Page 3 of Advance and Retreat (Dark Empire #6)

K alquor

Our escape is inevitable. It is also inevitable the All will defeat your puny attempts to destroy us. The All is eternal.

Dr. Cassidy Hamilton, Matara of Clan Tranis, ignored the snarling voice in her head, though her gaze was trained on its source. The gelatinous blob trembling in its small containment block slapped a few of its tentacles against the forcefield walls of its cell in frustrated defiance.

She remote-guided a tiny nanobot toward one of its many fluorescent pink eyes which studded those tentacles.

Her first impression when she’d initially seen a Dark pulled fully into her dimension had been revulsion.

The mottled black-and-gray bodies, over which pulsed red veins, oozed a clear substance, then reabsorbed it.

The tentacles had no symmetry in how they grew from its body.

The placement was haphazard, as if a toddler had stuck them on.

The round pink eyes were slashed by diagonal white pupils Cassidy had felt glowed in malevolence.

She’d lost her horror of the Darks’ appearance after a few days.

Scientific interest had replaced the squeamish urge to avoid looking at her subjects.

Scientific interest...and a deep loathing.

Her hatred for her research subjects had been brought on by the monstrousness of the creatures’ determination to annihilate every sentient being in her dimension.

The Darks despised her too. They despised the sentient beings in her universe, simply because Kalquor’s new phase technology had led to them accidentally crossing into the Darks’ home dimension.

Not even their dimension , Cassidy corrected herself. The border between dimensions.

In the first couple of weeks of their capture, she’d questioned her experimental subjects on why their parent entity, the All, had reacted so violently to the near-encroachment of one dimension’s inhabitants on theirs. The answer was as terrible as stupid, in her opinion.

The All hated other sentients simply for existing.

Lower beings must be eradicated was apparently the All’s mantra. As far as it was concerned, anything besides itself that drew breath was a lesser lifeform.

In the past few weeks, Cassidy seldom “spoke” to the Darks via the telepathy all human women had access to when it came to the hostile organisms. The Darks gave up little information when it came to the All and how it might be destroyed by the Kalquorians and Earthers determined to do so.

Vitriol and poisonous hatred were their message. Cassidy had tired of hearing it.

The Dark she currently worked on cringed as the nano it couldn’t avoid flew toward one of its eyes.

It closed it to avoid the attack, but the nano had no problem wriggling between the crinkled lid shut so tightly.

The Dark squalled in Cassidy’s head as the miniscule dot jabbed an entry point.

It quickly tunneled into the creature’s inner body to deposit a virus.

Cassidy noted the time of infection. She checked her subject’s vital signs to make sure it wasn’t close to death yet. Darks couldn’t survive in Kalquor’s gravitational pull, being unsuited to it and the planet’s atmosphere. Forcing them fully into Cassidy’s dimension brought death quickly.

Too bad we can’t yank the entire All here instead of the bits and pieces we capture. She sighed to see the Dark was closing in on the endangerment zone. Its shaking had grown pronounced in the last minute.

Her computer chimed. The nanobot, its payload delivered, had emerged from the Dark. Cassidy directed the containment field to let it out. It did so, opening a miniscule window the Dark couldn’t access.

You’ve finished. Release me from this torment.

She could have. She’d never thought of herself as a sadist, but the Dark represented utter extinction for well over two hundred known sentient species on her side of the divide. Millions had already perished thanks to the All, most notably the entire Bi’is civilization.

She rubbed her distended abdomen and felt the baby kick. Her child would be born soon. If the All had its way, he or she would die soon too.

Instead of resetting the containment so the Dark could return to its half-here, half-there existence where gravity would cease slowly crushing it, Cassidy glanced across the lab. At another table, a tall goateed Kalquorian frowned at his own containment block and experimental subject.

He wasn’t just any Kalquorian. He was no less than one of the three emperors of the Kalquorian Empire, Imdiko Egilka. A celebrated biologist in his own right, he’d joined Cassidy’s eager pursuit to find a way to eradicate the All.

She considered his intent face as he frowned at what his computer monitor told him.

Egilka was an intense man, seldom given to lightheartedness, particularly in these black days.

Had the contours of his face been any sharper, they might have rendered him unattractive.

However, the symmetry of his features suited his stark bone structure.

His intelligence and insistence on justice for the least of his people only added to the regal air unrelated to his title.

She wasn’t ashamed to admit she was awed by the formidable ruler so many tended to overlook in favor of his showier clanmates.

He appeared wrapped up in his work, lost in its complexities.

We’re so similar, like siblings separated at birth.

Cassidy wished she’d had him for a brother.

Despite his reserved personality, which often verged on coldness, she felt a kinship to him.

For Egilka at the moment, he recognized only his research.

She understood his intensity to her bones.

He was entranced by the data coming in on the Dark he’d attempted to infect with the very virus its kind had used to attack Kalquorians.

Based on older experiments carried out by the Bi’isils, the empire’s scientists had rallied to quickly develop a vaccine to fend off the deadly sickness.

Egilka had been inoculated and had nothing to fear from the strain called RCN-16.

A few thousand Kalquorians had died prior to the vaccine becoming available, but the outcome could have been much worse.

Earth II’s battle against its own virus, dramatically dubbed Dark Death, had proven more deadly to the humans on the planet and two colonies. Fortunately, researchers were making headway to treat those infected by the pathogen, and medical trials of a vaccine had begun.

Egilka’s effort to infect the Dark test subject with RCN-16 had met no success. A thorough researcher, he studied it minutely anyway and made extensive notes. He and Cassidy agreed that each defeat brought its own set of lessons and moved them closer to victory against their enemy.

I said release me, Separate! Unless you wish me to visit greater torments on the progeny you carry—

Cassidy’s subject broke off to telepathically howl as she brought it farther into her dimension, increasing its solidity.

It quaked violently, its gelatinous mass flattening to the surface of the containment floor.

When the howl became a piercing shriek, she returned it to the previous setting.

A glance at her readings showed she’d caused it no significant harm.

She’d learned just how far she could push its ability to recover from exposure to Kalquor’s gravity.

She wasn’t bothered by hurting it. She was bothered by how it didn’t upset her to hurt a living being.

It would kill every last sentient in this dimension, including my innocent child. Why should it trouble my conscience to punish it for threatening my baby?

It subsided to moans and voiced no further attempts at intimidation.

Egilka’s Dark decided to communicate in the wake of its fellow’s torture. Hurt us all you wish, Separate. Destroy us. The All continues. The All will send more, and we will be the same, for we are the All. There is no true loss.

She looked away from it to seemingly regard her own readings, but she flung a thought its way. I’ve heard you cry for the All at the brink of death. You sounded like any Separate screaming for its parent.

It paused. Then, it is painful to being cut off from myself. But it doesn’t change the fact that if a piece perishes, the All continues and is undiminished. If your child is erased, there is no one else like it. It is gone forever.

Cassidy kept her lips from curling at its smugness. If history has taught our dimension anything, it’s putting all your eggs in one basket has devastating results. When we find your weakness, we find the All’s. Just one little fatal flaw, and nothing of you is left.

I have no weakness Separates can exploit. I am the All.

You aren’t in any contact with the All. You’re a Separate yourself. Individual. Alone.

I am the All! You can’t take who I am from me!

I already have. Why else would you refer to yourself as “I”?

A com buzzed, distracting Cassidy from the Dark’s furious denials. Egilka huffed and irritably pulled his unit from his belt to check the frequency.

“Excuse me, Doctor. I need to take this,” he told her. He tapped a command to the containment holding his experimental subject, and its clamor in her skull ceased.

He left the lab, jabbering in Kalquorian, which Cassidy understood perfectly well. From the sound of it, he and his Dramok clanmate were arguing about the exploratory fleet Emperor Clajak had commissioned.

“You can’t give the Coydidak all our scientists,” he said before the door shut behind him and cut off Cassidy’s curious eavesdropping.

She chuckled, having heard a version of the debate earlier that day.

So few scientific minds were signing up for the extended Coydidak exploration, Clajak had begun to dangle incentives to convince them to undertake what would be a permanent journey.

Egilka was afraid they’d lose their best and brightest when the All’s victory wasn’t assured.