by Viki Storm
The ship doesn’t land, however. It merely hovers twenty feet in the air. Surveying the landscape. Looking for me.
I set my weapon to the highest charge—hoping that I won’t deplete the small qizo mineral that powers it. The mineral is said to have a half-life of a thousand years, but I am putting it to such hard use today, who really knows how long it’s going to keep producing blastwaves.
I deploy the button and send a mega charge down the narrow passageway. Four Kraxx are blown back, tumbling over each other, their long limbs tangling together.
But more keep coming.
Void take us all.
I keep one eye towards the Zalaryn warship—because I know who it is, and where he’s going.
Sure enough, from a tele-lift over the battlefield, I see him.
Dark Lord Noxu.
As the Kraxx look up at him, they give out little murmurs of awe. They revere the Zalaryn traitor as the god of their bloody prophecy. He survived a fierce air strike and rose from the rubble to unite the Kraxx and the rebel Zalaryns. He’s supposed to usher in a new dark era. Well, dark for everyone that the Kraxx impregnates or enslaves. This new era is probably going to be pretty peachy keen for the Kraxx.
They begin a low chant. It’s flat, and toneless, and utterly sinister. They’re in complete synchronization. Every Kraxxoid bastard at the mines is uttering the same words with religious fervor.
I want to be grateful for the brief surcease, but I’m not. I know the worst is still to come. I know that the endless army of marching Kraxx filing towards the mouth of the mines were just a precursor for the real onslaught.
“Ayvinx,” Noxu cries. I’m surprised that he knows my name. Noxu was the former High Merchant in the King’s council—so that means a rogue like me never had any reason to deal with him.
“Come down and fight, you blind bastard!” I scream. Though, in truth, I don’t much want to. Now that I’ve stopped and rested for a few moments, what remaining strength I possess has dribbled out of me like the last drops of freykka in a drunkard’s cup.
“I will,” he says. “Did you think that you were going to hold off my legion of loyal warriors?”
“No,” I say. Why would I lie now—at likely my last moment living and breathing in this universe. “But my legion of warriors will destroy you!”
There is a weak cry from the Fendans. What few remain standing. Most of the soldiers are bleeding out on the dusty ground.
In this moment I have one thing in common with Noxu at least—my hatred of King Xalax. This was Xalax’s best plan for saving the fate of the universe? Sending one mercenary—one son of a drunkard—to Fenda? With two weeks to train their armies to be fierce and skillful enough to withstand a Kraxxoid onslaught? What a joke.
“Your time for surrender is gone,” Noxu says. “There will only be pain and death. The Royal Palace is under siege as we speak. The Royal Family will be slain—as well as that little human cunt you brought with. Oh yes, I know everything. I have spies everywhere in the quadrant. You give a Marked female to curry favor with the Fendan Imperator? You mortals are so short-sighted. I can see everything now—all threads of time and existence, knitting together, unraveling, all at once. A better move would have been to prepare the females as tribute to me. The Kraxx and the true Zalaryn warriors will need to breed. We will sow our seed into every unprotected womb in the universe.”
I feel a possession taking place—as honest and physical as the prayer singers preach about. My limbs feel as if they’re reinforced with steel rods. My heart turns into a furnace, pumping boiling blood throughout every vein in my body. My teeth are razor-sharp, my fingers deft as the legs of a spider.
I am invincible.
Because I need to be.
The only other option is not an option.
Jula is in the palace. And no one is sowing seeds inside her womb. The combat joy is stealing over me.
“I will take joy in your defeat, charlatan,” I say. “We will feed your corpse to the swine and then burn the swine.”
“Such short sight,” he says again. In the time it takes me to blink, he has leapt from the tele-lift. He was hovering at least ten feet in the air, but he jumps ten feet higher. I lose sight of him, but he lands like a feline on his feet, his hands delicately balancing on the ground.
He outstretches his hand and the line of Kraxx is blown away, clearing the path for him like a strong gust of wind will blow away a pile of crisp leaves. It was like he had the blastwave strength of thirty anankahs—and it came straight from his hand; he never drew a weapon.
But I draw mine. Bet your sweet, void-worshiping ass I do. And I smile. Because I am going to kill this bastard once and—
I am on my back, my head striking a rock. What just happened? I feel hands around my neck, my throat closing to the size of a drinking straw. My chest is convulsing wildly, trying to take in enough air. Where is Noxu? He’s not even touching me.
“Do you like this?” he says. That closing sensation gets stronger, my throat growing narrower. My eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head. Ha, I think—maybe they will, and I can gain tremendous vision, as Noxu has insisted he’s done. And all of a sudden, the tightness is gone. I take in great gasps of air, my throat as ragged and raw as if I’d just swallowed a knife.
“Not really,” I say. I get up to my feet and stare at Noxu. He seems to have grown taller, his shoulders broader. But that’s no matter. It’s his eyes. They’re black and as never-ending as the void itself. He lost his eyes in the explosion that should have killed him, and it’s rumored that he replaced them with polished orbs of obsidian. But that’s utter nonsense.
It’s obvious that the empty sockets are filled with the raw and untappable power of the void.
Untappable—until now.
I point my weapon at him, and then it’s ripped out of my hands. It flies across the canyon until it disappears out of sight. Noxu steps towards me. My combat joy has evaporated, and the only thing left in my veins is the cold certainty that I am about to be destroyed—that Jula is going to be enslaved, and that the universe must not be a guiding force, as many think it is. The Fates would not give me a mate just days before our entire universe is cloaked in the wrath of Lord Noxu’s reign.
Something is burning. Inside me. My stomach is on fire. Lord Noxu points his finger at my midsection, holding my gaze with his own dark orbs. I can’t look away. I’m hypnotized, rooted to the spot. I can only stand like an idiot and wait as the fire consumes me from the inside out.
“This is only a small taste of what’s to come,” he says. He lowers his finger and the pain stops instantly. “You will wish for the fire—for the heat and the warmth—after you’re bathed in the cold isolation of the void.”
He holds out both hands this time and starts to massage the air. He would look stupid, except whatever magic he’s performing is as serious as it is deadly. First it’s in my toes, then my legs. I feel the cold embrace of ice—so deep and sharp that I ache with such intensity that I fall to the ground.
He’s right—the burning was better than this. Burning is heat, is love, is life.
This icy touch is pure isolation. It’s being cut off from all other life. It’s what I’ve felt my whole life—before Jula. The sense of helplessness. Of loneliness. Of pain.
My head is swimming with these desperate thoughts and it’s worse that the physical pain of the cold. The separation. The loneliness. The surety that I will never see her again. I’ll never see anyone again—but my soul will still exist, suspended in a freezing cocoon for all eternity.
This is enough to drive me mad. I scream and scream.
And scream.
My sanity must have broken, because I see something behind Noxu. The sky is alight again. Sunslight. No, not sunslight—there’s only one sun on Fenda…
…and the Fendan sun isn’t green.
The entire sky is suddenly green. I hear screams and explosions. I smell burning flesh. I smell excrement as
bowels loosen. I smell tangy salt in the air. Everything has stopped. Time itself is a fiction.
In the sky, I see a face. A face? Yes—and I know this face, that’s the damnest thing.
It’s the green and smiling face of a ghost.
I wake up in a room, the bright lights depending from the ceiling making it hard to see. The sound that woke me is the sound of a thick metal door slamming shut.
I’m propped up, standing against the wall. My arms are bound behind my back. There’s a rope around my neck. When I try to move my head, I can only move it about an inch away from the wall before I’m stopped. But the truly horrible thing? It’s that when I move my head back to the wall, the rope doesn’t slacken again. They tied it with some slipknot so the more I struggle and try to get away, the tighter the noose around my throat becomes.
Footsteps. Two long, flat heads silhouetted against the bright bulb. They chitter and my head spins—the language procedure I had is making my brain ache trying to decipher their insectile language.
“You are the mate of the one called Ayvinx,” they say. Dearest void, they’re speaking in complete unison. They really are linked up in a hive-mind.
“I am!” I shout defiantly. It feels good to declare this fact, even if I have only been mated to him for a short while—and even if I’m telling it to the very agents of my impending demise.
“He slayed many of our kind yesterday,” they say. “He slays many right now.” The way they speak, it’s as if they can sense it. Of course they can. Their sick minds are all bonded together. They can probably feel it every time one of their hive mates is slaughtered.
“You will not win,” I say. “You will not overtake this planet.” I don’t know why I say this—some inner voice just speaks up.
“We have already won,” they say. “The Dark Lord has descended. First Fenda, then beyond.”
“No,” I say. They might be a part of a violent swarming hive that shares a crude telepathy, but I have my own senses—and I know that this isn’t true. I know that Ayvinx is still alive. He spoke of our bond as a physical thing—and that was no metaphor. It’s real. When Ayvinx took my body, he connected our spirits. If he was to fall, I’d know it in the marrow of my bones.
“Yes,” they say. “First Fenda, then beyond.” They repeat their rallying cry. “We must replenish our race,” they say. “Ayvinx has slain many of us. We must repopulate.”
With their movements synchronized down to the millisecond, they peel back a layer of their… shells? There’s no other way to describe it. They don’t wear clothes. Their bodies are armored in thick black scaled plates. Their abdominal plates unfold, revealing a softer black body underneath. It’s like a cockroach that’s about to take flight.
But they’re not going to fly. I know that. I know what they’ve got on their mind. Repopulation. Replenishing the race.
First Fenda. First me.
With the same speed, they retract long… things from between their legs. They don’t have cocks, thick and pulsing as I expected. The things keep unfurling until they reach full length of almost two feet long. They’re thin and wiry, covered in curved barbs that look razor sharp. I think of that creature in the ventilation duct—how it hooked its claws into my hand. That’s what these barbs look like—claws.
“You will carry our seed,” they say. “You will grow our progeny. You will nourish our young. It will be just recompense. The mate of he who slew so many Kraxx will bear that many and more into existence.”
They approach me, pulling my dress apart in crude shreds. I recoil from the touch, but when I jerk back, that noose around my neck tightens a little more, the rope digging into my skin now.
“Deposit first,” one of them says, and it’s weird to hear them speak individually again. The creature bends down and grabs my ankles. He stands up, holding them aloft, and now my bound neck bears so much of my weight that it’s hard to breathe—but I wish it was harder. I wish this rope would snap my neck, so I wouldn’t become host to their vile offspring. He pulls my ankles apart, spreading my legs. Oh void, why couldn’t they deposit their eggs into my arm or something? If that thing touches me, I’m going to go insane.
I try to free my hands, but they’re tied tightly behind my back. I wiggle my arm and feel the wound from the duct creature break open again. The blood trickles again and it covers my wrist. It might be enough—just enough. I rotate my arm back and forth, coating it with the blood. Now, when I try to slip my hand through the ropes, I feel it give a little. I might be able to get it out now, the blood providing just enough slipperiness to get it through.
I wrench my arm free, taking some of the skin off my hand as I do so. I’m going to look like hell when this is done—but I’ll take any manner of wound just so long as my belly’s flat and not home to hundreds of Kraxxoid eggs.
I lurch forward, the rope around my neck tightening painfully. I jab one of my fingers into the eye of the Kraxx holding my legs. He flinches and drops them.
I notice with stunned horror that even though I only poked one of them in the eye, they both double-over in pain. They’re linked right now, I think—some sort of mind-meld that has to do with conquest and breeding.
I kick my legs and connect with one of their abdomens, but I can tell it’s a glancing blow at best. The rope around my neck is now dangerously tight. I can hardly draw in a breath. The edge of my vision is getting black and fuzzy.
I’m going under, but that’s okay, I think. As long as I die with the bond between myself and Ayvinx still intact. As long as these bastards don’t sever it with their barbaric breeding practice.
I’m slipping. My field of vision little more than a speck of color in a hazy sea of blackness.
But the last thing I see is the two Kraxx standing and straightening up. Slow smiles spreading across their emotionless faces.
As I watch the Green Ghost Army descend, I feel a state of calm wash over me. There is a prophecy. There is a force at work here. And if there is a force that’s working to destroy the Kraxx—then perhaps it’s the same force that’s working to bring me and Jula together.
To keep us together.
Because that’s what this is all about. The Kraxx need minerals so they can travel and deposit their eggs in more sectors. The disaffected Zalaryn males are denied a chance to mate and reproduce on their home planet, so they fight in hope that in some other planet, in some other distant quadrant, there might be a mate for them, too—their own hope for the future.
Because without offspring, this whole mess is useless. Without a mate—without a flesh-and-blood embodiment of the bond with your mate (or, in the case of the Kraxx, your subjugation) then what’s the point of any of it? The people of Zalaryx have struggled ever since the damned qizo ruined our females. Ruined our future. We’ve tried to get females from Earth, but that was just like pressing a handkerchief to the bloody stump of a severed limb.
And now I know what to do.
The Green Ghost Army is fighting the Kraxx, wielding weapons that shoot some ethereal green beam of light from the ends. When the green beam comes in contact with an enemy, the target crumples to the ground—but only for the briefest of moments. Then they shrivel, as if all the moisture has left their body, and for all I know, that’s exactly what’s happening. Finally, all that’s left is a tough, leathery husk.
Lord Noxu is engaged in combat with the leader of the Green Ghost Army. I know the leader’s face—and his mere presence is an affront to all the laws of nature. Because the male fighting Noxu is dead.
Was dead.
It is Xorba, Xalax’s long-dead father.
I need to go. I have a plan—not just for me and Jula to survive, but for all of us to survive. It’s the only thing that will save any of us—because Noxu was right. I am short-sighted.
But not anymore. I looked into the orbs of the void. I gained a little bit of that vision.
It’s almost impossible to tear my eyes away from the combat. Noxu and Xorba are fighting a
s no others I’ve ever seen. It’s poetry, their deadly motion. Every weapon strike is a song. There will never be two greater fighters engaged in battle ever again.
I’m going to make sure of that.
I roll away from the fray, behind a large chunk of rock. I rummage in my waist-pouch and when my hand closes around the thin capsule, I smile—because it’s not an end to this whole thing.
It’s a beginning.
I empty the contents of the capsule and begin to braid the wires together. I think this should work. I worked out the circuitry map in my head, but I’m working under less-than-ideal conditions.
I tap three of the sensors into the ground, wishing I had my anankah to use as a rudimentary hammer. I have to push them into the hard, stony earth with the palms of my hand. My hands feel like a hundred red-hot needles are burrowing deep into the palms, itching and pinching. I’ve probably broken something, snapped some vital tendon or crushed a central nerve, but I can’t worry about that now.
The sensors are ready. The wires are ready. I just need to program my comm-panel. I hit the keystrokes, setting up an algorithm that I hope will work. I double-check it, running through the steps in my head.
It’s ready. All it needs now is a catalyst.
I stand at the opening of the mines. So far, no Kraxx have made it through—and, void help me, if all goes according to my plan, none ever will.
None of us ever will—because these mines are an abomination. They were never meant to be opened.
And I’m going to close them. Permanently.
“Noxu,” I say. “Remember when I swore that you would never get into these mines?”
“I remember nothing but bravado and desperation,” he says. He casually flicks his finger in my direction and I feel the icy touch spread up my feet.
“I know that space is limited inside that little pea-brain of yours,” I say. My feet are frozen—literally. The cold has frozen them. The muscles, the joints are all frozen solid. I know when my boots come off I’m going to be lucky to have only a few frostbite- blackened toes. “But you’ll never cross this threshold. Not in a million years will you step foot inside.”