by Paul Tassi
“You know,” he finally said, sitting up so he could see Kyra curled up on her bed, her eyes reflecting the dim blue light of the clock. “I did come across one a few years ago in the Earth Archives. It was a thin paper book, one that had pictures on every page.”
“A children’s scroll?” Kyra asked.
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it was some sort of illustrated Earth fable.”
“How does it go?”
Noah closed his eyes and tried to picture the pages. The ink had been blurred and smeared, the pages crusty and decaying, but he’d read it through many times all the same.
“There was a child on a distant planet. His civilization was in turmoil in the midst of a civil war. The world’s core had grown unstable, and was tearing the planet apart. It was dying.”
Kyra lay her chin down on her arms to look at Noah as he continued.
“His parents were his planet’s greatest scientists, so they put him in a ship and pointed it toward Earth. His world was destroyed shortly after, and he was the last of his kind.”
Noah tried to remember what happened next.
“An Earth family found him and took him in. They found their sun gave him powers beyond those of any human. He could fly, he could fight, he could save those no one else could. He was a god among mortals.
“He defended Earth from threats both from within and without, domestic and alien. Powerful foes who would kill for profit or power or no reason at all. He had many friends, some with powers like him. He loved a girl, a reporter. He could never be hurt, could never age. He was Earth’s sentinel for all of time.”
Noah stopped. The silence hung there. Finally Kyra pressed him.
“So what happened to him?”
Noah shook his head.
“I don’t know. I think there are more books out there chronicling his tales. More colorful pages. It’s too bad he was just a myth. He might have saved Earth from the Xalans.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Kyra said. Noah could feel her smile even in the darkness. “I think he sounds a lot like someone I know.”
“How so?” Noah asked.
“The last son of a dead planet. A strong warrior trying to defend those he loves in his adopted world.”
Noah fell silent, considering the parallel for the first time.
“I’d certainly be better at it if I could fly,” he smirked.
Kyra laughed and rolled back into bed out of sight. It was good to hear her laugh again. It had been too long. The sound of it made him ache.
“Who was the woman? The one he loved?” she asked.
“Just a woman. A human.”
“She had to be something special to win the affection of a god.”
“She was pretty in the pages. And always knew just what to say to him. But a life with her was always just out of his reach.”
“I hope they ended up together,” Kyra said, yawning.
“I’m sure they did,” Noah replied, lying back down on the floor. Sleep soon found both of them.
Noah flew in his dreams.
The next day, Noah wasn’t so fortunate. He now had day duty with Finn, meaning he was attached to him at the hip for meals, which were usually the only times they’d let him out of his room. His father hadn’t tried to contact him again after Finn “refused” his mission, but the boy was in better spirits after realizing he wasn’t going to be thrown out an airlock.
Noah and Finn were seated near the door in the mess. They were joined by Asha, who had recently made a habit of scraping up any remaining dirt Finn could dish out about his father.
“It’s funny,” he said. “You all hating him so much. He actually loves you.” He nodded toward Asha. “He’s practically obsessed. It’s like you’re the second coming of Corinthia Vale or something.”
Noah and Asha glared at him.
“Too soon?” he asked, stuffing half a precisely cut sandwich in his mouth. He scratched the bandage on the side of his head. They’d already been able to grow him a new ear onboard. Ears were one of the easiest body parts to synthetically reproduce, Noah had learned. Lucky for Finn. Erik’s replacement fingers weren’t yet ready for attachment.
“Anyway,” Finn continued, “after Lucas died and he became High Chancellor, he actually had a plan to marry you.”
That made Asha choke on her bite of paleplant salad.
“He … what?”
“Yeah. Said you’d be great to show off at events, not to mention the whole ‘joining two worlds’ thing that the public would eat up.”
Noah eyed Asha’s fists, which were clenched so hard her knuckles were white.
“But then you sort of went crazy, and he decided to send you off to kill some Xalans instead. I think he realized you’d make a better soldier than lady of the house.”
Noah had to stifle a chuckle at the thought of his mother married to Madric Stoller. A union like that would have lasted from the time they were joined to a few hours later when Stoller tried to lay hands on her and she sliced them off.
“I don’t care about your father’s pathetic crush,” Asha growled.
“Did you know,” Finn continued, grinning mischievously, “that he had a full-res holographic sim model commissioned of you? You should see the amazing detail from every angle—”
Finn cried out as the metal tip of Asha’s boot dug into his calf under the table.
“Enough,” she said in a violent whisper. “Tell me something I actually want to know.”
Finn’s face was contorted in pain. He’d involuntarily crushed a biscuit with his hand.
“Fine,” he said, grimacing. “I’ll tell you that despite his affections, he’s going to be excited for your boyfriend to show up on Sora again. With those powers? He’s going to think he’s found the answer to his little war problem.”
“Lucas is in no shape to fight,” Noah said. He spotted Erik and Kyra entering from the opposite end of the room and watched as they sat down at a table far from them. Kyra glanced nervously at Finn from a distance. Even if they were keeping up appearances, there was no way they were letting him within a hundred feet of her again.
“Maybe not, but my father will want that science for his own. He’s been trying to run his own experiments with Soran Shadow mutation. Or something like it.”
That caught their attention.
“What?” Asha exclaimed.
Finn waved them off.
“Don’t worry, I said he’s trying, not succeeding. His team is horribly inept. All they’ve managed to do is liquefy a few street urchin ‘volunteers’ in the process. They’re nowhere close to having the Xalan science right, and he’s smart enough to know that if he tried to bring your Alpha in, the creature would stop building his warship cores or worse out of protest.”
Noah had never liked Madric Stoller, but every day he grew to want him dead even more. First the treachery of Talis Vale and now this monster? Sora deserved better. It would be miracle if the planet survived with that sort of leadership.
Noah looked over at Kyra, who was covering her mouth, laughing while chewing at something Erik had said. While she lit up the room with her smile, Noah’s thoughts were dark.
She’s not one of your Earthborn toys or Soran fangirls, Noah thought, but then he caught himself. They’re just talking. Calm down. What was wrong with him?
Noah waved his hand over his empty rectangular plate, which disappeared with the last remnants of his grilled barfish into the surface of the table.
“Lunch is over,” he said, standing up quickly. He circled around and hauled Finn up by the collar more forcefully than he should have in public.
“But I’m not done y—”
Another jerk and Finn agreed to start walking away from his remaining meal.
“It’s only a few more days,” Asha said as she split off to head up to the bridge. “Try not to kill him.”
Noah made no promises.
But then it was over. The core wound down and Asha’s miniature fleet
found itself back in the Soran system at last. Noah stared out the viewscreen in the observation deck as the planet slowly grew from a pale blue dot to envelop his entire field of vision. Despite their recent journey to Earth, it was Sora that felt like home. The twisted, ruined place where they’d found Lucas was a dead world, even if the air was breathable and the rain didn’t melt your skin. Earth was a husk. A ghost of a planet containing nothing but billions of dead and wretched monuments to war and savagery. Savages like his true father.
Noah watched Finn Stoller’s private aeroshuttle whisk him away back to Elyria. It was a relief to be free of him, and Noah hoped they never had to see him again.
“He can’t be trusted. We should have killed him,” Erik said as he approached Noah and stood beside him, watching the shuttle. Noah looked at him. Anger flashed in his bright green eyes. But also something else. Hurt.
“I know he was your friend,” Noah said. “It has to be hard to realize he was capable of this.”
With Erik and Noah on separate shifts with Kyra and Finn, they hadn’t had much chance to talk about the night of the assassination attempt, or Finn’s involvement.
Erik waved him off.
“He’s dead to me,” he said. “I’m just saying he should be dead to everyone else too for what he tried to do.”
Erik was talking tough, but Noah could feel the emotion being masked in his voice as the taillights of the shuttle dipped out of view. This was the first glimpse of the heavy toll Finn’s betrayal had likely had on his brother, something Noah hadn’t really stopped to consider while fretting over Kyra’s safety. Erik didn’t have many friends, after all, even at the colony.
“You know we couldn’t,” Noah said. “His father—”
“His father deserves it even more!” Erik hissed. Noah looked around nervously at the SDI officers milling around. Asha was chatting with Kyra behind them.
“Keep your voice down,” Noah whispered forcefully. “Stoller will pay.”
“She won’t be safe until he does,” Erik said, looking over at Kyra.
“This is not your responsibility,” Noah said, putting his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Erik brushed it off.
“Of course it is!” he snapped. “He was my friend, I brought him here! I brought her here!”
Noah was taken aback. Erik taking responsibility for actions? Worrying about the safety of others? Erik stole a quick glance at Kyra again.
Oh.
Noah knew that look. He’d caught himself too many times looking at her the same way.
Kyneth save us.
16
The most powerful people on Sora were in a single room, seated around a massive central holotable in the Grand Palace. There were so many maps and charts and readouts and videos playing, it was hard for them to even see each other through the layers upon layers of holograms.
Madric Stoller was front and center of course, flanked on either side by his cabinet, who were little more than a collection of nodding heads whenever he opened his mouth. Then there were his top military officials who were equally as subservient, though Tannon Vale had also been brought back into the fold for this gathering. Aside from Stoller’s government entourage, Asha, Alpha, and Zeta were seated next to each other across from the High Chancellor.
And there was Lucas, though he wasn’t actually physically in attendance.
He was locked in a cell with allium walls a dozen feet thick all around him. The room they had him in was a mile underneath Alpha’s lab at the Merenes Military Base, and he watched the meeting from a holographic viewscreen that took up the entirety of one of the walls. The three-dimensional image was so crisp and lifelike, it was almost like he was physically attending. Almost.
Lucas wasn’t a prisoner. Asha had made that clear. But as his Shadow abilities had begun to manifest, there was no way they were ever going to let him in a room with that many important people. Not to mention there was the Archon’s promise to use Lucas as a weapon, which Lucas had relayed to the Stoller administration along with the other details of the conversation he’d remembered with the creature that had twisted his genes and kept him locked away for sixteen years. It was the current topic of conversation in the room, and Alpha had led off with the most alarming piece of new information.
“If Lucas is remembering accurately,” Alpha said, “this ‘Archon’ seems to imply that he is not Xalan. That he is manipulating my people for his own ends, guiding their moves from the shadows.”
“What do you mean he’s not Xalan?” Stoller asked incredulously. “What the hell is he then?”
“You recently learned that you are not alone in the universe with the discovery of Earth, Makari, and the other colony worlds,” Zeta said. “Perhaps there is still more to discover.”
“Those were planets full of Sorans,” a stone-faced female general said.
“He’s probably just another experiment gone mad, like that Desecrator,” an admiral chimed in.
“How did he not get a good look at this ‘Archon’ in over sixteen years? How can we trust anything he says at all?” Stoller’s right hand, Viceroy Draylin Maston, spoke with venom. He was a pale man with jet-black hair and a thin, listless face that suggested only the impression of handsomeness. He was Mars Maston’s cousin, Lucas had learned, but possessed none of the admirable qualities of Lucas’s former friend. He was a political viper, figuratively poisoning Stoller’s enemies in the eyes of the public, or sometimes literally, if the rumors were true.
“I told you,” Lucas said, his mind much clearer and the psychosis that caused him to attack Noah having left him. At least for now. “My memory is still fragmented, rebuilding. But even then, I may never have actually seen him; I was nearly always unconscious, and he often spoke psychically when he wasn’t even present. I only saw glimpses of his shape in shadow, which did seem vaguely Xalan. But his eyes. His eyes were—”
“We don’t need a sketch of the damned thing,” Stoller said, slamming his fist on the table. “We need to find it and kill it. The war is turning! Their fleets are pulling back across all the colony quadrants. We have them on the run!”
For once, Stoller wasn’t embellishing. Alpha had relayed the news that Xalan fleets had pulled out of nearly every colony planet system. Intelligence suggested they were drawing back to Xala, but they hadn’t shown up there yet. Also strange was that, while a few planets like Makari had fallen to the SDI, some of the others were still being hotly contested when the Xalan fleets abruptly turned tail and fled. It made little tactical sense, but Sora was celebrating and the Xalan resistance and civilians left behind on the other worlds were welcoming the SDI relief fleets with open arms.
“I would caution against an overabundance of optimism,” Zeta said. “It is not necessarily the case that the Xalans’ decision to leave the colony systems is a sign of surrender. The broadcasts I have intercepted would indicate some larger—”
“Are you a military tactician, Xalan?” Stoller asked. There was at least one snicker from his men.
“I am a communications officer that has led the Resistance to—”
“You are not,” Stoller cut her off. “Do not discount the work our forces have done besieging those planets and breaking the spirits of your friends.”
Alpha stood up and loomed over everyone in the room at eight feet tall. The metal claws on his prosthetic hand dug into the paneling of the table.
“I will not have you address her in that way,” he growled, “whether or not you are ruler of this planet. And to classify the bloodthirsty Xalan armies who butchered my family as ‘friends’ is outrageous, and I will not tolerate it!”
The room grew loud with arguments from all across the table. Asha suddenly bolted up.
“Hey!” she shouted. The room quieted. “Can we stick to the most pressing matter at hand?” She gestured toward Lucas. “Why haven’t you greenlit Lucas for treatment yet? Alpha needs to get to work reversing the Shadow conversion process before it does god knows what to him.”<
br />
“Reversing?” Stoller said, a glimmer of something dark in his eye. “Oh no, we must complete the transformation,” he said, turning to Alpha.
“Complete?” Alpha said, stunned. “You are insane as well as ignorant.”
“Do you not wish to win the war, Xalan?” Stoller asked with a hard stare.
“Of course,” Alpha said, “But Lucas—”
“Lucas is now the most powerful soldier we have. We’ve been trying to make one like him for years now, but the Xalans have done it for us.”
“I have recently learned of your abominable experiments,” Alpha growled. “I will not help you continue them on my friend.”
“His abilities are not yet under his control,” Zeta pleaded. “It is possible he will never be able to harness them.”
“But what if he could?” Stoller said, flashing a greedy smile as he looked at the holographic feed of Lucas’s cell.
“One super soldier would not make a difference in this war,” Tannon Vale said gruffly, finally speaking up. “The Xalans have dozens of Shadows, hundreds even. What can one man do, even an extraordinary one?”
“What can one man do?” Stoller asked with a smile spreading out under his mustache. “I’ll show you what one man can do.”
Stoller raised his hands and a video stream floated up from the central table, expanding to almost their entire field of vision.
“This footage comes from the decrypted data your own daughter recovered at the Earth genetics lab,” he said, glancing at Alpha and Zeta. “It shows that this Archon, whatever he is, has given us a gift beyond compare.”
The video started playing, and a jolt ran through Lucas. It was a place he recognized easily: the sky-level bar in the Dubai hotel. He was looking at himself through frosted glass. His eyes were closed. The date-stamp of the security loop said it was the day of his rescue.
Xalan scientists milled about sifting through holographic displays and looking through readouts on Lucas’s unit. Armored soldiers patrolled the main floor, and a few were looking out the windows toward the sand dunes that once made up the Persian Gulf. There was audio, and in addition to the noises of machinery and electronics, the Xalans could be heard grunting and growling at each other.