Field Marshal Bastian (Leonidas)(Praesidis P2): “Europa target P2 destruction confirmed.”
He moved in front of the space elevator and faced Praesidis Command.
I can.
Excellent. Also, he looks agitated. Not surprising, I guess.
Major Phelar (Praesidis P1): “Solum target P1 wormhole active. Bombs deployed. Stand by.”
His diati stirred anew, aflutter at the nearness of such a great concentration of its brethren in such close proximity. Anticipation hummed through his bones.
The façade of the tower rumbled; a third of the way up windows shattered.
Major Phelar (Praesidis P1): “Solum target P1 destruction confirmed.”
Caleb Marano (Praesidis P1/PP): “Acknowledged. All forces vacate the area of Praesidis Command. I’m going in.”
The Primor’s location is unchanged, beyond some angry pacing. Good luck, priyazn.
Thanks, baby.
He’d been suppressing the diati’s rumblings as much as possible, but now he opened himself up to its desires. Do you want this new power? You want it to join with you, with me? Then let us invite it in.
At the same time, he allowed his heartrate to slow and decades of experience to take over, enhancing his senses and focusing his intentions.
He blinked and stood inside the expansive penthouse.
The man striding back and forth along the windows immediately spun toward him, shock on his face—
—dear god, it was his father’s face. Alex had tried to warn him, but even so only a lifetime of honed discipline kept his focus in the here and now.
PROTECT
His diati expanded out beyond his skin to form an impenetrable barrier as a stream of power hurtled across the room to slash at him…and be quietly absorbed into the barrier.
The Primor didn’t notice. They never noticed until it was too late. “You are Nyx’s mysterious adversary. Come to what, kill me? You know that is impossible.”
“No, it was impossible to kill your father. He sends his regards, by the way.”
A sharp intake of air accompanied the flash of horror crossing the Primor’s features. He buried it beneath a murderous scowl and lashed out again.
COME. JOIN WITH ME. I’M THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN LONGING FOR.
The rush of new power rendered him heady. Focus. He took a step toward the Primor, then another. He didn’t attack, content to let the man send out strike after strike, with each one draining his own power and strengthening Caleb’s.
“My father had vastly more power than I did when I vanquished him and took it for myself. You will be no different.”
Caleb smirked. “I won’t bother to point out the flaw in your reasoning. But please, do try.” He spread his arms out wide. “Kill me.”
“To the Styx with you!” The surge of diati pouring forth from the Primor shook the walls, ceiling and floor until the windows on the wall behind Caleb shattered. Caleb stumbled a single stride backward as the diati overwhelmed its own barrier and forced its way through his skin. Dizziness washed over him.
Must focus. Must remain in control.
He blinked, hard, and regained his step.
The Primor looked dismayed if not pathetically befuddled. “What…?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet, Renato? Or maybe you simply cannot admit aloud what you’ve always known in your heart. You. Are. Unworthy. What you took by force never truly belonged to you. And now, it’s eager to return to someone who deserves to wield it.” Did he believe this? He believed himself more worthy than this cowardly murderer, which was all that mattered here and now.
“It can’t! It obeys me!”
Caleb now stood close enough to the Primor to viscerally feel the agitation of the diati the man still controlled. Another step and the matter would be out of his hands.
“It obeys whomever it damn well pleases.” He stepped forward.
The diati he’d absorbed in all the encounters until this one was but a droplet of an ocean, a single star of the cosmos.
Control.
He flew backward and possibly hit a wall, or a window; it registered only as a distant, hollow thud. The Primor flew in the opposite direction, into a much closer window. Amid blurred, swimming vision Caleb saw it shattering and the man falling through it to plummet a very long way down. Fitting.
He breathed in, but his skin burned. It felt stretched, as if every cell strained under the pressure of the new power. All around him the air buzzed with free diati waiting to be allowed inside him.
Control control control.
He needed to get out of here. He envisioned the Siyane—
—a door across the room opened to allow a man to rush inside—
—the diati ripped itself out of the Inquisitor’s body so violently the man dropped dead on the spot. It collided with more of itself before it ever reached Caleb and ricocheted away. It found another Praesidis, and the process repeated itself.
The diati pressed in on him as strongly as it pressed outward, demanding an outlet, until it drove him to his knees.
LEAVE, MUST LEAVE, GO
He felt the leading edge of the power surge through the building, touching new Praesidis as it came upon them, ripping their own diati out of their bodies and adding it to the collective. He felt their deaths.
He tried again to impose his will on a force that now existed more outside his body than within it. But he was nothing in the face of its potency, a speck of dust caught in the throes of a maelstrom of elemental power.
Suddenly he was outside, though he had no recollection of having traveled there, floating in the air above Praesidis Command. Still the diati tore through the corridors and corners of the building. With each new Praesidis it touched its strength grew and its reach expanded, touching more and more and taking more and more.
OBEY ME. BE CALM. BE CONTENT.
But the new diati did not know his voice or his guiding hand and, for these terrifying seconds, it had no master.
Perhaps the diati could no longer control itself, either. How did he expect to exert control over something that lacked the capacity to be controlled?
The edifice of the building shuddered.
NO
It listed to the left, rocked by greater turbulence.
NO, STOP THIS. STOP!
The soaring structure collapsed, level upon level buckling beneath those above it, crushing untold hundreds or thousands of people as it fell. The storm of diati surrounding him reached out and called to its brethren now freed of their bondings, and reality began to lose its coherence….
…cornflower blue sky, upside down…
…façades and passageways cracked open above him…people fell in, then buildings…
…the cracks collapsed deeper into the ground, racing toward a horizon that receded…
…a force pulled him down—no, up—away from the madness of a splintering world…
…a thundering roar shook the air and the sky as something fell…something big…
…confused and disjointed voices in his head…the diati of thousands of former souls whipping in and out of his perception…
…even as his perception whipped in and out of existence…
…where?...
…clouds…
…blackness…
…stars…
…looming shadows…
…finally a surface…gray, dust in the air agitated by the roiling power that brought him here…
…madness…
…it followed him through skies and stars…
…to drown him…
…he clung to the faintest strand of his own consciousness, his own soul, for he could hold on to nothing else….
37
LUNA
SOLUM STELLAR SYSTEM
MILKY WAY SECTOR 1
* * *
“VALKYRIE, WHERE DID HE GO?”
‘Caleb’s locator puts him on the surface of Solum’s moon, outside of any settlements.’
Away from the planet, at least. “Precisely where?”
Coordinates streamed into her mind while she yanked on her environment suit, foregoing every safety check she’d ever learned.
‘Alex, we will try to help him together, but it is far too dangerous—’
She grabbed the little module she used to access the circuitry of the ship, bypassed Valkyrie and fired up the Caeles Prism.
‘Alex—’
She opened a wormhole in the middle of the cabin, its exit point at the coordinates Valkyrie had given, and ran through it.
A writhing cloud of crimson diati thrashed around Caleb. Dear god it must be two hundred meters wide before it even began to thin.
He struggled to stay on his hands and knees as tendrils whipped into him, sending him jerking to the surface. He straightened and pushed up to his knees, but the attacks continued.
Behind her a planet was disintegrating, but she didn’t care. She let go of the wormhole and her connection to the ship and hurried toward him. “Caleb!”
He tried to scramble away. “No! Don’t come any closer! I can’t control it—it’ll hurt you!”
“No, it won’t.” She strode into the crimson haze.
“Please—” A long, snaking coil of diati soared in from behind and above her. It wound around his body and lifted him into the air, then snapped him backwards so violently it should have broken his spine. He floated horizontally a meter above the ground, and his body jerked as if seizing. She gasped in horror, frozen for an instant before forcing herself onward. Faster.
The haze grew thicker, penetrating the environment suit to tickle her skin until it began to burn. She pressed on.
Abruptly he collapsed onto the basalt surface. His skin began to glow, more and more luminous until it matched the surrounding air. Bit by bit, he was absorbing the diati, willingly or no.
A stray tendril caught her in the shoulder on its way toward him, and she stumbled.
“Alex, go! Please, I can’t….” He floated upward again, jerked twice, and again dropped to the ground.
“I’ll be all right.” She pushed through what felt like molasses, the pressure of power thick in the air. She was almost to him.
His lips moved wordlessly, and her ocular implant focused in to read them.
don’t hurt her don’t hurt her don’t hurt her don’t hurt her
Her hand came to her mouth to stifle a gasp and instead slapped against the faceplate of her helmet. Tears blurred her vision as she fought for the last two steps and crouched beside him. “See? It didn’t hurt me. I’m right here.”
So much in the way. She collapsed her helmet, yanked the breather mask up and over her head—as always, breathable air surrounded him—and tugged her gloves off.
She brought her hand to his cheek. The power made her teeth rattle and her hair stand on end, but she hadn’t lied. It wasn’t hurting her.
He gulped in air when her skin touched his. She smiled bravely and stroked his cheek. “It’s okay. I’m right here. I’m right here.”
Diati swirled in a vortex around them, but it seemed as if it began to calm a bit. Not malevolent, just wanting.
She brought her other hand to his chest and leaned in closer. “I love you. I love you. You can tame this power. I know it. I know you can. I believe in you. I’ll help you.” She kept murmuring, stringing soothing words together as best she could and keeping both hands on him, touching his skin.
Ever so slowly the storm began to quiet. The tendrils dancing around him, darting in and out and through his body, gradually thinned and calmed. Though it appeared to dissipate out into space, she suspected in reality it was absorbing into him. His skin continued to glow like a florid sunset, but it cooled to something below a raging fever.
Time had ceased to have meaning when he blinked several times and brought a hand up to cover hers. His eyes focused on her, for the first time, as crimson bled out of them in jagged tears. “You mad, reckless woman. I could have killed you.”
“No, you couldn’t have.”
“It could have.”
“Was worth the risk.” She sniffled, but she didn’t dare remove a hand from him to wipe the tears away. “And hey, it worked.”
He struggled to prop himself up on his elbows. His voice sounded scratchy and hoarse, like his throat shredded every word as it passed through. “It’s not over, not yet. But I can…think. I can breathe. I—” His gaze locked beyond her shoulder, and the next second he leapt up to his feet, hauling her up with him. “We have to move!”
She caught a brief glimpse of fire in the corner of her vision as he pulled her close—then the scene changed.
He stumbled for two steps as diati renewed its dance around him, but righted himself.
She looked around in confusion. “Where are we?”
“Phobos—or whatever they call it here. We should be safe this far away.”
The profile of a planet rotated into view beyond the craggy, barren horizon, but it bore scarce resemblance to the Mars she knew—for it had been terraformed from pole to pole.
“God, no….”
She spun back to him, then followed to where his stare led. Against the blackness of space a new star flared into existence, all red and gold and magnitudes brighter than any object save the sun.
Solum.
Caleb fell to his knees, but not because the diati forced him down. His expression passed through horror into desolation. Tears streamed freely down his cheeks. “What have I done?”
She dropped down beside him and wound her arms around him as a sob wracked his chest. “This was not you.”
“I….” His breath hitched between sobs, but no further words came.
All she knew to do was draw his face into her chest and hold him as the strongest man she’d ever known fell into despair.
PART VI:
WEIGHT OF THE WORLDS
“I have traveled like a fool in the desert,
and I’ve crawled on shards of broken glass.
Followed my demons after midnight,
and I woke up with scars across my chest.
“I have sung in the twilight with a lover.
I’ve slept in the bitterness of death.
I met a stranger in the mirror,
and I have fought that man with my last breath.”
— Drew Holcomb, “Fly Home in the Morning”
38
AFS STALWART II
TARACH STELLAR SYSTEM
* * *
“DESTROYED? Can you be more precise? It can’t be correct—” Miriam’s face lit up when she saw David walk in, and damn if it wasn’t a beautiful sight “—very well. I’ll expect your formal report within the hour.”
She ended the comm and rushed to meet him halfway, then pulled up short just out of reach. “You came back.”
David’s gut twisted into knots for the four thousandth time since returning to conscious awareness. The pain he’d caused her…Richard was right. It could never be undone. His only recourse was to pile happiness, joy, devotion and comfort on top of it for the rest of his days, and hope that one day it would be enough for the balance to shift.
“I did. Sooner this time.”
Miriam exhaled and stepped forward, bringing her hands to either side of his face. He welcomed her into his arms, and they stood there embracing for many seconds, silently, not needing words.
Finally she eased back and studied him with a formal mien. “How did it go?”
He shrugged nonchalantly and glanced around, noticing for the first time that they weren’t actually alone. Two of the Prevos—Mia Requelme and Devon Reynolds—sat at the table, but their blank expressions suggested their minds were literally elsewhere. Two aides busied themselves with organizing incoming reports. Everyone else was presumably still en route from their missions or attending to post-mission details. Not a surprise that he was one of the first to arrive, as he had docked on the Stalwart II instead of the Tamao and rather sprinted straight here.
“For me? I spent most of the mission gawking at the Novoloume ships. Damn grace in motion, and impressive firepower, too. They did well. What was the comm about? What got destroyed? Something we didn’t intend to destroy, I assume?”
She frowned. “According to Bastian, Solum.”
“Earth’s doppelganger planet? I admit I’m new around here, but we don’t have weapons capable of destroying a planet, do we?”
“It wasn’t a weapon.”
They both spun toward the door at the sound of Alex’s voice, instantly recognizable even at a whisper. Miriam rushed toward her, an inherently motherly act. “What happened? Are you all right? Is Caleb?”
Alex stared out past Miriam. Her hands balled into fists, shaking as she fought to keep them at her sides, and for a second he worried she might punch the wall.
David felt the encroaching dread of tragedy, like a shadow eclipsing the sun. He stepped closer. “Alex, what is it?”
Alex’s gaze darted erratically around the room. “Can we step outside? Go somewhere private?”
Miriam nodded. “Of course. Major Halmi, you have the comm.” She urged Alex through the door and down the hall to the back door to her office. As soon as they were inside and the door closed, she grasped Alex by the shoulders. “What happened?”
Alex’s brow furrowed, as if perplexed by the question. “Caleb is alive. He’s not hurt—he’s fine, physically. Sort of. The Praesidis Primor is dead…and so are millions, or maybe billions, of other Praesidis. I assume some other Dynasties’ people, too, and aliens. Whoever was on Solum.”
Miriam regarded her daughter strangely. “Are you saying that Solum was destroyed? The entire planet?”
“It’s space dust. The diati….” She shook her head roughly and lifted her chin. “I’m sorry. I need to get it together, because you need to hear this from me. When Caleb stripped the Primor of his diati, it proved to be far too much power for Caleb to absorb at once. The excess boomeranged off in all directions. It propelled the Primor out of the building to fall to his death, but it also encountered other Praesidis inside the building. It stripped them of their diati as well, and the mass of power kept growing.
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