04 Dark Space

by Jasper T. Scott

  Desperate, Atton tried the comms as he ran. “This is Guardian Leader to anyone who can hear me, I’m on the ground at nav point Epsilon, looking for cover. Can’t see a frekking thing through the smoke . . .”

  The comms crackled ominously with static. Either everyone was dead, or they were too far out of range to hear him.

  But then a gruff voice cut through the static, and a light appeared, bright and shining through the gloom. “Commander, this is Mech Captain Alpha One—hold your position, I’m on my way to you now.”

  Relief flooded through him, but rather than stop running, he ran faster, heading toward the light. All of a moment later, a dark shape came swirling out of the chaos—faceplate blue and glowing in the light of holographic displays. It was a Zephyr light assault mech.

  “Frek, it’s good to see you, Captain!” Atton said. “Have you found any other survivors out here?”

  “Why don’t you come see for yourself,” the captain said as he reached Atton’s side. “Follow me.”

  Chapter 31

  Atton hurried up the stairs to the entrance of the Zenith Tower. He saw a glimmer of green beyond the gaping hole in the doors. That hole had been covered with a portable shield generator to keep out the smoke. He walked through the diaphanous blue membrane of those shields, passing from the nightmare of the burning city into an ethereal dream. A lush garden stretched out as far as the eye could see. The distant walls of the tower rose like glittering mountains of crystal. A bright blue sky sprawled overhead, etched with a faint spiral dotted with stars. The eye-shaped center of that spiral shone like the sun. White-robed people walked calmly through the garden, seemingly oblivious to the chaos and destruction beyond the walls of their tower.

  Atton unsealed his helmet and removed it. The air was fresh and honeyed with nectar. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “What is this place?”

  “It sure is somethin’ ain’ it?” the captain replied. “But you can gawk later. There’s someone here who’d like to see you. Come on.”

  “Who?” Atton asked, following the captain down a glittering pathway. They didn’t get far before he spied a small knot of people gathered in the shade of a tall, blue-flowering tree. Most of those people were armored Avilonian soldiers, but Atton thought he noticed a few who stood out. They wore neither a shining suit of armor nor the white robes of the people in the garden. What they wore instead were ISSF flight suits. As soon as he saw that, Atton took off at a run, quickly outstripping the sentinel who was escorting him there.

  Standing in front of the group were a pair of blue-caped Avilonians, and between them hovered a bright light. As Atton approached, he heard a voice like thunder speaking to the group of people.

  The light turned toward him, and Atton was abruptly blinded by it. He fell to his knees in the grass, clutching his eyes.

  “Atton!” a gruff, familiar voice called out. A moment later he felt himself yanked to his feet for a crushing hug. Now partially shielded from the light, he opened his eyes to slits in time to see his father withdraw to an arm’s length. “Glad you could make it,” Ethan said.

  Atton took in his father’s salt and pepper hair, his grizzly growth of stubble, and care-worn features, stretched now into a smile that crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes. He gazed into the piercing green eyes set within those crinkles and returned his father’s smile. “How did you get here?” he whispered.

  “Things got bad after you left. Your mother sent me to look for you.”

  “Hoi there, Atton,” a new voice added. He turned to see Alara walking up beside his father, her violet eyes bright with emotion. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “I found them . . .” Atton said, turning in a quick circle to marvel at the garden where they now stood. “I found Avilon.”

  “Yes, you found us,” a deep, gravelly voice interrupted. “But at what cost? The evil you brought with you has killed millions!”

  Atton stepped to one side of his father, and the blinding light found him once more. He was forced to shut his eyes as he spoke. “We didn’t bring the Sythians here. The only coordinates I received were for your forward base. It was your people who came and rescued us from the gravity field where we were stranded. They helped us find our way here. If the Sythians followed us, then technically it was your people who led them here.”

  “You dare to blame us for this devastation?” the gravelly voice replied.

  “Silence!” the voice like thunder interrupted, accompanied by an even brighter pulse of light from the blinding sun. “The martalis speaks the truth. They did not lead the Sythians here, but neither did my Peacekeepers. The Sythians did not follow you to Avilon. They already knew where it was. A martalis man by the name of Stevon Elder told them.”

  “Who?” Ethan asked.

  “Doctor Elder?” Atton added. “How would you know that? Actually, better yet, how do you even know him?”

  “I know many things.”

  “Who are you?” Atton replied.

  “I am your god!” the thunder boomed.

  Atton turned to his father with a dubious look. “He can’t be serious?”

  Ethan winced away from the light and shrugged. “Just roll with it. The Immortals are the Avilonians, Etherus is Omnius . . . it all makes a twisted kind of sense when you think about it. I never believed in all that, but I guess those who do should be running around screaming I told you so!”

  Atton turned back to the light with a frown, wondering if Ceyla being an Etherian would agree with that.

  Ceyla! His heart began to pound with the sudden fear that she hadn’t made it. Where was she? He recalled the group of people he’d seen as he approached the grassy clearing where he now stood, and he remembered that there’d been few people wearing ISSF uniforms. . . .

  Hope rising past the lump in his throat, he called out, “Marksman Corbin?” At that, he opened his eyes fully, trying to see past the light. His eyes promptly blurred with tears and he was forced to shut them again.

  “Over here, Commander!”

  Relief flooded through him, and he smiled through the tears.

  “Hoi, don’t forget about me, you old motherfrekker!” came Razor’s voice.

  “Quiet!” the gravelly voice hissed at them. “Omnius is speaking.”

  “They will learn respect . . .” the thunder replied. Switching to the Avilonians’ language, Omnius said something for the benefit of the Peacekeepers, and then the blinding light vanished, and the gravelly voice said. “On your feet!”

  Atton blinked the spots out of his eyes and he picked Ceyla out of the crowd of kneeling Avilonians on the grass. She was sitting beside Guardian Five, Razor. Atton reached her side just as the soldiers rose to their feet. She was in no rush to stand, but Atton held out his hand to help her up. She accepted it gratefully. “Thanks for your help up there,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  “Move along!” one of the soldiers beside Atton said, giving him a healthy shove.

  “Hoi!” Atton turned to scowl at the man. The face behind the glowing visor was inscrutable, but he imagined a nasty look on the soldier’s face. Maybe they were upset with him for suggesting that they were to blame for bringing the Sythians to Avilon.

  “Hold on a minute,” Ethan said, coming to stand beside Atton and face down the soldier with him. “Where are you taking us?”

  “Omnius has told us to leave you all in a temporary holding area and go join the fight.”

  “I see. Tell you what, why don’t you have us join that fight, too.”

  “Omnius said—”

  “Forget what Omnius said. You trusted us enough to ask for our help once. Now I’m offering it.”

  “Move along,” the soldier repeated quietly.

  “Quat est moror?” the gravelly voice said. Atton saw the owner of this voice was a blue-caped soldier with a glowing blue emblem etched into his radiant armor.

  The unadorned soldier turned to the blue-caped one and they spoke
briefly in Avilonian. A moment later blue cape turned to them. “Omnius accepts your offer of service. I assume you plan to use your vessel to join the fight.”

  Ethan nodded.

  “Then go quickly.” Reaching down to his belt, he opened a compartment and withdrew what looked like a small sheet of transparent rubber. Stepping up to Ethan he handed over the sheet and said, “Place this over your nose and mouth.”

  Atton saw his father staring at it in his palm with ill-concealed revulsion. Then he noticed that it was moving.

  “What is it?” Ethan asked, looking ready to hand it back.

  “A filter. It will allow you to breathe without being choked by the smoke. You will not get back to your ship without it.” With that, the blue-caped soldier turned and spoke to a few of his men. They produced similar squares of living rubber and distributed them to the humans in the clearing who didn’t have helmets.

  When one of them came up to Atton, he shook his head and smiled, putting his helmet back on instead. He watched with concern as his father pressed the sheet of rubber over his mouth and nose. Ethan’s mouth opened in surprise as the thing spread, adhering to his lips and nose.

  “Ethan!” Alara cried, her hands already reaching out to scrape it off his face.

  “Breathe!” the Avilonian commanded. “It will not harm you.”

  Abruptly Ethan relaxed and nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice now muffled with a watery sound. Turning to the others, he said, “Let’s go.”

  “You have room for us?” the Zephyr captain who’d found Atton asked.

  Ethan hesitated to reply. “Yes, but you’d be better off helping rescue efforts on the surface. There aren’t enough turrets on my ship for all of you.”

  “Understood.”

  “We could use some help finding it, though.”

  “Roger that—Alphas, form up!”

  Turning to Atton, Ethan said, “You and your squad mates can come with us if you like.”

  Atton sent Ceyla a questioning look. She and Razor both nodded, and he turned back to his father with a grin. “Ruh-kah!”

  Chapter 32

  Ethan stumbled out into the smoke-clouded world beyond the ethereal confines of the tower. From the top of the stairs he could see a vast field of flames, blurry orange light dancing through the fumes. Weapons fire flashed overhead, sounding with the distant screeching of pulse lasers and the resonant humming of beam cannons.

  He took a deep breath to test the living membrane the Avilonians had given him to place over his mouth and nose. It worked exactly as advertised, somehow passing clean, odorless air to his lungs.

  It did nothing for his eyes, however, which immediately began to burn and tear. He narrowed them to slits, and turned to look behind him for the mech captain who had agreed to lead them to the Trinity. He found Alara standing directly behind him, her eyes similarly clouded with tears. Behind her, Atton and his two squad mates were just now emerging from the tower. Bringing up the rear were eight Zephyr assault mechs—Alpha squad.

  “Hoi!” Ethan called out to the mech at the head of the group, shouting to be heard over the sound of weapons fire. “We’re going to need you to lead the way with your sensors!”

  “Roger that,” the mech captain said, striding by him and starting down the stairs from the Zenith. “Stay close,” he said as he and his squad descended into the gloom. Ethan and the others brought up the rear behind the mechs. The Zephyrs were keeping a close eye on the sky as they went, as if they could see some hidden danger lurking behind the rising columns of smoke. Every now and then they would hear an unearthly screaming as a Shell Fighter came whistling out of the sky to impact in the square with ground-shaking force.

  “We need to pick up the pace!” Alpha One called out from the head of the group. With that, the Alphas began to jog. Ethan and the rest of them had to break into a flat sprint to keep up with the Zephyrs’ longer strides. They couldn’t see all eight assault mechs, but Ethan tried to keep the nearest four in sight at all times.

  They had to watch their steps as they ran over the ash-covered ground. Ethan spared a glance to check on Alara as she ran beside him. “You okay?” he asked, suddenly worried about his pregnant wife.

  She nodded. “I’m fine.”

  “No argument about it not being safe to go up there and fight?”

  She took a moment to reply to that. Ethan was just about to ask her again when she said, “We have to fight them. Just look at what they’ve done to this place!”

  “What about our baby? I thought you wanted security. Safety.”

  “I do, and that’s exactly why we have to fight. With these people on our side, we might just win the war once and for all. Our part might not make a lot of difference, but at least I’ll be able to look my children in the eye one day when they ask me what I did to stop the Sythians. They’ll know their mother is no coward.”

  “Ruh-kah! Now there’s the Alara I remember. Welcome back, Kiddie.”

  “Thanks, I think. I’m new at this. I have to think about more than just me now. It’s not just my neck I’m risking.”

  “So what changed your mind?”

  “What’s the point in having children if they don’t have a world to grow up in? I was afraid to leave Dark Space because there was nowhere to go, but now we’ve found a place, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to rest before we rescue everyone and bring them here.”

  “Hoi, hold on a minute. We don’t have to rescue everyone, Kiddie.”

  “Well, obviously the criminals are a low priority,” she replied.

  “Actually, I wasn’t thinking about them. I was thinking about your father.”

  “Ha ha, very funny!”

  He gave a lopsided grin.

  “Heads-up!” the mech captain called out up ahead. “I think we’ve found her!”

  Ethan looked up to see a shadow come swirling out of the smoke. A moment later, that shadow resolved into the shape of his corvette. The Zephyrs slowed now that they’d found the object of their search, but Ethan sped up. He ran past the captain and opened the boarding ramp with the keycard in his pocket as he ran. “Thanks for that, Captain!” Ethan called out. “I owe you boys a round of drinks when we get back!”

  “I’ll hold you to that!”

  Ethan reached the foot of the ramp just as it finished lowering to the ground. He stopped and turned to see his wife, followed by Atton and two more officers go racing by him. He ran up the ramp after them, triggering it to close before they’d even reached the top. Eager to be rid of the living air filter the Avilonians had given him, he ripped it off his face and threw it over the side of the ramp. He noticed Alara doing the same.

  Once inside the ship, Ethan ran up to a lift tube that lay just beyond the boarding ramp, he slapped the call button and then turned to his crew. “Atton, take your friends here and head to the turrets. Alara and I will man the cockpit.”

  “This is a seraphim-class corvette,” the male pilot standing behind Atton said. “You’re going to need more than two people on the bridge.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Razor.”

  The lift tube arrived and they all crowded into it. “Well, Razor,” Ethan said as he selected the gun deck and the bridge from the wall-mounted directory. “This is a modified corvette, and it’s built for just two control stations.”

  “That’s a lot to manage in a fight,” Razor replied.

  “You just worry about manning your turret; let me worry about how much I have to manage.”

  The lift arrived on the gun deck a second later and Atton ran out with his squad mates. “Tag a few of them for me, son!” Ethan said.

  “I’ll tag a dozen,” Atton replied.

  With that, the lift doors swished shut and it went on to the bridge. A moment later, Ethan and Alara were running out and down a short corridor to the bridge. They reached their respective flight chairs and strapped in. Ethan fired up the Trinity’s reactors and began warming up the grav lifts whil
e Alara skipped through a quick preflight check.

  “Everyone ready back there?” he asked, speaking into the ship’s intercom. He left it open to keep a dialogue going between him and his crew.

  “Affirmative,” came Atton’s voice.

  “Roger that,” the female pilot said.

  “Ruh-frekkin’-kah!” Razor added.

  Ethan pushed the grav lifts up to maximum power and the Trinity shot straight off the ground, rising quickly through swirling clouds of smoke. Despite an upward acceleration of over 35 KAPS, they couldn’t feel a thing. “Set IMS to 90%,” he said, speaking to the ship. Alara shot him a quick look, and he got it. “Right—the baby—Make that 95%.”

  Now he felt a subtle pressure on his spine to accompany the upward acceleration. A few seconds later they emerged above the smoke and saw the midnight sky slashed with light and bleeding fire. “Holy frek,” Ethan whispered.

  Several Sythian cruisers were in the process of plummeting from the sky, breaking up into flaming chunks. Avilonian ground batteries answered that threat, breaking the debris into smaller and smaller pieces as they fell. Ethan looked up still higher to the clouds. Reams of fire converged on the lurking shadows of Sythian cruisers. What looked like thousands of gold-glowing insects danced through the air, firing streaks of bright red lasers at a significantly smaller number of orange-glowing insects.

  There were thousands of fighters, and that was just what the Avilonians had managed to rally on short notice. Larger ships were few and far between, however—with just a dozen that Ethan could see, and none of them much larger than the Intrepid.

  Speaking of which . . . Ethan scanned the grid for the ISSF cruiser, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. He had a bad feeling the Sythians had destroyed it before Omnius had come back online and restored control of Avilon’s defenses.

  Their fleet was destroyed in orbit, and this is what they had lying in reserve on the planet, he thought, marveling at the display of force. He tried to guess how many more fighters they had if this was what they’d managed to rally in the past half an hour since Omnius had been brought back online. He realized the number would be in the high six figures. Alara’s right, he thought. We do have a chance.