The Zygan Emprise: Renegade Paladins and Abyssal Redemption (25 page)

“Well, now, that’s better,” I said smoothly.
“Pooh-bear, put our weapons and Ergals back on the floor and step
away. Now we can all go down the three hundred storeys
together.”

Plionarctos stammered, “How…?” He held the
Ergal he had taken from me in his hand and looked at it,
confused.

“It really helps to have a back-up Ergal,” I
smiled, wagging my hand to display Gary’s ring on my middle finger.
“Gary clued us in. M81 technicians are making Ergals in micromodels
now. So move it, Plionarctos: Ergals, Weapons, Floor!” I pressed
the gun into Burr’s temple, and added politely, “Shall we go?”

Grudgingly, Plionarctos put the Ergals and
weapons down on the carpet and stepped back away. I motioned to my
comrades who, with no little hesitation, inched towards the pile.
Setsei finally picked up his stun gun, and, after a nod from me,
stunned the Ursans. I stunned Burr, and, radiating confidence, the
Ytrans and I grabbed the rest of our equipment and levved our
prisoners into the lift.

* * *

I cut through the paperwork to get out of
Daralfanoon by blasting all the bureaucratic forms to cinders with
the laser setting on my stun gun. We then Ergaled in peace to our
inn, where we were greeted by Lykkos and Spud, who had just
returned themselves and were eager to report on their
investigations.

I had Ergaled E-shields around all three of
our prisoners but was still uncomfortable with doing our debrief in
the small Orion suite. For all I knew, the walls could have ears,
big floppy ones like the hotels on Scylla. “Let’s take our friends
… upstairs,” I suggested, “where they’ll be a little more …
secure.”

In no mood for a slow scenic return via the
siderodrome train, we Ergaled to the spaceport. Spud and I both
used our Zygint ID’s to get our group expedited through Customs
this time. We were done in just over an hour. Burr repeatedly tried
to mumble protests, but was fortunately stopped by his frozen
tongue and jaws. The Orions were unable to make out Burr’s
incomprehensible syllables, and bought our story that he and the
Ursans were Zygan tax scofflaws we were extraditing back to Zyga to
pay for their capital crimes.

Back on board, Matshi recognized Burr
immediately. “That’s Benedict’s #8!”

Burr grumbled something unintelligibly
through his frozen jaw. I knew my practice understanding Ev with
his mouth full would come in handy some day. I was able to make
out, “He’s #7, now that Gary’s gone.”

“Maybe he and Fahrquardt can have a playoff
round to see who makes it to the semi-finals,” I joked as we
escorted our guests to their holding cells, in which only a few
hours earlier
we
had been prisoners.

On the bridge, Eikhus and Nephil Stratum
joined us by holo from their ship so we could all catch up. I
quickly filled in the group on our discoveries at the university
about the compact particle accelerator, and how our detective work
had led to our arrest of Burr and the Ursans.

“I think the box Gary was holding was an
older version of the super-Synchrotron that the Nestorian showed
us,” I offered.

“A subatomic parachute,” surmised Spud. “For
a quick getaway to another brane.”

There was a murmur of agreement. “But even
that Synchrotron apparently wasn’t strong enough to get him through
to the other dimension,” I added.

Sarion concurred. “Especially with Nephil
Stratum’s helpful barrier blocking his way.”

We nodded, and Matshi gave the Syneph an
energetic four thumbs up. I noted with some surprise that Spud’s
expression was dubious.

“Give me an hour with Burr and I’ll find out
what Benedict’s been up to.” Matshi was eager to tackle our
prisoners—literally, I expect.

“In due time,” Nephil Stratum soothed.
“First, let’s hear from Lykkos and William.”

Spud had remained lost in thought. At the
sound of his name, he started, and said, “Oh, er, yes.” He looked
at Lykkos, who gestured for Spud to speak.

“Well, as soon as we departed the Inn, Lykkos
and I made our way to the estate of Ulenem’s family,” Spud began.
“The streets were so quiet you could hear an athame drop. And,
actually, I did do.

“We hid behind a tree and waited. Nothing. No
one was there. So, we set off again on our path, and then, this
time, we both heard a sound.

“Again we hid, again nothing.

“By that time, we were in proximity to
Ulenem’s family estate. It was an enormous villa by Madai
standards, with several wings and a plethora of rooms. We vaulted
over the perimeter fence and micro’ed, so that we should not bump
our heads were we to venture inside. Unsurprisingly, as it was well
past the hibernation threshold, the main house was dark and silent.
What drew our eyes, however, was a small structure behind it.

“It appeared to be a mausoleum, recently
built, and lit brightly by floodlights. We proceeded closer and
observed that the door was open, or, more accurately, that there
was no door at all, just an arch. On each side of the building.

“We entered with great care and found
ourselves in a bare central atrium, with an open arch to our left
and right, and a conical ceiling that seemed to rise up into
infinity.

“I checked outside again, but from the
exterior, the building’s roof was flat, so I assumed the ceiling
was a holo. I was preparing to mega inside the cone and test my
theory when I heard the noise again. We spun round, stun guns at
the ready, and saw him.”

“Ulenem,” Lykkos said unnecessarily.

I nodded. “All cut up and … dead?”

Spud shook his head. “No. He was … complete …
this time. Well, still transparent, but healed.”

Matshi looked up, his expression puzzled.

“He spoke first,” Spud continued, “in
Zygan.

“‘It may be too late,” Ulenem said, ‘It has
begun.’

“‘Where are you,’ I cried, ‘Level Three?’

“He shook his head. ‘No, I am luxuriating in
a tomb with a view,’ he explained sadly, adding, ‘And I can see the
future in the past.’

“‘Then what do we need to do?’ I asked in
desperation.

“‘There is only one hope. Benedict must not
succeed. Destroy the Somalderis or all is lost.”

“‘How can we find it,’ I asked him anxiously,
‘if Benedict himself has not?’

“‘It will soon be in his hands,’ he said, to
my alarm. ‘You must—’

“
Whoosh
! The missile flew past me,
millimeters from my head. I sprung back behind a column in the
atrium and saw Assassins aiming weapons at us from both arches. We
were squarely in the line of fire.

“As we levved and dodged, Lykkos and I got
off a few good volleys, but we were quickly outnumbered. And Ulenem
had long since disappeared. There were at least ten Madai warriors
coming towards us—Ulenem’s family, I surmise—shooting missiles and
heaving knives, defending their brother’s crypt. In seconds, they
would be upon us.”

“How did you get out of there?” Sarion
interrupted anxiously, almost falling out of his seat.

Spud glared at him. “We used our magic
wands,” he responded with obvious sarcasm.

Sarion snorted. “No, really.”

Lykkos stepped in. “I think he’s being
metaphorical.” He pulled out his Ergal and waved it in front of
Sarion. “Abracadabra.”

Once again, everyone laughed. Everyone except
me.

* * *

Memories of Maryland and Mingferplatoi

One trait John and I shared was a love of
knowing how things worked. As a young kid, I used to take things
apart around the house to try to figure out their innards.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t always successful in putting them back
together again. Thankfully, John was always happy to help,
especially before Connie discovered what I had done that time with
her hair dryer.

It only took me about a week at Mingferplatoi
before I tried the same trick with my Ergal. I pried it open to see
what miracles of Andromedan technology made the instrument do all
the wonderful things we were learning. I expected to see some
combination of gears, dials, and motherboards, but nothing had
prepared me for what I did see.

Nothing. The Ergal was completely empty. By
then, mine had been disguised to resemble a cell phone, so, from
the inside, it actually looked like one of those cheap plastic
phone covers that vendors sell from carts in the mall.

I asked one of my pedagogues about it the
next day, expecting to get a lecture about nano-technology. I was
shocked at his reaction. He warned me I’d be in big trouble if
anyone else found out what I’d done. I shut up, of course, and
hoped that my curiosity wouldn’t have already bought me a visit to
the Omega Archon.

After a few months at Mingferplatoi, I’d come
home for a few days on my first leave, and finally decided to
venture back up to John’s attic room. Again, inexplicably, the
stairwell was filled with dust and cobwebs, but the room itself was
pristine. I didn’t need the overhead light this time, as the July
sunshine filtered through the windows and brightly illuminated the
entire chamber.

The letter from the “Army” that I had tossed
into the wastebasket months before had somehow disappeared. The
manila envelope was still there, however, lying on the desk where I
had laid it, empty. I sat in John’s comfortable chair and pulled
the box with his research onto my lap, running my fingers over the
multiple disks and computer drives it contained. Now that I’d
finished my astrophysics uploads at Mingferplatoi, maybe some of
John’s research would actually make sense to me.

To my surprise, under the metal drives, my
fingers felt several leaves of smooth paper. John was a brilliant
computer geek, but I’d never known him to do anything much by hand.
I pulled out the sheets and studied them. They were lined and
seemed to have been torn from a spiral notebook. John’s flowing
handwriting was easily recognizable, and covered all the pages. I’d
never figured John for an essayist—that was clearly Connie’s
territory—but I began to read a most disturbing story…

The story was set on a planet called Daedalus
where people lived wonderful lives—or so they thought. In reality,
the populations of this planet were slaves to a supercomputer,
which controlled their life and death. This computer had lined up
all the planet’s citizens in incubators inside massive chambers,
fed them by tubes, and wired inputs into their brains that made
them think they were actually experiencing active, exciting lives.
As they lived “virtually”, the computer powered itself with the
energy given off by the population’s brain waves.

To ensure the population wouldn’t become too
large or too old, this evil computer randomly generated a death
list each day. The individuals unlucky to find their names on that
list would be terminated, their virtual lives halted and their
physical bodies destroyed.

The protagonist of John’s story somehow
awakens out of his wonderful life, and realizes he is actually a
prisoner on full life-support. The hero escapes from his womb-like
entrapment, and strives to prevent other people on the death list
from being randomly executed. Eventually, he starts a revolution
that struggles to pull people away from the computer’s nurturing
virtual world into the harsh, but free reality.

I’d seen the theme with some variations in
many books, TV, and movies before reading John’s work. What stood
out in my brother’s story was the ending. The hero, also named
John, recognizes that even the so-called free world he discovers is
really just another layer of virtuality, and that his only hope of
fleeing these layers, these virtual prisons, is death.

So, to escape his multi-layered virtual
purgatory, John the hero sacrifices himself, hoping to go to heaven
and finally achieve freedom. And that was the fictional John’s end.
Not that he made it to heaven, but that there
was
no heaven.
There was nothing more after his death, except, simply nothing.

John the Martyr’s story ended by focusing on
his followers, his fellow resistance fighters. Without a sign from
their lost idol, some got desperate, and followed their leader into
the void. Others waited and waited for his return, his
resurrection, until one by one, they died, too. Eventually, the
planet’s sun went supernova and melted the planet and all its
organic and inorganic components, and, when the star receded into a
dwarf, all that was left in the planet’s place was … nothing.

I’d reached the end of the story and become
totally depressed. Then I noticed that there wasn’t a period at the
end of the last sentence. Seems trivial, I know, but John was a
stickler for punctuation. If he had completed his essay, he
wouldn’t have left off that period. I searched the box and then his
room for any trace of another page, and didn’t find it. There
wasn’t a file that I could find on his computer either. I looked
for hours without any luck. I finally asked George. He didn’t know,
but he did wonder if the last page could’ve been that paper John
had always kept folded in his wallet. In any case, he told me, with
eyes averted, that he didn’t have time to read John’s story, what
with law school finals looming. I doubted he ever would.

I never opened my Ergal again. I just kind of
took it for granted that it did wonderful things and that I should
just appreciate them. There had to be some technology that made the
Ergal work, but I would never be able to access it or understand
it. All that my curiosity would bring me would be … nothing. So,
for a while at least, I pledged my allegiance to “ours is not to
reason why,” and tried to avoid asking questions.

And that remains Zygan Policy #28746.33, by
the way. I never did think it was funny.

* * *

The Messier Sportstar—present day

“So Benedict
did
try the Synchrotron
to go to another brane and it didn’t work,” Eikhus theorized again.
“Shiloh? Hello? The radiation belts?”