“I am with you, be’shmai,” I tell her.
We stand in the Neridaa’s heart, staring at the projection she has cast around us. It is as if the Weapon’s walls were translucent: all the Void around us is rendered in close-up high definition, sharp as knives. My father reclines upon his crystal throne, but I can tell from the slight crease between his brows that he too is concerned about the force arrayed against us. If nothing else, that thought is enough to wake the fear in me.
I am still clad as a warrior of the Unbroken: black power armor painted with pale glyfs, daubed with songs of glory and blood. Twin kaat blades are crossed at my back, gleaming and silvered, a heavy pistol hangs at my hip, pulse grenades are strung at my belt. But I do not feel like a warrior. Not the kind he would want me to be, anyway.
“So many.” My father watches the incoming ships, and my blood runs cold as he speaks. “Your sister would have enjoyed this, Kaliis.”
“We’re too close to Sempiternity to just send out blind pulses through the Weapon like last time.” Aurora turns to meet my father’s eyes. “We’re going to have to take them down one by one. You and me.”
He smiles, eyes on our enemy. “That pleases you, yes?”
“Pleases me?” Aurora blinks. “Look, I’m not a psychopath like you. I don’t enjoy killing just for the sake of it. I’m—”
“I do not mean the killing, Terran. I mean the power.”
My father throws Aurora a dark glance.
“Tell me you do not feel it? Humming upon your skin and thrumming through your bones? Tell me you are not aching to unleash it again?” He tilts his head, eye flickering. “The Eshvaren were wise when they made their Triggers, child. They knew us well enough to make our poison taste sweet. For our deaths to feel like godhood.”
She purses her lips, meeting his stare but saying nothing. The ships are bearing down, swarming in out of the black. Aurora’s right eye begins to glow, and I feel heat upon her skin as she glowers at my father.
“You gonna speech some more, or are you actually gonna help me?”
“Help you?”
He meets her gaze, and without breaking eye contact, extends his left hand. I see his iris start to glow: that dark light within, leaking out through the cracks across his face. His braids move as if in some invisible wind, and out beyond the Neridaa’s skin, I see one of the Ra’haam ships—a massive, lumbering Terran carrier enveloped in tendrils and pulsing leaves—begin to shudder. The vessel must weigh millions of tons, and yet my father curls his fingers into claws, as if crushing the most delicate of flowers, and my eyes grow wide as I watch the carrier shiver and blow itself into a thousand burning pieces by the power of his will alone.
He shakes his head.
“I care nothing for helping you, Terran. I care for victory.”
Aurora grits her teeth, turns back to the display. “Good enough.”
My gaze lingers on my father for a heartbeat longer. I am thinking of those days when I was young and we trained together beneath the lias trees. But then I reach down and squeeze Aurora’s hand.
“What can I do to help?”
I can feel my father’s burning gaze on the back of my neck, but I ignore it. Aurora looks at me sidelong, a tiny galaxy gleaming in her eye as she squeezes the hand that holds hers.
“You’re already doing it,” she smiles.
And so it begins. The Ra’haam vessels roar toward us, an impossible multitude, and one by one, my be’shmai and my father reach out into the dark to crush them. I see bursts of light, soundless explosions in the black, like new constellations flaring briefly in a burning sky.
The carnage they weave is breathtaking. The light burns inside she whom I love and he whom I hate, and for a moment, I am heartsick at the thought of what they could be if only they were to unite and truly work together.
But I know that is a child’s dream. Caersan, Archon of the Unbroken, will never share his throne. Never trust another enough to believe they are driven by anything save the bloodlust and greed that drive him.
My father is insane.
“Kal, this is Tyler, do you read?”
I touch the commset at my ear. “I hear you, Brother.”
“We got new inbounds, multiple headings. Sempiternity’s launching all ships. Tell Auri if she can head off their charge, we’ve got her six.”
“Understood. How long until the rift drive is online?”
“At least thirty minutes. Can she and the bastard hold them that long?”
I look to Aurora, heart twisting. I can see the power in her, the strength gifted to her by the Ancients. But even as it burns inside her, flaring like a sun in her iris, I can see it. See them. Tiny cracks spreading out from her eye and across her skin. I see what this is costing her. How it is hurting her. And worse, just as my father said, how much she seems to …
She seems to be enjoying it.
“We will hold them,” I reply.
“Roger that,” Tyler replies. “We’ll keep as much heat off as we can.”
I watch the Sempiternity fleet scramble—perhaps fifty vessels, ragtag and mismatched. But as they soar out toward the incoming Ra’haam ships, I can see the hand of Tyler Jones directing them like a conductor before his orchestra. My brother was ever a master tactician, and it seems years of warfare have honed him sharper still. His ships cut a swath through the enemy, fighters launching, missiles flaring, explosions blooming.
But the Ra’haam is so many.
The black outside is now ablaze: burning ships and rupturing cores, boiling sap and bleeding leaves. But the enemy keeps coming, more and more, dropping in through tiny warp tears in the system’s skin. For every ship we destroy, another three seem to replace it, like the weeds these people name them for. And then …
“… Jie-Lin …”
A voice, echoing in the air around us. A tremor, running through my be’shmai’s body. I see her breath catch, her onslaught falter, feeling the horror and sorrow and rage flowing through her at the sound.
“… Jie-Lin …”
“Daddy … ,” she whispers.
“… We missed you … ,” it whispers.
I know the voice. Of course I do. Aurora’s father—the man she lost two centuries ago, and then lost again to the Ra’haam. One of the first human colonists on Octavia to be subsumed into the collective. In an awful way, he still lives inside it.
“… We thought we lost you. Oh, my love, we cannot tell you how good it is to feel you again. …”
“Be’shmai,” I whisper, squeezing her hand.
“I know,” she breathes. “That’s not him.”
“… We ARE him. We are everything we have touched. Betraskan and Terran, Syldrathi and Rikerite. Chellerian and gremp and Kacor and Cajak and Ayerf and Sarbor. Parents and children, friends and lovers, boundless and forever together. It is safe here, daughter. It is warm. It is love. …”
I feel Aurora tremble, gritting her teeth. Behind us, I hear my father’s voice, his own teeth bared in a snarl.
“Do not listen, girl.”
“I’m not.”
“It seeks to distract you.”
“I know!”
“… You do not know. You cannot. We do not want you to die, daughter. You know that is what it will cost you, don’t you? In the end … ?”