Nick’s broad shoulders tensed under the dove-gray scales of his civilian T-suit. Beside him, Riane tightened her grip on his hand. “Now!” he snapped to his companions. The sled flooded with blinding green light as he, Riane, and Jess began to glow, pumping their collective energies into the stone. The Victor stared down at the faux T’Lir in fascination.
Dona reached across to Frieka, her fingers sliding into the wolf’s thick black fur and curling into a fist.
Alerio looked up, silently praying to every goddess he could think of. Right on cue, two grav-sleds popped into view, swooping downward at the battlements to begin Galar’s rescue.
He whirled and glanced around, searching for Dona’s sled, which should be waiting nearby behind its own camo field. Exactly as planned, the big dark blue sled popped into view as its shield dropped. Its silver-trimmed door slipped open silently, and he raced toward it to fling himself aboard. “Get us up there!”
Carrie Jones sent the craft shooting skyward on pulsing blue anti-grav fields before swooping in to land on the fortress’s flat stone roof. Alerio popped open the weapons locker, revealing the shields and quantum axes inside. Without a word, he took one weapon and tossed another to Dona as she and the wolf moved to join him. Jones would remain with the sled, guarding their rear.
Jess, Nick, and Riane didn’t move; they were busy channeling power to the spirit of Charlotte Holt. The pilot gave Alerio a sharp nod. It was her job to protect the three while they did theirs.
The Enforcers leaped out onto the ramparts as the sled’s door snapped shut and locked behind them.
CHAPTER TEN
Images flooded the Victor’s mind, visions so hypnotically real, he could only watch in fascination. All of them featured six-legged creatures that looked vaguely familiar. It took him a moment to remember where he’d seen one before.
Ah. There’d been an old Earth animal called a tiger: huge, brawny, and striped. These creatures had six limbs, though. The first pair looked like thin, disproportionately long human arms with agile fingers like those of primates, but the other four were nothing short of massive, with claws as long as human fingers. Their feline heads had outsized pointed ears, short muzzles, and huge, intelligent eyes.
Despite their animalistic appearance, they were star travelers. Aggressive, too, conquering every race they encountered, then stealing their technology. The cats killed any individuals stupid enough to resist and enslaved the rest. The Victor could only admire their bloodthirsty efficiency.
It crossed his mind to wonder if these were some version of the Sela, who were also six-legged and catlike. But the Abominations were dainty pacifists, nothing like these brawling brutes who killed and died with equal abandon.
They also sang alien songs the Victor found he could somehow understand, though he’d never heard their language before. Songs that gloried in bloodshed and conquest as proof of their worthiness to rule.
He watched entranced as one of the aliens’ huge ships approached a green and blue gem of a world. It disgorged a smaller craft that landed in a clearing near a crowd of creatures that looked like wheel-shaped crabs, except with fur and a greater number of legs. They call themselves the Di’jiri, said a soft, androgynous mental voice.
What the hells? the Victor wondered, but then the doors opened on the felinoids’ lander. One of the big cats leaped out, followed by fifty or so armored feline soldiers. The lead cat demanded the Di’jiri surrender in a tone the Victor interpreted as acute boredom. He didn’t seem to care whether they understood his threat to kill them all if they didn’t immediately surrender.
Victor suspected they didn’t, since the Di’jiri only blinked their faceted eyes and trilled in polite interest.
The felinoid leader reared on his back legs and lunged, striking out with both powerful mid-legs. His claws ripped through the nearest Di’jiri, which died in an explosion of orange life fluids.
Roaring in joy, his team fell on the survivors and killed them all. The Di’jiri made no attempt to flee or resist as they fell beneath the warriors’ claws.
The Victor frowned in restless disappointment. Where was the glory in killing creatures so utterly lacking in fighting spirit?
“That,” something growled in the felinoids’ tongue, “is quite enough of that.”
A creature five times the size of the others melted into view as if it had dropped a camo shield. The mother of the Di’jiri, the psychic voice told the Victor. And she is most wroth.
The felinoid captain and his warriors froze as though suddenly unable to move, though rage flashed in their enormous eyes. The Di’jiri Mother has done something to them, the Victor realized, outraged.
She circled the team, scuttling on her ring of jointed legs, trilling and clicking her claws as if talking to herself. Finally she switched to the felinoid tongue. “My children did nothing to you. Nothing! And yet you murdered them!”
“Not murder,” the Victor corrected under his breath. “Conquest. The strong have a right to rule the weak.”
“It’s time you share the suffering of your victims, monstrous ones.” The Mother’s ring of eyes began to glow a bright, all-too-familiar green. The same glow he’d seen in the depths of the T’Lir.
The felinoids began to scream in terrified anguish; the pain the Mother felt at her daughters’ deaths and the grief of her surviving children. The psychic suffering of thousands of Di’jiri crushed down on them like the gravity of a black hole.
And the Victor shared that pain.
Though no stranger to the thoughts of others, he’d never experienced the agony of his victims. Now he discovered exactly what it was like as visions flooded his skulclass="underline" disorienting images of the Sela captain and his soldiers fleeing back to their mothership at maximum speed.
And yes, they were Sela. Apparently the events he was seeing had happened centuries before.
Every captain and his men infected every Sela they encountered with the same psychic abilities the Di’jiri Mother had forced on them. It was like some horrific mental plague.
In the weeks that followed, the contagion flashed from one end of the Sela empire to the other, carried by the mothership Conquest Song. The psychic plague drove warriors mad as they shared their victims’ horrific deaths, tasted the grief of sundered families, felt the helpless fury of being forced to serve sadistic conquerors.
Eventually the Sela could take no more. They began to slay themselves in an effort to escape their guilt. Their vast empire collapsed within months.
Those who survived retreated into hiding as they struggled to learn how to control their psychic abilities. Eventually they decided they had to atone for their actions, but they also knew their lives wouldn’t be long enough to make amends for so many crimes.
They created the first T’Lirs as a repository for their souls and power. They would be reborn in each Sela generation that followed. Though their new bodies did not consciously remember their past lives, they still felt the compulsion to devote themselves to peace.
And the Victor didn’t give a shit. He only wanted the pain to stop.
Roaring in agony, the Xeran god colony sent his life force streaming upward, toward the enemies he sensed battling his soldiers on the ramparts of his fortress.