04 Dark Space

by Jasper T. Scott

  “You will take us straight to the planet when we arrive,” blue cape said.

  “Well, I wasn’t planning to take you to the moon—unless of course you want to go to the moon. I live to serve, after all. Does this planet of yours have a moon?”

  “Ethan . . .” Alara began, sending him a warning look.

  She obviously thought he shouldn’t be adopting a sarcastic tone with them, and she was probably right, but he couldn’t help it. Dumb freks, he thought with a glance in blue cape’s direction.

  “Reversion in ten,” he said a second before the ship’s computer began an audible countdown. When it reached zero, there came a flash of light as the bright streaks and star lines of SLS were replaced by stars and a mottled green and blue planet. On one side, the planet was illuminated by a red sun. Daylight painted the surface of the world in blue, green, and gray—the colors of water, vegetation, and rock. But that natural appearance on the day side was somehow deceptive, because on the night side the planet was lit up with complex patterns of light. Glowing circles, lines, and squares crisscrossed each other to form intricate patterns of light. Ethan whistled softly. “That is one big city!” It had been a long time since he’d seen a world so overrun with people that it shone like a glow lamp in the dark. “Where to now, boss?” Ethan asked, turning to blue cape.

  “What do your sensors detect?”

  Ethan took a quick look at the grid. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find there, but what he actually saw was the last thing he ever would have imagined. “They’re here!” he said, his eyes widening suddenly with the realization.

  “Who is here?” blue cape demanded.

  Ethan gaped at the grid, unable to believe what he was seeing. “The ISSF.” A quick look at the grid confirmed it—there were over a dozen Nova Fighters out there, and that meant his son likely was, too. No sign of the Intrepid, but Ethan supposed it could be cloaked. They’re here, he thought, relief flooding through him like a sudden rain in a desert.

  “Your people?” blue cape asked.

  “My people . . . your people . . . Sythians! Frek!” Ethan exclaimed, only now noticing all the other contacts on the grid. “There’s a war raging out there!” Now Ethan hoped Atton wasn’t piloting one of those Novas. The grid was teeming with neutral yellow and red enemy contacts, but only a hint of green, which were ISSF forces. As he watched, a pair of yellow contacts succumbed to enemy fire and winked off the grid.

  “It’s not going well for your people. . . .” Ethan assumed the neutral yellow contacts were Avilonian ships, since none of them were firing back.

  “Because we are defenseless! Get us to the planet immediately! We must get Omnius to restore control of our defenses in time to stop this sacrilege.”

  Under any other circumstances, Ethan might have taken offense to the commanding tone, but he was inclined to agree—if the Avilonians didn’t get their fleet back online soon, there wouldn’t be a fleet left to activate. . . .

  And there wouldn’t be an Avilon either.

  * * *

  “They’re decimating the Avilonian fleet, Captain!”

  Caldin turned to Strategian Galan Rovik. “You still want me to get you to the surface?”

  It took a moment for Galan to reply. His gaze was fixed upon the star map and the glowing yellow icons which represented his fleet. As he watched, a pair of cruisers winked off the grid, and he turned to her, his deceptively young features slack with shock and horror. “Unless you can defeat these invaders yourself, it is the only way. We must bring Omnius back online as quickly as possible. Whoever has done this was surely not aware that your Sythians were coming. If they are not stopped, there will be no Avilon left to fight over.”

  Caldin nodded and turned to the pair of guards flanking the broken entrance of the bridge. While en-route to Avilon, she’d called them up to help clear the dead Gors off the deck. Caldin waved them over. As soon as they were near, she said, “Sergeant, escort Master Rovik to the hangar and have him board the fastest shuttle to the surface.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Galan and the other two Avilonians nodded once to her in parting, and Caldin turned to watch them leave. Her distraction only lasted for a second, however, before she turned back to the captain’s table and began snapping orders at her crew. “Helm, get us closer to the engagement! Weapons, stand by. Engineering, get ready to switch from cloaking shields to beam and pulse. Let’s show these skull faces our teeth!”

  * * *

  “Why do they not open fire?” Shondar asked aloud. His ships fired, and the enemy fleet responded not with weapons fire, but by belching flames, debris, and tumbling bodies out into space. It was a massacre.

  Shondar bared his black teeth in a rictus of glee.

  “The enemy does not appear able to respond to us. They are helpless, My Lord,” one of the twelve operators on the bridge of the Gasha replied.

  “Yesss,” Shondar hissed. “This is an unexpected thing, but a good thing. We are to have all the glory of this last conquest to ourselves! Let us be done with this fleet quickly that we can proceed to purge the planet. When we leave here this day, we are to leave not a planet, but a smoldering husk! Not a man, woman, or child is to be left alive. This day, we kill them all! For glory!” Shondar roared.

  “For glory!” his crew chorused.

  Chapter 26

  “How much longer?”

  “Hoi, don’t get your cape in a knot, I’m flying as fast as I can,” Ethan retorted. Avilon had swollen to fill the entire forward viewport. They would reach the upper atmosphere in just a couple more minutes.

  Blue cape began pacing around the bridge. “Hac enom at ipsa morientar!” he roared.

  “What are you babbling about?” Ethan asked while diverting more power to shields for what was going to be a very hot atmospheric entry.

  “They will die for this!” blue cape spat, whirling to face Ethan.

  “Good for you. I’ve never been a fan of the skull faces. Kill a few for me, too, would you?”

  Blue cape turned back to look out at Avilon, and he began mumbling in that strange language of his again.

  “Why do you have to antagonize them?” Alara whispered.

  “Maybe because they antagonized me first. They’re on my ship giving me orders, forcing us to help them when they clearly had no intention of helping us! They’re lucky a bit of sarcasm is the only thing I’ve thrown their way.”

  “You will be rewarded for your service, martalis,” blue cape said quietly.

  “Name’s Ethan, not Martalis, your skriffiness.”

  “Martalis, means mortal, and do not presume to insult my intelligence. I am far more knowledgeable than you on every and any topic you have ever studied.”

  “Then you must know a lot about arrogance, too,” Ethan muttered.

  “My ears are as keen as my mind, martalis. Declaring a fact about oneself is only arrogant when it is not wholly true. Now focus on getting us to the Zenith Tower, while I try to make contact with my people on the ground.” With that, blue cape fell silent.

  The Trinity hit the upper atmosphere of Avilon and almost immediately their view of the planet became shrouded in a bright blue glow, which was their shields dissipating friction with the air. Ethan yanked the throttle all the way back into full reverse, and then dialed up the shields some more, shunting energy away from weapons in order to do so. The surface of Avilon rushed up to greet them in a dizzyingly-bright pattern of lights. Now that they were just a few dozen kilometers up, Ethan could pick out other details—between the lights of the world-spanning city below, lay a diffuse blue color. Was it water? Perhaps the Avilonians were so short on space that they’d begun building hovering cities above their oceans.

  Clouds began streaking by in puffy white wisps. The lights below resolved into the shapes of elaborate skyscrapers which soared above the ground, breaking up the night into jagged shadows and radiant mountains of light. Ethan’s gaze wandered back to the blue spaces betwee
n the lights, and this time he saw a pattern emerge. The blue was broken up into shimmering hexagonal sections, like a vast honeycomb. “What the . . . what is that?” Ethan pointed out the forward viewport.

  Alara shook her head. “I don’t—”

  “It is the Celestial Wall,” blue cape said. “It is what separates us from the chosen—the Celestials.”

  “So, you’re not one of those chosen Celestials?”

  “No,” blue cape replied, a note of sadness bleeding into his voice. “I have not ascended that far yet. Many of us will never get there.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll make it,” Ethan replied with an accompanying eye roll. He felt a chill creeping down his spine, and shook his head to clear it. He had a bad feeling he’d stumbled upon some ages old religious cult. Who was this Omnius they spoke of so reverently? Alara cast Ethan a wide-eyed look, and he replied with a shrug. He was beginning to wonder at the wisdom of coming to Avilon after all, but it wasn’t as though they’d had a lot of other options. Religious cult or not, Avilon was humanity’s last hope for survival, and if they couldn’t get the planet’s defenses back online, even that hope would soon be lost.

  “There!” blue cape pointed.

  Ethan looked up from his controls to see a monolithic tower appear in the distance. That tower shone gold in the night.

  Seeing the ground rushing up too fast, Ethan pulled up, leveling out at just one and a half kilometers from the apparent surface of the planet.

  Skyscrapers rushed by underneath them, some rising high enough that their spires stared back at eye level, while others rose even higher than the Trinity flew. Whatever the pressure had been to build taller and taller buildings, the tallest of them were few and far between with most of the city lying close to the shimmering blue of the Celestial Wall.

  Ethan studied that diaphanous membrane, trying to imagine what lay beneath it. He thought he caught a glimmer of city lights shining below. Curious, he descended to 500 meters and aimed the Trinity for a particularly vast expanse of blue. As they flew over it, he was sure he could see thousands of tiny lights shining up through that barrier—lights and . . . shadowy lines. Those lines came together in recognizable patterns, and then the lights adhered to those patterns, giving Ethan a complete picture of what he was looking at. His mouth dropped open and he guided the Trinity down for an even closer look.

  “What are you doing?” Alara whispered.

  “Hang on, there’s something down there we need to see.”

  * * *

  Clouds whipped by Atton’s cockpit like gauzy white curtains. His gaze remained fixed on the city below. He’d never seen a world so populous in all his life.

  Someone gave a long, slow whistle over the comms. “So, there’s trillions of ‘em after all,” Guardian Five said.

  “What’s all that blue krak between the buildings?” Gina asked.

  “Water?” Guardian Seven suggested.

  Atton shook his head. “Not sure. Let’s get a closer look.”

  The jagged spires of kilometers-high skyscrapers rushed up to greet them and then raced by in a blur of shining lights. The buildings themselves were luminous, as if they were vast light sculptures crafted by some divine artisan.

  “This is amazing . . .” Guardian Four, Ceyla Corbin, put in.

  Atton’s eyes skipped past the buildings to study the shimmering blue rivers flowing around their foundations. Then he noticed a hexagonal pattern on the surface of the blue, and he saw that it was both casting light and reflecting it from the buildings above.

  “Hoi, looks like we’ve got some type of shield down there. That pattern is the emitter frame.”

  “Why would they shield the ground?” Ceyla asked.

  “They wouldn’t,” Atton realized. With that, he dropped down to 300 meters, and leveled out above one of the larger rivers of energy for a closer look. He flipped his Nova upside down so he could get a better look out the top of the canopy. What he saw next forced him to adjust his impression of Avilon so far. He’d seen the scattering of kilometers-high buildings and all the shorter ones in between. Putting that together with the radiating patterns of light he’d seen from orbit, Atton had assumed the surface of Avilon must be covered by one massive city. Now he realized it wasn’t just big—it was incomprehensibly vast.

  Barely visible below the blue rivers of energy running between the buildings were the shadowy outlines of the very same buildings—their real foundations disappearing endlessly below the shield. Millions of tiny blue-tinted lights shone up from the depths of bottomless man-made chasms.

  Someone called out, “There’s a whole other city down there!”

  Atton nodded slowly. He ran a quick surface-penetrating scan to confirm it and found that the real surface of the planet was buried under another kilometer of city, meaning that there were in effect two cities covering the surface of Avilon—one which soared high above the shield, and the other which lay below and served as a foundation for the first. The sheer scale of urban development was unimaginable. If the whole planet was like this, then there had to be countless trillions of people living on Avilon. It was mind-boggling. Atton rolled his Nova back over and saw monolithic skyscrapers racing by to either side of him, glittering mountains of light rising kilometers into the sky. Despite the massive scale of those buildings, the majority of the upper city was built just a few dozen stories above the shield, making the under city arguably the larger of the two.

  The flat rooftops of the shorter buildings below were carpeted with a dark, leafy green. Descending to 200 meters Atton picked out trees, grass, and flowers. Illuminated fountains bubbled up in the middle of man-made streams which flowed from one building to the next in thundering waterfalls. Descending still further, Atton rocketed over the top of one such waterfall. Brightly-lit synthstone paths wound through the gardens, and dozens of white-robed pedestrians populated those paths, out for a midnight stroll. As the Guardians roared by overhead, those pedestrians looked up and pointed at the sky.

  It was hard to believe that there was a battle raging in orbit, and that all of this man-made and cultivated beauty was now in jeopardy. Atton tried to imagine what it would look like in the light of day. He realized that with prevalence of parks, and the vast, architectural beauty of the tallest buildings, the upper city would be an urban utopia. As for the lower city . . . he couldn’t say without having seen it, but he couldn’t conceive of anyone, or for that matter any green growing thing, that would want to live so far below the reach of natural light. Between the shadows cast by the buildings of the upper city and the light-filtering shield layer, the lower city streets would be dark and dingy. The contrast that struck in Atton’s mind’s eye gave him the impression of a vast rich-poor gap.

  “This place is krakkin’ . . .” Guardian Nine said.

  “No krak,” Gina added.

  “All right, enough gawking, Guardians,” Atton said, his eyes searching the grid for their nav point. The Zenith Tower was coming up at just under one hundred klicks away, but at this low altitude he couldn’t see it for all the skyscrapers between him and there. “Let’s gain some altitude and get to our objective,” he said, already pulling up and away from the lush rooftop gardens and the shimmering blue of the shield that segregated the upper city from the lower.

  Atton switched his comms to the Renegades’ channel and listened to their chatter for a moment before interjecting with his own. “Renegades, this is Guardian Leader, we are about to reach nav point Epsilon. What’s your status?”

  “Renegade One here. Good to hear from you, Guardians. Anything we should know about down there?”

  “Your eyes are going to bug when you see this place, but all’s peace and quiet. Follow our flight path just in case. Transmitting now . . .”

  “Got it. Thanks for that, Guardians.”

  “No problem. What’s it look like up there?”

  “Not good. Heavy losses. The Intrepid’s dancing around the edges of the main engageme
nt trying to distract them, but she’s one against a hundred. She’ll be lucky to make it out herself. Last I checked they were coming to join us planet side.”

  “They’re abandoning the Avilonian Fleet?”

  “Not sure they have much choice. Best we can do is stall the skull faces until these motherfrekkers get their defenses online. I’m assuming they have ground batteries. Maybe a few wings of fighters in reserve.”

  “They’d better have something,” Atton replied.

  “Roger that. See you at Epsilon, Commander.”

  “See you there.”

  It was worse than Atton had thought. The Avilonian fleet was already forfeit, which meant the Sythians were going to come for the planet next. Atton tried to imagine those majestic towers falling in fiery ruins to the parkland below, or telescoping down on top of the vast lower city.

  The devastation would be beyond imagining.

  * * *

  “Set down over there,” blue cape said, pointing to a broad, grassy square at the base of the Zenith Tower. The tower was fine to all outward appearances—no sign of turmoil or conflict—but there were crowds of people in the square, most of them wearing flowing white robes.

  Ethan set the Trinity down gently to one side of the square. “Now what?”

  Blue cape turned and stalked toward the entrance of the bridge. “Now, you wait here while we resolve this crisis.”

  “Hoi, I didn’t bring you all this way just to sit on the sidelines and wait,” Ethan said.

  “You cannot enter the tower. Only Celestials are allowed in, and even then, only those who have the proper clearance. I will have enough trouble getting in myself without you there to make matters worse. Stay here and wait for us to return.”

  “You said all of your weapons have been deactivated,” Ethan said, not ready to give up just yet. “Ours haven’t. If there’s some kind of revolution going on, then don’t you think it would help for your men to be armed?”