by Paul Tassi
“It’s quieter,” Lucas finished her thought. “You can hear them all the time.”
She finally looked at him, an old fury burning in her eyes, rekindled once more by the image before her. But the wrath was mixed with sorrow, brought on by a loss she could likely never truly recover from.
“The anger is always there. Just under the surface. Like it’s going to burn me alive if it doesn’t have a place to vent,” she said, and he could almost feel the heat radiating off her.
“I know,” said Lucas, recalling the constant rage that propelled him through the past few years. Rage that still simmered within him at all hours of the day. But like her, grief was carved deep into his heart. A permanent mark that would forever stain his soul.
“This life, it’s not for me,” she continued. “I’m no princess. I don’t need to be rescued. I don’t need to be spoiled. I don’t want to be some political pawn or celebrity idol here. I want to actually matter.”
“You matter,” Lucas said, swallowing his own emotions.
“I don’t, not yet. I’ve done nothing here but get myself captured by some separatist idiot. What makes you think we can do anything to help end a ten-thousand-year-old war?”
Lucas paused as he considered the question and shoved remaining thoughts of his family into the prison of memory where they usually resided.
“Alpha.”
“What, the message? You honestly think that will work?” she said with crossed arms and obvious skepticism.
“‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’”
“Okay, Confucius.”
“Sun Tzu, actually. I think they’ve got his book over there.” Lucas motioned toward a pillar a few yards away.
“No amount of firepower will win this war for good the way things are going,” he continued. “Only when the people lose faith in their leaders will Xala be weak enough for us to strike a blow that actually cuts to their heart.”
“Since when are you a military strategist?” Asha asked.
Lucas shrugged. “I like history. No reason to repeat Earth’s mistakes here.”
“Still, it can all seem pointless sometimes.”
Asha leaned against the glass and played absentmindedly with the ends of her short, sheer nightdress.
“I want to show you something,” Lucas said. “Come with me.”
They were still underground, but only twenty or so levels beneath the surface. This time they were met by a pair of smiling female silvercoats who led them into a room secured by a twenty-inch-thick metal door. The attendants returned to the other room as they walked toward what lay in the middle.
“You matter,” Lucas said. “You matter to him.”
Their unborn son was decidedly human shaped at six months, though would likely still fit in the palm of either of their hands. Asha stroked the glass of the tank when she reached it. The child was suspended in a viscous, aqua-colored liquid. Tiny tubes threaded out of him, including a synthetic umbilical cord attached to whirring machines next to the enclosure.
“You matter to me,” Lucas said as he came up behind her and rested his hand on the back of her neck.
“I’d be lost here without you. So would Noah. So would he,” he said, motioning to the fragile child before them.
She remained silent for a while.
“God dammit,” she said. “You’re good. Playing the unborn kid card. You son of a bitch.”
She grinned, but the smile gradually faded.
“You know, it’s strange. Even being so far removed from the child, from this ‘pregnancy,’ I can still feel him some days. I swear yesterday I felt him kick …”
Her voice trailed off, but soon she returned to the point Lucas had been attempting to make.
“Yes, of course I’ll stick around to complete this weird family unit. Someone has to make sure these kids end up normal.”
Lucas laughed.
“One pulled from the wreckage of a smoldering cannibal village, the other bred in a tank who will never step foot on his home planet? I think we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
She nodded.
“I guess it has to be more than just revenge, then. We have to fight to make sure they can grow up in peace,” she said, looking at the tiny creature inside the tank. “They should never have to live through the kinds of things we have.”
“They won’t,” Lucas said firmly, even if he wasn’t entirely convinced of the statement himself.
As they made their way out of the incubation room, Lucas noticed a familiar-looking door. It was the same symbol that hung over a room near the Earth Archive, and he’d seen it again just a few minutes ago when they’d been down there. Can’t hurt just to take a peek. He pulled Asha toward it, and she looked up at the Soran glyph floating above the entryway.
“Eleven?” she asked, translating the symbol. “What’s in there?”
“I think I know,” Lucas said, but was surprised when he was greeted by a rather rude “Not Authorized” message that flashed at him from the control cluster when he attempted to open the door. Asha figured it out.
“You think it’s our old crew?” she said, referring to the eleven brain-dead humans Alpha had collected from all over the globe before he met them. They were meant to be “scientific specimens” to take back and study on his home planet. Lucas instinctively scratched his largest scar. There were a dozen originally, but after sustaining horrific injury at the wrong end of a plasma rifle, one had donated half its collection of internal organs so that Lucas might live.
“I do,” Lucas said. “But I don’t know why they’d lock us out of here.” The controls were still unresponsive, and after a third attempt to navigate them, the cluster shut down altogether.
“They let us wander around the armory freely, but not in here to see our old friends? What are they up to?” Lucas tapped the steel as he studied the elaborate locking mechanisms woven throughout.
“I don’t know; the last time we opened a lock like that, it turned out I’d been sleeping next to a nuke. Some stones are better left unturned,” Asha said as she moved toward the exit. Lucas furrowed his brow and gave the door one last pound before turning to follow her.
8
For the week that followed they lived cozily in the lap of luxury, each day another Talis-orchestrated sightseeing trip to the finest parts of the capital and continent meant to wash away the stresses of the Fourth Order assault. Each night was a circus of pleasure that far outclassed the evenings spent on the floor of the water chamber aboard the Ark. Some days felt like a lucid dream, while others were interrupted by nightmares that haunted Lucas with reminders of what he’d done to get there.
Reality came knocking when Lucas woke the morning before Guardian training was supposed to commence. He found himself staring at a feed of the Stream on the opposite wall through bleary eyes. As the room came into focus, he saw that Asha was sitting on the edge of the bed, already dressed and put together.
“Get up,” she said when she saw he was awake. “There’s about to be some serious shit going down around here.”
The Stream was in total disarray as live newscasts and recorded video footage were spliced together, while text stories fluttered around the borders, each with different reports on what was happening. After a few minutes of processing the calamitous coverage, Lucas could make out the main details of what had occurred.
A planet called Kollux was, or at least had been, a major Soran military installation. Four hours ago, the small planet was besieged by an overwhelming Xalan force that had all but wiped out every major facility on the rocky surface. Three hundred thousand soldiers were annihilated almost instantly, caught unaware by a fleet that was supposed to still be wounded from the failed Earth campaign. They’d besieged the planet’s bases from the air, and then dropped ground forces for face-to-face clean-up. It reminded Lucas of the war his own planet had recently endured. An orange-haired woman with obviously frayed nerves, who was reporting the sto
ry on one of the larger Stream feeds, assured viewers that Soran forces were already on the way to assist the remaining troops (provided there were remaining troops) and ensure the Xalan fleet didn’t advance further. Kollux was in a star system light-years away, but according to the Stream, this was the furthest Xala had pushed since the homeworld strikes of the previous millennium.
The various screens floating around the horizontal video band showed footage of furious firefights on land, in the air, and in orbit around the planet. Several of them cut to black after particularly raucous explosions, and in all of them, it was clear who was winning. It wasn’t the Sorans.
Lucas put on a shirt and pair of pants extracted from an oversized wardrobe stocked with a myriad of outfits meant to fit him and Asha.
“Have you heard from anyone?” he asked her. She sat on the bed, still glued to the projected newsfeed.
“I got pinged to expect orders shortly,” she replied.
“Does that mean we’re going?”
“I hope so,” she said through gritted teeth as she watched all-too-familiar scenes of devastation play out on the feed in front of her.
A mix of fear and excitement rose up inside Lucas. As appealing as the past week of lavish comfort had been, he found he had an itch for vengeance that seemed like it would never leave him. They’d both made a promise to the Guardians, either to join them or at the very least help them if Maston was too stubborn to officially bring them onboard. They’d proven themselves in their dealings with the Fourth Order and earned the respect of at least some of the soldiers, though likely not Maston himself. The war was moving too fast for training.
On one of the screens, a screaming Soran soldier was being torn apart by two armored Xalans with gigantic bladed weapons. The camera, likely attached to the helmet of an adjacent soldier, soon flew into the air after the Xalans turned toward it, and then rolled across the ground a few feet away.
“Jesus,” Lucas said. “They show this to the public?”
“Best way to drum up support for the war effort, I suppose,” Asha replied. “How could you not be calling for the complete destruction of Xala after watching this?” It was true, Lucas could feel the anger rising inside him as the images onscreen too closely mirrored the war on his home planet they’d barely survived.
The screen flickered for a moment, then was consumed by a shot of a singular man, Tannon Vale. Asha stood up from the bed and Lucas joined her. He looked exhausted and disheveled. When he spoke, it was directly to them. This was not a widely projected address to the nation.
“Good morning, Earthborn, if you can call it that.”
“What can we do?” Lucas said hurriedly.
“This event is an extreme cause for concern, if you haven’t figured that out,” Tannon said plainly. “It means the war is closer than it’s been in centuries, and I’m afraid we might not survive another push like the one twelve hundred years ago. Their technology has evolved too rapidly, and we’ve been too caught up in our own civil strife.”
His voice dropped.
“They could take Sora,” he said quietly. “They could finally do it. We’ve never seen them this strong, even with their supposed losses on Earth.”
Asha repeated Lucas’s earlier sentiment.
“How can we help? Are we shipping out to Kollux?”
Tannon shook his head.
“Kollux is gone, despite what the news reports are saying. Wiped out completely. The Xalan fleet is already three systems away, their mission accomplished. It was a surgical strike on a forward base they know will take us decades to rebuild. But they won’t wait for that. They’re going to keep coming hard and fast after this. We need a distraction.”
“What kind of distraction?” Lucas asked.
“I’ve been talking to your scientist. He’s pulled something off the salvaged data core of that Fourth Order Xalan at long last. Something we can use.”
“What is it?” asked Asha.
“I’ll let him explain. He’s down below waiting for you. I’m en route to Kollux to see if there’s anything to recover from this godforsaken mess. I’ve instructed Maston and the Guardians to escort you to where you’re going.
“Keep me posted on your mission progress. I’ll be back on Sora before you get there.”
“Tannon,” Lucas interrupted, ignoring seniority and title. “Where the hell are we going?”
Tannon eyed something offscreen for brief moment before turning back to the lens.
“Somewhere you can make waves.”
Despite the fact that Soran scientists all over the continent were bending over backwards to offer to help Alpha with his research, he had made the unusual request of being allowed to work in his old laboratory aboard the Ark. He’d been working on the white null core synthesis process initially, but had recently been consumed decrypting the data looted from the Fourth Order raid.
Lucas and Asha arrived at the hangar level and made their way into their old vessel, beaten and battered as it ever was. It was almost eerie to tread through the same corridors they’d spent so much time in. Glancing into the battle-ravaged CIC, memories of the heated firefight that took place there flooded Lucas’s mind. The viewscreen remained shattered; a jagged hole was the only remnant of the central holotable. Storage crates once used as cover were peppered with burn marks and holes.
As they navigated toward the lab, the dead had long been cleared away, but black blood still stained the walls and floors. A thick layer of dust blanketed everywhere they walked, and three-pronged footprints had been tracked all throughout the corridors. The ship was dead. Why was Alpha still holed up in here?
When they finally did reach their destination, they saw that despite Alpha’s refusal of Soran labor, he had accepted their technology to aid his endeavors. The room across from the lab, which had once held the stasis-bound humans, was now full of equipment running independent processes while he worked in the adjacent area. His lab had been completely stripped and refurbished with shiny new pieces of machinery that whirred and hummed and made the entire room feel alive. In the middle of all of it sat Alpha, sifting through data on a virtual screen raised out of his desk.
“There’s no place like home, eh?” Lucas said. Alpha twitched, startled at hearing his voice. Apparently he hadn’t registered they had entered the room. His work did tend to absorb him completely.
“‘Home’ is a term that no longer has particular relevance to me,” Alpha said. “Did Admiral Vale send you down here?”
“Yeah, he did,” Asha said, poking at a nearby device hanging from the ceiling. “What exactly is going on? What do you have to do with Kollux?”
“Nothing,” Alpha replied. “Our mission is a great distance away from that location.”
“And what is our mission? Tannon said you’d pulled something from the core of, uh, I never did catch his name …” Lucas said uncomfortably.
“I would not acknowledge his memory by speaking it,” Alpha spat out through his translator, his face full of the same contempt Lucas had seen in the interrogation room.
“But his work has proved useful. Most of it was being eaten away by a corruption algorithm by the time I reached it, but there were pieces that are quite valuable. One in particular.”
There was now a tangible excitement exuding from him, an energy Lucas had never seen him wear before. He motioned for them to come around to his side of the desk. He flung his claws outward and the screen he was working on expanded. In front of them were portraits of a dozen Xalans, each colored a variable shade of gray. Lucas could translate at least one word in the header: DANGEROUS. Alpha elaborated.
“These are the leaders of the Xalan resistance, the sect that wishes the eternal Soran war to end and the Council to be overthrown and replaced with proper leaders who truly have the well-being of Xala at heart. Should we be able to reach any of these figures, they would be of invaluable help in spreading the message of my father to our people.”
Lucas was scanning the tex
t under the pictures for words he could decipher. He saw terms like BOMBING, ASSAULT, REBELLION, and TREASON repeated frequently. Alpha motioned to one of the portraits and it grew to consume the entire screen. It was a Xalan who was almost pure white. It had larger eyes than Alpha’s with rings of sky blue. Not the ice cold glare of the Shadows, but a softer gaze.
“This is [garbled],” Alpha said, his translator again refusing to convert Xalan names to anything understandable.
“Ah,” he said as he stopped himself. “Refer to her as … Zeta, I suppose.”
Another Greek letter. If they ever met more than twenty-four Xalans, Alpha was going to be out of luck fashioning identifiers for them.
“She is an old friend, and one I must admit I was shocked, and thrilled, to find on this list. We studied together a century ago at the Institute of [garbled] and both came from science-minded families, a common ground over which we formed a bond. We became … close.”
His eyes trailed off to some faraway place for a moment before snapping back toward them.
“When I became drafted into my father’s work fashioning weapons systems, she was tasked with designing interplanetary communication relays that could transmit orders instantaneously from Xala to the colonies, or vice-versa.”
He scanned through a number of data entries below her picture. “Though stationed trillions of miles apart, we kept in contact for years, until one day, she disappeared. I feared her dead, and had no reason to believe otherwise. During any leave I had from research, I scoured the colonies and Xala for her to no avail. She was gone, and no one could tell me what had happened to her. Until I discovered this.”
He pointed toward the screen.
“This decrypted file says that she was arrested twenty-three years ago for setting up backchannels for the resistance to communicate across planets, precisely when she vanished. She was sentenced for extermination, but escaped custody in transit and piloted her prison ship to [garbled]. To a nearby colony planet. She has not been heard from since, but the resistance communication network remains online. The coding of the backchannels is sufficiently complex that the Council believes she must still be running it remotely, and so her name remains on this list.”