by Paul Tassi
The whine of an engine.
A wave of screams rippling toward them.
Autocannon fire.
Noah’s eyes sprang open. A microjet was strafing down the hallway, unloading a firestorm of plasma on the approaching troops who were trapped in the narrow corridor. The guns stopped firing as the jet burst into the room and flew over Noah’s head. It spun around in midair and resumed firing into the hall. The remaining live troops were fleeing the way they’d come, though most were being torn to shreds by another round of cannon fire.
Once the hallway was clear, the engines spooled down and the jet landed behind them. Noah pulled himself off Tannon’s lifeless body and spun around as the cockpit opened. Out jumped Razor and Celton, who ran toward the three of them.
“Oh shit,” Celton exclaimed after seeing the carnage in the room.
“Get them all inside,” Razor said. “We must go.”
A door on the side of the jet opened to reveal a cramped compartment where missiles were likely once housed. Celton and Razor lifted Tannon and Erik inside and came back for Noah. Both of them dragged him to the opening and lay him sideways next to his brother. Erik was coated in blood and vomit and didn’t appear to be breathing. The last thing Noah heard were the engines firing as he lost consciousness.
28
It wasn’t possible.
Lucas had watched Mars Maston die. During their mission to Xala, the man had hauled a Shadow into a cramped escape pod by the blade of his knife, and the two butchered each other as they rocketed through space. Lucas saw the blood pour from Maston’s neck in the pod’s video feed. He watched the data readouts, devoid of all life signatures. Maston had saved all of them from the Chosen Shadow’s wrath, and it had cost him everything. This was a sick joke. A mind game of the Archon. The demonic figure before him was not his former friend.
Though part of him wanted to believe it was. And so did Asha, it seemed.
“Mars,” she called out weakly, “it’s us.”
The Corsair stared at them blankly. It was hard to tell where his thin black armor plating ended and his obsidian skin began.
“What do you remember, Maston?” Lucas said. “What has the Archon done to you?”
Mars Maston’s eyes narrowed. His voice sounded as if a thousand souls were trapped inside him.
“You speak as if you know me, traitors.”
Lucas lowered his pistol as slowly as he could manage.
“Just tell us what you remember. Who you remember.”
Maston’s dark face looked momentarily confused.
“There is only the pair of them. Him and her. Tulwar and Cora. I will find him and kill him, and when I do, the Archon will bring her back to me.”
He didn’t remember them at all, then. The Archon had carved up his mind and memories to give him a single focus, to turn him into a whirlwind of destruction.
“Who have you killed? On all those ships, in all those systems?” Asha asked slowly, attempting to understand. All of their guns were now lower than they probably should have been. Draylin Maston looked at his cousin in awe as he propped himself up, his fine robes soaked in the blood of his dismembered crew.
“The Order,” the Corsair Maston replied. “Their agents are everywhere. They’ve died screaming, as they should. As you will, once your purpose has been served.”
God, Lucas thought. He’d been butchering SDI and civilian convoys thinking they were Fourth Order, thinking he was hunting down the already dead Hex Tulwar.
“Who is the Archon?” Lucas pressed, determined to find an answer from at least one of his creations.
“The Tomes of the Forest were wrong,” Maston said. “The Archon is our god.”
God of the Shadows. And still unhelpful.
“Tulwar is dead, the Order is scattered,” Asha said, a pleading look in her eyes. “The Archon is not a god, and can’t bring Cora back, no matter what he’s telling you.”
“The words of a liar mean little,” Maston mumbled, inching toward them. The viewscreen showed a vast expanse of space behind him. The stars drifted sideways as the crippled Endless Dawn was floating dead in the vacuum. “Why should I believe the fabrication of strangers, desperate to save their own lives?” he continued.
It was Alpha who spoke next, for the first time.
“You know us, Commander Maston. Some part of you does. Why else would you take the time to speak openly, rather than slaughter us and be on your way as you have done on so many ships, so many times before?”
Anger flashed in Maston’s unnaturally blue eyes. They’d been a rich brown once, Lucas recalled.
“This one is needed,” he said, pointing to Lucas. “The rest are expendable.”
Hallucination? Memory alteration? Deep psychosis? What was this new version of Maston suffering from?
“But cousin,” Viceroy Draylin Maston finally said, getting to his feet, every one of his limbs shaking with fear. “We are blood, family. I am elated to see you alive! The other cousins will be so pleased. We all thought—”
Maston turned toward the Viceroy. He extended his hand, and Asha’s darksteel sword detached itself from Draylin’s hip and shot across the room and into Mars Maston’s hand. Maston pulled his arm forward and the Viceroy flew toward him, a look of shock on his face as he appeared to be pulled across the room by his belt. Maston whipped the sword straight through his cousin’s midsection as he passed by. Asha kept her blade sharpened to the last molecule, and it made a cut so clean the Viceroy didn’t even collapse until he was five feet on the other side of Maston. Each half of him hit the ground with a wet thud, and the three of them were speechless at the sight, even in a room full of similar carnage.
“Another Fourth Order agent,” Maston growled. “Expendable.”
He turned toward them.
“And now you.”
This wasn’t Mars Maston. This was a weapon. This was simply the Black Corsair.
“You will come with me, or your friends will die in a much slower manner. I would relish the opportunity.”
Corsair Maston was itching for a fight. He might have forgotten that Lucas was a weapon too. Lucas clenched his fist and raised his pistol again.
There was a sound from behind them. The rear doors slid open and in marched a unit of armored Xalan Paragons, Maston’s crew aboard his impossibly fast ship, the likes of which Lucas and his sons had fought in Dubai.
“And what of them, Commander Maston?” Alpha said, gesturing to the soldiers whose gray faces were hidden behind dark oval helmets. “Who is your … unusual-looking crew?”
The soldiers lined up behind the three of them and pointed a collection of energy weapons at each of their backs. A quick glance behind him and Lucas saw there were ten of them.
“Do not dare mock the Guardians, Xalan,” Maston seethed. “Over the centuries they have killed more of your kind than there are stars in the sky!”
“Jesus Christ …” Asha said, trailing off as she realized what Maston was saying. As the Black Corsair, the Archon had Maston killing SDI troops thinking they were Fourth Order, while using a Xalan crew he thought were Soran Guardians.
“Your counterpart is a useful weapon,” the Archon had told him. “Destroying fleets on a whim on his imagined quest for vengeance, but he merely improves upon existing constructs.”
Existing constructs. A Chosen Shadow. Whatever this facsimile was, it truly was just a shadow of the man he once called an enemy, then a rival, then a friend.
“This ends here,” Lucas said with confidence that surprised even him. “Either you can cast off the Archon’s influence and join us, or you can die here and now.”
“I serve my god willingly,” Maston said, fully indoctrinated, it seemed. “And your threats are empty, traitor.”
Maston raised his arms. Alpha and Asha shot up into the air, propelled by psionic force. Asha held on to her rifle, but Alpha’s weapon was sent tumbling to the ground. Asha tried to fire but found the gun torn from her grasp and flung across the room.
Lucas’s pistol was wrenched away from him as well. Maston the Corsair was able to perform multiple psionic actions simultaneously, a talent Lucas had never seen before.
Lucas dropped to his knees, and the Paragon unit to his rear advanced toward him. Asha and Alpha strained in the air, their bodies starting to contort in painful ways.
“I surrender,” Lucas said loudly, raising his arms over his head. Blood seeped into his clothing after his knees hit the wet metal.
“No!” Asha choked out from above.
Maston eyed him curiously and took a step forward, as did the Paragons behind him.
But Lucas had a talent he bet the Corsair had never seen before either.
“Fire!” he screamed.
Lucas’s mind was engulfed in a freezing inferno as the Paragon troopers all turned their weapons toward Maston and simultaneously fired.
In a moment of apparent shock, Maston lost his telekinetic grip on Alpha and Asha, who went tumbling to the ground. Asha landed on her feet, but Alpha hit the ground squarely on his back. Maston barely had time to leap away from the execution squad before him, and he backflipped over the stream of plasma headed his way. His own troops fired shot after shot as he flew around the room and took cover behind a mound of corpses he’d created earlier. They began to circle around the hiding place, continuing to unload as the pile of bodies was reduced to charred carbon.
Maston rose, and the Paragons flew upward with him.
“Enough!” he bellowed, as his own soldiers were launched twelve feet in the air, most losing their grip on their weapons before crashing back down to the ground.
Die! Lucas thought with all his might, directing his mind toward the snarling monster in front of him. The man flinched, perhaps for a millisecond, but then he rushed forward past his dazed troops directly at Lucas, Asha’s sword in his hand, unfazed by Lucas’s attempt to control him.
So much for that, Lucas thought as the black shape raced toward him.
In the corner of his eye, Lucas saw Asha flick her wrist. There was a small metal cuff around it, one the Viceroy hadn’t thought to strip from her, even when taking her famed weapon for his own. But it was an essential part of the package.
The electromagnetic tether wrenched the sword from Maston’s grip a second before he arrived. It shot across the room and landed in Asha’s outstretched hand.
Course-correcting, the airborne and now swordless Maston lowered his shoulder and barreled into Lucas. The two were flung into the starboard wall, which cratered from the impact. Through the shooting pain that followed, Lucas could see the confused Paragon troopers regaining their senses after his influence faded. Asha knew well enough to not let them collect themselves, and she’d already decapitated three before a single one could turn to fire on her. Alpha followed her lead and was unloading into the group with one of the Paragon’s own energy rifles. They began to return fire and he was forced to dive behind the upturned holotable.
Lucas had larger problems. His body was racked with pain after the collision with Maston, who was now two feet away and swinging a black fist toward his face.
Time slowed, and this close it was easy to see it was indeed Mars. The skin and eyes were terrifyingly transformed, but it was clearly the face of the man he once knew; faint traces of his former good looks could be seen under the monstrous facade. He was even swinging the same punch that had struck Lucas more than once years ago.
While Lucas was able to deftly dodge even hypersonic plasma rounds in his own current Shadow state, Maston’s fist was moving even faster. Lucas didn’t have time to block and took the strike across the temple, which dislodged him from the wall and sent him flying to the hard metal floor. Maston’s speed matched his own, if not exceeded it. The Paragons, Alpha, and Asha seemed to be fighting in slow motion out of focus across the bridge. Maston was moving at lightspeed, however.
Lucas barely had time to roll out of the way as Maston’s knee slammed into the spot where his head had been a fraction of a second earlier. Lucas tried to get to his feet, but felt himself wrenched upward by an unseen force, and then caught a roundhouse kick in the chest, which propelled him into the viewscreen of the ship. He was yanked forward again by Maston’s telekinesis and met with a stiff clothesline that sent him pinwheeling around twice before he crashed into a communications console. Ignoring the pain, Lucas picked himself up, bringing a nearby rifle with him. He took aim, but Maston flung his arm sideways, and Lucas involuntarily swung the rifle outward with one hand and let out a stream of rounds that whizzed dangerously close to Asha’s head a few dozen yards away. She barely had time to turn and scowl at him before having to refocus and skewer an encroaching Paragon.
Lucas dropped the gun as soon as he was able, terrified he couldn’t even control his own body in the face of Maston’s awesome power. He lunged toward the man again, but Maston brought his palm down and psionically slammed him into the ground before he could reach him. There was something resembling a sneer across his cracked lips, just above his dimpled chin.
He’s just toying with me, Lucas thought. The idea was terrifying. I can’t win. We can’t win.
Alpha and Asha had won, however, and had just finished cleaning up the remaining Paragon troops across the bridge. They ran toward him, but Lucas held out a bloody hand to stop them.
“Wait, wait,” he said hoarsely, but it was too late. Maston’s eyes flashed with an electric charge, and he seized control of Asha’s arm, causing her to whip her blade around to stop within an inch of Alpha’s throat. The Xalan froze in his tracks, then his own arm was pulled upward, and he held a pistol aimed at the side of Asha’s head. It was clear neither one of them could move a muscle, completely under Maston’s control. Both looked uncharacteristically terrified.
“Wait!” Lucas shouted. “I’ll come, I’ll help you find Tulwar. But only if you let them go.”
Maston turned toward Lucas, his hands raised like a puppetmaster.
“I knew you were a liar,” he said. “I should execute these two as a lesson for your treachery.”
“If you do, you’ll never find him,” Lucas said. “The Archon will be most displeased, and you’ll never see Corinthia again.”
He had to play along. Maston would butcher Alpha and Asha where they stood if he didn’t. Lucas couldn’t kill him. It was impossible. All the stories about the Black Corsair’s prowess in combat were true, it seemed. As were the Xalan scientists who thought a Soran Shadow could be more powerful than a Xalan one. Even one made out of a dead man.
Maston shifted his head slightly and dropped his arms. Asha and Alpha relaxed, their weapon arms dropping to their sides. Lucas ran to meet them, pain coursing through most of his body. Something told him if he wasn’t half a Shadow, he’d have died instantly from any one of Maston’s strikes.
“What are you doing?” Asha said, visibly shaken from being immobilized. “You can’t go with him.”
“You’ll die if I don’t,” Lucas said, putting his arms on her shoulders.
“Lucas, you cannot—” Alpha started.
“The Archon needs me alive,” Lucas interrupted. “This isn’t like Xalan central command. You’re not leaving me to die. If I go, I can find out what he wants, and who or what he is. And there may be some hope for Mars. He claims not to know us, but he has no real reason not to kill either of you and drag me out of here with all my limbs broken. Maybe there’s still some part of the true Mars left inside him.”
“There isn’t,” Asha said fiercely, casting a hard stare at the statuesque monster behind Lucas. “I won’t let you go, not again.”
“Nor shall I,” Alpha said, his translator properly conveying his grave tone, which was matched by the determined look in his gold-ringed eyes. Both gripped their weapons tightly, and were clearly ready to die in his defense.
“I know you won’t,” Lucas sighed. “Which is why I’m sorry for this.”
“For what?” Asha asked, eyes narrowed.
Listen, Lucas th
ought. His mind was still in pain from turning the Paragons against Maston, and another invisible icy knife drove through his skull.
Asha and Alpha’s faces relaxed. Tears welled in Lucas’s eyes when he saw their blank, dead eyes staring past him.
“Listen to me,” Lucas said, voice cracking. “You’re going to leave. Take the fighter in the hangar bay and go to Solarion Station. Find Erik and Noah. Get them back to Sora. I’ll find you. One way or another, I’ll find you.”
Lucas concentrated as hard as he could. He mind was screaming in agony. He had to make sure they did what he said. That they wouldn’t come running back through the door in twenty seconds, his influence having worn off. When he could take no more, he broke off his mental focus, taking his head into his hands. It throbbed in time with his pulse.
Without saying a word, the tranquilized Asha and Alpha simply turned and walked out of the bloodied bridge. The door slid shut behind them. Lucas hated what he’d had to do to them, but hopefully it had saved their lives. It was clear Maston could eviscerate them with a look if he wanted to.
Lucas turned back to the blackened figure. Maston’s light armor plating didn’t have so much as a plasma burn from his sacking of the ship and their fight. He really was a new kind of monster.
“Wise choice, traitor,” Maston growled. The multitude of voices that made up his speech was unsettling. Lucas wondered if any of them were actually his own. Was this what Lucas was destined to become once his transformation was complete?
“Now what?” Lucas said, rubbing his temples, which still felt like they were being jabbed with a thousand tiny needles. His ability would not work on Maston; that much was made clear from their brawl.
“I take you to him,” Maston said. “And we watch the rest of the Order fall.”
Lucas’s gaze darted to the viewscreen as a ship rose into view. The gold engines of Alpha’s fighter glowed hot against the darkness of space, then flickered as the ship shot out toward the stars and a tiny red planet in the distance.
Thank god, Lucas thought. At least they’re away from him. His eyes went back to Maston.