by M. R. Forbes
“And that’s what you want? To bring them home?”
“That’s all I want. This whole mission turned into a complete frag job the moment we traced the disterium.”
“And do you realize they aren’t safe back in the fold of the RAS? Thraven will have them reassigned to the front lines and sent in for the slaughter a second time.”
“The front lines of what? We aren’t at war.”
“Yes, you are. It hasn’t been declared yet, but we’re all at war. I thought you understood that? You can’t protect your crew, Captain. And even if you could, the best way for them to protect their families is to fight back against the real enemy. To end the war with the Nephilim before the war between the Outworlds and the Republic can start. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I have skin in this game. I have a daughter of my own to protect.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I want you to join the Rejects,” Abbey said. “You’re exactly the kind of individual we’re looking for.”
“I’m loyal to the Republic.”
“So am I. The real Republic. Not this bullshit puppet theater Thraven has turned it into. Help me get it back to what it was. Help us stop the Nephilim. No more beacons. No more bullshit. I need good individuals like you and yours.”
Davlyn stared at her, their eyes locking. She held his gaze. They needed every ship they could get, and she would earn them one at a time if she had to.
“How do I know you won’t be leading us right into disaster?”
“You don’t,” Abbey said. “I can’t tell you where this is all going to lead. I can promise you I’m going to give everything I have to see it through. Look at me, Captain. Look at what I’ve already given. What this fight has already cost.”
“If it’s true that you disabled those ships on your own, it doesn’t seem like it’s cost you anything. You have a power I can’t even comprehend.”
“Believe me, Captain. There’s a price. A heavy price. I can never go back to what I was.”
“Would you want to?”
“Hell, yes. My dreams have been scattered to the stars. Now I only dream of my daughter’s future.”
“And if I refuse? Then what?”
“I’m going to repair the Faust. Once that’s done, we’ll leave, and you’ll be free to do whatever it is you feel you need to do.”
“Queenie,” Gant said.
Abbey put up her hand. “Not your decision.”
Davlyn took a moment. He turned his head away, looking at his bridge crew. They made eye contact, and she could sense their subtle nods. She wasn’t so far removed from being a soldier that she couldn’t remember why they had become soldiers in the first place. To protect what they believed in. To protect what they loved.
“I believe you,” Davlyn said at last. “More than that, I’ve seen it for myself. As long as you’re fighting for the Republic, the High Noon and her crew are yours.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Abbey said. “No more beacons?”
He smiled. “No more beacons. Where to, Miss Cage?”
“You can call me Queenie,” Abbey said. “Welcome to the Rejects.”
“You’re going to regret it,” Pik said, laughing.
3
“We had set a course for the edge of the Bain system,” Captain Davlyn said. “We’ll be there in an hour or so, but we can drop out of FTL and redirect now.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Abbey said. “Stay on course. We’ll adjust once we reach the original drop point.”
“Adjust to where?” Gant asked.
“Back to General Kett,” Abbey replied. “I have a few questions for him, and it seems like he owes me a bit of an explanation. Especially about Ruby.”
“Ruby?” Davlyn said.
“She’s a synth,” Bastion offered. “A pleasure synth turned service synth, so probably the hottest thing you’ll ever see in a Republic uniform.” Bastion paused. “Well, after you, Queenie.”
“You suck at flattery,” Gant said.
“I do not,” Bastion replied.
“Yeah, you do,” Gant said. “Queenie, we haven’t had much of a chance to talk. I know you’re eager to put Kett back in his place, and damned if I’m not eager to see you do it, but Olus sent intel that I think you should be aware of before we decide which way to pivot.”
“What kind of intel?”
“Thraven has Tridium Heavy Industries in his pocket, the same way he had Eagan Heavyworks under his control. While Eagan was tasked with perfecting the Nephilim’s ancient tech, Tridium was given a more important mission.”
Abbey didn’t like the sound of that. “What mission?”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Bastion said. “It rhymes with hate.”
“What?”
“That’s a dumb hint,” Pik said. “Queenie, it rhymes with Pleasium Fate.”
“My hint was dumb?” Bastion said. “You might as well have just said what it was outright.”
“That would be stupid,” Pik said.
“Elysium Gate,” Gant said, sighing. “They’ve been building a Gate.”
She definitely didn’t like the sound of that. If a Gate was already under construction, that meant Thraven was further along in his plans than she had guessed. “Do we know where?”
“We don’t know where the Gate itself is, but there’s a ton of materials being sourced through Avalon. It can’t be too far from there.”
“What else can you tell me about it?”
“Captain Mann got the intel directly from Tridium’s secure datastore. They had dumped as much of it as they could before they had to run, but they wound up with bits and pieces. Tridium was still taking deliveries there as of a few weeks ago.”
“They?” Abbey said.
“Apparently, Captain Mann hooked up with the Ophanim on Earth. Some woman named Pahaliah. She helped him with the job.”
Abbey looked at Jequn. “Do you know her?”
“No, Queenie, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t legit. My attention has been focused on the Fringe and the Outworlds.”
Gant chittered softly. “You’re going to love this. They gave Captain Mann the Blood of the Shard.”
“What?”
“He has the Gift, though I doubt it’s anything like yours.”
“It’s going to kill him.”
“He’s an old man,” Bastion said. “He’d probably croak before it could do him in, anyway.”
“He would be dead already without it,” Jequn said. “The Nephilim have a strong presence on Earth already. Our Servants are the only thing that have kept them under control.”
“Servants?” Abbey said. “I feel like the more I think I know about the Seraphim, the less I do know.”
“Plixians,” Jequn said. “We’ve been friends to them for many generations. We saved them from a virus that was ravaging their homeworld, and they’ve been loyal to us since.”
“You left that out of your original story.”
“If I were to tell you everything I knew, I would still be speaking about it.”
“Good point. I guessed the Plixians were involved in things when I saw the compound beneath the crater on Avalon.” She turned toward Jequn, making eye contact with her. “Did you know it was there? Did you know what happened to it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Infected?”
“Queenie, I helped place the teleporter at Mother’s request. I had never been down there before. She told me the structure was like a bomb shelter, to hide in during an emergency. That it hadn’t been used for thousands of years. I don’t know anything more, and I didn’t have time to question. We were being attacked.”
“She didn’t want you to know, either. I don’t know how your mother was connected to Azure, but I do know why the Gift kills Seraphim hosts. They were experimenting on the naniates, trying to alter them to combat the Nephilim. What you saw was only the top level of the complex. It went much deeper. It was filled with Seraphim. Not dead,
but not alive. The naniates were in them, controlling them, holding them in stasis or something while they waited for fuel. They seemed to know when I was there, and when Thraven’s forces came down after me. They attacked us both.”
Jequn shook her head. “I didn’t know about any of this.”
“I figured you didn’t. The odd thing is, the Venerants Thraven sent to kill me did.” Abbey looked over to Trin, who had taken up position near the rear of the group. “Did you know?”
“No, Queenie,” Trin replied. “But based on that I would guess that planet isn’t the only site where such a thing occurred.”
“You heard Koy, didn’t you? He thought I might have found something else down there. A weapon of some kind.”
“Yes. They believed that I could be that thing, so it must be something like I have become. Perhaps a robot of some kind, powered by the Gift?”
“Jequn, have you ever heard of anything like that?” Benhil asked.
“No,” Jequn replied. “If there were machines like that, they must have been a failure, like the other experiments.”
“It sounds like the Seraphim have kept a lot of secrets,” Gant said. “Even from each other.”
“It sure does,” Bastion said.
“I found something else down there,” Abbey said. “A pool filled with crystals. A way for the Seraphim to communicate across universes. I spoke to a Shard. She wasn’t the original. Her Shard had been killed as well. She begged me to close the connection. She said without a containment field things could go horribly wrong. So I closed it. That was when the Light of the Shard made itself known to me. It led me to the laboratory where the experiments had taken place. It wanted me to know about them.”
“Why?” Gant asked.
“I don’t know. I’m going to ask Kett what he knows about it as soon as I see him again. I don’t know if Charmeine ever told him what was going on down there. They sealed the whole thing off when they lost control of the complex, and as far as I can tell she was one of the only ones who made it out alive.”
“How do you know Charmeine didn’t give you the teleporter hoping you would find the complex?” Bastion said.
“What do you mean?” Abbey asked.
“Well, you said the Light of the Shard came to you down there. I remember you told Charmeine you had seen it before. Maybe she was hoping you would wind up in the complex, and that being down there would wake it up.”
“She couldn’t have known I would find the compound.”
“No, but she could have been hopeful. Only you would have been able to survive what she knew was down there.”
“We can’t rule it out,” Gant said. “If she was keeping secrets, she’s certainly capable of that sort of deception.”
“How many things would have to go right to put me in that situation?”
“That’s a logical fallacy, Queenie. How do you know things didn’t all go completely wrong to put you in that situation? It only seems preordained because it happened, but maybe there were a thousand other events that would have put us in an even better situation than we are now? A situation where you don’t even need the Shard to balance things out?”
“That’s another way of looking at it.”
“It doesn’t matter in the end. Now we know the Seraphim aren’t the purists they make themselves out to be. I can’t say I blame them. It’s hard to be a pacifist when your brothers and sisters are trying to kill you.”
“But why cover it up? Why not just admit to abusing the naniates the same way the Nephilim did?”
“If your god gave you a perfect, clean pool, and you went and pissed in it, would you want anyone to know?” Bastion said. “Or would you hide the truth and rewrite history to hide the awfulness of it?”
“How would the Focus be sullied?” Jequn asked. “We drew the Blood from it to give to the others. The same Blood that kills us. How could it be impure?”
“Someone at some time thought they had a better way,” Abbey said. “Maybe it made the Focus more powerful? Maybe it was the only thing that allowed the Seraphim to hold back the Nephilim the first time?” Abbey paused, considering. “The Shard told me to find the original Covenant. What if the Seraphim’s efforts to stop the Nephilim are the reason the Nephilim haven’t been stopped?”
“I’m not following,” Bastion said.
“The One promised to protect the Seraphim. That was the Covenant. But when the Shard was killed, the Seraphim took their protection into their own hands. They altered the Blood to defend themselves and the other life the One had created. But what if they had a little more faith? What if they had sat back and waited for the One to intervene? What would have happened then?”
“We would have been enslaved a long time ago,” Benhil said. “Sorry, Queenie. I’m not buying it. You can’t rely on some vague promise to save you when things go sideways. You have to save yourself.”
“Agreed,” Pik said.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Abbey said. “And maybe I’m right. I think we’ll find out before this is over.”
“As long as we win, I don’t give a shit how we do it,” Bastion said.
“Agreed,” Pik said.
“Did Kett know about Avalon?” Abbey asked.
“He did,” Jequn replied.
“What was his plan?”
“We were,” Gant said. “Gain control of the High Noon, scout out Avalon, and then detour to Azure to find you. We decided to find you first.”
“Kett isn’t going to do anything about Avalon if we can’t do it for him,” Bastion said. “That’s how he works. He’s afraid to lose.”
“Then that’s what we’re going to do. Captain Davlyn, change of plans.”
“Aye, Queenie?”
“Bring us out of FTL. We can’t afford to give Thraven the chance to finish the Gate.”
“Ensign Sil, set new coordinates for Avalon,” Davlyn said.
“Not so fast,” Abbey replied. “You aren’t going to Avalon, Captain. This ship is beat up as it is, and we have no idea what’s waiting there.”
“Captain Mann said Tridium hired an outside agency for security,” Gant said. “Mercenaries, most likely.”
“Hopefully not the Riders,” Abbey said.
“Who?” Bastion asked.
“Never mind. The point is, the High Noon won’t stand up to another assault without some repairs. Jequn, do you know where General Kett was taking the fleet?”
“I can access his location.”
“Good. Nerd.”
“Aye, Queenie?” Erlan said, standing again.
“I want you and Dak to ensure the High Noon and her crew make it back to Kett. The rest of us will go on to Avalon in the Faust, see what there is to see, and then catch up to you.”
“Aye, Queenie,” Erlan said. He sounded disappointed not to be coming along.
“Sorry, Nerd. I need you back with the Brimstone. You’re a damn good starship pilot, and I want you flying her.”
Erlan smiled proudly. “I don’t think General Kett feels the same way, Queenie.”
“When you get back to the fleet, I want you to tell General Kett I don’t give a flying frag what he feels or thinks. Tell him the fleet is mine, and I’ll be coming back for it and him.”
“Aye, Queenie.”
“Uh, Queenie?” Bastion said. “No offense, but in case you didn’t notice earlier, the Faust is fragged.”
“I did notice,” Abbey said. “I heard you were a good pilot? I bet Nerd wouldn’t have crashed her.”
“If I couldn’t get her in undamaged, nobody could.”
“I could have,” Erlan said.
“I could have,” Bastion mimicked. “You could not. You were there, Gant. Tell them.”
“I think Nerd could have done it,” Gant said, chittering.
“Me, too,” Pik said. “I was there, too.”
“Fraggers,” Bastion said. “Whatever. The Faust is still busted.”
Abbey smiled. She could feel the Gift of the Shard flo
wing through her, eager to do her will. “Not for long.”
4
Abbey returned to the hangar with the rest of the Rejects still trailing behind her. She was almost amused by the way they followed her, their curiosity and excitement obvious. They knew she was going to do something cool, and they all wanted to bear witness to it.
Even she knew it was going to be cool, and she hadn’t even started yet. She could feel the Blood of the Shard within her, the True Gift a familiar and yet altered tingle that ran across her flesh and down into her soul. It was power, clean and fresh and pure. Not the same as before. Maybe not as overtly destructive, but perhaps more useful. She didn’t need to be furious to use it. She didn’t need to think violent thoughts. It was just there, waiting.
She came to a stop in front of the Faust. The star hopper was tilted over, resting on the unbroken wing. The other one was still on the floor, one long main section and a number of broken pieces. They didn’t need the long surfaces to fly, but if they wanted to land in any sort of atmosphere with gravity? Some lift would be nice for added maneuvering.
“You really think you can fix her?” Bastion said.
Abbey didn’t respond. She noticed there were more individuals entering the hangar. Captain Davlyn and his crew. They had come to see as well.
“Give her a little space, will you?” Pik said, ushering some of them back.
“Queenie, this isn’t going to knock you cold is it?” Gant asked.
“I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I’ll probably just be really hungry.”
“There’s ice cream in the Mess,” Bastion said. “Unless Pik ate it already.”
“I did not,” Pik said. He paused. “I don’t think.”
“I tasted of the ice cream,” Phlenel said. “It was disgusting.”
“Thank you,” Gant said.
“You two have no taste,” Bastion replied.
“At least you can taste,” Trin said. “I miss eating.”
“How are you alive in there anyway?” Benhil said. “And are you sure you aren’t going to kill us all in our sleep?”
“Distracting,” Abbey said. “She’s not going to kill you. We’re best bitches now.”