Dark Space: Avilon (24 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
The bus went slowly, giving their imaginations time to populate the shifting shadows with hideous monsters. The occasional fuzzy glow bloomed in the darkness, giving just enough light to paint more shadows against the swirling clouds of gray mist. Ethan was sure the shadows were just his imagination, until he began to see those shadows
converge
. They swarmed toward the bus. Ethan’s heart beat faster, and the bus
slowed down
.
“Ah, Blue . . .” Ethan said.
Around them others were murmuring with concern, and Alara was back to digging her nails into his arm—this time with both hands. “Hey, Blue!” Ethan said. “Any particular reason why we’re slowing down?”
“Do not be alarmed,” Rovik replied. “Omnius wants you to see this.”
Then, as if it had all been perfectly staged, the shadows took form, and the bus’s running lights splashed them with color. Bedraggled masses of people came wandering out of the darkness, blinking against the light, stumbling about as if in a daze. They were a disorganized mob dressed with ragged scraps of clothing, a sea of bony arms and legs. They came toward the bus like moths to a flame, mesmerized by the light. Ethan watched them approach, horrified by the sight of them. He’d seen Psychos before, but not like this, not so close.
“Ethan . . .” Alara began, her grip tightening still further.
He winced, suddenly reminded of what it felt like to hold a pregnant woman’s hand while she was in labor. “Relax, we’re safe in here.”
“Then why are they still coming?”
Ethan shook his head, unable to answer that. Despite the shield, they saw the bedraggled masses step right through it, as though it were nothing.
“Blue, your shield’s not working . . .” Ethan said, his eyes on an old hag with stringy gray hair and wild-looking yellow eyes. Those eyes found his, and she licked swollen lips.
Ethan shuddered. “Rovik!”
“The shield is only to hold back the fog, Martalis, not the wildlife.”
“Wildlife?”
“I mean the Psychos, of course,” Rovik said.
Ethan could have sworn there was a touch of humor in the man’s voice, but whatever had the Peacekeeper so amused wasn’t tickling Ethan’s funny bone at all.
He eyed the old crone as she stumbled toward them. Alara leaned away, all but winding up in his lap. “What does she want?” Alara asked, sounding desperate.
The bus slowed to a complete stop, and the old woman walked straight up to their window. Dozens more crowded around her, each of them fixated on their own subject within the bus.
The old woman stood a few inches away from the window, watching them. She was at least sixty, but disfigured and scarred, with several open sores that they could see. Dirty fragments of cloth clung to her in all the wrong places, revealing jutting bones and dirty skin. She pressed hands that were black with dirt to the glass. Then came her nose, pressed up and pushed back like a pig’s snout. She began steaming up the glass with her breath, all the while staring at them with those wild yellow eyes. There was something in her gaze that inspired pity, and for a moment Ethan was almost fooled.
Then a few more bedraggled humans crowded around her. One of them, a younger man, rapped on their window with a long, impossibly thin arm.
“They look hungry,” Alara said. “Do we have any food we can give them?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the rising tumult inside the bus.
Rovik replied, “You might not like their idea of food.”
“What do you mean?”
The old woman licked her lips once more, and suddenly Ethan understood. “Because they think they’ve just stepped up to the buffet table,” he whispered.
More knuckles rapped on the window, and this time the sound echoed all around them. Psychos pounded on the sides of the bus, rocking it on its grav lifts.
A woman screamed.
“They can’t get in here, can they?” someone asked. Ethan recognized the voice as Atton’s.
“No, don’t worry. We’re safe,” Rovik replied.
“I think we should get moving,” Ethan said.
“Not yet.”
“I’m going to have nightmares tonight,” Alara whimpered, turning away from the scene and burying her face in his robes.
Ethan looked on, afraid to look away in case one of those clawing hands should find a way into the bus. The faces pressed against the glass were all dirty and ugly. If these people had been normal once, there was no sign of it now. A few of them were foaming at the mouth and spraying the window with spittle.
Then something new happened.
Ethan saw the middle distance behind the Psychos flash with a ball of blue light that sparkled and then swelled quickly to three times its size. At that point it burst and the world became a blinding sea of brightness. A deafening
boom
rattled the windows and the bus rocked violently under them. The fact that this time they could
feel
the movement told Ethan something was wrong. The lights flickered and died; then the bus suddenly dropped and hit the ground with a bone-jarring
crash.
People screamed. Ethan held tight to Alara, waiting for the lights to come back so he could see what was going on.
He felt a cold brush of something against his arm and jerked reflexively away from it. The lights came back a split second later. Everyone was thrashing to get back into their seats, the majority having fallen into the aisle. Ethan turned to look out the window, and he saw that the crowd of Psychos had left. There were no bodies on the ground where the explosion had occurred.
“What the frek?” he wondered aloud.
Rovik shouted something to the driver, and the bus leapt off the ground, lurching into motion again. This time they were going
fast
.
Another flash of blue light bloomed beside them. Ethan looked away to shield his eyes. It exploded a split second later, rocking the bus once more.
The shield bubble around them suddenly brightened and contracted, drawing much closer to the sides of the bus. The fog swirled back in, and Ethan was even more blinded than before.
Another blue light flashed on the other side of the bus, followed by another, and another. The explosions rumbled around them like thunder, and the bus rocked as though it was adrift over stormy waters. Ethan looked up to see Rovik come stalking back through the bus. He looked furious.
“What’s going on?” Ethan asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he replied. “We’re under attack.”
“I thought you said we’d be safe down here!”
“You are. Nulls are not supposed to have access to pulse weapons.”
“Pulse weapons?” Ethan caught the Peacekeeper by the arm.
Rovik twisted out of his grip easily and stood staring at him, his glowing blue eyes blazing. “Weapons that interfere with the conversion and distribution of energy.”
Another flash of blue light went off behind them, taking with it the Peacekeeper’s patience. He hurried on down the aisle.
“What the frek is that supposed to mean?” Ethan called after him.
“It means they are trying to disable us, Mr Ortane! They want us alive.”
Ethan blinked, suddenly curious. They
who?
He watched as Rovik reached the back of the bus. Once there, the Peacekeeper waved his hands and an emergency door slid aside. Unsavory smells began wafting in. Rovik raised his arms to fire back at whatever was pursuing them, using weapons built into his suit. For a moment it looked like he was taking an inordinate amount of time to fire on their unseen enemy. He kept repositioning his arms as if to get a better angle on some unseen target. Then he dropped his arms, as if he’d given up altogether. A second later, bright orange explosions began to blossom out of the fog behind them. The explosions peppered some unseen surface and then flowed together like an amorphous ball of plasma. When that bright orange glow was all they could see, it went off with a mighty screech of rending metal, and a sound like breaking glass. The brightness of the explosion was dimmed enough by the fog and the contacts they all wore that Ethan didn’t have to look away this time. Rovik turned away from the door and it shut automatically as the Peacekeeper strode back to the front of the bus.
As he breezed by them, he said, “Your tour is over!”
Alara breathed a sigh of relief and looked up. Ethan noticed that her cheeks were wet with tears, and he regarded her with a frown. “Are you okay?” Usually she had a better tolerance for danger.
She shook her head and returned to sitting upright in her seat. “Must be my hormones.”
He squeezed her hand and sent her a lopsided grin. “Don’t worry, I was scared, too.”
Alara shook her head. “I wasn’t scared.”
“Then . . .”
“I can’t help thinking about those people we saw, reduced to barbarism, starving to death down here in the dark. I can’t imagine a worse way to die.”
Ethan shook his head. “They’re not even human anymore. You heard what Rovik said. They’re brain damaged cannibals. Someone should put them out of their misery.”
“Maybe they’re not human anymore, but they used to be . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head. “They used to be someone’s mothers, daughters, sons, and fathers.”
Ethan frowned. “What are you getting at?”
She turned to look at him, her face distraught. “I don’t want our daughter to end up like that, Ethan.”
“She won’t.”
“No? Can you promise me that? One in five Nulls is addicted to Bliss!”
“We’ll raise her right.”
“And what if that isn’t good enough?”
“You’re getting way too far ahead of yourself. She’s not even born yet.” He squeezed her hand. “We’ll warn her every chance we get. Besides, you heard Master Blue—it’s just the rich that have to worry about Bliss.”
“No, Ethan. It’s just the rich that don’t have to worry about becoming Psychos. People like us, we might just get desperate enough to start using for a chance at a better life, but what happens when we can’t afford another dose?”
Ethan didn’t have an answer for that. “Let’s take one day at a time. For now, it’s good enough that we know what we’re going to choose. The rest will work itself out. It always does.”
Alara nodded and looked away, back out the window of the bus. Although she gave no reply, Ethan could read her thoughts as clearly as if they were his own. She wasn’t sure about what she was going to choose anymore, and that frightened him more than anything they’d seen lurking in the shadows of the under city.
Chapter 19
D
estra sat in the mess hall with her daughter. The ship’s intercom crackled to life and Captain Covani’s voice rasped through the room.
“Attention all personnel, this is your captain speaking. We are one hour away from our scheduled reversion to real space, and the time has come for us to decide where we should go from there.”
A sudden hush fell in the mess hall as the noise of conversations and cutlery scraping plates ceased.
“I’ve met with my advisers and councilors and we have discussed the matter at length. Every possible option was discussed.”
Destra’s eyes narrowed at that, and she wondered if there had been a meeting that she hadn’t been invited to. She and the captain had only discussed one option at length, which was for them to go to Noctune and help the Gors look for survivors.
“Our galaxy was ruled out, since the Sythians wouldn’t have been so relentless about killing every last one of us if they planned to share the galaxy with us. They’ll be looking for us here, and if we stay, eventually they will find us again.
“We discussed going to The Getties Cluster, but logic compels us to ask the question—if the Sythians came here because they ran out of space in their galaxy, will there be any room for us there to hide?”
“Thus, the third and final option becomes the only one still available to us. We must go somewhere so remote that no one would bother to look for us there.
“With that in mind, our destination is The Devlin’s Hand Nebula. We will search for rogue stars and habitable planets lying between the Adventa Galaxy and the Getties. Our ETA to the first such star is approximately three months. Food and supplies are scarce, so all non-essential personnel will be placed in stasis and only awoken when we arrive. There will be two crews of ten officers who will rotate in and out of stasis while we travel. If you haven’t already been told that you are one of those twenty, you should make your way to the med bay for stasis prep as soon as possible.
“For those of you who are wondering, the Gors are leaving us. They will go to Noctune to look for survivors from the Sythian assault on their world. We will stop briefly at our next reversion point to transfer the ones we have on board to their fleet.
“The road ahead of us is a long and treacherous one, but if we stand together, we will prosper. Ruh-kah!”
Silence reigned for just a moment longer as everyone in the mess hall processed the Captain’s announcement. Then people snapped into action. Chairs slid out from tables, pivoting on articulated arms that kept them anchored to the deck. Trays and cutlery banged and clattered into collection bins. A hundred different voices rose at once, everyone arguing over the Captain’s decision.
Destra took Atta by the hand, carrying their trays in the other. She stopped to drop them in the nearest collection bin, and then hurried on for the exit, all but dragging her daughter along.
“What’s the hurry?” Atta asked.
“We’re going to see the Captain.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to talk with him.”
“About what?”
“Quiet. Let Mommy think.”
Atta remained quiet for a moment, and Destra ground her teeth together as she considered the captain’s orders. She hadn’t been notified that she was one of the twenty individuals who would be awake for the coming journey.
Clearly Captain Covani had decided to negate her authority entirely and make himself the uncontested ruler of humanity. Worse, he was prepared to lose the Gors as allies!
Destra could barely contain her rage. She wasn’t going to let him do that without a fight.
* * *
Atton stood on the balcony of their communal quarters on level 30 of Destiny Tower—almost halfway down to the mist-choked netherworld on the surface of the planet. Up here the city was noticeably safer and more civilized. Just five floors below, Atton could see and hear the noisy bustle of pedestrians walking along the Null Zone’s well-lit, elevated streets. Pedestrian hover trains periodically
whooshed
by on both sides of those streets, leaving a broad gap between the buildings where streams of air traffic could be seen rising and descending vertically between the upper and lower levels.
Atton watched the crowds of pedestrians, his eyes darting from one person to another, searching for psychos. There was the occasional beggar standing on a street corner, but nothing consistent with the sub-human dregs they’d seen on the surface. It was hard to imagine that one in
five
people walking those streets was already well on their way to becoming a psycho.
Atton breathed a deep sigh, his nose wrinkling as he took in the musty odors of the city. He looked up at the Styx. The shield wall shone a dull, hazy blue overhead, a poor substitute for the sky. They’d begun touring Etheria in the early morning, and since then, Atton estimated that no more than six hours could have passed, meaning it was still the middle of the day, but it looked like the middle of the night.
He shook his head. The contrast between Etheria and the Null Zone was striking. There was no question that life would be better in Etheria, making it pointless to argue about whether or not individual freedom was really a good thing.
He turned away from the view and walked back inside the living area of their suite. The Peacekeepers had left the suite soon after arrival with the excuse that they were needed elsewhere. They’d warned that drones had been posted outside in case any of them started causing trouble. But no one seemed to have the energy for trouble. Everyone was lying around on couches and chairs, exhausted from the events of the past few days. Omnius’s nightly intrusion on their dreams hadn’t helped. Nightmares in Avilon were much worse, because you knew upon waking that it had all been real, and that your dreams definitely
did
mean something.
Atton meandered over to the dining area where a group of officers and non-coms were sitting and talking in hushed tones. On his way there, he passed his father and step-mother sitting together in an over-sized armchair. Alara was passed out, asleep on Ethan’s chest, but Ethan was very much awake, and he glared as Atton walked by.
Atton considered stopping to speak with his father, but then he saw Ceyla watching him from the other side of the living area, her blue eyes hurt and pleading, and he looked away quickly, suddenly unwilling to linger.
He reached the dining table and pulled out a chair beside the former venture-class captain, Loba Caldin.
“Ma’am,” he said, waiting for her permission before he sat down.
Caldin nodded. “We were just discussing what’s next while we wait for dinner,” she whispered.
Atton caught the hint and whispered back, “You’ve all already made up your minds,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Caldin replied.
Atton’s eyes flicked around the table. He noticed the other Nova pilot from his squadron besides Ceyla—Guardian Five,
Razor
. Then there was Caldin’s XO and chief engineer, Cobrale Delayn, sitting beside Lieutenant Esayla Carvon, the
Intrepid’s
ebony-skinned
gravidar officer; filling the rest of the seats at the table were a handful of sentinels.
“So . . .”
“We’re going to rejoin the fight,” Caldin said. “The Sythians aren’t defeated yet, and until they are, not even Avilon will be safe.”
Atton nodded. “I agree. All this concern over whether or not we die when we’re resurrected will be pointless if the Sythians conquer us here. Besides, death is more academic to us. We’re used to putting our lives on the line. Weigh the chance that we do actually die while transferring to our new bodies against the near certainty that we’ll die in combat, and it seems like a good bet to make. Besides, even if I die tomorrow when I resurrect, I’d still like to give my immortal clone a chance to do what I couldn’t and make the Sythians pay for what they’ve done.”
Murmurs of agreement spread around the table and more heads bobbed. “Ruh-kah,” one of the sentinels said. “Never thought I’d be agreeing with a Nova jock, but there you have it.”
Atton smiled. “And I never thought I’d be having a heart to heart with a stomper.”
“Stomper, huh. You better watch it or I’ll train up as a pilot this time just so I can shoot you down.”
Chief Engineer Delayn raised a new concern, “That’s a good point. Didn’t the P’s say we could join the fight for Dark Space if we choose to become Etherians? I thought they’re leaving soon. How are they going to train us in so little time?”
“The P’s?” Atton asked.
“Peacekeepers,” Caldin supplied. “I think if Omnius could teach us Avilonian while we slept he can teach us just about anything else the same way.”
Atton considered that. “The Imperium developed that tech already. Never works out. You implant a skill and it’s only ever a shadow of the real thing.”
Caldin shrugged. “Maybe they’ve found a way to get closer to the real thing. That would explain how education in Etheria is free.”
A new voice joined their discussion, “Well, isn’t this a nice little gathering.” Atton turned to see his father standing behind the captain, his arms crossed over his chest. “Captain Loba Caldin . . .” Ethan began. “I suppose I have you to thank for indoctrinating my son.”
“Hello, Mr Ortane,” Caldin replied, twisting around to address Ethan. “Atton is more than old enough to make up his mind for himself, which he evidently already did before arriving at this table. But you already know that, so why are you looking for a scapegoat now?”
“Maybe I just don’t like your face. Good thing you’re going to change it soon.” Atton watched his father’s gaze rove around the table. “So you’ve all decided to go through the meat grinder . . .”
“The meat grinder?” Caldin asked. “What are you talking about?”
A nasty smile crawled onto Ethan’s face, and his gaze returned to her. He affected a more nonchalant pose, uncrossing his arms for an eloquent shrug. “What do you think they do with all the bodies? Your old ones. I bet they go through a meat grinder to make tasty little sausages for all those starving Nulls. Waste not want not. Seems to be Omnius’s policy. What you throw away today could be on your plate tomorrow!” Ethan laughed.
No one else laughed with him. Atton rose to his feet. “That’s enough, Dad.”
Ethan turned to him with a dark look. “I’m sorry, did I ruin your appetite? Cause you sure the frek ruined mine.”
“Dad, I’ll still visit you in the Null Zone.”
“No you won’t.”
“I promise, I will.”
“Frek your promises, Atton, you won’t even
be
you anymore. Anyone else thinking about dying for the cause?” Ethan turned in a slow circle to address the whole room. “Omnius doesn’t need you to fight the Sythians. He can just make another billion Omnies and send them in your place, and they’ll probably do an even better job than you will!”
“Dad. That’s
enough
. Let people make up their own minds.”
Atton reached out to grab his father’s arm, but Ethan shrugged him off and shot him a cold look. “I’ve said what I had to say. The captain’s right, you’re an adult so you can do whatever you want, but know this—” Ethan raised a finger and jabbed him in the chest with it, forcing him back a step. “You join them and you’re dead to me.”
“Dad . . .”
“I’m serious, Atton. Dead. I don’t want to see you again unless I can be sure that it’s really you.”
Atton’s jaw dropped and he watched, speechless as his father returned to where he’d been sitting with Alara. Atton took one hesitant step to follow, but a strong hand grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the table.
“Leave him, Atton. He lives for himself, and he’ll die for himself. I don’t think your father has ever fought for something bigger than his own small world, and he never will. Not willingly anyway.”
Atton was about to sit back down when he noticed Ceyla staring at him. She was close enough that he could see the tears shimmering in her blue eyes. His father’s rejection had hurt, but this was agony. He’d never loved a woman before, never had the chance, but Ceyla already cared enough about him that she was actually
crying
for him. No sooner had his eyes met hers than she looked away and stood up from the couch where she was sitting.