The Exiled Earthborn (29 page)

“What happened to Hex Tulwar?” Lucas asked.

“What
exactly
happened to him? I’ve no idea, but eventually he and a small band of Rhylosi escaped Vitalla and made it back to Sora in a half-destroyed transport. Knowing what I know now, that was probably when he made a deal with the Xalans for Talis’s head. He blamed the Vales and me for the massacre of his people and family. It didn’t take him long to whip up support for a revolution once he returned and explained how the fleet had abandoned them.”

Maston threw a leaf into the fire and it vaporized.

“In the Tomes of the Forest, the First Order is to serve the gods. The Second is to revere the planet. The Third is to resist evil. The Fourth Order is to protect the weak. I forget the exact wording.”

“Forsaken are the strong who do not protect the weak,” Lucas interjected, remembering what had been tattooed on Silo’s chest. His friend had been religious, though not a zealot it seemed. Maston nodded, ignoring why Lucas would know the phrase.

“Tulwar made sure the entire world knew how we’d broken the Fourth Order, and so his movement had a name.”

“And you’ve been fighting them ever since,” Lucas said, many things now coming together in his mind. “Was there ever a second Xalan fleet? Would you have been wiped out if you tried to save them?”

Maston stared into the flames.

“I ask myself that every single day. I imagine Talis Vale does as well.”

“Why’d you tell Asha that story?” Lucas pressed.

“Your counterpart is a rare creature,” he said. “She possesses many of the same qualities as Cora, incredible beauty paired with an unconquerable spirit. She is an echo of the woman I once called my own.”

Lucas began to feel his blood simmer a bit, but Maston continued.

“Treasure her,” he said sternly. “Know how fortunate you are to have someone so exceptional at your side.”

Lucas relaxed. Maston wasn’t competing for her, then, it seemed.

“You’ve proven yourself capable as well,” he said. “You have a talent for both ending and saving lives. Not many would have braved that city and that creature to rescue someone they couldn’t stand.”

“Well, I’m hoping you can help get us out here,” Lucas said.

Maston nodded.

“Perhaps I can.”

Rising to his feet, he spoke to Lucas without looking at him.

“That is the last time you question what I know of sacrifice.”

After Toruk came down from the trees, it was Lucas’s turn to try to grab a little rest. But as he sat on a pair of branches staring at Mol’taavi, none found him. Maston’s story was incredible, horrifying. Lucas had killed many bad people to stay alive, but few good ones. His own experience executing Silo had shaken him, so he could only imagine how Maston felt with the lives of untold millions latched around his neck for the rest of his life. And losing Corinthia the way he had. Perhaps the man had earned the right to be difficult and hostile, but at times he had seemed borderline psychotic. The man did have him beaten half to death onboard the Spear, after all. Another of his “lessons” perhaps, as Asha maintained? He did finally appear to be coming around to Lucas as an ally rather than an adversary. Lucas had risked much to save him, and perhaps staring into the burning eyes of the Desecrator had melted Maston’s frozen soul just a bit. Too bad Silo wasn’t here to see his commander finally come around and embrace the wretched Earthborn.

Silo. Lucas remembered something. He dug through the pack attached to his stealth suit and, moving aside Omicron’s square, found what he was looking for. Silo’s Final. Lucas placed the chip in the palm of his hand and tapped it. Immediately an interface popped up, a list of names. “Madi, Rula, Koto, Velia, Kiati.”

Lucas tapped the first one. A three-dimensional image of Silo appeared before him from the chest up. His hair was longer, he looked at least a few years younger. Lucas wondered how often these were recorded or updated. As Silo spoke, Lucas felt his blood go cold.

“
Sa Madi
,” he said, smiling widely. “I hoped you would never have to watch this, but in my line of work, it’s bound to happen sooner or later.”

Holographic Silo paused to take a breath.

“I’m sorry this had to happen the way it did with
Padi
, with
Brota
. I can’t imagine how much your heart must ache now after all this. Just know that you’ll see us again in the Forest one day.”

Lucas paused the video. He hadn’t spoken of it, but it seemed Silo was religious enough to believe he was headed to a better place. This Blessed Forest Maston had told him about. Lucas wondered if it was controversial for a Guardian to have a Fourth Order tattoo. Even if the sentiment was a good one, the group that had adopted the name was bloodthirsty, ruthless, and the most destructive force on Sora.

Lucas hovered over the pause button, but didn’t resume playback. This was private. It seemed the video was for his
Madi
, mother, he assumed by the reference to “
Padi
” as well. Lucas looked down at the other names. Brothers? Sisters? Friends? He stopped at the one he recognized, Kiati.
Just a few seconds can’t hurt.

“Kiati,” Silo began, “who knows if you’ll outlive me, but I bet you will. You were always the smarter one with your fancy medical package and those record-setting cog scores.”

Silo still smiled, but looked pained.

“I’ll always remember that week of shore leave after Golgath. I don’t care that you told me to forget it. One of these days you’ll come around again, but if you’re watching this, maybe it’s too late for us. You were the best thing I found in this dark storm of war. I know you’ll go on to do great things, and someday, I’ll see you in the Forest. I’ll save you a spot. I know you don’t believe, but you’ll see. You’ll see.”

Silo briefly looked off camera, then turned back.

“I hope you never see this. I hope we made it through.”

That was enough for Lucas. He deactivated the chip and slid it back into his pouch. He pulled up his wrist display that showed a pulsing green dot labeled K
IATI
back at the underground village. She’d returned from a rescue mission of her own, saving one of the other stranded Guardians. Lucas was not looking forward to telling her how Silo died, nor giving her his Final. There had indeed been something between them once, long ago. The knot in Lucas’s stomach that had formed when watching the video had not yet gone away. Silo was a good man. Lucas had seen too many of those die these past few years.

The remainder of their trek through the jungle was uneventful and they took no further breaks. Either the Desecrator had lost them, or simply stopped pursuit. Toruk frequently let out a low sharp whistle that blended in with the rest of the forest’s noises, and Lucas thought he knew the purpose. He was trying to call his bloodwolf back to him, but there was no way the creature could have survived his attempt to stall the Desecrator. The bones they saw of much larger creatures the monster had killed were proof of that. Each time his whistle was met with silence, Toruk seemed to grow a little more despondent.

The entrance to the village was actually a narrow holographic stone in the earth that didn’t warrant a second glance. The illusion was perfect. They passed through the image and down into the cave system unseen and, after a short trek, came to the underground lake and the settlement itself.

There was no parade to greet them, only a worried-looking crowd of Oni wondering why so few had returned. He watched Toruk regale his people with tales of his warriors’ bravery as they faced down the terrible monster in the Dead City. Lucas had the unfortunate task of relaying to Zeta the news that her entire team had been killed in action.

“It cannot be,” she exclaimed, her pale face growing whiter. “All of them?”

Lucas nodded.

“They were such fine soldiers! I have known Corporal [garbled] for nearly a century. The man has survived more battles than I can count.”

Lucas glanced over at Alpha.

“He’d never fought anything like this before, I’ll tell you that.”

“You said it had
wings
?” Alpha asked, curious more about the discovery of the Desecrator than the death of those who fought him.

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “A dozen feet tall, claws like scimitars, and it was red. Blood red. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Nor have I,” Alpha said. He looked worried.

“No psionic abilities, so far as I could tell,” Lucas continued. “If it is a Shadow, I don’t know what kind it is.”

Alpha sifted through some data on a scroll.

“The Shadow transformation process is meant to spark premature evolution in our species. Perhaps through a different sort of experimentation, this Xalan went down a … different path. One I have certainly never seen replicated.”

“Well, you can dissect it after we kill it,” came a voice from behind them. Lucas knew who it belonged to from the first word. He turned around, already smiling.

Asha stood in the doorway of the hut clad in a torn stealth suit with her trademark sword crossing her back. Her hair was wild from the humidity and her skin had darkened in the sunlight to the point where she almost looked like a native. In her right hand she held a familiar object, the white null core they used to travel to distant star systems with relative ease. It was shaded, but still illuminated the room. She dropped it on the ground haphazardly, causing Alpha to cringe, but before he could chastise her, she was already across the room with her arms wrapped around Lucas.

She gripped him so tight he thought he’d rebroken a rib, but the happiness he felt seeing her alive outweighed it. All the anger he’d felt toward her on the Spear and afterward was erased in an instant. She was here. He hadn’t lost her. Not yet. She pulled back and wore a wide, bright smile. One he hadn’t seen in far too long.

Alpha said they needed to talk further later, but he allowed Lucas some reprieve to recover from his recent outing. He and Asha made their way to the edge of the lake and sat perched on a ledge about a dozen feet up from the crystal clear water. Colorful fish could be seen swimming in schools below, while light shone in from the openings in the roof of the cave. Toruk had told him upon their return that those gaps were also covered by holographic images meant to look, from the outside, like the forest floor. Though he had called them “fool shields,” as it was the best term he could come up with.

Asha attempted to tame her hair as she told Lucas the story of her own awakening in the jungle. She pointed to a bandage around her arm and said that, while she hadn’t run across any Xalan search parties, she was forced to battle a lizard-like creature the size of a pickup truck that wasn’t terribly pleasant. Fortunately, like Lucas, she’d slept with her weapons inside her pod, which had greatly increased her chance of survival right off the bat.

The search team eventually found her, but she wasn’t borderline psychotic the way Lucas had been after his Moltok sting, and she had remained conscious for the return trip. She peeled the bandage back to reveal a few swaths of skin missing in jagged patterns that were obviously bite marks. She’d wanted the bring the lizard’s head back with her as a trophy, but it weighed far too much to be worth carting around in the heat.

On the way back to the village, her group of Guardians and Oni ran across a large chunk of the engine bay of the downed Spear. After clearing out a few enemy Xalan troops attempting to comb through the wreckage, she spotted the white null core, detached from its housing and barely visible in the mud. Understanding its usefulness, she brought it back with her, much to Alpha’s delight. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked, she said.

The two of them sat with their feet dangling off the edge of the precipice, watching the fish swirl below them.

“Well, this is a goddamn disaster,” Asha said, echoing Maston’s earlier sentiment. It was a relief to have a conversation in English again. “We lost most of our escort and our ship and the thing that’s hunting us happens to live next door. Fantastic.”

“It is less than ideal,” Lucas said, staring out at the opposite wall of the enormous cave a few thousand yards away. “But at least we’re still alive.”

“Seems to be our curse,” she said distantly.

“It won’t last forever.”

“What the hell motivated you to go back out for Maston? Especially after all that shit with Silo and your fever? If anyone deserved a break, it was you.”

“You were right,” Lucas said. “He’s an asshole, but a useful one. If we’re going to figure out a way out of here, a plan is better with him than without.”

Asha turned to look at Lucas.

“About Vitalla …” she began. Lucas waved her off.

“He told me,” he said. “All of it. And you think this is a disaster. I can only imagine what Sora was like when that happened. No wonder they were so happy to see us. Lord knows they could have used a bit of good news right about then.”

Asha scoffed.

“Yeah, because we’re being terribly useful so far. We got half their nobles blown up, I was kidnapped, and now we’ve stranded or killed most of their finest soldiers an impossible distance away from home.”

“Well, we found Zeta,” Lucas said.

“Ah yes, the great ‘White Spirit,’ huh? And what exactly is she doing that’s so helpful? I don’t hear Alpha Senior’s message being broadcast around the galaxy yet.”

Lucas shook his head.

“I don’t know what the plan is anymore. Something must be wrong.”

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Asha said.

There was a commotion from back at the village and Lucas stood up to look down at what was going on in the square. A large group was gathered, watching a bloodwolf limp its way into town. Its pace was a crawl, and it was dragging both of its hind legs. Lucas was too far away to get a proper view, but he could see enormous gashes on the creature even from this distance. Toruk burst forth from the crowd and wrapped his arms around the bloodwolf’s neck, and other Oni rushed toward him with what looked to be medical supplies in hand. A few other smaller bloodwolves emerged from nearby huts and ran to greet their lost pack leader.