by Paul Tassi
Lucas stared out into the room. No one was looking for the boy.
“I’m not who I was before.”
He looked down, but the boy was fast asleep on his arm. He pulled his cloak around so that it covered his bare feet. Every so often, he’d look down to make sure the child was still there. It was increasingly hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Who was to say that this boy wasn’t some broken-off piece of his subconscious? But the mop of matted black hair never left his arm, and soon he drifted off as well, utter exhaustion having seeped into every inch of him.
The burning woods of Losara was no place for children. Lucas left the sleeping child wrapped in his cloak as he stole away to disembark when they reached the proper longitude. He found a row of all-terrain hoverskiffs in the top level of the cargo hold, which meant he could avoid a lengthy swim and sprint to the colony. Most of the deck crew were inside the ship, but those on the surface battling the wind simply stared as a man emerged from below deck and drove a skiff straight off the edge of the boat into the choppy sea. Just before plunging into the waves, Lucas gunned the craft so that it shot toward the shoreline, leaving a spray of white saltwater in its wake. Then a spray of sand and stone when it hit the beach, then a spray of leaves and ash as he burst into the forest, dodging trees, boulders, and flames. It seemed like nearly half the countryside was on fire, and there was no rain this far north. He kept trying his comm, but found nothing but static. Looking up, he now saw only a few Xalan ships retreating to a point on the horizon. Asha’s battle was miraculously won, which hopefully meant she would have reached the colony by now. Lucas hoped he wasn’t too late to stop what Maston had planned for the installation. No one else should have to be subjected to what he had endured during the sickening Shadow transformation. If he survived this war, he would burn every such facility to the ground, both Xala’s Genetic Science Enclave and whatever Soran horror show Madric Stoller had dreamed up. Lucas didn’t care if Stoller’s son said his father’s experiments failed. Even a program with only the slimmest chance to create more beasts like him and Maston, or Omicron and the Desecrator, was too great a threat. Lucas would be the last Shadow, one way or another.
Through the smoke, Lucas saw a mountain ahead. Nestled in the face was a white structure with sharp spires reaching toward the heavens.
I’m here, he thought, and accelerated through the last charred trees into the clearing.
Lucas had never been to Colony One, the place that had raised his sons while he was imprisoned on Earth. And he would likely never see the beautiful place it once was, except in the videos Noah had shown him. The complex was a ruin, all blackened stone, melted metal, and dismembered bodies.
But the living were there as well. At least three interceptors were on the ground, and SDI soldiers were racing around putting out fires and lining up the dead in neat rows. They all jolted upright when they saw him, and many pointed energy weapons at him. He leapt off the skiff, which slid to a halt in the air, and scanned the panicked faces of the soldiers. She had to be there.
“Lucas!” came the cry, and he could breathe again. Asha broke through a line of soldiers and ran to throw her arms around him. She was out of military finery and back into power armor, black with soot. Her sword was slung across her back, and somehow she’d reacquired her silver Magnum.
And there he was too. The relief on Alpha’s face was clear, but he looked worried too as his eyes crawled over Lucas’s blackened arm.
“Where are they?” Lucas asked, pulling back from her. “Where are the boys?”
Asha shook her head.
“We got a brief transmission from them a little while ago. It was mostly fuzz, but it was Malorious Auran, and all we could make out was that they were returning here.”
“From where?” Lucas asked, but Asha shrugged.
“I couldn’t reach him again.”
“It appears the Corsair buried some sort of jamming system nearby,” Alpha said, still eyeing Lucas’s arm. “I am attempting to locate it.”
“Where’s your family?” Lucas asked. “And the Earthborn?”
He scanned the bodies, but many were covered and the others were older. “Where—”
Lucas was interrupted as a transport rounded the mountainside, streaking past the white tower on the black cliff. It was Soran, and he immediately recognized the small pearl-and-gold fighter flying next to it. Lucas half expected a dark, flat ship to be chasing them, but they were the only craft in the sky. He and Asha shared a smile.
SDI soldiers parted as the large ship set down on the charred practice field in the middle of the complex. The rear ramp lowered, and Lucas’s eyes widened.
Two dozen or more teenagers walked out of the dark entryway, some limping, many injured. He recognized a few from the pictures Noah had shown him. The Earthborn.
But they weren’t alone.
Any of them that could manage it were escorting children and infants. A tall, blond girl with a shell-shocked look held the hands of two toddlers who waddled down the ramp onto the dirt. A large, dark-skinned boy held a pair of snow-white babes in his arms, with a two-year-old in a sling across his back. They just kept coming, the young men and women, and the very young children with them. But where were his sons?
The Earthborn met the soldiers and medics rushed to attend to both them and the children. Nearly all of the little ones were crying, and the Earthborn all seemed too stunned to speak.
Towering over the humans were the lanky, pale forms of Theta and Zeta, both stonefaced but apparently unhurt. Alpha raced to embrace them, and the words they exchanged needed no translation.
Then, at the back of the group, he saw them.
Erik limped down the ramp, holding his hip with one hand, a large pistol in his other. The look on his face was unfiltered rage, and he didn’t even seem to notice his parents in front of him. And then Lucas understood why.
Out came Noah, flanked by a tear-stained Sakai and the gaunt Malorious Auran. In Noah’s arms was a fragile shape. White, spattered with red. Her golden hair blew in the hot wind, and her skin was pale. Kyra’s eyes were closed, and Lucas knew from the pain on his son’s face that she would never open them again.
That girl was the future, he thought, feeling a dull ache take root in his heart. That girl was the best of all of us. Like Corinthia before her. How could this happen? How could this happen again?
Noah reached his father, and Lucas gently put his hand on the girl’s arm. Her flesh was ice.
A thought dawned on him. He had to try. No matter how impossible it seemed, he had to try.
Lucas focused like he never had before. Drawing on every bit of pain, shutting out the entire rest of the world. The only people in existence were him and this empty shell of a girl.
Live, he thought. Live.
But he felt no discomfort. No cold in his mind.
LIVE, he commanded.
She lay there in his son’s arms, unstirring, the air thick with the wails of children. He saw nothing in her. Nothing in her but the abyss.
“Live …” he finally whispered out loud, choking back a sob, but he knew it was useless.
Even his power had limits. He was no god after all.
The ship was in chaos.
The SDI supercruiser Kyneth’s Hammer had descended to form a new base of operations, the Colossus remaining in high orbit with the rest of the fleet rallied around it.
Noah had lost consciousness after coming onboard and was being treated for a litany of wounds including a sliced lung and a plasma-ruptured liver. A harried-looking Malorious Auran had locked himself in a room with his granddaughter’s body, and wouldn’t come out. They could hear weeping through the door, so they left him alone to contend with his grief. Sakai and a few of her siblings were overseeing the new Earthborn children they’d uncovered at Colony Two. Lucas and Asha were stunned to suddenly realize they were grandparents, many times over. But no one knew which children belonged to which Earthborn, and now wasn�
��t the time for mass DNA testing.
Rather, it fell to Erik and Theta to relay all that had happened at Colonies One and Two. Neither he nor Theta wanted to explain how Kyra fell, but Lucas had seen what the Corsair was capable of and understood. Through her sacrifice and the courage of his sons, the Corsair was finally dead. It was a huge blow to the Archon, as was the recent reclamation assault on Sora. But they had new problems now.
The Archon’s forces were solidifying half a world away. The remaining fleet was clustered over Rhylos, with millions of troops on the ground, flooding the entire continent. And there were still plenty of invading Xalans ravaging nearly every major city across the planet, with not enough SDI to intervene. They had won the last few battles, but it felt like they were still losing the war. The only bright spot was that the planet’s capital, the sprawling megacity Elyria, had been relatively untouched so far. It was well defended by the SDI, but curiously, the Xalans showed little interest in the populous city after only a few airstrikes and attempted incursions during the invasion. As such, refugees from the entire continent were flooding into Elyria as a safe haven, and its population had nearly tripled overnight.
It wouldn’t be possible to surprise the Archon again, and his fleet was still formidable, even after they had thrown nearly everything at him out in orbit. They’d lost over half their ships, and their ground forces were being pulled from conflict to conflict by the rampaging Xalans. The grisly scene Lucas had seen in Kun-lai was repeating itself all over the globe, according to the Stream and military intel.
Asha was back in command, conferencing with her generals and admirals, many of whom hadn’t yet been briefed that Lucas was alive, including his old friends Kiati and Toruk.
“I will administer an increased dosage,” Alpha said after the last briefing wrapped. “Perhaps it is still not too late.”
“It is,” Lucas sighed, looking at his blackened arm. “There’s no going back now. I can feel it. And it’s not just my skin. It’s worming its way into my brain. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. The things I’ve done.”
“You are still in control,” Alpha said as he readied the familiar-looking syringe. While that had been true of the last few hours, Lucas wasn’t confident it would last. He felt himself growing more numb with each passing hour. As if his soul were slowly bleeding out of him from some unseen wound. Alpha was trying to remain composed as he injected Lucas with needle after needle, but Lucas could feel the fear pouring off him in waves. Was his friend scared for him, or scared of him?
Asha walked in the room, rubbing her eyes after assuredly another frustrating session with the military council. She looked exhausted and, for the first time since Lucas had returned from Earth, older.
She sat down across from Lucas and Alpha in the makeshift laboratory of the Hammer. Her hair was falling out of a messy bun, and her fatigues hung loosely off her.
“It feels like the end,” she said at last, staring at both of them. Alpha had run out of injections to give Lucas, but he felt nothing, as if the syringes had been completely empty. There was no stopping the transformation now, they both knew that. But that’s not what Asha was talking about. She motioned to a cloud of ships that was being broadcast over the few remaining Stream layers. It hovered over tall red cliffs. The projected image was presented without commentary; most news outlets on the surface had been destroyed or evacuated.
“They’re massed over Rhylos in a formation we can’t possibly hope to assault. We can’t take them by surprise again. At any second they could launch a thousand antimatter city-erasers and we could barely hope to stop a fraction of them.”
“The Archon said he wouldn’t do that,” Lucas said, rubbing his arm where the needle holes had healed already. “He doesn’t want to destroy Sora like he did Earth.”
“Even so,” Asha said. “Taking the planet without completely destroying it is well within his reach. He already has half our biggest military bases under his command. He’s cleared out most of the major cities in the southern hemisphere and is creeping north. God only knows why Elyria still stands.”
She was speaking like a leader. Like the Chancellor.
“We could reclaim Xala while it is left undefended,” Alpha suggested.
Asha shook her head.
“They took every ship with them, yes, but no offense to your homeworld, Xala is useless to everyone now. They’ve traded up for Sora, like they always wanted.”
“What of the colony planets?” Alpha pressed.
“Sure, we could run, Stoller was right about that,” she said. “But to what end? We’d lose nine tenths of the population in the attempt, and the rest would be hunted down within what, a few years?”
“The Archon,” Lucas said. “He’s the key to all of it. Without his leadership, the generals would be in disarray. There is no more Council. Only him. I saw it; he’s coordinating every move and maneuver personally. With him dead, we would have a chance.”
“You keep telling us he can’t be killed,” Asha said.
“Everyone said the same about the Corsair, and yet here we are.”
“I mean no offense to your brave sons,” Alpha said, “but that was a miracle, and the Archon has no such weakness like that twisted version of Commander Maston. That unfortunate girl gave her life to end his, but he was a threat that pales before the danger and mystery of the Archon.”
“I can resist him,” Lucas said.
“Ah yes, this Circle,” Alpha mused. Lucas had told them of his ghostly visions of Omicron and the Desecrator, though from the worried glances they’d exchanged, he was concerned they thought it was merely a part of his mental degradation. And maybe it was, for all he knew.
“If only those monsters were as helpful in life as they are in death,” Alpha growled. “I wish—”
But he was cut off by a loud squeal from the Stream feed behind him. All three of them turned toward it.
The entire screen was now devoted to one image, the Archon himself. His mouthless face and star-filled eyes seemed to stare directly into Lucas. When he spoke, the voice was in his mind, all their minds. Asha and Alpha cringed when they heard it, but Lucas was used to it by now. It was almost … soothing. He quickly shook that thought out of his head.
“The time has come to step out from the shadows, where I have waited long enough,” the Archon said. Lucas could make out the Xalan ships behind him stationed at Rhylos.
“This age of Sora is at an end,” he continued. “A new one begins this day. Some of you desire a long, painful death, full of bloodshed and violence. Others are wiser, and will accept their fate with open arms. The decision is yours, and it matters not to me which path you choose. Both will reach the same destination.
“I speak not to you, Sora, but to your cherished hero, Lucas of Earth. The dead man who lives, but only just. I request his presence at my side, and I grow tired of scouring the surface and the stars for him. Lucas, you shall appear before me by day’s end. I anticipate your reluctance, but I assure you, you will come.”
Lucas looked at Asha and Alpha, both of whom shared the same stunned expression. The Archon continued.
“Behold, Elyria, perhaps the greatest city in this galaxy, by any measure.”
The shot changed to one of the capital, surrounded by SDI ships, flooded with refugees. The buildings stretched into the sky while, just outside the city, the tower of the Grand Palace loomed over all.
“The untouched haven of this bloody war,” the Archon said. “Perhaps you have mistaken me as foolish or merciful, but I say this to you: why target a metropolis full of sixty million souls, when in just a short while, over a hundred and fifty million fight to flood into the same space?”
Oh god, Lucas thought, and from the look on Asha’s face, she understood too. Elyria was a trap. That was the reason it hadn’t been touched. There was an enormous chunk of the fleet devoted to defending it, and civilians had been pouring in for nearly two days now.
“Over the course
of the invasion, my aerial forces injected a series of antimatter bombs into the surface surrounding the city. There are two ways these devices will now detonate. First, if there is any sign of evacuation, either military or civilian. Second, if Lucas does not appear at my side when the sun sets on this continent of dust.”
Even at a distance, they felt they could hear the cries of all those in Elyria rising up from the ground. Asha’s comm was screeching with generals trying to get ahold of her, panicked voices all talking over each other.
“You should know I do not play these petty Soran and Xalan games of boasts and bluffs,” the Archon said, his eyes narrowing.
There was a brief flash of light that made all of them wince. The sound that followed was a rush of rolling thunder, and a white sphere of pure energy expanded near the base of the Grand Palace on the outskirts of the city.
The palace had been his home once.
He’d been welcomed there by Talis Vale.
Charmed by her daughter, Corinthia.
Annoyed by Mars Maston.
Mentored by Malorious Auran.
Joked with Sol’tanni Silo.
He remembered the nights with Asha.
Little Noah and Kyra playing in the nursery.
Erik being born and christened the First Son of Sora.
And now, the Grand Palace fell in mammoth stone and metal shards, collapsing onto an atomized base, falling to the earth in a giant cloud of dust and ash. It was gone, erased from the skyline completely in a matter of seconds, along with the tens of thousands assuredly sheltered inside. The shockwave shattered a million panes of glass in the greater city itself, yet the blue flame of the explosion never reached its edge.
None of them had any words. Even the screaming in Elyria had gone silent. Only the Archon spoke, reappearing in place of the destruction.
“Day’s end,” he said again, and disappeared into darkness.
“I’m going,” Lucas said as he issued orders to the SDI to ready a transport a few minutes later in the hangar of the Hammer. Alpha and Asha both shot glances at him like he had finally gone fully insane.