Armageddon (5 page)

The rest of Marla’s crew were scattered around the core, using handheld scanners to image the different components so that they could disassemble a digital model before they disassembled the real jump core.

Sythians stood guard all around the circumference of the room, their glossy black armor making them look like diminutive Gors.

This was Marla and her crew’s reward for surviving the battle in Dark Space—being forced to reverse-engineer quantum jump drives so that the Sythians could reach Avilon and finish what they’d started.

There was just one problem: only Omnius knew how quantum jump tech worked. The Sythians had spent enough time probing her mind to see that she wasn’t on Omnius’s side, that she was de-linked, and that one of her recent roles in the Resistance had been to help refit old human warships with quantum tech. But somehow the Sythians refused to believe that Marla had no idea how to make a quantum jump drive from scratch. The Resistance had smuggled the components for their jump drives off Avilon using a quantum junction that they’d stolen from Omnius. No one actually knew how to create those components.

Marla blew out a breath, and a nearby pair of Sythians turned toward the noise. They appeared to notice her idleness, so Marla smiled and took out her scanner.

It was time for her to look busy again.

She walked up to the component she was supposed to be imaging, absently wondering how long it would be before the Sythians realized that their prisoners had outlived their usefulness. She began scanning the giant silver rod coming down from the center of the dome-shaped core. As she did so, she saw that the internal structure of the rod was like that of a supercollider. It appeared to curve away from the aft of the ship, disappearing both above and below the jump core. Marla recalled seeing cylinders like this one in Avilonian ship schematics. They ran in rings through the drone decks that made up the insulating outer hulls of Peacekeeper ships. Marla studied the scan of the silver rod in the center of the jump core, wondering what purpose a supercollider might serve. Marla began to formulate a hypothesis, as if she’d known the answer all along.

The jump core used black holes generated by the particle accelerator to… do what exactly? Power the jump drive?

Her hypothesis ended there. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start, and it might just be enough to keep her and her crew alive for a while longer. Marla whistled and waved her hand in the air to get her crew’s attention. They came over in a hurry. “What is it?” her chief engineer asked, sounding painfully hopeful.

Marla turned to him with a smile. “I found something.”

Chapter 5

S
trategian Hoff Heston sat in his office on the second level of his apartment in Etheria. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows running adjacent to his desk gave a sprawling view of pristine towers, shining bright and majestic in the fading light of the Celestial Wall overhead. That shield layer served as Etheria’s sky, but it was also the highest level of segregation on Avilon. It separated Omnius’s children from his chosen ones—the Celestials. Those white-robed men and women rarely ventured below Celesta, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Their city lay basked in
real
sunlight, with so many green, growing parks planted on its rooftops that from above it looked almost like the natural surface of Avilon.

Hoff sent a mental command to the room’s control system via his augmented reality contacts, and the windows polarized until the only thing he could see was the holographic star map hovering above his desk.

Ever since the Sythians had defeated Omnius’s Peacekeepers in Dark Space, Hoff had felt restless. Stargazing helped diminish that anxiety. For as long as he could remember, he’d been fighting the Sythians, and now Omnius had declared that
He
would defeat them with the help of the drone fleet and an army of self-replicating nanites. The Peacekeepers were grounded.

That was as frustrating as it was suspicious. Omnius had explained that the nanites were a last resort, far too deadly to risk bringing back to Avilon. In theory, the miniature machines wouldn’t affect the ecosystems of the worlds they infected, killing only Sythians and Gors, and disassembling only their artificial creations. Yet that did nothing to limit the damage they would do to a world like Avilon that was almost entirely artificial. Worse yet, shared DNA between humans and Sythians left them at equal risk of extinction. So whoever or whatever delivered the nanites to their targets, they would not be returning to Avilon.

It wasn’t the way he’d been trained to think of war, with torpedoes and beam weapons flashing bright against shields until hulls peeled open like mechanical flowers. Using a microscopic army to do all the work was somewhat less than satisfying, and not being able to watch the action was even worse. It was…
hollow,
Hoff decided.
A hollow victory.

There came a knock at the door, and a wave of light invaded Hoff’s sanctuary. He turned and saw his wife, Destra, standing in the open doorway.

“Atton is here,” she said.

Hoff’s dark eyebrows lifted. “He’s early.”

“He says he has an important announcement to make.”

“Oh?”

“Dinner’s about to be served, so we should go sit down.”

Hoff nodded, turning off the star map and brightening the windows in his office with another mental command. His ARCs responded by minimizing the associated displays from his periphery until they were out of sight.

Hoff took Destra’s hand on his way out and walked with her down the hall. The glossy white walls to either side of them came to an end as they reached a spiral staircase to the main floor. They descended the stairs into a bright, open-concept living area with another wall of floor-to-ceiling windows running along the breadth of it. Hoff saw his seven-year-old daughter, Atta, standing there, admiring the view with his elder stepson, Atton.

Hoff went to join them, and Destra let go of his hand, heading to the kitchen. Appetizing smells of roasted meat and vegetables wafted from that direction. Across the bar, Hoff saw the family drone, Ninety-nine, busy putting the final touches on their dinner. Skinny, silvery arms and the drone’s red, cyclopean eye gave the family servant a forbidding look that didn’t sit well with Hoff, but it wasn’t as though they had other models to choose from, and they were lucky to even have a drone. Ever since Omnius had sent the drones away to fight the Sythians and to work on New Avilon, they’d become a much rarer sight.

Walking past a shiny black dining table, Hoff looked up to admire the crystal chandelier hanging above it. Prismatic shapes shattered the light, casting off sparkling rainbows in all directions. Hoff walked up beside his stepson, Atton, and nodded to the view. Gilded light poured from the Celestial Wall above, simulating a real sunset with a gradient of red and gold light. Just below that air traffic raced in orderly lines, the cars’ hulls gleaming in the fading light. Looking down, Hoff saw several more levels of air traffic flowing like rivers against the distant blue haze of the Styx. They were over a hundred and eighty floors above the surface of Avilon.

“Nice view, isn’t it?” Hoff said.

Atton turned to him with a wry grin. “Nice? This is as good as it gets.”

Hoff nodded appreciatively. Soon the traffic would disappear entirely as light from the Celestial Wall dimmed to its natural blue haze and
Sync
approached. No one in Etheria needed to sleep after they’d been resurrected by Omnius, but they did need to Sync the data in their Lifelink implants with the databases in the Trees of Life.

Omnius used the data from their Lifelinks to predict any mistakes they might make in the coming day. Armed with that information, He told his children what to do to maintain their perfect world. But Sync was also necessary to create backups, just in case someone died too suddenly to transfer. Death was a rare event, however. The only Etherians who died were those who dared to venture into the crime-ridden chaos of the Null Zone. Most chose to avoid the danger entirely rather than risk going through the pain of death and the expense of resurrection.

“Your mother said you have an announcement to make?”

Atton turned to him with a cryptic smile. “Two announcements, actually, but they’re related.”

“He won’t tell me anything,” Atta pouted.

Hoff arched an eyebrow at her. “Kind of like how
you
won’t tell your mother and I anything?”

“That’s different. We’re not supposed to talk about The Choosing.”

Atta would be turning eight soon, and that meant she had to go through her Choosing Ceremony to decide whether to become a Null or to resurrect in a new, Immortal body and stay in Etheria with her family forever.

Hoff regarded Atta with a smile. She might not be allowed to say anything, but he already knew what she would choose. She wasn’t foolish enough to become a Null. The prospect of going to a boarding school for years just so that she could
learn
how to scrape out a living in a world of crime and shadows wasn’t appealing to most people, and Atta was too smart to fall for either the libertarian view that humans should be free, or the old Etherian view that there was a better life waiting beyond this one.

Hoff turned from Atta to face his son. “Back to your news—should I be breaking out a bottle of Avilon’s finest?”

Atton grinned. “Mom already has.”

“Dinner is served,” a robotic voice said.

Hoff turned to see his wife and Ninety-nine come in from the kitchen carrying silver platters piled high with food. It was a feast.

Once they were all seated and Ninety-nine finished bustling around the table to pour wine, and red berry juice for Atta, Atton raised his glass from the foot of the table and clinked his fork against it to get their attention. Hoff eyed his stepson speculatively, waiting for the news.

“As you know, I’ve been working on special assignment in the Null Zone,” Atton began.

Hoff nodded.

“What you don’t know, is the reason for that assignment.”

Ninety-nine momentarily blocked Atton from view as he leaned over the table to begin serving the food. Hoff watched the drone spoon out an extra helping of meat for Atton. Ninety-nine was trained to know their preferences.

Atton went on, “After we lost the battle in Dark Space, I came home feeling lost and wondering what to do with myself.”

Hoff could relate to that. All of the Peacekeepers could.

“It occurred to me that the only reason I chose to become an Etherian was to join the Peacekeepers and fight the Sythians. After that was taken away from me, I found myself longing for the things I’d given up to be here.”

“What things?” Destra asked quickly, defensively.

Hoff’s brow furrowed and he, too, began wondering what Atton meant by that.

“Love, for one. I spent the night before The Choosing with a woman named Ceyla Corbin, a pilot from my old squadron. The next day she chose to become a Null, while I chose to go to Etheria.”

Hoff began to suspect where this was going, but he didn’t understand. Relationships between Nulls and Etherians never worked. Only Etherians were allowed to cross the Styx, and their visits were limited. People couldn’t share a life together with a physical wall separating them.

Atton went on, “I begged Omnius to give me another chance, to help me convince Ceyla that I’m still the same person I was before the Choosing. She believes that we have a soul and that it passes on when we die, or in my case, transfers to the body of an immortal clone. Because of that, she told me even before I ascended that she wouldn’t want to see me after I was resurrected. She’d already made up her mind that the real me would die during transfer, and all that would be left is a convincing copy. So, I made a deal with Omnius to win Ceyla’s heart without her realizing who I am. In exchange, I’ve been working undercover in the Null Zone to help prevent an organized Null rebellion.”

“Go on,” Hoff said.

“Well, Ceyla and I have been dating for the past six months, and—”

“No,” Destra said.

“Mom, just listen.”

Destra shook her head. “You can’t become a Null, Atton! For the love of a woman? What about us? What about Omnius? Etheria? Don’t throw away an eternity in paradise for a love that you could just as easily find with someone else—someone from the Uppers!”

Hoff watched Atton’s green eyes flash and his features darken. “I’ve already made up my mind. Tomorrow, on our six-month anniversary, I’m going to ask Ceyla to marry me.”

“I suppose you’ve come to ask for our blessing,” Destra said, sounding equal parts hurt and angry.

“That would be nice to have, but no, I’ve come to share the good news with you, and to ask you all to come down and meet Ceyla in the Null Zone—assuming she agrees to marry me of course.”

“Go down
there
?” Destra sounded frightened at the very thought of it.

“We’ll meet somewhere safe,” Atton said.

“There isn’t anywhere safe! That’s why we have a shield to keep them away from us!”

Hoff raised his hands for quiet. As he lowered them, he found Destra’s knee under the table and he squeezed it just hard enough to convey a warning. “I’m curious, how did Omnius help you win this woman’s heart without her realizing who you are?”