Oliver Invictus (Annals of Altair Book 3)

by Kate Stradling

  Oliver Invictus

  Annals of Altair Book 3

  Kate Stradling

  Oliver Invictus

  Copyright © 2019 by Kate Stradling

  katestradling.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written consent of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner.

  Published by

  Eulalia Skye Press

  P.O. Box 2203, Mesa, AZ 85214

  eulaliaskye.com

  For Cade,

  who started it all

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About the Author

  Also by Kate Stradling

  Chapter 1

  Stay of Execution

  Monday, February 18, 2058, 7:32 AM MST, in transit

  Oliver Dunn’s life was officially over. He watched out the car window as the snow-covered Montana scenery passed, an odd sense of resignation on his shoulders. This was it. The end. The abrupt and anticlimactic finish to a short and mostly stupid existence.

  He had grown quite maudlin in his old age. Five years ago he was naïve enough to believe that the world was his to take by storm. Now at the wizened age of fifteen, he would gladly kick that ten-year-old brat in the face, if only to knock some sense into him that much sooner.

  For the past five years he had dwelt among rats and guttersnipes, sycophants, useful idiots, and the quiet desperation of slowly dying hope. In truth, he had dwelt among those elements his whole life, but they were so much more apparent at Prom-F than they ever had been at Prom-A. The administrators at both schools were equally calculating, equally uncaring, but at Prom-A at least they pandered to their flock, positioning their students to take over the world. The student body at Prom-F was all too aware that their life’s path led to nothing but dead ends.

  And Oliver’s dead end had come three years earlier than expected.

  “Special assignment,” they said when they roused him from his bed in the pitch-darkness of night. “Pack some basics. We just got a call that another campus urgently needs you.”

  He had obeyed, but only because he had no other choice. His roommate, bleary-eyed, sat up in bed to watch as Oliver packed two sets of clothing, a toothbrush, a comb, and a stick of deodorant. He’d thrown that last item in with a sense of defiance. Even in those first waking minutes he recognized his life was over. He was determined not to end it smelling like a sweaty teenaged boy.

  When all else was stripped from him, he would cling to his dignity still.

  “Quickly, Oliver. There’s no time to waste.”

  They’d tried to rouse a sense of duty and superiority within him, not realizing that his sense of duty was dead. At fifteen, he was too old to leave the F Campus of the Prometheus Institute. Only students from the ages of eleven to thirteen were allowed field trips; students older than that were considered flight risks. Any older ones who left never returned, and Prometheus scrubbed their records from its database as though they had never existed in the first place.

  Oliver was different than the others, though. He knew it, and the administrators tried to play up on it. In his glory days at Prom-A, he had helped with a number of disciplinary issues at the far-flung campuses. He had mistakenly believed that his difference, his special quality, marked him as a favored individual when in reality it was an albatross around his neck.

  The sun crested along the horizon. He watched in disinterest as its stark, bright rays burst over a far-off silhouette of mountains. The other Prom-F students would be awake by now. Class would start without him. Would anyone even notice he was gone?

  Silly question. Of course they would. They would whisper behind stricken hands, and feel their impending doom that much nearer, and be powerless to do anything about it. The Prometheus Institute was a school for geniuses. Its F Campus catered to the delinquents in its system, with an isolated location and an overabundance of security mechanisms both physical and digital.

  After a jailbreak five years ago—the only successful jailbreak in the history of the F Campus—that security had tripled. The administrators were quick to squash any hopes of escape and even quicker to separate friends who looked as though they might be conspiring together.

  Once upon a time, Oliver had harbored thoughts of breaking free. Now he knew his life had always been stuck on the same trajectory: hurtling toward the shadow campus, the mysterious Prom-E. What awaited him there was anyone’s guess. Rumors of military conscription, imprisonment, experimentation, and immediate death all circulated among the students of Prom-F. Oliver could attest to Prom-E’s existence—he had personally encountered its principal, the stringent General Bradford Stone—but beyond that military connection, nothing more about the place was certain. He didn’t even know where in the country it was. Such intense secrecy pointed toward the grimmer rumors as being closer to the truth.

  Did he prefer instant death or a life where scientists used him for unethical experiments? Not that his preferences mattered. Of one thing he was sure: he would have no say whatsoever.

  A cacophonous buzz interrupted his melancholy thoughts. It rattled in regular spurts from the front seat while the driver, Maggie Lloyd, placidly watched the road. Her hands never moved from their ten-o’clock and two-o’clock positions on the wheel.

  Oliver suppressed his irritation and said, “Your phone is ringing.”

  “Talking on the phone while driving is illegal,” Maggie replied.

  She was a remarkably stupid woman, single-minded and short-sighted but entirely unaware of either characteristic within herself. She viewed the world from a righteous standpoint: everything she did was correct, and anyone who deviated from her preferred methodology was wrong. How Principal Gates had survived this long with her as his administrative assistant Oliver could never guess. It was a matter of nepotism over competence, though. Gates’s wife was Maggie’s sister.

  The buzzing stopped. Oliver deigned to peer into the front seat, briefly. Maggie’s phone was in the cup holder, which explained why it had rattled so loud. He returned his attention to the passing scenery.

  The phone buzzed again.

  With an exasperated sigh he rested his cheek on the palm of one hand. He couldn’t think with that mechanized noise disrupting the quiet. Again Maggie ignored it, though, and he was forced to wait through its full cycle before it stopped.

  Blissful silence followed, but was short-lived.

  Oliver nearly burst as the phone buzzed to life a third time. “Don’t you think that might be important?”

  “
Whoever it is can leave a message,” Maggie said. “It’s illegal to answer a phone while driving.”

  He scoffed. “This car has government plates. No one’s going to pull you over.”

  He longed to add a colorful epithet—“you cretinous cow” was on the tip of his tongue—but he forestalled himself. Cretinous cow though she was, Maggie still held the steering wheel, which meant that his life was in her hands. True, his life was over, but he wanted at least to arrive at the end in one piece.

  Maggie, as was her nature, ignored his comments. Her self-righteous worldview said that talking on the phone while driving was wrong, so she wasn’t going to do it regardless of whether she could get away with it.

  No sooner had the cell phone finished its ring cycle than it ran through another one. Then it pinged with a text-message notification, followed by another, followed by another.

  “We’re almost there,” Maggie said, cheerfully ignoring the din.

  They couldn’t arrive soon enough, as far as Oliver was concerned, impending doom notwithstanding.

  The private government terminal at the Great Falls airport struck him with a pang of nostalgia. Oliver’s ten-year-old self had passed this way before and had been foolish enough to believe he would pass this way again on his way back to Prom-A in New York. Back then, the handler who had come with him had believed as much as well, and they were both fools for it.

  He had no handler with him this time, further proof that his “special assignment” had nothing to do with disciplinary issues at any of the Prometheus satellite campuses. The lackey currently assigned to him, Garrett, was probably immersed in menial office tasks and grateful for the slight reprieve. He was halfway through his Prometheus internship, but he had been with Oliver for less than three weeks.

  Good riddance to him, at least.

  Maggie parked the car on the tarmac, where a twin-engine plane awaited their arrival. Oliver cracked his door to a frigid breeze. His right foot settled on frozen blacktop as he stood to breathe in what felt more like powdered ice crystals than air.

  A man in a black suit darted to the driver’s side as Maggie exited the vehicle.

  “Ms. Lloyd, why didn’t you answer your phone?” Oliver, listening over the roof of the black sedan, was surprised to hear such gruffness.

  Maggie, in placid good cheer, stooped into the car to retrieve her cell.

  The man was almost beside himself. “There’s no point now! Just turn around and take the null back to Prom-F!”

  Oliver’s heart quickened in his chest. Had they changed their minds about his fate?

  Maggie argued. “Those aren’t the orders I received. My orders came from General Stone himself—”

  “It’s General Stone issuing the retraction,” the man snapped. He shoved her roughly back toward the open door, but Maggie dug in her heels. Her solid weight was too much for effective manhandling. With growing agitation the agent consigned himself to waiting as she stubbornly, stolidly browsed through her missed text messages. She turned her attention then to a waiting voicemail.

  The man groaned and pivoted on one heel to shout back to the terminal building. “Williams! Bring the orders that came through!” He bounded away, pulling a cell phone from his pocket to make a call of his own.

  Maggie, meanwhile, listened in ponderous silence as a tinny voice chattered. Her expression dropped into a confused frown. Oliver, on tenterhooks to learn his fate, could have leapt across the car and strangled her.

  “But what’s happened?” she asked at last, bewildered. Whatever the content of her messages, it was too much for her mean intellect.

  The man in black returned, a badge displayed. “Margaret Lloyd, I’m commandeering your vehicle and the null-projector. You are to remain here until further notice. You, boy, get in the car.”

  The adamant expression on his face brooked no argument. Oliver dropped into the relative warmth of the back seat. The agent took Maggie’s place at the wheel, and before the woman could even gibber a response, he slammed the door, started the car, and peeled away from the terminal and its waiting airplane.

  Oliver scrambled to buckle his seatbelt, taken off-guard by the speed of the careening vehicle. His heart pounded up into his throat as hope—a hope he had thought long dead—resurrected within him. This agent, who was he? Part of the Government-Civilian Alliance that oversaw the affairs of the Prometheus Institute’s several campuses, or did he hail from a different organization?

  Altair?

  The word fluttered through his mind in a whisper. His ten-year-old self, idiot that he had been, had refused a rescue from the subversive group. He hadn’t realized then that he needed rescuing, had believed that they were a flock of criminals and traitors.

  Surely they would not return for him nearly five years later. And yet, in the midst of this tangled morning, that thread of hope pulled through him. What if—?

  The car gunned through traffic and jerked onto the highway, headed back toward Prom-F.

  “What’s happened?” Oliver finally dared to ask.

  “Shut up and do as you’re told, null,” the agent replied.

  The hope in Oliver’s chest died anew. An agent of Altair would, at this point of an operation, have no cause to withhold information. This man was GCA through and through.

  That fleeting taste of hope made the subsequent bitterness all the stronger. Oliver settled back in his seat, swallowing disappointment. The man at the wheel accelerated.

  Whereas Maggie Lloyd drove precisely at the posted speed limit, this GCA agent kept his speedometer between thirty and forty miles above. Oliver’s initial despair melted into nausea. His fingers gripped the door handle. Not usually one for car sickness, he tried not to focus on every bump and jostle in the road. Even a mere lane change at that speed sent his stomach up into his throat.

  His mind raced. Such urgency to get him back to the remote campus could mean only one thing: in his absence, the projectors there had run amok.

  There was another null-projector at Prom-F, though. Cedric, formerly of Prom-C, had transferred in less than six months ago. The little runt, only twelve years old, didn’t understand that all nulls ended up at Prom-F eventually. He was still openly snubbing his classmates, convinced that if he brown-nosed the administrators enough they would transfer him back.

  But null-projectors, rare as they were, had different levels in their abilities. Apparently Cedric’s level wasn’t enough to handle whatever was happening. Apparently the administrators had underestimated one or more of the projectors in their student body.

  Oliver hoped his fellow students had wreaked havoc. He hoped to return to a burned-out shell of a building, with ominous black smoke drifting up into the cold blue sky.

  Again his hopes withered in the clutches of icy disappointment. The building still stood. No signs of smoke or mayhem littered the area. The black sedan rolled past security gates and up the driveway of the utilitarian structure with nary a sign that anything was amiss. No one even came out to greet them.

  The GCA agent was on his cell phone before the car was even in park. “I have the null in place.”

  Oliver’s gratitude not to be barreling down the highway any longer gave way to mounting confusion. The agent made no attempt to exit the vehicle. Neither did he command Oliver to exit. They simply waited.

  And waited.

  After three minutes of dead silence, a rumbling sounded on the road behind. Oliver twisted in his seat. A convoy of dark green military transports lumbered down the driveway. They encompassed the black sedan, parking ahead and behind and around it. Scores and scores of troops jumped to the ground. A third of them entered the school, another third circled around its perimeter, and the rest jogged across the wintry grounds toward the back gate. Their breaths puffed through their face masks into the frigid morning air.

  Chapter 2

  Negative Space

  Monday, February 18, 1:24 PM MST, Prom-F

  The office of Principal Lucian Gates crawled
with bodies. Most of the military personnel had gone, to be replaced by GCA agents and Prometheus administrators. Oliver slouched in a chair across from the principal’s desk. His handler Garrett, now restored to him, stood skittishly to his left. In the chair on his right sat Cedric, the miserable whelp.

  Principal Gates banged his fist to draw some order from the company. “Is everyone accounted for? Have they caught everyone who tried to escape?”

  One of the administrators spoke up. “Three are still missing, but they won’t get far on foot, especially in this weather.”

  The whole school was on lockdown, with students confined to their dorm rooms, Oliver and Cedric excepted. It wasn’t because of the administrators’ sudden need to keep null-projectors close, either. In the chaos during Oliver’s absence, Cedric’s classmates had bound and gagged him and left him in a basement supply closet. Had they thought to deactivate the electronic tracking chip embedded in his right hand, he might be down there still, so remote an area of the school it was.

  They had been too busy with their own electronic chips, though. From the chatter around him, Oliver gleaned that somewhere around a third of the two-hundred students at the school had cut the marker right out of their hands before they bolted over the back fence of the property. Some had electrocuted the spot to overload the chip. Some had taken their chances and run.