1: WARBRINGER
The Shade screamed through the glittering gulf of cosmic nothing, rattling and bucking exactly the way a finely-tuned, highly-pressurized spacecraft shouldn’t. A blurry ring, like the blades of a fan, spun around the ship’s axis. Occasionally, the ring hitched, and the space around the ship wobbled like a soap bubble.
Inside the Shade, oxygen hissed from a broken tube, an alarm screamed about the rising temperature of the fuel rods, and a system labeled “Collider Link” buzzed without any urgency whatsoever (which only made their buzzing seem somehow more dire), but the ship’s human pilot didn’t seem to hear any of this.
Taws was on the run.
He gripped the joystick with one hand, and his knuckles paled from the tension. His other hand hung frozen above a red switch. The co-pilot’s seat was empty, except for the blood spatters (not human) and the remains of shredded medical packets, empty pill bottles, and one ceremonial bracelet—also blood spattered (and not human)—that, until an hour ago, belonged to a rather important xeno politician.
But it wasn’t the xenos who were after him …
The Shade was already nearing maximum velocity, yet he rammed the joystick forward, as if all the universe rested in his clenched hand. A pipe, somewhere in the hull of the ship, rattled loose and started to spray out a misty gas. Taws didn’t blink, not even when spray slowed to a slight hiss, and clear fluid dripped onto his head, drawing a line down his cheek through the caked-on blood (both xeno and human). All he needed was for the ship to stay together. For how long?
Time. I just need more time. Need to think.
A message pinged on his screen. A message from On High. Mission accomplished, soldier. Time to come home. But how could he? Home was back there, not a place, but a point in time that was behind him now. How could he ever go back, after what he’d done?
After what they made me do.
A chime cut through the alarms, silencing them all just enough for the ship’s voice—pleasant, digital tones—to speak.
“Remote access granted. Correcting course.”
The control’s haptic pressure went dead—no joy, all stick—and the scarred nose of the E-13 Shade began to turn. Taws blinked. Seemed to realize where he was. A groan raced down the hull as the ship decelerated. On the left viewport, a nearby planet heaved into view. Cityscapes, gray and tan and asphalt black, crawled across the surface like dried up vines over rock. Strings of elevators lifted out of the atmosphere, stretching toward a sparse ecosystem of space stations. Xeno space stations.
The Shade spoke to him, “New destination locked in—”
He flipped the red switch. The Shade’s voice was cut short. The lights, the alarms, everything went dark. Even life support held its breath. Sweat prickled on his brow and gathered at the black peak of his hairline. The heat was smothering, the air thick, and, in a way, that made it easier to think.
“Heron,” he said her name to the darkness and the growing heat. “I tried to change my mind. I changed it too late.”
Taws flicked the switch back on, and life support banged and clanked inside the walls, struggling to turn itself back on. Then, cold air gushed through the flight deck, and the lights flickered back on, and the alarms played their cacophonous symphony once more. The propulsion engines fluttered online, first one, then the other two, then the AVEs. The ship’s voice said, “Powering up. Reverting to manual control.”
But Taws had eyes only for the jump sleeve. He could see the edge of the ring through the viewport, still clinging to the hull. Spinning slowly. A readout said, “Collider link at 22%.”
“What if I don’t run?” he asked no one, just to test out the words, to see how they felt. “What if I go home?”
His gorge rose in his throat, and his stomach clenched. He put a hand to his mouth to stifle the urge to lose his stomach. Don’t think about it. Don’t think—
Before she went AWOL, before Heron turned on the Agency (and therefore, all of Humanity), she left Taws a note. She’d told him she was going to stop the war, which was absolutely insane, because the war was the whole point. It was everything they, and the Agency, had ever worked for.
If we can change, Heron had said, then so can they.
“I tried,” he said with a laugh—no joy, all teeth—and it turned into a choked, animal sound as he dragged his fingers across his scalp until it hurt. He could still feel the his fingers curled tight, too tight, around the gun’s grip. Yet, it had felt weightless as he pointed it, not at the xeno, but at the back of his own Captain’s head. Nica.
A mistake. A mistake, because he’d waited too long to figure it out. To make up his mind. He’d waited too long to stop it all.
Like flammable gas and a lit match, despair fueled his fury. It rose in his throat and gripped his heart and before he could stop himself, he smashed his fist against the console And again. And he screamed, “They knew Heron went rogue. They knew it! Why send me?”
What a joke. There was no other way to look at it: They messed up. The all-seeing, all-knowing Agency, messed up. Taws messed up, had failed to even betray his own people.
Only Heron did the right thing.
Taws slumped down in the cockpit. His eyes were glazed over. Someone else’s blood trickled down the corner of his lip. The words came automatically to his lips: “Death above. Death below. Behind every star, the enemy waits. Ready to kill.” It bubbled up in his chest again, and this time it came out as hysterical laughter. “It’s us, isn’t it?” he said through tears, “We’re the killers. We’re the ones who can’t change.”
Without thinking, he dragged a hand across the flight deck, rattling through an ocean of trash and spilled pills. He grabbed a handful of blue lozenges and dumped them into his mouth. He gagged. Squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to swallow.
An alarm, like a hyper-voltaic cricket, shrilled. Taws choked and spat semi-wet globs all over the console.
Time’s up, the alarm might’ve said.
They were here.
As a rule, agents never flew in a squadron, but today all the rules had been thrown out the airlock. There were five ships. The first ship was hard to identify, but the other four were E-13 Shades; black spacecraft made for long, one-person excursions. They blinked into existence, their jump sleeves unblurred until Taws could see the individual “blades” that radiated around the fuselage.
Ga Yun’s voice burst over the intercom, “Taws, can you hear me? You did it. It’s time to go home.”
When he first met her, he thought Ga Yun would wash out. She smiled a lot, especially when she was nervous, and he always thought she was too nice to be an Agent. Now, he knew her better. She was nice, she still smiled a lot, but he knew she was too good to wash out. Better than me, in some areas. If things had been different, maybe she would’ve been the one to pull the trigger.
Taws voice was dry and scratchy, and it hurt to get the words out, “I shot her, Ga Yun.”
The line was quiet for a moment.
“I shot her,” he said again. “I shot the Captain.”
“I know, Taws. But the mission—it’s okay now.”
“How is it okay?” he spat out a laugh. “I shot her. I changed my mind. I ruined everything.”
“You did it, Taws. The mission was a success.”
If, at that very moment, his ship had plowed right into a planet, Taws wouldn’t have felt a thing. He sat there in stunned silence, unable to believe what he was hearing.
“Did you hear me, Taws? Your shot passed through her shoulder. You hit the target. You started the War.”
“No,” he said. Not denying the truth, but refusing it.
“The mission was a success, Taws. They want us to come back home. All of us. It’s time to go home.”
But while she spoke, so sweet and gentle, the five Agency ships fanned out in an array that Taws knew all too well. Though they were spread out over thousands of kilometers, his ship displayed an image of each one. The fifth ship had three drill-like turbines jutting out from the fuselage like the stunted claws of some insidious machine. A tackler. Sent to pin his ship in real space.
To stop me from running away with all their secrets.
Not that it matters anymore. The War has begun.
The tackler’s turbines spun, three glowing cones of light focused on Taws’ ship.
“Taws? Red Feather. If you jump—”
Taws glanced down at his readouts. The last destination was still set, and that non-urgent buzzing still buzzed. The Collider link was at 97%. The tackler’s turbines glowed a bright blue and streams of energy were curling around the viewport of his ship.
98 … 99 …
“Taws, please. Whatever it is, whatever you did, it can be undone. You’re a hero—”
The buzzing finished with a ping. With a flick of his mind—an impulse—he felt the Collider hook into its destination, and the jump sleeve blurred his ship, and yanked it through a hole in the void.
***
For most lifeforms, 300 million light years is an entirely academic distance. It is almost meaningless in its magnitude, and it might as well not exist. Some stars are born, expand into supergiants, and die fantastic deaths, and still their light will only reach a fraction of that distance.
To the xenos who lived in the Synod, 300 million light years was a long, dull stretch that required several months of travel (you try staring out the window for that long—and the scenery never changes), not to mention the tedious mountains of transport certificate applications, local bribes, and authentication forms for the official passes to get through Synod checkpoints (and woe to you, who attempts to trade without such passes).
To Taws, 300 million light years was a blip.
His E-13 Shade reappeared close (but not too close) to a planet burgeoning with life.
Xeno Prime, the Agency called it, though the xenos had a dozen other names for the Capital of the Great Synod. Here spun a sprawling city world as old as the Synod itself. It glittered with metal and concrete, was veined with rivers and green places, and even the deep blue oceans were streaked with immense bridges, ports, and the unnatural geometry of hovering cities. Countless elevators sprouted from the surface and skyhook lanes crisscrossed its lowest orbits, so that the planet looked like a pincushion stuck through by an aspiring acupuncturist with extremely poor aim. In the low- and mid-orbits, disjointed habitat rings circled the equatorial region, each one more thin and brittle than the last. Some were disheveled from thousands of years of use, infrequent attempts at restoration, not to mention, the grime and grit of continual habitation. The aliens had built and rebuilt these rings so many times, it was impossible to pick out the architecture of any one species.
Beyond the rings, massive tangles of stations, like colonies of metal algae, drifted between the moons. And beyond the moons and the planet’s orbit, scattered strings of lights sat unnaturally motionless in the void of space. Hyperlanes. They didn’t spin, nor orbit, nor give any sign of life—except when they lit up to send or receive some alien caravan.
“Life signs detected: 579 billion.”
579 billion xenos. How did they all fit down there? What’s more, they didn’t have a clue that Taws was up there, watching them—for not a single one of them had ever heard of a human.
Heron tried to change that. Thanks to the Agency, even she had failed. And now, they would come for him. A hero. A traitor. An assassin.
“I am a soldier of destiny,” Taws quoted, bitterly. “This is my honor.” Taws scratched at the blood that had congealed on his face.
Outside his viewport, the planet rolled. A continent-sized district slid into the terminator of night, the night half twinkling and glowing almost as bright as the day half.
The collider link pinged, but Taws hesitated over the jump command.
Stay, or run?
Go back or … or what?
“New entities detected,” the ship sang in its digital voice. Five marks appeared on his screen. They were almost impossible to spot unless you had a ship that was specifically designed to see other Shades.
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They were moving fast.
“Take me somewhere less populated,” Taws said. “Anywhere. I don’t care.”
The ship chimed, “Warning: link-structure at risk.”
“I don’t care.”
“Link established.”
Taws impulsed the sleeve to engage, and the Shade disappeared again.
***
Three fuel rods were missing. Well, not missing, but there was no way Taws was going back to get them now. And there was a breach in the hull that the ship was desperately trying to repair with engineer’s goo, and most of the alarms had only gone silent simply because he’d ripped them out. The rest were still quietly flashing on the flight console. He ignored them. His stomach growled, partially from hunger, and partially from the performance drugs he’d ingested right before the mission. He always overdid it, and now they twisted painfully in his gut. He ignored that, too.
All his attention was on the scanners, and the zoomed-in viewport itself.
“Life signs detected: 322.”
For only 322 aliens, there was a lot of activity on this dwarf world. The planetoid was pockmarked with huge, spiraling craters. Not impact sites, but mining sites. Lights blinked down in the shadowed regions of the spiral craters, slowly crawling deeper into the darkness. Each light must’ve been an earth-mover the size of an industrial warehouse.
Above the planetoid, two gargantuan freighters sat in high geosynchronous orbit. Their hulls were obscene chunks of metal, rippling with bulbous protuberances for storing rare, valuable gases and liquids, according to the Agency’s detailed reports. Each freighter was almost as long as a small moon, and dozens of freight elevators dripped down from their hulls like detachable umbilical cords. Or maybe jellyfish tentacles.
To them, he was invisible. But it wasn’t enough. He needed to be alone.
He was close to a hyperlane, lurking just under its entry ring, an ancient metal circle that had been here longer than any of the xenos. It lined up perfectly—down to the nanometer, according to the Agency’s reports—with eleven other metal rings spread across thousands of kilometers of empty space. There was no visible mechanism that connected the rings, no obvious force that kept them so perfectly aligned. Always the same distance apart.
The hyperlane started to glow, flashing rings of brilliant light, brighter than any sun, slipping from the end of the hyperlane to the entry. Going faster, and brighter, until all the light seemed to dump out at once in a flash of brilliance.
Taws didn’t need to zoom in to see it: another xeno freighter shot out of the hyperlane, its huge, angular face birthed out the gush of light, dragging the absurd bulk of its body behind.
“Life signs updated: 354.”
Too many, he thought. Have to get out of here. It wasn’t a thought, so much as a need that bled from his heart to his brain and back to his fingertips. He called up the list of destinations: millions of planets, and countless other objects the Agency had probed over the last thirty years.
Taws filtered the list down to the ones with zero life signs. He chose one at random, a rogue moon that had only been probed once.
“Severe warning: jump sleeve structure damaged.”
“Do it.”
“Link established.”
The Shade jumped.
***
An empty pill bottle drifted past his head, which meant the antigravity was broken. Trash floated overhead, and exposed wires waved like kelp in a calm ocean. Taws buckled himself in, just to stay in his seat. There was a moon, a rogue, all alone in the void. And yet, there were structures on it. Huge, raised shapes that twisted up from the surface of the moon, some of them a hundred kilometers high. In the moon’s notes, the origin of the architecture was labeled only as unknown.
At any other time, he might’ve wondered what is this place?
Instead, he read “Life signs detected: 0” and felt something unclench in his chest. Taws leaned forward, put his head in his hands, and sucked down slow, shuddering breaths while he clawed his hands through his hair.
Rocking back and forth, he mumbled the words to himself. “I am a soldier of destiny. We are the chosen species. This is my honor. This is my duty. This is my right.”
He shook his head. “What’s right about any of this?”
No one, of course, answered. He slammed a fist on the console, and half the lights blinked off. When they came back on, a fan, or something in the hull, started to click.
He threw his head back against his headrest, and stared bleakly at the moon. It, too, was empty. It, too, was alone.
“They’re all going to die,” he said. “That’s our legacy. All this nothing. Even this stupid, useless moon will be ours.”
How, he wondered, have I never realized what we are before this?
He looked over at the seat next to him. At the bracelet that had belonged to the Arch Minister of the Auran Arais, the first xeno Taws had ever met. Only an hour ago, Taws had looked into the Minister’s strange, gelatinous eyes, and had seen something there. Not just a life, but all their lives.
Countless xenos.
No mercy. Take your legacy. Your ancestors killed. Their ancestors killed. You—will—kill.
“I’m sorry, Heron,” Taws sniffed back the tears, “I tried to stop them. I couldn’t even stop myself.”
He had tried. He’d shot his own Captain in the back. Still, he failed. Whatever the Agency did to him now, he would deserve it.
And yet, he couldn’t stop running.
An alarm chirped at him. Five ships jumped into near space. Each one, with two agents aboard.
“Life signs detected: eleven.”
Eleven? Two per Shade. Two for the tackler. Then … that meant someone else was with them. The Captain.
She’s alive?
Taws had to check the gravity, because it felt like all the weight suddenly left his body. Everything shifted. I thought… Disbelieving, he wiped his face, staining his hand red.
Maybe I can go back. High stress environment, you know. Maybe they’ll forgive me and I can go home and—
Home was not a place, but a time no longer existed. Everything was different. The Agency was going to win, Humanity would live, and all the xenos…
And Heron was already gone. He could still see her, the way she had looked on their almost first date. He had asked her out when they were walking back from Diplo class, and she had turned him down, and Taws, thinking he was clever, made a compromise. What if we just walked a little? That’s almost like a date, but not really. It doesn’t count as anything. She had smiled, and he couldn’t help but think about how that scar on her lip made her look so pretty.
Without thinking, he clawed his chest with one hand, and thought, Taws, you blind fool. She tried to tell you.
The ship broke his thoughts with that false, too-soothing tone: “Remote access granted. Correcting course.” Someone was overriding his control, trying to slow his ship. This was it.
Taws slammed his fist on the console, almost breaking the emergency switch. Lights, sound, everything went offline. He was alone with the black shape of the rogue moon, and the dangerous groaning of the ship’s hull.
Taws flicked the switch again (“Powering up. Reverting to manual control.”), and set the Collider link to maximum power, urging it to calculate a new jump right now. It climbed rapidly, until a new voice barked over the comms. “Agent, stop.”
The Captain. Taws could hear the strain in her breath, but even now the sound of her voice gave him pause.
“Take your hand off the link.”
His hand obeyed.
“There was a mistake,” her voice was as hard as ice. Or maybe she was just trying to mask the pain. Taws had seen her shoulder explode, he couldn’t imagine the state she was in now. The fact that she was still talking spoke volumes about her grit. “All plans break. But you did your duty, Agent. Come back to us.”
“I can’t.”
“You must. You know what will happen if you don’t. You know how far we’ll follow. Come back, and I will help you undo this.”
“You can’t stop the War.”
“The War? Why would I—Agent Taws, this is our honor. We did this, you did this, to ensure our survival. The War will save us. This is our right.”
“This is wrong.”
“I don’t know what she told you, but nothing can matters more than this. This is all humankind we’re talking about. Without the War, the xenos will destroy us.”
“They don’t even know we exist.”
“You have studied the Synod. You know how it works out there. We can’t risk discovery, we can’t risk them every knowing we exist—not until we’re ready. This was the only way, and we were the only ones who could do it. Listen to me, Taws,” the cold edge of her voice softened. Maybe it was the painkillers, numbing her speech. Or maybe she just wanted him back. “You should be proud, Taws. We’re going home, and they’ll call us heroes.”
“They can call us whatever they want. It doesn’t matter.”
“Agent Red Feather, I didn’t get shot in the line of duty to let one of my own abandon his post.”
Taws’ gut filled with shame. What could he say? Captain Nica was right.
A staticky sigh rolled through his ship’s speakers. “Agent, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day.”
“I didn’t mean to shoot you—”
“Yes you did. But let’s not think about that right now. I’m alive, so we can fix it. I just need you to come back with us, Taws.”
“I can’t.” A fire extinguisher floated past his head. Annoyed, he shoved it out of the way, where it clanked against the walls and kept on sailing.
An alarm croaked.
“Live munitions detected.”
The other Shades. Through his sensors, Taws saw their missile bays iris open, and some wretched, angry part of his mind thought Go on, then. Do it. His thumb hovered over the joystick’s short-range jump button. The missiles could flicker too, no matter where he appeared in real space, but if this was how he was going to go out, then he was going to go out fighting.
But nobody fired.
A red wave pulsed over his sensors, and Taws felt the sudden tug of deceleration. While he’d been watching the shades, the tackler had nudged forward with its claws raised. Taws shoved up on the joystick, and his ship rattled louder as he fought against the tackler’s grip. Without the antigravity, he felt the strain instantly. A wet, green towel, smacked into his face and when he raised his hand to peel it away, his arm felt like it weighed a ton.
On impulse alone, he searched the data banks, scraping the furthest, most obscure planets across the Synod. The ones with no data, except for imagery from a long-ago probe. I just need time. One caught his eye. A tiny, nothing world at the edge of the frontier.
“Collider link at 20%. Warning: hull unstable. Warning: sleeve damage detected. Warning—”
“Don’t make us do this, Taws. You know we can’t let you go.”
“Is that what you said to Heron?” he said bitterly. He shouldn’t have said anything at all.
“I don’t anything about what happened to her. I had no part in anything to do with her. Whatever happened, the Agency had its reasons.”
The rage, the self-hatred, the injustice of everything everywhere rose up in his throat, but before he could let it out, another voice cut in.
“Collider link at 77%. Warning—Warning—”
“Taws!” Ga Yun shouted.
But he already saw it. Even through the spinning blur of the jump sleeve, he could see the wobble. One of the alarms he had cut out probably could’ve told him exactly what was wrong with it.
“Collider link ERROR. Do not engage. ERROR.”
“Agent,” Captain Nica warned. “Taws, don’t. Your sleeve’s safety is off. As your Captain—as your friend—please. How many years did we train for this? Remember why you started.”
“I do,” Taws said, “But I changed my mind.”
The Shade jumped.
***
The ruptured sleeve carved a thin line across half a galaxy, which caught a few dozen planets in gravitational eddies and flung them into new orbits. One planet harbored an undiscovered primitive xeno civilization, who celebrated the sudden shift in the day/night cycle by overthrowing their god-kings, and sacrificing them on altars of hot coals, which given the planet in question was now on a straight path away from its sun, was slightly ironic. Even the coldest winter they’d experienced thus far would be fondly remembered as a sweltering paradise compared to what was coming next.
***
The E-13 Shade blinked into existence and ripped itself into pieces. Torn pieces of hull, engines, cargo doors, all blossomed with fire as they entered the atmosphere of this nothing world.
Taws’ unconscious body thumped around the cockpit, one shoulder dislocated but still hooked into the straps. Three reticulated arms descended from the floor and the ceiling, and caught him. They pushed him down into his chair, and the straps buckled him into the seat. Another arm tried to drop a flight helmet onto his head, but there was no helmet to be found, so it merely ran through the motions before the arm, too, was ripped away. Translucent jelly was already spewing from small tubes around the seat, sticking to his back and neck and legs, creating a gelatinous cushion that covered all the softest parts of his body.
Taws eyes fluttered open. Through the shredded frame of his ship (metal plates flapping and wires whipping in the wind) a red-orange ocean of desert filled his view, growing nearer by the second. He was about to scream when the seat ejected, and knocked the wind from his lungs.
***
Down on the planet, a caravan of boveers—guided by a pair of cattleherds on hoverbikes—stopped. The boveers, lowing, lifted their heads and watched a ball of fire streak across the sky, shattering and breaking into pieces. As the last of the jump sleeve flung itself apart, it let out huge waves of magnetic energy that sent vibrant, unnatural auroras snaking across the entire Northern Hemisphere, all emanating from that single ship.
Far away, in one of the few cities fortunate enough to have an elevator, a pair of Synod enforcers were roughing up a drunk who, quite literally, had been asking for it. He’d relieved himself on the enforcer’s vehicle, and had thrown an empty bottle at one of them. But now that one of the enforcers was holding his arms, and the other walloped him in the gut, the drunk was starting to rethink his recent decisions, among other things.
The puncher took a break to nurse his fist, when the fireball caught his eye. “What in Crowns is that?”
His wide eyes caught his partner’s attention, who relaxed his grip on the drunk slightly, as he too gaze up at the sky. “Maybe one of the Floaters blew up a ship?”
“Never seen a ship blow up like that. Holy void, how can something that small make all that light?”
“Either way, someone messed up—” The second enforcer punctuated this sentence with a shocked wheeze as the drunk’s foot collided with his genitals. Before the enforcer could cough out a pained, “Get him!” the drunk was hightailing it across the sand, cackling like the lucky, drunken fool that he was.
A few seconds later, a single fleck dislodged from the source of all those magnetic disruptions, sailed over a vast canyonland, and crashed on the banks of a shriveled stream that wound through the silty foothills.
His seat was in pieces. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, and all he could think was how cold he was, when a bush approached him. A bush? No, a xeno, who appeared to be wearing every kind of leaf imaginable. Through the knotted vines and heavy leaves, he saw a pair of telescoping goggles sticking out of the foliage. They magnified the xeno’s eyes to an absurd size.
The eyes blinked down at him. Taws became vaguely aware that his face was covered in green goo, and blood, and burned-up dust. He sent an impulse out, telling the nanowires threaded through his skin to stop moving.
In a voice as dry and old as the desert, the xeno said, “Well, hit me with a bat and call me a donkey. I thought I seen them all, but now I know I have.”
“What?” Taws croaked.
The xeno telescoped her goggles forward, forcing Taws to blink and uncross his eyes.
“Can’t you hear me?” the xeno asked, “I said, what in the void are you?”