Homeworld: Beacon 3

by Valerie Parv

  “You may have neutralized our weapons,” Zael seethed, “but let’s see how you cope with being shoved out an airlock in space without a suit.”

  “You can kill us, but not permanently,” Kam told her.

  Her gaze spat pure loathing at him. “You’re forgetting, I killed you once today.”

  “My death didn’t take then, either.”

  “I’ll kill you as many times as I have to. Sooner or later you’re going to stay dead.”

  “Not in here.”

  Garrett recognized the new voice as Adam’s.

  The Kelek captain glowered. “What do you mean, in here?”

  “You are inside the flux,” Adam said. “All of us are.” Behind him, Guy nodded.

  Seeing the two men, nearly identical, distracted Zael. In that moment, Garrett ducked under his guard’s arm, knocking the man aside, and launched himself at her.

  He reached for her throat but she stepped back, raising the weapon between them. “If I cannot kill you in this reality, your power must be limited as well.”

  “Not so limited that we can’t stop you,” Garrett vowed.

  A bleak smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “You’re too late.”

  Twisting in the grip of the other guard, Elaine cried, “Garrett, she’s rigged the cruiser to blow. I can see a countdown on the control panel.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “I don’t know. Their way of measuring time is different.”

  If Zael’s vessel exploded, they might not die, although Garrett couldn’t be sure. Experience told him that the flux could absorb only so much punishment before shutting down. If they were all inside when it did …

  He was moving before he had the intention fully hatched. There had to be some way he could get to Zael’s cruiser and stop the countdown.

  Reality changed again.

  “Dammit, not now,” Garrett shouted. For all he knew, the original reality continued on its path. The cruiser could explode while he was busy reliving some other time.

  Ragnarok.

  He was back in the reception room thirty minutes earlier, telling Amelia about the cataclysm they thought might be building around the Kelek captain.

  “I want to interview Captain Zael,” she said.

  This wasn’t how the scene had played out before. “Even if she’d agree, we don’t have time. When her cruiser blows, she’ll take everything in the flux with it.”

  “It’s important,” Amelia insisted.

  His fingers dug into her arms, leaving marks. “Don’t you understand? We’re looping again. Zael must have found a way to keep us here until the ship detonates.”

  “She didn’t create the previous loops.”

  Garrett’s skin crawled. Amelia’s way meant they could die in mid-sentence. He tried to hammer his point home with his eyes.

  She held his gaze, hers brilliant with defiance. “Trust me.”

  She knew how hard trust was for him, knew what she was asking. Their world, hell, their universe could hinge on his next move.

  Having to talk instead of act went against every instinct Garrett possessed. How was talk going to save them when the world exploded? He couldn’t give way to her.

  But he did. Fighting himself every inch, he forced a nod. “Do what you have to.”

  She turned to Zael, standing near the serving table, face set and body language rigid. Garrett’s stomach lurched. What did Amelia hope to gain? But the TV presenter was all assurance as she led Zael through a door leading to the media room. Garrett followed.

  Then he stopped in his tracks. Kam hovered behind Zael’s chair, one side of his face livid with bruises from the guards’ rough handling. The glowing Jules stood in another corner.

  “Why are they here?”

  With the ease of long practice, Amelia adjusted microphones and controls. “The flux wants them here.”

  “So we can be blown to smithereens together? Touching.”

  The Kelek captain’s glare was as bright as her earlier weapon fire. “I don’t want this any more than you do.”

  Then this loop wasn’t her doing. Garrett took slight comfort in that, while bracing himself for the blast his instincts said was coming.

  “How do you know?” he demanded of Amelia.

  “That this is right? I just do. I feel it, perhaps from the flux itself.”

  The same way the flux had communicated its distress to Garrett and Elaine.

  Amelia leaned across the console. “I’ll start with you, Jules. You have something to say to Captain Zael?”

  The aide – the Prana – looked sullen as he nodded. “On behalf of the Prana people, I apologize to all the Kelek.”

  Garrett throttled back a harsh laugh.

  Zael was ahead of him, snapping, “You think you can right centuries of wrongs with an apology?”

  “Centuries of misunderstandings,” Jules countered.

  Amelia broke in. “Captain Zael, haven’t you wondered why the Kelek – of all the Prana races – didn’t have beacons of your own?”

  “We were meant to die out. We needed no such weaklings.”

  Kam flinched but stayed at his captain’s shoulder. “We weren’t supposed to struggle so. When we set off from Prana, our new home was a green world. It was laid waste by a collision with a meteor while we were on our journey.”

  “We didn’t know,” Jules said.

  Zael look unconvinced as she fought centuries of conditioning. “Why did we have adepts who can find and kill beacons?”

  Jules smiled wanly. “Has any adept ever killed a beacon?”

  Kam shook his head. “We can track them, but others do the killing.”

  “Because the Kelek are the traditional guardians of the beacons. That knowledge was lost in your years of colonization,” Jules said.

  The hairs rose on the back of Garrett’s neck. Kam had told Elaine that he was both her captor and her protector.

  Zael faltered. “This can’t be. But I remember … another reality where … No.”

  “What do you remember?” Amelia asked.

  “Using my equipment to restore rather than destroy an environment.” Zael’s voice came out barely above a whisper. She stood abruptly, planting her hands on the desk. “This is a Prana trick to deny us our revenge.”

  “Look inside yourself. You know this is the truth,” Kam told her, soft-voiced. “How often did our thoughts entwine when you used your implant the way it was designed to be used?”

  For pleasure, not pain, Garrett understood. His mind reeled from what he was learning. How much worse for Zael, whose people had lived a lie for millennia.

  “Do not presume on our relationship,” Zael snarled.

  “I must, if you are to understand what I’ve known since we reached Earth.”

  “You knew you were the beacons’ protector, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  Garrett saw reality sink in. This reality, anyway. “It can’t be true.” But Zael’s voice contradicted her.

  Kam touched her shoulder lightly and she glanced at him in appreciation.

  Then her expression tensed again. “When I set the self-destruct on my cruiser, I didn’t know.”

  “Can you countermand the order?” Garrett was afraid he already knew the answer.

  “Until the last thirty seconds, it could have been stopped. Not now.”

  Anguish coiled through Garrett. Thirty seconds. They weren’t going to make it.

  As if his dead run for the cruiser hadn’t been interrupted, Garrett felt himself looping again. Outside Government House on the deceptively peaceful green sward, the Kelek vessel sat quietly, as if it weren’t throbbing with potentially destructive power.

  He took a second to tune his hearing to the ship’s interior. The countdown ran silent, but he didn’t need to see the heads-up display to know they were nearly out of time. Why hadn’t the flux thrown him back to the start of the countdown? Better yet, to before Zael
had set this thing?

  Maybe the flux could save them but not itself. Garrett didn’t have time to think about that now. He clawed at the perfect seal the door made, then scanned the hull plates closest to the door. The Kelek might be aliens, but their ships functioned on similar principles to those of Garrett’s experience. There had to be a manual override here somewhere.

  “The small hatch to the right, under the insignia,” a voice suggested.

  Garrett spun. “Get out of here, Adam. Take care of Shana, Elaine and Amelia.”

  “We’re all here. You can’t do this on your own.”

  Garrett concentrated on opening the manual access. “Get to safety.”

  Elaine was beside him. “Unless you stop this thing, there’s no safety for any of us.”

  “Including the Prana who took shelter in the flux,” Shana reminded him.

  “There,” Elaine said. “I see a series of tumblers with Kelek symbols on them.”

  He shot her a fleeting glance. She sounded confident. Hell, she even looked like her old self. Her memory must be back completely. “I don’t suppose you can read the code?”

  “Not on this. I can’t read Kelek, and the tumblers show no wear I can discern.”

  He turned back to the hatch. None of them could read Kelek, and Zael was nowhere in sight. Despair warred with frustration. How could Garrett stop the countdown if he couldn’t get inside the vessel?

  “Garrett, here.” Amelia emerged from the building at a run, something clutched in her hand.

  “Get back,” he ordered. “Take the others with you. This isn’t working and we’re out of time.”

  “Not quite.” She thrust something into his hand.

  The dampening field. It had been in the pocket of his flight suit, before he’d given it to Elaine to protect Kam. She must have held on to it after the shuttle touched down, giving it to Amelia to return to Garrett. Being who she was, Amelia would have insisted on knowing what it was and did. It was no more of a mystery than anything else going on. Perhaps she’d acquired the knowledge from the flux, along with her certainty that she needed to get Kelek and Prana talking.

  “I don’t know if it’s enough,” he said, recognizing what Amelia had in mind.

  “It’s all we have.”

  She was right. He signaled to Elaine, who dropped to her knees beside him and snatched the card from his grasp. He didn’t have to tell her what to do. Her face immediately blanked as she turned her vision inward. For agonizing seconds, she stayed that way then surfaced with a shaky smile and held out the card to him.

  “Activate this code then place the card inside the manual override,” she instructed, reeling off numbers her alien vision had seen deep inside the card’s programming.

  He did as bidden, keying the code in with a fingernail, not at all sure he was getting this right. His hands felt cold and clumsy.

  While he worked, Elaine retreated to the shelter of the building, joining Adam and Shana in the meager protection the walls offered. As soon as Garrett reached them, Amelia huddled against his side. Not that anything would protect them if the dampening field failed.

  Three seconds later, the cruiser bulged with the force of a contained explosion. Garrett’s ears were battered by incendiary shock waves but he registered them as a fraction of what could have been without the dampening field. Half deafened, he got to his feet and dragged Amelia into a tight hold. His mouth ground against hers with a mixture of relief and gratitude.

  “You did it,” she said, her lips pliant against his.

  Three seconds. Bloody hell. “We did it together.” If she hadn’t thought – or been told – to bring him the card … Don’t go there, he ordered himself. She had the thought, and had probably saved them all. With her in his arms, he felt less alone than he had in a long time.

  He wasn’t the only one. Shana was holding tightly to Adam, and Timo had emerged from inside to embrace Elaine. He was followed by the Kelek captain, who stayed within touching distance of Kam on the steps of Government House, both standing a little way apart from the beacons.

  Garrett took a step toward Zael. “Your ship’s a bit of a mess,” he told her. Together they looked at the blackened, pitted hull. By containing the explosion, they’d magnified the destruction inside the vessel.

  “Your shuttle can take me back to my ship when I’m ready.” Her expression became more severe. “As you’ve already demonstrated.”

  “You’re returning to Kelek?” Adam asked.

  “In time. First, I intend to help the Prana restore their planet’s environment.”

  Garrett didn’t have to ask why her mission had changed. It was obvious she’d accepted the true relationship between Kelek and beacons. Hard to think of them as allies, he acknowledged, but if she could change, how could the beacons do less?

  There was reassurance in regarding the Kelek captain as an ally, if not yet a friend. Even more in knowing what her skills could do for the Prana. When that planet was again habitable and the population left the flux to return home, Elaine may get to enjoy that vacation she’d long yearned for on their parents’ homeworld.

  Home. The word sounded alien in his mind. Unlike Elaine, he had no clear notion of where home was for him. It wasn’t Prana, where he’d never set foot. Certainly not the flux, as alien an environment as he could imagine. That left Earth.

  Tucked against his side, Amelia watched the interplay of emotions on his face. “Tell me you’re not leaving now this is over?” she said, sounding afraid.

  What did she have to fear? The answer came in a rush. Finally there was someone who cared enough about him to fear losing him. “After what we’ve been through, I intend to keep my feet on solid ground for a long time,” he told her.

  She snuggled under his chin. “Sounds good to me. I’m just getting the hang of this togetherness thing.”

  Unusually, so was he, and his arm tightened around her.

  She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Surely one of our homes has survived the volcanic eruption.”

  After all the looping back and forth, he had no answer.

  Elaine came to them, keeping her arm linked through Timo’s. “That reality never happened,” she said. “I looked.”

  “The tsunami and the fire tornado?”

  Her mouth turned down. “They were real. Things only started to change after we discovered we were in the flux.”

  “Where we were taken when we felt the strange power outages – you here, and me in Hawai’i,” Elaine said.

  “Repairs to the city were already underway before we started looping,” Shana contributed. “Provided no more damage was done, the city should be back to normal within weeks.”

  How would real life feel after what they’d been through? Was there actually any such thing? Or only an endless series of realities layered upon each other, sometimes combining, sometimes diverging.

  Then there was the flux. Another reality or something unique to itself? Garrett’s instinct favored the latter but he would have to ask Guy when they got back inside – under their own steam, rather than through a time loop.

  As the flux’s avatar, Guy should have some answers. Always supposing Guy hadn’t disappeared. Maybe that would be a blessing, Garrett thought with a glance at Adam. You could have too much of anything. Or anyone. Although Garrett decided he could make an exception for the woman at his side.

  Epilogue

  The Grand Hall glittered like the jewel in Prana’s crown that it was. One of the first buildings to be completed during the Restoration, it was now home to the planet’s most momentous events when the World Assembly wasn’t in session. Tonight, almost a thousand beings were present and the events were being streamed to billions more through the flux.

  The assembly’s insignia was projected above a vast antigrav stage, a letter S turned on its side and pierced by two straight lines down the center. Not a being watching was unaware of the sign’s significance: the flowing curve represented the infinity of the flux, and
the lines symbolized the many paths back to Prana, ancient homeworld of all the beings gathered for the occasion.

  The chair of the Interplanetary Literary Guild, a handsome Prana woman, stepped up to the podium and waited for the dull roar of conversation to subside. “I seem to remember it was quieter when we lived in the flux,” she said. The old joke was greeted with laughter. She waited for it to die down then said, “At last we come to the reason why we’re gathered here – the announcement of the Book of the Century.”

  She paused, building the suspense, although the outcome was in little doubt by now, confirmed when she said, “I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that the work chosen by the literary bodies of our member planets as deserving that title is – Restoration by Garrett Luken of Earth.” As more waves of applause erupted throughout the hall, she held up a hand for one more moment of attention. “Here to accept the award is Felicity Rossi, also of Earth.”

  To thunderous acclaim, a tall, reed-slim woman stood and approached the stage. In her early sixties as humans reckoned age, she was still striking, with light-brown skin and hair only slightly touched by gray.

  “Thank you,” she said, her soft voice amplified and translated throughout the hall. “My godfather would be thrilled to receive this award for a book that meant more to him than anything else he wrote in his lifetime.”

  She took a breath. “I wasn’t born when he and his fellow beacons paved the way for this gathering, but I learned much later that I played a small role in bringing Prana’s restoration about. At that time, it required three beacons working together to access the flux. Adam Desai was the original messenger, born not far from where we’re meeting now. He harnessed my embryo watcher skills with the listener abilities of my wife of thirty years, Cate Rossi, to open the flux so the Kelek people could rediscover their heritage.

  “Helping in that task was a special person we also honor tonight, Captain Akia Zael Iroi of Kelek. Without her dedication to reengineering Prana’s atmosphere, we would have taken far longer to restore this hallowed ground.”

  More loud approval greeted this, and Felicity waited it out. By the time she was born, Zael had already started applying her unique skills to scrubbing toxins from the air and water, setting nano-scavengers to restore the oceans, and inventing ways to reseed the planet’s green canopy. The work had taken half a century, but Zael had never flagged, asking only that the vast green heart where the work had begun be named for her son, Ryn, killed during the early conflicts between Earth and Kelek. There had been no dissension.