Cassandra blew out a shaky breath, and nodded to Gakram. “Thank you.”
“Look out!” Tanik called.
They turned just as four swords flashed toward Gakram. He threw up two arms to block them.
“Gakram!” Cassandra screamed
All four blades connected with Gakram’s arms and his shield gave way with a pop!
Gakram’s arms were vaporized up to the shoulders in a fiery burst of embers and ash. He screamed in agony and thrashed as the stumps smoldered with a sickening stench. He lost his grip on the deck and floated free. Cassandra ran in to block a second attack, aimed for Gakram’s head. She caught two swords with her own and used the ZPF to telekinetically hold back the other two.
She felt a sharp stab from behind and stood blinking at her attacker in shock. His tail. The Ghoul’s mouth popped open in a grin of interlocking nine-inch gray teeth.
“Goodbye,” he growled. Cassandra recognized the depth and tone of his voice: it was Elder Arathos. He let loose a sissing peal of laughter and withdrew to join the fight against Tanik. The message was clear. She was a goner.
On his way to Tanik, Arathos leapt after Gakram and sliced off his head. It was vaporized instantly, and his body burst into flames.
No! Cassandra wanted to scream, but somehow she couldn’t. Her sword drifted from nerveless fingers, and she stumbled away, her head suddenly light. Her eyes blurred with tears at Gakram’s passing. Cassandra’s back pulsed with waves of fire where she’d been stabbed, but the pain quickly faded to numbness. She tried to recover her sword as it floated past her head, but she couldn’t move. The Ghoul’s venom had paralyzed her! Her feet were pinned to the deck by her mag boots, leaving her to stand and watch the fight through blurry, tear-filled eyes.
Tanik sliced one Ghoul in half with a burst of fiery embers, and assailed Elder Arathos from all sides with sailing black swords. Those blades were dark and unshielded, so they shattered to gleaming bits on Arathos’s shield, but that momentary distraction was enough. Tanik slipped one of his swords past Arathos’s guard and ran it straight through the Ghoul’s chest. Arathos shrieked and his shield failed with a loud pop. Tanik withdrew the blade and deftly sliced off the Elder’s legs at the knees. The severed limbs disappeared with a puff of glowing ashes, and Arathos spun away, shrieking. His arms and swords slashed at empty air in a vain attempt to strike back, but he could no longer reach Tanik. He used his tail instead, whipping it toward Tanik’s head, but Tanik saw it coming and sliced off the barbed tip with a flick of his wrist. Unlike the Ghoul’s legs, mysteriously the tail wasn’t vaporized by Tanik’s sword.
Cassandra noticed the forward holo panels return to an uninterrupted vista of stars and space. The Old Ones had ended their transmission. Tanik grabbed the severed tip of Arathos’s tail as it floated by his head. Brandishing it like a club, he rushed to Cassandra’s side, leaving Arathos to die slowly from his wounds.
“Where are you hurt?” Tanik demanded.
Cassandra tried to speak once more, but again, her lips wouldn’t move.
“He got you with this, didn’t he?” Tanik asked, and shook the severed tail in front of her by way of indication.
Cassandra wanted to nod, or blink, but she couldn’t do either. Fresh tears leaked from her eyes with the frustration of the attempt.
“We have to hurry,” Tanik said. As he turned to leave, Cassandra saw herself float free of the deck and drift along behind him. The doors of the bridge swished open, and Banshees and Ghouls came crowding in brandishing their claws and swords.
They parted before Tanik like a wave hitting the bow of a ship. The Cygnians snarled and shrieked at them, their arms straining against invisible bonds as Tanik walked by. Cassandra floated along on his heels, watching the Cygnians. Her mind was fading fast, and confusion swirled through her thoughts. If he can hold them back like that, why didn’t he do that with the ones on the bridge?
As Tanik strode down the corridors of the ship, the Cygnians they encountered were struck by the same invisible forces and roughly shoved aside. Tanik was an unstoppable force storming blithely through their ship in plain sight.
Cassandra began lapsing in and out of consciousness, catching only faint glimpses of their surroundings. She had a bad feeling that it meant she was running out of time. I’m sorry, Dad... she thought, while reaching out for him in the ZPF. She was surprised to find him nearby, racing toward the Nomad in a fighter. I should have listened, she went on.
Cass, is that you? Her dad’s voice echoed inside her head. Why did you leave!
They said I was the only one the Old Ones would listen to, but they didn’t listen! The prophecy... she trailed off, her thoughts flickering.
Hang on! I’m coming!
So are we... she thought as she and Tanik entered the hangar where they’d landed. He ran for one of the Ospreys, and she zipped along behind him, drawn by an invisible tether.
Chapter 44
—TEN MINUTES EARLIER—
Darius and Dyara managed to escape the incoming missiles by using the ZPF to push them off course and smash them together. Dyara had a close call with three of them, but Darius had managed to help her push them off course.
Soon after clearing the Revenant Fleet, they passed into weapons range with the Nomad. Curiously, the destroyer didn’t fire on them. It wasn’t shielded, so that wasn’t the reason.
“Don’t they see us coming?” Darius asked.
“Stay sharp...” Dyara warned. “They might be waiting for us to drop our guard.”
Keeping up an evasive flight pattern as they approached, Darius reached out to the Nomad to determine the intentions of the ship’s commander. What he found instead was Tanik and Cassandra, locked in a deadly struggle with the Cygnians on the bridge.
“We have to hurry!” Darius called out over the comms.
“What’s wrong?” Dyara asked.
He explained what he’d sensed on the bridge.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be there soon,” Dyara replied in a tight voice.
The next few minutes passed with agonizing slowness. Darius reached out periodically to check on Cassandra, each time finding her alive and fighting. He struggled to take heart from that even as despair and foreboding swirled inside of him. He was so close! Just a few more minutes!
Darius checked his range to the Nomad. It was still more than a hundred klicks away—ETA ten more minutes. He resisted the urge to push the throttle higher. It wouldn’t help. If he went any faster, he’d be unable to slow down in time to dock with the Nomad.
Darius started to check on Cassandra once more, when her voice came echoing through his thoughts—
I’m sorry, Dad...
He reached back. Cass, is that you? Stupid question. Why did you leave!? A better one. But it was too late for recriminations now.
They said I was the only one the Old Ones would listen to, but they didn’t listen! The prophecy...
Hang on! I’m coming! Darius thought back at her.
So are we...
Darius shut his eyes, heedless of the risk, and cast his mind into the Nomad in an attempt to see what she was seeing. He caught a glimpse of a shadowy hangar, and of Tanik running toward an Osprey.
His eyes snapped open. “They’re coming out!”
“What? How do you know?”
“They’re going to launch in an Osprey. They’ll need us to escort them to safety.”
“Safety?” Dyara echoed. “With the Revenant fleet behind us and the Cygnians in front there’s no such thing as safety. We need to plot a jump and get the hell out of here.”
“So plot a jump!” Darius snapped.
“Where?”
“Back to Cratus,” he decided. “It’s close. We can re-group and figure out where to go from there.”
“Good enough for me,” Dyara replied.
Darius plotted a jump of his own, keeping an eye on the nav panel as he did so to look for signs of an Osprey launching from the Nomad.
A few more minutes passed with his Alckam drive spinning up, and a jump timer ticking down.
“We’ll have to hold the jump until we can sync with them,” Darius said.
“Are you sure they’re coming?” Dyara asked. “I don’t see...”
Darius’s contacts panel chimed and an Osprey shot out the front of the Nomad. It went evasive immediately, but the destroyer didn’t fire on them. Not yet anyway.
Darius sent a message immediately. “Tanik! Is Cassandra with you?”
The reply came back a split second later. “Yes. But she’s hurt. One of them stuck her with its tail.”
“Did you get the tail?” Dyara asked quickly.
“No,” Tanik replied. “I couldn’t. We were cut off at the time, so I didn’t see which one stabbed her. It was all I could do to escape with her before they killed us both.”
Darius’s heart pounded erratically in his chest. “She’s alive?”
“Yes, but unconscious from the venom. I had to freeze her in a cryo-pod to keep her alive.”
Darius let out an uneasy breath. She was alive. That was the important part. “We’ll figure out how to deal with the venom later,” he said.
“You need the tail of the Cygnian who poisoned her!” Dyara said. “Without that, there’s no way to synthesize an antivenin. It’s like trying to solve a puzzle with half of the pieces.”
Darius scowled. “So we’ll find another Cygnian and use their tail!”
“The venom and antivenin is unique to each Cygnian, Darius! We’ll have to board the Nomad and find the one who stabbed her. It’s the only way.”
“She’s right,” Tanik said. “But it’s too dangerous. There are too many of them....”
Darius couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I’ll find him,” he said, already throwing his Vulture into a high-G turn. “Just get Cass to safety!”
“I’ll set a course for the Harbinger,” Tanik replied.
“No, not the Harbinger,” Darius said. “We’re not welcome anymore. Go back to Cratus.”
“Why aren’t we welcome?” Tanik asked.
“Long story,” Darius replied. “We can trade explanations later. I’m expecting a good one from you.”
“Of course,” Tanik replied. “I’ll see you at Cratus.”
Darius nodded to himself. “Dyara? Are you with me?”
“We’re going to have to take the whole ship, and somehow capture all of them alive...” She trailed off uncertainly.
“So?”
“So, how are we going to do that, Darius?! They’re all fully trained Revenants—Cygnians no less—and we’ll be outnumbered. We won’t stand a chance.”
“Then tell me there’s another way to save Cass.”
“I can’t, but... maybe we can find some way to track down the Cygnian who stabbed her later. She’s in cryo. She’s stabilized. We won’t help her by throwing our lives away.”
Darius gritted his teeth, warring with himself. He couldn’t just leave! But Dyara was right. “Fine. Sync our jumps, Dya, and let’s get out of here.”
“Way ahead of you,” she replied, her voice relayed by the extra-sensory chips (ESCs) in their brains. She must have been pulling too many Gs to physically move her lips.
A request to sync jumps began blinking at the bottom of Darius’s nav. He accepted it and lined up his fighter with the blue arrow of the jump vector. As soon as he did, his throttle shot up of its own accord, and his thrusters began roaring at nine Gs.
Darius fought to stay conscious and breathe against the immense pressure squashing him into his seat. His oxygen mask and flight suit helped, but not enough.
He glanced at his nav to figure out why they were making such a fast getaway. It didn’t take long to see why. More than a dozen squadrons of fighters raced toward them from the Revenant fleet, and several hundred Cygnian squadrons approached from behind the Nomad. Dyara was trying to get them out of the area before they got caught in the middle of a massive battle.
As the squadrons drew near to each other, Revenant fighters opened fire on the Nomad with streaking swarms of missiles and flickering yellow lasers.
“No!” Darius roared. He mentally toggled a target camera to watch the Nomad weather the assault. The destroyer was shielded, but that meant it couldn’t fire on the incoming missiles, and it had no fighters to protect it. The Cygnian squadrons would arrive too late to save them.
The Nomad slowly turned, its thrusters flaring bright blue in a belated attempt to run. Golden lasers lashed the destroyer’s shield, provoking fading flashes of light as they dissipated harmlessly. Then the missiles arrived—a glinting hail of metal bullets riding on tiny blue thrusters trails.
The impacts came one after another, explosions blossoming in roiling clouds of fire. The Nomad’s shields burned bright, repelling the onslaught. Darius held his breath. They just needed to last a little longer...
But then the shields failed and the Nomad’s hull darkened. Explosions ripped holes through the side of the ship. Debris and bodies gushed out.
“No!” Darius screamed again, staring helplessly as a massive explosion tore the Nomad apart from the inside. The antimatter storage had been breached.
Darius gaped at the empty space where the destroyer had been. Whoever had stabbed and poisoned his daughter, had just been vaporized.
Blinking hot tears from his eyes, Darius battled to breathe against the combined weight of acceleration and loss. Rage boiled inside of him, urging him to turn back and kill as many Cygnians as he could.
“I’m sorry,” Dyara said, her voice echoing through his thoughts over their ESCs, and giving him pause.
Then the jump timer hit zero, sweeping away Darius’s plans for revenge in a blinding flash of light.
As the intense pressure of acceleration vanished, Darius slumped against his harness, sobbing and gasping for air.
Chapter 45
Clouds swept by Darius’s cockpit and the surface of Cratus peeked through—lush green islands and tropical waters as far as the eye could see. Darius’s eyes weren’t seeing much. He’d set the autopilot to follow Tanik’s Osprey, because he was in no shape to fly. After spending the last four hours alone with his thoughts, he’d cried himself into a stupor.
There had to be some other way to save Cassandra. He refused to accept that his visions had somehow inexplicably come true.
Whispers from the ZPF—or the Sprites, whichever—echoed at the edges of Darius’s hearing, but they were as unintelligible as ever. None of this made sense. Why had Cassandra gone with the Nomad? What could she possibly have been thinking? In their brief telepathic dialogue, Cass had mentioned something: she’d said the Cygnians convinced her to speak to their Old Ones, because of a prophecy, whatever that meant.
But if the whole thing had been their idea, then why did they attack her? Why kill her for trying to help them? It boiled Darius’s blood and blurred his eyes with a fresh sheen of tears.
Tanik had a lot of explaining to do. That was part of the reason they were landing on Cratus now. The other part was to see his daughter, if only through the frosted glass of a cryo-pod. They also had to gather supplies from their abandoned camp and figure out what to do next.
Darius knew what he wanted to do. He was going to find some way—any way—to make the Cygnians pay. If they could kill a twelve-year-old girl after she’d tried to save their lives, then they deserved to die too.
Tanik landed his Osprey on a flat grassy plateau above the camp. Dyara’s fighter set down to one side, and Darius’s to the other. The subtle jolt of landing skids touching down jarred Darius out of his thoughts and brought him back to the moment. He wasn’t wearing his helmet or oxygen mask anymore—he’d turned them into a snotty mess and had to remove them—so he simply pulled the release lever for his harness, opened the canopy, and jumped down. His legs collapsed under him, but he picked himself up and ran to Tanik’s Osprey.
The airlock opened just as he arrived, and a cryo-pod floated out ahead of
Tanik. Darius peered into that pod as it settled in the grass at his feet—
And saw Cassandra’s face.
It was true. He placed both palms against the icy glass. The steady hum of the pod’s cooling systems shivered through his bones.
“I did everything I could to save her,” Tanik whispered.
Darius rounded on him and grabbed him by the collar of his flight suit. “What were you doing on the Nomad in the first place!? Did you take her there?”
Tanik shook his head. “No. She went on her own. I followed her. When I found out that she’d gone to join Gakram on the Nomad, I went after her to bring her back.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There was no time, and because I knew that the admiral had sabotaged the Nomad’s Alckam drive and rigged it to blow when they jumped. Telling you that would have been an act of treason.”
“The admiral did what?”
“When Cassandra refused to come back with me, I was forced to reveal the sabotage, and the Cygnians arrested me. I later broke out, but by the time I got to Cassandra it was already too late.”
“I sensed you both fighting together on the bridge...” Darius said. “You said you were separated when she got poisoned.”
Tanik nodded. “We were. It happened before I arrived. It took a few minutes for Cassandra to succumb to the venom, and by the time I realized what had happened, we were already on our way to the hangar.”
Darius glared at the man, not ready to give up, but he was out of accusations. Pushing Tanik away, he turned back to Cassandra’s cryo-pod.
Dyara approached them, long grass rustling against her legs. Darius noticed the grass, as if for the first time—green grass, bowing in the wind; then a sound reached his ears—running water. He looked up and saw that Tanik had landed them beside a rushing stream. To one side, jagged black cliffs, to the other, a thundering waterfall with a scraggly black tree beside it.
Darius gaped at the scene. It was almost identical to the landing zone on Ouroboros, and it definitely matched his visions. Darius barked out a broken laugh.
He saw Dyara shoot him a bemused look as she came to stand beside him. She was probably wondering what he had to laugh about. Maybe she’d never suffered enough to know that madness and laughter were a refuge from sorrow.
The Revenants Page 28