Starbreaker: Volume 4 - Chapter 27

“Standard operating procedure for any clandestine organization is to go in soft, make your presence invisible, don’t let anyone know that you’re there until you’re done, and, for preference, not even then. Make them think it was an accident or some mistake of their own. Don’t let them know that you did anything at all. Except sometimes that procedure is stupid. Sometimes, even if you’re clandestine, you need the whole universe to know that somebody did something. Something so big and nasty that it will give everyone else second thoughts about trying to do whatever you just stopped ever again. Shock and awe.”

—Covert Action, Conn Mullaney

“Kaya Runemaul, my darling. I have never seen anyone as beautiful as you in all my days. Why on earth did you just adopt my dear Sylvas into your clan instead of marrying him in? Can you imagine the fun you’d have climbing him like a tree?”

Whatever Kaya had been expecting—whatever mortification she’d been anticipating would be visited on Malachai and Hector—this completely derailed her train of thought. “What!?”

Mira rose to her feet and rubbed her hands down the front of Sylvas’ torso, stopping just short of any areas that would have made him start screaming in the back of her head. “Look at this fine body of manhood that you’ve been denying yourself. The two of you would make such a sweet couple. Can’t you find it in your heart to take my pitiful boy in? To cherish him and ride him around like a pretty little pony.”

Sylvas probably would have intervened at some point if he wasn’t so busy choking in horror at everything Mira was saying.

Kaya was tripping over her words, too. “Mira… He’s… He’s like my brother… I couldn’t… I wouldn’t…”

“Oh, damnation. He was too slow to make his play.” Sometimes when his eidolon was manifesting, Sylvas felt as though there was something predatory inside of his body, stalking everyone around him, but Strife was nothing compared to Mira when she was locked on a target. In fact, he was certain that the eidolon was beginning to take notes. “Well, if he’s your brother, then you had better be one hell of a wing-woman, because this poor boy is a simmering cesspit of repression. I thought he might have pulled it off with that Hotlips girl before she exploded, and I felt certain that the lizard would have popped his proverbial cherry. How could she not, when every time he was awkward and standoffish, her species read it as flirting? They were the perfect match. But then he had to go and spoil that, too.”

A pretty little pony?! Sylvas finally managed to form a complete thought.

Kaya finally seemed to be catching up to the speed of the conversation, even if she still looked more than a little horrified about the whole thing. “I thought he was your ex? Why are you trying to get him hooked up?”

“I just want what’s best for my boy.” Mira clasped her hands under his chin and sank back down into her seat. “And frankly, I’m concerned that he’s going to start getting weird if we don’t find someone to sleep with him soon. I don’t want him turning into Malachai.”

Malachai choked on his coffee before spluttering out. “I have taken many lovers!”

That statement alone was weird enough that the whole table fell temporarily silent.

If you think that I’m ever letting you out again after this mortifying ordeal—

“Shut up, darling, we had a deal!” Mira snapped, then rounded on Hector. “So what exactly is your situation? How did you come to roam the stars as an intergalactic man of mystery?”

“I… what?” The sudden change of direction felt completely natural to Sylvas, who was accustomed to the speed at which this new Mira processed information and made logical leaps, but he imagined it must have been difficult for everyone else to cope with.

“Well, you had to have been born somewhere, lived some sort of life, worked your way up through the circles before finding the alligator that would fit the hole in your heart.” Malachai stopped with the coffee halfway to his mouth this time, so he didn’t choke on it. But it seemed like Mira was pretty intent on killing them all through sheer embarrassment as she barged on. “Let’s hear a little about that instead of your spy stories.”

“You do understand that covenant mages aren’t meant to give out that sort of information? We work alone or in cells so that—” Hector had barely even begun with his perfectly rational explanation before it was interrupted by Mira yet again.

“The coffee! That was the whole reason I’m here!” She scooped up the cup and took a mouthful, swishing it around in her mouth before swallowing it. “Disgusting. Why does anyone drink this?”

Hector had put up with a lot from Mira so far. He’d endured her aggressive flirting, her interference in their operation, and even her prying questions about his personal life without any sign of anger, but at the insult to coffee, it seemed she had finally taken a step too far over the line. He lurched forward to slam his cup on the table. “This is some of the best coffee that can be found in the entire Empyrean!”

There was a long pause, and then Mira slurped another mouthful of it down, her face, or rather Sylvas’ face, contorting into a rictus of horror as she did. Finally, she said, “Perhaps it’s an acquired taste, darling.”

Perhaps you haven’t had a chance to acquire a taste for anything yet. Maybe we should start you off on bland elven food.

Leaning back, Hector glowered at her as he very deliberately drank his own coffee. The whole mess area fell into blissful silence for a long enough moment that Sylvas actually foolishly hoped that his misery might have been over, but then Kaya decided to poke the bear. “So what was Sylvas like when you dated him?”

Both Malachai and Hector visibly flinched at this invitation for Mira to talk more. But it was all the invitation that she needed. “Oh, you would have loathed him. If you think he’s a stanzbuhr now, he was so much worse when I first got my claws into him. All he did was study and work, day and night. Punctured his own internal organs trying to form his first embodiment and wouldn’t let me tell anyone because he didn’t want to fall behind in his lessons. An absolute bore, but everyone else in the tower was even more boring than him, somehow.”

Sylvas had not shared the details of his early life with his friends. They knew the broad strokes, about his recruitment into the Heralds and the planetary annihilation that he’d called down, but they really did not need to hear all of the minutiae.

Please don’t.

“Anyway, he wasn’t terrible looking, and he was clearly the most powerful mage on the whole planet, so I decided to marry him. There was no hope of wedding into the family of the Grand Dukes at this point, at least not from my lowly position, so the plan was to wed him, bed him as a little graduation gift, and then use him to overthrow the governance of Croesia so that I could establish a new dynasty of mage-queens to rule it throughout eternity. Unfortunately, the Heralds had their own plans for him, and being so eager to please and so oblivious to the pleasures of the flesh, he went along with them. Ergo, the death of a whole planet—and by unfortunate coincidence, me.”

Kaya had been grinning up until that point, but the ending of the story was something of a downer. “So wait, are you actually her ghost?”

Malachai scoffed almost immediately. “She is not a ghost. I know ghosts.”

“I tend to think of myself as a specter conjured from Sylvas’ guilty mind. A way for him to torture himself every single day over the mistakes he’s made. If it hadn’t been me, it would probably have been that fiend girl he had the crush on. The one who burned.”

Mira, I need you to stop.

Mira rolled her eyes at him. “Oh, hush, darling, we’re all grown-ups. Nobody is getting their feelings hurt by a little honesty.”

The others were all sitting frozen in a state of shock from everything Mira had been blurting out.

I am.

“Oh, I see. Perhaps I’ll just let you finish your own coffee then since I don’t much care for it.”

Mira…

The experience of being returned control of his body was no less of a shock to Sylvas. All his senses rang like a gong as he was reconnected to them, and while Mira had given him a brief window of paralyzed stillness, almost immediately afterwards, he shook with such force that he nearly lost what was left of his coffee anyway.

Everyone else on board was still staring at him with the same horrified expressions.

Sylvas took a deep breath and then a long draw on his coffee before finally breaking the silence. “So… that was Mira.”

Kaya was the first to speak, as always. “I love her. Please tell her I love her. Can she hear me? Mira, I love you!”

Malachai and Hector both continued staring or, more accurately, glowering at Sylvas. Malachai eventually said, “And she is going to be joining us for meals… every day?”

Sylvas took another extremely long sip of coffee as Mira raged in the back of his mind. “That is the plan, yes. Though I suspect she will… calm down. It’s her first time getting to socialize with anyone other than me since… well, she was born.”

Kaya nodded with sympathy writ all over her face. “Nothing but wall-to-wall stanzbuhr would be enough to make anyone a bit excitable to get something else.”

I really do like her. You should have married her when the opportunity presented itself.

Sylvas didn’t respond to that because he was pretty sure Mira felt his wincing reaction to the thought. Then he realized how much time had passed and knocked back the remains of his coffee. “I’d better get back to the controls.”

This seemed to be more stable ground for Hector, “Damn, Sylvas, you’ve got to slow down. You’re making the rest of us space-faring species look bad.”

Sylvas chuckled. “The sooner we check these planets, the sooner we find the Consortium.”

They emerged on the outer edge of the Kimberly’s Grift system, with Sylvas having learned his lesson the last time from showing up too close to a planet that might already have been destroyed. He was immediately rewarded for his caution. Every planet in the system was being peppered with asteroid strikes as they arrived. The atmosphere of the gas giants looked less like the usual solid surface and more like the top of a pond in the rain. KG5, where the Aion technology had been reported, was far further along in its death throes than their last stop had been. Fractures had extended out from the point where the potential treasures had been scooped out of the planet, encircling the entire globe. The initial clouds of debris thrown up by that attack had been subsumed into rubble peppering the other planets in the system, and now the planet itself was beginning to break up. Continental shelves became catastrophic-sized meteors. The planetary core that had been hot enough to sustain life even this far out from the system’s sun had been exposed to the chill of space and hardened up like a scab. The world was not splitting cleanly in two. Where the different hemispheres had been connected was now a crumbling wasteland of fragmentary destruction.

They didn’t have to get closer to know that nothing was left alive on the surface, but Sylvas insisted on navigating in closer to do some thorough scrying, just on the off-chance that there might have been survivors sequestered underground in an airtight bunker somewhere. If there had been, they’d expired long before the Folly had come to save them. KG5 was dead. Its population of twelve thousand colonists was dead. They had arrived months, if not years, too late to save a single soul.

Sylvas didn’t even feel the anger, just the presence. Strife was so close now, their connection so intimate, that it was less like something rising up inside him, and more a meeting halfway. In a strange way, he was calmer now than he had been the same time yesterday. The constant anger giving way not to acceptance but to a balance of the feeling, distributed through the three residents of his body.

I don’t know what you mean, darling. I’m perfectly level-headed—as always.

Once again, Sylvas found himself surrounded by everyone else on board, with nobody saying a thing. This time, they were staring out in horror at the planet that had been murdered instead of him, which was a little less awkward but still not ideal. “I’m adjusting our predictions based on the Consortium having operated here, and I’m plotting a course for the other system.”

Hector stepped up to the console and scribbled a message onto the slate. “I’m filing an anonymous report to the Empyrean about the colony being dead. They’ll send someone out to clean up in a few months.”

That should have made Sylvas angry, too, that a genocide didn’t even qualify for immediate attention, but the sad fact of the matter was that space was this vast, and without the jump gates, travel was too expensive in resources to justify anyone moving at the speeds he could move them at. There was a reason gravity magic was so prized.

He had their course locked in and was about to send them into null-space when Malachai laid a hand on his shoulder. “One moment.”

The necromancer had his eyes closed, his brow furrowed, and his mind obviously turned to other matters. Sylvas waited and then waited a little longer, staring out at the destruction the Consortium’s greed had wrought. Finally, Malachai said, “Thank you.”

Hector was looking back over his shoulder at him. “Speaking to ghosts again?”

Malachai shook his head. “A prayer for the departed.”

It had not even occurred to Sylvas that Malachai might have practiced any sort of religion, or how his ability to directly interact with the spirits of the dead might have fit into it. The dwarves’ religion seemed to be mostly a series of superstitions that they sometimes ignored when it suited them, so Kaya had never really discussed the matter, and Sylvas’ own views on religion had always been tempered by his own god turning out to be an extradimensional demon trying to consume his whole planet.

It was a topic he didn’t particularly feel like exploring at that exact moment. He cast the spell and sent them slipping back out of reality into null-space, flinging them across the cosmos at speeds that would have torn the ship to pieces if it were still subject to the laws of physics from the real universe.

“Well, that was just as nasty as last time.” Kaya broke the silence, and Sylvas couldn’t help but let out a bitter laugh.

“It doesn’t get better.”

Hector glanced between them. “It’s good that it doesn’t get better. If you start getting used to this kind of thing… it’ll mess you up inside.”

Yes, because it is so terribly organized in here at the moment.

Malachai gave the usually smiling man a sideways look. “You have seen much of this in your work?”

“They don’t send us to the nicest places.” Hector chuckled, but Sylvas had spent enough time with him now to tell that it was forced. “If I’m involved, the crisis is usually at least this bad. I just… It’s hard to believe it got this bad without anyone back in the Empyrean even knowing about it.”

Change the subject, darling. This is all getting too maudlin.

Sylvas pulled up the star chart. “Once we’ve made our next stop, we will be able to narrow our search for the Consortium base to about a five-lightyear sphere. I’d suggest we start at the center, where they’re most likely to be, and then work out from there, dividing it into sectors and scrying them as we go.”

“What’s the plan when we find it?” Kaya asked.

There wasn’t even a moment’s consideration from Hector. “We hit them hard; we hit them fast. We take the battle to the ground so they can’t use superior numbers to overwhelm us, take over their base, retrieve all intelligence we can find, and work out where they’ve been finding shikari. Stopping their operations is great, but until the shikari queen is put down, she’ll go on spawning until her kids eat the universe.”

Malachai sighed. “Even now, the people annihilating planets don’t qualify as the true threat.”

“That’s the other reason we’re doing this loud instead of trying to sneak in.” Hector’s grin took on a feral edge. “We’re going to show every criminal organization in the Empyrean and beyond what happens if they try to pull this on our turf.”