The news crews arrived and reporters all began speaking at once in front of hovering spotlights and holocorders.
Garek nodded to Lucien. “Show us what you found.”
Lucien sat at the terminal and searched for Chief Ellis’s records. He found the ones he’d flagged earlier and played them back with all the camera crews filming. Silence fell as they recorded Ellis’s private memories and thoughts. Subtitles gave voice to his thoughts, revealing all the machinations he’d gone through with the help of Director Helios and General Graves to make contact with someone named Katawa. The actual conversation was confusing at best—something about a lost fleet and the humans they’d used to find it—but there was no confusing the way Ellis identified himself as Abaddon.
“Proof enough?” Lucien asked, turning to the film crews with eyebrows raised.
Before anyone could say anything, Director Helios lunged for the briefcase bomb.
Joe whirled it out of reach and Bob shot her in the face.
“Nora!” Garek roared.
She collapsed on the deck and Garek dropped to one knee beside her, checking her pulse.
“She’s dead,” he said, and glared up at Joe.
“She almost blew us all up!” Joe replied. “Besides, she’s not your daughter. At this point it should be clear what she really is.”
Garek rose to his feet and aimed his rifle at Joe’s chest, his fingers toying restlessly with the trigger.
Joe arched an eyebrow at him and clutched the briefcase bomb to his chest like a shield. “You shoot me, and the bomb goes off.”
“Stand down, sir,” one of the other sergeants said, with a hand on Garek’s arm. “We’ll bring Nora back when this is all over.”
“Exactly,” Joe said. He nodded to Lucien. “What about the others? The admiral and the general?”
Lucien nodded and pulled up their records next. Their thoughts proved to be equally incriminating. By this point they had more than enough evidence. Lucien heard the reporters summarizing the shocking news for viewers all over Astralis.
“We need to get those reporters out of here,” Joe said.
“What’s wrong?” Lucien asked.
“The comms are still being jammed. None of this has reached the public yet.”
Garek nodded soberly. “And it isn’t going to.”
Before anyone could stop him, he raised his rifle to his shoulder and opened fire on the briefcase bomb.
Chapter 48
Astralis
Time seemed to freeze. A bright stream of crimson lasers stuttered out from Garek’s pulse rifle.
A few shots went wide, and Joe flinched, his body shuddering as lasers burned through the open top of the briefcase and into his chest. His shield must have been depleted by the firefight.
Joe took the briefcase down with him as he fell, but somehow he managed to keep it from flying out of his hands. The news crews turned and ran away at top speed, as did one of the Marine sergeants, but the other one stayed and gunned Garek down. His shield overloaded with a loud pop, and he fell over with a dozen different holes in his armor.
A moment of ringing silence followed, then Lucien snapped out of it and went to check the bomb. At least half the canisters were shattered, with viscous blue and red fluids leaking inside the case and mixing freely.
Confusion swirled in Lucien’s head. “How are we still alive?”
“Speak for yourself,” Joe groaned.
The Marine sergeant who’d gunned down Garek came to examine the bomb. He shook his head and looked to Lucien. “Either we’re the luckiest people in history, or this isn’t really a bomb.” The sergeant carefully moved the briefcase off Joe’s chest, revealing glistening black holes where Garek’s shots had punched through.
The stench of burned flesh choked the air. Lucien fought back a wave of nausea.
Joe smirked and then winced. “It is a binary explosive... enough to fool sensors...” he trailed off with a ragged gasp.
“But?” Lucien prompted.
“It’s all X and no Y. Food coloring.”
The Marine sergeant nodded, smiling. “So the threat was a bluff.”
“We’re going to get you out of here,” Lucien said. “Come on.”
“Don’t bother.” Joe whispered, sounding desperately short of air.
“His lung’s collapsed,” the sergeant said.
Lucien looked to him. “Can’t you do something? Don’t you have a medic in your squad?”
He shook his head. “It’s easier to bring people back in new bodies than to save the old ones.”
Joe’s hands batted the air as if to fight off an unseen assailant, and his mouth opened and closed in airless gasps.
Bob appeared, gazing stoically down on his boss. Joe’s eyes bulged and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. His hands grabbed Lucien’s shirt in white-knuckled fists. Lucien grabbed one of those hands and held on tight, weathering the gangster’s death throes until he grew still.
“So dies an uncommon patriot,” the sergeant said.
“He’ll be back. They all will,” Lucien replied, looking around at Garek and Director Helios.
“Let’s go,” the sergeant replied.
Lucien spotted Fizk, lying stunned behind the data terminal. “He’s still alive. Help me get him out of here.”
They carried him out between them with a dozen Marine bots clanking along to the fore and aft. Soon Lucien was panting from the exertion of carrying the demolitions expert, but the sergeant wasn’t even winded thanks to the augmented strength of his exosuit.
As soon as they were outside the center, reporters and film crews descended on them, all shouting at the same time—
“Was the bomb a fake?”
“Did Sergeant Helios miss?”
“Is he dead?”
“Where is Joe Coretti?”
“Where is the bomb now?”
As those questions rolled over them, Lucien thought to ask a question of his own—“Where’s Bob?” He stopped and turned to look behind them, but there was no sign of the android.
A rumbling roar came shivering through the ground, and an onrushing wall of light swelled behind the windows in the Resurrection Center.
“Get down!” Lucien said, dropping Fizk and himself at the same time.
The windows all exploded with a thunderous boom, and a deadly hail of shattered glass whipped through the crowd. Lucien heard shards of glass hissing off what was left of his shield. A gust of super-heated air rolled over him, and the shock wave roared like a furnace in his ears.
In an instant the noise was gone, and a dull ringing sound replaced the noise. A strong hand grabbed Lucien by the arm and pulled him to his feet. It was the Marine sergeant. His lips were moving behind his helmet, but Lucien couldn’t hear. He stood swaying on his feet, surveying a scene of utter chaos. Flaming debris cluttered the street, bodies strewn between them. Some were dragging themselves through the wreckage and moaning—others weren’t moving at all.
Just two reporters out of what had been nearly a dozen remained standing. They were cut and bleeding, but enduring their injuries to explain what had just happened for their viewers. Not that it needed any explaining.
Lucien turned back to look at the center. Fire gushed from open windows, a greedy inferno gobbling up three hundred million peoples’ claims to immortality—as well as Atara’s only hope of ever going back to normal. He stared in shock, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. The bomb was a fake, so how had it gone off? And why now?
Then Lucien remembered the second bomb inside of Bob, and suddenly everything made sense. The two parts of the binary explosive had been separated from the start. All of one compound had been inside the briefcase, while all of the other had been inside of Bob. There’d never been any risk of them mixing—by means of a detonator or a dead man’s switch. Either Fizk had just been twiddling his thumbs and pretending to disable the switch, or he’d been equally oblivious to the deception.
Bob obviously had standing orders to follow, and he’d carried them out just as soon as he could, but in so doing he’d also killed his maker, Joe Coretti.
Why would Coretti want to kill himself?
Then Lucien remembered something Joe had said to Garek: a guy like me could benefit from having his own resurrection center.
“Motherfrekker!” Lucien roared, his voice sounding muffled to his ears.
“Are you okay, sir?” A pair of EMTs swept into view, looking him over.
Lucien turned to them in a daze. All of his suspicions came rushing back. Now he knew why Coretti’s plan had been ready to go on such short notice. “They planned this all along...” Lucien muttered, sinking to his knees in the rubble. Learning about Ellis and the others had added another objective to Joe’s operation, but as soon as he’d exposed them, he knew it was safe to execute his original plan—or rather, Bob did.
Taking his collapse as a sign of injury, the EMTs rushed in to steady him. They rattled off questions about where he was hurt and how bad the pain was.
But Lucien was too shocked to reply. This was Joe’s agenda from the start—blow the center and make us all mortals again. Except for Joe himself. Somehow, some way, he was busy coming back to life in his own private resurrection center.
Chapter 49
Astralis
Brak stood right behind General Graves, listening as he argued with the Marine sergeant guarding the stasis chambers.
“I can’t open these doors, sir.”
“You’ll open them, and that’s an order!” Graves bellowed.
“You’re not yourself, sir.”
“What the frek are you talking about?”
“It’s all over the news. The records in the Res Center proved it. Stand down, General.”
“Stun him!” Graves ordered, but the bots standing beside him made no move to obey that command. “Did you hear me?”
“You are under arrest, General,” the sergeant said. “Your command privileges have been revoked. Raise your hands behind your head and—”
Graves launched himself at the sergeant and grabbed the man’s rifle.
“Shoot him!” the sergeant yelled. All six bots opened fire, and flurry of crimson lasers converged on Graves from the front and back. It was over in an instant, and Graves fell with a thud. Thin black tendrils of smoke rose from his corpse.
The sergeant stared at the general’s body in shock. Maybe he’d forgot to say stun him instead of shoot him. Bots were nothing if not literal-minded.
Whatever the case, Graves was no longer a threat. Brak turned and ran back the way he’d come. There were still two others to catch—Chief Ellis and Admiral Stavos.
Brak decided to go for Ellis first. The Marines on the bridge would take care of Stavos.
***
Astralis
Abaddon sat scowling in his living room as he watched the news. Both Garek and Nora had failed. It wouldn’t be long before Marines or police came up to his penthouse to arrest their Chief Councilor.
Abaddon walked through his living room, up to another holoscreen, this one displaying a painting. He removed it from the wall and set it aside, then he waved his hand over the wall behind the painting. The air shimmered, revealing a cloaked safe.
He typed in his combination and opened the safe; then he reached past a stack of worthless valuables and data wafers to retrieve an illegally modified pistol and the Faro comms unit he’d used to speak with Katawa.
Abaddon took both the pistol and the unit and sat down at the head of the dining room table, with a clear view of the hallway leading to the front door. He toggled the pistol’s illegal overload setting and laid it carefully on the table beside him.
The Faro prisoners in the stasis rooms weren’t much of a liability—they only had pieces of the overall plan, and their thoughts were all encoded in Faro, not Versal, but he and the other humans were another matter. A rigorous mind probe would reveal everything. He couldn’t allow them to take him alive. Hopefully Stavos and Graves would take similar precautions.
Abaddon hurried to configure the comms unit to make contact with the Faro fleet that was shadowing Astralis.
Once contact was established, he spoke into the device—in Faro, not Versal, so that no would know what he’d said.
“This is Abaddon,” he said. “Myself and my other instances have been discovered, but the lost fleet is on its way here. Do nothing until you detect its arrival. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged,” the reply came back a moment later.
Before Abaddon could say or do anything else, his front door burst open. He calmly lifted his pistol from the table and aimed it at his own head.
But no Marines or police came storming in. Abaddon frowned, hesitating with his finger on the trigger. What are they waiting for?
Then he felt the air beside him stir, and a cold hand grabbed his wrist, prying the pistol away from his head.
Abaddon turned and saw the air shimmering to reveal a familiar gray-skinned, skull-faced monster.
The Gor.
Abaddon wasn’t strong enough to resist him in this pitiful human body, but he didn’t technically need to aim the weapon while it was set to overload. “Goodbye,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
The weapon exploded in his hand, and everything vanished in an agony of heat and light.
***
Astralis
Tyra bounced Theola on her knee while she filled out a report at the police station. The poor baby hadn’t eaten anything for a long time.
Someone gasped and Tyra looked up. Everyone in the station had stopped what they were doing to watch the holoscreen on the far wall of the station. The headline read,
Terrorists Vindicated, and Leaders Exposed as Res. Center Explodes
It was Tyra’s turn to gasp. The bomb went off?
Someone turned up the volume, and everyone watched as clips of Ellis’s memories played, thoroughly incriminating him, followed by memories from Admiral Stavos and General Graves that exposed them, too.
They watched as first Director Helios and then her father, Marine Sergeant Garek Helios, tried to detonate Joe Coretti’s bomb to cover up the evidence. The bomb turned out to be a fake—only to explode minutes later while reporters swarmed around Lucien and a Marine sergeant outside the center.
Tyra’s heart froze in her chest and her blood ran cold, watching as Lucien dropped to the ground a spit second before the shock wave hit. It flattened the news crews, and the scene turned blurry with flying debris. As soon as the shock wave passed, the scene snapped back into focus, and Tyra saw her husband being pulled to his feet by the Marine who’d been standing beside him.
EMTs came rushing in from waiting ambulances to attend the wounded while firefighters jumped down from their trucks and ran out with hoses to put out the blaze. At least they’d been ready for this outcome.
But Tyra hadn’t. She slowly shook her head, unable to put words to the horror bursting inside her. Even Theola’s hungry cries had subsided.
Lucien was safe. Theola was safe. Their leaders had been exposed and were probably just about to be arrested. The crisis was over, but a new one had just begun: the Resurrection Center was gone. That meant a lot of things, but right now it meant just one thing to Tyra: it meant that Atara was never coming back. It meant that her eldest daughter was dead.
Chapter 50
Astralis
Lieutenant Commander Wheeler paced up and down her cell in the brig, wondering what kind of trial she could hope to get with Faros in charge of Astralis.
Not a fair one. That’s for sure.
She stopped at the door to her room and looked out the window into the hall. How long had she been in here? They’d taken away her ARCs, and she’d been stunned when she arrived, so there was no way to know.
As Wheeler was wondering about that, a Marine sergeant appeared and unlocked the door. She frowned at him as the door slid open.
“Time for my trial already? Or are we goi
ng to skip straight to the execution?”
“Neither, ma’am. You’re being reinstated as the acting CMO.”
Wheeler wondered if she’d heard correctly. “Say again, Sergeant?”
He launched into a quick summary of events in the center, then said, “We need you on the bridge, ma’am. There’s some concern that the Faros know where we are and might already be on their way.
Wheeler nodded. “Let’s go.”
She followed the sergeant out and back through the brig. Noting all the empty cells, she asked, “What happened to the admiral and General Graves?”
“The admiral shot himself before he could be arrested. Graves was caught trying to reach the Faro prisoners in stasis and he was killed in the struggle.”
“And Ellis?”
“Dead. Fired a sidearm on overload while a security officer attempted to arrest him.”
Wheeler grimaced. “So we have no one to interrogate and no records to study in the center. We have no idea what they were planning!”
“No, ma’am.”
They took an elevator up to sub level five hundred, and then spent another minute walking to the bridge itself. Wheeler endured routine scans at the entrance of the bridge and then breezed in.
“Commander on deck!” the sergeant who’d escorted her announced.
A female officer with bright golden eyes turned from the holo table on the upper deck of the bridge and saluted—Lieutenant Ruso, chief engineer. A pair of maintenance bots were on their hands and knees beside her, scrubbing a bright red bloodstain off the deck.
“Who has the conn?” Wheeler demanded.
“That would be me, ma’am,” Ruso replied as Wheeler approached.
“At ease, Lieutenant. Give me a sitrep,” Wheeler said.
“The bridge is secure, as is the rest of the ship—as far as we can tell. Marines and security forces are on high alert and on the lookout for more enemy agents. We’ve re-engaged outbound comms jamming—but not before a comms burst was detected going out from Chief Ellis’s penthouse. We intercepted the message, but...” Ruso broke off, shaking her head. “We can’t tell what it says. It’s in the Faros’ language.”
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 62