Martelle fidgeted with his suit. He’d never heard of Pleadian Pirates or Psy-bots, and what was this nonsense about AI? “Are you saying that the hostiles are AI based?”
The hologram cut to a statue of a woman with a device around her ears. The coiled device went around the back of her head, glowing a blueish-white. “That’s the AI,” said Lon. “Princess Leia...that’s what we’ve been calling her. We haven’t detected any other intelligence on that moon. It’s run by one statue. No flesh, fur, or scale-based Being exists on that moon...not that we have found.”
“That seems easy enough. We target the statue,” said Slade. “A few blasts, the target is down, the AI is down.”
“To get to the statue would be the issue. Yes, we could attempt to bombard it, but we don’t want to risk unnecessary lives or crafts. You just witnessed one of the three biggest ships in the Secret Space Program’s fleet being blown out of the stars. What you perhaps couldn’t see was Leia anticipating our next move. We never had the upper hand. We never had a fighting chance. They don’t just out gun us, they outwit us at every move. In under five minutes, thirty-thousand lives were lost, Mr. President. We suggest…leave it be and find another home, or go back home altogether.”
Martelle sat straighter in his chair, his hands folded in his lap, making sure to be as passive as possible. “Admiral Lon…can I call you Lon?”
Lon dipped his head.
“Thank you.” Craig steepled his fingers together, then dropped them back in his lap. “Now, Lon. As President, I’ve taken the biggest risk any President has ever taken – I’ve evacuated my office, the entire government and their families, to come with me to a place that will allow for a more peaceful transition into a new United States of America, a United States that keeps our forefather’s sacrifices intact, along with their ideals of a Republic; ideals on which the Secret Space Program was initially founded.” Martelle paused, waiting for Lon to understand what he was getting at.
Lon didn’t blink.
Martelle went on, “As you know, the President doesn’t just preside over the citizens of our country, but over the military as Commander in Chief, as well as the Commander in Chief of the Secret Space Program. Eisenhower was ahead of his time, when he created the SSP. He put an Off-World Power Act in place, allowing the President of the United States to seize control of the Secret Space Program for ninety days until Congress deems the Act allowable or unnecessary.” He paused again to see if Lon understood the situation.
Lon remained expressionless. He was used to asshole politicians who totally missed the point. He could wait Martelle out.
The President leaned forward, bringing himself closer to the camera to be sure his image was as large as possible on Lon’s holoscreen. He meant to imprint his face on the Wolf’s heart and in the Wolf’s memory. “You’re under my command, Lon. What I need you to understand is we’re going to Callisto.”
Lon nodded. “One last thing, Mr. President.”
Martelle nodded.
“Princess Leia has been transmitting a message. Star Warden didn’t have time to decode it, but we have.”
“Excellent,” said Martelle.
“It says, ‘Captain Katherine Bogle, call Kaden Jaxx home…’” It was Lon’s turn to let the information sink in. His audience was, predictably, silent. “That’s right, folks. The AI on Callisto knows Jaxx and Bogle by name. Now, want to tell me how we’re going to outwit them?”
5
Starship Atlantis
M-Quadrant, Solar System
(Near Mars)
Starship Atlantis. He was really, truly on Starship Atlantis, a cruise ship in space, but a hundred times bigger. Jaxx stood in front of a holographic kiosk, Slade next to him with his arms crossed at his chest, and watched the Public Service Announcement for the fourth time. He bit his lip, only now understanding why everyone – from his room to the first deck’s lobby – was staring at him, like he was a Hollywood A-List celebrity.
His own face jumped out at him from the PSA which ran like a soda pop commercial. “Archaeologist Kaden Jaxx, the man who knows pyramid power inside and out, will hook us up and hook us into the pyramids, giving all of us electricity. It is he who figured it out. It is he who will bring you light. It is he who will give you the luxuries you deserve. Kaden Jaxx!”
President Martelle’s image popped up on the hologram, jolting Jaxx back to reality. “This message has been approved by the President of the United States.” Martelle’s hologram smiled, his teeth glistening a pearly white – far whiter than they should have been. “When you see him, thank him. He is the reason we can live safely on Callisto, and the reason you and your family will have a beautiful new place to live.”
A futuristic house spun across the kiosk’s holographic frame. “The future is now and your home awaits. Imagine amenities, such as your own self-cleaning pool; compliant, double-safety-locked robots as butlers and maids; and don’t forget, your very own rock waterfall smack dab in the middle of your living room. Or, you can choose...”
“Let’s go, Jaxx.” Slade turned on his heels and headed to the ops room.
Jaxx followed, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the kiosk. “You’re telling these people that they can live on a moon that you have never visited, that hasn’t been tested other than by a satellite. It’s a lie.”
“Those pyramids have an energetic signature that’s off the fucking charts, Jaxx.” He leaned his head to the side, veins bulging out of his thick, reddening neck. “Don’t fuck with me, Jaxx. You’re going to do what you said you could do. You don’t have a choice.”
They strode up to the central ops room. Jaxx slammed his hand against the door, keeping it shut. “Those were theories.” His voice was low and urgent. If only he could get Slade to understand his position and turn the damned ads off. “Yes, I think the theories and the blueprints are sound. Have I ever turned a pyramid on? Hell no. You don’t just mosey up to a car and rebuild its engine because you have blueprints on how to rebuild it, especially when you’ve never worked on an engine before. You need the three ‘E’s, experience, expertise, and erudition evolution.”
Slade frowned. “Those are four ‘E’s, Jaxx. Two of the ‘E’s are in this room and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about with the two other ‘E’s, but they are probably in that room as well. Now, get your God damn hand off the door.”
Jaxx lifted his hand and Slade pulled the door open, pushing Jaxx in first.
The room was full. There were more scientists than Jaxx remembered, plus a window, something he didn’t have back in the Underfoot Black ops room, back on Grenada. Man, but that felt like it was a lifetime ago, though it was only a matter of days since they’d been underground, on Earth, studying an impossible moon…and here they were, much less than half-way there already, but on their way nonetheless. So, he’d been kidnapped and taken into space against his will. Worse things had happened.
The thrum that had struck him earlier, hit again, making his entire body vibrate. It was a song, of that he was sure. It had a melody he’d never heard, notes he hadn’t known existed, and words he could barely hear, but it was building in him, this song. And teaching him a new way of…
“Welcome back, buddy.” A small, bulbous man with a receding hairline patted Jaxx on his back. He held a smile and a beaming aura.
Jaxx couldn’t help but grin. “Jon Shaughnessy.” He gave the guy a hug. “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
Shaugnessy looked down at his belly, pursing his lips. “At least you aren’t seeing me in my skivvies, this time.”
Jaxx frowned, extending his hand. “About that – ”
Shaughnessy waved him away. “No, no. No need to apologize. I know you were in a predicament and couldn’t do anything about it.”
Jaxx relaxed, his shoulders dropping. Rivkah had forced him into Shaughnessy’s room at gunpoint, when she was trying to escape Underfoot Black. It was very decent of Shaughnessy not to hold a grudge.
/> “Well, where is our computer station? I heard you need help?”
Shaughnessy motioned to a computer station. “Your throne, sire.”
“Find anything interesting?”
Shaughnessy shrugged and leaned in, whispering. “I just can’t figure out half the shit I’m supposed to figure out. I’m faking it the best I can, but you’re the only one I know who can get the majority of these hieroglyphs from sight to paper.” He pointed a finger at the screen, showing Jaxx an icon. “Click on that one.”
Jaxx nodded. “Got it.” He clicked on the icon on the computer’s desktop and pulled up a glyph. “Where is this one located on Callisto?”
“It’s one of the first taken. It was written on what we think is a landing pad of some kind, just north-east of Princess Leia. And since we haven’t had response from TECS IV satellite in a while, we’re trying to figure out older images we kind of tossed aside as can’t-understands, which is technical-speak for no-fucking-clue.” He checked to see if Colonel Slade was listening.
The Colonel was looking out the window into deep space.
“In a way, it’s a load off our backs to have their satellite down for a while. We don’t have to hurry through everything like we did when TECS IV was taking pictures daily and sending them to us. We’ve had more time to assemble glyphs and study them. There’s a series over here I…”
Jaxx tapped the computer screen and gave a soft whistle to get Shaughnessy’s attention back to his question.
Shaughnessy pushed his glasses farther up his nose, squinting. “Yeah, that’s what we think is a landing pad. It’s a big glyph, extending across the entire pad. There are a couple more pads on Callisto with the same hieroglyph.”
Wings, or what might be glyphs of feathers, surrounded a six-pointed star that was etched in the middle of the landing pad. Carved inside the star were Atlantean symbols; an arch, a bird, and a bird inside a doorway, an ancient eye off to the left of that bird, along with three planets, which to Jaxx were clearly Earth, Mars and Jupiter. Next to Earth sat another smaller star with more hieroglyphs inside, also surrounded by feathers. Identical, albeit smaller stars, surrounded by feathers were spaced out directly between Earth and Mars, the third star right next to Mars’ magnetosphere. Three more identical hieroglyphs were positioned similarly between Mars and Jupiter, in the same type of configuration and distance.
Jaxx frowned. He knew what he was looking at. He dropped his hands to his side, sighing. He didn’t know if it was a good idea to tell anyone. He’d only seen this once before, but on a pyramid-shaped granite piece found somewhere near the Great Pyramid of Giza and now tucked safely inside a museum that no one visited. Even if someone had stumbled into that museum, to get out of the heat and press of the Bazaar, and accidentally came upon that granite piece, they’d see no explanation of what it was, except the name, “The King’s Sarcophagus.”
He pressed his finger on the screen, touching the glyph with the bird inside the doorway. “That’s not a doorway, by the way. That’s probably what’s screwing you up.”
Shaughnessy squeezed his shoulders together. “Yeah… yeah. I… uh… didn’t even know it was a doorway, actually. I was just shooting for the moon with that, trying to impress Slade.”
Jaxx looked up at him. “Don’t let him know you’re faking anything. He’ll shoot you on the spot.”
Shaughnessy yanked his ear, clearly uncomfortable. He looked everywhere but at Jaxx. “I helped build the TECS IV satellite. I at least have that as some leverage – if I ever need it.”
Jaxx nodded. Leverage would get Shaughnessy only so far with Slade. “Anyway, the hieroglyph of this doorway isn’t actually a doorway. It’s a hieroglyph of the sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid’s King’s chamber.” He studied it a second longer. “Usually, you see a person depicted inside the sarcophagus glyph. This, on the other hand, has a bird. A bird symbolizes flight.”
He heard the note again, deep inside his chest. It was getting louder, more insistent. He closed his eyes in an attempt to ward off the spins. A word rose up, from the pit of his stomach. One single word. It was a word he’d thought about, dreamt about, written about, and taken hours and hours of ridicule for.
That word was: portal.
Jaxx broke out in a sweat. “Any computer with sophistication beyond these computers? One that can quickly map and detect vortex energy?”
“The Lecturn,” said Shaugnessy.
“Where is that?”
“There are two. One on the bridge and one in the Admiral’s Quarters. I could ask Slade to let us use his for a moment.”
Jaxx dismissed the idea. “No, no.” He didn’t want Slade to know that these were portals; ways to move from one galaxy to another, in nanoseconds. If anything, he wanted to delete the glyphs off the entire ship’s network, so Slade couldn’t get to Callisto any sooner. The guy was willing to take the entire United States government and all her top scientists, along with their families, to what was essentially the wild west. In space. Without confirming whether the “wild west” had breathable air.
If there was a glitch or something wrong with any calculation or formula that went with the glyphs, and Jaxx didn’t know about it, he didn’t want Slade to blindly lead the ship into a star portal disaster, perhaps crashing them straight into an asteroid belt, or worse yet, a black hole.
Another thread wound about his worry for the people of Earth. It was a worry for the Beings on Callisto. There had been no reports – either from the satellites or the ship President Martelle had deployed to Callisto ahead of them – of sentient life on Jupiter’s moon, but Jaxx was certain that Callisto was inhabited. Quietly, carefully, deliberately inhabited.
By his people.
Oh, shit. Not good. Not good at all. He was known for being “out there” and this would only confirm his colleagues’ suspicions.
He shook himself. It must be the recycled air. They said the re-O2 was of the highest quality, but he’d been feeling lightheaded. And he’d forgotten breakfast, as he often did. There were a million and one explanations for the weird-ass thoughts and feelings he was having. None of which meant he knew jack-shit about an alien race living on Callisto.
Jaxx sat at his station, pulling up another glyph. He needed to find the calculations and the right star-set that told him how to activate and use these star portals. And then he’d have to get into the Admiral Quarters…without Slade’s permission.
Again, the note that entered his body and activated some latent learning system inside him, boomed through his brain. He looked back at the glyphs on his screen. He’d always had a knack for decoding them, but they were no longer symbols requiring translation. They were a language he understood, fluently. And, boom. There it was, the next image on the pyramid – an instructional ideogram. A snake, a DNA strand, a right triangle, and two knives, which meant frequency. Then, a backwards “L,” a lower case “j” with an oval dotting the “j,” and a slanted equal sign, all meaning numbers; 5, 100, 8.
If Jaxx was correct, and he’d bet his right hand he was, the moment before entering the star portal, the comm line frequency in a ship had to be dialed to 51008.
The ops door opened and a man in fatigues ran inside. “Colonel Slade Roberson.”
Slade turned. “What it is?”
The man took several quick steps toward Slade. They convened for a moment. Jaxx couldn’t hear them, but he knew instantly that Rivkah had broken out of her cell. He extended a chord of light from his center to hers and wrapped her in his protection. She was a stubborn fucker and tried to shake him off, but he wasn’t going to leave her unprotected while these jackals hunted her down.
Slade ran into the corridor, the door sliding shut behind him.
Jaxx looked at Shaughnessy. “Do you have a way to access the Admiral’s Quarters now?”
“I do, but I don’t.”
Jaxx knew what he meant. “Show me.”
6
Starship Atlantis
M-Quadrant, So
lar System
She felt him lasso her heart. Buttmuncher. Was it longing? Did she miss him? No, she hated him. That turd, Kaden Jaxx, had gone through weeks of deep-regression, remembered all the shit they’d been through when they were up against the half-human, half-lizard freaks known as The Kelhoon, but still failed to offer up an apology. He could take his “chord of protection” and shove it up his backside.
Rivkah ducked as Fox pulled the trigger, a stun ray zapping past her ear. The electric charge stung as it whizzed by. She rolled as another shot popped out of the IPR-8, missing her.
She jumped to her feet.
Another blast and she flipped, avoiding it, inching closer to Fox.
The other men took aim but it didn’t matter. Rivkah was focused on the team’s focal point – Fox. He was standing in the middle of his team. She pulled up every emotion she had, then blasted it toward his solar plexus, flinging her hands outward as if throwing everything she had at him.
She wasn’t surprised when Fox fell or when the men behind him tumbled backwards. She was getting used to her power; getting used to its ferocious energy, bending it to her every command.
Rivkah jumped and kneed Fox in the chest, “Oomph!” She swiped the IPR from his hands and shot everyone in the chest, their bodies writhing and twitching, becoming temporarily paralyzed. She was disappointed that they weren’t real ion bolts leaving holes in their bodies.
Destination Atlantis (Ascendant Chronicles Book 2) Page 3
