Sure enough, the doors clanked and began to open. Barely a second had passed and the officer was at the nearest door, ready to repel the intruder. All he saw, though, was one of his own guards, sitting at the console to the door with some sort of device strapped to his chest.
“He made me, I swear—I—!” he babbled.
Then the device exploded.
But the Kesh officer was already running back to the captives. He had been fooled; the intruder was coming in the other door!
Through the smoke and dust, he saw the flash of a weapon, and the last member of his escort tumbled to the floor. He watched in some panic as a tall, silver-armored warrior stepped over the bodies to survey the scene.
The Kesh officer hissed, choking on a growing sense of failure. He warned that he would shoot the prisoners if the warrior did not immediately retreat.
Seemingly unconcerned by the officer’s threat, the warrior raised his weapon to target the Kesh.
Howling a Kesh battle cry, the officer fired indiscriminately, striking prisoners and warrior alike. The great silver figure staggered back under the power of the officer’s ceremonial firearm. A lucky shot knocked the assailant’s weapon aside and cracked the seal of the silver armor at the shoulder. Concentrating on that point, the officer fired three more shots in quick succession, knocking the assailant to the ground.
A silver arm skidded across the floor, severed by the final shot.
Hope returned to the Kesh officer’s mind like fresh air through the smoke. He stepped forward to survey the carnage. Both stretchers had spilled their contents to the floor: the Surin reave had sustained an injury to her legs, and the Olmahoi creature was bleeding from a wound in its abdomen. He would put an end to their suffering in a moment, once he was certain that the intruder was dead.
The silver armor was the same as that worn by Roche and one of her companions when she had been captured. This one, he assumed, must have been stolen before they could be taken to the Sebettu for examination. It had been irreparably damaged, missing its right arm from the shoulder down, and now lay inert facedown against a wall.
He nodded in satisfaction, although a new anger rose. Heads would roll for the theft not to have been reported. The occupant of the suit had fought well against insurmountable odds; almost as well as a Kesh...
The officer stared in horror as the suit suddenly rolled over. Its left arm scrabbled for its fallen weapon and, before he could react, fired two shots. Falling to his knees, the Kesh clutched at his stomach, feeling the life ebb with his blood out onto the floor.
As his executioner turned away, the dying Kesh caught a perfect view of the interior of the suit, through the hole where its right arm would have been.
His eyes bulged even further as he keeled forward to die on the floor.
The suit was empty.
* * *
There were no minds left to view what happened in the secure compound. Only the Shining One remained, and he saw nothing through those eyes.
He felt his body lifted back onto the stretcher, but it had already become distant—even more so than usual. And the foggy sense that remained of his usual all-pervading sight was itself fading. As blood rushed out of his body and drained from his uniquely developed epsense organ, darkness pressed in.
The light of the Shining One was fading. As he watched it dwindle, unafraid, a voice spoke:
He had forgotten about the abomination. They must have been close for their drug-crippled minds to touch.
She was right. Apart from when his body had been tortured in order to gain information, he had had no care for it at all.
Yet here he was, dying because of its injuries. He would be glad for an end to this life. Without his people, without the Grand Design, he was nothing.
His only sadness was that he was dying alone.
He was comforted. That much was true, despite himself. And he wondered if the feeling was mutual as together they spiraled ever steeper down into the dark...
8
Galine Four
‘955.01.24 EN
0550
The vision came as a concentration of thoughts and words, of memories too, and its intrusion was as intense as it was abrupt. It had traveled so many routes on its way to her that its details were indistinct. But it could not be denied. It blossomed in Roche’s mind with the intensity of an outrigger Plenary minus the auditor’s guiding hand.
She saw a war. That much was obvious. A war so big that the galaxy burned for centuries, and trillions of lives were extinguished in a bloodbath never to be equaled.
Half a million years later, she watched as the events blossomed rapidly in her mind, with the war’s political machinations unfurling like the bloodied petals of a flower. Peace returned to the galaxy only after hundreds of novae had added their heavier elements to the dust clouds, and one of the opposing armies was defeated.
But even then it did not end. The vanquished had foreseen their fate and had prepared for their revenge—a revenge which would take place long after they had been forgotten by those who had eradicated them.
Roche saw a cloud of tiny machines erupt from the galactic spiral and dissipate away from the inhabited areas, into the outer depths. Their exact number was unknown, but they numbered in the millions at least. Traveling well below the speed of light, the machines did not have the momentum to quite escape the gravitational pull of the galaxy, although they did travel vast distances from the core.
Before long the great war was forgotten, buried by time and lost to more immediate conflicts; but the machines continued to hurtle to the darkest edges of the galaxy. Memories of their makers faded too, their legend dissolving into little more than a curiosity for scholars, and eventually forgotten altogether; and still the machines continued to travel on.
Eventually their velocity decreased and, as it did, they gathered mass—atom by atom, molecule by molecule. And as their orbits pulled them back to the denser regions where they had originated, they began to build. Each one became a capsule. And within each capsule, a life was born.
These lives would burn bright and fast, and, in burning, they would find revenge.
The Sol Apotheosis Movement and its followers had nothing to do with this plan; they were nothing more than a convenient cover. Yes, they had existed, and had been slaughtered at the hands of their united neighbors; they had indeed chosen for their base system one that had long been associated with ancient Humanity, although it was now fallow; and they might well have conceived such a plan for revenge, although they lacked the skills and subtlety to put it into action.
The name Adoni Cane had nothing to do with them. That name was as old as the ancient war itself. Other such names fell effortlessly into Roche’s thoughts: Vani Wehr, Sadoc Lleshi, Jelena Heidik, Ralf Dreher, and more. Each had played a role in the events at the dawn of time; each had been marked by the vanquished for revenge; each had a role to play in the times to come.
This was what Linegar Rufo feared: a plan far older and more widespread than anyone had suspected. And this was the knowledge the irikeii had given Maii, and which she in turn gave Roche.
* * *
When it was over, nothing remained of the young reave in Roche’s mind. It felt strangely empty, hollow. Why had Maii only managed to send her that one mind-dump and nothing more? Roche shook her head to clear her thoughts. But try as she might to deny the possibility that something bad had happened to the girl, the emptiness in her mind continued to fill her with concern.
She lay on her side at the feet of the Kesh guards. No one seemed to be paying her any attention, for which she was than
kful if not a little surprised. Then she remembered the clone warrior, and she realized that compared to her, Roche was no threat at all.
Some time had passed, but she had no idea exactly how much until she heard the general boom:
“Five minutes are up! She has nothing to bargain with—nothing! Just more games to waste my time!”
“General, someone did infiltrate our cooling systems,” she heard the translator say. “If we are still alive it’s only because they don’t want to destroy their only way out of here.”
“Then she still has nothing! We control the Sebettu; until that changes, we will not negotiate. Let her attack! It will do her no good.”
It took Roche a second to realize that the general was speaking in the Kesh tongue but that she could still understand what she was saying.
“Is the download complete?”
“Yes, General. The last of the data was transferred twenty minutes ago.”
“Then why are we lingering in this accursed place? Instruct all personnel to return to the Sebettu for immediate departure!”
A voice began talking over the station’s PA system, repeating the general’s order in the Kesh tongue. At this the guards near Roche moved off; after they had gone she managed to sit up, fighting dizziness and the aches all over her body. The general was some distance away around the curve of the corridor. She frowned for a moment, confused as to how she had been able to hear the general conferring with the other Kesh. Then she realized that the translation of the general’s words had been coming through her implants.
A roar of fury from the general cut across anything else the AI might have said.
“That incompetent fool! If there were time I would have Shak’ni skinned for this!” The general rounded on her aides, who backed out of arm’s reach. “I’ve had enough of this stupidity! Leave him behind. Leave all of them behind! We will erase this place from our memories!”
The general stalked off, the booming of her boots along the corridor receding quickly into the distance. Roche suddenly found herself alone.
She clambered stiffly to her feet. Her neck and back hurt where the guard had held her, and a bump had already formed on her skull.
Roche didn’t have the heart to tell the Box that she’d come across most of that data by other means.
Relief flooded through her.
It was Haid. “Morgan!” The ex-mercenary held out his new arm to grip her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She almost laughed. “Me? What about you? Your arm is broken.”
“Just another reminder of how poor flesh and blood actually is,” he said. “But I’ll live.” The fingers on his artificial arm flexed. “These toys didn’t perform so badly after all.”
“I guess not.”
Haid looked around; there was a cut to his cheek she hadn’t noticed before, oozing thick blood. “The Kesh are pulling out all over the station. B’shan went with them. He asked me to tell you that he regretted what had happened. I think he might even have meant it.”
“Yeah? Well apologies won’t help us much at the moment,” she said brusquely, but it did surprise her. It wasn’t like a Kesh to apologize for anything, whether he meant it or not. “Cane and Maii are on their way to the Ana Vereine, so we’ll join them there. When things settle down we can talk about getting the station out of the system. If Uri thinks the ship is up to it, we might be able to translate the entire thing, otherwise we’ll just have to ferry the people out in lots.”
Haid nodded. “The boundary’s getting closer by the second. Round trips will become progressively quicker.”
“And the holds should still be full of outriggers; that’ll save time. Once we pick up Byrne and the others, we’ll be done.”
“What about the Sebettu?”
She shrugged. “We let it go. It’s too big to take on directly, and if they leave peacefully I see no reason to pick a fight. We’ll just have to settle our scores at a later date, I guess.”
“Is that the Box?” asked Haid, tapping one ear. “How did you manage that?”
Roche’s stomach sank as a realization struck her. The Box! “Oh, hell. The Box is still on the Sebettu.”
“What about the data?”
That was probably the closest thing to humility that she had ever heard from the Box. “Don’t be such a martyr, Box. We’ll get you back if we can. Tell Uri to warm up the drives. We’re coming now.”
Haid hurried after her as she strode for the nearest transit cab. Rufo tried to get her attention as she passed, but she ignored him. Myer Mavalhin was more persistent. He trailed them to the cab and squeezed inside after them, apologizing hastily when he brushed against Haid’s broken arm. The ex-mercenary was still holding the druh in one clenched fist, and made sure Mavalhin knew it.
“Morgan!” the pilot panted. “Where are you going in such a hurry ?”
“None of your business, Myer.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Not just yet.”
“Then where—?”
“She said it was none of your business.” Haid’s expression darkened and the blade twitched.
“Okay, okay.” Mavalhin receded into the cab, and for a second Roche thought he might’ve finished. But as they crossed the glitch in ambient gravity—made even more disorienting by the damage to the generator—he started again.
“Can I come with you?”
She turned on him. “Myer, don’t you listen to anything I say? I told you to leave me alone.”
“No, you told me to take control of my life. Which is what I’m doing.” He consciously straightened. “I’ve decided that I want to serve with you on the Ana Vereine. It’s the right thing to do, I know it. Our destinies lie together, Morgan. You can’t say no.”
“Can’t I?”
The cab slid to an abrupt halt and the doors opened. They were on the outermost level, close to the major docking bays.
They entered a large disembarkation point similar to the one through which they had first entered the station. Roche was reminded of Disisto, whose job it had been to maintain security in this area, and felt a twinge of regret.
An inner airlock hissed open and they passed through a cramped umbilical. At the far end, the Ana Vereine’s outer hatch hung open, waiting for them. Roche felt a strong sensation of relief to finally be back on board. The sepia walls and earthy tones had begun to feel almost like home.
The Dying Light Page 34
