Family from Beyond the Stars, Ch. 20 (Patreon)

Ch. 20Duel in the Well

Nova had not stopped fighting since emerging from the inside of their Family warship.  Her frantically beating heart and raging emotions had helped fuel her desperation in blasting through the seemingly endless waves of Dredges all around her, but she was making mistakes.  She had even missed a few shots; at any other time she would have chastised herself for slipping from her usual perfect streak, but there was no time for such silliness now.  She could not even think about the Dredge that had gotten around her and into the ship, setting her focus onto exterminating all others that might do likewise.  She'd heard nothing of the situation inside and been unable to contact Kenny through their link.

Another wave of the abominations whirled toward her and she lifted her shuddering arms once again to decimate them before they could get any closer.  The engines thrummed and she fired staggered shots into their ranks.  Several of them blew right through the tide of monstrous creatures and impacted across the distant shape of her father's ship.  She'd been unable to do much else than graze him occasionally and her fury was fading fast.

'Kenny...' she worried, again trying to contact him, if just to know he and the Cubs were okay.

A moment or so after her onslaught resumed, the latest tide rushed off and away, leaving the better half of itself to drift in smoldering pieces before they were captured by the black hole's well and rushed away to be swallowed up.  She knew she was running on empty here.

‘Nova!’ came a voice then in her mind.  Her eyes went wide and she grabbed hold of the voice and its owner's empathic signature.

'Kenny!'  She nearly sobbed in relief as she felt his familiar mind meld once more with hers.  She embraced him psychically.  'I was terrified for you.  What happened?!'

'Let's...just say I'm gonna need a hand with a few things going forward, assuming we survive today.'  His voice was tired and pained but he still managed to make some kind of a joke, or at least so implied his tone of voice.  She looked out across their link, discovering with shock that he had been wounded.  He waved away her worry and anger.  'It's just a hand, Nova.  How is it out there?'

She melded their senses more, letting him look briefly through her own eyes in order to try and not let her emotions overpower her.  Kenny was right.  A hand could be replaced.  'Not well.  Father has been causing massive damage everywhere he goes.  Our allies are hard-pressed to fend him off.  It's been all I can do to deal with the Dredge waves and damage his ship while his attention is elsewhere.'

'I believe in you!' Kenny sent, voice stronger now.  'The cubs do too!  We can win this, Nova!'

'You give me courage and strength, my Mate,' she sighed joyously despite her exhaustion.

'It was always there, Nova,' Kenny told her.  'No one can beat you.  No one can beat us when our Family is together.  Now, let's kick your father's ass and send him to hell, so we can all wake up out of this nightmare!'

Nova's light surged to its previous heat within her and she dug deep, finding reserves she had not been sure she might still possess, and planted her anchored feet powerfully again.  She lifted her four arms, aiming again.  'You've a warrior's heart after all!' she snarled to her little Earthling.

Again, Nova Battle-Queen roared and so too did her weapons as she fired openly  without worry to distract her.  Dredges converged on her once more but melted away beneath her frenzy and joyful rage.  There weren't nearly as many now, lacking the coordination they once had somehow.  Her father's control was slipping; his precious ship had also not escaped so far from damage.  She pushed harder, watching a line of explosions dance across the Dreadnought, knocking out several weapon placements and helping alleviate the pressure from a beleaguered Voyager ship.

This had to end.

'Commanders!' she called through the link then to the remaining Officers.  'Fall back and form a firing line.  We finish this now!'

'Yes my Queen!' responded their combined voices in unison.  Engines flared and warcries resounded through the link as they peeled away and out of range of her father's cannons.

All seemed to take a predatory breath.  Then, with a roar, Nova unloaded everything she had directly at the hulking dark shape of her Sire, cutting through the remaining ranks of Dredges that sought to shield him with their warped bodies.  It was Lord Darken's one last desperate line of defense as he sensed, in his distant lonely cockpit, that he was for the first time in years truly in danger.

Invigorated and inspired by her orders, the other Voyagers returned to the fray, forming a firing line on either side of her warship.  Together, they repaid Darken for everything he had ever taken from them.  Gunfire opened up in a thunderous volley from the four remaining vessels that had come to fight alongside their Queen.  Warriors raged as they fired shot after shot, ship-mounted cannons unloaded their full arsenal upon the seemingly dumbstruck vessel.  The tides were turning at last.

***

Inside the ship, Lord Darken raged and was beginning to panic as flying sparks and searing jets of flame coursed and flew all around him.  He saw the ship was breaking apart around him.  The command module for the Dredges flickered before his eyes before exploding; the drive core dedicated to it had suffered a catastrophic failure.

Moments later, yet another ship-shaking quake covered him in sparks and nearly blasted him from his seat.  Outside, his army of remotely controlled undead creations were now lifelessly floating through space.  Before his furious eyes, he saw all of them being sucked gradually towards the black hole at the far end of the solar system.

He had only one last chance at victory.  Blinded by his rage, he disconnected himself from his doomed vessel and raced along the passageways to the hangar bay, where his personal armory awaited.  Some things you truly had to do yourself...

***

The impacts and explosions caused by their latest volley shots had struck her father's vessel broad-side.  The fleet paused, nearly struck dumb as they saw the damage they had caused.  They truly could win this fight!

'Do not let up!' roared Nova to her followers, shaking them out of their reverie.  'Open your hearts, bare your claws!  This monster denied the Light, slaughtered our people, murdered our King!  Give him everything you have!  Drown him in the Light of a people forged of purpose and will!  End!  This!  Now!'  She opened up all barrels upon the flagging dreadnought, sending a curtain of death and flame racing across the space between them.

The others followed suit moments later, following her example with a thunderous warcry.  'FOR THE LIGHT!'.  The last salvo was brighter than any other, a solid wall of streaming bolts, blasts, cannon shots, and whistling projectiles that struck the ship of their oldest and greatest enemy.  Explosions tore through and across Lord Darken's vessel.

Over and over they fired until many spent the very last of their ammunition.  They had to be sure.  This had to end.  A moment later, as their weapons lowered at last, sizzling and smoking in the frozen void, the biggest explosion yet ripped across the system, sending shockwaves that actually pushed everything back, almost blinding those looking directly at their target.

Just as he had done before to one of theirs, massive rips and tears spread across that dark, titanic hull before their countless glowing eyes.  More and more explosions raced across Nova's field of vision.  Gouts of oxygen-less flame and bursts of shrapnel gushed up and out of the command ship.

It began to break apart as the drive cores started to implode, hull erupting more and more as the destruction spread.  The sight caused her to finally draw back her own weapons, engines hissing and glowing at the barrel-tips.

Everyone paused and stared, disbelievingly, as Lord Darken's invincible ship careened wildly out of control.  His engines tried to flare to life but they couldn't respond in time.  Slowly, ever so slowly, it began to list towards the black hole beyond, trapped now in its gravitational pull.  A second later, it split in half, both sections breaking away from one another and then continuing their slow descent into the black hole.

It was over.

Or so they thought.

As the battle abruptly dropped to a complete calm as all present watched the slow drift of the dreadnought towards the maw of the black hole, there was a flashing of warning signs of another energy source emitting from the doomed ship.  Cannons were brought to bear again but whatever it was, sailing straight up from the crippled rear of their enemy's vessel, was too fast to be targeted.  Nova's internal scope zoomed in as much as possible.

Her eyes went wide in alarm.

Rocket boosters attached to his back, Lord Darken flew through the void like an armored bird of prey, faster than any ship that she had ever seen.  His faceless helmet reflected the flashes of his imploding ship all around him.  On each of his four robotic arms bristled a glowing sword blade.  He zipped and dived back and forth, as many as six separate engines attached to the back of the largest power suit of armor her people had ever designed.  She felt his intent from there.

She turned to yell at one of the Voyagers, about to tell it to flee right as Darken whirled up and above it on a trail of glowing blue jet trails.  Then he descended like a thunderbolt, leaving nothing but a glowing afterimage of his passing.  All four sword-blades flashed as he passed the battered, golden hull.

In the same second he had struck, he had zipped past and away again, leaving a pair of glowing, molten-edged slash marks carved into the ship.  Those lines began to rapidly expand before erupting into pillars of flame, sending soldiers attached on the side flying.  The explosions rocked the whole ship, sending it careening off to the side and almost striking another.

The remaining Warriors held on tightly to their ship as it slowly righted itself before a sudden, hollow boom resounded.  All eyes, both on and watching the Voyager, turned.  Darken stood there, looming over his own kind like a dark titan.  Their roars filled the link as they turned to do frenzied, terrified battle with their greatest of foes, but it was all for naught.

Almost as if frozen in a dream, Nova watched her sire carve through the defenders on the ship’s hull.  His four whirling arms deflected and parried every blow or shot aimed at him, bissecting, decapitating, or piercing through armored warriors as if waving reeds in the air.  He paused after barely a few seconds of bloodletting, faced the side of the ship he had just wiped clean of defenders, and attached cut another, smaller hole in the armored plating.  One of his four blades vanished for a second and he placed his returned paw against the hole he had made.  A second later, Nova saw what he intended.

‘MONSTER!’ she screamed through the void at him as he planted a thermal saturation charge inside of the ship’s vent nearest him.  Darken’s mocking laughter was his only reply as he reformed his blade and boosted away from the Voyager.  Moments later, an explosion almost as mighty as the one that destroyed his own craft filled the battlefield with light and muted vibrations of destruction.  Fire and debris began to blossom from every side of the doomed ship.

Before their horrified eyes, the ship listed badly more and more.  Darken flashed up and away from it, avoiding volleys of more blasts as if they were not even there, and drew a bead on the crippled Voyager.  Another blade vanished and he formed a massive cannon, took aim, and opened fire lazily.

More explosions rocked the golden, torn hull.  One final salvo and the warlord finally sailed away.  For a second, the ship drifted silent, alarms blaring mutedly through the link, then, with a hollow boom, a second Voyager erupted into a ball of exploding shrapnel that drifted slowly away and was eventually swallowed by the black hole's gravity well.

Nova and her brethren roared in anguish and rage, directing their unified but flagging weaponry onto trying to gun down the murderous warrior that raced amongst them.

But Darken was once again on the move, evading everything they threw at him.  He zipped off and away, faster than could be believed, engine wings roaring at his back, as he targeted yet another ship.  Gunfire exploded all around him, none of it able to so much as graze him for his speed.

He slashed again and took off an entire cannon arm from the next ship.  More explosions tore through the vessel as he seemed intent on carving his enemies to smoldering pieces by hand.  He was toying with them, picking them off now at his leisure.  He was truly the Destroyer in name.

Nova trained her weapons on him, disengaging herself from the ship's engines to allow them to recover and unloading her personal weapons on each pair of conjoined arms.  She settled her sights on her murderous Sire as he proceeded to pick off the surviving ships seemingly one after the other, disabling them as easily as he might have blown them to pieces with his ship.  The power, speed, and control he had were terrifying.  But she was beyond fear now.

She waited for him to pass another ship and aimed just in front of him.  She fired.  The explosion should have struck him directly.  However, it did not.  Lord Darken’s engine wings slowed and dropped away before his entire shape blurred in the same instant he was about to rush into the oncoming projectiles fired by his daughter.  When the explosive rounds cleared, there was no sign of him.  He had vanished from sight, only to reappear several hundred feet from where he had been.  His engine wings roared back to life and he resumed his warpath.

"How in the hell does he do that?!" Kenny asked over her comms, sounding equally frustrated and scared.  "That teleportation crap is getting really old!"

Nova could not help but agree.  Wordlessly, she readjusted her sights and tried, once again, to gun her father down.  As before, upon sensing the attack, Darken's engines would falter off and he would blur out of sight, leaving the shots to explode right where he had been.  Every time he would vanish he reappeared elsewhere to resume his brutal path of destruction.

There was seemingly no discernable pattern to how to stop him.  Any more of this and he would take apart the whole fleet, single-handedly.  Even without a ship and an army, Lord Darken was going to succeed in wiping out his own people.  And then he was going to come for her and the cubs.  She fired again and again, trying blanket-spread shots to at least slow him down.  Nothing seemed to be working.

***

It was Kenny that noticed something at last, even as Nova continued to hammer away with her weapons outside in her frantic efforts to halt her father's murderous rampage.  He had only suspected it the third or fourth time, especially hard to tell in the darkness around them, but, even as Nova tried to do her best with what she could, Kenny kept his eyes wide open.  At the exact point that Darken would vanish and then reappear a ways off, the same telltale ripple effect, just like whenever their ship would enter or exit slipspace, would occur.  The range of it varied but once he had latched his sight onto it, it was not difficult to pinpoint.

Once more, Darken blurred out of the way of a furious barrage of cannon fire from the ship he had been racing towards.  Kenny strained his eyes furiously to spot the second distortion.  He saw it then, directly above the next to-be victims of the warlord’s onslaught.

"Nova!" he cried through the comms.  She jerked in surprise.  "Above them!  Aim above Steel’s ship!"

She seemed confused, at first, but, trusting her Mate's judgment, she followed his instruction, casting her gaze towards the Voyager in question.  She saw what Kenny had in an instant, bringing her weapons to bear directly in line with that spot.  She fired a volley.  Lord Darken reemerged at the same instant that her shots detonated right where he was hovering.  The dark armored figure was abruptly sent spiraling off, wing engines sputtering and several of them trailing bluish smoke.

Kenny wasted no more time.  "Steel!" he shouted, linking their ship's systems back up to the Grey-Mane.  "Pull the others back!  You can't fight something as fast as him!"

'Destroyer-Bane!' objected the Veteran Officer.  'We must see this fight to the end!'

"You'll only end up getting yourself killed!" he argued back.  "Darken is too fast for you.  But not for us.  Get your remaining people out of here."

'Do it,' came Nova's firm voice a second later.  'Listen to my Mate.'

There was a tense silence before Steel replied at last.  'Acknowledged.'  As one, the three remaining Voyagers, several limping badly, began to gun their engines away from the battlefield.  It was a mercy that no more of them had been destroyed.

Nova turned her eyes firmly onto the field of debris that laid before them.  With the Voyagers hurriedly speeding away before vanishing into slipspace, it was just them left here.  Kenny wanted to beg her to leave with them, to leave Darken here.  Without a ship, he would have no chance of following.  But he sensed that she would not.

For her, this would never end if she did not do so with her own four paws.  She would always wonder, what if, and so he would continue to haunt her steps, to plague her nightmares.  It had to end, here and now.  And he wasn't about to leave her behind.  They would see this through to the end, together, as a family.  Their cubs shared their purpose.

"Keep your head on a swivel!" said Kenny through the comms.  "He's got to be out here somewhere."

Nova growled in response.  Kenny and the cubs turned their eyes to the multiple displays around them, trying desperately to spot a sign of the warlord before he could sneak up on them unaware.  It was Chandler who yowled out a warning first.  Kenny saw him too, barely half a second later.

"Nova!  Behind you!"

His Mate spun angrily, bringing her weapons to bear right as the armored demon sped at her, bursting out from behind concealment of a large piece of floating armor plating.  His one, furious eye glowed with a cold light and his four bladed arms trained directly onto his exposed daughter.  His wings on his back were not all fully functioning but they still afforded him incredible speed.

Only Nova's battle-trained instincts saved her from being sliced in two.  She activated her own boosters and jumped up and over the flight path of her Sire.  He passed by underneath her and she aimed ahead of where he would be, firing a furious salvo safely in front of the warship but intended to blow Darken to pieces.  Again his wing engines faltered and he faded from view, slipping away into his own internal rupture.  Nova landed back on the hull of the ship and again the game of hide and destroy resumed.

Darken appeared from their right, slashing with two bladed arms as soon as he drew within range.  Nova blocked one with a cannon, deflecting most of the impact at the cost of her own weapon, and dodged the other but barely.  A thin, angrily smoldering line was carved across her chest as Darken again whizzed away at top speed.

She eyed her firearms then, some hidden plan desperately forming.  To Kenny's shock,  Nova then boosted up and away from the ship to land slightly away on a large piece of debris that floated out in the open.  She lifted her remaining firearm and then unloaded it and the remnants of the other from her conjoined arms, allowing them to float away from her as she ejected them entirely.  She did the same with her extra ammunition as well, forming a small cloud of floating capsules and weaponry around her.

"Nova?" he sent to her.  "What are you doing?  You're too exposed there!"

She ignored him.  Instead, Nova kneeled down, bowing her head.  She almost looked as if she was praying.  He desperately tried to keep his frayed nerves calm; she knew what she was doing, he hoped.  He returned his attention to looking out for Darken's latest charge.  She must have been counting on his mindless dedication to eradicating her first before taking the ship.  Sure enough, off in the distance, he saw a blazing trail of light not too far off.

Nova's father zipped and dodged between various pieces of debris and shredded metal before he settled to a rest facing them all.  Nova lay between them and her Sire.  Her head slowly lifted, gazing directly across at him.  Their eyes met in a ferocious stare as Nova slowly straightened back up.  Her arms flexed together and she formed both of her own swords.  She crossed them in front of her, adopting a warrior's stance.

The message was clear.  Nova wanted one last stand; he would not take his prize without killing her first.  This fight had to end.  Darken knew that too.  The only problem was that her father was blinded by his rage, his single-minded determination to win.  He only knew how to charge forward.

Darken whirled his four blades around himself and then gunned his engines hard.  He accelerated so fast that it actually caused a visible distortion as his wings roared to full power.  Faster and faster he streaked across the distance toward Nova who refused to even budge.  What on Earth could she be thinking?!

Her father outweighed her, and could easily outclass her in terms of strength and martial frenzy.  Couple that with his dead-head charge and she had no way to parry or stop him in a direct, head to head confrontation.  She had to know that!

Nova glanced once back over her shoulder at the ship, seemingly at Kenny himself.  A single explosive round floated past her helmet right then.  From behind her visor, Kenny could have sworn he saw her wink.  A mental image blazed across their link to him.  Her plan dawned upon him in a rush of understanding.  He grabbed hold of a toggle, hand sweaty as he lined things up.  This had to be perfectly timed.

She returned her gaze squarely forward.  Her father was closing hard and fast.  His blades drew back, preparing to cut her in two.  Closer.  Closer!

At the very last possible second, Nova jumped.  Her boosters fired all at once, making her go once again straight up above her rage-blinded father as he sliced at and then rushed past where she had been.  Directly into the mini asteroid field of floating, live ammunition.

'Now!' howled Nova through the comms.

Kenny pulled the trigger on the controls he had hold of.  The auxiliary cannon he was directing roared as it fired a single round right where Darken was to be.  The warlord saw it at the last possible second but was going too fast to stop himself.  The wings died out and he tried to warp away, a breath too slow.  The cannon shot struck the leading piece of the improvised minefield Nova had left behind.

The resulting explosion nearly rivaled that of Darken's ship being destroyed, at least in terms of the proximity and fury of it.  Darken's armored form careened through the cloud of flame and smashed directly into the wall of debris ahead of him.  Sparks flew and blue smoke trailed from the ruptured wing engines on his back even as he frantically tried to right himself.

Darken whirled around, armor smoldering, wings broken and useless.  His blades lifted with a vengeance and he turned to look at the ship, barely a few dozen meters away.  His single eye narrowed.  He gathered himself and leaped right at them!

A flaming blur smashed into him from the side.  Darken's reflexes saved him from being struck by Nova's blades, crossing his four, larger, sickly purple-emitting weapons before him at the last second and locking him into a whirling, spinning grapple against his daughter's orange and pink swords.  They roared at one another as they whirled out of control.  They only broke apart as they were about to collide with another massive piece of shredded ship hull, both leaping just before impact.

Kenny's heart was in his throat as he watched both warriors pick themselves back up, and squared off, at least fifty meters away from the ship.  The final duel.  This had been what Nova had been planning.  The minefield, the cannon, all of it her desperate, cunning tactical mind having concocted just for this one last, blade to blade challenge.  She wanted to fight Darken openly, to beat him on her terms and prove to herself that he was not invincible.

Kenny and the cubs could only watch as the combatants drew themselves to their full heights.  As the black hole whirled on in the background, slowly swallowing up all evidence of this mother of all battles, Father and Daughter prepared for their final showdown.

***

Nova rushed at her father, both bladed arms leading the way.  She came in hard and fast, aiming low to use his greater height and size potentially against him.  She roared a challenge at him, forcing a link between her mind and his.  'Murderer!' she snarled at him as she hacked and slashed again and again, blades always turned away by his whirlwind of larger swords and purely mechanical limbs.  'Oath-Breaker!  Betrayer!  Honorless!'

Lord Darken laughed at her in his haunting, cold, passionless voice.  'What use is Honor, my daughter?' he taunted, deflecting yet another swing.  'What use are Oaths, the lies that bind us to the weak?  This was always to have been your inheritance, daughter of Chieftains and Conquerers: you could have shared in this power of mine!  You once knew this!  You were my pride, my best trained soldier!  You allowed yourself to be blinded, deluded, lied to by the Usurper.  To be polluted with his weakness...  How sad...'

'What power is that then?' she taunted right back, not rising to his words.  'Look around you, my Sire!'  They locked blades again and she gestured around them with a jerk of her head.  'Your fleet of enslaved servants?  Destroyed!  Your legendary ship?  Gone!  Our people, the ones you turned to your own dark, sickening designs!  Gone, finally to their rest in the Light!  You have lost!'

His return snarl nearly deafened her.  Using his greater weight, he bore down on her, pressing her with all four blades slowly inching closer to her.  She began to slide backwards, straining to match his strength.  'A true warrior can always recover if his will is strong enough!' he howled insanely.  'I will reclaim the loyalty of our people, even if I have to rip your precious Light from their eyes!  I will turn your cubs, my grandchildren, into my greatest weapons yet!  They will lead my armies upon countless worlds, help me to consume countless stars!  I am the greatest, the strongest, the purist warrior in all the universe!'

Nova's paws planted themselves firmly, ceasing her slow backwards slide.  Flame blazed within her eyes, across her flanks, and through her limbs, lending her strength she had never known before.  Blue light shone brighter than ever from her as she matched Darken strength for strength.  'You are nothing...' she said then, voice soft and surprisingly gentle.  Darken blinked in confusion at her tone, her refusal to become like him once more, to allow her emotions to overpower her.  Emotions made him strong.  Something else was making her stronger.  'You have nothing.  No one.  I would pity you, Father.'

'You would...pity me?' Darken demanded.  His voice became shrill and high, piercing her mind and ears.  He pressed her harder, trying to shove her back and down.  His strength was absolute!  She refused to budge.  'You!  Pity!  Me?!'

'I would.' Nova repeated then.  One paw lifted and she stepped forward.  Darken felt himself slide back a pace.  Their eyes met again, shock meeting a stoic rage that surpassed his own like a solitary flame before a blazing sun.  'But there is no room in my heart for you anymore.  I used to think my Hatred toward you would be the weapon I used to kill you.  But now?  I am not afraid of you anymore.  You took my Mate.'  She stepped forward again.  'You took my home!'  Again she stomped forward.  Darken's arms shuddered as his blades were pushed back closer to him.  'You have haunted my cubs since their birth!'  She shoved back, the Light of her eyes empowering her in a way that Darken could never understand.  'But worst of all...'

Darken was pushed back, sliding and stumbling as Nova's blades lashed up and knocked his four swords wide and away.  He stared down at his daughter in shock.  Desperately he struck with his tail, trying to trip her up or distract her as she kept talking.  Pain pierced through him as she flicked her wrist down in a single movement, as casually as waving away a fly.  His tail floated past him, severed cleanly in two.

'But worst of all...' Nova repeated at him, resuming speaking casually, her form seeming bigger than she ever had before.  'You.  Hurt.  MY!  KENNY!'  She screamed at the top of her lungs and charged at her father, blades slicing for his face as she roared her loudest, most furious yell ever.

But Darken had one last trick to play.  Activating his personal slipspace generator, he saw the rage and anger of his daughter flash across her eyes, mere milliseconds before her weapons would have taken off his head, as his form wavered insubstantially before he vanished from sight and reality.  Once again he had fled back into the folds of slipspace to escape defeat.

He timed the second charge immediately after the first faded, swirling around to just behind where she would still be in the miniature tunnel of distorted spacetime.  Time moved slower in slipspace, allowing him to enjoy the shock and brilliance of the maneuver.  His blades swung even as he dropped back out of the rupture.  Reality swirled back into view, his swords aiming right for her exposed back!  He had won!

Nova, however, had learned more than just to stand against her fears.  She saw her father slip away into his warp and flash away.  But she didn't wait for him to launch his attack again.  As she felt the slipspace rupture open behind her, she raised her swords to intercept the blow she knew was coming.

Darken's swords hammered against hers, crossed over her back and head.  She looked back at him over her shoulder, meeting his utterly shocked expression with one of cold fire.  'You never did know how to learn a new trick,' she growled at him.  Then she spun, boosters firing to add momentum and speed to her attack.  Both swords slashed up and across her father's armored form, not aiming for his chest or his face this time.

The Destroyer staggered back several times in shock.  Pain blazed through him on all sides, making his vision fade and flicker as his brain struggled to comprehend what she had done.  She had predicted his attack!  She had parried his downwards strike!  She had...  Had she beaten him?

No!  She couldn't!  It was not possible!

Darken lumbered forward, lifting his blades once again.  He would kill her!  He would take his grandchildren as hostages!  He would conquer the universe as had always been his destiny!

Nova did not even try and block more than one of his swords with her own, almost as if the gesture was needless and required no real effort to do so.  Only one.  Because it was the only arm he had left.  Darken saw one of his three other missing limbs float past his vision then.  Sparks flew from the straight, savage cut that had sheared the superior metal arm from his body right at the shoulder.

With the shock of her literally disarming him finally having registered, Nova roared and lifted one sword high and back.  'For my Family!' she snarled right into his face, right as her arm thundered forward.  The double-edged, glowing blade seemed to nearly ignite with flame before its dual-pair of tips plunged into Darken's armored chest and through it.  Her fists met his cuirass as the edges of the swords burst out of his back.

Darken jerked in shock as he was impaled.  He looked down at the sizzling edges of the wound, felt the inferno of agony coursing through him as the blades cauterized and incinerated every inch of flesh they had cut.  Blood and ash burst forth from his muzzle, spraying across the interior of his helmet, partially obscuring his daughter.

'I lost?' he wondered aloud, genuinely sounding shocked.

Nova met his eyes with a cold, dispassionate gaze.  'You lost long ago, Father,' she told him.  'When you would rather sit alone in the dark than be with your family.  Go be with Mother in the Light.  She died because of your war.  And now your war has cost you everything.   You can explain what you've done to her in the Light, if you even end up there.  That shall be your Judgment.'  She made to pull the sword out.

Darken's eye hardened and, even mortally injured, he raised himself up as if still trying to fight.  'No!' he howled at her.  His last failsafe.  Death before the dishonor of defeat.  That was the way.  The front panel of his chest armor, the part of it not still being slowly turned to ash by her solar-heated swords, opened wide before her.  His blackened heart thudded solidly, impaled and covered with ugly stained wires.  Before Nova's eyes, it began to beat faster and faster.  Glowing red light streamed out of it from beneath its metal cage of implants.  'You!  Die!  Too!  I never lose!'

Nova tried to stagger back, to remove her arm, but Darken lashed out and grabbed hold of her by the wrist, pushing her blades even deeper into himself as his ticking time bomb of a heart prepared to go nuclear.

Kenny screamed in the ship as he saw and heard what was happening through Nova's eyes and ears.  "NOVA!"

Desperately, Nova jerked back on her trapped arm, slicing the one holding her with her second.  She staggered back as Darken, now armless but with his chest now glowing so brightly that it obscured nearly his whole upper body in its ominous radiance, roared again.

'WE!  DIE!  TOGETHER!  I NEVER L~!'

His final words were cut off as he exploded.  There was no other word for it.  One second he was there, standing with his chest flashing faster and faster, brighter and brighter.  The next?  All of reality seemed slowed by the equivalent of a star going supernova with no warning.  Nova had only enough time to disengage and eject her swords, forming her double-armed shield in front of her the exact moment the conflagration reached her.

The strength of it would have decimated an entire frigate, the equivalent of a drive core imploding without the ship's hull to contain the blast.  Nova went flying at nearly supersonic speed away from the battlefield.  Kenny and the cubs watched her rocket off, armor and shields sparking nearly fit to burst.  They had been able to absorb enough of the blast to not also still kill her.  The forward momentum helped mitigate the rest, but just barely.

Farther and farther Nova sailed as if thrown by an angry God.  Kenny's eyes went wide with horror as he realized she was flying straight towards the black hole.  He gunned the engines nearly flat, making their vessel leap forwards with several halting lurches as they broke more and more barriers of resistance as they desperately attempted to catch up.

Nova herself was just then blearily shaking her head to clear the fog from it.  Her armor readout was nearly critical, her weapon deployment system completely fried.  Her plated sides were blackened and scorched.  She tried to get a sense of her bearings but she was moving too fast.  Glancing back she saw the black hole right behind her and steadily getting closer. She frantically hammered down onto her boosters, to slow her momentum before she sailed right into the maw of the universal erase-all function.

They sputtered and coughed at her command.  She smashed onto the prompt with all her might and hopes.  At the very last second, the boosters exploded in a massive burst of sparks and propulsion.  Her forward head on pace was pushed up rather than simply forward.  This resulted in her, instead of just continuing her massive acceleration with no interruptions, slamming into another piece of floating dark metal plating.  She rebounded off of it and slammed into another lower down.  She was nearly stunned by the impacts but she had stopped moving so fast.

Arms shaking, she rose up, and noticed that, far off but steadily drawing nearer, Kenny was speeding toward her location in the warship.  She smiled, exhaustion and pain warring against the relief she felt of his and the Cubs’ safety, then noticed that everything around her was also moving in the same direction.  Turning, she saw the black hole close.  Far too close.  Her heart sunk as she felt that pulling sensation that all the universe had learned to fear.

She was caught in the well.

Nova surged slowly up to her feet, desperately forcing every screaming muscle block in her body to respond.  She reached for a handhold above her and hauled herself up, climbing as high as she might until the piece evened out in its rotations and she could stand straight up and start to run across it.  She was racing away from a black hole, on foot, with damaged armor and no working gear.  Things could not be worse!

In the distance but rapidly closing in, she saw Kenny and the cubs still racing toward her.  She looked around her, behind her, trying to gauge distance, time, and the gravitational effect growing steadily stronger the closer she and her surroundings were pulled into its endless crushing blackness.  She turned and bellowed at them.  'NO!'

The ship halted, engines flaring, as Kenny threw his weight back on the controls at the shock of her command.  He stared, open eyed and mouthed at his Mate as she kept running across various pieces of destroyed ships and machinery.  "What...?" he whimpered out.  He felt the slight pull on the controls, the remotes vibrating in his grip before he hauled back on them more and they reversed back just out of the well’s pull.  He looked up again.  Nova was still moving but she was steadily being drawn farther toward the black hole.  "Nova?!"  His voice broke as he sobbed before he tightened his mouth and snarled in desperation.  "I'm going to come get you!"

'NO KENNY!' Nova sent him again.  'The pull is too strong here!  You can still get away!  If you come any closer, you'll be trapped in the well too!'

"I don't care about that!" screamed Kenny, leaning forward over the controls, tear-streaked eyes staring out beyond the ship to what the cameras were showing him was going on outside.  "I don't want to live without you!"

'KENNY!' cried Nova, her voice heavy with emotion.  Anger, sorrow, fear...resolve.  'You cannot endanger our family like this!  You are all they have left!  Left of me!  Left of their other Father.  You all must get out of here!  You have to live.'  Her gaze softened up at them.  'Please, Kenny.  For me.'

Kenny's hand shook on the controls.  The cubs looked up at him in alarm, in terror, in mortified sorrow.  They couldn't believe what they were hearing.  He wished he couldn't either.  What she was asking him to do…

"Nova, there has to be a way!  There has to be an answer!"

'If there was, I still would tell you to go.  It is too dangerous!'

"The cubs need you!  You're their mother; they NEED you!"

'They have a wonderful father, who will love them as much as I ever did.  And more.  You left behind your whole world for them, my Mate.  No one could love them more than you.'

"I need you!" he cried, tears streaming down his cheeks.  He felt like he could just reach out and grab her paw, lift her up out of there by hand.  She felt so close and yet the farthest they had ever been away from one another since they had first met.  "Nova!"

Nova put her eyes forward.  Her heart, already sinking like the setting sun, reached the horizon.  She was looking at the last piece of running space.  She had run out of time.  That had been what all of this was.  She had known she was doomed.  She just had to keep running long enough.  Just to say it.

'Goodbye, my love.  My Kenny.'

She mustered all her remaining strength for one last jump.  She had to get just a little bit father, reach just a tiny bit more out toward them.  To steal with her very paw the last second she got to be with her family.  With him.

She jumped.  Her boosters exploded to life one last time, one last glorious roar as she propelled herself forward through space just as her last platform fell away beneath her.  She looked back behind her into the bottomless nothingness, smiling.  The chase...was over.  It was finally over.  She turned her eyes up to the stars, to see their sparkling radiance one last time, to see them as he had taught her to.  Her eyes instead went wide.

'KENNY NO!'

The warship blazed toward her at full speed.  Through the link, she saw his deadset determined expression.  The cubs matched it on all sides of him as they got within the very last inclement of distance of salvageable momentum before being trapped in the well of gravity around them.  As the engines now roared their loudest in reverse, the front of the ship opened wide.

A golden beam reached out slowly toward her, the slowest moving thing she had ever seen.  Tractor beams had a relatively short reach.  Would they be too close?  How could he be so foolish?!  How could he endanger himself, the cubs, all for her?!

“NOVA!" screamed her Mate, her Earthling Mate.  "TAKE!  MY!  HAND!"

She saw it in the tractor beam.  She saw Kenny physically reaching out for her, to lift her out of the darkness she had always been fated to fall into.  She had always doubted the Light, at heart.  She wanted to believe in it.  But she had been her Father's daughter.  She had doubted its truth.  She had felt its warmth but always wondered if it was less because of that than what others got to feel.  She always wondered if she didn't love Brighten as much as she should have, if she was even able to do so, if there was some failing in her that prevented her to return the love he gave her.  She had always feared falling back into the dark and thus it held her back.

She had yearned for the Light so many times but been afraid to fully reach out and accept it.  She knew the reality; real life wasn't a fantasy.  There were no happy endings.  The truest experiences of actual joy, real happiness, came to her when she looked into the stars.  Imagining the endless worlds out there, beyond the horizon, past where even slipspace could go.  To constellations never before seen.  To see things no one else ever had, meet peoples she had never heard of.  To fall in love with one.  One utterly perfect one.

Nova had always reached for the Light, believing in it in her own way.  Her love for Brighten, even though it had been true, paled to the love she always wanted to experience.  The love of the unknown, of the unexpectedly beautiful.  The love of something...alien.

Kenny.

"NOVA!  COME ON!  TAKE IT! REACH FOR MY HAND!" her Mate cried again.

Kenny!

"REACH!"

'Kenny...'  She smiled, tears streaming from her eyes as she saw a sun blaze to light behind the mental image of him emerging from the golden beam that reached ever toward her.  She saw the Light.  It was life itself, the utter summation of everything in creation that made one utterly, truly at peace.  It was love.  It was fire and passion and warm embraces that melded body and mind as one.  She saw it, at last.  She saw Him.

"NOVA!"