Magnitude: A Space Opera Adventure (Blackstar Command Book 2)

by A. C. Hadfield

  Kai tried not to think of all the casualties.

  Despite that particular metric being available for the battle projection, he chose not to display it. There was a time to focus on the casualties, and right now his main aim was to prevent as many as possible. There would be time if they survived to do right by the dead.

  More and more shrapnel and cannon fire struck the Blackstar as Eesoh engaged the thrusters. The shields held, but a sustained barrage would soon breach them. Kai just hoped they could help turn the tide before the Blackstar succumbed.

  “Bandar,” Kendal called out over the comm channel, “use the particle rearrangement cannon to clear a path through the shrapnel and fire. Set a wide arc to cover you and the Rapier. It’s a trick I’ve used before.”

  “I hear you, Dad,” Bandar said, swinging the terminal over his lap and gesturing frantically to bring the weapons online while Eesoh focused on targeting and piloting—which had proven exceptionally taxing given that Eesoh hadn’t thought of the particle rearrangement cannon.

  Kai could feel the entity’s stress and emphasize with it.

  It wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, and given the Blackstar was its chosen habitat, each strike must have hurt like a knife to the body.

  They approached the defensive network and the hundreds of ships surrounding it. The rearrangement cannon worked well to turn any potential danger into subatomic particles, bathing the Blackstar and Rapier in a film of space dust.

  “Sen, are you making any headway?” Kai asked.

  “I’ve narrowed down the type of encryption,” she said. “Wiggs has a codec, as do all the drones. I’m just waiting on it to gain security credentials from the server. Given that the Sumahn are screwing with them, IDs are changing all the time, so we should be able to spoof our way… There! We’re in. Wiggs is online, tracing now…”

  “Great job, Sen!”

  Kai turned his attention back to the projection.

  Almost every allied ship was now firing on the Dominion. Its shields were holding, each missile’s strike sending heat and power around it in a distributed bubble of energy transference.

  Although the glowing white light had slowed, it hadn’t stopped.

  The battle was now utterly chaotic.

  All strategies had been abandoned, resulting in an all-against-one effort for survival.

  General Hominos was barking orders over the channel.

  Various captains and commanders were doing their best to implement his orders, but it seemed as though every few seconds another ship went offline.

  The Sumahn were littering the system with their temporary wormholes, taking the Koldax away, but even they were suffering losses, almost a third of which had been killed. Each loss stabbed Kai in the heart—these peaceful, majestic creatures being slaughtered by machines was almost too much to bear.

  The Dominion’s weapon reached its climax and fired again, just a few klicks from the Blackstar and Rapier’s position. Another two of the giant hexagonal superconducting magnets exploded, taking the surrounding craft with them.

  A red light began to flash on the battle projection.

  [Defensive Network Deactivated. Defensive Network Offline.]

  “We’re too late,” Bandar said. “Look, the Dominion’s spun to face Capsis Prime… and we have no way of stopping it.”

  All the noise and imagery began to fade in the distance as Kai felt the now-familiar tingle within his head as a vision bubbled up. His Navigator ancestry was activating as it had done in the crystal city. Only this time, he felt it come at him in great waves. Tons of metrics, outcomes, and strategies flooded his consciousness.

  At first, he felt he would drown in it and resisted.

  Yet it still came, the barrier now fully open and his full potential cascading down to him from hundreds of millennia.

  Senaya was waving her arms and screaming something.

  Bandar looked wild-eyed.

  Kai’s mother and father were saying something over the channel as the Rapier opened fire on a group of Koldax approaching their position.

  A formation of fifteen Sumahn swam in their elegant way past the front of the Blackstar and took the Koldax away through their wormholes, removing the threat. As the last one disappeared, the wormhole shrank to a pinhead of light, the vision in Kai’s mind crystallized, and he knew what he had to do.

  Senaya was still screaming, “We’re in! We’re in the network! I’m activating a virus to shut down the Koldax drones’ ability to carry out orders…”

  “It’ll still be too late,” Kai said calmly. He had a perfect picture of the outcome. A smile spread across his face. “Nothing matters anymore. It’s time to end this.”

  Bandar snapped his gaze away from the battle projection to face Kai. “What the hells are you talking about?”

  “I’m going in.”

  “Where?”

  “Kai?” Brenna said. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  Taking the tetrahedron from its familiar place within his pocket, Kai held it in his palm and closed his eyes to see the vision once more. He knew in that instant this would be the only way. He couldn’t come back.

  Nobody and nothing could.

  After all this time, he finally understood what the artifact was for.

  And his role in the fate of the galaxy.

  He turned to face Senaya and said. “I’m going into the belly of the beast. I’m going to destroy it from within. Eesoh, set a wormhole for these coordinates.” He read out a series of numbers that he’d received from his vision and that he knew was the command center of the Dominion. “I want it to start from just outside the airlock.”

  Senaya and Bandar were frantically trying to appeal to him, but their voices became silent. Shrugging them off, Kai exited the bridge and rushed to the airlock, saying “Guys, trust me, this is the only way,” over the comm channel and ignoring their protests and questions. He didn’t have time to translate what he saw in his vision. Action was needed now. He could explain later—if possible.

  “You better know what you’re doing, Kai. Otherwise, I will damn well kick your ass all over this galaxy,” Senaya yelled. “You hear me?”

  Kai smiled as he entered the airlock.

  Eesoh communicated to him that a small temporary wormhole was being generated and would be ready the moment he exited the ship.

  Kai knew he should be scared; no one had ever walked into such an anomaly before without the protection of a ship, but he knew instinctively he would be fine.

  The vision explained so much; the risks he’d taken as a ship racer. The ‘lucky’ moments that got him out of one scrape or another. It wasn’t luck at all; it was his fate.

  And for the first time in his existence, he knew he was doing the right thing.

  With his helmet and breather in place, rifle strapped to his back, and the airlock door behind him secured, he approached the outer breach.

  Eesoh opened it for him.

  A swirling white and blue entry point awaited just a few feet from the ship.

  “Hurry,” Eesoh said. “There’s no time to wait.”

  And so, Kai didn’t.

  “It was good knowing you, Eesoh.”

  With that, Kai stepped out of the Blackstar and dove headfirst into the wormhole.

  Chapter 31

  AT FIRST, Kai thought it hadn’t worked. The moment he stepped inside the wormhole, his vision was consumed by blackness. He felt nothing as though he were just floating in a vacuum. But a second later, a bright flash of light blinded him, and he struck his head against something solid. His body slumped hard to the floor. Pain exploded in his hip and lower back.

  He took a deep breath and opened his eyes but saw only darkness. Behind him, a pop sounded, and a mist settled on the glass mask of his helmet. He spun around to see a pinhead of light wink out of existence—the wormhole had closed behind him.

  Okay, he thought, where am I?

  The pain continued to pulse in
his hip when he shifted his body and got to his feet. Reaching out, he touched something solid. With the place in total darkness, he had to rely on the sense of touch and quickly came to the conclusion he was in a tall corridor of sorts—the ceiling was out of reach, but he found two walls about two meters apart and of course the floor on which he stood.

  The vacuum motors in his shoes whined on and off with each step as he made his way down the corridor, using the right-side wall as a guide.

  Vibrations ran through his gloved hands and up his arms. The sensation was familiar: a ship under thrust, albeit in this case a low thrust. There was a deeper thrum coming from somewhere else beneath him.

  “Kai, do you read me?” Senaya was calling him across their comm channel, but her voice was so faint he could barely make out her words.

  “Just about,” he said. “I think I made it. I’m on a ship, so I’m assuming it’s the Dominion.”

  “I’m so glad you’re alive. What other crazy plans do you have in mind? Because whatever it is, you’re going to have to be quick about it; the weapon is recharging.”

  “I’m heading for the battery compartment,” he said. “If I destroy that, it won’t have the power necessary to destroy Capsis Prime.”

  “And how do you plan on doing that?” Senaya asked between bouts of static.

  “I’m kinda hoping you’ll help with that when I get there.”

  “Kai, you’re mad, you know…” Her voice trailed off as static overwhelmed the signal.

  Damn it, he thought. He’d have to figure it out himself after all. He took a few moments to relax, get his breath back and focus on the vision he’d had. He pictured an area within the ship that had grabbed his attention and where he suspected the batteries were held. The more he focused on the image, the more he got a sense of where he was.

  And then the realization slapped him so hard in the face he laughed out loud.

  He was a freaking Navigator! Of course he would know where to go…

  The barriers to the cache of information in his mind were coming down one by one with each of these visions and realizations. He wished the Navigators themselves could have been a little more helpful so he had the info at hand the moment they got here, but he supposed he had to let the process happen for himself so he truly understood.

  Despite the ship being in total darkness, he hurried forward now, taking one corridor after the other, rifle in hand and pointed forward into the gloom. That the ship was so devoid of machinery or drones didn’t surprise him. They wouldn’t have expected anyone or anything to have boarded, and the drones were more useful in the battle.

  It took a further couple of minutes to descend the levels and traverse the long corridors until he came to a door he knew instinctively led to the battery compartment.

  Although compartment didn’t really cover it.

  When he tested the door, it opened easily. He stepped inside and felt its cavernous dimensions expand around him. The place was huge and hummed loudly; the pressure pushed against his mask. He felt it thump against his body in a rhythmic pattern.

  The helmet’s HUD told him it was nearly a hundred degrees inside. A loud whine started, telling him that the weapon was ramping up its power. Massive batteries, like two-story buildings, stretched as far as the eye could see into the darkness—which ultimately wasn’t very far, but using his newly realized Navigator sense, he knew they went for many hundreds of meters, perhaps even the full length of the ship.

  The battery units closest to him featured a strip of neon blue across their flat, metallic surface. Although not perfect, they were enough to provide him with more light to ‘navigate’ by. He thought of trying to communicate to Senaya, but the comm channel continued to hiss.

  His hand began to tremble as he stepped forward and moved closer to the area he’d seen in his vision. This long corridor between batteries would lead to a central open area, where a command unit regulated the power.

  Running now, almost leaping given the microgravity generated by the low thrust, Kai quickly reached the open area that he had foreseen.

  Each time reality matched up to his vision, he felt more confident this was the way, this was what he had to do.

  The command unit in the center of the room was a semitranslucent sphere of coalescing gas set atop an obsidian column roughly waist high. He had seen something similar in the library of artifacts back at the crystal city on Azelia. He knew this to be of Koldax origin and the center of their power.

  This was where he was always meant to come.

  The trembling in his hands increased. He moved closer until he could reach the sphere. A crackle of energy snaked all over the round ball of gas. He put his hand into it, but nothing happened; the gas just obscured his hand, creating no other damaging effects.

  This was a technology he did not understand. It was a technology even the Navigators didn’t understand; otherwise, they would have told him more. Even his vision and opened cache of information provided no insight.

  But he didn’t need to know how it worked to destroy it.

  The process was very clear.

  Kai slung his rifle over his shoulder and removed the tetrahedron from his pocket. A streak of electricity shot from the gaseous sphere to strike it. The strange symbols he had seen but once on the tetrahedron’s surface came to life, eliciting a chill down his spine.

  The heat in the room increased a further ten degrees.

  Warning lights flashed on his helmet. He switched off the early-warning system. He didn’t need it now; he only needed the helmet to provide oxygen.

  The whining sound also increased, making the glass of his mask vibrate.

  And the rhythmic pulsing became more violent. With each pulse, Kai had to fight to maintain his balance. It felt as though the entire ship was building tension.

  He knew what that meant and knew he had little time left.

  With no other choice, Kai placed the tetrahedron, the key to travel to and from the Veil, and his birthright, into the gaseous sphere. When he removed his glove, the artifact floated within the gas orb.

  The green symbols grew brighter until they were aflame with green fire.

  A miniature lightning storm exploded within, each bolt striking off the Navigator artifact. The ship all around him shook and vibrated. The temperature continued to increase, but the whine didn’t stop, and the batteries continued to convert their power.

  Before Kai had time to think what else he had to do—his earlier vision no longer providing clues—he felt a looming presence behind him.

  He spun to see the large hideous form of a half-organic-half-machine entity.

  The thing looked like a mechanical bipedal dog with a long snout, glowing yellow eyes, and taloned hands. Before Kai could do anything, the creature roared and grabbed the sides of Kai’s helmet, ripping it clear from the mounting ring and tossing it aside like a piece of inconsequential trash.

  The heat blasted Kai’s face, making his skin prickle as it dried almost immediately. The loud whine made him wince with pain, yet he managed to squeeze out a few words. “Farah Hett, I presume?”

  “Your presumptions are correct, but it matters not. It’s time for you to die.”

  With that, the creature reached behind its shoulders in a way that organic limbs don’t normally work and pulled forward two long, gleaming blades that within a split second were thrust forward into Kai’s chest.

  The pain was incredible. His entire body went into spasm, and his throat closed. Then, with a pulse of energy, he let out a primal scream that cleared all pain, anguish, and anxiety. His mind flashed brightly, and everything was put into place.

  There was no more confusion, no pain from the past, no questions.

  The attack, although not part of his previous vision, had been the catalyst he needed. At that moment, as short as it was, he saw the truth of it all. Saw that he was born for this moment, that the Navigator queen, his mother, had foreseen this and strived to make it happen.

&nbs
p; He understood too that fate was just a guide. One still had to move in the right direction, and his species were the masters of that. Kai saw that he’d always had that ability, but being a half-breed had meant that his latent birthright was buried under the infinite minutiae of conscious thought.

  Farah Hett had, ironically, sealed his own fate with this attack. He too had moved toward it, but for him, his fate was not of transcendence and peace, but destruction.

  Kai snapped back to the present. His eyelids shot open. He stared down at the wounds in his chest as blood poured into the gaseous orb. The tetrahedron exploded into a ball of white light that grew and grew until finally…

  Kai had become what he was always meant to be.

  He was going home to where he belonged to take his place in the bigger picture and keep the Veil between the two parts of the universe running, to keep the cosmic horror that is Darkarahn imprisoned.

  With his mortal sacrifice, Kai Locke, the new Navigator king, had assured an afterlife of service to peace and protection.

  Although he would never be conscious again as he knew it, he was now aware of a crystal coffin around his spirit, although he now realized it wasn’t a coffin at all but rather an eternal womb, where his spirit would ascend to its full form and eventually start the cycle all over again, but that was many millennia away.

  Whispers surrounded him in the ancient language of the Navigators, which he now understood fluently. The entire universe opened to him, and from within his crystalline surroundings, his mind was free to travel and shape and influence the mysteries of time and space.

  For the first time in his life, Kai Locke was home.

  Chapter 32

  BRENNA HIT full power to starboard thrusters to avoid an oncoming wreck of a shrain ship.

  Kendal yelled as heavy g-force struck those in the cockpit. Brenna gritted her teeth and let out a scream. The pressure built to squeeze her vision to tiny tunnels, but when she thought she was about to succumb to unconsciousness, the ship’s AI cut the thrust and activated counterthrust to keep them on a clear approach.