The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. His headache pounded so hard he felt it in his bones. The tinnitus whined like a hornet. He turned his head to look up at the cloud. It was more than a cloud. It was a bank of dark clouds, boiling along the horizon. He thought he saw lightning in them.
“Whoa, where did come from?” Walter asked as he stared at the clouds, too.
For a moment, Jace thought he saw something long and needle-like threading through those clouds, but it disappeared. But Jace knew what it looked like. It looked like one of the Khul spaceships that he had dreamed about.
But, of course, that must be impossible, because that was a dream.
There were no Khul.
There was no Storm Strike or Gehenna.
Aliens, if they did exist, were not flying spaceships above Sunrise, Arizona.
The Rule
“Commander Khoth Voor, you are accused of violating the Rule of Duuskukeh by risking your command--twenty-four highly skilled pilots--to save one,” High Councillor Nova Voor pronounced from her seat at the council table, known as the Vakh, twenty feet above Khoth’s head. Her voice was even. Some would characterize it as cold. There was no familiarity in it. No one would ever know she was his mother from the way she spoke to him. “What say you?”
Khoth’s fingers curled slightly towards his palms. It was the only sign of emotion he showed. He quickly forced them straight. His voice was as even and cool as hers as he answered, “It was necessary.”
“I did not ask if it was necessary, Commander Khoth. I asked if you violated the Rule,” she stated crisply.
The six Councillors to either side of her nodded their heads in agreement. They loomed above him in judgment now, but not one of them had been in a battle for over ten cycles, some much more than that.
His fingers twitched. He stilled them again. He lifted his head slowly so that he was looking directly at his mother’s face, blanking out the rest of the Councillors, speaking only to her. She had commanded more missions than all combined up there. She had to hear him. She had to understand. The Rules were there to guide, but they should not--could not--become a prison that would stop a Commander from doing what was necessary.
Hear me, Mother, he willed even as his face showed none of his need.
She filled his vision. Blue skin like the color of the lakatch flowers that grew in abundance on their homeworld of Haseon. The whole right side of her face was tattooed with the ta’na, her marks of victory in battle. Her back had grown too full to contain them all. She was given a dispensation to mark those great battles on her face for all to see. He had been granted the same, but for only one battle with the Khul. He wondered if he’d be commanded to remove it after this. He felt he deserved to lose it.
I could not save Daesah. I could only end her suffering. We lost the best of us with her.
“I believe that the Rule does not apply in the situation I was in,” he answered, not allowing any of his raw feelings to taint his voice. “As it was a mission to save our High Commander, the concern of sacrificing the many for the one was not triggered.”
“You expect us to believe that you acted as you did because it was your High Commander in danger and not… your sister?” His mother lifted a white eyebrow. Her glowing blue eyes, a deeper blue than her skin, darkened.
And your daughter, his traitorous mind whispered.
A tremor went through him, but he stilled it and shook his head. He would have been gutted to lose Daesah, but he would not have risked twenty-four other pilots just to save her. They might be blood and he had loved her and would always love her, but the Rule of Duuskukeh was at the very core of Thaf’ell society.
The many above the one.
It was something that every Thaf’ell was taught from birth to death. The needs of the society were greater than the needs of the individual. To act to the detriment of the whole for the benefit of the one was verboten and punishable by exile, the worst of all punishments. Better to die than to be split from the whole. But there were exceptions. And risking himself and his command to save Daesah had been one of them. Saving her was saving all of The Illumen Alliance.
“That she is my sister played no role in my decision,” Khoth said with chin lifted, meeting every set of glowing blue eyes on that Vahk. Let them see the truth in me. He continued, “High Commander Daesah Voor was worth more than twenty-five lives. She was… invaluable.”
He included his own life in that. Twenty-four under his command plus his own for twenty-five.
I would give my life and so many others to have her back, Khoth thought and grief threatened to eclipse his powerful control.
“High Commander Daesah was a fine pilot and a keen strategist,” his mother stated. Her voice remained as even as ever. It did not catch over saying her daughter’s name. “But she was one person.”
One person...
He remembered every second of the mission where his sister’s saber class ship, the Alarion, had been overrun by the Khul and she had been taken. The Alarion had responded to a sighting of a squadron of Khul ships by a mining operation on the planet Dracelea’s surface. The mining operation was small and it was only a sighting of the Khul. There had been no attack. The Khul could have simply been passing through. It hardly warranted attention, let alone attention by the Alarion and himself. But his sister had thought very differently. After they had done a sweep of the system without success, she had contacted him.
He remembered her face on his view screen. She was not seated in the command chair of his Alarion. Instead, she had been in her quarters on the war vessel while he and his command were all in their Paladin-class fighters, about to dock and head back.
Her expression was rarely relaxed, but the tensity it normally carried was increased. She was the leader of The Illumen Alliance’s military branch. It was assumed that she would be their mother’s natural successor as High Councillor when Nova was ready to step down. Responsibility for everyone had been drilled into his sister every moment of every day of her life. But the usual weight on her shoulders had been doubled. But why? They had found nothing.
