by Ben Weaver
“Racinian?” I asked, imagining those ancient aliens manipulating the quantum bond to construct the place in such flawless detail.
“We think so,” said Poe. “And we think this moon is a companion world to Exeter. In the center of this chamber is a perforation in the space-time continuum, one the Racinians discovered. They built this chamber around it, and it’s a safe bet that they harnessed its power.”
I squinted toward a point in the middle of the chamber, where, for a split-second, a tiny blue flash erupted. “I’ve seen something like this on Exeter, though it was more a rift, with these blue orbs that shot from the ground and rose into space. And when I got near it—”
“What?” Poe asked intently.
“I saw something.”
“Yes, you did,” he said gravely, then regarded the chamber. “I believe the Racinians were also trying to protect themselves from this perforation, and the chamber here is all that’s left of their efforts.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because when we found this place, I reached into the bond and jumped to the center.”
“Then you saw it, like I did. The beginning of…everything.”
“You went back?”
“I saw the universe collapse on itself, moving to a point when all matter was one.”
Poe looked away a moment, his breath racing. Then he said quickly, “I went forward through my own life. I saw the exact time, place, and hour of my death.”
One look into the man’s eyes told me that he firmly believed what he had seen, and I’m unsure if I was trying to cheer him up or whether I doubted his vision, but I said, “Maybe you only glimpsed a single thread. One possible future.”
“What I saw was like a billion trillion images, each one slightly different, but in all of them I was trying to manipulate my own fate—because I had seen it—and in all of them, I died at the same time, place, and hour.”
I drew my brows together. “How were you able to comprehend a billion trillion images?”
“The same way you were able to comprehend the beginning of everything.”
I shrugged. “There could be a scientific explanation for what we saw. Maybe they’re just hallucinations coming from our subconsciousness and somehow heightened by this seam or perforation or what have you.”
“You know they’re not. You know they’re real.”
I sighed loudly. “Why did you show me this? Are you looking for sympathy? Is there something I should know that’ll help us with the attack?”
“You want to know how to solve your aging problem,” he replied, then pointed at chamber’s center. “There’s one way to find out.”
I snickered. “No, thanks. I’ll leave the paradox to rest and take my chances the old-fashioned way.”
“Good.”
“What?”
“I said good. You’d rather trust in yourself. I should have done the same. Because that’s the first step.”
“Toward what?”
“Listen carefully, Major. Right now, standing beside this perforation, we’re as close to the bond as we can get without using our minds. This is the place where I’ve trained those neovics who can touch the bond. And this is the place where I can train you.”
“Train me? For what?”
“I don’t believe you can make yourself young again through sheer force of will, but you can stop this accelerated aging. You need to make a connection with the bond that is much more intimate than what you know. When you do that, you’ll be able to control what’s happening, just as Eugene has done.”
“But he told me he doesn’t know what’s happening.”
“That’s right. For him, that control occurs naturally, unconsciously. He has always been a neovic.”
“Mr. Poe, I’m intrigued by this place and these ideas, but there’s a Dr. Vesbesky on board the Wardens’ command ship who thinks he has this all figured out. And if we ever get back, I’m going to give him another chance.”
“That’s fine. Trust in science. But right now, just take a moment. Close your eyes, reach toward the center of yourself, toward what you believe is your burning core. Go there for a moment, and tell me what you see.”
Trying not to make a face, I sighed deeply, was about to close my eyes, when Halitov burst onto the ledge. “Excuse me, but we got a big problem,” he cried.
“What is it?” Poe asked.
“One of your people just called. Something’s going on at the capitol.”
“I’m sorry, Major,” said Poe, sounding calm despite the news. “Another time. Come on.”
Back at the main station conference room, we patched into the security holo images and watched as Alliance Marines tightened their stranglehold on the capitol. Airjeep patrols were doubled, as were sniper nests and artillery bunkers. You could’ve received an F in your recon intelligence course and still easily conclude that the enemy had been tipped off.
“Mr. Poe, we need to get off a message so we can warn our CO of a traitor,” Halitov sang bitterly. “Seems we share a common problem.”
“If there’s a traitor among us, it’s me,” said Poe. “I leaked the information. They know we’re going to attack, and they know exactly when. They’re waiting for us.”
“I knew it,” hollered Halitov. “I just knew it!”
“You did not, asshole,” I said. “You knew nothing.”
Poe swallowed and took a long breath. “Gentlemen, our attack on the capitol is part of a moon-wide assault that myself and the other miners in all five colonies have been organizing for months.” Poe directed his attention to me. “Major, you weren’t far off the mark when you said that the Marines were herding us into one place so they could launch a major attack. Actually, we’re doing that to them. We need as many as possible near the capitol when the bombing begins.”
“You set us up for a suicide mission,” said Halitov. “Well, guess what? I ain’t playing.”
“I thought we were the rallying cry,” I told Poe. “Now you’re saying we’re the diversion? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I told you everything I knew. I wasn’t sure of the extent of our role until only a few hours ago.”
“Prove it,” challenged Halitov.
Poe gripped my shoulder. “Major, you know how military operations work. Flexibility, maneuverability, and misinformation work hand-in-hand.”
“But now our people outside won’t stand a chance,” I said. “Unless you have an alternate plan.”
Poe’s gaze fell to his boots. “I have nothing.”
11
Miners across five major colonies on Icillica had organized themselves into a resistance and had planned and coordinated a major assault with the help of but a few hundred guardsmen and retired military folks. The simultaneous attack on Marines occupying their cities and provinces would be recorded in history as the single greatest civilian uprising of the entire war. Years later, Halitov and I would say we were proud to have been a part of it, but secretly, we both knew that being a part meant that we’d had front row seats to yet another massacre, with the defeat at Columbia Colony still fresh in our thoughts.
As we hunkered down on the rooftop of a small machine shop about a quarter klick south of the capitol, waiting for our signal, Halitov looked at me and said, “We should’ve been on Jing’s ride.”
“When we get in there—”
“You mean if we get in there…”
“When we get in there, I’ll launch the drone while you’re hacking into their POW records. I want everything you can get on Jing.”
“I knew you’d say that. I shouldn’t have brought her up. And you know, even if we find out where she is, we still have no ride off this rock. And even if we find one, what’s to say those cruisers don’t blow us into a navigational nightmare?”
“You’re right. You’d better start thinking about that. I’ll expect your report within the hour.”
“I’ll give you my report right now: We are—”
“Don�
�t say it. Let’s use reverse psychology and think positively.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this is going to be one of the easiest ops we’ve ever run. We’re going to stroll right in there, get off the message, find out where Jing is, commandeer a ride out of here, go stop Paul, save Jing, then eat pasta and drink vodka.”
“My God, you’re right. What was I thinking? And this particle rifle they gave me? I don’t even need it. I should throw it away.”
“Oh, just hang on to it as a souvenir. Maybe you can test fire it a little bit, once we get down there.”
“Yeah, that sounds good.”
An unsettling moment of silence passed between us.
“Scott? This is bullshit.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I have to say it.”
“Go ahead.”
He sighed loudly. “We’re fucked.”
“But maybe that’s good, because if someone wrote the story of your life, it wouldn’t be boring.”
“It’d be a horror story.”
I forced a smile, skinned up, activated my HUV, and zoomed in on the capitol building. I panned from sniper’s nest to sniper’s nest, from airjeep to airjeep, from cannon bunker to cannon bunker. A little over three thousand miners would, according to the Alliance Marines, storm the building, with only about thirteen hundred of them armed with particle weapons. In the Marines’ minds, the battle would resemble something ripped from a text on medieval warfare, with Saxons laying siege to a Celtic fortress. Of course, we had something slightly different in mind.
“Major, we’re ready,” came Poe’s voice over my private channel. “On your signal.”
“On my signal. Initiate Alpha Zulu. Mark!”
I had great respect for those civilian miners; they had as much courage as any guardsman or Warden I had ever served with. They came running out of buildings and access tunnels and subway entrances surrounding the capitol. They were the group armed only with conventional pistols, lead pipes, and—believe it or not—rocks. They crowded along the perimeter force fence, firing lead rounds and hurling those rocks, and all the Marines could do was remain in position and stare in disbelief at the amazingly pathetic assault on their position. As Halitov and I used the bond to double-time sideways down our building, we shouldered our rifles, then hit the ground, de-skinned, and charged into the crowd. We needed to get as close as possible to that fence.
With our heads low, we wove into the riot, fists and voices raised around us. I wanted to skin up and glance at my HUV to be sure Poe’s ten neovics were doing likewise, but then I’d alert the Marines. I could only hope the others had reached the fence.
“This is your attack?” cried the lieutenant colonel, a portly, unkempt man in his fifties, skinned up and standing in the rear seat of an airjeep hovering over the crowd. His voice came harsh and amplified via his suit. “Are you the only brave souls who dare defy Marines of the Eastern and Western Alliances? Where are your friends? I want them to bear witness as we mow you down like Sunday grass gone too long in the rain.”
“Well, Poe didn’t lie about him,” muttered Halitov over the channel. “Mow them down like Sunday grass? Guy’s a nut.”
We reached the edge of the crowd, coming as close to the capitol building as we could. I glanced to Halitov, nodded, then spoke over the command channel to our guardsman. “Clock starts at T-minus five minutes. Mark!”
In case our conditioning failed—as it was wont to do—Halitov and I had devised a backup plan. But one look at him told me he was all right, and I already felt the familiar and welcoming tingle. I reached out, willed myself inside the building, into the lobby, bridging the shortest distance that I could. We hoped that doing so would temper the drain on our bodies. I arrived with a chill, and it all hit me at once:
The dizzying backlash of my effort…
The Moorish-Gothic architecture of the high-ceilinged and ornate entrance…
And the two Marines pivoting to face me, their rifles coming to bear…
I threw myself forward into a biza, driving myself headfirst toward them, even as I skinned up and wrenched my rifle from my shoulder.
But Halitov had materialized just a few meters to my left and had reacted a half-second more quickly. He had catapulted himself in an Ai—the floating kick, counter-kick—and booted the first Marine with one foot, the second with the other. As their heads lolled back, he hit the ground and did a reverse somersault while withdrawing a pair of Ka-bars Poe had given him. He spun and slashed the Marines’ throats before they saw him coming. I hit the ground, turned.
Three streams of particle fire struck Halitov, even as a fourth and a fifth caught me in the abdomen, all of them originating from a small bunker constructed at the foot of the broad, main staircase. The bunker, a circular nest of alloy blast plates attached to a titanium frame, stood about two meters tall and provided good horizontal cover for those troops guarding the stairwell, but it hardly protected them from a vertical assault.
In unison, Halitov and I leapt up, shooting a full ten meters to the ceiling, where we turned, struck boots-first, and hung there, inverted, leveling our particle rifles. All five Marines fell under our spray and could not react in time. Their combat skins succumbed, and our rounds chewed into them.
Remaining on the ceiling and exploiting that improbable advance, we darted to the stairwell, taking the walls around, passing the second floor, where the house and senate chambers were located, forging on to the third-floor governor’s offices, then passing long halls leading to the executive offices on the fourth. As we ascended, I contacted Poe, who told me his neovics had reached the security bunkers and were working to take down the force fence. They had three minutes before the armed miners outside would launch their attack amid the riotous diversion of the rock-throwers and name-callers.
We had three minutes to seize control of the communications command center and disrupt local transmissions. With that done, I’d be free to launch my comm drone, and Halitov could probe their records for news about Jing. Even then, we only had a few minutes more until we needed to evacuate. According to Poe, miners in Wintadia Colony, along with a dozen or so colonial pilots, were gaining control of a squadron of atmoattack bombers fitted with ice-burrowing missiles that would penetrate the surface and reach the capitol. The blast would level everything within a half kilometer radius and take out perhaps seventy or eighty percent of the garrison. The civilian population in the area was already quietly evacuating, but those three thousand miners would remain until the very last minute.
All of which meant that Halitov and I had a pair of ticking clocks ringing so loudly in our ears that we could barely think straight. But we had to. Those bombers were en route, and I imagined the faint whine of their turbines in the distance.
Panting, we reached the fifth floor, and for a moment I turned my head and was lost in images displayed on a long bank of stained glass windows. The first expedition to Icillica unfolded in striking detail, and the visual narrative continued all the way to the founding of the moon’s first colony, Colyad. Abruptly, particle fire turned the magnificent scene into a shower of tumbling glass. We dodged from the spray, toward an inverted sign ahead:
COMMUNICATIONS COMMAND CENTER LEVEL FIVE CLEARANCE
We streaked down one wall, glanced furtively around the corner, as the power suddenly went out and backup generators kicked in. All right. We had to get past four Marines crouching along both sides of the entrance, two hallways spanned by force beams, and a spacecraft-like hatch of alloy as thick as my fist. Make that five Marines. No, six, seven, eight…
“What the hell?” Halitov thought aloud. “They’re diverting people up here.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s all about the clock. They’re all going down. Now!” I vaulted down from the wall, hit the floor, then I screamed like a maniac and ran toward the Marines, whipping myself into a killing frenzy. So much particle fire exploded toward me that the world became flashes of white light
and booming and the beating of my heart. My tactical computer issued multiple warnings about the drain on my skin: sixty percent, fifty percent, forty-two, as I fired point-blank at the first Marine, held the bead until he collapsed, then spun and fired at the second Marine, as my skin plunged to twenty-two percent power.
Jerking like a man suddenly electrified, I shouldered my weapon and launched myself over the second pair of Marines, withdrawing my Ka-bars as I did so. With the blade tips held between my thumb and forefingers, I flicked my wrists and sent the blades tumbling. Even as they flew, I reached into the bond and guided each of them through the air, feeling the connection between the particles in them, in the air, in the Marines’ skins, and even in their heads—which is exactly where they struck. One man got it in the cheek; the other woman blinked as my blade struck her left eye. And it all happened in a flicker of death that drove me on.
In fact, I had no idea where Halitov was or what he was doing. I reached the first row of force beams, willed myself to the other side, then hesitated. Oh, shit. I felt as though I just been pistol-whipped. I glanced back at the force beams. The drain should not have been that strong. My eyes felt very heavy, and for some reason, all I could see in my head was a page from the Chronology of Important Events in Galactic Expansion:
2284
First convention of business and political leaders from all extrasolar and solar colonies held in Columbia Colony, on planet Rexi-Calhoon. Informal assembly created. Negotiations begin to establish a new Colonial Alliance. Two high-ranking officials from 12 System Guard Corps attend convention to listen to arguments why they should break from alliances and become new colonial military.
“You all right?” Halitov asked, materializing beside me. “Come on!”
I just looked at him. Who was he? And I felt compelled to read aloud the page in my head: “By mid-year, nearly one million Exxo-Tally employees killed on frigid world of Icillica in Procyon Binary star system. Akin to old Russian Arctic and yielding similar deposits of nickel, iron ore, and apatite, Icillica predicted to become next Gatewood-Callista and geologic cash cow for colonies. Life-support systems in forty-seven of fifty-one mining facilities go offline, as do all three redundancy systems. Corporate investigators declare malfunction an act of sabotage but cannot gather enough evidence to formally indict alliance military.”
