“As for who I am, I am the God and ruler of this universe,” the alien went on. “And we are Faros. We met once before, but you don’t remember that meeting.”
The Inquisitor. That explained how this being knew him. Garek worked some moisture into his suddenly dry mouth and shook his head. “You should be speaking to our leaders. I can escort you to an audience with them if you like,” Garek suggested.
“I am already speaking with them.”
Garek blinked. Confusion swirled. “I’m not a lead—”
“Not you. Not here. I am in many places. Your leaders have agreed to a surrender.” The Faro’s blue eyes brightened, and a smile curved his lips. “Your people are now slaves of the Farosien Empire.”
Garek’s blood turned to ice. “What do you mean slaves?”
The alien didn’t have a chance to reply. There came a tell-tale flash of dazzling white light that left them both momentarily blind and groping in a sea of white cotton. Astralis had just jumped away. The surrender must have been a ploy to escape.
When Garek finished blinking the spots from his eyes, he saw that the alien’s smile was broader than ever. He looked delighted. “So you have some fight in you after all. Good!”
“Weapons free!” Garek yelled.
His squad opened fire with a roar of explosive rounds. The corridor turned white again, but this time from the constant flurry of explosions. Amidst the bursts of light and glowing shrapnel, the blue aliens stood their ground, shielded from the onslaught by unseen means. Slowly, they drew shimmering swords from scabbards on their backs, and they started toward Garek’s squad. The crown-wearing alien reached the first bot and casually sliced it in half with his sword. The pieces clattered as they fell. Those swords were shimmering for a reason. The blades had to be razor-shielded—sheathed in microscopically-sharp energy shields.
Garek’s guts twisted into a knot as he imagined being sliced in half just like that bot. “Fall back!” he yelled over the squad’s comm channel. He turned and ran as fast as he dared in the confines of the ship’s corridors. His feet slammed the deck like thunder. With his suit’s augmented strength, Garek was able to put a lot of distance between him and the invading aliens in just a few seconds. He breathed out a shaky sigh as he neared the end of the corridor.
They wouldn’t be able to touch him with their swords now, and it didn’t look like the aliens had any ranged weapons. No sooner had he finished that thought than a flash of movement raced into and out of Garek’s peripheral vision with an accompanying thup-thup-thup of robes slapping bare skin, like a flag flying high in a stiff wind.
The crown-wearing alien now stood blocking the way at the end of the corridor. Garek stumbled as he tried to slow down, but he was moving too fast. With his exosuit’s augmented strength he’d already hit 45 kph.
The Faro gave a gaping grin, and a black tongue flicked over black lips. He thrust out his shimmering sword a split second before Garek collided with him. The sword went through him, armor and all, with a searing heat. The alien stumbled back a few steps with his momentum, but he pushed back with impossible strength, and managed to remain standing. The Faro’s blazing blue eyes were wide and gleeful.
Garek coughed, splattering the inside of his helmet with a crimson ink-blot. He could feel his blood boiling where it touched the alien sword; he heard it sizzling as smoke rose from his belly. Garek gaped, breathless, at the blue-skinned monster before him, the one who called himself by a human name and spoke their language as if it were his own.
Darkness swelled, and Garek’s head swam. The Faro pulled him close, until those glowing blue eyes were all he could see, and then the alien whispered into the audio-pickup in the chin of Garek’s helmet.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of your daughter.”
Garek’s eyes flew wide, and he raged against the encroaching darkness. He grabbed the Faro’s neck in both of his hands and squeezed with all of the strength he had left. The alien sneered and flexed his neck against the assault, battling with Garek’s hands, trying to break his grip. Then something popped and snapped. Garek felt bones grind together beneath his fingers, and the alien’s head sagged at an odd angle, blue eyes suddenly dim and fading. Garek let go and stumbled away, taking the alien’s shimmering, sizzling sword with him in his belly. He coughed up another crimson ink-blot. Unable to see, he reached for his helmet with numb hands and twisted it off. Stumbling in a dizzy circle and fighting to remain standing, Garek batted clumsily at the hilt of the sword protruding from his torso. After several tries, he managed to grab the sword and pull it free. Blood bubbled lazily from a broad slit in his suit, and Garek collapsed to his knees, eyes wide and blinking. His mind raged against his body, urging it to stand and fight, but his muscles didn’t so much as twitch.
Garek blinked, watching the last bot in his squad fall in half a dozen pieces as three swords flashed through it at the same time. Then the blue-skinned aliens stalked toward him. It was all he could do to remain conscious and watch as they came for him. Those aliens hoisted him to his feet, pulling him up as if he weighed nothing at all, then they turned and held him facing their fallen leader, the one whose neck Garek had snapped. The alien lay on the deck with that haughty grin frozen on its lips, blue eyes bright and staring at the ceiling.
Garek blinked and heaved a shuddering gasp. Those eyes had been dim a moment ago. As he watched, the impossible happened. The dead rose to life. The alien’s broken neck once again held its grinning head high, and those glowing blue eyes swept to Garek.
The dead alien spoke: “You cannot kill me.” It held out a strangely glowing hand to its fallen sword, and the blade snapped into its palm. The dormant weapon shimmered to life with a barely audible hum of energy.
Garek blinked, wondering what he’d just seen. Some kind of grav gun? But there was no device in the alien’s hand—just as he hadn’t seen any kind of shield emitter lurking beneath the alien’s robes. It was as if they weren’t really flesh and blood, but some kind of living technology.
The alien leader stalked toward him. With a derisive twist of its lips, the one who called himself Lucien—light-bringer—ran him through, over and over again. The shimmering blade flashed in and out of Garek’s torso with a searing heat, and his mouth opened in a soundless scream.
Just as he felt his life slipping away, the alien held up a glowing palm to his face and blinded him with pure, radiant light. Light-bringer, he thought, as the light swept him into a blinding sea. For a frozen heartbeat, Garek saw the mind of his enemy laid bare; it unfolded before him in a landscape of thoughts, memories, and plans as old as time. He wanted to scream out a warning to any who would listen, but it was over before he could: the light faded, taking this strange new world with it, and he was left to flail in the dark.
Alien whispers skittered around him, followed by hissing laughter. Somehow Garek knew that alien had seen into him, just as he had seen into it. It had been to the landscape of his mind and found something there, some vital weakness in Astralis that would be their undoing.
Garek battled the darkness, every ounce of his being clawing for purchase, fingernails cracking as they held to a shadowy cliff over a gaping abyss. He tried thinking the thoughts that would activate his comms and allow him to send the others a warning, but he couldn’t tell if it worked, and he no longer had the strength to hold on. He lost his grip and fell into the abyss. The darkness was so absolute that not even time could escape. This was death: falling forever in a frozen instant between all that was, and all that wasn’t, into a place so empty that not even energy could exist.
Chapter 8
Astralis
Astralis jumped. Tyra stood blinking spots from her eyes as the afterglow from the jump faded. Confusion warred with tenuous hope in her brain. The last thing she’d heard from the battle was that they were overrun and the enemy was boarding them. How had they gone from that to being able to jump away?
Tyra stared at the holomap of Fallside in her offi
ce, where she and the heads of various departments and emergency response units had gathered to oversee the evacuation of Fallside’s outer sections. Her responsibility didn’t extend to directing the defense of her city, but she could clearly see the green dots that marked the locations where squads of Marines had been deployed, and the red and green Xs, that indicated where enemy soldiers and friendly Marines had fallen. There were only a handful of red Xs for fallen enemies, but plenty of green.
“We jumped? What’s happening, Madam Councilor?” Fallside’s Chancellor of Education sidled up to her, his high brow furrowed with concern.
Tyra shook her head. “I know as much as you do, Chancellor.” Turning away from the others in the room, Tyra walked over to a window overlooking Fallside and used her ARCs to mentally place a call to Chief Councilor Ellis. He answered after just a brief delay.
“This had better be important.”
“What’s happening?” Tyra demanded.
Ellis sighed. “Your curiosity can wait, Mrs. Ortane.”
She pressed on, “We jumped away?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“At the risk of repeating my—”
“Never mind. I’m joining you on the bridge.”
“You don’t have clearance!”
“Then grant me clearance! If I’m supposed to keep Fallside safe, I need to know what I’m up against. Where are we now? Were we followed? How many hostiles do we have on board? What’s the nature and disposition of the enemy forces?”
“None of that is any of your concern, Councilor. Rest assured Admiral Stavos and General Graves are doing everything they can to keep us safe.”
Tyra didn’t reply, but Ellis must have heard her panting over the comms.
“Did you hear me, Councilor?”
“I heard you,” she said as she reached the nearest elevator.
“Why are you out of breath?”
“See you soon,” she said, and ended the comms. She punched in -500 on the keypad and the elevator dropped swiftly through Hubble Mountain, down past two hundred and fifty meters of dirt, and past more than a kilometer of decks on its way to the command level.
Tyra’s AR implant trilled with an incoming call from Ellis, and a corresponding comms icon flashed in the top right corner of her field of view. She muted the sound and ignored the flashing icon.
Leaving the familiar comforts of the surface behind on her way down into the labyrinthine depths of the ship’s sub-levels, Tyra felt more cut off from her children than ever, but she’d already checked in with Lucien, and both Atara and Theola were safely hidden away in Hubble Mountain Shelter Twelve.
Besides, the only way she could know how much danger they were really in was by going down to the bridge and demanding answers, so it wasn’t like she was abandoning them. Not really.
The elevator reached sub level five hundred, and the door slid open. Tyra jogged out into a no-frills corridor that sported low ceilings with exposed conduits and naked, scuffed metal walls.
She pulled up a map on her ARCs to locate the bridge and followed the guide prompts to get there: take next left down Corridor C. Make right at junction four. Await scans at Security Checkpoint Delta.
Tyra must have jogged past a dozen squads of Marine bots with their human sergeants trailing safely behind before one of those sergeants thought to ask where she was going.
“On my way to the bridge to see Admiral Stavos and General Graves,” she said, between gasps for air.
“I’ll escort you there,” the sergeant said.
“Thank you... Sergeant Ikes,” Tyra replied, looking his name up on her ARCs. She thanked her luck that he’d asked where she was going. This sergeant was probably her best bet to actually get into the bridge. Sergeant Ikes led the way there, striking a brisk pace that made her feel like she needed to jog to keep up. The sergeant’s squad of bots clanked along behind her, their metal feet striking the deck in perfect synchrony.
When they arrived at the bridge, a pair of guard bots scanned her and the sergeant with flickering blue fans of light while the sergeant’s squad fanned out to wait on either side of the doors.
As soon as the scans were complete, the doors parted to reveal a vast chamber with several tiers of catwalks and control stations. The far wall soared with four-story-high viewscreens and unparalleled starry vistas.
Sergeant Ikes led Tyra straight up to a holo table in the center of the deck where they’d emerged. Familiar faces leaned over that table, aglow in the azure light of holo imagery.
The sergeant fetched up short in front of a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man in a Marine’s gleaming black exosuit. His helmet was missing, revealing dark hair, clipped peach-fuzz short, and the collar of a Marine’s uniform, sporting the four silver stars of a general’s insignia.
“Sergeant Ikes reporting, General,” he said, saluting crisply.
The general straightened from leaning over the table and returned his salute; then his eyes flicked to Tyra and he looked her up and down with one dark eyebrow raised.
“I have Madam Councilor Ortane here from Fallside to see you, sir,” Sergeant Ikes explained.
“I didn’t request to see any councilors,” he barked gruffly, and Sergeant Ikes faltered visibly. The sergeant glanced uncertainly at Tyra, and she smiled sympathetically back.
“My fault,” she said. “I led Sergeant Ikes to believe I had been summoned here.”
Graves snorted. “I see. In that case, you can leave.”
“This way, ma’am...” Ikes said, taking her by the arm to lead her back the way they’d come.
Tyra jerked her arm free and stood her ground. “Hold on! I have tens of millions of people trampling each other on their way to get to shelters that were only built to hold a few hundred thousand. If I’m expected to calm all those people down and bring order, I need to know what’s going on.”
General Graves ground his teeth. “I don’t have time for this. Councilor Ellis—”
Chief Councilor Ellis looked up from the holo table with a tight smile. “I’ll deal with her, General.” Ellis came and took her aside. “I told you not to come here,” he chided in his most patient voice, the one he reserved for detractors at political rallies.
Tyra rounded on him with arms crossed over her chest. “I’ll go just as soon as you answer my questions.”
Ellis’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want to know?”
“How did we get away? We were surrounded. They must have had quantum jamming fields engaged. They did the last time.”
“We jumped through their jamming field.”
Horror sliced through Tyra at that. “I thought jumping through a magnetic field could cause a jump failure... what do you call it?”
A new voice joined the discussion: “Scattering. The chances were high, but we didn’t have a choice.”
Tyra turned to see Admiral Stavos come striding up to them. He stopped a few feet away, a picture of calm and obsessive neatness. His short white hair—a fashionable color for a man with his rank and position—was perfectly combed and gelled into submission, and his matching Van Dyke beard was trimmed to a regulation length. His uniform was neatly pressed and a spotless white with gold buttons and medals gleaming brightly, as if they’d just been polished. The five golden stars of his rank insignia glittered on his collar, winking at Tyra from the shadows under his chin.
“How high were the chances?” Tyra pressed.
“Forty-seven percent. Not odds I’d want to play again with three hundred and fifty million lives hanging in the balance.”
Tyra nodded woodenly. The admiral had just tossed a coin to determine their survival. No wonder he’d waited until they’d already been boarded to jump out. He’d probably been hoping to find some other way to escape. Any other way.
“Where are we now?” she asked.
Ellis shrugged. “Does it matter? Somewhere.”
Tyra chambered a deadly look, twin barrels glaring at him. “Did the enemy fl
eet follow us?”
“Not yet,” Admiral Stavos replied. “But we still have hundreds of alien troops on board, and we’re having difficulty eliminating them. We’re jamming all outbound comms to make sure they can’t transmit a signal to their fleet, but they might still find a way to do that if they can disable our jammers.”
“Hundreds of alien troops? That’s it? You’re telling me a few hundred aliens are overwhelming our defenses?”
“I’m afraid so,” Stavos replied.
Tyra was shocked. They had over a million Marine bots on Astralis, plus thousands of human sergeants and security forces. It was absurd to think a few hundred of anything could overwhelm all of them.
Ellis nodded. “Now you know why the general is in such a bad mood. They have us falling back faster than we can retreat.”
“How is that possible?” Tyra asked.
“Our weapons appear to be ineffectual against their personal shields,” Admiral Stavos put in. “At the risk of damaging our own ship, we’re bringing heavier firepower to bear.”
“What do they want? Have they made contact with us? Any demands?”
“Unfortunately, they have,” Ellis said. “Their leader is aboard... several dozen clones of him, anyway.” Tyra’s eyes widened at that. “They all speak Versal fluently.”
“Versal?” The shocks just kept coming. Tyra shook her head, struggling to process the implications of that. “What were his—their—demands?”
“First he introduced himself and explained who they are,” Ellis said. “Apparently they’re a race of humanoids called the Faros, and they claim to have been created by Etherus alongside the Etherians. They were to be Etheria’s army, but they instigated a rebellion, which led to the Great War. After which, as you know, Etherus put some of the rebel Etherians in human bodies to give them a taste of freedom. The part that’s news to us is that Etherus exiled all the Faros beyond the Red Line.”
Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within Page 5