Page 114 of Stars on Fire

Then he wrapped his arms around her tightly as his body was wracked with soundless, heart-wrenching sobs.

‘I am the true embodiment of the wordchimera.’

Kainan spoke quietly, his gaze fixed on the expansive ship’s window that opened to the night sky above New Malindi. The moonlight had waned somewhat with Eden II’s gradual shift in the night sky. And the stars above were plumper, closer.

After Kainan’s confession, they’d knelt in the sands for what seemed like hours.

Until he’d recovered and gathered his cool.

Then he’d lifted Selene into his arms.

They’d escaped the cooling temperature outside and retreated inside the gunship.

He’d slipped into his quarters, where he found a fresh pair of pants, pulling them on before leading her by hand to the command deck.

Now, Kainan’s arms wrapped around Selene, who lay with her head on his chest.

The time on the gunship’s chrono showed it was inching towards 0300 Standard. They were inside Mirage, sprawled on the familiar king-sized couch that Kainan had pulled out of the panel on the gunship’s command deck.

He ran his hands over her skin, and she shivered, not from the cold but from his heated touch. She snuggled in closer to him, traced her lips along his jaw, moving lower to place a kiss on his chest.

‘I’m a quantum biological mess,’ Kainan continued. ‘My metanoids exist alongside my atoms and cells, giving them the ability to carry extraordinary energy. I can release them at will to cause an insane reaction. When I transmute into a flame vortex, it can spread out over great gulfs of space before returning to my form. My mind spreads over the area my atom cover and the ‘noids to control each element individually, down to single molecules. It’s a powerful but exhausting transformation that takes everything from me.’

‘Were you always this way?’

Kainan gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Nada. I’m the result of hundreds of experiments. It was no fast process; the complete mutation into becoming a chimera took years. The time needed for my body to grow and build new structures and components. My height and size are due to my appetite and body being tampered with, too, so I could massively ramp up my energy stores to aid the mutation process. Which was pure torture as my body slowly and painfully warped. The chimera cells infused in me comprise two majorly different DNA strands forcibly linked with my meta-human one. So I’m a mix of a meta-human, a flame creature from an unknown planet and a sentient high energy radioactive organism which I suspect was harvested from a hydrogen-rich nebula.’

Selene half sat up, looking at him while shaking her head in horror.

Kainan stroked her cheek to calm her distress. ‘The problem,khamila, is that I’m dying. The different DNA strands inside me are too distinct from each other. I rarely use my chimera powers because each vortex transformation kills my metanoids. It burns them off. Day to day, the foreign strands are using too much energy to remain compatible with my DNA, so they’re breaking down. They can’t regenerate fast enough, and those that remain are dying, leading to thousands of incompatible and simultaneous impacts on my body. Nothing that the so-called architects of these experiments could have known or anticipated.’

Selene pushed herself and sat up, tucking her legs underneath her.

‘Who did this to you?’ she asked, her face contorted with outrage. ‘Who are these monsters?’

Kainan flicked his eyes to the stars.

‘The Technocracy,’ he said quietly.

‘Fokk,’ she hissed. ‘How? When?’

‘Years ago. Remember I told you when we first met on Eden II that we were Kubai warriors, the Kwavi’s most elite soldiers? Eden City needed to expand. We were getting overpopulated due to taking in so many refugees from Planet Earth. We had to find a new satellite home for our people and secure passage. So we were sent out to scan for security weaknesses before our science ships, and generation arks could launch.’

‘We?’

‘The Riders as you know them. We were all under twenty-five with different years of experience, most of it together. Most of us were orphans. As I shared before, I was one too. My mother died in childbirth on the streets of Eden II. I was born premature, drug dependent and underweight. The Kwavi Elders had an orphanage. They nursed me to health, took me in, and put me through school, where I first met Kage, Riv and Zane, and later Xion, Ki’Remi, Kisan and Sax. The Elders enrolled us all in their military academy when we were seven. We were in the same warrior training class in Eden City. We did the hard yards and became the best of the Eden Guards. Which is why they entrusted us with the mission.’

Kainan paused, gathering his thoughts and memories with a sigh.

‘Our small platoon of eight was sent from Eden City to Pegasi on patrol. In a small corvette, conduct re-con in this system. I was a pilot and first lieutenant, leading the platoon. Assisted by Kage, acting as a platoon sergeant and tech specialist. Riv was our sniper and marksman. Ki’Remi, whom you’ve yet to meet, was our medic. Xion, our gunner and Zane, our logistics officer and deputy squad leader. We also had Kisan, our alien languages interpreter and Sax, our science officer.’

‘Fifty days after we left Eden City and a few days past the galaxy borders, we were caught in a massive asteroid storm. It hit our patrol boat real bad. We lost engines, and our shielding was toast. Kisan was seriously wounded when he fell from his crash couch during the turbulence. He broke his back, and our med bay was destroyed, so we couldn’t help him. We drifted for days, completely off course.’

‘We were totally isolated, so we had no other option but to broadcast for help. Unfortunately for us, The Technocracy had planted surveillance satellites throughout the galaxy. One of them picked up our signal. We were easily captured because we didn’t have it in us to offer any resistance. They had, at the time, more lethal weapons, more crazy tech, more superior crat soldiers.’

‘They took us to one of their dreadnoughts, called The Posteriori, meaning what comes before and after. It was essentially a giant floating experiment lab.’

‘They were elated that they now had meta-human test subjects to work with. But, so far, their efforts to breach the Milky Way and Earth were thwarted by the Iccythrians living on the farthest edge of Pegasi, where the three galaxies meet.’

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