Darius nodded. “Gooood,” he drawled.
“Throttling up...” Kara said.
Darius watched on the screens as the throttle hit five Gs. The crushing weight on his chest—Korvin’s chest—was a familiar feeling. Time dragged by, and the pressure remained. Darius gritted his teeth and endured. Korvan’s mind was fading fast, so he wouldn’t have to endure it for long.
He wondered absently what would happen to him after Korvin was knocked out by the drugs. Would he lose his mental hold on the man, or would Korvin’s body drag his consciousness down with it?
Darkness fell, and Darius’s mind blanked, giving him his answer.
After what seemed like just a few seconds, he awoke to the sound of a klaxon screaming in his ears.
“Wha...” he mumbled.
“Use your stim,” Kara groaned.
Darius fumbled for the utility compartment and found a yellow-coded pen. He injected it, and his eyes flew wide open. “Grak! That’s a rush,” he said.
“Yeah...” Kara replied in a strained voice.
Darius tried to stretch—
And felt an explosion of pain. The pressure of acceleration was gone, but the damage remained. Even with nanites coursing through their blood to repair injuries as soon as they occurred, tissue damage had accumulated over the last nine hours. They passed the next few minutes in silence, enduring their own private worlds of pain.
“Jumping,” Kara wheezed.
“Are you okay?” Darius asked just as a flash of light tore through the cockpit. A minute later the stars returned with another flash of light.
Darius checked the nav for an idea of how the battle had gone in their absence, but the screen was blank. The whole cockpit was dark, and the reassuring hum of the fighter’s reactor was dead silent.
“You powered down,” Darius whispered.
“Had to,” Kara said. “We’ve got to stay dark to maximize our chances of staying hidden. We’re running on battery now. Critical systems only.”
“What about shields?” he asked. “Should we...” Darius trailed off in a hacking cough, and he tasted blood. His air hose began rattling with a watery slurping sound. He inhaled some of the blood he’d coughed into the hose, and ended up coughing it back up for the second time. Darius yanked out his air hose and ripped off his helmet.
Korvin’s voice intruded on his thoughts just as his coughing subsided. Motherfekker... you’ve already gone and gotten me killed, haven’t you?
Darius stared at floating gobs of blood drifting in front of him, and slowly shook his head. “Kara?”
“No shields,” she replied belatedly. “Can’t risk it.”
“What about what you said—about a speck of dust being enough to take us out?”
“I was exaggerating. It’ll do some damage, but it’ll take more than a speck to do us in. We’ll hold off with shields as long as we can.”
Darius nodded and peered around the back of the pilot’s seat to watch Cygnus Prime swelling rapidly larger with their approach. Glinting silvery specks appeared, spaced out in front of the planet—starships? Darius assumed.
“Not long now...” Kara said.
Tell her you love her, Korvin said.
Darius winced, but did as he was asked.
Kara gave no reply for a long moment, but then she returned the sentiment. “I love you, too, Korry.”
I wish we’d had a chance to settle down and have those kids, Korvin went on. Darius relayed that message, too.
“Me, too,” Kara said, sniffling audibly. “But this is more important.”
“Yes,” Darius agreed, and swallowed past a painful lump in his throat.
You’re going to burn in hell for this, Korvin said.
I know, Darius thought back. I’m sorry, Korvin. I really am.
Cygnus Prime filled their view now, the red and brown surface sweeping up fast, clouds strewn like tattered sheets across it.
“Five seconds to hit the atmosphere!” Kara announced. “Shields up, Korry!”
Darius engaged his ZPF shield, and the cockpit began glowing bright with its aura.
“Three, two, one—”
The Vulture began shuddering violently and glowing bright orange as they hit the upper atmosphere at a hundred and sixty kilometers per second. The air inside the cockpit grew warm, then scalding.
“Launch the missiles!” Darius screamed against the pain.
Kara did, and everything vanished in a blinding flash of light.
Chapter 48
Darius woke up crying. He couldn’t believe what he’d done. He’d just forced an innocent man to kill himself!
“They did it...” Tanik said.
Darius looked up and watched through a blurry film of tears as a ball of fire went roiling through the darkness of space. For a moment he thought it was a star, but then that ball of fire dimmed and spread, expanding rapidly into a shimmering red cloud of super-heated dust and plasma. A kind of miniature supernova, the result of an exploding planet. Cygnus Prime.
“Look! It’s taking out their fleet!” another voice said. It was Dyara. Dyara? he wondered.
Pinpricks of light bloomed, speckling the void with fresh bursts of flame as the expanding cloud of dust and gas reached them. She was right.
How was Dyara here? Tanik had been the only one with him in the cockpit of the Vulture.
Blinking in confusion, Darius turned to find her sitting next to him. He wasn’t in his cockpit anymore. He sat strapped into a seat in the nonessential crew cabin of a much larger starship.
He remembered spending the last nine hours in Korvin’s body, completely unaware of his real surroundings. Dyara had obviously come and rescued him and Tanik.
“Where are we?” Darius asked in a croaking voice.
Dyara turned to look at him, her eyes wide with shock and awe from the event they’d just witnessed. Her gaze softened in sympathy and confusion when she saw his tears.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and grabbed his arm.
He dropped his gaze and shook his head. She obviously didn’t know what he’d done.
Dyara’s sympathy turned to alarm. She glared over his shoulder. “You said it was just a trance! You said he’d be fine when he woke up!”
“It was,” Tanik replied. “And he is fine—physically, anyway.”
Dyara frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Her eyes skipped back to Darius.
“I killed him,” Darius said.
“What? Killed who?” Dyara asked.
Darius wiped his eyes and made a feeble effort to pull himself together. The least he could do was own up to it. So he explained in a halting voice what he’d done to the Revenant pilot named Korvin. By the time he was done with his explanation, Dyara was staring at him in horror.
He nodded and flashed a bitter smile. “Now you know why I’m not fine.”
* * *
The Revenants had a raucous celebration that night in honor of the two pilots who’d sacrificed their lives to wipe out the Cygnian fleet and destroy their homeworld.
Darius spent the time in his quarters with Tanik and his daughter’s cryo-pod, sharing a bottle of something that Tanik assured him was single malt scotch from Earth. It tasted nothing like single malt, but it was plenty strong, so it was good enough.
“You should be out there celebrating, too,” Tanik said as he sucked whiskey through a straw in his flask. He lowered the flask with a grimace. “Drinking in space leaves something to be desired. Scotch through a straw! Bleh.”
Darius nodded. Maybe that was why it didn’t taste the same. He peered down at his daughter’s cryo-pod and scraped away a layer of frost with his fingernails to get a glimpse of her face. She looked too peaceful to be frozen at the brink of death. Maybe she was sleeping? But no, the Harbinger’s medics had run scans and performed a tissue biopsy. She’d definitely been poisoned.
“We’ll find a way to save her,” Tanik whispered, and squeezed his shoulder.
Darius nodded an
d emptied his flask with a long drag from the straw. “More,” he croaked, and wiped his mouth. The action sent tiny golden globules of scotch spinning away to the nearest air intake.
Tanik fetched the half-empty bottle floating behind them. While he re-filled Darius’s flask, the door swished open and Dyara walked in. Followed by Admiral Ventaris.
Dyara was frowning, but the admiral beamed brightly. He walked right up to Darius and thrust out his hand.
Darius eyed the hand for a moment. The alcohol had turned his brain to soup.
“May I shake your hand?” Admiral Ventaris prompted.
Darius scowled. “For what?”
Ventaris dropped his hand to his side. “Dyara told me what you did. It can’t have been easy, but I want you to know you did the right thing, although it might not feel like that now.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” Darius replied.
“All the same.”
“I keep trying to tell him,” Tanik drawled, and then hiccuped loudly.
Admiral Ventaris stared at him. “Yes... you know, Mr. Gurhain, I’m still not fully satisfied with your explanation for being on board the Nomad. You were instrumental in that ship’s escape. If not for you—”
“My daughter would be dead,” Darius said, cutting the admiral off with a growl. “Blown to bits by your missiles.”
Admiral Ventaris turned to him with a thin smile. “Yes, well—” He held Darius’s gaze for lack of further justification. “I’ll let you get on with your... drinking. I just wanted you to know that someone appreciates what you did. And more to the point, I respect it. When you’re ready to formally join this fleet, there’ll be a rank waiting for you.” The admiral tapped a gleaming black badge with a glowing red outline on his upper left sleeve. Inside of it was a gold triangle with a single star at the top. The insignia of an admiral.
Darius nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind... sir.”
“Good.”
“Cheers to that!” Tanik said, and raised his flask with a lazy grin. It got twisted into an ugly snarl by the scars on his face, and he hiccuped again before he could drink to his own toast. “I think I’d better go lie down... or, or—up, actually, since you can’t lie down in space.” He snickered at his own joke, and turned to leave. “G-night, D-arius,” he said, with two more hiccups.
Admiral Ventaris mumbled something under his breath, and Tanik followed him out. The door swished shut behind them, leaving Darius and Dyara alone.
She walked over to him slowly, and he watched her approach with dull, staring eyes.
“I don’t know how you could do what you did,” she said, stopping in front of him. “But I’m not going to join you in beating yourself up. I don’t think you’re a bad person. You’re a good person with a good heart who was in a bad situation, with the wrong people giving you advice.”
“It was my choice,” Darius objected, feeling suddenly too sober. “I didn’t have to listen to them.”
Dyara sighed and grabbed his hands in hers. “No, you didn’t have to, so keep that in mind next time. As for right now, you can’t let this destroy you. It won’t undo what you did. You need to live if you’re going to make up for your actions.”
Darius nodded slowly. “What if they were right? What if this ended the war?”
“I hope they’re right,” Dyara replied. “That won’t make what you did okay, but it would be a start.”
“Yeah,” Darius agreed and sucked in a shuddery breath. “What about her?” he jerked his chin to Cassandra’s pod. “What do I do now?”
Dyara walked over to the pod and peered inside of it with a sad smile. “Nothing yet. Maybe we can find a specialist of some kind—someone with more experience in dealing with Cygnians and their venom. Maybe you’ll get a different answer than the one the Harbinger’s medic gave. Like you said, as long as she’s not dead, there’s still hope.”
Darius swallowed thickly and a broken smile graced his lips. “Hope. That’s an empty word if ever there was one.”
Chapter 49
Tanik walked a suitably drunken line back to his quarters. It was more than enough to fool everyone who passed him in the corridor.
Darius hadn’t noticed that he’d only been pretending to drink. He wouldn’t have minded getting drunk, but he couldn’t afford to lose his wits here, and not yet. He needed a clear head for what he was about to do.
Tanik locked the door to his quarters behind him, and then shut his eyes and raised his hands, drawing on the ZPF with every ounce of strength he had left.
A dazzling light soaked through his eyelids, and when he opened his eyes once more, he saw the source of that light: a dazzling orb hovering in the air, transparent in the center. A window into another world—literally. Through the window he spied a familiar stone edifice. Tanik smiled and stepped through to reach it.
He emerged on the steps of the castle on Ouroboros, having traveled tens of thousands of light years in an instant. Wormholes were mysterious objects. Some took time to cross, while others could take you around the galaxy in the blink of an eye. It all came down to the craftsman, and Tanik was a master like no other. He sucked in a deep breath of Ouroboros’s warm air, savoring the scents and flavors of it...
The smell of home. Tanik smiled, and reached into the castle to look for his partner and summon her outside to greet him. Summoning her turned out to be unnecessary. She sat nearby, beside the fire in the entrance hall, and she’d already sensed his arrival.
She came striding down the steps, just as beautiful as ever.
“Tanik!” she said, beaming brightly at him.
“Feyra!” he replied, and ran to greet her with a kiss. As he withdrew, he picked her up and spun her in a circle. She laughed. It was the sweetest sound he’d heard in years.
Tanik set her down and withdrew to an arm’s length to look upon her. She was the same as ever: gaunt cheeks, jutting chin, prominent cheekbones, pointed white teeth, and a sparkling white skin that danced with Sprites. Her eyes were even more crowded with the glowing symbionts, and mesmerizing to look at. Feyra’s thin, lanky arms reached for him, and three-fingered hands laced through his.
The Keth were not a beautiful species to most humans, but they were to him. Orphaned by the war, they’d raised him as one of their own. Tanik had come to love their people, even as he’d come to loathe his own. As a child, he’d often wished he could have been born a Keth rather than a human. The Keth hadn’t treated him like an outsider, even though he’d often felt like one. His childhood and early adulthood on Ouroboros had been the happiest time of his life—until the Revenants slaughtered his people.
Feyra was one of the few that had survived, and only because the Revenants had mistaken him for the real Tanik Gurhain, a Revenant soldier. Tanik had taken advantage of the mistaken identity and used it to save Feyra’s life by claiming that she was his prisoner.
They’d escaped Ouroboros together, and months later, they’d found their way back. Sitting in the ashes of their world, surrounded by the corpses of their people, they’d plotted their revenge. Tanik had planned to use his fake identity to infiltrate the Revenants and find a way to destroy them from within.
The Keth had always said he was destined for greatness. Tanik had never understood why they’d said that until this moment. Now, after twenty years of plotting and striving to tear the Union apart, it was all finally coming together. They’d finally done it.
“Tell me, Tanik,” Feyra said in a whispering voice. “Did you succeed?”
“I did. The war has begun. Darius destroyed the Cygnians’ homeworld. The Revenants had planned to cripple them in one blow, but I managed to stop them by letting the Cygnian Revenants escape and warn their people.”
Feyra’s dancing eyes widened and she smiled. “Darius destroyed their world? He has come a long way since you chased him off that cliff. It’s a good thing I put him back together again.”
Tanik nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“But I wonder, why bother
? Why him? Why go to so much trouble to make him feel special?”
“Because he is special,” Tanik said.
Feyra arched an eyebrow—a human gesture, one of many that she’d picked up from him. “But you didn’t need him to do any of this. You have the same power to influence other Revenants that he does. You could have done it all on your own.”
“Yes, my love, I could have, but then I would have to be the one fighting with the Revenants, risking my life to tear them apart from within. This way, I’ve trained someone else to take up the crusade for me, which means we can be together while the war runs its course. The galaxy will burn, and our people will rebuild.”
“Yes...” Feyra replied, smiling blissfully. “It’s all happening just as you said it would.”
“More or less,” Tanik agreed.
“But why lure the girl to her death?”
Tanik smiled. Feyra had always been good at reading his mind. It helped that she was just as gifted with the ZPF as he.
“Darius needs a reason to make this war personal,” he explained. “Now he has one. And besides, she’s not dead.” Tanik reached into his jumpsuit and withdrew a vial of clear liquid.
“What is that?” Feyra asked.
“Antivenin. From a Ghoul’s venom sac.”
“The one who stabbed her?”
Tanik nodded.
“You extracted it so that you could save her? Why?”
“Insurance. Darius is very powerful. We may need leverage someday.”
Feyra looked dubious. “There has never been a Revenant as powerful as you.” She rubbed his arm appreciatively and licked her lips with a bright pink tongue. Her sparkling eyes widened, and her mouth parted with a mixture of awe and adoration—or perhaps that was lust. It had been a long time since they’d last seen each other, let alone had time to themselves.
“I am not a Revenant,” he chided. “Just because I took his name and look somewhat like him, does not mean that I am him.”
“No, you’re right,” Feyra replied. “I am sorry. Speaking of your namesake...” She pulled an ancient-looking necklace from a pocket in the loose-fitting white tunic that she wore. It was the heart-shaped locket Darius had seen in his vision. “You’re very lucky that no one opened this,” Feyra said. She flicked the heart-shaped pendant open with her thumb, and a life-sized hologram of two people wrapped in each other’s embrace flickered to life.
The Revenants Page 31