The Chosen One

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Galactic Standard Date: 152,323 AE

Command Carrier: 'Light Emerging'

Border between Zulu and Tango sector

Colonel Raphael Israfa

RAPHAEL

Smaller and sleeker than other command carriers [40] in the Angelic Air Force, the Light Emerging belonged to the 42nd Intelligence Division, and Colonel Raphael Israfa was her commander. Built for stealth and deep-space intelligence gathering, it was his job to figure out what the old dragon was up to, or that's the excuse Supreme Commander-General Jophiel had given when she'd assigned him command of this ship and banished him into the uncharted territories.

"Where did Mikhail's distress call originate from?" Raphael asked his second-in-command, a two-and-a-half meter-tall Mantoid [41] by the name of Major Glicki.

"All we received was a truncated data burst." Glicki touched her voice modulation box which helped her enunciate non-insectoid sounds. "I didn't receive enough data to triangulate his position, Sir."

Raphael flared his buff-gold wings. When Mikhail had gone to ground two weeks ago, he'd been running black-ops. With dual hyperdrives geared to push a ship seven times that size, he could be anywhere in the galaxy right now. Anywhere!

"According to his last check-in—" Glicki tilted her heart-shaped green head "—he was tracking a suspicious Sata'anic merchant vessel, Algol-class, somewhere up into the Orion-Cygnus spur." [42]

Raphael rose and paced over to the vast, spinning hologram of the galaxy which blinked at them in varied, multi-colored lights. Each light represented a red giant, brown dwarf, or other stellar body; all teeming with planets, all teeming with moons and asteroids where a ship could go down and never be heard from again.

"Damantia!" Raphael ruffled his reddish-gold under-feathers. "Even if we launch an armada, it will take a hundred years to search that spiral arm. Orion-Cygnus is almost completely uncharted!"

"Two hundred twenty-seven years, Sir." Glicki tapped her command module as she calculated the odds. "Based upon the number of known stars multiplied by the likely percentage we don't know about in an area this size. That’s how long I estimate it would take to search all habitable planets, not including asteroids and moons."

Glicki met his gaze.

"Unless he rigs a homing beacon, Sir, we shall never find him."

Raphael's golden eyebrows came together in worry. They were due back in Tango Sector next week. How long would the Emperor let him dither in the middle of nowhere?

"Play the distress call again?"

Glicki slid her prayer-like tibia across the console which served as the Light Emerging's nerve center. With the click of an armored fingertip, she boosted the audio signal, ran it through a series of data sequencers to enhance the quality, and then replayed it loudly enough for the entire bridge to hear.

Raphael … I’ve been hit! Shay’tan has found the godsdamned Holy Grail!!! This planet is crawling with enough Sata’an to… >>

An explosion cut off the message, and then it went to static.

"I'm afraid that’s all we received, Sir," Glicki said. "I boosted the signal and traced the source as best as I could."

Raphael's wings drooped.

"Do you think he survived?"

Glicki enlarged the hologram to focus on the likely search area, silently running calculations to narrow it down to where a scout ship could travel in the amount of time since Mikhail had relayed his last position. Large swaths of the sector displayed nothing but spotty static. She tilted her green head as the Light Emerging's long-range sensors pulled up the most obvious stellar bodies and filled in some of the gaps, but the tags which marked those stars were all labeled 'unexplored.'

"Shay’tan's too cheap to terraform an entire planet—" she fluttered her soft, gossamer under-wings. "If it's crawling with Sata'an, we can assume the world is habitable."

He was her friend, as well…

"What do you think he meant by Holy Grail?" Raphael asked.

"It could mean almost anything," Glicki said. "If Shay'tan sends in another ship, maybe we can tail them?"

"Nobody is as good at stalking prey as Mikhail," Raphael said. "That’s why Jophiel sent him in to investigate."

"He was trained by the Cherubim." [43] Glicki glanced at the lower-ranking officers. "If he could survive…"

She didn't finish the sentence because the information was classified, but Raphael knew what she referred to.

"Anybody who could survive that could survive anything," he agreed.

He tucked his wings against his back and settled into his commander's chair, a seat which felt too large despite the eight months he'd sat in it, wishing he was someplace else. He patted the arm as if the Light Emerging had heard him.

"That's not true," he whispered. "It's what I had to give up that has my feathers ruffled."

He picked up a portable flatscreen and pulled up Mikhail's service record, one he hadn't had access to until he'd been given command of this ship. He scrolled through images of him and Mikhail going through Basic Training together, him goofy looking and inexperienced next to the stoic Seraphim he'd befriended on a dare.

He glanced at Glicki. She was the one who'd dared him to approach the dark-winged candidate who'd been dumped into their Basic Training class and try out his fledgling intelligence gathering skills. Nobody dared bunk with the Cherubim-trained novitiate who slept with a sword. Nobody wanted to train with him. Nobody wanted to fight him. They were all scared shitless of the icy young Seraphim who fought without any emotion whatsoever.

The last living Seraphim…

The last of his species…

He never laughed.

He never smiled.

He never warmed up to anybody.

Or that's what people thought. Raphael knew otherwise.

Jophiel had ordered him to let Mikhail run black-ops wherever he wished, no questions asked, and gave him just enough information to understand why.

It was true…

Mikhail had been on 51-Pegasi-4 when the planet had been attacked. Not off-world, like the unclassified portion of his service record implied.

"What happened?" Raphael had once asked.

Mikhail had stared right through him, his expression oddly empty.

"The Emperor said I must never try to remember."

"The base commander ordered you?"

"No," he'd said. "The Eternal Emperor gave me that order himself."

Raphael stared at the blurry picture of the nine-year-old boy a battalion of Leonids had found, defending his mother's body with a Sata'anic sword.

He'd seen that look…

That dark look of fury.

He'd caught glimpses of it, right before Mikhail would withdraw into an icy shell and refuse to speak to anybody for days.

He flipped through the flatscreen to a gruesome image of an autopsy.

According to the forensics report, he'd pulled the sword from his dying mother's body and used it to kill three Sata'anic defectors despite never having used such a weapon before, and then he survived an airstrike. His entire family was burned beyond recognition, but somehow Mikhail, and his mother's body, remained unburned.

Buried alive? For four days? In a burnt house? Clinging to his dead mother's body?

Cold tingled through Raphael's feathers. He hadn't dared broach the subject, that Jophiel had divulged his best friend's deepest wound. But he now understood why Mikhail kept that sword at his side. Always. A silent, chilling reminder of a past he refused to discuss.

"Sir?" Glicki interrupted his musings. "Would you like me to send out a bulletin that we are looking for suspicious shipping activity into this sector? If Shay'tan has a base out here, at some point he'll need to resupply?"

"Do it," Raphael said. "And put in a report to Supreme Commander-General Jophiel. We need extra time to organize a search and rescue."