The Peacekeeper ignored it and pushed himself off the ground to point a finger at Preston. “Bliss is illegal. What are you doing putting it in beer?”
“What, so now Peacekeepers are being sent to do Enforcers’ work? Mind your own business, Non.”
“I should report you.”
“You should leave.”
“What’s Bliss?” Ethan asked, even though the word had already dredged up a definition in his brain, courtesy of the information Omnius had fed them all while they slept. Bliss was a performance enhancing stim that made people stronger, faster, and smarter—the stim to end all stims—and one in every five Nulls was addicted to it.
Ethan turned to his father, suddenly seeing him with new eyes. Preston was agitated all right, his hands clenching and unclenching, his eyes darting, his lips twisted into an angry sneer. He looked ready to explode at any moment.
Ethan felt some of that same restless, angry energy flowing through his veins. The clarity of mind and euphoria he’d felt earlier had come at a price. Forcing himself to calm down, he took a few deep breaths and shook his head. “Dad,” he managed.
“What?”
“Why are you living down here?”
“In the Null Zone? Because Omnius is a control freak who wants everyone to be on their best behavior all the time.”
“No, I can understand that, but why are you here. This is free housing, your furniture is free, your food is free. You don’t pay for anything do you?”
“Sure I do. You think that brew you wasted didn’t cost something to make?”
“Do you sell any?”
“Well . . . I’m not set up for mass production. Not yet. Have to perfect the recipe first. You could help me!” He took another hasty gulp of his beer, part of which missed his mouth and dribbled down his chin.
Ethan shook his head, feeling violated. “You should have warned me you were giving me stims.”
“Then you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about! You wouldn’t get how important this is.” Preston walked up to him, his eyes wide and wild. He held up his half-empty bottle and shook it in front of Ethan’s face. “This stuff is better than what you’ll find on the streets. Fewer side effects! Tastes better, too! We could make a fortune! You and me, son! Think about it!”
“I need to go, Dad.”
Preston’s eyes flashed angrily, but then they darted sideways to the Peacekeeper, and he nodded, offering them a tight smile. “You’ll be back,” he said, turning away, and then—“He’ll be b-back . . .” Preston whispered to himself, stuttering like a pro.
Ethan felt himself being pushed and shoved back the way they’d come. He felt a fiery flash of annoyance at that, but he resisted the urge to turn on Rovik again.
Once outside his father’s apartment, Ethan turned to the Peacekeeper and asked, “Why didn’t you warn me?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know. Omnius only told me after you’d had your first few sips. I suspect he wanted you to know what it feels like.”
“Why? So he can make me an addict, too?”
“No, so that when you choose to become a Null you don’t end up like your father.”
That cooled his jets. Ethan looked away quickly and made an irritated noise in the back of his throat. “Let’s go. My wife’s waiting.”
“Of course.”
All the way back to the mansion where he’d been staying at the top of Destiny Tower, Ethan tried to convince himself that he would never end up like his father. He told himself that the entire trip had been a waste of time. Just because he’d been a stim runner in the past didn’t mean he would become a stim user. That was entirely different.
He was different.
One in five nulls is an addict, he thought, remembering the statistic that was apparently common knowledge on Avilon. Why so many?
Ethan didn’t want to dwell on it, but his mind was still clear as crystal and working twice as fast as usual, so ignorance wasn’t an option. If Bliss made a man stronger, faster, and smarter than he’d otherwise be, it stood to reason that regular citizens would have a hard time competing with all the Bliss-doped addicts, and that would force more people to start using. In a world as overcrowded as Avilon, having a competitive edge wasn’t just good business—
It was key for survival.
Chapter 15
“We detect incoming vessels, My Lords!” One of the diminutive Kylians called out in a high, reedy voice from the crew pit below the command deck.
“Report!” High Lord Kaon hissed from where he sat in Lady Kala’s seat aboard the mighty Kyra—her command ship. Rather than wait for the report, Lady Kala herself flew down to the crew pit and spoke quickly in hushed tones with her sensor operator.
Kaon’s wide blue eyes narrowed swiftly. He had commandeered Lady Kala’s ship, but clearly her crew was still more loyal to her than him.
A moment later Lady Kala flew back up to retake her seat beside him on the command deck.
“Our reinforcements arrive,” she said.
“So sssoon?” Lord Shondar asked from Kaon’s other side.
Kaon brought up a star map and watched the red friendly blips begin melting out of the icy nebula at the entrance of Dark Space. Wave upon wave of Sythian cruisers poured out of the nebula until space was crowded with warships.
Kaon felt his twin hearts accelerate, flushing his skin with a pale lavender heat. Beside him Shondar bared his black teeth and hissed with pleasure.
“Make contact with the new clusters, and have them join our formation,” Kaon said.
“Yess, My Lord,” the comms operator said. “We establish contact. . . . They request to look upon us.”
“Transmit a visual,” Kaon replied.
The starlight shining in through the bridge’s star dome was replaced by a dark view into another bridge deck, almost identical to the one where they sat. In the center of it sat a small Sythian in an over-sized command chair. “Greetings, I am Queen Tavia,” she said in a smooth voice. “I trust I am not too late to save you from the terrifying humans.” Tavia’s papery black skin and bright red eyes were trademarks of her sub species. She was a Kylian like Lady Kala, but she was no mere Lady, she was the queen of her people. Tavia smiled, revealing two neat rows of needle-sharp teeth.
Kaon’s eyes began to itch. He did not appreciate being condescended to, but when faced with the queen of all the Kylians, he had little choice but to accept the shame her words brought to him. “You are not late, My Queen.”
“Good. As you might guess, I am here at Mighty Shallah’s request . . .” She trailed off, letting that sink in. “To replace you, of course.”
“Of course,” Kaon replied, bowing his head. “We have made many preparations for the enemy already, but I am sure that with your superior leadership we—”
“Forget your preparations. I come to you with a weapon that shall make all of your plans obsolete.”
“A weapon?”
“Yess. The Avilonians have cloaking shields, just as we do, yet it would appear that they can see through ours, and we cannot pierce theirs. This has since changed.”
“We can detect cloaked vessels?” Kaon’s mind whirled as he considered the tactical advantage that would give them. The Avilonians would fly in assuming they were invisible when in fact they were not.
“They shall come expecting to have the element of surprise, when in fact they fly blithely into our trap. We must hurry to install these new sensors in your existing clusters. How long do we have before the Avilonians come for us?”
“I do not know,” Kaon admitted. “We do not even know for certain that they do come. I have been unable to contact my agent in Avilon.”
“I see. Well, if they do not come, then we shall go to them.” Queen Tavia smiled her needle-sharp smile once more. “For glory,” she said.
“For glory!” Kaon replied.
Kaon risked glancing up, and he noticed that something had caught Queen Tavia’s attention. Her head had turned as if she
were looking past them. “Interesting,” she said, and her eyes found Kaon’s once more. “I appear to have found the fleet you lost, Lord Kaon.”
At that, Kaon’s gills flared and he sat up straighter in his command chair. “Where?”
“Right above your head, and they are with a cloaked human vessel . . . no . . . three human vessels,” Tavia said, looking past them again, no doubt studying a star map. “They are oblivious to the fact that we can see them slinking away.”
“We must strike!”
“You shall do nothing!” Queen Tavia spat at the screen, her red eyes shining fiercely in the purplish gloom of her bridge. “Nothing, but watch and learn,” she went on, her voice becoming smooth and calm once more. “I wouldn’t want you to lose another command ship.”
The contact ended, and Kaon was left blinking in shock. Lady Kala shot him a look. Her expression was inscrutable, but he felt certain she was being smug. He had commandeered her command ship, but her queen had just commandeered Kaon’s entire armada.
* * *
Bretton gaped at the scene before him. “I don’t understand . . .” They had been on Avilon in the heart of the Null Zone just moments ago. Now they were on the bridge of an old venture-class cruiser.
“What’s not to understand?” Marla asked.
Bretton turned to her and studied her black ISSF uniform. “You’re a captain,” he said, his eyes once again finding the gold star emblazoned on her shoulder.
She nodded once. “And so are you.”
“I was,” he corrected. “That was a long time ago.”
“You know more about these ships than any of us. We need you.”
“Wait . . . ships?” Bretton’s eyes widened appreciably. “You have more?”
“Only two. This beauty here is the Tempest. Our other ship is the Emancipator, but she’s still being refitted.”
“You’re in command of this one?”
“Technically this is Admiral Vee’s ship, but I’m in command whenever she’s not on deck.”
“Admiral Vee?”
“You haven’t met her yet. She’s with the prisoner.”
“This is ridiculous,” Farah said. “You’re all out here playing soldier, building your little fleet so that you can do what exactly? Swoop in to save the day and liberate the Nulls with all two of your ships?”
“Never despise humble beginnings, Commander,” Marla replied.
“I’m not a commander,” Farah said.
“That’s up to you.”
Bretton heard his niece snort, but she left it at that.
“Come with me,” Marla said. “The admiral would like to meet you.”
They followed her back the way they’d come, walking back through the circular chamber with the quantum junction to a familiar bank of lift tubes. They’d set up the junction right outside the bridge, no doubt so resistance members could jump directly in and out of the ship’s nerve center rather than waste time with lift tubes and long corridors. A few seconds later, they found themselves in just such a lift tube, and after that, walking down one of those long corridors.
Bretton passed the time wondering where they might be in space. Where would the resistance hide an illegal fleet? Better yet, where in the netherworld had they found it?
They reached the ship’s med center and hurried through a pair of sliding transpiranium doors. A corpsman waited for them on the other side. He saluted briskly and told them to follow him.
Another long corridor brought them to one of the ward rooms. The door swished open and they walked into a room crowded with medical equipment both old and new. In the center of the room was a stretcher with their prisoner laid out and strapped down. He was writhing and frothing at the mouth as if he were in great pain. Clustered around him were no less than three officers and two medics. One of the officers, Bretton noted, was wearing a Supreme Admiral’s uniform, with four gold stars arrayed in a diamond on her shoulder.
Bretton approached the table cautiously and stopped to salute the admiral when she turned to see him. “Ma’am,” he said.
“At ease, Captain.”
The admiral was no less stunning than Captain Marla Picara. Her refined features, and large, faintly glowing green eyes belonged to a young model, not a battle-hardened admiral, but Bretton assumed that she, like him, had descended from Etheria, and her physical beauty was just an unwelcome reminder that some vital element of her humanity had long ago been stolen. Her blond hair was tucked up under an admiral’s cap that he had to struggle to remember. As an Avilonian, she couldn’t have known the hat that went with her old Imperial uniform was reserved for formal occasions and not daily wear.
“I trust you’ve already briefed Captain Hale?” the admiral asked, turning to Captain Picara.
The other woman nodded. “Yes, Ma’am.”
On the table before them, Donali stopped writhing long enough to shout something unintelligible at them.
“What did he say?” Bretton asked.
“I believe he’s cursing at us in Sythian. He’s been trying to call home ever since we woke him up, but this ship is fitted with quantum disruptors, just in case Omnius figures out where we are and tries to jump a battalion of drones on board.”
Bretton’s eyebrows shot up, wondering why they would need quantum field disruptors to stop him from contacting the Sythians. “I hadn’t realized Sythians have quantum tech.”
“Just comms,” Admiral Vee said, turning to him. “We analyzed the data you brought us. He’s a Sythian all right, but there’s a lot more to it than that.”
Bretton waited for her to go on, but he noticed the admiral’s gaze slip past him to his niece. “Miss Hale, would you please excuse us for a moment?”
Farah looked up, wondering why she’d been singled out. Then she caught on. “Oh sure, keep your secrets. I don’t care.”
She left in a huff with the corpsman who’d escorted them to Donali’s room leaving with her. Neither of them had the clearance to hear what the admiral was about to say. Bretton watched Farah go with a frown, wondering why she was still treating the resistance like a lost cause even after learning about their access to a quantum junction and their hidden fleet.
“Captain . . .” the admiral began.
It took a moment for Bretton to realize she was speaking to him. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“This agent you brought us was the right hand man of a distinguished admiral in the fleet, perhaps you knew him—Admiral Hoff Heston.”
Bretton blinked. “He was my commanding officer. I was attached to the 5th Fleet when I died.” He glanced over his shoulder to the door by which his niece had left. “Both of us were.”
“I know. Commander Donali—back then Lieutenant Donali—knew both of you by name.”
Bretton shook his head, not catching the significance of that.
“Admiral Heston was actually an immortal Avilonian, living in exile in the Imperium.”
“What?” Bretton couldn’t believe that. “That doesn’t make sense. He was old.”
“A long time ago, things were different in Avilon. People were immortal not because their bodies were engineered to live forever, but because they cloned themselves over and over again, always transferring to a new clone before they died.”
“Back when Heston lived on Avilon, Omnius didn’t exist, and neither did the nulls. Everyone was immortal, and it was believed that allowing mortals and immortals to coexist would have disastrous consequences. When Heston proposed that the council was wrong about that, they tried to kill him and he fled to the Imperium. His XO here—” Admiral Vee turned to indicate Commander Donali. “—found out that he was an Avilonian. Rather than find a way to shut him up, Heston made Donali immortal, too, which is why he has an older version of a Lifelink implant. The Sythian implant sitting beside it is some type of quantum transmitter. We believe the Sythians are using it to keep in touch with their agent.”
“He should have a Lifelink from Omnius, too,” Bretton said. “Everyone in
the Imperium was implanted. How did Donali escape that?”
“At the end of the war, Heston’s fleet ran and hid along the edge of the galaxy for several years. The original Lieutenant Donali was killed by Sythians during that time, and his clone obviously never received one of Omnius’s implants.”
Bretton’s eyes widened with understanding. “That explains why Omnius didn’t find and capture him before I did.”
“Yes, we are lucky you found him first.”
Bretton still felt like he was missing something. Abruptly he realized what that was. “Wait a minute. That means the original Donali who died . . .”
“Is somewhere on Avilon right now, but he’s not a Sythian spy, so we don’t have to worry.”
“No, I suppose not,” Bretton agreed.
At that, Admiral Vee’s eyes seemed to drift out of focus, and Bretton realized she was studying something that had appeared on her ARCs. Her smooth forehead wrinkled with concern, and her eyes focused on him once more.
“We need to get to the bridge.”
“What’s wrong?”
Admiral Vee and the pair of officers accompanying her were already on their way out of the ward room. “Keep the prisoner sedated!” she called over her shoulder as she left.
One of the medics attending Donali nodded. Captain Marla Picara turned. “We’d better go,” she said.
They hurried to catch up with the Admiral.
Farah was waiting for them outside the med center. “Now can we get something to eat?” she asked, her eyes on Captain Picara. Again, the captain ignored her.
“Hey!” Farah said.
The admiral and her entourage broke into a brisk jog, and Bretton ran to catch up. “What’s the hurry?” Farah called after him.
He jogged up beside the admiral. “Ma’am, what’s going on?” he tried again.
“Sythians, that’s what. They’re on the move.”
“Sythians? They’re here?”
Admiral Vee shot him a look. “Do you even know where here is, Captain?”
He shook his head. “No, Ma’am.”
The admiral smiled, and her green eyes glittered. “We’re in Dark Space, surveilling the enemy fleet.”
Dark Space: Avilon Page 18
