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The atmosphere flamed until, after a time, its vacuum contained the furnace, which roiled down into a smaller cloud of flames. Which hovered mid-firmament between a sea of ashes, churning debris and a deep, almost reverent stillness.
18
Now You Can Have Your Forever
Selene
On Mirage, the entire party on board watched the fireworks with wide, horrified eyes through the giant holo screen.
Kage, Ki’Remi and Riv shared long, worried looks.
Sheba held Selene as she wept softly, staring at the glowing, roiling, pyroclastic form.
Then it was all over.
All 51 of The Technocracy ships were gone. Disappeared. Scorched into oblivion. As if they’d never existed.
All was dark except the cloud of flames still floating in space.
Then it moved towards them.
‘He’s coming!’ whispered Selene through a ragged, hurting throat.
The three Sable Riders onboard rushed down to the cargo deck doors.
Selene, too, followed by Sheba.
They crowded at the view window of the blast doors outside the cargo hold, waiting. Then a bright light encompassed the cargo hold, sparking with flames and embers. The team stepped back, holding their arms over their eyes to shield them from the brilliant cluster of heat and luminance.
Suddenly, the light fell, and they heard a thump.
‘Mirage, doors!’ Kage ordered.
The external cargo hold entry closed, and the internal doors slid open as soon as their seams were joined.
There he was. He stood inside Mirage’s airlock, merged back into his meta-human form. One covered in a myriad of hideous burns and bruises.
Kainan swayed, and Selene leapt forward, partially catching him as he slumped heavily onto the floor.
The journey back to Eden II was a sombre affair.
Kage and Riv sat on the command deck, quietly guiding the Phantasm back home.
A deck below, Selene sat by Kainan’s bed where he’d lain since being carried in by his brothers after falling unconscious on Mirage’s storage deck.
After docking in the battlecruiser, they’d taken him into the Phantasm’s gleaming white medbay, where Ki’Remi had immediately placed him into a med-scanner bed and induced a coma.
Two hours into their return flight, Selene sat glued to his bedside, watching anxiously as Kainan’s vitals spiked up and down. She wouldn’t let go of his hand.
Ki’Remi and Sheba worked in the background, but she barely acknowledged them. All she could do was stare at her man wordlessly, stricken by despair.
She only stepped back to let the pair administer medical care. Casting aside the shock of her recent capture, Sheba had stepped into her natural nursing role to assist Ki’Remi. The pair moved quietly and flawlessly in a dance of professional precision.
Their patient was gravely ill. Silent. Unmoving.
Only the hiss of the high-tech ventilator sounded in the room, the only sign that Kainan was still alive. His skin was scorched in swathes of peeling, blistered black char with full-thickness third-degree burns. His face, too, had not escaped the blaze.
His magnificent hair was shaggy, short and burnt in places to the scalp. His eyebrows and lashes were gone, his beard ragged and seared.
