The Exiled Earthborn (34 page)

“Is he dead?” Asha yelled over the roar of the prison ship’s engines.

“I don’t know,” Lucas shouted back. “But we don’t have time to find out.”

That displeased Asha, who continued to scour the area, but there wasn’t a trace of the beast.

Alpha broke through on their armor comm.

“Has the issue been dealt with?” he asked, as though he were troubleshooting a tech support call.

“For now,” Lucas said.

“Come,” Alpha continued. “It is time.”

Lucas and Asha left the edge of the roof and ran back toward Maston, still sprawled unconscious behind the cooling tower. Lucas hooked his armor onto his back and carried the man like a rucksack as they walked toward the ship, which was now slowly turning around and lowering its exit bay ramp. Inside were a dozen or so Guardians, including the banged-up Kiati. They were the few who had survived the assault.

As they made their way inside, the ramp was raised and they started to ascend. Lucas peered out the window and saw the spaceport in ruins below. The hangar was completely annihilated. The other structures within were almost entirely consumed in flame. The Oni swarmed the street like ants and would mop up any remaining troops before anyone discovered they’d taken the base, though the smoke would soon be spotted now.

Reinforcements hadn’t come. They’d pulled it off. The loudest covert assault of all time.

The forest disappeared beneath them and the curved edge of Makari could soon be seen from the viewscreen as they continued to rise. Kiati was tending to Maston, and Asha had passed out sitting against the bay doors. Lucas felt like he was about to collapse as well.

In the rear of room, he saw Alpha playing with some controls with Toruk next to him, having slipped inside the ship after he landed on it.

“What are you doing?” Lucas asked.

“Sending our friend home,” Alpha replied, typing coordinates into the display in front of him.

“You don’t want to come back with us?” Lucas asked, turning to Toruk. “To Mol’taavi? You could help us.”

Toruk shook his head.

“Khas’to need Toruk. Oni need Toruk. Must protect. Must protect until big Mol’taavi army come. Kill all sky demon.”

Someone had filled him in on their plan. Lucas was worried the Oni would think they were abandoning them by leaving.

“We will come back, Toruk. Thank you for giving us your White Spirit. She will be the one to help us end this. She will give you your planet back.”

Lucas didn’t have the heart to tell him it would be a full decade before anything resembling an army could even reach Makari because of the time it took to synthesize new white null cores. He wondered if he’d ever see the man again.

“You not fail. I know you secret,” he said as the door slid up in front of him and he ducked into a cramped-looking cockpit.

“Another secret?” Lucas asked with an eyebrow raised. “What have you figured out this time?”

Toruk smiled.

“Goodbye Saato. Valli keep you strong,” and he nodded toward the sleeping Asha across the bay.

They weren’t emissaries of the gods. They were the gods?

Lucas turned back to say something, but the door had already slid shut. Toruk was gone.

Alpha tapped a few more virtual keys, and with a muted whooshing sound, the escape pod was jettisoned from the ship. Its engines kicked in a few thousand meters out, and it sped toward the jungle.

“A champion of three planets now, it seems,” Alpha said, turning toward him.

Lucas smiled weakly, but felt so dizzy he almost fell over on the spot.

“You should attend to that,” Alpha said, motioning downward.

Lucas followed his finger and saw a smoldering hole in the plating of his leg armor. He’d been shot? He hadn’t even noticed. Once the injury was spotted, his brain forced him to feel the pain, and he sank down to the ground. He was tired. So tired.

17

The trip back was far less intense than the journey to get there had been. They had to fend off a pair of reconnaissance fighters near one of the outer planets that spotted their escape, but true reinforcements couldn’t reach them in time before the null core was fired. Zeta’s men on the ground reported that it took a full hour for the rest of the planet to realize the spaceport had been wiped out. They were long gone by that time, lost in a tunnel of space-time on their way back to Sora.

When they finally managed to get long-range comms back online, they got word to Tannon Vale about the relative success of their mission, and that they were en route home. He told them that they’d been presumed dead for weeks, though that information had been kept private. Back home, the planet was still reeling from the Xalan assault on Kollux, and intelligence indicated they were keen to strike again soon. “Hurry back,” he said. There was much to do.

There were only Xalan sleeping pods onboard. Those were declared strictly off limits after Asha recounted her side-effects from prolonged use of the devices, and they made do on the floor with fur blankets provided by the Oni as parting gifts.

In the end, only eighteen Guardians had survived the mission. The unit had never suffered a loss so devastating, though they’d never been assigned a task so monumental. Lucas and Asha trained with the remaining soldiers to keep in shape as Maston barked orders at them. The man could do an impressive number of exercises with only one leg.

Each night the group gathered to tell war stories about their fallen comrades. Lucas laughed as Kiati recounted a time that Silo crawled through a murky swamp during an assassination mission in the Ruined Marshes, only to discover it was the dumping grounds for the enemy’s latrines. The rest of the Guardians found it hilarious when Asha recounted the story of how she and Lucas had first met on Earth, where she’d put a bullet in him after he unwisely tried to help her in Georgia. Lucas didn’t understand what was so funny about that one. His shoulder still ached some nights.

Lucas’s leg had mostly mended, even though the plasma round had eaten away to his bone by the time he managed to treat it. One final souvenir from the Desecrator. Lucas knew the beast wasn’t dead. Monsters like that didn’t die. He saw its burning eyes far too often in his dreams.

The most heartening part of the voyage home was seeing Alpha and Zeta reconnect. He’d never seen Alpha like this before, lighthearted, almost carefree. The two passed hours fixing up parts of the old ship like they were rebuilding a classic hot rod. They did sleep in separate quarters, however.

Asha had taken quite a liking to Zeta herself. The two spent many afternoons wandering the cramped halls of the ship, talking at length about the resistance, life on Xala, and what Alpha was like in his youth. Lucas only heard bits and pieces of these conversations, and Asha wouldn’t fill him in on the details. “Girl talk,” she said reproachfully when he inquired.

Lucas had gotten a chance to talk with Alpha more than he’d been able to since they’d arrived on Sora. His high spirits with Zeta around had made him amiable.

“So what are you going to do when this is all over?” Lucas asked him one night on the bridge as the two of them both battled insomnia. They were playing an old Xalan game on the central holotable. Alpha couldn’t pronounce it in English, so Lucas just took to calling it “Squares.” It involved moving holographic cubes around, blocking and parrying your opponent’s advances. Lucas always lost, ending the games with no more cubes to push around, but he was getting better over time.

“Even with our current actions, the likelihood of the war ending in our lifetime is remote,” Alpha replied.

Lucas rolled his eyes.

“Humor me. If it did end, what would you do?”

Alpha looked out the viewscreen for a minute. The only light in the room came from the table in front of them. They could hear footsteps on other decks; the walls and floors of the old ship were thinner than most. Lucas guessed there weren’t many who could sleep soundly after what they’d experienced on Makari.

“I should like to continue the research my father began many years ago.”

“What research?” Lucas asked. He grabbed three of his cubes and flung them toward one of Alpha’s. The Xalan’s piece disintegrated instantly.

“True terraforming,” Alpha replied. “The rejuvenation of a planet.”

“Doesn’t that already exist?”

“No,” Alpha said. “Artificially raising temperature a few degrees, or forcing plants to grow through twisting their genetics is not what I speak of here. Rather, I refer to a process that could take a desolate planet and turn it into a place like Sora. Like old Earth.”

“Or Xala.”

Alpha nodded. He swept his arm across the floating game sphere and a wave of his cubes advanced forward, crushing a half dozen of Lucas’s own.

“That would indeed be a crowning achievement. Millions of years ago, Xala was such a place, but it would require an exceptional amount of effort and an unknowable amount of science to revert it back to that state.”

“Well,” Lucas said, “if anyone can do it, I’m sure it’s you.”

“Perhaps,” Alpha said quietly. “Though war remains a focus for the foreseeable future. Perhaps my own children can see the vision come to pass someday.”

Lucas raised his eyebrows. Glancing at the board, he saw that his cube count was starting to get dangerously low.

“Thinking about starting a family?”

Alpha sighed.

“Again, a lofty idea in our present circumstances. But for a long while now I have looked upon you and Asha and Noah and now your new child, and have … desired such an opportunity for myself. I have been alone too long.”

“And who’s the lucky lady?” Lucas asked, attempting to hide a grin.

Alpha chortled and took the opportunity to destroy another pair of Lucas’s game pieces.

“Do not attempt to be coy. You have knowledge of my attraction to [garbled]. To Zeta.”

“How’s that going?”

“It is a bridge that must be built from both sides, though it may take some time. We have both endured much. The treatment Zeta suffered after capture is … to use the Earth word, inhumane. Unconscionable.”

He paused. In the pale blue glow of the room Lucas could see a deep sadness in his eyes.

“I see the woman I once knew, but often she feels like a shadow of who she was. She likely thinks the same of me.”

“Just give it some time. You have decades to catch up on.”

“And yet sometimes it feels like there is nothing to say.”

Alpha absentmindedly swirled one of his cubes around with his finger, seemingly pondering his next move.

“You and Asha. What binds you together?”

Lucas leaned back in his chair to consider that.

“At first it might have been, what was the phrase you used back on the Ark? ‘Proximity and duress.’ But it became more than that. It’s a kind of connection you can’t verbalize. It just … is.”

“That is most unhelpful.”

Lucas laughed.

“Sorry, but it’s something you have to find on your own. It took her almost killing me three times before it finally clicked.”

“I would like to avoid a similar path toward such a revelation.”

“Well, I’d hardly say we’re the model. And I’m no expert on the inner workings of Xalan relationships.”

Lucas advanced the majority of his remaining pieces, crushing one of Alpha’s strongholds on the spherical board. The move caught him off guard, and he was visibly surprised.

“Emotion is weakness on my planet. Other than anger of course. That’s what we have been taught since birth. Here and now, Zeta and I exist as two of the only truly ‘free’ Xalans to live in thousands of years. Traitors are imprisoned or executed. They do not escape the way we have. There is nowhere to go.”

Alpha brought up a secondary display, checking on the status of the ship before quickly closing it.

“The idea that we answer to no one is liberating, but also terrifying.”

Alpha flicked a few of his cubes forward. Reaching a certain point of the board, they combined into a single pyramid. Lucas was in trouble now. Alpha continued his thought.

“If the war ends, I worry my people may not understand freedom; they have been subservient for so long. A vacuum may be created that another corrupt body could fill. They will need strong, but kind leadership.”

Lucas folded his arms.

“Well, I nominate you.”

Alpha scoffed.

“I despise politics, and am far from capable enough to be thrust into a role such as that. If only my father still lived …”

He waved his claw in the air.

“But enough of such talk. You have caused me to ignore our present circumstances and speculate on an all-too-ideal future. Such fantasizing is not helpful.”

Alpha’s pyramid advanced and crushed the last of Lucas’s cubes. Another loss.

“Have faith in the plan,” Lucas said as he made another tally mark in Alpha’s column to recognize his latest defeat. “You’ll get your future.”

“How you have endured so much, yet continue to have such an attitude is perplexing.”

Lucas shrugged and tossed aside the game board so that there was nothing a but a dull blue glow in between them.

“If I don’t, then all of this has been for nothing. Every injury suffered, every friend lost. I’ll make it mean something if it kills me.”

“It might,” Alpha said wearily.

“I know.”

That night Lucas walked back to the cramped cell he and Asha had made their quarters. She was asleep, curled up in a pile of crimson and black furs. A few of them belonged to Guardians who hadn’t made it back onboard after the assault on the spaceport. It was freezing in the cell block, as it was most places on the ship. The craft was so old that nothing worked right, despite Alpha’s constant tinkering. A pair of Guardians once got stuck in their cell for a solid six hours when the door mechanism jammed. They finally just had to cut them out with a plasma torch. A female Guardian had lost the tip of her index finger to a faulty ray shield meant for emergency lockdowns only. A half second earlier and she would have likely been cut in half. The prison ship was something of a deathtrap, but if it got them home, none of them cared.

Lucas pulled the blankets over him, but couldn’t stop shivering in the icy room. He could see his breath in the dim light, and curled up close to Asha, attempting to siphon some of her body heat. This was no place for romance, but some nights they blocked out their surroundings completely and made do. Lucas pretended they were back in the palace penthouse on Sora, wrapped in smooth sheets in a room stocked with unlimited food and drink and priceless treasures. It was a pleasant thought that stayed with him until he drifted off to sleep and the nightmares began again.