Chapter 26
Death in Disguise
Khar
“Every life ends, sooner or later. We may hope we were more to the universe than a parasite’s selfish ruin, blinded by its own desires… but we never truly know, do we? I believe this: to die for my queen is immortal glory. And I do so love glory.”
Attributed to Karom Zzolnok, famed figure of Divani history and commander of the Queens’ Guard
Khar and his brothers spent the following chrono-cycles drafting their battle plan.
Each jump grew shorter, a clear sign they were closing in on their final destination.
Vegrun and his mercenaries were on their trail and would likely arrive within hours once the Vitro and Helios stopped to recharge.
The Legion or the local galactic security forces would appear eventually, as they always did—too late to matter, and no one was counting on their help during first contact.
That first contact, in Khar’s mind, would end with Horos flayed alive, after Lily was safe.
He needed tranquilizers strong enough to knock out a ferish bear-beast just to get a few hours of sleep. Every moment apart from her stretched into eternity, his restless mind torturing him with images of what Lily might be enduring under Horos’s claws.
He knew exactly what Corvus were capable of.
There was a reason his gut had turned the moment he first saw Horos.
In the animal world, Divani were predators, Corvus scavengers, but their prey was the same.
The urge to destroy Horos was instinctive, primal.
Yet the rules of civilization demanded that all species coexist without violence, no matter how impossible that sometimes felt.
Not that such rules meant much to him. They merely complicated life a little for someone who had to suppress the constant temptation to kill.
During one of the mid-jump stops, while Helios recharged on solar energy, Khar slipped into the Legion’s servers without a shred of guilt and accessed intelligence systems no civilian should even know existed, searching for anything he could find on Horos.
What he discovered both calmed and unsettled him.
Horos came from a line of unremarkable Corvus families stretching back generations, and nothing distinguished him in the slightest. Average education, above-average sycophant.
Add a touch of misfortune, and it wasn’t hard to see how he had slithered into Vegrun’s circle.
It seemed recent. According to the credit logs, the very moment he was dismissed, Horos purchased a magnetic shackle and set a course for the Vitro.
He knew he was racing the clock. Once Vegrun boarded, his access to the system would be erased.
Khar cursed himself for ever leaving Lily alone, though there had been no way to foresee the danger. It didn’t matter. That mistake would never happen again. From now on, he would not take a single step away from her.
Khar, Ikar, and Aros agreed that Horos would want to sell the Vitro as quickly as possible and secure a new ship, something smaller and less conspicuous.
They had no clear sense of what kind of resistance awaited them, but the most probable scenario was a mid-tier criminal syndicate.
Small crews couldn’t afford a cruiser of this class, and the larger ones would never settle for a stolen version when they could own the real thing.
When the jumps became so short that they knew only two or three remained before arrival, the three brothers armed themselves for close combat and for ranged plasma fire alike.
Their plan was simple. No need to tamper with a recipe that works.
The Vitro would have to lower its shields to let the buyers board.
That was the moment Helios would slip beneath the barrier and deploy the vukri into one of the sensor conduits.
Anyone aboard the Vitro would have no choice but to deal with them unless they wanted the ship rendered worthless once the creatures started chewing through the wiring.
They knew Lily and Horos had been alone on the Vitro when the cruiser departed the dock, but they had no idea how many buyers would arrive or how heavily they would be armed. It was also possible Horos had contacted someone en route, though Khar found that unlikely.
His profiling had turned up no allies Horos could turn to. The Corvus seemed fundamentally distrustful. If Khar had been forced to guess, he would have said Horos was coercing Lily into helping him, but he had no idea how. The not knowing drove him mad.
Another dread gnawed at him. What if Lily was already dead? Perhaps she had argued with Horos and things had escalated. The thought would have driven him out of his mind if not for the discipline that kept dragging him back to the mission.
He had to stay strong. Calculating. Cunning. Cold. For Lily.
When they burst out of deep space at last and the Vitro appeared before them, Khar gave silent thanks to every deity he had ever heard of.
He was not religious, but if Lily’s safety depended on it, he was the kind of selfish, morally unrestrained bastard who would have burned incense at any altar in the galaxy if it would save her.
He was grateful too that, despite not training or deploying with his brothers in chrono-cycles, they moved together with perfect synchronicity. Ikar and Aros worked like parts of a single machine and obeyed Khar’s commands without hesitation.
He could not have wished for better companions for the most important mission of his life.
Helios seemed to anticipate his commands before he voiced them.
The speed and exactness bordered on uncanny.
Khar understood that Helios’s intelligence exceeded the limitations he had come to expect from the Vitro, yet the performance still stood out.
If Ikar and Aros noticed, they kept it to themselves, their only tell a pair of curious looks.
Thanks to Khar’s quick judgment and Helios’s expert navigation, the first phase of their plan succeeded. The vukri were deployed.
They moved on to the buyers’ ship, which was docked directly at the hangar.
With the Vitro’s shields down, their scanners finally pierced the hull and revealed the number of life signs inside.
They could not isolate Lily’s signal, but Khar convinced himself he would have felt it if something had happened to her.
He knew this was a comforting lie, but he needed something to hold on to.
Helios ran its stealth systems and shields at full capacity, rendering them invisible for a short, precious window. It was all they required.
Khar watched with approval as Ikar secured the boarding grapples with practiced ease, never once triggering an alarm.
The process took time. Starships bristled with sensitive sensors that had to be tricked one by one with a quiet stream of falsified nothing-to-see-here data.
Still, this waiting was a mercy compared to the desperate chase through blind space earlier.
Soon, Khar would set foot on the cruiser’s surface and see Lily with his own eyes.
Once the connection between the two ships locked into place, Ikar waved Khar and Aros ahead and followed close behind them.
For a being his size, Khar moved with a startling lack of sound as they ghosted onto the other vessel. Their instruments confirmed the deck was empty and that everyone was aboard the Vitro, but Khar refused to rely on readings alone. He trusted his instincts more than any scanner.
The ship they passed through was packed with cargo illegal across the IMPERIUM. Khar did not comment, but he knew his brothers noticed everything he did. The buyers were smugglers, beyond doubt.
Better smugglers than mercenaries, perhaps, but likely armed and experienced. It did not matter. If Khar had his way, they would all be corpses by the artificial nightfall, Horos foremost among them.
They advanced in Divani military formation to the hangar threshold. Ikar tracked movement inside the Vitro and flagged two figures breaking off to deal with the vukri. One of them peeled away, darting toward the service tunnel in a quick, erratic pattern.
Khar could hardly believe his eyes. That could only be Lily.
His chest tightened with relief so sharp it bordered on pain. Aros was assigned to retrieve her and bring her back while Khar and Ikar locked down the smugglers and Horos.
“Divani Constabulary. You are under arrest on probable suspicion of smuggling and theft.”
Ikar raised the standardized IMPERIUM badge in one hand and a Divani stunner in the other. Khar kept a heavy plasma-grenade launcher leveled at the group, silently wishing none of the smugglers would question why a supposed patrol officer carried such firepower.
At first the smugglers stared in shock, then their leader stepped forward.
“Gentlemen, there is no need for alarm. We are simple traders offering aid to a cruiser damaged by vukri.”
The smugglers began to fan out in a slow arc, one staying planted at Horos’s side. Horos opened his beak to speak, but the leader silenced him with a look.
“In any case, discharging your weapons would be unwise. None of us desire casualties, and the ship’s shields are down. From what I understand, even constables are not immune to the cold kiss of vacuum.”
Khar and Ikar stepped back together, refusing to allow the smugglers to circle behind them.
“Even if you are counterfeit constables. Correct, males?”
At that final word, every smuggler lunged.
Khar and Ikar met them head-on. Ikar smashed his fist into one male’s face and snarled, “The badge is real, you blind cradle-whelp.”
Khar held four attackers at bay alone when Aros’s voice crackled through comms.
“I have Lily with me. No visible injuries. We are coming to you.”
“Aros, we are engaged with the smugglers. Bring Lily here and keep her safe.”
The surge of relief nearly cost him. He took a brutal hit from one smuggler, shook it off, and then the hangar hatch slid open and he finally saw her.
Lily.
Beautiful. Otherworldly. A vision.
Pinkish fluid, probably blood, slicked her boot. Her hair was a tangled mess, her face pale, and she looked thinner than before. But she seemed healthy, mostly unharmed, and she was here.
Khar wanted nothing more than to run to her, to sweep her into his arms and never let her out of his sight again, but he allowed himself only a single aching glance. Then he forced his attention back to the smugglers.
Everything had been going so well. The smugglers stood no chance against the combined strength of three Divani warriors.
Then that filthy, treacherous leader unleashed the Colossus, and in that instant Khar understood there was no benevolent god, no miraculous chain of fortune that could save them all now. The universe had never been so kind.
He did the only thing he could.
“Aros, take Lily and go. I will hold it.”
Khar threw everything he had into buying Aros the time he needed to get Lily out.
He knew she would fight him every step of the way, but he desperately hoped his brother would be strong enough to drag her off the Vitro if he had to.
Once they were aboard Helios and under way, the Colossus would never be able to track them.
It was almost certainly running on some ancient protocol imprinted during the Ancient Artificial Intelligence Uprisings.
Without directives, a Colossus would destroy any intelligent life it deemed a threat in its immediate radius, then return into hibernation.
He had heard tales of other Colossi that somehow survived the war’s last brutal waves ages ago, only to be found by one IMPERIUM species or another.
Usually no discoverers survived. Only the rescue teams sent after them returned to tell what they had faced.
And no one ever deployed infantry to face a Colossus.
They were destroyed from a distance by cruisers, never by living soldiers.
He would not give up. If anything, the threat cracked open reserves he had never known he possessed. If by some miracle he lived through this, he would brag about it to anyone who would listen. No one would believe him, and that thought amused him as he waltzed with death.
Right up until the music ended and the machine’s weight crushed him to the deck.
He heard a scream. Too close. Far too close.
No. Please. Lily.
What was Aros doing? Why was she still here?
The Colossus and Khar locked eyes. The long slit pupil measured him without the slightest flicker of emotion, as if he were nothing more than a pest to be crushed. The machine drew its arm back for the killing blow.
Khar’s last conscious thought was painfully simple.
Buy her time. One heartbeat. Just one. She could not die here.
He could not track the motion. Instinct or luck tipped his head at the last possible instant before impact.
The strike slammed into the deck beside him, leaving a smoking crater in the metal.
A sudden iron grip closed around one of his horns.
The Colossus pinned him flat, erasing every path of escape.
Khar kicked, twisted, roared his defiance. It made no difference. The Colossus raised its fist again, then paused.
Gold-and-black optics dimmed. When the light returned, the pupil had changed shape.
No longer a predatory slit.
Round, like a human’s.
Round, like Lily’s.
The Colossus rose, lifting Khar by his horn as if he weighed nothing at all. It hurled him aside and turned toward the girl Aros had failed to drag from the hangar in time.
Khar heard the voice then, familiar down to its smallest cadence, a voice Lily had crafted over hours until it reminded her of her home.
“Lily.”
Her eyes filled and she began to sob, softly at first, then with a shaking breath that grew. The towering machine and the small, fragile-looking woman faced each other. The Colossus raised a vast hand, slow and careful, and brushed away the tears running down her cheeks.
Lily looked up, gratitude breaking through her smile.
“Helios.”
“But… how?” Khar thought.