It’s a long Fold for those on the way to the Octavia system. Long enough for my wounds to begin healing as we wait for news that the coalition fleet has reached its destination. I find the rehab hard work, and the cybernetic they gave me still feels strange, but good news is, I can read the news feeds right off the network now.
Fin is still confined to the med bay, but as I limp into his room, he and Scar break apart with an audible pop, so I figure he can’t be too bad. My sister straightens her tunic, brushes a stray lock of newly dyed red back from her flushed lips, settling in on the medi-cot beside Fin. I rumble to a stop and raise an eyebrow, looking back and forth between them.
Fin’s blushing, which is kinda weird for a Betraskan.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” I say.
“He is resting,” Scarlett says breezily.
“You stabbed a pen into his throat, Scar. You might wanna give him a few more days before you start licking his tonsils.”
“Very droll,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And very graphic. But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I wave at my face. “You know, this cybernetic eye they gave me can see into the thermographic spectrum. Your cheeks get almost 0.2 degrees warmer when you lie.”
She screws up one of Fin’s many pillows, hurls it at my head.
“Should’ve gotten you a damn eye patch.”
“That might be pushing the space-pirate thing too far, even for me.”
“Avast, matey,” she grins.
“Hoist the mizzen,” I smile. “Jolly the Roger.”
“Yarrr,” Fin growls, in a small, broken voice.
Scar turns on him in mock outrage as she pokes his chest. “You’re not supposed to be talking!”
Fin shrugs and grins sheepishly, and she puts one hand to his cheek, kisses his lips. I watch them break apart slowly, eyes fixed on my Gearhead. Fin pretends not to feel my stare, but eventually he glances at me sidelong.
“You know,” I say, “when all this is over, you and I are gonna have to have us a little chat about my sister, buddy.”
Fin waves at the derm patches wrapped around his throat and shrugs apologetically, mouthing the words Not Supposed to Be Talking.
“My burly protector,” Scar says, hand to heart and lashes fluttering.
“I’m not worried about you,” I scoff. “I’m worried about him.”
She rolls her eyes, looks at the satchel I’m carrying.
“What’d you bring me?”
I sit beside the cot, rummaging around before tossing her a few packets of Just Like Real Noodelz!™ My sister stares at me, trading mock outrage for the real deal. “You brought me ship rations? Tyler, we’re on station, they have real food here, what the … ?”
Her voice fades out as I produce a tub of ice-cold quad-choc gelato and an academy-issue spork, toss them into her waiting hands.
“Oooooh, you are a good man, Tyler Jones. I pardon you.” Fin winces, speaks in a whisper. “Can’t believe … you’re hungry.”
“You’re not supposed to talk.” Scarlett eases off the top of the gelato tub like it contains the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything. “And when in doubt, eat your way out.”
Fin looks at the holo projected on the wall, mumbling. “Just … feels strange to be celebrating.”
Scar and I follow his gaze to the holo, drinking in the sight. Battle Leader de Stoy stayed behind aboard Aurora Station to oversee the assault. But Adams is sending us a feed direct from the bridge of his flagship, the Relentless. He said we’d earned ourselves front-row seats to history.
And sure enough, history is playing out before our eyes.
After almost two weeks of Folding, the assembled ships of the coalition fleet have finally reached the Octavia gate and are now poised to commence their attack, wiping out the first seed world of the Ra’haam.
They gather like spears in the Fold’s black and white, silhouetted against the gate. Like all the systems where the Ra’haam hid its nurseries, the Octavia gate is a naturally occurring weak spot in the fabric between dimensions. Instead of the hexagonal gates we Terrans use, or the teardrop portals of the Syldrathi, this one looks like a shimmering rip right across the face of the Fold. It’s tens of thousands of kilometers across, edges rippling with bursts of black quantum lightning. Over its horizon, the view sheers and shifts like heat haze, and beyond, I can see a faint glimpse of the Octavia star, burning blood-red in the rainbow hues of realspace.
Last time we saw this, it was just the seven of us. Squad 312. We all know what we lost on the planet. What was taken from us. For a moment, the anger and hurt are so bad it’s all I can do to breathe.
“Strange to celebrate the death of the Ra’haam?” Scarlett scoffs, leaning back and taking a big bite of quad-choc. “Are you kidding? Should’ve brought some damn beers.”
The crackhisssss of a pressured seal echoes in the room, and I hand Scarlett an ice-cold bottle of Ishtarrian ale.
“Oooooh, you are a gooooood man, Tyler Jones.”
“Thought … you didn’t drink,” Fin whispers.
“I’m making an exception,” I reply, taking a slow mouthful. “Want one?”
Fin shakes his head, looking back at the screens. I can feel his trepidation, his fear, and a part of me shares it, honestly. If the Eshvaren went to all that trouble to get us the Weapon, to plot their assault on their ancient enemy over the course of millennia, it seems a touch overconfident to expect we can just brute-force our way through this.
But thinking about it rationally, for all their power, the Eshvaren lived a million years ago. We don’t know if there were any other inhabited planets during their time—maybe they were all alone. They probably had no concept of the firepower a coalition of a few hundred star-spanning species could generate if they got motivated enough. This fleet, this force … it’s like nothing the galaxy has ever seen.
And besides, it’s our only hope.
Adams and his fellow commanders aren’t fools either, and they aren’t charging in blind—they’ve already launched a wave of recon probes through the gate to scope the system. From the reports coming in, Octavia III looks almost exactly as it did when the seven of us were last there—a run-of-the-mill M-class rock. Seventy-four percent ocean, four major continents. Dull as a Saturday night in my dorm room—unless you’re into chess, I guess.
But I know those blue-green land masses and stretches of blue-green ocean aren’t really earth or water anymore. They’re the skin of the Ra’haam. Beautiful fronds and rolling vines and curling leaves, basking in the heat of the planet’s core. It’s a mask, hiding the face of the monster growing beneath.
But from all the data, all the readings …
“It’s still asleep,” Scar murmurs.
“Looks like,” I nod.
“You really think this is gonna work?” she asks.
I clench my jaw, watching as the order is given and the fleet begins flooding through the gate. I try not to think about all we need but don’t have, all we gave up to get this far. Cat and Zila and Kal and Auri.
“It has to,” I breathe.
The approach is textbook perfect, the armada descending out of the gate like the hand of the Maker. Wave after wave of Rigellian endsingers and Chellerian scythes and Betraskan saht-ka, cutting through the dark like arrows skimming the skies of some ancient battlefield, the crows already singing for the slaughter.
Behind them come the capital ships—the massive silhouettes of orbital bombardment platforms from Ishtarr, Aalani warstars, gremp battlehulks, Nu-laat warp-throwers, Aurora Legion carriers, surrounded by endless flights of Longbow escorts. I realize I’m breathing faster just at the sight of it all, the rush of it crawling in goose bumps on my skin. A part of me wishes so desperately I was there to land this punch, I can taste it.
Instead, I’m stuck in a hospital room halfway across the galaxy.
Helpless except to watch.
“This is for all of us, Ty,” Scar says, meeting my eyes.
“Yeah.” I nod, swallowing hard. “This is for Cat.”
The order comes across comms. The bombardment begins. Ten thousand ships, ten thousand shots, ten thousand fists holding aloft our light in the dark.
As the first bombs fall, the atmosphere of Octavia begins to burn: fusion flashes burning white, orbital barrages splitting the clouds, mass-drivers shaking the foundations of the earth. It seems small at first. The planet is so big, the scope of it so immense. But even an elephant can be killed by enough ants. And most ants aren’t armed with nuclear ordnance.
The blue green burns black. The crystal-clear skies of Octavia III are growing dark, billions of tons of earth and dust thrown into the atmo as the surface is engulfed in flames and the planet shakes to its bones. The barrage is relentless, endless, the might of the combined races of the galaxy bent to a single purpose—to slay this dragon in its lair, to drown this beast while it sleeps.
And Maker’s breath, at first I didn’t dare let myself hope. But as the bombardment continues, crushing, overwhelming, as the skies of Octavia III turn black with ash and its atmo boils away into space …
“They’re doing it,” I whisper. “They’re actually—”
It’s like a whisper at first. Shapeless and toneless, lodged somewhere at the base of my skull. Building in the place where I hid all those silly fears I thought were real as a kid—the monsters under my bed and the ugly voices in my head.
I look to Fin, and he seems not to notice, big black eyes still locked on the attack, blazing skies reflected in the smooth dark arc of his contact lenses. But looking past him to Scar, I see a frown forming on her brow, her lips parted as she begins to wince.
“You hear that?” I ask.
“No.”
She meets my eyes and shakes her head.
“I feel that.”
The pressure builds, cascading along the length of my spine and pressing on the back of my eyes so hard I’m forced to shut them, hand to my sweat-slick brow.
There’s a tiny lull, as if something were drawing a single, smooth breath.
And then the whisper becomes a scream—a SCREAM so vast and hungry and hateful it reaches across the lonely wastes of space and seizes hold of my heart, squeezing so hard it almost stops.
“Oh Maker …”
Scar hisses, her nose bleeding. “What’s … h-happening?”
Fin raises one shaking hand, his whisper like ice in my belly.
“… Look.”
The fleet. The assault. The missiles, the mass-drivers, the bombardment—all have fallen quiet and still. It’s like Adams has called a cease-fire, except no such order has come through over comms. In fact, nothing is coming through over comms anymore, as if everyone in the armada is listening, enraptured or horrified or paralyzed by that awful
awful
SCREAMING.
Alarms are ringing aboard Aurora Station now—alerts for commanders to report to station, the lighting dipping toward yellow as we shift to Ready Status 2. The whole galaxy is witnessing this across the feeds, and I can imagine the uncertainty, the panic, spreading like poison as the mightiest fleet ever assembled hangs frozen and still, etched in dark silhouette against the shining cusp of that burning world.
“Admiral Adams … ,” I whisper.
The atmo of Octavia III swirls and churns, firestorms raging among walls of black cloud, hundreds of kilometers high. That scream rises in intensity, so bright and sharp I can barely see through my tears, blood gushing from my nose and spilling over my lips. Fin has hold of Scarlett’s hand, mopping at the flood of red dripping from her chin. But I force myself to watch those screens, horrified, stupefied, as the seething clouds of Octavia III tear themselves wide and the thing beneath comes flooding out.
It doesn’t look like a monster. Like a horror, or an ending. And that’s the awful thing—I’m actually awestruck at the beauty as a trillion spores of burning blue light come rushing up from the burning skin of Octavia III, flooding out into space. It rips the planet apart as it comes, shattering it to the heart, sundering mountains and molten mantle, the bleeding, liquid core splitting apart in a cataclysm beyond imagining.
Octavia III dies screaming, just like I’m screaming, just like it is screaming, yowling, howling like a hungry newborn dragged from the warmth of its mother’s womb into the cold of the world. And my heart sinks in my chest as those glittering spores tumble through the dark, latching hold of those listing ships and sinking in, tendrils questing, seed pods bursting, corruption spreading out through the mightiest fleet the races of the galaxy have ever assembled and claiming it for its own.
“Oh no,” Scar whispers. “Oh Maker …”
“It’s awake … ,” I breathe.
I see the light of engines engaging, ships beginning to turn—a few crews with the presence of mind to try to flee their fate. But most of them just hang there, listless and lifeless as Octavia III dies burning, screaming, giving birth to the thing she’s warmed in her womb for the last million years.
I watch those spores tumbling, spilling, like globes of gleaming blue glass, engulfing the coalition fleet and rolling onward. I see the feeds from the armada begin to die, as one by one those ships are consumed, corrupted. I want to turn away, to close my eyes, to tell myself the monster under the bed isn’t real, isn’t real.
But I force myself to watch as the Ra’haam reaches the FoldGate—that glimmering tear across the stars, the endless pathways to the rest of the galaxy beyond. Scarlett has never attended chapel a day in her life, and she’s praying as those gleaming orbs begin to flood through. Fin slips his hand into mine and squeezes so hard my knuckles creak.
“I saw this,” he whispers. “… In a dream.”
I say the only thing I can think of.
I say its name.
“Ra’haam.”
An entity that once threatened to swallow every sentient life in the galaxy. A hunger so vast, an intellect so terrifying, an enemy so dangerous that an entire race sacrificed itself to prevent its rising again.
But they failed.
The Eshvaren failed.
And Maker help us, so have we.
Ra’haam.