It took Selene a moment to grasp that this frail, shaking man was her father.
She raced forwards, throwing herself at the energy wall. Despite all her strength, she couldn't break through. “What have you done to him? Why is he here?” Her father recoiled a step at the sight of Selene charging forwards, but there was a moment when something like recognition flashed through his eyes. Hope and horror combined.
The Walker sounded amused. “In truth, he's been a poor toy. It took only a few months to break him, make him tell me everything he knows. He is weak, degenerate. The memory of the scourging agonies he has suffered at my hand keep him compliant, and he now obeys any instruction I give him without question. Pathetic, isn't he? I think he's probably happier like this, knowing his place, understanding where he belongs in the order of things. There must be comfort in that, don't you think? Before I took him, he was filled with such grand ideas and doubts. Now he is himself. Are you pleased at the sight of him?”
Selene battered on the energy wall three, four times with all the strength of her augmentations, but made no impact. She couldn't reach her father. In the thin light from the low crescent sun, there was a hint, the slightest hint, of black in his matted grey hair. Once it had been raven-dark, like hers. He'd been a strong man, muscles wiry and taut from his years of hiking and digging, but now he sagged like a broken puppet. His skin had once been weathered, darkened, by his long days spent outside in the elements, but now it was sallow and pale.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked through her tears.
But she knew the answer to that question, too. They'd tortured her father for information. More: the show was continuing, and they were the masters of the message, spreading the truth they wished people to see. As much as anything, the destruction of Maes Far was a warning to the galaxy, and the last deaths, those of her and her father, would make that warning complete. Two dangerous heretics, enemies of Concordance, brought to justice, and their entire homeworld sacrificed along with them.
Concordance wanted to obliterate everything the inhabitants of Maes Far had learned. Whatever secrets the planet had harboured, Concordance wanted to be extremely sure that they never escaped. They didn't know who had learned what, who suspected what, and so they were killing everyone on the planet in order to be sure. The calculation of it was simple.
A Void Walker was forgiven all sins, could carry out any evil, any atrocity, so long as it was done in the service of Concordance. Their souls were already lost. The one standing before her slipped a knife from his sleeve, its edge glinting, honed to a fine edge. A cutting blade.
“Ondo, do something,” she said. But, incomprehensibly, Ondo wasn't looking at the unfolding scene. He was staring into the sky, studying something, as if bored or offended at what was taking place.
The Walker held the knife to her father's neck, but his gaze was on Selene. “Give your daughter your message,” he said.
Her father's throat worked a few times, his Adam's Apple bobbing. His voice was wavering, broken, but he got the words out eventually. “You have to die, Selene. You should have died; we all deserved to die for our evils. You should never have escaped judgement.” Now there was no look of recognition in her father's eyes.
Selene hurled herself once again at the energy wall, screaming abuse at the Walker. Even as she did so, she knew she was playing her part perfectly. The galaxy might or might not see the Walker threatening a defenceless, broken wreck of a man, but it would see her screaming in her animal fury. It would see what Ondo had turned her into.
His speech delivered, her father stood shivering visibly, unsure why he was there. The Walker watched Selene with clear pleasure on his face. He said, “Your father spent his life unearthing forbidden knowledge, peddling vile lies about Omn, and when the end came, he passed all he'd learned onto you, planning for you to take over from him. Now you will watch what happens to him as a result, and then the same will happen to you.”
“No.”
“Tell me first, was your father a good man?”
“What?”
“Think carefully before you answer. Was he a good man?”
“Yes, he was. He is a good man. Always.” Her father, the knife to his throat, didn't respond, as if incapable of understanding what was happening.
The Void Walker appeared satisfied with her reply. “Then you should be grateful to me. An eternity of ecstasy awaits him through the sacred wormhole. I will speed his passage to the judgement of Omn and free him from the sufferings of this realm.”
The Void Walker took a fresh grip on the blade in his hand and slowly, deliberately, pushed it into her father's neck, slicing his skin and tissues open. A spray of red blood speckled the white snow and her father slumped silently to the ground, clutching at his ruined throat, trying and failing to keep the blood inside his body.
Selene stepped back, raised the blaster barrel and fired again and again, desperate to get at the Walker so she could tear him to pieces, save her father, but the energy shielding held.
“Selene.” Ondo was still looking upwards, something up there fascinating him. “We have to go.”
She turned on him in her rage. His words made no sense. “Go where? Go how? We need to save him. My father, your friend, is dying in front of our eyes. Can't you fucking see?”
“Look.” Ondo was pointing into the sky. A ring of three lights shone, like stars at dusk. She could make no sense of what they were, but they were unimportant. A few steps away from
