Percival’s eyes were fixed on the Rokura. Cade was coming out of the spell, but he had the feeling Percival was heading deeper in. “We could stop this war,” Percival said, his words dripping with desire. “We could end Ga Halle like we should have so many years ago. We could—”
“Percival,” Cade said, pulling hard on the Rokura. “Percival!”
With a labored breath, Percival snapped back into focus. He released the Rokura and staggered backward, covering his mouth as he went. He pointed at the Rokura, waving it off, and Cade got the feeling that, while Percival saw value in the Rokura’s power—power that could change the course of the galaxy—he feared it as well.
“I’m sorry, Cade. I am. But you have no choice. I—I can’t trust myself with it. And if you don’t possess it soon, it’ll find its way to Ga Halle. She’s been preparing for this her entire life. She’s ready. But I can get you there as well, Cade. I can train you, just like I trained Kobe. Only you’ll succeed where he failed. Where I failed. You have the Rokura; you’ve heard its call. Now I’ll finish what’s been started. I’ll make you the Paragon.”
Cade looked at the Rokura, this thing that was supposed to be the key to ushering in an era of peace to the galaxy. But that was seeming less and less likely all the time, and Cade never felt more despair in his life as he realized everything around him—both sides in this galactic conflict—was broken. Praxis, the Well, the Rising Suns—not a single one of them delivered what they promised, clinging instead to their warped ideas of peace and how it’s achieved. And now, Cade was thrust in the middle of it all; he had been given a life sentence without committing a crime, and there was nothing for him to do but accept it.
“I don’t want it,” he mumbled. “I don’t…”
Percival stood at Cade’s side and patted his back. “I’m sorry, Cade. But you don’t have a say in the matter. Praxis has become too strong, and the Well is poisoned. This must happen.”
Cade looked up. “What?” he asked, and before he even had time to react, he was surrounded by a half dozen of Percival’s soldiers. They all had their blasters trained on Cade.
“Come on, you can’t be serious,” Cade said.
Percival backed away from Cade, and with Kobe by his side, they joined the soldiers.
“We’re not on this planet without reason, Cade. As we’ve been hiding in this forest, we’ve always been feeding explosives to the Mithladorians in the mines. Right before you and I came out here, Kobe informed me that at the next shift rotation, the explosions would go live. Which means we have exactly forty minutes to evacuate this planet. You and your friends are coming with us.”
“Evacuate the planet?” Cade asked. “We’re miles from the mines. Why would we have to leave the planet entirely?”
Percival sighed. “It’s no use to just ruin the mining operation. We have to destroy what Praxis is after as well. We have to obliterate all the koruvite.
“The explosives—they’re nucletoid bombs.”
A chill ran up Cade’s spine. He backed away from the encroaching squad, nearing the edge of the ridge.
“You’re out of your mind. You’re going to kill the entire planet. The Mithladorians, they—”
“—knew exactly what they were getting into, and we’re in the process of evacuating as many as we can. This is war, Cade. We’re doing what we have to do, and you’d better get used to it. Praxis can’t be allowed to build more War Hammers, it’s as simple as that.”
Cade grimaced and shook his head, disgusted by what he was hearing. He thought of Quarry and its barren, bleak landscape. He looked around Mithlador, at the trees, plants, and life that surrounded him. He couldn’t bear to imagine what it would look like in the very near future, when all of it was dead. “You’re destroying a planet to get what you want. That remind you of someone?”
Percival began to stomp toward him, then stopped himself. “Don’t you dare say that to me. Do you know what I’ve given in this fight? Do you know what I’ve sacrificed of myself? You Rai—you think you have all the answers without asking a single question.”
“Where are my friends?” Cade yelled. “I’m not going anywhere until I know they’re safe.”
“Your friends are fine; they’re back at the camp waiting for you,” Percival said, sliding back into an amiable tone. “I’m not a bad person, Cade. And I agree with you—we do need the Paragon. But under my terms. Now come off that ridge and follow us back. Your friends don’t even have to know about our arrangement. They follow you, and you follow me.”
Cade took a step back, bringing him right to the very last inch of the ridge’s real estate. He looked down and smiled. “We would have been better together, Percival, but you blew it. Because I’m not following you anywhere.”
The realization of what Cade was about to do washed over Percival’s face. “Cade, no—!” he said, but it was too late.
“See ya, Percy,” Cade said, right before he took one final step back and dropped off the edge of the cliff. He heard Percival yell his name, shock filling his voice. That same shock was also on his face when Cade shot over the ridge on the dasher bike. He flew right over Percival’s head and landed on the ground with a crash. Even though they were meant to be land-cruising vehicles, dasher bikes had enough propulsion to allow for short bursts of flight—Cade had pushed this one to its max, propelling it over Percival and his men. He turned and winked at Percival before speeding off.
* * *
“Whoa, sweet ride,” Mig said when Cade pulled up alongside him. The encampment was all but emptied out, save a few soldiers who, Cade assumed, were waiting around for Percival to return. Percival’s numbers were thankfully thinned out due to the evacuation process.
“Where’s Percival?” Kira asked.
“Um, probably a few clicks behind me, running his ass off to get here and catch me,” Cade said.
Kira groaned unhappily. “What did you do, Cade?”
“Look, I have no time to explain everything that happened. What you need to know is that Percival is going to wipe out this half of planet with nucletoid bombs that he’s had placed all over the mines.”
“Those are quite bad,” 4-Qel said. “I strongly urge we leave before we’re incinerated.”
“Yup, seconded,” Mig said, clasping his hands together. “Let’s go.”
“Okay, yes, we could leave. Or—”
“Or we stay here and die?” Mig asked, confused.
“The bombs aren’t set to blow for thirty-seven more minutes. That gives us thirty-seven minutes to steal Praxis’s most precious commodity right from under their noses. Which would pretty much make this the biggest heist in the galaxy.”
Kira, Mig, and 4-Qel looked at Cade, their faces blank, then they looked at each other. None of them said a word.
“Clock’s ticking, guys,” Cade said.
“We won’t get another chance to snag any koruvite, I can tell you that much,” Mig said. “And I’m all for messing Praxis up in the worst way possible.”
4-Qel shrugged. “It could be fun.”
Cade looked at Kira. “We’re a team. It’s all or none. What do you say?”
Kira smiled and hopped onto the dasher bike’s passenger seat. “Let’s do this.”
Mig and 4-Qel took the two seats in the back of the dasher bike, and Cade hit the ignition. The bike’s engine, which gave it its powerful thrust and hovering capacity, burst to life, and they were ready to take off.
“Thirty-six minutes,” Cade said. “Let’s make it a point to really, really keep track of the time.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The mining colony was engulfed by chaos. Cade pulled the dasher bike just short of a firefight between Percival’s infantry and Praxis gunners, all protected by their AI armor. The armor, though, wasn’t much of an issue for the infantry’s objective, Cade recognized. Half the squad was laying down cover fire, keeping the gunners in a defensive position behind the cover of steel support beams that were fused to the ground
throughout the colony. The other half of the squad was rushing Mithladorians away from the action and to a transport shuttle that Cade could just barely see sticking up from behind a latticework of aboveground pipes that divided one side of the colony from the other. At least Percival was true to his word, Cade begrudgingly admitted. But he was still a jerk.
Night had consumed Mithlador, though light coming from the many bulbs that dotted the colony’s landscape provided enough illumination to keep the operation running under normal conditions. But these weren’t normal conditions, and the fires that roared across much of the colony added a hazy orange tint to the sky just above Cade’s head. It was a nice bit of justice, Cade concluded, that the lights Praxis used to push the Mithladorian miners into grueling working hours were now helping to guide an insurrection. If this set off Praxis’s fury, Cade could only imagine how livid the kingdom would be when he and his friends used a dose of koruvite to give it a taste of its own medicine.
On the three-minute ride to the colony, 4-Qel briefed everyone as well as he could on its layout. Thankfully, he’d done his homework and studied the planet way more thoroughly than anyone else. Though, to be fair, he was the only one who had the capacity to memorize detailed schematics.
The colony was a massive metropolis that, when pitted against its surrounding landscape, looked like it had been dropped onto the planet’s surface rather than slowly assembled over time. Giant towers spiked into the ground, plunging enormous drills down into the surface in order to excavate as much koruvite as possible without the use of manual labor. Smokestacks belched some of the unusable by-product of the operation into the night air, while fiery eruptions, coming from slender towers, burned off the rest. Through it all, mining drones—shielded flying orbs with a single ocular lens dug into their centers—zipped around overhead, servicing the entire operation.
At ground level, the place was a labyrinth of pipes, catwalks connecting one tower to another, and steel doors covering tunnels that led down into the mines. Just the idea of following one of those tunnels, however far it led into an oppressive, deep down dark, terrified Cade. If he didn’t fully understand why the Mithladorians were so eager to level the entire operation to the ground, he did now. Praxis built this monstrous colony on their planet and then forced them to work to death. In their desperation, mass destruction would probably seem like the only option they had left.
“Okay,” Cade said, leading Kira, Mig, and 4-Qel to cover behind a tower’s base. “Where to?”
4-Qel craned his head around the tower to scan the area. “Judging by the blueprints I saw, we need to go … there.”
Cade joined 4-Qel, poking out his head to see where the drone was pointing.
A giant silo, smack dab in the middle of the colony.
“Couldn’t be on the outskirts, could it?” Cade grumbled. He turned back to the rest. “So, we’re going to have to make it through some evacuation skirmishes between us and the koruvite storage. We’ll leave the bike here because if it gets wrecked, we have no way back to the Rubicon, which means we all die.
“Everyone ready to run and fight?”
Nods all around; sidewinders drawn.
“Thirty-one minutes. Nobody stops unless they absolutely have to. And we stick together.”
With Cade at the lead, they charged out from the tower’s base, ready for anything. And it was good that they were, because as soon as they turned around a series of pipes, they caught up to a gunner patrol chasing a group of Mithladorians—furry little blue creatures with trunks that dangled off their faces—who were racing toward one of Percival’s escape ships. Realizing they were about to be gunned down—and in the back, no less—the Mithladorians turned to surrender. But Cade knew better; Praxis wasn’t in the business of taking prisoners.
Cade charged the gunners. He was less than ten yards away when he ignited his shido and launched it like it was a javelin. Either he was getting better or getting lucky because he hit the bull’s-eye, striking the lead gunner in her back. Before she could even hit the ground, her four-person squad turned, their E-9s hot.
“Down!” Cade heard behind him, and he ducked just in time for Mig to fire off a shot from his custom third barrel. The blast hit the closest gunner directly in his chest, and it sent his suit into electrified paralysis. He made a weird gurgling noise before his limbs went limp and he collapsed to the ground.
“And you said we’d never need my paralysis ammo!” Mig yelled toward 4-Qel. Cade turned and saw 4-Qel with a gunner held over his shoulder.
“I said I prefer to maim, not disable,” 4-Qel said as he launched the gunner into the air, sending him soaring headfirst into the middle of a tower. Cade winced at the sound of a good many of the gunner’s bones crunching on impact.
Noticing a gunner running straight at him, Cade rolled beneath his electroaxe’s swipe and landed next to his shido. He yanked it from the downed gunner’s back and, seeing Kira running at his side, tossed her the weapon. She grabbed it in full stride and batted the gunner in his chest, doubling him over and leaving the back of his head exposed for a final blow. Kira obliged the opportunity.
“I can get used to this thing,” Kira said as she handed Cade his weapon.
“Well, don’t,” Cade replied. “Twenty-eight minutes, so—”
“You saved us,” a voice said from behind. Cade turned to find that the Mithladorians who’d been fleeing the gunners were still hanging around. “We owe you a debt of—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cade said. “Pay us later. Right now, you have to escape and we have to—”
The Mithladorian raised the cobalt trunk that extended out from the middle of his head and pointed it at Cade.
“Shake. Bond.”
Cade sighed and grabbed the squishy trunk. “Yes, okay, bond. Now beat it.”
The Mithladorians darted to the nearest transport ship while Cade and his team raced toward the silo. They covered a good amount of ground without interruption, and they were nearly to the silo when they turned a corner and encountered trouble. Big trouble.
Between them and the stairway leading up to the silo’s entrance was a scene that Cade couldn’t quite accurately call a skirmish; it was a straight-up battle.
Praxis gunners and Rising Sun infantry blanketed the area with blaster fire, relentless and inescapable. Each side was at least twenty soldiers deep, and as far as Cade could tell, this fight wasn’t ending anytime soon. Both sides were entrenched in their positions, trapped there, in fact. Even if one side wanted to fall back, they’d be immediately mowed down by their enemy. And even if Cade bothered to intervene, toppling a force of this size would chew up way more time than they had to spare.
“4-Qel, tell me there’s a way around this,” Cade commanded. “A tunnel under?”
4-Qel stroked his chin, surveying the area. He looked to the sky, and his eyes narrowed. “Under?” he asked, sounding rhetorical. “No, not under. Over.”
Without hesitation—or asking—4-Qel used one hand to grab Cade by the back of his jacket and the other to grab him by his crotch.
“Hey!” Cade yelled, but he was already in the air, soaring to a catwalk about fifty feet above his head—but getting nearer fast. He reached his hand out just in time to grab the metal railing before he flew past it; 4-Qel put a little too much oomph behind his launch.
Just as Cade was pulling himself onto the catwalk—and catching his breath—Mig landed right next to him.
“He does that sometimes,” Mig said.
Kira landed behind Cade, and Cade looked to the ground, wondering how 4-Qel would join them. His concerns were quelled as 4-Qel sprung off of nearby pipes onto the side of an adjacent tower and used its side to propel himself up to the catwalk, where he landed with a crash.
“See?” 4-Qel said, patting Cade’s arm as he walked by. “Over.”
Cade laughed, awkwardly, as he realized what a good thing it was that 4-Qel was on their side. The only thing that made him more terrifying was the thought
of him becoming an enemy.
“Right,” Cade said. “Over.”
They sprinted to the silo with only twenty-two minutes to spare. This couldn’t get much tighter, Cade estimated. Fortunately, when they reached the silo’s entrance, it was unguarded. 4-Qel shredded a hole through the outer shutters, and they dove down a winding staircase that led straight to the silo’s vast storage space. There, they found gray cases—so many that Cade couldn’t even venture to guess how many there were—that measured about three feet wide and two feet deep, all stacked and lined up in perfect rows.
A feeling of relief, apprehensive relief, afforded Cade an anxiety-free moment. It was about time something worked out in their favor.
Cade grabbed a case by its handle and flipped it over. He was struck by how light the case was; his assumption, which he felt was based on pretty sound reasoning, had been that material strong enough to safeguard against the sun would at least have a little heft. But this case was light, almost like it had nothing in it. Cade cursed himself for acknowledging what he thought at the time was good fortune.
With the clicking release of the case’s two fasteners, its top separated from the bottom, and Cade was struck by a shimmering glow. He yanked the case open, and inside was something he’d never seen before. Given its indestructible power, Cade expected the koruvite to be … well, he hadn’t thought it through, exactly. He never would have guessed, though, that he’d be able to hold up a sheet of koruvite between his two fingers. The mysterious element was paper-thin and clear, though almost gaseous orange and yellow plumes swirled from one end of the sheet to the other, radiating a soft glow.
“Is this it? Kurovite?” Cade asked.
“What else can it be?” Kira replied.
“Let’s see,” 4-Qel said, and he unholstered his sidewinder in a blink of an eye and fired a round into the assumed koruvite. Which also happened to be right in front of Cade’s face.
Wide-eyed, Cade was paralyzed. His heart may have even stopped beating.
“Why would you do that?” Cade asked, still stunned.
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