Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1) (10 page)

Chapter 13.

The
Master’s backhand slap sent me flying wildly across the room.  There was a loud
clank when I hit the deck and I felt the sharp grates press painfully against
my bare back.

“Incorrect
form, Lor’ten!” The Master spoke abruptly to me without looking. “A Draugari
warrior must never lose focus!”

I
bowed low. My cheek stung and something on the floor was digging into my back,
but I didn’t move. I’d learned weeks ago to stay where I am until the Master
releases me. Some of my ribs were still sore from
that
beating.

The
Master continued his lessons. Kal, Jen’tak and Tren didn’t flinch or break
form, and nobody else made the same mistake I had. I was glad that they had
learned from my error. As the Master says, one misstep is an accident, two
missteps is a pattern. Your enemy will use those patterns to destroy your clan.

It was
a good lesson.

I
watched as the rest of my cadre continued to follow the Master’s maneuvers,
thrust, feint, and parry. All with empty hands. It will not be long now; we are
all almost of age. Soon we will travel to our clan’s bladestones where the
elder warriors will hand forge blades of our own. Blades that we will carry in
honor until death.

When I
came to, I was suspended upside down, still strapped into my seat. I looked
around the smoky air and saw that the cockpit of the Carrack was still mostly
intact. Over half of the viewport was shattered and missing, and the several of
the display panels were shattered, but the main structure had held firm. A
testament to Earthborn engineering.  Ju-lin had managed to slow our descent
before we crash landed, but that last brief freefall had been more than the
haggard ship could sustain.

I reached
up, grabbing my shoulder straps firmly, and clicked the emergency release.  I
had intended to use the straps to swing down gracefully, but it didn’t quite
work out that way. I ended up face down on what had been the ceiling of the now
overturned ship.

I
groaned.

“That has
to be the sorriest way to land a ship I’ve ever seen,” Lee grumbled.

“Any landing
you can walk away from, right dad?” I heard a click and a soft thud as Ju-lin
landed easily on her feet next to me. She had a cut above her left eye and
fresh blood smeared across her cheek, but she was smiling.

“So it
would seem,” he responded. “Lin, I’m proud of you.”

From the
corner of my eye, I saw Ju-lin hiding a proud smile as she looked up at her
father as he hung from the ceiling, still strapped into his chair.

“Come on,
get to it,” he barked as his face was turning red, I wasn’t sure if that was
from the sentimentality of the moment, or blood rushing to his head. “Both of
you get your asses over here and help me get down.”

It took a
little work, and a lot of cursing, but we got Lee back down and made our way
through a hole in the shattered viewport and out into the sun. Once we were
clear of the wreckage, we dropped to the short, dry grass, exhausted, and
looked back at what was left of the Carrack.

The
command deck had broken off from the fuselage and was lying next to the rest of
the ship, which remained upright, engines down, and nose up.  The four long
engine tubes that had been mounted on the rear of the vessel were crushed to
less than a third their original size, they had taken the brunt of the impact.
It looked like a body, still standing, with its severed head lying on its side.
There were pools of chemicals and hydraulic fluid at the base of the ship, and
debris was scattered throughout the little valley where we’d landed.

Now that
we were out in the sun, I could tell that Lee’s wounds were serious. The shot
to the shoulder hadn’t been just an energy weapon. Whatever had hit him was
still lodged in his shoulder. Though the bleeding had stopped, his face was
pale and his teeth were set in a grimace.

“Oh,
don’t look at me like that boy,” he waved his good hand. “I’ve had worse.”

“How did
you know find us?” Ju-lin asked. She seemed to be comforted by his dismissal. I
wasn’t so sure.

“Growd,”
Lee responded. “He sent a distress call to the other colonies when the
Celestrials started bombing New Haven, and then a few minutes later he made a
second call, saying that he had spotted Draugari fighters engaging the
Celestrials. We didn’t know what to make of that, I figure the Celestrials and
the Draugari must have been in a battle, and a few stray shots hit the colony.”

“No,”
Ju-lin responded. “There were three Celestrial fighters making bombing runs on
the colony before the Draugari arrived. The Draugari showed up with two Slires
and this Carrack, got the drop on them. Ghosted one before the Celestrials knew
they were there.”

“Why
would the Celestrials would come out this far and cross the blockades at the
Furies just to attack a defenseless colony?” Lee asked to no one in particular.
“Where were you when they attacked?”

“We were
in the cave when the bombing started,” I said.

“Yeah,”
Ju-lin broke in. “And then they fired a plasma drone
into
the cave. We
barely made it out.”

“They
fired
into the cave
?” Lee turned toward her, his voice incredulous.
“Sure it wasn’t a stray shot? Dumb luck?”

“No,”
Ju-lin answered. “We saw them bombing, they were using standard charges on the
colony, what hit the cavern was a semi-autonomous drone. It was targeted.”

“The
Celestrials attack an archeological site, and the Draugari sweep in behind
them?” Lee asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does
if the Draugari were protecting something,” I said.

They both
turned to me.

“Protecting
what?” Lee raised his eyebrows, expectantly.

“I don’t
know,” I said sorting through my memories. “I’m not even sure why I said that,
but somehow, I know it. They were protecting something. I just don’t know what.
Maybe they didn’t know what.”

“And the Celestrials?” Lee pressed.

“I have no idea,” I responded.

“You intercepted Growd’s message when he sent it to the
orbital com station. Maybe they intercepted the communications drone after it
left the coms relay,” Ju-lin broke in. “We’re close enough to the Celestrial
frontier that we should expect that they would intercept any coms drones they
can.”

Lee
looked at Ju-lin, considering for a moment before shifting his focus back to
me.

“You know
the Draugari were protecting something, but you don’t think they knew what.” He
said, his voice was metered, he was calculating his words. “On the ship
everything happened quickly. When you killed that Draugari, something happened.
I saw it. There was, well, I don’t know what it was. It looked like some kind
of energy transfer. There was electricity in the air. I’ve never seen or heard
of anything like it. And when you got up, you said you’d seen yourself kill
him.”

I looked down at the grass. I knew the question that was
coming, though I didn’t have any of the answers.

“And then,” he continued after a pause. “You could read the
Draugari symbols. The best minds in the fleet haven’t made h
eads or tails of the fragments of
Draugari writing we’ve found. But you read it. And you knew the code to
override the self-destruct sequence. Where did you learn to reroute power to
the engines for that last burn? You did it without thinking. But it’s a complex
procedure on a Carrack. You did it in seconds. You didn’t learn how to do that
by plowing a field and planting peas.”

“I did it
without thinking,” I realized that he was right. I hadn’t thought about it at
the time, I had just acted.

Ju-lin
sighed uneasily.

“So, Eli,
in the last hour we have saved each other’s lives.” Lee was solemn, serious.
“That means something where I come from. I’ve asked you before, and so now I’m
going to ask you once more, and I want as much of the truth as you yourself
understand. Where are you from?”

I was
silent for a long time, staring at the grass. Ju-lin and Lee waited. The
grasses were brown at the base, dying. I pressed my finger into the soil, it
was sandy. I put the tip of my finger to my tongue, salt. The terraforming had
planted grasslands on a salt plain. I looked around, we were in large valley
like a bowl. There had been a lake here, long ago. But it was gone. Gone with
everything else from this world, save for me.

“I was
born here. On this planet." I didn’t look up. “The site where you built
the Downs was once a village. A quiet village. I used to farm and cut wood. The
grasses were blue-green, not green. I lived there. My family lived there.”

They
remained silent, waiting for me to continue.

“I wasn’t
in the village when the terraforming started. I don’t remember why. My memories
are scattered into pieces. I just know that I woke up in a cave up in the
hills, alone.”

“My god,”
Ju-lin whispered. “People had already colonized the planet.”

“Not
people,” Lee answered, and then paused. “Well, I’m sorry, yes, people. But I
suspect, not Earthborn.”

“What are you talking about?” she blurted. “Not Earthborn?
We’re a dozen fluxes away from the Collective, with all of the Draugari attacks
Collective traders are sticking to the trading lanes. The Celestrial worlds are
closer, but look at that hair on his head, he’s no Skin. He’s not just human,
he’s Earthborn. Chen’s tests said so. You two must have knocked your heads back
there.”

“Ju-lin,” I looked up, leveling my gaze at her.

She met my eyes and held my stare. A wave of realization
swept over her.

“You
cannot possibly mean,” she broke off.

“The
terraforming,” I said. “The cave must have protected me from the worst of it,
but it found me. It changed me.”

“Is that
even possible?” she gasped. “That can’t be possible. Stage 4 terraforming wipes
out
all
life forms down to the smallest microorganisms and then
repopulates the world using earthborn DNA. What you’re saying is that—No
fucking way!”

“
Lin
,”
Lee snapped.  “Language.”

“But he’s
saying that he survived the terraforming and that it turned him from—something
else
into a human,” she continued , her hands flailing in the air wildly as she
spoke, as if the more she moved, the more what I was saying would make sense.
“That’s crazy! It’s impossible!”

“It’s the
only thing that makes sense,” Lee said. “Your people, Eli. Were they another
branch of humanoid, something from the Collective? Maybe from Noona or
Olsterians who settled a few hundred years ago?”

“No,” I
answered. “I am, I mean, I was, something else.”

“You
were
?”
He pressed. “Why do you say it like that?”

“I know
they’re my memories, but it doesn’t feel like it’s
me
.” I said. “The
faces I see aren’t human. Sometimes they frighten me. The stories, the moments,
the world, they all feel
strange
to me. They may be my memories from
before, but they are alien to me now. It’s as if someone else had poured their
memories into my own.”

“Like
stealing someone’s memories?” Lee responded.

“Something
like that,” I answered, looking back at the dirt.

“Like
with the Draugari,” he pressed.

“Yes. But
no.” I answered keeping my eyes locked on the ground as I sorted through waves
of confused emotions. “My memories from before, the ones from my life on this
world. They are like background music to a song you know. Something that plays
deep within. They somehow
fit
into my head. Like the beat of a familiar
song. The thing with the Draugari, that was different. It’s like a marching
band running around inside my head, it’s out of control. It’s something, I
think my people, well, the people I used to be, called it the Charon.”

“Charon?”
Ju-lin repeated the word.

“Yes,” I
said. “It’s hard to sort through all the words, but a Charon is the energy of
your life that slips away in death.”

“The
soul,” Lee said.

“No,
but—well yes. Something like that,” I answered. “I really don’t understand it.”

“When you
killed the Draugari,” Ju-lin eyes were wide. “You are saying you captured his
soul? Okay, that’s crazy
and
creepy.”

“Captured
isn’t the right word,” I said. “The best way to describe it is that, well, as I
held the knife it felt as if his energy was pulled through it and passed
through me, making an imprint as he went.”

Lee
shifted here he sat, he winced in pain as his hand went to his shoulder.

“This is
all insane,” she said.

Lee
didn’t disagree as we sat in silence. Looked up at Ju-lin, she was staring off
at the wreckage with a furrowed brow, avoiding my gaze.

“The
knife,” Lee looked at the blade tucked into my belt.