Chapter 8
Astralis
Astralis jumped. Tyra stood blinking spots from her eyes as the afterglow from the jump faded. Confusion warred with tenuous hope in her brain. The last thing she’d heard from the battle was that they were overrun and the enemy was boarding them. How had they gone from that to being able to jump away?
Tyra stared at the holomap of Fallside in her office, where she and the heads of various departments and emergency response units had gathered to oversee the evacuation of Fallside’s outer sections. Her responsibility didn’t extend to directing the defense of her city, but she could clearly see the green dots that marked the locations where squads of Marines had been deployed, and the red and green Xs, that indicated where enemy soldiers and friendly Marines had fallen. There were only a handful of red Xs for fallen enemies, but plenty of green.
“We jumped? What’s happening, Madam Councilor?” Fallside’s Chancellor of Education sidled up to her, his high brow furrowed with concern.
Tyra shook her head. “I know as much as you do, Chancellor.” Turning away from the others in the room, Tyra walked over to a window overlooking Fallside and used her ARCs to mentally place a call to Chief Councilor Ellis. He answered after just a brief delay.
“This had better be important.”
“What’s happening?” Tyra demanded.
Ellis sighed. “Your curiosity can wait, Mrs. Ortane.”
She pressed on, “We jumped away?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“At the risk of repeating my—”
“Never mind. I’m joining you on the bridge.”
“You don’t have clearance!”
“Then grant me clearance! If I’m supposed to keep Fallside safe, I need to know what I’m up against. Where are we now? Were we followed? How many hostiles do we have on board? What’s the nature and disposition of the enemy forces?”
“None of that is any of your concern, Councilor. Rest assured Admiral Stavos and General Graves are doing everything they can to keep us safe.”
Tyra didn’t reply, but Ellis must have heard her panting over the comms.
“Did you hear me, Councilor?”
“I heard you,” she said as she reached the nearest elevator.
“Why are you out of breath?”
“See you soon,” she said, and ended the comms. She punched in -500 on the keypad and the elevator dropped swiftly through Hubble Mountain, down past two hundred and fifty meters of dirt, and past more than a kilometer of decks on its way to the command level.
Tyra’s AR implant trilled with an incoming call from Ellis, and a corresponding comms icon flashed in the top right corner of her field of view. She muted the sound and ignored the flashing icon.
Leaving the familiar comforts of the surface behind on her way down into the labyrinthine depths of the ship’s sub-levels, Tyra felt more cut off from her children than ever, but she’d already checked in with Lucien, and both Atara and Theola were safely hidden away in Hubble Mountain Shelter Twelve.
Besides, the only way she could know how much danger they were really in was by going down to the bridge and demanding answers, so it wasn’t like she was abandoning them. Not really.
The elevator reached sub level five hundred, and the door slid open. Tyra jogged out into a no-frills corridor that sported low ceilings with exposed conduits and naked, scuffed metal walls.
She pulled up a map on her ARCs to locate the bridge and followed the guide prompts to get there: take next left down Corridor C. Make right at junction four. Await scans at Security Checkpoint Delta.
Tyra must have jogged past a dozen squads of Marine bots with their human sergeants trailing safely behind before one of those sergeants thought to ask where she was going.
“On my way to the bridge to see Admiral Stavos and General Graves,” she said, between gasps for air.
“I’ll escort you there,” the sergeant said.
“Thank you... Sergeant Ikes,” Tyra replied, looking his name up on her ARCs. She thanked her luck that he’d asked where she was going. This sergeant was probably her best bet to actually get into the bridge. Sergeant Ikes led the way there, striking a brisk pace that made her feel like she needed to jog to keep up. The sergeant’s squad of bots clanked along behind her, their metal feet striking the deck in perfect synchrony.
When they arrived at the bridge, a pair of guard bots scanned her and the sergeant with flickering blue fans of light while the sergeant’s squad fanned out to wait on either side of the doors.
As soon as the scans were complete, the doors parted to reveal a vast chamber with several tiers of catwalks and control stations. The far wall soared with four-story-high viewscreens and unparalleled starry vistas.
Sergeant Ikes led Tyra straight up to a holo table in the center of the deck where they’d emerged. Familiar faces leaned over that table, aglow in the azure light of holo imagery.
The sergeant fetched up short in front of a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man in a Marine’s gleaming black exosuit. His helmet was missing, revealing dark hair, clipped peach-fuzz short, and the collar of a Marine’s uniform, sporting the four silver stars of a general’s insignia.
“Sergeant Ikes reporting, General,” he said, saluting crisply.
The general straightened from leaning over the table and returned his salute; then his eyes flicked to Tyra and he looked her up and down with one dark eyebrow raised.
“I have Madam Councilor Ortane here from Fallside to see you, sir,” Sergeant Ikes explained.
“I didn’t request to see any councilors,” he barked gruffly, and Sergeant Ikes faltered visibly. The sergeant glanced uncertainly at Tyra, and she smiled sympathetically back.
“My fault,” she said. “I led Sergeant Ikes to believe I had been summoned here.”
Graves snorted. “I see. In that case, you can leave.”
“This way, ma’am...” Ikes said, taking her by the arm to lead her back the way they’d come.
Tyra jerked her arm free and stood her ground. “Hold on! I have tens of millions of people trampling each other on their way to get to shelters that were only built to hold a few hundred thousand. If I’m expected to calm all those people down and bring order, I need to know what’s going on.”
General Graves ground his teeth. “I don’t have time for this. Councilor Ellis—”
Chief Councilor Ellis looked up from the holo table with a tight smile. “I’ll deal with her, General.” Ellis came and took her aside. “I told you not to come here,” he chided in his most patient voice, the one he reserved for detractors at political rallies.
Tyra rounded on him with arms crossed over her chest. “I’ll go just as soon as you answer my questions.”
Ellis’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want to know?”
“How did we get away? We were surrounded. They must have had quantum jamming fields engaged. They did the last time.”
“We jumped through their jamming field.”
Horror sliced through Tyra at that. “I thought jumping through a magnetic field could cause a jump failure... what do you call it?”
A new voice joined the discussion: “Scattering. The chances were high, but we didn’t have a choice.”
Tyra turned to see Admiral Stavos come striding up to them. He stopped a few feet away, a picture of calm and obsessive neatness. His short white hair—a fashionable color for a man with his rank and position—was perfectly combed and gelled into submission, and his matching Van Dyke beard was trimmed to a regulation length. His uniform was neatly pressed and a spotless white with gold buttons and medals gleaming brightly, as if they’d just been polished. The five golden stars of his rank insignia glittered on his collar, winking at Tyra from the shadows under his chin.
“How high were the chances?” Tyra pressed.
“Forty-seven percent. Not odds I’d want to play again with three hundred and fifty million lives hanging in the balance.”
Tyra
nodded woodenly. The admiral had just tossed a coin to determine their survival. No wonder he’d waited until they’d already been boarded to jump out. He’d probably been hoping to find some other way to escape. Any other way.
“Where are we now?” she asked.
Ellis shrugged. “Does it matter? Somewhere.”
Tyra chambered a deadly look, twin barrels glaring at him. “Did the enemy fleet follow us?”
“Not yet,” Admiral Stavos replied. “But we still have hundreds of alien troops on board, and we’re having difficulty eliminating them. We’re jamming all outbound comms to make sure they can’t transmit a signal to their fleet, but they might still find a way to do that if they can disable our jammers.”
“Hundreds of alien troops? That’s it? You’re telling me a few hundred aliens are overwhelming our defenses?”
“I’m afraid so,” Stavos replied.
Tyra was shocked. They had over a million Marine bots on Astralis, plus thousands of human sergeants and security forces. It was absurd to think a few hundred of anything could overwhelm all of them.
Ellis nodded. “Now you know why the general is in such a bad mood. They have us falling back faster than we can retreat.”
“How is that possible?” Tyra asked.
“Our weapons appear to be ineffectual against their personal shields,” Admiral Stavos put in. “At the risk of damaging our own ship, we’re bringing heavier firepower to bear.”
“What do they want? Have they made contact with us? Any demands?”
“Unfortunately, they have,” Ellis said. “Their leader is aboard... several dozen clones of him, anyway.” Tyra’s eyes widened at that. “They all speak Versal fluently.”
“Versal?” The shocks just kept coming. Tyra shook her head, struggling to process the implications of that. “What were his—their—demands?”
“First he introduced himself and explained who they are,” Ellis said. “Apparently they’re a race of humanoids called the Faros, and they claim to have been created by Etherus alongside the Etherians. They were to be Etheria’s army, but they instigated a rebellion, which led to the Great War. After which, as you know, Etherus put some of the rebel Etherians in human bodies to give them a taste of freedom. The part that’s news to us is that Etherus exiled all the Faros beyond the Red Line.”
“So that arbitrary line that Etherus told everyone not to cross is a political boundary?”
Ellis nodded. “Part of a treaty that the Faros signed with Etherus before humans even existed. It divides the Farosien Empire from the Etherian Empire.”
Tyra scowled. “Etherus might have mentioned that before we left.”
“He might have mentioned a lot of things,” Ellis replied. “Anyway, their leader calls himself Lucien, and he—”
Tyra held up a hand to stop Ellis there. “Lucien? You mean like my Lucien?”
“I know. I thought that was strange, too. Might be a coincidence, but we’re going to have to look into it. Anyway, the alien Lucien seems to know a lot about us. He claims to have met our people aboard the Inquisitor eight years ago, and apparently he killed several of them personally, or one of his clones did, anyway.”
Tyra gaped at Ellis. “Did he say why? Did they provoke him somehow?”
“They refused to submit to slavery. The very same offense we are busy committing now. Admiral Stavos pretended to surrender and then jumped through their jamming field without warning, despite the high risk of scattering.”
Admiral Stavos nodded along with that. “Lady luck is definitely with us. Let’s hope it stays that way.”
A female lieutenant rushed up to the admiral, breathless, her golden eyes wide and flickering with images from her ARCs. “Admiral, we have a problem!” she said.
He turned and nodded for her to continue. “Yes?”
“Reactors sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen are all registering unusual activity.”
“Define unusual, Lieutenant Ruso.”
“Radiation spikes well outside normal bounds. Power output is erratic. If it continues like this, there’ll be a containment failure and they’ll all go critical.”
“So shut them down. We have hundreds of reactors. We can live without three of them.”
“I tried, sir. They’re not responding.”
“Then send teams to shut them down manually!”
“I would, sir, but two of those reactors are behind enemy lines.”
The admiral’s expression froze somewhere between horror and dawning realization. “Clever little kakards... How long do we have before those reactors blow?”
“Ten, maybe twenty minutes.”
“At least those sections are evacuated. If we’re lucky the blue-skins will blow themselves up and save us the trouble.”
“Hopefully, sir, but one of the affected reactors is behind our lines. The operators on site say the manual overrides aren’t working.”
Admiral Stavos ran a hand through his beard. “They don’t have access to that one, so they must be hacking our control systems.”
“That’s what I thought, but it might also be a physical data probe traveling through the coolant pipes or electrical conduits. Whatever the case, the effects are spreading from one reactor to another, and fast... I think we’re going to have to shut down all of our other reactors preemptively until we can find the source of the problem.”
Admiral Stavos shook his head. “If we do that, the whole ship will be running on fumes. Gravity, life support, lights, jamming fields—all of that will be running on reserve power, and when reserves start to run dry, systems will fail all over the ship—including the comms jammers that are keeping the enemy from calling in their fleet.”
“Yes, sir, but if we don’t shut everything down now, the enemy is going to keep turning our reactors into bombs, one after another, until Astralis rips itself apart.”
Tyra couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “How could something like this happen?”
“Shut them down,” Admiral Stavos growled.
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Ruso replied, already turning to leave.
“And find the problem before we run out of power! I want every available man and bot on the job.”
“Aye, sir,” she said, and took off at a run.
Admiral Stavos turned back to Tyra and Ellis. “Excuse me, councilors.”
“Wait—” Tyra said. “How long do we have before power starts to fail?”
“That depends. We’re going to have to ration it, so some systems are going to go down immediately. Gravity sucks the most power, so I’m going to have to kill that first.”
Tyra blinked in shock and shook her head. “You can’t. There’s millions of people on the surface level! Our water reservoirs are there. You kill the gravity, and there’ll be nothing to hold them in place. The tiniest shift in our momentum will send trillions of gallons floating free, bulldozing homes, uprooting trees, and drowning everyone in their path.”
“I have no intention of maneuvering the ship while gravity is offline, so Newton’s first law should save us—an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force.”
“You’re assuming that an unbalanced force needs to come from the engines, but we’re talking about a complex system of forces, including weather forces that are constantly engaged all over Astralis. One rain drop, falling at the moment that you turn off the gravity, will sail on until it hits the surface of a lake, and when it does, it will knock a dozen more raindrops free and send them flying back up into the sky.”
The admiral’s lips quirked into a grim smile. “So find an umbrella.”
“You’re missing the point, Admiral. You can’t predict what the effects of this will be. There’s too many variables, too many tiny fluctuations.”
Stavos leveled an accusing finger at her. “No, you’re missing the point, Councilor. You think I don’t understand chaos theory? I was schooled in science by the Academy, the same as you. The difference is, I also studied war,
and war is all about minimizing casualties.
“There are three hundred million people living in Astralis, and over ninety percent of them live either above or below the surface. To them, turning off the gravity will only be a minor nuisance, and I can protect them by doing so. As for the other ten percent who live under boundless skies—yes, their homes might be bulldozed, or they might temporarily lose their lives in the chaos, but when it’s all over, the other ninety percent will still be around to resurrect them. My way, everybody lives—your way, everybody dies. I think that makes the choice obvious, don’t you?”
Tyra had nothing to say to that. All she could think about was a tidal wave the size of Planck Lake crashing into Hubble Mountain, cracking it open, and drowning her children.
Admiral Stavos turned and stalked away, heading for the comms control station. Ellis followed him there, and Tyra listened in horror as the two of them delivered a dire warning to everyone on board, saying they had just five minutes to secure themselves and their belongings as best they could.
Before they’d even finished speaking, Tyra placed a call to her husband.
“Tyra? I—”
“Lucien! Get back to the shelter! They’re going to turn off the gravity. Find the girls and keep them safe!”
“I know. I’m already on my way,” Lucien replied, sounding out of breath. “I’ll let you know when I get there. You’d better find someplace safe, too.”
Tyra nodded. “I will. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” he replied.
Chapter 9
Astralis
As the patrol car raced out of the station, Lucien glanced at his old partner, Brak, sitting in the back beside him. Before he’d been promoted to chief of security, they’d worked together every day, but now they only did so occasionally, whenever Lucien could find an excuse to leave the station and go out on patrol.
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 30
