The last time Maez had felt this humiliated was when Myrha had taken off his hand.
‘Save one for your own corpse,’ he growled. ‘I’ll send it back to Alyxander with the King’s regards.’
‘How is the old man doing?’ Arturus asked. ‘Off crafting some new technology while you misbehave? Pity, I always thought he was someone who wanted to do some good here.’
Maez took a breath. He would not be provoked.
‘King Masaad is deeply apologetic,’ he said, ‘and vows to help the Orionis government rebuild.’
‘Sure he does,’ Arturus cooed. ‘You know, Maez, I always imagined your sister leading that fleet around. One has to wonder: you’re here, with the crown jewels, so to speak … and your father is sorry? What could Vladric possibly take to make him send a thousand Lightspears all this way to do harm? By the way … how is Myrha these days?’
The pleasure barges were closing at terrific speed, turning their bulks around to burn and decelerate. At their current velocity, they would be almost impossible to avoid hitting when the attack commenced.
‘Don’t put your barges between us and the Tabit,’ Maez warned.
‘I bet Myrha isn’t well at all,’ Arturus said. ‘So, Vladric found the King’s weakness. I’m sure you’ve asked yourself by now: is she really worth what you’re about to do?’
Seven thousand Obyerans were listening to this. Maez was moving beyond anger, surrendering to the rationale that he had been sent here to do violence.
‘She’s out there somewhere, suffering,’ Arturus pressed. ‘All that strength and intellect rendered moot as she lies bound, gagged, and violated by someone weaker than her, afraid of her, threatened by her greatness. Imagine, to be denied what she was literally born for. And here you are, the beneficiary of her torment. Here’s a thought: perhaps you’re the one who gave her to Vladric. We’re none the wiser, Prince.’
Maez snapped.
‘Target that lead barge and fire,’ he ordered.
39
VESPA
Laser fire is visible only when the medium it travels through is filled with dust.
An observer from one of Tabit’s rings might have seen several points of light in the black of space, each lasting a second or two. They would have also seen the simultaneous obliteration of a House Alyxander pleasure barge as its unarmoured hull plating vaporised in a spectacular plume of white-hot debris. A secondary explosion from within broke the barge into three incinerated segments, each one hundreds of metres long.
Two more points of light appeared, and the largest chunks were blasted into clouds of shrapnel hurling towards the Tabit.
‘That debris field will hit us in twelve minutes,’ Lieutenant Andrews warned. ‘Ring One and bow-ward. Too much for point defences.’
Vespa’s teeth were clenched tight.
‘How many are still on board?’
Senator Tice was beyond livid.
‘What was that asshole brother of yours thinking?’
‘I said how many!’ Vespa shouted.
‘Twelve thousand,’ Lieutenant Andrews said. ‘Excluding Navy personnel.’
Thirty-three minutes remained in the deadline. They had managed to get forty thousand off, but the hangars were overwhelmed. It was time for the triage to begin.
‘That’s not enough time,’ Vespa grumbled. ‘It was never going to be enough time. Lieutenant, start directing people in the rings towards the life pod batteries. When those are expended, it’s survival suits for everyone else. Make sure some of the queued shuttles are prepared to make EVA pickups.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Lieutenant Andrews said.
Vespa glared at Senator Tice.
‘My brother provoked Maez to discover their weakness,’ Vespa said. ‘Now we know what to shoot at. We’re going on the offensive to buy ourselves more time. Captain Jankovich, focus on neutralising those Lightspear clusters. You now have total control of Orionis’s arsenal – don’t make it easy for the bastards. If they want to hurt the Genesis they’ll have to get in close to do it. I never dreamt I would say this … but the Tabit Genesis is indefensible. Abandon ship.’
There was a chorus of solemn, affirmative responses.
‘Agreed.’
‘Chancellor,’ Colonel Tors said. ‘We have to move you now.’
‘Not yet, Colonel,’ Vespa said.
Another barge exploded. Then another. The House Alyxander ships were vaporising at random as the entire Lightspear fleet unleashed beam fire upon them.
‘You’re not a military officer,’ Colonel Tors insisted. ‘The rules are clear on this. Let’s move.’
Vespa sighed, taking a look around.
‘The toll will be more than any of us can bear,’ she said. ‘But Orionis shall persevere.’
‘Sacramento here,’ Captain Jankovich said. ‘It’s been an honour to serve.’
40
THE BLOOD PRINCE
Maez enjoyed watching those barges die.
Their destruction served notice for those Orionis ‘firstborns’ to take him seriously. And who better to warm the Lightspear’s guns on than House Alyxander? But the time for games was over. It was time to prosecute the King’s business and then start the journey home. If Myrha was not released, they would be making stops along the way, perhaps even paying the Archangel a visit. Now there was a challenge worthy of House Obyeran …
… Maez happened to be looking at the danger just as it happened.
Six, eight, and then an entire squadron of his Lightspears exploded as a hail of rail fire converged on four separate deltas. The Navy cruiser Sacramento, which had moved close to the Tabit to help ferry passengers, instead decided to fight. She was supported by the moored Geneva-class destroyers, still in port, their guns coordinating as a single battery.
Tabit’s orbital turrets had fired as well. Each delta had faced a minimum of ten shells per ship, all approaching from different trajectories. The Lightspear point defences were overwhelmed. Maez could see the rounds heat up as they approached, streaking across space as the Lightspear beams tried in vain to vaporise them before impact.
Now one hundred and forty Obyerans had died under his command.
Maez channelled his rage into the skills his father had programmed him with.
First, he disarmed Orionis. Lightspears decimated the orbital turrets, then filled space with electronic noise to fool Navy sensors, blinding the frigates and corvettes. One by one they were melted into slag, withering under the staggering firepower of the Lightspear fleet. They swarmed the Sacramento with surgical precision, melting her railguns and missile bays. They razed the destroyers, severed their moorings and sent them adrift, crashing into the fragile shipyard that had constructed them.
By the time the last Navy gun ceased, the Tabit Genesis was unapproachable. Debris clouds from the decimated House Alyxander barges hammered its hull with deadly shrapnel. Huge strips of metal plating, some of it welded when humans still walked the Earth, were blasted away from the superstructure; ominous jets of gas sprouted from ruptures on all three of the Tabit’s rings.
Soon, only the crippled Sacramento and the Tabit remained. The space around her hangars was littered with destroyed shuttlecraft; people died as cloud after cloud of debris struck. Maez tallied his own losses: ninety-seven Lightspears destroyed, and just five survivors among their crew.
He turned his fury towards the crippled Navy cruiser, limping just a few hundred metres from the Tabit’s hangars, surrounded by tugs and shuttles of her own, desperate to save themselves.
Vladric Mors had demanded that the Tabit Genesis be destroyed. How convenient then, Maez thought, that the Sacramento and her fusion reactors were so close by.
41
VESPA
Vespa’s last memory was authorising transfer of the government capitol to the Navy shipyard at Amnisos. And before that, the declaration of martial law for the Inner Rim.
She was about to address the people of Orionis when a horrible sound bu
rst her eardrums. Twisted metal fell from above; then a revolting, nauseating feeling rushed through her as the station’s rotation changed direction, yanking everyone and everything off their feet; the floor dropping away and then rushing up to meet them over and over.
Colonel Tors had been begging her to leave. One minute sooner would have been enough. Vespa saw the colonel slammed against the ceiling; her head flapped against her shoulders, held in place only by skin.
Then, the terror of pitch darkness, and the roar of air escaping a breach.
When her eyes opened, the first colour she saw was gold, then the upside-down face of torment: the Angustia of House Alyxander, embracers of human suffering. The comforting blue light of ORPHUS was among them.
Darkness again.
Vespa awoke, as she knew she would, to catch her final, familiar glimpse of the Tabit Genesis: her rings breaking apart, and the entire ship twisting in a lazy corkscrew; a massive metal tomb devoid of light and life, a silhouette set against the dead skies of Eileithyia.
‘Rest, sister,’ she heard Arturus say. ‘And let the new dreams come.’
42
ADAM
For a time, the Lycidas fascinated Adam enough to make him forget that it had killed Pegasus. But now, as he coasted through the circular hallways leading to the observation bubble, he felt the same suffocating anxiety as he had when his father was dying. He would trade all the luxurious amenities of the Lycidas to return to those humble days, when he was just a miner providing for his family.
The source of his angst was the three-hundred-cubic metre steel tank currently being lowered into the Zeus atmosphere. Nicknamed ‘Orpheus’, the Merckon scientists intended to capture a live hunter with it.
Using Viola’s research of the creature’s anatomy, they had worked day and night for weeks to build it. The main caveat for the trap’s design was the Arkady’s hypersensitivity to electromagnetic fields: active emissions could not be used to target them. Every drone that used a radar or radio frequency was attacked by hunters and destroyed inside an hour. Drones with passive sensors could never find targets. And pilotless, AI-controlled mechs angered the hunters; one was snatched from the rig and hurled down into the depths.
As far as anyone knew, the only reliable method for drawing hunters to the rig was to use Adam as bait.
The next design challenge was an arrest mechanism that could stop a hunter within the high gravity, high wind environment of Zeus without using conventional power-assisted projectiles. Arkady hunters repeatedly demonstrated their cunning ability to evade fire-control systems; thus Orpheus could not use electronic tracking systems or ‘active energy’ delivery mechanisms. So Merckon’s engineers built a harpoon system that relied on a multitude of nanoscale spring coils that, in aggregate, stored enough mechanical energy to launch the grapple and tow cable with as much force as a subsonic railgun slug.
The catch, however, was that the weapon would have to be manually aimed and fired.
After analysing the radar imagery of the Pegasus ‘incident’, the scientists concluded that a mature hunter could survive a puncture wound – and that several thousand volts of sustained electrical current would paralyse the specimen without killing it. When the harpoon struck the target, the voltage would be applied; then the winch would pull the crippled beast inside and seal. A turbine-driven air filtration system attuned to the local atmospheric molecular composition would pressurise the tank and simulate a jet stream inside to keep the creature from asphyxiating.
The goal was to keep the hunter alive for ten hours. It was not expected to survive longer. A host of passive and invasive scientific instruments designed to study the creature’s unique biology lined the inside of the tank.
To Adam, this plan amounted to the human equivalent of kidnapping, torture and murder. Viola also loathed the plan but was powerless to stop it. The Lycidas was not their ship. Merckon had the numbers, the incentives, and the weapons to put a stop to anything that would interfere with their interests.
Adam would have to play his part whether he wanted to or not. So instead of trying to fight the plan, he and Viola secretly planned for its failure.
Their preparations began with Adam learning how to fly the MGX-10 Avalon inside the Lycidas’s ventral hangar bay. Excluding his family and Viola, the security detail was the only crew that tolerated his company. When Adam expressed interest in the gunship, they let him sit in the cockpit and explained the craft’s capabilities. With their blessing, Viola gave him access to a training sim and encouraged him to learn how to fly it.
Since then, he had spent nearly all his time on board mastering the Avalon, and hardly any on the rig itself. Merckon owned the trawler, and the Lycidas had enough Three on board to burn non-stop to the Inner Rim and back. There was little else he could do to make himself useful, and the scientists had no time for his questions. They were too busy transforming the rig from a mining station into an armed research platform.
That was just as well. Adam hadn’t been able to bring himself to return to Zeus since Pegasus had died, and Viola was the only person on board who didn’t think of the Arkady as monsters. There was no one else to turn to, his mother least of all. She had become even more unavailable, absorbed in her own dark thoughts, losing weight by the day and obsessed with her new habit of smoking narcotics. Whenever Adam asked what was wrong, she claimed to miss his father, which angered him since he knew that was a lie.
Ever since Merckon had entered their lives, his mother had never spent another moment alone with him or Abby. Both had sensed on numerous occasions that there was something urgent she wanted to tell them. But she never did … because of Captain Mohib. He held some power over her, and it was clear that power extended beyond the traditional role of starship command. Everyone on the Lycidas who was enthusiastic with their work and the mission got along with the captain. Abby worshipped the man to a sickening extent.
But Adam didn’t like him. Neither did Viola nor his mother. And no one had the courage or even the desire to challenge him, especially now that his moment of triumph had arrived.
‘Adam?’ a familiar voice called out behind him.
He turned and saw Abby floating there, dressed in her Merckon uniform.
‘I’m not going to be late,’ Adam said, rolling his eyes.
‘I didn’t come here to nag you,’ she said, looking sheepish. ‘Can we talk for a minute? Before we go in?’
‘Now?’
‘It’s never a good time,’ she said, lowering her voice, glancing around. ‘Or place. Ever, with Mom. And now, I think I know why: Captain Mohib isn’t who he claims to be.’
‘Well, duh,’ Adam said.
‘I know you suspect they have a history, but he slipped. He said to me, “You have your mother’s eyes.”’
‘So what?’
‘Well, it really bothered me because—’
‘That’s really creepy, you know that?’
Abby sighed impatiently.
‘Mom despises him but still does everything he asks,’ she explained. ‘She denies ever having met him before, but … she’s never been a good liar.’
‘Your eyes are green,’ Adam suddenly realised. ‘Hers are dark brown.’
‘I took some of Mom’s hair and sequenced it,’ she whispered, gently letting her greaves make contact with the deck. ‘The Lycidas taught me how. She was born with green eyes. Like mine. So was Dad.’
Adam blinked.
‘Are they really our parents?’ he asked.
‘Biologically, yes,’ she said. ‘But … I don’t believe the surname “Lethos” is ours. Adam … they had their appearance changed. The Lycidas told me something else. We aren’t ghosts. We … are firstborns!’
She paused to let it sink in. But Adam didn’t care. His father had once explained what amniosynthesis was. It was just a different way for people to be born.
‘So what if we are?’ Adam said.
‘Don’t you see?’ Abby implored, eyes darting aro
und again. ‘It explains why they always discouraged any talk of travelling to the Inner Rim … why Mom refused help for Dad even near the end. They were running from something to protect us. Something even worse than Ceti. And I think Captain Mohib knows what. I have memories from before we settled here … just flashes here and there, but I always felt we used to have a better life. Mom always told me I was mistaken. But we weren’t meant to be miners.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Adam said. ‘So who’s Captain Mohib, really?’
‘I don’t know,’ Abby said. ‘But he has far too much influence with Merckon to just be a freight captain.’
‘This doesn’t change anything,’ Adam said. ‘We’ve never been able to trust anyone but each other.’
‘About that …’ Abby said, looking downwards. ‘I haven’t been the best sister to you. I’m sorry for my behaviour. Some of the time, anyway. When you weren’t acting like a little—’
‘—Brat Face,’ Adam offered.
She flashed a brief grin.
‘For what it’s worth … I don’t agree with what they’re doing here either.’
She pushed herself forward, latching onto him in an embrace that left them both floating through the hallway.
‘I love you,’ she said, squeezing tight. ‘You’ll always be my little brother. Please be careful.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen?’ Captain Mohib announced, his champagne pouch raised before him. ‘Orpheus is in place.’
The bubble observatory erupted in cheers. All the mission personnel were present, dressed in white and green jumpsuits, embracing one another beneath the distant glare of the Orionis sun.
Adam tethered his greaves near the entrance and kept quiet.
‘We don’t normally throw early celebrations,’ Captain Mohib said, as the voices lowered. ‘But your effort deserves an exception. Corporate is so pleased with your progress they’ve upped the ante: for every hour we keep our specimen alive, each of you will earn an additional ten per cent of your base mission pay.’
The Tabit Genesis Page 39
