“Jumping to warp prevents them from using wormholes to reach us? Then why don’t we just do that?”
“Because we can’t stay in warp forever,” Darius explained. “It’ll be safer to kill Tanik and the Keth.”
“If we can, you mean,” Dyara replied.
“We can. We outnumber them. Meet me in the aft hangar bay, and I’ll explain everything.”
“All right...”
Darius shut down the connection and turned and ran for the aft hangar bay. He needed to open another portal soon, before Tanik tried to open one of his own to get Feyra back.
Chapter 18
“It’s that easy to open wormholes?” Dyara asked, while gazing into the shimmering portal that Darius had summoned.
“It is for me,” Darius replied, and turned from her to watch as soldiers streamed into the hangar by the hundreds. Before long several thousand were gathered around them, all staring at Darius’s wormhole with wary awe.
He turned in a circle to address everyone in the hangar. Using his ESC to access the ship’s intercom system, he configured it to amplify his voice through overhead speakers. “As you may know, we’ve recently encountered your old enemy. It seems that the Keth manipulated us into starting a war with the Cygnians in the hopes of weakening us. They used an undercover agent by the name of Tanik Gurhain.”
Shock and outrage rippled through the group as they processed that news. Many of these Revenants had met Tanik.
“Tanik hid his true intentions from us, just as he hid his true nature. Not long after he learned that I killed the last Luminary, he revealed to me that he is another one, and he tried to kill me so that he would be free to take control of the Revenants himself, and lead you all to your deaths! I defeated him and chased him back through a wormhole to Ouroboros.”
Darius went on, “Tanik manipulated us into a war with the Cygnians in order to destabilize the Union. He and his Keth allies hoped that war with the Cygnians and with each other would get most of us killed without them ever having to fight us themselves.
“As I speak, Tanik and the Keth are on the other side of this portal, laughing at us as they rebuild their home! They think that their plan has worked, but I’m living proof that it has failed. They never expected any of us to be able to open a wormhole back to their corner of the galaxy. Now that we have, we have an opportunity to launch a surprise attack and finish what the Augur started all those years ago. It’s time to wipe out what’s left of the Keth. Only then will we be free to establish a lasting peace throughout the Union.”
A rumble of disagreement spread through the crowd, and a nearby Revenant raised his voice to express his objections: “We followed you against the Cygnians because we disagreed with the Augur’s war against the Keth, and now you want us to take up that same cause again?”
Darius shook his head. “Don’t think about the Augur who enslaved you to fight in a war that you never really understood. Think about all of your friends and relatives who died fighting the Keth! Think about the Keth agent who we recently captured aboard this ship, who was trying to sabotage our munitions store and kill us all. Don’t fight for me, or for the Augur’s enigmatic reasons, fight for your own survival. The Keth won’t stop plotting against us until all of us are dead. It’s kill or be killed, and right now we have the element of surprise. That won’t last forever. As long as I’m holding this portal open, Tanik won’t be able to open a wormhole to help the Keth escape.”
“How do you know that?”
Darius explained what he’d learned from interrogating the Keth agent they’d captured, and silence rang in the wake of those reassurances.
“They could still escape aboard their starships,” Dyara said from beside him.
Before Darius could come up with a reply for that, someone else answered: “They don’t have any. Until we came along and diluted their power base, they used to travel between their worlds via portals just like this one. They had no need to build interstellar vehicles, and their empire was never very large to begin with.”
That news took Darius by surprise, but it was a welcome surprise. A small smile graced his lips and he nodded. “There you have it,” he said. “So it seems we are poised to wipe out the Keth once and for all. Let’s make it happen.”
Heads began bobbing around the hangar. It was obvious that he’d convinced these soldiers to fight for him. He could have forced them all to follow him into battle, but keeping the portal open to Ouroboros was hard enough without having to expend additional energy to subdue the wills of several thousand soldiers at the same time.
Darius drew his sword with a metallic shriek and held it high. Sucking in a quick breath, he let it out in a roar: “Death to the Keth!”
“Death to the Keth!” the assembled Revenants thundered.
“Death to the Keth!” Darius said again, pumping his sword in the air like a fist.
The Revenants took up that cry once more, and then Darius turned and led the charge through the wormhole.
Chapter 19
It was disconcerting to go from standing in the hangar one minute, to a rippling green field the next. A gust of wind blew Darius’s overgrown hair into his eyes and swayed the umbrella-shaped tops of nearby trees. A rumble of thunder sounded, and fat rain drops began pelting down.
Booted feet came thudding out of the portal behind him in a never-ending stampede. Darius turned to watch his army assemble in the field. Before long people were forced to elbow each other out of the way as they crowded through, and Darius had to back up to make room for all of them. Dyara appeared, picking her way through the crowd to reach his side.
In a matter of minutes, all two thousand Revenants from the Deliverance had assembled on the field, and they were all looking to him for orders. Their gazes were fraught with suspicion and resentment. Darius wasn’t the leader they would have chosen. He wasn’t the most experienced in battle, or even the most competent when it came to tactics or strategy, but sticking close to him was the only chance any of them had to protect themselves from falling under the sway of other luminaries—luminaries like Tanik, who would like nothing more than to get them all killed.
“By now the Keth must have sensed us coming,” Dyara said, glancing behind them to the shadowy forest.
“Maybe,” Darius agreed. “Even if they have, it’s too late to stop us now.” Raindrops seeped into his jumpsuit, chilling him despite the warm air. Another peal of thunder boomed. Darius waited for it to die down before addressing his army. Even so, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the rain. “If you’re standing directly beside the portal, you get to stay here and guard it. Everyone else, summon your shields and follow me!” Darius pumped his sword in the air and cried, “Death to the Keth!”
A scattered echo of that cry reached his ears, taken up by a few of the Revenants, as he turned and ran for the tree line. Dyara kept pace beside him.
“Can you sense Cassandra from here?” she asked. They entered the forest and what little light was filtering through the storm clouds disappeared, filtered out by the dense canopy above.
Darius reached out with his awareness and immediately found a group of about thirty alien presences and one human further up ahead. The human was Tanik, if the familiar darkness of his presence and thoughts was anything to go by. But Darius couldn’t sense Cassandra anywhere. “No, I can’t,” he said as he leapt over a fallen log and then ducked under a low-hanging branch. “It’s probably because she’s in cryo.”
Dyara nodded but said nothing. She didn’t need to say it. Cryo could be the reason they couldn’t sense her. Or else it was because she was already dead.
“When we find Tanik, we’ll find her,” Darius said, more to reassure himself than Dyara.
Footsteps thudded along behind them in a steady rumble that competed with the thunder. Tree trunks blurred past them as they ran. Within just a few minutes, another grassy clearing came peeking through the trees—along with something else, a log cabin.
Darius could sense and
vaguely see, aliens gathered together in the field up ahead. The Keth weren’t running. They’d decided to stand and fight.
That gave Darius pause, but it was too late to stop and come up with some cunning strategy now. He barreled out of the forest and into the clearing with Dyara. Revenants poured out of the forest on all sides, encircling the huddled group of ghostly-white aliens in the center of the field. Tanik was nowhere to be seen, but Darius could sense him. He gripped his sword in a tight fist and started toward the Keth. Dyara kept pace beside him as he went. Meanwhile, the Revenant army was busy circling around through the trees to cut off any possible retreat.
Darius stopped walking once he came within a dozen meters of the Keth. “Where is Tanik?” he asked.
The group of aliens parted, revealing a knot of huddled children in the center of their circle, along with something else—a glass and metal cylinder gleaming with raindrops. Cassandra’s cryo pod. Tanik Gurhain stood beside it, leaning heavily on a pair of wooden crutches.
Darius’s heart leapt into his throat at the sight of the cryo pod. He reached for it with his mind, trying to carry Cassandra safely out of the Keth’s midst, but they resisted him, collectively holding her in place.
A boom of thunder split the air, and a jagged fork of lightning flashed down between the trees not far from the clearing.
“Give me my daughter, Tanik!” Darius demanded.
Tanik dropped his crutches and came floating out to greet him, his feet hovering a full foot above the ground. Both of his legs were encased in crude-looking splints.
“Why would I do that?” Tanik replied. “As soon as you have what you want, you’ll kill us. Besides, you have someone that we want, too. Return the Keth woman you captured, and we will return your daughter to you. That’s a fair trade.”
Darius snorted. “You’re outnumbered and surrounded. We could simply kill you all and take Cassandra back by force.”
“Not before we could kill her,” Tanik replied, and gestured to the aliens gathered behind him. The crowd of Keth parted just a little more to reveal an adult Keth holding a glowing sword poised above Cassandra’s cryo pod, ready to plunge it through the fragile glass cover and into her chest.
A rising murmur sounded from the soldiers gathered behind Darius. One of them shouted out, “Darius doesn’t speak for all of us! Let’s just kill them all before it’s too late! Death to the Keth!”
“Death to the Keth!” the others shouted. Before their collective voices even died away, Revenants came pouring into the clearing on all sides. Their footsteps made the ground tremble, while their glowing swords and shields peeled back the gloomy twilight of the storm.
Tanik gave a twisted smile and called out. “Amara! Kill the girl if even one of them engages us in combat!”
“No!” Darius shouted, and simultaneously reached out to subdue the minds and wills of every single soldier he’d brought with him. He forced them all to freeze right where they were. Suddenly the thunder of footfalls ceased, and all was quiet but for the actual thunder, and the rain slanting down in a steady roar. Darius listened to raindrops hissing as they hit his shielded sword and those of the soldiers in the field.
“Well?” Tanik demanded. “Are you ready to talk terms?”
“Darius...” Dyara whispered in a warning tone.
He hadn’t bothered to suppress her will, since she hadn’t joined the charge against the Keth. He shot her a dark look and shook his head. “Not now, Dya.” Turning back to the fore, he started toward Tanik, covering some of the distance between them to make it easier to talk over the rain.
“I have your wife,” Darius said. “If you kill Cassandra, I’ll kill her.”
“My wife?” Tanik laughed, and a ripple of alien warbling rumbled through the Keth. “She’s hardly that, Darius. And not irreplaceable. My people aren’t nearly as sentimental as yours. Why do you think we sent her in the first place? Because we could afford to lose her.”
Darius peered at Tanik through heavy curtains of rain. The field was turning to mud and puddles, washing away under the assault. He struggled to decide if Tanik was bluffing. He remembered what he’d seen in Feyra’s mind. She and Tanik had grown up together, and as adults they’d certainly become more than friends, but there was no way for him to know just how deep their bond was without going back to take another look inside her head. He reached out for a glimpse of Tanik’s thoughts, but the man was shielding them too effectively.
“You’re bluffing,” Darius said.
“No, I’m not, but we’re not entirely without sentiment,” Tanik replied. “We’re willing to agree to a trade: your daughter for Feyra, and the guarantee that we will be allowed to leave Ouroboros in peace.”
Darius shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then we’re at an impasse. You can kill us all here and now, but you’ll lose Cassandra in the process. You have to decide what’s more important to you. This victory, or her life.”
Darius ground his teeth together. “If I let you go, you’ll only try to kill us again later.”
Tanik shrugged, and his smile grew. “Try? Yes. Succeed? That’s up to you. At least now you know how to prevent us from transporting ourselves directly onto your fleet. You also know that our numbers are few and that we have no advanced technology to use against you. It’s thirty of us against twenty thousand of you. The odds are in your favor, and you’ve already proven that you can defeat me all by yourself. I’m the best that my side has to offer, so what do you have to fear?”
Darius felt like he was being manipulated again. Tanik was too smug, too confident. He had something in mind, some yet-to-be-revealed new plan or avenue of attack that was sure to take Darius by surprise.
He took a stab at what that plan might be. “The only way I can protect everyone is to keep them close and to keep a wormhole open somewhere nearby, indefinitely. I’ll grow tired and weak eventually. When I do, you’ll come and assassinate me, and then you’ll kill everyone else.”
An ominous rumble of thunder rolled overhead to punctuate Darius’s concerns.
“I’m feeling magnanimous, so I’ll give you a tip: opening a wormhole into a warp bubble is impossible.”
“I already knew that,” Darius replied.
“Then you know that you can rest while you’re traveling between the stars. If you don’t stop in any one place for too long, you should be able to protect your fleet without any difficulty at all.” Tanik’s yellow-green eyes glittered in the light of his ZPF shield. “Now, what do you say? Do we have a deal?”
“I want to see Cassandra, alive and well. You said you have the antivenin. Wake her up and administer it. I’m not agreeing to anything until I see that you’ve held up your end of the deal.”
“I had a feeling you might say that.” Tanik reached into the dark cloak he wore and produced a syringe full of a clear fluid. Turning on the spot, he floated back into the huddled group of Keth and stopped beside Cassandra’s cryo pod.
Darius wanted desperately to be there by her side when she woke up, but he couldn’t risk allowing himself to be surrounded by the enemy. Darius ground his teeth and repeatedly curled his free hand into a fist while he waited. After just a few seconds, the lid of Cassandra’s pod swung open, and Tanik reached in with the syringe to administer the antivenin.
“Bring her to me!” Darius demanded, screaming to be heard over the pouring rain. But the rain was lighter now. The storm was passing.
Tanik bent over Cassandra’s pod and lifted her out. Turning on the spot, he floated back to Darius with Cassandra draped over his arms. Darius’s heart fluttered at the sight of her, and his palms began to sweat. He held his breath, waiting to see her eyelids flutter open...
But nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” Darius demanded.
Tanik’s smug demeanor vanished. He laid Cassandra in the grass at his feet and nodded to Darius. “Her heart has stopped. You need to administer CPR.”
Darius stared in s
hock, watching as raindrops fell and ran down Cassandra’s pale cheeks, soaking through her clothes and hair.
“Quickly!” Tanik urged.
Chapter 20
Darius dropped his sword and rushed forward to administer CPR on Cassandra. He almost forgot to watch his back in the process, but when Tanik began crowding suspiciously close, he gave the man a telekinetic shove and sent him flying away.
“If she dies, then so will all of you!” Darius shouted between chest compressions.
“She won’t die,” Tanik assured as he floated back over, keeping a respectful distance this time.
Darius opened Cassandra’s mouth and held her nose shut. Her skin was ice cold. He breathed hard into her lungs. Her chest rose, but nothing else happened, so he went back to chest compressions. After performing an indeterminate number of them, he tried the kiss of life for the second time.
This time she stirred. A second later, her eyes flew open, and she saw him. She screamed with fright, and her eyes darted around with alarm. “Where...”
He crushed her into a fierce hug. “You’re alive!”
“I was dead?” Cassandra pushed him away. She glanced around at the Revenant army standing frozen in the field, and started to get up for a better look.
“Let me help you,” Darius said, and yanked her to her feet by one arm.
Cassandra’s rose petal lips were turned down in a frown, her bright blue eyes pinched with concern. “What... what’s going on?” She glanced behind her to see Tanik and the Keth standing there. “Tanik?” She started toward him, but Darius grabbed her arm to stop her, his own arm whirring with a mechanical noise as he did so.
She rounded on him and glared at his hand. “Ouch! That hurts!”
“Sorry.” He’d obviously grabbed her too hard in his hurry to keep her away from Tanik. “I had an accident and lost my arm,” he explained, flexing his hand with another mechanical noise. “I’m still getting used to the replacement.” He looked up and studied her face. “Is it really you?”
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