His eVi blinked red, and a second later a brief message flashed into his vision.
We found him.
The body had floated onto a beach filled with frolicking children mid-morning Atlantis time. Once the children were corralled for counseling and the scene secured, a thorough forensic investigation was conducted onsite before moving the body to a medical facility.
The examination indicated a time of death between late afternoon on Wednesday and mid-morning Thursday; two-plus days in the water made a more precise TOD impossible. The cause of death was determined to be drowning. All evidence indicated that upon escaping the convention facility, however he accomplished it, he had simply dived off a walkway and let himself drown.
Oceans did not constitute a significant feature of Senecan topology. They existed of course, but were shallow and unexceptional, and generally far too cold to frolic in. It was conceivable Candela didn’t know how to swim. Unlikely, but conceivable.
It remained a mystery how he escaped the lockdown. But he clearly had—after which, by all indications, he committed suicide.
The evidence at this point was near to irrefutable. And despite herculean efforts and their most earnest protestations, they had nothing they would be able to show to the Alliance government to prove the assassination was anything other than a premeditated act on behalf of the Senecan Federation.
32 Palluda
Senecan Federation Colony
Thad Yue led the fighters into Senecan Federation space. He had swung down a bit to the south so should they be tracked, they would appear to be approaching from the nearest Alliance military base on Arcadia. They were unlikely to be picked up until they reached Palluda however, as other than one tiny Alliance colony the region to the south of western Federation space was a desolate wasteland devoid of life.
At 0.2 AU out from Palluda they dropped out of superluminal. He signaled the other fighters to move into a tight standard Alliance approach formation, one they had practiced several times in the last week in the skies above Cosenti.
From here on out, everything needed to proceed according to the script.
“Activate transponders.”
Acknowledged.
“Switching to Alliance encrypted communications protocol. Confirm.”
Confirmed.
He consciously added a crisp abruptness to his tone. “This is Vengeance Alpha. Operation Vengeance is a go. Initiate jamming of orbital sensors on my mark. And…mark.”
Palluda became visible in the viewport moments later. It was a smallish planet, two-thirds the size of Mars, and the lone habitable world in the system. Nevertheless with a location solidly in the goldilocks zone and a stable orbit, it was a bountiful if ordinary garden world.
The colony had been founded ten years earlier as an agricultural outpost. It supported a population of under thirty thousand, for bots did most of the work tending the vast kilometers of farmland. A single town sat in the center of the cultivated land. Thankfully the first atmosphere corridors had begun operation six months earlier—corridors which helpfully included transponder monitoring, though no connected security measures.
“Bravo, Charlie, Delta, on me. Prepare for corridor transit.”
The corridor ended to the southwest of and outside town. Only the most basic defense system protected the colony, consisting of two surface-to-air turret lasers and a single patrol drone. He planned to knock out the drone immediately, and custom jamming ware would disrupt the STA turrets.
His ship emerged from the corridor and the distant outline of the town came into view. The other three fighters followed him out as he banked east.
“Vengeance, you have your targets. We are weapons heavy.”
Thomas Harnal was deeply engrossed in watching Ava Loumas saunter across the street. As such, he didn’t see the patrol drone until it crashed to the ground three meters in front of him.
“Ah shit!” His arms cartwheeled in the air as he was thrown backward to land on his ass on the sidewalk. He looked up to discover Ava staring wide-eyed at the scattered wreckage of the drone and the deep crater it had created.
He laughed gamely and climbed to his feet. “Well, there’s my brush with death for the day, eh?”
She glanced over at him, a perplexed frown animating her pretty features. “Oh…Norm…Tom? That’s your name, right? Are you okay?”
She didn’t even know his name. His shoulders sagged. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He looked back at the crater marring the park grass. “I wonder what happened to make it fail? Maybe the—”
A sonic boom reverberated, so close the ground trembled beneath him. His eyes jerked up to see two fighter jets zoom overhead. The distinctive navy Earth Alliance emblem was clearly discernable—they were flying that low.
He hated the Alliance. Alliance soldiers killed his grandfather in the Crux War. He had never met his grandfather, but his mom said he had been a great man, which was good enough for him.
A fireball plumed into the sky from the vicinity of the spaceport. Three seconds later the sound of the explosion reached them, a low rumble vibrating along his skin as it built to a malicious growl.
In a burst of adrenaline-fueled bravery, he grabbed Ava’s hand and started sprinting in the direction of the town hall. His dad worked for the Agriculture Bureau; he should be there if he wasn’t on his lunch break.
“Come on! We have to warn them the Alliance is attacking!”
Gerald Harnal sat at his desk, picking at a sandwich while he reviewed the quarterly production reports. The whole-grain hybrid fields were doing really well, which was fortunate since the food corps on Krysk were requesting an increase in shipments next quarter.
No matter how smart, how fast or how resilient humanity grew, they still needed food to survive. Sure, using adaptive cybernetic subroutines most people could now survive longer without food, so long as they had water. But the limit had only been stretched to four months at the outside, and no one wanted to live in such a state for any length of time, much less months.
So the seeds to feed humanity continued to be planted, nourished, reaped and transported across the galaxy.
He knew he was a small cog in a very large machine, but he liked to think he did his part. His great-great-great-grandparents had been farmers on the Oklahoma plains, and in his own way he carried on their proud tradition.
Nevertheless, it—
—his eVi flashed red and pushed an emergency pulse into his vision.
Dad Alliance ships are attack—
He never saw the missile, nor the ship which fired it.
The town hall appeared to implode from within, then expel an enormous red-gold wave of fire to consume all in its wake. The heat rolled over them like a blast furnace.
“Dad!” Thomas fell to his knees in horror. “No, Dad….”
Ava was pulling on his arm, trying to drag him back up. “Come on, we should get somewhere safe.”
“But my dad…he might still be alive and need our help….”
She glanced at the collapsed, destroyed building at the end of the square. It bowed in to the center, where jagged pieces of synthetic stone piled twenty meters high. Black smoke billowed out of every surface, licked by bright yellow flames.
“I don’t think so, Tom. I’m sorry. We need to move!”
He gazed at her, eyes wide and desperate. It felt like a dream, everything hazy and sluggish. Ava was talking to him…and his father was dead. Slowly he nodded and struggled up.
She tugged him around the rubble. “Come on, let’s go to the school—they’ve got a storm shelter!”
They stumbled through huge chunks of debris and upended vehicles and veered left toward the school. People were running in every direction, some panting, others screaming. A few merely huddled on their knees beside bodies.
Behind them the jets could be heard approaching again—or maybe it was different ships, more ships. The beam of one of the defense turrets chased them as they passed overhead.
He saw the beam trail off in the air to the right. Why didn’t the lasers hit the ships? The government had promised they were state of the art.
Someone crashed into him from behind, and he remembered to start running again.
Ava’s hand felt sweaty and clammy in his. Not at all like he had imagined it would feel. But she was probably scared, right? That was why it wasn’t soft and warm and gentle.
To their left the community center smoldered in ruins. A gust of wind blew a cloud of ash and smoke onto them; he accidentally inhaled some of it and doubled over in a coughing fit.
“Tom, please, we have to keep going!”
Ava was crying now. Her tears cut wet streaks into the ash coating her face, but her gorgeous green eyes, stark with terror, shone through the smoke.
He tried to stand, but another coughing fit crippled him.
She stared at him, panic bubbling forth. “I’m sorry, Tom, I don’t want to die. I have to go!” She let go of his hand and took off running.
“Ava, wait….” His voice was hoarse and cracking and there was no way she heard him above the cries and screams and thunder of collapsing buildings.
He crawled to his feet and stumbled after her. She seemed far ahead of him now. He saw her join a group of people scrambling up the stairs and fighting to squeeze through the doors all at once—
—the front of the school erupted in a pillar of fire.
His steps slackened to a halt. It was a dream. It had to be. Only in a dream would Ava finally talk to him, then have the life stolen from her.
“Ava?”
A column of thick black smoke flowed down the street toward where he stood. He let it wash over him, no longer caring if he could breathe.
33 New Babel
Independent Colony
Olivia observed the feeds from the jets on a large screen above her desk as their fourth and final run began. The perfectly manicured nail of her left index finger tapped a slow, measured beat on the surface of the desk; it was the only sign of tension in an otherwise calm and poised demeanor.
She waited until the first of the final two missiles had been loosed by each ship. Twenty-eight high-powered precision Alliance missiles had done quite sufficient damage to a nascent village of thirty thousand. She entered a code on the control panel beneath her right hand. The custom ware installed on the jets to jam the defense turrets ceased to function.
Five seconds later Charlie fighter exploded. Confused chatter burst forth in the other three cockpits.
“Wha—? How’d that laser hit?”
“Jamming is down. I repeat jamming is down! Evasive maneuv—” Bravo took a missile to a wing and spun out of control to disintegrate on impact with the ground.
“Abort! Delta, abort!”
But they were too close to the town and its meager little defense systems.
“Eject!”
She checked, concerned for a moment at least one team member had somehow managed to eject. The eject mechanisms were supposed to be disabled, but mistakes did happen—and would be paid for if they did. Area scans identified no chutes, however.
She listened as Thad Yue grumbled in the final seconds before his fighter caught a laser from one of the turrets and exploded as he pulled ineffectually on the eject lever. “Qu si, gāisĭ biăo zi.”
Her eVi helpfully provided the translation: Go to Hell, you fucking whore.
A wry smile grew on her lips as she shut off the screen. “You first.”
She had told Marcus traceability wouldn’t be an issue and she had meant it. Yue had been the sole team member who knew the operation was under her direction, but they all knew they weren’t working for the Alliance. Modern interrogation techniques were quite effective, no matter the will of the captive. She simply could not risk the slightest chance of any information being revealed to either Alliance or Senecan agents.
Therefore none were allowed to survive.
She sent a brief pulse to Marcus, one whose meaning would never be construed as incriminating.
As requested.
34 Siyane
Metis Nebula, Center
The Siyane dropped out of superluminal into an ocean of light.
Like most plerions, Metis grew brighter as one neared the center despite the lack of visible light from the pulsar itself. Alex had been prepared for it, and spectrum filters were in place over the viewports above and beyond the strengthened radiation shielding. Even so, she had to blink away halos while her eyes adjusted to the increased brightness and her ocular implant adapted to the new range of signals it now received.
The wispy, amorphous nebular dust of before was gone, replaced by sweeping, dramatic cloud formations in vibrant shades ranging from crisp gold to rich cornflower blue. They towered in thick pillars, resembling the storm wall of a galactic hurricane and spilling forth as crashing waves upon a shore.
It was magnificent. A stunning tableau of brilliant color and radiant luminance.
“Well that’s not something you see every day.”
She tore her attention away from the scene to look over her shoulder. Caleb stood behind her chair, hands perched on the headrest. His attention was directed out the viewport, but sensing her gaze he looked down.
He wore a spirited grin, one which only broadened when he saw her own expression of delight. Dear lord, when it was genuine his smile could illuminate a world.
Things had been different between them this morning…more comfortable, more naturally at ease. It was as if giving full voice to the unresolvable conundrum of their circumstance enabled them to, if not break through it, at least put it aside for the time being.
She returned his smile before returning to the vista. Silently she framed and captured a number of visuals using the external cameras, including several excellent candidates for future additions to the wall in her loft. Satisfied, she leaned forward and rested her chin on her palms to simply stare out and soak it all in.
Moments such as this made everything else worth it. The difficult choices, the judgmental frowns and even scorn of others, the fading away of friends and lovers, the isolation and solitude and, every now and again, perhaps loneliness…
…of course she wasn’t alone right now, was she? She found—somewhat to her surprise—she was okay with that.
After a soft exhale she sat up and straightened her posture. “Time to get to work.” She glanced back and found him watching her instead of the view. Huh. “All the sensors are wide open. We can monitor the readings along the top of the HUD, though not to the level of detail we can analyze later at the data center.
“The pulsar resides about half an AU in that direction.” She gestured to an area fifteen degrees port. “Physically it’s quite tiny, only a few kilometers wide, yet obviously the pulse is very strong.”
The top far right screen showed the rapid, spiking frequency of the gamma flare. “We won’t be able to get any closer than 0.15 AU or the radiation shield will be overwhelmed. But we don’t have to. We can see everything we need to from here.”
She leaned back in the chair and kicked her feet up on the small dash lip, crossed her arms against her chest and watched as the screens lit up to display new readings. Thirty seconds, a minute passed in silence, her focus wholly on the screens.
Finally she looked over at him. He had taken up a position beside the half-wall of the cockpit. “See anything interesting?”
He huffed a laugh. “If you’re seeking an opportunity to put me in my place, now would be a fairly good one.”
She merely shrugged, and he sucked in a deep breath. “Well, for the most part the readings match the earlier ones you took. The TLF radiation is definitely stronger now, but…it seems a little off-kilter. I can’t put my finger on why.”
Her lips smacked together, though she was impressed he picked up on the oddity. “Yep. Sure does.” She swiveled to contemplate the far left screen for a moment, then stood and went to the data center. In a few seconds she had redirected the feeds to the table.
She pulled up a large physical map of the region and began superimposing the various electromagnetic waves.
The gamma flare, not surprisingly, lined up directly on the location of the pulsar. The synchrotron radiation also originated at the pulsar to spread in all directions. Same for the pulsar wind. The visible light was diffuse throughout the region, having no clear origin point—consistent with a late-stage supernova remnant. The minor infrared and microwave readings were a bit haphazard, clumping around the pulsar but peaking at several other locations as well.
The TLF radiation…. “It’s not coming from the pulsar.”
He had joined her at the table, and stood near enough if she shifted her weight their shoulders would brush against one another. Yet for the moment the unsettling effect of his rather close physical proximity was outweighed by the sheer magnitude of the impossibility in front of her.
“Impossible. It lines up perfectly on the gamma flare.”
“I know. But it’s not coming from the pulsar.” She zoomed the map in. “It intersects the pulsar, but it’s coming from…there.” ‘There’ was a region of thick nebular clouds 0.2 AU to the right and behind the pulsar. “And…” a thought and the entire table updated with new data “…I think the pulsar’s orbiting that location.”
He ran a hand through his hair in consternation. In its wake loose curls spilled down across his forehead, sending her pulse subito accelerando, to put it in polite terms. She willfully blinked the sensation away.
He seemed completely unaware of the effect he was having on her. “Which would mean it’s a binary system, just as you suspected. Can you detect a companion in here anywhere?”
“Nope. I mean it’s possible it’s one of these infrared or microwave markers. Still, they don’t really line up correctly for it.”
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