Chapter 7
Sithen and Karath stepped through the forest until a black heavy fighter class ship with silver trim revealed itself among the large green bushes and spotted round-leaf trees. It sported a single, TR2 engine, two S2 missile racks, and two S4 hard points bolted onto either side of its nose. Sithen arrived at the ship as the hatch opened and the ladder descended to the ground. He looked back to notice Karath gawking at the ship, inspired. She noticed him waiting for her and shook it off, hurrying onboard.
The pilot and co-pilot seats were tandem, with the co-pilot seat up front. She hopped in and realized that she didn't recognize the Casse Aerospace interface: Looks like she'd be learning more than swordplay, she thought. Sithen closed the hatch, started the ship, and they were up in the air in seconds.
The boost speed of the ship surprised her, and as she half-panicked looking around the dashboard for some way to contribute, the big spacial towns surrounding the old, developed city of Stalford caught her eye, and inspired a desire to settle down in a place like this, a place where people stopped each other for friendly chats, where the only noises came from the wind, a place with an empty hangar, a place with nothing to do, a place with a paper book library. The details of the towns quickly escaped focus, with the white froth of the clouds taking over, before the big empty dark made itself present, pulling Karath out of her dream and back into reality, forcing her to think about the dark-faced tevarin behind her whom she was now putting so much trust in.
"We're warping to the Bremen-Vega jump-point," Sithen stated. "Are you ready?"
"Ready," she replied through the comm, and switched it off as her eyes locked onto Rytif, maybe for the last time, to see its light streak out and disappear out of her sight, out of her mind.
"Rytif's a pretty place, ain't it?" Sithen asked.
"Yes it's, well the prettiest place I've ever seen up close."
"The people are good fighters," he said.
The words he used panged in her mind. Fighters she thought. She had seen the exact opposite. Not that they were bad fighters but she just couldn't imagine a quiet place like Ecklestein's hometown breeding much violence.
"It was during the war," he clarified. "The second one."
"I thought the war was over by the time Tee and his pirates raided Stalford." A heavy silence weighed down the comms.
"Some people's wars never end," he stated. "You need to remember that, especially as a tevarin."
They dropped out of warp 10 kilometers away from the Bremen-Vega jump-point, and Karath's mind wandered as they entered and navigated it, sparking relevant questions in her mind that might help clarify Sithen's past.
They exited the jump-point and began their warp chain around Vega Belt Alpha, and it were as if all the rocks in the field found their way through the slivers of where the cockpit cover met the ship's black and silver hull, in through the latches of her helmet and the stitches of her suit, up through the feathers on her neck and down deep into her chest, through her heart, that warm, fleshy doorway to her soul. Flashes of memory cached up in her mind and flooded her body: with scenes of Olly, whom she left broken next to the warm corpses of his disturbed family, the only family he'd ever known; with the image of Ecklestein outside of her bedroom window, his pale skin and dark brown eyes being blown and burnt away, out into space and permanently into her daydreams; with the swirling, spinning darkness she strafed through, that endless, blanketing void she suffocated in, buried for days to eternity. She would have panicked had Sithen's voice not pulled at her focus.
"Humans are weak," he whispered.
"Wh-what?" she replied, too surprised to manage to utter anything else intelligible.
"Humans," he continued, "weak. It takes a whole crowd of them for one to build up the necessary courage it takes to achieve even the mediocre.
"Their civilians are herd animals, grazing on learned behavior until they're plump with redundancies, satisfied with the truly unfulfilling, and coasting through life, constantly complaining about the things they're too lazy to change: The aspects of their reality plagued by their inadequacies.
"Humans tumble through life like asteroids, and any collision with destiny is merely the fault of the random, chaotic nature of the universe.
"Tevarin, however, we tevarin have honor writ through our bones; the tevarin soul is a rising light that lives and pierces through every generation, lifting us up to destiny. Haven't you felt it?"
She questioned him with her silence.
"You grew up with a human, but haven't you always felt different? Haven't you always felt like there was an untapped power within you, that your words and actions bubbled up from a shallow surface level, obscuring the view to the truth buried deep below?"
Again, she responded with silence.
"You will eventually understand it. It is a pity you grew up with anything but a tevarin."
She felt pieces of her mind tear off into other directions, as part of her thought he was right, part of her thought he had a strong, iron-fisted influence she had missed—being raised by a human. Another part of her still loved Ecklestein. He was not only the balance she needed to effectively be comforted by a man of a different species, but also the balance she needed to be able to even appreciate that balance, as if without a kind hand to guide her she would be immune to the very concept of kindness. He kept the exact distance he needed to lead her but also encourage her to discover how to lead herself, and that kind of sweet-spot, middle-ground parenting gave her the strength to build her own strength, to figure out the tools she had all along to be her own.
As they passed the belt she could swear he was still out there, and he was, she realized, for Ecklestein still existed in her mind, and as she tumbled alone through the universe those parts of him were among the few things no one could ever take from her.
"Anything but a tevarin..." she repeated.
They arrived at the Vega-Nul jump-point, making their way through, and it wasn't until they came out the other side that Karath remembered who else was in the Nul system, and what it was that waited for her here.
"We tevarin have faults, too though, Karath."
She could feel her heart rate accelerating, her adrenaline spooling.
"I was in the military," he continued. "The second war...we fought for years. After decades of preparation it was clear that somehow, what we had wasn't enough. How was it, that we tevarin, after our whole history, lineages of warriors, thousands of generations, how was it, then, that we suffered defeat at the hands of humans?"
Karath looked around at the stars, instinctively searching for a way out.
"Leadership. We had no one but our own leadership to blame. It wasn't the pilots, the technology . . . it was the leadership. Ever since Corath'Thal rose up from the ashes of battle and took the reigns up to lead our people across the stars, we were destined to fail, destined to lose ourselves in the fires of war, in flames atop the tainted atmosphere of Kaleeth."
Karath's head-feathers twitched, and she gravely glanced over to the navigation panel at their destination. "Olympus," she whispered.
"Our people deserved better," Sithen started. "Our people, Karath. We deserved to fly over the fires of Earth, the human homeworld, and watch it turn grey with ash as we rounded them up as slaves, so that we could exponentially expand our control across the galaxy like we were always meant to."
Karath was frozen with fear as they dropped out of warp thousands of kilometers above Ashana.
"Approaching target," announced the ship's computer, and the words echoed around in Karath's head, falling silent to Sithen's words.
"I couldn't follow him. We had lost at the Battle of Centauri, we were broken, and what were his orders? To make a mad dash to Kaleeth? He was mad. It was apparent that he was under the spell of some kind of illusionary honor, hiding behind it, and he was going to take all who were left down with him.
"But not me.
"I wasn't going to be reduced to particles for a mission like that. I took my best fighters, ones with brains, with hearts, and we took on a new mission: To gain power and influence among the UEE, itself, to grow within their borders and become an unseen virus that would eventually be too powerful to stop once the UEE began to experience organ failure. We would live in the shadows of their biggest cities, in their blind spots, under the guises of criminals and vagrants, and when they finally realized our strength it would be too late: We would already own the very land they stood on."
They approached Olympus, that massive beautiful mess that was once a glorious, Bengal-class carrier, but now was nothing more than a lawless city of gamblers and gangsters. Karath's anxiety steadily raised the closer they got to it, and they quickly and swiftly pulled into one of the ship's old docks, parking in a dark, hidden chamber as the hydraulics from the gate sounded off, spraying steam into the air which became illuminated by the deep red lamps along the wall.
Karath looked slowly around the darkness as the sound from a shattering SLAM bottle electrified her, and she shuddered as she listened to him inhale it all.
"It is why they call me Tee," he said, the smoke creeping from his mouth, muffling his voice. The cockpit cover opened, startling her once again. "I am the next generation, I and those like me will rise up in the dusty undercarriage of the humans. I am the continuation, the securer of the new. I am tevarin, and no matter how long it takes, our people will take over the stars and my symbol will rise up from the ashes of the flames in black, carbon-hardened steel, and people like us, Karath, we will get statues of us made from pearl-stone, and eventually take over the entire galaxy!"
As he spoke, Karath twitched and shook every time he raised his volume or spat from his beak. She had flown halfway around the stars only to be brought right back to the center of it all, escorted by the devil himself. She wished she had the key that would unlock her stiff self and reach into her bag and blast him away, but they were empty wishes, not granted. She sat there, eyes glued out to the darkness, flinching with every noise Tee made as he stepped out of the ship. He turned to give her a stark gaze, his ebony head-feathers and jade-black beak illuminated by the faint, blinking red glow of the landing room's floodlights.
"Leave the ship, Karath."
She stood there staring at him, with a face that must have screamed fear. She reached into her bag and the moment it made a noise Tee had his pistol pointed right at her face. It took him the time between the light strobes to do it: As Karath witnessed him staring at her in one flash, to a shaking hand caressing a pistol in front of intentful eyes in the next, she became disarmed and surrendered.
"Don't be stupid, Karath," he stated. "I would have done it a long time ago, but after seeing you face to face, after looking into your eyes, I realized that you and I have a lot of work to do."
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
He lowered the gun to his side as a wide smirk materialized behind his beak. "Glory, young tevarin."
She became compliant and taciturn, exiting the ship, subconsciously memorizing the sounds of the code he inputted to close the cockpit hatch. She then followed him out the doors into the dark hallways which navigated the Olympus' innards.
They entered the gambling hall and Karath brought her arm to her face to block the introduction of smells she never knew previously existed. She had picked apart rotting scrap from broken ships near gaseous geysers, but those didn't seem to be as bad as the cocktail of SLAM, body odor, stims, and dirty dingo that currently invaded her senses. They walked through a cleared pathway everyone who saw them made, and it seemed like the place stopped to watch them: Gaping mouths and wide eyes followed them through the hall, and even the timers on the games paused.
They reached the stairway in the back that led up to Tee's room and paused as someone interrupted the silence.
"Ay boss can I get first dibs when you're done wit' her?"
Karath turned to see a fat slob of a guy drooling from the mouth at her, chewing on a soggy stim. The comment bothered her more than the smells and it showed on her face. Behind her, Tee looked at his guards for a moment before turning and continuing his slow walk up the stairs, and as they walked past Karath, she watched as they beat him, collecting his gambling chips when they were done. She peered around the hall at everyone watching: After they shot a quick glance back up to her, the hall then revived itself, and the music, the games, the chatter, even the female slaves with the dirty dingos, were as they were before they had entered. Karath watched it all a moment, curiously, before continuing up the stairs and into Tee's room.
She looked at him, already at his desk on his computer reading various reports having to do with slaves captured in the stars and revenue from his businesses, and she wandered around the room slowly, relieved to be breathing air not poisoned by the gambling floor. She looked at each scenic viewing panel, gazing longingly into the grasping beauty of the scenes, reminded of Ecklestein's estate, the pain from it all starting to creep back in, held at bay only by the fantastic nature of the gorgeous scenes before her.
Tee glanced at her now and then, monitoring the child before him that would become his most important protege, and thought about how easy it was to manipulate the youth.
Karath stopped at a particularly unusual looking scene of a large canyon, filled with strange rock formations, against a backdrop of a cloud-filled sky, and looked down to the bottom of the panel, whispering the word that was engraved into it.
"Kaleeth."
Flashbacks flooded her mind: of reading about her father, Yaruf'Haj, in her mother's letter; of Ecklestein, whose life was cut short by the gang she seemed to have inadvertently joined; the blade she had found in Ecklestein's home, a blade from her family, the very people to which Tee had expressed so much blame. She thought about her mother, who let her husband leave her to retain what honor he had left that wasn't already destroyed by Squadron 42; she thought about the sacrifice of her people, that sacrifice that they believed was necessary for nothing else but to live shortly and die in the atmosphere of their home planet, like it was their only true option left.
She turned to judge her mother's killer, the tevarin who believed himself to be the future of a species he abandoned, a species he enslaved, a species he killed.
The sharp, unmistakable sound of a short blade leaving its sheath forced Tee's eyes up from his work, and he surveyed Karath and the blade she was holding, picked apart her foreign stance, found her eyes pinpointed on his own. He then stood up, grabbing his own blade which had rested against the desk.
"Are you sure you're ready to learn?" he questioned.
She answered with a quick step forward and a two-handed downward slice towards his face. He unsheathed to swat her attack sideward and retaliated with a one-handed cut attempt toward her shoulder: The move was in a single, fluid motion, and his other hand gripped a weathered carbon fiber sheath. She dodged back and shot him a purely focused gaze, with an expression lacking anger, lacking hatred.
She shifted to the right and sliced upwards towards his leg and up across his body, immediately stepping back with her sword primed above her head, dodging Tee's horizontal counter. He sliced again in reverse and she dashed forward, quick as lightning, jumping over his blade as it passed, swinging her blade at his face, screaming. Tee's eyes widened in fear for a split second before he ducked—Karath's blade barely missing his head—and he rushed in as she landed, forcing his shoulder deep into her chest. Her light frame tumbled across the floor, slamming into the wall as she let out a guttural cry from pain and frustration.
"Your style is human," Tee said, panting. "It's flawed, and lacks a tevarin flair."
"Fuck you!" she yelled, and got up to rush him, her face scrunched in anger, her blade cocked ready to attack with a two-handed stab.
Tee swiftly moved diagonally forward towards her, out of the way of the stab and batted her across the head with his sheath. She collapsed to land sprawled out across the floor unconscious as her blade bounced out of her hands.
"Emotion will slow you down, little girl," he whispered, and looked over her limp body for a moment before calling out to his guards over the comm.
As the two stair guards entered the room, Tee was already at his desk, sword sheathed and taking its usual spot leaning up against his desk. He pointed to Karath.
"Grab her sword and go lock her up in one of my rooms."
They complied, leaving within seconds: Nobody liked to stay in the boss' office for too long.
When she came to she was still in one of the thugs' arms, dangling down a dimly lit hallway, escorted by another of Tee's security detail who seemed to be holding her sword. They were talking to each other too much to notice she'd opened an eye to look around, but she still laid limp like a rag. Her head pounded and it hurt to focus, but she managed to catch an arrow sign on the wall with a gun decal and a word that looked a lot like Cache through her blurred vision.
Adrenaline exploded into her body, and she turned up at the tevarin holding her and shot a fast, piercing punch square through his throat, her entire body twisting with the strike and then out of his arms as he fell.
It happened so fast that by the time the other tevarin knew, Karath was already gripping the handle of her sword, pulling it out and slicing him across his beak. He fell to his knees with his back against the red-lit rusted wall of the hallway, screaming through his broken face. He looked up at Karath just in time to see her thrusting her sword into his throat, and with his head pinned to the wall, his scream turned into a gurgle as Karath watched the life leave his eyes.
She turned to the writhing tevarin who was coughing and struggling to breathe as he watched her mutilate his co worker.
"No—" he tried saying through his crushed windpipe, before Karath came down quickly with her sword, stabbing him hard through his throat, severing the nerve cord in the back of his neck, and then twisting her blade as the body of the freshly dead tevarin twitched hard, its legs kicking the air.
She wiped the blood off on the guard's clothes, and sheathed it, sliding it into a slot on her suit. She then picked up one of the energy rifles the guards had slung across their backs, and followed the green-lit arrow she had spied.
It was a store with various guns, grenades, and EVA suits lining the walls. Karath stepped through the door just as the sound of a glass vial shattering echoed around the room. In the far corner of the store, a man was deeply inhaling the fumes from a SLAM vial. Raising his head, his expression went from pleasure to confusion as his eyes caught a young tevarin girl holding a rifle that was almost a big as she was.
"Now who the f—" he started, and a beam fired from the rifle and pierced him through his mouth, snapping his head back and blasting his brains all over the white-lit wall behind him.
She exhaled sharply through a gritted beak and immediately began searching the room. She strapped a couple gas and high explosion grenades to a utility backpack she found, and locked a helmet with a fancy user interface onto her suit. She searched the guns against the wall and decided on a shotgun; as she loaded the final shell into it, the lights in the store went from white to a blinking red, and an alarm began to sound in the hallway outside, so she quickly vacated.
Karath's adrenaline took her through the halls, turning at intersections not knowing where she was headed. She heard running footsteps echoing all over and couldn't seem to find an open door. As she rounded a corner, the door behind her opened finally and she sprinted inside to see that she had somehow made it back to the casino room, and a hundred or so people inside—made up of gamblers, slaves, game workers, and armed security guards—were all staring back at her in disbelief, watching her catch her breath in the doorway.
"Shit," she said, just as a gun fired behind her in the hallway. A bullet whizzed by her head as she spun around, down to one knee, and raised her rifle to the hallway and fired, spraying the men who were running toward her with a torrent of bolts before the door slid closed. She fired at the door panel, exploding it into sparks, and the ground around her broke apart with bullets ricocheting in every direction. She dove behind one of the game tables and quickly took out two gas grenades, priming them as the table was being shredded by bullets, and tossed them into the center of the room.
She knelt up and peeked over the table with her gun and began shooting at various guards as the grenades exploded into a huge gas cloud that instantly filled the room. She dropped her rifle and ran to where she last saw the guards, swinging the shotgun from her back into her hands. She stayed low through the smoke as she ran up to each disoriented guard, shooting them point blank in their upper chests, a few of them in a row before she stood face to face with the gambler who had berated her earlier.
"I-I, hey, you," he stammered.
Before she could say anything back, they both heard the opening of Tee's office doors, and footsteps on his stairs. The gambler slowly backed away.
"Sithen," Karath said, grinding her beak. She took off towards the stairway, knelt down, aimed, and fired.
"Argh!" Sithen yelled, being blown to his back against his own bottom steps.
Karath tossed down the empty shotgun and pulled out her blade, and as the smoke was beginning to clear she lunged and landed on top of Sithen with her blade stuck deep into his left shoulder. He looked up at her in pain and surprise.
"You?!" he growled. "I would've turned you into a leader!"
"You? You killed my family, twice," she replied, Sithen looking back at her, confused. "Ecklestein was the father I never had, and Thela—"
The stairs lit up with bullets fired from across the hall, and Sithen began screaming.
"WAIT, you idiots! I'm right here!"
Karath grabbed a high energy grenade from her pack, armed it and tossed it towards the door. She held the hilt of the sword to brace for the shock wave, moving when it exploded, wiggling the sword around inside of Sithen's shoulder forcing him to grab the blade, yelling as the sharp edge dug into his fingers. She ripped it out of him cutting his hand even more, before shoving it right back down into the same spot, pinning him to the stairs.
"Thela was my mother, you murdered her on Kabal III. Do you even remember?"
Sithen's face was filled with rage and pain, but tried to think back on all the tevarin he'd enslaved and killed: It was such a long time ago he barely even remembered going to Kabal III. Karath twisted the blade again, bringing him back to the present.
"You're making a big mistake, girl," he snarled. "You're gonna be hunted for the rest of your life."
"You're going to die right here," she replied, ripping the sword out once again, holding it in the air, intending to bring it down right into his heart, but blood blew out from the front of her suit and she fell against the stairs from the impact of a gunshot.
"No!" she screamed, panicking, writhing in pain. She pulled out another grenade, primed it and shoved it under Sithen's body, crawling quickly away on all fours, using the tables for cover. She went through a door on the far side of the hall, wincing as she felt the shockwave from the grenade exploding behind her.
She alternated between upright and all fours as she bore the pain from the shot, but pushed on through the hallway toward the docking station she had entered from before. When she reached it, she opened a mounted box of health kits and gripped a couple against her side as she limped into the hangar.
She reached Sithen's Hurricane, punched the code she had memorized earlier to open the hatch, and crawled up into the pilot's seat. She wasted no time in starting it up, and inched towards the opening bay door as she noticed guards pouring out into the bay, firing their weapons at her. The bullets and laser blasts were absorbed by her timely power shift to the rear shields, and the ship scraped the floor and walls of the hangar as she awkwardly flew out the exit amidst a meteor storm of projectiles.
Back in the broken and bloodied gambling hall, Sithen's goons walked past pools of fresh blood, one of whom had a medpack and was hurrying to the stairs where Sithen lay. He was gripping the wound in his shoulder, deathly eyeing the man who approached him.
"Get me to a ship. Now."