Free Web NovelChapter 736: A Dying Ancestor
The facility was loud when they got back.
Kelvin found Diana’s hand in the corridor outside the main dock and held it and she let him and they walked like that for about thirty seconds before she stopped.
"Say it properly," she said.
"I already said it."
"You whispered it at me while smiling for cameras." She turned to face him. "Say it properly."
Kelvin looked at her. "Noah is on the Vanguard station. With the EDF."
Diana looked at him for a moment.
"How long have you known," she said.
"Since this morning."
"And you waited until we were standing in front of the whole Eastern Cardinal to tell me."
"I didn’t want to affect the ceremony."
"Kelvin."
"I genuinely didn’t want—"
"That’s the same bullshit," Diana said. Her voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be loud. "That’s the exact same thing you and Noah did on Raiju. You both clocked Lyra before anyone else did and the two of you just. Handled it. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t bring it to the team. Just nodded at each other and went off and did the main character thing while the rest of us were standing there not knowing." She looked at him. "And now you find out Noah has gone back to the EDF voluntarily and you sit on it and smile for the cameras and whisper it to me like it’s a fun secret."
"It’s not the same—" freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
"It’s exactly the same Kelvin, oh my god." She pulled her hand back. "He’s at the Vanguard station. Voluntarily. After everything. After the tribunal and the delegation and them using his parents as a bargaining chip, he just walks in there and what, has tea with the Supreme General?"
"I don’t know the full picture," Kelvin said.
"Nobody does because nobody told us anything," Diana said. "That’s the point."
Lucas had come up behind them in the corridor with Seraleth and Lila and had the expression of someone who had caught the tail end of a conversation and was calibrating how much he had missed.
"Noah’s at the Vanguard station," Kelvin said, before anyone asked.
Lucas looked at him. "How long."
"Based on the trail I followed, about a week. I can’t say exactly. Maybe slightly more or even less,"
Lucas nodded slowly.
"That’s it?" Diana said, looking at him. "You’re just nodding?"
"What do you want me to do," Lucas said.
"I want someone to be concerned about what this looks like," Diana said. "We just stood in front of the entire Eastern Cardinal at a ceremony for Eclipse and our actual leader is sitting in an EDF facility. Do you understand what that looks like when it gets out? We spent two years building something that stood on its own. Something that wasn’t the EDF and wasn’t anybody else and was just us. And now Noah just walks back in there like—"
"We don’t know why he’s there," Seraleth said.
Diana looked at her.
"We don’t," Seraleth said simply. "We know where he is. We don’t know why. And given everything that man has done for everyone standing in this corridor, I think he deserves the benefit of having a reason before we decide what it means."
"Sera’s right," Lucas said. "He doesn’t do things without reasons."
"He doesn’t always tell us the reasons," Diana said. "That’s the problem."
"No," Lila said.
Everyone looked at her. She was leaning against the corridor wall with her arms crossed and the expression she wore when she had been listening to something and had waited long enough to have an opinion about it.
"The problem," Lila said, "is that you’re all acting like Noah disappearing into something without announcing it is new information about his character." She looked at Diana. "You’re right that it’s the same as Raiju. It’s also the same as every other time he’s decided something needed doing and went and did it. That’s who he is. That’s been who he is since academy twelve" She looked at the wall. "He’ll come back. He always comes back. And when he does he’ll have a reason and the reason will probably be annoying because it’ll make sense and then we’ll all have to be fine about it."
Diana pressed her lips together.
"I’m still allowed to be pissed off about it," she said.
"Obviously," Lila said.
The corridor was quiet for a moment.
"The rival factions," Lucas said, thinking out loud. "When this gets out."
"It’ll get out," Kelvin said. "I found it. Someone else will find it. Might take a week, might take two, but it’ll get out."
"And when it does," Lucas said, "Eclipse looks like it bent."
"Only if we let it look that way," Kelvin said. "We control the narrative before someone else does. We say Noah is consulting with EDF on a specific matter. We don’t say what matter. We don’t confirm or deny anything beyond that. We keep the ambiguity working for us instead of against us."
"And if they push," Lucas said. ƒreewebɳovel.com
"We don’t answer pushes," Kelvin said. "We’ve never answered pushes. That’s not going to change now."
Lucas nodded. The tactician brain working through it, the angles, the positioning, the way it would land with the factions that had been watching Eclipse operate independently and would read this as weakness or compromise depending on how it was framed.
’He has a reason,’ Lucas thought. ’Whatever is on that station, whatever pulled him there, he has a reason. The question isn’t whether I trust him. I trust him. The question is whether the reason is worth what it costs us publicly and I can’t answer that without knowing what the reason is.’
’Which means I need to talk to him.’
’Which means I need to find a way to reach him on an EDF station without it looking like Eclipse is calling the EDF for updates on their own leader.’
’Great.’
---
Cora showed up at the facility door at four in the afternoon.
No message ahead of time. No warning. Just the security feed showing a short girl with a dark bob cut in an officer’s uniform standing at the main entrance with her hands in her jacket pockets and the expression of someone who had made a decision about coming here and had stopped second guessing it somewhere on the way over.
Sam buzzed her in.
She came through the main corridor and found the common area and stood in the doorway and looked around at the people in it until she found the faces she was looking for and her expression did something complicated and then settled.
Kelvin saw her first.
He stood up from the table. "Cora."
"Hey," she said.
Just that. Hey. The word doing the work of everything she hadn’t figured out how to say yet.
She looked older than the last time any of them had seen her properly. The academy had been a long time ago and field experience was a different kind of long time and she wore both of them in the way she stood, the bob cut shorter than it used to be, the tomboy energy still completely intact underneath the uniform.
Her eyes moved to Diana. Then to Seraleth. Then to Lucas coming in from the side corridor.
"I heard," she said. "About Jayden." She stopped. Started again. "I wanted to come."
"We’re glad you did," Lucas said.
She looked at Kelvin again. Something in her face moved that she pulled back quickly and Kelvin crossed the room and put his arms around her and she held on for a moment and then stepped back and cleared her throat and looked at the ceiling briefly.
"Okay," she said. "What do you need. I’m here. Tell me what you need."
---
The memorial was in the barracks courtyard the following morning.
Not a large service. Not the kind of thing that got streamed or announced publicly. Just the people who had been there and a few who hadn’t but should have been, standing in the early morning light in the courtyard while Sam read the things that needed to be read and the faction stood and listened.
Jayden’s Descending Dragon had been recovered from the alien ground before they left. It sat at the front of the courtyard on a stand Kelvin had built overnight, the chain between the staffs still now for the first time since Noah had pulled it from his domain and it had started moving immediately like it had been waiting to. The cold staff and the hot staff catching the morning light differently from each other, the weapon still carrying the quality of something that hadn’t fully accepted that its owner wasn’t coming back.
School teachers like master Anng and the headmaster were also present. They greeted the gang as they came and left.
After the service, a private one was held at the facility with all the people present at the Kruel fight and then some.
Cora stood between Diana and Seraleth and looked at the weapon and said nothing.
Lucas stood at the front and spoke briefly. Not a long speech. Just the facts of who Jayden was and what he had done on that planet and what it had cost him, delivered in the flat honest way Lucas delivered everything, no performance, just the truth of it given the weight it deserved.
When it was done people stood for a while and then slowly the courtyard started to empty and the morning got on with itself.
Jayden’s family had sent a representative. A woman, his older sister, who had arrived the night before and had been housed in the facility’s guest quarters and had sat through the service with the particular stillness of someone holding themselves together through will alone.
She found Lucas afterward.
"Where is she," she said.
Lucas looked at her.
"Sophie Reign," the woman said. Her voice was level. Not angry. Not yet. Just asking. "Where is she."
"She’s around," Lucas said. "At base,"
"I want to see her."
Lucas looked at the woman. At the grief sitting in her face that she was managing through the question, through the forward motion of needing an answer, the way people managed grief when they needed something to move toward.
"I’ll ask her," he said. "I can’t make her come out. But I’ll ask."
The woman looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded once and walked back inside.
Lucas stood in the emptying courtyard and looked at the Descending Dragon on its stand and thought about knocking on Sophie’s door again and what he was going to say this time that was different from the last two times.
He went inside and knocked.
"Sophie."
Silence.
"Jayden’s sister is here. She wants to see you." He paused. "I’m not going to make you. But she came a long way and she’s not angry. She just wants to." He stopped. "I don’t know what she wants exactly. But she asked for you."
Silence for a long moment.
Then Sophie’s voice through the door. "Tell her tomorrow."
Lucas looked at the door. "Okay," he said. "Tomorrow."
He walked back down the corridor and told the sister tomorrow and she nodded and went back to the guest quarters and Lucas went to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his hands for a while.
Valor was leaning against the wall across from him. The blue-green energy running through the blade in its slow pattern, the weapon pulling ambient charge from the facility’s electrical system the way it pulled from everything, quietly and continuously.
He looked at it.
’We won,’ he thought. ’That’s the thing that I keep coming back to. We went to that planet and Kruel is gone and four hundred million people are alive and we won. And Jayden is dead and Noah is on a Vanguard station and Angel has a scar on her back and Kelvin has no arms that are his own anymore and Diana wakes up every morning and moves her hand.’
’We won.’
’This is what winning looks like.’
He lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling and was asleep in four minutes because his body had been waiting for permission and he had finally stopped moving long enough to give it.
---
Somewhere past the edge of mapped space, past the survey boundaries and the last relay beacon and everything humanity had bothered to name, a structure sat on a world that didn’t appear on any human chart.
It was large. The kind of large that took time to understand from the outside, the eye needing several passes before the scale of it resolved properly, towers and walls and courtyards spreading across a plateau that had been cleared of everything that used to grow on it. Built from the planet’s own stone, dark and dense, the architecture of something that had been constructed without any concern for how it looked and complete concern for how long it would last.
Inside, in one of the deep chambers where the light came from beast core lanterns running amber along the walls, a man lay on a bed surrounded by equipment that hummed and cycled and kept doing the things it did regardless of whether the man was awake or asleep.
He was awake.
He had been awake for an hour, which was the longest stretch he had managed in three days, the body underneath the equipment fighting and losing and fighting again in the slow grinding way of something that refused to stop despite everything pointing toward stopping.
The door opened to the chamber opened.
Two figures came in. A man and a woman, moving through the chamber with the ease of people who had been in it many times and knew where everything was and how close they could get before the equipment required navigating.
The man lying on the bed looked at them.
"Rowes," he said. His voice came out wrong, thinner than it used to be, the resonance that had once filled rooms down to something that filled the space between the bed and the two figures and not much further.
"Sir," the woman said.
He looked at their faces. Read them the way he had always read faces, the information in them before the words came, the thing people communicated without deciding to.
"Say it," he said.
The man looked at his partner briefly. Then back at the bed.
"Kruel is gone, sir," he said. "Confirmed."
The chamber was quiet.
The equipment hummed. The beast core lanterns ran their amber light across the stone walls. Outside somewhere in the structure something moved, heavy and deliberate, the sound of it traveling through the stone and into the chamber and fading.
The man on the bed looked at the ceiling.
His hand, lying flat on the bed beside him, closed slowly into a fist. The knuckles going white, the tendons standing out through the skin, the grip tightening until the fist was shaking slightly with the effort of it.
Then it released.
He closed his eyes.
The Rowes stood in the chamber and said nothing because there was nothing to say and they had been with him long enough to know when nothing was what was needed.
Outside in the courtyard the sounds of movement continued.
Multiple sources moving through the space, the particular thud of things that were large and had nowhere else to be.
Through the chamber window, just visible in the amber light that spilled out onto the courtyard stone, shapes moved.
Grey and bipedal.
Harbingers.
More than one.
More than several.
