by Paul Tassi
He’d seen the massive cyclone of Xalan ships from afar, but now he realized they were inside the spiral, at the point on the surface they were all circling. Looking straight up, the slowly moving Xalan ships extended as far as Lucas could see, like some enormous school of fish. The fighters were minnows. Interceptors were sharks, motherships whales. And a few craft so massive they were like undiscovered leviathans, lurking deep in the depths of the ocean. The diameter of the fleet’s orbit was about two miles, he gathered, with all of them clustered in the center.
On the ground it was another scene entirely. Countless armored Xalans stood at attention, all facing them in eerie silence. Around the Archon himself was a personal guard of a half dozen Shadows, thick with muscle and armor plating, eyes full of quiet rage. Lucas noticed that a few of them held the weapons they’d brought. One had Asha’s sword, the other Noah’s hammer, though with their size they looked like toys strapped to their hips. His family looked anxious, but intact. Lucas couldn’t see any new injuries on any of them, other than the menacing cuts on his sons’ necks, threatening to erupt at any moment. His own arm still ached from being crushed under the Archon’s heel.
“Come,” the Archon said finally, and turned away from him. Lucas walked up to the others.
“Are you alright?” he asked Asha, putting his hands into hers, which were bound by metal. He could rip the bindings off all of them, but what would that accomplish? There was no need to provoke the Archon further until he knew he could actually end him. But he was far from confident in his ability to do so, despite what Maston had said. Let go of the pain? How?
It wasn’t just a switch he could flip, though the hurt within him dimmed a bit whenever he looked into Asha’s eyes.
“I’m fine,” she said weakly. “What’s the plan?”
“To wait,” Lucas said. Erik snorted, but said nothing.
“Come!” the Archon said, and suddenly the four who were bound in front of him were wrenched forward a few feet. Noah stumbled and dropped to his knees, but everyone else kept their footing. Lucas glared at the Archon, but everyone starting moving toward him. Lucas walked alongside the Archon, his family in tow behind him. He was suddenly uncomfortable that the Archon didn’t have him chained, even more so when he noticed a cloud of camera bots swirling around the procession. Is he broadcasting this? Walking alongside the Archon unbound made it look like he was already his pet, his new Corsair. But he wasn’t. Not yet. Not ever. I’ll die before I ever turn completely, he thought. Though he carried a deep fear he might not be given a choice.
As they walked with the Archon leading the way and the honor guard of the Shadows behind, the other Xalans spread out before them and lowered themselves to their backward-bending knees as they passed. The gesture spread outward like a ripple, and soon every Xalan they could see was kneeling.
It was only then that Lucas glimpsed where they were walking. Sticking out of the lone and level sands was a rock formation, a jagged spire of red stone poking out at all angles in a malformed tent shape. It was probably two hundred feet high at its peak and looked like it could be a natural formation.
But as they grew closer, he could see some very unnatural things about it. A door had been carved at the base, and surrounding it were faded white symbols encircling the entrance. Lucas recognized the language.
“Ba’siri,” Asha said from behind him. Lucas had learned the language in half an hour one day when he was bored at the Merenes base.
“It says, ‘Leave thy sins in the sands, for you enter sacred ground,’” Lucas said as they drew closer to the archway.
“It’s a temple,” Noah said. “An old one.”
“What are we doing here?” Lucas asked the Archon.
“Communing with your gods, of course,” the Archon replied with no hint of humor.
They soon reached the entrance and the Archon cast open the huge stone doors with a small wave of his hand. Alpha had stopped to try and look at the mural etched on the stone slabs, but a Shadow shoved him forward with a huge black claw.
The only lights inside were ancient candles. If the place ever had been a church, it was long abandoned. The prayer stones were covered in dust and many were overturned or split. A statue of Kyneth lay shattered on the ground, and Zurana’s head was missing, though she was still upright and at least thirty feet tall. There were pages of paper books decaying on the ground, and the red walls were full of carvings that were either cracked or had been worn away completely.
In the center of it all was a large circle on the ground, placed right below the apex of the domed roof. Something had once been painted on the ceiling, but only glimpses of faces or limbs or stars or swords could be seen.
As they drew closer to the circle on the ground, however, they could see a staircase spiraling downward. The stone had all its edges worn away, but the Archon wasted no time descending. More candles were lit on the walls, and the Shadows nudged the lot of them toward the first stair. They had no choice but to follow, and Lucas noticed that all the Shadows were staying behind at the mouth of the staircase. Well that’s progress, at least, Lucas thought. Let the pain go, he repeated to himself, but his mind was racing a million miles a minute, trying to understand where they were going, formulating escape plans, assassination attempts, anything and everything to get them out of this.
The stairs seemed to go on forever, but eventually they ended on the floor of a very large cave. There were no candles, and no camera bots had followed them down, Lucas realized.
And yet, there was light. The walls glowed with a strange luminescence. Some natural occurrence, perhaps. But there was something very unnatural about this place.
They found bones. Old ones, covered in dust and discolored to dull gray. Sorans, it seemed, dead thousands of years. There was writing on the walls here too, but it was all runes, not a language Lucas recognized. The frenzied scrawling made the symbols seem like they were drawn by madmen.
“I don’t like this,” Asha whispered to him through her teeth. “What are we doing here?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas whispered back, but his voice bounced all around the cave walls, even as he was trying to be quiet. There were no secrets here.
The Archon said nothing as he moved through the cave toward a wall that appeared to be nothing more than a giant slab of stone. A dead end.
“He’s crazy,” Erik said, not bothering to lower his voice.
Lucas decided enough was enough, and when the Archon stopped to gaze at the wall, he turned and ripped the bindings off Alpha, then Asha, then the boys, all in just a few seconds. Each rubbed their wrists, and the torn metal bouncing on the hard stone echoed all around the cavern. Lucas looked to his left and saw a sharp stalactite hanging from the ceiling. The stone was three feet long and dangerously sharp at the end. The Archon’s back was still turned. Lucas was contemplating the danger to his sons and to Elyria if he leaped toward him with the jagged point in hand when suddenly the entire cave shook.
“Earthquake!” Alpha cried out, his translator accurately portraying the panic they all felt. They struggled to keep their footing, and Lucas watched his stalactite dagger shatter, along with all the others nearby.
Ahead he saw what was really happening. The Archon had raised his clawed hand, and the cave wall was sliding upward, shaking the entire cavern violently. Soon, there was a dozen or so feet of space underneath it.
“Come,” the Archon said, as he strolled through the new opening. Reluctantly, they all followed. Lucas gaped at the wall as they passed under it, and on the other side they could see it wasn’t a wall as much as it was a boulder. It had to weigh a hundred tons. How can he be that powerful? Lucas thought, and knew everyone else was thinking the same thing. After they were through, the stone slid down behind them. Even though it landed softly, it still shook the cave like a bomb had gone off.
Streams of glowing ore in the walls lit their way, and after a few twists and turns, they reached one more chamber, this one smaller.
The ore glowed brighter here, and seemed to snake through the walls toward a central point.
They all saw it at once.
It was metal. Or had been long ago. The shape in front of them appeared to have once been a sphere. It was lodged in the wall twenty or so yards above them. It couldn’t have been much larger than two dozen feet in diameter.
The sphere had lost much of its symmetry as panels had been pried out of it. On the inside of the rusted and stone-like metal was machinery that looked long dead. Inside, as they drew closer, they could see something in the center.
Seats.
Two of them.
“A throne?” Asha asked breathlessly.
“It’s a ship,” Lucas said slowly. The light of the ore bathed all of them. It was so concentrated around the ship it looked like they were gazing into an eclipse.
Lucas moved toward it and tripped over a bone. Looking around, he saw many skeletons, some decaying into dust, but many still bleach white. There were remnants of prayer stones scattered around too, but crudely made and worn down to mere lumps of rock. What few symbols were still painted on the walls were completely unreadable.
“What is this place?” Alpha asked, his translator flickering in the dark.
“Fifty thousand years ago, the first Sorans called it the Tomb of the Gods,” the Archon replied, his starry eyes glinting. “But it was buried, lost, forgotten in time.”
Lucas looked at the two seats covered in chalky dust, lodged in the wall above.
“The truth …” he said mindlessly, but no one seemed to hear.
“Now it is time,” the Archon said. “I will not suffer another failure. First, a demonstration.”
He waved his claw and everyone but Erik was wrenched backward, away from the small ship in the wall. Lucas raced forward but found razors digging into his shoulder, and the Archon tearing him backward with unmatched physical force.
Erik turned toward them all just as an unseen nudge sent him stumbling another few feet. He looked at the floor around him. It was littered with skulls. His son’s eyes widened in terror.
And then he was bathed in a golden light.
The cries of the four of them reverberated through the chamber.
Then the light was gone, shrinking to a pinpoint in the central console between the two seats.
Erik turned back toward them. Alive. Unhurt. Only stunned.
The torn-open panels of the ship displayed a few dim, flickering crimson lights, then went out. The ancient craft groaned almost angrily.
Everyone was released and ran toward Erik, who slowly backed away from the ship, shaken but intact. Lucas didn’t even notice the blood streaming from his collarbone where the Archon’s claws had sunk in.
“I normally execute the failures,” the Archon said. “The bones of Sorans, humans, Oni, and all the rest lie before you. They all failed.”
He turned toward Lucas.
“You will not.”
Lucas didn’t exactly understand what was happening, but he knew what was being asked of him. He had stopped breathing when he thought Erik had been cooked alive. All their hearts were still racing. He could feel it. They’d seen dozens, hundreds of battles between them all, but he’d never seen fear in their eyes like this.
He would do what was required.
Lucas kicked away a pair of skulls and strode forward toward the ship. The Archon’s eyes lit up with delight.
The light found him.
Though it hadn’t burned Erik, it was noticeably warming in the cool cave. He stared into the bright point of light coming from the ship ahead, unblinking, bathing in its brilliance. He could feel the light searching him, flooding through him. It was a bizarre sensation, and he felt momentarily delirious. He could hear voices calling out from behind him, but he remained transfixed, staring at the light.
And then they descended.
The Archon laughed in his mind as the figures floated toward him like angels. The others were silent now. The beings smiled as their feet touched the ground without a sound.
How?
More jagged laughter, but he barely heard it. He was staring at two humans. Or something close. A man and a woman, clad in pale flight suits that clung to their bodies like a second skin. Lucas turned to see if the others could see them, or if he had breached the edge of insanity at last. The looks in their eyes told him they were seeing exactly the same thing.
The two figures stood to his right and left, their smiles strangely reassuring. The ship behind them was now alive with light and color, even in its ravaged state. The Archon paced around the three of them like he was stalking prey.
Impossible, Lucas thought as he stretched out his hand. It passed through the shoulder of the man. A hologram. But more lifelike than he’d ever seen. A perfect recreation of a man, down to the shadows he cast from the glowing ore. The woman was the same. Their skin was bronze, the man had auburn hair with flint-gray eyes. The woman had cascading blond locks and her irises were pools of blue-green. Both were beautiful, almost impossibly so. It was hard to look away from either. Not that he wanted to.
“Speak, fools,” the Archon said as he circled back around behind Lucas.
The pair of them obeyed.
“Greetings, child,” the woman said, her lips parting to show a warm, white smile.
“We are glad to meet you at last, even if only the memory of us remains,” the man said, his voice calm and smooth like water.
“You must have questions, and we have answers,” the woman said, clasping her hands together.
“It has been long enough now where you have become as we were, discovering your gifts, your ability to shape the world around you, and those within it.”
They kept alternating.
“That is why we have revealed ourselves to you now, after all this time. To tell our story. Your story. You are smart enough now, strong enough, to find the others and tell this tale on our behalf. To unite the worlds, and learn from our tragedies.”
“I don’t—” Lucas began, but the pair talked over him. It was clear he was supposed to simply listen. It occurred to him for the first time they were speaking his native tongue, English.
“We are the Exos. The last of the Exos. We come from a galaxy so distant, the light of its birth is still not visible here. For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in peace in the Garden. A chain of star systems full of lush planets filled with endless greenery. At first we threatened to destroy the beauty of nature as our technology grew and our cities expanded, but eventually we learned to live in harmony, ensuring the Garden’s eternal existence. We created jungles out of desert worlds. Forests out of gas giants. The Garden grew. We had our troubles, like any civilization, but we were content. At peace. Fifty thousand years of genetic research had eliminated disease, extended our lives almost infinitely. Our bodies healed themselves constantly from the ravages of age, and we developed new and wonderful abilities to move matter and communicate with our minds. It seemed there would be no end to our era of scientific progress and discovery. We lived to solve the mysteries of the universe, and delighted in unlocking the unseen wonders of nature.”
“Everything changed when the Az’ghal came. We knew we were not alone in the universe. We made contact with a few of the other races, shared our knowledge, lived in harmony. But the Az’ghal were something else. They would not bargain, they would not listen, they would not even speak. They lived only to destroy.”
“They were a race that feasted on other worlds the way a beast devours prey. They stripped planets bare, purging their inhabitants to extinction, taking what they wanted and leaving nothing behind.”
“We had weapons, and with them we fought. The war seemed winnable, until the day it was not. The Az’ghal were a savage, bloodthirsty race. Even if we had more advanced technology, they had been waging wars for a million years. They lacked even a shred of mercy, decency, or restraint. Their numbers seemed without end; their ships were so numerous they eclipsed the stars.”
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“Eventually they broke our lines, swarmed the Garden, and the forests burned. The war raged for centuries and we almost drove them off, but in the end we fell to their relentless assault and endless hordes. Billions were hunted down and extinguished. They tracked us through every planet, every star system, every tiny, hidden moon. There was no escape. There was nowhere to hide.”
“And then, The Answer.”
“The only answer.”
“The Answer was a ship unlike any before it. We had developed cores with the ability to travel between nearby galaxies, a previously insurmountable distance, but The Answer was something else altogether.”
“The device our brightest minds designed required every last shred of energy our planets could muster. They called it the ‘infinity core.’ The power it required was unmatched, and could only be housed in a specific shape, and work within a ship of a specific size. And so The Answer was born. A single ship, as we had no time nor resources to build others.”
“The distance it could travel was nearly infinite, though it couldn’t be directed, and its destination was at the mercy of chaos. The size of the craft only allowed two of us, so we were chosen. We were the best of the last of us, they said, the most likely to survive what was to come, the most able to do what needed to be done. We boarded The Answer and destroyed all our research, just as our last stronghold was being consumed by the Az’ghal. We fired the infinity core, never knowing if we would live again.”
“We did.”
“This is the galaxy in which we arrived, nearly two hundred thousand years ago. The core brought us here. Some would say by luck, others by divine providence. It was our new home. Our last hope. Far from the Az’ghal. Far from our burned worlds. The answer, the true answer, was to start over completely. To birth a new civilization free from our past burdens.”
“It would have to be pure. A fresh start. We were a trillion years away from our old technology; our ship contained the infinity core and room for us alone. There was no way to alter the genes of our offspring, and so far away from danger, we knew our civilization would have all the time in the world to grow on its own. Our children were weak, their lifespans short as ours once were, but they would endure. Our first planet was this one, now called Sora. Our offspring grew and thrived and discovered the answers of the universe on their own, with only cursory guidance from us. A civilization cannot be constructed as many think; it must be grown organically. Our first few failures were evidence of that.”