Star Angel: Awakening (Star Angel Book 1)

by David G. McDaniel

  Not him.

  Yet she couldn’t raise a hand against him.

  Stop! She gaped in mute pain, frustrated she had no idea how to make the suit talk. No matter, she couldn’t even catch her breath to try. She gasped, laying there defeated as Zac methodically punched her shoulders, disabling the suit’s arms. It hurt so bad. She couldn’t find her voice. Couldn’t act. Then, as Zac drew back for what might’ve been the death blow she managed to lift an arm. Forcing the suit to respond with what little power remained, putting a hand up in front of her face in what she hoped would be taken as a submissive gesture. A cry for compassion by the battered occupant of the suit.

  And … Zac paused. She could see his heart wasn’t in it. Could see he didn’t want to kill. He seemed to orient a little to his surroundings and … stood. Straightened, standing over her; responding to her weak physical plea.

  Leaving her broken but alive.

  Behind him Kang stepped into her field of vision. Covered in dust, clothes in ribbons but otherwise looking completely unaffected. Nothing she’d done phased him. The two Kazerai stared at her and Kang sneered.

  “Lost your nerve?” he chided. Then he looked over his shoulder at something Jess couldn’t see. “Mercy doesn’t become you, brother. Not the best quality for a Kazerai.” Jess wondered if that meant Willet was alive. Then Kang stared down at her and took a step toward the prostrate Skull Boy.

  “Well,” he said, “guess I’ll take care of this myself.”

  But Zac stopped him. Reached out a hand and held the smaller Kang by his shoulder. Kang jerked away and whirled on him.

  “Don’t touch me,” he warned, voice like ice.

  Zac was unmoved. Kang didn’t scare him. In fact, Jessica thought, looking up into his face, it almost looked as if Zac wanted an excuse to hit him. To finish their earlier fight. To destroy this asshole once and for all.

  Kang fumed, debating his next action. Tension gripped the air and Jessica’s heart beat fast in her chest. Would they? Would it snap Zac out of whatever memories were trying to take hold?

  If only she could say something!

  “Willet,” she managed a croak, hoping he could help. Hoping the radios still worked. Maybe he could advise her.

  But the airwaves were dead.

  Desperate she tried to move, to wave her arms—anything—but the suit was ruined. All she could do was flop the one arm slowly, back and forth. A stupid, spastic little wave. It wasn’t enough. The two warriors remained in stand-off poses, near all-out war.

  Then a new voice shattered the moment.

  “Come, my Kazerai.”

  Jess strained to see who’d arrived, finding several robed figures moving into view. She recognized one, from the woods.

  The Shogun.

  “We will take it from here,” the old man continued, stepping up beside his two warriors. Several golden-robed others were with him. “It is good you did not kill them,” he said to Zac. Kang pursed his lips, looking at once stupid and enraged. The Shogun ignored him, speaking directly to Zac. “We will want to discover why two, foolish Venatres have attempted to break into the Crucible alone.” Now he looked down at Jessica. “This should prove interesting.”

  She, in turn, stared up at him, immobile, hating him as much then as she hated Kang. More, even, for he was the one truly responsible for all this.

  “Come,” he waved the Kazerai away, leading them off, leaving the other golden robes behind. A cadre of soldiers came up a moment later.

  Jess watched as Zac walked away with the Shogun and Kang, until he was at last out of sight. Feeling more empty than she ever had.

  This time it was truly over.

  CHAPTER 35: THE DEATH OF ALL HOPE

  “You’d better show more courage tonight.” Kang held to his anger, scowling at Horus as they made their way aboard his airship. Horus ignored him, looking around the interior of the large airship, piecing together memories. He had a vessel like this once, he recalled. Probably still did. Each Kazerai had a flagship.

  “We’re ready to leave at once,” one of the crew met them at the airlock, addressing Kang with a curt bow.

  Kang dismissed him, pointing Horus toward the rear of the ship in the same motion. The crewman went off. Horus moved deliberately slow, not caring whether he annoyed Kang or not.

  Kang led him to his private stateroom. As he entered Horus noted Kang had a flair for decoration. Artifacts of war covered every surface, mounted on pedestals and framed in display cases, all of it bolted securely to the walls and floor. As far as Horus remembered he’d never added a personal touch to his own private chamber. This was the quarters of the great Kazerai when in flight, and it was clear Kang took his pedigree to heart. Being a Kazerai meant everything to him, and he apparently relished it to the fullest.

  Horus wondered why he himself had never so fully embraced it.

  Or had he?

  “Sit there,” Kang ordered, pointing to one of the room’s plush couches. Horus sat, continuing his policy of not speaking, not reacting, just going along with what was expected. Back in the compound, during the fight, he’d almost snapped. Almost saw through the fog, it seemed, and turned on the Dominion, the Shogun, Kang and all the rest. Almost fled into the wild to find himself, to clear his mind.

  For a moment he resisted the sudden urge to just stand up and pound Kang’s head through the wall. To punch him again and again until he punched him all the way out the back of the ship. Until his face collapsed and he sneered no more.

  Curious!

  It was a strong, unexpected sense of rage.

  “We’ve got some time,” the little man went on, making a welcoming gesture that was totally fake, pretending to put their differences aside. As if to say, Come. Let’s be friends. “Let’s plan. I think we need to get our heads straight. We’re striking directly into the lair of the worms.”

  Horus just stared at him. When it came down to it, would he follow through? Could he massacre all those people as he was expected to?

  Kang waited but Horuses’ response was more silence. Then he had a thought, fished in his pocket and pulled out the “phone”. The device that belonged to Jessica. He’d made the Shogun give it to him. He looked at it, curious, unwound the wires and began putting the little speakers in his ears as she’d done.

  “What’s that?” Kang demanded, his weak effort at mending fences over. He was back to his old self.

  Horus pushed a button and the device came on, screen coming alive with color. He swiped it, experimenting his way through the interface, forcing Kang to swallow down the fact that he was tuning him out.

  “Of course,” Kang sneered. “One of the dead girl’s toys.”

  Horus refused to react. Just kept his eyes on the screen, searching through options. All the menus were in English. It was actually fairly easy to work; incredibly layered in its complexity, but immediately understandable.

  “Don’t get used to it,” Kang warned, even as Horus found what looked to be a list of songs. “That’s an artifact from the other side. You’ll have to—”

  Music came on, filling the earbuds and cutting off Kang. Horus looked up at his moving lips, enjoying the fact that he could no longer hear him. At least not much.

  He turned up the music. It was good. Really good, it hit him all at once, and for an instant he was taken away. Wow. Where did Jess get this stuff? Did she make it? It was complex, rhythmic. Way better than anything he remembered from there on Anitra. This was music and, for the moment, it was all his.

  Now, at least, the flight would be bearable. He turned to the side and lay back on the couch, completely ignoring Kang. Looking up at the ceiling he held the device overhead, dialing through its various other functions. He found one of the little icons marked Photos and opened it. Discovering …

  Pictures of Jessica.

  A flower of ache bloomed in his chest. Sadness.

  Slowly he scrolled through them, captivated, listening to the music as he looked with a fierce co
mbination of sadness and joy at all the grinning, goofy poses. Pictures of Jessica’s friends. Several of the other girl he met on her world, Bianca. Other pictures with what looked like family. Mother, Father. Jessica herself. One in particular, such happiness on her face, laughing and smiling so wide. He left that one on the screen.

  She was beautiful.

  She didn’t deserve what had happened to her. Didn’t deserve to die here, forgotten, on a world that wasn’t even her own.

  He vowed he would honor her, somehow.

  Deep in the bowels of the ship the engines fired off, throbbing the superstructure and lifting them into the air. Horus barely noticed.

  He was a million miles away.

  * *

  Everything flashed by in a whirlwind of images. Jess felt completely disconnected as the robed priests supervised the soldiers in the task of popping her out of the ruined armor. She noticed Willet nearby, limp, being pulled from his own Skull Boy, laying in a heap not far away.

  Zac hadn’t killed him.

  They were dragged to a wheeled vehicle, thrown in the back, still in their ribbed operator suits and driven through the compound. She bounced against Willet on the ride, looking out the windows in a fog. After the rush of the fight, then seeing Zac, only to lose him again ... She was absolutely numb.

  The vehicle stopped outside one of the buildings. The buildings all looked the same by then, though part of her imagined this one was near the one they’d been trying to get to. They were hauled out and dragged up stairs, into an elevator, down a bleak corridor, to a cell and thrown in. There she and Willet lay. Left alone, for the moment, to ponder the end.

  All of it. Over.

  After a long time, or a short time—it was hard to tell—Willet groaned. The corridor outside the cell was quiet. The cell was quiet. Like a tomb. The sound of his groan seemed to start the clock again.

  He sat up. Rubbed a hand over his aching head.

  “Well,” he said, “we almost made it.”

  Jess just lay there, listening to herself breathe.

  “I thought I was dead.” he continued to rub feeling back into his limbs. Then, with grim humor, “Guess I am, actually. We’ll never make it out of this.”

  “He’ll come for me,” Jess whispered, the sound of her own voice distant in her ears. “Once he finds out.”

  “Horus?”

  “Zac.” But even as she said it she knew it wasn’t true. She could hear the lie in her own words. So obviously a lie.

  Zac would never find out.

  He would never come.

  Then a distant rumble. It rose in volume and began moving, somewhere outside in the compound. Continued, then began to diminish.

  Willet identified it. “That’s the Kazerai ship,” he said. “Guess they’re sending them back to the battle.” He stared off into space, through the prison walls, lost in his own thoughts.

  Jess listened as the thunder dwindled in the distance and …

  Was gone.

  All was silent once more.

  Zac was gone.

  She lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling, breathing softly.

  Tears streaming quietly down her face.

  CHAPTER 36: ALONE

  At length Jess sniffled, a small sound made loud in the deathly quiet of the cell. Tears had long since dried on her cheeks.

  She and Willet had been in the cell nearly an hour, according to her watch, sitting in silence for most of that—though Willet just seemed to be respecting her privacy more than anything. He continued to rub feeling into his injured limbs, groaning now and again but otherwise saying nothing.

  They’d both suffered injury.

  Yeah, thought Jessica, but Willet probably didn’t cry like I did.

  Like a little girl.

  But she was a girl. And she was tired of being a commando, a warrior, an angel or whatever. She just wanted to go home.

  Only now she’d never make it home.

  Now she was going to die.

  “You know,” said Willet, perfect timing as her thoughts began spiraling toward those darker depths, “you may be right about your friend. He could’ve killed us. I could swear I saw … hesitation. Even though he was beating the hell out of me.” At this he rubbed his shoulder stiffly.

  “They got to him,” she said. “Somehow. He’s confused.” But her next words sounded hollow: “He’s not the enemy.”

  Willet, however, didn’t object. Instead he just sat there quietly. And as she watched him in the dim light it seemed he’d come around. That he realized, here at the bitter end, maybe Zac was trying to get away from his past.

  Too bad none of that mattered now.

  After a moment he stopped rubbing and looked absently around the featureless room.

  Jess wondered about Darvon. Had he made it back alive? She couldn’t imagine, even if he had, that he wouldn’t have been found. Surely the Dominion were sweeping the countryside and would find both him and the ‘thopter. Oddly, she thought, though Darvon’s motives were the purest among their little group, he was the one that ran away. Even her own motives were more basic: get home. That was the extent of it. To Darvon, however, she was Divine. To Darvon she was fulfilling a grand prophecy, one he and his people had been waiting on for generations. Darvon was on a Holy mission. Yet, when it came time to follow through, his courage had failed.

  And Willet … Willet seemed to have hardly any motivation at all. Yet he alone sacrificed the most.

  She caught his roving gaze and held it.

  “Why’d you do it?” she asked quietly.

  His expression was unreadable in the half-light. For a second she thought to rephrase the question, maybe it upset him, then, abruptly, he laughed. Like … a laugh of surprise. Wonderment, that he could not explain.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t. Something … something about you. Don’t ask me what. I just, I felt like there was a shot to pull this off. Insane, right? But I really thought we could do it. Get you home and solve our Icon problem in the same move.” He shrugged. “Maybe I was hoping to be a hero.

  “Anyway, it’s pretty clear I was amazingly, stupendously—as in couldn’t be more—mistaken.”

  At that he grinned. His handsome smile stood out against his dark, youthful face, made more stark in the gloom of the cell.

  And all at once Jess was overwrought. That Willet was there at all, victim of her fate though her trials were not his own ... Here was a young, intelligent man with his whole life ahead of him, and he’d chosen to waste it on a suicide mission with a stranger from another world.

  She was sure there were selfish motives he wasn’t mentioning, there always were; he had a thing for Satori—anyone could see that—so he might’ve done it to impress her in some outrageous way. But it seemed more likely that what drove him was a genuine desire to help, as he claimed. To do something bigger than himself. And that, that pure example of humanity, of helping one’s fellow man for the sake of help alone, was suddenly painfully clear and, as she saw that, she realized she could never thank Willet enough.

  She swallowed down an intense, sudden admiration.

  Wishing so badly she could change things.

  But Willet was moving on.

  “So what happened?” he wanted to know. “On your world? How’d you guys cross paths? You and Horus? I mean Zac.”

  She inhaled, mind shifting to that. So long ago, it seemed, in truth those incidents less than a few days old.

  “Coincidence, I guess.” She shrugged. “I was just hanging out at my house.” She wiped her face; rubbed away traces of the earlier tears. Remembering Bianca, a cascade of happier times rushing to mind, shaking her to the core. Fresh tears blurred her eyes.

  She got it together and sniffed.

  “He fell out of the sky.”

  “Over your house?”

  She nodded. “The Icon connects over my house, apparently. Way up in the air.”

  “So that’s heaven.” Willet knew as much a
s she did that was the vision of zealots. He knew the Icon was practical technology.

  “Yeah, I guess. Anyway,” she sat a little straighter, “We were hanging out when this fireball appeared in the sky and, what we thought was a meteor fell to the trees. It turned out to be Zac. He hit the ground on fire. You can imagine our shock at finding him alive. We don’t have any Kazerai on my world.

  “Then he showed us the Icon and, on accident, I activated it and it popped us back here.

  “The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “And he didn’t remember who he was.”

  Jess shook her head.

  “So you gave him the name Zac.”

  She nodded. Then, recalling that night at the mall: “Even bought him clothes.”

  Understanding dawned for Willet.

  “So that’s why he was dressed like that. I have to tell you, what you guys were wearing—especially him—confused us nearly as much as anything else. You guys looked like clowns. If you haven’t noticed, we don’t have much variety here.”

  It was true. Anitran fashion was, as far as she’d seen, nonexistent.

  All at once Willet looked curious. “What do you do?” he asked. “On your world.”

  It made her laugh. A mirthless laugh.

  “Do? I’m a kid. I go to school and get ready to be a grownup.”

  Willet shifted, grimacing with a sharp stab of pain. Injuries plagued him.

  “Get ready to be a grownup?” he found a more comfortable position. “Seems like you’ve made it. If you weren’t grownup before, you certainly are now.”