Broken Worlds_The Awakening

by Jasper T. Scott

  Darius found him already jogging down a nearby tunnel, his helmet lamps bobbing. Darius mentally turned on his own headlamps and ran after the man.

  I’m coming, Cass, he thought. Just hang on. I’m coming.

  Chapter 42

  The tunnel branched in several places, but multiple branches had collapsed, forcing them to turn back and try alternate routes. Captain Riker periodically shouted out the names of his kids as he ran: “Aurora! Roman! Can you hear me?!”

  Darius added his voice to the thundering mixture of echoes from Riker’s cries and the crashing waves beyond the Grotto.

  “Cassandra! Cass! Can you hear me? Say something!”

  They ran down tunnel after tunnel, shouting the names of their kids, with the beams of light from their helmets bobbing in the smoky gloom of the Grotto.

  “Fek!” Riker said as they ran up against yet another pile of boulders blocking their way. Riker pounded the heat-deformed remains of a metal door frame with the heel of one hand, drawing a ringing report from the lumpy metal beam. He slid down the slick rock wall, shaking his head, his eyes red and cheeks wet behind the faceplate of his helmet.

  “What are you doing?” Darius demanded. “Get up!”

  “There’s no way in!” Riker cried between muffled sobs. “The whole fekking place collapsed!”

  Darius stared at the pile of boulders blocking the tunnel, irrationally willing them to move. When nothing happened, he fell on the rocks on his hands and knees, finding the loose ones and tossing them aside.

  “Help me!” he screamed.

  But Riker made no move to get up. He just sat there, slowly shaking his head and gazing at the wall with dull, staring eyes.

  Darius clicked his tongue in annoyance and went back to work. Before long his arms were shaking and his hands were bruised from rocks rolling down onto them. His back spasmed sharply as he heaved away a large rock. He leaned back on his haunches, gasping for air. Despair crowded his thoughts and his chest began to ache. A painful knot rose in his throat, and his eyes burned and blurred with tears.

  There had to be a way to move these rocks! Maybe they could blast them out somehow? They could take one of the missiles from the Vultures and rig it to blow.

  A loud crunch of gravel sounded behind them, and Darius turned to see Dyara standing there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is hard to accept.”

  Darius shook his head. “We need to get in there! They’re trapped!”

  Dyara slowly crossed the remaining distance between them and then pointed to the mangled remains of the door frame Riker had hit with his hand.

  “The blast wave was hot enough to melt metal when it hit,” she said. “It would have vaporized anyone in its path. I’m sorry.”

  Darius gritted his teeth. “There were pools of water in the sleeping chamber. They could have jumped into the pools to take shelter from the heat.”

  “Even if that would have worked, they’d have needed to hold their breath. How long do you think it took for that much heat to dissipate?” She shook her head. “Besides, they didn’t have any warning. There’s no way they could have prepared, and the blast wave would have ripped through these tunnels in less than a second.”

  Darius glared coldly at her. “You don’t know that. Maybe one of the survivors from Karkarus saw the missiles and came down to warn them.”

  Dyara pulled out a wand-shaped device, a scanner, and aimed it at the pile of rocks blocking the tunnel. A flickering blue fan of light joined the fat white beams pouring from their headlamps. “There are no life signs on the other side of those rocks.”

  “That scanner’s probably not strong enough. Now stop wasting time, and help me figure out how to blast this tunnel open!”

  “Darius. I did a sensor sweep with my fighter too, both from the air and after I landed inside the cave. There’s nothing alive down here. There’s nothing alive on the surface either. The Cygnians sterilized the whole planet.”

  Darius’s body shivered with rage, and he shook his head vigorously. “You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re wrong.”

  She walked up to him, until she was close enough that he could clearly see the tears shining in her brown eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, then she turned and glanced down at Riker. “I’m so sorry.”

  Captain Riker’s head snapped up, and an ugly look crossed his face. His eyes appeared to focus once more, and he nodded once, stiffly. “You’re sorry?” he asked.

  Before Dyara could reply, he sprang off the ground with a roar and lunged across the distance between them. He knocked her over and pinned her down, his hands fumbling for the neck seals of her helmet.

  “Darius!” Dyara cried.

  He stared stupidly at the two of them struggling on the ground. Then Dyara’s helmet popped open with a hiss. Riker tossed it aside and Dyara gasped and coughed on the smoky air. Then Riker’s hands closed around her throat and her eyes bulged in alarm. She swatted his arms with her hands, trying to break his grip.

  Darius snapped out of it and grabbed Riker from behind, lifting him bodily off her. Riker planted his feet on the ground and backpedaled quickly, pushing Darius up against the wall. He hit with bruising force and Riker elbowed him in the gut, knocking the wind out of him. Darius gasped soundlessly, and Dyara scrambled to recover her helmet, coughing on smoke, or maybe from a bruised windpipe.

  Riker pinned her down again and dragged her away from the helmet. Her hands found a rock and she slammed it into his faceplate, cracking the glass. “Snap out of it, Riker!”

  He ignored the assault and grabbed her throat again, this time lifting her up and then slamming the back of her head against the rock floor of the cavern.

  She groaned and her head lolled to one side. Darius pushed off the wall and body-slammed Riker, sending him sprawling before he could crack Dyara’s head against the rocks again. She lay there, stunned and groaning while Darius fought to pin Riker to the ground. But Riker was much stronger than him, and Darius realized he wouldn’t be able to hold him down for long.

  Desperate to end the fight, he picked up a rock of his own and smashed it against Riker’s cracked faceplate as hard as he could. The glass turned into a gleaming spider’s web of fractures and Riker shoved him off with a roar, only to end up stumbling around blindly, unable to see through his own helmet. He fumbled with the seals of the helmet and then tossed it aside. Whirling around, his gaze found Dyara still lying stunned on the ground. He let out an incoherent scream and ran over to her with single-minded focus.

  Darius saw murder glinting in Riker’s eyes. Gritting his teeth, he ran up behind Riker and slammed his rock into the side of the captain’s head. The man fell over with a heavy thud, and Darius stood over him, panting with rage, waiting for him to get up. Long seconds passed, and Dyara appeared beside him, swaying on her feet.

  Still, Riker didn’t stir.

  “Is he...” Dyara trailed off.

  Anger and adrenaline left Darius’s body in the same instant, leaving him cold and shaking. He glanced at the rock in his hand and found it smeared red with Riker’s blood. Then he noticed that his faceplate was sprinkled with it too.

  Darius dropped the rock and stared sightlessly at Riker’s half-curled body. Dark blood bubbled from a concave depression in the side of his head. Darius felt sick.

  Dyara ran her life signs scanner over Riker’s body and slowly shook her head.

  “What about a nanite booster shot?” Darius asked. His heart was pounding painfully hard in his chest.

  “It’s too late,” Dyara said quietly. “He’s brain dead.”

  Chapter 43

  TEN HOURS AGO...

  Tanik stood watching the decrypter crunch through numbers to break into Gatticus’s data cubes. He still hadn’t woken anyone from cryo yet, because he couldn’t add narration to his orientation video. The people in cryo all spoke a dead language—English. Gatticus had known that language, and if Tanik could just gain access to the android�
�s data, he could pass it through a module maker program to produce a data module for a neural mapper.

  Unfortunately, Gatticus had used a particularly strong encryption key for his data, and the decrypter had already been working for two hours with no results.

  Tanik scowled. That blasted android had delayed his plans considerably. There was no telling how long it would take to decrypt his data.

  Maybe he could produce a silent orientation video...

  But just then, a chime sounded from the decrypter and the data cube glowed to life.

  Tanik smiled. He used his ESC to link the data cube to the ship’s computer and activate a standard module maker program from a list of available applications. He set the program to filter for linguistics data and then executed the program.

  A status bar appeared before Tanik’s eyes, relayed by his extra-sensory chip. The timer below it read:

  2h 10m.

  Tanik’s smile broadened, and he felt old scar tissue tugging painfully in his cheek. Soon he’d be able to wake up the first batch of people from cryo and download the necessary training modules to make them useful crewmen.

  Of course, there was no telling how many of them would rather take their chances with the USO and the Cygnians than join a war against them, but Tanik had found that the will was like a wild animal—it could be tamed with the right mixture of force and persuasion.

  Neural mappers could be used to indoctrinate people, but in order to do that he would have to produce the necessary modules, and that would take time.

  For now, he would have to exert his own will to keep everyone in line. Fortunately, he’d had plenty of practice subjugating people’s wills over the years.

  There’d been a time when controlling even one Cygnian over short distances would have taken an impossible amount of effort, but only a few weeks ago he’d managed to utterly subdue two of them at a distance of several million kilometers. He’d even managed to reach out across more than a dozen light years to find the Deliverance and make contact with Captain Okara in order to coordinate the launch of his stolen beacon drone with her arrival at the Eye.

  He’d also gotten her and Lieutenant Reed to inject a timed-release sedative into the ship’s air cyclers so that even the slightest suggestion from him would be enough to put the crew to sleep. That had made them all easy pickings for the Banshees, and with the exception of Gatticus’s last minute fuel dump, Tanik’s plan had gone off without a hitch.

  Now he had a fully-fledged Colossus-class carrier at his disposal, along with a ready supply of naive fools to help him crew it. Long live the Coalition, he thought.

  The USO had no idea who they were dealing with. The Dark Revenant indeed.

  * * *

  “Darius, it’s not your fault,” Dyara said. She had her helmet back on, and the twin beams from her headlamps swept back and forth as she shook her head. “He was going to kill me.”

  “Yeah.” Darius nodded quickly, jerkily. His eyes were so wide that they felt like they were going to fall right out of his head. “You’re right.”

  “It was an accident.”

  Darius’s hands were shaking. He stared at them in shock. Smashing Riker in the head with a rock was an accident?

  Dyara grabbed his hands to stop them from shaking. “We need to go.”

  That brought him back. “Go?” he echoed. “What about...” He glanced at the rocks blocking the tunnel, and then he remembered all of Dyara’s well-reasoned arguments against holding onto hope.

  Despair took its place and grief consumed him. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. “I can’t...” He shook his head and forced himself to suck in a breath. “She can’t be dead!”

  “Maybe she isn’t. Some people think that no one ever really dies, that they just pass on to the next life—or the next level of reality.”

  “You mean Heaven?”

  “Heaven?” Dyara shook her head, as if she didn’t know what the word meant.

  “Well, where do you think they go?”

  “Into the Source.”

  “The what?”

  “The ZPF—the zero point field? You’ve never heard of that?”

  Darius actually had heard of it, but he’d heard of it back in his time, over a thousand years ago. He’d never spent any time looking into it, however. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Vacuum energy, an energy field that permeates everything, even empty space. The Cygnians believe it ties the whole universe together and that it’s the source of all matter and energy in the universe. They believe it’s also the source of all consciousness, and that some people have the ability to interact with it.”

  Darius frowned. “Is that just something the Cygnians believe, or has it actually been proven?”

  “Well... there’s evidence. There’s virtual particles, and the Casimir effect, and USO scientists believe that the ZPF might be responsible for the cosmological constant, otherwise known as Dark Energy.”

  “How does that tie-in with consciousness?” Darius asked. “You said the Cygnians believe it’s the source of consciousness.”

  “That part remains unproven, but it’s a fundamental tenet of the Church of the Divine Light.”

  “The what?”

  “The primary religion in the USO—thanks to Cygnian missionaries.”

  Darius scowled. “Converting to an alien religion isn’t going to make me feel any better.”

  “Then what will?”

  “Revenge.” Darius’s hands balled into fists as a flash of sheer hatred washed over him and made his whole body feel light. He spared one last glance at Captain Riker’s corpse. Riker had lashed out at the wrong person. This wasn’t Dyara’s fault, or even Tanik Gurhain’s. The Cygnians were to blame for sterilizing Hades, and Darius was going to fight them unto his dying breath for it.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We need to get back to the Deliverance.”

  Chapter 44

  Back in the cockpit of his Vulture, Darius slapped the open/close button for the cockpit, and stowed his portable oxygen tank under his seat. He exchanged air hoses once more, secured his acceleration harness, and flipped the ignition switch for his fighter.

  The Vulture’s reactor whirred to life, and the thrusters ignited with an idling roar. Darius flipped off the lock-switch for his docking jets and pulled the flight stick straight up to fire the ventral thrusters. The Vulture jumped into the air and he backed off the jets to hover just above the cave floor. Then he retracted the landing gear and pushed the throttle up to two Gs.

  Darius slammed into the back of his chair as the fighter screamed out the mouth of the cave and over churning gray water.

  Black ash was still falling from the sky like snow, and just then a chunk of flaming orange debris streaked down like a meteor and crashed into the ocean somewhere beyond the horizon.

  Darius glanced at his nav display to check for Dyara, and he saw the green blip of her fighter racing out of the cave behind him. He pulled up sharply and throttled up to five Gs, rocketing into the smoke-clouded sky of Hades.

  His whole body felt cold and numb. Cassandra was actually dead. Dead, and not coming back.

  Suddenly he understood how Tanik Gurhain had become the way he was. He’d lost his children to the Cygnians too. He’d become a pirate and so-called terrorist out of necessity, not by choice. As for executing civilian crews who refused to join the Coalition, that was an act of mercy. Death at the hands of the Cygnians would be far less humane than a death by poison gas.

  Darius pressed his lips into a firm line. Extreme circumstances called for extreme measures. Tanik was just doing what he had to do to fight an oppressive regime.

  The dense clouds of smoke fell away, and a shining blue sky appeared on all sides of Darius’s cockpit, giving a sense of physical clarity to accompany his newfound idealogical clarity.

  A double chime sounded, followed by another, and another, and then several more. Darius glanced at nav display to see twelve red blips dead ahead and racing down from
orbit at a range of 2,522 kilometers.

  “We’ve got incoming!” Dyara said over the comms. “Twelve Cygnian Blade Fighters, bearing triple zero by mark sixty-two. Set course to bearing zero four five and throttle up to nine Gs. We’ll have to try to slip by them before they reach weapons range.”

  Darius increased his throttle to nine Gs, but he made no move to break off. Instead, he mentally armed his Vulture’s twin double laser cannons and hornet missiles.

  “Darius? Did you hear me? Break off! We can’t take on a whole squadron of Blade Fighters by ourselves!”

  But he wasn’t listening.

  “Blast it!” Dyara said, and he saw her fighter banking to join his. “All right, fine. You want to draw some blood? Listen up.”

  “I’m listening,” Darius said, using his ESC to vocalize his thoughts without having to move his lips. At nine Gs it was hard enough just to keep breathing, let alone to talk.

  “We use Hornet missiles only, and we’re going to juke around like our tails are on fire. If you stop flying evasive for even a second, one of those Blades will tag you with a laser and it’s game over. You understand me?”

  “Got it.”

  “Hornets will lock on automatically. All you have to do is arm them and pick your target. Fire two missiles per Blade, and as soon as we reach orbit, you go evasive. They won’t waste time firing lasers into atmosphere at this range, but as soon as we hit open space, they’ll light us up. Until then, charge your ECM and increase power to your point defense turret, because you can bet your kakker they’re going to shoot missiles back at us.”

  “Understood,” Darius said, and mentally modified his countermeasure settings as ordered. He activated the 360-degree visibility system linked to cameras mounted on the Vulture’s hull. As soon as he did that, all of his control surfaces disappeared from view—as did his legs—and he had the unsettling impression of rocketing through the air as a disembodied entity. He flexed his hand on the flight stick and curled his toes in his boots to remind himself that his body was still there.