Crossroads of Fate (Cadicle #5): An Epic Space Opera Series (26 page)

“They made me better, just like we could have done for all of you,” Haersen spat back. “Instead, you’ll eliminate us and continue on with your weak, pathetic lives.”

Wil met his gaze. “What you are now isn’t natural.”
The Priesthood shouldn’t have created a life that had no way of surviving. To make them suffer like this is too great an injustice to comprehend.

“We were the future,” Tek declared.

“No, Tek,” Wil shook his head. “Your ancestors were a grasp at capturing a future that should never have been. Engineering a new way of life was never a viable answer. The physical self cannot be separated from its surrounding context. We need to evolve as a people holistically—culture driving form and function. What happened to you was wrong, but it can’t be undone. You never should have been driven away, but you also shouldn’t have been created in the first place. I understand why you have fought for your existence—I would have done the same—but the time for fighting has ended. If we can’t live together, then our conflict must end here.”

“So you do know the truth,” Tek murmured.

“I do. I’m sorry that the Bakzen people need to meet this end, but you led them to this juncture. And facing you… I’ve been waiting for this day a very long time.”

Around him, Wil’s officers had tuned into the conversation, trying to piece together the truth he was talking around. There was no sense in keeping it from them any longer—the war was already won.

Wil straightened in his chair. “The Priesthood will pay for their mistakes. I’ll make sure the Bakzen are remembered for what you achieved, not for what we made you become.”

Tek’s face softened with surprising understanding. “We fought to the end.”

“Your people did,” Wil agreed. “But you, Tek—you don’t deserve an honorable death.”
He came after me, after Saera—he tried to take everything I love from me, and so now I’ll do the same. He’ll watch as everything he’s built is destroyed.

“Sir, a volley of shuttles just launched from the surface!” Rianne interrupted. “Intense telekinetic signatures.”

More clones to detonate as bombs.
Wil met Tek’s cool stare.

Tek nodded. “They are so very special. It’s a shame you never had a chance to meet your brothers.” He stepped to the side, revealing an underground lab filled with clone maturation tanks. Their faces were eerily familiar.

They cloned me!
Wil gaped in horror at the abominations. He had always wondered why the Bakzen had wanted to extract marrow from him during his initial capture. In his wildest speculation, he never imagined it was to bolster the Bakzen army. The hatred for all things Taran had seemingly run far too deep. If there was some aspect of him worth incorporating, even if it meant an adulteration of the pure Bakzen bloodlines, then he couldn’t underestimate them for a moment.

“I wonder if they’re as strong as you?” Tek asked.

“Take out those shuttles!” Wil ordered Rianne.
That’s it… That’s the pinnacle of his achievement. They will be his undoing.

“I’m on it!” she replied, targeting the Conquest’s weapons on the approaching vessels.

Wil’s skin tingled as telekinetic energy surged through him. “This was your aim all along—to make me a part of your perverse plan.”

Tek sneered back. “Don’t flatter yourself. This has always just been about the advancement of the Bakzen race, and we borrowed one little piece from you to accomplish that goal. It’s the very same imperative the Priesthood programmed into us at our inception.”

Not only did they try to manipulate my mind, but they used my very genetic code as a weapon!
His grip tightened on the handhold, glaring into Tek’s searing red eyes.
This ends now.
“I won’t have any part in your future.”

“You didn’t have a choice,” Tek replied. “And come now—you couldn’t hurt these poor innocents, could you?” He swept his arm to encompass the clones in the maturation tanks. “After all, they’re your brothers. They want to meet you.”

“Sir!” Rianne cut in. “The shuttles have been destroyed, but the electromagnetic signature around the planet is intensifying. Our sensors can’t get clear readings.”

The clones… that must have been what was blocking me when I attempted to observe the planet before the attack.
Wil examined the immature clones in the tanks behind Tek on the viewscreen, detecting a telekinetic link between them. Together, under Tek’s direction, they could take out the whole TSS fleet. However, their abilities were also the perfect weapon to use against Tek—turning the creation against the creator, just like the Bakzen had done to the Priesthood.

Wil steeled himself for the task at hand, trying to maintain emotional distance from the abominations on screen in front of him. The clones had been aged to the equivalent of early-teens—almost the same age as Wil was when the bone marrow sample had been taken from him. Their entire purpose in life was to kill and destroy, just like Wil had been created to do. Except, they weren’t a copy of him, but rather living weapons in the hands of the enemy—mindless drones being manipulated toward Tek’s ends. The Bakzen could consume them alive, with no thought for them as individuals.
I won’t let them suffer any longer. I won’t let anyone else suffer at the Bakzen’s hands.
“You say they want to meet me?” Wil asked his adversaries over the viewscreen.

Tek nodded, and Haersen smirked next to him.

Wil extended his consciousness toward the planet. As he approached, hundreds of the clones’ voices filled Wil’s mind, chanting a repeating mantra in unison:
“Killer! You let them die. You killed them all.”
Caught by surprise, Wil released the handholds connecting him to the Conquest and pressed his palms over his ears, but the voices continued to taunt him. Except, the thoughts weren’t from the clones. Underneath it all, Wil detected Tek and Haersen leading the chorus.

Gathering himself, Wil remembered his target. This was between him and Tek—the rest was just a distraction.
He can’t control me.

Consumed by rage, Wil summoned all his power and blocked his mind. His world went silent. In the new stillness around him, he reached across the distance to isolate Tek’s mind.
“No, I didn’t kill them,”
he told him.
“You did.”

Without hesitation, Wil expanded his mind to let in the clones—tapping into the parts of them that were once part of himself. He sensed a resonance as the clones recognized their kinship.
“More will die so long as Tek lives,”
he said into their blank minds.
“Kill him.”

On screen, the clones writhed in their maturation tanks, sloshing the nutrient water onto the floor. Tek ignored them at first, but then he went rigid—frozen in a telekinetic vice as the clones latched onto him with their collective minds. Next to him, Haersen’s eyes widened with distress.

“I have you now, Tek.”
Wil sliced into his consciousness, tearing through the layers of hate and fury that had driven Tek’s blind ambition to destroy Taran civilization. As Wil ripped apart his enemy’s consciousness, he caught sight of Tek’s childhood, growing up as the only child to have ever walked among the Bakzen. He had been weak then—he hated being weak. No one else should ever feel so helpless, so the Bakzen must become stronger. Everything in his life going forward had been dedicated to achieving that strength, through any means necessary.

As Wil stripped Tek down to his innermost self, he saw that dedication to gaining power persisted down to Tek’s very core.
“You had physical prowess, Tek,”
Wil told the sliver that was left of the former Bakzen commander’s consciousness,
“but you lost sight of kinship and love. In the end, no force is more powerful.”

With one final telepathic spire into his mind, Tek collapsed on the floor in the Bakzen lab beneath the planet’s surface.

Haersen took a step back from the body. “This isn’t over!”

“It will be soon enough.” Wil reached out to the clones again.
“He tried to kill us. Don’t let him get away.”

As Haersen was gripped in a telekinetic vice on screen, Wil cut the video feed. Ignoring the shocked expressions of his crew throughout the Command Center, he gripped the handhelds to fuse once again with the ship. “Tek was only their leader. We leave no survivors.”

The air hummed as Wil fed telekinetic energy into the relays. After a moment, the others joined him. As the ship charged, Wil focused on his target: the planet. They had never attacked anything larger than a carrier with the telekinetic weapon, but the only way to take out the Bakzen for good would be to decimate their world.

“Don’t hold back,”
he told his officers. He released the onslaught.

A beam of pure telekinetic energy shot from the ship toward the capital city on the planet. The ground buckled at the impact site, sending a shockwave through the surrounding landscape.

Wil continued to feed the beam, pouring more of himself through the ship’s relays. At the edge of his consciousness, he sensed his officers straining to keep up. He couldn’t let them hold him back. He needed to end it.

For the first time since his Course Rank test, Wil let himself go. The sweet energy of the rift fueled him from beyond the dimensional veil as he directed the destructive force through the ship. While he focused, the crater on the planet spread under the crippling force. Around the darkened pit, the ground began to glow as the rock liquefied. Cracks jutted across the surface and fissures formed around the equator. No population could seemingly survive, but Wil had to be sure. He poured more energy through the ship, aware that his officers had pulled back. It was better that way—they wouldn’t need to bear the burden of the planet’s destruction.

Wil lost himself in the energy. All the anger and bitterness about the war poured forth into the telekinetic beam burrowing through the planet. Soon it would be over. He just needed a little more…

“Evacuate the fleet!”
he heard Michael order somewhere in the back of his mind.

Wil was barely aware of the ships disappearing from view around the edges of the screen. He was consumed by the energy feeding into the ship—his consciousness reaching deep into the rift beyond the dimensional veil in a search for even greater power.

Beneath them, the entire planet was a molten mass collapsing in on itself from the impact crater. It contracted until it was a blinding point of light against the starscape. For a moment, the light dimmed.

A shockwave fanned out from the planet, hurtling molten rock that instantly turned to dust in the cold vacuum of space. The wave sped toward the Conquest.

Wil’s officers disconnected from the weapon to redirect their energy to the shield at the last possible moment. The Conquest hurdled backward under force from the explosion. They tumbled to the side, the artificial gravity unable to compensate.

Wil was thrown from the console. He hit the floor with his shoulder, but barely registered the impact. Energy still surged through him. He fought to keep it in check—with nowhere to direct it, he could take out the ship. Slowly, the charge dissipated. As he rose to his feet, everything was still.

On the viewscreen, only a dusting of debris gave any indication of where the Bakzen world used to be. It was gone, utterly and completely. Whatever Bakzen remained at outposts were the last of their kind. Soon, they, too, would be destroyed.

Cheers erupted in the Command Center and over the comms.

“We did it!” Ian exclaimed.

Ethan grinned. “That was foking spectacular!”

Michael placed a hand on Wil’s shoulder. “We won.”

Wil looked around at the joyous faces around him.
Don’t they realize what we’ve just done? We exterminated a whole race. They were one of us…. We made them, cast them aside, and then killed them. All of them. How can they celebrate?

He collapsed to his knees. The cheers around him were muted in the distance, his vision faded at the edges. Images of the planet’s final moments replayed in his mind. They had won. The Bakzen were all but eliminated. Everything that had made them who they were had been extinguished by his hand. And all the others who had died along the way in the name of that singular mission to annihilate an entire people—those deaths were on his hands, his conscience. Darkness closed in around him.
What have I done?

Saera hung her head, wishing she brought better news about her husband. “There’s still no change.”

Cris closed his eyes and slumped forward in his chair outside Wil’s quarters on the Conquest. “I can’t stand to see him like this. We have to do something.”

“I don’t know what we can do,” Saera replied.
He’ll barely even talk to me, let alone look me in the eye.
It had been that way for four days. Saera had journeyed from Headquarters as soon the war was declared won, since Wil had immediately sequestered himself and refused to interact with anyone. If even she and Cris couldn’t get through to him, it was looking like there would be no remedy other than time.

“I hate to suggest it, but do we need to be watching him more closely?” Cris asked.

Suicide watch.
“I’d like to think that’s not a concern… But besides, he would never stand for it. I think it would only make things worse.”

“You’re right.” Cris sighed. “I had no idea how great the burden on him really was. Michael told me about the final call with Tek—that the Priesthood created the Bakzen.”

“Wil thought it would be easier if you didn’t know,” Saera admitted.

Cris took a moment to reply. “I suppose I’m thankful for that. All the same, I hate that Wil had to bear that alone.”

“He told me,” Saera pointed out.

“That’s true.”

“But then he shut me out, so I guess that’s not the best example.” She collapsed into the chair next to Cris, overtaken with emotional and physical exhaustion. The end of the war was supposed to be a celebration. Instead, it seemed like her entire world was collapsing.

“Relationships are complicated enough without all the added stress of command. He’ll come around,” Cris told her.

There was more to it than that, she had no doubt. For years Wil had treated her as a confidant, sharing things he didn’t dare utter to anyone else. If he had shut her out so completely, it wasn’t because of stress or lack of trust. It was because whatever he was hiding related to her in some way—that much was clear. Whatever it was seemed to be compounding the guilt she knew he felt about the war. It was enough to have put him over the edge.

Why won’t he just talk to me?
She jumped back up to her feet, too frustrated and agitated to sit still. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Okay. I’ll hang around,” Cris replied.

Saera headed down the hall toward the other officers’ quarters. The Primus Elites had been taking turns with rift corridor repairs, only coming back to the Conquest to sleep for a few hours at a time. Their experiences with Wil made them uniquely qualified to guide others in the repairs, once they figured out how to work in tandem without an amplifier like the Conquest—keeping it slow and steady to avoid any tears or burning themselves out. It was exhausting work, but they were making progress. She didn’t know if any of them would be around in the common area, let alone feeling up for socializing, but she needed to get away from the cloud hanging over Wil’s quarters; she couldn’t even think of it as their shared space anymore.

As Saera approached the common area outside the sleeping chambers, she saw Michael sitting in one of the plush chairs by the back window while he reviewed something on his handheld. He roused as she neared. “How is he?”

She shrugged.

“I keep wondering if I could have done anything differently toward the end to prevent this,” Michael murmured.

“Whatever is going on with Wil right now, I don’t think any of us could have prevented it,” Saera replied.
He never thought he would make it through the war. Is he just fulfilling his own dire expectation?

“Still…”

Saera leaned against the chair across from him. “I know what you mean.”

“In better news, I think we’ve perfected the system for repairing the rift, with three or four Agents working in tandem. It takes a lot longer than the ways we were doing it before, but it’s much more effective. The other ways left space prone to tearing when we used a jump drive nearby.”

“That is good to hear,” Saera replied, her mind still elsewhere.

“We could use some extra help, if you want to get out for a bit,” Michael offered.

“I might take you up on that. My presence here isn’t helping any.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself.”

Saera shrugged. “Or maybe I should just go back to Headquarters to attend to the students.”

“No rush. Elise said she’s having fun playing High Commander, though I guess it must be pretty empty back there if she’s the most senior Agent.”

“You’ve been talking with Elise?” Saera was caught off-guard. “I mean, yes. Almost all available Agents have been sent to repair the rift corridors around the Taran worlds and to pick off the scattered Bakzen survivors. It’s going to take a long time to get everything back to how it should be.”

“It will,” Michael agreed. He paused. “And yes, we’ve become good friends over the last few months. It was nice to have someone to talk to about everything that was going on.”

“She’s always been a good listener.”

He examined her. “Are you okay with us—”

“Of course! Why wouldn’t I be?” Saera responded too forcefully.

“I’ll always be your friend, Saera,” Michael said after a moment.

“I know.” Tears stung Saera’s eyes.
Why are you crying?
She turned away.

Michael rose and wrapped his arms around her before she could protest. The once familiar embrace stripped away her defenses, and she sobbed into his chest.

She was surrounded be people who cared for her, and yet she felt completely alone. Wil was her partner—her world. Friends and family were no substitute for that companionship. But moreover, she felt his pain through their bond. It gnawed at the edges of her mind as she sensed it slowly consuming him. She hated not knowing what was causing it, and for being defenseless against its darkness. Seeking comfort from an old friend didn’t stop its advance, but it did make it temporarily easier to bear.

“Wil is going to rally, don’t worry,” Michael murmured into her hair.

“He better hurry up and do it already.” Saera wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Thanks for the hug. I needed that.”

“Anytime.”

Saera bit her lower lip. “You know, I think I will go out with you tomorrow. I’d like to help with the rebuilding.”
At least the rift is one thing I can fix.

*       *       *

“All right, just a little more,” Tom urged the other members of the Primus Squad as they manipulated the energy grid around the edge of the rift.

Each of the four men stared out the window in the lounge of their assigned transport ship, concentrating on an agreed upon patch of space two hundred meters away. They stood in a line, directing telekinetic energy into one unified beam to repair the rift torn by the Bakzen over the last several hundred years. The frayed pathways that had been yanked apart to form the rift drifted back into place within the natural grid as the team sent a steady stream of healing telekinetic energy toward the wound.

The repair process was painstakingly slow-going, but they’d been warned about what had happened to Wil’s team when they had tried to do too much, too fast. So, they kept feeding the trickle of energy to redirect the broken spatial pathways, and eventually, the rift was a tiny measure smaller.

Tom released his telekinetic beam when the repairs in the target zone were complete. He itched the connection point between his thigh and his temporary prosthetic leg, fatigued from hours of concentration on the numerous zones they’d visited so far that day. “I don’t see how we’ll ever seal the whole rift at this pace.”

“Don’t think in those terms,” Rey replied. “We take care of our portion each day, and the other teams do their part. In aggregate, we’ll start to see measurable results in no time.”

“Still, this isn’t what I had in mind for a post-war assignment,” Tom muttered.
There are still Bakzen out there we need to hunt down.

Andy shrugged. “Until I have other orders, I’ll do what I’m told. The rift is too dangerous to leave unchecked.”

“I’m with you,” Sander agreed.

Tom sighed. “Okay, you win. No more complaints from me.” He stepped over to the viewscreen in the lounge to consult the map of their assignments for the day. “Let’s see… I guess we should head over here next—”

A communications chirp interrupted him just as he was about to point to the map.

“Alert! We have a situation with an occupied Bakzen outpost in the adjacent system. You’re the closest Agents. Please respond,” Helen, their contact in fleet command, informed them.

Sander frowned. “Isn’t there anyone else?”

“Sir, a Militia team has tried to access the facility, but there is a telekinetic shield around one of the rooms,” Helen explained. “The combat group requires Agent intervention.”

Tom muted the comm channel. “I, for one, would like to go face-to-face with the Bakzen for a change.”

“It was easy to shoot down a jet, but exterminating them in person…” Andy trailed off.

Tom nodded. “My point, exactly.”
Finally, I can take out some Bakzen like they did to my family.

“I don’t share your enthusiasm, but we can’t ignore a request for backup,” Rey chimed in.

Sander nodded.

“Then it’s settled.” Tom unmuted the comm channel. “Send us the coordinates. We’re on our way.”

The destination was a short jump further into former Bakzen territory, on a rock moon around a planet with a red, gaseous atmosphere. A surface port on the moon had already been captured by a team of TSS Militia soldiers, but an underground chamber was inaccessible.

After landing the transport ship at the port using a universal docking coupling installed by the Militia team, the Primus Squad was escorted to the edge of the telekinetic shield underground. The plain concrete corridor was pressurized and equipped with artificial gravity, so they didn’t need suits. However, wearing only his normal Agent uniform, Tom’s skin crawled under the dim lights illuminating the dreary space.

The group approached the end of a hall, which terminated in a steel door. A meter in front of the door, Tom detected the edge of the telekinetic shield that had caused the Militia officers to turn back.

“I can see the problem,” he commented as he assessed the barrier.

“This isn’t mechanically generated,” Sander observed as he performed his own evaluation. “There could be a whole army of Bakzen soldiers in there.”

Tom sent a low-intensity counter pulse against the shield to see if it flexed. There did seem to be a little give. “I think the four of us could break through. It’s just a matter of what we’ll find on the other side.”

“I think we should call in some reinforcements,” Andy suggested.

“The other ground teams haven’t experienced resistance from the Bakzen, have they?” Tom asked. “Once we break through the shield, they’ll probably surrender.”
And then I can get some proper revenge.

“I don’t like it,” Rey insisted. “Let’s get a couple more Agents here, just in case.” He pulled out his handheld and headed back to the surface to get in touch with central ops while the others waited for instruction. After a minute, he returned. “We’re in luck. Michael, Ethan, and Saera are heading over.”

“Since when is Saera doing rift repairs?” Andy asked.

“First I’ve heard of it,” Tom replied.

Sander crossed his arms. “I guess that means Wil is still sequestering himself.”

“What’s up with that, anyway?” questioned Andy. “We won the war.”

“How’d you feel if you came across a bunch of hybrid clones?” replied Rey. “We don’t know if that batch on the homeworld was all of them. I wouldn’t want to be out in the field, either, if there was a chance of accidentally wandering into a room with an enemy version of myself.”

“Based on what Ethan said, it was a pretty gruesome scene,” Sander said with a shiver.

“Not to mention everything else,” Rey continued. “I haven’t even started to process all the deaths. TSS officers, Cambion, the other border worlds… I don’t blame him for needing to disconnect from reality for a while.”

I don’t want to accept my new reality, either.
Tom anxiously milled around in the empty concrete hall while they waited for their backup to arrive.

After fifteen minutes, three sets of footsteps echoed from down the hall.

“Finally!” Sander breathed, pushing off from the wall he’d been leaning against during the wait.

Michael, Ethan, and Saera rounded a bend in the hall and waved at the group.

“Good to see you!” Tom called out. “Couldn’t have asked for better backup.”

“Great timing,” Ethan replied. “It was about time I checked up on you to make sure you were actually working.” He flashed them a grin.

“Very funny,” Tom retorted.

Andy ignored the exchange and focused on Saera. “How are you?”

She smiled back, but it seemed half-hearted. “Relieved to be anywhere other than Headquarters.”

“And how’s Wil?” Rey asked.