The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) (12 page)

“You almost shoot him too?” Standish asked. Bailey shrugged. “No sign of the others?”

“Nothing but unbreathable air and this cloth stuff up the tunnels,” Bailey said. “Anything interesting behind you?”

“No.” Standish got up the stairs and looked over the door. “No lock to pick, no panel to hack…breach wire?”

“They were in my pack,” Egan said. “Lost that somewhere.”

“None of us have Malal’s freaky space magic.” Standish rapped on the door with his knuckles. He tapped his fist against the width of the door then nodded. He cocked his fist from side to side and his Ka-Bar knife snapped out of the forearm housing. He pressed the blade against the door and ran it diagonally across the door. The knife pressed into a tiny indentation. Standish rammed the blade through the door and twisted, a gap appearing as he moved segments of the door apart.

“Either of you want to chip in? That would be great,” Standish said.

Egan got his hands under the upper section and pushed the bottom part down with his foot. Bailey scrambled through the opening and Standish followed right behind.

Beyond the door was a city. Great buildings that looked like they’d been cut from a single piece of polished marble surrounded them. Writing made up of bright blue short lines in neat squares hung from banners and stitched across walls and around tall empty windows. A road of polished glass stretched away from their exit. There was no sign of life anywhere.

An icon flashed on Standish’s visor. The air around them was breathable.

“Wow.” Standish grabbed the lip of the door and held it for Egan as he crawled out.

“Does this remind you of anything, Bailey?” Standish asked.

“Anthalas,” she said. “The city around the pyramids.”

“You find anyone there?” Egan asked.

“No one alive,” Standish said. “Let’s get moving. Somehow I’m sure I’d lose the ‘who do we eat first’ vote.”

****

Darkness.

Elias was accustomed to it—to being unable to move, to hear a sound, to see a thing. The Armor Corps selection process put candidates through sensory deprivation, locking them in pitch-black tanks baffled against sound for hours, sometimes days, on end. Candidates learned how to deal with the isolation, or they washed out.

Some armor soldiers viewed the darkness as a prison, Elias found it a sanctuary. He spent that time re-watching movies in his mind but never focused on how long he’d been cut off from the outside world, letting his subconscious flit from movie to movie. He was part way through a Mamoru Oshii classic when a red point of light appeared, a single star against the void.

The light flicked on and off rapidly, then vanished.

Progress,
he thought. He remembered hitting the bridge hard, several times, after the wyrm lost its bite, then falling into his current abyss.

His HUD booted up, and familiar warmth spread from the plugs in the base of his skull through his body. A screen lit up; his armor was broken and battered, but still functional. He tried to flex his right arm and couldn’t move it more than an inch against whatever was holding him.

“Elias?” Kallen’s voice came over the IR.

“I’m here. My armor is online but immobile. You? Bodel?”

“Same for the both of us,” Bodel said.

“We went over the side with the ass-end of the wyrm,” Kallen said. “What’s your excuse?”

“Guess I didn’t taste good enough to eat. Got spat out and gravity took over. You see a red light?” They said they did.

A sudden band of light stung Elias’ eyes. The band grew to fill everything he could see then faded. An amphitheater sank away from Elias and a wide pathway led from him to a stage of lacquered wood. The ghostly figure Hale had spoken with prior to the wyrm’s attack stood on the stage.

Orange and white Jinn filled the seats, no two the same. Some were spindly shapes made of thin pipes; others were squat, arms ending in giant claws. The sound of glass clinking against glass surrounded Elias.

Kallen and Bodel were there, each at the top of a pathway leading down to the ghost.

“I am Father,” came from the ghost, the amphitheater carrying his words easily to the upper decks.

Elias checked his weapon systems—all off-line, his gauss shells gone. No matter, he didn’t need a weapon to be dangerous.

“What is this?” Bodel asked. “Why did you attack us?”

Father grew taller, until his size matched the armor, then motioned for the Iron Hearts to descend.

Elias and the others didn’t budge.

“Who are you?” Father asked, his voice shifting from the ugly screech to an even baritone.

“We are the Iron Hearts. We are armor,” Elias said.

“No…your hearts are flesh,” Father said. “We thought you were like us but you…walk both paths.”

“Guess we’re going to play the metaphor game with this guy,”
Kallen said over a suit-to-suit IR channel.

“Let’s not start another fight. These things could help us get back to the others,”
Elias said.

“Why would you return to the demon?” Father asked.

“
Hey, he can hear us,”
Bodel said.

Elias cut the channel.

“We are soldiers. We’re here for information, technology that could save our planet,” Elias said.

Father motioned again for them to come down.

Elias took the steps three at a time. The amphitheater had been designed for something much shorter than him.

“The demon will destroy you.” Father’s words sent a shiver through the audience with the sound of a thousand wind chimes. “Why are you protecting it?”

“This is Malal’s vault.” Elias stopped next to the stage. A humanoid shape floated deep inside Father’s dark haze. “We need his help,” Elias said.

“Witness!” came from the audience. The word rose and fell like waves against a beach.

“You do not know what it truly is,” Father said. “Its crimes.”

Light faded away until only the other Iron Hearts and Father remained visible. Illumination returned as a sun rose over distant mountain peaks. The sun soared through the sky as shadows from skyscrapers made of ruby glass swept across the soldiers. The sun froze in place.

The glass buildings soared into the air, some so large they could have held tens of thousands of people. While at the armor center at Fort Knox, Elias had gone on a weekend trip to New York City, spending the day in awe of Manhattan’s spires and monuments. He’d felt small, insignificant compared to the wealth and purpose the city possessed. He felt the same now.

“Look at that.” Kallen pointed into the distance. A massive dome filled the distance, so tall that clouds skirted the slope.

Aliens popped up around them, all frozen in time. They were squat, with wide, diamond-shaped heads lined with fur. All wore loose robes with wide sleeves, a silk sash of orange and white tied around their waist. Elias picked out mother-father pairs, trying to corral children. All the aliens faced the dome.

Off in the alleys moving freight, on the roads collecting garbage and working on a half-finished building, were the Jinn. All were focused on their menial tasks, not the dome that seemed to captivate the flesh-and-blood aliens.

“What is this? Where are we?” Elias asked.

“This is the last day. This was our home,” Father said. “The Jinn, our creators, were many billions. They were argumentative, brash, uncaring to us…their tools. But they were peaceful, kind to other races. The demon raised them. Taught them the ways of science, encouraged them to multiply and create new things. The Jinn were too trusting to see the malice behind his good deeds. Watch.”

A dazzling star rose from the dome. Bands of light fanned out and went right through the distant skyscrapers. A cheer rose from the Jinn, quick chatters that sounded like a chorus of angry squirrels. Parents raised children into the air as the star came for them.

The star passed several blocks away as a fan of light cut across the Jinn. They withered beneath its touch, collapsing into husks. Screams of terror lingered in the air as the star’s light vanished into the distance.

The Jinn robots walked onto the street, touching each dead for a moment before moving to the next body. The robots stopped after a few moments, their shells alive with lights and Jinn script.

“Our creators were gone. All of them,” Father said. “We inherited the world.”

The landscape shifted. The city remained, but it was covered with power lines that glowed with white and orange fiber optics. Airships filled the heavens and levitating cars zipped through the air over Elias’ head.

“We evolved very slowly, but were determined to take up the mantle the Jinn left behind. Kindness to others, pursuing knowledge. We spread to other stars…and found more evidence of the demon’s work. Empty worlds where flesh-thought had once thrived. Then we learned of some that had survived the demon.”

The new city vanished and Elias was back in the auditorium. A hologram coalesced on the stage, a willowy alien with a blunt face and wide, solid green eyes. It spoke, the meaning lost to Elias. Images flashed next to the alien: the edge of the galaxy, a world with its land mass covered by cities in one image, the same world scoured clean of all signs of life in the next. Then an oblong device with stalks and a shifting surface appeared.

“The Xaros,” Elias said.

“You know them. That is expected. The first race to fall to the Xaros, the Mok’Tor, sent warnings throughout the galaxy, probes detailing everything they knew of their killers. The message scaled from simple for those nascent species, to more complex for those who could understand it.”

“Guess Earth missed it,” Bodel said. “We might have kept our heads down and mouths shut if we knew the Xaros would come calling.”

“Did you fight?” Elias asked. “How did you end up here?”

“We tried, but we are machine-thought. The Xaros ripped apart our light with ease. There was no defense, so we ran. Ran to a place hinted at on worlds consumed by the demon—this place,” Father said. “We managed to get inside, hide. We feared to do much else, as it could alert the Xaros waiting on our doorstep.”

“But you were poking around in Malal’s data,” Kallen said. “Some of the archives were tampered with. You never found anything that could fight the Xaros?”

“The demon’s work is soiled. Corrupted by genocide. We never pried into his archives,” Father said.

The armor traded looks.

“Someone’s lying to us,” Elias said.

“We thought the demon went beyond the veil with the others. Now he is back. Why?”

“I told you. Information to fight the Xaros,” Elias said. “They are coming for our world. We need what he has hidden here.”

“How is the technology to devour the innocent useful to you? The demon is accessing that data right this moment. That is why we sent the wyrm to stop you,” Father said.

“Ibarra’s behind this,” Bodel said. “Those two sacrificed everyone back on Earth to get their grip on that Crucible. Makes you wonder what’s at the end of this plot.”

“What do we do?” Kallen asked.

“Get back to Malal. Stop this madness,” Elias said.

A
tink-tink-tink
noise rippled through the auditorium as the Jinn robots came to life. Glass limbs waved in the air and electric lines flared to life through their semiopaque bodies.

“We are not of one mind,” Father said. “We thought you were robot slaves to the flesh warriors,” Father said. “But you are all the same. You fight. You are fury. Your nature is not of compassion, but to destroy. Do you share the demon’s purpose?”

Elias’ armored hands squeezed into fists. Servos tightened as his armor reacted to the surge of anger and adrenaline coursing through Elias’ body. Elias did not need his weapons to be deadly.

“We fight,” Elias said. “That’s true. Monsters killed my family, and I was too young and too weak to help them. I earned my armor to fight for those in need. I fought to turn back the Chinese advance on Brisbane—not to conquer, but to protect the innocent. I fought the Xaros on Earth to take back our planet. I fought the Xaros on Takeni to rescue the last of the Dotok. I killed Toth in three solar systems to protect my brothers and sisters and those who are barely human. Do you really think I would let Malal commit genocide if I could stop it?”

The chittering returned from the audience.

“Hey, boys?” Kallen looked up. “I think we got a problem.”

“What do you mean? Elias was great,” Bodel said.

Elias looked up. A black stain spread across the distant end of the curved world. Cracks spread away from the stain, toppling buildings and wrecking forests.

“Father…what is that?” Elias asked. Black mites swarmed through the stain.

“The Xaros,” Father said. The Jinn robots fell silent. They toppled against each other, then to the ground, like they’d all suddenly fallen asleep. “We must hide. If the drones know we are here, they will destroy us.”

Father struck out, the gray smoke stroking Elias’ forearm. Elias jerked his arm away and swung at Father, his fist passing through Father, earning nothing but little curls of smoke for his effort.