Authors: Jasper T Scott
“Roger that,” she said.
“Hoi! Iceman! Where the frek are you?” Gina called out. “I’ve picked up a whole squadron.”
“I’ll be right there, Tuner,” Atton said, diving back down the way he’d come. A group of Shell Fighters roared up to meet him. His enemy missile lock alarm began to sound, and then half a dozen Pirakla missiles flashed out toward him and Ceyla. “Heads up, Four!” he warned.
“I see it!” she commed back.
Atton waited until the last minute and then threw his Nova into a downward spiral. The missiles went wide, but a stuttering rain of lavender pulse lasers followed him down. Impacts began hissing off his shields.
“Aft shields critical,” his AI warned.
“Iceman!” Gina hissed. “I’m flattered you think I’m good enough to handle a twelve on one, but it would be nice to have a little help from my wingman!”
“I’ll be right there!” Atton rolled out of his dive, pulling up hard to shake off the Shells on his tail. Looking for Gina on the grid, he found her a few dozen klicks away,
literally
being chased by an entire squadron of Shell Fighters.
Frek . . .
He’d thought she was exaggerating. He pushed his throttle past the stops into overdrive.
“I’m in trouble!” someone screamed. It was Ceyla again.
“Keep them busy, Corbin!” Atton replied.
“There’re too many of them!”
“Someone go help, Green V!”
“Negative, Lead; I’m cornered,” Nine replied.
“Likewise,” Razor put in.
“Frek it—help yourself, Green!” Eight yelled. “We’re all engaged! Just jink hard to throw off any missiles, and then get on their tails. You’re more maneuverable than they are!”
“I’m not!” Ceyla snapped, sounding stressed. “They clipped one of my engines and half my starboard wing is missing!”
“Lead . . .” Gina came back. “Where are you . . .”
Atton could hear the angry hiss of lasers hitting shields in the background of Gina’s commcast. She was his wingmate. His responsibility was to help her first.
“They just sliced off my other wing!” Ceyla cried.
“I’ll be right there, Corbin,” Atton commed.
“Lead!” Gina screamed.
“Just hold on, Tuner! I’m going to help Green on my way to you.” Corbin was in the opposite direction. “I’ll be there in a few seconds!” He wouldn’t.
“I’m going to kill you, Ortane!”
Ignoring her protests, he thumbed over to Hailfire missiles and rolled to starboard, banking toward Ceyla. He found her pursuers—all six of them—firing mercilessly on her. Bright purple beams streaked across the night sky, occasionally hitting Ceyla’s Nova with a shower of sparks. She was flying in a relatively straight line—whether because she couldn’t maneuver, or because she was afraid to bleed off any more air speed, Atton wasn’t sure.
Hovering his targeting reticle over the nearest of the six, Atton listened to the
beep-beep-beeping
of a missile lock. As soon as the targeting reticle turned a solid red and the beeping became a steady tone, he pulled the trigger and two Hailfire missiles roared out on bright orange contrails. The Shell Fighter realized his peril and broke away just a second too late. The Hailfires split apart and eight shards spiraled off in separate directions, four of them angling for the original target. All four hit and the Shell Fighter flew apart. A chunk of debris clipped one of the others, causing him to wobble into the path of another shard with a sudden
boom
. The explosion set the enemy fighter on fire and sent it banking toward the ground.
Two down.
Atton thumbed over to lasers and began lighting up the other four Shells chasing Ceyla. He traced his crosshairs back and forth over all four of them, hoping to scare them off, but they ignored his scattered fire and stayed intent upon their target.
The Sythians’ pulse lasers began scoring consecutive hits on Ceyla’s fighter, and a thick jet of flames erupted from one of her thrusters. Her engines sputtering, she began bleeding airspeed and altitude. She was going down. There was nothing more he or anyone else could do to help her.
“Punch out, Corbin!”
A second later, her canopy blew away and Atton saw her flight chair rocket out above her doomed fighter. Atton was already rolling back the other way to help Gina.
“Hang in there, Tuner! I’m on my way!” Atton said.
“Too late, you motherfrek—
kkksrrr
ss.” Her comm died in static. Atton came about just in time to see her Nova spiral out of control into the distant spire of an adjacent skyscraper. Her fighter exploded with a blinding flash of light. Seconds later another explosion burst open the top of the building she’d crashed into, and it cracked away, falling in two giant flaming chunks to the city below.
“Gina . . .” Atton breathed. “Did anyone see her punch out?” he called over the comms.
“Negative.”
“Frek you, Iceman,” Razor replied.
“No,” Eight put in.
Atton kept the comm open for a moment, as if he had a reply ready, but the words never came. If he hadn’t gone chasing after Ceyla, he might have been able to save Gina. Ceyla had had to punch out anyway. He hadn’t helped her either.
Instead of guilt, a cold emptiness filled him. There was no painful ache in his throat, or pulse-pounding burst of rage, just clean, cold numbness.
You really are the Iceman . . .
Atton thought.
* * *
Ethan wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to see inside the Zenith Tower. Perhaps a vast entrance hall lined with thick columns and expensive artwork. Lavish displays of wealth and opulent furnishings seemed a given. He’d expected a palace or a fortress—something which befitted the government headquarters for a planet with many trillions of people. What he actually saw behind the 10-story-high doors was a vast, well-tended garden.
Lush, vibrant green sprawled out as far as the eye could see. Blossoming trees and flowering bushes splashed the scene with color. The distant walls of the building seemed to be made of luminous crystal, rising some twenty or more stories, curving up to a bright blue dome of sky overhead. Faint, but visible within the clear blue of that sky was a glowing spiral pattern with bright points of light like stars. In the center of that pattern was an artificial sun with the same eye-shape as the center of the glowing emblem in blue cape’s chest. Now that Ethan thought about it, the entire sky bore the pattern of that emblem, only without the circumscribed
A
.
Climbing plants and flowers grew up the luminous walls, in some cases all the way up to the sky, their fronds and blossoms turned inward and upward toward the eye-shaped sun. The air was fragrant and honeyed with the nectar of a million flowers. A warm breeze blew; the air was neither hot nor cold, but perfectly temperate. Waterfalls cascaded from dizzying heights, pouring from broad apertures in the walls. Small avian creatures flitted through the air, chirping as they went. It was as if someone had copied it all straight out of a children’s storybook about the ages-old garden of Etheria.
Ethan watched the Avilonians lead the way through the garden. The sentinels in their Zephyr assault mechs stomped clumsily along behind them, their backs arching as they stared up at the sky. The pathway leading from the doors glittered brightly underfoot as though it were made of diamond dust.
“What is this place?” Alara whispered.
“I guess this Omnius of theirs likes open spaces,” Ethan replied.
“Do not touch anything! Keep to the middle of the road,” a gravelly voice bellowed from the front of the group. Ethan recognized that voice as belonging to the other blue caped soldier, the one whose presence he had not been forced to endure on his ship. “You are on sacred ground,” he explained.
Ethan ignored their warnings, straying to the edge of the walkway to stare down into the silvery depths of a shining river running crosswise to the path. Fat blue and scarlet fish followed the current downstream. Ethan turned from looking down to looking up at the distant walls of the tower. They were at least several kilometers away. From that he estimated that the garden had to be a thousand or more acres in size. As they walked further into the leafy green depths, white-robed civilians began to appear along the sides of the path, their eyes narrowed and accusing. A few called out in Avilonian, sounding just as unwelcoming as they looked. Some of the soldiers replied, their tones more polite, but the white-robed civilians remained unimpressed.
“What’s going on?” Ethan asked, walking up beside the nearest soldier.
The man ignored him, but Ethan insisted until the man’s glowing faceplate turned to regard him. “They warn us that we are not allowed to be here. Only Omnius’s disciples are allowed into the temple after the doors have shut, and we are not even Celestials, let alone disciples.”
“The temple?”
“What you see around you. This is the dwelling place of Omnius. He lives here among his most faithful servants. During the day, the garden is open to all his chosen people, but at night the doors are shut and his disciples are free to commune with him without the impatient press of pilgrims come to bask in His glory.”
“You speak of this Omnius like he’s a god,” Ethan replied.
“He is that and more.”
“Right . . . so this is where he lives? Where is he?”
“He is not a person or an entity that you can point to and say—
there he is!—
he’s all around us, ever present, always watching, all-knowing, and all-powerful.”
Ethan frowned. “I don’t feel him.”
“Neither do I . . .” the Avilonian replied in a shaky whisper. “I fear he has left us all to die.”
“Nice god you have.”
“Do not speak ill of him! He would not abandon us unless we deserved it.”
“This . . . invisible god of yours. He’s in control of all your defenses? Every weapon on this planet?”
“That is correct.”
“So no one fires a shot without his permission.”
“No, ordinarily he trusts us as his Peacekeepers to do what we must, but someone must have threatened him terribly for him to deactivate everything.”
“I don’t see anyone here to threaten him.”
“Omnius resides here, but his essence is spread out across our world. The threat could be somewhere else.”
“Then why are we here?”
“This is the coming together of all that he is. Here the disciples come to know Omnius better and tend to him. Here the beauty of his mind is laid bare for all to see, that we might stand in awe of him. If there is something wrong with Omnius, we will find it here.”
Ethan looked around the garden and struggled to wrap his head around what the Avilonian was saying to him. “So . . . what exactly is he? A tree?”
“You make fun of things you know nothing about.”
“It was an honest question.”
“Leave me.”
“All right, I apologize. If he’s not a tree, then what is he?”
“Your people would call him an artificial intelligence.”
“Oh,” Ethan said, taken aback. “Well, we have that, too; we just don’t worship ours.”
“No, Omnius is different, he is self-aware.”
“So are ours.”
“You mean so they appear to be. True artificial intelligence evolves quickly, learns endlessly, and grows ever more potent with time. Your equivalents remain stagnant and do only what they are designed to do. They are slaves of humanity, while we are slaves of Omnius.”
“I think I like our version better.”
“Do not blaspheme to me,
martalis
. Omnius is benevolent and good. We are slaves to him because his goodness compels us to serve him, and because his wishes and demands are only for our best. Without him we would have long ago succumbed to our inner darkness and destroyed ourselves.”
Alara grabbed Ethan’s arm and pulled him away from the soldier. “Ethan!” she hissed. “Don’t make fun of them—or
it,
” she said, her eyes scanning the sky warily.
He decided not to press the point. Alara was right; they couldn’t afford to make enemies here. He turned his attention to the path they were walking on. A muffled boom of thunder rumbled subtly through the air, and Ethan recalled the battle raging outside the tower. It occurred to him then that they should be running through this thousand acre garden rather than walking as though they had all the time in the world. Ethan suspected the only reason they weren’t was because of the white-robed
disciples
who stood on the sidelines watching their every step. Perhaps they thought the intruding soldiers were part of the rebel army which was to blame for Omnius’s sudden disappearance. Ethan eyed the
disciples
right back, wondering if
they
were to blame—after all, they were the only ones here.
The pathway came to a building which looked like a giant overturned bowl. That bowl was golden, smooth and reflective like a mirror. As they approached it, Ethan saw his blue cape holding one of the white-robed disciples at gunpoint, using the plasma rifle Ethan had given him to threaten the civilian’s life. A sudden suspicion formed in Ethan’s gut, and he wondered if they weren’t in fact helping a rebel army to instigate a coup.
Hurrying to the front of the group, Ethan found the pair of blue-caped men yelling at the man in the white robe until at last that man held up his hands and placed one of them against the glossy golden surface of the bowl. In response to his touch the bowl rose off the ground on four shining pillars of light. Then the blue capes shoved him underneath the bowl and the rest of the Avilonian soldiers crowded in behind him. The squads of Zephyrs followed, as did Ethan and Alara. From the inside, the dome was black and empty, as was the slightly raised podium underneath, although a glowing red line ran around the edges of it. Not far from that was a glowing green line, which Ethan noticed the Avilonians were careful to stand inside. Ethan caught Alara straddling the line and he grabbed her hand to pull her over it.
The white-robed man raised his hands as if beckoning to the sky. And with that, the inside of the dome sprang to life, glowing subtly, but with ever increasing brilliance. Suddenly that man dropped his hands, and the dome fell with a
boom.
Alara all but jumped into Ethan’s arms, and he held her tight. Then the inside of the dome became painfully bright, and Ethan’s eyes shut reflexively. A loud whirring filled the air, wind whipped about in a sudden frenzy, and then Ethan felt his ears pop. The brightness glowing behind his eyelids faded, and the whirring noise disappeared. Then the air was abruptly still.