Dark Space: Avilon (21 page)
Read Dark Space: Avilon Online
Authors: Jasper T. Scott
Tags: #Children's Books, #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Alien Invasion, #Cyberpunk, #First Contact, #Galactic Empire, #Military, #Space Fleet, #Space Opera, #Children's eBooks, #Metaphysical & Visionary, #Science Fiction
Bretton shook his head slowly, still reeling with shock. “They’d be better off fighting for the Sythians.”
“So that fleet there is a rebel fleet,” Farah said, pointing to the cloaked ships racing toward the out-system jump gate.
“Yes,” the admiral replied.
“So what about the second fleet?”
“What second fleet?” Admiral Vee asked, searching the grid.
Captain Marla Picara was the first to point it out. “There!”
They all watched as another, larger group of cloaked ships broke formation with the rest of the Sythians.
“That’s curious . . .” the admiral said, watching both fleets for a moment. “They’re both cloaked, but the second fleet is matching trajectories with the first.”
“They’re following them,” Bretton said.
“Yes, but how?”
“I thought Sythians don’t have cloak detectors,” Farah said.
“Not that we know of,” the admiral replied.
“Then?”
“Either that’s changed, or our rebels have a Sythian agent on board. Either way, the rebels are in trouble.”
“We have to warn them!” Farah said.
“They haven’t noticed us,” Bretton added, noting that their position on the grid wasn’t attracting any groups of cloaked Sythians.
“No . . . which makes the traitor theory a lot more likely. All the same, we should make sure we don’t get too close to the enemy.”
“The rebels are going to jump out . . .” Farah interrupted. “Aren’t we going to do something?”
Admiral Vee turned to her with a smile. “Yes, that’s a good question.” Turning to Bretton she said, “What do you think? Are you ready to assume command of the
Tempest
?”
“You want
me
to command her? It’s been a long time, Admiral.”
“I’m sure it’s just like riding a hover cycle. Besides, who better for the job than a real venture-class captain?” With that, she turned to Farah. “The same goes for you, Commander. We need you both.”
Bretton turned to look at Farah, and he was surprised to find a hesitant grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I was late with my rent payments anyway.” Her grin popped out of hiding, and he matched it with one of his own.
“We accept,” he said.
“Good. Just in time, too.” The admiral pointed to the grid, where the rebel fleet had been only a second ago.
“Where’d they go?” Farah asked.
“Jumped out,” Captain Picara replied.
“Did someone record their jump heading?” Bretton asked, raising his voice to ask the entire crew.
Picara shook her head. “We don’t have to.” She gestured to the star map rising from the captain’s table and it zoomed out until all the contacts on the grid became just one big red dot. Further out, seen speeding away at several times the speed of light, was another dot, a green one. “There they are,” Picara said.
Bretton smiled. “Quantum tech. Got to love that.” Range on quantum scanners was rated in the
light years
rather than klicks. “I’m assuming we have quantum drives, too?”
“And comms,” Picara replied.
Bretton tried to imagine a venture-class equipped with quantum technology. It would be more or less equivalent to an Avilonian judgment-class cruiser, but slightly larger, with a slower sub-light drive and weaker shields.
“What kind of range do we have on these scanners?” he asked.
“They’ll drop off the grid at about a thousand light years out,” Captain Picara replied. “Tracking them won’t be hard, but we’ll have to wait until they drop out of SLS before we know where to jump to follow them, and depending how far away they are . . . jump calculations could take a while, since we don’t have Omnius to do them for us.”
Bretton ran a hand along his jaw, stubble rasping audibly against his fingers. “Hopefully they drop out of SLS soon, then.”
As they watched, the second cloaked fleet jumped after the first. That gave a lag time of just a few minutes between the rebel fleet and the pursuing Sythian one, which meant they’d have to be quick if they were going to warn the rebels before the Sythians found them and attacked.
“I suppose you’d better take this time to get me acquainted with my command,” Bretton said, speaking to Captain Picara, whose ship the
Tempest
had been previously. “No hard feelings I hope?”
“Not at all. Once you’re done training me, I’ll head back here to command the
Emancipator
. By then the refits should be finished.”
“Training you?”
“You’re the one who knows about Imperial warships, sir. I can brief you on the refits and the crew, but that’s about it.”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m going to leave you all to handle this situation,” Admiral Vee said. “Admiral Hale, I expect to find my ship in one piece when I return. Your orders are to engage the enemy only if necessary, and only with extreme caution. Don’t go playing the hero on the Resistance’s tab.”
Bretton turned to salute her. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“Good. Carry on then.”
They watched Admiral Vee turn and start back down the gangway at a brisk pace. Bretton found himself admiring her figure as she left. “She’s a Null?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t look like one.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” Picara replied. “I don’t look like a Null, and neither do either of you.”
Bretton turned to her with an appraising look. “So she came from the Uppers at some point. Like us.”
“Could be.”
“What do you mean
could be?
It’s obvious she wasn’t born below the Styx.”
Picara smiled a pretty smile. “We’re not allowed to know much about her, for our safety and hers. Suffice to say, the Admiral could even be a
he
under that bio-synthetic suit.”
“Bio-synthetic . . .” Farah trailed off.
“She’s wearing a disguise,” Bretton clarified.
“The best money can buy. She’ll even pass biometric scans and surface level DNA analysis.”
Bretton turned back to watch the admiral as she left, thinking to himself that there was no way she was a
he
. Wide hips and narrow shoulders would be hard to fake without holographics, and that was something any sophisticated scanner would easily pick out. As for her perfect skin and teeth, her long blond hair and blue eyes . . . all of that could easily be fake. “What’s she really look like?”
Marla shook her head. “No one knows.”
“So she could be anyone,” Farah said.
“That’s the idea,” Picara replied.
Bretton nodded, his brow furrowing all the way up to his wavy brown hair. He knew that the rebel leader hiding her identity made sense, but he couldn’t help feeling suspicious. If he didn’t know who Admiral Vee was, then he couldn’t be sure he could trust her.
The doors at the entrance of the bridge
swished
open and then shut behind the admiral, punctuating his thoughts.
“How far up the command chain is she?” Bretton asked, turning back to Captain Picara.
She raised her hand up as high as it would go above her head. “All the way, sir.”
Bretton nodded. “Interesting.”
* * *
Lord Kaon studied the star map. Friendly and enemy contacts were highlighted red and purple respectively. The purple enemy ones winked off the grid as he watched, and he hissed, pounding the armrests of his command chair with his fists.
“They escape! Why does Queen Tavia let them escape?”
“She does not
let
them,” Lady Kala replied. “She follows them with one cluster.”
“Yess, but by now they should be dust in the cosmic wind!”
Lady Kala turned to him, her red eyes glittering. “You dare to second-guess your queen?”
Kaon thought to remind her that Tavia wasn’t
his
queen. She was the ruler of the Kylians, not all seven sub-species of Sythians, but he decided against that. Queen Tavia was still far above him in rank, and he didn’t want her or Shallah to hear his thoughts about whose queen she was and wasn’t.
Kaon turned away and called down to the comms operator. “Put a call through to Queen Tavia.”
“Yes, My Lord.”
“You wish to second-guess her to her face?” Lady Kala asked with a warble of laughter. “You are a fool, Lord Kaon.”
Kaon was about to reply to that, but the queen’s visage appeared before he could. Her papery black skin was wrinkled with disdain, and Kaon’s stomach turned. As an aquatic species, his skin was perpetually moist and smooth. Wrinkles meant desiccation and death to him. “My Queen,” he said, bowing his head.
“What is it, Lord Kaon?”
“I am merely curious, why do you allow the human fleet to escape?”
“I am following them.”
“But you could have their heads stuffed and mounted by now.”
“And risk showing these Avilonians of yours that we can now detect cloaked warships? No. We would be giving up our advantage too soon. This must come as a surprise, Lord Kaon.”
Suddenly he understood the queen’s patience, but he wasn’t sure her caution was necessary. “My Queen, how would they ever know?”
“How does an enemy ever know anything before they should? By spying on you. I trust you have noticed that two of the cloaked enemy vessels remain in this star system.”
Kaon rubbed his rubbery lips together as he struggled to remember the position of all the contacts on the star map. “I confess I do not notice this.”
“Then you know why Shallah replaced you with
me
. Those vessels are here watching us, Lord Kaon.”
“Then they saw your fleet leave, chasing the Gors, so you are already revealed to them.”
“Indeed, but what do they make of that? We do not attack the fleet we follow. For all they know, both fleets are ours.”
“Ahh, I see.”
“Patience, Lord Kaon, we must wait until we have all of the fish in our net before we make our move.”
Kaon wasn’t sure he appreciated the analogy to fish, since his sub-species, the Quarn, was much closer to a fish than humans were.
“I defer to your wisdom, Queen Tavia.”
“As you should. Do nothing to show the other two vessels that we can see them. Our trap must come as a complete surprise, one we spring upon the enemy at precisely the right moment, or we will be the ones with our heads stuffed and mounted.”
Kaon bowed his head once more. “Yes, My Queen.”
Chapter 17
T
he quantum junction rose overhead, and Ethan walked out into Etheria, straight up to a broad viewport that was shaped like the inside of an inner tube. Through the curving bottom half he looked down, down, past a dizzying swirl of traffic, streets, and colorful holo signs popping out the sides of the buildings. There were at least two separate levels of streets and traffic. Below that was the faint blue shimmer of the Styx, looking like a luminescent river.
Around him, the refugees gasped and shook their heads in awe. Alara grabbed his hand, using him as a lifeline as she leaned toward the bulging windows to peer down. She sucked in a quick breath and took a quick step back. Ethan smiled, despite how ill he felt. The dose of Bliss he’d received from his father had made him dizzy and sick. Peacekeeper Rovik had explained to him on the way back up that the first few doses of Bliss were always a shock to a person’s system—something about rearranging neurotransmitters and receptors. Users and pushers alike called it
Initiation Sickness
.
Etheria was much more colorful in the urban sense than the majestic upper city with its vast stretches of low-rise buildings and cultivated parks. As they had seen while staying at the top of Destiny Tower, Celesta was designed so that the people living there could sometimes forget they were living in a planet-wide city. Not so in Etheria. Here metropolitan life was celebrated and emphasized. The city was bright with the neon lights of holo ads and glow panels, bustling with multiple layers of air traffic and elevated streets, and variegated with pedestrians dressed in all kinds of clothes, not just Celestial whites. Here things weren’t so alien, and Ethan actually felt like maybe the people walking the streets were real humans.
Alara squeezed his hand and whispered beside his ear, “Look up!”
Ethan did, and that’s when he noticed something strange. The distance above their heads was at least as far as the distance below, but despite there being another two levels of both streets and traffic between them and the Celestial Wall overhead, Etheria was bright, not cloaked in dark shadows as one might expect. The reason for that was hard to miss. The bottoms of the streets above them were plated with broad glow panels that shone so dazzlingly bright Ethan found it hard to look at them. Then there was the Celestial Wall above that. It was equally blinding, and brighter than he remembered seeing it from the air above Celesta.
“Looks like Omnius built a pipeline to the sun,” Ethan muttered.
“Very bright for such a vertical city,” Atton agreed.
He turned to see his son standing on the other side of him. Beside Atton, the Peacekeeper, Rovik, stood with a hand on the boy’s shoulder. That man’s gravelly voice was the next thing that Ethan heard:
“In Etheria Omnius simulates the rise and fall of the sun with artificial illumination. Paradise would not be paradise if it lay in darkness.”
Ethan shook his head, remembering the deep, depressing gloom in the Null Zone. “So why don’t they do that below the Styx?”
Rovik turned to him, his blue eyes bright with with all the light that the Null Zone didn’t have, as if the Peacekeeper had personally stolen it from them.
“We don’t say that the Nulls live in darkness just because they have chosen a dark path. It is also literal. They don’t have light in the Null Zone because it is too expensive to produce that much illumination, and the Null government cannot afford such waste. What daylight they can afford to generate is reserved for growing food.”
Ethan scowled and looked away, back out the viewport, gazing down to the bottom of Etheria far below.
“Come,” Rovik said. “Our tour bus is waiting,”
They followed him to a pair of broad doors on one side of the room. Standing to either side of the doors were two more of Omnius’s drones.
Omnies
. Ethan eyed them curiously. Then the doors slid open and everyone walked through. The Omnies didn’t react to their passing. They just stood there like statues. Curious, Ethan stopped between them and stared at the nearest one.
“Do you have a name?” he tried.
Nothing.
“Hey! Can you even hear me?”
Still no reaction.
Ethan walked straight up to it with one fist raised to punch it in its gleaming metallic chest. Seeing that the drone still didn’t react to him, he cocked his arm back and swung.
Suddenly a sharp pain erupted in his wrist. The drone’s movement was so fast that his eyes hadn’t registered it at all. Maybe he’d blinked at just the wrong moment. Whatever the case, he saw that his fist had stopped mere inches from connecting with the drone’s armor, and its spindly fingers were wrapped tightly around his wrist. The ball-shaped head rolled his way and its red eye fixed him with a bloody stare. The drone’s grip tightened abruptly, and Ethan cried out in pain. His wrist felt like it was about to explode.
Then Rovik appeared, and the drone released him. Ethan gasped from the sudden release of pressure. He was left rubbing his wrist and staring accusingly up at the big red eye of the drone. “Frek! That thing almost broke my wrist!”
“What did you do to it?”
The drone looked away then, as if feeling guilty for its overreaction, but Rovik wasn’t mad at the drone.
“Come on,” he gritted, dragging Ethan through the doors. “You need to watch your step or you’re going to die long before old age finds you.”
“Frek it! Let me go,” Ethan said, struggling.
“Then behave yourself.” Rovik released him, and he almost fell on his nose.
Ethan glowered at the Peacekeeper’s back. “I was just trying to get it to react. They stand there all day, doing nothing!”
“Their job is to react to
threats
, not small talk. Clearly you identified yourself as a threat. You’re lucky it didn’t kill you.”
Ethan shook his head, outwardly annoyed, but inwardly shaken. He hadn’t been expecting such a violent response when he tried to punch the drone. He couldn’t do the drone any real damage by punching it, and he hadn’t even meant to hit it very hard, but either the drone didn’t know that, or
overreacting
to threats was part of its programming.
Ethan followed Rovik through the doors and out onto a balcony that led to a waiting air bus. He found Alara already seated inside. She shot him an angry look as he sat down.
“What were you thinking?”
“How do you even know what I did?”
“I was going to go save your ass until Rovik told me get on board and let him deal with it. If there weren’t Peacekeepers around, you could have gotten us both killed!”
Ethan looked away. “Lucky for us they were here then,” he replied.
“Ethan, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” he said, nodding slowly, and turning to look past her, out the side window of the bus. She looked out the window, too, making an irritated noise in the back of her throat after it became apparent that he had nothing else to say for himself.
As the bus began pulling out of the narrow alley where it had parked and into the vast chasm between buildings that they had been looking out on earlier, Ethan’s mind wandered back to the drones.
From what he’d heard they were not sentient or independent. Omnius controlled all of them. Whatever independence the Omnies had was likely governed by automatic sub routines. No doubt a self-defense sub routine had been responsible for almost amputating his hand. Either that, or Omnius had been behind that display of force, and the AI was just itching to make an example out of him.
Whatever the case, the drones were a more direct extension of Omnius’s will than the Peacekeepers would ever be. Peacekeepers followed orders almost without question, but they were still part of a grand society of people that all worshiped Omnius as god. They thought he was good and perfect. Ethan doubted the truth of that, but since everyone else was suckered into believing it, the AI definitely had some appearances to keep up.
Which means he can’t order his Peacekeepers to do something atrocious, but with the drones he can be himself—whatever that looks like.
I wonder what your drones are up to when no one’s watching?
The inner voice that Omnius had occasionally used to speak to him since arriving on Avilon was strangely quiet, as if the AI knew the jig was up, and there was no point hiding himself from Ethan anymore.
I’m on to you,
he thought, but still there was no reply. Ethan watched the lights of passing holo signs streaking past the air bus. He listened with half an ear as Rovik stood in the aisle between the rows of seats in the bus, describing what life would be like in Etheria. Ethan couldn’t be bothered to listen. Whatever life was like here, he knew it wasn’t for him. Having Omnius watching his every step . . . telling him what to do, even invading his dreams at night . . .
That was no way to live.
* * *
Atton watched the neon lights of the city blur past the air bus. Animated holo signs caught his eye, each one seeming to leap out at him as he focused on it—no doubt a trick of the ARCs he wore. He watched pedestrians walking on the streets and bridges below, glancing up now and then to keep from getting dizzy. Rows of colored windows streamed by, highly reflective and impossible to see through in the bright, artificial daylight of Etheria. Up ahead Atton saw endless lines of red tail lights stretching out to the horizon, as well as the bright white headlights of oncoming traffic. There were four lanes running in each direction, making the space between the buildings wider than Atton had first suspected. Given the amount of traffic and the risk of collisions, he guessed that the cars were all running on autopilot. Master Rovik confirmed that just a second later, explaining that Omnius controlled all of the cars in Etheria in order to avoid accidents. In his next breath, Rovik said that was not the case in the Null Zone, and accidents were a frequent occurrence there.
Atton turned from watching the sights to focus more squarely on what their tour guide was saying.
“Among the many advantages to life in Etheria, jobs, medical care, and education are all freely available. Even natural abilities can be altered or enhanced via gene therapies. Like Celesta, Etheria is a place of equal opportunity where you can rise as far as your own merit takes you.”
“So, I could be a professional grav ball player?” someone asked.
“I’m not sure what grav ball is, but if you mean to ask whether you can be a professional athlete, the answer is yes. You can be anything you want, but certain jobs are in greater demand and less supply. As a result the the training for certain jobs will cost more, while other jobs will not even be available to you at your citizenry rank. Because a person’s training and education can change overnight via their Lifelink implants, it’s not uncommon to start your career with various undesirable jobs, working your way up until more appealing options become available to you. As refugees, you will all start at the bottom of our society and live just above the Styx.”
“Doesn’t sound equal to me.”
“In a lot of ways it’s easier to gain favor with Omnius, and thus gain rank, when you are at the bottom, because less is expected of you, and those around you are often worse than you and have been stuck there longer. If you are truly of equal merit to say, a high-ranking Celestial, it will not be long before you become his neighbor.”
“What’s your idea of merit?” the same naysayer asked. Atton pegged the man as a former sentinel from the
Intrepid.
“It’s not my idea of merit that counts, but Omnius’s. Your merit is represented by your citizenry rank. Your rank is determined by how well you follow Omnius’s commands.”
“So what are these so-called commands?” Atton recognized his father’s voice this time.
“The first command is simple. Serve Omnius above all else, and the second one tells you how to do the first: treat others as you would like them to treat you.”
“All well and good, but what if I’m the only one doing that? Then I get frekked,” Ethan said.
“No, you get promoted, so you move up in our society, figuratively and literally. Then the people around you will be like-minded, and they will treat you just as well as you treat them—sometimes better.”