“Many thanks, little sister,” Hades said dryly.
Artemis bowed her head.
Without another word, Hades turned his back to his long-lost sister and headed for the open bridge. I only hesitated for a moment before scooping up my doru and following.
I couldn’t believe I had just met Artemis, one of the most renowned Amazon warriors of all time. I couldn’t believe she was still alive, not as a clone, but as the original. And I really couldn’t believe what a complete and utter disappointment she had turned out to be.
19
I emerged from the gephyra onto a hill in the center of a small Olympian settlement with half-built towers encapsulated in a thick, gleaming layer of ice. The ground was blanketed by snow, and fluffy snowflakes fell from the overcast sky in gentle flurries. My breath came out in a white puff of air and my cheeks and nose stung from the cold, and I was grateful for the hoplon suit’s climate-control feature, keeping me from freezing my toes off.
At first, I thought Hades had made a mistake and formed a bridge back to Earth. Except, the Alpha site had been nearly completely unfrozen by the time we left. Plus, the dome of ice surrounding the energy barrier that protected the city blocked any view of the sky. This was someplace new.
“Come on through, guys,” I said, walking around the gephyra to survey the unfinished city. The land surrounding this hill was remarkably flat, with rolling hills in the distance leading to jagged mountains that reached incredibly high into the sky. A few of the smaller towers spread throughout the settlement were complete, but most stood with their interiors exposed to the elements. It was as though the Olympians who had come here had started the colonization process but abandoned it before it was finished.
A large white mound barely visible between a couple of half-built towers just beyond the far edge of the city caught my eye, and I squinted to focus. It might have been a small, isolated hill, like the one I was currently standing on, but I was fairly certain I could sense the faintest tingle of energy coming from exactly that direction. That tingle stood out more than usual, surrounded by the utter deadness of the rest of the city.
I closed my eyes and focused on the tingle. The sensation strengthened under the full focus of my psychic senses, sending a thrill of excitement cascading over my skin. The mound wasn’t a hill, but a dome-shaped energy shield, covered in ice. A protective barrier, like the one emitted from the central tower in the Alpha site, was there to protect the city from the ice cap threatening to consume it. It had to be.
My people erected energy barriers to protect one of two things—a settlement, or a ship. The dome was huge, but clearly not large enough to cover a settlement, considering I was standing in the local settlement and not remotely close to the dome. Which meant it had to be protecting a ship. And based on the size of the mound, it was a massive ship. Something like, oh say, an ark ship.
The sound of footsteps behind me alerted me to one of my companions’ approach. I had been too distracted by my discovery to notice the arrival of his and the others’ minds. I opened my eyes and glanced over my shoulder to see Raiden walking toward me.
“This doesn’t look all that promising,” he said, coming to stand beside me. His discouragement and frustration seeped in even though I had muted my psychic senses as much as possible where he and the others were concerned. “Another dead end?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, unable to keep the excitement from my voice, and looked past him. “Hey, Hades . . .” I raised one hand to wave the Olympian prince over. When he joined us, I pointed to the mound of ice at the edge of the unfinished settlement. “Think that mound is large enough to conceal an ark ship?”
Hades squinted. “Perhaps,” he murmured. “Though it is hard to say from this distance.”
I grinned at him. “Well then, don’t you think we should get a closer look?” I could feel Hades’ excitement rising to meet mine.
We didn’t even bother splitting up the group. All together, we trekked through the frozen ghost town, and the closer we drew to the icy mound, the stronger the energy signature became. I grew increasingly certain that the mound of ice was, in fact, covering an energy dome. And it was absolutely enormous.
I jogged ahead, and when I reached the edge of the mound, I sheathed my doru and placed my hands flat against the frozen surface. Closing my eyes, I channeled a steady stream of psychic energy out through my hands, sending superheated tendrils branching throughout the ice, until it was all melted.
“Holy Mother of . . .,” Fiona murmured.
I opened my eyes and took a step back from the exposed energy barrier, lowering my hands. An enormous ship shaped like a bullet lay beyond the shimmering silver barrier. The four largest skyscrapers on Earth could have been tipped on their sides and stuffed inside, and then some. The ship was practically a city all on its own. A slow grin spreading across my face, I turned to Hades, who I sensed standing at my right. His features were transformed by an expression of wonder.
“Well?” my mom said from my left. “Is it an ark ship?”
A laugh bubbled up my throat. It wasn't just an ark ship. It was the Elysium, a grand ark ship, capable of carrying billions of souls in miniature consciousness orbs, about the size of a shooter marble, and millions of frozen embryos. Like all ark ships, this one could sustain the “passengers” indefinitely, so long as the ship was powered by a chaos stone not taxed by frequent use of the FTL engine. The Elysium’s AI was the most advanced ever created by Olympians, able to initiate and direct the colonization and repopulation process on a new world all on its own once a suitable planet was found—or to assist when manually directed by a living, breathing crew.
“Yes,” I said, grinning like a fool. “Yes, it most definitely is an ark ship.”
Hades raised his forearm and activated the screen on his holoband. He swiped to the left, and then to the right, tapped the holographic screen a few times, and the silver energy barrier fizzled out.
I looked from Hades to my mom and Fiona. “You guys wait here.” I shifted my focus to Raiden, standing on the other side of Hades. “Raiden and I will check it out and let you guys know if it's safe to come aboard.”
Raiden nodded, his hand going to the laser pistol holstered on his hip.
“Do you think there could be live Olympians in there?” my mom asked.
I stared at the ship and chewed on the inside of my cheek, excitement warring with a sudden spike of uncertainty within me. Someone had activated the energy barrier that had been protecting the ship, and I didn’t think it was the people who had abandoned the city before finishing it. Why would they have fled onto the ark ship, but not left the planet? That didn’t make any sense.
I glanced over my shoulder, scanning the unfinished cityscape. What happened to these people? I turned back to the ship. And who activated the energy barrier? And when?
“Let’s just say I don’t not expect to find live Olympians on that ship . . . especially after what we found on the last planet,” I admitted, and a combination of anxiety and excitement surged in the three humans.
“An energy shield can remain active indefinitely,” Hades told them. “Once established, it requires a low but steady energy input to be maintained. This energy shield could have been established thousands of years ago.”
“Or yesterday,” I countered, then glanced at my mom, sensing her mounting eagerness to explore the ship, as well as Fiona’s hunger to analyze the alien tech. “Just, wait here. Raiden and I will check it out, and then you guys can come aboard.” I looked at Raiden, my eyes locking with his. “Ready?”
Raiden nodded and stepped forward. “Ready.”
We climbed down over the eight-foot ledge of snow where the energy barrier had been and landed on dark, rich soil. In warmer weather, this land would have been perfect for agriculture. I could see why the Olympians who had started the colony here had chosen this location.
We headed for the Elysium, and as we approached, I psychically hacked into the
ship’s operating system. The AI was dormant, which didn’t bode well for the prospect of finding a chaos stone on board. Had the ship been at full power, I could have linked with the AI like any other mind—a much easier task. But it wasn’t, suggesting the ship was currently being powered by a power core instead. We could run the ship without a chaos stone, but we wouldn’t be able to access the FTL drive, which meant it would take several thousand years to reach Earth, rather than several days. In that case, the ship would essentially be useless to us.
Concentrating, I navigated my way through the ship’s complex systems to the manual controls and willed the nearest passenger hatch to open. A panel in the ship’s hull slid open directly in front of us, and a long ramp extended down to the ground. I led the way up the ramp, my boots striking the metal surface like a gong with each step. As we neared the top of the ramp, the airlock chamber lit up, and I flashed back to all the times I had come and gone from the Tartarus during our first dozen or so years on Earth before the Alpha site had been completed.
Raiden and I paused in the airlock while I concentrated on the inner door. The metal panel slid open with a whoosh, emitting a hiss of stale air.
I exchanged a glance with Raiden, who drew his laser pistol, and then I marched through the open doorway and into the ship.
The corridor beyond was shaped like a trapezoid, just like in the Tartarus, with steel grating on the floors and polished steel on the walls and ceiling, reinforced by posts and beams of orichalcum alloy. The Tartarus had been an ark ship, and I was operating off the assumption that the layout of the Elysium was generally the same, just on a larger scale.
Raiden and I had boarded the ship on the main level, and we followed the entry corridor past numerous bisecting hallways to the wider central corridor, which if I was right about the layout of the Elysium, should run the length of the ship, connecting the engine rooms at the rear to the command center at the front.
“Seems like you know where you’re going,” Raiden commented as we hurried up the central corridor, our eyes constantly moving and weapons at the ready.
“Seems like it,” I agreed, flashing him a nervous smile. “Seems being the operative word.”
He chuckled.
“We’ll find out if I actually do know where I’m going as soon as we’re close enough to read the writing on those doors,” I added, nodding toward the oversized double door panel ahead in the distance. If the blue, blocky letters spelled out the Olympian equivalent of BRIDGE, then my instincts would prove to be correct. If not, we would need to do some scouting to find the ship’s command center.
Turned out, I had been right about the ship's layout. The bridge doors slid apart, revealing a vast chamber with a high, arched ceiling, completely empty save for the gephyra platform at the center of the floor and the curved control panel set off to the side. Like the corridor that had brought us here, the floor within the chamber was steel grating, the walls and ceiling polished steel reinforced by ribs of orichalcum alloy. At the far end of the chamber, a railing blocked the drop off to the open level below, and in either corner, a staircase curved down to the lower level of the bridge.
I crossed to the staircase on the right and hurried down the stairs to the ship’s command center. Bypassing countless control stations, I headed for the captain’s station on its raised pedestal further back in the room. I climbed up the steps and slid into the captain’s chair, pressing a button on the desk in front of me to activate the holoscreen while Raiden looked around. I tapped the screen once, initiating a complete systems check, then swiped through a few menus to run a couple of ship-wide scans—the first for active life-forms, and the second specifically for Tsakali.
Within seconds, a box popped up on the holoscreen displaying a 3D cross-section of the bullet-shaped ship, and two tiny blue dots blinked near the ship’s snubbed nose. Raiden and I were the only living things here. A second box popped up beside the first, reporting that zero Tsakali life-forms had been detected.
“Alright guys,” I said through the comms patch, “come on in. We’re in the command center.” While we waited for the others to join us, I ran a third scan, this time for chaos signatures.
A new box popped up on the screen, again displaying a cross-section of the ship, and a vertical green line slowly moved from the tail end of the ship toward the front, representing the progress of the current scan.
“Does every Olympian ship have a gephyra?” Raiden asked, heading my way. He glanced up at the ceiling like he could see the gephyra through the layers of steel.
“Every ark ship,” I told him, watching the slow progress of the green line on the screen. “Plus, they usually carry an extra gephyra in storage for the colony itself.”
A faint, blinking green dot appeared on the diagram of the ship, directly above us, in the gephyra chamber, signifying that the scan had detected a weak chaos signature. I had expected it, but not the ping that appeared a moment later. A second green dot blinked a level below us, almost directly in line with the first dot, but even fainter.
“That’s strange,” I said as I sat up straighter, reaching out to zoom in on the diagram. I rotated the diagram to get a better idea of what I was looking at.
Raiden climbed the steps to the captain’s pedestal and joined me. “What is it?” he asked, standing to the left of my chair.
“I ran a search for chaos signatures and got two hits, but the readings don’t make sense.” I pointed to the stronger of the two blinking green dots, clearly indicating that the chaos signature was coming from the gephyra. “That's the gephyra above us,” I told Raiden, briefly glancing at the ceiling. “It's powered by chaos fragments.”
Raiden’s confusion seeped into me.
I could hear footsteps on metal overhead and sensed the others’ minds approaching.
“Think of chaos fragments like mini chaos stones,” I told him. “Like a watch battery compared to a car battery.”
Raiden nodded slowly. “Alright.”
Hades descended the stairs from the level above first, followed by my mom and Fiona, who scanned this new space with wide, awe-filled eyes. When Hades reached the floor of the command center, he made a beeline for us.
I returned my attention to the holoscreen, pointing to the second, weaker blinking green dot. “This one is a level below us,” I said. “In the cryovault, but what's weird is that this signature is even weaker than that of the chaos fragments above us.”
“It could be a single fragment,” Hades offered, climbing the steps to the captain’s station. He settled in on my right.
I narrowed my eyes, studying the diagram, and shook my head. “But why would a single chaos fragment be down there?”
“Or,” Hades said, “it could be a containment box muting the signature of a chaos stone.”
Cold washed over me, and I went absolutely, completely still. For seconds, I didn’t even breathe. I sensed that Hades’ thoughts had gone to the same place as mine—to the team of Amazons who had found a chaos stone while searching the lost colonies twelve thousand years ago and had been moments from reestablishing a bridge to return to Earth when Hades yanked the chaos fragments from the guts of the gephyra, thus stranding the team of Amazons off-world.
I exchanged a look with Hades, then stood and silently climbed down from the platform. I felt like I was moving through a dream as I approached the staircase tucked in the back right corner of the bridge.
“What?” I heard Raiden say behind me. I could sense both him and Hades following. “What is it?”
I ignored him, erecting mental blinders in my mind. My heart thudded in my throat, and my ribs closed in around my lungs, making it harder to breathe. I had a single purpose—to go down into the cryovault and find the source of the chaos signature . . . and to see if any of the cryochambers were occupied. An occupied cryochamber wouldn’t have pinged the life-form scan, so it was a very real possibility that the team of Amazons was down there, cryogenically frozen, just waiting for someone to wake
them.
I descended the spiraling steel staircase into the cryovault, and lights flared on overhead, illuminating row after row of cryochambers on either side of the elongated space. A containment box sat on the floor in front of the third cryochamber on the right side of the cryovault. I froze at the foot of the stairs, my eyes drawn past the containment box to the cryochamber behind it.
And to the mummified corpse of the Amazon warrior who had died within.
20
“A containment box!” Hades exclaimed from the stairs behind me. He gripped my shoulders, the contact allowing his glee at finding another chaos stone to overflow into me. “We did it, Cora. We can save them. We can take this ship back to Earth and . . .” His words trailed off as shock replaced his glee. He had seen the body in the cryochamber behind the containment box, my worst fear come to life.
I pulled free from his weak grasp and slowly approached the cryochamber, passing the containment box and coming to stand directly in front of the desecrated corpse of one of my spearsisters, only a thick pane of glass separating us. Her skin was blackened by age and as thin as paper, her eye sockets were empty black holes, and her lower jaw hung partially unhinged, locking her in an eternal scream. It was impossible to identify which of the five Amazon warriors Hades and I had stranded here I was looking at, but there were only five options. Five women I had known for centuries. Five women I have trained and fought alongside. Five women I had, to varying degrees, considered friends. Now that my fear had been realized, it washed away under waves of sorrow and guilt.
Reciting their names in my head—Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Selene, Metis, and Nike—I placed my palm against the glass. No hint of cold touched my skin, as it should have, had the cryosystem been functioning properly.
Licking my lips, I opened my mouth to speak, but found I had no voice, so I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hades,” I said, my voice sounding hollow, “run a diagnostic on the cryosystem.”
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