“Jeff,” Kate cried out in flustered happiness. “You’re father’s here. Look.”
Jeff stepped into the range of the holograph camera and allowed Kate to grab his hand and drag him into focus. The camera instantaneously scanned him and a moment later Jeff’s eyes lit up.
“Wow, Dad,” he said. “We’re all together for the fourth of July well kind of.”
Jeff looked fit. Too much like his old man for Rage’s liking. Handsome brute, young and free to play the field for the next few--
Rage drew a sharp breath and knew what he had to do.
“How’s life on Mars?” Kate asked. “What exactly is so important that it’s keeping my only son from missing Independence Day with his family?”
Jeff rolled his eyes. “Mom, it’s a hush-hush science vessel mission,” he said in a mock scolding voice. “I can’t say a word.”
“Son,” Rage said in that unmistakable command voice of his that Kate had nurtured out of him during family time. She and Jeff visibly jumped.
“What is it Dad?”
“I need you to listen carefully, Jeff.” Rage said. “Your vessel is about to be attacked.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
“Jeff, I need you warn the crew and go directly to a life-pod.”
Jeff glanced to one side and shook his head. He turned back to the camera and looked directly at his parents.
“Dad, you’re mistaken. There’s nothing on my scanners. Who or what is supposed to be attacking us? Where’d you get this Intel?”
“Yes, Jeb,” Kate said and balled her hands into fists, “what is going on? Is this why you’re home? To ruin our family day?”
He shot a dark look at Kate, and hated himself for it, but there wasn’t time for this. He had to shut her up.
But being the fiery, independent woman that he loved her for being, she snarled at him. She stared at him. In her eyes he could see that she recognized some truth. She turned back to Jeff.
“Jeff, do as... Do as your father orders,” Kate said and forced her balled fists behind her back. “Do it for me.”
“Mom, I can’t just--hey, wait a sec.” Jeff moved out of range of the camera. All Rage could see was a small cabin. There was a muffed explosion, the camera shook and settled at an angle.
“Jeff?” Kate called out in panic. “Jeff?”
Rage heard a scream that sent a shiver that turned his blood cold.
“Jeff?” cried Rage. “Son?”
A hand. Bloody and gashed, fell into view. The fingers crooked in despair. The holograph dissolved into a ball of static.
“Jeb, what’s happening?”
Rage took a deep breath. “War, Kate,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean, ‘war’?” she shouted. “We’re at peace. My son is not a soldier. He’s a damn scientist for God’s sake.”
He put his arms around her. She fought off his embrace.
“You’d said he’d be safe,” Kate screamed. “You swore he’d be safe.”
“I know, I know,” Rage said and as he held her a faint rainbow light slithered up his arms.
She stepped away with a look of horror.
“What’s happening, Jeb?”
“No, not now,” he begged and reached out for her.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again he was standing in Valiant’s dining hall as a giant dust cloud settled around him.
CHAPTER 12 - VISIONS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
Dax tried to crawl out from under the crumpled metallic heap that was Peggy Sue. The G-RUNT had taken the full force of the blast. Dax felt along his body. His limbs seemed intact. But he couldn’t move one leg. Pain shot up into his groin. He knew the weight of Curly’s severed leg was crushing him.
Dax kicked out with his one good leg. He rolled Curly’s leg off him. He stared into the billowing cloud of smoke and dust. An eerie silence was confirmed by his contact lens data. It gave him no life-signs.
The thought of some five hundred crew wiped out by the blast sent a rolling wave of nausea through him. He swallowed hard. He clenched his knuckles to quell the burning pain of the white hot fireball in his stomach.
To preserve his sanity he told himself his data-lens must be malfunctioning. He sat up and felt a ringing tone engulf his hearing. And something else.
Glimpses of another sound he couldn’t define. Embedded in the distorted tinnitus, as if hiding. It felt important. What is it?
“Van Cleef?” he called out, but couldn’t hear his own voice.
He caught another glimpse of the hiding sound. It seemed to shimmer through the tinnitus. Cutting through the fog in is mind. Voices.
But not cries of pain or pleas of help. Words he couldn’t decipher. Like a code. Carried aloft on harmonics that could almost be... But it’s impossible!
He knew he must be suffering from shock when his mind registered the other sounds as singing. Ethereal. Gentle rises and falls. Fluid, cyclical like a whirlpool. No perceived beginning or end.
He couldn’t tell from which direction it was coming. All directions, and yet none. As if he had plunged into the center of a lake and felt buffered by the reflecting ripples caused by his own fall. But he told himself that was impossible.
He couldn’t be the cause and the effect. Can I? I can be one, or the other. Unless the ripples are reflected back at me by something or someone...
His mind struggled with defining his own perceptions. He felt gripped by a growing sense he was concussed and losing all reason.
But he felt the singing rising, always rising. As if bursting out of another dimension he had no idea, until now, even existed. Voices organically cascading like the drifting glowing orange embers about his head. Voices collecting, gathering, joining together into a choir. Growing more intense with each staccato breath he took.
Soon it dominated his tinnitus. Subdued it to a secondary melodic distortion. Begging him to ask one simple question.
Am I mad?
At last a crescendo of harmony seemed to collapse his resistance and punch a hole in the dust cloud before him. As if opening a door. A shadow moved across that opening in the dust cloud. It hesitated. It seemed reluctant to embark on the discovery of a new world of reason.
Dax felt no force of malevolence from it. He felt only... familiarity.
Dax crawled onto his knees and straightened up.
“Van Cleef?” he yelled again. “Show yourself.”
A small boy stepped out of the door in the dust cloud. He smiled. For a moment Dax felt at a loss to explain what a child was doing on a military vessel. Then, as the dust settled, he slowly recognized the boy’s features.
His nose. It was sharp like his own. The boy’s eyes. Exactly like his wife’s.
This is impossible... you’re dead...
Dax felt his breath trapped in his chest. It exploded with the realization he was hallucinating. Am I dead? Am I finally reuniting with my family?
He called out to the ghost of his son. “Ben?”
The boy waved.
“Ben, is it you?”
The boy giggled.
“How is it possible, Ben?”
Ben turned and ran back into the smoke. Dax staggered to his feet and ran after his son.
CHAPTER 13 - A VISION OF MADNESS
Dax ran into a clearing. Argyle Valkyrie held out her hands and spoke, but Dax couldn’t hear her words or read her lips.
He shouted, “Have you seen him?”
He thought he read her lips asking, “Who?”
“My son! Did he come this way?”
Argyle touched his forehead. She glanced at the fresh blood on her finger tips. His blood.
Her eyes flitted to a medi-bot. She beckoned it to them. A light from the palm of one robotic hand shone into Dax’s eyes. The other robotic hand manipulated a syringe.
All about him, medi-bots pushed hovering gurneys of broken and disfigured bodies. A darkness gripped his soul. He felt his fingers grip his hair and tug.
>
“This is all my fault,” he shouted, but no one seemed to be listening. “It’s happening all over again. I’ve cursed you all.”
His attending medi-bot prepared another syringe. Over the medi-bot’s shoulder, he spotted Ben. The boy’s lips moved, but the voice wasn’t his son’s. Instead, Ben seemed to be a conduit for the ethereal choir.
Dax felt the voices like a virus infecting his soul. They seemed to offer sanctuary in their melody. A healing strain battling his darkness and lifting him to the light of salvation. Or am I just high from the medi-bot’s pain medication coursing through my blood stream?
Dax shoved the medi-bot aside and ran. No matter how fast Dax ran, he couldn’t catch Ben. He felt the loss like a knife to his heart.
He slowed and stumbled. Then heard the familiar giggles. Ben appeared for a few seconds, some way ahead before vanishing once more.
Each time Ben disappeared, the loss felt like the first time he witnessed the Vanguard’s merciless destruction of the Fleet’s Moonbase.
The boy appeared again. Standing, waiting at the exit of the dining hall. Dax weaved through a crowd of medi-bots and injured crew. He tripped over debris of tables and fell onto the charred remains of an anonymous body.
“Ben, wait!”
He chased Ben through Valiant’s wide corridors until he found him on the observation deck. Under a huge glass dome, Ben looked up at the stars. As if waiting for something or someone.
Dax stopped a few feet from Ben. He held out a hand to touch his face. He hesitated. Suspecting he would discover Ben wasn’t real. A figment of his delusions. But, he had to know.
He shut his eyes, and reached out, expecting Ben to be gone when he opened them once more. As he reached out to touch his son’s hair, he felt a jolt. His fingers recoiled. His eyes sprang open.
Standing next to Ben was a tall, slim, young and beautiful woman. The sclera of her eyes like bio-luminous sapphire oceans glowing in the dark. Hair black as the darkness consuming his soul. The bio luminescence pulsed across her pale blue skin and seemed to indicate an agitated mood.
Her race was unmistakable and her presence repulsed him.
Dax felt the familiar fireball explode inside him. His body shuddered as he failed to control his rage.
He couldn’t fathom if his rage was born of jealousy that his son’s ghost held the woman’s hand, but not his. Or if he shook with rage because her beauty had one repulsive flaw. She smiled with the tell-tale indentations of a Vanguard’s fangs.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“I am Fyre, of House Von Rha,” she said in a tone of suppressed panic. She glanced over her shoulder. “Please listen, there isn’t much time.”
“What are you doing with my son?”
“It was the only way to reach you.”
“Get away from my son.”
“We need your help.”
The shattering fireball in his stomach spat fragments of molten rock, piercing his consciousness. He felt his mind incinerating with grief. Here he was, listening to one of his son’s murderers taunting him with the boy’s ghost. The final insult of this Vanguard specter: asking for his help.
He felt his life force shrivel up. His legs collapsed under him. He fell to his knees. Finally, he knew he was in purgatory for his sins.
“I’m sorry, Ben,” he cried out and let his heavy head slump. “I should have been there to protect you and your mother.”
Self-disgust rose up on a wave of nausea. He felt tears scorch his cheeks. He felt this was his damnation for abandoning his family at their time of need. And then something unexplainable happened.
He felt a small hand gently wipe the tears from his face. He looked up into Ben’s smiling eyes and felt an overwhelming sense of joy wash through him.
“Don’t be sad, Papa,” Ben said. Only it wasn’t Ben’s voice. But the voice of a thousand strong choir singing a melody that seemed to purge his soul of wrath. Ben reached out and wrapped his arms tightly around Dax’s neck.
Dax felt the exhilarating wave of euphoria wash through him. But some tiny part of his soul denied it. He glanced up into the luminous eyes of the Vanguard woman and knew she was doing all this to him.
Through the pain and bliss of torturing him with what he most desired in the world, he knew she was taking possession of his soul. And he was letting her.
With the last iota of strength and reason that he could claim, Dax pried open his son’s embrace and pushed his arms away.
“What do you want?”
She glanced over her shoulder before answering him. “Hermes is in danger,” she said with a tone of rising panic. “You must help me gather the seven names of the Blood Rites prophecy.”
Starlight punched holes through her. She and Ben began to fade in and out. She glanced over her shoulder again.
“Where are you?” he said.
“The psychic link is breaking,” she cried. “I can’t hold it together much longer.”
“Why should I help you?”
“There isn’t time to explain. For the sake of peace in the galaxy you must come here.”
“That’s not good enough,” he snapped. “Give me one good reason why I should help you?”
She nodded. “Your son.”
“What about him?”
“He and the mother are alive.”
The deck began to spin. He clung to the floor. He would give anything to believe it, but he knew it was impossible. Moon base was a charred crater. Nothing and no one survived the Vanguard onslaught.
He stared at the ghost of his son. “You’re lying. You’re not my son.”
Ben shook his head. Tears welled up in his eyes. “Help me, Daddy. Help me,” Ben said in a sobbing, throaty whine of a thousand voices.
Dax bit down on the knuckles of one of his hands. He knew if there was even a remote possibility Ben was alive, he must do anything to find him.
“Where are you, Ben?” he said and lunged at his son. He felt himself pass through Ben as if falling through a cloud in a dream. Feeling a torrent of aching loneliness cascading through him.
“Gather four of seven. The Ursu, Glaw. The human, Myf. The Lupos, Blaidd. They are the last help for mankind. Bring them to me on Hermes.”
“Ben, where are you?”
The stars seemed to devour Fyre and Ben. Ripping them apart into a thousand specks of light.
Dax reached out and tried to touch the fading whisper of voices. Twilight sighing a dying note, left him feeling more alone in the universe than he could ever wish for his worst enemy.
CHAPTER 14 - DO WE HAVE A DEAL
“Play Personal Archive,” Oksana said to the invisible and always listening Personal Environment Control, or PEC. She slumped into her stiff back chair by the steel desk in her small, dark, sparse and functional quarters.
The savage nature of the galaxy had once again flexed its claws down her psyche and left her feeling fragile, vulnerable. She was under no illusion that she was the only one to feel this way. Each and every crew member of Valiant had their own personal demons to deal with, she was sure. But her only way to cope was to find answers.
A hologram of a young, athletic blond man flickered to life in the center of the room. He thrust his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. He paced around in a tight circle like a caged tiger.
“I’m calling from Mars. I wanted to speak with you about something... important. I’ll be here for another hour. Once negotiations recommence I’ll be incommunicado. I guess you’re busy...”
He bit his lip as if mentally weighing his options. He had that familiar deep groove in his brow. The way he always did, when he was a child and needed to get something off his chest.
“Don’t make the same mistakes I made, Oksi,” he said.
She studied his handsome face. Noted the first signs of premature graying.
“If she gets her hooks in any deeper, Oksana, you’ll never be free,” he said. “Fight her. Do whatever it takes, or she’ll
manipulate you into doing things that eat at your soul.”
She stared at the dark circles devouring his young face. His usually clear eyes seemed flecked with stress and broken blood vessels. If only she’d caught his last call. She cursed herself for the thousandth time.
He stopped, glanced over his shoulder and listened to something out of earshot to her. He turned to face her and sighed.
He fixed the camera with a hard stare. His face succumbed to an uncharacteristic seriousness.
“I know we’ve not always seen eye-to-eye on everything,” he said, “but I’m hoping one day we will, and everything will be revealed and... forgiven.”
At last, he blinked as a flicker of his old self, with a carefree smile returned momentarily. He glanced over his shoulder again.
“It will be great to see you when I get back from Mars,” he said and struggled to smile. “Can’t really talk about it on Q-NET, but peace negotiations with Ursu and Lupos are...” He shook his head. “What the President and your mother are sending me to propose is...”
He hesitated and stared at his feet. He seemed to be losing an internal war to sum up his frustration. She studied him for any sign to help her understand. For something only the two of them would recognize. A fragment she could decode. A single thread of evidence she could pull on to unravel the mystery of his death.
“Give me a clue, Alex,” she whispered. “Did you know this would be your last ever message? Come on, I know you. I know you’re telling me something. What is it?”
Nothing appeared to her. He looked up.
“Oksi, it’s insanity. Barbaric. The worse thing is, I’m afraid they’ll agree to it. Your father never would have allowed it to come to this.”
He bit his lip once again. “I’m sorry I have to break it to you like this. But I think his death was by design. I’ll explain when I return.”
He glanced over his shoulder once again and nodded.
“Watch your back. Always remember, I love you, Oksi.”
His image deteriorated into static and vanished.
She sat unmoving in darkness. An uneasy feeling came over her. There’s a message in there somewhere... I know it.
Valiant (Jurassic War Universe Book 1) Page 7
