by C. C. Ekeke
“There’s your proof,” the hybrid pointed at the gruesome remains of the Cybernarr and his female Galdorian thrall littered on the floor.
Puemri grumbled something unflattering under his breath and marched up to Darkstar’s side. For a long moment he just stared in stunned silence, clearly unable to mentally digest what lay before his eyes. Then dawning recognition drained the color from his face. “Holy tattshi! Those are…?”
“A Cybernarr agent and his thrall,” Darkstar finished his sentence.
Puemri backed away slowly, breathing shallowly, body beginning to tremble. “Are they…?”
“Dead? Destroyed? Terminated? All of the above.”
The stormborn ran both hands through his hair again and shook his head, as if refusing to believe any of this. The dim lighting of the apartment did little to hide Puemri’s panic. “How many more sleepers are on Terra Sollus?” he asked in a small, shaky voice.
Darkstar folded both well-built arms behind his back and shrugged. “Uncertain.”
Puemri gaped. “How many more are there in Union Space?”
“Uncertain, but undoubtedly more than just these two.”
“Nonono!” Puemri’s headshaking became more vehement, almost angry. “This cannot be happening. Not today!”
Darkstar got in the stormborn’s face, seething. He towered over him by almost half a foot. “It is happening. Today.” He itched to backhand some poise into this frantic human. But patience stayed his hand. Too much was at stake to lose his cool. “It has clearly been happening long before that. There are Cybernarr sleeper agents within Union Space. And your government needs to know before it is too late.”
That reached Puemri. He paled, and the tension in his body slowly uncoiled. “How are you so calm?”
Darkstar’s eyes narrowed into glowing violet slits. A ripple of watery light washed over his face. “Someone has to be. Now that I’ve given you proof of a possible Cybernarr incursion, I assume you and your agency have work to do.” He’d done as tasked: expose a herald from the forthcoming Technoarchy threat to the Union. Hopefully the Union would now have a fighting chance. The cybernetic being turned on his heel to exit the common room.
“Wait,” Puemri’s request stayed his exit. “You’re a Cybernarr. Why do you care what happens to the Galactic Union?”
Darkstar turned back around, his tattered coat fluttering about. “I’m half-Cybernarr…” he corrected evenly, “and I care as someone who knows how the Technoarchy deals with anyone or anything that they consider imperfect.”
Puemri’s frown suggested further confusion. “But of all the beings you could choose to tell, why me?”
Darkstar almost said nothing. Since he first contacted the UniPol agent over a month ago, Puemri had been too doubtful and arrogant to even buy the Cybernarr infiltrating the Union in plain sight.
But after he’d finally grasped how real this threat was, Darkstar threw caution to the wind and said, “Because you told me to…six years from now.”
That revelation seemed to visibly break Puemri’s brain a little. “What?!” he barked, eyes bulging in cartoonish shock.
Darkstar had revealed too much. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, transmatting from the apartment in a shimmer of light.
Passenger
Rouma came to, flat on his back, awoken by the lightning rods of agony shooting through his chest, back, and all the way to his fingertips. The golden Retributionary armor that once felt like a second skin now weighed down on him with immovable bulk.
He heard a distant roar of fury, closing in from all around. A charred stench of death and blood filled his nostrils.
Everything within his line of sight appeared staticky, meaning his helmet visor was damaged.
Even scarier to the Korvenite was the lack of sensation below his waist. But a more chilling realization than not being able to feel his own legs?
The Unlink, the babbling river of noise and verve that flowed through his mind, was silent.
Panicked, Rouma stretched out with Mindspeak. Other non-Korvenite minds were nearby, afraid from seeing Sollus attacked, grieving from losing friends or loved ones, pained from injury.
Rouma sighed with as much relief as his tortured chest would allow. My psionics aren’t gone, he gathered, just any communal link to my Korvenite brethren.
Before Maelstrom freed him from slavery, Rouma had been deprived of the Unlink for years. But after growing accustomed to hearing other Korvenites’ voices again, returning to that desolate silence was unmooring.
Rouma thought back to when he last sensed the Unilink. It had been when he’d crash-landed inside of some skyscraper with that human soldier he’d tried to kill—the one from Star Brigade.
He had snuck up from behind, taking perfect aim to finish off the earthborn whore…
…until some witless creature had warned her of the attack. Rouma had fired anyway, but regrettably the human had dodged and pointed her fingers at him like a gun. Rouma could never forget the immediate blast of concentrated sound that struck the Korvenite harder than any blow he’d ever felt—smashing through his chestplate and fracturing his ribcage.
The last thing Rouma remembered was blinding pain after he was thrown from the skyscraper, followed by a moment of weightlessness.
By Korvan’s will…my armor…must have broken my fall and saved me…just barely, he winced, trying to sit up. Every cell in his body flared up, scorching away his already failing strength. He slumped back down, wracked by violent coughs.
Rouma didn’t need his eyes to know that he was hurt badly. Several ribs were broken, spine perhaps shattered. His life’s blood was oozing like a leaky pipe from the deep wound in his chest, wet and sticky within his ruined armor, a dark green ichor pooling around where he currently lay.
Even Rouma reaching for his helmet added to the anguish. But Rouma fought through as much of the pain as he could, frantic to know why he couldn’t sense the Unilink.
Had Maelstrom been defeated? Impossible. This time the Anointed One’s plan had been foolproof. Sollus was sheathed in its own defense shielding. Not even the Kedri would thwart Maelstrom this time.
Rouma fumbled at his helmet’s delicate controls with fingers that had grown clumsy and weak until finally, the malleable helmet slid away from the Korvenite’s face.
He breathed in the foul, unfiltered air and took in his surroundings. The Korvenite lay in a valley of twisted debris and ruin from the KIF’s righteous assault.
The skyscraper he had fallen from was at least seventy or more stories high, resembling a jagged tooth jutting up into the dirty smoke soiling the blue skies—
Rouma gasped, and almost choked on another fit of coughs.
“[The skies are blue]?” he whispered fearfully in Korcei. The Korvenite could no longer see the golden forcefield that had bathed Sollus’s heavens. Nor could he see the eclipsing shadow of the Amalgam hovering above him, or any Korvanes statues striding through the starscrapers. What Rouma did see were hordes of warships high above, both UComm and Imperium, swarming like angry bees around a gigantic smear of dirty black smoke and fiery embers.
Rouma’s ravaged body went cold.
No. The Korvenite felt his eyes beginning to water as the truth dawned on him.
No! He could not believe it. He refused to believe it. Maelstrom had sworn to Korvan Almighty that the Korvenites would have their homeworld back.
Rouma stretched his mind out further than his injuries allowed, pain blurring his vision as he searched for any Korvenites still alive.
He found a number of his brethren either captured or dying or fleeing underground. Their thoughts all revealed the same horrible truth.
The Korvenite Independence Front, defeated and scattered.
The Amalgam, destroyed.
Lord Maelstrom, killed. The survivors had felt the deaths of him and every other Korvenite aboard the Amalgam, right before the Unilink went dead.
“[It’s over…again],” Rouma heard him
self say. And this time, he had no doubt the Korvenite race would be wiped off the face of the ‘Verse.
Somehow he knew this would happen, his renewed faith in Maelstrom notwithstanding. No way would the Union just allow the Korvenites to reclaim their homeworld without consequences.
But that didn’t dull the agony of those losses, or the heartbreak of failing to recapture their home.
Rouma’s eyes grew blurry. Soon, tears were streaming down his cheeks, loosening the greenish blood caked on them.
Through the chaotic noises swirling around him, Rouma started to make out individual voices nearby. One sounded human. Possibly UComm soldiers?
They would never capture him alive, not after what the KIF had done. But the Korvenite would not let them be the ones to kill him.
With strenuous effort, Rouma turned his head to the right and saw a twisted spike of 1arasteel. Sharp enough to stab with, small enough to hold with both hands. A smile tugged at Rouma’s torn lips.
He reached for it with a weak and shaky arm…
Rouma. The voice startled Rouma out of his single-minded struggle.
It took a moment of glancing around for Rouma to detect another presence inside his mind, a passenger. A few more moments passed before the Korvenite assigned an identity to this passenger.
“[You!]” He was beside himself with shock. His arm dropped, strength spent. “[I thought that…when the Amalgamation exploded. How—?]”
I jumped from my body into yours, right before…it was too late,” the voice explained, sounding strong and hale for a dead Korvenite.
“[And the Chouncilor?]” Rouma asked, almost afraid of the answer, “[Did he die also on the Amalgam?]”
Escaped, his passenger admitted with clear shame, before changing the subject. You’re weakening, Rouma.
“[Dying will do that.]” Rouma should have been angry at his psychic visitor for not fulfilling his promise to win back Sollus, should have been lost in despair over dying.
Instead, Rouma managed a smile. Of course this one survived death. That only proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was Korvan’s Anointed.
High above, the swarms of warships began to disperse from the big black smear, which had almost exhausted its thunderstorm of blazing wreckage. While Rouma watched this, a world-shaking swell of sorrow not belonging to him overwhelmed his thoughts.
The two Korvenites mourned today’s losses together in Rouma’s body.
“Holy tattshi! Kiran, look what I found!” a nearby voice pulled Rouma from his grief. He sensed two sentients dangerously close. The Korvenite raised his neck as high as possible and eyed the slope of crooked debris and rocks ahead.
Humans. An older earthborn male stood in front, swarthy and balding, with a roll of pudge around the midsection. The other one who looked like a stormborn human male trailed behind him, young, lean and limber, a shock of white hair over beet-red roots atop his head.
The stormborn human’s eyes widened. “Is that one of those armored Korvies that attacked Conuropolis?”
“Yup,” the earthborn took a few nonchalant steps forward. “It looks fekt up!”
The older human stared at him with merciless eyes. Rouma could taste his loathing from afar. “Let’s finish the job.”
When this day began, these dungheaps cowered before the Korvenite. Now he couldn’t even run and hide; his terror reached nightmarish levels from two normal, nobody humans with hostile intentions.
“Stay…back,” Rouma wheezed in accented Standard. “I want no trouble.”
“You telling us what to do?” the human advanced angrily. “After what you did to my homeworld?”
It’s not your homeworld, Rouma almost screamed, but held his tongue. He was in no position to back such words up. And if they had any clue whom Rouma was housing inside his head… “Please, I’m already dying. Just…let me pass in peace.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” the youth named Kiran warned, backing away. “We should leave, find shelter.”
His partner was adamant. “Not until this blekdritt pays.” He launched himself at Rouma and stomped his foot down hard on the Korvenite’s chest. Rouma shrieked. Every pain receptor in his body ignited, even in the legs he could no longer move.
The earthborn was far from done. “You green-blooded, blekdritt piece of Grade-A tattshi!” the human roared, each word punctuated by a swift and vicious stomp. “You attack my fucking planet, kill thousands and think you can get away with it? Fuck! You!”
The attack was ugly and brutal, so much that the human almost fell over in his unending desire to stomp Rouma’s chest in. The Korvenite couldn’t even cover up. So his end would come at the hands of a human. As blow after blow crushed more bones in him, he just prayed to Korvan Almighty that the end would come quickly.
Don’t fear, Maelstrom declared through the onslaught, I’ll handle this insect.
Rouma’s arm, the one he no longer had the strength to lift, snaked out on its own volition and grabbed the human by the leg.
“What the—WHOA!” The arm jerked back, yanking the pudgy human’s leg forward and sending him face first to the ground. “Kiran, help!!”
Silence. The human’s eyes went black as pitch and he began to convulse, limbs and head flopping about like a fish yanked out of water. Suddenly Rouma felt his passenger leave, and once more his mind was alone. The stormborn human who had hung back cried out inarticulately and dashed forward.
Meanwhile, his earthborn partner sat up and examined his body with disdainful hands. “This body will serve for now.” His species and tenor were that of a human’s. But the facial expression, the authoritative lilt of his voice and even his posture resembled the Korvenite that Rouma had revered and followed. Praise be to Korvan!
Kiran was almost upon Rouma, fear and hesitation giving away to fury and confusion. “What did you—”
The Korvenite-possessed human raised a calm hand. “Sleep.” The telepathic command caused Kiran to slump forward in mid-sprint.
Turning away from the unconscious stormborn, the Korvenite-possessed human stood up on unsure legs. Rouma felt the possessed human link with him, projecting out thoughts via Mindspeak to Korvenites far and wide in—but using Rouma’s voice. It is over, my brethren. Maelstrom is truly dead. Flee now. Do not let them destroy you like dogs.
Rouma stared up at the Korvenite-possessed human in disbelief. Why did you lie?
No one can know I am still alive, his comrade replied psychically. Not until I correct my, he gestured at his new body with unconcealed disgust…my current situation.
That consolation was the least of Rouma’s concerns. The human’s attack had hastened the inevitable, and he felt his life ebbing away more quickly.
The Korvenite-possessed human dropped to his knees and cradled Rouma up in his arms, holding his comrade as gently as possible.
“[Rouma, I am so sorry,]” the human said in spot-on Korcei, “[This was…Sollus was supposed to become home again for our species. I failed all of you, again.]”
“[You didn’t fail me,]” Rouma chided, but his voice sounded so weak. The sensation had left his arms, and the world began to darken. “[Because of you, I have returned to our homeworld, and I am free.]” In the distance, Rouma heard vehicles soar overhead, closer than he cared for.
“[I won’t stop…until our species is avenged],” Maelstrom continued, that familiar fiery passion engulfing his words. He glanced at the motionless stormborn nearby. “[I can save you…put you in that other body over there so we can—]”
Even as he lay dying, the thought of telepathically possessing another sentient—even worse, a human—sickened Rouma to his core. He shook his head with his remaining strength. “[My journey ends here…on our homeworld.]” Surprisingly, his leader wasn’t upset by the refusal. Empathy radiated off the Korvenite-possessed human.
“[But I don’t want to die like this…ebbing away…alone.]”
In his failing eyes, Rouma saw the human shake his hea
d. “[I’ll make it as painless as possible.]”
“[My…thanks… Anointed One,]” Rouma’s words came out so soft he was afraid they went unheard.
Thankfully, they weren’t. “[Enough with the titles and the aliases, Rouma. Call me…Isydryas. Until we meet again in Illyria.]” He rested a hand on Rouma’s clammy forehead.
The surrounding charred debris, the dirty skies, and the chill numbing Rouma’s body faded.
Now he saw rolling hills, sparkling lakes, and clear skies. The region now called Oklorada Basin, untouched by Union hands, unclaimed by earthborn defilers.
Sollus, as Rouma had remembered it almost thirty years ago.
In this illusion, Rouma was no longer armored or crippled. He could stand tall again, whole and healed. His companion and their two children, all killed years before the first Korvenite Rebellion, stood beside him.
In the real world, Maelstrom’s arms wrapped around Rouma, one encircling his head while another snaked over his armored torso in the opposite direction. Both arms tightened, especially the one holding his torso steady.
Rouma barely felt that. I’m finally home. He gazed up at the sunny skies with a smile…
…right as Maelstrom gave his head a quick, hard twist.
A white-hot jolt shivered through Rouma’s body. Then everything went black.
Together
“Now turn around.”
Jeremy Nwosu did as told and turned to face the floating 8’x4’ holomirror. This was the first time he’d been allowed to mostly dress himself. Too bad it wasn’t for a more fun occasion.
Under bright and warm halolights, the boy saw himself very dressed up, in a black suit and collarless white shirt. His bushy, dark brown fro had been trimmed to a manageable length which he cared little for. Jeremy was in his small room cabin on the Crimsonborn, his father’s personal freighter space yacht.
His light brown skin looked flushed, probably from how anxious he felt about today.
Behind Jeremy sat the human who’d helped dress him, his father Captain Habraum Nwosu.