Dark Space: Avilon (10 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
They came to the end of the corridor and entered a lift tube with transparent walls and floor. The doors
swished
shut behind them, and the lift started down. As it dropped, their top-down view of the clone lab was replaced by a cross-section. There were fully grown men and women inside each of the hexagonal cells, all of them naked and floating peacefully in shining blue tanks. Their eyes were closed, their legs drawn up to their bodies in a fetal position, and nutrient tubes trailed from their belly buttons.
The clones were all stunning—noses the right length and shape; eyes not set too wide or too close together; brows not jutting, too sloped or too high; chins and jaws the right size and shape for their respective sexes. A few of the clones were smiling in their sleep, revealing coveted dimples in their cheeks. There were skin tones of every shade and color, proving that at least Omnius was not racist. Black didn’t become White, but fat became skinny, old became young, and weak became strong.
“This is perverse,” Ceyla whispered.
Atton shook his head. His own stomach was churning, but he hadn’t decided yet if that was from revulsion or excitement.
They dropped past a dozen identical floors of clone tanks, the lift picking up speed.
“How big is this place?” Atton heard his father ask.
Galan Rovik’s voice resonated in the confined space of the lift tube, “The capacity of a Tree of Life’s clone rooms is just over five hundred million. There are more than a thousand towers like this one, spread out all over Avilon.”
Atton frowned, curiosity tickling through the back of his mind. As the lift tube continued to drop past layer after layer of sleeping clones, he realized what it was that had sparked his curiosity. “Five hundred million people, times one thousand towers like this one . . . that’s only half a trillion people. . . . The Imperium had a population just less than sixty trillion. That doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Not to resurrect everyone all at once, no. Clones are grown to maturity in a month or less, but even so, it had to be done in stages. People were resurrected in the order that they died, with immediate family members being resurrected as soon after their loved ones as possible.”
“How did you do it?” Atton asked. He imagined five hundred million people suddenly waking up to find that they weren’t actually dead, all of them disoriented and confused . . . Multiply that by a thousand times, and repeat it once a month.
That’s a lot of processing.
“The drones did most of the work,” Master Rovik explained. “There are many more of them than there are of us. They were the ones who expanded Etheria to make room for your kind.”
Your kind,
that description rattled around in Atton’s head, making noise.
A new voice asked, “There are more drones on Avilon than people?” It was Captain Caldin.
“There were. They’re mostly gone now, off to build New Avilon.”
“There’s another planet like this?”
“We can’t stay on Avilon forever with a population as large as ours—not if we want to keep having children.”
Atton noticed Alara rubbing her belly at the mention of children. “Will we be able to travel to New Avilon and see it?” he asked.
“No,” Master Rovik replied.
Atton’s eyes narrowed swiftly at that. “Why not?”
“It’s not ready.”
“I’m not talking about living there. I just want to see it.”
“Not even
I
have had that honor, so you surely will not.”
“Has
anyone
been there?” Atton heard his father ask.
“It is a surprise.”
“You mean a secret,” Ceyla said.
Master Rovik turned in a slow circle, his expression incredulous as he took in the small group of refugees. “Where I come from, we don’t judge things that we know nothing about. We study them and learn until we understand. Only then do we form our opinions. It has been many years since I have encountered such resistance to the truth. If all of the citizens in Dark Space are like you, I fear for the future of your people.”
Your people.
Again, Atton was made to feel like an outsider, and he realized that Master Rovik considered them all second-class citizens, just because they hadn’t been born on Avilon. He wondered if Omnius felt the same way.
Atton frowned and turned back to watch the lift tube dropping past an endless series of honeycomb-shaped clone tanks. His eyes drifted out of focus and it all became one big, bright blur of sleeping humanity.
One thought kept turning over and over in his head as he watched.
There are more drones than people.
Even if all of Avilon rebelled against Omnius, somewhere out there in the galaxy, now busy building another world just like this one, was the army Omnius could use to stop them.
But Master Rovik was right. They
were
all suspicious without cause. So they had to give up some of their freedom in order to achieve a real utopia. Was that such a bad thing?
The sheer scale of development on Avilon gave him hope. No matter how numerous the Sythians were, the Avilonians with their superior technology were more than a match for them. He imagined a future where some day there would be hundreds of worlds like Avilon in the galaxy, and thousands more supporting them. It would be an Imperium on the scale of the Sythian Coalition, spanning from one side of the galaxy to the other.
Ceyla caught him smiling. “What are you so happy about?” she asked.
His smile faded when he saw the guarded look on her face. “Nothing.”
She didn’t look convinced. Ceyla would be harder to win over, given her beliefs. With that realization, he felt a stab of fear for her that took him by surprise. What if she decided to become a Null? Would he ever see her again?
The real price of paradise wasn’t that they were unable to make mistakes. It was that not everyone wanted to be there.
A whispering voice rippled through his thoughts, startling him:
Yes, Atton, that is the price, but it is only paid by Nulls. Etherians can visit their loved ones in the Null Zone whenever they like. And most Nulls do eventually ascend to Etheria.
Ceyla shot him another wary look. “You seem to be taking all of this in your stride,” she said.
Atton frowned. “No, Omnius just spoke to me, he was explaining something about—”
Ceyla raised a palm in front of his face. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear anything that serpent has to say.”
“Ceyla, he wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, he was just explaining how things work here.”
She raised her eyebrows and shook her head, gesturing to their surroundings. “The way things work here is determined by Omnius,” she whispered. “
Everything
on Avilon is designed to convince you to live the way
he
wants you to. To believe what he tells you. The whole planet is one big arrow pointing up—straight to him. Why do you think they call themselves the Ascendancy?”
The lift tube stopped, and the Omnies preceded them out onto another identical field of clones. As they walked, half a dozen tanks began rising, revealing shining blue pillars of water that served as the clones’ amniotic fluid. They came to the first cell and the Omnies stopped. Within it was a beautiful young woman, long blond hair floating in a silken mane around her head. Master Rovik gestured to her, and Ceyla gasped.
“What the frek is this?” she demanded.
“You,” Master Rovik replied.
Atton felt like someone had slapped him in the face. Now that he looked at the woman in the tank, he did recognize her, but her features were all somehow more beautiful and less real, like she was a doll rather than a clone. As soon as he recognized her, he looked down, shading his eyes with his hand so he couldn’t see anything above the knee.
The Omnies stepped aside, and the refugees took that as their cue to go running across the field of clones, checking raised tanks at random. Atton stayed with Ceyla, peeking around his palm to watch as she placed a splayed hand against the transpiranium tank.
“It can’t be me,” she whispered, sounding miserable.
Unsure of how to comfort her, Atton placed his free hand on her shoulder, being careful to keep his eyes averted.
Ceyla flinched and rounded on him. “Mind giving me some privacy, Commander?”
“I . . .”
“Or were you planning to stare at my naked backside all day?”
Atton frowned. “Sorry.” With that, he turned and began walking toward the next nearest clone tank. Another woman floated there. From a distance he noticed his father and Alara standing beside that clone. Atton announced himself before he drew near, to make sure he wouldn’t surprise anyone. “Hoi!”
Ethan turned and waved him over, which Atton took to mean that they weren’t as concerned about privacy as Ceyla had been.
As he drew near, he recognized the clone floating inside this tank as a slightly prettier version of Alara. She had always been beautiful, but just like Ceyla, her features had been subtly adjusted to make them even more symmetrical and feminine.
“Is that you?” Atton asked, turning to Alara.
She shook her head. “No, it’s not.” She had both her hands wrapped protectively around her vaguely protruding belly, and her violet eyes were wide and unblinking as she stared at her clone’s midsection.
Atton followed Alara’s gaze and saw that her clone was equally pregnant. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said.
With that, a familiar gravelly voice spoke up behind them. “How could this be paradise if all the women who were pregnant when they died were resurrected without their babies?”
Alara turned to Galan. “My baby doesn’t have an implant yet. How will you transfer her memories?”
“She will be implanted through her umbilical cord with what she remembers from being in your womb.”
“You can do that?” Atton asked.
Master Rovik smiled. “Omnius can do anything.”
Atton went back to staring at Alara’s pregnant clone. It felt perverse looking at his stepmother this way—naked, and floating in a tank, but she didn’t quite look like Alara. More like her sister.
Alara took a step toward the tank and pressed her hands against it as Ceyla had done. She traced the nutrient tube running from the clone’s belly button to the floor of the tank and then looked up to study her own face.
Suddenly, the clone’s leg jumped, and so did Atton. Clone Alara’s eyes popped open, wide and staring, and her mouth opened as if in a scream. Atton stumbled away from the tank.
Ethan cursed viciously and turned to Master Rovik. “She’s alive, you sick frek!”
Galan was unfazed by the accusation. “Of course she’s alive.”
“She looked like she was trying to say something,” Atton added, hugging his shoulders. “Or like she was in pain.”
Galan shook his head. “Clones are alive, but they cannot speak. They’ve never learned how. And they have never experienced pain. Our methods of growing them are completely humane.”
Atton watched the clone slowly close its eyes and mouth, and he shivered violently. “Why did she open her eyes?” he asked.
“Why does a baby kick in its mother’s womb? Perhaps she heard us talking, but don’t worry. Whatever memories she has of being a clone and living in a tank will be erased at the moment Omnius downloads and transfers the data from her Lifelink to her brain.”
“I’ve seen enough of this,” Ethan said, turning away. Alara lingered with her palms pressed against the glass, her own eyes wide and staring, her jaw hanging slightly open in a parody of what they’d seen from her clone a moment ago.
“Alara?” Ethan called.
“Yeah . . .” She gave a sudden shiver, and that seemed to snap her out of it. She backed away from the tank, rubbing her arms as if they were cold. Ethan took her hand and led her away.
Atton knew just how Alara felt. There came a hiss of frigid air and the clone tanks sank back into the floor.
As they returned to the lift, Atton couldn’t help thinking about the clones, and wondering why he hadn’t seen
his
.
While riding back up to their transport, others began asking the same question. Master Rovik replied, “Some of you are ready to become Etherians, and others are not. Only the drones and Omnius understand the way the
Trees of Life
are organized. One thing is certain, however—the people you saw will soon be separated from those you did not.”
Atton frowned, wondering what conclusions he could possibly draw from that. Then he realized what that meant for him and Ceyla, and a sharp pain lanced through his heart. He glanced at her, studying her features, memorizing them: the soft red glow of her cheeks, the redness of her lips, the luminous golden color of her hair . . . and the subtle curve at the tip of her nose . . .
Ceyla was still in shock. She didn’t notice him staring. She had also missed the prophetic implication of Master Rovik’s last comment—if Atton’s clone hadn’t been in that room, and hers had, that meant they weren’t going to make the same choice.
“Hey, Kiddie, don’t believe it. We’re going to stick together. I’m not going to leave you.”
Atton turned to see his father embracing his wife. Alara was nodding along, her head tucked under Ethan’s chin, her violet eyes bright and shining with tears.
Ethan’s clone hadn’t been in that room, either. Despite that, Atton knew better than to think they would choose to go their separate ways, even with something like the promise of immortality and eternal youth to sway their choice. Him and Ceyla on the other hand . . .
They were just two friends who kept flirting with something more, and that wasn’t enough to keep them together with eternity hanging in the balance.
Not even close to enough.
Chapter 9
O
mnius called the war council aboard the
Vicerator.
It was
the largest surviving warship in the Peacekeepers’ fleet, at just over six kilometers long. Strategian Hoff Heston took his seat with the other ranking officers in the second row of the assembly room. At the front of the room, the twelve Overseers of Avilon sat at a U-shaped table beneath a dazzling holo projection of the Avilonian crest. The outer spiral of the crest rotated slowly around the glowing eye in the center. The eye was that of Omnius, and at the moment it was glowing bright as any sun, illuminating the entire room. The augmented reality contacts they all wore shaded their eyes from the glare, but Omnius was still so bright that most of them had to bow their heads in order to avoid looking directly at him.
Hoff was unique among those present in that he was the only one with first-hand experience of what they were going to face in Dark Space. He’d been an Admiral in the Imperial Navy, on the run with his fleet for almost a decade after the original invasion.
“We should take the drone Fleet with us,” one of the overseers said. The man’s name appeared before Hoff’s eyes, projected onto his ARCs—
Overseer Talon Fothram.
A booming voice replied, “That will not be necessary.” The grandeur of that voice was hard to mistake.
“My Lord—after the Sythians destroyed our fleet in orbit, we’re down to less than a tenth of our original strength. What remains of our fleet could be defeated if we don’t augment it with drone ships.”
“We defeated them easily enough when they came here,” Grand Overseer Thardris put in from his place at the head of the table.
“We had the help of Avilon’s ground batteries and fighter garrison to fight them off,” Overseer Fothram said. “We also took them by surprise with the fact that our scanners can penetrate their cloaking shields. This time they’ll be ready for us, and they’ll have the advantage of any fortifications they’ve made.”
“But we’ll know what those fortifications are,” the Grand Overseer replied. “Their human slaves have Lifelink implants. Omnius will see everything that the Sythians are planning.”
Another overseer, Jurom Tretton, spoke up from the opposite side of the table, directing his attention to brightly-glowing eye of Omnius rather than to any of his peers. “My Lord, why not just kill them? If all the Sythians’ slaves suddenly drop dead, their fleet will be as helpless as ours was when you were forced to shut down. The slaves will resurrect here either way.”
Thunder rolled through the assembly room. “I cannot kill them without taking from them their right to choose. The only thing we stand to lose by liberating Dark Space is a few more warships.”
“But those are warships we cannot afford to sacrifice!” Jurom added. “Before last night’s attack, we were going to send the fleet to the Getties Cluster and take the fight to the Sythians! Now look at us! We’re planning to rescue the remnants of humanity and bring them here so that we can hide. We need to crush the Sythians decisively, not suffer more attrition.”
“Mind your tongue, Overseer. You would be wise to listen before you presume to tell
me
how to run
my
empire,” Omnius said. “If we take the drone fleet, as you suggest, Avilon will be defenseless. I have not yet fully rooted out the rebels in the Null Zone, and without the drones to keep watch over the city during Sync, there could be a rebellion the likes of which I’m sworn to protect Avilon against above all else.”
Jurom bowed his head. “Forgive me, My Lord, I did not mean any disrespect.”
“You are forgiven, my child. After all, it was only last night that the Nulls brought Avilon to its knees. The virus they introduced into the Omninet inadvertently let the Sythians into our star system and allowed them to destroy our orbital fleet. We very nearly lost Avilon itself.”
“The Nulls had unfortunate timing, My Lord,” Jurom replied. “Perhaps now the price of their freedom has become too high. They are unpredictable and dangerous.”
“They are unpredictable because I allow them to be. They chose to live apart from me and so they do. Their freedom may seem a pointless luxury to you, but they serve as an example for all of Avilon. Without them, humanity would forget how things were without me. You would call me a tyrant, and soon everyone would be rebelling.”
“Never, My Lord,” Jurom said. “We would never do that.”
“No? You would be among the very first to betray me, Jurom.”
“My Lord! Never!”
Omnius went on, “Nevertheless, Overseer Tretton raises a valid point. What happened when the Sythians attacked can never happen again. I will remove the fail-safes that disabled our defenses.”
Hoff heard a few of the Strategians seated around him gasp, and the Grand Overseer turned to look up at the dazzling eye hovering above the floor in the center of the U-shaped table. “Master, what if there is an armed rebellion? Can you trust us?”
“I already know exactly what all of my people will do before they do it, so I can stop Etheria and Celesta from ever rebelling. As for the Nulls, they have no defenses, and the use of weapons is already restricted there.”
Hoff noted that besides Jurom, Fothram, and Grand Overseer Vladin Thardris, the other ten overseers all kept quiet, making it impossible to know whether they agreed or disagreed with what was being said.
Omnius went on, “As of now, even if I were to shut down completely, you will all be able to defend Avilon. The drone fleet, however, will still depend upon me to function.”
Hoff wasn’t sure that the fleet would ever need to be independent of Omnius, especially now that the Nulls responsible for the virus had been executed and Peacekeeper patrols in the Null Zone had been doubled.
You are right to trust that I can protect my people, Hoff, but after what happened not everyone is as trusting as you.
Hoff smiled at the mental pat on the back.
Omnius went on, “The Sythians will never get close enough to touch the surface of Avilon again!”
Applause erupted, peppered with a few utterances of, “Great is Omnius!”
Once the applause died down, the discussion turned to tactics and strategy for the coming battle in Dark Space.
Based on what Omnius could see from looking into the minds of the Sythians’ human slaves, the enemy was busy laying cloaking mines and other traps at the one and only entrance of Dark Space. They had also clustered their entire fleet there.
That meant that they didn’t know Avilonian ships could jump directly from one point to another. They didn’t have to stop and navigate around strong gravity fields—such as the cluster of black holes that surrounded Dark Space.
The enemy expected them to come through the front door, but the Avilonian fleet would make its own entrance, popping up where they were least expected. And since Sythian scanners couldn’t pierce cloaking shields, they wouldn’t even see the Avilonians coming. The battle would be a rout.
Hoff smiled. Soon he would be reunited with his wife, Destra, and their daughter, Atta. It would take some explaining to make them understand how he was still alive, but then again, it would take some explaining for them to understand how
everyone
was still alive.
The answer was actually quite simple:
Great is Omnius.
With that thought, Hoff felt a warm glow of peace and contentment wash over him, and somehow he knew . . .
Omnius was smiling, too.
* * *
“Mommy . . . when is Daddy coming back?”
Destra heard that even through the high-pitched whine of the explosion. Gor teams had just blown the doors of the prison compound. She watched on the live visual feed projected over the cruiser’s main forward viewport as ten squads of cloaked Gors rushed through the dissipating clouds of smoke and pulverized castcrete.
Destra placed a hand to the comm piece in her ear. “Atta, not now. I’m busy. I told you not to call me unless it’s an emergency. I’ll be back down soon.”
“But . . . I’m
hungry!
”
“I’ll try to find you something to eat when I get back to our quarters.” Destra would have to give up her own rations again in order to save her daughter the pain of an empty stomach.
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
Destra hung up and focused on the mission. She caught Captain Covani staring at her from the other side of the captain’s table. His lips were pressed into a disapproving line.
“Councilor, this is your op. . . .”
She waved his disapproval away with one hand. “I’m watching.”
Gors rushed through the facility in the dark. They’d knocked out power to the compound before blowing the doors. The camera’s infrared and light amplification overlay painted the walls in blue and bewildered guards in hot reds and oranges. Destra watched those guards crumpling to the ground, the glowing red balls that were their heads flopping this way and that as they fell, their necks broken before they even hit the ground. A few opened fire before they died. Random bursts of ripper fire plinked off the walls and the Gors’ armor with showers of sparks that blinded the light-amplified feed from the camera. While cloaked, the Gors’ armor wasn’t shielded, but the guards weren’t exactly carrying state of the art weapons due to the risk that the prisoners could get their hands on those weapons.
So far the Gors were proving reliable. They’d been fed before the mission in order to prevent another incident like what had happened on Forliss.
It wasn’t long before they reached their target—the prison block. Fifty thousand cells stacked one atop the other in rusting towers. This was where the Imperium had kept its worst criminals. Destra had scanned a list of the inmates and their crimes before they’d arrived in order to cherry pick just three hundred of the least violent and least depraved. That hadn’t been an easy task. In the end, she’d had to pick smugglers with violent tendencies, political prisoners, pirates who only cared about their coffers, and corporate villains with more dirty laundry than clean.
They would outnumber the human crew of the
Baroness
, but humanity needed more than just a few hundred survivors if they were going to start over and someday build up enough strength to defend themselves from another invasion.
Destra watched Echo Squad race down a narrow street between the tall, rusting towers of prison cells. Metal stairs and catwalks provided access to the ten different levels of the prison block. Cloaked Gors fanned out, visible only by their short-range comm ID tags, which showed up on the camera as strings of floating blue text with Gor-shaped icons underneath. The visual feed could theoretically be used to pinpoint the Gor wearing the camera, despite his cloaking shield, but the others would be impossible to detect. In the interests of keeping them that way, Destra only kept contact with the teams via the Gors’ liaison and their telepathy.
“Torv, please remind your men that the prisoners will not go peacefully, so they must use the stun weapons we provided.”
“They already know this.”
“Remind them anyway.”
“Yess, My Lady.”
The Gor wearing the camera climbed one of the metal rung staircases, his footsteps echoing loudly and causing the staircase to rattle. He reached the designated cell—293 . . . and walked right by it. He stopped at cell 294 instead.
“Torv! That’s the wrong cell! Tell him it should be 293.”
“Tell who?”
Destra wasn’t used to commanding military ops. She’d forgotten to use the Gor’s ID. “Echo Nine!”
It was too late. The Gor had already pasted explosives along the locking mechanism and taken cover. The explosive paste began to react with the duranium lock, hissing and fizzing loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear. Suddenly there came the
bang
of an explosion
and Destra’s ears rang once more.
Echo Nine turned and ran inside the cell. Destra heard an inhuman scream, followed by a loud crunch. Their viewpoint went spinning into the nearest wall.
Crunch.
Echo Nine spun again, and they saw the aggressor. A monstrous outline appeared, glowing red and orange in the infrared overlay.