Dark Space: Avilon

by Jasper T. Scott

  The door opened to reveal the smiling face of Master Blue Cape, A.K.A. Strategian Rovik himself, already dressed in his shining armor. His blue eyes were glinting rather than glowing in the broad light of day. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Go frek yourself,” Ethan replied. “We’re kind of in the middle of something here, and we’re not even dressed—you mind giving us some privacy? Oh—wait, you don’t know what that is here. Let me see if I can explain. . . . It’s where you and everyone else keep their noses out of my krak! Does that sum it up for you?”

  Master Rovik’s smile faded. “Omnius warned me about you,” he said, striding quietly into the room, as if gliding on air.

  “He did, did he? Well, why don’t you warn him for me: next time, ask permission before you go poking around in my head.”

  “You already gave him permission.”

  “The frek I did!”

  “When you came here. Uninvited.”

  “You invited me!”

  “Not I. Another strategian.”

  “Same krak, Blue.”

  Rovik shook his head, “Please stop cursing, and no, it’s not the same. You sought us out. Your intention was to find us, and now you have, but even after arriving here, in a strange land, you insist on having everything your way, trying to force your ideas and your culture on us. Well, I’m afraid you can’t have your way here, Ethan. We have our own ways. Now stop acting like a spoiled child and follow me. Breakfast is ready.”

  The Peacekeeper turned on his heel and stormed away, his flowing blue cape swirling as he went.

  Now who’s being a child, Ethan thought but didn’t say. The door swished shut.

  “I’m as upset as you,” Alara whispered, rubbing his arm. “But he’s right. We don’t get to make the rules here. We’re lucky they’re offering to accept us and make us a part of their society. Here we’ll be safe from the Sythians. We’ll be free to live our lives in peace! Isn’t that worth losing some of our privacy?”

  Ethan turned to her. “We’ll be free from fear of the Sythians, but chained and restricted in every other way that matters. I think I liked Dark Space better.”

  “Ethan! He can hear you.”

  “Apparently Omnius already knows what I’m thinking, so I don’t need to spare his feelings with what I say.”

  “Maybe you should try,” she said gently. “Let’s at least see what life is like here before we insist that our way is better. They’re giving us a week to choose how to live here, and to choose whether or not we want Omnius to be a part of our lives. That doesn’t sound like a malign force trying to hurt us. Love doesn’t force itself on anyone. Love waits patiently to be returned. The way I waited for you.”

  Ethan’s scowl softened. “That’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it? If Omnius were so oppressive and bad, wouldn’t he just force us to choose him, or do away with the people who don’t?”

  “Who says he doesn’t? He made a real live netherworld just for them.”

  “Ethan, has it ever occurred to you that a lot of the bad things in our lives are a product of our own bad choices? It occurred to Omnius. That’s why he wants to help us make the right choices.”

  “Alara . . .”

  “Shhh. Just promise me you’ll go into this with an open mind.”

  Ethan struggled with that. He didn’t want to lie to his wife.

  “Promise me, Ethan. Do it for us. All three of us,” she said, grabbing his hand and placing it over her belly.

  He half expected to feel a kick, but there was nothing. “We don’t even know if it’s a girl or a boy, yet,” he said, dismay creeping into his voice.

  “I bet Master Rovik can help us, if you’d be nice for a change . . .”

  “Hey, I’m nice.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him. “To me you are. Sometimes.”

  He affected a wry smile and leaned in for a kiss. She gave him a short peck on the lips before withdrawing.

  “We’d better get dressed. I’m so hungry I almost haven’t noticed how sick I feel.”

  “Sick? Are you okay?” he asked.

  Her eyebrows shot up with that question. “Morning sickness, remember?”

  “Right,” he said, sending her an apologetic look. “We’d better ask about that, too. If doctors here can stop people from dying, they must have found a way to make pregnancy more fun.”

  “That’s the spirit. Keep thinking like that.”

  “Sure thing, Kiddie.”

  Alara rose from the bed and stretched. He eyed her appreciatively, her naked backside stirring him to life.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked, casting a sly look over her shoulder.

  “The view,” he said through a smile.

  “View’s out the window—behind you.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  She laughed and padded across the floor to the on-suite bathroom. He watched her go, his smile fading by degrees.

  Somehow she’d missed the fact that he hadn’t promised to be open-minded. Although technically Omnius had made open-mindedness a foregone conclusion with his nightly probing. The trick here is not being open-minded.

  Ethan had a feeling that wasn’t going to be easy.

  Chapter 5

  Bretton Hale raced toward the Imperial officer, but came to a skidding stop when he saw the man fall beneath the onslaught of no less than a dozen Psychos wielding makeshift clubs and bony fists. He didn’t have much time. He rushed forward once more, his footsteps concealed by the noise the gang of Bliss addicts was making, and his presence concealed by his armor’s cloaking shield. He raised his arms, palms outstretched as he approached, and mentally cycled through weapons in his armor. He settled on the standard issue Peacekeeper suppressors, which had come with his borrowed suit of armor.

  Bretton opened fire and his cloaking shield automatically disengaged to prevent an overdraw from the suit’s aging power cell.

  He grabbed the nearest pair of Psychos in the grav field projected by the suppressors. Still running, he flung them to either side by spreading his arms like a bird about to take flight. The pair of stim addicts went skidding through the dust, fetching up against nearby shanties. They didn’t rise to their feet. Peacekeeper suppressors were almost identical to Imperial grav guns, but much more powerful.

  The remaining Psychos turned as one to greet him, their bloodshot eyes reflecting sharp, glinting tongues of flame from the nearby bonfire. They snarled at him like wild rictans and charged. He flung two more aside before they reached him, and then dirty fingernails began clawing at his mirror-smooth, diamond-hard armor.

  He electrified his suit and the Psychos fell away screaming. Reaching the fallen Imperial, Bretton took just a moment to assess the man’s injuries before deciding that it didn’t matter; there wasn’t any time to waste. He picked up the Imperial with one arm, using the suit’s augmented strength, and then slung him over his shoulder with a grunt of effort.

  “Bret! Check your six!” Farah warned over the comms.

  He spun around just in time to see a rushing wave of madness—a hundred or more Psychos, coming at him. He’d stirred the buzz flies’ nest to life. Bretton checked his power levels. Just five percent left. Good for a few more suppressor blasts or a minute or two of cloaking, but he couldn’t cloak both him and the Imperial, and he couldn’t send a hundred Psychos skidding away with just a few suppressor blasts. It would take a full squad of Peacekeepers to fend off this onslaught.

  Thinking fast, Bretton looked up. He saw the rickety remains of what had once been a fire escape clinging to the rising wall of the nearest skyscraper. It looked like the stairs hadn’t been used or maintained in decades. He hoped they would hold his weight.

  Raising one arm above his head, he fired the suppressor and there came a sharp jerk on his arm, pulling him up. He kept his other arm on the unconscious man slung over his shoulder. The ground began to drop away underfoot. Then the bestial mass of humanity reached him. A few Psy
chos leapt off their fellows’ shoulders with what had to be Bliss-induced strength. Two grabbed on to his boots and hung tight. He was about to electrify his armor again to shake them loose when he remembered the man draped over his shoulder.

  Cursing, Bretton kicked his feet, trying to shake the Psychos free. One of them tried to bite him, but didn’t make it past his armor. Bretton reached the fire escape and grabbed on to the nearest railing with the arm he’d been using to grapple up. Dangling from the railing by one arm, with the combined weight of him, the Imperial, and two Psychos, the railing began to bend with a warning shriek of metal.

  One handed, he wrangled the unconscious Imperial off his shoulder and onto the fire escape landing. The pair of Psychos clinging to his boots abandoned their attempts to bite through his armor. Now they climbed him like a ladder, trying to get at their original target—the unarmored Imperial. Bretton shuddered to think what they had in mind for him.

  He hit the first one with a suppressor blast from his free arm, and that Psycho went flying, falling backward, jaws snapping, limbs flailing, and eyes wild. He landed on a shanty three stories below and squashed it flat. A warning blaat sounded inside Bretton’s helmet, and he noted that his suit’s power supply was now at critical levels. Power would fail at any second, and soon he would feel the full weight of his armor as the suit’s power-assist went offline.

  The second Psycho scrambled up Bretton’s legs and sprang off his shoulders, landing in a crouch on the fire escape beside the fallen Imperial. He flashed Bretton a wicked grin of rotting teeth and licked his lips as he gazed down at his prey. Acting on instinct, Bretton aimed another suppressor blast at him, and the psycho went flying into the nearest wall. He hit with a crunch of bone grinding against ancient bactcrete walls that were as heavy and solid as any rock. The Psycho’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed.

  Then, suddenly, power-assist failed and Bretton felt the full weight of his armor jerking him toward the ground. The arm he had wrapped around the railings shuddered, and he nearly lost his grip.

  “Bret! Are you okay?”

  “No!” Bretton growled. Cursing once more, he crawled through the railings to lie panting between the Imperial and the fallen Psycho. Powered systems were failing fast now, but at least his comms were still online.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  “Not yet, but I’m tapped out. Systems are going offline. You’d better get down here before this animal wakes up and tears us both apart.”

  “Already ahead of you, boss.”

  A sharp whistling noise reached his ears via his helmet’s aural sensors and he looked up to see their air car hovering down beside the fire escape.

  “Good,” he grunted, struggling to rise despite the weight of his armor. He managed to regain his footing, but the prospect of either dragging or carrying the Imperial was too much. “Mind giving me a hand with our cargo?”

  “I’ll be right there,” Farah replied.

  * * *

  City lights flashed by to either side of the air car as Farah raced away from the Psycho den. Bretton sat in the copilot’s seat, wearing a plain black under suit. His Peacekeeper armor with its depleted power core lay in a gleaming pile in the back of the hover, while the man they’d rescued lay on the back seat, bleeding from myriad injuries, but still breathing. He was unconscious from a blow to the head, but at least he wasn’t bleeding out.

  “Where to?” Farah asked from the pilot’s seat beside him.

  Bretton considered that, frowning over his shoulder at their mysterious passenger. “Let’s take him to Dag.”

  “We don’t even know if he wants to be a Null.”

  “Well, we can’t ask him without Omnius realizing he hasn’t gone through The Choosing yet. Peacekeepers will come and get him before we have a chance to learn anything.”

  “What are you hoping to learn? Never mind—it doesn’t matter. He’s not our problem, Bret. Tara Halls, remember? She’s our meal ticket, and she’s the one we were sent to find—not some runaway survivor from the war.”

  Bretton shook his head. “We can get back to chasing rich brats another day. Right now, we need to find out more about this guy. How did he get here? What’s going on in the rest of the galaxy? Where did he come from, and are there any other survivors? Those are things the Resistance needs to know.”

  “The Resistance doesn’t pay our rent, Bret.”

  “They could if we enlist.”

  “I don’t want you to get yourself killed.”

  “You remember what you told me about why you enlisted in the ISSF all those years ago?”

  “That was another lifetime. A lot’s changed since then.”

  “You said everybody dies, but not everybody dies well.”

  “I’ve already died well. Maybe this time around I want to live.”

  “So why did you join me in the Null Zone? You could have stayed a Peacekeeper, lived forever in Etheria.”

  “I don’t want to die of boredom either. This way I got the best of both. I’m forever young, immortal, and I don’t have to live in an insufferably perfect paradise.”

  Bretton snorted. They’d both been resurrected by Omnius when they died near the end of the war. After that, they’d become Peacekeepers in the hopes of rejoining the fight against the Sythians. Instead, they’d been sent around Avilon chasing crime before it happened. That might have been good enough, but Bretton hadn’t been resurrected alone. His wife had already been on Avilon waiting for him when he’d arrived. Almost nine years after that happy reunion, something terrible happened, and Bretton had left her, paradise, and Peacekeeping for good in order to become a Null. His niece, Farah, had followed him for reasons only known to her. And both of them had taken a souvenir with them from Etheria—they had already been resurrected. That meant they had perfect clone bodies and they would never die of old age. Of course, in a place as dangerous as the Null Zone, old age probably wouldn’t have killed them anyway.

  “Well, if we’re going to get him de-linked, then you’d better stun him before he wakes up,” Farah said. “Dag will kill us if we bring him a live wire.”

  Bretton opened a dash compartment and withdrew a hefty pistol. Setting the weapon to stun, he turned it on the back seat and pulled the trigger. A dull screech sounded, and a flash of blue light dazzled his eyes.

  “That should keep him from waking up until Dag’s through with him.”

  “What if he gets upset when he finds out he could have lived forever in paradise?”

  “Too bad. I saved his life. That means I’m calling the shots. Besides, if I’m right about him being from the Imperium, he won’t even know what he’s missing until we’ve already gotten all our answers from him.”

  “That’s cold, Bret. Even for you.”

  “It’s a cold world. Getting colder every day. When’s the last time you saw the sun?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He shook his head. “Down here we don’t have the luxury of being soft. There’s more lives at stake than his.”

  Farah grew silent at that. Bretton watched the endless night of the city flicker by them in a blur of colorful light and starkly-drawn shadows. Air traffic raced ahead of them in orderly, auto-piloted lines, red tail lights shining crimson in the gloom of the under city.

  Farah turned off the autopilot and peeled away from the main artery of traffic to get to Dag’s place. Dag managed to avoid trouble with the law by living on the surface. Down there, organized crime was the law.

  Bretton set his pistol from stun to kill and withdrew a utility belt and holster from the dash compartment. He buckled the belt and holstered the weapon on his hip, looking up just in time to see them plunge down through a thick wall of filthy gray fog. The lights of the city disappeared, becoming dim, amorphous balls of light. Farah turned on a sensor overlay so they could still see their surroundings. Outlines of buildings and structures raced by, projected on the forward viewport in shades of blue and green.r />
  They reached the surface and flew along a crumbling street, hovering just a few feet above the ground. At this level, the buildings were mostly dark. A few neon signs or holographic displays flickered through the gloom, and some shady-looking pedestrians walked the streets. The city was always alive, even down here, but these weren’t the kind of people you’d like to say hello to.

  “You didn’t tell Dag you were coming, did you?” Farah asked.

  “No, when would I have had a chance to do that?”

  “He doesn’t like drop-ins.”

  “He’s going to have to. He owes me.”

  Farah snorted. “If you say so.” After a few more minutes of flying, she said, “We’re almost there. You want me to park on the street and wait, or should I go in with you?”

  “Can’t risk getting our ride jacked. You’d better stay. Keep her running.”

  “Sure thing. Want me to get us something to eat while I wait?”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “All right.” She pulled to a stop along a particularly dark section of the street and turned to him with her hand held out expectantly. “Twenty bytes.”

  Bretton eyed her palm. “What? You don’t have twenty bytes?”

  Farah shook her head. “I’m broke.”

  “We’re broke,” he amended.

  “You want to eat or not?”

  “Put it on credit,” he growled, opening the passenger’s side door and climbing out into the murky gray soup. Farah called something after him, but he shut the door before he heard what it was. Outside, the air was damp and cold, rich with fetid smells. Bretton took a quick look around, eyes scanning the shifting gray clouds of moisture. Neon signs from bars, nightclubs, and casinos set the fog aglow in all the colors of the rainbow, peeling away the gloom with halos of blurry light. He checked in a full 360 degrees, his hand ready on the butt of his sidearm.

  The street was deserted.

  So far so good.

  He opened the rear passenger’s side door and immediately heard Farah again.