by Richard Fox
“You were spying for Earth?” Roland grabbed a water bottle on the end of his bed. Bits of half-formed ice swirled around in the liquid, and the cold plastic stung his palm. He took a small sip, spilling plenty of it down his chin. Using his own body after so long in armor took some getting used to.
“Mediating,” Ibarra said, raising a finger. “Trying to keep Earth from coming after us. Trying to get Earth to see the errors of their ways in approving the Hale Treaty. Trying to keep Stacey from losing all hope…She just used that time to build up the nation, keep after her little pet projects. Now I realize she was playing me—brilliant move on her part. I’m almost proud. Earth never felt threatened by us so long as I was around to rein her in. Stacey kept me in play until I was on the verge of telling Earth exactly how many proccies we had and where to find Navarre.”
“Wait.” Roland set the water bottle against his knee. “I know you’ve got your own procedurally generated soldiers. I met some on Oricon. You were Earth’s spy and you didn’t tell them how many you were making?”
“I may have…lied. I’ve been known to do that and am of the opinion that one should not tell the truth when a lie will do. Old habit. Born out of necessity and practice. But when Stacey decided it was time to leave Earth along with a few like-minded individuals—”
“Like Nicodemus.”
“You’ve met him? Isn’t he fun? We skipped town with a fleet Earth wasn’t even using…and some technology that I kept off the books for a rainy day: a small omnium reactor, construction droids, automated foundries and a number of procedural-generation tubes with psych compilers.”
“How did you keep all that hidden?”
“I’m Marc Ibarra. I kept an impending Xaros invasion secret for sixty years and laid the groundwork to take Earth back with no one the wiser. You think keeping a secret stash was a challenge? Granted, I had help along the way.” He looked over at the only drawer in a small desk by his bed.
“So President Garret thought you got away with only a fleet of ghost ships and a few armor soldiers. But the whole time, you were making your own army and navy.”
“It was a matter of prudence at first—help crew the ships and build up Navarre. Then Stacey had more militant aims.”
“How many?” Roland asked.
Marc Ibarra’s head shook slightly from side to side, then he smiled.
“Now you’re going to clam up?” Roland shifted back and leaned against the wall.
“I don’t actually know,” Ibarra said. “She started a rather aggressive expansion plan after she found some information on Barada. I found the crèches by accident—a power drain in the lower caverns, so many new people coming into the world—that’s when I signaled Earth for a meet to finally spill the beans and that’s when Nicodemus ripped me out of my air car and almost crushed my head. He’s many things. Subtle isn’t one of them.”
“I noticed.” Roland worked his shoulder around. The Ibarran armor soldier had demolished Roland’s own armor in their brief and one-sided fight. The phantom pain from those “injuries” still nagged at him.
“It takes nine days for a procedural tube and psych compilers to make a fully grown, fully trained adult,” Ibarra said. “The technology was our saving grace against the Xaros…I wanted to phase out the program after the war. Let humanity do things the way nature intended. Stacey had other goals. Other needs, shall we say.”
“What happened to her? To you?” Roland asked.
“I couldn’t stand around and watch her die.” Ibarra’s face fell. “I was there, you know, when the Xaros scoured the Earth clean of every last human being. Billions dead to the drones. I heard the screams, saw the cities burn…but when I saw my granddaughter bleeding to death in front of me, I could not let her go.”
He tapped the side of his head.
“I wasn’t exactly corporeal when Stacey needed me the most, but there was a Qa’Resh ambassador unit just lying around that I appropriated. I got her body into stasis and her mind into the shell you’ve already met.”
Roland squeezed out the last of his nutrient paste and gave Ibarra a sidelong look.
“‘Ambassador unit’?”
Ibarra waved his hands up his body.
“Obviously,” he said. “The Qa’Resh had a good system going on Bastion, before the Xaros destroyed it. Bringing ambassadors from across the galaxy to one place was difficult without the Crucible gates we have now. So the Qa’Resh sent probes to planets with species that could fight the Xaros, put their bodies into stasis, and transported the consciousness of the ambassadors to Bastion, where they got one of these numbers to walk around in. This made the ambassadors effectively immortal. No aging. No risk of spreading disease. Through some advanced holo technology and translation programs, all the ambassadors saw the other races as species that looked like them. Spoke like them. But Bastion could never make any of the ambassadors think like each other. Which is still a problem.”
“And you just happened to have two of these ambassador bodies handy?”
“Pa’lon, the longtime Dotari rep to Bastion, wasn’t using his. Stacey had hers. I got attached to this one and Pa’lon decided to retire after the war ended and the Dotari went back to their home world. It’s a hassle around anyone not prepped for arctic temperatures, but it sure beats living inside a Qa’Resh probe. No more genie in a bottle routine for me.”
Roland got to his feet and rubbed soreness out of his neck and jaw.
“Is this why you two dropped off the edge of the world after the Ember War was over? Because you were…that?”
Ibarra crossed his arms over his chest and paced up and down his cell.
“Most of humanity was wiped out by the Xaros. You were in the fleet that sidestepped the invasion, so you know what that mess was like. Reconstruction. The Toth show up. Everyone realizes that I’ve snuck proccies into the population. The Xaros arrive in that hollowed-out moon. More fighting…then the war’s over and now it’s time to let the immortal Marc and Stacey Ibarra run the show. My plan was never for me to control humanity forever. Just long enough to get through what would have been an extinction event. I thought I’d stay in that probe forever, but staying out of the limelight after the war seemed natural. Stacey, though, her trauma was never part of the plan.”
“What exactly happened to her?”
Ripples spread across Ibarra’s face…but there was no sound. The metal man’s face contorted in confusion. He looked up and shook a fist at the roof. The light dimmed in his cell and a privacy screen formed between his cell’s bars.
“Hey!” Roland shouted. “I’m talking to him!” His words echoed off the stone walls of the prison.
“Damn it.” He kicked his bunk, got a spike of pain for his efforts, then sat down on the bunk and looked over his enclosure. A sink and toilet. Small drain in the floor. He went to the small metal desk and opened its single drawer. Empty.
I am a prisoner of war, he thought. I am not a criminal. I am armor. I still have my duties.
Roland sank to one knee and bowed his head in prayer.
“Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia…”
Chapter 2
Gideon leaned against the railing of the observation pod. A wide oval window in the Crucible offered a view to the center of the gigantic jump gate, Ceres’ horizon, and to Earth beyond. He’d been there for almost an hour, watching silently as the white plains of wormholes—humanity’s link to the stars—opened and shut.
The basalt walls of the Crucible and the twinkle of golden flecks in the material told of the Crucible’s alien construction. The miles-long and -wide thorns that made up the Crucible shifted between each jump. He’d found no rhyme or reason to the station’s movements but knew they were integral to manipulating the graviton fields between the countless thousands of other Crucibles the Xaros seeded throughout the galaxy.
He felt the vibration of approaching footsteps through the catwalk.
“Tongea,” Gideon said without looking over.
“You walk like you’re ready for a fight,” Gideon said.
The Maori grunted as the flash of an opening wormhole lit across the tribal tattoos on his face.
“It’s a struggle to keep the mind focused when out of armor,” Tongea said. “My synch rating always suffers.”
Gideon finally looked at the other armor soldier.
“And instead of going back to the Ardennes to plug in, you came up here to find me. When will my lance be reassigned to the fleets searching for the Ibarras?” he asked.
“Your request was denied,” Tongea said curtly.
Gideon slammed a fist against the railing.
“Bullshit, Tongea. The Ibarras took Roland away from us—from me! He is my responsibility and I won’t let another risk themselves when I’m the one at fault.”
“No one blames you for what happened. The Ibarras overpowered Roland and Aignar, then took Roland’s womb and—”
“I am to blame.” Gideon tapped his own chest quickly. “I gave the order to split up the lance while we were on that Qa’Resh station. I refused to fire on Stacey Ibarra and her pack of traitors. That she got away with the alien tech and my soldier are on me. No one else.”
“You split your lance to stop Cha’ril from redlining. If you’d tried to stop Ibarra from leaving, then Aignar and the rest of your company would have been lost when the station sank into Oricon Prime. You made the right decision…don’t let your history with Nicodemus cloud your judgment,” Tongea said.
“You think I can ever forget or forgive what he did?” Gideon squeezed a hand into a fist so tight his knuckles went white. “They betrayed the Corps, Earth…me. And for what? Some sort of mysticism?” He reached out to touch the Templar Cross on Tongea’s shoulder.
Tongea’s hand snapped out and grabbed Gideon by the wrist. The two strained against each other for a moment, then Gideon let his arm go slack and Tongea released his grip.
“There were plenty of Templar that stayed behind,” Tongea said. “No one believes Nicodemus and the others did the right thing by siding with the Ibarras.”
“‘No one’? I’m not part of your little brotherhood, but don’t think I’m ignorant to what you Templar believe,” Gideon said.
Tongea stiffened and turned back to the view port. “Those that went with the Ibarras have been expunged from the honor role. Cast out. They are no longer my brothers or sisters. Not Nicodemus. Not Morrigan. Not—”
“Don’t. Don’t say his name.” Gideon leaned his hands against the railing and let his head droop between his shoulders.
“They were my friends too,” Tongea said, laying his hand on Gideon’s shoulder.
“I have to find them,” Gideon said as he shrugged the touch away. “I have to find Roland.”
“Colonel Martel needs you elsewhere, someplace where you’ll do far more for Earth than bringing traitors to justice: New Bastion.”
“Where all the old Alliance sits around doing nothing? What the hell am I going to do there?” Gideon’s brow furrowed.
“The Ibarras have been busy. They’ve raided more than one alien planet and the Congress on New Bastion demands answers from Earth. You’re going there as a witness, to try to keep the rest of the galaxy from dog-piling on us while we figure out what to do about the Ibarras,” Tongea said. “But we have to find the Ibarras first, which is proving harder than we thought.”
“A witness? No. Send Admiral Lettow or the Oricon governor. I can’t add anything more than they already know. Let me bring the Ibarras back in chains. New Bastion can watch the video of their trial and execution for treason.”
“Lettow’s taking the Ardennes to New Bastion. You and your lance are going with him. Martel’s orders. By the time you get back, the Keeper thinks she’ll have a way to track the Ibarras’ movement through the Crucible network. Then we’ll be ready to enact justice.”
Gideon shook his head.
“I don’t do well around aliens,” he said. “I saw what the Toth did to prisoners on Hawaii, saw the dead on Cygnus killed by the Vishrakath.”
“The Toth are gone and you do well enough with your Dotari lancer. Our ambassador there will help keep you in line,” Tongea said. “Cha’ril is on her way. She’s recovering well from her near redline. I wanted her in my lance, but someone took her on a shoestring tackle of an operation against the Vish and there was no separating her from that lance.”
“I regret nothing,” Gideon said.
“Go to New Bastion. Tell the truth. Then hunt down the Ibarras after that.”
“We’re going to kill the Ibarras when we find them. Promise me that,” Gideon said.
“President Garret could be forced to ask for a declaration of war in the next few days,” Tongea said, his face falling as he spoke. “It takes time to get the public behind something like that, especially since we as a culture should have moved on from fighting each other after the Ember War.”
“The Ibarras are to blame. And they’re going to pay for what they’ve done,” Gideon said.
****
A bright light passed over Cha’ril’s left eye. She fought the urge to blink, but the slight numbness across her body made dealing with the discomfort easier. She ran the blunted talon on her thumb across the side of her index finger.
“Uh uh uh,” Dr. Eeks said as she moved the light to Cha’ril’s other eye. “No moving while the neurometer is attached.” The human woman was older than most of her kind Cha’ril had encountered, with gray hair and lined skin typical of those well past what humans considered “middle age.” The aroma of burnt herbs clung to her lab coat, a by-product of an addiction that seemed oddly prevalent among human medical workers.
Cha’ril flared her nostrils in annoyance. The device interfacing with her skull plugs was heavy and had sent tiny electrical jolts through her muscles for the last ten minutes of the exam.
“What do you think, Dr. Bar’gil?” Eeks asked over her shoulder to the Dotari staring intently at a holo screen displaying Cha’ril’s nervous system.
“Her neural kinetics are well within normal,” he said. “She experienced a minor system spike, not a true redline. My recommendation stands.”
“I can’t find any reason to keep her off active duty,” Eeks said. “Though her hormone levels have certainly spiked.”
“Then clear me for deployment,” Cha’ril said. The neurometer punished her with tiny shocks to the muscles she dared to voluntarily control.
“Don’t, dearie. Things have a tendency to bite.” Eeks reached behind Cha’ril’s head and removed the neurometer with a click, then she slipped the palm-sized device into her lab coat. “Our jogger will link up with the Crucible in a few more hours. You can join your lance then. I’ll have the paperwork done up after my smoke break.”
“Thank you, doctor.” Cha’ril rubbed the skin around her plugs, noting it was more sensitive than usual.
“I’d tell you to stay away from any weird geometry in Qa’Resh artifact worlds, but I doubt that’ll happen,” she said, getting halfway out the door before looking back to Bar’gil. “Coming, doctor?”
“I need a few minutes with her,” the Dotari said. “I’ll catch up.”
He waited until Eeks was gone before he took a data slate out of his coat pocket.
“Your hormone levels are indeed above normal,” he said in the clicks and tweets of Dotari language.
“The home world removed all the contraceptives from our food and water. This is to be expected, yes?”
Bar’gil removed a pen-sized device and pressed the tip under her beak. He looked down at his data slate and clicked his tongue.
“Not to this extent. Your pheromone glands are swollen…have you been exposed to anything unusual? Eaten something not from the food processors?” the doctor asked.
Cha’ril worked her jaw slightly, then gripped her hands together over her lap.
> “I’ve been eating coffee berries,” she mumbled.
“Aha,” he said, putting the device back in his pocket. “We did note an uptick in the birthrate during our stay on Hawaii. I’ll send word back to Dotari that raw coffee berries warrant further study.”
“What’s happening back home?” she asked. “My father sent word that there’s some sort of illness and that’s why we’re barred from going back and that’s why the Council of Firsts lifted the restrictions on…breeding.”
“They’re calling it the phage,” Bar’gil said. “When our ancestors fled the Xaros on the generation ships, we lost so much of our history and culture. Turns out we also lost our immunity to certain diseases present on our home world. We spent so much time in the clean environment of spaceships, and our home on Takeni had little to nothing in the way of microbes that could threaten us. Every Dotari on the home world is at risk, the young and elderly especially. The fatality rate is over seventy percent. More and more healthy adults are succumbing too.”
“The humans have their green blood cells to protect them from such things. Why haven’t they shared the technology with us?”
“The Qa’Resh devised the green blood cells as a by-product of the outlawed procedural-generation program.” Bar’gil’s quills shuddered in disgust. “The green blood cells only work for the humans, but they’ve sent medical teams and are working with our scientists for a cure. Unfortunately, our physiology is quite different. Humans will learn to fly by flapping their arms before one of them could function as a Dotari physician.”
Cha’ril touched the plugs beneath her loose quills.
“Mechanical, not biological,” Bar’gil snapped.
“What’s going to happen to us? To the home world?” she asked.
“If the phage continues on its current disease vector…a few hundred Dotari will survive the next decade.” Bar’gil delivered the prognosis clinically, ignoring Cha’ril’s gasp. “Many more in our expeditionary fleet and those assigned to joint commands like you. After that, those who outlast the phage may develop new immunity and we could return—though the Council of Firsts gives that a low probability.”
