Cassandra nodded slowly, uncertainly. “Is it really you?” she countered.
Darius’s brow furrowed. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“No.” She began backing away from him.
A painful lump rose in Darius’s throat, followed by a brief, piercing sense of deja vu. He’d been here before, said and done all of this before... but when?
His dream. Right before his confrontation with Tanik.
“It’s me,” Darius insisted, and deja vu struck him again.
Cassandra kept backing away until she came within Tanik’s reach. He reached out and placed a hand on each of her shoulders in an almost paternal way. “Your turn, Darius.”
Cassandra glanced up at Tanik with wide eyes. “What...”
“Cass! Get away from him!” Darius shouted.
But it was too late. Tanik produced a glowing dagger from his robes and held it to Cassandra’s throat.
“Dad...” Cassandra trailed off in alarm. She peered down her nose at the dagger, not daring to move her head for a better look.
“Don’t move,” Darius said. “You’ll be free in a minute.”
“What’s going on!? What are all of those soldiers doing here?”
“It’s okay, Cass,” Dyara said, passing into view as she crossed the odd half a dozen paces between Darius and Tanik. She had her hands raised to show she was unarmed, but Tanik wasn’t satisfied by that. He pulled Cassandra back a step and inched the dagger closer to her throat.
“Not another step,” he warned.
The Keth shuffled their feet restlessly, their eyes flicking around the clearing to the encircling Revenants. All of them were frozen on the spot, staring dead ahead with glazed and sightless eyes, like a living terracotta army.
“Well?” Tanik prompted. “I’m waiting. Where’s Feyra?”
Darius smirked. “I thought you didn’t care about her?”
Tanik shrugged. “A trade is a trade. If you don’t hold up your end of it, then neither will I. Consider Feyra’s safe return a show of good faith. After that, we can discuss how you’re going to let us all leave here unharmed.”
“Dyara,” Darius said.
She turned to him with eyebrows raised.
“Go back through the portal and get Feyra. Bring as many guards as you think you need.”
Dyara nodded slowly and walked by him, heading back the way they’d come. He could feel the indecision radiating from her thoughts. She didn’t approve of this trade, but she also couldn’t bring herself to give up Cassandra for dead. She’d grown too close to Cass.
“Hurry!” Darius called after her.
Dyara broke into a run and disappeared between the trees, leaving Darius alone to face Tanik and the Keth with his army of mindless soldiers.
Tanik smirked infuriatingly. He knew he’d won. Filled with nervous energy, Darius began pacing back and forth in front of Tanik. He summoned his sword back to his hand from where he’d dropped it in the field.
Tanik arched an eyebrow at that. “Don’t get any stupid ideas.”
Darius aimed the glowing tip of the blade at him. “Shut up.”
Tanik’s grin spread, but the scars running across his face twisted it into a sneer.
“Dad...” Cassandra gulped. “What happened? Why are we fighting Tanik? He saved my life.”
Darius nodded agreeably. “And now he’s threatening it. Ironic, isn’t it? He saved my life, too.”
“And then you broke my legs,” Tanik said. “Some gratitude.”
“Did I tell you to talk?” Darius demanded.
Tanik’s eyes glittered darkly. “You seem to have forgotten that I’m holding a blade to your daughter’s throat.”
Darius ignored him and stopped pacing to look Cassandra in the eye. “He was with the Keth from the start. He lured you away from the fleet to negotiate with the Cygnians so that you would get poisoned. Then he took a sample of the venom from the Cygnian that stung you so that only he could bring you out of cryo safely.”
“But why would he do that?”
“To get leverage over me, which he’s now using to save himself and the Keth survivors.”
“I don’t get it,” Cassandra said.
Darius shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.” He went back to pacing. “Right now let’s just focus on getting you out of this alive.”
“Good thinking,” Tanik put in. “But if I may, I believe I can clarify some of your daughter’s confusion—you see, Cassandra, when your people, your friends, your neighbors, and their children are all slaughtered in front of your eyes and hunted to the brink of extinction with utterly no provocation, it makes you realize that there are only two kinds of people in war: the winners, and the corpses.”
“Your people? The Keth are your people?” Cassandra asked. “You’re a human!”
“They adopted him,” Darius explained. “He was orphaned during the Revenants’ war.”
Cassandra said nothing to that, and a heavy silence fell. The air grew thick with it until Darius could hardly breath. He struggled to control his breathing as he paced back and forth. Fatigue was creeping in, weighing him down in ways that went beyond the physical. He was struggling to maintain the wormhole and his grip on all of the soldiers in the field at the same time.
“Getting tired, Darius?” Tanik taunted.
Before Darius could think of a fitting retort, he heard the steady pounding of footsteps and turned to see Dyara running back into the clearing with four Marines and their Keth prisoner in tow. As they elbowed past the frozen army of Revenants, the Marines’ helmets turned every which way, taking in the scene around them. Their expressions were hidden, but their body language was clear: they were afraid to become frozen like the others.
Darius stopped pacing and nodded to Dyara. “Make the trade,” he said in a hoarse whisper of a voice. Sweat was pouring from his brow and running in rivers down his back. He felt hot and cold all over, and his eyes were threatening to slam shut of their own accord. He swayed on his feet as he turned back to Tanik.
Dyara and the Marines walked into view, escorting Feyra to the Keth. They stopped a few paces away, and Feyra continued on alone. Her hands were unbound. As soon as she reached Tanik, she stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek, and then turned to take her place beside him.
“Now send Cassandra over,” Darius ordered.
“Not yet,” Tanik replied, smiling smugly once more. That expression spread to Feyra’s face with a flash of her pointy white teeth.
“We had a deal!” Darius exploded, and aimed his sword at Tanik’s chest once more. “Release her!”
“First, allow your wormhole to collapse so that we can summon one of our own and leave.”
“How do I know you won’t drag Cassandra through with you?”
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” Tanik said.
Darius barked a laugh. “Not happening.”
“Then we can stand around here and wait until you become too exhausted to sustain your wormhole. At that point, I will take Cassandra with me.” Tanik chuckled darkly at that.
Darius scowled. He was through negotiating. He reached for Tanik’s arm with all of his remaining strength to force the dagger away from Cassandra’s throat.
Tanik’s dagger began inching away from Cassandra’s throat.
“Run!” Darius gritted out.
“Let me help you, my love,” Feyra said. She held out an empty hand, and a sword leapt from the scabbard of the nearest Keth. It immediately began glowing with a shield, and she held the blade in front of Cassandra’s abdomen, ready to slice her in half if she tried to escape.
Darius directed some of his energy to pull Feyra’s weapon away, too.
It didn’t work. He wasn’t strong enough to fight them both. “Dyara!” he said. “Help me!” He could feel her adding her strength to his, but then the Keth began helping Tanik. It was a telekinetic tug-o-war with just two against more than thirty.
“You’re juggling to
o many balls, Darius,” Tanik chided. “You’ve got to let one of them drop. I suggest you let us go before one of us overcompensates and there’s a terrible accident.” To emphasize his point he tugged his blade suddenly closer to Cassandra’s throat, and it began smoking with a horrid stench. Cassandra cried out in pain as the glowing blade burned a black line around her neck.
Darius gritted his teeth and pulled harder. Darkness crowded at the edges of his vision. He could feel himself fading. If he kept this up, pretty soon he’d pass out, and then they’d all be dead. Tanik was right.
Darius dropped his hold on the Revenants first, and they snapped out of it with an indignant roar.
“Darius!” Tanik said, his voice rising in warning as hundreds of Revenants began advancing on him and the Keth once more.
Darius allowed the wormhole back to the Deliverance to collapse, and in that same instant, used all of his now undivided strength to yank both Tanik and Feyra away from Cassandra as hard as he could.
They went flying in opposite directions and landed in the midst of startled Revenants. Before any of the other Keth could react, Cassandra made a run for it. Darius grabbed her in a telekinetic vice and brought her sailing through the air to meet him.
Just as she reached him, the Revenant army parted around them like a rushing river around a rock and began attacking the Keth on all sides. The Keth all drew their swords in unison, and blades clashed with a hissing roar of shielded metal.
Darius caught Cassandra’s eye and said, “I’ll be back!”
With that, he drew on the ZPF and leapt over the heads of the Revenants to land in the middle of the Keth formation. He was just about to cut down the nearest Keth, when he noticed that he was surrounded by children. That gave him pause.
Then the older ones drew shimmering blades of their own, and Darius realized he was in danger. He parried the first blow and leapt away before any of the others could land. As he sailed above the Keth formation once more, he saw Revenants flying high into the air from two disparate points as both Tanik and Feyra floated up and away, defying gravity in a way that Darius hadn’t known was possible.
Darius soared down just behind the Revenants’ lines, pushing the nearest ones out of the way to avoid spearing himself on their swords. Recovering from his landing, Darius elbowed through his army to join the attack on the Keth. Just as he reached the front line, a shimmering portal appeared in the middle of the Keth’s formation. Tanik and Feyra both floated straight through, and the Keth backpedaled toward it, furiously parrying swords from all sides in a desperate retreat. Darius jumped out and thrust his sword at one of the fleeing aliens, slipping past the Keth’s guard to burn a blackened hole in his chest. The alien collapsed in a heap at Darius’s feet. One after another, more Keth fell and were promptly trampled underfoot as the Revenants pressed forward. Darius sensed alien minds sliding into darkness as they died.
The last three surviving Keth backed through the portal together, and it vanished, taking a few over-eager Revenants with it.
Silence fell over the battlefield, and a feeble rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. Booted feet shuffled as the soldiers’ attention shifted. Accusing eyes stabbed Darius from all sides.
“You!” a nearby woman said, and pointed her sword at him. “It’s your fault they got away!”
Chapter 21
Tanik dispatched the final Revenant himself, running the woman through with his sword. As she collapsed on the rocky ground, he surveyed the barren moonscape of gray dust and craters that he’d brought his people to. This world had a breathable atmosphere, but not much else to recommend it. The Keth huddled together in a small group, looking around with wide eyes and concerned expressions. Fully half of them were missing. Counting the children, there couldn’t have been more than twenty of them left. It was going to take a miracle of genetic engineering for them to survive as a species with such a limited gene pool, but they could worry about that later.
“Gurhain! Where have you brought us?” Vartok demanded, his voice sounding close behind Tanik.
Tanik rolled his eyes, of course, Feyra’s father would be among the survivors. Pasting a smile on his face, he turned to face the man. Feyra walked over to stand beside him as he faced her father.
“Does it matter?” Feyra asked. “He just saved all of our lives!”
“Yes, it matters, Daughter.” Vartok stopped uncomfortably close to them and glared at Tanik. “If this planet kills us all with unknown toxins, he won’t have saved anyone.” Vartok made a show of looking around. “It doesn’t appear to be very habitable. There’s no food or water in sight! And it’s freezing.”
Tanik endured those complaints without comment. When Vartok finished speaking, he said, “I’ve been here before. It’s an abandoned staging ground that was used by the Revenants during the war.” Tanik pointed to the rim of the crater they were standing in. “Just over that rise is an abandoned facility with more than enough food and water to sustain us.”
“For how long?” Vartok demanded. “We can’t hide here forever. You were supposed to be able to control your human puppet. Now he’s run amok and almost wiped us out! You were supposed to use him to get rid of the Revenants, not lead them to victory against us! It’s clear that he’s become even more powerful than you, and your plan has failed. We should execute you and be rid of your incompetence.”
I’d like to see you try, Tanik thought. But they both knew it was an empty threat. He was the only one among them strong enough to open a wormhole to get them out of here. Not letting his contempt show, Tanik bowed his head, and said, “I will take care of him, master.”
“How?” Vartok demanded. “It’s clear that you cannot defeat him yourself.”
“I could if I were to fill myself with Sprites as he has done,” Tanik replied.
Feyra clutched his arm, her nails digging into his skin. “It’s too dangerous,” she whispered.
Vartok nodded along with that. “You’ve already filled yourself as much as you can. Unless you want to sacrifice yourself in the process, I suggest you come up with a better plan than that.”
Tanik grimaced. Vartok was right. He had tried dosing with living water during the battle for Ouroboros, and he’d nearly killed himself in the process. Some people were more resistant to the detrimental effects of the Sprites than others. Most couldn’t survive more than the initial activation, and some didn’t. Darius was unusually resistant to be able to imbibe as many of them as he had.
“There’s another option,” Tanik said.
“And that is?”
“We engineer a virus to target and kill the Sprites. We can infect Darius and all of the other Revenants without their knowledge. They’ll be stripped of their powers before they even realize what’s happening. Once Darius is too weak to defend himself, I’ll find him and kill him. After he’s gone, hunting the others down will be easy.”
“And what if your virus infects us, too?” Vartok asked.
“We’ll inoculate ourselves against it,” Tanik suggested. “Besides, staying here will be an effective quarantine.”
“Until Darius comes here looking for us,” Vartok pointed out.
“Hide your presences and don’t draw on the source field for any reason. He won’t find you if he can’t sense you.”
“What if you get yourself killed and leave us all stranded here?” Vartok asked.
“The Revenants left behind transports at the facility I told you about. If the need arises, you can use one of them to fly away to a more habitable world.”
Vartok’s eyes pinched into baleful slits. “Show me.”
“Of course,” Tanik said, and sent himself floating up the rise to the rim of the crater. The effort of doing so nearly exhausted him. Between the recent battle and the constant drain of hovering above the ground to keep weight off his broken legs, he was in desperate need of rest. Once he returned to Union space, he’d get a nanite injection to knit his bones together faster. He didn’t share the Keth’s
disdain for technology. There were some things they could learn from their enemy.
As soon as they reached the rim of the crater, the abandoned facility came into view—a sprawling complex of blocky modules and transparent hydroponic domes, all connected by narrow tunnels. Landing pads stood around the perimeter, most of them empty. Two of the six in view had transports landed on them.
“There it is,” Tanik declared.
“It will do,” Vartok said.
Tanik bore his father-in-law’s demanding and ungrateful behavior just as he always had—by pretending not to notice.
Feyra rubbed his arm appreciatively. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He nodded but said nothing. She was the only reason he hadn’t killed Vartok years ago and taken his place as the leader of the Keth. That, and because he doubted the survivors would accept a human for their new leader.
“Are you sure your virus will work?” Vartok asked, his pale forehead wrinkling with doubt. Sprites crawled in random patterns beneath his translucent skin, like an infestation of luminous ants. “You will need help to develop it.”
“I will make it work,” Tanik said. “And I won’t have trouble convincing people to join my cause.”
“Very well. You have one last chance. If you fail again, you will no longer be welcome among us.”
Feyra caught Tanik’s gaze, her blue-white eyes filled with concern. He could imagine what she must be thinking. What if he failed? Years ago they’d discussed the possibility of running away together, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave her people. That left Tanik only one choice if he wanted to be with Feyra: he had to defeat the Revenants.
Tanik nodded to Vartok. “I will bring you Darius’s head to mount on your wall.”
That drew a rare smile from the Keth patriarch. “A fitting end for him.”
Tanik inclined his head one last time and turned to Feyra. Kissing her goodbye, he said, “I will return as soon as I can.”
She nodded. “I will be waiting, my love.”
Chapter 22
Surrounded by an angry mob of armed soldiers, Darius saw only one way out. He subtly smoothed away their ire through the zero-point field. As the angry, accusing looks directed at him faded to confusion, Darius strode over to Cassandra.
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