Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (138 page)

“This doesn’t invalidate who you are.”

He glanced over at her in surprise. “You know?”

She gave him the tiniest smile, though it wasn’t a happy one. “I had my own words with the Director after you left. He came to see the merits of filling me in.”

“I don’t doubt it. You have a way of refusing to accept any alternative to getting what you want.”

“Yeah…look, I’m not happy about you so dismissively shutting me out, but I won’t add to your burdens right now. We can deal with it later. Caleb, there’s something you need to understand. Having a father who was a hero instead of a villain doesn’t make life any easier
or
harder, and it doesn’t bring them back.”

It was almost as though she could see straight into his mind, reading the echo left by his thoughts. “But it does change the way you view the world, right?”

“Not really. Instead of being bitter at my father I was bitter at the rest of everyone. You were bitter at your father but quite amenable to everyone else, so long as they weren’t a criminal anyway. If we want to be bitter, we’ll find a way. I think—I hope—the opposite is true as well.”

He closed his eyes. She was correct of course, and he didn’t want to be that person; he didn’t want to be hostile, or sullen and spiteful. But he was so damn angry and confused and…terrified. His past had come unmoored, and him with it.

“I just—I feel like I was sold my entire life under false pretenses. Like it was never mine to begin with.”

“Not long after I met you, you told me you enjoyed your life and didn’t regret the choices you’d made. Does learning what happened twenty years ago honestly alter your feelings on the subject?”

Rain at last broke free from the heavy clouds hidden by the darkness, and fat droplets began splashing loudly onto the rooftop. “I don’t
know
. The whole bloody firmament’s been yanked out from underneath me. I have no rudder. I have no—”

Her hand touched his shoulder, feather light, and before he realized it he had buried his face in her hair.

Her arms were hesitant as they wrapped around his waist, but he squeezed her tight against him, as if holding onto her for his very survival. She was so much warmer than the cold air and colder rain, provided so much more comfort than either violence or solitude had.

His lips found her ear to murmur into it. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have shut you out.”

She pulled back a fraction to regard him, her eyes alarmingly wary as they searched his. “Are you keeping any more secrets from me? Real secrets, the kind that matter?”

“No.” A simple, bare word. But it was truth, something which currently seemed to be in rather short supply.

Her throat worked in a hint of unease. The rain had begun to dampen her hair in uneven streaks, and a thick strand clung along her neck to accentuate the act.

“When you ordered me out, then ran away from me…I didn’t want to, but I felt a dread that maybe this had all been a lie after all. That my initial fears about you were true, and the switch had flipped and you were going to walk away—” she cut off his burgeoning protest “—I realize I was wrong, and I’m sorry I thought it. But—”

He didn’t let her silence him this time. “You weren’t wrong to think it. I’ve given you no reason not to think it. In all honesty, it could have been true.” He reached up to grasp her face in his hands. “But it isn’t.”

She nodded in superficial acceptance of his answer. Her irises glittered brightly in the rain now streaming down her cheeks to flow over his hands, but the sentiments behind them were once again impenetrable to him.

He couldn’t blame her for remaining wary, but right now he didn’t know how to fix it. For the first time in years, there were a great many things he didn’t know.

7

SAGAN

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY

A
BIGAIL FINISHED PACKING ANOTHER CRATE
and stood—to find eight soldiers in full combat gear staring at her from the doorway of the lab.

“Dr. Canivon?”

She brushed strands of hair out of her eyes and wiped her palms on her slacks; always careful to project a poised aura, today she undoubtedly looked a wreck. “Yes, I’m Dr. Canivon.”

An extremely tall, dark-skinned man stepped forward from the group. “Major Yardua, 4
^th
Brigade, SE Command. We’re here to escort you and your equipment off-planet and ensure you reach Earth safely.”

“Well, I hope you brought a sizeable transport.”

“Transport? Ma’am, we brought a frigate.”

She offered a quiet, weary laugh. “That should be sufficient. If two of you can assist me in securing the heavier modules in crates, the rest can begin carrying out what’s already boxed up.”

The Major immediately began issuing orders to the other soldiers with a clear air of urgency. She watched him in growing concern, and when he took a breath she broke in. “You appear to be in quite a hurry. How much time do we have?”

“None, Doctor. We have no time.”

Yardua turned his back on her frown and brought his hand to his ear. “Lt. Colonel, we’ve secured the interior. Requesting SAL support along the building’s perimeter. It’s going to take approximately twenty minutes to secure the cargo and load it on the
Fitzgerald
, so any available fighter coverage would be welcome as well.”

Two of the men moved deeper into the room and began dismantling Valkyrie’s remaining server racks, and she forced her focus away from Yardua to oversee their work.

The lab had no windows, but she kept glancing over her shoulder through the open doorway to the wide windows of her office. There were flickers of soldiers rushing to and fro outside and the occasional blur of laser fire, but she was simply too far away to ascertain any details.

Troubled and increasingly curious, she escorted the next crate out of the lab and halfway through her office to get a closer view. As she motioned the men carrying it on ahead of her, the walls shook in a roaring crash and a massive fireball plumed outside the front window.

Off to her left, Major Yardua sprinted toward the exit while shouting into his comm. “Fighter down! Pilot did not eject—I repeat, pilot did not eject. Attempting rescue now.”

Aghast at the war’s dramatic arrival upon her doorstep, she stumbled backward until her hands found the wall of the lab.

One of the soldiers came up beside her. “Ma’am, the best thing you can do to help them is to help us get this equipment loaded faster.”

She shook her head roughly. “Right. We’re almost finished.”

Abigail exited the front door of the Institute to find a nightmare awaiting her. She froze at the entryway, halted by a tightness seizing her chest beyond the ache of the muscle she’d pulled lifting one of the crates.

Sagan was a lovely planet by any standard, flush with aquamarine waters sparkling under a vibrant primrose sun and bordered by verdant emerald hills. Now fire and smoke raged to devour the colors like ravenous beasts gorging on the landscape.

Debris rained across the bay in white-hot streaks. The water sizzled when the metal impacted, creating a layer of steam to hover above the surface. On the horizon a dozen fighters spun through the sky, locked in combat against more numerous strange tentacled alien ships. Closer, the Harbour Pointe entertainment district lay in smoldering ruins under the shadow of a mammoth superdreadnought.

Steps from where she stood, the wreckage of the crashed fighter jet was not yet smoldering. The twisted heap of metal still burned hot as thick smoke roiled to surround it. Five meters to either side two soldiers stood with SALs positioned on their shoulders and pointed upward. All the windows on this side of the building had shattered, leaving a carpet of glass to coat the entryway.

“We need to move, Dr. Canivon. Please follow me.”

She jerked her head clear, blinked past the shock and studied Yardua. On his arrival his uniform had been clean and well-pressed; now it sported streaks of dirt and soot and…perhaps blood.

“Of course.” A pack slung on her back filled with her most precious data and a change of clothes stuffed in the crevices, she accompanied Yardua along the path that led away from the Institute and wound around to the park adjoining it.

“Were you able to rescue the pilot, Major?”

His only response was a terse shake of his head.

On rounding the corner of the building she found herself standing thunderstruck for the second time in less than five minutes.

Sitting in the center of the manicured grass was in fact an Alliance frigate. It loomed large over the scattered picnic tables and benches, all of which were unsurprisingly empty. Burn marks had scorched two sections of the park, one worryingly close to the ship.

Soldiers hauled the last of her crates up the ramp of the open bay door while others stood guard, more SALs raised and pointed at the sky.

“It seems Alex was correct. Nothing is impossible.” She adjusted the pack higher on her shoulders and started down the hill.

The abrasive flooring beneath Abigail shuddered. The ship was taking off an instant after she climbed aboard. They truly had no time.

“Doctor, we need to get you strapped into a safety seat. The corridors are no longer safe, so we’ll be departing through the atmosphere.”

Yardua was prodding her toward a row of jump seats on the far wall of the flight deck, but she resisted his efforts. Part of her wanted to keep an eye on Valkyrie, but all the crates were lined in two layers of adaptive cushioning gel. Absent a crash, she told herself, the hardware should be safe.

“I’d prefer to be able to see if possible. Is there somewhere I would be secure with windows—er, viewports?”

The Major sighed. “Follow me. And please,
hurry
.”

They took a plain metal lift up what felt like maybe two decks then headed at a brisk pace along a hallway. Soldiers jogged past her in both directions, none of them sparing her the slightest notice. To a one they looked shockingly young and utterly competent.

Her guardian took a sharp left and opened a door to a small room—possibly a meeting room, though the military decor was so spartan she couldn’t be sure. As the door closed behind them the entire frame of the frigate began to vibrate. The scene out the viewport on the opposite wall suggested it was due to increasing atmospheric turbulence, not mechanical problems or an attack.

He gestured to several chairs attached to the wall. “These seats don’t have as much support as the jump seats below, but they do have basic safety restraints.”

The ship lurched hard to send her stumbling into the wall. Properly chastised, she followed the wall to the first chair and quickly sat. He activated the restraints, and her torso was yanked against the smooth upholstery of the chair.

“Thank you, Major.”

“Yes, ma’am. I need to attend to my duties now. Someone will return to check on you soon.” Then he was gone.

She tried to find a more comfortable position in the chair, but unfortunately the restraints had very little give to them. Making matters worse, her blouse clung to her skin in grimy patches and her scalp itched beneath dried sweat. Resigned to the discomfort, she peered out at the thick rust and gray clouds billowing past the viewport as the ship ascended through the atmosphere.

The impenetrable haze continued to swirl for so long she had begun to wonder if the ship was going sideways instead of up when the clouds finally thinned then vanished.

She had expected their disappearance to reveal the blackness of space accentuated by the pinprick light of stars. In their place it revealed a battle so breathtaking in its ferocity as to render the scene back on the planet a ridiculously pitiful skirmish.

Abigail had spent a number of years working on the periphery of the military. While she acknowledged the improvements in both medicine and technology which regularly occurred as a by-product of its mission, she had never approved of a culture that based its entire existence on the pursuit of warfare. It bred brutes and bullies and more than one sadist, but mostly it bred bureaucrats and drones.