“O-of course,” his communications officer stammered, already keying in the call.
“Grouthe!” Boys barked into his wrist holo as soon as the call connected, on his feet and watching the scene in front of him with a fixed, sick fascination. “I gave you a direct order to stand down!”
“So you did,” Grouthe agreed, his tone quiet and light. He sounded perfectly reasonable in that moment. Almost pleasant.
Boys recoiled, jerking his communicator out to arm’s length when Grouthe simply hung up on him. He blinked dumbly at the communicator as he rapidly tried to put the pieces together.
“Sir?” his communication’s officer asked, his voice pitched up half an octave higher than usual with nerves. “What do we do?”
“Patch me through to the command team,” Boys demanded, turning away from the digital window. “All of them, this instant.”
His communications officer launched into frenzied activity to connect the call, as if being quick might somehow undo what had happened.
In just a moment, Boys was all but snarling into his holo. “I issued a direct order to stand down. What part of that was unclear? Further failure to comply will result in disciplinary action!”
He got a flurry of panicked responses in return, everyone talking over everyone else. If nothing else, it meant Boys got an explanation—Grouthe had fired first, and considering his influence, other ships in the fleet had simply assumed that a new order was in the process of being issued—but there was no way to un-fire a missile barrage.
There was no way to fix what had been done.
Boys turned to look at the digital window again. He couldn’t help but to be glad of the silence of space in that moment. There were some things he simply didn’t want to force himself to hear.
“Sir?” his pilot asked carefully. “What now?”
For a moment, like a deer bumbling into a set of headlights, Boys simply stood there.
It was a very good question.
Chapter 14
Aboard Glock’stor Ship #597
The pilot kept up a steady stream of chatter with the navigators.
Ruther and Trev’or rambled back and forth to each other just as much as they always did. On top of that, Gultorra had turned up on the bridge to drop off a report, and then lingered to catch up with Clor. He leaned casually against the side of the command chair as they spoke.
It was an almost unusually normal day, all things considered.
At least until it wasn’t.
“The Estarian fleet is firing, sir.” The technician sounded bemused as he reported the update, his head cocked to one side as he stared at his terminal. “Or rather…a portion of it is?”
He didn’t sound alarmed, though, so Admiral Clor was calm as he commanded, “On screen, then. Let’s see what they’re up to.” He was fairly willing to assume that any amount of firing was, at the very least, not good news, especially considering how close the fleet was at that point.
He was not ready for the sight that greeted him as the virtual window lit up. A hush fell over the bridge as the crew watched the fleet bombard Molly’s ship. The shields crackled and sparked at first, until eventually they gave out under the onslaught. Like a cascade of light, the shield retracted, almost seeming to evaporate.
No matter how unpleasant, though, all eyes stayed locked on the sight in front of them. It would have been an insult to look away.
Gultorra stood rigidly beside the command chair. Trev’or was clutching at the edges of his terminal so tightly that Clor could hear his nails digging at the metal. Clor’s fingers tightened around the armrests of his chair until his hands hurt.
“Sir, what do we do?” Ruther asked, his hands hovering anxiously over his terminal, as if he could do anything on his own. “What can—can we do anything?”
Clor didn’t answer immediately, mentally going over ideas and just as quickly discarding them, before he finally admitted, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do.” His voice was low as he admitted it, but he may as well have been shouting it.
Once the shields were gone, Molly’s ship didn’t last long. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing would be a constant debate from that point onwards.
With each strike after that, pieces of the hull flew off, breaking apart like chips of confetti and drifting silently away. Until finally a missile struck the engine room. The middle of the ship expanded outwards for a fraction of a second, like a balloon with too much air, just before the ship fractured in half and burst away from each other with a few geysers of plasma and gas that burned out as quickly as they erupted. Countless shards of shrapnel, each as big as a scouting ship, broke off and drifted away. Lights flickered in the ship’s gaping interior, until they went out in clusters.
Finally, the wreckage was dark. The missile barrage halted as if it had never happened in the first place.
The calm afterwards seemed unfair, as if the cosmos was trying to pretend that nothing had happened. As if it had simply been business as usual.
Had someone dropped a stylus on Clor’s bridge in that moment, it would have been louder than a gunshot. No one moved or said a word, as if the entire crew was waiting for it to be declared as a joke. As if breaking the silence was the only thing that would make it real.
Finally, Gultorra put a hand on Clor’s shoulder. “Sir.”
Clor jerked as if he were coming out of a trance, turning sharply to look at Gultorra.
“What now, sir?” Gultorra asked simply, though it was not a simple question by any stretch of the imagination.
Nevertheless, it gave the Admiral something else to focus on. He took a breath and let it out.
He turned his attention to Ruther. “Connect a call to the command team,” he ordered, his voice still low.
If Ruther heard the Admiral’s words, he gave no sign of it, and Trev’or had to reach over and swat his shoulder. It still took a moment for Ruther to jerk his attention back to the present, hands still poised over the front of his terminal. “Sorry, sir?”
“The command team,” Clor repeated slowly. “Connect a call. I need to explain what just happened.”
“Ah—r-right. Of course, sir,” Ruther agreed, before he turned all of his attention to tapping out commands at his terminal with an almost single-minded focus.
Clor used the time it took Ruther to set up the call to figure out what he was supposed to say to explain the entire ordeal.
Paige’s Office, Base, Gaitune-67, Sark System
Paige sat quietly in her office, working through the hundreds of things that had been neglected when she and Maya went to the surface. She tapped curiously on one holoscreen and then another making sure that the most urgent and important things were handled. Having been up for close to thirty-six hours straight at this point, she felt wired and suspected she was going to be unable to sleep.
Just a couple more, she promised herself, and then she would call it a night.
Bourne interrupted her flow of concentration.
“Paige? There’s a holo message come through. It’s from Emma.”
“You mean from The Empress?” Suddenly Paige’s backlog of work paled into insignificance. “What news is there? Do they need anything?”
“No,” he told her solemnly. “No, it’s not that. They don’t need anything. I believe you’ll want to be sitting down.”
There was a long pause.
“Bourne, I am sitting down.” She felt her anxiety rising. “Can you send me the message please?”
Bourne released the message to her holo. Her hand trembling now, she flicked it open and scanned the contents.
Maya appeared in the doorway. “Hey, I thought you were going to bed soon…?” Maya noticed Paige’s gray complexion. “Are you okay?”
Paige shook her head slowly. She looked as though she had been hit in the chest. Gasping for air, she managed to tell her that Emma had messaged.
Maya hurried over and t
ook the holoscreen that was in Paige’s hand. She read it and staggered back a little, catching herself against the desk.
“It can’t be true,” she rejected. “It must be a mistake. Emma must have written this just in case and then programmed it to send in the event of the unthinkable… But she must have had some kind of systems failure. You’ll see, they will be back here in a few hours totally fine.”
Her face and mannerisms told a completely different story though.
She looked at Paige and watched a single tear trickle down the side of her face. It looked like Paige was in too much pain to even cry. She knew that feeling too.
The two girls remained in silence, barely moving, trying to make sense of the communiqué:
Dear Paige and Maya,
If you’re reading this, then we’ve been destroyed. It all happened very fast, and no one suffered physically. Rest assured that I did everything within my capabilities to keep everyone safe. Unfortunately even I have limits, and the barrages of missiles were just too great.
In the coming days and weeks, you will learn more about what happened. As I write this now, we are anticipating that we will take on the fire from at least one Estarian ship. Oz and Molly have implemented an adaptation to the shields to ensure that we take the strikes rather than the Zhyn. It was and is of utmost importance that the Estarians do not strike either the Zhyn or the ARs—for the sake of peace in the Federation. I hope that we have been able to achieve that.
You’re on your own now. A similar message will be sent to the Federation and you will no doubt be hearing from the General in due course.
On a personal note, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with you and the whole team. I’m sorry that it had to end.
Be well, my friends, and live a good life.
Emma
Neechie appeared in the office and jumped up onto the desk, and then onto Paige’s lap. Paige, dazed, allowed the sphinx to nestle up against her without any reaction. Absent-mindedly she allowed her hand to fall to Neechie’s back as she processed the worst news of her life.
Bates’s Office, Undisclosed Location, Spire
Director Bates carefully closed off the holoconnection. Slowly she turned her chair around so that she couldn’t be seen through the floor-to-ceiling windows of her office. Facing the wall, she bowed her head and tried to smother her mouth with a hand as she sobbed silently.
Philip Bates arrived in the office. He slipped quietly in through the office door. “I got a message from Paige Montgomery to meet you here,” he reported with a sense of urgency as he breezed in. “Is everything okay?”
Director Bates swiveled in her chair to look at him. By her expression and the smeared makeup, he knew straightaway that everything was far from okay.
“What? What’s happened?”
A few moments later a wail reverberated from the office through the entire open-plan bullpen beyond. The agents below looked up, bewildered, trying to make sense of the sobbing and wails that followed.
Rhodez strode in from the elevator purposefully. For a moment he looked as if he were planning to go straight up to the director’s office, but then, hearing the commotion, he slowed his pace and then stopped.
Clevedon called out to him in a raised whisper. “What’s going on?”
Rhodez wandered over to his desk, his expression serious and morose. “Intel downstairs has just received confirmation that the ship, Empress, has just been destroyed. Molly, amongst others, was on it.”
“You mean…?”
He nodded. “Yes, Molly is dead.”
Clevedon felt the shock through his entire body. For a moment he found it hard to breathe. “Are you sure? Is there any chance that…”
Rhodez shook his head. “There is no hope.”
Bailey Residence, Spire, Estaria
Arlene ran towards her apartment door, responding to a knock. “Just a minute, Anne,” she called back over her shoulder. “Just hold onto them for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
She peered through the viewfinder and then stood back, opening the door wide to her friend. “Giles!” she exclaimed brightly. “Just in time. Anne decided that she wanted to paint her room before Ben’or got back, but we could do with someone taller to reach the ceiling.”
Giles’s expression was sober. “Well, quite. I’d be happy to help, but errr, Arlene…”
“Oh come on,” she teased playfully, leading the way back through to the sleeping quarters. “I’ll order up some pizza. We’ll have it done within an hour I’m sure.”
Giles hesitated again. “Arlene, something’s happened. I think you should probably sit down… I have something to tell you.”
Arlene stopped, suddenly realizing that Giles wasn’t his usual stuffy and flippant self. He seemed as if he were actually trying to be sympathetic about something.
“I tried to call,” he explained to her, “but I suspect your holo is still out.”
“Yes it is,” she confirmed. “But I received the public service announcement Paige and Maya sent out...” Her voice trailed off as her concern as to the purpose of Giles’s visit mounted.
“Giles? Have you been… crying?”
“I have,” he confessed without any embarrassment. “I’ve just had a conversation with Uncle Lance. Something terrible has happened. The crew of The Empress… They’re all dead. Arlene, I’m so sorry. Ben’or isn’t coming back.”
Still standing, Arlene started to process the information, her body convulsing silently as she began to sob.
Anne had been standing around the corner behind the kitchen counter. She had heard everything. As Giles moved in to steady Arlene, Anne ran back to her room and slammed the door.
Arlene felt her arms and legs go limp as she took in the news. Carefully Giles helped her to the sofa, where she collapsed in a heap, sobbing.
* * *
Much later in the evening, Giles had managed to coax Anne out of a crawlspace she had accessed in her room. Arlene hadn’t moved from the sofa in hours. Instead she lay semi-catatonic, uninterested in eating or drinking anything.
Or communicating, for that matter.
Sitting with her, Giles and Anne quietly played some form of checkers that Anne had learned in the convent.
“I’m not sure that’s a valid move…” Giles started to protest.
Anne glared at him and took her finger from the checker she had just moved. “And, I win again,” she told Giles quietly and matter-of-factly, with a finality in her halfhearted glare.
Arlene stirred slightly and mumbled to Giles. “You should make sure she’s not cheating you,” she told him.
Anne smiled. “I’m not!” she protested, a little more playfully now.
“Don’t trust a word that one says,” Arlene added, narrowing her eyes at the adolescent.
“Good to see that you are rejoining us,” Giles confessed quietly and reset the board for another game.
“Yes, well, we’ll see.”
Anne got up and headed out to the kitchen with her glass, leaving Giles and Arlene to talk as grown-ups.
“How are you feeling?” Arlene asked him.
He shrugged. “Trying not to think about it. I can’t bear the idea that…”
Arlene nodded from her scrunched-up position on the sofa. She started to sit up a little.
“I just keep thinking I should have been there with them,” he added.
Arlene gently placed a hand on his arm and shook her head. “It’s better that you weren’t,” she said sensibly. “Besides, you don’t know how many of your nine lives you have left.”
Giles smiled, trying not to let his lip tremble. Tears streamed down his face quietly as he and Arlene consoled each other, just with their mere presence.
It wasn’t long before Anne returned from the kitchen. “Are you going to play this next one with us, Arlene?” she asked. “It’s actually more fun with three players…”
Chapter 15
Safe House, Undisclosed Location, Estaria
There was a noise towards the front of the safe house. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, and it wasn’t quite like any noise Joshua had heard before.
Even so, it wasn’t a particularly concerning sound.
But it drew Joshua out of the kitchen. A buzzing noise, distant and muffled. He didn’t even bother putting down the knife he had been using to cut his sandwich, assuming he would just have to give one of the generators a swift kick and then head right back into the kitchen.
But then he smelled smoke. And hot metal. A line along the edge of the main door was glowing red hot. It was getting longer, reaching closer and closer to the bottom of the door as someone on the other side took a blowtorch to it.
“Suedermann!” Joshua hollered over his shoulder, his grip on the bread knife tightening. “Get into the safe room!”
He could hear hurried footsteps behind him, heading deeper into the house, followed by the sound of the safe room opening and closing again. He only just heard the beep of the lock engaging.
Joshua glanced around to see if his protective vest was in the room, but he didn’t see it and he didn’t have a chance to go look for it before a narrow metal rod abruptly slammed its way through the gap between the door and the doorjamb, bending the heated metal out of the way and prying it open. With an unholy, almost deafening screeching sound, the door slid back along its track one painstaking inch at a time until it was open just wide enough for someone to shoulder through. Afterwards, the metal of the door was warped beyond any hope of closing again.
Four people barged into the room. Almost immediately, a bullet ripped through Joshua’s shoulder. Adrenaline let him ignore it as he surged forwards. He lifted the knife and crashed into the nearest of the four intruders, slamming the blade into the man’s neck. It sank through muscle and cartilage with a damp crunch, and he yanked it to the side, sending blood spraying through the air. Their momentum as they stumbled helped the knife to go deeper, and they both landed on the floor in a tangle of limbs.
The Ascension Myth Box Set Page 243
