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  Darius casually flicked his free hand at the Ghoul facing him, and it went flying into an ornate marble pillar. The pillar broke in the middle and crumbled down on top of him, crushing the alien with a sickening crunch and a thick spurt of black blood.

  “Anyone else?” Darius asked, turning in a slow circle to address the others.

  The remaining four appeared to hesitate. Then one of them, a Banshee, standing on six limbs rather than two, reared back and lunged into the air with a piercing shriek.

  Darius seized it in midair, holding it there, and then threw his sword at it like a spear. The blade remained shielded even though he wasn’t touching it—an ability that only he seemed to have. The weapon sailed right through the Banshee’s chest and out the other side, and the creature’s torso disappeared in a flaming cloud of ash. Darius allowed the grinning head and the lower half of its body to fall with meaty splats.

  Glancing between the final three, Darius said, “Submit.” The Cygnians snarled and rocked their heads, refusing the order, so Darius added the weight of his mind to the suggestion, making it an order they couldn’t refuse. They bowed their heads in unison and prostrated themselves before him. “Much better.”

  “How did you...” Resonda trailed off, backing away quickly.

  Darius rounded on her. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I-I didn’t have a choice! I had to obey them!” she objected.

  Darius’s sword sailed back into his waiting palm, and he flourished it with a grin. “Baaad robot,” he drawled. “That’s a tired excuse. There’s always a choice.”

  “You just said it!” Resonda cried. “I’m a robot! I’m programmed to behave, to follow commands. That’s why the Cygnians put us in charge! Because they knew we’d be faithful stewards of their empire.”

  Darius suddenly stopped advancing on her, as if her arguments had given him pause. “So what you’re saying is, you’re a mindless slave?”

  “Exactly!” Resonda replied.

  “Then that means you’re a lost cause.”

  “Wait, no—”

  Darius threw his sword again, and it lopped off Resonda’s head with a shower of molten embers. The body toppled to the floor, and Darius’s sword sailed back into his hand. Darius sheathed it with a smirk and shook his head. He’d replace her with a worthy Revenant and a cadre of his enforcers once the planet was cleared of Cygnians.

  He’d already done that on five other worlds so far—of course, on those worlds it hadn’t been necessary to make a full scale invasion to root out the Cygnians. The local populations had already done a good job of that themselves. In most cases the Cygnians’ withdrawal had left only skeleton forces behind, which were ill-equipped to deal with the angry mobs of citizens they faced.

  Tarsus was an odd exception to the Cygnian withdrawal, but that probably had something to do with the planet’s ship-building industries. It was too important for the Cygnians to abandon completely.

  Darius contacted Dyara once more. “Dya, I’m going to stay down here for a while to help secure the planet. Make sure our troops understand that they’re not to make a mess. We need to take planets like Tarsus intact if we’re going to rebuild the Union.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dyara said again.

  Darius smiled at her respectful tone. He’d won Dyara and Cassandra over by pretending to stop using the Sprites, and by making them feel like he was actually listening to their concerns. It was easier that way. They thought he was seriously entertaining their idea of sending an envoy to negotiate with the Cygnians. They had no idea that he’d already opened portals to the Cygnians’ remaining worlds and personally traveled to each of them with a ZPF bomb. These scattered enemy forces that they were rooting out in Union space were all that was left of the Cygnian people. Their species was on the brink of extinction.

  As for the other Revenants, they’d been easy enough to win over once Darius had outlined his plans to make them all wealthy and powerful rulers in his new empire. Even the lowly enforcers propping up each governor would be like royalty. If there was one thing the Revenants seemed to have in common, it was their thirst for power, so they were an easy sell.

  Cassandra was too young for the fulfillment of such ambitions to motivate her, and Dyara seemed oddly distracted by her lingering feelings of attachment toward him. What she most wanted was for him to walk away from the war and the promised reward of power in order to live a normal domestic life with her in relative obscurity. Perhaps he could slip some Sprites into one of her drinks. That would open her eyes in a hurry. Maybe then she’d start looking forward to her true destiny—to rule the galaxy by his side.

  Darius smiled at the thought and went striding through the throne room. His mindless Cygnian slaves trailed meekly behind him. Walking straight up to the golden throne, Darius climbed the dais and tried the seat on for size. It was built for an android, so the padding was lacking, but otherwise, it felt like a good fit. Tarsus was the most important world that they’d liberated thus far, so it was fitting for it to become the capital of his growing empire.

  Darius allowed his eyes to drift shut, taking a moment to rest his weary mind. The need to constantly hold a wormhole open wherever he went was exhausting. It was tempting to let his guard down for a moment. He’d spent two whole months guarding himself and his fleet from Tanik’s return, but how would he know if Darius dropped his guard for a moment?

  He wouldn’t. Darius allowed his portal to collapse and let out a deep sigh. He cracked one eye open, half-expecting Tanik to come striding out of thin air and into the throne room, but nothing happened. Darius reached out with his awareness, searching far and wide, but Tanik was nowhere to be found. His Keth allies were gone, too. Maybe Darius had gotten lucky, and Tanik had accidentally killed them all in his hasty retreat from Ouroboros. That, or they’d given up trying to defeat him.

  Darius smiled at the thought. Wishful thinking. It wouldn’t be a good idea to let his guard down permanently. Summoning another wormhole in front of his throne, Darius got up and walked down to the shimmering portal. A bleak, rocky landscape was visible through the center of that portal. Glancing at each of his mindless Cygnian slaves in turn, Darius gave them a mental nudge to walk through the portal. “Time to join your brothers and sisters,” he said, and watched as they stepped through the portal one after another to their designated prison world.

  The Cygnians were enduring symbols of fear and terror to all species throughout the Union. As such, it wasn’t in Darius’s best interests to completely eliminate them. Having a planet full of hungry Cygnians would be useful to motivate criminals and dissidents to change their ways. Not to mention, if Darius could find some way to reliably control them without exhausting his own personal stores of energy, they would make excellent soldiers to keep local populations in line. Perhaps he’d find a way to lobotomize them and turn them into cyborg soldiers. Failing all else, a modern version of cock fights might draw a crowd. Darius snorted with amusement at the thought. He’d certainly buy tickets to that.

  Chapter 25

  “Where is he sending them?” Dyara asked.

  Cassandra peered down on the parade grounds around the Tarsian palace. At least a thousand Cygnians were marching like lemmings through a portal to a dark and desolate-looking world while her father and several hundred Revenant soldiers looked on. A cheering crowd of Tarsians from all different species stood safely behind the Revenants’ ranks, watching them go.

  “That planet doesn’t look very nice,” Cassandra said. “I know they’re prisoners, but if they starve to death because of us, it won’t help us to negotiate a peace treaty with their leaders.”

  Dyara caught her eye with a grimace. “I’m not sure that your father is actually planning to negotiate. He keeps making excuses.”

  Cassandra had heard all of those excuses a thousand times over the past few months. He kept saying he wanted to negotiate from a position of strength, and to him, that meant re-forming the Union under his comm
and before they discussed any kind of treaty with the Cygnians. The way she saw it, his logic was flawed. If the Cygnians agreed to a surrender now, then there might be a faster and easier way to get them all out of Union space. They might agree to leave peacefully, rather than resist only to end up captured and sent to whatever prison world her father had chosen for them.

  Cassandra was tired of the fighting. What was the point, anyway? It was clear that the Cygnians stood no chance against Revenant soldiers who could bend their wills and make them into mindless slaves without breaking a sweat.

  If her father refused to start the negotiations, then maybe she could convince the Cygnians to take the first step. But trying to get them to negotiate had almost gotten her killed the last time. This time Cassandra would be smarter. She’d talk to them from a safe distance. With that in mind, she closed her eyes and cast her mind out into space, using her awareness to search for Cygnian space.

  Stars streaked through Cassandra’s mind’s eye, the inhabited ones shining brighter than the rest. She recognized the collective presences of familiar species—Lassarians, Murcians, Vixxons, Korothians, Dol Walins, Sicarians, Humans... in some systems they were all mixed together, and she could sense Cygnians scattered among them, but she couldn’t find a particularly strong concentration of Cygnians anywhere. Picturing the super-heated dust clouds that corresponded to Cygnus Prime, Hagrol, and the other Cygnian worlds that they’d destroyed, Cassandra managed to find the star cluster where the Cygnians should have been.

  But none of the surrounding systems were inhabited by Cygnians here, either. Looking closer, she found the reason—another four super-heated dust clouds. There were nine of them in all. Miniature, planet-sized supernovae that had no place in healthy star systems.

  Cassandra’s eyes flew open, blazing with fury. “He lied to us! He killed them all!” she screamed.

  “What? Who lied and who’s them?” Dyara asked.

  Cassandra explained, and Dyara’s face grew ashen. “Are you sure?”

  “Check for yourself,” Cassandra said.

  Dyara’s eyes slid shut, and her breathing slowed. Cassandra looked away, back down to the parade grounds while she waited. Indignant rage roiled inside of her, growing with every passing second. This was too much. Something had to be done. People had to know what their new emperor had been doing behind their backs.

  Dyara’s eyes cracked open, and she nodded. “You’re right.”

  A cold gust of wind blew over the roof of the palace, pushing Cassandra against the railing as if goading her to go down and confront her father.

  “We can’t let him get away with this,” Cassandra said. “I’m going down there. I’m going to tell everyone what he did! We’ll see if they still want to follow him when they learn that he’s a mass-murderer!”

  Dyara winced and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Cassandra. It must hurt to see what he’s become.”

  Cassandra shrugged off the hand. “Whatever. It’s the Sprites, not him. I bet he’s still using them, too.”

  “Probably,” Dyara agreed. “But let’s not do anything to confront him yet.”

  “Why not?” Cassandra demanded.

  “Because you need to know your audience. You and I both met Gakram, and we know what he was like. We know that the Cygnians aren’t all bloodthirsty savages, but how many of the Revenants are likely to agree with you? And more importantly, how many of those citizens down there will agree with you? Listen to them—”

  Cassandra strained to hear past the thudding of her own heart, and the crowds’ cheering snapped into focus.

  “They’re happy to be rid of the Cygnians,” Dyara explained. “If they find out that your father has defeated them entirely, they’re not going to be horrified. They’ll just cheer louder. To them he’s a conquering hero, and to the Revenants, he’s a ticket to power, riches, and an easy life. They’re all firmly under his sway. He doesn’t even have to force anyone to follow him anymore.”

  Cassandra’s cheeks bulged with impotent fury. “So what are we supposed to do?”

  “We bide our time and wait, make him think we’re on his side, just like everyone else. One day, when people see the side of him that we have, and they’re fed up with his tyranny, then we take advantage of the fact that we’re still close enough to do something about it.”

  The heat of Cassandra’s anger bled away into a cold suspicion. “Do something? You mean like kill him?”

  Dyara hesitated. “If that’s what it takes, maybe.”

  “He’s my dad, Dya! He might be off his goffity head, but he’s still my dad. It’s the Sprites that are making him like this. It’s not his fault. It’s happened to me, too. I’m not the girl I used to be either.”

  “They’ve changed all of us,” Dyara replied. “But we haven’t become megalomaniacs and lost all perspective like your father.”

  “Megalo-what?”

  “It means power-hungry. We’re also not drowning ourselves in the Sprites every day. Your father is. He’s an addict, Cass. And like all addicts, he’s never going to get any better until he can admit that he has a problem. Until then, he’s dangerous.”

  “To the Cygnians, sure,” Cassandra agreed.

  “No,” Dyara shook her head. “They’re just an outlet for the demons inside of him to get their exercise. What happens when the Cygnians are all gone and he needs a new outlet?”

  Cassandra looked back to the parade grounds below with an uncertain frown. “He’s not killing them,” she said. “That means there’s hope. If he were such a bad person, he’d just kill them all. Or torture them.” She watched as the last of the Cygnians filed past Darius on their way to their prison world. They all passed within easy reach of him, but none of them seemed tempted to do anything about it. Of course, they no longer had minds of their own with which to resist.

  Even as Cassandra was thinking about that, one of the Cygnians darted out of line and grabbed her father’s arm in its massive jaws. She watched in horror as it shook its head and ripped his arm right out of its socket. A bright red spurt of blood followed, which meant that it hadn’t gotten Darius’s mechanical arm. He stumbled away and fell over, and the crowd erupted in chaos. They screamed, running in all directions. The Revenants were frozen in shock, and the portal had disappeared, leaving the remaining Cygnians in a stagnant line.

  The one that had attacked Darius was floating helplessly in the air, swiping at him with dagger-long claws.

  “Get the crowd under control!” Darius’s voice boomed as he regained his footing on the podium where he stood.

  Cassandra recovered from her shock and rounded on Dyara. “We have to go down and help him!”

  “He doesn’t look like he needs our help,” Dyara pointed out.

  But Cassandra wasn’t listening. She was already racing across the rooftop to the stairwell.

  Chapter 26

  “Your name?” Tanik asked with a furrowed brow and slowly shook his head. “One of the others must have mentioned it,” he said, gesturing vaguely to Trista and Yuri.

  Gatticus met Tanik’s gaze unblinkingly. “They did not, and I do not remember ever meeting you, so the question remains: how do you know my name?”

  “You got me,” Tanik said, holding up his hands with a crooked smile. “We did meet, aboard the Deliverance.”

  “The Deliverance...” Gatticus said slowly. That name sparked a memory. Several months ago he’d woken up aboard an Osprey bomber/transport to find himself stranded in the middle of deep space with no fuel and no memory of how he’d gotten there. He’d checked the logs of the Osprey and found that it had been launched from a Union carrier named the Deliverance. The course laid into the autopilot had been designed to leave him stranded with no hope of rescue, which meant that someone on board that ship had been trying to get rid of him—permanently. “Now I remember,” he said, nodding.

  “Do you?” Tanik asked. “What do you remember?”

  “Not much,” Gatticus replied.
“I remember that I was on the Deliverance until someone cast me away in a transport with the goal of stranding me in deep space.”

  “Yes...” Tanik replied, frowning. “That was an unfortunate incident.”

  “Do you know who did it?” Gatticus asked.

  “Of course. It was Darius Drake, the leader of the Revenants. You discovered that he was trying to take over the ship, and he needed to silence you before you could warn the crew.”

  Gatticus accepted that with a nod. “I see. And now you want my help defeating him? What do you have against him?”

  “Oh, it’s not a personal quest. I’m just not eager to see the galaxy go from one tyrannical government to the next. Since you knew him, Darius has moved on from his ambitions of being the uncontested captain of his own starship and crew. Now he’s planning to become emperor of the entire galaxy. A law unto himself.”

  “And you mentioned that you need to develop a virus to target a certain strain of fungi in order to stop him.”

  “Indeed I do,” Tanik replied.

  “That should be easy enough to accomplish with either nanites or biological agents,” Gatticus replied. “The hard part will be sneaking a pathogen past the nanites already present in people’s bloodstreams....”

  “The fountain of youth,” Tanik said. “One of the Cygnians’ more ironic legacies. They used nanite injections to wipe out disease and make us immortal and then began to hunt us like animals.” Tanik snorted at that. “Do you have an idea to get by the nanites?”

  “Perhaps,” Gatticus said.

  “Good. Why don’t you put a team together and get started? The sooner we can come up with a way to defeat the Revenants, the better.”

  Gatticus nodded. “Before I agree to help, I need you to release the others—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate Yuri, Trista, and Buddy.