Page 101 of Cheating Fate

Tharek puffed out his chest, lifted his bracer, and called up a holographic display of his scoreboard. Even my jaw dropped. Seeing him glance at me with a mix of pride laced with worry brought a smile to my face.

“Impressive!” I conceded.

He grinned proudly as Vahl whistled.

“That’s incredible! Great job!” Vahl said with awe.

“I’ve completed all the Braxian modules at least six times each, and I keep improving my scores,” Tharek boasted. “Since then, I’ve been unbeatable in all the sparring matches I’ve participated in.”

“I told you that you were one of us,” I said teasingly.

He grinned and nodded in concession. “So I see!”

Vahl gave me a playfully disapproving look.

“First, you steal my twin. Now you steal my baby brother. What’s next?” he growled with pretend anger.

“I’m still looking for an angle to lure Rhadames to my side,” I said pensively. “But that’s a tougher one.”

“Fat chance of that ever happening,” Rhad chimed in, flicking his hair over his shoulder like a diva. “Tharek already tried and failed. No one takes me from my Gem.”

“In your face, Braxian,” Vahl said smugly, making us all laugh.

“Fine… for now,” I conceded. “But Tharek is all mine. And now, we have to test your endurance and tolerance to pain.”

“Why do I not like the sound of that?” Tharek asked, eyeing me warily as I stared at him with a malicious grin.

“Because you shouldn’t. We’re going to teach you how to play Beikor. Expect to get zapped to oblivion.”

The other Braxians burst out laughing and glanced at him with a predatory look. Yeah, this was going to be fun…

Epilogue

Zharina

Over the following days, we received an obscene number of submissions from people throughout the galaxy requesting to join the Vigil. They hailed not only from our allied planets, but especially from lesser-known worlds in the Eastern Quadrants. That initially baffled us until we questioned some of them about it. It turned out that many of them didn’t want to join the Sentinels due to their ties to the Galactic Alliance. They wanted to fight on the right side of the Great War, and the Vigil was the neutral army they felt comfortable finding a home in.

That struck a nerve and helped us better understand the reason for our existence. Initially, we wondered why an already established army didn’t take the lead instead. But now it all made sense. Our conversation with Svira further reinforced that understanding.

She genuinely wanted peace with us. That messed with my head. Gavin had gone into extensive details about what Siona went through when the Draylians, Guldans, and Sarenian rebels attacked the imperial palace on Sarenia in an attempt to murder her. Prince Zerien—now Emperor Zerien—had also told us much about it when he last visited us.

It still disturbed me to know how the Draylian mimics were able to not only take on our appearances but also harnessed our powers once they did. Svira’s warning that Dread wasn’t their only mimic had not fallen on deaf ears. During the Great War, facing off against a swarm of them would indeed lead to a bloodbath.

I didn’t know what challenges she had foreseen for us, but there was no question in my mind that we would prevail over them like we did with the previous ones. That it could get a greater number of her people to side with us was a benefit we couldn’t spit on. At the same time, I didn’t see how a collaboration with them would be possible without causing a major rift with our other allies. Things were already complicated enough between the Sarenians and Korletheans. They would only get uglier once we threw the Draylians into the mix.

But we would deal with that problem later.

For now, we took great heart in the fact that many planets asked to join the Coalition. While they didn’t actually send troops to join the Vigil, they pledged that large segments of their respective armies would follow the Vigil’s leadership during the Great War as soon as we called them to battle.

On that front as well, finding out how much the friends of the Coalition had already done totally blew our mind. They had started—and in some cases completed—building ships for us, including an orbital station. Both Gavin and I nearly fell off our chairs discovering that his father fully financed the construction of the station, which nearly rivaled the size of Venus Hive. The fact that the luxury pleasure barge he had grown up in was actually the size of a small city blew my mind.

Earth, Xelix Prime, Veredia, Avea, Dantor, Sarenia, and many other planets deemed as part of the core Coalition provided specialists to manage the various administrative and technical needs of setting up this new army. My poor brother had to make his first difficult call when Korlethea also offered to send its own specialists.

As a team, we discussed the matter and agreed to politely decline. There was still too much bad blood with their homeworld. After more than a decade, they still had not resolved the outstanding issues of reparations with many of the planets and species they had wronged with their experiments. And above all, they had too many traitors in their midst, trying to force an alliance with Guldar instead, and eager to fight on the opposing side of the war. At this early stage in our development, we weren’t ready to have to devote the necessary amount of energy and attention dealing with potential moles looking to destroy us from within.

To our complete shock, the Zolians also pledged their loyalty to the Coalition. We silenced our initial knee jerk reaction of shutting them down. After carefully considering all the evidence, including the extensive interrogations my Veredian sisters subjected the captives to—we had to admit that we couldn’t blame an entire planet over the actions of the few. The males who fought us were all rebels and mercenaries. And that also applied to the humans we battled.

Zolis was an emerging primitive planet at the far edge of the Eastern Quadrant. Although they had achieved interstellar travel, their limited funds and shaky economy kept them from reaching their full potential. Unfortunately, since the Galactic Alliance decided to expand its reach into their sector, things had taken a turn for the worse for them.