Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Space Opera
Roche could only stare dumbstruck back at him.
“This farce is at an end!” the general declared. “There will be no further distraction, and no more leniency. Lieutenant, your weapon.” The general indicated the druh in B’shan’s hand. The Kesh threw it expertly across and up to his superior, who caught it with one strong hand. She waved vaguely in Roche’s direction. “Bring her to me.”
Roche realized what she meant when the general’s bodyguards began converging on her. She looked around for some way to escape, but every exit was blocked. A circle formed around her as she backed away. Strong hands grabbed her from behind and dragged her to where the general waited, druh at the ready.
“It is bad luck to wield a blade without bloodying it,” the general said. She pointed at the ground before her, and Roche was pushed onto her knees. She struggled but could do nothing to prevent being forced facedown onto the ground at the general’s feet.
“Morgan!” Haid’s voice echoed up from the gardens. She realized he couldn’t see what was going on, and was glad to be spared that indignity.
“Ameidio!” she called back. “Do what the Box says—take the
Ana Vereine—
tell Maii—!”
A boot connected with the side of her head to silence her, and her mouth filled with blood.
She heard the general curse her in the Kesh native tongue. She sensed the blade being raised. She closed her eyes and waited for the blow.
Into the expectant hush, a woman’s voice spoke.
“General Darkan!” said the voice. It came over Galine Four’s public address system and seemed to echo from everywhere at once. “Surrender control of the
Sebettu
immediately or I shall overload its primary generator and send you all to hell!”
Roche heard the general hiss. “Who is this? What is the meaning—”
“You have thirty seconds to think about it. If I don’t have an answer by then, I will make good my promise.”
The general roared. Roche, forgotten for the moment, dared to breathe again.
“I do not listen to threats!”
“Then listen to this: I have instructed your cooling systems to shut down. In five minutes a chain reaction will begin that cannot be stopped. Your primary generator
will
blow if you don’t give me a reason to reverse the instruction. There is nothing you can do to stop it, except to hand over control to me. It’s as simple as that. You now have twenty seconds left.”
“How is this possible?” the general roared, but for the first time Roche detected a hint of fear in her voice. “How are you doing this?”
“
How
I am doing this is irrelevant. Know only that I
am
doing it, and give me control of your ship!”
“Never!” The booming voice was defiant, but the general’s expression was full of uncertainty.
“Then mine will be the last voice any of you will ever hear.”
“Who
are
you?” barked the general.
“I’m the one everybody has been looking for, General,” said the voice. “But I suspect you already knew that.”
Roche’s head reeled:
female
?
There was a long silence from the general, then:
“No,” said the general. “I would rather die than let you loose on an unsuspecting galaxy.”
“So be it,” said the woman. “You have five minutes to make peace with Asha, General. I suggest you make good use of that time.”
“You are bluffing!” the general hissed, but neither the clone warrior nor Morgan Roche was listening.
INTERLUDE
While under Xarodine, the universe was a very different place.
What little he could see was far off and blurred. The only minds close to him belonged to the Shining One and the abomination. The latter also labored under the epsense-inhibiting drug, coiling around herself like a restless snake, while the former appeared to be sleeping. Certainly his thought patterns were passive and his sensory inputs minimal. Yet the dark speck at the heart of his glare was still active, and through this speck some of the outside world leaked in.
The enigma had been taken away. The other Shining One had come closer. The Cruel One, too, had appeared to put fear into the hearts of her servants. Things were coming to a head, that was for certain, and he was frustrated to be kept at arm’s-length from it, trapped in a fog of Xarodine.
Then someone appeared. It was a mind he had encountered before: petty, brittle, filled with self-doubt and hatred for all others. This mind came on a mission from the Cruel One: to take the Shining One elsewhere and to neutralize the other prisoners. Those were his orders, and he would fulfill them to the letter. It was either that or face further dishonor. And as far as this Kesh officer was concerned, dishonor was worse than death.
“Neutralize” meant kill. That much he could glean from the mind bearing down on him. But it was with some relief that he contemplated the imminence of his demise, for it would also mean the end of the abomination.
The officer spoke briefly to the guards, who admitted him to the secure compound with an escort and closed the doors behind him. Nothing, even now, was being left to chance.
The officer checked the cocoon within which the Shining One rested. All was well there, it seemed. Various instruments and controls were prepared for travel, and an internal supply was activated. From that moment on, the Shining One became independent of everyone around him. Thus encased, he could survive several hours in a complete vacuum until the gel boiled away, and, if rescued in time, emerge unscathed.
Not that the officer thought such precautions were necessary. He refused to believe that the captive could be superior to a Kesh warrior. The events he had witnessed in recent weeks he put down to luck, or the element of surprise. Pristines made poor warriors in his eyes, and he found their slaughter an unremarkable thing. All it would take was planning and persistence—the twin virtues of Kesh military dogma.
When gunfire sounded from the other side of the security compound’s already battle-scarred doors, the Kesh officer thought for a moment that he was hearing things. There was no resistance left in the station; the Cruel One had everything under control. What could possibly have gone wrong?
The Kesh officer wheeled the Shining One into the hallway and ordered his escort to guard the cocoon. When he tried to speak to the guards outside, only one of the two groups monitoring the double doors answered; the other was under attack by an unknown number of assailants.
Remembering his other captives, the Kesh officer tried more esoteric means to find out what was going on. He had already decided not to call for reinforcements until he was sure what he was up against; he did not want to risk the general’s further displeasure.
“How many are there?” he asked, manipulating the pain-givers.
The minds of the guards under siege—imprecise and vague through the drug—saw only a single attacker, and then only fleetingly.
: ONE
“Who is it?”
That one’s mind didn’t register at all.
: NO ONE
“Don’t play games with me—”
The Kesh officer stopped, for the sound of gunfire at the entrance had ceased. But the silence didn’t last long: a moment later it began at the other entrance, where the second group of guards waited.
“Who
is
that?”
: NO ONE
: ABOMINATION
: KILL
“Bah! You’re talking rubbish.”
Still the officer hesitated to call for help. He was sure he and his guards could deal with a single assailant. The interior of the security compound would be easier to defend than the exterior, and he made sure his escort was ready for anything. They would put the three prisoners in one cell and seal it shut. That way the intruder would be at a disadvantage, not knowing which cell to aim for and therefore where to direct his attack.
Then it occurred to the officer that the welfare of two of his prisoners was irrelevant. They could even be used to his advantage. The officer ordered the Shining One to be locked securely away once more and the other two to be brought out into the hallway.
Again the gunfire ceased. The Kesh officer tensed. It was theoretically impossible for one person to open the doors, but he didn’t dare believe that would be the end of it.
Sure enough, the doors clanked and began to open. Barely a second had passed and the officer was at the nearest door, ready to repel the intruder. All he saw, though, was one of his own guards, sitting at the console to the door with some sort of device strapped to his chest.
“He made me, I swear—I—!” he babbled.
Then the device exploded.
But the Kesh officer was already running back to the captives. He had been fooled; the intruder was coming in the other door!
Through the smoke and dust, he saw the flash of a weapon, and the last member of his escort tumbled to the floor. He watched in some panic as a tall, silver-armored warrior stepped over the bodies to survey the scene.
The Kesh officer hissed, choking on a growing sense of failure. He warned that he would shoot the prisoners if the warrior did not immediately retreat.
Seemingly unconcerned by the officer’s threat, the warrior raised his weapon to target the Kesh.
Howling a Kesh battle cry, the officer fired indiscriminately, striking prisoners and warrior alike. The great silver figure staggered back under the power of the officer’s ceremonial firearm. A lucky shot knocked the assailant’s weapon aside and cracked the seal of the silver armor at the shoulder. Concentrating on that point, the officer fired three more shots in quick succession, knocking the assailant to the ground.
A silver arm skidded across the floor, severed by the final shot.
Hope returned to the Kesh officer’s mind like fresh air through the smoke. He stepped forward to survey the carnage. Both stretchers had spilled their contents to the floor: the Surin reave had sustained an injury to her legs, and the Olmahoi creature was bleeding from a wound in its abdomen. He would put an end to their suffering in a moment, once he was certain that the intruder was dead.
The silver armor was the same as that worn by Roche and one of her companions when she had been captured. This one, he assumed, must have been stolen before they could be taken to the
Sebettu
for examination. It had been irreparably damaged, missing its right arm from the shoulder down, and now lay inert facedown against a wall.
He nodded in satisfaction, although a new anger rose. Heads would roll for the theft not to have been reported. The occupant of the suit had fought well against insurmountable odds; almost as well as a Kesh...
The officer stared in horror as the suit suddenly rolled over. Its left arm scrabbled for its fallen weapon and, before he could react, fired two shots. Falling to his knees, the Kesh clutched at his stomach, feeling the life ebb with his blood out onto the floor.
As his executioner turned away, the dying Kesh caught a perfect view of the interior of the suit, through the hole where its right arm would have been.
His eyes bulged even further as he keeled forward to die on the floor.
The suit was empty.
* * *
There were no minds left to view what happened in the secure compound. Only the Shining One remained, and he saw nothing through those eyes.
He felt his body lifted back onto the stretcher, but it had already become distant—even more so than usual. And the foggy sense that remained of his usual all-pervading sight was itself fading. As blood rushed out of his body and drained from his uniquely developed epsense organ, darkness pressed in.
The light of the Shining One was fading. As he watched it dwindle, unafraid, a voice spoke:
He had forgotten about the abomination. They must have been close for their drug-crippled minds to touch.
She was right. Apart from when his body had been tortured in order to gain information, he had had no care for it at all.
Yet here he was, dying because of its injuries. He would be glad for an end to this life. Without his people, without the Grand Design, he was nothing.
His only sadness was that he was dying alone.
He
was
comforted. That much was true, despite himself. And he wondered if the feeling was mutual as together they spiraled ever steeper down into the dark...
8
Galine Four
‘955.01.24 EN
0550
The vision came as a concentration of thoughts and words, of memories too, and its intrusion was as intense as it was abrupt. It had traveled so many routes on its way to her that its details were indistinct. But it could not be denied. It blossomed in Roche’s mind with the intensity of an outrigger Plenary minus the auditor’s guiding hand.
She saw a war. That much was obvious. A war so big that the galaxy burned for centuries, and trillions of lives were extinguished in a bloodbath never to be equaled.
Half a million years later, she watched as the events blossomed rapidly in her mind, with the war’s political machinations unfurling like the bloodied petals of a flower. Peace returned to the galaxy only after hundreds of novae had added their heavier elements to the dust clouds, and one of the opposing armies was defeated.
But even then it did not end. The vanquished had foreseen their fate and had prepared for their revenge—a revenge which would take place long after they had been forgotten by those who had eradicated them.
Roche saw a cloud of tiny machines erupt from the galactic spiral and dissipate away from the inhabited areas, into the outer depths. Their exact number was unknown, but they numbered in the millions at least. Traveling well below the speed of light, the machines did not have the momentum to quite escape the gravitational pull of the galaxy, although they did travel vast distances from the core.
Before long the great war was forgotten, buried by time and lost to more immediate conflicts; but the machines continued to hurtle to the darkest edges of the galaxy. Memories of their makers faded too, their legend dissolving into little more than a curiosity for scholars, and eventually forgotten altogether; and still the machines continued to travel on.
Eventually their velocity decreased and, as it did, they gathered mass—atom by atom, molecule by molecule. And as their orbits pulled them back to the denser regions where they had originated, they began to build. Each one became a capsule. And within each capsule, a life was born.
These lives would burn bright and fast, and, in burning, they would find revenge.
The Sol Apotheosis Movement and its followers had nothing to do with this plan; they were nothing more than a convenient cover. Yes, they had existed, and had been slaughtered at the hands of their united neighbors; they had indeed chosen for their base system one that had long been associated with ancient Humanity, although it was now fallow; and they might well have conceived such a plan for revenge, although they lacked the skills and subtlety to put it into action.
The name Adoni Cane had nothing to do with them. That name was as old as the ancient war itself. Other such names fell effortlessly into Roche’s thoughts: Vani Wehr, Sadoc Lleshi, Jelena Heidik, Ralf Dreher, and more. Each had played a role in the events at the dawn of time; each had been marked by the vanquished for revenge; each had a role to play in the times to come.
This was what Linegar Rufo feared: a plan far older and more widespread than anyone had suspected. And this was the knowledge the
irikeii
had given Maii, and which she in turn gave Roche.
* * *
When it was over, nothing remained of the young reave in Roche’s mind. It felt strangely empty, hollow. Why had Maii only managed to send her that one mind-dump and nothing more? Roche shook her head to clear her thoughts. But try as she might to deny the possibility that something bad had happened to the girl, the emptiness in her mind continued to fill her with concern.
She lay on her side at the feet of the Kesh guards. No one seemed to be paying her any attention, for which she was thankful if not a little surprised. Then she remembered the clone warrior, and she realized that compared to
her,
Roche was no threat at all.
Some time had passed, but she had no idea exactly how much until she heard the general boom:
“Five minutes are up! She has nothing to bargain with—
nothing
! Just more games to waste my time!”
“General, someone
did
infiltrate our cooling systems,” she heard the translator say. “If we are still alive it’s only because they don’t want to destroy their only way out of here.”
“Then she
still
has nothing!
We
control the
Sebettu
; until that changes, we will not negotiate. Let her attack! It will do her no good.”
It took Roche a second to realize that the general was speaking in the Kesh tongue but that she could still understand what she was saying.
“Is the download complete?”
“Yes, General. The last of the data was transferred twenty minutes ago.”
“Then why are we lingering in this accursed place? Instruct all personnel to return to the
Sebettu
for immediate departure!”
A voice began talking over the station’s PA system, repeating the general’s order in the Kesh tongue. At this the guards near Roche moved off; after they had gone she managed to sit up, fighting dizziness and the aches all over her body. The general was some distance away around the curve of the corridor. She frowned for a moment, confused as to how she had been able to hear the general conferring with the other Kesh. Then she realized that the translation of the general’s words had been coming through her implants.
A roar of fury from the general cut across anything else the AI might have said.
“That incompetent fool! If there were time I would have Shak’ni skinned for this!” The general rounded on her aides, who backed out of arm’s reach. “I’ve had enough of this stupidity! Leave him behind. Leave
all
of them behind! We will erase this place from our memories!”
The general stalked off, the booming of her boots along the corridor receding quickly into the distance. Roche suddenly found herself alone.
She clambered stiffly to her feet. Her neck and back hurt where the guard had held her, and a bump had already formed on her skull.
where it has allowed me to communicate unnoticed. I now have full control of this station and complete access to the data Linegar Rufo collected.>
Roche didn’t have the heart to tell the Box that she’d come across most of that data by other means.
?
>
as we speak.>
Relief flooded through her.
?>
absorbs and behaves as a passive sink for spurious thoughts in its vicinity. That, clearly, is why General Darkan had it kidnapped and brought here. Had it not—>
It was Haid. “Morgan!” The ex-mercenary held out his new arm to grip her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She almost laughed. “Me? What about
you
? Your
arm
is broken.”
“Just another reminder of how poor flesh and blood actually is,” he said. “But I’ll live.” The fingers on his artificial arm flexed. “These toys didn’t perform so badly after all.”
“I guess not.”
Haid looked around; there was a cut to his cheek she hadn’t noticed before, oozing thick blood. “The Kesh are pulling out all over the station. B’shan went with them. He asked me to tell you that he regretted what had happened. I think he might even have meant it.”
“Yeah? Well apologies won’t help us much at the moment,” she said brusquely, but it did surprise her. It wasn’t like a Kesh to apologize for anything, whether he meant it or not. “Cane and Maii are on their way to the
Ana Vereine,
so we’ll join them there. When things settle down we can talk about getting the station out of the system. If Uri thinks the ship is up to it, we might be able to translate the entire thing, otherwise we’ll just have to ferry the people out in lots.”
Haid nodded. “The boundary’s getting closer by the second. Round trips will become progressively quicker.”
“And the holds should still be full of outriggers; that’ll save time. Once we pick up Byrne and the others, we’ll be done.”
“What about the
Sebettu
?”
She shrugged. “We let it go. It’s too big to take on directly, and if they leave peacefully I see no reason to pick a fight. We’ll just have to settle our scores at a later date, I guess.”
“Is that the Box?” asked Haid, tapping one ear. “How did you manage that?”
Roche’s stomach sank as a realization struck her. The Box! “Oh, hell. The Box is still on the
Sebettu
.”
“What about the data?”
Ana Vereine.
The important thing is that you survive. I am not irreplaceable.>
That was probably the closest thing to humility that she had ever heard from the Box. “Don’t be such a martyr, Box. We’ll get you back if we can. Tell Uri to warm up the drives. We’re coming now.”
Haid hurried after her as she strode for the nearest transit cab. Rufo tried to get her attention as she passed, but she ignored him. Myer Mavalhin was more persistent. He trailed them to the cab and squeezed inside after them, apologizing hastily when he brushed against Haid’s broken arm. The ex-mercenary was still holding the druh in one clenched fist, and made sure Mavalhin knew it.
“Morgan!” the pilot panted. “Where are you going in such a hurry ?”
“None of your business, Myer.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Not just yet.”
“Then where—?”
“She said it was none of your business.” Haid’s expression darkened and the blade twitched.
“Okay, okay.” Mavalhin receded into the cab, and for a second Roche thought he might’ve finished. But as they crossed the glitch in ambient gravity—made even more disorienting by the damage to the generator—he started again.
“Can I come with you?”
She turned on him. “Myer, don’t you listen to anything I say? I told you to leave me alone.”
“No, you told me to take control of my life. Which is what I’m doing.” He consciously straightened. “I’ve decided that I want to serve with you on the
Ana Vereine.
It’s the right thing to do, I know it. Our destinies lie together, Morgan. You can’t say no.”
“Can’t I?”
The cab slid to an abrupt halt and the doors opened. They were on the outermost level, close to the major docking bays.
.>
They entered a large disembarkation point similar to the one through which they had first entered the station. Roche was reminded of Disisto, whose job it had been to maintain security in this area, and felt a twinge of regret.
to get you back.> Mentally turning her back on the AI she spoke to Kajic:
Tell them we want the Box back and we’re prepared to negotiate.>
Ana Vereine
sounded glad to hear her voice.
An inner airlock hissed open and they passed through a cramped umbilical. At the far end, the
Ana Vereine’s
outer hatch hung open, waiting for them. Roche felt a strong sensation of relief to finally be back on board. The sepia walls and earthy tones had begun to feel almost like home.
Roche turned to see Mavalhin crossing the threshold.
He smiled sheepishly and stopped halfway. “Well, you didn’t actually
say
I couldn’t come.”
“You’re right.” She strode back to face him and stared him in the eye.