stiff as he pushed up into a standing position. “What are you talking about?
He’d been spending the last several minutes dutifully doing exactly what Linh had told him to – crafting reports to send around the globe to inform people of precisely what was happening to their planet.
“That Endo in South Korea. I just picked up some chatter between Cartaxian units. They’re going to use a gate to capture him.”
“What do we do?” Harry demanded.
Linh didn’t want to say this, but Harry had come a long way from the frightened jittering mess she’d saved from that beach.
She suspected it was because in this ship, he was protected from the brunt of the horror, and though he could watch it through a screen, it would still seem at arms-length.
Then the kinder side of Linh’s personality pointed out one thing. She wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the muttered words Harry had shared with her. She could pretend that Harry was only holding onto his nerve because the battle was far away, but he’d managed to hold onto it when it had mattered most in front of those two Cartaxian warriors.
“What do we do?” Harry demanded once more, and she could see a flash of real determination deep in his eyes.
Linh sighed. It was a heavy move that saw her shoulders bang hard against the back of her chair. The connectors shifted around her body, always accommodating her movements. She could pulse to her feet as quickly as she could, and they woul
d shift with her. They were designed to go wherever she did, ensuring that her connection to the vessel never ceased.
And that very same connection was telling her not to do this.
Not to do what?
Save the Endo.
She ground her teeth together.
Maybe Harry knew her better than she suspected, because he took a sharp step toward her, his rubber-soled shoes echoing out against the smooth metal floor. “Is this where I’m meant to tell you to believe in hope again?”
She got the reference, and she ground her teeth together. “If we go to save him, it will jeopardize our primary mission.”
“Our ultimate mission,” Harry said, emphasizing the word ultimate, “is to save Earth. “If this guy is nearly as good as you suggested when you practically guffawed, then we need him.”
“Firstly, I did not guffaw.”
Harry shot her a knowing look.
She ground her teeth even harder. “It won’t be easy. They’re sending more forces to South Korea to get him. That’s not even to mention the forces they’re rerouting to London.”
“What’s going on in London?”
“I honestly have no idea. But we’re closer to South Korea, and without knowing what the Cartaxians are up to in London, I don’t want to take the chance of heading to the wrong place.”
“Fine, then we save this guy. What did you say he was again?”
“An Endo,” she said, and she tried to keep that slightly awed tone out of her voice.
Once upon a time, Linh had assumed that she was the most sophisticated alien resident on Earth. She’d been wrong. If there was an Endo, then God knows what other sophisticated aliens could be out there.
Maybe, somehow, humanity had a chance.
But Linh didn’t want to blow her own chance by getting messed up in the epic battle happening over South Korea.
Harry kept his knowing gaze locked on her. He took another step toward her and crossed his arms. “I guess we have to risk it.”
“There’s no we. There’s me. And it’s me who’s going to have to risk. It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in a battle like that.”
“You said you were a battle mind. You said your people once formed the heart of entire battlecruisers. How long has it been?”
Linh shifted her gaze up to the side. “About 1325 years.”
Harry had looked in control before, but now he balked. “I’m sorry?” The skin around his eyes widened.
Linh shot him a sly smile. “What, don’t I look my age?”
“1320 years?”
She brought up a finger. “1325 years,” she said emphasizing the 5, almost as if those measly five years mattered in the long length of her lifespan.
Harry didn’t bother to correct himself. He shifted another step forward and angled his head toward the screen. “Let’s do this.”
She didn’t bother to arch another eyebrow. Instead, she half settled her eyes closed and concentrated on connecting to her ship once more. Not, of course, that she ever technically lost her connection to it.
As long as she was in this command seat and as long as the connector tubes were attached to her body, she would always have a full lock on the ship’s sensors, and they would always be integrated with her own.
And they were telling her one thing. This was suicide. There was a very low possibility of success.
The Cartaxians obviously appreciated that in order for their land attack on South Korea to be successful, they needed to get the Endo out of the way, and to do that, they were going to gate him out of there.
That raised a rather important question. Why not just blast him off the street with one of the strike ship’s ionic pulse cannons? Sure, the guy was an Endo, and had some of the most sophisticated endoskeleton armor this side of the real Milky Way – but a few concentrated blasts of an ionic pulse cannon would scatter that armor over the Korean Peninsula.
But they weren’t doing that. Which was another important indicator that the Cartaxians had something else planned.
She knew enough about the war-loving race to appreciate how they usually behaved – and this wasn’t it. though they loved hand-to-hand combat, and there was nothing they enjoyed more than striking fear into the hearts of their prey before ripping said hearts free from their prey’s chests, they were also in it for the ultimate victory that lay at the end of a successful battle. And there was no good reason the Cartaxians should be engaging in such protracted warfare.
“What are you thinking about?” Harry demanded.
Linh took a moment to answer him. She rolled her eyes. “I’m thinking this is suicide, but there’s… a tiny chance it might work.”
“Okay, then we take hold of that tiny chance—”
“Don’t you dare say that we take hold of that tiny chance and we hope. Hope is not going to come into this equation. Overcoming and adjusting for astronomical chance will.”
Harry nodded competently, almost as if he were accepting the mission on her behalf. “Okay, then we do that. Now tell me what to do. Is the South Korean Army still functional? What kind of message can I get out?”
Linh winced. Then she tilted her head back and finally started to think. “We need to concentrate on the gate ship that’s approaching. As soon as it reaches Seoul, that Endo is done for. I don’t care what kind of armor he’s got, they’re going to open a gate above him and whisk him away, as well as half of the city.”
“Do we have anything that could take a gate ship down?” Harry demanded.
“I assume by we you mean the humans. The answer is no. Technically.”
“Technically?” Harry’s voice did it again, and she heard unmistakable hope soar through it almost like a bird reaching for heaven.
She half groaned. “It is not necessarily the quality of weapons that make the difference in a battle—”
“But the quality of intelligence and how you use it. That’s where you come in. Just tell me what to do,” Harry demanded once more.
Linh sat all the way back in her command seat and closed her eyes.
She tuned in. She didn’t want to do this. But Harry was right, and she had no choice.
If humanity had a chance, they needed that Endo.
So it was time to show the Cartaxians just why a battle mind was so damn dangerous.
Chapter 22
Nick
This Amal – the Centauri, as he called himself – seemed to think Nick was something special. Something worthy of protection.
Nick didn’t need to be able to read people’s emotional expressions to appreciate that. He could… feel it coming in from Amal.
Amal had already claimed his race had the unique ability to touch people’s minds, and Nick could confirm that.
Or at least whatever the hell was happening to Nick’s body could confirm that.
Nick desperately needed the opportunity to stop, stand still for several minutes, and truly gauge what was happening to him. He had to take stock of these astounding changes to his body.
He didn’t have that option.
London was falling.
Not the bridges and buildings. Not Westminster, not Buckingham Palace.
The people protecting it were falling while the city itself remained eerily fine.
Though all Nick wanted to do was find every single Cartaxian warrior he could and blast through them, Amal wouldn’t let him. He kept muttering something about the Accords, and how if he allowed Nick to be hurt, he’d be breaking them.
Nick had no idea what these Accords were, but his body did. Just as his body had known what the Cartaxians were when Amal had mentioned them.
And more importantly than that… just as his body had known what a Rayar was.
That was Nick.
What he’d always been.
On the inside.
He’d never been a human struggling to get by. He’d been… some kind of illusion. Something that had been painted to look like a human while its true nature remained h
idden within.
The old Nick would have crumbled under this knowledge. The new Nick was caught between his human side and something growing inexorably from within. This strength the likes of which he could never have imagined previously.
Amal locked a hand on Nick’s head, forcing him forward and down into a tube station.
Nick expected to see people huddling out of the way, but he saw nothing.
The center of the city had been evacuated, save for the soldiers still battling selflessly above.
“We have to get back up there,” Nick spat.
“Trust me, Rayar. Please,” Amal said, and Nick could feel his desperation. Which was saying something. Amal seemed to be unflappable. And yet at the prospect that Nick could be harmed, his façade of control always broke.
They ran down the steps, Amal’s boots striking discarded gun magazines and chunks of concrete that had fallen from the ceiling above.
They got to the base of the stairs, but Amal suddenly stopped, throwing out an arm and catching Nick around the middle before he could take another step.
He didn’t need to ask Amal what the problem was. He could feel it himself. His extended senses started to pick up the barely perceptible sound of footfall. Heavy as hell, and not coming from a man’s foot.
“Dammit,” Amal spat bitterly under his breath. He twisted his head wildly from side to side, and Nick could tell he was looking for a way out. But just before he could push further down into the tube station and take his chances, Nick picked up yet more heavy armored footfall.
Amal didn’t bother to swear again. He grabbed hold of Nick’s shoulder, turned him around, and pulled him up the stairs.
But up on the city streets, it was arguably worse.
The constant blare of gunfire echoed through the air, and yet it didn’t reach as far as it should.
Amal had already pointed out to Nick that the Cartaxians had put in place some kind of sound-buffering force field over London. It was there to interfere with people’s natural senses, to disorient them, to give the Cartaxians a further edge.
And yet, for some reason, it wasn’t working on Nick. As his body transformed into a Rayar, his new sense of hearing was piercing through the veil of that force field.
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