by Paul Tassi
“We may not have long,” Theta whispered when they reached the room. Or, tried to whisper, at least. All her translator collar did was lower the volume of her voice, so the effect wasn’t quite the same.
“What’s going on?” Lucas asked. A knot was starting to form in his stomach.
“After an … incident at Colony One, I needed some time away. I tried to visit my father who I was told was working at the Thylium orbital hangar. Halfway to the station, I was denied access.”
“Yeah, I heard there was a solar storm wrecking havoc out there,” Lucas said, eyes narrowing.
“I rechecked all current status reports on Thylium by hacking SDI remote logs,” Theta continued, voice wavering. “My father never reached the station.”
Lucas started pacing around the room, the knot in his stomach tightened painfully.
“Asha is supposed to be there guarding him …”
“Lucas,” Theta said. Her black eyes were wet. “I spent the last three days infiltrating SDI off-book servers. Some of the most advanced encryptions your species is capable of. There I found an order. One that issued an arrest warrant for Asha and my father. They have been apprehended and taken to an undisclosed location.”
Lucas froze while his insides melted. His mind was racing so quickly it almost hurt.
No.
“The second part of the order is something you should read for yourself,” Theta continued. She waved up a data file to hover in between them. “It is from High Chancellor Stoller’s Viceroy, Draylin Maston.”
Lucas expanded the text.
Attn: GS Jahane Tarla—We’ve now confirmed Alpha’s data on Lucas has been forged since his return. The Xalan is trying to cure him, as we feared. His stats are dropping rapidly, and soon he’ll be nothing more than simple flesh and bone, and entirely useless to us as anything but a trophy to trot out to the public. We don’t need a trophy. We need a weapon.
I’m securing Alpha and the volatile Lady Asha and sending you in his place with a cover story. Using Alpha’s “cure,” we’ve managed to reverse engineer the actual Shadow conversion formula, at long last. I realize you couldn’t make your own batch in fifty-odd attempts, but now we finally have it in hand. Data says trials on humans or Sorans could take years, but Lucas is already far enough along to be a current asset, provided we can control him when this is all over.
Report everything he does or says. Send all data by EOD after collection. This could be your finest hour, Geneticist Tarla. Your greatest work and eternal place in history. Or it could mean your slow and painful execution. Do not make Lucas your latest failure. He is too valuable to lose.
Lucas read the entire document almost instantly, the Shadow conversion having dramatically increased his cognitive functioning. In a rage, he whirled around, his fist moving through the holographic page and slamming into the opposite wall with such force the entire level shook like it had just been hit by an earthquake.
Theta looked terrified, and when she spoke, her metallic voice was shaking. She raised another file from her wrist communicator.
“I forged my own clearance to visit you, and an order for your immediate transfer authorized by the Viceroy himself. I was hoping we might use it to leave this base peacefully, though I do not know if my falsified information is convincing enough. I was forced to draft it rather hastily, given how recently I acquired this information.”
Lucas sat down on his bed, chin to his chest. His knuckles were cut, but he couldn’t feel the pain. A piercing alarm began to bounce around the metal walls of the laboratory floor.
“There’s no peaceful way out of here,” Lucas said through clenched teeth.
Lucas stormed out of his quarters, Theta trailing timidly behind. Then, after a blinding sprint forward, he was across the room, his hand around Jahane’s soft throat. She grasped at his forearm with a grip stronger than one would think with her supposed years, though infinitely weak compared to his own. A garbled voice squawked out of her communicator.
“What’s the prisoner’s status?” it shrieked as the long, slow alarm blared all around them.
Prisoner. He had been so foolish.
“You lied!” Lucas roared at Jahane, lifting the tiny woman a solid three feet off the ground. She continued to claw at Lucas’s iron grip. Theta finally caught up to the pair of them, long strides allowing her to bound across the room.
Lucas released Jahane, who crumpled down in a heap next to the door, which flashed with red lights indicating total lockdown.
“Can’t you see it was worth it?” she choked out, pawing at her neck like the motion would help her find more air. “Can’t you feel how strong you’ve become?”
“You ran Stoller’s Soran Shadow trials. How many did you kill? Dozens? Hundreds?”
“To save billions!” she wheezed. “You could save us all if you’d only cooperate.”
“And this is how you make me fall in line?” Lucas growled. “By kidnapping my friends? Where are they?”
Jahane merely glared at him. Her face was twisted in anger and pain. It was clear that her permanent smile was nothing more than a facade. This was the real geneticist, one who had committed countless atrocities on Stoller’s behalf and had slowly dosed Lucas with Shadow serum until he was ready to burst with power.
“You’ll never find them,” she spat.
“Where!” Lucas bellowed, and he knew immediately he’d struck the right note. A piece of his brain felt like it had just touched ice, causing him to wince painfully, but the effect on Jahane was immediate.
Her eyes went vacant. She stared past Lucas and Theta to a blank spot across the room. She was his now.
“Where?” he said more calmly.
“I do not have that information,” Jahane said matter-of-factly in a monotone cadence. “The Viceroy will know.”
“Where is he, then?” Lucas said sharply, temper spiking again. “Where is Draylin Maston?”
“The palace,” she said, her voice still raspy, bruises already forming around her throat. Her stare slowly softened, then she blinked her eyes and glared at Lucas. She was back.
“Your friends will be dead by the time you reach them,” she said.
“Stoller and the Viceroy better hope not,” Lucas said, darkening her frail form with his shadow. “Or I will burn their entire ruling class to ashes.”
“Lucas,” Theta called from behind him. “We must go, sensors indicate troops are moments from—”
“Alright,” Lucas said, letting out a cough. Then another. Something was in his lungs, burning. Barely visible yellow gas was starting to pour from the ventilation ports in the room. Lucas looked at the door, then down at Jahane.
“Kill me, then,” she said. “And be done with it. The monster I’ve helped create would make for a fitting end.”
“No monster,” Lucas growled. “Not yet.”
He turned away from her as she dissolved into a fit of hacking coughs, and he planted a sharp kick into the double metal doors to her right. They exploded outward, allowing fresh air to rush into his lungs.
“Come on,” he said, turning back to Theta. “Stay behind—”
“Lucas!” Theta shouted, as loud as her translator would let her.
Lucas turned and saw a quartet of armored guards sprinting down the corridor, rifles raised. They fired.
The effect his abilities had on his perception of what was happening was strange. Lucas stiff-armed Theta to the side, sending her flying to safety behind a wall. He could see ovals of burning plasma hurtling toward him. Not frozen, but like someone was lobbing a very slow pitch down home plate. A pitch coming at fifty miles per hour rather than the usual 1,500 of a plasma round. He ducked in and out of the bursts with ease, though one did manage to painfully graze the side of his arm.
Lucas wasn’t a telekinetic Chosen Shadow like the Council or the Black Corsair, but he only needed their trademark strength and speed against something as fragile and slow as man. He drove his fist into the chestplate of t
he first soldier, which cracked like ice, then whirled around to shatter the helmet of the next one with his elbow. The two were unconscious before they hit the ground. His next strikes were more precise. He knocked the third soldier’s rifle downward so that it fired into his companion’s leg. As a shrill cry filled the hall, Lucas wrenched the entirety of the last soldier upward, sending him flying a dozen feet into the ceiling to come crashing back down to earth. The only sounds now were the moans of the shot soldier mixed with the dull wail of the alarm.
“Follow me,” Lucas called to Theta, who had a look of complete shock on her face. The entire exchange had taken just a few simple seconds, though it had felt much longer to Lucas. He grabbed one of the soldier’s rifles, but there wasn’t time to stop and change into armor that might shield him from a shot he didn’t have the capacity to dodge. As he lifted the rifle out of the downed soldier’s hands, he caught a reflection of his own face in the man’s helmet. His eyes were wild, and so blue they were glowing.
They turned the corner to find the lift open with even more guards spilling out. Some fully armored and helmeted, some merely in fatigues, hastily assembled to respond to the distress call.
Lucas’s mind raced faster than he ever thought possible. His brain instantly assessed the armor of each soldier, their weapons, their positioning, who was likely to fire first, who had a clear line of sight on him. A flood of data surged through his mind in a single second, and he knew exactly what to do just as the first trigger was pulled.
Though these were Stoller’s soldiers, tasked with keeping him at bay, they weren’t the enemy. There was a loose threat on base, and they had to contain it. He would have done the same. They didn’t deserve to die, and Lucas was thankful he still had enough of his sanity to realize that. For now.
During his instant analysis of the scene, he found his target. Lucas rolled right to dodge a stream of plasma from the first few soldiers, then unloaded a precision shot into the blue stun grenade clipped to the foremost soldier’s belt. The device exploded at his waist, sending searing white light and deafening sound through the other half dozen soldiers all around him, who cried out and staggered around, crashing into one another. Lucas took advantage of their disorientation to sprint into the middle of them, cleaving the group in half and sending all six crashing into the sides of the hallway where their armor dug deep gashes in the walls. When none stirred, Theta danced over the downed bodies and entered the lift with him. One unarmored soldier lying prone on the ground tried to raise his pistol toward the pair of them. Lucas stamped down on it with his boot, crushing the gun to scrap and atomizing a few of the man’s fingers in the process.
The lift rocketed toward the surface. Lucas stopped to catch his breath, but realized he didn’t need to. He’d never been able to fight like this. Think like this. It was exhilarating, terrifying. Theta couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was an impossible creation, a horrible one. But his thoughts were fixed on Alpha and Asha alone.
“How far is the palace from here?” Lucas asked as the lift sped past sublevel after sublevel toward the surface.
“8,854 miles,” Theta said, seemingly not needing to reference any data to say that with certainty.
“Can you open a connection to the colony?” Lucas asked. He wiped a smear of blood from his chest. He didn’t know which soldier it had come from.
Theta fiddled with her communicator. “We are still too far underground. When we reach the surface, I will show our clearance to the local authorities on base and then we can—”
“Theta,” Lucas said, stifling a reactive laugh. “We’re far past forged clearances.”
“Then have you formulated a plan for our escape?” she asked.
“Sometimes you just have to improvise,” Lucas said, checking the readouts on his rifle.
The doors opened, and Lucas remembered where this exit went. To a hangar for one of Alpha’s many projects: the mech testing grounds.
Problem.
When he saw what was outside, he shoved Theta back into the lift and wrenched the doors shut with his bare hands. He leapt upward just in time for a hail of plasma to pepper the metal. Landing on a precarious catwalk, he surveyed the situation on the ground below. There were dozen soldiers but, more pressingly, there was also a pair of giant mechs, streamlined versions of the exosuit Alpha had designed to fight Commander Omicron’s Paragons during their first trip to Sora onboard the Ark. Why did he have to be such a damn good engineer?
The catwalk exploded and Lucas was forced to leap away before the blast arrived. The barrel arm of the dark-red mech was smoking, while the navy-blue one had a shot heating up in the chamber. A second blast, another impossible leap. The soldiers tried to get a bead on Lucas while he darted across the room. The air was thick and hot with plasma, too much to effectively dodge. Lucas took cover behind the torso of an unfinished exosuit and the pings on the metal were fast and frequent. A shot from an unseen mech caused the torso he was hiding behind to rocket into him, sending him sprawling forward, sliding across the ground with fresh pain shooting through his back. Filled with rage, Lucas kicked the mangled, smoking metal piece forward, where it bowled over a pair of soldiers. Lucas got off two shots expertly guided into the shoulders of two other troops—nonfatal, but assuredly painful. He let off a stream toward the mechs, but the plasma merely spattered off the suits. Both the crimson and navy units were sprinting toward him now, gun barrels raised.
He raced forward like a whirlwind to meet them.
The first booming shot whizzed by him and its heat baked the right half of his body uncomfortably. He leapt forward and drove his fist into the headless mech, ripping off the morenthic plating to reveal the flesh-and-blood human inside. The operator’s eyes were wide with terror, and Lucas flung him down to the ground before leaping to the adjacent navy mech. He landed on its shoulder and pummeled its gun arm with a flurry of barefisted strikes. The barrel started heating up to fire to try and shake him off, but its housing was now severely bent inward from Lucas’s thunderous blows. The stifled explosion inside the arm sent Lucas flying off the exosuit as the mech whirled around and fell on its back with a thud that shook the entire hangar.
Lucas stood up and pulled three inches of shrapnel out of his side. Only five soldiers remained in the room, the others lying on the floor with gunshot or blast injuries. Lucas raised his heavy rifle with one arm. Five other guns clattered to the floor, the soldiers dropping to their knees with hands raised and looks of fear on their faces. Lucas marched the soldiers over to the lift, where they traded places with Theta. She wandered outside to marvel at the carnage. Lucas slammed the doors shut and cratered them with his palm so they wouldn’t reopen.
Turning back to Theta, Lucas finally felt something close to exhaustion. He’d fought like a demon, but still had limits. He clenched his side where blood flowed from his ribs and let out a sharp hiss as he bent down to press the superheated barrel of a discarded pistol to his wounds to seal them shut.
Lucas looked forward toward the final obstacle. The hangar doors. He stumbled toward them and found them slowly rising, light flooding in to reveal the destruction inside.
An army waited for them.
Three hundred soldiers. A half dozen mechs. An enormous hovering tank with a barrel the size of a oak tree. Anything that could fire plasma or metal was pointed directly at him. It was too much. Far too much.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Theta as he struggled to stay on his feet.
“Perhaps I will see my father again,” she said as two burly soldiers approached her. Fifty were now shuffling toward Lucas. A veritable firing squad. One hammered his boot into Theta’s backward-bending knee, causing her to fall. The other raised his pistol to the back of her head. There would be no prisoners. No witnesses. Lucas tried to lunge forward but couldn’t.
“Stop,” he cried. “STOP!”
His brain felt like it had been submerged completely in freezing water. He clutched the sides of his head and dropped
to his knees as the pain forced tears from his eyes. When his vision returned and the stinging dulled, he saw what was happening around him.
No shot was fired.
The two men froze, then relaxed, arms at their sides. Lucas recognized the vacant looks on their faces immediately. Turning around, he saw the same blank stares across the entire army. Legions of soldiers, unmoving, stares fixed straight ahead with weapons dangling at their sides.
Lucas cautiously walked toward Theta and helped her to her feet.
The silence was eerie. There was no shouting. No gunfire. Just the purr of the hovertank’s engine and the distant groan of the alarm.
The entire base was empty, even though it was filled with Sorans.
But if Lucas knew anything, it was that it wouldn’t last long. He shook out the remaining splinters from his head and finalized the last leg of his plan in an instant.
“Come on,” he said to Theta, and the two of them made their way through the maze of frozen soldiers, who didn’t move even when they were brushed or bumped into. Lucas briefly thought of another word, “die,” for what they almost did to Theta, but he thought better of it and pressed forward. He was in no way eager to feel that stinging chill in his mind again. There was no pain quite like it.
Another hangar loomed ahead. Two prototype aerial fighters hung from the rafters like sleeping bats. Soon they reached a long rope that automatically hoisted them to the cockpit of the one with its paneling closed up and ready for flight. The sleek pearl-and-gold vessel bristling with unmatched firepower and a miniaturized blue-core drive was Alpha’s latest masterpiece.
“Can you fly this vessel?” Theta asked, securing her restraints in the gunner’s seat. If she were any taller, she wouldn’t have fit. A dome closed up and around them.
“Yes,” Lucas said, his eyes and brain analyzing the Soran/Xalan hybrid controls at lightning speed. A thousand menus and settings and options and readouts, and it was all so simple. But Lucas’s mind was fatigued. Whatever he’d just done out there had taken most of the strength he had left. Once he studied the cockpit, it was all he could do not to pass out.