The Exiled Earthborn

by Paul Tassi

  She backed away from him and spoke as she headed toward the entrance back into the gala.

  “It was a pleasure, Earthborn. I’m glad you found us.”

  And then she was consumed in a ball of flame.

  3

  Lucas’s back arched as the fiery blast that shot out from the balcony entryway flung him against the stone banister. He hit the ground conscious but disoriented, with pain surging through his body. A dull tone sounded in his ears while his eyes could only see enormous red spots.

  He fumbled around on the ground, crawling forward, feeling bits of stone and glass under his feet, trying to understand what had just taken place. An explosion. A bomb. An attack. Immediately, his mind raced to Asha. He tried to stand, but the attempt resulted in an instant collapse to the ground. As his vision slowly came back into focus, he saw a pair of glassy, prismatic eyes staring back at him. Corinthia Vale lay on her side, her cheek and neck blackened, her tattered dress aflame. Her gaze was fixed and unmoving.

  Lucas dragged himself over to her on his elbows and placed a trembling pair of fingers on her neck, confirming what he already knew. She was gone. Looking past her, the Throne Room was a hellish furnace of smoke and flame, and Lucas could hear screams coming from within. How had this happened? His mind swam as he tried once more to get to his feet, this time with greater success. He rose unsteadily, bracing himself against the railing. Corinthia lay still in front of him.

  The ground shook as an armored figure landed on the balcony next to him, cracking the tiled floor. Jets protruding out of its back flickered with blue light, then went out completely. It turned to Lucas and revealed an assault weapon in its clutches and a face hidden by a helmet. The figure was a tower of black armor streaked with four blood-red lines intersecting across its breastplate. It was taller than Lucas, but too short to be Xalan. It raised the rifle and Lucas instinctively reached for a gun he did not have.

  The figure’s head jerked right and blood sprayed out of the side of the shattered helmet. The suit of armor dropped to the ground as if the body inside had evaporated entirely. A man strode through the flames from inside the main room. It was Mars Maston, uniform scorched and ears bleeding, clutching a long silver energy pistol. He met Lucas’s eyes briefly, but his attention was soon caught by the body below him. He immediately dropped to his knees.

  “Cora!” he yelled. “Cora!” He attempted to find a heartbeat as Lucas had and discovered the same sickening truth. He smashed his hand against the stone and turned a fierce gaze toward Lucas.

  “Come, now!” he shouted as he rose to his feet, lifting the still smoldering Corinthia. He put her over his shoulder and clutched his pistol with his free hand. Lucas stumbled over to the dead invader and picked up his weapon, which strangely resembled a shortened version of the Xalan rifles he’d become intimately familiar with.

  The scene inside was chaotic. The entire room was on fire and bodies littered the ground, including two armed guards on either side of Lucas as they entered. There were audible screams, but through the smoke it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. Lucas stumbled over a body. His ears still rang and smoke filled his lungs.

  Ahead, two more armored figures streaked with red marched through the carnage, firing at those stirring on the ground or attempting to flee. They saw Maston and Lucas too late and were each met with a round to the skull. Lucas’s instinctive shot from the energy rifle vaporized his target’s head entirely, much to Lucas’s surprise.

  “Asha!” Lucas called out, but heard only unidentified shrieks in reply. “Asha!”

  “This way!” Maston shouted as he pulled him in the direction of the large throne, Corinthia’s body dangling down his back. The central serving table was in splinters and a circular blast pattern on the floor seemed to indicate it was the origin point of the explosion. In the distant smoke, more armored figures lumbered about. Lucas fired indiscriminately at them, but couldn’t tell if he was landing any shots. How had they gotten past Tannon’s security? Another one entered from the balcony they’d come from. It was clear this was an aerial assault. The newly arrived intruder took a pair of rounds from Maston and went down. Lucas saw palace guards enter from a passageway on the other end of the room and engage the armored troops as surviving civilians scrambled for safety behind them.

  They approached the throne and Maston waved his hand, which drew out a holographic interface from the ancient, and now blackened, marble. He moved various virtual pieces around, and with a groan, the massive seat slid forward on the ground. At the base was square hole with a metal ladder.

  “Inside!” Maston yelled.

  “No!” Lucas replied as loudly as he could muster, ash burning his lungs. He turned back to the fiery room.

  “Asha!” he yelled hoarsely as he walked toward the inferno. Maston tried to reach for him, but with Corinthia on his back and a weapon in his hand, he couldn’t stop him.

  And then, there she was.

  Lucas saw two armored men dragging a woman with curled black hair over her face, clad in an unmistakable red dress and a jeweled necklace reflecting the flames around it. They went around the corner and out the balcony entryway on the other side of the room.

  Lucas tried to sprint, but almost fell. He braced himself against the wall and continued forward as fast as he could manage. It was hard to even understand what hurt in his body anymore. A flood of adrenaline had shoved the pain away for later.

  Stepping over another dead guard, he reached the opening. Rounding the corner with his rifle barrel, his sudden and unexpected appearance caught a man standing there by complete surprise. At close range, Lucas blew a hole clean through his armored torso and blasted off a piece of the stone railing behind them. As the man sank to the ground, Lucas saw what was ahead of him. His heart stopped.

  The figure was clutching Asha with one arm while holding a snub pistol to her skull with the other. Lucas froze. The man gestured with the gun in silence. Slowly, Lucas let his rifle barrel drift toward the ground as the man’s pistol retrained itself on Asha. She wasn’t moving, and her skin and dress were a mess of black burns. But Lucas saw her chest rise and fall under the man’s metal arm.

  Lucas had dropped his gun far enough for the invader, and in a single moment he activated the blue jets on his back and fired the pistol. Lucas instinctively raised his rifle, which deflected the initial shot while the next two whizzed by his head and into the ground as the man soared into the sky at an incredible speed. Dropping the now superheated gun, Lucas ran to the railing. The blue lights of the jets were still visible as the pair of them kept rising into the cloudless night. Lucas looked down at the dead man, but his jet mechanism had been mangled by Lucas’s shot, and Lucas quickly deduced that he couldn’t somehow appropriate it to give chase. When he turned back to the sky, the lights were gone.

  She was gone.

  Lucas’s forgotten pain returned all at once, and he collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

  His vision was blurry when he woke. He could see lights and shapes, but couldn’t make out what they formed. Lucas’s head rolled from side to side and the shapes changed, but became no clearer. He was lying down, he thought, and tried to raise his arms but found it like trying to push through tar. A fuzzy blotch that must have been his hand waved in front of him.

  “He’s awake,” a voice said.

  Had he been captured too?

  “Dial it back a bit then.”

  Pain. He winced and his muscles tightened.

  “Not that much.”

  Relief, and his vision began to return. A man and a woman were standing over him clad in long silver coats. It was the woman who spoke.

  “His injuries aren’t severe. The vertebrae will heal. The burns are minor.”

  “Special case though,” the man said.

  “I know.”

  As his vision continued to return, Lucas saw the woman had short brown hair, dark green eyes, and severe cheekbones. The man was out of his field of vision
now.

  “Get him up, they want to talk to him. Keep him at 20 percent though.”

  Lucas felt pain return to his spine, but his mind became less cloudy. The woman unhooked several wires from his torso. He managed to sit up, though his back was angry with him for it.

  “Over there,” she said. “They’re waiting.”

  Lucas looked over and saw that the room they were in was dark except for a brightly lit holotable in the middle. Figures were huddled around it and sifting through various displays that flew up from the surface.

  Lucas stood up from the stretcher, which was immediately wheeled away into the darkness by the pair of attendants, a bevy of mobile machines along with it.

  Walking was rough for the first few steps, but became easier as he found his footing through numb legs. He drew closer to the table and understood where he was. And where he was not.

  He hadn’t been captured like Asha; the appearance of Tannon, Maston, and Alpha confirmed that. The other men and women around the table he didn’t recognize, but some were in military fatigues while others wore the suits of public officials.

  Another attendant in a silver coat was applying something to Tannon’s back. His uniform was scorched and his chin was dripping blood onto the shimmering surface of the table, but he appeared to be without mortal injuries. Maston looked similarly ragged. His once prim and proper appearance was transformed into a torn-up mess of ash and blood.

  Across the table, Alpha was the first to spot him.

  “Lucas,” he said as the blue hologram on his translator collar flickered.

  “Glad you could join us,” Tannon said as he waved the silvercoat away from his back.

  “Where are we?” Lucas asked, his voice sounding strange in his own head.

  “A bunker under the palace. One of many. It doubles as a wartime fortress.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “You have Maston to thank for that,” Tannon said, gesturing toward the man across from him.

  “I couldn’t let two Earthborn leave us,” he said in a tone that annoyed Lucas. But the man had just saved his life twice. As he moved into the light, Lucas could see a look of barely bridled anguish on his face.

  “Asha, where is she?” His mind snapped back to the most pressing issue.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We’re attempting to make sense of this whole damn catastrophe. Get him up to speed.”

  A shorter man to Tannon’s right spoke with a shaky voice. Lucas couldn’t place his type of uniform.

  “At 28:05, a device was detonated in the Throne Room from a concealed location inside the serving table. Its exceptionally small size and unique material composition allowed it to pass undetected through every layer of security.”

  The man waved and a three-dimensional vision of what looked like a microchip hovered above them.

  “The thing was smaller than a fingernail,” Tannon said. “Any bigger and it would have blown the whole floor to dust.”

  The short man continued.

  “After the initial explosion, an assault team was dispatched from a ship of unknown origin. Casualties were high, but all members of the invading force have been killed or have fled.”

  “Who were they?” Lucas asked.

  “Fourth Order,” answered Maston through gritted teeth. “Their armor was unmistakable. But those weapons …”

  “Fourth Order? Aren’t they a political party?” Lucas asked, remembering the name from the Stream earlier.

  Tannon scoffed. “A political party? They’re rebels. A resistance group led by that fool Hex Tulwar. They’ve lashed out before, but I never thought they were capable of something like this. It doesn’t make any damn sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Another military official spoke. His unscathed uniform indicated he hadn’t been in attendance at the party.

  “The assault team simply appeared, and then disappeared. We don’t know how they breached security.”

  An ash-covered woman spoke as she pulled up a readout on the table. She had to cough a few times before she spoke.

  “Scans came back. No detection on motion, thermal, infrared. And nothing on video. They just … vanished.”

  A feed showed an attacker with a blue jetpack ascending into the sky. He slowed, then, in a split second, disappeared from view altogether in the cloudless black night.

  Lucas had seen something like this only once before.

  “Alpha, that’s not …” Lucas said.

  “It must be,” Alpha said, his claws extended outward on the table. “The Sorans do not have the capacity for this technology yet. They cannot.”

  “What are you talking about?” Maston asked.

  “They piloted a short-range cloaked Xalan ship. Study of their weapons and the explosive device will likely yield elements of Xalan technology as well.”

  “Impossible,” Tannon said. “You’re the first Xalan to even speak to us in three hundred years. What would they be doing working with the Fourth Order?”

  Alpha looked nonplussed.

  “Would you instead believe your underfunded resistance group managed to develop technology centuries ahead of your own by themselves overnight? It seems clear the two parties have conspired in an assassination attempt.”

  “Who was their target?” Lucas asked. “Asha? Is that why they took her?”

  “You think you’re that damn special, Earthborn?” Maston said, boiling with rage. “The most powerful people on this planet were at that party, and a good quarter of them are now dead! They wouldn’t organize this just to snatch up a single useless Earth girl!”

  That made Lucas push past two men and get right in Maston’s face before a few nearby officers could separate them. Lucas backed down and his head throbbed from the surge of anger and whatever medication he was likely on. An obvious thought occurred to him.

  “Where’s Talis? I mean the High Chancellor?”

  “She’s safe,” said Tannon quickly. “But mourning the loss of her daughter.”

  Corinthia. An image flashed in Lucas’s mind of her being consumed in flame.

  “Who was talking to you last I saw,” Maston said venomously.

  “She wouldn’t … I was … There was no time,” Lucas stammered. “She had walked inside when the blast hit. When I reached her … she was gone.”

  “There’s nothing he could have done, Maston. Calm down,” Tannon said.

  “This whole damned party was for them! If they hadn’t shown up in the first place—”

  “I had no idea this would happen!” Lucas spat back. “Maybe if your security had been better, you’d have stopped this and she’d still be alive!”

  Mars Maston lost what was left of his composure. He swung at Lucas’s jaw and connected, his target too groggy to dodge the blow. Lucas hit the floor and Maston leapt on top of him. The officials around them scrambled to pull them off of each other as Tannon circled around the table, shouting at the pair of them.

  The holotable lit up and the image that was displayed made everyone freeze at once. The top of the frame read “incoming transmission.” Underneath it was Asha, battered, burned, and bloody. She was seated, her hands behind her back and her black hair hanging wet around her face. Her green eyes shone brightly through the feed and Lucas saw a familiar look of burning anger in them. Her mouth was covered by some sort of metal device that looked more involved than a simple gag. From the way her muscles were tensing, it looked as if she couldn’t move an inch, and the mechanism was inducing a sort of paralysis. Lucas let Maston’s collar slip from his hand, and the pair of them slowly got to their feet. The camera panned back and two armored men walked into frame, each with weapons drawn and pointed at Asha. Lucas’s heart was thundering in his ears.

  A new figure entered, one with no helmet or mask to hide his face. He was tan, with long brown hair and dark features. He wore a black uniform that was unbuttoned to his chest and had the sleeves rolled up.

  “That
bastard …” Tannon spoke slowly. Lucas looked at him. “That’s Hex Tulwar,” he clarified.

  “Sir, this isn’t just for us. It’s taken over every layer of the Stream,” the short man next to him said.

  “What? How is that possible?”

  “It seems your resistance is doing many impossible things today,” Alpha said.

  The man began to speak as he drew closer to the camera, which panned away from Asha. The background was dark and unidentifiable.

  “Greetings, my Soran brethren,” he said. His voice had an accent unlike any Lucas had heard on the planet so far.

  “By now you’ve received word of the judgment that has rained down from the heavens on Elyria. The apostates of the High Chancellor have been made to pay for their misdeeds, and their facade has come crumbling down.”

  Lucas looked over at Maston, who was now seething at the monitor, not at him.

  “We did not know what we would find when we infiltrated the gala of the vain and powerful this evening. After weeks of preparation, only this morning did we learn it was to celebrate the appearance of the two false idols known as the Earthborn.”

  He said it with the same sort of sneer Maston had.

  “I hope that you are not foolish enough to believe these two are truly long lost relatives of Sora from some distant land. They are merely tools, pieces of propaganda created to further fan the fires of war.”

  The Fourth Order’s statement decrying the Earthborn’s validity on the Stream earlier that day was worded nearly identically to what Tulwar was saying now.

  “This war has gone on for too long, and we want no more of it. For every ship that’s vaporized, a hundred thousand Sorans could have eaten for a year. The cost of an antimatter missile could filter a million gallons of toxic water. And they have the nerve to celebrate this new chapter of conflict with a lavish party where the elite oppressors stuff their faces with fine food and drink as they worship these new idols.”

  The camera panned back to Asha who was still frozen motionless in her restraints.

  “Now we put their lie to the test. If this Earthborn is as special as they claim, the last of her kind, they will pay to see her safely returned. It will be a ransom used not to kill, but to heal. The Fourth Order demands a payment of fifty trillion marks by tomorrow’s moonrise, or we open up the idol and see if she looks like us on the inside as well.”