Free War Against the White Knights by Tim C. Taylor Page B

General,” said Ambassador Del-Marie Sandure, grinning broadly.
    The sight of his old friend awoke dark memories, and Arun could only stare in response.
    Del was clearly confused by Arun’s reaction. “You ordered me to stay alive,” he said, defensively. “I did as you asked. I took a long fishing holiday, hopping from one sub-Polar island to another, always managing to evade the Imperial patrols. I don’t think I could have kept out of their clutches much longer…”
    Arun managed an inchoate grunt in reply.
    “Arun, what’s the matter?” Del seemed genuinely concerned now. “Why are you staring at my beard? Come on, man, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
    Arun got a grip and forced himself to relax. He was determined not to reveal what had rattled him. “I feel like it, Del. It’s all the talk of destiny and foreseeing the future. It freaks me out, especially when we’re all aging at different rates.” There was enough truth in Arun’s words that Del seemed to believe them. “Tremayne… Springer is nearly your age now. Xin is younger than me. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living my life out of chronological order.”
    Del slapped his old friend on the shoulder. “Relax, General. It’s entirely natural to get confused. You’re getting old. That’s all.”
    The words were meant as a joke, but aging was never a laughing matter to Arun and especially not now.
    Arun felt himself transported back to an event when he was eighteen, and had led a boarding action on a mysterious ship they’d named the Bonaventure , which had blown up in unexplained circumstances shortly after. Admiral Indiya had been monitoring Bonaventure closely and told Arun that a rescue ship had ripped apart reality in order to take off the crew undetected. Indiya was not someone given to exaggeration, nor to half-baked theories.
    The ship’s human crew had identified themselves as Amilxi, and the first Amilxi Arun encountered were injured personnel in an infirmary. Underneath the sheets of his hospital bed had been an old man with a beard who had referred to Arun as General McEwan. The Amilxi crewman had been older, and there had been more white in the beard, but Arun was absolutely certain that the same man was standing before him.
    The wounded Bonaventure crewman had been none other than Del-Marie Sandure. But that was impossible…

— Chapter 11 —
    Remus hurtled down the corridor. He was in a hurry and not in a good mood. Funny, but he had always thought of himself as carefree, happy go lucky – despite what Romulus thought – but that was before…
    In truth there had always been a dark corner, a knot of anger, of… not despair exactly, but rather the fear that everything good in his life would be snatched away, that he would somehow lose everything he considered dear, and now it felt as if he had.
    He’d never discussed this with anyone, not even Romulus. He didn’t need to, not with his brother. He could sense a similar kernel of clenched obsidian lurking within him too. This was what made their bond so strong and kept them so close; they shared more than mere history, they shared this darkness too. It was one of the reasons Remus had transferred away from the Wolves, and Romulus had always acted the part of the extrovert, the couldn’t-give-a-damn risk-taker, to deny what lurked within him. Until the attack on Khallini. Since then the carefree Romulus had been an act.
    He didn’t need anyone to psychoanalyze his situation: he knew that any shrink who caught wind of it would point straight towards the traumatic death of their mothers, to the compassionate but tough upbringing Nhlappo had subjected them to. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. Remus didn’t care. Nhlappo was all the mother he’d ever needed and he had been too young to remember the death of his actual birth-mother; any memories of that incident he might think he possessed were merely constructed from what others had told him. Besides, the