Vyken: (Warriors of Firosa Book 3)

by Thanika Hearth

  “You’re right,” I say gruffly. “We must have hope.”

  We travel as fast as we can, together, over the difficult terrain until we come to the opening in the dirt that leads downwards towards the tunnels that hold the Oracle. The sun is just about to creep back up over the horizon already, indicating that our night of chill is almost over and I was able to keep Roxie warm and safe…

  ...so far.

  Just as we are about to hop into the tunnel systems once again, a mechanical baying echoes around the planet nearby -- too nearby. It’s caught onto our trail and now it is required by its programming to track us and eliminate us. The war cry was literally created in a lab to be intimidating to its foes, and it’s working.

  “Vyken…” Roxie says, tension in her voice that makes my fists clench.

  “In,” I command her. She watches with wide eyes as I draw my weapon from my belt. A blaster gun set like a lobster claw aside a sturdy steel sword zips out to its full length and with a high-pitched scree noise it begins to charge as I lift it to eye level.

  “Here, doggie doggie,” I imitate in my best English, and I stride back and forth.

  “Vyken, I don’t--”

  “I said in,” I repeat, turning back to her. Her eyes harden at my command, and I let out a breath. “Find what you can; that’s where your skills are best suited.” I swallow. “Please.”

  She must hear the pain in my voice, the genuine desperation, because she shakes her head, squeezes my arm in solidarity, and turns to disappear down into the tunnels.

  Just in time.

  I’m thrown off my feet by a flurry of whirring razor blades attached to a segmented chrome colored snout. Instincts kick in and my leg comes up before my suit can be pierced by ‘teeth’, catching the bot’s center of gravity and launching it up off of me, but causing it no harm. Damn.

  I manage to just about lift the blast gun an inch before it springs back to pin me again. Its main attack procedure is to pin and rip out the throat. If that fails, it begins to use its ammo. My training is coming back to me -- it has been many years since I even thought about facing off against a Suhlik attackbot.

  Its heavy feet land on my chest again, pushing air from my lungs and making me see white spots momentarily. I see the blinking facial panel and the whirring ear satellites, and instead of kicking it off me, I waste precious seconds and swirl my sword through the air. It is razor sharp, just as the deadly teeth are, and it whips off the two ears in one swipe. The dog is disoriented from that, and tilts its head, digging its fangs into the dirt beside me when I give it a push.

  Those were its comms devices, too. Now if the kill takes too long, the bot won’t be able to call for help from its ship. I blow out a breath and wrestle it off my body, springing to my feet and swinging my sword again, lashing it in the lower jaw. The bot turns and snaps at me, its whirring teeth grinding and sparking.

  “Gotcha,” I say. Avoid the jaws. Take out the comms. What was the next step?

  Two little barrels click upwards from its shoulder blades and its face panel flashes red. Dammit! Gatling guns whir and ready themselves. I have less than a second. I throw myself on the floor and roll diagonally towards it. It snaps its jaws again, teeth sparking from my blow. I lift my blaster and let a fully charged blast go, hitting it square in the neck and ripping a hole in its body.

  I roll across the dirt once more, listening to my blaster. A Mahdfel is finely tuned in to his weaponry, and I know the sound of my gun wailing for more time to charge. I also know the sound of it reaching acceptable capacity. Not ideal power, but I can’t afford to wait any longer. The guns pepper the dirt all around me with holes, blowing dust into the air, and I throw my bulk once again in an agile roll, landing on my feet in a crouch and firing for the exact same spot.

  Circuitry bursts and sparks and the attackbot sputters and lowers its head, the sound of its systems shutting down almost eerily alike a mammalian whine.

  “Goodnight,” I say, almost feeling guilty for felling it like that. I pause to pull in a deep breath, knowing I’m a little rusty in combat. If there had been more than one attackbot I would certainly have struggled.

  I grit my teeth -- I’m becoming only as powerful as the average Mahdfel warrior? Impossible. I square my shoulders. I am a General, after all.

  And now my mission has become even clearer than ever.

  I’m coming for Roxie, and we’re finishing this. After that, come what may, I’m going to tell her how I feel. I feel every cell in my body screaming out for her, no matter what else my mind is occupied by.

  Her safety has become more important than my own -- if that isn’t love, then dammit, I don’t know what is.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Roxie

  The singing is here, it’s real, and it’s beautiful.

  I throw my head back and sing along. I can barely help it. I twirl as I walk through the tunnel systems, arms stretched out wide, and I sing as loud as I can. I know it’s stupid -- I know there are things out there trying to find me, but honestly I can’t help it.

  It’s almost as if I’m being compelled, deep in my very being, to sing along to this beautiful, harmonious, haunting music. It’s like I know this song by heart, and it’s bursting from my chest.

  As if everything in my life has led me here to become a part of this song.

  Maybe I belong here. Maybe the Oracle knew that.

  Maybe…

  I snap out of my trancelike state momentarily and stop singing as I realize I’m in a wide cavern now, lit by streams of light from above, here and there. Twisting roots make up the ground and the walls and part of the ceiling.

  I stand in the center of the cavern and fold my arms, humming at first and then singing, tapping my feet on the root-covered ground beneath me. A few feet away from me stands another one of those same electronic black boxes. It blinks with a green light, and it makes me uncomfortable to be around.

  I can tell, almost, by the pattern of the melody, that whoever I’m singing along with does not like the black box. The singing voices do not want me to go near the black box. They want me to come closer to them. To be with them. Not with the box.

  The more I listen to the singing, the more the musician in me begins to hear the patterns. The peaks and the troughs. The riffs that are left without logical conclusions; the harmonies that don’t quite sound beautiful, and the rush of silence between the notes. It’s like a language that I’m learning from scratch. After a few moments of listening to song, I sing a little of my own melody, and I hear the happy, proud tone I get in response and it makes me feel so good. Who I’m communicating with -- and what I’m saying -- is unclear, but it’s an amazing experience.

  “Don’t stop, Roxie,” the AI in my ear says, breathless with excitement. I know it’s only an algorithm that has her speaking in that tone, but she sounds so human and so real, it’s unnerving sometimes. “I’m trying to translate -- I really am. Maybe I’m getting there. It’s just that they speak in notions -- primal feelings -- and not really in words like you and the Firosans do.”

  I want to tell her I understand, but I’m trying to memorize the harmony that’s building into a crescendo around me. It’s fantastic. If I could learn this language, I would be a millionaire singer songwriter back on Earth within a year.

  “Wait, is this the language of the--”

  The ground rumbles beneath my feet and I look down, glancing up to see Vyken burst into the cavern and deflate with relief at seeing me. “Come here,” I cry to him, my knees feeling weak on seeing him. It’s only been two days, at most, and already I don’t like being without him for long. It’s like we’re two pieces of one machine, and we make more sense working alongside each other.

  I wonder why that thought sprang to my mind, and I wonder if the singing voices are telling me that. It’s not the kind of thing I would have come up with on my own.

  “Roxie.”

  “You’re so tall,” I marvel at Vyken’s body. He must be
over seven feet tall. At least! In fact … eight feet. Nine feet?

  “You are shrinking into the ground,” he observes with a harsh panic note to his voice. The singing voices mimic that note and then build on it, bringing it up and up so that it’s calm and beautiful again. And instead of feeling panicked along with Vyken, I just feel calm. So calm. My eyelids are almost drooping shut.

  “Roxie.” His voice grinds like a wrench in between gears, but again the voices catch his tone and repeat it, lighter and sharper and more and more carefree with every repetition.

  They’re telling me not to listen to him -- that he’s overreacting. They’re telling me to take a nap.

  To go under the ground and take a nap with them.

  Forever.

  It sounds lovely.

  “Roxie,” he says again, but it sounds so muffled -- the singing is so loud now. I’m almost under the ground, and I’m so tired…

  Suddenly I feel firm hands clamped over my ears and Vyken’s voice sounds again, vibrating through my skull. This time with nothing keening over it. “Roxie, snap out of it! They’re--”

  My eyes fly open and I see clearly. I see Vyken’s worried, beautiful chiseled face … and the fact that the roots beneath my feet are swallowing me whole. Soon my chest will be under the ground. Why are they pulling me down like this?

  “Drown out their voices,” Vyken said. “They’ve reverted to their most primal form of language, and it speaks to you for some reason.”

  “I’m a singer,” I manage to croak to him. His eyebrows raise as if things are starting to make sense to him.

  “The Suhlik device,” he reminds himself. “Do not struggle. Do not listen to the song. They need nourishment but they will not get it from you. We must save them.”

  “What?” I reply, shifting my weight around and trying to find a root to grab onto to stop sinking, but nothing is working. If anything, I just slip under the surface faster the more I move around. “Hurry…” I gasp.

  Nourishment?? These goddamn half-dead plant people are trying to eat me! This day just went from spectacular to shit real fast.

  “No…” I hear Vyken mutter as he reaches the device in record time and inspects it, finding a button. I jerk my head in his direction in time to see a holographic image burst from the top and rotate slowly.

  It’s him. How strange.

  “No, no no!” he roars, kicking the black box so hard it clatters across the cavern.

  “Vyken,” I call over again. “What’s going on?”

  “My Roxie,” he says back, his voice a sharp hiss of regret. “Nothing you need to worry about. Just keep still. Keep breathing. Just wait. Everything is going to be fine.”

  But I can hear his tone as plain as day. It’s being echoed in the earth, in the roots, in my own heart.

  Everything is not going to be fine.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Vyken

  These devices are Suhlik-made, and I know that because they are brutal. Whatever they did to take control of my body and mind for that time, they knew exactly what they were doing.

  They -- or I, I suppose -- came to this planet, set down several devices under the ground that let out a high-pitched wail that human or Mahdfel ears cannot hear. The noise drove the Ferathorns into a half-madness. They are one of the most sensitive species to noise that exists across the known universe, and the cruel Suhlik took advantage of that with these noise boxes.

  Then they had me come and do it, not just because it’s a way to spread inner turmoil within the Firosan Mahdfel military -- but because they had my body lock it with what we call a dead man’s box.

  The hologram of my own body slits his palm. “I keep this locked until my lifeblood drains to open it,” it says in my voice, buzzing and tinny in the recording. But mine. The image of me looks up and smirks, and then it fizzles out of existence.

  A dead man’s box is sealed by a few drops of blood. After that, whichever device it is connected to can only be turned off by the rest of it. Yes. The rest of the blood.

  All of it.

  I see my Roxie sinking underneath the roots, panic filling her eyes and punching me repeatedly in the chest. I hear the lamenting song of the Ferathorns, close to death without sunlight and nutrition for so long, driven to trying to absorb a human body to eke out a few more days of existence. Driven to their primal form of language. Driven mad by the Suhlik.

  I am filled with rage. Righteous indignation.

  I came here to clear my name, and that’s what I am going to do.

  I don’t need to be alive to receive my pardon, after all.

  But Roxie. My Roxie. She must live. When I took her onto my vessel, no matter the circumstances, I made an unspoken vow to keep her safe. As my prisoner, yes, but even more so as my friend. And even more so as my mate.

  I love her. This will be my first and only act of love.

  I smile as I draw my blade and drag it across my skin. To die for something so honorable, so pure? I could not have envisioned a better way to leave this world.

  I mutter an old Firosan mantra as the blood spirals down my amethyst skin, trailing across my gently glowing tattoos. No regrets.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Roxie

  They were still pulling me under. I just had to stand there and watch Vyken bleed. The man who saved me. The man who saved me from my stupid decisions, from my planet’s harsh laws, from a lifetime of incarceration. You name it, he saved me from it.

  My own stubbornness. My own loneliness.

  Fuck.

  I bite down hard on my lip when I realize tears are streaming down my face with the same ferocity that blood is streaming down the General’s violet-colored arms. “Vyken,” I say softly, and with great effort he looks further away from me instead of into my eyes. Then he squeezes them shut, and turns, and locks his gaze with mine.

  “Roxie,” he replies.

  And all the feelings come flooding out. I haven’t cried in years, and it pours from my eyes like twin waterfalls. “Don’t leave me,” I whisper.

  “We only knew each other a short time,” he says, and then grunts and grits his teeth, “but in that time you were everything to me. You made me feel…” He is woozy; he steps to the left and blinks hard. “You made me feel like I could do everything. All the things I was too afraid to do. You’re a miracle. I’m going to … I’m going to die fulfilled. Happy. Honored. Because of you. That’s the greatest gift you can give to a Mahdfel. Thank you.”

  I move to wipe my nose with my forearm but my right arm has slipped below the roots. I can hear the meaning in the songs sounding out all around us in this underground cavern.

  They can’t wait for me to join them. To give them the energy they need to survive without sunlight for another few … what? Hours? Days? I squeeze my eyes shut and then open my mouth.

  Here goes nothing. I mean, literally, really, nothing.

  I start to sing. Wordlessly, I use their tones and notes and patterns and I sing to them about the sacrifice Vyken is making this very second so that they can live.

  I sing about the shrill noise from the black box that is keeping them feeling as though they can’t stand. I sing about what he’s doing to protect them. I ask them, please, to let me keep singing; keep fighting for another day.

  And after my throat is raw from pleading with an alien species with the highest, most melancholy notes I can hit, after Vyken’s knees buckle and he falls on the ground, and my song takes on the guttural wail of a mourner … after all that, I feel the tugging on my body begin to slow.

  And then stop.

  And the song changes tune. They are thankful. They are sorry. They are sane enough to know how disoriented they are … I don’t know whether that was from Vyken’s blood sacrifice weakening the electrical device, or from my learning to communicate with them directly, but I like to think it’s a combination.

  To no one in particular, I end our conversation with a solo about how my final act with Vyken was one tha
t would benefit the universe to fight the Suhlik. To convey them, I let a terrible low hiss escape my teeth. The trees hiss back in agreement, and I finally pull myself out of the tangle of roots and lie, panting and hoarse, on the dusty ground.

  “Wake up,” I say, partially to the Ferathorns and partially to Vyken.

  Nothing stirs, but the gentle hum around me signifies that they are all feeling better. That’s good news, sure, but it also means … it means Vyken’s suicide mission succeeded.

  I run to him, falling to my knees by his side. The device is no longer blinking and I pull him away, raising his wrist and wrapping it in the sleeve of my robe. I don’t know much about first aid but I had to take a course or two to work as a regular in a bar. I just about know enough to be able to make a tourniquet.

  The heavy bleeding almost immediately slows to nothing, and I know that means one of two things: one, he’s an alien and he heals fast and I can’t predict what will happen next … two, he’s, well, he’s running out of blood.

  The second option makes my body cold and heavy and I don’t know what to do.

  The electrical device, no longer working the way it was intended, suddenly starts to beep so that my human ears can hear. The beeping gets faster.

  “That’s not good,” I mumble. Three distinct ‘pop’s from all around the cavern sound out. The Suhlik’s last failsafe measure. A cave in.

  I curse as loud as I can, my throat aching with overuse, and scramble out of the way of a tumbling dump truck-load of heavy dirt. Before I know it, I’m running as fast as I can. Away from everything that happened in there. I need to get my head together. I’m sobbing now. Confused and aching and hurting so badly inside it feels like it’ll never stop.

  Vyken…

  Why?

  I almost run headlong into the Oracle, I’m paying so little attention. I manage to stop and I flail my arms comically, landing on my butt in front of the gently glowing mass of plant matter.

  “Why?” I voice to it, my word quieted by the groan of collapsing tunnels. The Oracle must have enough mysterious power to keep its own chamber safe, because there isn’t so much as a falling particle of dust in here. “What just happened?”