Trista scowled and held up a hand, indicating for the android to wait. She cycled the airlock and waited while fans sucked the air out. The outer doors slid open, and she grabbed one of the safety rails inside to help the android through.
As soon as the doors were shut and the atmosphere inside the airlock was restored, she nodded to the android and asked, “Who are you?”
“Gatticus Thedroux,” he said, holding out his hand to her.
She accepted it with a grimace. “Trista Leandra.”
“Thank you for rescuing me,” Gatticus said.
“Sure. What happened to you?” She pointed to his forehead. “It looks like you got shot.”
“Yes, I believe I did.”
“You believe?”
“I don’t recall what happened. My memory appears to be damaged.”
“Great. Do you at least know where you’re headed?”
Gatticus inclined his head to her. “Earth.”
“Earth?” Trista blinked, and her nose wrinkled at the mention of her homeworld. “It’s a wasteland. Why would you want to go there?”
“Because it is my posting. I am the Executor of Earth.”
Chapter 12
A roaring fire crackled in the hearth. Darius and Cassandra sat on stools in front of the fire, roasting chunks of Awk meat on the tips of gleaming black Revenant swords. Tanik had warned them to be careful with those weapons, because they were sharp enough to cut through mag boots and slice off their toes if they accidentally dropped them. The castle was littered with such artifacts—both Revenant and Keth weapons and armor from the battle they’d fought twenty years ago.
Tanik and his wife, Samara, sat with them, but they were too enamored with each other to bother about food.
Darius stared into the fire. Reflections of the flames flickered and danced along his glassy black blade. He withdrew the meat he was roasting to see if it was cooked yet. The outside was charred and crispy. Raising the morsel to his lips, he blew on it to cool it. Once cooled, Darius took a cautious bite. The meat was juicy, salty, tender... just like roasted chicken. A big improvement over dry rations. He made appreciative sounds as he chewed.
“Is it good?” Cassandra asked as she withdrew her sword from the fire and began blowing on her meat as he had done.
“Delicious,” Darius replied.
“The good thing about Ouroboros is that Seeker meat is easy to come by,” Samara said. “The bad thing is so are the Seekers.” She rolled up a ragged sleeve to reveal three long parallel scars running from her elbow to her wrist.
Darius grimaced at the sight of her injury and nodded to Tanik. He had a similar set of scars running across his face. “Is that how you got yours?”
“It is,” Tanik replied.
Cassandra took a break from blowing on her food. “I thought you got your scars from a Banshee?”
“I never said that,” Tanik replied.
“I guess I just assumed...”
“Indeed you did.”
“Are Seekers more dangerous than Cygnians?”
“To Revenants they are,” Samara said. “They can hide their presence and surprise us.”
“Using the ZPF?” Darius asked.
“Yes,” Tanik replied.
“We’re used to relying on our awareness,” Samara went on. “So we’re not prepared when it fails.”
Cassandra nodded as she tried a bite of the roasted Awk. “You’re right. This is good.”
“So what now?” Darius asked.
Tanik appeared to consider that. He looked around the foyer. “What is this place?” he asked, turning to Samara.
“Seems like it was a training academy for Keth warriors,” she replied. “There’s a lot more to it than this. It’s warm and defensible. The plumbing is solar powered, so there’s water to drink and the toilets still flush. More importantly, there’s a strong residual presence from when the Keth lived here.”
“That must be the evil I felt when we were up in space,” Cassandra said.
“Evil?” Tanik asked. “Not what I would call it, but it’s quite palpable, yes.”
“The Keth aren’t evil?” Cassandra asked.
Tanik’s dark eyebrows beetled. “Of course not.”
“Then why are you fighting them?”
Tanik snorted. “Ask the Augur. The Keth are just like us, but we were forced to slaughter them—their families, their children, even helpless babies, if you can imagine that.” His eyes blazed with fury. “I still have nightmares.”
Darius felt sick hearing that.
“But he made you do it, right?” Cassandra asked. “I mean, it’s not your fault.”
“Yes,” Samara replied. “But it doesn’t always feel that way. I remember enjoying the slaughter, and taking pride in the number of Keth that I killed. That’s the real horror of what the Augur does. He makes you want to do his will.”
“His days are numbered,” Tanik growled.
Samara snorted. “I wish I could believe that.”
“Believe it,” Tanik replied. “I have found the one who can defeat him.”
Samara straightened and stared at him with sudden interest. “Who?”
“He means me,” Darius said.
Samara’s brow furrowed. “You? You’re not even trained.”
“He will be,” Tanik replied.
“And how do you know that he can defeat the Augur?”
“I foresaw it.”
Samara frowned. “You know better than to go looking into the future, Tanik.”
“I didn’t. This vision came to me unbidden, and I know it’s more than just foresight. It’s his destiny to defeat the Augur. Besides that, he has the potential. Even untrained, he found you hiding here when I could not. He can affect other Revenants, just like the Augur.”
A gleam of hope appeared in Samara’s eyes, and Darius felt suddenly uncomfortable under the weight of her gaze. “If that’s true, then we finally have a hope of ending this war.”
“Let’s say that’s true,” Darius said. “Say I defeat this Augur. Then what? There’s still a bunch of blood-thirsty aliens in charge of the USO who’d like nothing better than to go back to hunting every other sentient species to extinction. Tanik said the Augur is the only thing holding the Cygnians back. If we’re going to take out the Augur, we need a plan to defeat the Cygnians.”
“You could do what he does,” Tanik suggested. “You could make them follow you.”
“He’ll never be able to do that,” Samara said, shaking her head. “The only reason the Augur gets away with controlling the Royals is because he gives them their designated hunting grounds as an outlet for their aggression. He also satisfies their need to dominate by putting them in charge. It would be impossible to completely pacify the Cygnians. Even if someone could do it with the Royals, their subjects would rise up and overthrow them the very next day. You can’t change who they are as a species without changing all of them, and no one is that powerful.”
“Yes, I’ve considered that,” Tanik said. “Fortunately, there’s another way.”
“And that is?” Darius asked.
“The Revenants have a secret weapon.”
“Oh?” Darius asked. “What is it?”
“A bomb that can tear matter apart.”
Darius frowned. “You mean a nuclear bomb? That’s old news. Antimatter is more powerful than that. You’d be better off venting your reactors in the direction of your target.”
Tanik shook his head. “Not a nuclear bomb—a zero point energy bomb. Just one of them is enough to turn an entire planet into a cloud of dust. To do the same thing with antimatter would require all the antimatter in all the Alckam reactors of the entire Union fleet. This is far more discrete, and far more effective. It’s how the Revenants are winning the war with the Keth. The technology is a closely guarded secret, but if we could steal one of those bombs and learn to develop them ourselves, we could bring the Union to its knees, one planet at a time.”
Darius shuddered at the
thought of destroying entire planets. He shook his head. “We can’t go around killing billions of innocent citizens to defeat the Cygnians. That would make us worse than them.”
“Who said anything about killing innocent citizens?” Tanik asked. “We would start with Cygnus Prime and work our way through their worlds from there. I assure you, even the Cygnians will surrender before they go extinct.”
“So the way to stop the killing is to kill more people than ever?” Cassandra demanded.
“That’s how most wars end,” Tanik replied. “But let’s not worry about that right now. First we need to train you and the other Acolytes.” Tanik spent a moment looking around the foyer of the castle. “Perhaps this would be a good place to do that. The residual energy here will make it easier for us to hide.”
“I don’t think everyone will fit in here,” Darius said. “And we’ll still need to grow food. That means we need arable land.”
“Not everyone,” Tanik replied. “Just the Acolytes, and maybe a few others. The rest will stay where they are. Do you and Cassandra want to stay here while Samara and I go back for the others?”
“Hell no,” Darius said. “You’re not leaving us alone in here.”
Tanik smiled crookedly at that. “Very well. Let’s go.”
* * *
The trip back to the camp was uneventful. They left the castle in the middle of the day, but arrived at camp in the middle of the night. Darius estimated it had only taken a few hours to get from one place to the other, so the two locations had to be separated by more than a few time zones.
Darius stood with Cassandra and Samara inside the open airlock of the Osprey, watching as Tanik went from tent to tent, waking up the other Acolytes. When he was done, he went to wake up some of the others as well—the Marines and Vulture pilots that they were taking back to the castle with them.
Darius shivered. He rubbed his arms, hugging his shoulders to stay warm. The air was much colder here, which did nothing to help ease the mysterious chill he’d felt at the castle. He glanced around but no one else seemed to be suffering from the cold, not even Cassandra, who was thin as a reed and wearing the same jumpsuit as him. Maybe he was coming down with something. But weren’t the nanites in his blood supposed to keep him from getting sick?
After about twenty minutes, Tanik came back with the Acolytes. Darius kept an eye on Arok as the Lassarian boy hopped up beside him. Gakram, the Banshee, climbed in next, walking on all six legs, followed by Seelka and Flitter. Dyara was conspicuously absent.
Darius asked about her.
“She’s flying over in the other Osprey with the Marines,” Tanik said as he shut the outer airlock doors and opened the inner ones.
“I see,” Darius replied. “Who did you leave in charge of the colony?”
“Ra.”
Darius nodded. “Good choice.” Ra had successfully led the people of Karkarus on Hades for many years. If he could keep them alive despite nightly attacks by Cygnian hunting parties, protecting a similar colony on Ouroboros should be easy for him.
Everyone followed Tanik to the cockpit and took their seats, but they were short two seats, and the troop bay wasn’t designed to carry unarmored passengers.
“Where do we sit?” Darius asked. Samara was also left without a seat.
Tanik glanced at them. “Why don’t you go man the gun turrets?”
Samara nodded and Darius followed her back down the corridor from the cockpit to the troop bay. Halfway to the troop bay she reached up and unfolded a ladder. “I’ll take the dorsal turret,” she said.
Darius nodded and waited for her to climb up to a hatch in the ceiling. She opened it and pulled herself up into a cramped space with it’s own a bubble-shaped canopy. The hatch slid shut behind her, leaving Darius to figure out how to reach the lower turret on his own. He spied a matching hatch at his feet and pulled that one open. A ladder extended below the hatch to an empty seat surrounded by dark glass. Darius climbed down and dropped into the seat. Blue-green grass pressed against the glass canopy of the gun well, making it impossible to see out.
Darius reached around and folded the two halves of his acceleration harness over his chest, clicking them into place. A split second later, the Osprey blasted off, and the grass fell away in at a dizzying rate. The transport’s running lights illuminated a shrinking circle of light on the rippling field. The white domes of tents appeared along with the gleaming black hulls of other Ospreys, and the still-glowing embers of dying camp fires. The glass canopy made him feel particularly exposed, inducing a brief thrill of vertigo. The dark barrels of twin laser cannons protruded slightly into his field of view, directly below his seat.
Moments later, clouds came whipping by, blotting out the view; then they fell away and rolled out in all directions as the Osprey continued on for space. The force of their acceleration was about two Gs. Enough to notice, but not enough to be uncomfortable. Clearly Tanik wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the castle. The stars snapped into focus and midnight sky turned to the purest black. They leveled out, and their acceleration eased to just over one G. Darius felt his body relax. All the tension in his muscles bled away.
Fatigue swirled in, and his eyes drifted shut. It would be at least a few hours before they arrived back at the castle, and something told him that he wasn’t going to sleep peacefully there, not with the whistling wind, and the cold, dark presence seeping through him.
Darius’s mind wandered. He wondered what they’d find as they explored the castle. How big was it? Maybe he’d feel better about staying there if he had a chance to take a look around. He resolved to do just that as his mind succumbed to sleep.
Suddenly Darius was in the castle, standing in front of the fireplace with stairs curving up to either side. The wind howled in through the broken doors and windows, and although the air was warm, a feeling of coldness seeped through to his bones. Darius shivered and hugged himself for warmth.
Then he heard something: a susurrus, like the sound a field of grass made when running through it. At first he thought it was the wind, but the sound quickly rose in volume, and he distinguished voices, whispering furiously in his ears. They were loud enough to hear, but the words were indistinct.
“Hello?” he turned in a circle, looking for the source of the voices. He couldn’t pinpoint an exact location, but he felt they were coming from behind the fireplace. Darius walked around it and discovered another staircase, this one winding down. The voices were coming from down there.
Vaguely aware that this was a dream, Darius started down the stairs. He wound down the stairwell, past several landings with wooden doors, some of them broken, others intact. There were no windows and no lights. It should have been too dark to see the stairs, but somehow he could. He continued down and down, all the while the whispers grew louder and more insistent...
Finally, after passing nine landings, he came to a tenth at the bottom of the stairwell. A wooden door barred his way. It looked like it had been recently repaired, with fresh boards nailed over the splintered remains of older ones. The whispers were uncomfortably loud now, and impossible to ignore.
Darius reached for the door handle with a sweaty palm. His heart beat like a drum in his chest...
The door was locked, but Darius rattled it on its hinges, not willing to give up yet. The door popped open, and the whispers abruptly stopped. An old metal deadbolt fell to the floor with a ringing sound.
His palm felt slick on the cold metal handle of the door. He hesitated, terrified to open the door further, but something compelled him to go on. Darius pushed, and the door creaked loudly as it swung open.
A long hallway appeared ahead of him. The wind howled. Open windows lay along the length of the hall. Moonlight sparkled off broken wedges of glass on the dusty stone floor. Darkness pooled at the end of the hallway. Darius peered into it, and an echo of the whispers returned, urging him onward.
He crept down the hallway, broken glass crunching under foot. Beside each of th
e windows were small rooms with beds and wooden chests inside. The doors were either missing, or splintered open. A few of the rooms held child-sized skeletons, covered in rags and papery bits of skin. The smell of death hung in the air. Darius grimaced at the sight of the bodies. They looked like human skeletons, except for their elongated heads and three-fingered hands.
Keth children, killed in the Revenants’ attack? Darius wondered if they were what he was supposed to see, but the darkness at the end of the passage still beckoned, and the whispers returned each time he looked down that way.
As Darius reached the end of the hallway, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he saw a vast circular chamber with no windows or doors. A pool of water gleamed in the center of the room—a well or reservoir of some kind.
More whispers.
He walked up to the edge and peered into the water. Nothing but his own reflection stared back at him in the glassy pool. About to turn away, a gust of wind slammed into his back, carrying a glowing cloud of... Sprites. The tiny, luminous symbionts zigged and zagged in a random pattern resembling Brownian motion, and the whispers became deafeningly loud.
The previously darkened chamber now danced with glowing white specks. The Sprites coalesced into a shimmering ball of light, and as one dipped below the surface of the pool.
Darius peered into the pool once more, and this time he saw something besides his reflection.
Dead bodies were chained to the bottom of the pool. Darius flinched in horror at the sight of the upturned faces, some of them human faces, with drifting mops of hair, others covered in fur or wrinkly hide. There had to be a few dozen people down there. The sprites dropped below one of the bodies, traveling down the chain. The chain abruptly snapped, and that body came rocketing to the surface with the Sprites on its heels. Darius rocked back on his heels and leaned away from the pool just as the body broke the surface. The Sprites burst out a second later and hovered over a woman’s face.
Darius blinked in shock at the sight of her staring gray eyes. Long dark hair splayed the water around her head. She had a prominent brow, a strong jaw, and long, regal features. There was no mistaking who this was. It was Samara Guharin, Tanik’s wife.
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