Chapter 26
Death in Disguise
Khar
“Every life ends, sooner or later. We may hope we were more to the universe than a parasite’s selfish ruin, blinded by its own desires… but we never truly know, do we? I believe this: to die for my queen is immortal glory. And I do so love glory.”
Attributed to Karom Zzolnok, famed figure of Divani history and commander of the Queens’ Guard
Khar and his brothers spent the following chrono-cycles drafting their battle plan. Each jump grew shorter, a clear sign they were closing in on their final destination. Vegrun and his mercenaries were on their trail and would likely arrive within hours once the Vitro and Helios stopped to recharge. The Legion or the local galactic security forces would appear eventually, as they always did—too late to matter, and no one was counting on their help during first contact.
That first contact, in Khar’s mind, would end with Horos flayed alive, after Lily was safe.
He needed tranquilizers strong enough to knock out aferishbear-beast just to get a few hours of sleep. Every moment apart from her stretched into eternity, his restless mind torturing him with images of what Lily might be enduring under Horos’s claws.
He knew exactly what Corvus were capable of. There was a reason his gut had turned the moment he first saw Horos. In the animal world, Divani were predators, Corvus scavengers, but their prey was the same. The urge to destroy Horos was instinctive, primal. Yet the rules of civilization demanded that allspecies coexist without violence, no matter how impossible that sometimes felt.
Not that such rules meant much to him. They merely complicated life a little for someone who had to suppress the constant temptation to kill.
During one of the mid-jump stops, while Helios recharged on solar energy, Khar slipped into the Legion’s servers without a shred of guilt and accessed intelligence systems no civilian should even know existed, searching for anything he could find on Horos.
What he discovered both calmed and unsettled him. Horos came from a line of unremarkable Corvus families stretching back generations, and nothing distinguished him in the slightest. Average education, above-average sycophant. Add a touch of misfortune, and it wasn’t hard to see how he had slithered into Vegrun’s circle.
It seemed recent. According to the credit logs, the very moment he was dismissed, Horos purchased a magnetic shackle and set a course for the Vitro.
He knew he was racing the clock. Once Vegrun boarded, his access to the system would be erased.
Khar cursed himself for ever leaving Lily alone, though there had been no way to foresee the danger. It didn’t matter. That mistake would never happen again. From now on, he would not take a single step away from her.
Khar, Ikar, and Aros agreed that Horos would want to sell the Vitro as quickly as possible and secure a new ship, something smaller and less conspicuous. They had no clear sense of what kind of resistance awaited them, but the most probable scenario was a mid-tier criminal syndicate. Small crews couldn’t afford a cruiser of this class, and the larger ones would never settle for a stolen version when they could own the real thing.
When the jumps became so short that they knew only two or three remained before arrival, the three brothers armed themselves for close combat and for ranged plasma fire alike.
Their plan was simple. No need to tamper with a recipe that works.
The Vitro would have to lower its shields to let the buyers board. That was the moment Helios would slip beneath the barrier and deploy the vukri into one of the sensor conduits. Anyone aboard the Vitro would have no choice but to deal with them unless they wanted the ship rendered worthless once the creatures started chewing through the wiring.
They knew Lily and Horos had been alone on the Vitro when the cruiser departed the dock, but they had no idea how many buyers would arrive or how heavily they would be armed. It was also possible Horos had contacted someone en route, though Khar found that unlikely.
His profiling had turned up no allies Horos could turn to. The Corvus seemed fundamentally distrustful. If Khar had been forced to guess, he would have said Horos was coercing Lily into helping him, but he had no idea how. The not knowing drove him mad.
Another dread gnawed at him. What if Lily was already dead? Perhaps she had argued with Horos and things had escalated. The thought would have driven him out of his mind if not for the discipline that kept dragging him back to the mission.
He had to stay strong. Calculating. Cunning. Cold. For Lily.
When they burst out of deep space at last and the Vitro appeared before them, Khar gave silent thanks to every deity he had ever heard of. He was not religious, but if Lily’s safety depended on it, he was the kind of selfish, morally unrestrained bastard who would have burned incense at any altar in the galaxy if it would save her.
He was grateful too that, despite not training or deploying with his brothers in chrono-cycles, they moved together with perfect synchronicity. Ikar and Aros worked like parts of a single machine and obeyed Khar’s commands without hesitation.
He could not have wished for better companions for the most important mission of his life.
Helios seemed to anticipate his commands before he voiced them. The speed and exactness bordered on uncanny. Khar understood that Helios’s intelligence exceeded the limitations he had come to expect from the Vitro, yet the performance still stood out. If Ikar and Aros noticed, they kept it to themselves, their only tell a pair of curious looks.
Thanks to Khar’s quick judgment and Helios’s expert navigation, the first phase of their plan succeeded. The vukri were deployed.
They moved on to the buyers’ ship, which was docked directly at the hangar. With the Vitro’s shields down, their scanners finally pierced the hull and revealed the number of life signs inside. They could not isolate Lily’s signal, but Khar convinced himself he would have felt it if something had happened to her. He knew this was a comforting lie, but he needed something to hold on to.
Helios ran its stealth systems and shields at full capacity, rendering them invisible for a short, precious window. It was all they required.
