The Exiled Earthborn (16 page)

Lucas blocked out Maston’s last few points, one of which brought a rousing cheer from the soldiers around him. Upon hearing “dismissed,” he and Asha remained where they were. Most of the soldiers filtered out to the cryo area. The Xalan pods had been stripped out and replaced with ones suited for Soran biology, which didn’t have the unfortunate side-effect of unleashing scarring flashbacks or outright madness.

A few Guardians were filtering toward the front, however, including Kiati and Silo. Lucas counted twenty in total. When they were all assembled, Maston launched into a new set of directives.

“Congratulations. You lucky few have been chosen to stay out of cryosleep in order to help our newest recruits not kill themselves or us once we reach Makari.”

Lucas couldn’t contain a look of surprise as all twenty hulking soldiers turned to glower at the pair of them. Asha interrupted Maston.

“Really, we’re fine,” she said. “Wasn’t the Fourth Order raid proof enough we know what we’re doing?”

“How can something so lovely be so dense?” Maston wondered aloud to the snickering Guardians. Flames flashed in Asha’s eyes, but Lucas put his hand on her arm to prevent her from tearing his head off.

“This isn’t just about you and your inexplicable ability to stay alive. The Guardians are a single unit, and only as strong as their weakest. Despite the admittedly adequate combat skill the two of you possess, you know nothing of the tactics, techniques, or training of the Guardians.”

Asha was still fuming from the insult and had likely not heard a word he’d just said.

“Every man and woman here was bred to be a warrior before they were even born. They have strength and intelligence natural biology like yours cannot possibly compete with. You are inferior.”

That did it. Asha lunged at Maston, but he deftly moved to the side, caught her with a haymaker blow, and slammed her down on the holotable. Lucas sprang to her aid but was leveled by a high kick from Maston that landed just under his jaw. He released Asha, shoving her toward Lucas who was struggling back to his feet.

“You know nothing, Earthborn,” he said smugly, his demeanor closer to the time they’d first met. He’d clearly locked Corinthia away in some dark corner of his mind now.

“But we will do you the honor of teaching you as much as you are able to learn.”

Adrenaline was flowing through Lucas like lava, but he restrained himself from further assault, as did Asha, surprisingly. A single trickle of blood streamed from her cut lip. Lucas could now shift one of his molars with his tongue. Maston continued talking as if nothing had just happened.

“You twenty have been chosen as the best possible instructors for these new
recruits,
” he said the word contemptuously, “and will spend the duration of the trip molding them into something resembling half an actual Guardian.”

More stifled laughter.

“Space and equipment is limited aboard this craft, but most exercises will require only your body, and your mind,” he said, turning back to them.

“Dismissed.”

Asha stormed out of the CIC without a word, and most of the other Guardians followed her. Maston stayed at the holotable and started sifting through data on Makari, ignoring Lucas.

“I don’t understand you, Maston,” Lucas said to him. He didn’t look up.

“That’s probably for the best.”

“All we want to do is help.”

“All I want to do is get this over with,” he replied, scrolling through three-dimensional terrain maps. “Tulwar’s trial starts the week we get back.”

“You realize this mission could change the entire course of the war?” Lucas said emphatically.

Maston turned to glare at him.

“What do you know of our war? What you’ve read in scrolls? What you’ve seen on the Stream? Have you smelled the air after Golgoth? Have you walked through the ruins of Bedlam? Have you heard the screams at Vitalla? You’re a tourist at best, a dangerous distraction at worst.”

“Isn’t it enough that I watched my entire planet burn, along with everyone I loved?” Lucas growled.

“Not everyone,” Maston said.

Lucas realized the conversation had become a recursive loop and began to walk away. A thought stopped him.

“What happened at Vitalla?”

Maston flashed him another look of anger, but as he turned back to the screen before him, Lucas was surprised to see his expression shift into something resembling anguish, if only for a brief moment. The silence said Lucas should press no further, and he was tired of dealing with the man anyway. Lucas rubbed his bruised jaw and winced.

He approached Alpha in the central command chair. Alpha was running through a pre-flight checklist of sorts, and green indicators seemed to say the Spear was ready for another galactic journey.

“They do not trust me,” Alpha said with a twinge of sadness as Lucas came to stand beside him.

“They’re here, aren’t they? That’s enough.”

“I cannot understand how they fail to realize the importance of this mission. They think I have set them on, what is the phrase? A ‘fool’s errand.’”

Lucas shook his head.

“It’s not that. They lost a lot of friends today and wish they could be helping. Exploring a planet light-years in the other direction is a hard sell. They probably think we should be attacking this colony, not infiltrating it.”

Alpha revved the engines and the entire ship rumbled.

“That would be an unwise tactical decision.”

“Well, the Vales have faith in you, or else they wouldn’t have greenlit this. And you know Asha and I always have your back.”

“That is appreciated,” Alpha said. His six-fingered mechanical hand was speeding through a control cluster. The viewscreen before them opened to reveal the hangar doors.

“Besides, you’ll get to see Zeta again.”

Alpha’s face brightened instinctively.

“I hope that is indeed the case.”

“Tell me,” Lucas said wryly. “When you said you became … close with her. Were you—”

Alpha sighed.

“You and your kind’s notions of romance. Such things do not exist in Xalan culture. Most pairings are arranged from birth. Zeta was promised to an army commander for the duration of the time I knew her.”

“And who were you promised to, before all this?” Lucas asked.

“Someone I would not deem a suitable match. Being sent to the Earth campaign allowed me to temporarily escape my obligations. My treason freed me from them entirely. I am sure my promised partner was elated.”

“But Zeta?” Lucas asked. “She would have been a ‘suitable match’?”

“We shared many common interests and goals, yes. Physically, we would have made a better pairing, as well, than our assigned matches. Light coloring is a good indicator of fertility and quality genetics in females. And I have never seen anyone with a coat as pure as hers.”

“So you thought she was cute.”

“You have a way of simplifying things to the point of annoyance.”

The hangar doors were starting to open.

“Well, you know,” Lucas said. “Her treason has probably freed her from her obligations as well.”

The thought struck Alpha like a silent thunderbolt, but after pausing briefly, he resumed his duties at the controls.

“Just something to think about on the way,” Lucas said with a masked smile.

“You may want to find a seat,” Alpha said, motioning toward one of the two smaller chairs that were on either side of him. Lucas saw that Maston had occupied one already. It was comically oversized for his frame, meant for an eight-foot-tall Xalan. Lucas walked toward the rightmost chair.

“He’s not authorized to—” Maston began. Alpha held up his metal claw to silence him.

“I require his presence on deck. Secure your restraints and cease verbal communication.”

Alpha answered to no one here. It was his ship, whether Maston liked it not. Realizing that reality, he did as instructed with a scowl.

Vibrations.

Tunnel.

Daylight.

Elyria.

Blue sky.

Black sky.

Stars.

Planets.

System’s edge.

The blue-green haze of a space-time wormhole.

No matter how many times Lucas made this kind of journey, it would never fail to take his breath away.

9

Lucas stared down at the pile of vomit he’d just created on the floor of the poorly lit storage room. He heaved again, but found himself choking and coughing this time instead of evacuating.

Maston wasn’t joking when he said the Guardians were perfect physical specimens, and trying to live up to their level of strength and vitality seemed like it might kill Lucas before they even reached their destination. The ten pounds he’d gained sampling all of Sora’s finest delicacies before shipping out certainly hadn’t helped matters, but in the past few weeks he’d lost all that and then some.

His body had endured hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and pain out in the wilds of a ruined Earth, but what they were putting him through almost made him miss the wastelands.

“Again,” said the instructor in front of him, a dark, towering man roughly the size of a Volvo. Today was Fight Day. It was exactly what it sounded like.

“Just give me a—”

His plea was interrupted by a seismic slam to the face that propelled him back against the wall of the fiber cage.

It was like this every Fight Day. Lucas was thrust into a makeshift pen and got his ass kicked by Guardian after Guardian. He’d fought Axon, the man in front of him, a few times now, and it had always gone something like this.

Another lightning jab, this one to his twice-broken ribs. Pain at this point was becoming as commonplace as breathing, which was one of the purposes of the exercise, he was told. They’d patch him up with tech that allowed him to heal at ten times the rate of any medical supplies on Earth, but all it would do would be to get him healthy enough to be destroyed again.

Though his trainers consisted of both male and female Guardians, he was kept separated from Asha for practically all hours of the day. The reason given was that they couldn’t become reliant on each other; they first had to draw only on themselves in order to learn to become a solid member of an ironclad team like the Guardians.

“Get your goddamn guard back up!” Axon bellowed at him.

Lucas raised his forearms just in time to deflect a tree-sized arm flung toward him, but couldn’t react in time to catch the surprise follow-up knee to his kidney.

There were also Survival Days, something Lucas thought he should excel at due to his past few years on Earth. But they were more daunting than he anticipated. During one he was forced to tread water in an unfiltered tank for hours until he lost consciousness. After he did so, he found a Guardian dragging him out of the drink and expelling the water from his system with a hearty slap on the chest. They’d test his mind by locking him in a storage crate for what felt like eons, alone with only his thoughts and without the ability to move, see, or hear.

Lucas’s favorite were Marksman Days, as they were the only ones without physical abuse. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. Using a variety of energy weapons, including Natalie, which he had been approved to equip, he shot at jury-rigged moving targets in the galley for hours. Each miss was noted and various punishments would be added on to Fight or Survival Days. Another few hours in the box. Another opponent in the ring.

Today there was only Axon, but that was enough. He might as well have been two people.

Lucas sidestepped an uppercut that would have likely taken his head off. He countered with a high spin-kick that caught Axon on the cheek. When that didn’t faze him, he looped around and tried for another strike at the back of his right knee. This time, Axon caught his leg and jabbed his elbow into Lucas’s thigh. He was far too hoarse to cry out, but below the impact point, he could no longer feel a thing as his overloaded nerves simply shut down.

There was almost never a time of the day where Lucas wasn’t in agony. The line between training and torture was a fine one, but Lucas was determined not to show weakness by complaining to Maston. He would survive. He would become one of the monsters if it killed him.

And it might.

Axon raised both his fists clasped in an axe handle and attempted to smash Lucas’s head down through his neck. He rolled out of the way and hit Axon with a hard cross that actually made him stagger. Using the rarely seen opening, Lucas lunged off his good leg and flung him toward the cage’s cables. Axon staggered backward for a moment, but suddenly planted his foot firmly in the ground. He stopped moving, Lucas didn’t. He flew up and over the man’s shoulders and came crashing down on the outside of the ring. He landed with a crack on the metal floor. He resisted the urge to puke again.

“Enough for today,” Axon said. “Get him wrapped up.”

A familiar tuft of red hair bobbed its way around the side of the cage. A familiar frown followed it. Kiati was assigned to keeping Lucas alive through this, and he’d discovered she was actually a practicing silvercoat in addition to her regular duties of death and destruction. Silo had been assigned to Asha’s training squad, as Maston had deemed him too “friendly” with Lucas based on their past interactions. Kiati had no such conflict of interest.

“Hold still,” she said as she jerked his arm toward her. She sealed a gash with a hot liquid that solidified within seconds. Hiking up his shirt without permission, she sprayed him with a stinging mist that would reduce his abdominal bruising significantly by the time he hit cryo that night. Sleep. It was the only thought driving him most days. He got twelve hours in his frosty cryochamber each night, with the twenty-five that followed spent almost entirely in hellish training.

More liquid was poured over his tattered knuckles, which had gotten the worst of their limited interaction with Axon’s face. Kiati shone a piercing blue light into his eyes that somehow alleviated the nearly constant headaches he suffered on account of repeated blows to his skull. The feeling was starting to flood back into his dead leg now, but it felt like a thousand fire ants were attempting to burrow their way into his bone marrow.