Brak hissed. “It is dark. A perfect match requires better lighting.”
“Or the right person,” Lucien replied. “Unless someone’s found a way to bring the dead back to life without going through the Res. Center, I’d say we just hit a dead end.” Lucien blew out a breath and checked the time on his ARCs—it was ten PM. “We spent six hours sitting here—for nothing! Did you even get a look at what was in the case?”
“No.”
Lucien rubbed tired eyes and shook his head. “Great.”
“This is not for nothing. The patient hunter always catches his prey. We need more time if we are to catch Coretti.”
Lucien glanced at Brak with bleary eyes. “What I need is a vacation.”
Brak hissed and looked away. “You would not make a good hunter.”
“Good thing I prefer my meat grown in a vat.”
Brak gave no reply to that, and Lucien ordered the car’s driver program to take them home.
After a few minutes of racing down the dark alleys and streets of Astralis’s sub levels, they emerged on the surface and flew up to five hundred meters, out over the frozen landscape of Winterside—trees laden with snow, rooftops white, ski hills lit up with spotlights and hover lifts carrying late night skiers back up, while others raced down: an endless loop on repeat.
Lucien shivered at the sight of all that snow, thanking his luck that he and Tyra could afford a place in the more desirable, and warmer, city of Fallside.
They crossed the fuzzy blue shield wall between Winterside and Fallside. At night all the colors of the latter city’s ever-changing trees were cloaked in shadows, but here and there streetlights revealed bright pools of red and gold. Lucien directed the car to drop Brak off at his apartment first.
After that, the car flew on toward his home, a mansion clinging to the side of Hubble Mountain in the center of Astralis’s ground level. Lucien’s thoughts turned to his family while he waited to arrive. He’d left Tyra at home with the girls on one of her rare days off. Not that it mattered. She’d brought her work home with her, so it wasn’t as though they were going to spend any quality time together.
He scowled, nursing old grievances. As the councilor of Fallside, Tyra didn’t get a lot of time off, but what time she did get, she never seemed to spend with her family. Maybe a vacation would be a good idea, Lucien thought as the car hovered in for a landing on his driveway. He resolved to mention the idea to Tyra... a beachside resort in Summerside, perhaps...
Chapter 4
Astralis
FOUR HOURS UNTIL THE FAROS ATTACK...
Sand gleamed gold in the sun. Generated waves swished up the beach, tickling children’s toes and making them squeal with delight. An artificial sun beamed down from the artificial sky. Lucien shaded his eyes with one hand and peered up at the distant floor of Level One, faded blue from all of the air in between. Five kilometers of atmosphere blanketed the ground level of Astralis, providing enough room for clouds to form, for the illusion to look almost as real as it felt. Lucien’s eyelids fluttered shut against the warmth of the fusion-powered sun. Fusion-powered. That clicked, and Lucien smiled. Astralis’s sun was the same as any other in that respect, just a lot smaller.
He sighed, allowing the warmth to melt some of the ice around his heart. His ears pricked with girlish laughter. It belonged to his one-year-old and five-year-old daughters, Theola and Atara. His eyes cracked open and he squinted up at Level One once more, imagining for a moment that all those glinting viewports were stars he could travel to—but he couldn’t actually travel anywhere. It was hard to feel trapped aboard a spaceship with thousands of decks and millions of square kilometers of space, and yet he did.
“Contemplating the unknown again, Lucien?” his wife asked.
His gaze came down for a landing, catching diamonds off the water as it fell. He checked that his children were both fine—they were making sandcastles at the water’s edge—and then he turned to his wife.
Tyra lay on a purple beach towel beside him, sunbathing in the intermittent shade of a tall palm tree from ancient Earth. A light breeze blew, bringing the smell of sand, flower blossoms, and salt water to Lucien’s nostrils. Palm fronds skittered, and black blades of shade flickered over his wife’s flawless skin.
Lucien remembered when the top of that tree had barely come up to his shoulder. That was over eight years ago, right after he’d awoken on Astralis to the unsettling news that he’d just died. Death wasn’t permanent, but memory loss was. Lucien had no recollection of anything that had happened in the first month after coming aboard Astralis.
Apparently he’d been assigned to Astralis’s expeditionary forces along with all the other ex-Paragons. They’d served together aboard Tyra’s galleon, the Inquisitor, going out to explore nearby systems for sentient life. But something had gone wrong, and they’d never returned. Instead, a hostile race of aliens had joined Astralis at the rendezvous, and they’d barely escaped the subsequent battle. Ever since then the expeditionary forces had been grounded, and Astralis had taken care to avoid contact with any other aliens. Their mission was cosmological—to determine the nature of the universe, not to meet all of it’s inhabitants.
“Hello?” Tyra propped herself up on her elbows and frowned at him. “Are you ignoring me?”
Lucien flashed an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I’m just remembering. Or trying to.”
“I see...”
“Doesn’t it ever bother you?” He asked. “Not knowing what happened to us out there?”
Tyra shook her head. “You can’t dwell on that. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”
Lucien nodded slowly, and his gaze slipped away from his wife, out to the hemmed-in ocean and the archipelago of sandy, palm-studded islands. Each of them was dotted with quaint little huts and villages, as well as a handful of modern mansions scattered between. This was Summerside, a tropical island paradise. Fuzzy blue shield walls ran from the soaring, balcony-lined sides of the wedge-shaped ship to its center, segregating each of the ship’s four climate zones and cities from each other.
Lucien gazed out over the water to Hubble Mountain at the center of Astralis. More than one hundred kilometers distant, he could just barely see the faded blue outline of the mountain and the inverted glass pyramid at its peak, glinting in the sun. The Academy of Science. Directly below that, in the mountain itself, were the government offices where his wife and all the other councilors worked. For most people, the Academy was symbolic of Astralis. The inverted pyramid was the symbol on its flag, the symbol that evoked patriotism in the hearts of its people, but to Lucien it was the hateful symbol of his wife’s neglect. Even here, at a resort in the farthest corner of the ship, the Academy’s shadow still loomed over them. Out of mind, but never out of sight, Lucien thought.
Tyra was a councilor and a workaholic, one of the elected rulers on Astralis who got to have a say in where they went and how they got there. Meanwhile, he was an ex-Paragon in Etheria’s army, now the chief of security for Fallside. He was an explorer with nothing to explore, trapped in a giant metal box.
It had grated on Lucien’s spirits over the past eight years to be whisked through the universe at high speed, getting to see all of the alien planets along the way, cataloged in tantalizing detail by astronomers at the Academy, but never being allowed to set foot on any of them.
That was a Paragon’s job: to explore—not to baby-sit a bunch of scientists as they flew right by all of the sights on their way to the edge of the universe.
Now, finally, they’d arrived at that edge—only to find that there were a whole lot more stars and galaxies to explore beyond the old cosmic horizon. Just more of the same for another thirty billion light years. And after that...
A vast stretch of emptiness: The Black. Tyra had bent his ear about the implications for months following the discovery.
“Do you realize what this means!” Tyra had been all but hyperventilating at the time.
“No.” Lucien was busy feedi
ng Theola. His wife’s dinner was a block of ice at the other end of the dining table. She hadn’t even noticed it sitting there yet. She was three hours late.
“We’ve just disproved the cosmological principle.”
“The what?” Lucien asked.
“It means the universe isn’t all the same everywhere! It has this big empty stretch, and we have no idea what could have caused that! It might be filled with dark matter, or dark energy, or both! Or maybe it’s some kind of ripple in the fabric of space-time—some kind of mountain or a cliff. It might even be a real physical edge, and when something reaches it, it just pops out of existence, or disintegrates.”
Theola smacked her bowl of chunky green goop and flipped it into Lucien’s lap. He scowled at the mess, and his one-year-old daughter giggled. He flashed her a long-suffering smile, and she smiled winningly back with all six of her half-in-half-out baby teeth. Theola was late to eating solid foods. Something to do with a sensory integration disorder. This was his latest attempt to get her to eat something other than milk. Buttery smooth purees were all she would tolerate, and barely at that.
“Well, I can’t blame you this time, Theebs,” Lucien said, his nose wrinkling at the smell of the mess in his lap. “I wouldn’t eat it either.”
“Da-da! Blubalidee! Blub-blub... blub...” Theola replied, blowing bubbles with her saliva, and then popping her thumb in her mouth for a good suck.
“Are you even listening to me, Lucien?” Tyra demanded.
Theola craned her neck to look up at her mother, and Lucien followed her gaze to give his wife an exasperated look. “I might have listened, if you’d been home three hours ago, when I called you and you said you were on your way.”
“With this news, can you blame me? I got caught up. Chief Ellis needed me to—”
Lucien held up a hand to stop her. “Save it. That’s the third time this week. Why did you bother having kids if you weren’t going to be around to raise them? You’re barely here to tuck them in at night!” Atara was alone in her room, playing with her toys.
Tyra’s eyes narrowed at him. “That’s not fair. You know I have a demanding job. It’s what allows us to live here—” she gestured to their surroundings. High ceilings. Real hardwood floors. Crystal chandeliers. Expensive furniture. Their mansion clung to the base of Hubble Mountain, overlooking Planck lake in the picturesque city of Fallside. It had a fantastic view from nearly all of its floor-to-ceiling windows. “You think all of this comes without sacrifice?” Tyra went on, nodding to herself as if he’d just answered yes. “Maybe that’s because it’s not your responsibility to pay for it. Your income barely covers our energy bill! Everything else is on me—my shoulders, my sweat—while you get to spend the whole day patrolling paradise.”
Lucien blinked at her, speechless. He looked away, out the bay window at the end of the dining table. He gazed down on the kaleidoscope of yellows, reds, and golds around Planck Lake: the ever-changing leaves of Fallside. The scientists who’d engineered Astralis had used stasis fields to freeze the trees that way. Each of them was a living sculpture, a middle finger to nature. The mighty hubris of science had reared its head all over Astralis, and the message was clear: We are the gods here.
“You’ve got nothing to say to that, because you know I’m right. You’re happy to enjoy the luxuries afforded by my job, but not to endure the sacrifices.”
Lucien looked away from the window. “All of this isn’t worth a newton if we don’t have the time to enjoy it.”
At that, Tyra frowned and her gaze slipped away from his, fleeing out the window. This was the only problem in their marriage—the only thing they needed to fix but somehow never could. It was as though they were caught in a stasis field like the trees in Fallside: their lives looked beautiful on the outside, but on the inside everything was frozen and stuck.
On the bad days, after putting the kids to bed, Lucien would sit in their echoing great room with a book and a glass of whiskey for company. He’d watch the electric fireplace crackle, sipping his drink, his eyes glazed, his holo-reader open to the same page of the same book that he’d been pretending to read for the past month. On days like that, he wondered if he should just take the kids and leave. Maybe that would get his wife to sit up and take notice. Or maybe she’d come home as usual, a few hours before midnight, re-heat her cold dinner, and flop into bed, not even noticing her family’s absence, just as she never seemed to notice their presence.
Lucien winced at those memories. All he wanted was for his wife to show up—to be there, to laugh at his jokes while he did the dishes, to clink glasses with him after dark and kiss by the light of an artificial moon.
Lucien wondered if he should finally talk to Tyra about all of this, to let her know just how bad it had gotten....
The sound of waves swishing and children laughing brought him back and reminded him why they were here. No, he decided, flexing his fingers through the hot sand and nodding to the hateful, inverted glass pyramid at the top of Hubble Mountain. He’d wait until the end of their vacation, until Tyra had a chance to finally spend some time with her family and see what she was missing.
“Chief Councilor Ellis!” Tyra said brightly. “What’s so urgent?”
Lucien’s blood boiled at the sound of his wife answering a comms call on their vacation. He turned to her, his skin feeling hot and tight, like an over-inflated balloon just about to explode.
Tyra’s blue eyes were rainbow-colored in the light of her ARCs. She was smiling at Ellis like he’d just saved her from the dullest moment of her life.
That’s it... Lucien thought, his teeth clenching.
Tyra sat up suddenly. “That’s impossible...! No, of course, I’ll catch the first shuttle back. I’d love to say a few words.... Give me one hour.” Tyra nodded. “See you soon.”
The colored light left Tyra’s gaze as the transmission ended and her ARCs returned to their usual transparency. She turned to him with a broad grin. “You’re never going to believe this!”
Lucien met her enthusiasm with a scowl. “I thought we agreed to unplug. Shut off our ARCs and spend some time as a family for a change.”
“I did, but I have to leave a way to contact me in case of an emergency.”
“It’s always an emergency.”
“This is different.”
“Save it, Tyra,” Lucien said, shaking his head.
She reached for his hand and squeezed until the bones in his fingers ground together. “They’ve found us.”
Lucien’s brow furrowed. “Who has?”
“Us—you, me, the rest of the crew. The Inquisitor made it! Somehow they made it all the way here without us. They spent the past eight years catching up with us.”
Lucien blinked in shock, the news finally settling in. “You’re telling me we never died?”
Tyra shook her head and a grin sprang to her lips. “We’re on our way to meet them right now. The judiciary will probably rule that we have to integrate our memories and put the extra clones in stasis. Who knows what we’ll learn? You and I might even be married twice!”
Or divorced twice, Lucien thought, but didn’t say. He flashed her a tight smile. “So you’re going back to work.”
“Just for a day or two, until we bring the Inquisitor on board.”
Lucien looked away, his jaw set, his mind churning with conflicting thoughts.
“You can come with me,” Tyra said. “You’re going to have to meet yourself at some point.”
“Sure. Why not.”
“You don’t sound excited.”
He wasn’t excited, but maybe he should be. Tyra had said they’d have to integrate their memories, consolidate two lives into one. The injection of a fresh perspective might be just what they needed. “You’re right,” he said. “We should be there to welcome them home—but we’re extending our vacation by however many days this takes.”
Tyra nodded, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth once more. “Agreed.”
Lucien’s gaze drifted to their girls again just in time to see Theola go stomping through Atara’s sandcastle, flattening it in an instant. Atara screamed and smacked her sister’s thigh in revenge. Theola fell down and burst into tears.
Lucien sighed. “I’ll get the girls,” he said, already on his way down the beach. He scooped up Theola and grabbed Atara’s hand, chiding her for smacking her sister.
“But Dad, she—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “We have to go, anyway.”
And upon hearing that, Atara started crying, too.
Chapter 5
Astralis
TEN MINUTES UNTIL THE FAROS ATTACK...
Tyra Ortane stood to one side of the comms station in the operations room of Astralis. She watched with a conspiratorial smile as Chief Councilor Ellis stepped to the fore. He was wearing his ceremonial white council robes, as was she.
Tyra balanced on the balls of her feet, ready to jump into view as soon as Ellis introduced her. It took all of her will not to fidget while she waited for the Inquisitor to respond to their hail. The galleon had arrived at the rendezvous less than a minute ago, but the seconds were passing like hours.
She couldn’t wait to find out what her clone had seen and done. Although, technically, the Tyra she was about to speak with was the original and she was the clone. Meeting herself was going to be like stepping into a time machine, since as Chief Councilor Ellis had just informed her, the crew of the Inquisitor had spent the past eight years in stasis while their navigator bot took them to the cosmic horizon. It made sense, of course: there was no way that a galleon could support its crew for eight years otherwise.
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