There are so many.
I know in my head the Ra’haam is an It. One hive mind, composed of billions of pieces, interlocked and connected into one massive singularity. When one part of it feels pain, all of it hurts. What one part of it sees, all of it knows. But as I watch that swarm of ships bearing down upon us—more vessels than I have ever seen—it is difficult not to see it as Them.
Terran heavy carriers. Syldrathi specters. Betraskan troopships and Chellerian scions. A hundred different models and classes, stolen from a hundred different worlds, all of them encrusted in writhing growths of blue green and trailing curling tendrils behind them into the dark.
And they are coming for us.
“Holy cake,” Aurora breathes. “That’s a lot of ships.”
“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 … ?”
“Fool,” my father says. “Shut them out. Do not listen!”
“Father, you are not helping!” I roar.
“… Even if you triumph in this battle, you cannot win, all that awaits …”
My heart twists as Aurora’s nose begins to bleed. As the tiny cracks in her skin tear a fraction wider. And I know it speaks truth.
“… All that awaits you is death. …”
Our defenses are crumbling. The enemy’s numbers are too great. Tyler’s ships weave through the black. Explosions light the night. I see my father’s face twisted in his fury, fingers curling. But purple blood is dripping from his nose now, dark light seeping through his cracks.
“Tyler, how long?” I demand.
“Ten minutes! Maybe less!”
“We cannot hold them!”
The closest Ra’haam ships unleash a barrage, spiraling, spinning, spitting. They ignore Sempiternity entirely, intent only on the Neridaa—on the Weapon built to kill it, the Triggers meant to fire it.
I look to my father, to Aurora, desperate. Their faces are slick with blood, eyes shrouded in shadow, but still they strike: a concussive wave, blasting the projectiles into ichor. But more ships come, an endless tide, and I feel my heart sinking in my chest.
“Tyler, what is happening!”
“Rift drive is online! But the ’Walkers still need to power up the crystals!”
“Kal … ,” Aurora whispers.
“Tyler, we cannot hold them off!” I roar.
“Kal!”
I meet Aurora’s eyes, see the starlight flaring within them. She sways beside me, her lips red and bright. Her eyes are alight, and I recognize the kaleidoscope of emotion within her—elation and delirium, fierce and joyful, the drunken rush of battle. She reaches out her hand toward Sempiternity, current crackling at her fingertips. The power of a tiny god within her.
“I can do this.”
I look to the World Ship, shaking my head. “No, be’shmai, you will h—”
She squeezes my hand. “I can do this, Kal.”
I look to the battle outside, the corrupted ships flooding toward us, blossoms of fire arcing across the stars. I pull her into my arms, press my lips to hers, tasting blood between us. “I am with you.”
My father slices his hands through the air, crushing the vessels around us. Aurora stretches her fingers toward Sempiternity, and the entire galaxy seems to tremble. I feel a pulse of power around us, tingling on my skin. The whole ship shakes, the walls around us humming with that strange, off-key tune as power flares in the World Ship’s heart, and the fragments of Eshvaren crystal within burst into blinding light.
“What the hells!” Tyler roars.
Aurora’s right iris burns with that same light, leaking through the cracks around her eye. I feel her tremble in my arms, and I turn to my father and roar over the rising pulse of that beautiful, awful song.
“Father, help her!”
The enemy swarms closer, ever closer. Hunger and want and death. The light within the World Ship flares again, a colorless tear opening in the universe’s skin. Blood spills over Aurora’s lips, and my heart twists as I see they are curled in a smile.
“Yes,” she whispers. “Oh yes.”
“That’s it!” Tyler shouts. “FoldGate is open! All units, retreat! Retreat!”
With one last vicious swipe of his hands, my father turns from the carnage outside and reaches to the ship around us. I hear the Neridaa’s tune change in pitch, feel the swell of vertigo as we begin to move, the black ablaze. I cling to Aurora, holding on to her as if to keep her from drowning as we drop through the shimmering FoldGate.
The rift hurls us across the vast gulf of space, screaming and blurring. I can taste ash in the air, feel my body stretching, the space around me folding, power singing at the tips of shaking, bloody fingers, rainbows running to black and white and then to full and glorious color again.
And then, in another flash of impossible light, it is over.
We are safe.
I hold Aurora in my arms, keeping her upright. Her eyelids are heavy, flickering as if she were dreaming. Her chin is sticky with blood.
“Aurora?” I ask. “Can you hear me?”
I press my hand to her cheek, pleading.
“Aurora!”
“Well done, Terran,” comes a hollow rasp. “I am almost impressed.”
I look over my shoulder, to the shadow at my back. My father sits upon his throne, cloak flowing down the stairs like a crimson waterfall. His eyes are bruised, chin smudged with faint violet where he is wiping away the blood. I can see the cracks in his face run a little deeper, his shoulders slumped—just the slightest signs of strain from his ordeal. But for him to show weakness at all tells me how badly this has hurt him.
How much it has cost them both.
“Are you well?” I ask.
He rubs his brow, wincing. “I did not think you cared, Kaliis.”
“Of course I care,” I growl. “Without you, we will never find our way home. We will never defeat the Ra’haam.”
“Victory at any cost.”
He looks at me, eyes glittering as he smiles.
“That’s my boy.”
“K-Kal?”
I turn as Aurora whispers, squeezing her tight. Her hair is draped over her face in curtains of black and white, soaked with sticky red. I smooth it back and press my lips to her brow, my breath catching at the blood smeared upon her lips, her chin, the shadowed hollows around her eyes.
“Aurora …”
“Are w-we … are we s-safe?”
“Yes.” I run my thumb across her lips, gently wiping away the blood. “We are safe, be’shmai. You did it. You did it.”
“Oh,” she sighs. “Good …”
Aurora blinks hard, looking to the glittering crystal around us.
A trickle of red spills from her ears.
And then she collapses in my arms.