by Paul Tassi
“When one colony took root, we moved on to the next world. And the next. And the next.”
“We traveled the stars in search of planets that could sustain life, and would spend a thousand years at each, setting up colonies we hoped could survive, and thrive. There were hardships, struggles, but our children were strong. Some planets boasted primitive life forms already when we arrived, but our descendants were dominant. Our vision was being realized. Our people were saved.”
“Over a hundred thousand years we spent bringing this galaxy to life. The years changed our story countless times, until the truth was merely a memory. We left it that way, and decided it was best not to interfere. Not until you were ready, as you are standing before us today. We may be nothing but dust now, but we live on through you. Through all of you.”
“Our children gave us many names over the millennia. We were once L’yii and Njhalo, but in their new tongues they called us Kyneth and Zurana, Adam and Eve, Saato and Valli, and countless others. Sometimes we were ancestors, sometimes gods. Sometimes we were forgotten entirely.”
“As our health finally faded, we returned to Sora, our greatest hope for the future. We rested here, until you found us, evolved into near perfect beings as we knew you would. Now it is time to find the others.”
“This is our last gift to you, Exos.”
The woman reached forward and touched Lucas’s forehead with three fingers. His eyes went white and in his mind he saw the beauty of a spiral galaxy, their own, and glowing points of light scattered all around it. Numbers floated over each of them. Each string etched itself into his mind immediately.
“Find them,” the man said. “Make our family whole. You are ready. Share with them all you know. Raise up a strong, united civilization. You are the Exos reborn. You will thrive free from the danger of the Az’ghal, who are trapped across the stars. Even if in time they uncover the power of our infinity core, they will never be able to find this place. The core cannot be guided or controlled, and the universe is too vast for pure chance to lead them here. You are safe, and together you will be greater than we ever were.”
“Find them,” the woman repeated, and then they were gone.
Lucas saw the galaxy in his mind, slowly spinning. He blinked and the image faded.
And then the Archon was before him.
“How safe do you feel, Exos?”
Lucas understood, and fresh fear seized him.
“You’re Az’ghal,” he said. The entire story was unbelievable, but now everything was coming together in his mind. Except for the impossible appearance of the creature before him.
“How …”
“In time,” the Archon interrupted, “but I have not waited over ten thousand years to be delayed a minute more. Give them to me.”
“Give … what?” he stammered. His head was reeling. He felt feverish and his heart hammered against his ribs. The gods were real.
“The coordinates. The locations of your damnable Exos brethren scattered throughout this wretched galaxy.”
Extinction. That’s what the Archon wanted. A roadmap to find all the other human, Exos colonies in the galaxy to finish the war his people started. He’d found seven worlds already, but this would give him how many? Lucas searched his mind.
A hundred and eight, he realized, and the enormity of the situation took his breath away. A hundred and eight worlds out there full of others just like him. Billions of souls, if not trillions, the Archon would destroy with his Xalan horde.
The Xalans. He leads him. He looks like them. How …?
And just when everything made sense, nothing did. There were still so many questions. He looked at the ship, but though it was still lit, the Exos did not return.
“I will not ask again,” the Archon growled. The entire chamber started to shake. Stones began to float up from the ground. The creature’s anger was all-consuming.
Lucas’s mind raced through the thousands of numbers that had been engraved in the canals of his cerebral cortex. He stared at them as if they were floating in the air in front of him. Each line a piece of a puzzle that would end with the total eradication of humanity.
The cave was still. The stones hit the ground.
“Then we will start with the stray,” the Archon said coldly.
He simply looked at Noah, and a fountain of blood erupted from the small cut on his neck. His son fell to the ground. Choking. Dying.
Lucas charged the Archon, but immediately found the creature’s crushing hand around his throat. He watched Noah claw at his neck as Asha and Alpha tried to stop the bleeding.
“He has seconds,” the Archon said. “And the other will follow.”
Lucas looked into the pair of cruel, galactic eyes before him. There was no trace of mercy, decency, or restraint. Only a vast and endless evil.
41
Noah was alone. It was dark, and he was floating. Space? No. His arms and legs pushed through liquid, and air escaped from his lungs in large pockets. Too large.
He was drowning.
The panic set in immediately, and he flailed and floundered. He was a strong swimmer, but it was hard to tell where the surface was. There didn’t seem to be a shred of light anywhere. More air escaped his lungs as he choked back a scream, and he followed the bubbles upward this time. Strong strokes. As strong as he could manage.
He breached the surface of the water only to be slapped in the face by waves. Coughing, he expelled the remaining water from his chest, but his mouth was thick with the taste of iron. In the darkness he couldn’t see, but he knew he was swimming in blood.
The sky was cloudless, but also starless. The only light was coming from a point in the distance, a flickering flame. Noah coughed again and turned toward it, his long limbs paddling through the choppy ocean of blood as he tried to ignore the taste.
The light grew closer, but his muscles burned and he was tempted to vomit as metal and salt drained into his stomach.
He couldn’t remember what had happened moments before he’d appeared underwater. He only remembered blood.
The crimson waters fought him at every stroke, but still the light grew. A fire, he realized, and he drained every last bit of his strength to surge forward. The beach was a half mile away. Then a quarter. Then five hundred feet. Then his feet brushed against the soft sands near the shore.
He trudged up the beach toward the blazing fire, his clothes clinging to him. The sand seemed like it had once been white, but it was stained a pale red from the frothy blood. Before him, a silent, black jungle loomed. Here, there was only the fire.
And her.
She was weeping as he circled around the demonic-looking bonfire planted in a circle of stones on the sand. Dried blood was caked on her skin, and it colored her hair. All but a few blond wisps.
But her eyes were still blue.
“Kyra …” he said. He took a step toward her, and the fire roared, sending smoke and ash into his eyes. He winced and coughed, and took another step around the pit.
She was huddled with her arms clasped around her knees. Her eyes were full of tears. And terror.
“Noah,” she said. “Why did you leave?”
“I didn’t,” he replied, his own eyes wet now. “You did, and I’m so, so sorry.”
“We were happy here.”
Had he been to this place before?
“I don’t understand. But I’m here now. We can be together.”
She shook her head violently.
“Not here. And not when you still have so much to do.”
Noah looked up. There were now stars in the sky in a few select clusters.
“I need you,” he said, turning back to her.
“I’m scared,” she said, looking around nervously. “The nights are cold here.”
“We’ll stay by the fire.”
“The fire is the coldest of all.”
Noah looked up again. Not stars, eyes.
He felt something pull at him, like a hook through his na
vel. He lurched back, his hand just inches away from brushing Kyra’s cheek. The fire flared and then he flew back, being dragged through the sand. Kyra watched with despair in her shimmering blue eyes.
“No!” he cried out as he was wrenched backward again. Back to the sea. Back to the blood.
Kyra was gone. The fire became a golden pillar of light that stretched all the way to the sky. He was pulled under the waves, into the blackness. Down deeper and deeper and the pressure cracked his bones and the blood filled his lungs. Until—
Noah grabbed his chest and sucked in all the air he could. He lurched upright and found himself in the dimly lit cave with those galactic eyes staring directly at him. His family was crowded around, and he immediately remembered what had happened. His hand raced to his neck, but though he found dry blood, there was no cut. No pain.
“He’s back,” Erik declared, his voice sharp but his face visibly relieved. His cut was gone as well.
“I was …” Noah stammered. “She was …”
“Calm down,” Asha said, rubbing the sides of his arms, which were rife with bumps under his armor. Everything was blurred, and there were spots in his vision.
“He has lost a great deal of blood,” Alpha said, scanning him with a device attached to his powersuit.
Noah sat up further and saw Lucas looking anxiously at him. His father was typing furiously on a scroll with the Archon looking on approvingly. Asha told him what Lucas was doing.
“The-the coordinates,” Noah said. “He can’t—”
So many lives at stake. All the untold billions out there, waiting to be contacted. Lucas couldn’t sacrifice them to this monster for his sake.
But it’s not just you. It’s Erik and Asha and Alpha. It’s Elyria and the rest of the world. Would he do anything else if he were in Lucas’s skin? Noah stood up and nearly lost his balance. Erik caught him under the elbow.
“You can’t …” Noah said. Lucas could only look at him. His father barely even looked human anymore. The black skin was creeping up the sides of his jaw now, and the dark veins were crisscrossing his entire face. Only a few patches of white skin remained. His eyes shone bluer than ever in the dim cave.
Asha turned and whispered in his ear, “The Archon can’t use the coordinates if he’s dead.”
That was always the plan, wasn’t it? Kill the Archon? But now the fate of many worlds were in their hands, not just one. And they seemed no closer to their goal.
Noah tried to push the vision of Kyra on the hellish island from his mind. There are no hells, he told himself. The gods are human. Well, Exos, at least. The story seemed impossible, but it had to be true given everything they knew about the humans scattered across the galaxy. They were all the descendants of refugees, a race trying to start over from the brink of a holocaust.
They said we would be safe, Noah thought. But looking at the sinister creature before him, they were clearly anything but.
“Explain it,” said Alpha to the Archon. “Your presence here. Your control of Xala. None of it makes sense.”
“The spawn wishes to speak with his god?” the Archon said, bemused. He glanced at Lucas who glared at him but continued to enter numbers at lightning speed. Noah wondered what the map Lucas saw in his mind looked like. Erik rubbed his neck where the cut had been only minutes earlier.
“I wish to know the full extent of your twisted power fantasy,” Alpha growled.
“You are the very image of your father,” the Archon said. “And also headstrong, but the most brilliant of them all.”
“Do not speak of my clan,” Alpha warned him.
“You presume to command me? Your entire race would not exist had I not willed it.”
“The Sorans made the Xalans,” Asha said, glancing nervously at Lucas who seemed now to be in a trance, staring at the glowing virtual page in front of him. More numbers. Too many numbers. Each sequence a new, doomed world.
“Did they now?” the Archon said.
“It’s a fact. It’s history,” she said.
“And who do you believe wrote your history?” the Archon said.
“Explain yourself, creature,” Alpha said again. “No more of these games.”
“This is not a game. It is all it has ever been. A war.”
The Archon looked at the broken ship in the wall.
“In every ecosystem there are predators and prey. It is true in your forests, your oceans, anywhere life exists. But the same is true of galaxies. Civilizations rule their little rocks, dominating lesser creatures and each other as if they are the largest, most dangerous beings in the universe.”
He paused.
“They are not.
“The Az’ghal are as old as time. Forged in the fires of a thousand dying stars, and bred and born to kill all those who would deem themselves kings of floating rocks. We swept through hundreds of races, devouring their citizens and consuming everything their worlds had to offer to fuel our next conquest. We started our endless hunt within our own star system, then our own galaxy. Eventually we developed cores to travel within our local cluster. Everywhere, more life. Everywhere, more death.
“In time we grew more powerful than we ever dreamed, able to control matter itself with our minds. We evolved our psionic gifts naturally, over millions of years, and once they spread throughout our population, truly no one could stand before us. And none did. None but the Exos.
“To look at them, it was easy to scoff. They were numerous, yes, spread across their garden planets, living in so-called harmony. But they were weak. Fleshy creatures of brittle bones and soft skin. They surely could not stand before the invincible might of the Az’ghal.
“But too many victories had made us complacent. The war was fierce, and raged for ten times longer than any we had endured before. Though their bodies were fragile, their machines were fearsome, and worse yet, through their demonic technology they developed a synthetic way to implant psionic abilities in their own people. They did not have the purity of evolution behind them, but their chosen warriors could match our own. Further still, a few among them had the power to warp the very minds of our soldiers, infecting them with madness, or turning them on one another. They were a foe the likes of which we had never seen. The Exos were almost the end of us.
“But in the end, we were victorious. The Az’ghal do not know defeat. We do not even have a word for it in our tongue. It was bloody, but the flesh men fell, and we hunted them to absolute and utter extinction, long after the war itself had been won.
“Or so we thought.
“It was fifty years later we discovered their ‘Answer,’ their final escape plan to tear a hole in the universe, and live wherever it led. We excavated what we could from the wreckage of their facility. We saw a plan to not simply escape, but reproduce. To grow an entire new civilization of Exos on the other side of space and time, recovering their strength, re-establishing their empire.
“‘Let them go,’ some of our leaders said. ‘They are worlds away, and only two in a small ship. What threat could they pose?’
“But the rest of us remembered the war. How many were lost and how it might have been us erased, instead of them. And the Exos were a young race. Extremely intelligent. It had taken them barely a few hundred thousand years to grow into a united civilization that almost defeated us. We, the Az’ghal, old as time and death itself. They could not be allowed to breed and thrive and return. They must be destroyed, along with whatever new world they hoped to build.
“It took another hundred years to draft plans for this ‘infinity core’ and another hundred after that to deduce a way to repeat the exact firing sequence of the original vessel. The Exos believed the core was impossible to control. That they could never be tracked. They were mistaken. The simply had not had enough time to realize the full potential of the device they had created. We ensured they died before they did. It humors me now to hear they thought they were safe. That their children were safe.”
“But they only sent you,”
Erik interrupted.
“The ship we created was small, like theirs. It could house only a single pilot. There were thousands considered, but only I was chosen. I was a scientist, once, though they made me an admiral after the burning of the Gaal Spiral. I understood the technology, and was also prepared for a long hunt, if it came to that. I was our best, sent to chase after theirs.
“We calculated the coordinates and firing sequence correctly, but there was another compounding factor we did not, could not anticipate.”
“The time shift,” Alpha said slowly. Noah didn’t understand.
“When you travel between stars utilizing a normal core,” the Archon continued, “it takes months to make a journey that should take years. But the infinity core was different. The journey was over in an instant from my perspective, but when I arrived in this new galaxy, I found that time had fled away from me. Nearly two hundred thousand years had passed since the Exos first departed. When I left, my people were trying to develop prototypes of new infinity core ships. Larger ones that could hold more than one of us. Five, a hundred, an army, eventually. But for all I knew, they could have arrived the next day, in another hundred thousand years, or never. The time shift was impossible to account for. Soon enough, I realized I was truly alone.
“I tracked the Exos ship as I was meant to, but what I found was Sora, in the height of its supposed golden age. Another wretched planet full of Exos, hugely populous and on the verge of countless technological breakthroughs. The kind that put my people in so much danger. It was then I knew my mission was far more important than it had ever been before. The Exos themselves were dust when I found them, and though I tore apart their ship, accessing their files for further information was impossible. I would have to destroy this world alone.