Ignite the Stars

by Maura Milan

  He had no desire to figure out what had happened here. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  Knives stopped in front of a door. He tapped on the sensor, and the door slid open. If he thought the smell was bad in the hallway, it was a hundred times worse across the threshold. Using his hands to shield his nose from the stench, he stepped inside. No matter how much Knives squinted, his eyes failed to adjust to the shadows. But at least there was some light. It came from the center of the room, streaming from the edges of an onboard console. The server, he realized.

  Limp sacks, like bags filled with food supplies, were positioned around the console. But there was something strange about them and the way they slumped over.

  As he stepped closer, his vision adjusted to the dark scene before him.

  His knees grew weak, and he reached out, leaning his hand up to the wall to steady himself.

  No. It couldn’t be.

  These things weren’t sacks at all. They were corpses. Relatively recent ones, though starved for weeks by the look of it. They were nothing but skin, bone, and fraying dark-blue hair.

  Deus up above. They were Tawny.

  Knives knew the Tawny were shunned in Olympus, but that was nothing in comparison to what he witnessed now. These people had died in their own filth, each of them chained to their own chair for Deus knows how long. A white cable dangled from the base of each of their skulls, hardwiring them straight into the console they clustered around.

  He tapped on his holowatch, opening up a stream to the cruiser. “I found something.”

  The display responded with a hiss of static and a garbled message from his father. “We…document…thing…”

  Getting the idea, Knives accessed the camera function of his watch. A holographic screen floated in front of him, and he angled it parallel to capture a shot of the nearest body. The dead man’s face was jaundiced, almost yellow in the pale light. His mouth lay open as if he had been caught in the middle of a scream. The man was older than the rest of them, his blue hair already turning gray. Knives took the photo quickly, not wanting to stare at his face for much longer. As he was about to move on to the next body, he saw something on the man’s neck. A scar of some sort. His fingers darted out, pulling the man’s collar away, and he saw a pattern of red flesh the shape of two hearts side by side. It wasn’t a scar, Knives realized. The man was branded. A quick glance around showed others also marked with the same symbol.

  He swiveled as he saw something. Movement. A shadow stretched toward him in the inky darkness. In that instant, he remembered the story of Fugue, of the monster watching from a darkened corner.

  Knives stood frozen as a figure stepped toward the light. His face was covered by a black helmet, raised on each side to form sharp edges like small horns. He was dressed in a sleek black flight suit. The figure raised his arm, his pistol flaring orange, ready to fire.

  “Hands up.” The voice was low, male, and carried a smoothness to the syllables. “I’ve always wanted to say that.” There was something familiar in the way he spoke. That vicious glee and troublesome mirth.

  As the figure stalked forward, the light caught on two white hearts engraved onto his chestplate. Before Knives could ask who he was, what he wanted, the man’s arm rose and fell, the pistol cracking Knives hard across the head. Knives crumpled to the floor, and for a brief second, he saw an expanse of glittering stars, so bright they burned into his eyes, smoldering like a million suns all at once. As he lost consciousness, he was thankful for the light.

  CHAPTER 39

  BRINN

  ONE STEP.

  Then another.

  Brinn’s feet kept moving, shuffling through the hallway around the canteen. Dinner period was nearing its end, but Brinn still hadn’t grabbed anything to eat. Instead, her thoughts were stuck on the same three words.

  I pity you. I pity you.

  “Brinn?” A face drifted into her periphery, following her. He continued to speak, but her mind was still stuck. After a while, she realized it was Cammo’s voice.

  “You’ve been walking around the canteen for an hour.”

  The only response she could manage was a short grumble.

  Cammo scratched his jaw. “I visited Liam earlier.”

  Liam. Her feet stopped, and she blinked. For the first time in their walk around the canteen, she looked at Cammo. It was strange seeing him without that crooked smile on his face.

  “Is he okay?” Brinn asked.

  Cammo hesitated, but she saw the truth in his eyes.

  “You should go see him,” he said. “I know it’ll cheer him up.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because every time he talks about you, he smiles.”

  Her heart faltered. It didn’t matter if Ia pitied her. There were other people at Aphelion who valued her, who would call her a friend, maybe even something more.

  Brinn rushed down the hallway.

  She turned the corner, then staggered. Geoff and Aaron stood at each side of the clean, white doors.

  What are they doing there? They’re supposed to be guarding—

  “Where’s Ia?” she burst out.

  Geoff opened his mouth to respond, but she rushed past them. She knew the answer. Ia was inside.

  Brinn tried to ignore the panic brewing inside her, but it was too much of a coincidence. Ia and Liam in the same place, moments after they had fought.

  Inside the med bay, 494 stood in the center. Her face was blankly pleasant as she charged on her pedestal.

  Brinn raced to the far wall, the only section that had been curtained off. She waved away the holographic divider, completely expecting her heart to shatter at the image of Liam’s body broken in so many ways it’d be impossible to jigsaw him back together.

  Instead, she saw nothing.

  Only an empty floatbed with crumpled sheets.

  She checked each section of the room. No one was there.

  Sprinting back out into the hallway, her eyes shifted back and forth between Aaron and Geoff.

  “Get all the guards to the flight deck. Ia Cōcha has escaped.”

  CHAPTER 40

  IA

  “DO WE HAVE TO DO THIS?”

  Ia had Liam in a headlock. They were crouched at the end of the tunnel, ready to push out into the open.

  “It has to look like you’re my prisoner on camera,” Ia said. “If you want to be charged with treason, I’ll happily let go.”

  “I’m no good to you if I collapse from lack of oxygen.”

  She loosened her grip. It was fun torturing him, but he was right. She needed him in order to get out of Aphelion, and he wouldn’t be much help if he was unconscious.

  She kicked out the grate and peered out. Above them, starjets hung on the storage tracks. The lights were dim except for the beams lining the tarmac. It was 2200 in the evening, and the flight deck was empty.

  She adjusted her grip around Liam’s neck and nodded to the Eyes at the ceiling. “Try not to smile too much.”

  Then she lunged forward, not wasting any time. She would have gone straight for the Kaiken, but with Knives gone, it wasn’t available. Luckily from all the nights and nights of maintenance duty, she had a good idea which starjets were in better condition than the rest. But since she was an engineer, none of these jets would power up for her. Ignition required an approved biometric signature, a handprint. A perfectly good reason why Liam was in a headlock and being dragged across the tarmac.

  After zipping through a maze of vehicles, she stopped in front of the seventeenth spot, deciding to take a training jet parked on the ground and not stored above in the hanging units. It was one of the older models, which she preferred, and from previous examination of the front and rear engines, she knew the jet would hold up well for a long-distance flight.

  As expected, the side door was sealed shut. Ia shoved Liam over to the door’s biosensor. “All right, Junior, do your thing.”

  Liam rolled up the sleeve of his flight suit and
pressed his palm onto the sensor. The computer whirred and buzzed as it sifted through the cadet database for a match.

  Hurry, she pleaded. Come on, hurry.

  Finally, she heard a mechanical click as the door unlatched.

  “Well, I’m glad to say this is goodbye,” Liam uttered as he edged away from her.

  “I wish.” She grabbed his wrist tightly. “I need your pulse print to start the launch sequence. Once everything is up, I’ll let you go.”

  Liam was about to protest when she interrupted. “You’re lucky it’s a pulse signature they need instead of a simple print. Otherwise, I’d have already snapped that thumb of yours clean off.”

  “You’re disgusting,” he spat out.

  “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

  She dragged him toward the steering wheel. Liam gripped the thruster handle so his pulse would register.

  All around her, the starjet whirred to life. She scanned all the gauges, making quick note of the fuel levels. Only one full pod’s worth, but if she drove economically, it would be enough to get her to a refill station after the jump.

  “All right, Vyking, you can go,” she said, looking behind her, but Liam was already gone. She peered through the pilot window and watched as he ran down the tarmac. She couldn’t blame him.

  Setting her sights back on the task at hand, she scooted into the pilot’s chair and navigated the training jet out onto the tarmac.

  “So far, so good,” she muttered to herself.

  Out on the flight deck, bright warning lights strobed out in alarm.

  Mif. She spoke too soon.

  Behind her, a line of sentry borgs spilled onto the deck. Because of their mechanical limbs, they were fast.

  Ia quickly activated her rear thrusters to thermal burn. She glanced at the back monitors, watching as a stream of high-temperature exhaust burst out the back of the jet, taking out a group of borgs nearing the tail. A part of her felt a twitch of guilt, especially after everything 494 had done for her. Hell, even Aaron had given her a new sense of borg appreciation.

  But right now, the only thing that mattered was getting herself out of there.

  Force field generators sparked at the end of the runway, and she knew her escape time had been cut in half. She needed to be on the other side of that force field before it came down. Otherwise, she’d be trapped.

  Retracting the wheels of the jet, she set the mid thrusters to hover. There wasn’t enough time for a runway takeoff. She had to blast out of there cold. It would be bumpy, less precise. But faster.

  The force-field barrier started to seal, quickly forming to meet at the middle. Swiveling back and forth in her chair, she switched to ionic thrusters and, with both hands steady, she guided the jet upward, bringing it to a hover at the midpoint.

  Her hands now on the drive controls, she felt the jet hum, and at that exact moment, she slammed the rear throttle forward at full speed. Using her left hand to steer, she eyed the force-field surface for the exact position where the barrier would come to a close. The hole was barely big enough for the jet to pass.

  Ia yipped like a maniac as the jet punched through, the edge of the closing force field knocking her aircraft to the right, and she knew it had shaved off the tip of her wing. Not a big deal. She could compensate for the wing imbalance with proper steering.

  Nope. Not a big deal at all.

  Because she was alive.

  Because she was rising up through the swirls of snow and breaking through the clouds.

  Because once again, she could see the sky.

  An hour later, the floating archways of this system’s intergalactic gate appeared in the distance. The structure was unmarked, so she had no idea where it would lead her. It could drop her into the middle of a hostile system for all she knew, but Ia didn’t care as long as she was putting distance between her and Aphelion. Ia hovered the jet to the side, transmitting a signal to the gate’s network. All she needed to do was activate the usage code, and she could jump away from this sector.

  An automated voice came in through the speakers. “Thank you for using the Birra Gate. Your vehicle’s data signature is locked. Please provide vocal confirmation before your jump.”

  Her tongue pressed against a metal node at the top of her mouth, initiating the voice generator wired into her vocal chords. All the audio data she had collected was stored there, perfect for a day like this. That was the reason she sought out conversation after conversation with that cold-eyed weirdo.

  Well, one of the reasons.

  She cleared her throat, testing out the feel of Knives’s voice upon her tongue. “This is Knives Adams. Requesting access for travel.”

  She watched as an icon swirled upon the transmission display.

  Then, finally: “Vocal confirmation approved.”

  Ia let out a sigh of relief. She clicked upon the navigation display, setting her itinerary while the gate whirred into life, its concentric circles churning as it activated. She laid her hands on the thrusters, but before she went forward, she saw a shimmer in the distance beyond the gate. Another ship was approaching. How odd. It had found its way to this star system without jumping through the gate.

  With her awful luck these days, it would turn out to be a RSF ship making a pit stop at Aphelion. It could even be Knives, returning from wherever the mif he was.

  But wait—all Star Force vehicles had free access to interstellar gates, while everyone else was tolled for their usage. A lot of pilots sometimes decided to take longer routes to forego the charges. So if it wasn’t Knives or any other RSF vehicle, then who was it?

  Her eyes widened. Perhaps it was Einn, finally come to rescue her. She positioned the jet to get a better look. As the ship approached, she tried to make out its shape. Einn’s ship, Shepherd, was long and shaped like a cross with a yellow stripe running right through its center.

  But the ship that approached wasn’t any of that. Whatever it was, it was coated in nonreflective black, making it almost impossible to figure out where the ship started or ended, at least from a far distance. It was relying on stealth, which meant it was here for reconnaissance.

  A scout.

  And based on the model of the jet, she knew they were bad news. All the pirates, slavers, and crime lords she knew used those stealth jets as feelers to see if there was anything out in the far reaches to take.

  Why were they scanning this star system? There was nothing here.

  Except for the academy.

  And once AG-9 was scanned by this jet, others would follow. That uranium core Ia had told Einn about would light up on the jet’s sensors. Aphelion wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Brinn wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Ia sunk back into her pilot seat, trying as best as she could to sweep away all her worries. No loose ends, her brother told her.

  She powered up her jet and raced through the gate, away from Aphelion, away from Tarver and the rest of those poor oblivious cadets.

  She didn’t dare look back. If she did, she knew she might change her mind.

  CHAPTER 41

  KNIVES

  KNIVES WOKE UP, the smell of death still surrounding him. Rolling to his knees, he discovered his hands had been bound together by a goopy adhesive. His helmet was gone, and so was his holowatch. He couldn’t connect with the cruiser or the ArcLite. His captor had thought things through.

  Knives’s eyes trailed across the confines of the room until he saw him, leaning against the server console and sharpening a thin blade the length of his forearm. Behind him was a small box with a purple display screen broadcasting a blocking signal. So he was the one scrambling Bastian’s stream.

  His captor was of light build, but by the way he held himself, Knives could tell he was a confident fighter. To make matters worse, his suit was modded with a lot of tech. Exoskeletal armor, plasma charges on his wrists. His captor would not be easy to take down.

  As far as Knives could tell, there were no name tags on the armo
r, only those two white hearts emblazoned on his chest piece.

  “Excuse the mess,” White Hearts apologized, seeing Knives was awake. “I’ve been upgrading.”

  Knives seared a look in his direction. “You murdered them.”

  White Hearts glanced at the decaying bodies arranged around him like petals on a flower. “I merely put them to good use. The processor in this rust shack was dead, so I needed to whip something up. What’s the old saying? If we put a few heads together—”

  “You used Tawnies for processing power?” Knives spat out. “That’s inhumane.”

  “Inhumane? Olympus nearly wiped out the entire Tawny civilization. I only acknowledged their strengths. Their minds are the key to making GodsEye what it should be.” He pointed his blade in Knives’s direction. “Do you even know what this place can do?”

  White Hearts made his way toward Knives and crouched before him. “It makes all kinds of rips and tears.” He drew his blade up and slashed it across the thick of Knives’s bicep. Knives felt warm blood drench the sleeve of his suit, and he bit the inside of his cheek to block out the pain. He wouldn’t give his captor the satisfaction of seeing him suffer.

  It only made White Hearts lean in close.

  “Black holes, worm holes. They’re all very deep gouges in the fabric of space.” Another slash trailed across Knives’s chest, ripping through the thick poly-fabric of his suit. Then one against Knives’s cheek. Knives’s vision pulsated, dimming and brightening as his body reacted to the pain.

  His captor leaned back on his haunches. As he spoke, he waved his knife around like a toy. “What was that story you all tell each other? Of a monster that ripped apart Fugue?”

  Knives angled his head. Was his captor former RSF? How could he know about that?