Aurora’s Tale

By Tarot Barnes

With edits and advice by JH and Brantley

Courtesy of Alternate Histories:

http://www.alternatehistories.com

Editorial note: Aurora's Tale is presented here by the kind permission of Tarot Barnes, who has - only temporarily, I hope and pray - taken a break from fiction writing. I think Tarot deserves greater recognition. Five chapters have been posted at Alternate Histories, and four of those are mirrored in the first of three installments at The Bright Empire. But Tarot had completed edits on all but the last chapter, and offered advice on editing that last for presentation here. He also authorized further edits to the earlier chapters, which have been made in regard to matters of spelling, punctuation and style.

This is the origin story for Aurora Fairchild as she appears in the Linith and Faré series at Alternate Histories. As Tarot puts it: "Ever since arriving on Earth, Aurora has been surly, rude to the other Velorians and condescending to Faré. What's more, and to the rising frustration of her erstwhile allies, she has steadfastly refused to explain how she killed the Tset'lar.

This is why..."

--Brantley Thompson Elkins

Chapter 1

Seven months ago: Betah Stronberg

The fields leading to the city had once been green. Only a few weeks before it would have been possible to stand in the hip length grass and see nothing but billowing viridian waves for as far as the eye could track. People had joked that they felt they were the only ones on the planet when standing in those endless acres. This despite being less than an hour’s walk from O Império Brilhante, the planet’s second city.

Now the green had been replaced with the brown, black and red of war. The once lush savannah had been scarified on the altar of combat, its soils poisoned by gunpowder and meadows reduced to sparse patches of stringy brown weeds by incessant shelling. Between the islands of dying plants the seas of mud were stoically guarded by the empty carcasses of warrior machines and the men and women who’d fought along side them.

What remained of the fields had been surrendered to a vast network of trenches that extended from one end of the ex-savannah to the very edge of the city boundaries. Within and above them the city’s warriors fought a desperate battle against the encroaching enemy, using every resource they possessed to stem the black tide.

Yet the tide continued onwards. The opening days had been filled with small, almost cautious battles that were really little more than skirmishes as the enemy probed the city’s weaknesses. That had changed almost overnight. When the real attack began the defenders quickly realized that what victories they’d wrested from the enemy were just the opening gambits in a much vaster strategy.

The city had held its ground for a day. Even as the divisions multiplied and casualties mounted, even as the city itself was ruined to the point where it barely deserved the name, the defenders held the black suited legions at bay.

But the tide turned and the enemy crashed down on the defenders like a wave. Now the dawn of the eighth day was barely over, and already a quarter of the trench network had been overrun, driving the defenders into frantic retreat.

As the soldiers died in the trenches, the Landwarriors above them were directed to fire upon the densest portions of Arion advance, hoping to do in numbers what was impossible for them as individuals. Yet even as he gave the order, Comandante Alexandre Álvaro knew that, as over reliant as his enemy was upon its infantry, his armor was next to useless against them. The largest of his combat vehicles found it impossible to do more than inconvenience the Primes racing towards him, and would have been lucky to be considered a danger by their opposites in the Imperial mechanized corps.

Furthermore he couldn’t escape the inherent weaknesses in his forces. Made slow by their thick shells, and unable to maneuver in any case for fear of hurting the entrenched troops, Alexandre had to concede the only thing his Landwarriors brought to the battle were their cannons.

Before the war, Alexandre had possessed an entire division of the most advanced Landwarriors on his planet. Now, six months after the Arion “negotiations” had failed, he had been reduced to a mere four hundred, none of which was more than three months old and all of which were already in such desperate need of repair that some had actually had to suffer the indignity of being towed into position.

Surveying the field, observing the smoke that flowed over the desecrated ground like sick fog and trembled with each shell burst, Alexandre didn’t recognize any of the faces poking out of the neighboring ’warriors. Somewhere along the line, he knew, there would be three or four that were familiar, but he hadn’t known the rest long enough for them to form any lasting impressions The attrition of war, either enemy action or simple reassignment, meant that he would never see his old comrades again.

At least he’d seen his last command; more than three quarters of his Landwarriors were now controlled by people who existed, at least to him, only on paper. He’d never seen the majority of his mixed regiment and chances were he never would; they’d either already been on station before his ninety-eight Landwarrior “battalion” hobbled across the savannah, or limped in afterwards.

It had been a surprise, albeit not one as great as he might have wished, to find he was the most senior officer present. Despite the urgency of the situation, Command simply had not been able to get anyone more senior than a Battalion Controller into place. And not for lack of trying; the Arions had a terrifying knack for knowing the movements of staff officers.

More explosions roared, this time not cannon fire but hideous tinny bangs, much like a teakettle exploding -- and the Comandante knew the Arions had begun their murder anew.

Arions, even Betans, didn’t like or trust Landwarriors. To a species that thought it was indestructible, the idea of wrapping yourself in metal was just asking for trouble; inside your metal shell you were slow moving and vulnerable. The only reason they used Landwarriors at all was because of their ability to carry larger weapons, and even then they only deployed what, under other circumstances, Alexandre would have considered criminally deficient numbers.

Unfortunately that deficiency only spoke to the qualitative superiority his opponents enjoyed; even in ridiculously small numbers, the Arion ’Warriors were more than capable of decimating any opponent they came across. It had once been said that a Landwarrior controlled any territory that fell under its gaze. The Arions had changed that, since all too often the first sign of an Arion vehicle was the sight of a Porturegan Landwarrior brewing up as it was struck by a shell from an enemy sitting – or, more likely, racing – over the next hill.

In addition to their lethal accuracy and unbelievable range, the vehicles were protected by advanced armors and energy shields. Rumor stated that it took fifteen well-placed human Landwarriors to destroy a single Arion vehicle, but Alexandre Álvaro placed his personal estimate at around seventeen or eighteen. It wasn’t just that the Arion ’Warriors were tough; they were smart as well. Like every soldier the Empire had sent to this world, their crews were professionals, with skills hardened by a lifetime of war.

Unlike their Porturegan counterparts….

Alexandre ducked lower into his cupola as more Landwarriors blew apart, scoring their surroundings with lethal shards of white hot metal Even in their attack the Arions showed their contempt for fighting vehicles. Instead of firing on any target that came to bear, they methodically annihilated the ’Warriors in order of their threat assessment, taking out the least damaged first and working down from there.

Even as he ordered another volley into the Arion ranks, Álvaro wondered where his vehicle was on that list and if he’d be lucky enough to be killed outright, or be cursed to a lifetime as one of the innumerable walking wounded.

Raising his head once again, he felt something flatten his hair against his skull and heard a section of city wall behind him collapse as something exploded against it. Álvaro instinctively ducked deeper into his cupola, raising his head after a few seconds only far enough to slowly sweep his gaze across the field, searching for whatever had shot at him.

He found it in the form of a Betan detachment armed with shoulder-mounted missiles. Silently thanking the Fair Child for his deliverance – had the shell struck, it would have left little more than a hole where his Landwarrior now stood – he ordered the left cannon around and shook with his vehicle as it ripped the Arions apart.

Yet the armor hadn’t stopped clinking from the vibrations before his attention was diverted by the sound of torn air and sight of dark shadows whipping across the field. Even before he turned his head to the skies, he knew it wasn’t their relief. The sound was too quiet, barely a whisper despite being practically over his head. Only Arion Airskirmishers were that silent, and he turned his gaze towards the city, watching the fleeting form pull up sharply, its payload of bombs visible only in the destruction it brought to entire streets.

A few native aircraft gave valiant chase to the alien bomber, one even managed to bounce a few cannon rounds off of its shields, but quickly gave up when the Arions’ guns reduced half their number to ash. Unlike the surface-crawling Landwarriors, the Arion ’Skirmishers had energy weapons like those mounted upon their spacecraft and weren’t shy about using them.

Many had speculated, even argued and pleaded that it was suicide to continue a campaign against an opponent with such terrifying advantages, both in experience and technology. The Arion Empire had studied their planet for decades before invading, it had even infiltrated their society and slowly subverted it, priming them for the “Negotiators”-- who arrived in vacuum warcraft and whose only task was to issue an ultimatum: “Surrender, or die.”

Alexandre shook his head. To him it didn’t matter what terms the Arions offered, or even if they offered them at all. He didn’t care that his leaders had ordered, “Not one step backwards,” because he would have resisted anyway. As far as he was concerned, he had already received his orders from a higher source. She had told his planet about the evils of the Arion Empire and Alexandre had listened.

Intellectually the Comandante knew She didn’t need reverence; that she’d even begged not to be worshipped. But like so many of his people, Alexandre ignored her because he could only describe her actions in terms of divine intervention. Her celestial physique aside, the Fair Child might as well have admitted her goddesshood when she declared her people were sired by the Ancient Ones themselves. After all, were not her abilities impossible? Had the scientists not said that what she did was impossible? Had it not been those fantastic powers that had kept defeat at bay for months now?

No, she had done more than that. She’d been the only effective weapon his people had against the Arions. Everything else in their inventory had to struggle just to stall the Arion forces, if they were lucky, until She arrived.

…Not, he was reluctant to admit, that she was likely to arrive any time soon. Sightings of the Fair Child were rare lately. Ever since the Tset’lar had arrived, the Fair Child had almost disappeared, materializing only fleetingly in the wake of another Arion attack.

Without her, casualties and losses had risen to unbelievable levels.

Álvaro didn’t like to dwell on such matters. Soldiers who spent long periods of time thinking about defeat didn’t survive very long. Instead he concentrated on the warmth thoughts of the Fair Child always brought.

With Her image in his mind, the world always seemed simpler, more manageable. The Arions seemed less like omnipotent demons and more like what they were; soldiers on the wrong side of the field.

And they were far from undefeatable, the Fair Child herself had shown them how to exploit the Arions’ weaknesses, to play to their arrogance, to make them believe in your “inferiority” and, above all else, look to the Betans.

The Betans were the Arions’ major strength and weakness. Not only did they fuel, maintain and repair the Arion vehicles, they also made up ninety-nine soldiers in every hundred. And it was there that they fell short, for if you plucked at them enough times, even a rifleman would find the gaps in their body armor and then there’d be one less Arion to worry about.

Peering over the lip of his cupola once again, Álvaro saw the Prime unit he’d ordered fired upon smashed, or at the very least, dispersed. Knowing that it would take them a few moments to reorganize themselves, he could begin to put his guns to real good.

Re-aiming the turrets for a shallow trajectory, Alexandre gave the order and, even though there was no actual difference between this volley and the last, he imagined it sounded louder, more triumphant than the rounds he’d sent against the Primes.

The results were certainly more effective. Great gaps suddenly appeared in the sea of bodies as countless Betans were blown away by the high-density shrapnel their bodies, even protected by full armor, reduced to little more than a red mist.

Still smiling, Álvaro ordered another volley, this one aimed high so the canisters would explode above the enemy and shower them with round shot. Each piece of shrapnel was all the more lethal for, even if it didn’t strike an Arion, it would lie in wait until it could deprive some poor Imperial of his foot. Another volley, and then another rained death amongst soldiers forced to bunch together as they entered the trenches, or wade across the muddy sea. Entire companies were decimated and the flow incrementally slowed as the Betans abandoned their advance in favor of cover on the open plains.

Alexandre was halfway through redirecting his command’s fire once again when the front third of his Landwarrior exploded in flame. Superheated gasses from the shaped warhead instantly flooded the lower compartment, not so much crushing as imploding his driver and the gunner before consuming their remains in a firestorm. The only thing that kept the Comandante alive was the fact modern ’warriors were compartmentalized for exactly this reason.

His vehicle disabled and crew dead, Álvaro knew he only had seconds before the heating element at the core of the Arion shell reduced his Landwarrior to slag. Scrabbling out of the armored cupola and down one rapidly warming side, Alexandre jumped the last meter to the ground, rolled in the mud and ran for the nearest trench. Arion infantry fire carved the ground before him, cutting off his means of escape and forcing him to flee for a brick wall no higher than his knees.

A thunderous explosion shook the ground as the Arion shell blew the barely recognizable remains of his Landwarrior into a hundred thousand pieces of shrieking, white hot shrapnel. Álvaro felt two blows to his back and went down screaming.

By sheer luck he fell into the burnt-out shell of what had once been someone’s home, and it was only the scarcest memory of hard-won experience that made him roll aside and give the Arions a smaller target to shoot at through the wall.

For tense seconds golden orange beams burned effortlessly through the brick and mortar, passed centimeters from Álvaro’s body and vanished in the depths of the ruins. Alexandre felt the very sweat on his brow boil, and smelled the torn, muddied remains of his uniform char, yet that was as close as the lethal rays came. Eventually the marksmen gave up, either assuming their target was dead, or finding something more worthwhile to shoot at.

Lying prostrate and paralyzed by the pain, Alexandre fought to perform a rough self-diagnostic. The first hit, he realized, had struck either in, or just below his left kidney. While agonizing, and without medical assistance, undoubtedly lethal, he could live with it for a while. The second strike was more deadly as it had hit him dead center in the socket of his right arm.

As he lay there, choking on dust, trapped in a bombed out house with only a half-meter wall between him and his next life, the screams of his countrymen filling the air, explosions laying waste to the street around him, Alexandre closed his eyes and prayed.

“Please,” he half thought, half begged, “Protector. If you are out there, if never before, we need you now. Please!”

But no one responded. No one answered his prayers and no one came.

At least not from the air.

“Over there, do you see him?”

“See who?”

“There, in the ruins. Someone’s alive.”

A third voice answered, “Nothing could live in there.”

“Really? Look closer!”

“Fair Child, is he still alive?” The second speaker hissed.

“He’s still breathing.”

Turning his head slowly, the Comandante peered towards the voices but could see only burning smoke and piles of bricks.

“Okay, covering fire. Fifteen seconds of restricted bursts towards that AM-RaC. Give us ten seconds to get out there and wait for our signal. See if you can distract that AT-110 while you are at it.”

A few moments afterwards Alexandre could see exactly where his saviors were and, from the intensity of the automatic bursts, even make out the expression on their faces.

The next few seconds were a blur of strobe lighting as four men and one woman -- militia, not regular army from their uniforms -- made a frantic dash across the killing grounds, dove into the ruins beside him and started unloading bullets into whichever Arion thought he’d found a juicy target.

While the woman and three of the men crawled forward to take up firing positions, the fourth man crouched low over the Álvaro’s body and began inspecting his wounds.

“Where you hurt?” he asked gruffly.

“My shoulder.” Alexandre winched as he tried to indicate the injury without actually moving. “And my side… my kidney.”

The medic simply nodded and quickly rolled him over, causing his patient to scream in agony. “Fucking hell! What are you trying to do, kill me?”

The outburst only earned him an impassive grunt from the man above. “Y’ want to get fixed or not?” The medic started pulling something from his pack. “Now stay still and let me see what I can do.”

Against the wall, the woman -- her markings said she was group leader -- shouted. “Hëimer, whatever you are doing. Move it!”

“Just give me a sec will yah!” Hëimer yelled back. To his patient he warned, “This is going to hurt for a bit, but it will let y’ move,” before injecting half a vial of grey goo into Alexandre’s shoulder and the other half into his kidney.

For Álvaro it was as if acid had been poured on wounds, yet as the medic promised, the pain lost its edge and let him move again.

Slapping a patch over the injections, Hëimer gripped Álvaro’s good arm and heaved him to his feet. But before they could make it, both became aware of the woman yelling something.

“…Told them to take care of that RaC. Everybody down!” She screamed as a flurry of crimson bursts pummeled the building, bringing down what remained of its walls and tearing into their group.

Mud and white powder exploded from each impact. The ground shuddered, bricks splintered, entire walls collapsed and the street filled with heavy, cloying dust so thick that even the Arion gunner couldn’t tell what was going on.

For those he’d fired upon the entire landscape had changed.

No one was on their feet. Of the four who’d been seeking shelter behind the wall, one was obviously dead. Even had a burst not decapitated him, his chest and lower abdomen had been laid open to his shattered spinal column. Two more, another man and the woman, were lying near where the Arion cannon had torn their pathetic barricade apart. There was no sign of the fourth man.

Álvaro sensed movement and looked up to see the medic hovering over him, an expression of pure horror on his blood soaked face as he looked at the remains of his companions. Slowly at first, then faster, he began to back away.

“Wait!” Alexandre called weakly after him. “Wait for me. I am not dead!”

Hëimer didn’t hear him, with eyes so wide it was surprising they didn’t fall from their sockets, he turned and ran at a dead sprint back toward the trenches.

The moment he stepped from the ruins, Arion GAR fire danced around him, turning the air into a horizontal murder. For a second it looked to Alexandre as if he might make it, and then an energy stream sliced downwards, severing the medic’s arm above the elbow.

To Hëimer’s credit, he didn’t stop running. Even with his lifeblood streaming down his side, adrenaline, or simply instinct kept his legs moving until a second cascade of beams turned his body into a butchers shop of assorted meat.

Alexandre Álvaro was alone once again.

* * *

“Hey buddy… you alive?”

Alexandre, careful to keep his profile as small as possible, rolled over and towards the blasted wall and what he’d assumed were two corpses. To his great surprise one of them was inching towards him on its elbows.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Just about.”

“Can you move?” The figure asked in a remarkably clear voice considering its face was practically burnt off.

Seeing the brilliant streams of GAR’s tearing into the front lines and hearing the whistle of Arion bombs collapsing Brilhante’s proud spires, Alexandre found himself nodding. “I had better.”

“Good.” Still keeping close to the ground, the figure crept closer; as it did Alexandre realized it was a man. “Because if one of their Airskirmishers sees us, we are going to get a fingernail.”

Fingernails were standard Arion antipersonnel devices. Resembling their namesakes in size and shape, the amount of devastation they could bring was staggering. A handful could devastate a company. Though they were usually dropped by the kilogram, it was common for an Arion pilot to release a couple if they saw stragglers at the edge of a battle.

Glancing back to the other figure that had to be the woman, Álvaro asked: “What about your group leader?”

The man didn’t look around. “She’s gone.”

Glancing back, Alexandre suddenly saw what he couldn’t before. While most of her body had escaped the bombardment, half the woman’s face had been burned right down to the bone and a single disgustingly white eyeball stared blankly out towards the enemy.

“Fair Child!” Alexandre breathed, he was no stranger to the “glory” of battle, but it still struck him to see a woman on the receiving end.

“You are a Believer?” The soldier asked almost conversationally as he shouldered his weapon. “Never could get into that myself.” Seeing the Arion bombardment lull, he spoke something into his radio and, after receiving an answer, nodded towards the trench. “Hope Hëimer patched you up right because this is as good a time as any. Get going.”

Alexandre tried to get up but the moment he tried to move his arm his body was wracked with pain. Shaking his head, he motioned for the man to run. “I can not do it. Go on, save yourself.”

The soldier shook his charred head looked at him incredulously. “Are you kidding?”

“No.” Unused to having his orders disobeyed, Álvaro faltered. “I can not move and carrying me would only slow you down. Four people have already died; you do not need to join them.”

“You want me to throw away their sacrifice by abandoning the person they gave their lives to save?” The soldier made it sound like a capital offence. “And who said anything about carrying you? You are going to walk and I am going to support you.”

“It makes no sense,” the Comandante complained as the soldier gripped him under his good arm and pulled him to his feet.

“Why? Even an Arion will go after a fallen comrade.”

Alexandre couldn’t disagree with that. The Arions might have marched across the face of the planet, but through it all, the people had stuck together. Even here, faced with unimaginably superior firepower and a city that had been bombed, shelled, shot, blasted, and mortared virtually to rubble, the citizens were still marching up to the lines to preserve their way of life, if only for a couple of minutes.

The Arions stepped up their offensive as the pair stumbled towards their destination. More aircraft dropped below the low clouds to rip into the city, either pummeling it with missiles, or extinguishing entire streets with their bomb payloads. Arion Landwarriors, their competition destroyed, now turned their fire from the defense lines to the city buildings, raking them with explosive shells and energy cannons. Not a hundred meters away the last mobile gun was obliterated as two whole Prime companies overran the front lines.

Soil showered around the pair’s ears as a misaimed shell went wild and struck close by. The hiss of GAR’s and the sizzle of rising steam grew louder as more and more lethal energy extinguished itself in the mud around them. Both soldiers stumbled as a wall collapsed, crushing an antique window and showering them in flying splinters that tore at their muddy uniforms and cut their skin. Bombs and shrapnel shook the battlefield and it seemed as if the entire city was screaming as it died around them.

Finally, never more than a couple of steps from death, the soldier and the Comandante made one last heroic leap into the deep trenches.

Fortunately for Alexandre, Hëimer’s injections had had their full effect by the time they made that last jump; otherwise the eight-foot drop into the dark earth would have left him comatose with pain.

As it was, the leap merely left him feeling as if he’d finally torn his arm out of its socket, as well as both legs, his pelvis and a number of ribs.

Within the trench the sounds of the war were muted, transformed into something unearthly, almost as if they were happening on another world. The realities of war shattered that comfortable illusion at birth; the muddy walls shook with every shell burst and broken topsoil rained down from what seemed to be an unending series of explosions. As if that wasn’t enough, the sharp clatter of Porturegan machine guns wasn’t hushed in the least and served as a constant reminder of the fact that what had been the rear to mid-line trenches were very quickly becoming the front as Arion soldiers overran their defenses.

Lying in the mud, Alexandre’s savior raised his head and asked. “You said you were a Believer?” Alexandre nodded. “Well if I were you, I would start praying for Her presence right now.”

“You think I have not?”

“No, I mean,” the soldier jabbed one finger emphatically at the ground, “as in we need her here, now.”

Álvaro was about to ask what it was about this moment that made it more urgent than any other since the war had began, when a runner, her uniform brown with the mud, ran into view. Tripping over a corpse, the woman didn’t even pause while delivering her message; she simply scrambled to her feet and shouted as she ran.

“The front is gone! Command says grab your gun and retreat into the city. Make the Arions pay for every meter!”

Strangely, this did not cause instant chaos. Despite the terror the Arions were trying to inflict, the retreat still bore the resemblance of organization as soldiers fired briefly over the heads of their colleagues, gave up their positions and fell back while they themselves were covered in a staggered pattern that ran across the entire length of the trench.

For an instant Alexandre was proud of his people for that dedication, their willingness to sacrifice for another person. Then he felt pressure on his arm and saw the soldier tugging at him once again.

“You want to wait for the Arions? We have got to get out of here!”

Álvaro nodded and climbed to his feet. Intellectually he knew he should be watching his movements because the lack of pain didn’t mean he wasn’t damaging himself but that thought was suppressed by the survival instinct, which reminded him, in emphatic language, that it wouldn’t matter what shape his insides were in if the Arions caught up with him.

Even as he began to retreat, another voice, even louder than his screaming instinct was another voice. It asked just one question over and over.

“Where is She?”

Chapter 2

The other side of the world.

The entire region was alive with moss. In place of grass, giant setas stretched knee high into the air, waving delicate fronds in the wind and presenting a soft, rippling sea of lavender further than the eye could see.

From above the land appeared vast and flat. Occasional ripples in the form of hills or mountains could be seen, but beneath the moss carpet anything less massive was obscured and amalgamated into a single amorphous sheet.

The largest of these ridges stretched the breadth of the continent. In this one area the violet hue lost its hold and a thin crack appeared where sheer cliffs denied even the moss a foothold.

Over the millennia the range had stood as the region’s primary line of defense. Even when the power of flight had been mastered and danger was no longer confined to the ground, the mountains and their harsh and unforgiving air currents had provided a more than adequate layer of defense.

Through this granite wall the plum carpet had managed to colonize only three passageways. In times past two of straits had been barricaded by a succession of embankments and bulwarks that, in recent times, the Arions had taken great pleasure in taking apart, brick by brick.

The third passage took the form of a wide, gently sloping ravine. At some point in its history there had been a great wall here also, but the extended peace had proved more destructive than any siege as the town growing in its shadow gradually ate away at the barrier that had nurtured its birth.

Deep within the deceptively steep valley basin, a small cloud of earth and moss rose skywards.

Half a second latter the town was shaken to its foundations by the shockwave.

* * *

Aurora Fairchild glared at her opponent from the pit she’d been driven into.

Grinning triumphantly, Tala’Aerie licked a drop of blood from the corner of her mouth. Aurora shuddered; the blood didn’t belong to the Tset’lar.

“You actually managed to injure me, Fair Child?” Tala dabbed the crimson splatter and glanced at her fingers. “Perhaps not. A shame, because any injury at all would have been a vast improvement over any of your previous attacks.”

Aurora tried, and failed, not to grimace through the pain of a broken jaw and missing tooth. After such a pounding over so long a time, even the Virago’s body had yielded somewhat but, despite the agony flaring through every limb and organ, the Tset’lar’s words managed to strike a nerve. Much to the Virago’s dismay, they weren’t an idle boast. If the small spray of blood droplets crawling down the Tset’lar’s face had indeed belonged to the Arion, they really would have been the worst injury Aurora had inflicted.

Seeing the Arion floating above her, supremely confident in her victory, Aurora knew exactly what she should do with the perfect opportunity for a sneak attack presented.

She did precisely nothing, except shift slightly so her ribs would stop aching so much. From painful experience Aurora had learned just how quick the Tset’lar’s reflexes were; Tala might appear relaxed and nonchalant, but it would take her a split second to react and bat away any strike Aurora could make.

Obviously I’m going to have to ask that they rewrite the books – again – about the correct approach to dealing with a Tset’lar, Aurora thought grimly.

That was the primary reason Aurora didn’t try and exploit the incredibly tempting opening. The secondary was that she simply couldn’t find the strength.

For almost a month she’d fought the Arion. Their battles had been waged on and over all three continents, Aurora had grabbed perhaps a few hours sleep in the last fortnight and been forced to ignore the helpless pleas of those she’d sworn to protect. Her bones ached from the times they’d been broken and reset, her muscles burned raw from the strain of supporting the continued war and her senses were dulled by the lack of rest. Worse, her energy levels, which popular – and personal – belief said were indomitable, were flagging. After so long, Aurora could barley lift her head, let alone contemplate launching another assault.

“Go ahead,” she gasped in Arion. “Finish it and another will replace me.”

Hands on hips, Tala burst out laughing. “And will she surrender as easily as you have? You’re meant to be the best of the Enlightenment’s Viragos, Fair Child, and I’ve beaten you in a few short weeks. No,” she corrected herself, eyes narrowing, “I’ve beaten you in one battle!” Still roaring with laughter, she shook her head, “How little you understand my kind.”

“You’re an Arion.” Aurora rolled over, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the moss. “You’re all the same; all you want is death and destruction.”

“And power.” The Tset’lar’s eyes glowed lavender, singeing the Virago with the suggestion of hard radiation. “Isn’t that something else your people say about mine?”

Aurora didn’t dignify that with a response, Tala continued unperturbed.

“What I find strange however, is that in all this time, in all the thousands of years our two races have been at odds – isn’t that another peculiarity; we never got around to calling this a war? – your glorious Enlightenment has never seen that we, Arion and Velorian, both have the same goal? We both desire peace and order throughout the galaxy, we both wish to end the blood that so many of our humans shed in their needless wars. It’s only our methods that differ; Velorians prefer to hope their example is enough, while we favor more… stringent methods of control.”

Had Tala spoken without a smirk on her face, Aurora might have believed her. Instead she answered.

“You mean you like to massacre humans like cattle.”

Tala shrugged. “Only the weak. It’s a kindness really; with our viral technology it’s not like they feel anything when we uh, we cull the herd.”

“You call that a kindness!” Aurora spat, rubbing her aching jaw as her overtaxed immune system finally got around to knitting it.

“Compared to other methods we could choose, compared to some of the ‘techniques’ they themselves have come up with?” Tala’s eyebrows rose in genuine surprise: “Believe me, putting them to sleep is very kind. And, really, what do a few million matter in a population of billions?”

“To those millions? Everything.” Aurora answered, slowly crawling out of the hole, every bone buzzing with pain.

“But we improve the species as a whole,” the Tset’lar simply shrugged and floated above the Virago.

“More people have died from their own pollution than from anything we will, or have, done to them. Before we came along and started upgrading their technology, your Protectorates were killing themselves with fluorocarbons and petrochemicals. Now look at them; those people under our jurisdiction have health care, efficient waste management and renewable energy. By contrast the Porturegans you’ve prevented us from accessing live in squalor, have to choke on the fumes generated by the combustion engines of their war machine and pay for chemicals that only alleviate pain instead of cure their illnesses.”

All appearance of joviality fled from Tala’s face as she dropped to within a few feet of Aurora. “As hard it might be for you to admit, we’re doing a better job of protecting these people than you are. I mean, you have to see that we’re the best thing to have happened to this world? We might some take millions during the annexation, and a few more in the purges, but if we weren’t here they’d be killing each other just the same.”

Pure burning furry forced Aurora to her feet; “Until you came these people hadn’t fought a war in a hundred and fifty years!”

“Who said anything about war?” Tala asked bobbing innocently in the air. “The corporations were well on the way to bringing this planet down long before we arrived. Dumping pollution, over harvesting resources, bribing politicians, consolidating profits over people? All these factors add up, Aurora; our pre-invasion analysts estimated that without our help in the next twenty years, fifty million people would die from curable diseases. With our technology – with your technology for that matter – creating vaccines and cures is the work of a few hours.”

“What’s your point?” Aurora asked warily; her energies were returning but she wasn’t yet ready to stage her next attack.

“Quite simply my dear Fair Child.” Tala paused just long enough to remind the Virago of the honorific her protectorates insisted upon using. “If we kill ten million in this war, Skietra, if we kill twenty million, yet cure those diseases we save thirty million lives. And that doesn’t even begin to address the millions we’ll save by clearing up the ecological damage and pollution they’ve created.”

“If you continue to fight” -- Tala jabbed Aurora hard in the chest -- “and if you somehow defeat us, then you might as well kill those fifty million yourself. It’ll be kinder in the long term. What’s more, if you do push us off the planet those five million who’ve died already will have done so for nothing.”

The cold logic of the numbers slid into place in Aurora’s mind. She knew that they weren’t simply idle ruminations or theoretical projections, the Arion Empire really had done such wonders for the worlds it’d conquered. She was also aware that her world had not performed any such miracles, except to gift planets with Protectors, because Velor did believe in leading by example. It pained her in ways she couldn’t properly articulate to admit that; her instincts screamed for her to coddle her planet, to demand that her government cure its illnesses and clean up its environment, but she also knew not to indulge that seductive voice too much.

Humans should not learn to rely on her species like those in Arion controlled space did. If for no other reason, she’d seen the speciation that could spawn from such reliance. The Arions called that subspecies, Guíse: “Pets.”

Guíse were an extreme example, of course, and even the Arions occasionally admitted it had been a mistake to allow humans to evolve along that path; but what they did to the rest of their captive population was little better.

The irony was that Tala had been right; Velorian and Arion aims were identical. They both wanted to nurture the human species, but their methods couldn’t be more different. Velor believed it was better to stand back and allow humanity to evolve naturally, except when truly exceptional circumstances -- like, for example, an Arion invasion -- demanded intervention.

Aria didn’t.

Aria thought that direct intervention was the best way to improve humanity. They stopped at direct genetic manipulation, thankfully; but as Tala had freely admitted, thought nothing of killing millions to save humanity from itself. It didn’t matter whether this was during the initial occupation or when they improved the gene pool by simply euthanizing those with truly incurable diseases… or blonde hair. So far as Aurora was aware, the Arions had never justified that particular decision.

Yet concern for their welfare was not the only reason the Empire hungered after her Protectorate; it needed them. Maintaining a civilization as vast as theirs was expensive, and as prolific as the Arions were, even they couldn’t hope to manage the untold billions of humans in the galaxy by themselves.

Especially not when humans were so much better at it than they were.

It wouldn’t be a cruel exploitation; the Arions had long since learned they got a better per capita return if humans actually liked their captors. The sad thing was that it actually worked… most of the time. To a civilization as vast as the Empire, it was nothing to buy off its conquered peoples with comfortable lives, especially when most of the tools to that end could be constructed locally.

In return for the high initial cost, the Empire got the resources of an entire planet and a workforce numbers in the tens of millions.

But they wouldn’t care for them, not as Aurora and the rest of her race would. At least she hoped not; it was hard enough to think of the purges Tala had mentioned without imagining that the people committing them might do it out of some kind of love.

And purges were just only the most visible aspect of the damage they inflicted; the Empire also wounded their humans in ways that were impossible to quantify. Early on Arion academics had realized that change equaled chaos, and chaos was obviously contrary to well being.

And because of that decision, regardless of what they spouted, the Arions were ultimately the greatest hypocrites the galaxy had ever known.

Ultimately, they had no intention of truly nurturing humanity. They might be able to justify “strengthening” humanity – if that was the word for slaughtering anyone who didn’t conform to Arion ideals. But to nurture something meant allowing it to grow and the Arions caused stagnation on every world they touched. The situation was so bad, Aurora knew, that worlds captured during the Empire’s formation three thousand years previously hadn’t changed since.

Again, three thousand years had made the Arions almost sickeningly successful. In areas such as culture, where some movement was not only necessary, but also impossible to avoid, allowances were made although only so that it served their purposes. The humans, with their short lifespans, couldn’t see it, but over the course of centuries it was obvious that fashions, styles and trends were being turned through one large endless cycle.

No one was publicly restricted from expressing themselves – studies revealed that such obvious shows of repression led to unacceptably high levels of dissension – at least not so long as they didn’t cause outrage. But vogues could be created simply by ensuring that certain artists or designers (generally those that relied on past fashions for inspiration) received more attention than those that showed true originality.

Murder, subjugation and endless stagnation was the fate waiting for the Porturegans if they lost this war. It was the reason Aurora stood proud before her enemy and why her voice had such authority now.

“If they die, at least they die free.”

Tala snorted decisively and spat on the blood soaked moss.

“Freedom? It’s an overrated lie. Just how ‘free’ are they, Aurora? How free are you for that matter? You are ‘free’ to patrol this planet. You are ‘free’ to live and die amongst weak, short-lived humans. And finally, if you are lucky enough to survive your tenure, you are ‘free’ to return home and pine away your last days as a bureaucrat within the Protector Council.”

She waited just long enough.

“Assuming your injuries have not, by that point, precluded even such minimal activities.”

It was Aurora’s turn to snort.

“Those are just the requirements of any civilization upon its chosen few. I might ask what… ‘Freedoms’ the Empire places upon you? Eternal battle? The autonomy to die on any world of their choosing? The liberty to swear devotion to an Emperor you’ll never meet, or the sovereignty emplaced upon your genes, your desires, by the geneticists who made you?”

Tala yawned.

“And you were doing so well. Really, Fair Child, falling back upon genetics? Even if you didn’t belong to one of the most infamously engineered castes of the Galaxy’s most recognizably artificial species, it would be a bad defense. What do you think happens among ordinary Arions when a man and woman couple in hope of producing a child? Even before they get into bed a thousand, a hundred thousand selective processes have taken place to determine that child’s future.

“Strength, height, hair shade” -- Arions were universally dark haired so shade was the only variable left to them -- “intelligence, personality. They’re all factors narrowed down before their child is ever conceived. I’ll admit the probability of any one particular trait being manifested aren’t as certain as in either of our kind, and the failure rate is considerably higher, but ultimately it’s just a more primitive version of the system that produced us.

“How is that dissimilar from the way our parents – our real parents, those who worked in laboratories and white coats – selected which of our genes would manifest? The only difference between us” -- she waved her finger between herself in the air and the Virago on the ground -- “is evolution; I’m a daughter of the new regime, one which designs its warriors from the molecule up, while you belong to a system which still requires the more primitive methods of physical and emotional selection between two statistically random adults.”

“It is that union between ‘statistically random adults’ that gives us our strength.” Aurora said coldly. “The love of our parents makes us unique and fully actualized individuals. Your computer controlled conception robs you of something you’ll never understand.”

“Love?” Tala cocked her head. “You think we have no love? You think we have no concept of that emotion? Do you know nothing about us!? Our emotions, our passions are what make us strong! Can you honestly believe that the Arion Empire would spend a century developing us, invest the resources of whole planets, entire legions of warriors and thousands of its best scientists in a project, only to allow it to fall flat because they forgot we needed emotion in order to function!?”

Despite herself, Aurora stepped back at the Tset’lar’s unexpected fury. It was a new development; in all of her previous encounters the Arion had never taken anything, except the Virago’s humiliation, personally.

Yet even as she watched, Aurora saw the anger vanish from her nemesis’s face as easily as a cloud fled from the sun. Giving the Velorian the bored look of a child tiring of a new toy, Tala somersaulted head over heels away from the Virago. Aurora tensed to pursue, but found it unnecessary since the Tset’lar had moved barely a few inches and was now beaming down at her.

Though she was careful to maintain a steely exterior – showing weakness before an Arion was like waving bloody meat before a Kintzi – Aurora inwardly cringed. That smile meant Tala was about to launch an entirely different type of attack.

Leaning forward in midair and lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, Tala asked. “Do you want to know the real reason why I’ve been fighting you?”

No answer, Aurora could feel her muscles bunching in preparation.

“Not interested? Well I’ll tell you anyway, it’s quite simple really. Ridiculously obvious if you think about it – which, as your continued presence reveals, you obviously haven’t.”

Still Aurora remained silent, biding her time, and her strength, for the assault to come.

Tala appeared almost affronted by her silence. “Are you sure you don’t want to even make a guess?” she probed. “It’s not what you think.”

Aurora twitched slightly, not in response to the Tset’lar’s words but so as to better position herself. Deep within her muscles, she could feel the power building, feeding upon itself like a primitive beast gorging on her renewed strength.

“Really sure?” Tala teased, a grin switching her lips. “Not a clue why I might have decided to tease out these last few battles instead of merely, I don’t know, beating you to death and conquering this planet?”

Aurora tensed one last time. Just a few more seconds! She fixed her eyes on the Arion and tr