The Exiled Earthborn

by Paul Tassi

  “When do we leave?” Lucas asked, knowing from the beginning that no matter what they were asked to do, they would do it. He glanced at Asha, who looked riled, but he knew she was onboard. This was what they’d come here to do; it didn’t matter what the planet thought of them at the moment. Truth is eternal, after all.

  “Tonight,” Maston said. “We leave tonight.”

  Everyone retreated to the ships and waited for the escape craft to appear. That meant there was room to breathe in the cabin again, and only Alpha and Zeta remained, conversing quietly by the fire. They were risking even more than he and Asha, Lucas thought, to save a species that wasn’t even their own. But he supposed they were more motivated by hopefully freeing their people from tyranny. Lucas realized he often forgot that the Ruling Council had also butchered Alpha’s entire family; he rarely spoke of it. And god only knew what Zeta had been through.

  There was a knock on the door and Lucas figured it was Maston coming back to go over more logistics. But when he opened it, he found that one final group of visitors had made the journey out to see them off.

  Malorious Auran stood in the doorframe, holding Noah by the hand. Beside him, a teenaged caretaker delicately held little Erik in her arms. In recent weeks he’d grown a thicker tuft of brown hair, and his eyes were starting to change from blue to Asha’s bright green. Lucas’s face lit up, as did Noah’s.

  “Lucas!” squealed Noah as he toddled over. Lucas dropped to his knees to give him a hug. Asha stood up from the table and raced over to take Erik from the caretaker. She too wore a brilliant smile.

  “They wanted to say hello,” Auran said. “They were very well behaved on the ride here.”

  “Thank you for bringing them,” Lucas said, extending his hand to Auran.

  “It was my honor,” Auran said as he grasped it. “As it will be to watch over them until you return.”

  Lucas’s smile dimmed a bit. Auran started backing out of the doorway.

  “We will let you have some time,” he said. Alpha and Zeta had come over to greet the children, and they too were now moving toward the exit.

  When the door shut behind them, a realization struck Lucas like lightning. This could be the last time he’d be together with his new family. The last time he’d ever see these children. Sure, they’d survived much, and had lived through many other battles they shouldn’t have, but this was different. This was a new level of danger. They were diving straight into a snake pit without a definite way back out.

  “Where are you going?” asked Noah, tilting his head to the side. He seemed to grow taller by the day. His white-blond hair was starting to become more sandy-colored.

  “I have to go help make sure you’re safe,” Lucas said, kneeling so he could look into Noah’s eyes. “I have to go somewhere very far away, and I might not be back for a long time.”

  Noah looked anxious.

  “Can I come too? I can help. I’m good at that,” he said earnestly. Lucas couldn’t get over how well he spoke for someone so young.

  “I know you are,” Lucas said, smiling. He felt the sharp sting of tears beginning to form in his eyes. “But I need you to stay here and be brave for your brother. Can you do that?”

  Noah nodded reluctantly. Asha was speaking softly to Erik, who couldn’t reply and was content to nap in her arms.

  “Just know that whether we’re here or not, Asha and I are always with you. You mother and father will always be with you.”

  Lucas didn’t usually refer to himself as a father when it came to Noah, the boy he’d had thrust into his arms by a dying slave in a cannibal village, but it suddenly felt rather foolish not to call himself that. He loved this child like a son. If that didn’t make him a father, he didn’t know what would.

  “You will do great things,” Lucas said, placing his hand on Noah’s shoulder. “You’ll lead a whole new generation.” He thought of Auran’s thirty-six souls, waiting to emerge from their tanks.

  “Can we go to the park when you get back?” Noah asked, too young to understand what Lucas was saying.

  “Of course,” Lucas said. “Of course we can.”

  A half hour later, Noah was playing on the boarskin rug with toys he’d brought with him while Asha and Lucas sat with Erik by the fire, which was starting to die down into embers.

  Lucas finally spoke.

  “You should stay.”

  Asha glanced over at him.

  “What?”

  “I said, you should stay.”

  “Like hell.”

  “I’m serious,” Lucas said. “They’re going to need a mother.”

  It was something that had been plaguing Lucas since Makari, where he’d thought about what would happen to the children if neither of them made it home to Sora.

  “And they’ll have one. A father too, when we get back,” Asha said slowly.

  “Do you really think we’ll come back?” Lucas asked.

  Asha pulled on Erik’s blanket to swaddle him a bit more tightly. He hadn’t cried once since his arrival.

  “We always have so far.”

  “You shouldn’t go, you shouldn’t risk it.”

  Asha was starting to get angry now.

  “I shouldn’t risk it? Do you honestly think after everything we’ve been through I’m going to turn back now?”

  “I just—”

  “I’m not going to abandon you or Alpha after all this time. I’m not going to sit back and do nothing to help destroy the bastards that killed our entire planet.”

  “I want you to stay,” Lucas said firmly, his blood starting to boil. Erik had woken up and was looking dangerously cranky.

  “Why?” Asha said forcefully. “Why should I stay?”

  “Because I love you!” Lucas said.

  The words felt foreign in his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said them, or to whom. They might have been raising two children together, but it was the first time he’d ever spoken it out loud. Asha froze like she’d been stabbed in the chest. After what seemed like an eternal silence, she spoke.

  “I love you too,” she whispered. “And that’s why I have to go. To make sure you come back.”

  “It might not be up to you,” Lucas said, calming down a bit.

  “But it could be,” Asha said quietly. “If I don’t go and you don’t make it back, I’ll never know if there was anything I could have done. I couldn’t live with that.”

  Lucas looked down at Erik, who was settling down as the volume of their voices had lessened. He thought about what Asha was saying. What kind of father could he ever be if he stayed behind and Asha went off and died on Xala? It would destroy him. He understood what she meant. They needed to look after each other out there, like they always had. He sighed.

  “You know, if we asked they’d probably give us a little villa on the beach somewhere on this planet. All four of us could just live out the rest of our days without a care in the world.”

  “If only,” Asha said.

  “Someday,” Lucas said. “Maybe someday.”

  The next knock on the door was one Lucas had been dreading. He’d heard the engines outside, and knew which craft had arrived this time. He gathered up Noah and Erik, bundling them up in warm blankets and coats, and headed out into the chilly night. When he reached the shore, everyone else was already assembled.

  Their ride hung in the air and slowly descended toward the beach. It was a civilian cruiser, about as big as the Ark but dramatically different in style. Jagged angles, white hull plating, and gold lighting made it look like a chunk of some unearthed rare mineral. Maston told them it was a luxury liner they were meant to have stolen in their escape, along with the white null core, and at the very least it might make for a somewhat pleasant first leg of the journey.

  Alpha had split their last remaining white null core in two. It was a dangerous process, and upon completion, each half would only continue to function for another twenty days or so, when they would then be rendered useless. As
the rim planet they were fleeing to was a two-week flight away, it would suit their purposes.

  The other half of the core was being given to an SDI cruiser, the Valiance. It would fly a parallel path to their own (at the same speed, because of the core), but hide when they reached the rim planet. When the Xalans arrived to collect the four of them from the civilian transport, the Valiance would spring into action, disabling the ship and filling it with their own crew. Lucas tossed out the term “Trojan horse,” but no one knew what he was talking about except Asha. The SDI ship was far too large to dock at the island and would be following them shortly after they left.

  Lucas felt a large hand grasp his shoulder.

  “As soon as this is over, I promise we’ll clear your name,” Tannon said. “You won’t have to worry about that when you come back, or what your children will grow up thinking if you don’t.”

  Tannon was the only one making a frank assessment of their chances of survival.

  “Don’t think I don’t realize what you’re doing for us. It’s more than I could ever ask of you.”

  “That’s why you didn’t have to ask at all,” Lucas said. “This is what we came here to do. Not just to save your world or avenge ours, but to stop this from spreading to planets we don’t even know exist yet. Who knows how many more humans, Sorans are out there? This evil must be extinguished.”

  Tannon grunted.

  “One thing I’ve learned from war is that evil is never truly destroyed. The best you can hope for is to contain it.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Lucas said.

  “I know you will,” Tannon said gruffly. A curt nod, and that was that.

  Final preparations were being made for departure. Maston and the Guardians were already heading to the mainland to board the Valiance. Alpha and Zeta were already onboard.

  “Where are they?” Lucas asked, and Asha led him over to a nearby hovercraft parked on the beach. Inside, sheltered from the cold, were Noah and Erik, sleeping soundly. It was now the middle of the night and the pair were exhausted from traveling all day.

  “Should we wake them?” Asha whispered.

  Lucas shook his head.

  “Nah, let them sleep. They’ve earned it.”

  “We’ll see them again soon,” Asha said.

  Lucas placed his hands on each of them; they were warm, wrapped in heavy blankets. Noah stirred slightly but didn’t wake. He’d keep this image with him. The Last Son of Earth, the First Son of Sora. He would see them grow up, no matter what it took.

  21

  The atmosphere was tense aboard the cruiser as they moved through a space-time tunnel toward the rim planet and their eventual ambush. It reminded Lucas of their final days on the Ark, when they were waiting for Omicron to jump out of the shadows once they reached the Soran solar system. To make it feel somewhat less like a voyage of the damned, the four of them took to telling old stories over meals, about their lives before and since they met each other.

  Alpha spoke of elaborate pranks his older brothers pulled back at the Xalan science academy. Zeta talked about what it was like to try and introduce technology to the Oni, who were forever convinced she was a sorceress.

  Tonight it was Asha’s turn, and she was regaling them with a story Lucas knew all too well.

  “So these ugly assholes have us all tied to stakes, right? And what does Alpha do? He blows up his suit of power armor right in the middle of them. Never mind that if it had been a few feet further forward, it would have cooked all of us.”

  “I calculated that action with precision,” Alpha said.

  “Bullshit,” Lucas said, chuckling.

  “Anyway, we pick ourselves up and start mowing down all these poor SOBs who had no idea what just happened. There were probably fifty in the group, but I made short work of them while these two were napping on the ground. Unfortunately, their leader survived, and was about the size of a rhinoceros,” Asha continued.

  Zeta stared blankly at her.

  “Ah right, you don’t have those. Well, he was really goddamn big, which is all you need to know. He almost caves Lucas’s head in before I knife him in the shoulder and shoot him in the hand.”

  “Excuse me,” Lucas interrupted. “I think you’re leaving out the part where I remove his head with a shotgun. Credit where credit’s due.”

  “I was getting to that!” Asha exclaimed. “But before that happens, the guy starts speaking Norwegian. He tells us that he’s a schoolteacher. A schoolteacher! And now he’s the chief of a cannibal village teaching classes on raping and eating people. That should tell you how messed up our planet got near the end.”

  “You have some unbelievable stories,” Zeta said as she chewed on a piece of blackened meat. The luxury cruiser had a fully stocked kitchen, much to their delight.

  “Yes, some are quite unbelievable indeed,” Alpha said flatly. “And I was present for many of them.”

  Asha did have a tendency to exaggerate.

  “Do you want me to tell the one where you got yourself captured, and your idea of a fix was to blow up yourself and a whole space station with a nuke?”

  “If you had listened, I would not be here to endure such mockery,” Alpha replied. “Let us not forget who persuaded our heavily armed friend here not to execute you in the middle of an ashen crater.”

  “Well he’s just lucky I didn’t shoot him in the head in Georgia.”

  Lucas shook his head in exasperation. It was clear this could go on for some time, though it did serve to remind him how intertwined their fates were, and how often they’d had each other’s backs since this insane adventure began.

  Later that night, Lucas heard Alpha approach on the bridge. Lucas was often up there to gaze into the hypnotizing blue-green glow of the space-time tunnel. He found it calming.

  Alpha was clutching something in his six-fingered metal claw. Lucas recognized it immediately.

  “Wow, I’d forgotten all about that.”

  It was the glass square Lucas had taken from Omicron’s hidden safe aboard the Spear. But instead of being blank, a dim white light was shining outward from the center.

  “Did you …” Lucas began.

  “In a spare moment I acquired a tissue sample from Commander Omicron’s corpse, which is currently being studied by Soran scientists as they attempt to learn about Shadow biology. I reanimated the cells enough that the [garbled] recognized his genetic signature and activated. Once switched on, I was able to sustain the process permanently.”

  “What’s in it?” Lucas asked, staring into the white light.

  Alpha set the cube down on the arm of the captain’s chair and suddenly a brilliant display of Xalan symbols flooded the viewscreen in front of them.

  “Many things. Commander Omicron was indeed much older than I believed. He speaks of many military battles, even the initial invasion of Makari, which was well over a thousand years ago.”

  Lucas was taken aback. Omicron was over a thousand years old? It couldn’t be possible.

  “It seems the regenerative properties of the Shadow conversion can prolong life indefinitely. A truly unsettling notion,” Alpha continued.

  Indeed it was, and that meant that if their production was allowed to continue, the numbers of Shadows in existence could swell to terrifying proportions.

  “One passage stood out to me and appeared to be relevant for our present mission.”

  Alpha hovered his hand over the square and was somehow navigating through it.

  “Here,” he said, coming to rest on a particular data file. “Though I realize you understand basic Xalan, I have translated it into English for your convenience.”

  It was a dated personal log entry, though Lucas was unfamiliar with the Xalan calendar. He began to read.

  1124.32[945]

  Today marks a day I have long feared. My youngest son will attempt to survive the conversion process to become a Shadow. The scientists persist in telling me they do not understand why my other children
perished in the transformation. The Council demands continued efforts so that they may replicate my power, and I have no choice but to continue to surrender my offspring for the slaughter. I maintain it is their dangerous new enhancements, the push of these psionic powers they’ve thrust upon this new generation of “Chosen” Shadows. Is speed and strength and limitless prowess in battle not enough for them? I feel myself breaking further away from the Council on this issue, even if I have been the face of the project for centuries.

  But he is strong, despite his age. I have faith that he will pull through, that he will endure the way his father did all those years ago. And if he does not? The Council has no more children to take from me.

  Alpha had described the brutality of the Shadow conversion process, saying only a fraction of the subjects survived, but to read about Omicron’s own offspring being forced to make the attempt seemed cruel. Lucas felt just a tiny amount of sympathy for the creature who had once hunted them.

  1124.32[949]

  I rejoice! My son has survived conversion. It was a perilous few days, but he managed to pull through despite dire prognoses. He is not yet awake, and the scientists run their tests. They express discontent that he does not exhibit initial signs of the Chosen, but they are foolish to overlook the new warrior they’ve spawned. I envision a day where the two of us fight side by side as equals.

  If his mother were alive to see this momentous occasion, she would be as elated as I. As would his brothers. But he is now all I have left. I will begin training him in the ways of the Shadows as soon as he has woken from his slumber.

  He’d survived? Great, all they needed was another Shadow as strong as Omicron running around out there. Lucas continued reading.

  1124.32[952]

  Something … disturbing has happened with my son’s transformation. The scientists do not know how to explain it. Some mutation, something gone wrong in the genetic code. Speaking to him, his mind is clearly fractured. He is prone to fits of rage, and has already broken out of restraints twice. His skin has not blackened, but rather has become crimson. I fear his affliction may be a fate worse than death.