The Revenants Read online

  Broken Worlds: The Revenants

  (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, made-up euphemisms

  Sex: mild and implied 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.

  Acknowledgements

  This book comes to you just two months after the last one, thanks in part to my wife’s support. A good woman is worth her weight in gold. I also owe a big thanks to my editor, Dave P. Cantrell. A good editor is also a good writer, and Dave is a master of both crafts.

  Finally, I owe a big thank you to my advance readers. These people never cease to amaze me. They somehow manage to wade through rough drafts of my work and still have nice things to say at the end! My heartfelt thanks goes out to B. Allen Thobois, Bill Schmidt, Chase Hanes, Dave Topan, Davis Shellabarger, Donna Bennet, Earl Hall, Erik Smith, Gary Matthews, Gary Watts, Gregg Cordell, Harry Huyler, Ian Jedlica, Ian Seccombe, Jacqueline Gartside, Jeff Morris, Jim Owen, John Nash, John Parker, Jonathan Hagee, Karol Ross, Kenny Harvey, Lisa Garber, Mary Kastle, Mary Whitehead, Michael Madsen, Paul Burch, Raymond Burt, Rob Dobozy, Rose Getch, Shane Haylock, Tim Runyan, Tom Spille, and William Dellaway—it’s been a pleasure to have you all reading for me again!

  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

  Human male.

  Dyara “Dya”

  Human female.

  Acolytes

  Thessalus “Arok” Ubaris

  Lassarian male.

  Flitter

  Murciago male.

  Seelka

  Vixxon female.

  Gakram

  Banshee male.

  Secondary Characters

  Trista Leandra

  Human female.

  Buddy

  Togran male.

  Gatticus Thedroux “Slick”, “Metal Head”

  Male android.

  Admiral Ventaris

  Human male.

  Blake Nelson

  Human male.

  Samara Gurhain

  Human female.

  Nova

  Human female.

  Jaxxon Ricks

  Human male.

  Yuri Mathos

  Lassarian male.

  Minor Characters

  Lora Addison

  Human female.

  Asha Wilks

  Human female.

  Elder Arathos

  Male Ghoul.

  Primus Kathari “Ra” Sievros

  Lassarian male.

  Ectos

  Sicarian male.

  Veekara

  Vixxon female.

  The Augur

  Human male.

  Feyra

  Previously in the Broken Worlds Series

  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 tra
ined 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 - Visions

  Chapter 1

  Disgusted with himself, Darius watched the scene before him unfold. Tanik Gurhain was officiating the funeral of thirty-two Vulture pilots lost in the Crucible battle. He pointed out that fourteen of them had died heroically to save Darius’s life after he’d recklessly charged in to save his daughter, Cassandra. Tanik didn’t say “reckless,” but everyone knew he meant that. Darius hadn’t asked to be rescued, yet Tanik had ordered it because of some crazy idea that Darius is the key to everything—that the future somehow depended on him. Still, most of the crew blamed him for the deaths. Maybe they were right. If Dyara Eraya hadn’t piloted an RR-3 Eagle to save him, and those pilots hadn’t been forced to protect her, he’d have died a slow death drifting in the starlit void around the Crucible, and those fourteen pilots might have lived.

  Darius’s gaze found the ceremonial casket floating in front of the airlock doors. The casket was actually a cryo-pod like the ones that had stored him and his daughter, Cassandra, for the past thousand years. His eyes swam out of focus and burned with the threat of tears. This should have been his funeral, and everyone here knew it.

  Tanik stood beside the casket, giving his speech. His bald head gleamed in the bright lights of the Deliverance’s corridors. The long, parallel scars on his face stood out in sharp relief. “Do not mourn because they are dead. Rejoice because they are finally alive! It is from the light we come when we are born, and it is to the light we go when we die. Their bodies may be dead, but their spirits live on, undying and undiminished.”

  With that, Tanik waved a hand over the airlock controls and the inner doors swished open. He pushed the floating casket inside and shut the doors.

  “May their spirits find rest. We commit these souls to the divine light: Lisa Davies, Ectos Fisk, Ikatosh Karosik, David Hunter, Kyle Turner, Ashley Palin....” The list went on and on, and Darius began to attract angry looks from the surviving pilots. He’d become a convenient scapegoat for all of the dead, not just the fourteen pilots who’d died to save him.

  Dyara flashed a particularly dark look at him, but he pretended to ignore it. She wasn’t just angry about the dead pilots. She felt betrayed that he’d refused to go through with their planned coup to overthrow Tanik. Not that he’d had a choice—Tanik had promised to rescue Cassandra, and he’d delivered on that promise.

  It turned out that it didn’t matter, anyway. An election had been held, and the vote had come out overwhelmingly in Tanik’s favor. He’d gone from military dictator to democratically-elected dictator, which was different in theory but not in practice.

  There was also good reason to doubt the legitimacy of the vote. Tanik was a Revenant, and he’d already shown Darius what that meant. It meant he could tap into the zero point energy field that permeated the entire universe in order to do seemingly impossible things. Among others, he could control the minds of the people around him. He’d done that with the crew of the Deliverance once before already, to convince them to join his war against the Union. He’d downloaded military skills directly to their brains with something called a neural mapper, but that didn’t make them soldiers. They were medical refugees who’d gone into cryo to wait for cures to their illnesses. It made no sense that all of them would decide to join Tanik in his war against the Union.

  As far as Darius was concerned, Tanik was definitely messing with everyone’s heads—or almost everyone’s. He, Cassandra, and Dyara were all immune to his mysterious abilities because they supposedly had the same potential to use the zero point field—the ZPF for short, or source field, as Tanik sometimes called it. That immunity put them in a unique position to oppose Tanik, but Darius owed him. Tanik had saved both his and his daughter’s lives, and out of respect for that debt, he’d agreed to set the matter aside.

  Tanik was definitely up to something, but it wasn’t Darius’s job to stop him. At least not yet. Besides, whatever his methods, Tanik seemed to be on the right side. He was fighting against the Cygnians and the USO. That had to count for something.

  Darius shook his head to clear it and swallowed past a knot of guilt in his throat. His chest ached with grief. Tanik continued rattling off a list of the dead. There’d been a few dozen casualties on board the Deliverance, too. Tanik didn’t have a physical list of names to consult, but he didn’t need to; he had perfect recall thanks to his extra-sensory chip (ESC).

  Ra, the black-furred Lassarian pilot, bared his teeth at Darius and his pointed ears twitched. “Skarvot,” he growled.

  Darius didn’t understand the word, but Ra’s tone made it perfectly clear.

  “I’m sorry,” Darius whispered, but Ra had already looked away.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Cassandra whispered, as she laced her fingers through his hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  Darius glanced down at his daughter and shook his head. “I had to,” he whispered back. “It’s the least I could do.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You didn’t kill them.”

  “Now that’s a load of krak,” Blake put in, and flicked a scowl in their direction. His eyes were dry, but red and puffy as if he’d been crying before he’d arrived at the funeral.

  Darius frowned. Blake had his own cross of guilt to bear for a friendly-fire incident he’d caused on the Crucible, accidentally killing dozens of innocent children by firing one too many missiles at the ring-shaped station, and yet even he was piling accusations on Darius.

  “Shhh!” someone said before Darius could point out Blake’s hypocrisy.

  Tanik finished reciting his names and then nodded once to the crowd before turning to the airlock controls to open the outer doors. A warning chime sounded, and Darius watched through windows in the top of the inner doors as crimson lights flashed inside the airlock. The outer doors parted, and a gust of escaping air carried the ceremonial casket out into space.

  Turning back to the group, Tanik said, “You have the next two hours to reflect and grieve. After that, report to Ready Room One at sixteen thirty for your next mission. Dismissed.”

  The crowd dispersed quietly, and Darius caught a few more accusing looks as the pilots left. He decided to wait for them to go first, and Tanik’s eyes met his through the thinning crowd.

  “Darius, Cassandra, Dyara—” Tanik’s yellow-green eyes flicked to each of them in turn. “—don’t go anywhere yet. I need to talk to you about your training.”

  Darius narrowed his eyes at that. The three of them were supposedly all capable of becoming Revenants, just like Tanik, but so far none of them had displayed any unusual abilities—not even Cassandra who had already been activated during her time aboard the Crucible.

  Darius favored his daughter with a worried frown. He hoped they hadn’t done anything to harm her. What did activation entail?

  As the last of the pilots left the corridor, Tanik came over with a twisted smile. Darius wondered if that expression was just a product of the scars running across the man’s face, or if there was something more intentional behind it.

  “You look afraid,” Tanik said, still smiling. His eyes glittered with amusement.

  Dyara drew herself up. “Well, I’m not.”

  “Should we be afraid?” Darius asked.

  Tanik held his gaze for a long moment, then said, “We need to activate you and Dyara before we start your training.”

  “That wasn’t an answer,” Darius replied.

  “It wasn’t intended to be,” Tanik replied.

  “What does activation entail?”r />
  Tanik shrugged. “Nothing elaborate. You have to drink the living water.”

  “The what?” Darius asked.

  “It’s water filled with little sparkly things,” Cassandra said.

  Darius glanced at her and saw she was making a face. “You had to drink it?”

  She nodded, and Darius shot a worried look at Tanik. “Is it safe?”

  He spread his arms. “Look at me, I am alive, am I not?”

  “Again, that’s not an answer.”

  Tanik’s smile broadened. “It is perfectly safe. Now come. Follow me.” Tanik turned and strode down the corridor.

  Darius hesitated, but Cassandra followed and tugged him along by his arm. As they went, Darius quietly regarded his daughter. “Do you feel any different, Cass?”

  “I don’t know. Not really. Your body goes kind of tingly after you drink the water, and then the feeling fades. Other than that I feel the same. Mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Well, it might be nothing....”

  “Tell me,” Darius pressed.

  “Well, it’s like, you know that flutter in the pit of your stomach just before a roller-coaster dives down?” Darius nodded. “Or how you feel when you’re standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down?”

  “Yeah...”

  “It’s like that, only more... I don’t know. It’s like I’m exposed, like I’m not entirely inside my body anymore. Like...”

  “Like you’re part of something bigger than yourself,” Tanik supplied. “Something powerful.”

  Cassandra nodded. “Yes.”

  Darius’s brow tensed into a hard knot between his eyes. “You feel all of that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It doesn’t sound safe to me,” Dyara said.

  “It doesn’t feel safe,” Cassandra replied.

  Up ahead, Tanik reached a bank of elevators and hit the call button. Now that power was on and the maintenance bots had fixed all the broken doors throughout the Deliverance, the access chutes with their ladders had become a secondary means of travel between decks.

  As they reached Tanik’s side, the doors of the nearest elevator swished open and they followed him in.