The white foam-like substance sprayed out into their wounds, causing the bleeding to stop at the source. It was the best they could do considering none of them was a doctor. The rescue team from the approaching UNE fleet would have to do the rest.
“Vaish,” Fiesei’s voice echoed on the ship’s intercom. “We really need to talk, in person. Meet me on the flight deck.”
Without a second thought, Chloe’s hand took hold of her rifle, and her feet stormed her off toward the elevator. Michei said something, offering help? Asking her to say? Who the fuck knew? She didn’t care what it was. Vengeance was on her mind, and it was the only thing she was answering to.
Chloe pushed forward to the elevator leading toward the main fuselage of the ship. In hindsight, a lot of the decisions she’d made lately may not have been the best ones, and this realization filled her brain with rage, putting her mind in an “I don’t give a fuck anymore” trance. Her career didn’t matter anymore, her life, anything; fuck it. Fiesei had to be brought down; he had to pay. The world, no, the galaxy needed to know that screwballs like him were the real reason things were going to hell, why so many innocent lives were being lost.
She turned the corner and saw the back of Fiesei’s business suit walking toward the elevator. Flight deck, my ass; he’s already up here! Had she seen the small holo emitter on the floor, she would have realized she had walked right into a trap.
Fiesei, the real one, struck her from behind. She felt a sharp stabbing feeling hit the back of her head as his fingers pushed an object into it. Chloe quickly regained her balance, pushing Fiesei away in the process. He tumbled to the floor while her rifle pointed toward his face. There was a small holographic window floating above him. Before Chloe could pull the trigger, Fiesei’s hand reached and tapped one of the commands on the hologram, and Chloe froze in place.
Fiesei got back to his feet and interacted with the hologram once more. A secondary window appeared, displaying video playback…the video reflected exactly what Chloe saw with her own eyes. Fiesei tapped into her mind, her whole body. The moves of his body became her moves, and he was able to see exactly what she was looking at.
“Impressive, isn’t it? One of the many trinkets developed by the old Linl government before Radiance took over and banned us from further using these devices.”
Fiesei’s hand reached into his pocket and removed an oddly shaped data crystal. The very same one he had been going to stick into Chloe’s brain before. Chloe’s body moved in unison with him as he reached to grab the object, not that she had any jacket pockets.
“Your memories, your real life is here, Vaish,” he said. “You may hate me now, but in a few seconds, you will be thanking me for waking you up from this never-ending sleep.”
He threw the data crystal toward Chloe. She unwillingly mimicked his actions as he readjusted his hands, forcing Chloe to catch it as it came to her. Her hand, holding the device, was then forced toward her face so that she could see the sharp metallic spikes sticking out, before her hand was once again forced to move, this time toward the side of her head.
“I’m sorry for doing it like this. I really hoped you would have allowed this to happen with your own free will…but this will have to suffice.”
Fiesei moved his hands, forcing Chloe to stick the device into her head. She wanted to scream as the spikes bored holes into her head, through her skull, and into her brain. A projection appeared in front of Chloe’s face, displaying text in the Linl language as well as a progress bar. She recognized some of the words and numbers, “memory upload in progress.”
“You,” the voice in Chloe’s head called out to her. “This was not our intention; this Fiesei has not been touched. He does not walk the path.”
The progress bar halted. Fiesei’s face showed worry at the unexpected turn of events.
“You may be my host, but I could always find a new one,” the voice once again called out. “Is that what you would like?”
Get me the hell out of here! Chloe thought.
“Embrace the goddess, Chloe. Free your mind and know that only we can prevent your suffering from continuing.”
Chloe felt the pain in her head cease as the tiny mind-controlling device was ejected. Slowly, her body’s control returned to her as an error message flashed in front of Fiesei’s holographic windows. Her hands were able to move at her will, and she ripped the data crystal and the bloodied spikes on it away from her head. In an instant, the small wounds on her head began to rapidly seal shut and heal.
“But know this, your payment for this act will be the cessation of the blessing you and the Jazz have been given. Other bargains such as this will be made in the future.” Chloe saw Fiesei panic and run away as Aviuheart appeared in front of her, handing her rifle back to her. “Now…shoot him. Shoot that man; his methods work against the celestial ascension.”
The entrance to the flight deck came into view as Chloe chased Fiesei towards it. He had a decent head start. She couldn’t help but wonder what Aviuheart meant by the cessations of the blessing? The rapid healing? A stray piece of shrapnel provided the answer; she grabbed it while continuing to swim into the flight deck. She intentionally slit the palm of her hand with it, and blood orbed up and floated away from the gash.
The cut remained.
Fiesei was seconds away from floating toward the rear entrance of the strange ship when a single bullet from Chloe’s rifle put a hole through his leg. The blast caused him to spiral slightly, delaying his escape.
“Fiesei!” she yelled.
“That’s the furious woman I remember!” he said as he slowly reoriented himself, ignoring the fact that blood floated away from his leg.
“My sister.”
“She’s not your sister, Vaish! You never had one!”
“My lover.”
“He’s not your true lover. I am!” She felt her heart skip a beat as he continued, “You were my wife!”
“Fuck that!”
“We fought the Hashmedai during the invasion of the Linl republic! We fought against the republic joining the Radiance Union; we fought to have our exiled families in secret to be free to return to the worlds we handed over to Radiance! Worlds that were taken away by the Hashmedai!”
“Shut up!”
“The Morutrin system is all that remains of our once independent society, and even today both the empire and the union have their hands around it, trying to take it for themselves!”
She had had enough of his talk. Rage forced her to pull the trigger, and his body shot backward, impacting against the side of his transport. Chloe floated over toward his body, gazing down at him as he held on to his chest while blood seeped away.
“Go on, do it, end me,” his weakened voice said. “Maybe…maybe you really aren’t her. Maybe you are…your next actions will prove that.”
She held her rifle down toward his defeated body, looking at the gaping hole in his chest leaking blood. She hesitated as her finger hovered half an inch away from the trigger. The pain in her body, the chaos bellowing across Earth, the lives lost, the lives being lost, and the ones that would be lost…Sarah and Chris. This man had played a key role in it all. All he needed to do was use words to get what he wanted, as far as she was concerned.
“Get up. You’re pathetic.” Bring him in. Let justice do its job. Rage isn’t your thing, Chloe!
He remained still, unmoving, with a grin on his dying face. “End it. You know want to. Release the beast within you. Be yourself once more.”
“Shut up!” Her gun stretched closer to his face, for she was beginning to question if the justice system would even do something about him. The thought of him getting off after all this made her sick, and even if he didn’t get off, would he be put to death? Or just locked away for life? The lines between being a hero, naïve, and an antihero were blurred by unfocused fury.
“Make me a martyr,” he whispered. “If this is how it’s going to end, pull the trigger. I’d rather it be you than anyone e
lse.”
“Whatever you say.”
Chloe pulled the trigger, and a weightless stream of blood released from the exit wound at the back of his head, while droplets of blood from the opening wound slashed upward toward her face.
A bullet through the head, it solves everything. Words to live by.
… … …
►► Earth Cube, Geneva, Earth
► Sol System
Jazz’s hands guided his plasma katana in a circular motion, cutting away at the steel that made up the elevator door on top of Earth Cube. His boot kicked in the center, causing it to fall down the shaft into the abyss below. Several seconds had passed, and he did not hear the sound of the two hulks of metal crashing. It was a long way down. Time to test how fast I can recover from this, he thought and leaped in.
The impact put him out for a solid five minutes, and his battered body rested on top of the elevator until it was time to act again. Only something was different: he still felt pain, and he hadn’t fully recovered from the fall as expected. It was almost as if the strange healing he had was sapped away during the middle of his recovery. Well, that’s not good…what the fuck happened?
Once again his katana was put to work. Cutting a hole through the top of the elevator he had fallen on, he crashed down upon cutting his way through. The emergency bunker was at last available to him, and before him stood a shocked President Mariana Salamanca, all alone inside the square-shaped room.
“So…this is how it ends?” she asked while placing her hands on top of her desk.
“It doesn’t have to,” Jazz said, powering down his katana.
She looked at Jazz, visually unshaken by his presence, especially when he began to walk toward her. “Why do you serve the empire?” she asked. “They attacked us, killed billons of people, human lives! Gone!”
“There’s a lot out there ya’ll don’t know about,” Jazz said. “The empire ain’t perfect, but the attack was engineered, engineered by a Radiance cult.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No, I ain’t got no proof,” he said.
“If you do this, right or wrong, you’ll never see Earth again as a free man.”
“Listen,” he said while thrusting his blade through the top of her desk. “When Empress Y’lin sent me here, it was to ice you and some other guy I don’t give two shits about. But…it’s been brought to my attention I’m being played. I don’t like being played.” He pointed to his blade, still stuck through the desk. “I need you to cut yourself.”
She looked at his weapon and then back at him. “You’re crazy.”
“The world…the galaxy needs to think you’re dead,” he said. “If I walk from this, Y’lin will just send another assassin, and another if they fail, and quite possibly another fleet of ships. Your blood on my blade will be the proof I bring back to the empire that you’re dead. We can end this conflict between Earth and the empire once and for all right fuckin’ now.”
“I can’t abandon my post as commander and chief!”
“You’ll be saving lives; humanity doesn’t have enough ships to take on the entire Hashmedai navy. And you’re kidding yourself if you think Radiance will send all of theirs to defend one system.”
“If we join the union.”
“Don’t. You’ll just make Earth a target for centuries to come if that’s the case.” His arms folded. “The choice is yours, but I ain’t gonna kill ya. The Celestial Order will have to get someone else to do that if it’s gonna come to that.” Salamanca’s hands came within reach of the side of his blade and stopped for a second in hesitation. She then gently brushed the palms of her hand along the side of it, leaving behind a trail of her blood along the blade. “Now, use whatever powers you’ve got to make this look legit—take a nice permanent vacation in Barbados or something.”
His blade was once again back in his hands, and his feet took him back toward the sliced-up elevator he’d come through. He stared up toward the long dark shaft and a set of ladders along the side.
… … …
►► EISS Headquarters, Geneva, Earth
► Sol System
Destiny’s and Eupiar’s steps splashed through puddle after puddle of blood. Bodies of UNE and EISS personnel created a path of death leading toward the psionic prison cell, which held Hannah. Destiny didn’t know what to make of it. Someone clearly had beaten them here, someone armed with a plasma melee weapon, by the looks, as each and every body was dismembered with burn marks along the areas that had been directly sliced. It certainly made their job easier: Eupiar didn’t need to hack any entrances open, and Destiny didn’t need to engage in risky combat.
“This should be it,” Eupiar said while reading off the holographic map of the facility.
The two approached the cell door leading toward Hannah’s cell. Destiny already had a bad feeling about what she was going to see when she entered. The door was already partly open. She held on tight to her rifle and then entered the white-walled room. There was a single body lying directly in the center of the room, drowning in a pool of its own blood.
It was Ken. A Hashmedai plasma dagger was jammed through the back of his head. “Oh my god,” Destiny said. The two saw no one else, just Ken’s body…Destiny activated her communication ear piece. “Jazz,” she transmitted. “I got some bad news.”
… … …
►► Unknown Transport Ship, Outside Jupiter Orbit
► Sol System
Hannah stood behind Kasidey and Whigli as they watched Fiesei’s demise from the windshield of their transport. She placed one of her hands on Whigli’s shoulder and the other on Kasidey’s.
“Excellent!” Hannah said excitedly. “Let us depart. Fiesei’s task is complete.”
As their transport began to lift off from the flight deck, Kasidey’s fingers inputted a command to remotely open the hangar doors. The cold blackness of space surrounded the ship as it traveled away from the John F. Kennedy and toward the wormhole high above Jupiter.
“Do you remember what to do?” Hannah asked Kasidey.
Kasidey produced a red gem from underneath the dashboard of her flight terminal. She held on to the gem firmly while focusing her vision toward the wormhole. It changed; Paryo could no longer be seen in the distance of the vortex, just the emptiness of interstellar space, some place far away from the Hashmedai capital.
“I think it might be off,” Kasidey reported. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Close enough,” Hannah said as her arms spread apart in a welcoming gesture toward the rift in space that was minutes away from consuming them. “Mommy! I’m coming to you. We will be reunited, and we’ll be a family again! Yes, I’ve aged, but that’s OK, because you haven’t, not really. You’ll be just the way I last saw you, and that’s what is most important, what will make me happy. My happiness will make you happy; my return will fill the void in your life. You’ll support me, my every choice, especially the most important one of them all, my ascension into the celestial realm. Mommy, you are going to be so proud, I promise. I am the key.”
Kasidey’s reaction toward Hannah’s speech was a neutral one, unlike Whigli, who glared at her then back toward Kasidey. “Is this what ships are like now these days?” he asked as the operation of the ship was different. The biggest thing being gravity, without the need of a rotating ring like all the UNE ships.
“No, not quite,” Kasidey said.
“Who built this?”
“Nobody you need to be worried about right now,” Kasidey replied. “The only thing you need to know right now is we’re going to be making the galaxy a better place.”
No further questions were asked on his part, especially how she became Chidorli. He wanted to believe that she was indeed Chidorli coming back to him. How else would she have known all that stuff about him? How else would she have been able to free Hannah from the EISS psionic prison? Kasidey was no human; that was for sure. Perhaps Radiance was right, and there was some kind of aft
erlife…no, not Radiance. The Celestial Order, they might have been the ones who were right. Maybe, just maybe Chidorli had descended from such a plane of existence to come back into his arms, looking like a human to keep her cover secret.
… … …
►► ESV John F. Kennedy, Outside Jupiter Orbit
► Sol System
Fuck that, Chloe thought upon seeing the mysterious transport take flight. She floated toward the equipment storage closet, equipping herself with a flight jumpsuit and helmet, and climbed into the cockpit of a dormant fighter. Flight wasn’t her thing, and it showed as she projected a blank stare at all the buttons, sticks, and holo screens within.
“EVE autopilot,” she requested. The top of the cockpit slowly shut as it automatically began to prime its engines and launch. “Pursue and attack the ship that just departed the JFK!”
Chloe’s fighter launched then swung around as its sensors picked up the unknown craft flying toward the northern pole of Jupiter. The ship quickly entered her fighter’s weapons range. A gut feeling told her maybe she should let this go. After all, she wasn’t a trained pilot, and leaving flight and combat maneuvers in the hands of an AI was…risky to say the least. If things got rough she may be better off trying to fly it herself. It’s a transport. What’s the worst that could happen?
Chloe was three seconds away from missile lock when a single blast of energy pulsed away from the transport, demolishing her fighter into a flaming ball of metal and debris. All with one shot.
… … …
►► Imperial Palace, Paryo
► Uemaesce System
“It would appear I was wrong about you,” Y’lin said as Noylarlie bowed before her. “And for that, I am sorry. Your status as an Archmage has been reinstated.”
News of Kroshka’s and Noylarlie’s actions saving Paryo quickly spread throughout the masses of the world. The eyewitness accounts of the crew aboard the Hashmedai capital ships that were lagging behind the Crimson Arrow only helped to add to their fame.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Noylarlie said, rising up from the cold solid floor.
Uprising of the Exiled (Splintered Galaxy Book 2) Page 46