'Luciferi…'
I realized my nose was pressed into warm, golden fur, and that it was mortal arms which carried me, not the branches of a tree. The song continued, but it was Mother who sang it, tears streaming down her cheeks as her mouth formed the words of a mortal song. The Happy Bird sang harmonies from its perch in the canopy of the Eternal Tree. My chest hurt.
"I think he's going to live." The Leonid soldier wore the stripes of a Colonel on the shoulder of his uniform, a uniform that was covered in blood.
"Lucifer," Mama touched my cheek. "You've been shot. But you're going to be alright now."
"Mama?" It was the only word I could squeeze out, but I could breathe again. My heart beat softly in my ears, no longer silent.
"I'd heard your kind has the gift," the Leonid said. "But never have I seen it for myself."
"Thank you for protecting him, Colonel Harakhti," Mama said. "Had he been shot a second time, he would have been beyond even -my- abilities to heal him."
I realized that I lay in the roots of the Eternal Tree. Above me the branches reached for the sky, barren of fruit as it had been ever since the end of the Second Galactic War. Had it all been a dream?
"Let me heal your shoulder before the song fades," Mama said to the brave Leonid who had thrown his body over mine. She began to sing again and placed her hands on his shoulder where he'd been shot protecting me. His wounds closed up, leaving only his bloody uniform. I touched my chest, which no longer hurt, and my fingers came up drenched with blood. The place I had been shot hummed with a deeper song. Somebody else sang that song along with her, enhancing her gift. Enhancing -me-. Someone who wasn’t here.
"Shouldn't the Emperor do this?" the Leonid asked.
"The Emperor doesn't know -how- to do this." A tear slid down Mama's cheek. "Only a mated pair can hear the Song of Ki."
"Thank you, Ma'am," the Leonid said. "Would you like me to tell the Emperor his young cadet will be alright?"
"The Emperor is gone," Mama hissed. "He didn't even notice Lucifer had been shot! He just went after the Agent and then disappeared."
"I had no idea he was your son, Ma'am," the Leonid rumbled. "I just did what any Leonid is trained to do. Protect the Emperor and those he cares most about."
"Thank you, Colonel Harakhti," Mama said. "I can never repay you for what you did."
"Just doing my job, Ma'am."
The Leonid saluted Mama and then marched back towards the Great Hall, where I could still hear shouting and the sounds of disarray. Mama clutched me to her breast as though I were still a little boy.
"Mama? What just happened?"
"Ohthankthegods," Mama's body shook with tears. "Your father helped me heal you!"
"Father?"
Her words were spoken start-and-stop, the ramblings of a woman who was hysterical with relief.
"No! Your -real- father! You gave him what he needed to cast off the shade which has been feeding his hatred. But now that he knows you exist, nothing will keep him from you."
Mama squished my face into her boobs, rather uncomfortable, I might add, and did not answer my questions until her weeping had run its course. Her heart thumped beneath my ear, so strong, I realized, when all along I had thought my mother weak. Her thoughts were a jumbled tangle of emotions, but the emotion that my gift strained to pick up on, to know the truth about what had just happened and which, if any of it, had been real, spoke of a -new- emotion which had taken fire in Mama's heart.
Hope…
"Mama? What do you mean Father did not know I existed?"
That enormous wall she used to hide her thoughts from my gift came up, a wall which had always been there, I now realized, standing between me and her memories of that silver-eyed man.
"The Emperor will be very angry with me." Mama would not meet my eyes. "But I could not bear to lose you, too. Not after I had lost him."
Up in the branches of the Eternal Tree, which I now realized existed in all dimensions, the Happy Bird began to sing its beautiful, musical song. So much like Mama's. Only this song was happy, not marred with the sadness that Mama's song had carried. Was she sad because she missed the man who had come out of the green flame to carry me back to the Eternal Tree?
That second song which hummed in my chest gradually faded, but it did not completely go away. It felt as though something which had always been missing from my life had suddenly found a home.
I remembered the look in Father's eyes as he had pushed me aside to wade into the room to smite the shooter. Why was he not here now? For the first time in my life, doubt began to creep into my mind.
"Why did Father not notice I was injured?"
"He lingers in this realm to fend off the monster you saw in the land between," Mama said. "Not dabble in the affairs of mortals. We are only a hobby to him. Something to pass the time."
"Why would he not care?" Tears welled in my eyes.
"It's not that he doesn't care," Mama sighed. "It's just that he's a god. Sometimes he forgets that for the rest of us, life is fleeting."
Her lip trembled. I remembered what she'd said as she had straightened my collar before bringing me into the Great Hall today.
"When you said I looked like my father," I asked her. "You were talking about the man in the land between. Weren't you, Mama? Not Father."
Mama looked away and did not answer, her dark wings trembling like a dying swan. That gift which enabled me to -see- things, hidden beneath people's words, told me nothing, but that lesser gift I had inherited from her, the ability to reach into people's hearts and feel empathy, could not hide this was the man she grieved for every year on my birthday, a man she had loved and lost.
"What's his name?"
I thought for a moment she would not answer, a name forbidden by the Emperor to ever be spoken, but then she did, her words so soft they were barely more than a whisper.
"Shemijaza."
It was a name I had heard whispered around the Eternal Palace but never understood. The name attached to the small silver Third Empire that Father did battle against on the great chessboard. It was the name attached to a holographic image of DNA Father often had displayed in his laboratory, trying to figure out how to complete Mama's third strand so it would look more like mine, and hid it every time I came into his lab.
Father's words as he had put his arm around me and said he had the -real- prize and his enemy didn't even know it suddenly made sense. My -real- father was the ruler of that strange, silver empire.
And Father had stolen me from him…
Chapter 41
Galactic Standard Date: 152,324.01 AE
Delta Sector – Command Carrier ‘Syracusia’
Centauri Cavalry General Kunopegos
Kunopegos
"Clear!"
Kunopegos cringed as Doctor Fuflun slammed down the paddles on Aigharn's chest and her tiny body jerked upwards.
"Code blue! Code blue!" Lieutenant Edena, Fuflun's gazelle-like Saola nurse shouted into her comms pin. "We need a trauma team in here. Stat!"
"What is the cause of the myocardial infarction?" a voice crackled from the other end.
The nurse's gaze was accusatory as she glared at her commanding officer. "Premature labor. We need to perform an emergency C-section."
Aigharn's heartbeat gave a jagged line across the monitor, and then flattened out again. The machine screeched out its high-pitched warning of her cardiac arrest as though it were a witness to a murder.
"Aigharn!" Kunopegos shook his wife's hand. "Please! I thought we had more time!"
Medical personnel crowded into the sick bay, stopping in shocked stupefaction as they stared at the women who lay upon the table.
"What's a pregnant Angelic doing on a Centauri command carrier?" one of them whispered.
"Start chest compressions," Doctor Fuflun shouted. "Lieutenant Edena … give me 120 cc's of atropine. And a syringe full of adrenaline."
"Step aside, Sir," Edena barked, her now in charge with Doctor
Fuflun frantically trying to restart Aigharn's heart.
"No no no nooo!!!" Kunopegos hooves clopped helplessly on the deck. He cringed as Lieutenant Edena filled an evil-looking needle with a vial, amber liquid and stabbed it through Aigharn's ribcage into her heart.
"She … doesn't … have … wings?"
One of the medics realized the woman they were working on was not an Angelic. The trauma team who milled about, not sure what to do.
"Talk later!" Edena snapped. "And get him the Hades out of here! He's done enough already!"
Edena's eyes were murderous as she had two of his burly subordinates wrestle him out of sick bay so they had room to work. The two security officers shoved him into the next room and stepped, arms crossed in front of their chests, to block the door. Only the fact they were Centauri, and that he knew the Saola was right, that he was in the way, prevented him from beating both men to a bloody pulp and forcing his way back into where the trauma team forced air down Aigharn's throat. Two Saola crewmen manually compressed Aigharn's chest to keep oxygen pumping to the foal while the rest of the medical personnel prepped for surgery to take his foal via C-section, far too early for the foal to survive.
He pressed his face against the glass and watched helplessly as they sliced his wife's abdomen open and lifted a tiny bundle, still wrapped in an opaque sacque, and hurried it over to an incubator. They jammed tubes down its throat and stuck it full of needles, trying to get his foal to breathe. Even from here, he could see her coloring was wrong, that the bundle was black, tinged with blue, and not the color of a proper Centauri foal.
He wasn't sure which group he should watch. His wife? Or the foal which had cost her life?
The tide of medics shifted, no longer focused on Aigharn. Doctor Fuflun moved to work on the foal, leaving Lieutenant Edena to stitch Aigharn up while a two-man tag-team pumped air into her lungs and manually compressed her chest. For Aigharn, he could tell already it was over. Complete renal failure. Even if they did somehow restart her heart, she had slipped into a coma three hours ago, her brain devoid of all electrical activity.
Lieutenant Edena wiped her brow as she took the final stitch and cut the black thread. She glanced to where her he stood pressed against the viewing window, Aigharn's blood smeared across the white blaze on her forehead beneath her horn. She dropped down to all fours and gestured to the two crewmen who guarded the door to let him back inside.
"What the hell were you thinking?" she hissed at him. "To beget a colt upon a mare that tiny?"
The Saola were a deer-like species, faster than a Centauri, but not much larger than a human themselves. They were an important component of the Centauri Cavalry, but because they only had four limbs and needed all four on the ground to run, they had never been able to fill in the shortfall in the Emperor's armies created by the Centauri's dwindling numbers. Right now the cavalry was a hodge-podge of species, none in the galaxy able to take up the gap created when the Centauri bloodlines had begun to fail.
How could he explain to his hard-working Lieutenant he'd been thinking he'd like more of his kind on his ship and not just her? Especially given what had just happened?
"Is … she … gone?"
Tears streamed down his cheeks. At the back of the room, a swarm of medical personnel obscured his foal from his view, but from the way Doctor Fuflun barked orders, she was still somehow alive.
Edena's expression softened.
"Kiss your wife goodbye, general," Edena said. She reached a hand-like hoof up to wipe away her own tears. "There's nothing we can do for her. As soon as we stop the chest compressions, I have to call it."
She looked so tiny, so helpless as the Mantoid medic stiffened her elbow-joints to ram Aigharn's chest into the emergency room table, her ribcage audibly cracking with each push they made to force her heart to pump. Her heart had failed, this brave human female who had dared to try birth a Centauri foal to save his species. He couldn't even see her face hidden beneath the oxygen bulb the second medic squeezed to manually force oxygen into her lungs. Only her long, black hair, so unique if she had been a hybrid, and the blood smeared all over her abdomen, now empty of the foal she had died trying to bring into this world, was recognizable as his wife.
"Let her go," he choked out, snot smearing from his nose as he wiped his eyes. "Please. We've done enough to her. It's time to let her go."
The two medics looked to him, wanting to be certain before they stepped away. They took their horrid instruments of torture with them and left her there upon the table for him to see, dead. The heart monitor went flat the moment they stopped, not even the jagged lines of d-fib to give him hope that, just one more time, this brave woman's heart would beat for him.
"Aigharn," Kunopegos caressed her cheek. "I'm so sorry. I thought we would have a few more weeks."
He gathered her into his arms and buried his nose into her hair, that long black hair which had always fascinated him. She smelled of antiseptic and iodine, the scent of her pregnancy fading as the heart which no longer beat could not carry the pheromones to the surface. Behind her, Doctor Fuflun barked orders in the back of the room, a surreal symphony of a military trauma team more used to dealing with death than trying to give the hope of their species life. Their words faded and became a blur, no longer recognizable, as tears streamed down his high, dark cheeks and heard the promise he had made to his wife whispered into his heart.
Promise me you shall raise our foal yourself…
How could he raise this foal when he had just murdered her mother?
The sea of medical personnel writhed as he held her, felt her body begin to cool as the life spark which had animated it fled this world and left him behind to carry out his promise that her sacrifice would not be in vain.
The medical personnel shifted back and forth, like the tide of his guilt and that aching hole Aigharn had left in his heart, his brave star that had graced his life and then left him before he'd even have a chance to contemplate just how bright she really was. The sea shifted again, the medics now moving away from the tiny foal, running to get things. Running to move things into place. He had not yet heard her cry. Doctor Fuflun wiped his hands upon a surgical towelette and approached him, tears in his eyes.
“It’s a girl, Sir,” Fuflun mumbled. “As we expected.”
"Is she…"
"We've got her stable for now," Fuflun said. "But for how long? I don't know. No foal has ever been harvested this early and survived."
No cry came from the incubator. No elation from the nursing staff at the new life they held in their hands. There were only silent tears as they frantically worked on the tiny blue foal and tried to keep her alive.
"I thought you said we would have more time?" Kunopegos whispered.
Fuflun wept now as well. He was guilty, not for lying, for he had told Kunopegos all along he thought Aigharn's only hope was to abort the foal, but for not pressing him harder to do the right thing, for not reporting this, for not killing his hope that, somehow, Lucifer would get this trade deal through and they would have the leverage to force the Eternal Emperor to not make the choice they knew he would make if it were left up to him, to abort the foal and save the mother so he could study her. They had gambled they could save both … and lost.
The medical personnel began to thin.
"I'd like to hold my daughter." Kunopegos voice was so choked with tears he could barely utter the words.
He picked up Aigharn's body, a tiny, limp doll cradled against his chest, and carried her over to the incubator where their foal lay, looking more like a transdimensional alien with all the tubes and wires jutting from her body than any creature that could be alive. Her coat was black, and so was her hair. Her mother's hair. His tears fell faster as he held his dead wife and beheld their daughter.
"She looks like you," he kissed Aigharn's hair. "See? I knew she would look like you. And she has your heart. See how she fights to breathe?"
Her tiny body jerked with every breath the ox
ygenator pumped into her immature lungs, as though each breath caused her pain. And still she fought, this tiny foal his brave wife had given him. She fought for life because, somehow, she understood her mother had given her life to birth her, and she wanted to stay in this world. He would make sure nothing stood in her way.
Kunopegos took a deep, shuddering breath. He was a military commander. He had promised Aigharn when he had told her they only needed a few more weeks that he would bring the Syracusia to Haven-1, if necessary, and point its pulse cannons at the Eternal Emperor's palace to force him to save their foal. That was a promise he could keep.
He kissed his wife's hair and set her down, kissing her on the lips one last time. He turned to the two guards who had wrestled him out of here. They too wept, tears streaming down mocha cheeks as they realized that not only had their commanding officer found the Holy Grail, but he had also lost her.
"Get me Colonel Gamygen," he choked out.
"He's just outside the door, Sir," the two men said.
The colonel who was his second-in-command, a gazelle-like Saola like Edena, clopped in, the sound of his soft cloven hooves lost amongst the whir of medical equipment keeping the hope for Kunopegos species alive.
"I want you to…" He looked away and wiped a tear, unable to say the words. He swallowed and tried again.
“Get Supreme Commander-General Jophiel on the horn,” he choked out. “Tell her I wish to turn myself in for the murder of my wife."
Gamygen nodded.
"I will only surrender without a fight under the condition that the Emperor himself makes every effort to save my foal.”
“Yes, Sir,” Colonel Gamygen said softly.
“Turn this ship around and make top speed towards Haven-1," Kunopegos said. "I don’t care if you have to melt down the hyperdrives doing it. The survival of our species depends upon this foal surviving."
Gamygen queued up his comms pin to relay the order to prepare for a jump into hyperspace. He placed a hoof upon Kunopego's equine shoulder, and then turned to carry out the first half of the order. To call their supreme commander and let her know what had happened.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 45