Chapter 8
"Get me to a ship, now."
"Hang on, boss, you're bleedin' badly."
"Give it to me," he said, grabbing the medpack from the tevarin's hands. He opened it, taking a piece of some small globular mass and shoving it into his wound, yelling and cursing in pain, writhing around the bottom steps of his own office. The tevarin stood there in shock, staring at Sithen's blood-soaked clothes. The medi-glue would stop the bleeding and keep it clean, but how much blood could he have left in him, the guard wondered.
Sithen grabbed and chewed a tablet from the medpack, and looked up towards the guard with hateful eyes.
"Give me some SLAM!" he yelled.
Another tevarin guard jogged over with a vial, handed it to him, and watched him break and inhale the stuff.
"Boss?"
Sithen grunted back.
"Boss, some of the guys over there, they . . . they said they saw what happened."
Sithen ignored him.
"They said you tossed a grenade at a group of tevarin guards."
Sithen swallowed what was left of the painkiller he was chewing on, which seemed to be working as the look of pain disappeared from his face, leaving only fervent rage. The guard gulped as Sithen rose up to meet him, face to face.
"Where's. My. Ship?"
The guard winced from the blood being spat onto his face from Sithen's mouth, and immediately wiped it off. "The girl took it."
High above Ashana, Karath piloted the Hurricane out of the atmosphere and gravitational pull of the planet. She felt herself getting tired, immediately recognizing her blood loss, and let the ship fly as she pulled apart the medpack, grabbing the medi-glue inside and shoving it into her bullet wound. She gritted and grunted in pain, but knew she'd have to close the other side, too, before she passed out probably never to wake up ever again.
She reached behind her, exacerbating the pain, and as she heard the hiss of the glue reacting with her wound she shut her eyes and screamed.
After chewing on a caffeinated pain pill, she finally began to feel able to fly the ship again, so she opened up the warp screen. When it came up, the ship's crosshair hovered exactly over the Nul-Centauri jump-point.
"Centauri," she whispered, just as a pair of blips came up on her radar. She monitored their distance, and to her surprise they stayed a few thousand meters back, never gaining any space on her. She watched their distances closely, and began her warp.
A couple of minutes later, she dropped out of warp a few thousand meters away from the jump-point, and by the time she arrived, she noticed the two ships drop out of warp behind her.
She waited a few hundred meters from it, anticipating the ships' sprint towards her, but they never did: They kept a few thousand meters between them, just like they did before the warp, and she stared at the ships on the radar screen in query for a moment before heading in.
When she came out the other side, she brought up her warp screen, noticing the planets around Centauri, wondering about the Tevarin Wars. She thought about the battles that were had here, especially the famous Battle of Centauri, where the tevarin were defeated by Squadron 42.
She couldn't help but think about Bremen, too, about Rytif, and the boy she met in the ship hangar in Ecklestein's hometown, outside Stalford. Bremen couldn't be the only system in the galaxy with people like those that lived in its small towns. Every corner of the galaxy had places where people stopped each other only to chat, living their day to day lives with adversity or life-altering challenges rarely faced; there were people living simply, planetside, without ever having to wear an EVA suit.
Even down on Yar or Saisei, in this very system, she thought, how many people were bathing in Centauri's rays with nothing to fear, or mining away on Centauri I, with no idea about what people were going through elsewhere in the galaxy?
She glanced back at her radar at the bogeys keeping their distance, and gazed up at the warp screen at the locations on the map, noticing another jump-point, and the whole universe seemed to slow to a stop when she saw it.
"Elysium," she whispered.
At once she realized. She realized where she had to go, what she had to do, knowing that her course had to inevitably take her to this place, this moment. She felt the stars whisper, the spirits of her ancestors arrive in a gust, her soul start up into a cyclone of ambition: Her final destination was finally as clear as a supernova.
She warped there, to the Centauri-Elysium jump-point, and swore to herself that, one way or another, this would be the last jump-point she'd ever have to navigate.
Karath flew out the other side and brought up the warp map. She looked at the destinations and read them aloud.
"Vosea . . . Jalan."
She reached out with her fingers and touched the word "Jalan" on the screen, and felt a warmth swirling inside her chest.
"No," she said. "Kaleeth."
She warped, and was soon hovering high above the planet; she spun the ship around to look up through the roof of the cockpit, and floated there for what seemed like forever, staring at the planet, tracking the clouds and the wind patterns, memorizing the colors and shapes of the landscape. It felt like she was daydreaming, but everytime she questioned it, the realness of it all weighed her down deep in her stomach: It wasn't just the lack of gravity that was making her nauseous.
Her two shadows reappeared on her radar, and this time began to advance on her position. She turned the ship to face their approach, and when they finally got within a thousand meters, they stopped, and hailed her on the comm.
"Girl," a female tevarin's voice crackled. Karath said nothing, focusing on the ships ahead of her, waiting for a missile blast to show itself so she could begin evasive maneuvers.
"Girl," a male voice repeated.
Karath opened the comm line. "My name is Karath," she said. "Why don't you just get it over with already."
"Well," the female's voice started, "we didn't actually come here to kill you."
"Then what are you doing here," she replied. "Aren't you a part of Tee's gang?"
"We are."
Confused, Karath sat there with silence over the comms for a few moments until another ship appeared coming out of warp on her radar, and it neared, passing the other two, and stopped a few hundred meters away. Karath instinctively shifted power to her front shields, as the third voice came over the comm.
"You worthless piece of scrap."
Karath knew who it was, and she wasn't going to respond to his words: She had nothing to talk about with him.
"I told you," he continued. "That you'd be hunted down for the rest of your life, didn't I?"
"..."
"Fitting that you've come here, though very stupid. The UEE owns this place now, you think they're going to just let you dance your way in, let you hide away here on Vosea or Jalan? It won't happen. It would never happen. And now I'm going to make sure of—"
His speech was interrupted by a lock-on warning, and a projectile firing out of one of Karath's missile racks. He immediately banked to his right out of the way and watched as Karath sped up to get around and behind him.
"Idiot! That's my ship, I know how it moves, how it—" The missile exploded in his chaff, and the shockwave rocked the ship a bit. "You're dead, tevarin!"
Anything he said fell on deaf ears, as Karath tracked behind him firing her gatling and laser hard points simultaneously, pumping them both at different times to avoid overheating, or running out of energy too fast. The lines of projectiles sprayed over him like whips as she tried to center her crosshairs on him.
He started to sway back and forth, eventually spinning around and accelerating towards her, firing back with his gatling and lasers, and the explosions against the forward reinforced shields made Karath flinch as she accelerated past him to try to swing back around again.
As she flew, she looked back at the two ships, wondering why they hadn't joined the fight, but a lock-on warning grabbed her attention, so she switched her countermeasures to flares and released them.
She spun the ship as hot bullets trailed in on her position, and as she drifted back to head towards Sithen, the g-force made her vision go blurry. She inhaled in short, sharp bursts, trying hard not to grunt, doing all she could not to pass out, and fired another missile. The missile exploded into his shields diminishing them considerably as he flew by. Yells and curses bounced around the interior of his helmet, and he turned the ship back around towards Karath and boosted.
He closed in on her, slowing down from the boost, and at five hundred meters fired a missile, continuing to follow her trajectory as she released a chaff and veered off to their left. He angled in the direction she was going, his speed getting him within fifty meters of her, almost cutting her off, and he released an incendiary missile which detonated right on top of her almost immediately.
It happened so quick she couldn't switch her countermeasures, or shift her shield power to its side, and the blast brought her down into the red and forced her off her course. As she was recovering, she felt the ship get riddled with bullets and lasers, and as her shields reached down to zero she screamed, feeling the ship's hull getting pierced. She boosted away from him and down towards the planet as fast as the ship would go.
Sithen grinned and turned to follow her, only now noticing he'd been fighting without contribution from his gang.
"Come on, Nes!" he yelled. "You do nothing, you get nothing."
The pair began to follow him slowly as he boosted down towards her, down towards Jalan's atmosphere.
As Sithen approached her, he released his boost, clicking a button on his console to match her speed, and started to fire his gatling and lasers at her.
Karath moved from side to side, desperately trying to evade the projectiles, but was still getting hit at every pass. Her breathing accelerated and she started to panic. The projectiles started to dig into her engines and wings and she screamed as her lock-on warning came on again. Sithen had fired his last two missiles and they were quickly approaching her rear.
She let go a flurry of chaffs and flares, and when she was done she decoupled and spun the ship around, tightening her stomach at the direction change. She spotted the missiles exploding before her and locked onto the heat with her last heat-seeker and fired, simultaneously squeezing the gimbal triggers, letting loose a barrage of bullets and lasers as Sithen jetted through the countermeasure cloud.
They all hit him, and after the missile brought his shields to zero the projectiles ripped into his left wing and engine, disabling both as he let out a flurry of screams and curses that almost penetrated his cockpit cover and into space.
"Fucking get her you idiots!"
He was met with silence and turned back to them to see missiles fly out of their racks as his lock-on warning came on. He gauged the trajectories of the bombs and looked down at Karath's ship, which was dropping fast and backwards towards Jalan, and as he looked back he realized who they were actually firing at.
"You traito—"
The missiles took out his wings and engines and the field of mess flew down towards Jalan's surface, the inside of his cockpit painted with blood and shrapnel. His vision blurred, his breathing shortened, and the air around him was quickly escaping through multiple perforations. The female tevarin pilot, Nesca's voice came on over the comms.
"You die with no honor, Tee. You die, massacred like our brothers on Olympus, like Peg on Rytif: Betrayed by your own."
"You can't...you can't," he mumbled. The words formulating slowly and having trouble finding their way to his mouth.
The two pilots turned a moment and watched Karath silently as she dropped deeper and deeper towards Jalan's atmosphere. Over thousands of meters, over the crackling of an open comms channel, the three had a silent conversation before Nesca and her wingman turned and disappeared, warping away into the stars.
Karath's console pulsed as the power steadily drained from it, and when it died she attempted to revive it to no avail. She looked back through the cover and watched sparks fly through the bullet holes in the engine casing as it tried to start itself.
The comm in her EVA suit beeped, and as she opened the channel she heard gasping over the backdrop of what sounded like a steady stream of air being sucked out of a cockpit. Karath looked over at what was left of Sithen's ship, dropping down towards Jalan, at a similar altitude and speed as her own.
"Pathetic," she stated. "Look at you."
Sithen's incoherent mumblings transmitted through his breaking comm.
"Look at you," she repeated. "A scoundrel like you, how fitting that the universe has made this place your tomb."
More sounds that Karath translated to be protests skipped over the static.
"Except here, now, you'll be remembered as a traitor, a failure. You'll burn up into nothing, your true form, bastard, and though we'll suffer the same fate, I can die with my honor, like a tevarin should, and you will only die a disappointment."
The comm finally clicked off and Karath was left alone in the darkness of her ship. She looked out at flickers of debris, speckling the backdrop of a universe that calmly gazed back at her demise without objection. Inklings of faint regret and hatred whispered around the interior of her tired mind, tugging at her soul from a quiet distance, wishing to pull her down deeper than she was already falling. At this fated, helpless circumstance, something within her reached desperately for comfort, grasped at the familiar, barely feeling at the edges of the physical void left behind by Ecklestein's death. The thought of his name made his memory more tangible and inspired a bittersweet realization.
It was her birthday.
Karath looked up to the stars and closed her eyes, her ship finally making contact with the atmosphere, and when the back of it began to crackle and burn, she listened as the sounds of the sparking and ripping away of her outer hull went dull and silent to her own memories, to all the words she'd read in the stories from Earth, to a few from her own culture, to the words in her father's letter, to the imagination of her mother's voice. She listened to the stars and swore that she could hear Ecklestein's voice among them, telling her to let go of her hatred, to let go of her sadness, to simply let go.
Down on Jalan, it was a calm evening in the capital city of Gemma, where a human family was resting in a large park with friends near an ancient Rijoran temple at sunset. The young children galloped across the green grasses, tagging each other and yelling the impassioned screams children couldn't help but yell, during what the aged would probably view as trivial circumstances.
A man in his early forties lay comfortably against a large tree root, under an old and well-knotted round-leafed tree, lazily sipping on wine, serenely gazing up at the red horizon, peeking up at the first few stars in the sky—the most luminous in their galactic neighborhood. A similarly aged man walked up to him with a drink in his hand, noticing him in a daze, and kicked some dirt on him.
"Chase," he said, surprised. "What are you doing?"
"Sabotaging your wine, Aaron," the man replied, kicking more dirt on him.
"You know, you can get as much dirt in this wine as you want," Aaron said with a grin, "'cause this stuff's local: It came from dirt."
They both chuckled, and Chase took a seat on the exposed root.
"What were you thinking about?" Chase asked. "You looked pretty locked in."
"Yeah," Aaron responded. "watching the kids play with some wine in my belly always gets me thinking about life, ya know?"
Chase nodded.
"Just about how fast time goes," Aaron continued. "The uncontrollable swirl down the toilet of our existence."
Chase looked up at the sky and sipped his wine, stopping to taste it while he looked down into his cup. "I think you're drunk, bud."
They chuckled again.
"Yeah maybe," Aaron said. "But one thing you can't deny is how awesome the horizon is at sunset, no matter what planet you're on."
Chase lifted his cup towards Aaron's, and Aaron tapped it with his own without looking.
"Are you," Chase said, "getting inspiration for another painting?"
"I'm always getting inspiration, Chase," Aaron replied. "I just don't always have the opportunity to put it somewhere."
They sat for a moment until they both realized that their children had fallen silent somewhere behind them on the hill. They looked back to see them standing still, staring up at the sky, and they walked out of the cover of the tree to see what they were staring at.
Two small streaks of flaming debris, high up in the atmosphere, travelled slowly across the sky, with their smoke trails expanding behind them, like someone had dragged an ink brush through water. A woman strolled along and quietly grabbed Chase's hand and arm, and joined them in viewing the spectacle.
"What is it, Chay?" she asked.
"I don't know," Chase replied. "Meteors?" He looked over at Aaron and noticed his eyes squinted in focus at the streaks, his lips tightened, his eyebrows furrowed.
"Yeah," Aaron finally said. "Meteors."
Chase looked back at his wife and she gazed back up in wonder, and when he looked back at Aaron he noticed that his eyes had welled up, and his free hand was balled up tight in a fist.
Aaron knew what he was looking at: the shapes and streaks; the sequential bursts of flames from the heat of the debris reacting with ship parts; the debris itself breaking up into smaller pieces and burning up in arbitrary directions. He inhaled deeply as his lungs shook from emotion; he exhaled audibly, looking down at the reflections of the sky in his wine and brought it up to his lips.
Before he could take a sip, he felt a nudge to his side, and noticed Chase eyeing him with a look of understanding, nodding with his cup raised. Aaron looked down at Chase's raised cup and tapped it with his own, and they both took a sip with their faces towards the stars.
Aaron then knelt down next to his daughter and hugged her close.
"What are those, daddy?"
"Meteors, honey," he answered.
"They're beautiful," she said.
The words transported Aaron Fring back 12 years to a night where he had felt the effects of his chronic sickness waning, and had decided to walk the hills around his med-station during the final approach of Corath'Thal and his fleet. That night, Aaron witnessed them as they lowered their thermal shields, entering the atmosphere of their beloved homeworld amidst flame and destruction, honoring their fallen brothers and sisters from that war and the previous, in a final, fiery statement to the galaxy and everyone in it that they, Corath'Thal and his men, had made it back to their world, and they chose death in the atmosphere of the world that would forever be their home, over surrendering to the people who took it from them. The ultimate tragedy of the tevarin fleet reached out across the world to a man who felt the pain of his enemy, where these unnecessary deaths haunted him, and he captured that moment in a painting to show others a glimpse of it. That empathy was his connection to all life and now he felt it again, witnessing a pair of ships that had tumbled through their stories to a violent end before him, before his family, and before his daughter, who, only as an innocent, could state something so tragically true like she did.
His stomach tightened, catching an involuntary sniff as tears streamed down his face, and he hugged his daughter tighter as they stared at the sky.
"Yes they are."