Broken Worlds_Civil War Read online

  Broken Worlds: Civil War

  (1st Edition)

  by Jasper T. Scott

  JasperTscott.com

  @JasperTscott

  Copyright © 2018

  THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS

  FOR THIS BOOK

  Cover Art by Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Author’s Content Rating: PG-13

  Swearing: PG-13, mild with made-up euphemisms

  Sex: mild references

  Violence: moderate

  Author's Guarantee: If you find anything you consider inappropriate for this rating, please e-mail me at [email protected] and I will either remove the content or change the rating accordingly.

  Acknowledgments

  Editing is the least satisfying part of writing, and it also happens to be the part where I need the most help. As such, I’m grateful to have such a great group of editors and advance readers. Among the former many thanks go out to my editor, Dave Cantrell, my volunteer editor, William Schmidt, and to my proofreader, Ian Jedlica. You guys are amazing.

  As for the advance readers, I’m always amazed how each and every one of them finds something different. I can go through a dozen sets of feedback, fix a hundred typos, and somehow advance reader number thirteen will still find something new to fix. It’s a case of the more eyes the merrier when it comes to editing, and my heartfelt thanks go out to: B. Allen Thobois, Chase Hanes, Dave Topan, Davis Shellabarger, Donna Bennet, Gary Matthews, George P. Dixon, Gregg Cordell, Harry Huyler, Ian Seccombe, Jacqueline Gartside, Jeff Belshaw, Kenny Harvey, Lisa Garber, Mary Kastle, Michael Madsen, Paul Birch, Peter Rouse, Ray Miles, Raymond Burt, Rob Dobozy, Ryan Nelson, Shane Haylock, and William Dellaway—you all make me look good!

  To those who dare,

  And to those who dream.

  To everyone who’s stronger than they seem.

  —Jasper Scott

  “Believe in me / I know you’ve waited for so long / Believe in me / Sometimes the weak become the strong.”

  —STAIND, Believe

  Dramatis Personae

  Main Characters

  Darius Drake “Spaceman”

  Human male

  Cassandra Drake “Cass” / “Cassy”

  Human female, 12 years old

  Tanik Gurhain “Scarface”

  Human male

  Dyara “Dya” / “Hottie”

  Human female

  Acolytes

  Thessalus Ubaris “Arok”

  Lassarian male

  Flitter

  Murciago male

  Seelka

  Vixxon female

  Gakram

  Banshee male, deceased

  Secondary Characters

  Trista Leandra

  Human female

  Buddy

  Togran male

  Gatticus Thedroux “Slick” / “Metal Head”

  Male android

  Admiral Ventaris

  Human male

  Blake Nelson

  Human male

  Yuri Mathos

  Lassarian male

  Minor Characters

  The Augur

  Human male, deceased

  Feyra

  Keth female

  Vartok

  Keth male

  Kovar

  Male Cygnian (Ghoul)

  Previously in the Broken Worlds Series

  Broken Worlds (Book 2): The Revenants

  WARNING: The following description contains spoilers for Broken Worlds (Book 2): The Revenants. If you haven’t read that book, you can get it from Amazon here: http://smarturl.it/brokenworlds2

  After the battle at the Crucible, Darius and his daughter, Cassandra, end up stranded on the other side of the Eye with the crew of the Deliverance, and their enigmatic leader, Tanik Gurhain.

  While stranded behind enemy lines, Tanik plans to train Darius and Cassandra, along with a handful of other Acolytes that they rescued in their attack on the Crucible, to become Revenants so that they can take the fight to the Cygnians and defeat the Union. Darius learns that he is special, a so-called Luminary, whose powers can influence other Revenants. While training the Acolytes on Ouroborous, an abandoned planet that used to be the Keth’s home world, Tanik is reunited with his long-lost wife, Samara Guhain, who claims to have been stranded there since the Revenants attacked.

  As time goes by, Darius begins to suspect that Samara isn’t who she claims to be. He starts having visions the lead him to discover the truth: she isn’t Tanik’s wife, but rather the new leader of the Revenants, and she has Tanik under he spell. Her real name is Nova and Samara is dead. The original leader of the Revenants, the Augur, was killed during the invasion of Ouroborous along with Samara.

  Nova has foreseen the same thing Tanik has, that Darius will someday defeat the Cygnians and take over the Union. She is afraid of him and tries to kill him before her visions can come to pass, but he escapes and survives the confrontation.

  Upon returning to camp, Darius learns that Nova has taken over and brought her fleet of Revenants to Ouroborous. She has Tanik and Darius’s own daughter under her mental influence, as well all of the other Acolytes.

  Darius slips into the fortress where everyone is staying, hides in Nova’s room, and sneak-attacks her in the night, killing her. At this point he and Tanik convince Nova’s fleet to join their quest against the Cygnians and the Union. Since Nova had enslaved all of them to her, it wasn’t difficult to convince them to switch sides.

  The fleet flies through the Eye to Union space and prepares for their attack on the Cygnians. Their plan is to use Revenant weapons of mass destruction, called ZPF bombs, each one capable of vaporizing an entire planet.

  While preparing for their war, Darius begins having visions of Cassandra getting killed because she tries to negotiate with the Cygnians. Meanwhile, Tanik pursues a hidden agenda to get Cassandra to do exactly that. He convinces her to leave with him and negotiate with the Cygnians.

  Darius finds out and uses his powers as a Luminary to force the Revenants to go after his daughter and attack the Cygnians prematurely.

  By the time Darius arrives to rescue Cassandra, it’s already too late. He learns that she was poisoned by a Cygnian, and the antidote died with that alien. There is no way to save her, so Tanik freezes her in Cryo. But unbeknownst to Darius, Tanik was able to save a sample of the antivenin, and he plans to use it to manipulate Darius.

  Blinded by rage and a thirst for revenge, Darius destroys the Cygnians’ homeworld with a ZPF bomb, but he has to force a Revenant pilot to sacrifice his life in order to do so. This decision leaves him feeling guilty and conflicted. He struck a deadly blow against the enemy, but at what cost?

  Meanwhile, Tanik opens a wormhole to go back to Ouroborous to visit his real wife, a Keth woman named Feyra. We learn that Tanik was an orphan of the war between the Revenants and the Keth. He was raised by the Keth on Ouroborus. Like Darius, he is also a Luminary, and he was only pretending to be under Nova’s influence. He’s also a look-a-like for one of the Revenants who invaded Ouroborous—a man named Tanik Gurhain who died alongside his wife, Samara Gurhain. After assuming the identity of Tanik, he killed the leader of the Revenants, the Augur himself. Feyra has the man’s head stuffed and mounted on the wall of the cabin she and Tanik once shared on Ouroborous.

  Tanik and Feyra discuss their plans and we learn that Tanik’s agenda to defeat the Cygnians and the Union stems from a desire for revenge against the Revenants who all but wiped out his people, the Keth. The reason he lured Cassandra away to be poisoned by the Cygnians was to gain leverage over Darius, in case he gets out of control. Tanik is the only one who has the antidote that can save Cassandra’s life; he pla
ns to reveal that fact when the time is right in order to get Darius to do whatever he wants. In the meantime, he and Feyra plan to enjoy a well-deserved break from war and fighting while Darius unwittingly pursues their agenda of defeating the Cygnians and destabilizing the Union.

  Broken Worlds (Book 1): The Awakening

  WARNING: The following description contains spoilers for Broken Worlds (Book 1): The Awakening. If you haven’t read that book, you can get it from Amazon here: http://smarturl.it/brokenworlds1

  In the year 2045 AD, Darius Drake and his daughter, Cassandra, were put into cryo-sleep to await a cure for Cass’s cancer. They expected to sleep for fifty years, maybe a hundred, but instead awoke fourteen centuries later, and not on Earth.

  They found themselves aboard a giant spaceship, the Deliverance, with hundreds of other cryo-sleepers, and in orbit around an unfamiliar planet, Hades.

  The ship’s biological crew were all dead, ripped apart by vicious alien predators called Phantoms. Only Gatticus, an android, survived the slaughter but with most of his memory corrupted.

  Gatticus helps Darius and the others solve the mystery of where they are and why. They learn that Hades is a hunting ground of the Cygnians, which turns out to be the proper name for the Phantoms.

  Cygnians hunt humans and other species for sport, and they do it with the approval of the Union, an interstellar government formed to keep peace with the Cygnians. The Union sends criminals and innocent children to designated hunting grounds.

  Children from every species are sent to the Crucible when they come of age. They have no memory of the experience, but each receives a mark on the underside of their right wrists: the seal of life, or the seal of death. Those with the seal of death are sent to designated hunting grounds, such as Hades, while the ones with the seal of life are returned to their parents. A small percentage of children never return and are presumed dead—they are known as Revenants.

  Hades is populated with those sentenced to be hunted. A society has formed on the planet and does its best to defend against Cygnian hunting parties. Darius and some other cryo patients go down to the planet to find fuel for the Deliverance in the hope of escaping the system before the Cygnians show up again.

  But they’re too late. The Cygnians arrive. Cassandra is captured, and presumed dead, while Darius and the others are forced to flee with the help of a man named Tanik Gurhain—an exiled war criminal with mysterious powers.

  After leaving Hades, Tanik assumes leadership of the band of survivors and declares his plan to use the Deliverance and its frozen cargo of patients to fight a war against the Cygnians and their empire—The United Star Systems of Orion (USO). He wakes all of the cryo patients and cures them of their various diseases using nanites.

  Darius is surprised when the entire group agrees to go along with Tanik’s plans. He learns from Dyara Eraya, Tanik’s right-hand, that she has misgivings about him, and that Tanik might in fact be controlling the recently-awoken crew by supernatural means.

  Dyara and Darius seem to be the only ones able to resist Tanik, so they plot to overthrow him. The coup fails, and Dyara is arrested.

  Gatticus learns that Tanik had a role in the death of the Deliverance’s original crew, but before he can warn the others, Tanik disables him and sends him into deep space on a transport ship to cover up his actions.

  Tanik doesn’t arrest Darius for plotting his overthrow, because he believes Darius is the key to defeating the Cygnians.

  Believing his daughter to be dead, Darius only cares about revenge and wants no part of Tanik’s war. He changes his mind when Tanik tells him the Cygnians actually took Cassandra to the Crucible to be tested and marked like all of the other children.

  Clinging to hope, Darius joins forces with Tanik to find and rescue his daughter from the Crucible. They succeed and manage to rescue a handful of other children as well, none of which had been marked. The Crucible is heavily defended, and the Deliverance is forced to flee. Tanik takes them to an abandoned world to hide and reveals the true purpose of the Crucible. It’s part of a eugenics program, designed to breed more Revenants for a war against an enemy called the Keth. The children returned to their parents show signs of being able to breed new Revenants; the ones marked for death are sent to designated hunting grounds to prevent them from propagating, and the ones who never return are conscripted and trained to become Revenants.

  Tanik says he’s going to train Darius, Cassandra, and all of the children they rescued to become Revenants, but not to join the war against the Keth. They’re going to fight the Cygnians instead.

  Darius isn’t pleased about joining a war with his twelve-year-old daughter, no matter how good the cause, but with no fuel and the way back to Union space blocked by Cygnian patrols, he has little choice but to go along with Tanik’s plans.

  Part 1 - Destroyer of Worlds

  Chapter 1

  Dark blue lines spidered the day side of Gaharr’s rocky gray surface, while the dark side of the planet gleamed with the lights of its ten billion residents. It was the fourth Cygnian world the Revenant Fleet had attacked in as many months.

  So much for ending the war before it began, Darius thought. After they’d vaporized Cygnus Prime, the Cygnians hadn’t been frightened into submission. If anything, they were more hostile than ever.

  The bright silver hulls of Cygnian warships gleamed against the dark side of Gaharr. Darius smirked at the sight of them. By now the Cygnians knew what they were up against. Word of what had happened to their last three planets had spread far and wide. But it didn’t matter. These Cygnians had never encountered Revenants before, much less a whole fleet of them.

  “Commander, are you ready?” Admiral Ventaris asked from the command station beside Darius. “Our fighters will arrive any second now,” Ventaris added.

  Darius tore his gaze away from Gaharr and nodded to the admiral. The hint of a smile tugged at the corners of Ventaris’s lips, and the skin around his eyes crinkled.

  The admiral had been Darius’s mentor for the past four months, ever since Tanik had mysteriously disappeared. Darius had learned a lot since then, both about his powers, and the galaxy that he’d woken up in. At first, he’d been horrified at having sent a man to his death to win the battle at Cygnus Prime. Now he realized that it had been a necessary evil, but he was in no hurry to turn anyone else into a suicide bomber. Fortunately, there were other ways of defeating the Cygnians.

  Darius closed his eyes and relaxed against his acceleration harness. He opened his mind to the zero-point field and used his Awareness to find the commander of the enemy fleet.

  It didn’t take him long to zero in on a particular bright and shining presence aboard one of the Cygnians’ three ring ships. The commander was a Ghoul, as usual. Darius zipped inside the alien’s mind and took over. The bridge of the alien ship snapped into focus. He saw a dark, gleaming deck surrounded by curving panoramic viewports arrayed in a circle around five command stations. The Ghoul commander’s station lay in the center of the other four. Banshees, rather than Ghouls, sat at the other stations, recognizable from their smaller size. Darius raised all four of the Cygnian commander’s arms and flexed giant hands with wicked gray claws. He felt an insatiable hunger gnawing inside of him, along with an inexplicable need to rip something apart with his teeth, to feel hot blood spurting into his mouth and running down his chin...

  This was what it felt like to be a Cygnian: always hungry, always burning with violent, blood-thirsty desires. It was almost enough to make Darius empathize with them. They couldn’t help being the ruthless predators that they were. It was part of the Cygnian condition. All the more reason to exterminate them, Darius decided.

  One of the Banshees growled something urgently. “King Dahgurr, enemy fighters just jumped in at a high velocity on the far side of Gaharr! Should we send our squadrons to intercept?”

  “It’s a trick,” Darius growled back, speaking in Cygnian. “Let our ground defenses deal with them. We have to foc
us all our forces on keeping the enemy fleet away.”

  “But master, what if they have their secret weapon aboard one of those fighters?”

  “Do you really think a weapon capable of destroying an entire planet could be carried aboard a fighter?” Darius countered.

  “I do not know, master. Surviving witnesses from the prior attacks were unable to determine what caused the destruction. Perhaps we should send a few squadrons of our own to intercept them to be safe.”

  “Are you challenging my orders, Keeper?” Darius said, pouring as much malice into his voice as he could.

  The Banshee’s four black eyes widened and slowly blinked at him, first the upper set and then the lower. “No, Master.”

  “Perhaps you think you should be the one to lead us into battle!”

  “I meant no disrespect, My King.” The Keeper inclined his head in a gesture of submission.

  “Good, then let me know once our fighters reach the enemy fleet.”

  “Yes, master.”

  Darius watched the Revenant Fleet through the Ghoul King’s eyes—all four of them. He counted eighteen capital ships, although at this range they were barely larger than pinpricks and much duller than the average star.

  “Our fighters are ten blinks from firing range with the enemy fleet,” the Keeper announced. “The enemy does not appear to have launched any fighters to defend themselves. It will not take us long to devour them.”

  Before Darius could reply, the Revenants’ ships all went from a dull gray to shining brighter than the stars. The Revenants had just begun shielding their vessels with the zero-point field.

  “Something is wrong,” another Banshee growled. “The enemy fleet is radiating some kind of energy in the visible spectrum.”

  “It is the Divine Light,” Darius mused, to which the four Banshees on the bridge began muttering and growling amongst themselves. The Divine Light was the deity that all Cygnians worshiped. It was just another term for the zero-point field, or ZPF, but no Cygnian this side of the Eye had ever seen physical proof of it before. To physically see it for the first time, and to find it accompanying their enemies, must have been a shock.