“Yes, Miss Corbin?” Master Rovik growled, sounding as though his patience were being strained with all the questions.
“If this is Etheria, where are all the people who died?” Ceyla’s expression was mild and there was a faint smile on her soft, ruby lips. Her blue eyes contrasted sharply with them, her gaze hard and angry.
“I’m not sure I understand . . .” the Peacekeeper slowly replied. “Everyone is here, alive and well.” He gestured outside the bus to the endless rows of skyscrapers flashing by to either side of them.
“No,” Ceyla shook her head, and now her lips parted in a tight smile that curved contemptuously up on one side. “I mean the ones who died before the Sythians invaded—my grandparents, and great grandparents. Where are they?”
Master Rovik sighed. “They are not here, nor are they anywhere else. We’ve been over this Miss Corbin. The afterlife you are looking for does not exist. If it did, we’d at least be able to see whatever it is that links us from this plane of existence to the next. There would be some evidence of that link.”
“Maybe you just don’t know how to look yet. We didn’t know how to see past cloaking shields. Your very own Omnius exploited that and implanted us all without our knowledge. What if something bigger than Omnius puts a different kind of implant in all of us at birth? What if its something that’s cloaked even from Omnius? If Omnius could fool us because he’s so much smarter, it stands to reason that an entity even smarter and more powerful than him could do the same thing.”
The silence that followed those arguments was palpable. Atton turned back to look at Master Rovik and the rest of the peacekeepers sitting at the front of the bus. Some looked annoyed or angry, but none more so than Master Rovik himself. The man’s blue eyes were full of something that looked all wrong and out of place.
When he’d turned around, Atton had half expected to find the man’s gaze full of compassion and pity for Ceyla’s ignorance and inability to accept the truth. Instead what he saw was raw, raging hatred. There was enough of a threat lurking in the Peacekeeper’s steely blue gaze that Atton was reminded of a deadly predator backed into a corner and ready to pounce.
As the silence wore on, Atton’s insides clenched up in anticipation of something terrible. His heart beat erratically in his chest, and his palms began to sweat. He felt a sudden need to defend Ceyla from the Peacekeeper.
His father beat him to it. “So that’s what you look like when you don’t have all the answers. You don’t look very happy, Blue. Down right crushed. Just watch how you throw that tantrum you’re fantasizing about right now. You touch one hair on that girl’s head and I swear I’ll mess up your pretty face so bad you’ll never want to see a mirror again.”
For a few more seconds, Rovik didn’t so much as twitch, but then he seemed to snap out of it, and the bloody gleam left his eyes as his gaze left Ceyla’s face. “You’d be dead before you even touched me, Martalis,” he said, turning to Ethan.
“Hey, you remembered my name! Martalis. I get it now, Blue. Means mortal in Versal, just like you said. That’s what you call the Nulls, isn’t it?”
“No,” Rovik replied. With that change in topic the last vestiges of cold hatred burning in the Peacekeeper’s eyes seemed to disappear. “By calling you Martalis, I am being polite, referring to you as I would refer to any child in Etheria or Celesta—the word simply means you are not yet immortal because you haven’t made your choice. Calling you a Null, however, is a way of denying your very existence. The word means the same thing to us as it means to Omnius—nothing. A null byte is a byte with the value of zero, and that is exactly how much value you will have once you become a Null.”
Ethan replied with a snort, and Master Rovik smiled ruefully. “You are as lost as anyone I have ever met, Ethan, but Omnius isn’t through with you yet. He is more patient than you realize.” The Peacekeeper’s gaze swept back to Ceyla. “That goes for you as well, Miss Corbin.”
“The feeling’s mutual, Glow Stick.”
Atton had to suppress a laugh at that. The Peacekeepers were strangely bright to look at, thanks to their glowing armor and eyes.
“Cute,” Rovik replied. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I must get on with your tour. No more questions please.” For the most part, the rest of their tour through Etheria passed in silence. Atton watched the sights of the city pass them by, listening with half an ear as Master Rovik described them and explained what they were. He was too distracted to pay much attention. For some reason, he couldn’t get Ceyla’s arguments out of his head.
What if there was a way to prove the existence of something more, some other life beyond the one they were all busy living?
Yet if proof of an afterlife existed, surely a vast super intelligence like Omnius would have found it by now. He’d already been around for thousands of years, and he’d never found anything to suggest that there could be a life after this one. At least, if he had, he hadn’t thought to share that discovery with his people.
But if he truly cares about us, he wouldn’t hide that. And hadn’t Omnius already proven his love for people by saving them from the Sythians and by building a utopia for them?
Then there was the Null Zone—a large, impoverished, and unhappy group of citizens looking for ways to undermine the whole system. If Omnius didn’t love people, he wouldn’t give them a choice.
No, the lie made no sense. What possible motive could Omnius have to hide the real nature of the universe from people? Atton couldn’t think of one. It was easier to accept that Omnius was exactly what he claimed to be, and that he wasn’t hiding anything.
Chapter 18
“What are you hiding, Mr Cavanaugh?” An ugly threat lurked in Captain Covani’s voice.
Destra eyed the big, broad-shouldered man, known so far as Cavanaugh. He stood before them, his hands already bound behind his back with lengths of stun cord. His nose was bleeding, and a set of bloody gashes were torn in his baggy orange prison garb, revealing one muscular upper arm with matching furrows carved into his skin, while the other sleeve was torn away entirely, revealing the shiny silver shell of a cybernetic prosthesis.
Destra thought about the man’s bloody nose and the gash in his arm. She didn’t have to wonder where he’d received those injuries. The gash was consistent with claw marks. Her eyes narrowed on the Gors. At least they hadn’t taken a bite out of him.
“Please, call me Darron,” the broad-shouldered man replied in a breezy tone. “None of my friends call me Cavanaugh.”
“I’m not your friend,” the captain replied.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m not yours, sir, but you broke me out of prison, so that makes you mine. You’ll come around.” He flashed a big smile. “I’m irresistible.”
“Cut the krak. You compromised our rescue operation on Etaris in order to rescue unauthorized persons. I want to know who you really are, and what the frek you thought you were doing,” Covani said, looming close to the prisoner. The effect was no doubt intended to intimidate, but it merely looked comical due to the vast difference between the two mens’ sizes.
The big man’s cheer abruptly vanished. “I already told you who I am.”
“Then you’re going to need some proof, because the man who was supposed to be in your cell was one Edgar Framon, murderer and rapist, serving two consecutive life sentences. I suppose the other prisoners you rescued are equally depraved low-lifes?”
Cavanaugh’s brow furrowed and he shook his head. “If you think I’m Framon, why the frek would you bust me out of there?”
“We only rescued you because the Gor who broke into your cell got the cell number wrong.”
“Seems like it’s my lucky day then.”
“Start talking.”
“Name’s Darron Cavanaugh, just like I told you, sir. Framon along with his crimes is an identity they made up for me when my commanding officer burned us and threw us to the bureaucrats. Have you even thought to look up the name Darron Cavanaugh in any of your databases? Surel
y you still have some records from the old Imperium.”
Covani frowned. “We did look you up, but we didn’t get a match.”
“Really? Not even if you check Sentinels’ databases? The kakards must have done a better job covering up than I thought.”
“Covering up what?” Destra asked.
“You ever hear of the Black Rictans? The Blackies?”
Destra blinked and her eyes widened as that unit name connected to meaning in her head. Back before the Sythian Invasion and the war, the Blackies, or the Black Rictans, had been the most famous squad of sentinels in the Imperium. They had been splashed all over recruitment posters, and their unit was the unit to be in. The faces changed over the years as soldiers died or got promoted and moved on, but the squad had stayed the same, with the same reputation.
Suddenly, Destra found herself scanning the others standing with Cavanaugh. They were all equally big and tough-looking, which was consistent with a squad of elite sentinels. There was just one problem—the Black Rictans had gone down in a blaze of glory during the gener riots on Alista. The Alistans had been fighting over ethical and societal objections to engineering genetically superior children.
“You all died,” Destra said quietly.
“So everyone keeps telling me. Try looking me up again. Sergeant Darron Cavanaugh, serial number 24-1556-6179-8858.”
Captain Covani snapped his fingers to an aide standing beside him.
“Sir?”
“Go find a holo pad and look up that serial number.”
“I have one here, sir. Could you please repeat the number to me, Mr Cavanaugh?”
The broad-shouldered man repeated the string of numbers, and the aide spent a moment tapping them into his pad. Once he had the result, he shook his head and turned the pad so Covani could see. Destra peered over the captain’s shoulder to get a look.
“Name, classified,” Covani began, reading the dossier aloud. “Division, ISSA, Sentinels. Rank, Master Sergeant. Unit, classified.” Covani looked up with a patient smile. “You know what that tells me, Cavanaugh? You knew a Sentinel, and somehow you got him to tell you his serial number.”
“Can someone reach into my pants?” Cavanaugh asked.
“You think this is a joke?” The captain gestured to all of the other prisoners standing with them in the hangar. “You put all of these men’s lives in jeopardy with your actions. I’d let them decide your fate, but I don’t want to encourage their darker sides any more than I have to.” At that a few angry looks turned Cavanaugh’s way.
“It’s no joke, Captain. Release my bonds and I’ll show you what I mean.”
Covani’s eyes narrowed quickly. After a brief pause he gave a quick nod and took a long step back. “Release him.” Destra and the others retreated to a safe distance with the captain, and watched warily as a pair of sentinels stepped forward, their weapons drawn and ready. One of them aimed a small remote at Cavanaugh and pressed a button. There came a click and the man’s stun cords clattered to the ground, deactivated and inert. Cavanaugh relaxed his arms and took a moment to roll his big shoulders.
“Get on with it, Framon,” the captain said.
They watched as he reached into his pants and fiddled around for a moment. Covani didn’t look amused.
“There we go . . .” the prisoner said, and he produced a small, shiny silver chip. Destra recognized it as a soldier’s ID tag. Wrist-embedded Identichips were ubiquitous to everyone in the Imperium, but Sentinels also wore a secondary piece of ID around their necks that was nearly indestructible. ID tags contained a few bytes of basic data hard-coded into their molecular structure, rather than digitally encoded in a more fragile format. That was in case, say, a plasma grenade burned the sentinel in question to atomic ash and his regular identichip didn’t survive.
“My ID tag,” the prisoner said, holding it out to the captain. One of the sentinels stepped forward and cautiously took the tag, his eyes and weapon on Cavanaugh the entire time. The sentinel retreated, backing up until he could pass the tag to the captain.
Destra watched as the captain’s aide scanned the chip with his holo pad. Another few lines appeared on the pad.
Cavanaugh
Darron A.
24-1556-6179-8858ISSA
Blood Type: O+
Religion: Agnostic
“Where did you get this?” Captain Covani demanded.
“With respect, sir, where do you think I got it?”
Destra shook her head. There was no way a prisoner had managed to create that tag to support his phony story. It was equally unlikely that he’d found a way to read it, or that the real Darron Cavanaugh had told Edgar his serial number before Edgar had killed him and stolen his ID tag.
“You said something about a cover up?” Covani asked, taking a step closer to the prisoner.
“That’s right. Alista was just to get the public eye off us. We weren’t even there. We went on a highly-classified mission instead. To the Getties Cluster.”
Destra blinked. “When was this?”
“Oh, about five years before the Imperium built the space lane between the two galaxies. Six years before their official, inaugural mission went there and stirred up a krakload of Sythians.”
“Why would anyone want to cover up your mission?”
“Because our mission went to a different sector of the Getties. Our report was used as the primary reason to open a space lane for Imperial expansion into the Getties. In the six months we spent exploring, we didn’t find any Sythians. Or at least, we didn’t think so at the time.”
Captain Covani crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on.”
“We found Noctune and the Gors, sir. Our exploration was limited to the sector around Noctune, but we found nothing to suggest civilization. Our xenobiologist classified the Gors as a type zero civilization. Primitive hunter-gatherers. We found evidence in our geological surveys to conclude that Noctune was once much warmer with a much brighter and stronger sun. Something catastrophic happened that diminished the power and likely the mass of their sun.”
“Skip the Gor history lesson and get to the point, Cavanaugh.”
“Yes, sir. As I said we encountered no sentient life besides the Gors. We explored several solar systems in depth and found most of them contained sterile ice balls even less habitable than Noctune.
“A few worlds had basic flora and fauna, but the Gors were the only intelligent species we found. Our long range probes found more of the same. The Getties was dark and cold, and unoccupied by any kind of advanced civilization that we could detect.”
“Then explain the Sythians to me, Sergeant,” Covani replied.
“I’m getting to that, sir. Based on our report when we returned one year later, the government began funding a space lane to connect the two galaxies. My recommendation was that another more extensive mission be sent before any conclusions be drawn about whether or not the Getties was safe and open for Imperial expansion. The brass ignored me, and rather than funding another mission, work began on the space lane to the Getties.
“But rather than put the lane through to Noctune and the system we’d already cleared as safe, some krak-for-brains committee decided we should put the lane through to a more habitable system that we had yet to fully explore. Well you all know the rest of the story. No sooner had we finished the space lane than we ran into Sythians on the other side.”
Destra shook her head. “A testament to human arrogance.”
Cavanaugh snorted and went on. “At the time our unit was assigned to another undercover op. We were recalled to join the war, but rather than join the fight, we were taken straight to Etaris without trial or explanation. We found out when we arrived that our identichips had somehow been altered and we were now convicted felons with false names. Suffice to say no one believed us when we arrived. Our uniforms and weapons were confiscated along with our ID tags. You don’t want to know what I had to do to keep mine.”
At that, the captain glanced dist
astefully at the metal chip lying in his palm.
“The prison warden was in on it, so he didn’t let us say anything to anyone who mattered, and the guards figured we were all crazy.”
“So someone buried you all to make sure no one ever held them accountable for letting the Sythians into our galaxy.”
“That’s right. I guess back then they still thought we might win the war.” Cavanaugh flashed a nasty grin. “But the ones who burned us ended up dying in the war, while we all survived here in Dark Space. Irony’s a kakard,” Cavanaugh said, chuckling.
Captain Covani didn’t look amused. “We’re going to have to verify your story by running the serial numbers of the rest of your men.”
“Not a problem,” Cavanaugh said.
“If everything checks out, the Black Rictans will be officially reinstated with a public pardon—public in this case being the officers on this ship.”
“That’s more than I could have hoped for, sir.”
Covani nodded and Destra watched as he turned to speak to the entire group of prisoners they’d rescued. “As for the rest of you, you will be riding in the brig under close watch until we can determine who, if anyone, should receive a pardon for their crimes. You will also all be subjected to medical examinations and interrogations to ascertain whether or not you have yet been brain-washed into becoming Sythian slaves. If you are cleared, you’ll soon pay your debt to society by helping us rebuild on a new world. That will be all.” Turning back to Cavanaugh he said, “Unfortunately, Sergeant, you and your men will also have to go through the exams.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Good. Dismissed.” Covani saluted the sergeant and turned on his heel to head back the way they’d come. Destra caught up to him a second later.
“Sir,” she whispered.
“What is it, Councilor?”
“I need to discuss something with you.”
“Can it wait? I’m running short on sleep, and I’m long overdue for a hot meal.”
“So am I. I could join you in your office for a meal and we can discuss our next steps.”
Dark Space: Avilon Page 22
