Below is absolute chaos. There’s fighting between two sides. I recognize the loyalist guards. They wear the same uniforms as the ones who tried to nab Iris and me inside the city walls. But the other side isn’t wearing uniforms.
Shots ring out from weapons I don’t recognize. Both sides are firing energy blasts from rifle-like weapons. The projectiles explode on impact. A few stray shots hit the transport ship and ricochet off its shield.
The transport ship is bigger than I could have ever imagined. The closest thing from Earth I can compare it to is a massive cruise ship. There are no balconies or windows, though. The exterior looks just like the ship already on Earth. It’s chrome and seamless. Despite its humongous size, the ship is levitating ten feet off the ground without any supporting structure.
Most concerning of all is that it is slowly moving toward a fully activated wormhole.
Looking through the wormhole is disorientating. It looks like a hole in reality itself. My brain struggles to make sense of it, but one thing is unmistakable: through the hole, I can clearly see Earth’s surface. The opening on the other side must be only a few miles above the planet. By the time anyone sees the ship coming, it’ll be too late.
The enormous transport ship lumbers toward the massive intergalactic doorway. Gunfire from the opposing faction is focused on the ship’s tail fins. This seems useless, but I’m happily proven wrong when a crack appears in the facade.
The invisible shield surrounding the ship warps and splinters near the focal point of their gunfire. I’m not the only one who notices. The New Empire troops shift their suppression efforts on the group of soldiers who ripped the hole in the ship’s defenses.
The guards are distracted, and no one has noticed me in the sky yet. This is my opportunity. I swoop down to the exposed tail fin and grab it with both hands.
The exterior of the ship is denser than anything I’ve ever felt on Earth, allowing me to get a tight grip without crushing it in my hands. Once I do, I hurl myself backward as hard as I can, straining to keep my hands wrapped around the fin.
It feels like it’s working. The ship’s slow forward movement comes to a complete stop, then begins to slide backward. I feel momentum on my side and pull with all my might, inching the ship away from the wormhole.
Flashes of pain explode across my back. Hundreds of feet behind me, a small platoon of loyalists duck behind a crate. They take turns alternating gunfire in my direction. I wish I had my old heat vision; it would make dealing with these two problems much easier.
All that matters is pulling this ship away from the wormhole. I’ll deal with the pain later.
A long, low whistle emanates from the ship’s hull. It’s the shield system coming back online. Without a deluge of firepower to keep the hole in the shield open, they must be close to fixing it. I’m sure whoever is piloting this thing has noticed that they’re dragging something heavy behind them too.
More shots pepper my back, and my hand slips off the tail fin. The pain is immense and lingers long after, but I swing my arm back around to grab on to the ship.
A wave of blue light dances across the ship’s hull, starting from the front and moving toward the back. It’s the shield. I’m determined not to let go as the light moves closer to me, sealing the ship within. The shield reaches me and sends a surge of electricity through my body. The electricity loosens my grip and repels me from the ship like a magnet, and I fall.
My vision goes dark. All I see is blue electricity surging across my legs and chest. My body bounces off tree limbs, and then I hit the ground. A haze of dirt hangs in the air as the friction gradually slows me.
When I come to a stop, I experience the pain inflicted by the ship’s defense system. The nanobots are shorting out and struggling to stay connected to one another and me. Bots fall off my body thousands at a time. They look like nothing more than dust.
All the while, I’m losing precious time before the ship makes it through the wormhole.
To save itself, the nanosuit disengages and spreads out across the forest floor. Bolts of electricity hop across the thin sheet of magtonium. The nanobots move farther and farther apart, dividing into small chunks that scurry away.
Slowly, the electricity dissipates as the distance between pieces becomes too great to jump. It’s isolated the affected nanobots and stopped the damage from spreading. Pieces of the suit reconnect on the forest floor. I reach out to summon it back onto my body, but the bots are lethargic and not fully back online yet.
Frustrated, I check the wormhole. The transport ship has disappeared through the portal between worlds and is drifting toward Earth. They made it through, but I’m not through fighting yet.
I hold out my arm, and a chunk of nanobots leaps onto it. They’re weak but responsive. More nanobots slowly slither close to me. Near my feet, a quivering chunk struggles to keep more nanobots together. I try to force it to connect with the rest, but that only causes another piece to fall from my shoulder.
The magtonium is too damaged to listen. It needs time to recharge, but that’s time I don’t have. I need to make my way through that portal before it’s too late. If I couldn’t stop the ship, then I have to follow it.
“Don’t move,” a woman commands.
A soldier snuck up on me and has a large rifle-like weapon pointed at my head.
Slowly, I raise my hands in the air. The soldier moves in front of me. Her clothes are tattered and dirty and look like they were once part of a military uniform, but they lack the New Empire insignia. She must be part of the opposition forces. The bandage wrapped around her right arm is soaked through with fresh blood. Her face is covered in dirt, sweat, and specks of blood. She looks like she’s been through hell, but her eyes are locked on me like a laser, watching to see if I make a move.
“Hold on,” I say. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Hurt me? I’m the one with a gun pointed at your head.”
“I’m aware of that. What I should have said was, I don’t want either of us to hurt each other. I think we’re on the same side.”
“And which side is that?”
“The side that’s not on that ship. I need you to let me go after them.”
“And how do you plan on going after them into space?”
“Like this.”
All at once, the nanobots swarm my body, sealing me inside a cocoon of relative safety. A plasma blast rips across my chest, and I stagger back a couple of steps, but I keep my hands in the air.
“Ow, that really hurt. Please don’t do that again? I promise, I’m on your side. I need to get to that ship before it destroys another planet. I know I look strange to you, but I’m asking you to trust me. There isn’t much time.”
The soldier keeps her rifle trained on me while she pulls back a handle to reload. We stand in silence staring at one another, then she breaks eye contact and drops the gun to her side.
I slowly lower my hands.
She slumps to the ground, staring into the wormhole. “It doesn’t matter anymore. If you wanted to hurt me, you could have done it already, but why bother? We failed. Volaris is doomed, and we’re all doomed with it.”
“So you’re just giving up?”
“The wormhole is open. We were too late. Once opened, it can never be closed. It’s created a gravity well, a depression in the fabric of space that will only hasten the arrival of the black hole destined to swallow this planet.”
I look around the battlefield and see thousands of soldiers utterly defeated. The New Empire guards employed to push them back have given up too, realizing that despite her promises, Violet Jones has left them to suffer the same fate as all the others.
There’s no fight left in them. Some are breaking down in tears, for themselves and for their loved ones. Their culture, history—all of it is destined to be destroyed.
I peer through the wormhole at Earth, my home. It’s up against a threat I’m not sure I can stop. I approach the portal, passing by Volarians consol
ing each other. They barely notice my presence.
It breaks my heart to abandon them, but I have to help Earth.
Facing the wormhole, I’m only steps away from returning home. Without Vanish, this is my only way back. But can I really abandon an entire civilization? Even if I saved Earth, I’d always know I’d turned my back on them, leaving them to die.
Making up my mind is easy.
I step back from the wormhole to take it all in. There’s a breeze against my back as air is drawn toward it and into the vacuum of space.
I raise my hands and give the silent order to the magtonium encasing my body.
Destroy it.
The nanobots hesitate. They’re programmed to protect me no matter what and this goes against that.
It’s okay. I’ll be fine. This is the only way.
The nanobots begin to disengage from my body. They collect in a small puddle of black liquid at my feet, then slither toward the wormhole.
The nanobots are apprehensive—the wormhole has too much energy for them to contain—but once the first nanobot makes contact, the rest go into a frenzy. The magtonium scurries up the structure. A burning white glow consumes the places where the nanobots make contact.
Soldiers gather behind me to watch what’s happening, although they don’t understand it.
The magtonium is moving faster and growing as it consumes more and more quantum energy from the structure. There’s no way to stop the chain reaction. Every last nanobot has left my body to attack the structure. Even if I could still communicate with them, they wouldn’t listen. Their appetite for quantum energy is insatiable, and I’ve brought them to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
A web of magtonium covers the ring. Beams of light emanate through the few remaining exposed areas. The nanobots quickly find and cover them.
“What’s happening?” a local asks.
“I’m not sure, but I hope something good.”
“Um, is it safe to stand here?”
I look at the gathering behind me and then back at the wormhole. “Now that you mention it, we should probably back up a bit.”
I step away from the wormhole, and they shadow me. Satisfied this is a safer distance, I turn back to watch the magtonium. There’s a loud, high-pitched squeal. It sounds like air being let out of a balloon, except ten thousand times louder. It’s a very distressing sound, and I rethink whether we’re far back enough.
“Maybe we should back—” I begin.
From somewhere deep in the crowd, someone shouts, “Run!”
All at once, the soldiers and guards turn and run into the surrounding woodlands as fast as their legs will carry them. No one gambles a look back. They just run.
Not being a total idiot, I join them. However, without my nanosuit, I’m back to being a regular old human being.
A human being who is easily outrun by elite-trained soldiers.
I’m falling behind the pack, and the whining is growing louder. Looking back will slow me down, but I can’t help a look. A ring of white light surrounds the wormhole. The magtonium is no longer visible.
I’m not paying attention to where I’m running, and my foot hits a rock. I tumble into a ditch left by a plasma round. As I pull myself back to my feet, the whining reaches a crescendo. The edge of the forest is too far. I’ll never make it in time.
I lie down in the ditch and cover my head with my hands.
There’s an explosion of light. Even lying face down with my eyes closed, all I see is white. This must be what it’s like to stand next to an atomic bomb.
Just as quickly as the light appears, it extinguishes.
Then quiet. There are no sounds except for the faraway rustling of trees. I venture a look out of my hiding place.
The apparatus has been completely destroyed.
The wormhole is gone, and Volaris is saved.
Forty-Four
Nothing gets the party started like saving a planet doomed to annihilation.
The soldiers and guards emerge from the forest, whooping and hollering. The wormhole is gone. They’re saved, at least for now. Their planet may not exist a few hundred years from now, but that’s the future and this is the present. They don’t know the fate of their planet. They probably won’t be around by the time that fate comes. All that matters is today, and today, they’re alive.
But saving one planet doesn’t overcome my utter devastation over abandoning my own. I’m consumed by thoughts about what Earth must be dealing with at this very moment. The transportation starship has arrived, intent on taking all it needs from Earth regardless of the consequences.
I sit in the dirt. Where do I go now? What do I do? I don’t even know where to begin.
“Excuse me,” a woman says as a pair of boots step into my eye line. “You did this?”
I’m the only one on this battlefield wearing jeans and a t-shirt, so it’s pretty obvious that I don’t belong to either side’s forces.
“Yeah, that was me.”
It feels liberating to take credit for something I’ve done. There’s no more mask or alter ego. No one on this planet knows who I am, and it wouldn’t matter even if they did. My powers are gone, as is my magtonium. All that’s left of it is a black scorch mark where the wormhole generator once stood.
“Our queen would like to have a word with you.”
“Your what?”
“Our queen. Word has reached her of your actions, and she wishes to meet with you.”
“I was under the impression your queen was dead?”
“An impression the acolytes of Violet Jones would be glad you believed.”
I rise to my feet and brush the dirt off my hands against my jeans. I’ve got nothing to lose. If I’m going to spend the rest of my life here, it’ll be worth it to meet the queen. She might give me a medal or a title or something. That’d be a small consolation, considering the Volarians are probably destroying Earth right this minute and I can’t do anything about it.
“Lead the way,” I say.
She heads toward the quiet battlefield and motions for me to follow. A ship the size of a school bus hovers overhead before setting down softly.
The ship reminds me of a military transport helicopter, except without any blades or noticeable means of propulsion. Both sides of the craft are open and lined with rows of seats. It must have been used to transport soldiers.
I climb inside, and before I can figure out how Volarian seatbelts work, we’re off.
The craft lifts silently into the air and climbs to an altitude of a few thousand feet before tilting forward and beginning our journey.
This is the first time I’ve had a chance to take in Volaris without worrying about someone shooting me down. It takes my mind off Earth.
From this height, I can see vast rivers and lakes in the far distance. A geyser shoots hundreds of feet into the air from the center of the largest lake. Along the riverbanks different colored sands. I spot blues, pinks, greens, and silver.
I see other towns, much smaller than the city of Galahue. These look more like what I’m used to back on Earth. No towering skyscrapers reaching into the heavens or gated fortresses surrounding them. Just one- and two-level structures painted in vibrant colors. I wonder who lives in them and think about the families who were spared today.
After a ten-minute flight, the pilot glances back to tell me we’re coming in for a landing. Below is a series of connected buildings. It resembles a military base, with smaller houses along the outskirts.
We land on a target that looks just like a helipad, and I spot the person who must be waiting for me. He’s wearing a burgundy uniform, which a few others on the base are also wearing. This must be their version of an officer uniform.
“You must be the one we’ve heard so much about,” he says. “My name is Badu.”
“I can’t imagine you’ve heard much yet.”
He smiles at the joke and gestures for me to walk alongside him. “As soon as the reports began pouring in of what you
did, the queen requested to have you flown here so she could meet you herself. You took a very brave stance and saved Volaris. For that, we will be eternally grateful.”
“Thanks …” I hesitate to say the next part, wondering if I should let them relish their victory a little longer before delivering them the truth. “You know I only slowed the black hole down, right? It’s likely still heading toward Volaris.”
The officer looks surprised. “No one has told you? The black hole has reversed course. The destruction of the wormhole generator inverted the gravity well that Volaris sits in. It is now repelling the black hole rather than drawing it closer. You saved us not only from this catastrophe, but many potential ones in the future as well.”
Huh. Maybe I should start claiming that I knew that would happen and this was my plan all along.
“It’s right through here,” the officer says as he points to the doorway of the building we’re approaching.
Two guards armed with plasma rifles stand guard outside. They salute and step aside to grant us entry into the building.
Inside, the building is much larger than it appears from the exterior. The walls are lined with dozens of doors, but one set of doors is larger than all the rest and made from a violet-colored wood.
“She’s right through there,” the officer says.
“You’re not coming in with me?” I ask.
“No, she requested to speak with you in private.”
“Oh, okay … so I should just go in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To meet the queen all by myself?”
“Yes, sir.”
Even though I didn’t know she existed until a few moments ago, I’m still nervous. It’s not every day that I meet a queen, especially one from another planet. I push down my nerves, grab the door handle, and enter.
Forty-Five
Meta (Book 5): New Empire Page 18
