“Yeah, I don’t think your father should make a peace treaty with the Commonwealth now,” Clarice said. “We should kill him. Right now.”
“I agree,” I said, now certain of my course. “If this is the final stage of what happens, then he’s not only recruited millions to his cause but murdered them.”
Hell, he could make an army to man his ships and vessels from anyone. He didn’t have to worry about technical training, incompetence, or labor shortages. Computerized brains could be filled with whatever data he required or switched out like interchangeable parts. People had long feared bioroids would make the human laborer obsolete but the organic portions of their brain meant they could only been trained to a limited degree. These, by contrast, were beings without that sliver of humanity to guide them. Mechs in all but name. Except a lot cheaper and probably more talented.
Major Terra finally spoke. “I’m actually with William here on this being incredibly fucked up and us needing to get out of here.”
William shook his head. “Goddamn zombies, man.”
“I don’t think they’re—” I started to say.
“The time for the distraction is now,” Isla said, looking out the window.
An explosion caused the castle to shake and I had to steady myself against the dresser. I ran to the window along with Clarice, only to see the spaceport was completely fried with towers falling over and the Melampus taking off into the sky. The anti-starship guns didn’t move to pursue it even as everyone sought to pour down the flames. The alarms I expected earlier started blaring and I expected a dozen more troopers to pile through the door at any second.
“Well, there goes that treaty,” I muttered.
Clarice muttered.
“No shit.” I felt my face and hoped we could salvage this. “Did you expect a distraction this big?”
“Not really,” Clarice said. “I did order Jun to take the ship out of here, though.”
“Do you have a plan to get us off this planet?” I asked.
“Sort of!” Clarice said.
“Sort of?” I asked, panicked.
“Steal a ship off this rock,” I said.
“That’s not a plan, it’s an objective!” I said.
“Better than some of yours!” William said, shaking his head. “Let’s get going. I didn’t want to be part of this anyway!”
“Then why are you?” Isla snapped.
William shrugged. “It seemed like an opportunity to kill Crius.”
Major Terra elbowed him in the gut. “Where the hell is Fade?”
“Fade is in on this, too?” I asked.
“It’s everyone,” Clarice said. “This is to save the galaxy, after all.”
“Well, you’re the captain,” I said. “Unfortunately, I don’t see any sign of Fade.”
“Duck,” Clarice said.
“What?” I asked.
Clarice pulled me down as the windows shattered and we were showered in glass, one piece cutting my face. The sound in the room rang in my ears and I couldn’t hear anything for several seconds before everything became the roar of a repulsor engine. Looking upward, I saw Fade sitting on the back of a kinetibike with another hovering behind him. My brother, Thomas, was sitting on it with a cold but certain expression on his face. They’d taken the machines up in front of the shattered windows and were presently hovering there.
Kinetibikes were machines that had been fairly popular on the mostly open and free environments of Crius. They were also exceptionally good for travelling across smooth terrain, water, and countryside. Little more than an aircar’s engine slapped onto set of gravity poles, they were exceptionally hard to maneuver but incredibly thrilling to use. The fact that my father seemed to be using them for his scouts impressed me. As well as made me doubt his sanity.
“You were supposed to bring four!” Clarice snapped at Fade, her voice sounding like a distant echo in my still aching ears.
“The others didn’t make it,” Thomas said, climbing off his kinetibike and getting onto Fade’s. It left the second bike with room for two. “Do you have the bomb?”
“Yes,” Agent Terra said, tossing a fist-sized globe in her hand to him.
Fade put it in the side of the kinetibike’s satchels. “We don’t have much time. You need to choose who is going to the prison temple and who is staying behind.”
“Cassius, Isla,” Clarice said, notably choosing her two lovers. “Go.”
“We can’t,” I started.
“Go,” Clarice said. “We’ll be fine.”
It was a lie.
Isla and Clarice kissed then Clarice kissed me before Isla grabbed my arm and dragged me to the kinetibike’s front.
We were off as the sun started to rise.
Void Scouts were in pursuit within minutes.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The roar of the kinetibikes drowned out everything else as I drove it as fast as humanly possible according to Isla’s vague directions away from the Kolahn ruins. The sun was rising, which told me the day cycle of this world wasn’t remotely similar to most human-inhabited worlds. The air was hot and sulfuric, which probably would have made me pass out if not for the fact that my lungs were artificially enhanced.
There was almost no sign of vegetation as we moved across the dusty planes underneath the planet’s visible rings and moons, life on the world having seemingly ceased to exist in the decades since the Kolahn’s mass suicide. Something, or someone, had seemingly stripped this planet of its life in the meantime with not even a rat or similar vermin visible among the dried out desiccated rock formations jutting from the ground.
“If we get blown up, I’m blaming Clarice,” I said, watching Fade and my brother travel alongside us.
“This is a plan!” Isla said, holding onto me tight.
“A terrible plan,” I said, shouting. “What kind of plan depends on alerting everyone to our presence versus sneaking out!”
“A plan which doesn’t involve getting turned into cyber zombies!” Isla said.
She had a point there.
I couldn’t believe my brother had helped us this way. Thomas was a decent man, somewhat. By some standards. Aw, who was I kidding, he was a ruthless killer, but the planet he’d served with such fanatical loyalty had been dead for almost a decade. His loyalty to Father was far weaker than any he’d displayed to our government and it was quite possible this was a trap.
Except, really, what was the point of a trap? I was already someone they could have just arrested and put into prison. I was more concerned with the Melampus since I wasn’t sure how our Q-ship would be able to survive the fleet above orbit. The only possibility I could figure out would be to flee back into the gaseous cloud but that was suicide. Wasn’t it? Why did I feel like Theseus in the Labyrinth without a ball of string?
“I’m still not sure how we’re going to escape this!” I shouted, checking the kinetibike’s sensors and detecting a squad of Void Scouts in pursuit.
“Thomas has promised us a vessel to pick us up,” Isla said.
“You trust my brother?” I asked.
“We didn’t have much of a choice!” Isla said.
“Yes, we could have not taken this job to begin with!” I snapped.
“It was your idea!”
The eight-man squadron of Void Scouts was similar to the group of Void Marines that had pursued them, moving in perfect unison. The fact they were mindless creatures of mad science did nothing to make me less guilty about the fact were going to have to kill them. These had been individuals willing to sign up for my father’s crusade against the Commonwealth and he’d grossly betrayed them.
“Can you shoot?” I asked, heading to a particularly jagged collection of rocks.
“Always,” Isla said, grabbing a disintegrator from the kinetibike and aiming behind her. “Can you drive?”
“Please,” I said, snorting. “I’m a pilot.”
“Yes, but this only moves side to side!” Isla said before ducking as an
energy blast passed right over her head.
“Not quite,” I said, lifting us up ten feet in the air to leap over a particularly nasty rock. “Mind you, I don’t know if the terrain allows kinetibike maneuver—”
“Shut up and drive!” Isla said, shooting one of the Void Scouts off his bike and sending his machine crashing into the ground.
The two of us passed into a cave as I lost sight of Fade and Thomas. I couldn’t help but worry about my brother and Ida’s son, even though both had been my enemy. The scanners told me the cavern system had another exit and I swirled down the tight corridors as the Void Scouts blasted at me with their kinetibike’s cannons. I made a corner tighter than I should have, which resulted in one of them exploding, leaving only two as the cavern interior was utterly opaque, causing me to pull up my flight goggles and turning everything an iridescent green.
“You’re worried about that now!?” I shouted, fully wondering if she understood I made everything up as I went along.
“You know, after this, I think we should seriously consider retirement!” Isla said, shooting a third of the four Void Scouts off their bike before the final one pulled up directly behind us.
“I love not being human,” Isla said, before blasting the fourth of the soldiers and leaping onto the bike behind me.
“Are you insane?” I asked, pulling out of the cave’s mouth.
I shouted back a yes but there was no point since there was no way she could hear me.
We came into a long valley full of the skeletons of massive beasts which were almost a half-kilometer long. I had no idea how such creatures could exist, but they stunned me with their magnificence as I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of world had been destroyed and how. Had the Kolahn all committed suicide because of the Kathax Prime or was I trying to make him into a Satanic (irony not lost on me) figure? Had they simply destroyed themselves because they knew their atrocities would never be tolerated by the Community that was coming to kill them anyway? What method had they used which could leave this world both intact and dead at the same time?
My attention was immediately drawn to the roar of engines from nearby and I saw Fade and Thomas pursued by two more of the Void Scouts. I turned around my kinetibike to intercept the attackers when I heard the deafening roar of an Engel-class starfighter over my head. A trio of dual energy blasts sailed over my head and slammed into the ground before Fade’s kinetibike. The explosion didn’t need to be a direct hit to send it flying through the air along with the Void Scouts behind it.
“THOMAS!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, hitting the accelerator to rush to their side, not even bothering to check to see if the other attackers were still alive despite the suicidal stupidity of it. I was at the ruins of Fade’s kinetibike within seconds before powering it down and leaping off the side to the two bodies beside it. There was wreckage and ruin all about them both both forms were still intact.
Mostly.
I immediately went to check Thomas’s form to see if there was anything to I could do to help him. We were both cyborgs after all, mechanically improved along with our biological enhancements to be able to take more punishment than a regular human being could. It had saved my life during many starfighter encounters as I could make more G-forces and push myself harder.
I needn’t have bothered.
“Oh, Thomas,” I said, turning over his body and seeing he’d lost a leg while having his face crushed in. It was an ugly, undignified death which shouldn’t have happened the way it had. I had barely said two words to the man before he’d let my friends escape and now I would never be able to say anything to him in this life again.
“You know, we’re supposed to fight to the death,” Thomas said, standing across from me as the two of us stood in the paper-walled dojo meant to invoke a country on a planet long dead. The weapons on the wooden racks weren’t Japanese, though, but from a variety of cultures both fictional as well as real.
Thomas and I were both wearing gis, him a black one and myself a red. We were both Level Ten masters of the Dai’mochi system of combat that was about as useful in real combat as pointing your finger at someone and saying ‘Bang.’ I’d eventually learn more practical martial arts form and Thomas would learn to use a gun.
“Yes,” I said, sighing as I stretched my back. “Your mother has been determined to get you to kill me for my entire life.”
“And Father wants you to kill me,” Thomas said, frowning. He picked up a double-bladed curved weapon which was more for show than lethality. Thomas was many things but a great warrior was not one of them.
“Yes.” I picked up my own and took a position across from him. “As well as I know. I think he’s as disappointed with me as he is you. He should ask for his money back from the clonemasters.”
“Well, I guess our parents will have to deal with disappointment,” Thomas said. “You are the most singularly honorable noble I have ever met.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment,” Thomas said as we playfully dueled. “I’m a spy, remember?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to go around announcing that.”
“How else will I scare people into obeying?” Thomas said, chuckling. “But seriously, it’s an enormous drain on my resources trying to keep you alive. I’ve prevented poisonings, skycar accidents, bombings, and even an attempt to gore you with a genetically engineered unicorn.”
“I was wondering what happened to Stella’s birthday gift.”
Thomas took a deep breath. “You’re more family to me than my father ever was, Cassius. You are the way he should have been.”
“Let’s not make this weird,” I said.
“Right,” Thomas said, pausing his attack and stepping back. “Let’s go to a brothel instead and get drunk after getting laid.”
“A much better plan than banging swords.”
I would also never know his motivations. Had he actually been so offended by my father’s view that he’d tried to mutiny or was this all a plan to manipulate us? I couldn’t ask him. However, the feeling of Isla grabbing my shoulder and trying to pull me away managed to shake me out of my fugue.
“No,” I said, wondering why the starfighter hadn’t come back to finish us. Why it hadn’t just bombed the area flat. “I need to see if Fade is alive.”
“Cassius, we have to get away before they come back,” Isla said. “Dammit, I had to shoot some of those creatures before they came back!”
She fired a couple of more blasts in the fallen Void Scouts’ direction.
I crawled over, rather than walked, to Fade’s body, only to be stunned that he seemed unharmed. Wait, no, he had a broken leg, but I could see his eyes were blinking and there was a confused expression on his face.
“This is why you should always leave your personal barriers up,” Fade said, tapping his belt which had shielded him. “It’s not just for fight-fights.”
I didn’t respond, the death of my brother too raw for levity, and put him into a fireman’s carry before plopping him on the back of our vehicle. “We have to get you to some place safe.”
“We have to go to the temple,” Isla insisted, surprising me. “The mission comes first.”
I was confused by her insistence, especially as she checked the satchels spread across the ground and picked up the entirely intact planet-busting bomb. She casually slid it into my bike’s satchel and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
It was a weird gesture. “Isla—”
“It’s our rendezvous point,” Isla said simply.
I nodded.
Fade grabbed me by the arm. “You need to finish this, Cassius. I’ve seen what your father has planned for the galaxy. What he’s done to those people. His own—”
“Yes, I know,” I said, staring at him. “He’ll pay for his crimes, I promise you.”
“Not that,” Fade whispered. “He’s not responsible.”
“What?” I stared at him.
“He’s a puppet,” F
ade said. “The Elder Races can—”
Isla pulled out a hydro-spray and injected it into the side of his neck. Apparently, the guards had done a thoroughly awful job checking her for items. Fade managed to make out a few syllables before he passed into unconsciousness but looked up at her with a betrayed look on his face.
“Now can we go?” Isla begged.
I nodded and climbed onboard my kinetibike. “Yes. One less objection to blowing this planet straight to hell has been removed.”
I took off seconds later, holding the safety field in the bike kept Fade from flying off. Isla followed close behind as I could hear more kinetibikes in the distance. We weren’t that far from the Temple of the Kathax Prime now and I wondered if I should just set down the bomb and let it detonate. It probably didn’t matter if it was nearby or directly in the temple. That was a ridiculous thought, though, brought about by grief.
While I might be willing to die killing the THING that had turned my father into a mass murderer just as it had done Zoe, I wasn’t inclined to sacrifice any of my crew or friends. That, more than anything, signaled the old Cassius was dead. The Fire Count had given up far too many friends and loved ones for glory to be forgiven. As soon as I thought that, I felt even more hypocritical because what was this whole mission except one grandiose risk of my loved ones to achieve a bit of glory? I’d attempted to achieve redemption by repeating my sin. I swore, in that moment, I heard Judith laughing in my head, but it wasn’t quite her voice.
“Dammit, of course,” I muttered, figuring out how I’d been played. There was no time to think about it now since I heard another starfighter in the air above.
Engels might not be designed for use in atmosphere, but they could be modified for them and this one clearly had. It fired a number of shots in my general direction, ones I predicted enough that the explosions of dust and ground didn’t kill me immediately. Still, there was no way to stop the attack, only stay out of its way and there was no way to do that if the pilot decided to fire a pair of fusion torpedoes.
That was when the Engel turned around and went back toward the base we’d just fled from.
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