“Lucky you,” someone growls. “Most of us have been living with your failure for twenty-seven years, kid.”
It is the Betraskan who speaks—a surly veteran named Elin de Stoy, who serves as Tyler’s second-in-command. The cybernetic monocle over her eye whirs and shifts as she holds Aurora in her black gaze. Aurora is taken aback at the jab, but keeps her temper, meeting Elin’s stare.
“I’m sorry. But I had no control over what—”
“That is a word you use a great deal, Terran,” the Syldrathi helmswoman says. “I hope you realize sorry counts for nothing at all.”
Her violet eyes glitter as she stares at Aurora in unmasked challenge. Her name is Lae, or so Tyler calls her—a curious moniker for one of my people. But I suppose these are curious times. She wears the glyf of the Waywalkers on her brow, yet she bristles with warlike hostility. Deep cracks scar the skin around her eyes, marks of pain twist the corners of her mouth, but beneath it all, there is a … familiarity to her I cannot quite place. And strangest of all, now that we are out of the Fold, I see her hair is not the silver common among my people, but a faded alloy of silver and gold.
“We hope to make whole what was broken,” I tell her, meeting the challenge in her eyes. “We think we can journey back to the moment we left, and undo what was done. But first, the Weapon must be repaired.”
“And we’re supposed to trust you?” Lae scoffs. “Son of the Starslayer?”
“From the state of your ship, your crew, what little we have seen of the galaxy, what choice do you have?”
The shadow of it hangs in the ready room now—the memory of those worlds consumed by the Ra’haam. Those corrupted ships bearing down out of the Fold, those cargo bays below full of refugees. Aurora looks at Tyler, hurt in her eyes as she speaks.
“What happened here, Ty?”
He lifts a battered metal flask, takes a mouthful, teeth gritted. I can smell the liquor from where I sit—harsh, home-brewed. Tyler wipes his lip, scratches the patch of leather covering the place his eye should be.
“What do you think happened, Auri? We got our asses kicked.”
He breathes deep, takes another swig. I can feel a weight in the room then, a scent on the air. Looking among these warriors, seeing the color reflected in their eyes, the taste of salt and rust on my tongue.
Blood.
So much blood.
“Saedii and I were captured by the GIA,” Tyler sighs. “Taken off the board to provoke Caersan. And like an idiot, the Starslayer took their bait, kicked off a war between the Unbroken and the Terran-Betraskan alliance. After the Weapon disappeared during the battle, the Unbroken pulled back from Earth, but not before massive casualties had been inflicted on both sides. And then the Ra’haam unleashed its real plan.”
Tyler shakes his head, takes another sip.
“It had covert operatives all over the galaxy by then. Using the GIA’s networks and resources, it staged a series of terror attacks against several galactic governments—the Chellerians, the Rikerites, the Betraskans—framing the strikes to look like they were perpetrated by other species. Sowing mistrust. Fracturing the old alliances. The Galactic Caucus called an emergency meeting to get the bottom of it all. Every planetary head gathered together in one place. Stupid, really.”
Tyler sighs, looks out the viewport to the stars outside.
“A Ra’haam agent detonated a bomb in the Caucus meeting. Simultaneously wiped out every top-end diplomat and head of planetary governance in the alliance. Effectively cutting the head off the Caucus. Each planet blamed the other, old grudges came home to roost. So much effort was wasted looking for the perpetrator and fighting petty squabbles that by the time they figured out what was really happening, it was too late.”
“Bloom and burst,” Aurora whispers.
“The Ra’haam hatched from its seed worlds,” Tyler nods. “Spread through the natural gates in those systems, and from there into the Fold. Trillions of spores, infecting everything they came across. Ship by ship. Planet by planet. Race by race. Dragging them all into the hive mind.
“We fought. Of course we did. But every world it consumed made it stronger. Every soldier or ship it infected shifted the tide of the battle. Until its numbers were too great to fight anymore, and all anyone could do was run. Scattering to the corners of the galaxy, lying low, hoping the hive mind wouldn’t hear them, sense them, find them. But it always does.”
The horror of it washes over us both, and Aurora finds my hand, squeezing tight. “But … you’re still fighting?”
“There’s a few of us left,” he says, motioning to his ragtag crew. “A coalition, looking for survivors, bringing them back to what little sanctuary we can offer. But it’s just a matter of time.”
Tyler shakes his head, meets Aurora’s eyes again.
“Until it has everything.”
“How is it that you stay ahead of the enemy?” I ask. “The FoldGate you opened to bring us here … I have not seen such technology before.”
“We call it a rift drive,” Tyler says. “It’s an amalgam of Betraskan and Terran tech, using Syldrathi psychic energy to manipulate spacetime. I don’t really understand it, but we’ve discovered some of the unusual properties of Eshvaren crystal ourselves.” He nods to the golden-haired Syldrathi woman, still staring at Aurora, those cracks in her skin darkening as she scowls. “Each of our ships has a Waywalker aboard, and a chunk of crystal taken from recovered Eshvaren probes. The Waywalkers use the probes to open the gates, let us cut through the Fold. But it takes a toll every time they do it. And we don’t have many Waywalkers left.”
“What happened to the others?” Aurora asks softly.
Tyler frowns. “The other Waywalkers? They—”
“No, I mean the others,” she insists. “Scarlett. Fin. Zila. Are they … ?”
Tyler’s mood drops further, the scrape of wet gravel in his tone as he answers. “They died at the Battle of Terra, Auri.”
“And … Saedii?” I ask.
Tyler looks at me then. Dragging a hand through his graying hair, he drinks deeply from his flask again.
“We escaped the GIA together. I actually teamed up with her and her old crew to fight the Ra’haam.” He smiles, but behind it, I can see the pain of an old scar. “We fought like cats and dogs, but we did okay for a few years there. She was a hell of a woman, your sister.”
The other Syldrathi woman is staring at me now, eyes like knives.
“Where is she?” I hear myself ask.
“Saedii killed herself, Kal.”
“No,” I whisper. “She would never …”
“She was on a rescue run.” Tyler sighs. “Trying to recover a refugee fleet near Orion. They got hit by the Ra’haam. Her engines were disabled, her ship was dead in the black. She and her crew were surrounded. She detonated her core rather than be consumed into the collective.”
I murmur a prayer to the Void, press my fingers to my eyes, my lips, my aching heart. Aurora squeezes my hand, her eyes misting as she sees my grief. We were not close in the end, my elder sister and I. But Saedii and I once loved each other fiercely, as only siblings forged in the same furnace can.
Tyler guzzles the rest of his flask as the Syldrathi glowers at me.
“She died with honor,” Lae spits. “Unlike the rest of her family.”
Her tone shifts to bitter violence as she turns those cracked violet eyes to the air beside my head.
“You hear me, cho’taa?” she spits. “I feel you! Skulking in the dark like a thief! Show yourself, i’na destii! Ko’vash dei saam te naeli’dai!” She rises to her feet, spitting fury as she raises her null blade. “Aam sai toviir’netesh! Vaes santiir to sai’da baleinai!”