Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
AIRIK
Airik dropped Ed’un’s planetary-decommission order onto the skyport clerk’s control panel.
Surviving Zarmur’s skyport—the largest structure in all of the Axa Galaxy, built to house Veynari craft—was proving the hardest part of his mission.
Stone portals slid open and closed around them, controlling the flow of Veynari forces into the launch way.
Above them, drones skimmed above the glass ceilings, letting the twin suns warm the icy hall.
Teeming with soldiers at all levels and, more distressingly, priests who sang the True Father Ulliel’s commandments, Airik fought to keep his focus where it should be—getting off Vorakon’s cursed soil.
The clerk, who’d been tracing the swirling tattoos on her wrists—tagion code markers that some clans liked to display with unearned pride—sat up with a jolt. Her gaze landed on the hilt of Airik’s sword at his hip—the Sword of Ulliel.
She gulped. “You’re free to move beyond the gates without dispatch—”
“Read the order,” Airik said. As a morazir, he shouldn’t have faced any barriers.
But without a tagion code encoded in his genes, the Veynari security network, known as the Watcher, wouldn’t recognize him.
Thus, he endured the indignity of needing permission to move through the worlds he served with his body and life.
And now, at the whim of a clerk whose only accomplishment in life had been to have wiser progenitors than he, allowing her to be enhanced before birth, he’d be stopped from escaping Vorakon to his next mission, where he could have had some peace in a solitary post at the edge of the Axa Galaxy.
The chaos of the hangar closed in, forcing him to unbutton his uniform jacket.
Cold air seeped beneath his collar, and slowly, the tremble in his hands calmed.
He jammed them into his pockets in case they started again, then stepped once toward the clerk’s control panel. “Do you need me to read it for you?”
“N-No. I apologize—the systems are slow.” The clerk’s voice came out as a nervous squeak. She expanded the control panel, letting him see the long line of craft awaiting launch. “The solar storms have been brewing trouble all day. Even the portals are down.”
“What?” Airik’s heart dropped, and in rising panic, he stepped closer to the clerk, away from the pressing crowd behind him.
She gasped, her eyes locked at his hip, where his hand had reflexively closed on his sword’s grip.
What in Ulliel’s name was he doing? Carefully, he uncurled his fingers from the handle, forcing his hand down.
“They’ll open soon—I’m sure of it.” The clerk tried to smile, though it looked more like a grimace. “You have time to use the regeneration chambers. For your wounds.” She pointed at her face, indicating his scars.
“No.”
“A-All right. Then let me at least direct you to the right launch way. It’d be my honor to assist a morazir in any way possible.” She made a pointed effort to search the document.
Airik knew the precise moment the spaceport clerk realized why he stood before her, needing to be let past the barriers to the launch way because her flustered smile hardened into a sneer.
Her three eyes turned up to him, all of them full of judgment. “You’re of wild constitution.”
The drone in the hangar rang loud and hard in Airik’s ears, but he heard her perfectly well. He cast a glance down to his left boot, where he’d sewn a sheath for a short combat blade the night before. It was still there, and that knowledge held him stable.
“Those hideous scars—of course you’re wild.
I’ve heard of you! You’re the morazir from the Lemides,” she babbled.
“I thought that you died. That you’d lost your way and couldn’t reach the extraction point during what was the simplest of missions.
” She looked to the other clerks who had now stopped their own tasks to watch the two of them.
“I got the notice. It said the wild prince had allowed himself to be taken and touched and killed!”
Controlling his breath, Airik rubbed his face, the tip of his finger tracing the scar on his left cheek. “Please hurry,” he asked quietly.
Seemingly determined to find answers, she searched her omnislate for what Airik assumed was his kill notice.
She wouldn’t find it. It had been retracted the moment he’d been found unconscious on the Lemidian beach, surrounded by bodies he’d beaten to death.
Her eyes went round, as if faced with something unholy. “I can’t believe it. Even if you hadn’t died, why would they allow you to bear the sword again?”
Something in the back of his mind throbbed. A shadow. The glint of a blade out of the corner of his eye. A knife, flying toward his uncovered face. Sand. Everywhere.
Airik shook his head, trying to empty his thoughts. He had to hold together, or else everyone would know that he wasn’t ready, unworthy for a mission as simple as a planetary decommission. He stepped back the moment he saw her eyes drop to his sword again.
Untouched. Untaken. Unconquered.
“That sword’s not real.” A snide smile formed on her yellow-furred snout as an easier truth to accept presented itself to her. “It’s a forgery, isn’t it? You’re just wild trash, hoping to gain access to Veynari technology.”
Emboldened and perhaps fooled by Airik’s outward calm—his attempt to starve the impulse to raze everyone around him—she reached across the panel, grabbing at his sword.
She had no chance.
Using the handle of his blade, he slammed her wrist to the table, trapping her. The rage—clinging to him since the disaster that had been the Lemides and maybe even before—now had direction.
Realizing her grave mistake too late, she flailed all her limbs, trying to break free. But no one could save her from him, and no one tried.
“You do not touch a morazir. To do so means to make peace with death.” Airik’s voice sounded oddly tranquil, even to himself.
“In my presence, you’ve broken three Veynari covenants—you’ve used an archaic word, you’re hindering a morazir’s objective, and now you’ve reached for my body.
Are you in need of re-education? If so, I am oath-bound to give it. ”
She trembled, a strangled sound escaping her. In the shadows of the hangar, she looked so much like them—the insurgents from the Lemides. Who he’d thrown to the ground, who had also looked up at him, hoping for mercy. Like they’d never known it their entire lives.
Threatened by how the memories would ravage him if he allowed them, he let her go. She clutched her arm to her chest, backing until she hit the wall.
“Greetings, all!” A jovial voice interrupted them, breaking the eerie and sudden silence in the hangar.
The crowd around them parted, allowing the large, hulking ti’rosi morazir—Torren of the Osian clan—to pass through.
Torren had been his forgemate. They’d been paired as a wild birth and a prime—two anomalies the Algorithm had inexplicably selected, against all logic, to be forged into morazir.
With no true progenitors and designed by experimental protocols using technologies not yet perfected by the Veynari, Torren was the perfect opposite of wild.
He shoved himself between Airik and the clerk’s panel, twirling his own Sword of Ulliel so that it grazed the strands of his long white hair, then toward the clerk, where it sliced the tips of several of her whiskers.
“Does he need to wear an identification tag for you all to remember?” Torren blew the cut whiskers from his blade. “That he’s not only a morazir but an unbranded. Truly untouched—even by the Veynari.”
Airik let out a frustrated sigh. What should have been a two-minute task would now stretch to an hour if Torren were allowed to pontificate.
Now Aelior would have time to find him. She’d drag him to the Garden of Solitude, where morazir broken by missions were surrounded by nothing but the wretched sound of their own blood coursing in their veins and a mind soother calling out the oath, until every thought was Untouched.
Untaken. Unconquered. Worse than death and just as entrapping.
Leaning over the desk, Torren flashed a wide, fang-bearing smile at the clerk.
A display reserved for long-abandoned intimacy rituals.
“You pretty thing. I’ve never seen you before.
” He glanced at the clerk’s wrists, the corner of his lip lifting.
“It seems there must be something wrong with the life-design algorithms. All that prestige encoded into you. The effort of remaking what you are into something better.” He sighed.
“Only to produce you. Someone who can’t read an order and do the job they were set to do.
Will you let us pass, or must I assist you? ”
The clerk’s body rattled with a short spasm, the fur on her body on end. She keyed in a command on the panel, fumbling to push the request through. “No assistance needed. Thank you.”
The stone gate to the spaceport bays slid open.
A cold gust blew past them. A freighter craft passed behind the gate with a trembling force, briefly blocking the gates.
Its gravity engine hummed, leaving the watching crowd in awe and silence.
Freighters never coasted so close to the ground—something was wrong.
Airik pushed past Torren as soon as the freighter cleared.
They were met with a darkened sky—dim even for Zarmur—the sun blocked by hundreds of powered craft stacked in the sky, waiting for the portals to open. He rushed down one of the halls, then waved his blade before a steel door. Recognizing his blade’s call, the door slid open.
In the silent, ice-walled hall of the morazir, rows and rows of lit power bays stretched as far as the eye could see.
At the very end, a winged statue stood, towering over everything and overlooking all.
Its shape was plain, representing all true sapient species—with a torso, two arms, two legs, and a head—and it bore a sword, pointing it toward the sky.
Its tip breached the glass ceiling, piercing the clouds.