Vertigo: Aurora Rising Book Two (36 page)

Richard frowned. “Director, I appreciate everything you’ve given me so far, but it will have to be a damn good reason for me to accompany you to a Federation world in the middle of a war.”

Delavasi nodded. “How about I can get Olivia Montegreu to come to us. And please, it’s Graham.”

36

PORTAL PRIME

U
NCHARTED
S
PACE

“
S
O MAYBE THAT’S WHY
it allowed you through the field with your cybernetics active.”

Alex regarded him askance. “What’s why?”

She and Caleb were sitting on the ground, backs propped up against a large boulder. He had grudgingly performed minor first aid on the worst of his wounds. The remains of what passed for a meal—MREs and energy bars—hadn’t yet been cleaned up and were scattered on the ground beside them.

When they had finished eating she had rested her head on his shoulder, draped a leg over his and laced their fingers together. And he had listened.

“The alien needed to be able to control your mind. I don’t mean what or how you thought, but take you where it wanted and show you what it wanted. And keep you unconscious, obviously. Even if it can communicate telepathically, I suspect it needed to interface with your cybernetics in order to accomplish the rest.”

“But now that it’s done with me, why hasn’t the repulsion field kicked me out?”

“Well, two possibilities.” Caleb reached into the pack lying next to him and produced a small, unadorned metal orb. “These orbs generate the field. They were staggered along the mountainside for a while, then eventually I quit seeing them. At first I thought the repulsion was an all-encompassing field, but now I suspect it’s more like a demilitarized zone.”

“In which case the field isn’t active here…what’s the second possibility?”

“That because our cybernetics are internal, they don’t trip the field at all—in which case I’m eVi-less unnecessarily.” He shrugged. “But I couldn’t take the chance.”

“Is it weird, having everything turned off?”

“Yeah, it is. I reach for modified vision or a nano-boost of adrenaline and nothing responds.”

“You did fine slaying the dragon all on your own.”

“True, but it wasn’t exactly easy. Beast tried to roast me.” He sighed. “Mostly, though, it’s quiet. I don’t think any of us realize just how much we have constantly going on in our heads, how much our eVi is always multitasking and tracking and informing.”

“You believe it’s become a crutch?”

“Well, sure. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad crutch. It’s a tool, one which has made us stronger. Healthier, smarter, faster. But the quiet is kind of nice once you get accustomed to it.”

His thumb lazily traced a pattern on her palm. “Any idea what the point was? The aliens went to a fair amount of trouble, kidnapping you and spending a day and a half running you through a mental and emotional gauntlet.”

“It was a test.”

“Why do you say that?” His voice had taken on a more measured tenor; he was intrigued.

“‘You have done well.’ It’s what my captor said right before the last vision, scenario, whatever. With my father. Up until then it had simply dumped me into these scenes and let me rant at the empty air. But apparently it was paying attention.”

She groaned. “Unfortunately, it provided no information as to what the test was
for
or what consequences flowed from doing well, other than not killing me.”

He leaned in and kissed the top of her head. “I saw one of them. Spoke to it. It didn’t speak back.”

She twisted around to face him fully. “Are you serious? What did it look like? What happened?”

“It looked ethereal…individual points of light which morphed and took shape. It was a brief encounter and I’m afraid I was a little distracted by the powerful need to get to you.”

“Oh.” She melted under the intensity of his gaze. “Where did it go? Did you see?”

He motioned behind them, beyond the plateau. “I’ve no idea how far. It vanished from view after the first dip in the land.”

Her eyes followed the direction he indicated. The peaceful, natural terrain continued unabated to the horizon and offered no clues as to the secrets it held. “That’s where we go then.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, resolute. “It owes me some answers. Owes us both answers.”

“Okay.”

“Here’s the problem: it sounds like the aliens don’t look like anything at all. I don’t know how many of them are here or a thing about them except they understand English and are supremely arrogant, yet can be reasoned with. But as to where to find them? This isn’t space. I don’t know the rules of the wilderness quite so well. Or at all.”

“Then it’s a good thing I do.”

“It is. I mean, you found me hidden away deep in the mountains, didn’t you?” She kissed him, long and deliciously slow, before climbing to her feet to scrutinize the copse on the off chance there might be a breadcrumb or a directional arrow.

He jerked his head toward the pack. “I brought you fresh clothes if you want to shed those.”

“You’re not getting in my pants right now. You’re injured.”

“Not what I meant—”

She winked at him. “I know. I do want to change, but I’m so filthy I’ll only ruin the new clothes, too. Maybe we’ll happen upon a stream or something and can both get clean.” She gestured to the now-dried blood on his clothes.

“Hazard of being a dragonslayer.” He re-secured everything in the pack and closed it up then stood and slung the sheathed sword across his back.

She smiled to herself, watching him while he couldn’t see her do so. In another time, another life, with another person she would’ve tossed a string of expletives in his direction for what he had done, kicked him out the airlock and held a grudge towards him for the rest of her life for daring to touch, to
alter
, her beloved ship.

But this wasn’t another time or another life, and he wasn’t any other person. Now she was able to get out of her own way long enough to see past her blind spots and recognize he had been right to act as he did.

Her heart, perhaps even her soul, palpitated with this…
sensation
. She had called it love, but she had called feelings ‘love’ in the past. Feelings which weren’t this.

She recalled the bottomless, powerful emotion, the
dushevnoye volneniye
bleeding out of her mother’s voice and shining through the anguish on her father’s face and considered the possibility this was but a hint, a small tease, of what her parents had felt for each other.

It terrified her. It made her throat convulse and cut off the oxygen to her brain, leaving her unable to process a rational thought. It made her want to run away from him, all the way to the other end of the universe if necessary, before this damnable ‘feeling’ got any stronger. It made her want to protect him, to grab him by the hand and run away
with
him to the other end of the universe, to somewhere the evils of the world would never beset him.

It terrified her, but she had no choice. She could no longer fathom walking away.

So when he turned to her, she merely pointed to the mountainside. “Lead the way.”

37

EARTH

EASC
H
EADQUARTERS

L
IAM GLOWERED OUT THE WINDOW
of his office. From the top floor of Logistics he observed four other buildings, the bustling courtyard below and a sliver of the continuing clean-up effort at the bomb site.

It was a more expansive view than he’d enjoyed on Deucali, where no military building stood higher than five stories. Yet in the corners of his vision the walls undulated menacingly, as though they plotted to close in and suffocate him if he let them out of his sight.

It was all falling apart, and no matter what he did he couldn’t seem to wrangle it back under control.

Why did God-damned aliens have to show up? Now, in this year, this time—
his
time—when they had so many millennia to choose from? They were ruining everything. Ruining his carefully devised plans and with them his hopes for the future, for redemption, for vengeance.

He wanted to grind every Federation world into dust beneath his boot as his army blazed a trail of blood and corpses all the way to Seneca. He wanted to storm their inner sanctum and fire a laser into the skull of their Field Marshal while their Chairman watched, then fire a laser into the skull of their Chairman. He wanted to burn their bodies on a pyre and carry the ashes back to Deucali and spread them on his mother’s consecrated grave.

Instead he struggled to simply keep his head above water, overwhelmed by a crumbling northwestern force which had proved unable to even penetrate Federation space. His northeastern force had gone unashamedly renegade and the southern fleets were unwilling to budge beyond minor shoring up of Earth and the First Wave worlds’ defenses. The politicians, the press and the public were demanding to know how he proposed to fight these aliens and thus far neither he nor the new Prime Minister had been able to pacify their clamor.

He didn’t want to fight the aliens. He didn’t give a flying fuck-all about the aliens, except insofar as they interfered with his plans. His sole solace was a deep suspicion these aliens would surely reach Seneca before long. If it became impossible to burn it himself, at a bare minimum he could witness it burn from afar.

Once the planet lay in smoldering cinders, then and only then might he consider fighting the aliens.

The door slid open behind him, jerking him away from the window. His jaw ground his teeth roughly against one another as Miriam Solovy invaded his personal sanctum.

Ever since her daughter was purportedly ‘cleared’ of involvement in the bombing, she had been insufferable. Marching around his facility like she was the second coming, ordering his people around like she was in charge.

“Solovy, have you not the basic decency to request permission before storming into my office?”

“Your secretary was absent, and I hadn’t the time to wait.”

“I haven’t the time either. What do you want?”

Her smirk curdled his stomach. “In that case, I’ll spare you the niceties and come straight to the point. Your brief leadership tenure has been an unmitigated disaster. You send our forces against meaningless targets, wasting resources we need in order to fight the alien invasion while refusing to send them where they can be of actual use. You neglect the monumental threat these aliens represent to the point of outright dereliction of duty in favor of lobbing ineffectual taunts over the Federation border.”

“How dare—”

“I realize you lost your mother in the First Crux War. I understand from where your hatred of Seneca stems. I have been there, and it is a dark, desolate place. For this reason and this reason alone, I am giving you the opportunity to resign voluntarily. Return to Southwestern Command and work to protect those worlds. You were competent at that task at least. But if you do not resign in the next twelve hours, know I will seek your removal from the Chairmanship and, if necessary, your discharge.”

He was in her face. He didn’t recall how he had gotten there.
She was so small, such a puny little creature.
“You bitch. What gives you the right to think you have any say in my command? You’re nothing but a glorified secretary playing dress-up. Go back to your tea party and let the real soldiers do the work.”

She didn’t flinch.
People so small as her always flinched.

If anything her glare hardened further. “I gave you your chance. You are a disgrace to the Alliance Armed Forces and the uniform you wear. You aim to sacrifice millions on the altar of your delusional crusade and I will not allow it. I—”

His punch knocked her back a meter into the wall. His fist had moved of its own volition, carrying a rage and frustration all its own.

To his dismay, she didn’t fall.
People so small as her always fell.

No tears pooled in her eyes; instead they flared golden amber as she rubbed her jaw and pushed off the wall to stand rigid straight. A peculiar smile danced across her lips. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and down her chin, but she ignored it.

“You should not have done that, Liam. Thank you for confirming everything I suspected about you. Pack your belongings, because you are finished.”

Then she pivoted and was gone, leaving him standing there aghast. Striking a fellow officer was grounds for censure, if not demotion or even dishonorable discharge.

She just made him so damn angry! She understood nothing—nothing about what it meant to be a soldier, nothing about what it meant to serve a higher purpose. Worse, she dared to be unapologetically arrogant in her ignorance.

Pulse thundering in his ears, his eyes darted around the office. Here only weeks, it held no personal attachment for him.

He did not intend to be humiliated in public. He’d die before being dragged in front of a tribunal for crones to stare condescendingly down their noses at him and dare to judge him.

A cold certainty descended upon him, quieting the storm in his head. He had nothing left but the mission to which he had devoted his life. It had sustained him this long. It would not fail him now.

He would make Seneca pay. And after he exacted his just reward from Seneca, he would make them all pay.

38

ROMANE

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY

A
LONE IN A QUIET ROOM
for the first time in days, Mia sank against the wall and closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep for a week. If a little luck swung her way, after this last meeting she could sleep for six hours or so. It seemed a reasonable start.

The ‘strategy session’ had been a nightmare. Corralling, focusing and stroking the egos of two dozen egomaniacs and dysfunctional genius intellects so they didn’t storm out, or even better kill one another, was not a task she’d wish on anyone. She would be happy if millennia passed before she was forced to do it again.