Chapter 33

“The order is often reversed in the minds of the feeble. They believe that you become fearful of that which is going to kill you. It is the opposite. That which you fear will be your end. It is why fear is a weakness to be purged, not an instinct to be admired. To recognize a danger is not fear, it is awareness, but to linger on thoughts of the danger, to let it dominate your resting mind and haunt your dreams, that is succumbing to weakness. I fight every battle in my mind before I wage it in reality. I trace out the possibilities that will unfold, and I prepare myself for them. 

Once again, this is logic and awareness. But to fear combat is to fear life. Every moment of every day is a conflict, and if you focus exclusively on how you are going to lose, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Victory is for those with the foresight to predict their own victories. Fear is the antithesis of this. If you fear, you focus on how you might lose each conflict instead of how you might win. If you fear, you grant the things that you fear power over you. You make yourself weak to them where you should be fortifying yourself.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

They were left alone with the pilot for the first half of the journey, as they plunged on across Empyrean space, while Kaya and Malachai lurked in the cabin, arguing with each other in low voices intensely enough that they could still be heard this far across the ship. About seven hours into the journey, conversation had run dry. It wasn’t that Saizen wasn’t an excellent conversationalist; it was just that his subjects of interest tended to lack depth. 

Or, at least, the subjects that he was willing to discuss in front of two complete strangers did. As for Sylvas, he realized fairly early on that anything they talked about would need to be pretty abstract to prevent them from giving away anything about their mission. Whatever their relationship was at the present, the moment that Sylvas and his team were off this ship, Saizen would default back to being a career criminal, and providing him with any information that he might want to sell to the highest bidder seemed like a bad idea. It put a definite damper on Sylvas and Rania’s conversation, too.

The other Saizen came up front at about the same time Malachai and Kaya emerged from the cabin to swap places with them, and while Sylvas had expected to be kicked out of the cockpit immediately on their arrival, they all crammed in instead, quietly falling over them as they dropped back into real-space.

“Why are we…” Kaya began only to be immediately shushed by both Saizens.

Across the screens, overlays flickered as their scrying spells tried to detect any movement out in space. Any sign of Dominion patrols. They had reached the border, and now the smugglers were doing what they did best: sneaking behind enemy lines.

Normally, Sylvas could have just stretched out his own senses through whatever ship he was piloting to detect any enemy craft, but after some time studying the enchantments and apparatus that the smugglers had set up, he had come to realize that when he did something like that, it was like lighting a beacon and alerting everyone nearby that there was scrying going on. The complexity and weakness of the ship’s sensory array were deliberate. A light enough touch on anything out there that it might go undetected.

After a few moments of creeping forward, the Saizen who had been piloting swapped places with his clone. “Take a look.”

Sylvas was half tempted to jump into the circle and try and look for himself, but he had his suspicions that he’d set off every alarm on the ship—and probably on every nearby ship, too.

They continued their slow drift forward over the Dominion border in tense silence until the new pilot said, “No patrols.”

Immediately, the passengers relaxed, but for some reason, the Saizen didn’t. Sylvas frowned. “What’s wrong? That’s good news, right?”

“Could mean they aren’t there. Could mean we can’t detect them. Neither of those is good news.”

“People who want us dead not knowing where we are is probably good news?” Rania quipped.

The Saizens glowered at her. “If they aren’t here, they’re somewhere else. Somewhere we won’t be expecting them. Which means we can’t safely jump to null-space again. Not without knowing where they’re looking.”

“So… what?” Kaya looked confused. “We just float until we see them?”

The pilot shrugged, and the other Saizen grunted. Neither gave any sort of helpful answer. Sylvas pressed them. “How long is this going to add to our journey?”

Both Saizens glowered at him. “As long as it takes.”

Sylvas tried to remain calm in the face of their belligerent attitudes, but it wasn’t easy. “We don’t have time to delay.”

“Oh, you’re in a hurry? Should have said. I’ll throw the lights on, blast forward at full speed, and wave to the Obbies when they show up to blow us to pieces.”

“What’s the alternative? Sit here forever?” Kaya snapped back.

Malachai held up his hands. “There is a course somewhere between the two extremes.”

“Oh, is that right, posh boy?” The Saizen who’d been piloting up until now had seemed the more relaxed of the two, but now he was just as irritable as his clone. “What you got up your sleeve?”

The necromancer let no emotion show on his face, but he did seem to wilt ever so slightly. “I have no tricks, only a belief that we can balance the risk and reward of moving forward.”

“Your ship can obviously detect the Dominion patrols before they’re in range to detect you, right?”

“If we’re in real-space,” a Saizen conceded. “In null-space, who bloody knows?”

Kaya nodded. “So we can bang on at full speed, so long as you’ve got good enough reflexes to brake before you hit the patrol?”

“If we had perfect reflexes…” the Saizen in the circle began.

“Which we don’t,” the other added.

The first Saizen concluded, “Then we can go up to maybe sixty percent.”

Sylvas shook his head. Mira’s calculations were feeding through to him. An hour in null-space was equivalent to three days in real-space, even at maximum speed. The six-hour journey would stretch out to a month and a half. He sighed. “Too slow.”

Kaya held up her hands. “Hold on now. We only have to creep until we find their patrol and sneak past, then we can get back up to…”

“It could still take weeks, Kaya.” Rania wasn’t bad at math either, it seemed.

The Saizen who’d been piloting all day scowled out into the darkness. “Where are you?”

“Calculated risks,” Mira said, in Sylvas’ voice. “They could be anywhere between here and the temple world. So we divide it up, make small jumps. Reduce our chance of bumping into them.”

Saizen spat on the deck. “If we bump into them, we’ve got their whole fleet up our ass.”

“An hour-long jump, then drop back into real-space. Each jump has a five in six chance of going fine. Eighty-three percent, give or take. Those are good odds.”

“That get worse with every jump,” Saizen snapped back. “The house always wins, and you’re betting on never running into the Dominion in their own space.”

“There isn’t a solid wall of Dominion ships for us to run into.” Sylvas slipped back into control of his own voice. “Space is big. What are the chances we run into them at all?”

The first jump didn’t last the full hour before the Saizen who’d taken over yanked them back into real-space with a gasp. Whatever had tickled across the ship’s sensors had been too distant for Sylvas to pick it up on any of the readouts, but they were trusting their lives to these smugglers for a reason. They had the expertise. Saizen dumped them back into real-space and slammed on the reverse thrust to bring them to a halt with a few rapid motions.

His clone had retreated to their private cabin, which they apparently used in shifts, while Sylvas and the others, too full of tension to even attempt to relax, had remained in the cockpit. They all lurched to the closest console and began searching for the telltale signs of enemy ships on patrol, any hint of movement or magic, but whatever Saizen had seen, they still couldn’t.

“What happened?” Kaya demanded.

“Found out where the patrols went.” Saizen had lost a lot of his bite in the last few seconds. He looked pale, even in the stuttering electric lighting of the cockpit.

They continued to drift forward inch by inch, and as they did, moving like debris drifting along through space, the sensors began to report back what Saizen had seen. There, at the periphery of the ship’s sphere of vision, were ships. Some sort of spatial distortion must have been in play over the distance, because they looked to be at least ten times the size of the regular fighters that they’d encountered before, and Sylvas doubted that they’d be sending out any ships off the line to do border patrol. 

But as they drifted closer, and more and more of the massive ships came into sight, it became increasingly apparent that this was not a border patrol. It was a fleet. Mira counted hundreds of ships before he asked her to stop. Not just a fleet, but an invasion fleet. Troop carriers lingered behind the heavy gunships, just waiting to disgorge troops onto Empyrean worlds. Even the massive war craft that took up most of the space that the smuggler’s ship could perceive were varied in their purpose. Some bombers, and some rigged up to unleash forces so violent that Sylvas wondered if they didn’t mean to outright destroy some planets instead of conquering them. 

“Kaghmaragh’s Culgh,” Kaya murmured as she took them all in.

“The Empyrean is in disarray,” Malachai spoke softly. “They have been overrun by the eidolon incursion, while it seems that the Dominion has matters under control. They mean to exploit this moment of weakness.”

“What… what do we do?” Rania asked, staring at the readouts with horror written across her features.

“Nothing,” Sylvas replied. “We get past them, and we complete our mission.”

“They’re going to invade, stanzbuhr.” Kaya’s voice sounded reedy and thin.

“They are. And we might be able to get a warning back to the Empyrean before they do if we abandon our mission.” Sylvas and Mira had already run through every potential scenario in their shared mind-space. “But if we do, there will be no sneaking past them. We will not be able to get into Dominion space again until the war is fought.”

Rania quoted the prophecy. “Make your war, Starbreaker, for the end is nigh.”

“This is not my war.” Sylvas shook his head. “And the way we save the Empyrean is by getting rid of the eidolons.”

“Even with the eidolons gone…” Malachai began, “This mustered force will be enough to conquer the Empyrean.

“Saving the universe has to come first.” Rania seemed to have reached the same conclusion as Sylvas. “We can’t fight to win control of it back if we’re all dead.”

“You’re truly willing to sacrifice the whole Empyrean to achieve your goal?” Malachai asked in dismay.

“Whatever it takes.” 

Sylvas turned his attention back to Saizen. “How do we get past them?”

It took the gangster a moment to realize he was being spoken to, and then he cleared his throat. “Slow and steady. Drift by them like garbage. We’ll need to stay quiet. There’re no shortcuts here.”

“You’re the expert,” Sylvas replied softly, heading for the exit. “I’m going for a lie down.”

“You don’t think we should at least discuss this?” Malachai asked.

“There’s nothing to discuss. This is what has to happen.” Sylvas had a hand resting on the frame of the door, trying to steady himself, trying not to let them see the turmoil he was going through. All of the people in the Empyrean, even the ones the eidolons hadn’t touched. All of them were in the path of the Dominion’s fleet. The death toll of the conflict would be so high that they’d need to invent new forms of arithmetic to calculate it. All of that, on top of the slaughter that the eidolons were still carrying out.

It seemed that his horror had crept into his voice, because Malachai didn’t push further, and neither of the girls tried to stop him. They would all be able to sleep tonight, safe in the knowledge that they hadn’t made the decision that he just made. The blood of all the people that could have been saved was not going to be on their hands. First the vault, now this. If this was what it meant to be the tyrant Vaelith had warned him about becoming, he wanted no part in it. If this was the job of the Starbreaker, he didn’t want it.

Mira whispered into his mind. Not to give him comfort, but to recite more of the stupid prophecy.

Haunted triumphs none would crave.