He nodded. "&alon… we need your help. You have to join forces with us again hUen-dE; that's the only way any of us will survive this. We have to attack the Vengeance and do enough damage to disable hUen-dE's ability to use the Sacred Blade. If you can help us do that, and help the rebel ships escape, we'll be able to survive even if the Lodestars are fired."

"No no no!" &alon yelled. She turned to me. "You can't let them fire the big bad weapon, Daddy Genneth! Everybody will die!"

"We can't let the Lodestars be fired," I said.

"No shit," Tal said, "we'll be in the line of fire."

"No, it's about Mr. Klay-Oh!"

"No, it's not that," I said, replying to Tal. "EUe already knows this, but… there's a dead god inside my planet. If the Lodestars are fired, the Darkness will be able to consume that god's power."

"And then it'll spread everywhere!" &alon said.

"And then it will spread everywhere," I said. "We want to avoid that no matter what."

"What you've seen?" EUe asked. "Have things gotten worse?"

I sighed. "Oh, you have no idea."

V chirped. "Perhaps this has something to do with the two capital ships that were recently shot down?"

EUe nodded. "Yes." He turned back to me. "Genneth, I assume you're aware that someone or something from one of your planet's nearby cities attacked and destroyed two Vyx capital ships with some kind of energy weapon?"

"Yes," I replied, "&alon told me it was because of the Darkness."

EUe's tail feathers stuck out, wings fluttering in shock. "W-What!?"

&alon trembled in fear. "Daddy, tell Mr. Woowee-bird that the Darkness is waking up! We hafta get out of here now or everything will be over, forever!"

"&alon says the Darkness is waking up," I explained. "We have to get out of here as quickly as possible."

"By the Herald," EUe said, "I hadn't realized the situation had already deteriorated this badly."

"So… what can you guys do?" Jules asked.

EUe turned to face her. "Oh, who is this?"

"EUe," I said, gesturing at Jules with my hand, "I'd like to introduce you to my daughter, Jules. The little guy standing next to her is her younger brother, Rayph."

There was a moment of silence as EUe simply stared at them. There was a rush of painful emotions in his eyes. "I have one trick left up my sleeve," he said. "hUen-dE thinks she still has control over all the capital ships' command centers. What she doesn't know is that I've asked the Shiplords sympathetic to our cause to pretend as if they are still loyal to hUen-dE."

"How so?" Alahumadwod asked.

"We've been letting hUen-dE think that the rebels are attacking only through mutiny," V said, "whether it's taking control of fighter modules that have already been deployed, or rising up against hUen-dE's loyalists within the capital ships themselves."

EUe raised his beak to the ceiling. "But, on my signal, all of that will change. What hUen-dE doesn't know is that all of the fighters our capital ships have been deploying are actually on our side. On my word, and they'll drop the façade, and the Loyalists will find themselves surrounded on all sides."

"You can't have come up with all this just now," I said.

EUe twittered mischievously. "Oh, I didn't. The plan was already in the works. It turns out that V and I were just what the smoldering rebel movement needed to bring everything to a head."

"Then why haven't these maneuvers already been implemented?" Qua'loc asked.

EUe nodded decisively. "That was my doing." He turned to me. "I've seen the data. Unless there are a couple legions' worth of closeted rebel sympathizers that have been holding out on us, hUen-dE's militant loyalists even number those who support the cause of Vyxit freedom. The Rebel council has been planning this surprise attack not because it's guaranteed to work, but because it's the only strategy that isn't guaranteed to fail."

"It was always—inevitably, inescapably—going to h-have to be done by ambush and surprise," Twiggy said. "N-Neither side would be able to survive an extended, long, drawn-out battle."

"Yes," EUe said, "which is why I'm praying &alon will aid us. As crazy as it might sounds, the Blight is our only option to tilt the odds in our favor." He turned back to &alon and I. "&alon, with your help and the wyrms at our side, our surprise attack might just succeed. Not only will it secure the rebels' freedom, it will cripple the Vengeance and disrupt hUen-dE's ability to negate your portals. All I need is your promise, &alon, and then we can begin. Please, &alon… will you help us?"

She glanced at me, and I nodded my head, thumping my snout on the floor and the spores piled there.

"Okay," she said, "but… what do I have to do?"

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"&alon, tell all the wyrms to help." I spoke aloud so that everyone could hear.

"But they don't like me!" she whined. "They never listen!"

"What's she saying?" Rayph asked.

"That the wyrms don't like her, and never listen to her."

Jules chortled. "I wonder why…"

But I dismissed the sass; this wasn't the time for flippancy. I needed nobler words than that.

"Tell them they're fighting for themselves and their freedom," I said, "and tell them what I've told you to do, and that things are going to change. The old ways are over. Tell them that they've finally got a chance to fight to live their lives as they see it. And… tell them you're telling them this because you found what you were looking for all this time, and that it turned out to be a wyrm."

And then, to my surprise, &alon smiled. "I let them hear what you just said, Daddy," she said. "A lot of them agree."

I turned to EUe. "You have the wyrms' support, Martyr EUe," I said, and inside, I grinned.

I had to admit, all things considered, this was pretty darn cool.

"Then there's no time to lose!" Alahumadwod said. "Let's fly!"

— — —

Words were powerful things. I'd known that fact my entire life. I owed much of my career to words, to their ability to cross divides and plumb the unknown depths. But I'd never seen words' power on display quite as spectacularly as when I slithered out of Perzandebilis and onto the laser-scarred earth and raised my head to the sky.

Once again, the tides of battle were turning—and, for once, it was turning toward good.

The Night was a chorus of wyrms and war. The dome of Night was lost amidst the tempest of strife; everything beneath it was in constant motion, even the battle itself, which was changing shape before my eyes. Wyrmsong roared in battle-cries beyond number. Wyrm eyes rose like stars into the Night, shooting up to join the battle. Fungal hordes ran across the land on the earth and in the sky, sprouting wings and took flight. Stretches of earth tore free from the ground, exposing undersides riddled with fungal roots as they drifted upward to join their older siblings.

Because of my words, the wyrms had taken a side. However deep their grudges against the Vyxit might have been, those grudges were puddles compared to how much they loathed &alon. The demented god-child had destroyed their worlds, robbed them of their bodies, and enslaved them to an eternity of servitude. But now… now they could fight back. And not just that: now, they could fight for something—for themselves, for their forlorn hopes and dreams long deferred. And freedom. They could fight for freedom.

The three-way war was losing one of its sides.

Instead of &alon's indiscriminate destruction, the freed wyrms attacked with surgical precision. Mile-long wyrms whipped through the air, swatting smaller bodies like flies. Death-rays crisscrossed in every direction, casting shadows on the land. Wyrms wrapped around hUen-dE loyalists' starfighter modules and crushed their protective force-fields in their coils, while EUe's forces fired.

Hurricanes of acid spore breath tore through across the aerial battlefield, lighting up like fire as the Vyxit's protective barriers incinerated them en masse. Then ceaseless clouds of green death barreled in and overwhelmed them, making them like sand in a stream. The wyrms' breath attacks dissolved the exposed ships in seconds.

"Testing, testing," Tal said. "Can you hear me, Dr. Howle?"

"Yes, I can," I sang.

"The device—arrangement—works!" Twiggy said.

Despite Al's insistence on expediting things, Twiginix had pointed out the foolishness of heading into battle without me having a way to hear and talk with my kids and the crew while I was outside Perzy. Thankfully, the high-strung science officer had a solution to this dilemma: implement the reverse of the wyrm communication software the Vyx had developed with the help of my samples.

It was just a matter of Twiggy giving me the detailed specifications about Vyxit communications: the kinds of carrier waves they used, the frequencies they occupied, the encryption methods they used, and so on. As electromagnetic radiation was one of the many things that my many eyes could see, now that I knew what frequencies to look for, all I had to do was spot them, isolate the Trenton-language signal contained within (or, as the Vyxit called it, the "English-language signal") and, presto, I received the data in my mind, including any voice messages carried therein.

I will admit, being a biological supercomputer has its advantages.

"Alright then," Tal said. "We're about to take off."

"Do you mind if I ride along?" I asked.

As they'd told me, the Vyx starfighters' top speed outpaced most wyrms'."

"I'll wrap myself around your ship."

"You'll w-what!?" Twiginix yelled, flabbergasted.

But I was already busy floating up off the ground and wrapping myself around Perzy's hull. I had to squirm around a bit to bring my head and torso to the top of the ship. &alon fluttered up and took a seat on my back.

"It will be dangerous, Genneth," EUe's voice said.

I glanced up at the sky. "It'll be dangerous no matter what I do," I said, tightening my grip on the Sword. "But… I have the Sword, and I have &alon's power at my disposal." I glanced back at her. "You'll lend me your power, won't you?"

She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tightly.

"Anything for you, Daddy."

Blue flames appeared out of nowhere and began drifting into me, filling me with the power of boundless possibilities. My body burned with an aura as blue as the midday sky.

"I'll use the Sword to help the rebels," I said. "And if push comes to shove, you'll need it as an engine for the rebel fleet to escape. I think it would help to have it on hand, no? Besides… my kids are on board. What kind of responsible parent would let their kids fly on a spaceship unattended when they weren't even old enough to get their driver's licenses?"

"Dad…?" Jules sounded like she was about to cry.

I nearly wept with her.

By all accounts, this should have been a moment of triumph, but it wasn't. No: it was tainted.

Love wasn't the victor here, nor mercy, nor forgiveness, nor any of the other virtues that made man more than just another beast. I'd acquiesced to evil for the sake of doing good.

Pel would have told me so, had she been there.

All of &alon's adoration rang hollow. And why wouldn't it? Even now, she didn't really understand. She was only listening to me because I was giving her what she wanted, not because it was the right thing to do. She wasn't truly evil, she was just a sad, lonely little girl too simple and selfish to understand the enormity of her actions. This was a tragic and farcical ending, not a happy one.

But the wyrms had suffered enough, as had the souls they'd abused to act out their anger.

Angel… I could barely imagine all that suffering.

That's what made it all the more important that I finally let them have their freedom. To deny them that would make me as evil as the goddess that had first put them in bondage.

"Enough dawdling!" Tal yelled. "I'm taking Perzy up now. Brace yourself, Dr. Howle, this is gonna be a bumpy ride!"

Below, the landing ramp retracted with a hiss and sealed into the ship. Currents of air streamed from the engines flaring in back as Perzy rose, blowing dirt and spores about. Then the engines roared bright, spewing their brilliant blue jets down at the ground.

The Vyx module took flight.

I wished I'd been able to give &alon's victims justice, but… I suppose that was just asking for too much. But… no matter. I had all eternity to figure it out. Maybe I'd come up with something.

But first, we had to fight, and we had to win. I owed it to all who had been lost.

Pel…

I raise my head toward the sky, with the Sword in hand.

It was time to rock-n-roll.

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