It should have been satisfying, but instead, the General felt … conflicted.

He’d long realized that the Empire subscribed to the oldest of lies: that it is the highest honor to die for one’s country. And it wasn’t long ago that he would have gladly, even eagerly, helped every Imperial he could find to realize that honor.

He could remember the immense satisfaction as he watched a Vyrăin soldier – a living, thinking, feeling person – become a lifeless thing. It was like he’d finally claimed control again. After all the pain and suffering, it had felt so right to kill.

It was after seeing the Viribus that he’d realized what he needed to do. He’d watched them attack the soldiers and freeze at the sight of him. The freeze had cost them their lives, but he’d realized where the lines were drawn then. He’d realized where the line between Us and Them was. The Viribus were a part of the Us, and the Vyrăis were part of the Them. The General had had no choice after that.

It was right to destroy the Them.

And he’d spent twenty years on that singular goal. He’d made the Imperials on Laetus fear the night, and then the day as well. They’d learned to fear him, to fear Laetus itself. And then he’d left, snuck away to plot his ultimate victory on Laetus.

And the General felt satisfaction in the knowledge that, if successful, the Them on Laetus would be surrounded and die.

But … this didn’t satisfy him.

The bodies of the Imperials mingled on the floor beside the General’s T’nann converts. Bright red, Imperial blood mixed with the deep blue of T’nann blood. Methamphetamine, it turned out, worked just as well on T’nann as it did on Humans. The National Socialists of ancient Germany used it to turn their shock troopers into an extremely effective strike force, a Blitzkrieg. It spurred the T’nann into a suicidal, but extremely effective, charge.

The heavily armed T’nann, outfitted with the General’s illegally manufactured armor and weapons, had rushed the line to devastating effect. The station had, as he’d expected, redeployed the soldiers to the streets, where they could be used to help quell the riots. The T’nann, better armed and outnumbering their opponents, broke through the Imperial defense.

But these deaths felt selfish, and he realized with some surprise that he’d never gone on such a campaign since leaving Laetus. He’d killed, certainly, but only those that had stood in the way of his penultimate plans. Those who stood in that path were Them, but what about all the rest?

Could he genuinely say that the soldiers protecting what amounted to a train station were the same as the soldiers that were part of an active campaign of genocide? He wasn’t sure if it felt wrong. He could make any number of arguments that might say they were the same: It was a facility like this that allowed the Empire to continue its campaign above Laetus.

It was selfish, he realized. Greedy even. What he wanted from this place was purely to satisfy his gnawing curiosity. The General wasn’t even sure he truly wanted what he would find, or if it even worked the way he hoped it would.

The General looked at his hands, speckled with red and blue blood. He looked at the wrinkles that were starting to appear there. He felt old, and his hip flared with pain. Maybe it was also just a way to give up, to finally, truly rest after so long. There was some peace in death … before he would wake up again in a new body – a younger, whole body.

“C-control room secured, S-sir!” a voice stuttered over the radio tucked into his pocket.

The General quashed his musings. What he was doing now was selfish, but it was too late to stop now.

The mask slipped back on, and he stepped into the control room.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(Θ_Θ)(Θ_Θ)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

Freefall was a familiar and uncomfortable sensation for the Singer. Space travel was almost exclusively in free fall, except maybe on light rider ships. Though on ships accelerated by laser light, it could barely be called gravity – more like a vague sense of up and down.

The shuttle didn’t have that. The shuttle had the velocity it had, and it wouldn’t change until the thrusters fired again.

The shuttle’s inactive thrusters did nothing to reduce the noise of the small ship. Space travel was full of the grinding, whirring, and humming of every single machine needed to sustain life in the void – and the sound had nowhere to go but the ship itself, so it tended to be loud and then stay loud. During months and months of travel, she’d come to miss it on the much quieter station.

The Singer remembered, however, that the comforting white noise of a healthy spacecraft also had a downside.

“Let me the fuck out of these cuffs!” she shouted as the First Officer unbuckled himself and left her to float in her restraints. Whether he couldn’t hear her over the noise of the ship, or simply ignored her, she couldn’t be sure.

Her struggles were made feeble by freefall and did little more than bruise her wrists. She had to watch passively as some of the crew unbuckled. The equipment strapped to the center of the shuttle became a hive of activity, but the Singer’s curiosity was interrupted as the First Officer floated over to her.

The First Officer wore a padded headset on his head with a puffy microphone next to his mouth and held another in one hand. He hooked his leg around one of hers with a mouthed apology, and with a bit of struggling, forced the headphones over the Singer’s ears. She heard his claws scrape against the plastic cups, and then the noise of the ship disappeared in a hiss of active-noise-cancellation.

“Can you hear me, Singer?” the First Officer said through the headset.

“I can hear you fine,” the Singer grumbled. “Now, can you take these damn cuffs off me?” she demanded.

“Do you promise to stay in your harness?” he asked insistently. With a groan, the Singer nodded. Mercifully, this was enough of an agreement, and the Officer reached up and unlocked the cuffs from around her wrists.

The Singer gratefully pulled her arms down from above her head and rubbed at her wrists. “What’s your name, by the way? I never asked earlier,” she said, more out of the hope to ingratiate herself than out of genuine politeness.

“Call me Achilles, it’s what the General calls me,” the First Officer sighed. His expression was a strange mixture of resignation and amusement.

“It’s not your real name?” the Singer asked incredulously.

“It’s a Vyrăis tradition to strip outcasts of their names,” Achilles said, his expression morphing to a grimace. “A story for another time,” he said as he pulled something from the pocket of his flight suit and pressed it into her hands. With a swift motion, he secured it to her wrist with a nylon strap, and then pushed away from her.

The Singer looked down at her hands and found a data tablet of alien design strapped to her wrist. Hesitantly, she tapped at the dark screen, and it glowed to life. One corner of the screen was dominated by dead pixels, but otherwise, it appeared fully functional. The symbols and icons were alien in origin, but she was traveled enough to have learned some of the symbology.

She tapped on the “communications” icon and found only one saved contact: TTG.

Thief-Taker General.

The Singer steeled herself and made the call. She jumped as a tone played in her headset. The tablet was apparently already tuned to her headset. It rang and rang, and the Singer felt her stomach twist into knots. It was an intrusive thought that he might not answer. Whether because he couldn’t, or worse, that he wouldn’t. It was a dark and ridiculous thought that his death would be more acceptable to her than his rejection.

It surprised her, even, how relieved she was when his face appeared on the screen. Her relief was cut short as the camera was set down, and she watched the General turned away.

“Get out!” his voice clipped as he shouted, tinny through the small microphone of his own tablet. T’nann scrambled away from him as the control room of the Anti-Euclidean Engine was revealed to the camera. The sound of their hopping gait disappeared, and the General turned to the control panels.

“Please talk to me, General,” the Singer said, a weak attempt at regaining his attention.

“What’s the point?” he asked flippantly. “I know what you’ll say, and you know what I’ll say.” Keys clicked on the terminal, and he frowned at the esoteric text that appeared on the screen. “You’ll say something like ‘Why aren’t you coming with us?’ And I’ll say that I already told you why: you’re taking my place. And then you’ll demand I tell you the parts of my plan I left out. But that will just lead to more questions. So I’m not going to talk to you,” the General ranted. “Instead, you’re just going to have to satisfy yourself with listening.

“At first, I put off investigating this because it didn’t seem relevant at the time. I had a war to prepare for, a ship to steal. I had to prepare agents on Laetus to hold out for decades for just a chance at striking back. And then you came,” he said, and his expression darkened.

“Just your existence threw so much I thought I knew into question,” he growled. His typing grew more frantic, the keyboard flexed in an unnerving way under his fingers. “How many more Humans has the Empire managed to steal from us? How much more suffering were they responsible for? If it was by His will, why did Father wake me? Or you? What else don’t I know!?” he roared, his voice clipped and became tinny.

His fist came down on the keyboard, and the keys sprayed around him. He sagged into the terminal, its glow changed to a threatening-looking red, and cast his features into stark shadows.

The Singer’s head swam with emotions and thoughts. At first, the dismay and indignation at his dismissive attitude had made her feel sick. And then, as he spoke, guilt closed its fist around her heart.

She’d intended to try one last time. The Singer wanted to beg the General to set aside the pointless killing and be the man he’d convinced Torus Terminal that he was. To stay with her and make the world better with her. To not leave her alone.

But now she realized how childish and selfish that had been.

How long had the General been alone, with only the Viribus to confide in? Could he even confide in a people that all but worshipped him? His whole, true-life? Did he even remember the false memories anymore and their faux nostalgia for a place he’d never really been to? He’d seen first hand what the Empire was doing on Laetus, and he’d taken the responsibility of ending it onto his shoulders.

He blamed himself, she realized. He’d blamed himself for the deaths of the Viribus. Blamed himself for fleeing Laetus. Blamed himself for her.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

All the killing and pain and scheming suddenly made sense: It was better than the future he saw laid out before them. It was better to turn himself into a monster feared by kings and paupers than to bend his back under the Empire’s yoke. It was better than letting Sheh’teh’s people go extinct and un-avenged.

Being alone was better, too.

And the Singer? She’d seen her chance to run away from it all and never think about it again. She’d become so willfully ignorant that she’d started to think of herself as a folk hero. She’d sung to sailors and spread joy where she went, she’d stopped murders and thieves and uncovered crime rings. When she’d learned about the Thief-Taker, she’d treated it just like any other of her adventures.

She’d come off that prison ship with the intent of saving him. Like he was just some sort of misguided youth who could turn a new leaf. She would swoop in, show him the error of his ways, and they’d join forces to do even more good across the galaxy. And neither of them would have to be alone anymore.

Like a fucking bedtime story.

Her first taste of reality had been those photographs. She’d been the misguided one, and kept resisting it right up until … now. It was like her fantasy had been flipped on its head, except they wouldn’t be leaving together.

“What are you doing, then?” she finally asked, her voice a croak. “Why stay?”

He turned to look at her and stood with a wince. He clutched his wounded hip as he spoke. “I stole a lot of things from the Imperials on Laetus. Among those things was a Human artifact: a piece of quartz glass. It was a data-crystal, filled to the brim with … something. But until you arrived, I’d put off trying to decode the thing in favor of the mission. I thought my curiosity could wait.

“And then you came, and all those old questions came bubbling back up. So I asked Arnarxx to try to decode it. And,” the General chuckled, “the kid managed to do it!” His mirth faded. “There were recordings and images stored on it, as well as a bunch of other data we weren’t able to decode easily. I expected to find some sort of explanation inside it. Maybe a ‘So you’ve woken up on a new Earth’ pamphlet. Or something.

“Instead, I found a collection of diaries and news articles,” he grumbled. “We were in a golden age. We’d started terraforming Mars and Venus. We were mining the asteroid belt. The power crisis was over for good, and the climate was stabilizing on Earth. We were going to colonize the stars.” He looked wistful for a moment, but his expression darkened. “Suddenly, the news articles stopped. All that was left were panicked diary entries and Public Service Announcements. Humanity was suddenly in damage control mode, and I don’t know why.

“Death tolls went up by the millions daily. The only hint I had was the diary of a man who apparently was working on the colonial initiative. He said it was their last and only hope. And he said it still wouldn’t save anyone.” The General sighed, and he suddenly seemed older. “The only one who might know what happened is Father.”

“The Anti-Euclidean Engine,” the Singer realized. “You’re going to use it to jump-start your Gates somehow.”

“Exactly. Everything I need is behind that window,” the General nodded and pointed to the thin strip of mirrored glass. “Normally there are emergency shutdowns to prevent the Anti-Euclidean Engine from running if something interferes with that chamber, but I’ve disabled those. When I break that glass, the emitter will begin to fail and enter a positive feedback loop. The reactors will emergency shut down before they meltdown – but by then, I’ll have had my chance. Either it will work, or it won’t be my problem anymore.”

The glass behind the General cracked.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(Θ_Θ)(Θ_Θ)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

Darenius roared with the effort of moving his spine, and the rubble over the top of him shifted like sand. His bulk, gained from years of huffing across planets with full armor and gear, finally became a boon in the low gravity environment. There was gravity on the station, its spin created a workable imitation anyway, but it was nothing compared to the attractive natural force of sextillions of tonnes of rock.

The smaller marines coughed around him, sheltered from the fallen steel beam by their armor and Darenius’s shoulders. The marines groaned as the weight of the building lifted off of them.

The marines dug themselves out, using Darenius’s efforts to free themselves and others. Moments later, they turned their attention to the steel beam that had fallen across his back. Dust and embers rained around him as he finally stood up straight again.

Darenius extracted himself from the rubble and what was left of the restaurant sagged ominously around him. The building smoldered around him as he took stock. Two marines dug through the wreckage, both in search of their fellows and their weapons. The mercenaries were nowhere to be found, and Darenius did not hold out hope for the other five marines.

Darenius accepted his retrieved weapon from one of the marines and gave the order to move out. From the grim expressions on the faces of his marines, Darenius was sure they felt the same as he did: it was time to find someone to kill.

The Human worked quickly, or more likely, had called after the deed had been done. Darenius had no doubt that the Human had already stormed the Anti-Euclidean Engine, and its pageantry had been for its own satisfaction. But the Human truly had blundered this time, because Darenius was still alive and very angry.

When they reached the Anti-Euclidean Engine, it was clear that he’d been correct. What was less clear was where the occupying force was. Bodies littered the gates leading into the Anti-Euclidean Engine facility, and there were plenty of T’nann and Vyrăis among the dead – but no soldiers left to occupy the entrance.

Rather than rush in, as his rage insisted, he ordered his marines to the sides of the entrance. No sooner had he made the orders, and the group split apart, did a hail of gunfire rip through the open gate. With a shout, one of the marines kicked a concussion grenade through the door.

The explosion and flash of the grenade cut the gunfire off, and the three of them rushed into the entrance with weapons drawn. Darenius leaped down the corridor, upon the entrenched position in an instant. The frail, space weakened bodies of the T’nann soldiers broke under his boots like twigs. Gunfire rippled up his remaining, unbroken armor plating – but the marines only steps behind him cut down the rest of the resistance.

Blue T’nann blood covered his feet, and Darenius moved in beside the marines to begin to clear the next corridor. They needed to reach the control room quickly. If they were fast, they might still catch the Human before it could cause real damage.

With that much power at its fingertips, the Human could turn the entire Terminal into a nuclear fireball. Or, worse, he could collapse the portal between Torus and Surot, and cause a cascade collapse that would create two expanding gravity waves – not enough to destroy planets but enough to tear apart anything larger than Darenius’s hand for thousands of kilometers.

Thunder rattled Darenius’s skull, and a shockwave rippled past his head. The marine just behind him exploded into a pink cloud, and Darenius tackled the other through the thin divider of a room filled with desks and terminals.

Three more thunderous gunshots echoed down the hallway, and Darenius used his body to try to shield the marine as the division above their heads – and the armored wall five meters beyond it – gained a new set of ragged windows.

With a break in the gunfire, Darenius rolled off the other marine. The marine cursed sharply, and Darenius scowled as he realized that in his haste to save the marine’s life, he had crushed the man’s leg under one of his knees. The marine clutched at the limb, which now visibly bent in the wrong direction.

Darenius dragged the marine into a corner, hopefully away from the line of fire, and took two of the marine’s flash-bang grenades. The marine did not protest. He simply grimaced and braced his gun against his shoulder. There was a mission to do, and there was no time to complain about Darenius’s careless strength.

Darenius returned to the divider and silently tossed an armed grenade through the hole. He dropped to a crouch as the massive gun fired one suppressing round before the flash-bang could blind the shooter.

With the grenade as his starting gun, Darenius lept through the wall and into a sprint. He snapped his rifle up to his shoulder and fired blindly down the hallway. Blue mist exploded at the end, and Darenius rushed forward. Blinded and cowering behind cover, the T’nann stood no chance as Darenius tore through their position.

It was so easy against spacers. The low gravity lifestyle was simply not conducive to the kind of raw strength a body could acquire from inside a gravity well. Darenius reveled in his superiority as he ran, but no more gunshots stopped him, and he soon found himself at the control room.

With the door wide open, he didn’t bother to rush through. He would not fall for such a trap a third time. Instead, he tossed his last flash-bang through the door and waited for it to announce him. When it had adequately prepared the room, he spun through the door and raised his weapon-

Darenius’s left leg exploded with pain. He felt as the bone shattered underneath his weight, and he collapsed to the floor. He hadn’t even heard the gunshot that had destroyed the limb. It was all he could do to keep himself from writhing in pain as the auto-tourniquet in his suit constricted around his upper thigh, and he looked at the shredded meat that had been his knee. A chunk of flesh as big as Darenius’s fist had been removed from the bone.

Shouldn’t there have been more blood? The strangely calm thought was all his mind seemed prepared to handle as he stared in numb shock at the wound.

A deep timbre echoed in his ears, but he could not hear the words. Something grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him through the room until he felt something solid behind his back. Lucidity returned in sputtering bursts as his rapidly beating heart began to circulate auto-injected morphine.

The Human stepped away from him, blinking rapidly, but not blinded.

“So you are learning,” Darenius heard the Human rumble as it waved a handgun nearly as large as its head at him. “Too little, too late, I’m afraid.”

There was another noise; it droned in a repeating pattern. Screens and lights flashed on terminals all around them in an ominous red. Darenius’s eyes returned to the Human and the ominous glow behind it. The shielded glass that separated the control room from the intense power of the alignment chamber on the other side was shattered – intact but broken. The cracks seemed to widen as he stared – all pain forgotten – at a fate far worse than death.

Darenius might survive the destroyed leg, but the death behind that glass was a slow and insidious one. He didn’t want to die of lethal radiation damage, coughing blood, and shedding dead skin. Cooked from the inside out by light. It would be an incredibly ignoble death.

“So you do understand where we are,” the Human grinned, framed in the glow of the broken window. A shard of glass finally fell free, a six-centimeter thick flake of a twenty layer shield, and a noticeable shaft of light speared into the room.

“You’ll- kill us both,” Darenius choked. “The whole station-“

“Oh, please, Darenius. I have no intention of destroying the station. And frankly, it’s only you that will truly die here,” the Human growled. It turned and fired two gunshots into the glass shield. It pulled the trigger until the weapon clicked on an empty chamber. Two layers of shielding collapsed to the floor and slid across it, the heavy glass enough to send sparks of pain up Darenius’s leg as they skidded to a stop against it.

“It wasn’t all that long ago that you expressed to me what you thought of me,” the Human mused as it turned blinking eyes from the harsh light that now bathed the room. It was little more than a harshly outlined shadow to Darenius now, its body all that stopped the light from reaching him. “You told me how you would show me the difference between us. But now it’s my turn.”

The Human spread its arms and whispered as the glass behind it finally shattered.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(Θ_Θ)(Θ_Θ)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

Achilles froze as the lights in the shuttle died. His momentum swung him around his grip on one wall, and he listened to the ship’s systems start to spool down. The pilots began to demand reports, but their radios were dead. Even the chemical lights seemed to be too dim, but it was not pitch black.

Achilles pushed himself off the wall, back toward the cargo compartment. Toward a dim, golden light. He was so shocked, however, by what he witnessed, that he missed the handles by the entrance and drifted out into the open air.

The Human glowed.

Light reflected out from behind her, shining through the open spaces of her harness. A halo of light surrounded her, broken only by the tubes and steel beams that made up the interior wall. It was as if a spotlight shone out of her spine.

And her eyes – Achilles had always considered Human eyes strange, with their white borders that made it obvious where they were looking. But now, where the infinite blackness of her pupil had been was a blinding golden light. The light was so intense that in brief moments, his eyes were able to compensate for the intense glare, and he could see it glowing through the flesh of the eyeball and highlighting blood vessels.

And the air hummed with even more light, suffused with motes of glowing, magenta shapes. They hummed and buzzed and traced through the air in glowing trails. The Viribus muttered in prayer as the motes of light spelled out strange runes around their heads. The crew murmured in astonishment as the motes of light danced through the air of the shuttle.

The Viribus clutched to whatever surface they’d been nearest – their heads pressed to the floor. The crew, and even the marines, watched with a silent mixture of terror and morbid curiosity.

“What- ?” he tried to say, but a massive, muscular tail wrapped around his throat and pulled him to the floor of the cargo compartment.

“Be silent!” Sheh’teh hissed. “You are in the presence of a God!”

A massive hand took hold of his head and pushed him until his temple pressed against the floor. A mote of light danced in front of his eyes. It spun itself into strange shapes and glyphs. At one point, he thought it even traced out the outline of a Human. It hummed in a strange song and burned lines into his retinas as it moved.

Then the Human spoke, and ice crawled up Achilles’s spine. It’s voice echoed in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. As if two – no, two hundred Humans spoke all at once.

“Noli timere,” she intoned.