Brilliant Starlight

by Anna Carven

  He’s reaching out. Some fucking instrument is in his hand. He’s pushing it through the opening in her chest, past skin and bone and muscle, pressing it against her heart.

  “Still slowing,” Mareth whispers.

  If the pronouncement bothers Zharek, he doesn’t show it. His expression of furious concentration doesn’t change. He’s still working.

  He is not giving up on her. I close my eyes and say a silent prayer to the Goddess. I am not a religious man, but sometimes…

  “Pulse is gone.”

  I drop to my knees. I am paralyzed. What do I do now?

  What the fuck do I do now?

  Abbey…

  What is it, my love?

  I open my eyes in shock. A strange sensation enters my body, rippling down my spine and into my arms. The feeling spreads to my head. It’s a warm, tingling kind of sensation; it feels as if I’ve just walked into a highly charged energy field.

  Tarak? She sounds confused. Why am I…? I was just trying to reach you, then… Oh.

  She’s inside my head. She’s inside my thoughts. I know this. It has happened to me before. Complete dissociation from one’s mortal body.

  The moment before death. Ka’qui leaving the body, preparing to merge with the energy of the Universe. Everything is connected. Everything returns to the whole.

  I’ve been here before.

  For me, however, there was only the cold, dark room. There was no-one to anchor myself to. I was floating, looking at my own body in surgical stasis and wondering if this time, it would be different. Maybe this time, I would finally get to leave this infernal body. There was no other consciousness for me to be drawn towards. How many times did Zharek put me under? How many times did he bring me back?

  After a while, I got used to it. I found myself becoming curious about the other side.

  The other side…

  No!

  A terrible chill rips through me. I wrestle with the feeling. Not now. Now is not the time to give in to feelings of despair and panic. I have to be in complete control. I only have a few precious moments.

  She is invading my mind, my heart, and my soul. She is desperately reaching for something. Her thoughts merge with mine. She needs something to anchor her to the world of the living.

  I reach out with my mind. What are you doing, my amina, heart-of-my-heart?

  Tarak? What’s happening? I’m over here, but I’m over there. I want to go back, but those horrible nano-things are killing me. I don’t know how to stop them. I did it once before, but I can’t anymore.

  You will go back, right now. There is no time to lose. I become stern, but my love for her spills over into my thoughts. You are not leaving me, and you are not leaving our child. Go!

  I can’t…

  You can!

  Not knowing what else to do, I open my consciousness to her, and she comes to me. She gives me everything. Her thoughts, her memories, her beautiful soul. Nothing is spared.

  I am floored.

  In return, I give her everything she needs.

  For one single transcendent moment, we are two souls combined as one. If only we could stay like this forever.

  We can’t. There are too many things we still have to do. Ami is waiting for us. She is our universe now.

  Go back, I order. You know what to do now.

  I show her how to control the machines. I give her everything I know. It is not a thought, but a feeling. It is not the kind of thing that can be taught or explained. On this level, it can only be given.

  It is the gift of control. The machines in my body are subservient to my will. It took me countless quants and an immense amount of pain to achieve this degree of control; so natural and perfect it is just like breathing. It is instinctive and fluid and brutally rigid, all at the same time. It is not something one can just train for.

  One must be able to tap into the flow of the Universe, to some small extent. I am no Silent One, but I possess the ability to some small degree. We all do. The trait is stronger in the Aikun than in the civilization dwellers, and it seems even the Humans have it. Abbey has it.

  Everything is connected, and she cannot leave me now. I will not allow it.

  Abbey al Akkadian, I growl, you will return to your body right now. Use what I have shown you. Control the curse.

  My stubborn General… Her thoughts are an affectionate caress. She does not want to go. She is addicted to this feeling. A part of her wants to stay as one with me forever.

  “You are still here? Go!” I am shouting now. I open my eyes and see her floating body. She is weightless, sightless, and motionless. Her chest does not rise and fall. Wisps of soft brown hair float about her face, forming an ethereal halo.

  She no longer looks Human.

  Suddenly, her radiant presence is sucked from me, as if into a vacuum. A chill surges through my body. It’s as if she has pulled all the energy from the air around me and left the chamber cold and empty.

  “I can’t get it started.” Jeral’s flat voice filters through the amplifiers. “No pulse.”

  “Go!” I scream, unsure whether she can hear me or not. Perhaps I have finally gone mad. I turn to Zharek. “Return the blood to her body.”

  “Nanofiltration is not yet complete and I have not been able to remove the nanoparticles in her heart.”

  “I don’t care. Do it!”

  “This will kill her.” Zharek shakes his head. He doesn’t know what I know, and there is no time for explanations. I put my claws against his neck. “If what you’re saying is correct, then she is already dead. Put it back,” I say softly. “All of it.”

  “She’s my patient. I’m the medic here.” In his domain, Zharek is lord and master, but he is forgetting one crucial thing.

  “She is my mate.”

  Zharek pushes up the neural integrator and stares into my eyes. His usual pretenses have been stripped away. His desperation is evident. He wants this to succeed almost as much as I do. “You’re sure?”

  I nod. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.

  He sighs, pulls the integrator over his eyes and gives the command.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Abbey

  Is this what it feels like to have a so-called out-of-body experience?

  I’m floating. I’m everywhere but nowhere. I’m searching for something to hold onto. Behind me, my mate is shouting. He’s desperate. He’s holding onto his sanity by the tips of his claws. I’ve never, ever seen him like this before.

  There’s someone in the tank next to my body.

  Shit. My body. I can see myself. I look terrible, like a floating corpse.

  Tarak’s deep, booming voice fills the dark chamber. It’s filled with the promise of death. I want to go to him again, but I can’t. He just pushed me away!

  Go!

  Sure, my love. I focus on the memory of what it felt like to be inside his head; to be connected to him in both mind and soul.

  In that moment, I understood everything. I understood the beginning and the end and everything in-between. I saw the void inside him, and I saw what he had filled it with.

  Go!

  How can I leave you now? I want to live…

  Reality blurs. I’m everything and nothing. I’m numb but filled with pain. It’s cold. So cold. There’s something inside me; an abomination, an unnatural, sentient thing.

  Sentient?

  Sentient!

  That’s what he showed me. This other; it can be controlled. You must bend it to your will.

  Control.

  It isn’t something that can be explained. It’s just a feeling. It’s thousands upon thousands of hours of training; of pain, of walking alone the precipice between life-and-death.

  And he’s just given all of it to me.

  Everything.

  You are mine.

  I reach for control. I sense the tiny machine-monsters inside me. This virus; it has a will of its own.

  Ah. I get it now. Control. I can do
this. After all, I have just been shown how by the master himself.

  As the blood flows back into my body, I reach into my heart and bend the monster to my will.

  Chapter Twenty

  Tarak

  “We’ve got a pulse. Rapid cellular repair is happening right before my very fucking eyes.” Zharek is astonished. I haven’t seen him speechless in a long time. It takes a lot to surprise a man who knows everything. “General, how did you—”

  “Close her up,” I snap. I do not want Zharek to become fixated on the details.

  “I might not have to…” Zharek manipulates the metal tentacles and begins to carry out the nano-surgery. “I just need to give her a little help.”

  The beauty of utilizing nano-machines for healing is that they operate at the sub-cellular level. There will be no scarring. There will be no pain.

  “If he’s no longer needed, get him out of the tank.” I try and suppress the possessive rage that rises up within me. I know Joran is only doing his job. I know his intentions are noble, but I’m full of wild fury right now, and the thought of another male laying his hands on my mate sends savage bloodlust coursing through my veins.

  It is always like this when it comes to her. Rational thought goes out the door. I can’t plot, I can’t strategize, I can’t think. Something very primitive rises up within me. It is always there, seething just below the thin veneer of control.

  Joran leaves the tank, and I breathe easier.

  Right before my very eyes, the wound in Abbey’s chest is healing. She’s breathing. The empty look on her face is gone, replaced by a serene expression.

  The threat has passed. She has fought my curse and won. She is at peace.

  She is a goddess, and she is mine.

  “We can bring the temperature up and drop the sedation.” Zharek is still working. I take a step forward, drawn towards my mate. She is like a sweet, intoxicating drug. I will immerse myself in the blue liquid and be by her side when she awakens.

  Fierce shouting interrupts my plans. “Get it, Tor! Before it breaches surgical…”

  I hear rapid, uneven footsteps. Someone—or something—is moaning. The voice is low and guttural. It’s a twisted imitation of Kordolian speech.

  I spin around. A monster is lurching towards us. Unlike me, this monster has lost all reason. Perhaps he was once Kordolian, but now…

  I draw my twin longswords. I need to put this poor wretch out of his misery.

  The creature pauses as he reaches the threshold, sniffing the air. The irises of his crimson eyes are milky, and his lower jaw has been replaced with a metal structure that extends down his neck to the top of his torso. His body is huge; artificially enlarged muscles bulge and strain, and thick, tortuous veins run beneath his skin.

  Skin that would have once been a similar color to my own has turned several shades lighter, becoming almost translucent.

  His claws and toenails are fully extended. I get the feeling he’s forgotten how to retract them.

  A failed experiment. I have seen his like before. I have fought them in the Pit. Piteous wretch.

  He roars as he catches sight of me. For a moment, I hesitate.

  This could have been me. There are hundreds, if not thousands of Kordolian experiments hanging in those stasis tanks. I doubt any of them can be salvaged.

  How did he get here? Why does he exist? I don’t know. Zharek said a small skeleton crew had been left behind to maintain the labs. There is probably more to it than that, but I do not care to know what the Empire was trying to achieve.

  I only want to leave this place with my ultimate prize—my mate. When we are safely in orbit, I will deploy one of Silence’s fission missiles and burn this cursed Swallowing Pit off the face of the planet.

  The abomination rushes towards me with claws extended and fangs bared, a beast in the truest sense of the word. He wants my blood, nothing more.

  Mareth and Joran are yelling. Zharek says nothing. Beneath the integrator, his expression is resigned.

  I hold my blades low as I run forward. The beast almost catches me with a powerful swipe of his right hand, but I dance back. Air rushes past my face.

  Make it quick.

  His breath is fetid. His lips and teeth and fangs are stained with black—the color of drying Kordolian blood. There is nothing in his eyes, only emptiness.

  That could have been me. Anger and pity wage war inside me. Neither will win.

  Put him out of his misery.

  Bile rises in my throat as I deliver the killing stroke. My blades meet in the center, severing the beast’s head from his torso. Black blood sprays across the room, splattering across Zharek and the two medics.

  His body falls to the floor with a great crash. I turn, seeking out Abbey’s sublime form. She’s waking up. Her limbs move back and forth and her eyelids flutter.

  “We need to leave.” I turn to Zharek. “Can she tolerate a rapid extraction to the ship?” Rapid, meaning: in my arms as I run and evade numerous bloodthirsty attackers.

  Nothing here—no person, no machine—can move as fast as a First Division warrior in full flight. That is why we do not rely on ground-machines for transport. We can run faster.

  And I will cut down anything that tries to harm her. That is a given.

  “Blood pressure’s good, perfusion is good, neural activity has returned to normal, surgical wound has been repaired, and surprisingly, the nanites—what’s left of them—have returned to their resting state.” Zharek sounds mildly impressed. “I don’t see why not. Let me disconnect her and start to drain the tank. She’ll be fully conscious soon.”

  I nod. I had expected this. My mate is a quick study. She knew what to do because I showed her.

  Her green-and-brown eyes are open now. Like windows to another world, they beckon to me, promising a way out of this Kordolian-made hell.

  I do not want to stay in the Swallowing Pit for another siv. I open my comm, patching through to my warriors. “What in Kaiin’s Hells is going on out there?”

  “Sorry, General.” Torin speaks first. “I let one through. My bad, although I figured you would have dispatched it easily enough.” He sounds annoyed with himself. Torin’s problem is that he is too much of a perfectionist, even when it comes to killing.

  “They’d escaped stasis somehow. All fucking defective and mind-wiped.” Disgust bleeds into Jeral’s voice. “We found them snacking on a group of former Imperial scientists.”

  In this case, former means dead.

  “They were trying to create more of us,” Kail adds. “Don’t they ever fucking learn?”

  “Apparently not.” I can easily imagine the desperate nobles—even with their depleted personnel and resources—trying to salvage something from the ashes of their burned empire. It doesn’t matter anymore, though. The heads of the twelve Noble Houses are dead.

  I issued that kill order. I made sure our strike would be felt right at the very heart of the Empire. Only a Silent One could have penetrated the elaborate defenses of the Palace of Arches, and I found a way to turn their lethal weapon against them.

  I did it because they threatened my mate and my child, but perhaps I was also enacting my own personal revenge.

  Revenge is my blood-right, and I took it. For this. This monstrosity of a place, where thousands of souls were sent to the underworld for no reason other than the pursuit of power.

  The Swallowing Pit. After the First Division was complete, they stopped the experiments.

  They had run out of subjects, and our race was slowly dying. There were no more bodies to spare.

  “Is the stasis chamber clear?”

  The clear and distinct sound of a blade meeting flesh reaches my ears. There’s a vicious scream, then silence. “It is now,” Kail grunts.

  “Then we get out of here as quickly as fucking possible.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Mm.”

  My three warriors are united in their agreement, and I c
an only echo their sentiments. We have all hidden our torment behind our armor-helms, but the dread is there all the same. All we know of our existence begins and ends with this place. They made sure we remembered everything that happened from the moment we were taken.

  To remind you that you are, were, and always will be nothing, they said. Mirkel, that spineless fuck, kept repeating it, just before I nearly tore his throat out.

  I’m sure he still has the scars—if he is still alive—but I have half the fucking Kordolian war fleet, and I am about to return home with my mate.

  As I make my way across to the surgical tank to retrieve Abbey, I signal to the medics. “We’re getting out of here, now!”

  Wait…

  “Where the fuck is Zharek?” I demand, frustration coursing through me.

  Joran and Mareth exchange a look. “He just… left. Said he had to go and find something. Told us to monitor the Human.”

  That idiot.

  “Both of you, get to the surface now. I’m not waiting,” I growl. “If he wants to go and meddle around in his infernal labs then that’s his business, but I’m not waiting.”

  I’ll just hold off on razing the Swallowing Pit, then. Zyara would never forgive me if I killed her mentor. Zharek’s resourceful enough when he wants to be. He’ll find a way off this planet if he gets left behind.

  Wisely, Joran and Mareth turn and leave. They know better than to question my orders.

  I climb the small ladder at the edge of the tank and jump in. Half of the fluid has been drained, and Abbey is standing in the center, pulling tubes and monitoring devices off her body. Her skin glistens and her face is radiant. For a moment, I just stop and stare, unable to tear my eyes off her. Despite the urgency of the situation, my cock twitches and hardens.

  She is completely, utterly irresistible.

  “Welcome back, my love.” I wade through the half-empty tank, reaching out to hold her wet, glistening face in my hands. “You were brave,” I murmur.

  She raises an eyebrow. “So were you, General. Coming here of all places.”