by E. A. James
“I’ll go,” Thor offered.
He could run through the low gravity rocky terrain, burdened down by the combat armor, faster than any of them.
“Fine,” she said, nodding to him. “Hurry.”
“That’s why I’m the one going, isn’t it?” Thor replied, winking at her as his helmet snapped into place.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“You have to help her,” the man kept saying over and over as Dario attempted to do whatever he could to ease the woman’s suffering while they waited for Thor to return with his medical supplies.
“What is your name?” Alaria asked, walking up next to him. She gave him her trademark kind, genuine smile as she lowered herself down in front of him.
“Myles,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the woman. “And this is Kora.”
“Why don’t you tell us what happened, Myles?” Alaria said, resting her hand gingerly on his shoulder.
Myles’ eyes went wide. It was as if he were seeing the entire thing playing out in front of him. He leaned back, finally shifting his gaze from Kora to Alaria. Alaria kept the kind smile on her face as she waited patiently for him to speak.
“It happened very fast,” he began. “We were working. It was a typical day in the mine. But then, out of nowhere, ships began descending upon us from above.”
“They rained down on us out of nowhere. They were filled with soldiers, Arkadian warriors," Myles continued. "Arcanum soldiers," he added with a clear hint of disdain.
“If the Arcanum were here, that means Grimm is definitely behind this,” Kira said.
“Not just the Arcanum, though,” Dario reminded them. “The Arkadians were here, as well.”
“Arkadian warriors?” Bron asked. He let out a quick scoff. “Those peace loving pussies actually have warriors?”
“They’re not as peaceful as they’d have you think,” Kira replied quickly. “Not all of them at least.”
“Why did they come here?” Alaria asked.
“For the Divarium,” Myles said matter-of-factly. “The mineral we mine here.”
“A mineral?” Vinnie asked, with a scoff surprisingly identical to Bron’s. “All of this for a mineral?”
“It’s not just a mineral,” Alaria answered for Myles. “It could be used as a catalyst for high energy reactors.”
“What would Grimm want that for?” Dario asked.
“He could make some huge ass bombs with it,” Bron suggested.
“He can make bombs with just about anything these days,” Alaria replied.
As the discussion continued, the hairs on the back of Kira’s neck began to stand up. Something about the conversation was beginning to bring back memories of a time in her life she had forgotten about long ago.
“Why would he raid these mining colonies for that specific mineral?” Dario asked.
Kira knew the answer before it was spoken.
“To purify the galaxy,” Myles replied.
Every face in the room went blank as they turned their attention back to the injured man huddled in the corner of the room.
“That’s what the Arkadian said,” Myles continued with a weak shrug. “His name is Mordecai. He’s some crazed Arkadian warlord who led the whole thing and went on and on about his work with Grimm to purify the galaxy.”
“It’s official,” Dario said, leaning back on his heels and looking at the group over his shoulder. “Grimm has gone completely mad.”
“How did you survive?” Kira asked, wanting to shift the conversation again. Her mind needed to piece everything together before she announced what she was thinking—what she was fearing.
“We took cover deep in the mine,” he explained. “We waited there until we were sure they were gone.”
“Then you came here? With her injured like this?” Dario asked.
“We weren’t injured initially,” Myles explained. “But Mordecai left behind a swarm of Zel’Dar to finish off whatever survivors he may have overlooked. There were eight of us—at first.”
“Son of a bitch,” Bron muttered.
“How long ago did they leave?” Kira asked, trying to calculate if they could make it to the third colony in time to stop them.
“About an hour ago,” Myles replied.
Just then, the door to the airlock slid open, and Thor entered the room. He had made the trip—a mile each way—surprisingly fast. Yet, he didn’t look to be winded or strained at all.
“Here,” Thor said, marching across the room and holding Dario’s kit out to him.
“Just in time,” Dario said, setting the kit on the ground and rummaging through it.
As Dario worked to patch up the two survivors, the others paced around nervously, trying to figure out their next step.
“We have to get to the third mining colony,” Kira said. “There’s a chance that this Mordecai and his men are still there. Maybe we can stop them before they completely destroy that place, too.”
“Is it really safe for the six of us to go up against a man leading an army of Arcanum soldiers?” Bron asked.
“We have to at least try to do something. He’s out there killing all these innocent people, collecting this mineral, who knows what his next step will be,” Alaria said.
“I say we just blow them all to hell!” Vinnie said, jumping up from his seat.
“Yes, we’ll blow them all to hell with the state-of-the-art missiles and cannons our state-of-the-art ship is equipped with,” Thor said, smiling sarcastically.
Bron huffed as he crossed his arms over his chest. “You keep complaining about the Curio, but without it, you’d still be stuck on Vandor—running from robot rodent bounty hunters and Roughneck pirates.”
“You’re right, this is much better. Now we’re running head first into the face of danger, instead of away from it,” Thor commented with a chuckle.
“We’re all set,” Dario informed them, crossing the room in their direction. “Myles is much better off, and I think I got Kora patched up enough to at least make the trip back to Earth where she can get proper medical attention.”
“Good,” Kira replied. She walked over to where Myles was still sitting on the floor next to Kora. “Do you have a shuttle?” Kira asked him.
“We do, but I’m not sure if it was spared during the attack,” he replied. “And, neither of us are engineers.”
“Lucky for you, we’ve got one of the best engineers around right here,” Kira said, gesturing toward Alaria.
“It’s just across the way,” Myles said, pushing himself up.
“Perfect. Get suited up, and Alaria, Bron, and Vinnie will go over there with you to inspect the situation.”
Myles expressed his gratitude, and within a few minutes, the group of five were making their way toward the airlock. Bron carried Kora, who had regained consciousness and insisted she could walk. Still, Dario felt it would be best for her to save as much of her energy as possible.
Taking advantage of the moment, Kira filled Thor in on what Myles had told the rest of the group about the attack.
“Grimm’s lost his mind,” Thor muttered, mirroring Dario’s previous statement.
“Yes and no,” Kira said, shifting her weight back and forth.
“What do you mean?” Dario asked.
“Grimm’s working with the Arkadians,” Kira said, more in an effort to think out loud than anything. “But, as Bron pointed out before, the Arkadians are generally non-combative.”
“And?” Thor asked.
“There is a group, a sect really, that follow a religion known as Empyreanism. Within that religion, there are smaller, more extreme groups that believe in taking drastic measures to purify the galaxy.”
“’Purify the galaxy’,” Dario repeated. “That’s what Mordecai claimed he and his men were working to do.”
“How do they plan on doing something like that?” Thor asked.
“Death by the purifying light of a star gone supernova’,” Kira said, repeating word-for-word something
she had heard before. Something she laughed at, at the time. “They want to find a way to make stars collapse in on themselves before the end of their lifecycle.”
Kira swore she heard an audible chill ripple through the air. Her own skin prickled with goosebumps at the thought of stars all across the galaxy imploding simultaneously.
“That would wipe out…,” Dario began.
“Everything,” Thor finished for him.
“I’m not sure that’s what they’re planning,” Kira said quickly. “That’s why I didn’t say anything earlier. But, it makes sense. Collecting the Divarium, the Arkadian soldiers, talk of purification…”
“They need to be stopped,” Dario said with purpose.
“That is what we’ve been hoping to accomplish this whole time,” Kira reminded him. “But now, we may have enough to get the bounties off our heads and actually team up with the Alliance.”
“We need to get a message back to Artanis,” Thor said.
“Dario,” Kira ordered, “go meet with the others at the shuttle. Tell Myles and Kora that they need to find Admiral Artanis and tell him everything that happened here. Tell them to make sure that he knows that we are positive Grimm is behind all of this.”
“On my way,” Dario said, nodding firmly as he marched toward the airlock, leaving Kira and Thor alone.
“We should get back to the ship,” Thor said, watching Dario disappear behind the sliding doors. “You’ll want to have the engines initiated and everything ready to go so we can get to the next colony as quick as possible.”
“I agree,” she said turning to face him.
He kept his eyes fixed on the metal doors. His face was stern but his eyes were filled with emotion.
“Are you okay?” she asked him, reaching out and setting her hand on his forearm.
“I’m fine,” he replied, turning to face her. “Really.”
“What that man said before…,” Kira started.
“Is not important right now,” Thor cut her off, pulling his wrist out of her grasp.
“It clearly upset you.”
“How could it not?”
“Because he doesn’t know you, Thor. You’re not like the others.”
“But, in a way I am. And no matter what, that’s how everyone will see me for the rest of my life. I can either hide it, hide who I am, or suffer being marginalized or demonized or…”
She stepped forward quickly, taking his hands in hers and squeezing them tightly. “Stop it,” she said to him firmly. “What they did to you can only define you if you let it. Your actions, your spirit, who you are, they can never take that away—they didn’t take that away.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” he confessed, inhaling sharply. “We have a mission to focus on right now. Let’s take care of business first.”
“Okay,” Kira said, stepping back and releasing her hold on his hands. “But, you know you can talk to me about this, right?”
"I know," he said, leaning forward and kissing her softly on the top of the head. "And I will when I'm ready."
“I’m going to hold you to that,” she replied smiling at him over her shoulder as she walked toward the airlock.
“I never doubted that you would,” he replied with a wink.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Their departure from the second mining colony was a mad dash of adrenaline pumped determination. Kira and Thor were already on the flight deck when Alaria, Dario, Bron, and Vinnie entered the ship.
The second Kira saw them cross through the airlock on one of the screens glowing around her, she sent a ship-wide broadcast, sending her crew into action. Alaria, Bron, and Vinnie rushed to the engine room, to keep an eye on things, while Dario joined Kira and Thor on the flight deck.
“It shouldn’t take long to get there,” Kira said, lifting the Curio off the ground and dialing in the coordinates for their next destination.
“Hopefully we’ll arrive before Mordecai has the chance to destroy the base the way he did the last one,” Dario added.
“That’s the plan,” Kira agreed. “We need to stop him from getting more Divarium if possible.”
“You really think that Grimm is planning to work with the Empyreans to destroy solar systems?” Dario asked.
He was standing behind the Captain’s chair, shifting his weight back and forth nervously as the mental images of white-hot implosions rippling through space once again shook through them.
“There’s really no telling what Grimm is up to,” Kira said. “But, I’m not sure what else it could be.”
“How would he even know about this religion’s extreme views? How do you know about it?” Thor asked.
“My first spec-ops mission,” Kira replied. “Right out of the Academy, Grimm recruited me to work with him on a mission to find and destroy the heart of the Empyreans’ experiments.”
“Did you?” Thor asked.
“Oh yes, it was a huge success. Can’t you tell?” Kira replied, shooting Thor a crooked smile.
“I just assumed anything you were involved in always was,” Thor replied, looking at her with the same playful smile.
“We thought we got them,” Kira continued. “At least, we disrupted them enough we figured they knew we were onto them and would stop.”
“How long ago was that?” Dario asked.
“About ten years ago,” Kira answered.
“Ten years? The threat of the Empyrean religion has been known for ten years, and no one has done anything to ensure that it was completely eradicated?” Dario said.
“Even then, the High Command didn’t feel that the Empyreans posed a huge threat. Once we found and destroyed their lab, they did acknowledge that something more was going on. But, Grimm was the one that took over the operation from there on out,” Kira explained. “He assured me time and time again that we had done our job, and that the threat had been wiped out completely.”
“Is it possible that instead of destroying them, he began to work with them?” Dario asked. “Even back then?”
“Again,” Kira said, “there’s no telling with Grimm. He’s done a great job obfuscating his reach. Everything he does, though, he does for a reason. But, what those reasons are, he rarely feels the need to explain to anyone. The one thing he always said, though, was that he was doing what needed to be done to protect Earth and the Terran race. Humanity’s survival was always his highest priority.”
“Seems like you two got pretty close,” Thor observed.
“He was my first mentor,” Kira explained. “He was the one who made me the soldier that I am. I can’t deny that. But, it’s been years since I’ve had any involvement with him. Well, besides the out-of-the-blue mission he sent me on to transport you to Jaantu 7. Just because I knew him once, doesn’t mean I know him now.”
"Still," Dario said, pacing back and forth now, "your personal knowledge of Grimm could end up being very beneficial in the future, Kira. It's like Ashford said, if we can understand his motivations maybe we can find a way to stop him. Or, at least a way of making sure that this ideology he's spreading can be shut down."
“That’s true,” Thor agreed. “He’s doing more than just staging a coup. He’s working with proxies, and by extension promoting, a very dangerous belief system. If that takes root, it will only strengthen his position.”
"Yes, well," Kira replied, keeping her eyes fixed on the viewscreen as the third mining colony came into view, "I don't think my memories of the times I had casual chats over lunch with Grimm are going to help wipe out an entire radical religious sect."
“Who said anything about lunch?” Thor said, leaning forward to get a better view of the colony, “it’d have to be at least dinner. Everyone knows that dinner is when serious conversations take place.”
“Well, that’s too bad then. We never had dinner together,” Kira replied.
Dario moved forward as Kira matched Thor’s hunched over position, squinting at the images in the distance. The mining colony was engulfed in chaos, but the close
r they got, the easier it became to make out the images of Terrans, Arcanum soldiers, and Arkadian warriors scurrying about.
“They’re here,” Thor said, leaning back.
“It’s our lucky day,” Kira replied, taking the ship up higher. “Do you think they saw us?”
“It’s hard to tell,” Dario replied. “But, I don’t think it’ll matter.” He leaned in closer and stared out the view screen. “It looks as if they’re preparing to leave.”