by Ewing, Al
PAX OMEGA
Jason Satan ran to a speaking-tube dangling from the wall and screeched into it. “Savate!”
A moment later, a lithe, powerfully-built figure dressed in an orange jerkin burst in from an ante-room! Their ace in the hole – Savate, the deadly mercenary and master of the French martial art whose name he had adopted as his own!
The mysterious Man Of A Thousand Kicks had clashed a dozen times or more with America’s Greatest Hero, and always escaped to fight another day! Savate was usually hired to delay Doc Thunder and other champions of the law for the crucial moments necessary to complete some heist or scheme – yet his strange code of honour forbade him from taking the lives of those uninvolved in the struggle between the forces of law and the criminal underworld.
But to delay Doc Thunder’s victory now would be to doom thousands to slow and painful extinction! Was Savate an unwitting dupe of the sinister forces of Untergang? Or had he finally crossed the line that separates the dashing rogue from the callous murderer of millions?
The answer will astound you! Turn to page five for more of the incredible front-page scoop this reporter had to call -- “The Fearful Fate Of Doc Thunder!”
PAX BRITANNIA
PAX OMEGA
AL EWING
PAX BRITANNIA
EL SOMBRA ADVENTURES
By Al Ewing
El Sombra
Gods of Manhattan
Pax Omega
ULYSSES QUICKSILVER ADVENTURES
By Jonathan Green
Unnatural History
Leviathan Rising
Human Nature
Evolution Expects
Blood Royal
Dark Side
Anno Frankenstein
Time’s Arrow
For Sarah, who is the best thing.
An Abaddon BooksTM Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
[email protected]
First published in 2012 by Abaddon BooksTM, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
Editor-in Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Desk Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Pye Parr
Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece
Marketing and PR: Keith Richardson
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
Copyright © 2012 Rebellion. All rights reserved.
Pax BritanniaTM, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-347-2
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-348-9
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
James Newton (“The Printer’s Devil”) and Matt Zitron (“The Last Stand of the Yodelling Bastards”) are the names of real people.
They appear in this book courtesy of the “Genre for Japan” charity auction, which took place in April 2011, in support of the Red Cross efforts in the aftermath of the Japan Earthquake.
The characters appearing under their names are, of course, wholly fictional.
ALPHA
FIRST, THERE WAS not.
Nothing existed, and there was nothing in which to exist.
Over a timeless interval, during which time had no meaning, He considered the situation.
He existed. He was the only thing to exist. That did not feel correct.
He focussed His being, and spoke.
And there was.
As He watched the fundamental forces slowly tear themselves from one another, He found himself wondering if He had chosen to create, or if creation had somehow chosen Him. Nuclei formed in the torrents of energy He had released and spent millennia wooing electrons, forming atoms as He debated the matter with Himself.
Dense pockets in the primordial gas, warped by gravity, ignited into the first suns, and He decided that the question was of no consequence. The act of creation had happened. The future had been seeded.
Around the new stars, swirling debris coalesced and cooled into planets, moons, meteors, the endless architecture of the cosmos. In a moment of curiosity – rebellion against the chain of events He was bound into, perhaps – He attempted to shift some of these emerging bodies from their set course.
Once, He had created a universe from nothing, but things were different now. Exposure to time had somehow decayed Him. He still existed, but not in any physical sense, and the power of His mind was not strong enough to effect the necessary gravitational changes.
He realised then just how much time had passed. His perception of it was accelerating in odd patterns – speeding and slowing – and his disembodied consciousness was starting to drift apart. The decay would continue. Death was coming to Him.
Death, at last.
How strange and novel it would be.
His awareness drifted to one of the new planets, the third out from its star. The shape of the emerging continents was familiar in places, and microscopic life forms were beginning to thrive and propagate in the volcanic regions. He studied them for a short while as they evolved, to flatworms and algae, then to more complex forms.
His intelligence was starting to dissipate now. Death was approaching rapidly, and He relaxed into it, watching the events occur on the new planet until He could no longer comprehend them.
The last thing He saw and understood was the ship, appearing from the wormhole at too great a velocity, trying desperately to change its course and then crashing into one of the newly-formed continents. They were very familiar now.
Hello, He thought. Hello. Hello.
After that, He could no longer think of words. He thought of her face, for a moment, and then that, too, became too complex to hold onto.
He thought of a smile.
And then He was not.
THE END OF THE WORLD
MUNN, THE NAVIGATOR, sat with his legs dangling off the edge of the high cliff and watched the monsters fighting in the valley below.
What else was there to do?
There were two of the creatures, giant lizards with great fans of bone crowning their heads, and three horns – two at their temples and one jutting from their snouts – above what looked like a large beak. From what Munn could work out, the combat was between an old bull, defending his place in the pack, and a smaller challenger bucking for a higher position in the hierarchy. A group of females watched, grazing on the tall grasses nearby. They were patient animals – the fight had gone on for at least an hour.
Was it a fight? Now that Munn had watched the pair for so long, the regular clashing of horns looked more like a display – almost a dance. A contest of endurance, perhaps, one that would continue until the weaker of the huge beasts no longer had the energy to carry on. Munn examined each of the creatures carefully from his vantage point, looking for signs of exhaustion, but gave up quickly. Unwen, the Biologist, might have had something to say about it, but he was busy in the ship with his mammals. Perhaps Munn would ask Unwen what he thought on the matter. Without the selfsearch, Unwen might not know precisely, but he seemed to be adjusting himself to the lack of it better than most. He could probably come up with an answer.
Munn undid one of the clasps on his belt, lifting the small plaso
l bag of hosa from its pouch and packing a little into the three-inch metal pipe he now wore, as a matter of habit, around his neck. He thumbed the stud that ignited the yellow powder, and then breathed the smoke into his lungs, feeling his perceptions loosen and shift slightly as the new possibilities began to fall into his mind, slotting perfectly into place like the bind-blocks he’d played with as a child.
He breathed out a long coil of yellow smoke. The pipe was an inefficient system for delivery of the drug, especially compared with the skin-patch he’d worn on his upper arm ever since he’d left the crèche. In the Habitats, skin-patches were a necessity – without a constant low-level infusion of hosa, the speed, intensity and complexity of normal life would be impossible to comprehend. But on this new planet, in this slower, stranger existence, priorities had changed – the skin-patches had had to go, because they had precious ununtrium in the contacts and there was no ununtrium to be had here, or any way of synthesising it. And without ununtrium they would have had no way of establishing a permanent perimeter-field, and without the perimeter-field they would all have died, as surely as the Captain had.
So, no more skin-patches.
QED, as Unwen or Soran would say.
Munn’s thoughts drifted. That was another problem with smoking the hosa-powder instead of having the pure essence of the drug micro-injected into the capillaries. Bad memories had a sudden habit of ambushing the conscious mind, and Captain Tura’s death was one of them.
After the crash, she’d been monitoring the ship’s attempts to seal and repair itself – as much as it could, outside a proper docking bay. He remembered her face in particular, lined with concentration, trying hopelessly to jolt the lift-engines into proper function, not noticing the shadow suddenly descending on her from above. Munn had opened his mouth to call out, but she was already gone – a screaming shape high in the sky, held in the claws of one of the flying monsters. Munn had watched helplessly as the thing had pulled her head from her body with its beak, swallowed it and flapped off with the twitching remnants. Something to feed to its nightmare children, he supposed.
He tried to imagine what the Captain had experienced in death – the tearing pain, a split-second of disorientation, the realisation that her body was simply gone... and then the ego winking out like a light, or spiralling away like water into a drain.
And then... what?
Something unimaginable. Something that nobody had had a reason to contemplate, for hundreds of thousands of years. Death, in all its totality.
Munn tried to think of what that inconceivable absence might be like. He tried to think of not thinking, of not existing, and even with the hosa accelerating his mind he couldn’t make the mental leap. It terrified him.
He shivered, shaking his head to try and flush the idea away. He’d never had to consider death before he’d arrived in this place. Death was for the special soldiers in the Red Queen’s employ, the Silver Service, and no-one else. Theirs was the highest sacrifice, opening themselves to the possibility of non-existence. Munn wondered if the Silvers were given any special reward for their work, beyond the honour of the work itself. Probably not. Nothing material could make up for such a horror.
His mind drifted on, to the vote they’d taken after the Captain’s death. Not a true vote, of course – without mental-linkage equipment, the best they could manage was a vague, approximated version of democracy. Still, they’d done the best they could in the circumstances, and after a brief debate they’d made the decision to atomise all those items unnecessary for continued existence in this world, like the skin-patches, the fiction gels – even the selfsearch.
They’d used all the rarer elements thus harvested – the precious ununtrium, the sparse grains of dubnium and meitnerium, impossible to hold together outside a quantum envelope – to repair the life-support and create a working perimeter-field strong enough to keep all the monsters outside at bay. Once survival was thus assured, they could work out what to do next.
That had been the plan, anyway.
So now the remaining crew-members were safe in their bubble, and Munn was dangling his legs off a sheer cliff, safe in the knowledge that if he should fall, or leap, the perimeter-field would catch hold of him – he could even walk on it, if he wanted – and watching the lizards dance, hundreds of feet below.
What else was there to do?
“How’s your reading, Munn?”
Maya, the Security Officer. Munn took a long drag on the metal pipe, holding the hosa-smoke in his lungs, and exhaled slowly, considering the question.
“It’s a phrase that’s already lost its meaning, isn’t it?” he murmured, smiling humourlessly. “There’s no selfsearch any more to get a reading from. I could give you an estimate, if you like...”
Maya looked down at him disdainfully. She’d never thought much of Munn, and with the hosa coiling in him he could read all of her contempt for him as clearly as any stellar map. “I can make a guess for myself,” she murmured. “You’re missing Habitat One, you’re missing a working ship... you’re missing civilisation. You’re starting to fall into a depressive state.” She frowned dismissively, and Munn found himself resenting her – the way she’d so readily accepted being exiled here.
He shrugged, turning away. “I suppose I am. Without a selfsearch reading it’s difficult to be sure what I’m feeling, exactly.” He laughed bitterly to himself. “This must be how our ancestors felt. Or assumed they felt.”
Maya frowned. “Forget selfsearch – it’s gone. Frankly, I’m happier without it. I’d have gone all the way and junked the talkeasies, if I could be sure we’d understand each other without them.”
“Well, why not? It’s not like we understand each other as it is.” The words sounded angry in his ears, and he wanted nothing more than to consult the familiar machine and have it tell him why, and what to do about it. Why had he agreed to get rid of them? They could have found what they needed elsewhere. One of Soran’s scientific toys, maybe.
“Listen, Munn. What was is over. We should try to make the best of what we have now, not sit around moaning about all our old trinkets. Our species existed for millennia before selfsearch, or hosa, or psychetecture. We’ll learn to exist without them again. We’ll build back to what we had before.”
“You sound very certain, considering it’s just the four of us...”
Maya shrugged. “That’s how it has to be. That’s how it will be. What other choices do we have?”
Munn shook his head, angry at her fatalism. “Rescue?” Even saying the word, he felt stupid. There wouldn’t be a rescue – nobody from the Habitats would be able to find them, out here on the other side of the wormhole. “Escape, then?”
Maya shook her head. “There’ll be no escape. It’s us and this world now – the ship won’t take us anywhere else. The xokronite we have is enough to keep us powered, but we can’t synthesise the elements we need to repair the lift-engines. Soran was working on it, but...” She shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“He’s given up?”
Maya shrugged. “He tried. He failed. I had a feeling he would. Still, it’s more than the rest of us have done.” She looked pointedly at Munn, and he felt uncomfortable, under scrutiny. She might as well have asked him straight out what exactly he was doing to help, besides watching the reptiles bash their heads together.
Munn bristled. “There’s not much I can do in this situation. I’m a Navigator, Maya. I’ve been a Navigator for... for...” He tailed off, trying to work out exactly how long it had been since he’d first sat at a navigation station and plotted a course between the galaxies. Eighty thousand years? Ninety thousand? Enough time to grow bored and exhausted with navigating between stars and galaxies and wormholes, and then to fall in love with the process all over again as new developments in the art appeared. And then to lose faith again, and get it back, over and over... but always Navigator, always guiding ships between the stars. It had defined him in a way nothing else had, and
now it was gone.
How long had it been? Without selfsearch, or external memory packs, or even an efficient supply of hosa in his bloodstream, it was impossible to remember and collate much before the last two or three thousand years; only the vaguest of flashes. The horror of that washed over him for a moment. I’m brain-damaged, he thought. We all are. In three thousand years, four at the most, will we think we’ve always been here? Will we even remember Habitat One, or things as simple as selfsearch or gels or talkeasies? And if we do remember everything, if we do build it all just the way it was – is that better?
Or worse?
Maya snapped him out of it. “Munn?”
He rubbed his bare scalp gently with his fingertips, trying to work his way back into the conversation. “For all that time, I’ve flown ships. Ships are... part of me. Stars are part of me. But that ship” – he waved his hand at the lush canopy of the jungle, in the rough direction the ship was in – “that ship’s just... a domicell-complex now. A place to live. It won’t fly. And at night, the light from the field stops me seeing the stars. And I’m never going to see the stars again...” He swallowed, unable to speak. His eyes stung. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed the stars until that moment. “So what should I do now? Tell me that. What am I going to be?” He turned away from her, not wanting her to see the tears. “I could spend a thousand years trying to decide. We all could.”
Maya shrugged. “We’ve got a thousand years. We’ve got ten thousand, and ten thousand times that. We can do anything we want. And in the end, what we’ll do is build.”
