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  That resonated with Darius. He wasn’t even from this time. He shouldn’t even be in this position! Except that he was. “I won’t trade one life for twenty thousand, not even Cassandra’s.”

  “I’m surprised at you, Darius. I was certain that you would want to save your daughter, no matter the cost. I’ll be sure to wake her and tell her why she has to die. But first—”

  Tanik unleashed a powerful kinetic attack that sent Darius flying across the room. He resisted, cushioning his impact with the far wall. Then he poured out all of his rage and pain and grabbed Tanik in an invisible vice, squeezing as hard as he could. The man’s eyes flew wide, and fat purple veins appeared like worms crawling just beneath the skin on his forehead and temples. All of Tanik’s muscles tensed and stood out like cords as he resisted both physically and mentally. It wasn’t nearly enough. Darius felt Tanik’s ribs crack, then break. A strangled cry escaped the man’s lips, but Darius wasn’t done. Not even close.

  He folded Tanik’s legs the wrong way, popping both knees and ruining the joints. The man screamed with thunderous volume, while rivers of blood streamed from his ruined legs like party streamers.

  “You fekking fool!” Tanik roared. “She’s dead! You’ve just killed her!”

  A shimmering portal appeared between them, along with a familiar green field beneath a dark blue sky. Ouroboros. Darius’s eyes flew wide, and he lunged toward the portal, propelling himself toward it as fast as his legs and the ZPF could carry him.

  But Tanik made it through first, and the portal vanished just as soon as he crossed it, leaving Darius to sail through open air and slam into the door to his room. He hit with bone-cracking force and bounced off, drifting away stunned and shivering with horror and rage.

  The door slid open a moment later, and Dyara stumbled in, looking pale and weak. “Darius? Is everything... what’s wrong?”

  “It’s Cass. Tanik has her.”

  * * *

  “Think, My Love! You can’t kill her. Not yet.”

  “I will!” Tanik screamed, spitting a fat gob of blood on the glass cover of Cassandra’s cryo pod. It took all of his strength just to hold himself up on his useless legs and to numb the pain from his shattered ribs. He stabbed at the cryo pod’s control panel, paging through holographic displays to find some way to shut off the power and kill the pod’s occupant.

  “There’s a better way.” Feyra insisted. Her nettlesome voice was not helping him to concentrate.

  “It’s too late,” he replied in a hoarse whisper.

  Smack! Tanik’s cheek erupted in fire, and suddenly he was lying in the field, staring up at the colari trees.

  Feyra loomed into view. “I am sorry for that, but your anger has blinded you. You must listen to me. Darius will come to his senses and do exactly as we ask, but first, you need to show him what he stands to lose. Wake her, cure her, and let him see her.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Tanik replied. “He’s become too powerful. He’s been using the Sprites. I don’t know how he’s still alive, but he’s too powerful to meet in person now.”

  Feyra was nonplussed by that. “I assumed that he must have somehow surprised you...”

  Tanik barked a laugh that ended in a wet cough that drew blinding agony from his ribs. “I surprised him,” Tanik groaned. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes and soaked the bed of grass where he lay. “He wasn’t even armed! He stole my sword like it was nothing, and snapped my bones like twigs.”

  Feyra’s expression grew troubled, and she looked away from him to glance around the field. “Does he know how to manipulate wormholes?”

  “If he did, we’d be dead already. It would take all of our surviving warriors to defeat him, and even then...” Tanik rocked his head from side to side.

  “Then don’t face him. Use his daughter to manipulate him from a safe distance. This is why you saved her. Somehow you knew this was coming.”

  Tanik lay there, gasping in agony with thoughts of vengeance burning in his brain. As much as he hated to admit it, Feyra was right. He couldn’t afford to give up the only advantage they had. Once Darius’s own anger cooled enough for him to think clearly, he’d regret his decision. For all Darius knew, Tanik was pulling the plug on Cassandra’s pod right now.

  Tanik smiled and licked the blood from his teeth, wincing as he did so. He’d bitten straight through his tongue when Darius had popped his knee caps. “You’re right,” he said.

  Feyra favored him with a wan smile and bent to pick him up. “I’m going to take good care of you, darling. Be happy that things turned out the way they did. This way you get your wish. You can stay here and pull Darius’s strings from a distance. You won’t have to risk your own life in the fighting.”

  “Y-es,” Tanik said, his breath hitching in his throat as he began to shiver. He was going into shock. “B-ut, there is one o-other thing we c-can try.”

  “Shhh, save your strength, my love,” Feyra cooed as she carried him through the doors to their cabin. “There will be time enough to tell me after you have rested.”

  Chapter 13

  “He’s going to kill her!” Darius screamed.

  “Slow down, Darius,” Dyara replied. “Who’s going to kill who?”

  “Tanik is going to kill Cass! He’s probably shutting down her pod as we speak!” Darius’s chest rose and fell quickly as he began to hyperventilate. Panic gripped him, and his thoughts turned to mud.

  Dyara’s brow wrinkled. “Cass? I thought she died on the Harbinger?” When Darius failed to respond, Dyara grabbed his hands in each of hers and forced him to look her in the eye. “Calm down. Start from the beginning. What’s going on?”

  He took a deep breath and told her how Tanik had been lying to them since the very beginning, and why.

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. He led the Coalition Fleet against the Union for twelve years. You’re telling me all that time he was part of some plot to undermine the Revenants and get revenge on them for killing Tanik’s... foster people?”

  “The Keth,” Darius supplied in a cold whisper. “Yes, that’s exactly what he’s been doing. He obviously found a way to accelerate his plans when he met me.”

  “But why you? Why not go after the Revenants directly from the start?”

  “Because he needed me to defeat the Luminaries first, and I did—starting with Nova, and then Kovar. He would have had me hunt down the others, too, but Kovar already did that. When Tanik found out, he tried to get me to surrender control of the Revenants to him so that he could wipe them out, and when I refused, he tried to kill me.”

  Dyara glanced over her shoulder to the open door of Darius’s recovery room. “So... where is he now?”

  “On Ouroboros, with Cassandra.”

  “Ouroboros?” Dyara echoed. “That’s on the other side of the Eye. How did they get all the way over there?”

  “He opened a wormhole to get there.”

  “I thought he said he couldn’t open traversable wormholes?”

  Darius took another deep breath and let it out in a brittle whisper, “Another lie.”

  “Okay... and you said he has Cass. Are you sure? He would have had to rescue her before the Harbinger was destroyed.”

  Darius hesitated. “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Assuming that’s true, why would he save her just so that he could kill her himself?”

  “He planned to use her to blackmail me.” Darius went on to explain how Tanik was to blame for her getting poisoned in the first place, and how he had supposedly saved a sample of the venom from the Cygnian who had stung her so that only he could cure her.

  “Okay...” Dyara said slowly. “But then he still doesn’t have what he wants. He wants the Revenants dead, right? And in order to kill them, he needs you to cede control of the fleet to him. That means he still needs her alive.”

  “You didn’t see what I did to him,” Darius groaned.

  A wary look crept into Dyara’s brown eyes. “What did you
do to him?” She’d witnessed what he’d done to Kovar.

  “I crushed his ribs and snapped both of his legs. He managed to escape before I could do anything else. If he hadn’t, I probably would have killed him.”

  “Did you catch him by surprise?”

  Darius shook his head. “He wasn’t strong enough to face me. It’s a good thing I’ve been dosing with Sprites.”

  “That’s debatable, but regardless, we need to wait before we do anything.”

  “Wait? We can’t wait! We need to get to the Eye and rescue Cass before it’s too late!”

  “Don’t you think they’ll have thought of that? Tanik already proved he can shut that wormhole, so unless you know how to open it again, going there won’t help us. We need to wait for Tanik to make contact and reiterate his demands.”

  “What makes you think he will? He might have killed her already.”

  “If he has, then he’s going to have to find a way to kill you, too,” Dyara pointed out. “And by the sounds of it, you’re not that easy to kill. Let’s not assume the worst yet.”

  Darius nodded slowly, his eyes welling with tears and swimming out of focus.

  Dyara pulled him into a hug and whispered in his ear. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he mumbled.

  “For not giving Tanik what he wanted.”

  Darius nodded wordlessly against Dyara’s shoulder. If she knew how much he regretted that decision now, she wouldn’t be thanking him. Faced with the same choice again, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Cassandra’s life versus the lives of twenty thousand Revenants. There had to be a way to rescue her without killing anyone.

  Part 2 - The Evil Within

  Chapter 14

  Trista Leandra stood inside the cockpit of her Archer-class MRV—Mechanized Robotic Vehicle, or mech, for short—striding down a broken street lined with cracked and crumbling skyscrapers in what used to be Atlanta. The rest of her squad trailed behind her single file in three more Archer mechs. Moonlight shivered in flooded potholes with every fifty-ton step, and rubble crunched loudly underfoot.

  Trista rolled her shoulders and stretched her arms inside the control sleeves that corresponded to the arms of the mech. Inside the cockpit, a dead weight landed on her shoulder and sharp claws bit through her pilot’s suit.

  “Where did they all go?” Buddy whispered.

  She shot the Togra a frown. At first glance he could pass for a sentient squirrel: round, stubby-legged, covered in short brown fur with white belly fur.

  “What?” Buddy asked, blinking his big brown eyes at her.

  “You’re heavy.”

  “You’re heavier,” he replied. He nodded out the cockpit. “Better keep your eyes on the road.”

  Trista looked away with a grimace. Where had they all gone? After invading Earth and turning it into a designated hunting ground, the Cygnians had suddenly evacuated the planet and withdrawn their fleet, leaving only token forces on the ground.

  As soon as news of that withdrawal reached the Coalition, Trista had gone to its leader, Yuri Mathos, and insisted that he send a task force to investigate. Naturally, he assumed that meant she was volunteering for the mission.

  The comms roared to life. “Saber Four here—scanner drones are picking possible hostiles inside the ruins at bearing one three niner, over.”

  Trista checked her scanners. The bee-like scanner drones had left a red marker on the map at a point behind them and to their right. Trista stopped and turned to get a visual on the location. Her mech’s spotlights revealed nothing. The suspected enemy contacts had to be lurking deep inside the ruins. Their mechs were too big to investigate inside the ruined buildings, and getting out to clear them on foot was out of the question.

  Trista frowned. Their mission was to make contact with human survivors, not eliminate all the straggling Cygnians they could find, but given the close proximity of these potential enemies, it was possible they were trying to ambush Trista’s squad. The best defense is offense. “Light ‘em up, Four,” she said. “Cannons only. Maybe we can spook them out.”

  “Roger that, Sarge.”

  The arms of Saber Four’s mech flashed with the thumping reports of its fifty cal. Gatling guns. Crumbling concrete walls exploded in a hail of debris that plinked off their mechs’ armor. Shifting clouds of gray dust drifted out, bright and shining in the beams of their spotlights. Gatling guns were ancient weapons, but ancient was easier to build and maintain, which made them perfect for the resource-strapped Coalition.

  After a few seconds of sustained fire, Trista thought she saw something—shadows creeping through the clouds of gunsmoke and dust. “Hold fire!” she called over the comms. “I thought I saw something.”

  Four belatedly stopped firing. “You sure ‘bout that, Sarge? I’ve got nothing on thermal or motion sensors.”

  Trista swept her mech first one way, then the other, checking the street. Whatever she’d seen it was gone now.

  “Never mind. It’s gone now. Probably just wind stirring the dust.”

  “Permission to resume fire?”

  “Granted.”

  Four went back to firing into the ruins. Just as he did so, a shower of sparks leapt up from the back of his mech.

  “What the fek...?” he trailed off.

  Trista swept her spotlights over him and caught a glimpse of a gunmetal gray mass clinging to his back. “Hang on, you’ve got one on you!” she said, already running toward him.

  “Get it off!” Four danced on the spot, trying to reach his back with his mech’s arms, a dire parody of a human trying to scratch his own back.

  As Trista ran, another wave of sparks leapt off Four’s armor, and this time he screamed. A moment later, his mech stopped moving.

  “Four!”

  Trista reached his mech and grabbed the shadowy mound off his back in a giant metal fist. The mech’s haptic feedback system kicked against her palm as the Cygnian struggled to free itself. Four arms with wicked gray claws swiped the air mere inches from the reinforced glass of her cockpit.

  Buddy whimpered beside her ear, his claws biting deeper into her shoulder as he cowered.

  Trista squeezed as hard as she could, and felt bones crunching. A blood-curdling scream burst from the Cygnian’s lips along with a gleaming black gout of blood, and then the monster went limp and silent. Trista threw it aside and passed her spotlights over Saber Four’s mech to check his status. His cockpit had been ripped open from behind, the reinforced armor of his mech peeled open in curling sheets. The inside of his cockpit was sprayed and dripping with blood, and he was hanging halfway out of his mech in an impossible limbo that implied a broken spine.

  “Four! Come in, over.” Trista checked her sensors while she waited for a response. No life signs. “Fek it!” Trista roared.

  “Sarge! We’ve got incoming,” Three said.

  The rest of Saber squad whirled around, their cannons thumping indiscriminately into the night before she could even respond. Trista spun away from Four to see more chameleon-skinned Cygnians streaking wraith-like from the broken windows of ruined buildings, converging from all sides. Trista’s sensors lit up with no less than seven contacts.

  Targeting the nearest one, she opened fire. Fity cal. rounds ripped her target open with an explosion of black blood and glistening guts. Just as she targeted the next one, she heard and felt a heavy thud as something landed on her back, followed by the teeth-gritting screech of alien claws cleaving through her armor.

  Chapter 15

  Darius stared into the shimmering portal, blinking in shock as a bipedal alien stepped through. The alien’s features were bony, but its frame and musculature were distinctly feminine. Her translucent white skin sparkled and her pale blue eyes danced with bright specks of light. A high brow rose over eyebrow-less eyes to an equally hairless scalp. Darius recognized her as one of the same aliens he’d seen standing behind Cassandra in his vision of her on Ouroboros.

  “Hey!” Darius said as the ali
en cleared the portal. It vanished behind her.

  When the alien didn’t react to the sound of his voice, he walked in front of her to force a confrontation, but she passed straight through him as if he were a ghost.

  Staring in horror and slowly shaking his head, Darius watching the alien go walking down long aisles of mag-locked rectangular crates.

  Darius recognized where they were. They were inside the Deliverance’s munitions storage room. All kinds and classes of missiles and ammo were stored in here in shock-proof armored crates.

  As he watched, she stopped beside a particular crate. Reaching into her loose-fitting brown tunic, she produced a luminous knife and used it to slice the lid of the crate open. Raising her free hand toward the crate, she sent the lid drifting away, and a familiar-looking missile drifted out. It was one of the planet-busting ZPFs. Using her knife to open a panel on the missile, the alien spent a moment fiddling with wires inside of it, and then left it there, unsecured and floating inside the munitions room.

  Just then, another portal appeared, shimmering in the air where the first had been. Peering through that portal, Darius glimpsed a familiar man standing on the other side, leaning on a pair of rough-hewn wooden crutches. Tanik.

  Darius ran toward the portal, but his legs refused to obey. It was as if they were stuck in tar. He watched helplessly as the alien disappeared through the portal. Once again it vanished in her wake, leaving Darius alone with what was almost certainly a ticking bomb.

  He tried walking over to the weapon. This time his legs responded, and he made it there in a matter of seconds. He didn’t know much about how ZPF warheads worked, but it was obvious that some of the wires had been crossed, and the intention behind that was obvious enough. Tanik can’t kill me face to face, so now he’s trying to assassinate me with a bomb.