The Exiled Earthborn

by Paul Tassi

  One of the two guards brandished a long curved knife that flittered dangerously close to Asha’s throat. Lucas’s fists were clenched so tightly he’d lost feeling in them.

  “We demand the funds used for war be returned to the people of Sora for peace. If they refuse to pay, and she dies, you’ll know that your government has lied to you and the Earthborn are no more from another world than you or I. Surely the greatest discovery in Soran history is worth a few marks, no?”

  The camera cut away from Asha and fixated solely on Hex Tulwar once more.

  “Think, my children. Vales, I await your reply.”

  The feed cut to black and only a short string of symbols remained.

  The room was silent.

  “Trace?” Tannon said, but the woman next to him was already shaking her head.

  “What the hell do we do now?” a rather frightened-looking military commander said from across the table.

  “We leave her,” Mars Maston said coldly.

  “What?” Lucas exclaimed. “You have to be kidding. Just give them the marks!”

  “Fifty trillion marks could finance our entire next campaign,” Maston said, too close to Lucas’s face once more. “Your … counterpart isn’t worth a fraction of that.”

  Lucas clenched his teeth, but avoided lunging at the man again. He tried reason.

  “If you don’t pay, and they kill her, your citizens will think that we’re just inventions of your government to drum up support for the war.”

  “You mean you’re not?” Maston said mockingly.

  Tannon slammed his fist down on the holotable, causing all the images on it to fizzle.

  “You boys are forgetting a third option. We kick down their door, save the girl, and bring Tulwar to justice.”

  Maston had a confused look as he turned to him.

  “They came here in an invisible ship, you can’t trace the location of the transmission, and they’ve already carved out her tracking chip. How exactly are we supposed to find them?”

  Tracking chip? Lucas quickly looked over his own body. They’d implanted him with something? And it had been cut out of Asha? Both thoughts were highly disconcerting.

  “I’ve been chatting with our new friend here, and he has a way we can find her. Tell ’em,” Tannon said, motioning to Alpha.

  “Back on Earth,” Alpha said, looking at Lucas, “I planted a chemical tracking element on you and Asha.”

  “What? Why?” Lucas asked. Him too?

  “I required knowledge of your whereabouts in the early phase of our partnership, as I did not know if you were to be trusted. Later, it served to locate you as we journeyed to dangerous areas and were separated.”

  “Alright …” Lucas said hesitantly.

  “The trace is still on you now. And Asha as well. It will be undetectable by this Fourth Order even if they were able to locate the more obvious Soran device. So long as they do not take her out of the system, the agent will still be traceable. I would, however, require a few hours to rebuild the device needed to detect the trace; it was destroyed in our last conflict aboard the Ark.”

  “We’d never reach her,” Maston interrupted. “They’d detect us miles out and slit her throat before we could storm the place.”

  “He’s got a point,” Tannon said gruffly. “If there’s one thing the Fourth Order is, it’s jumpy. They’ve got more aircraft detection in Rhylos than ever after our last string of operations there.”

  “You are forgetting another gift you have been given,” Alpha replied. “There is a ship in a bay a mile underneath us that would allow immediate and undetected access to anywhere on your planet.”

  Omicron’s flagship stealth cruiser. Lucas had forgotten. It had the same cloaking abilities as the vessel the Fourth Order had used. But it was presumably much bigger, and much faster.

  “Absolutely,” Lucas said, energized by Alpha’s plan. “Keep your money, let’s just kill them all.”

  Maston was silent. He stared into the light of the holotable. Finally he spoke.

  “For Corinthia,” he said solemnly. “Put me on this infernal ship and Tulwar will be dead by dawn.”

  Tannon pushed back from the table.

  “I’ll talk to the High Chancellor. You,” he said, pointing at Alpha, “start building that tracking device.”

  “At once,” Alpha said. “But I need to be aboard my ship.”

  “And I need access to a few things as well,” Lucas said.

  Soon they were deeper inside the palace, down many levels past the dimly lit war room. Mars Maston had gone to assemble his Guardian squadron, which had been assigned to the mission at hand, and the group had dwindled to only Lucas, Alpha, and the admiral.

  When the doors opened, Lucas saw a sight he hadn’t witnessed since back on Earth: the exterior of their savior ship, the Ark. The transport looked worse for wear after their frenzied firefight with Commander Omicron’s troops, and much of the internal tech had been ripped out when the ship depressurized in the battle’s final moments.

  The entrance ramp descended and Alpha walked into the light, promising that there was enough material onboard to craft the tracking device he needed. Tannon then led Lucas to an offshoot room. Two Soran symbols were imprinted above the opaque door. EARTH ARCHIVE.

  Inside, Lucas was told he’d find what he was looking for. As he entered, he had the distinct impression he was inside the most significant museum on Sora, though one not open to the public.

  Everything they’d taken from Earth and kept aboard the Ark was on display here. There was Lucas’s desk, looted from the Scandinavian mansion. Asha’s worn black tank top hung stretched out behind thick glass, a few dozen other pieces of clothing next to it, including his own. In another row lay books in secure containers on top of pillars rising from the floor. Approaching one, Lucas saw it was The Picture of Dorian Gray, every single one of its pages translated into Soran in a holographic screen below it.

  Lucas turned a corner and entered a new section, one more relevant to his needs. A large display spanned the entire length of the wall, and this time the transparent energy field securing it promised to liquefy anyone who attempted to cross it. Mounted every few feet was a new gun labeled EARTH WEAPON along with a string of identifying numbers. There was his old boot pistol, shining more brightly than it ever had when he’d used it. A cannibal’s assault rifle, wiped free of blood and dirt. Standing vertically was an RPG that never ended up being fired in combat. As he reached the end, past two dozen weapons, he found what he was looking for.

  “Open it,” he said coolly.

  A small man in a blue lab coat glanced nervously at Tannon, but the admiral nodded his approval. The energy field dispersed, and Lucas took his old friend into his hands. Natalie had been polished to an almost mirror shine, though the letters etched into its stock still remained. As Lucas turned it on, he could see that Alpha’s technological hybrid appeared to be as fully operational as the day it was confiscated from him. The scientist next to him looked terrified as Lucas cycled through the modes from full-auto, to shotgun, to sniper, and back again. It had saved him many times over the years, and now it would help him save someone else.

  But it wouldn’t do it alone. Lucas slung Natalie over his shoulder and stooped down to pull out another pair of weapons, a long-barreled Magnum and a black-bladed sword only a few molecules thick. He clipped the revolver to his belt and mounted the sword so it crossed Natalie on his back. They were Asha’s weapons, and when he found her, she’d need them to exact vengeance on those who had taken her from him. He turned toward Tannon and nodded and the two marched out of the room, leaving the skittish lab attendant to reinstate the force field over the armory. As they left, Lucas saw one last door they hadn’t gone through. One simply labeled with the Soran symbol for “11.”

  Lucas was led into another large hangar area, though one far larger than the space that housed the Ark. It took him a minute to recognize the sleek ship before him, as he’d never seen Om
icron’s vessel in full light before. Previously, it had been in the blackness of space, reflecting starlight, or hidden from view altogether with the same advanced cloaking system that had been employed to attack the Grand Palace.

  On the ground in front of the ship stood a formation of burly soldiers, each clad in gray fatigues and holding an energy rifle across their chest. Their eyes stared straight ahead, not daring to deviate from their path as their leader strode among them. Maston had assembled his Guardians.

  It became obvious that Maston wasn’t exaggerating when he said they were the finest genetic specimens on the planet, crafted using god-knows-what procedures for billions of the local currency. Every soldier here, male and female, was taller than Lucas, with many towering above him. They looked like a legion of comic-book superheroes, with bulging muscles and stone-cut jaws. Many looked more beast than man. Lucas caught the eye of a towering giant to his right when the soldier broke off his fixed gaze to eye the strange newcomer. If this was Earth, Lucas would have guessed he was Polynesian, but he still didn’t understand the racial groups here.

  Maston immediately strode up to Tannon, ignoring Lucas’s presence entirely.

  “You let him arm himself from the archive?”

  “Would you prefer he take on the Fourth Order with a right hook instead?” Tannon replied.

  “We could have issued him a rifle, that … thing he’s using hasn’t been fully tested yet. It could be dangerous.”

  “That’s kind of the point,” Lucas said.

  “Dangerous to us,” Maston clarified. “I’ve seen the preliminaries. If you overload the core in that weapon it would blow an entire ship sky high.”

  That much was true. Alpha had told him Natalie’s power source could in fact detonate if it became unstable enough. All the more reason to take good care of his longtime friend.

  “I’ve seen a feed of him using that loadout to kill a ship full of Xalan Paragons and their commanding Shadow. If we had the time, I’d have the mad scientist make one for every soldier in your unit,” Tannon said.

  Flustered, Maston walked back toward his troops.

  “There’s more than one way to kill a Shadow,” he said, scratching at the scar on his neck.

  4

  Once Alpha’s tracker had been built, the flight was going to take a mere forty-one minutes, despite the distance to Rhylos being equivalent to orbiting Earth about three and a half times. Omicron’s ship was fast in the atmosphere as well as out of it. The newly appointed Guardian crew had taken to calling it the “Spear,” likely due to its flat, elongated shape and razor-sharp nose.

  Lucas was relegated to crew quarters and found himself sitting across from a familiar looking brown-skinned giant, the one who had been eyeing him earlier. His black hair was shaved into a wide mohawk that ran all the way down to his neck, and he had a bandage wrapped around his enormous left bicep, which was laced with a series of angular tattoos that resembled circuitry. Next to him was a pale, lean woman whose dark red hair had been roughly chopped short around her ears. Her blue-green eyes pierced Lucas with a glare that made him uncomfortable, but he was too preoccupied to be intimidated; Asha consumed his every thought.

  They’d heard nothing from Hex Tulwar or the Fourth Order since the initial video message other than a brief transmission with instructions for delivery of a ransom payment that would never come. Rather, Alpha had used the chemical trace on Asha to reveal she was being held in a fortress buried deep inside the cliffs of Rhylos, a dusty continent tens of thousands of miles removed from the lush greenery of Elyria. Tannon had told him the nation had been in open rebellion for years, but civilian deaths as a result of SDI retaliation strikes had only strengthened the revolutionaries’ cause, and nearby regions had begun to rally to Tulwar and his Order. The only thing they knew for sure about this hidden installation was that Asha was still alive inside of it, and that was all that mattered. Lucas’s thoughts were interrupted by a gruff voice in front of him. The man’s.

  “Did you truly kill Commander Kurotos on this ship, Earthborn?”

  Kurotos. It took Lucas a second. Omicron.

  “Yes, on the bridge.”

  “How,” the man pressed. It wasn’t really a question, only a statement of disbelief. A silver plate on his shirt read “Silo.”

  “I had help,” Lucas said. “My … friends. We all nearly died trying, but his arrogance allowed us the upper hand.”

  “Impossible,” the woman said, finally speaking. Her tag read “Kiati.” Lucas didn’t know if these were first or last names, or merely coded identifiers. The fatigues he had received and changed into were unlabeled. Presumably everybody already knew who he was. Kiati continued.

  “You may be from this planet, Earth, but the stories they’re telling about you? No one could survive that. Especially a fight with a Shadow.”

  “Maston did,” Silo said, but Kiati shot him an angry glance and he said no more.

  “He fought a Shadow?” Lucas asked, incredulous.

  “He killed a Shadow. But it is not our place to reveal details of the Commander’s history. Ask him yourself,” Kiati said, still glaring at Silo.

  Lucas leaned back against the wall.

  “We’re not exactly on the best terms,” he said, rubbing his bruised jaw where Maston had struck him earlier.

  “I heard he saved your life at the palace,” Silo said, scratching at his bandage.

  “That may be true.”

  “And that Corinthia Vale died in front of you.”

  Lucas sighed. Even if it was unwarranted, guilt did plague him. The blast was something unknowable, but the party in his honor? It was the perfect target for an attack with so many important guests in attendance there.

  “She was gone when I reached her, there was nothing to be done.”

  He paused to form a question of his own he’d been meaning to get answered.

  “Were she and Maston … involved? He seems pretty distraught over her death.”

  “We all mourn the loss of the High Chancellor’s daughter,” Kiati said with a stern face, but Silo had locked eyes with him and was silently nodding.

  It was true then. He felt a touch more sympathy for Maston, and recognized his own fury would reach similar levels if it had been Asha murdered instead.

  There was a ping from his chest, and he tapped his badge, where a holographic indicator tumbled out in front of him. The message that hung there told him to report to the communications center.

  “Either of you know where comms is?” he asked hopefully as he rose from his seat.

  Kiati simply stared at him, while Silo jerked his head to the right.

  “Thanks.”

  Lucas was immediately lost after going down the first hallway. He’d only been on the ship once, and that was during a heated battle on the bridge that left him half dead. But as he continued, passing troops pointed the way to his destination. Some were already suiting up. It appeared that the Guardians had been training on this ship for some time, at least to the point where they knew their way around. They only needed someone to turn it on and fly it, a role Alpha now filled.

  Comms was a large area buzzing with officers and flooded with an array of monitors everywhere he turned. As soon as he was spotted, a man ushered him to the rear of the room. A small screen floated up to his face, then tripled in size. Two familiar figures appeared. It was Talis Vale, and she was holding Noah in her lap.

  “Madam Chancellor!” Lucas said, unable to hide his surprise. She was in a new ensemble from the gown she’d worn earlier, but bruising on her neck and face indicated she hadn’t escaped the assault entirely unscathed. Dried tears were etched on her cheeks in two columns, but when she saw Lucas, she grinned. As did Noah, and the boy reached for the screen, trying to touch him.

  “I’ve told you a dozen times to call me Talis, Lucas,” she said with a weak smile. “It is good to see you well. I was thrilled to learn of your survival.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re saf
e too, Talis. But I have to say I’m sorry for the loss of your daughter.”

  Her smiled faded.

  “Thank you. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve appropriated your child to help me through this difficult time. He’s a constant source of joy, even in this darkness.”

  She bounced Noah on her knee and he giggled.

  “Of course. I can imagine no greater protector for him.”

  Talis gazed off out of frame, her tone softer when she spoke again.

  “I never thought I’d lose her. My sons, my husband, my father. Those deaths I knew in my heart would come someday as they fought impossible enemies millions of miles away. But Cora? She was supposed to be safe here. I cannot believe it.”

  Lucas didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry.”

  But that didn’t feel like anything close to enough.

  She turned to face Lucas once more.

  “The reason I called you here isn’t to pine for the lost. I’m issuing you an order I hope you’ll follow, even if you’re a citizen of a planet other than this one.”

  “Anything.”

  “If you find Hex Tulwar in this mess after saving your companion, ensure he is captured alive.”

  Lucas was taken aback.

  “Alive? After all that he’s done? Conspiring with the Xalans? Killing your … killing so many?”

  She shook her head.

  “If you come home with his head, this will look like a covert assassination rather than a rescue mission. Even if his death is warranted, it will set the entire region on fire and we’ll have two full-scale wars on our hands instead of one.”

  Her right hand was trembling as the other held on to Noah.

  “As much as I want vengeance for my daughter, I won’t put more lives at risk for my own vendetta. But I cannot say the same for Mars.”