by Paul Tassi
Tulwar laughed again.
“You are blind like all the rest. If it were only that, perhaps Kyneth would have allowed me to forgive her after all these years. But Talis Vale’s sins run far deeper. I always knew in my heart, but now I have the proof.”
Lucas and Asha slowly circled around so they could see Talis fully. She was in bad shape, and blood was pooled out all around her, soaking into the ornate rug beneath her body. She clearly needed serious medical help, but Lucas couldn’t let his guard down for one second with Tulwar clutching Natalie. At this distance, one carnage blast could shred them both.
Lucas was thrown off guard when Tulwar suddenly threw a chip at him. He caught it by instinct.
“What’s this?” Lucas asked as he pressed the device with his thumb and watched a hologram spring out of it. It was mostly just a string of Soran numbers and letters.
“That is a coded transmission, one long thought deleted from the archives. But I resurrected it with some degree of technological magic.”
“A transmission of what?” Asha asked. Talis eyed the chip worriedly.
“Dates, times, and most importantly, coordinates. All the details of the Vitalla voyage.”
“And?” Lucas asked, his head cocked.
“It is a transmission sent to the Ruling Council of Xala from our very own High Chancellor Talis Vale.”
“Bullshit,” Asha said curtly, readjusting her aim on Tulwar.
“It’s true,” he said, half shrugging in his armor plating. “Ask her yourself.”
Talis was breathing heavily, painfully. She remained silent for a minute, but after a menacing glare from Tulwar, she began to speak.
“Rhylos … was worthless,” she said. “As were the R-Rhylosi. A drain on our entire planet. Their promised work on Vitalla wouldn’t have paid for a fraction of what … they’d cost us over the c-centuries.”
What was she talking about? She’d sold the Rhylosi out on purpose? The kind woman who had embraced them like her own children since their arrival here? It didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t understand. You sacrificed all those people and your own father? Why?” Lucas asked.
Talis’s face was ugly now. He’d never seen her like this. Blood crept over her bottom lip as she spat out her words like each one burned her throat.
“Varrus … was a monster. His foolish campaigns led m-my husband … my sons to the slaughter. I knew his arrogance would draw him to the ceremony on the planet. The fleet was to be spared … those were the terms.”
“It can’t be …” Lucas said slowly. He felt physically sick.
“And you just so happened to become High Chancellor yourself, how convenient,” Asha said venomously. “And your daughter, Corinthia. You put her at risk?”
“I pleaded with her not to go … she was so stubborn, like her father. But I knew Mars would keep her safe.”
“What else did you get out of it? That can’t be all.” Lucas pressed. “What did those millions of ‘worthless’ lives buy you?”
“A truce,” Talis said weakly. “A decade of peace.”
“Peace for you maybe, but that’s when our planet was getting destroyed,” Lucas said angrily.
Lucas’s head was spinning. Had Talis really orchestrated the genocide of almost an entire race, and essentially ordered the murder of her own father? It seemed beyond impossible, but here she was, confessing. It was now no wonder she’d forbidden anyone to speak of Vitalla since. Tulwar spoke next.
“That data,” he said, pointing at the chip, “has already been sent to every news outlet on the planet, which will verify its contents. I’ve also excavated some decrypted personal logs that relay the lovely back story the High Chancellor has just told you. Nothing is ever truly erased. Not really. I only needed the access to unearth it.”
Talis was in tears now. The blood flowing from her wounds wasn’t slowing, a side effect of the rifle’s specially formulated plasma.
“I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely. “I wanted … to be free of Rhylos, free of my father. I-I truly thought … it was the best path for Sora. Tell them that.”
Lucas didn’t know what to say; he was still in shock. Talis fell silent. Her eyes slipped shut. She was still breathing, but barely.
“Now what?” Lucas said, turning back to Hex Tulwar. “You kill us too and then die during capture?”
“Or he can die right now,” Asha said, her finger quivering over her trigger.
Lucas was stunned when Tulwar grinned and tossed Natalie at him. Lucas caught the rifle with his free arm.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked. Tulwar now appeared to be completely unarmed and raised his good hand outward in a sign of submission with the other dangling uselessly at his side, a ghost of a limb inside the armor plating.
“There is one last act to the play,” Tulwar said slyly.
“I’m going to kill him,” Asha said, taking another step toward him.
“Wait,” Lucas said, holding up his hand. “What are you talking about?”
“A lovely rifle you have there. A truly one-of-a-kind weapon,” Tulwar said, nodding toward Natalie. “One that makes one-of-a-kind wounds.”
Lucas looked down at Talis. Her head was bowed and her chest was no longer rising and falling. The unending bleeding was too much. She was gone. Tulwar paid her no mind. He’d known she’d never survive those injuries.
“And it’s quite a disturbance you caused here tonight.”
Tulwar raised his hand, causing Asha to twitch and almost take his head off. Instead, a floating display of the Stream appeared in between them. A reporter spoke over security camera footage from the palace.
“We’ve just received this feed of what appears to be the Earthborn, Lucas and Asha, staging an assault on the Grand Palace.”
The footage showed Lucas disarming and beating down the two guards in the docking bay. Then it switched the Great Hall where he and Asha shredded Maston’s enlisted palace guards with gunfire.
“There’s no word on the High Chancellor’s condition, though SDI forces are en route to the palace after responding to the presumed distraction of the machines in Tatoni Square.”
This was a setup.
“There’s no way,” Lucas said. The look on Asha’s face said she understood as well. “But you’ve escaped, you’re here. There’s other footage.”
“Film that has all been cleansed. And we cannot forget your premeditation of this heinous assassination!”
Tulwar pressed a button on his white suit of armor and a different video appeared in front of them. It was a high-angle shot of their room; the timestamp showed it had been filmed earlier today.
“You’re really backing out?”
“I’ll be with you in spirit.”
It was his and Asha’s conversation about Stoller’s party. But it sounded …
“This isn’t going to be easy to do alone.”
A quick cut.
“I don’t want to do this.”
“You have to, you made a promise.”
Tulwar spoke, closing the video.
“How fortunate your lovely counterpart decided to assist you after all.”
Asha was seething.
“These are nothing but cheap tricks. We’ll show them your body, explain—”
“You will not,” Tulwar said sternly. The Stream feed reappeared and was showing pictures of Lucas and Asha with the headline EARTHBORN STORM PALACE.
“Though I thank you for your invaluable assistance in bringing me here, and helping me escape. What are coconspirators for? They’ll never find me.”
“What are you talking about?” Lucas asked. “There’s no way out of here.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t commented on my armor here. Do you know its history?”
The pair of them remained silent.
“Of course not, you’re new here. This is plating back from the Sacred Wars. I had my men bring it in for tonight. All the elite Rhylosi warriors wore it in batt
le. It provided more than just protection. It brought them honor.”
Lucas heard the wail of alarms sounding outside.
“In the one, true faith, if a warrior’s body is not burned after he falls in battle, he does not gain entry into the Blessed Forest. Only if he enters as ash may he be reassembled in a new form, which will live forever. This suit allows such a transition.”
Tulwar pressed a button and a helmet shot up from behind his neck and encased his entire head.
“It is how I will enter the Forest tonight. After exposing and killing Sora’s wicked leader and corrupting her two false idols. My journey is complete.”
He paused, and raised his fist toward them.
“I go to my family; may you go with the gods.”
“No!” Lucas shouted as he lunged toward Tulwar. Through the visor, a furnace erupted inside the suit, and the cracks of the armor glowed. Lucas winced and yanked his burned hands from the metal. As Asha looked on in horror, Tulwar was incinerated in an instant, turned to dust in a flash fire that continued to burn as the suit crumpled to the ground. Within seconds, all of the plating had turned to ash as well, and there was nothing left but a pile of gray matter that began to absorb Talis’s blood like sawdust.
Lucas and Asha were speechless.
“Holy shit,” she said finally. “Did that really just happen?”
“We have nothing,” Lucas said frantically, thinking through what had just taken place. “He killed her with my gun, fed the footage and the story to the news. We don’t even have his body. Do you have any idea how bad this looks?”
From the horrified look on her face, Asha did know. Had they really been played this well? How long had Tulwar been planning this? Since his imprisonment? Since Rhylos? Since the Earth Gala?
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Asha said, sprinting toward the doorway. Lucas checked his wrist display.
“They’re already on their way up. We have to surrender. They’ll kill us on sight if they see us in here armed.”
“I don’t surrender,” Asha growled. Lucas was racing through alternate options in his head, but none came to him.
Suddenly a blinding light burst in through the large windows at the opposite end of the room. The familiar whir of hovercraft engines could be heard from outside.
The window shattered as an armored figure dove through it, his back lit up by the flames of a jet propulsion attachment. He tumbled forward, and though Lucas’s brain told him to drop Natalie to the ground, he simply couldn’t. He raised the weapon.
As the figure rolled to his feet, Lucas and Asha dipped the barrels of their guns. Through his translucent visor, they could see it was Mars Maston. He stared in astonishment at Talis Vale’s body, then at them.
“What … happened … here,” he said slowly. “Where’s Tulwar? Do you have any idea what the Stream is saying about you?”
“Maston,” Lucas said, his heart in his throat. “It was all Tulwar. This was a setup from the beginning. He played us, tried to make it look like we conspired with the Fourth Order and the Xalans.”
“Where is he?” Maston growled fiercely.
“You’re looking at him,” Asha said, gesturing down toward the ash. Much of it had been scattered by the winds whipping in from the shattered window. Only a few small piles remained.
“He had some sort of incineration suit. Combusted on the spot so we’d never have a body.”
Maston whirled around in a rage and sent his fist through one of the sturdy wooden posts on Talis’s bed, which splintered into a thousand shards. Lucas understood. Maston would never have his vengeance now, no justice for Corinthia. He hadn’t killed Hex Tulwar, and there wasn’t even a body in the aftermath. Tulwar was now nothing more than a phantom.
“Mars, you have to—” said Asha before he cut her off.
“I believe you,” Maston snarled. “But they won’t. We have to get you out of here. They’re already inside.”
Lucas collapsed inside the armored hovercraft. They sped away from the palace, from Elyria, as fast as the vehicle would take them. Looking out the rear viewscreen, Lucas could see craft similar to their own swarming the structure. Soldiers were assuredly crawling through the palace, discovering dead guards everywhere and the deceased Talis Vale next to a few inconspicuous mounds of ash.
Lucas’s heart was finally slowing down from its hours-long mad racing ever since he’d heard the first explosion aboard Stoller’s craft. Asha stared out the window with her hand to her mouth. She appeared to be in absolute shock, a true rarity for her. Maston remained silent in the driver’s seat and had a white-knuckled grip on the controls of the craft.
The Sorans would never believe it, would they? The tale Hex Tulwar spun framing them for the High Chancellor’s assassination. The Earthborn were heroes, symbols of hope. But that’s why Tulwar did it, wasn’t it? Take away their leader and their hope at the same time.
Lucas switched on a feed of the Stream but kept it muted. One panel showed Tulwar’s evidence he’d unearthed against Talis Vale, yet another shocking part of the evening. The screen showed the text of her decrypted personal logs.
“The agreement is in place. The Xalans will take Vitalla and the Rhylosi; we will have a decade of peace to rebuild and prosper. If my father is planetside when they strike, so be it. He did not mourn for his grandchildren when he sent them to be killed at Hannaras, I shall not mourn for him. We shall be free of two evils with a strike impossible for our own armies to execute. The Xalans do not know it, but they are helping to save Sora from itself.”
Lucas had felt like he knew Talis, but her warm smiles and kind eyes masked dark secrets and a bloody past. She wanted power and revenge above all else, but coped by telling herself she was acting “for the good of Sora” by killing millions of its citizens and its leader. Ordering the fleet out of Vitalla would have been a tough choice, but orchestrating the entire ambush was unforgivable. Perhaps she deserved Tulwar’s brand of justice after all, though he and Asha certainly did not, nor did many of Tulwar’s other victims. The Stream reported that the killbots had slain 2,043 people before their rampage was brought to an end. Lucas couldn’t imagine the death toll back when there were hundreds of thousands of machines running amok during the first uprising, not just a dozen.
The Stream kept scrolling and the central story once again flipped back to the Earthborn’s betrayal. They were spinning Tulwar’s story that they’d been Xalan plants the entire time, and had conspired with the Fourth Order since their “debut,” having fooled all the government’s scientists with expertly forged genetic tests.
But what did the government think? The feed announced that Tannon Vale had been sworn in as acting Chancellor, but there was no official comment from the administration about Talis’s death or their involvement. The media was simply running wild with Tulwar’s lies and the video feeds he’d spoon-fed them. Rhylos and its allies in the region were aflame with anger over the revelation of Talis’s involvement in Vitalla, and were worshipping Tulwar, even after they’d previously distanced themselves from him. The official story was that he’d escaped custody with the help of the Earthborn and fled the palace before the High Chancellor was killed by Lucas.
Could they ever sort this out? Prove that Tulwar had set them up? Lucas’s mind raced for a way, but there was nothing. Tulwar had left little to chance. The Stream was now interviewing the elderly couple whose hovercraft Lucas had stolen to reach the palace from Stoller’s party. They described him as “unstable” and “violent” during their ordeal.
“Shut that shit off,” Asha said grimly. “I can’t handle this right now.”
Neither could Lucas, and he was happy to close down the feed.
Staring out the window, he could see they were over a body of water with land only a small strip in the distance.
“Where are we going?” Lucas called up to Maston. He was met with silence.
Lucas lay back in his seat and his eyes closed like his lids were dipped in l
ead. No nightmare could compare to what had happened tonight.
20
Lucas found himself sitting on a floor of trampled brush, staring at a fire, unaware of how he got there. Around him, the jungle creaked and chirped and white rays of moonlight streamed in through the treetops.
Makari.
A figure emerged from the shadows. He sat down opposite Lucas, crossing his legs. He leaned toward the small fire, which illuminated his face.
“Hello Saato.”
“Hello Toruk.”
Lucas knew it was a dream, because Toruk was speaking broken English instead of broken Soran. Not to mention it would be rather difficult to teleport to a planet billions of miles away.
“Great problems on Mol’taavi,” Toruk said, poking at the fire with a stick.
“You could say that,” Lucas said, leaning back onto his elbows. Looking down, he saw that he was wearing bits of bark armor and was covered in white Khas’to tribal tattoos. In his hand he was surprised to find a long black stone knife, one with a small skull on the pommel. It looked familiar.
“Like before, eh?” Toruk said.
“When?” Lucas asked, rotating the knife around in his hand.
“New body. You forget. Many ages past.”
“What are you talking about?”
Toruk threw some dirt into the fire, which caused it to smoke less. He was easier to see now.
“Back when Great Storm first create Mol’taavi and Makari, First Man Saato leader of all. Oni love Saato. Bring many years peace, food.”
Lucas sat listening intently. The ambient noises of the forest were growing quieter.
“One day, Saato’s men bring woman to him. They say she thief. Great beauty mask dark soul. Must die.”
Toruk rubbed his hands together in front of the fire. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and bits of bark and fur weren’t exactly keeping Lucas warm. He shivered.
“Saato looks in eyes. Sees magic. Great magic. Says woman must live. Tribe furious. Woman stole from rich and powerful. Evil men turn people from Saato. Seize throne. Imprison Saato and woman for many years, much torture for their crimes.”