Diana Fenton
… She couldn’t explain what was happening to her. But she knew there was no point in trying.
She didn’t have the time to sit down and go through every extraordinary experience that had befallen her. She didn’t need to. All she had to do was accept this power, this knowledge, this force growing within her. Accept it, and use it.
They reached the closed door in the corridor, and rather than wait around for Sampson to open it, she competently ducked to the side, pushed to her knees, pulled off a panel at ankle height, and rummaged around within. She expertly grabbed hold of the correct control crystals and pulled them out.
The door creaked, then groaned. With a shudder and a few sparks, it rolled back into the recess in the wall.
She punched up quickly, casting her worried gaze Sampson’s way as he flattened a hand on the wall and took a moment to breathe.
“You okay?” she asked quickly.
He settled for smiling. Maybe he thought it was charming. It was weak, and it showed just how shaky he was, but at least it was there.
“Come on, the lab is just this way.” As she ran, she collapsed her hands around one of the handguns she’d pulled out of Sampson’s backpack.
She felt two cadets in a room several meters to her side. Rather than waiting for them to throw themselves at her, she rolled. Pausing in front of the doorway, she fired just as it opened. She downed the two cadets before they even had a chance to lurch her way.
Sampson stumbled behind her. She ran on.
She felt more officers several doors down, and she dealt with them until finally, she reached the lab. “This is it,” she said in a pressured breath. “Just through here.”
“Lead the way,” Sampson said. He turned back the way they’d come, a light handgun clutched in his fingers.
She knew he preferred that long rifle, but she also understood he didn’t have the strength to hold it. To a man like Sampson, holding a rifle like that would usually be as easy as picking up a fork. Now his body bucked and rocked. He needed medical attention, rest, and a chance to take in what was happening.
He would not get those things anytime soon.
“It won’t take long,” she promised as she began to expertly hack into the panel that would lead into the lab. She wasn’t surprised by the fact that it had been locked – and it had been locked well. There were two layers of heavy encryption and three perfectly functioning security shields.
It would take five minutes to get through them.
“Dammit,” she spat bitterly under her breath.
Sampson swung his gaze over to her. His brow crumpled, and she felt his second sight building. His gaze ticked up and down the wall, then swung to the left. “There,” he pointed with a weak hand. “Just shoot there.”
“What?”
“Stand back.” He encouraged her over with a wave.
She jogged over to him, then Sampson proceeded to fire 10 times into a single point in the wall. She didn’t know what he was doing until, in a cascade of sparks, the door opened on its own.
“What?” Her voice shook as she stared at him.
“I used second sight. You have it, don’t you?” he confirmed needlessly.
She nodded. Her eyes were wide as she stared at him. “But I can’t seem to use it like you can. How did you know that door would open if you fired there?”
Sampson wiped the back of his hand over his sweaty mouth and shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t use it all the time. But sometimes, it just… I guess arises in me, and I see through things. I thought you could do the same?” Desperation and surprise shook through his tone.
“Occasionally I can see through things – but not in the way that you’re describing. And I certainly can’t control it. How… how did you get that power?”
Sampson paled. He looked like he was about to throw up or fall down. “I don’t know. I thought—”
Though all she wanted to do was have this discussion, she shook her head. The determination to get this done rose in her. And even though she’d never been a great cadet, every night, she’d been a fantastic soldier.
They couldn’t afford to have this conversation here and now. “We’ll figure it out later,” she hissed.
“Good call,” he acknowledged as he took up a defensive position.
Slowly, she walked into the lab.
She couldn’t sense anyone within. She knew, however, that she needed to be careful. Yes, her powers had surged seemingly in the last 10 minutes, but that did not mean that she could afford to be complacent. Just the opposite. She understood that it was at times when your power was growing before your eyes that you became blind to your faults.
She crept in warily, her shoulders hunched high, her hands clasped around her gun.
Her gaze ticked left, then right, left, then right. She honed not just her psychic senses, but her ordinary human ones as well.
Only when she confirmed she couldn’t hear, see, or feel anything, did she rush into the room. “Come on. We don’t have much time,” she added.
“Why?” Sampson staggered in behind her, twisted to the side, and locked the door, slamming his palm onto the base of the door controls and hitting it hard.
“I don’t know.” A shiver ran down her back. “I just think we don’t have that much time, that’s all. I’m sorry that sounds weird—”
He let out a gruff laugh. “Weird? Coming from you?”
Despite everything that had happened between them, she stiffened.
And despite everything that had happened to Sampson, obviously he still had the psychic skills to feel it. He shook his head, and it was a deliberate, slow move. “I didn’t mean it like that, Diana. I meant that you’re the most surprising woman I’ve ever met.”
Her cheeks blushed. She only had minutes to save the Academy, and yet her stupid face found the time to flush.
She looked down at her hands as she threw herself at a console. As soon as her fingers settled on it, she relaxed into what she was doing.
She’d done experiments in this laboratory numerous times before. She knew the layout, she knew the systems, and right now, she knew the stakes.
Sweat didn’t dribble down her brow, and neither did she hold herself so stiffly, she would’ve looked like an immobilized stick insect.
Her movements flowed as she swore something reached up from her past. There was a warrior inside her. A warrior she’d met back when she was eight, and a warrior who had grown in her every night she’d slept.
That warrior simply needed the chance to come out.
Diana didn’t have to think about the doses required for the neural agent she was synthesizing, or the exact modifications she needed to make to Academy systems.
She just worked. She used every second – every damn pressured second that passed like a hangman tightening his noose.
Maybe Sampson started to feel something, too, because as he guarded the door, his breath shuddered out in low, percussive pants. His fear wafted off him in waves.
“Come on. This is going to work, this is going to goddamn—” she began.
She didn’t get the opportunity to finish. Something slammed into the side of the building.
This laboratory had no windows, but that didn’t matter, because one was suddenly carved right in the side of the wall only several meters to her left.
Chunks of concrete spewed in, splattering over the floor like blood.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t move. Her fingers continued to fly across the panel.
“Dammit,” Sampson spat. He suddenly forgot his every weakness and pushed past every injury. He threw himself forward, rolled over a console, and crouched low just as a soldier bolted in through the hole. They had their hand on some kind of combat drone, and as they landed, they released the drone. It spun into the air.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the drone engage.
Before it could send out cascading blasts of laser pulses, obliterating everything in its path, Sampson roared. He punched to his feet, he reached out a hand, and he grabbed the drone. He crumpled his fingers around it, and she felt as he sent all of his mental energy into his holographic armor, commanding it to give him every single ounce of power it could.
It was just enough, and he crushed the drone’s casing, smashing through to its control computer.
He didn’t just do that, though – he swung his feet forward, kicking them into the soldier who’d just landed before the guy could jerk up his gun and start firing.
“I’ll buy you the time, Diana – I’ll buy you the time,” Sampson promised, his screams echoing through the room.
And she would use that time. She would use every single second he sacrificed for her.
Sweat might not have slipped down her brow before, but now there was nothing she could do to fight past her fear as it welled from within. It was like a cloud that was trying to swallow the sun.
Come on. You can do this, you can goddamn do this, Diana.
You were born to do this.
That was a question that had haunted her most of her life. And for most of her life, she’d answered that the only thing she’d been born to do was fall.
Now she would rise.
Sampson continued to fight, and she tracked him out of her peripheral vision, though she knew she couldn’t pull her full attention off the hack. It was complicated, and if she got even the smallest thing wrong, she could jeopardize the lives of everyone.
“Come on,” she hissed at herself out loud. “Come on.”
Sampson was fighting for his life, but just as he tried to get a handle on the warrior, another jumped in through the hole. And the guy was holding two combat drones.
… God. It was over.
They were going to die.
“No,” she bellowed, and her voice came from somewhere else.
It came from her past. It came from the angel who had visited Diana the day her parents had died. The angel who’d chosen her, and the angel who’d fought through her since.
“No,” she bellowed once more. And she did it. She slammed her hand down onto the control panel, her fingers inputting the last command.
Shimmering light traced through the Academy grounds, visible through the massive hole in the wall.
The neuro agent deployed. And so did the Endgame Maneuver. It locked onto every single Academy member of staff, student, or civilian, knocked them out, and transported them away.
It locked onto Diana and Sampson, too. But she did not program it to whisk them off Academy grounds. She would reappear, and she would continue the fight.
The end of War Begins Book Two.
You can continue the story today in War Begins Book Three.
Turn the page for more information on the Galactic Coalition Academy.