by Greg Dragon
The door slid open to a cold, misty atmosphere which was a result of the condensation of the tanks mixing with the heat generated from the pods. There was a figure standing in front of one of the glasses and he walked up to it until the features of Marika Tsuno stood out to him. She was checking in on Vallen, who floated peacefully in the blue-tinted waters of the tank.
When she saw Rafian, she walked up to him and embraced him warmly, burying her head against his chest. He held her close and kissed her bald, spotted head, and then he held her for a time. When they separated she took his hand and led him outside.
“Why him, Rafian?” she asked suddenly. “This was our fight and he almost got himself killed fighting off the lizards.”
“I don't know many people in the two galaxies who can fight like Val. That lizard ran into the wrong man when he threatened your safety. I've fought with Val, and I'd like to think I know his motivations. This thing he did… he did it for you, Rika. He loves the hell out of you.”
“I know,” she said quietly and looked down at her feet. “I don’t deserve that sort of love from anyone.”
“Nonsense. Don’t start with that. We’re your family, and I won’t allow you to go to that place where you think that you’re the lone assassin again. I was lost in a desert with no way out and you know what? I was worried about you. ‘Where’s Rika?’ I asked myself. ‘We haven’t talked in a while.’ Then you have Val, who talks about you so much that I fight to not roll my eyes. And Marian. What about her?’” He looked down at her to gauge her response.
Marika flashed him a glance, her large black eyes bulging out, and he shrugged and nodded in defeat. “Yeah, I know, Rika, I know about you two. I’ve known for a really long time. The thing is, you and I, we’re the same person. It’s just that the creators made me a lot more handsome.”
Marika feigned a snicker but didn’t look up at him and he placed his forefinger under her chin. Lifting her face gently, he saw that she was crying and he hugged her closely, massaging the back of her neck. “I want you to say it,” he said finally and she leaned back to look up at him curiously.
“You want me to say what?”
“That you deserve his love. That you deserve the love of all of us who care about you. Marian, me, Vallen, Camille … everyone you’ve hugged, kissed, and shared blood with on the battlefield.”
“Raf, this is stupid,” she began but he held up his hand.
“It’s important and I want you to say it.”
“I deserve Val’s love, and I deserve yours, Marian’s, Camille’s and whoever else.”
“See, not so hard,” Rafian said, then looked at Val’s glass before looking away. “He’ll be fine. He always lands on his feet,” he said as if he was trying to convince himself. “How’s your stomach?”
“Pain is on and off. I want to get back out there and crack some lizard skulls.”
“Get better first. Don't overdo it,” he said and then stood up to leave. He went back into the room to look at the tank where Dott Toga was healing. He placed his hand on the glass and felt the coolness as he watched the woman's body floating in stasis. Her wounds were bad but she was healing rapidly from the tank’s chemical properties.
“I'll see you in a week, kid,” he said to her and then tapped the glass gently with his fist. “I wish we had one hundred like you. We’d win the war. But since we only have one, get better so that I can teach you some more skills with the sword.” He stared at her to see if there was any sign of comprehension, but her body was in stasis and too far gone to hear.
So many injured and so many cloned. It was a day that he never had imagined he would experience on Zallus. He thought about how much worse it would have been if Marian had gotten hurt. He thanked fate that she had been spared the terrible trauma that her fellow Phasers had suffered.
Why did he think that they could survive it alone? Why did he stay on Geral for so long even after he was given the means to return home? He thought about these things for a long time and no matter what he did to justify his actions he still could not shake the guilt. He could have come back, fought, then left again to return to Geral, but he stayed and let his people get butchered.
His comm lit up and Marian’s face hovered before him. “Come to the command center. I want to show you something,” she said.
“If it’s bad news I want it to wait,” he replied with a grimace.
“If it was bad news I would have told you, Commander,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
Rafian nodded and made his way up to the passageway that held the door to the command center. He passed by a few recruits who literally did a double-take when they saw him. There had been no formal message to the agency that he was back, and many of them had never seen him up close before. It was a tall, dark, brooding version of himself that they saw walking briskly past them, so they did their best to get out of his way.
When he entered the command center, Marian was looking over the Vestalian globe, examining a few vessels and typing in her notes. “Do you know that there are Helysian marines surveying our country?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m the one that requested them here. You will see Aqnaqak fighters and a few dropships, as well.”
“Why? What are they up to?”
“They’re the head of the spear. The attacks on Geral were a distraction to soften up their cover here on Vestalia. In a few days those cruisers will be sending in their troops. Others will begin the bombing of lizard compounds, and the fighters will be shooting down the atmosphere-generating towers. I had hoped to ask Val to march his warriors on the Geralos camp near here, but we will have to stall that plan until he’s back on his feet.”
Marian switched off the hologram and powered down the console, leaving the room in relative darkness except for the control panels. “You’ve been busy, it seems,” she said to him and slid towards him on long, graceful legs. He touched the small of her back and pulled her in. His left hand tangled in her thick, black, mane as he suckled her lower lip. “You haven’t kissed me in two days. Not the way I want to be kissed, at least,” she whispered.
“Everything’s tragic. Makes it hard to see beauty, let alone the woman that I had to get back to.”
She threw off her cloak and wriggled out of her 3B suit. It happened so fast that he was stunned and only went for his own belt when she was fully nude. “Door’s not locked. Anyone could come down here,” he said to her as she helped him out of his 3B suit.
“Everyone who comes down here is in the cloner or floating in a tank. I haven’t felt you in months, and I want you now. That is all that matters.”
He cupped her buttocks and lifted her into his arms, biting into her neck firmly but not strong enough to break the flesh. She in turn hugged him and he could feel her nails digging into his back. He tried to talk but his voice caught as they united for the first time since the week of his disappearance. It was angel heaven and devil hell wrapped in a vortex of guilt, pleasure, and pain.
This was Marian, the woman he would be with for an eternity. A Felitian debutant turned Phaser Ace who was the only Tyheran in his galaxy. Her glittering eyes excited him. He had dreamed of this for so long on Traxis. Unlike Jinay, this wasn’t just lust. This was everything he needed with the person he cared for the most.
It made his head spin and his heart race and it didn’t feel like enough. He wanted to bite into her and consume her like a Geralos would. He wanted to make her a part of him, to become what he felt in his lower half and absorb every single inch of this creature that was Marian VCA. For this he felt more than the urge to make up for lost time. He wanted to make up for all the times that he wasn’t with her, but the most he could do was love her.
They did it the Tyheran way: kisses, bites, and scratches. She cried tears of happiness at one point and he tried to force back his. Their spinning, thrusting, and moving put them on the console, triggering the map on and off several times, and by the time they had consummated their violent joining it looked as
if a bomb had detonated inside of the room.
They lay on the cold floor with him staring up at the ceiling and her still straddling him, her knees on the floor. She lay with her head on his chest and rested her hands on his massive shoulders. He raised his right hand from off the floor and used it to stroke her hair. “This brings me back to Veece,” he said quietly, and she laughed hard, causing her chest to heave against his.
“I guess we did go pretty hard in that hotel room,” she said.
“Yeah, the android attendant gave us a warning, remember? That is until you threatened to have it disassembled.”
Marian exhaled a puff of disapproval through her nostrils and sat up to look down at him. “I was such a little schtill back then. I don’t know how you didn’t just kill me and kept on with your mission.”
“I was a little schtill, too. Plus, you were the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on in two realities. Think that I was going to let you go that easily? Hell, I had to give love a try. Good thing for both of us. You turned out to be a wise warrior, willing to give a rebel a chance.”
“A rebel with a nice rump and a set of moves that made me purr,” she whispered in his ear as she leaned down to kiss him.
The cool air of the vents brushed down on top of them and Rafian reached for her cloak and pulled it over them. “I love you, Rienne,” he said, using her original Tyheran-born name.
“And I love you, Rebel Rafian,” she teased, rubbing her small button nose against his. “But, do me a favor. Don’t scare me like that ever again.”
24 | Scorched Earth
SEVERAL WEEKS passed and the citizens of Zallus rebuilt their homes, healed their wounds as best they could, and prepared for another invasion. They voted for an inner council to represent their needs to the Phasers, and Rafian visited and spoke with the families of the recruits who had died during the attack.
The mood at the agency was still grim but Rafian kept his spirits high by spending his off hours with his nephew, Ian. With urging from Marian, Aurora and Velman moved into their cave home, and for the first time since its construction, the place was full of life. Aurora was always in a positive mood and the arguments that she would get into with Marian were entertaining to listen to.
Tayden had finally woken up inside of her cloned body but spent most of her days in bed. Dott had assumed many of her duties, standing in as commander of the base. Frank got his bed placed inside of Tayden’s room and the lovers healed together. Rafian visited the two of them daily to tell them the status of the war.
The situation with the Geralos had gone viral, and the war was now on every planet and moon. The Louines who had stayed out of it for hundreds of years had slowly become the number one target of the enemy. Louine was a city planet with no remote areas, so the attacks were more prevalent there than anywhere else.
Yuth Varience, Louine’s greatest hero, was back home helping the government find and destroy the Geralos terrorist cells. He had five Phaser recruits with him and from what Rafian heard, the six of them were training a branch of Special Forces to counter the Geralos plans.
Like Yuth did for Louine, Marika Tsuno went home to Casan to train her people. She had gone before Val was out of his tank but the two spoke daily via holo-chat.
Every planet received help from the Phaser agency in the form of an agent stepping in. Anstractor saw the Phasers as Geralos experts and they leaned on the agency to get an edge on the war. Meanwhile the Alliance marines continued their attacks on Geral and the battle for Vestalia was underway.
On a peaceful night while baby Ian slept, Rafian left the cave to take a walk while checking in on an old friend. He followed the pathway up to the tower, then climbed it to its apex and sat down. His legs dangled off the edge and he laid back, looking up at the starry night and the bright white blip that was the Rendron in orbit.
A new set of hands and feet on the ladder’s rungs shook the tower. It was a warning that someone was approaching. The tower shook some more and then Rafian heard boots; heavy boots, like the type worn by the Alliance infantry. A large figure plopped down next to him and took up the same position.
“You're moving kind of slow these days, old man. Did that lizard finally break you?” Rafian said without looking at who it was.
“Slow? Me slow? You must be sniffing spice. Hand me some of that, will you. I want to be able to hallucinate and make up schtill stories too.” Val made his fingers into the shape of a square, then moved it to where he assumed Geral would be. The square represented the target box of a fighter, and he made a noise that was reminiscent of a rocket launching. “I hear that the Louines have a planet-killing rocket in the works,” he began.
“If only that were true and the other fantasy, that all of the Alliance council is built up of warriors. We could wipe out the lizards, start rebuilding here, and take our girls out for sweet coffee and animal viewing. That's one hell of an imagination you have there, Marine. Unfortunately, reality says that we are being thyped by a superior enemy.”
“Yeah, but they don't have us, so the Alliance will prevail,” Val said confidently before launching another imagined rocket up at Geral.
Rafian turned to look at him and his eyebrows furrowed as he struggled with what he wanted to say. Val read his face and looked back up at the sky. “You don't have to say it, and I know that it was crazy.”
“Does Marika know what you did and how you got hurt?”
“She knows, bro, she knows. She already exploded, so I'm good. Plus someone had to stop that schtill or he would have circled back to kill more of our babies. What are we going to do, Raf, about the lizards? We both know they'll be coming back.”
Rafian didn't answer for a time and then made his own square, placing the gap in his fingers over the tiny spark that was Geral. “Remember in cadet training how we learned about Geralos battleships and why their pilots are forced to keep them in space?”
“Yeah, they're made of Trylene compound and they use ephemeral nitron cores. Stay too long in the atmosphere and they would explode. You planning on stealing one to fly to lizard town?”
“Thinking about it. But if I did, I wouldn’t be able to do it alone.”
“Where are you going to find a Geralos ship that will allow you to take it over? Okay, and let’s say you find one and figure out how to fly it. How are you going to make it to Geral using their FTL technology? You're not, that's how, but you get top grades for the idea. We are going to have to kill the lizard by good old-fashioned war tactics.”
“We’ve tried that, and it has become the only thing we know. It has become so much of our reality that if given the choice between ending the Geralos now or a thousand years later through ‘war tactics,’ most of us will choose the latter.” He sat up suddenly, gesturing at Val as he spoke. “We are war babies, Val. Born and raised with ‘the fight’ as our only reality. Let’s face it: most of us are winging it, fighting because it is the only thing we know. I don’t know about you but I’m sick of the lizards. I’m sick of trading blows with them while they grow their territory across the galaxy, and I’m sick of them being our only focus when we should be past them, growing, rebuilding, and contributing.”
Val chuckled and looked at Rafian as if he were a child using logic that came from a place of naiveté. “Don’t you think that our ancestors were as sick as you are about the fighting, Raf?” he said. “People like Hellgate, Johan VES, and even Cibo Heth? They were all sick of the lizards and they each did what they could in a short lifetime to push the war to this point. Yes, the lizards still run the galaxy, but all of those warriors gave a little to put us here where we are attacking them on their own planet. How do you think they would feel seeing us now? I think they’d be damn proud!”
“It will never be enough for me to fight, die, and hope that a future Raf or Val can keep up the momentum, brother. The time is now, and I want to bring so much bloody fire to Geral that the lizards will beg us to stop.”
“That sounds like sweet
music, bro. What do you need from me?” Val asked suddenly, his face an intense mask beneath the moon.
“I need you to do what you do best and bring hell to the Geralos here on Vestalia. While they’re here I’ll hit the capital in Geral. They won’t see me coming before it happens.” He stood up suddenly and helped Val to his feet, turning to look over the silver spires of Zallus and the surrounding countryside.
“So, this battleship,” Val said, “how are you going to get it?”
“Ever heard of the Serylusk?” Rafian asked.
“Who hasn’t?”
“What about Constance ITO, XO to Rend?”
“Cute girl, pilot, met her down here while you were vacationing. Go on,” Val said.
“She managed to stall and gut that beast as the standing captain on the Rendron,” Rafian said and Val’s mouth slipped open in surprise.
“You don’t say … I would have never guessed she was hard like that. Damn. Rend must be one hell of a teacher.”
“Yeah, well Constance has Serylusk tethered to the Rendron right now as they syphon off fuel and other usable resources. I gave her a call and asked her to hold it for me. This is why they jumped it into Vestalian space, so that when I’m ready I can grab it and do what I need to do with it.”
Val said, “Raf. Bro. You’re not making any sense. If the ship has no fuel and had to be tethered, how are you going to fly it? Plus it’s a battleship, twice the size of Rendron. I don’t think one man can manage those, let alone set FTL coordinates and jump to a quadrant of deep space. You’re gifted, in strange ways that I couldn’t begin to understand, but you will need a crew and—”
“The Phasers will be with you when you start the assault on the Geralos cities down here, Val. I am going to take the Serylusk by myself. Listen. Remember how I told you that I was in Traxis—when the explosion happened, I mean.”
“Yeah, you were in Traxis, getting it on with the locals,” he said with a grin and punched Rafian playfully in the shoulder.