The Exiled Earthborn (45 page)

“What have you seen?” Lucas asked her.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she replied coldly. Lucas couldn’t imagine much worse than what he’d been forced to witness, but who knew? He still couldn’t shake the image of her and Maston and the pile of corpses, including their own children. It had sunk into him and seemed like it would be impossible to extricate.

“So you’re saying this thing is putting these images in our minds?”

It was the woman who spoke, Reyes. The “Whisper.” She had such dark circles under her eyes it almost looked like war paint.

“A Chosen Shadow has telepathic abilities, the full extent of which is not yet understood. Though, from our collective symptoms, this seems to be the most likely answer.”

The man, Kovacs, rubbed his eyes.

“Is there any way to make it stop? We can’t train like this.”

Lucas wondered what career assassins had nightmares about.

Zeta chimed in. She looked less fatigued than the lot of them, but that wasn’t saying much. Perhaps what she’d already endured while in captivity was worse than any terror the Shadow could show her.

“Alpha and I will try to develop a compound to feed into the pod’s ventilation unit to disrupt its brainwaves. Though that poses a few risks. We could wake it, for one.”

“It’s worth the risk,” Asha said with arms crossed. She’d already been driven insane once by maddening visions caused by Xalan technology; she wasn’t about to have it happen again.

“Why is he doing this?” asked Kiati, who looked more angry than usual.

“I believe he is showing us visions based on manifestations of our own deepest fears ingrained in our subconscious. This would explain the … intensely personal nature of the horrors,” Alpha said. “It is the only way he can torment us in his present state, without access to his physical body.”

“And we really can’t remove his physical body for good?” Lucas asked.

“Not without immediately alerting Xala something is wrong onboard.”

Maston had remained silent through all of this.

“If he shows me her one more time, I’m going to lose it,” he said. “I’ll rip his telepathic brain from his skull and send it out an airlock.”

“That would be ill-advised,” Alpha said calmly.

“Then do it,” Maston growled. “Make it stop. Or I will.”

But Alpha and Zeta couldn’t stop it. Not really. The compound they’d mixed up in their mad scientist lab didn’t wake the creature, but it didn’t stop the dreams either; it merely slowed their production. The nightmares still came, the pain still felt real, but it was only a few nights of the week now. Not a true solution, but at least something of a bandage.

Lucas had lost his roommate for good when Asha woke one night and almost slit his throat before snapping out of it. They called it even, but more serious steps had to be taken. Each night now, everyone onboard was locked in their rooms, away from weapons that could be used to hurt themselves or others.

This was torture, plain and simple. A mentally manufactured hell from which they couldn’t escape. Lucas was tempted more than once to smash through the glass and cut the Shadow’s head off, but he refrained, as did Maston, despite his earlier threats.

The two of them were in the cargo deck watching Asha and Reyes spar with each other. Asha had her faithful black-bladed sword and Reyes used two curved silver blades that were miraculously made out of a material Asha couldn’t slice through. The two whirled around each other like the wind and clangs echoed through the chamber. Kiati and Kovacs were strategizing over virtual central command blueprints in the corner. Training was a way for all of their bodies to release the built-up rage induced by the nightmares, and planning focused their minds elsewhere, giving them problems to solve. But currently Lucas and Maston were doing neither.

“What does he show you?” Lucas asked. It was a dangerous question as he didn’t want to set Maston off. But he was less angry today, and merely looked fatigued.

“It’s Cora,” he said quietly. “It’s always Corinthia. Tortured, mutilated, battered, raped, dismembered. It’s too much to take.”

He put his palms to his forehead.

“Why her?” Lucas asked.

“I have no one else,” Maston said. “It was only her. I never cared for anyone as much. I never will.”

He stared out into the room as Reyes took a swing and missed Asha’s throat by a millimeter.

“And even worse, it’s always Tulwar. He’s there with that serene smile on his face, committing the atrocities. And I can never reach him. Can never kill him. When I get close, he simply drifts away until the next night, and it starts all over again.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucas said.

Maston folded his hands together.

“Not as sorry as the thing’s going to be the second we no longer need him alive.”

“I meant I’m sorry about Tulwar. I’m sorry we let him win.”

Maston threw up his hand dismissively.

“You didn’t let him do shit. He played us, and did it well. All of us underestimated him, even before you showed up.”

“If I’d let you kill him in Rhylos—” Lucas said.

“Cora would still be dead.”

“And if we hadn’t shown up at all?”

Maston fell silent for a minute. Then two. The only sound in the room was the clashing of metal in front of them. Asha was certainly being put through her paces from the looks of it.

“Tulwar and the Xalans would have found a way. As it happens, your presence is more likely to save us than destroy us.”

He paused again.

“And you’re the first friends I’ve had in years.”

Maston gazed outward toward the duel in front of them, which was now drawing to a close. Both women were obviously fatigued, and the floor was wet with sweat and a few drops of blood from rogue swings.

Reyes dashed toward Asha, swinging her blades like a combine about to devour a line of crops. Asha spun to avoid the onslaught, whipping around her sword, which was immediately caught between the two blades. One sharp flick of the wrist from Reyes and the sword was wrenched from Asha’s hand and thrown across the room, where it stuck into the wall.

“Yield?” Reyes asked with her one of her blades hovering in front of Asha’s eye, the other pressed to her navel.

Asha just snorted before leaping backward and thrusting her legs forward into Reyes’s stomach. She landed on her hands and propelled herself back to her feet. Her electromagnetic metal cuff had already been activated and the sword rocked out of the wall and into her hand. Reyes tried to recover, but Asha flipped the sword around so that the flat of the blade rested against her neck. With a sly smile she flicked the pommel and a quick jolt of electricity sent Reyes instantly crumpling to the ground. Not enough to fry her for good, but her hair was smoking as she lay on the deck.

“Cheating bitch,” said Reyes, rubbing her head. But she was smiling. Asha extended her hand and helped her to feet.

“No such thing,” Asha replied. She turned to Maston and Lucas.

“You two up next?”

As time passed, the voyage toward Xala grew quieter and quieter. Evenings of restless sleep had everyone on edge, and no one bothered to talk about their latest nightmares anymore. The atmosphere onboard grew increasingly tense. With each passing day they were closer to a place they might never leave.

They now headed into the final day before they’d reach Xala. Alpha was double- and triple-checking their broadcast signatures and lifeform readouts to ensure everything was in order for the interceptor to pass inspection. There had been no incidents with the sleeping soldiers on the lower deck. Though the Shadow plagued them with visions in their sleep, Alpha believed it was not in his power to telepathically contact anyone on Xala from such a distance, especially in his current comatose state.

Everyone was itching to dive into the mission. They’d been training exceptionally hard to prepare for what was to come. Kiati and Reyes, the two tank-bred superhumans, had been putting them all through hell, and Lucas had never felt so powerful before. Combined with top-of-the-line armor and weaponry, Lucas began to feel like the eight of them could storm the whole of Xala themselves, though that was a lofty ambition. Central command would be enough of a task, as even ghosting their way into the building they’d likely meet a great deal of resistance. And getting out was another level of impossible in itself. The looks on everyone’s faces as they roamed the halls suggested no one expected to make it back to Sora.

The last few hours had been all business. No room for fear or nervousness anymore. They went over their infiltration plan for the thousandth time and laid out their combat kits so they could be assembled and equipped in seconds. Once they were cleared to enter Xalan airspace, they would exterminate the crew, infiltrate central command, disseminate the message, and then escape while everything was in chaos. When put like that, it didn’t sound all that bad, but the reality was likely to be far more complex.

23

There would be no dazzling array of stars or planets to greet Lucas as they came out of the space-time tunnel into the Xalan solar system. He was locked away in a windowless cell. The other six non-Xalans were in their own individual cells. When they entered the system, their ship would be scanned, and Alpha didn’t want to take any chances. Everything had to look normal, and Zeta had spent a week forging the Shadow captain’s biological and vocal prints that would let them pass into Xala. They had been broadcasting occasional updates to Xala during transit, but they’d be under much closer scrutiny here. One wrong word or suspicious readout and they would be boarded or blown out of the sky before they could even see the Xalan homeworld.

Lucas could feel the moment they exited the wormhole and started moving through space the old-fashioned way. Even if they were covering less distance, it felt like they were speeding up, now traveling at millions of miles an hour rather than suspended inside a place devoid of such measurements.

It was hard to tell what was taking place outside. They kept stopping and starting, presumably moving through the series of military checkpoints that Alpha warned them would be coming.

Lucas did push-ups on the floor of his cell to distract him. There was no way to know what was going on. Alpha wasn’t broadcasting or translating any communication to the rest of them as he’d done previously. “Zero unnecessary risks” was his mantra for the entire mission, and everything had to be by the book to an almost insanely detailed degree.

Lucas wished Asha were here. Even though she was just in the next cell over, the thick, soundproof walls made her all but nonexistent. All the same, when he had exhausted himself, he leaned up against the wall where he figured she might be.

Then Lucas did something very strange. He prayed.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done so. His faith had left him the moment the Xalans showed up on Earth, though in truth it had probably been many years before that. Here, with no one else to turn to, he prayed fervently to not just one omnipotent being, but any he could think of. Kyneth, Zurana, Saato, Valli. Maybe one of the stories was true. Maybe one of them out there would help them. In other circumstances, he would have felt foolish, but these were desperate times.

There was no answer, of course. But perhaps the silence was an answer in itself. Every second that went by where Lucas couldn’t hear the clang of a security ship boarding them, or the explosion of a missile breaching the hull, was indeed what he had asked for. Whether luck or skill or divine intervention, Lucas didn’t care at this point.

Finally, that one little word he’d been waiting for came booming through the ship.

“Go.”

It was Alpha’s voice, which meant they’d cleared the last hurdle required for phase two of the plan to kick into action. Lucas sprang up from the floor of his cell, the lightscreen in front of him deactivated, and the metal door behind it slid open. He tumbled out into the hall, almost crashing into Kovaks, who was in the room across from him. To his left was Asha, and next to her Maston and Kiati and Reyes followed. All had a fierce look of determination in their eyes, and no one hesitated for longer than a second as they sprinted to the armory. As Lucas ran down the hall, he could now see stars out of the ship’s portholes, and in the distance a supergiant star burned bronze. Xala’s sun. It looked old, ancient.

Within a matter of minutes, the six of them were outfitted in their stealth suits. Lucas felt the nanofibers of his armor turn icy, a way to slow down his pounding heart. He grabbed Natalie, a sidearm pistol, his knife, and a grenade belt, checking each one final time to ensure all were in working order. Looking over at Asha, he saw that she was already armed to the teeth and wore her familiar combat scowl. She bounced on the soles of her feet, waiting for everyone else to catch up. Soon, they all did, and the deadly fighting force before him was fearsome to behold. At least it would have been if they were about to take on anything but an entire planet.

They arrived on the bridge to find Alpha and Zeta similarly equipped. Alpha had appropriated and modified the Shadow captain’s set of power armor, and Zeta was wearing Paragon plating. Both were highly functional, but also a worthwhile disguise if need be. A helmet covered each of their heads so their gray and white flesh wouldn’t give them away.

“What’s the status?” asked Maston, the first to enter the room and the ranking officer leading the mission.

“We successfully passed through three checkpoints on the outskirts of the system,” said Alpha.

“No problems at all?” said Maston.

“It appears not,” Alpha said somewhat proudly. “We underwent six separate scans, which left no doubt our manifest was as we claimed.”

“What’s that?” Lucas asked, pointing to a vaguely menacing-looking readout full of red dots that were slowly eclipsing adjacent green ones.

“I have begun exterminating the crew before the ship’s auto-wake function activates. Half are dead already from the neurotoxin I have released, the rest will be extinguished shortly.”

He said it without a hint of remorse or emotion. Alpha, despite appearing to be a meek scientist most of the time, was as stonehearted as any of them when he needed to be. Lucas thought back to when he’d ripped the throat out of his former mentor who dared to taunt him about his murdered family.