Dark Space: Avilon (14 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
Ethan got up from the bed, found his Avilonian sandals, and retrieved his white robe from the back of the chair where he’d left it the night before. Once dressed, he padded up to the door. He raised a hand toward the keypad, but the door opened automatically, as if someone were watching him. He dismissed that thought as being overly paranoid. Avilonian doors all opened automatically so long as you had the proper clearance.
Hurrying down the hallway beyond his and Alara’s bedroom, Ethan tried to ignore the light paintings on the walls. Despite his best efforts, some of them caught his eye. The colorful abstracts once again looked to him like human faces. This time all the faces wore expressions of agony and despair, and their eyes looked accusing.
He reached the stairs and stopped on the second floor balcony, staring down into the foyer. The marble floor at the bottom shone with reflected moonlight pouring in from the mansions’ many windows. Ethan considered going downstairs to look for some caf. He wondered if he’d be able to figure out how to make it without the Peacekeepers’ help. Ethan turned the other way, looking up to the next flight of stairs. He wondered what was up there, and before he knew it, his feet were carrying him up.
On the third floor he found another long hallway, this one lined with windows. Out those windows lay a long balcony that ran the length of that side of the house, and at the end, a tall, rounded parapet that towered over the mansion. Another balcony lay at the top. Wondering about the view from there, Ethan started down the hallway to a pair of doors that looked like they might lead to the parapet. He reached the doors and they slid open automatically once more.
He walked into a small, semi-circular room. The doors slid shut behind him, and a display appeared before his eyes. It was a diagram of the tower, showing four separate levels. Text at the top read,
Please choose a floor.
Ethan thought about the top of the tower, and the floor beneath his feet immediately began to rise. Just a few moments later it came to a stop, and the other side of the lift rotated open. A warm breeze caressed his face. The top of the tower was open to the air, with railings rather than walls. In the center of the floor lay a familiar golden dome. Ethan recognized it immediately. It was a transporter dome—no, that wasn’t its name . . .
It was a
Quantum Junction.
Yet another term that had been downloaded to his brain without his permission.
Ethan crept up to the junction. He didn’t know how to use it, and even if he did, he was certain he didn’t have the necessary clearance.
Walking around it, Ethan watched his distorted reflection in the smooth surface of it. Remembering how he’d seen the Avilonians activate these domes before, he stopped and placed one of his palms against it.
The dome vibrated at his touch, and his reflection became blurry. A sudden hiss of escaping air tickled his feet.
Startled, Ethan jumped back and watched wide-eyed as the dome hovered off the ground, rising on four shining pillars of light. He stared open-mouthed at the dome, and then at his palm. Why would the junction respond to
his
touch?
He turned to look behind him, half expecting to see a Peacekeeper standing there. . . .
But there was no one.
Ethan turned back to the dome. It had hovered up to a set height and stopped, as if waiting for him to walk under it. A part of him was suspicious enough to wonder whether or not he should. He was fairly sure this was Omnius’s doing.
Curiosity got the better of him. Ethan ducked quickly under the edge of the dome, and hurried to the middle of the green-glowing circle in the center of the raised black podium underneath. He thought back to what the Avilonians had done next, and he raised his hands, as if beckoning to the sky—to Omnius, he supposed.
The dome began glowing with ever increasing brilliance, and a whirring noise filled the air, rising quickly in tempo and pitch. Suddenly the junction fell over his head with a
boom!
and the light inside of it became painfully bright, forcing him to shut his eyes.
The
whirring
noise screamed in his ears. The air inside the dome whipped around like a tornado, tearing at his robe and hair. Then his ears popped with a sudden change in pressure, and the light shining through his eyelids faded to black. He opened his eyes to see the dome rising once more on four pillars of light.
That light was the only light he could see. Wherever he was, whatever lay beyond the quantum junction—it lay in complete and utter darkness.
Ethan blinked, and forced his eyes wide in a vain attempt to see. He wished he had more light to see by. With that thought, the shadows fled and he saw the world around him revealed in the faux color of a light amplification overlay. The contacts he wore continued to surprise him. . . .
But nothing surprised him more than what he saw beyond the edge of the dome.
Chapter 12
B
retton and Farah walked up to a pair of mean looking sentries, their illegal plasma rifles tracking, their glowing blue visors turning to keep an eye on them as they approached. With one hand Bretton held his fake ID card high, so they could scan it with the sensors in their helmets. With his other hand, he held the grav gun that he was using to levitate Commander Lenon Donali, the Sythian agent, ahead of him. Once the sentries had scanned Bretton’s ID, they turned away, having lost interest in the newcomers.
The Underlevels were not a pleasant place to be, and usually far too dangerous to venture into, but Bretton and Farah were currently protected by the fact that they were walking through the territory of a little-known criminal organization called Havoc.
Bretton’s ID card was his passport through Havoc territory. It said he worked for a fuel mining company called Gencore. The ID was counterfeit, but Havoc recognized it because they were a branch of the organization that had given it to him. That organization was known simply as the Resistance, and their operations were located deep in the abandoned bowels of the planet, where miners had once toiled to extract valuable deposits of dymium.
Bretton and Farah continued down the foul-smelling corridor in the flickering yellow light of old glow panels. Somewhere up ahead water dripped from exposed pipes. The end of the corridor lay obscured by shifting clouds of steam leaking from an ancient heating system. They walked past a bank of lift tubes that were out of order and went for the stairs instead. They descended, heading for Sub Level 50.
The Underlevels used to be fit for habitation, but they were now officially abandoned. Unofficially they were home to Psychos, scavengers, and criminal organizations like Havoc.
At the bottom of the stairs they stepped out into an alley crowded with rubble, garbage, and bad-smelling puddles that hadn’t made it to a working lavatory or drain.
“Almost there,” Farah said beside him, using her glow lamp to check the holo signs and phosphorescent graffiti on the nearest wall.
Bretton nodded. “Good, I’m getting tired of this smell.” He shifted his grip on the grav gun he was using to levitate and carry their prisoner.
“We’re not going to stay long, are we?” Farah asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. Depends if they need us to.”
She sighed. “You know I don’t like getting involved with these people. They’re fanatics, and there’s always two or three of them whose job it seems to be to ask me when I’m going to get my commission.”
“When
are
you going to get your commission?”
Farah sighed theatrically. “Why would I want a commission? It’s a lost cause. What are they hoping to find, anyway? All the information we have access to is already public on the Omninet.”
“Public in Etheria maybe. Nulls don’t have access to the Omninet at all.”
“That’s because we don’t want access. You think Etherians are the ones Omnius tells all his dirty secrets to? If he’s hiding something, he’s hiding it from everyone.”
“They’re working on slicing into Omnius’s private archives.”
“Yea, I can see how a group of
human
slicers are going to break through the network security of a super-intelligent computer. You shouldn’t waste your time, Bret. They’re never going to get anywhere.”
“How I waste my time is my business. No one’s forcing you to hang around with me.”
“That’s gratitude. I bust my ass saving yours all day long, and you tell me you’d be just fine without me.”
“I didn’t say I’d be fine. I said you’re free to go.”
Farah grunted, but left it at that.
Up ahead, the end of the corridor came swirling out of the putrid steam hissing through the alley. They came to a pair of reinforced doors with warnings written on them in flickering red holotext:
Sutterfold Mine
RADIATION HAZARD!
STAY OUT!
Bretton set Donali down on the ground and stepped up to the entrance with his ID card in one hand and the grav gun in the other. Using his fingernails to peel away a fresh growth of green slime, he found a small gap in the seam between the doors and inserted his ID card there. Something clicked and a loud groan came from the doors. They ground halfway open, leaving a narrow space for them to walk through.
Once on the other side, they found themselves standing on a rickety metal lift platform, suspended over a vast chasm of nothingness. Farah walked over to the lift controls and triggered the lift to descend. It jerked into motion, dropping slowly with the
tat-tat-tat
of old chains unwinding from a motorized winch. Simultaneously, the doors began grinding shut, sealing them into the mine.
They spent long minutes descending past sheer rock walls slick and glistening with moisture in the light of their glow lamps. Finally, the lift jerked to a stop in front of a tram station with a waiting rail car.
They walked out into the middle of the platform and waited there. The station had a few working glow lamps, but the rail car and the tracks were dark and silent. A few more minutes passed, which Bretton spent studying the cottony puffs of condensing moisture streaming from his nose and lips. He and Farah were both wearing thick jackets emblazoned with the Gencore logo, courtesy of the Resistance, but the cold crept in despite their layers. The Null Zone was cold, cut off as it was from natural sunlight, but at least it retained the heat produced by indoor heating, air cars, and power plants. Much worse were the abandoned Underlevels and the subterranean labyrinths of abandoned mines. There, the only heating came from Avilon’s molten core, and that was still a long way down.
“How long are they going to make us wait?” Farah asked, glancing around nervously.
Bretton turned to her with a shrug and set Donali down once more. He turned off the grav gun and joined Farah in looking around. The station was damp and cold. The air smelled of dirt and wet rocks, with a vaguely ferrous tang. “I guess that’s up to them,” he replied. While he waited, he brought to mind the code phrase the Resistance would be looking for when they came. Someone would ask them what they were doing in an abandoned mine, and Bretton’s answer would be,
We’re investigating a dymium gas leak.
The use of code phrases wasn’t particularly secure, but any extra layers of security could only help. The Resistance’s main defense was that once you got to know where their headquarters were, you could never leave. Everyone else was brought in and out whilst heavily sedated. It was more or less the same principle that Omnius had used to keep Avilon hidden for countless centuries.
Bretton turned to his niece and saw her hugging herself and shivering. She was much skinnier than him, and the cold had obviously begun to affect her core temperature. “Cold?”
“As krak on ice.”
“Colorful.”
“Not really. Turns white.”
“I don’t want to look inside your freezer.”
Farah barked a short laugh that echoed off the walls of the mine. They passed several more minutes in silence, broken only by the sound of Farah’s chattering teeth and the distant sound of water splashing on rocks from some subterranean river. Then, finally, another noise reached their ears—
“Hello strangers,” it said, slicing through the gloom.
They turned toward the noise. The familiar blue-white glow of shielded armor, made fuzzy by the low light and the humid air, was strange to see in the Null Zone—but far stranger were the speaker’s glowing amber eyes—ARCs. Then the man stepped out of the shadows, and they saw him for what he was—
A Peacekeeper.
* * *
Ethan was shocked. Far below, he saw a vast field of garbage. The air was saturated with a rancid stench that made him want to gag. He buried his nose in his robes in a vain attempt to get away from it.
Giant, glowing blue accelerator tubes snaked down from a high, dark ceiling overhead. Ethan’s vantage point was a rooftop at least a hundred meters above the ground, and the ends of the accelerator tubes were at eye level with him, spewing a continuous stream of multi-colored refuse. Far below, circling at a cautious distance from the falling streams of garbage, Ethan saw the floodlights of giant, mobile trash compacters as they rolled over the top of the garbage piles, packing them down. Mechanized load lifters used saw-bladed arms to cut and carry cubes of recently packed trash to glowing red pits in the ground. Ethan assumed those pits led to some type of recycling plant where the trash would be processed further. A planet with as many citizens as Avilon couldn’t afford to waste any of its resources.
But the vast field of trash wasn’t what had shocked him. It was the horde of humanity crawling around the machines and climbing the mountains of trash like spiders. Ethan focused on the nearest group, trying to get a better look. His ARCs responded to that desire by magnifying what he was seeing, and he gasped. These people were wearing torn and patched clothing—dirty fragments of cloth at best. They were crawling over the trash on all fours like animals, picking some things up and tossing them aside, while other bits of garbage they lifted to their mouths and tore into greedily.
They were
hungry
, hunting through the refuse for food like rats. Ethan shook his head, horrified. Dark Space had been bad, and the people there had been hungry, but they’d never been hungry enough to resort to eating garbage. His stomach did a nauseated flip, and he felt his gorge rising again.
Frozen in shock and horror, Ethan stared for a long time, watching these rag people enjoy their buffet. As some left with their hunger sated, others came, seeming to melt out of the shadows.
There was no end to them.
Ethan blinked, and then blinked again. He shook his head and looked away. As he did so, his ARCs returned to a normal zoom, and he began to notice his more immediate surroundings. To one side of the rooftop he saw a lift tube, flanked by a pair of drones. Curious, Ethan walked up to them.
“Mind if I use the lift?” he asked.
The red optics in the center of each ball-shaped head tracked him, but neither of the drones replied.
Nevertheless, the doors of the lift
swished
open. Again, Ethan turned to look behind him, convinced that someone was following him and secretly opening doors for him as he went.
But there was no one there.
Ethan stepped into the lift, walking up to the far side. It was transparent and gave him another look at the starving hordes swarming over the trash mountains below. He heard the doors
swish
shut, and the lift started downward of its own accord, dropping swiftly toward the trash collection level.
Omnius was definitely behind this little tour.
As the lift drew near to the ground, Ethan got a sense of scale. The load lifters were as big as any mech Ethan had ever seen, while the mobile trash compactors were the size of miniature skyscrapers, bright with running lights, their treads grinding along the shallow slopes of falling trash.
Then the lift dropped below the collection level and his view changed to that of another wide-open space, this one a vast, brightly-lit warehouse with clean white walls and matte gray floors.
Racks of revolving conveyor belts ran down from the ceiling. The aisles between those racks were crowded with orderly lines of people. These people at least wore decent clothes, but they were all drab browns and grays. They pushed hover carts ahead of them while they picked small, cubic packages off the conveyor belts and placed them in their carts.
Ethan realized he was looking at some type of supermarket. The lift stopped and the doors opened behind him. He turned and walked out, bracing himself for another noxious wave of rotting garbage to invade his nostrils. Instead, he found the air sterile and slightly fragrant.
That raised his spirits. He walked from the lift to the nearest line of shoppers. They watched him carefully as he approached, momentarily distracted. As he drew near, he noticed that the looks he was getting weren’t simply curious; they were either fearful or hostile. A little girl pointed to him and said, “Look, Mommy! It’s a
Non!
”
Ethan stopped and gave the girl a curious smile. “What did you call me?”
She shrank away, hiding behind her mother’s legs. The mother’s reaction was similar. She went back to her shopping.
Worried he’d somehow offended them, Ethan stepped up to the woman and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said.
The woman turned to him with wide eyes and shook her head. “What do you want from me, My Lord?”
At that, Ethan noticed a few others turn to look at him. A pair of white teenage males caught Ethan’s eye. Their faces were pale and dirty, their hair greasy and disheveled, and their eyebrows were mysteriously missing. They didn’t look frightened—they looked angry. Their eyes were dark and soulless.
“I’m not your lord,” Ethan replied, ignoring the two ruffians who’d glanced his way. “I seem to have come here by mistake . . . could you tell me where I am?”
“You’re on Sub Level 40 . . . in the Grunge.”
“The what?”
“Sutterfold District, Master.”
“I’m not your master, either.”
The woman shook her head, and for the first time her watery blue eyes seemed to really
see
him. The fear shining there retreated a few steps, and she seemed to relax. “You’re wearing one of their robes, but you’re too old to be one of them.”
“One of who?”
“A Non!” the little girl he’d seen earlier popped out to inform him.
“Hey, what’s the hold up?” someone shouted. Ethan noticed then that the woman he’d stopped to talk to wasn’t moving, but the conveyor belts were rolling on. Up ahead there was a growing gap between her and the rest of the line.
“Excuse me, I have to get back to shopping,” she said.
“Sure, I’ll walk with you.”
“If you’re not a Non, what are you?” the little girl asked, departing from the safety of her mother’s legs to walk beside him.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s what we call people from the Uppers,” the girl’s mother replied. “Nons. It’s short for non-human. You’re wearing white, like a Celestial, but you’re too old to be one of them. And if you were one of us, you’d know what a Non
is.”
Ethan’s lips quirked up in a wry smile. “I suppose I would. Actually . . . I’m a refugee from the Imperium. The Nons
are making me go through something they call The Choosing.”
The woman met that admission with wide and blinking eyes. “What are you doing here, then?”
“I don’t know yet. I came here by accident.”
“If you came from the Uppers, nothing that happens to you is an accident.”
“So I’ve been told,” Ethan replied dryly.
“You’ve been to other worlds,” the woman said.
“Yes, dozens . . . hundreds actually, but that was before the war.”
“You’re very lucky. I can only imagine what that must be like . . .”
Ethan heard the longing in the woman’s voice, and he felt a pang of sympathy for her and her daughter. “I bet you’d like to get away from Avilon and go start a colony someplace else.”
“Omnius would never allow that.”
“Right, Omnius. He’s a real pain in the you-know-what, isn’t he?”
“He is what he is.”
Ethan watched the woman reach out to take a bright green cube from the conveyor belt running beside her. It was wrapped in some type of transparent packing material. “What’s that?”
“Enriched cellulose.”
“Plants?” Ethan eyed the green cube. “Looks processed.”
“That’s because it’s recycled.”
“From what?” A suspicion formed in Ethan’s gut, and his insides churned.
“Garbage,” the woman said, confirming his suspicions.
“And you
eat
it?”
“Down here we don’t have a choice. If we had the money to buy fresh food we wouldn’t be here. This food is free,” the woman said, reaching out to take a bloody red cube from the conveyor belt.
Ethan wondered if it might be recycled meat. Suddenly he remembered the hordes of people he’d seen crawling over the mountains of unprocessed garbage. “I saw something . . . people, lots of people, looking through the garbage before it gets recycled. They seemed to be looking for food. If all of this food is free, why would anyone try to eat raw garbage?”
“Because they’re Psychos. If we allowed them in here, they’d sooner kill everyone than thank us.”
“
Psychos?
”
“You really
are
from someplace else,” the woman said. “They’re Bliss addicts who’ve gone too long without a dose. The withdrawal symptoms destroy your brain and turn you into an animal. That’s why we call them Pyschos, because they’re all crazy.”
“Sounds a lot worse than the drugs we had in the Imperium.”
The woman nodded and they walked on in silence. They turned a corner and came to a conveyor belt laden with rolls of fabric and stacks of cylindrical containers, each of them a different color from the next. As he wondered what they were, glowing text appeared above them, revealing their contents. Some were filled with toothpaste, others with moisturizing creams, soap, cleaning solvents, paint, and more.
“This is all made from trash?”
The woman nodded, but said nothing.
“Amazing.”
She sent him a hesitant smile and looked away quickly. Noticing that the fear in her eyes was back, he wondered what he’d done wrong. “I’m making you uncomfortable,” he said. “I should go.”