Triorion Omnibus

by L. J. Hachmeister

  “I want to see the Spinner called Aesis. This is an urgent matter, soldier.”

  “Sir, the Minister ordered—”

  Jaeia didn’t bother arguing this time. Sidestepping the soldier, she spouted off her priority codes as he fumbled to input and verify them in his interfaced uniform sleeve. Heads turned as she searched the interrogation cells for the Spinner’s familiar tune.

  The soldier guarding the entrance caught up to her. Expecting resistance, Jaeia instead found him holding the key to Aesis’s cell.

  “Cell B. He’s in the final stage of metamorphosis.”

  “Why is he in lockdown?”

  The soldier seemed confused by her question. “All Spinners are kept in lockdown until they complete their metamorphosis. It’s for protection.”

  It’s not his fault, she reminded herself. That’s a lie propagated by Razar.

  Years ago, the Military Minister had created the secret program to use Spinners in interrogations and kept the wing off-limits from most of the Starbase staff, including the senior officers. If it wasn’t for this crisis situation, I probably wouldn’t even be allowed in the cell blocks.

  “Thank you,” she said as the soldier unlocked the door.

  Jaeia stepped into the dimly lit cell. Drab, brown walls enclosed a spartan living space. She eyed the wash basin, toilet, locker, and bed. Only the Alliance mission statement, tacked in the center of an otherwise empty wall, broke up the monochromatic scheme. Even the lower deck cabins have more character.

  Letting out her disgust in a huff, Jaeia turned her attention to the semi-cocooned body lying on the bed. Viscous fluid saturated the dark sheets and dribbled onto the floor. The air smelled heavy and sharp, with a strange alkaline tang.

  “Aesis?” she said.

  A reflective film covered the white body. No movement could be seen.

  “I’m sorry,” she stuttered, her cheeks turning red.

  She turned to go, but stopped in her tracks when she heard a crack. More snaps and pops followed. She backed up into the door as a pink hand slid out from underneath the protective white casing.

  “I—I came to ask you...” Jaeia started, but then stopped at the sight of something wiggling beneath the white covering. “No, I can’t do this. I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re free. I’m setting your people free.”

  She hurried out, heart hammering in her chest, afraid and uncertain of her own actions.

  “Soldier, I order you to set the Spinners free,” she said, this time using a psionic push to her words. “Now.”

  The chief of the security deck popped out of the monitoring station. “What’s this about, Captain?” He turned to the soldier with a scowl on his face: “And why the hell didn’t she go through decontamination?”

  The soldier mumbled to himself as Jaeia continued her conversation with the chief. “I want the Spinners set free on my orders.”

  The chief looked at her through the narrow scopes of his optic implants. A few weeks ago Jaeia overhead that he had lost his eyes in a battle against the Dominion. Now, every time she saw him, she secretly wondered if it had been an assault that she had led. “We’re under direct orders from the Minister.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  In one quick motion he plucked a loose strand of hair off her shoulder. “You have to be careful around here, Captain.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your DNA. All it takes is a strand of hair, or just the right touch, and they have you.”

  “You mean they can replicate me,” Jaeia clarified.

  “Yes,” the Chief said, not hiding his contempt very well. “And forgive me, Sir, but every time you have an unauthorized interaction with one of them, I have a lot more paperwork to do.”

  Jaeia thought about when she first met Aesis and brought him before the senior military council. She had innocently put her hand on his shoulder. Does he have my DNA now? Can I be replicated?

  “Those worms are best kept under lock and key, Captain,” the chief added, his eyes retracting with a whir into their metal sockets. “We don’t want to compromise your safety.”

  His tone sparked her anger, but she kept herself in check. By the way his psionic rhythm rang in her ears, she afforded him some empathy. He’s a victim of his own ignorance.

  “I gave an order, Chief. I expect it to be executed,” she said.

  Their minds drifted in a cloudy air of confusion. She was glad they didn’t press her for a reason, because she didn’t think she could offer them a rational answer.

  As she walked back to her quarters to change for her shift, she grimly thought, After all, what’s left? Setting the Spinners free was radical, but in light of Victor’s imminent takeover of the Starways, something so relatively minor would not register the attention of her superiors.

  The Spinners could be dangerous. They might replicate me or my sister—maybe even Wren or the Minister. It’s an unnecessary risk—

  (Trust yourself.)

  “But it’s the right thing to do,” she whispered as she changed into her formal uniform.

  She ran her finger along the contour of her face, watching her reflection in the mirror do the same.

  “At least I hope it is.”

  LONG, DELICATE FINGERS found their way under Jetta’s suit and helmet to the notch underneath her jawline, feeling for a pulse. Someone with a high-pitched, squealing voice shouted and screamed. A young voice with burdened tones.

  Two arms grabbed underneath her armpits. The ground raced underneath her. Jetta tried to pick up her feet, but they felt like blocks of cement dragging in the ash.

  “Hey,” she mumbled through numb lips.

  She lifted her head and opened her eyes. A field of decimated corpses littered the street. Breathing in sharply, she tasted blood in the back of her throat.

  What happened?

  Memory fragments slowly refitted into a larger picture. The Necros milling around the entrance to the subway tunnel. Running out of time. The sickness spreading in her chest. Had to know—the tattoo—the Steins—why?

  My talent... She remembered her awful deed, reaching into the corroded minds of the deceased and pulling out the only nightmare they could know. Their last moment...

  Jetta jerked her head up, her helmet rearing to the sky as the clouds rumbled angrily.

  I made them remember their last moment they were alive.

  “Stop!” Jetta cried, wrestling against the forces dragging her along.

  Agracia and Triel slowed their pace, but didn’t stop. “We have to reach the tunnel—it isn’t safe!” Agracia shouted.

  “No,” Jetta said, freeing her arms and crawling over to the nearest Necro. Twitching, it sputtered black juices from its oral cavity, eyes open but blind to her presence.

  “I saw.” Jetta stroked the stringy crescent of hair that lay across the Necro’s mottled brow. “I know who you were. Who you all were.”

  “Jeezus, Doc,” Agracia said, trying to grab her, but the Healer cautioned her against touching Jetta.

  “Just give her a minute.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Jetta whispered as her mind returned to the mangled recesses of its necrotizing heart, and the collective nightmare that shook her from ignorant slumber.

  The skies were still, the entire city silent in the last breath before the bombs fell. Before the poisons leaked from their biocapsules. Before death consumed the world.

  “You were on your way home,” Jetta said.

  She no longer saw the mummified man before her, but a middle-aged father of three dressed in a tailored gray suit, a briefcase in one hand as he signaled for a taxi with the other. He smelled like aftershave and perspiration, and his palms were sweaty from nerves.

  Jetta’s eyes drifted to another Necro nearby. This one was missing two limbs and possessed no recognizable ears or nose. “You were riding a bicycle, on a delivery.”

  When Jetta looked around, the street was no longer a part of a greate
r wasteland, but a busy avenue bustling with people, bicycles, hovercars, and airbuses. Birds flew across a blue sky in a V, and the smell of hot dogs and fresh pretzels tempted her nose. It wasn’t Red Polyps that pierced the sky but massive skyscrapers, powerful and indomitable. The collective energy—the synergy—of all the life in the city, in the country and well beyond, filled her like an infinite number of shining stars until she felt like she would burst.

  Life.

  Earth.

  “Home...”

  “Jetta,” Triel said gently, touching her arm. “We need to go. Now.”

  Still caught between the past and present, Jetta was only faintly aware of the new horde of Necros creeping over the hill.

  “They’re all human,” she mumbled as Agracia and Triel helped her to her feet.

  “Can you walk?” Triel asked.

  Jetta’s legs felt like slabs of cement, but Agracia and Triel helped her limp to the subway entrance where Bossy was furiously trying to dig a hole through the wall of fallen debris.

  “Chakking thing won’t budge!” Bossy said, straining against a studded beam. Triel and Agracia joined her as the Necros began to hoot and holler, alerted to their presence.

  “Move,” Jetta said, shoving them aside.

  Sick, exhausted, and still wobbly from overexerting her talents, Jetta pressed into the beam and lifted it with a groan. Bossy quietly cursed her out as she passed underneath.

  “Freak show...” the dark horse muttered.

  Jetta held it together until they were safely through the clogged trap of fallen archways and impassable rail lines and inside a barricaded office at the farthest end of the station.

  “We’re safe,” Agracia assured them, using the flashlight attached to the arm of her suit to illuminate their dust-covered surroundings.

  Jetta thought otherwise. The Necros might not have been able to make it past this blockade a few years ago, but the station has changed. With a careful eye, she scanned the erosions and cracks on some of the vertical support beams. That Polyp is butting up against some of the main structures of this facility. There could be new entrances—

  The station quaked, and debris rained down from the ceiling.

  Or the whole thing could just collapse.

  “Uh, we need to keep moving,” Agracia said. “This sycha ain’t stable.”

  “Give us a moment,” Triel said, putting her arm around Jetta.

  “Whatever,” Agracia said as she her companion wandered off into an old storage closet and rummaged around for parts. Bossy cursed up a storm about something, but Jetta didn’t care.

  Triel clicked on her flashlight and set it next to them.

  “What was that? What just happened?” Jetta said, as Triel lightly rubbed her back. Jetta sensed that she wanted to connect to her, but it was still too dangerous to take off the hazard suits.

  “You’re pushing yourself too hard, Jetta.” Triel took her hand and squeezed. “You need to look out for yourself, too.”

  Exhausted, Jetta didn’t have it in her to fight the Healer’s grip. Not that she really wanted to. Part of her relished the touch, even as another bristled.

  “You’re in no condition to use your powers that extensively, even with my help,” Triel added.

  I’m dying.

  She angrily pushed the thought from her head. No. I won’t let what the Deadwalkers did to my body stop me. And I won’t let Victor, or the monster inside me, get in my head. Nothing will keep me from finding the truth—and a solution.

  Old promises solidified her resolve. I will save the Starways, if only to protect my brother and sister. She turned her hands into fists. And I will rescue Galm and Lohien, and find my mother. I won’t let anything bad happen to anyone I love.

  But anger wouldn’t serve her now, not with Triel’s concerns pricking her mind. Jetta hated doing it, but she knew she had no choice if she wanted to quell the Healer’s anxieties.

  “I’m sorry,” Jetta said, putting her other hand on Triel’s. “You’re right. I’ll be more careful.”

  Triel pulled her in close. “Please, Jetta. For me.”

  Eyeing the Scabber Jocks, Jetta pushed back and got to her feet. “We need to get going.”

  “Jetta, wait—just take a second—”

  Although the aftershock of her talents had finally worn off, the exhaustion remained. Still, they couldn’t afford to wait. “We don’t have time.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jetta said, joining Agracia and Bossy as they fussed near the supply closet. One of them had opened the hidden trapdoor inside the closet.

  “Gonna be a tight squeeze.” Agracia stepped aside to expose the stairwell. Peering down, Jetta saw that the stairwell had partially caved in. “The kid here hates small spaces.”

  Bossy let loose another string of cuss words and slammed her fist into a dust-covered desk. A name tag sitting on the edge fell off. Jetta reached down and grabbed it, rubbing away the dirt to reveal the name. Ms. Ariya Ohakn.

  “Ariya Ohakn...” she said aloud.

  When she looked up, her companions were gone. A woman with auburn hair and pale green eyes sat typing away at her desk on an electronic tablet. Her brows pinched in a familiar way, reminding her of somebody. Somebody important.

  What’s happening?

  Barricades and debris vanished, replaced by mid-twenty-first century décor and design. A faded black-and-white modernist print hung in the middle of the far wall beside an uninspired arrangement of fake flowers on a side-table. Eco-friendly lights with nature-themed trimmings hung from the ceiling.

  This can’t be real—

  Jetta caught sight of something discontinuous with the minimalistic décor. On the desk, tucked away from customer sight, lay a series of designs scribbled on a piece of paper—intricate patterns woven together like Japanese kanji, but in an esoteric language that struck a chord within Jetta.

  She leaned forward, trying to get a better view. It almost looks like... my tattoo.

  The woman chewed on the inside of her cheek before hitting the send button on her tablet.

  “Please God, tell me I’m doing the right thing,” she whispered.

  “Hey!”

  A hard-hitting punch landed smack against the meat of her shoulder. Jetta reared her fist back before realizing she was back in her own time.

  Bossy stood in front of her, audibly slurping on her lollipop. “Are you pulling one of your tricks again?”

  “Back off!” Jetta said sharply. Bossy stumbled backward in surprise.

  What just happened? she thought as she found herself holding tightly to the name tag.

  “Jetta?” Triel whispered.

  Jetta opened a private channel between the two of them. “I saw that woman again—the one from the memory stain you got off of Reht. The one that Jaeia thinks is our birth mother.”

  “What?” Triel exclaimed.

  “It’s impossible, but I know I saw her. She was here—centuries ago. She was some kind of secretary.”

  Tilting her head to the side, the Healer studied the name tag in Jetta’s hand. “I can’t read English.”

  Jetta translated the words for her as best she could. “It says this was just a service station for the subway, but that’s not the feeling I got when I was there, especially in light of the fact that there’s a laboratory underneath. This place was a front, and this woman—Ariya Ohakn—guarded its secret.”

  “Hey, kids—let’s keep it among friends,” Agracia said, butting in on their channel.

  “We should get moving,” Jetta said as the station gave another ominous rumble.

  Leading the way through the tangle of pipework and fallen construction, Jetta brought them far enough beneath the Earth that she felt confident they could remove their helmets. However, the thin air and lack of active filters made her wait.

  This feels like something out of a long forgotten dream, she thought, entering the laboratory. An eerie feeling crawled into her belly as they passed dried-out stasis cylind
ers and ancient testing equipment. She felt as if she should know the place, as if she had been here before, apart from the memories she had grafted from Agracia. Or maybe it’s something else.

  “Same weird sycha as before,” Agracia said, clicking the switch back and forth on a dysfunctional Bunsen burner. “Nuthin’s changed.”

  “Yeah...” Jetta said.

  Triel touched the back of her hand.

  “It’s okay,” Jetta whispered to her through their private channel. “Just strange to be here.”

  The Healer put her hand out in front of her as if to steady herself. “No, it’s more than that. These walls contain memories.”

  “Chakking leeches,” Bossy mumbled, kicking over a chair.

  “Shut it, kid,” Agracia said. She turned her attention to Jetta. “Keep me in the loop, Doc. Is this place haunted or what?”

  “In a sense,” Triel said, running her fingers along the control board on a thermostatic biosphere regulator.

  Jetta froze mid-step. “It kind of feels like the Temple of Exxuthus.”

  “Wha?” Agracia said.

  The ground shifted, and debris showered down from the ceiling. No time to figure that out—we have to get in and out as quickly as possible.

  “Let’s get to where you found my tattoo,” Jetta said.

  Agracia led them down a series of steel-plated stairs hidden behind a bookshelf to another dusty subbasement. Aside from the portion of ceiling that had caved in, the structure of the laboratory appeared relatively intact. Most of the internal destruction, from smashed smartservers to broken stasis cylinders, looked like it had happened centuries ago.

  “Gods,” Triel said, holding her helmet with both hands as she stumbled into a workbench. “Something terrible happened here.”

  All the hair on Jetta’s arms and the back of her neck stood on end. There’s something alive in this place, just like in the Temple of Exxuthus, she thought. Something with tethers in this world and the next.

  Sweat filled the inside of her hazard suit, and her heart boomed inside her chest. She went over the room with her flashlight but found nothing abnormal or out of place; it looked like a bombed-out laboratory with ancient equipment she didn’t recognize.