04 Dark Space

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Stop or I shoot,” blue cape said.

  Ethan held up his hands and nodded to the grand overseer. “Where is your god?”

  “Qua est hic?” the overseer demanded, looking Ethan up and down quickly with undisguised scorn. “You dare to approach me, martalis? You are unworthy of my attention.”

  “Yea, yea, I get that a lot. I want to know what you’re doing about that—” Ethan gestured to the city beyond the dome-topped tower where they stood. Noticing something new in his periphery, he turned to see Sythian missiles raining from the sky. The cruisers had opened fire. He watched, his mouth agape as those missiles began to impact on the surface. Explosions sprouted like mushrooms, setting the city aflame.

  “I have done all that can be done,” the overseer replied. Omnius is recovering from an unexpected shut down. It will take some time before He is back online and all of His functions restored.”

  “You don’t have time!” Ethan said. “Where are your defenses?”

  “We will regain control of them soon . . .” the overseer replied, turning away from Ethan to place his hands upon a glowing white sphere which sat at waist height, just above the railings of the raised walkway where they stood. The sphere grew brighter at the overseer’s touch, and a holographic display appeared in the air. A moment later, the overseer said something in his language, his tone full of reverence. As one, the Avilonians standing under the dome fell to their knees and bowed their heads.

  Then, abruptly, the dome was bathed in a blinding light. For a split second Ethan thought the Sythians had found them and that the light was from an exploding warhead, but absent was the anticipated boom, and the light remained. He looked up to see a bright spheroid now hovering between the two scythe-shaped pinnacles arcing out above the dome. It looked vaguely like the spiral and eye-shaped center Ethan had seen emblazoned on the Avilonians’ armor. The light was so bright that it turned back the night and bathed the surrounding city in a facsimile of daylight.

  Ethan was forced to look away. He saw spots, but his eyes were not blind enough to miss what happened next. A terrible, animal roaring filled the air, followed by a deafening screech as white-hot beams of light leapt from the sprawling Zenith Tower and from the other skyscrapers which dotted the horizon like glittering mountains of luminescent quartz.

  Hundreds of beams arced across the sky—straight bolts of lightning reversed from their natural course. Those beams sliced through the clouds, vectoring in on the wraith-like shadows of Sythian cruisers.

  A cheer went up from the Avilonians, but they remained on their knees. Ethan watched that dazzling light display go on for what seemed like hours. The blurry-bright shadows of Sythians hovering above the clouds now turned as if to flee, but the raging torrents of light followed them. The scattered violet rain of deadly missiles falling from the sky took a sudden shift, as if driven by an unseen wind. The Sythians returned fire with focused streams of missiles heading for the Avilonians’ ground-based batteries. Ethan winced in anticipation of the destruction. He remembered the damage the crashing Nova had done. Pirakla missiles would be far worse.

  The horizon began to flash with the sporadic impacts of alien missiles, and Ethan was tempted to look away rather than watch Avilon’s most majestic towers crumble and fall. By some force of will or enervating horror he looked on. Rather than see those towers tumble and fall, he saw them rebuff the attacks with shields.

  Ethan’s eyes lit up. The towers were shielded now! Hope swelled in his chest as he watched tiny specks of glowing orange swatted from the sky with miniature starbursts of light.

  Then, bright golden lights appeared streaking into the sky, swarming up from the city below. For a moment Ethan thought they must be some type of warheads, but then one of those golden streaks flew right past the Zenith’s spire with a bone-rattling roar and Ethan saw that it was a starfighter not unlike a Nova. Yet where a Nova’s hull was dull gray duranium, this one was a luminous cobalt blue.

  Hundreds of those fighters sailed up into the sky, and stuttering lines of red lasers began streaking out from them to join the beams firing from the towers.

  A nearby boom rumbled overhead, sounding like a thunderclap, but rather than see lightning arcing from the clouds, Ethan saw a flaming wreck burst into view—a mountain on fire sent sailing down straight on top of them.

  Someone screamed. An instant later, he realized it was Alara. She was still standing by the edge of the dome, her head tilted up, one hand pointing to the ruined Sythian cruiser. She stood frozen before it like a bosin caught in a hover car’s headlights. Ethan vaulted down from the catwalk to get to her. He wasn’t sure what he could do, but a primitive part of his brain was screaming at him to do something.

  Before he even reached her, the beams of light arcing up from the city changed course, all of them now firing on the doomed Sythian cruiser. It was vaporized with a spectacular boom and an accompanying starburst of light. Ethan stumbled around blind for a few seconds before his vision cleared enough to see a blurry-bright world saturated with light from the after image of the doomed cruiser’s explosion.

  Another animal roar sounded, and this time Ethan realized it was coming from the blinding light hovering between the two scythe-shaped pinnacles overhead. He had assumed that light was a representation of Omnius, not Omnius himself, but now he thought the opposite. If the AI god of Avilon had physical form, it was this artificial sun.

  Swarms of Avilonian fighters met with the Sythian Shells in the sky—glowing golden thrusters mingled with glowing orange, swirling smoke trails against the faded shadows of the night in a fiery kaleidoscope of death and destruction. Bright lines of red pulse lasers knocked Shell Fighters from the sky by the dozens. The Sythians’ answering fire seemed somehow ineffectual by comparison, as Ethan didn’t see even one Avilonian fighter fall. All the while, ground-based defenses slashed the sky with vengeful fury.

  Ethan shook himself as if waking from a nightmare, and hurried over to Alara. He crushed her in a fierce hug and buried his face in her hair. “I love you, Kiddie,” he spoke beside her ear. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him over the continuous screeching of weapons fire or the distant thunder of exploding starships, but she whispered something equally unintelligible beside his ear, and he smiled, knowing with a sense keener than hearing that she’d just said the same thing.

  * * *

  Caldin looked on with wide eyes and a gaping grin. Brilliant white beams of light shot out from Avilon’s tallest buildings like the white-hot spokes of giant wheels. Hordes of Avilonian fighters wove through the sky in glittering blue-gold shoals, sending Sythian Shells tumbling to the ground by the dozens. The Sythians were actually outnumbered for a change. We might just make it out of this yet, she thought with a flicker of hope.

  Then the deck rocked with a sudden explosion, snapping her out of her triumphant daze. The lights on the bridge flickered. Caldin saw the ruined city below slowly tilt on its axis, and she actually felt the deck tilt with it. From that she deduced that the cruiser’s artificial gravity was failing, allowing the planet’s gravity to bleed through. “What was that?” Caldin demanded, grabbing onto the captain’s table for support.

  “Five Shells just ran into our main engine array!” gravidar reported.

  “What you mean they ran into it?”

  “He means they flew up the exhausts!” Delayn replied from engineering. “The reactor is at 22% integrity and dropping!”

  “Reduce power!”

  “If we reduce power any further, we’re going to fall like a stone!”

  “Comms! I want a repair crew on it now!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “18% integrity . . .” Delayn warned in a rising voice. “It’s going critical! I’ve got to shut her down!”

  All the lights and glowing consoles of control stations on the bridge abruptly died and then came back again, but much dimmer than before. Now they were running on emergency backups.

  “Status report!” Caldin called
out.

  “We’re going down!” the helm replied.

  “Any chance we can land safely?”

  “The backup generator is redlining with just 10% power to grav lifts,” Delayn said. “That’s not nearly enough to land.”

  “Then use that to steer us away from the taller buildings; aim for the worst of the devastation!”

  “I can’t,” the helm replied, a note of panic creeping into the man’s voice. “Maneuvering jets are offline! We’re out of control!”

  “Calculate our trajectory! I want to know where we’re going to hit and when.”

  “Calculating . . . oh frek.”

  “Oh frek, what?” Caldin demanded.

  “We’re headed for the Zenith Tower. We’ve got three minutes till impact.”

  “Abandon ship! We haven’t come this far just to die now!”

  The evacuation alarm began to sound in strident tones. Caldin turned and ran, pounding down the gangway to the escape pods that lay just beyond the bridge doors. Her XO and chief engineer, Cobrale Delayn, as well as the gravidar officer, Esayla Carvon, reached the same escape pod as her. Caldin keyed open the hatch and shoved them inside. By the time she shut the hatch behind them, Delayn was already at the pod controls, his hands flying over a holographic keypad.

  A moment later something clunked and the escape pod flew down a brief launch tube, racing past bright rings of light.

  * * *

  Commander Donali awoke in darkness. He raised his hands, groping in the dark, and promptly smashed his knuckles on the transpiranium cover of the stasis tube.

  Stasis. They put me in stasis! He heaved against the cover with all his strength. It swung aside easily. He stumbled out into the room beyond. A dim red light flickered on beyond the stasis tube, revealing that the world was askew, as if he had one leg shorted than the other. He took a few steps, and then promptly fell over, only to stand up and fall over again. A roaring, screaming noise filled his ears. Frowning, he got to his feet more slowly this time, and now he noticed that the deck was sloping under his feet. That shouldn’t have been possible unless artificial gravity had failed and there were another gravity source somewhere else nearby . . .

  Suddenly he realized what the roaring noise was. It was the evacuation alarm. The Intrepid was in trouble. Donali bolted for the nearest exit. He was naked but there was no time to put on his clothes. He raced out the doors of the stasis room and down the corridor, bumping into bulkheads in his mad dash for the nearest pod bay. He knew there to be a bank of escape pods very near to the stasis rooms, so he was well-situated to get away.

  Upon reaching the pod bay, he waved his wrist over the door controls and then hurried inside. He heard booted feet racing after him and turned to see a group of corpsmen and doctors headed his way.

  “Hoi!” one of them called out. “He escaped!”

  Donali’s heart pounded. He thought quickly. His security clearance hadn’t yet been revoked, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to get inside the pod bay. That meant his override codes would still be working. He turned to the door controls inside the pod bay and typed in a lock override code. The doors swished shut just moments before the doctors and corpsmen reached them. Donali waved to them with a smile as they began pounding on the doors, trying their own security codes to no avail. With that, he turned tail and ran for the nearest pod. He keyed it open and dove inside, reaching for the red launch button at the pod controls. His fingers just grazed the button and then came a sudden burst of acceleration, followed by racing rings of light and then . . . freedom.

  His mouth dropped open and confusion swirled as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing. A vast city sailed by underneath his pod, wreathed in smoke and flames. It was the middle of the night. Clouds raced by overhead. Monolithic skyscrapers glittered on the horizon. Wraithlike shadows floated behind the clouds, raining a familiar purple light on the city below. Dazzling white beams of light arced through the night, striking at those shadows.

  The Sythians were here, and an unknown enemy was fighting them. Fighters raced by on all sides of him. Some were familiar Shells, but the others . . . Donali squinted out at them and he realized that the fighters firing at them weren’t Novas.

  His brain belatedly put it all together. This was Avilon, and the Sythians had found it. Donali settled into the pod’s flight chair with a grin. Somehow his mission had been accomplished without him. He let out a shaky sigh.

  Then the comm light on the pod’s control panel lit up with the bleep bleep of an incoming message. Donali was just about to answer it when he realized that he was a suspected traitor. His hand returned to his lap. It would be better for the surviving crew of the Intrepid to think he went down with the ship.

  He returned to watching the battle raging around him. He delighted in the destruction of the city, but he could tell that the tide of the battle was turning. Shell Fighters were raining from the sky by the dozens, flaming and tumbling to their doom. Just now a pair of Sythian cruisers came crashing down with them, bursting through the clouds on a collision course with the city.

  If this was Avilon and the Sythians were losing, then perhaps his mission wasn’t over yet. He might yet find a way to help his masters. Donali smiled and closed his eyes to make contact with his handler. Lord Kaon replied a moment later, demanding to know what had happened to him. He explained everything, right up to the present moment where he found himself sailing out over the Avilonians’ home world. Kaon told him the Sythians were losing the battle for Avilon, but that they would return. Donali was instructed to find a safe place to land and then go into hiding until he could be of further use. He ended his telepathic contact with High Lord Kaon and returned to admiring the destruction before him. He was relieved to know that the fleet the Sythians had sent was a mere hundred ships, not their entire armada. His masters had lost the battle but not the war.

  Donali reached for the pod’s flight controls, but then he recalled the comm light, and he first checked the grid to make sure no one was nearby to see him abandon the pod’s auto-piloted course. If he wished to pretend the pod was empty, he couldn’t be seen to deviate from his current trajectory. One look at the grid was all it took to assuage that fear. The sky was so fraught with contacts that no one would notice what he was doing. He turned the pod off its current course and began an in-depth scan of the planetary surface, looking for a place he might be able to hide. When the results of that scan came back a moment later, his jaw dropped and he shook his head. The city was far more than it seemed, stretching over a kilometer below the apparent surface of the world. There was some type of energy shield guarding what lay below, but with all of the destruction raining down, he could see a few places on his scopes where the shield had opened up, revealing the city below.

  Donali dove for one of those holes, racing toward the raging inferno. He wasn’t sure what he’d find in the lower levels of the city, but he had a feeling it would be much easier to hide down there than it would be on the rooftops.

  * * *

  The escape pod rocketed out the back of the Intrepid, flying through a thick, black trail of smoke from the cruiser’s ruined thrusters. The smoke cleared to a wispy gray, and then they were flying out over the flaming city. Captain Caldin watched the light show created by hundreds of crisscrossing beam cannons and thousands of fighter-based pulse lasers. Avilonian and Sythian fighters raced by them on all sides, the former swatting the latter with dazzlingly bright red pulse lasers. Shells exploded all around and them in bright orange puffs of molten alloy.

  Through the clouds of debris and the blinding light of exploding fighters, Caldin saw something new. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing out the front of the pod.

  “What’s what?” Delayn asked, checking the grid. A moment later he let out a long whistle and shook his head. “Looks like the Sythians didn’t wipe out their fleet after all.”

  “Looks like,” she replied. The Avilonians didn’t just have fighters in the air. Now there were s
everal large starships roaring up from the ground and racing toward the engagement around the Zenith. They all looked to be the same class as the cruiser which had found them in the gravity field a few short hours ago. Counting just the ones she could see out the porthole-sized forward viewport of the escape pod, there were a least half a dozen.

  Looking out to the hazy orange line of the horizon to see if she could find any more, Caldin realized that the city was on fire as far as the eye could see. Millions must have died in the attack.

  “Never thought I’d live to see this twice,” Delayn remarked, obviously reminded of the original Sythian invasion by the apocalyptic scale of the devastation before them. Caldin saw Delayn reach out beside him to find Esayla Carvon’s ebony hand. Esayla was kneeling beside him and leaning her head on his shoulder.

  That display of affection had Caldin looking away, out the rear hatch to watch the Intrepid’s final moments. Her thoughts turned to a certain corpsman—Corpsman Markom Terl—her lover and longtime friend. She chewed her lower lip, hoping against hope that he would have enough time to escape. The flaming bulk of her ship sailed inexorably toward the Zenith Tower like a giant torpedo, trailing a fat plume of ugly black smoke. Here and there an escape pod came jetting out of the flames, fleeing the doomed cruiser in just the nick of time, but those pods were too few and far between to be carrying the entire crew.

  Caldin wondered absently what the Avilonians would do to them if the Intrepid took down the Zenith Tower, and with it, their AI god, Omnius. She needn’t have wondered. A dozen white-hot beams suddenly shot out from the Zenith, converging on the doomed ship.

  It burst open like an overripe piece of fruit, and Caldin flinched away from the blinding light of that explosion. An ominous roll of thunder reached her ears just a moment later, and then she turned back to look. The Intrepid was gone. In its place, a hail of tiny fragments sailed on and splashed harmlessly across the face of the Zenith, provoking a telltale flicker of light—the tower is shielded, she realized.