‘Twenty seconds remaining.’
“An EMP blast will damage the Rasu as much as…” on the tactical screen, the enemy began blinking away “…and the Rasu are retreating to a safe distance.”
‘Fifteen seconds.’
Frustration boiled angrily beneath her loudest thoughts. “Tell Supreme Three that we will comply.”
‘Its response is: ‘Then comply.’ ’
Dammit.
Commandant Solovy (CAF Aurora)(Rudan Mission Channel): “All ships, disengage immediately and report back to your ready coordinates.”
The channel exploded in disbelief and requests for clarifications, even as the screen showing the Rudan power flows brightened to wash out the dark colors of the surface beneath an avalanche of white.
Commandant Solovy (CAF Aurora)(Rudan Mission Channel): “Retreat now.”
The ships outside the viewport blurred away in rapid succession, until only the Aurora remained.
‘Orders, Commandant?’
Her hands gripped the overlook railing until her knuckles blanched white. “Go.”
80
* * *
ONEIROI NEBULA
An explosion of light and raw power burst out from the pillar ahead of them, momentarily blinding Alex. She stumbled back into Caleb’s arms, and they both staggered for several steps before he regained his footing and secured his hold on her.
His voice was rough through her helmet. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, but I can’t see for shit. Give me a second.” She blinked away halos, and her ocular implant auto-adjusted its filters until she was able to see well enough to try to discern what was happening in front of her.
A portion of the stream had broken off from the main pillar, curving out to the left and down toward the slab they stood on—
A body was suspended within the torrent, tumbling end over end over end.
“Nika!” She and Caleb both took off running in the same instant.
Dashiel was far ahead of them, and he got to Nika just as she and the current that carried her reconnected with the surface of the Reor slab beneath their feet.
When the stream impacted, the Reor began to…melt. Liquid light poured into a forming chasm being carved into the slab. Once the well stretched for ten meters in diameter, the flowing energy lowered Nika’s body into it, submerging her completely within the swirling vortex.
Dashiel seemed to be eternally reaching for Nika yet somehow unable to grasp her, though no visible barrier separated them. Alex didn’t know what she and Caleb were going to do when they arrived on the scene, but they had about three seconds to think of something—
Mesme suddenly coalesced directly in front of her and Caleb, and they slammed into a solid wall of resistance when they tried to run through the Kat.
“Mesme, let us through! We have to help her.”
She is safe.
“Are you kidding? The kyoseil is eating her alive—or drowning her, or both!”
It cannot harm her, for it is already an intrinsic part of her essence.
Caleb growled through his faceplate. “If it’s all the same, we’ll confirm this ourselves. Let us pass.”
The wall of lights quavered, but lost none of its impressive solidity. No.
“No?! Fuck you, Mesme.” She darted to the left, Caleb to the right—and the wall expanded to curl out and around them, blocking their paths.
Caleb planted his feet and shoved against it with both hands. “Goddammit, Mesme! She’s supposed to be your friend!”
She is more than…please, I need you to trust me. She is safe, and this must happen.
“It WHAT?” Alex kicked ineffectually at the barrier with an incensed groan. “Oh, you infuriating, gandanov fiend! Must it, now?”
A hundred hundred billion quanta of information raced through Nika’s mind. Everywhere and nowhere and everywhere all at once. She was data, she was power, she was without question the universe itself.
Her skin burned white-hot, but it did not char. Her helmet was gone, her suit undone at the neck. Along every seam, golden flames ate away at the material.
She looked down—no, up. Light-energy poured into her mouth and eyes and pores. Her arms were extended out beside her, for she floated in a glistening vortex of incandescence that had no bottom.
“Nika! Gods….”
Dashiel’s voice was like cotton in the ether, distant and muffled. She beckoned him with her mind, trying to bring him closer. In the physical world, to which she remained tethered by but a single, wispy filament, his hand stretched out for her, only to be rebuffed by the vortex.
No, this wasn’t right. Not how the universe should be.
Don’t you understand? He’s part of me. Part of us.
She willed her body ‘up.’ To her complete and utter surprise, it complied, in a sense. She was still floating, suspended in a divergent current of power, but she was now upright. Light above her, light below her…but it wasn’t truly light. It was knowledge. Energy. Life.
What else could she command it to do?
She reached out for Dashiel, stretching her fingertips past the dancing fringes of the energy stream. Their skin touched, and she drew him closer. This time, the vortex allowed him to pass through.
Her hand moved up to curl around his neck until it found the toggle for his helmet, then collapsed it.
He gasped in surprise, his own hand instinctively jerking up to reactivate it as his eyes widened in fear. But she just smiled and took hold of his wrist.
It’s okay. You can breathe with me.
She drew him into her arms and kissed him, and the part of her that was life incarnate flowed into him with a roar.
Dashiel vanished into the rapidly expanding pillar of energy, until all Alex was able to make out was distorted glimpses of two intertwined shadows.
She banged a fist against Mesme for good measure. She’d accessed one of these pillars before; if she could do it again, she might understand what was happening here. She might even be able to save them.
Valkyrie’s avatar materialized beside her. “I returned as soon as I—oh, my.”
“Eto pizdets. My vse ushli chertovski bezumnyy.”
“I see. I will investigate.” Valkyrie’s avatar darted forward, only to slam into the wall Mesme had created.
It was strong enough to stop her, too? This had surely never happened before.
Valkyrie diffused into particles. “I will simply reemerge on the other side.”
I cannot allow that. I’m so sorry.
Before any of them could react, Mesme’s wall raced away from them to form a complete, impenetrable circle around Nika, Dashiel and their pillar of fire.
Now this had definitely never happened before.
Then, though it was impossible for the scene to grow any more extraordinary, thin filaments from every other pillar in the colony began to break away and curve toward the two Asterions, joining the torrential energy they were caught up in and lifting them ever higher into the air.
In a brilliant burst of light that seemed to consume the entire nebula, Nika and Dashiel vanished.
Shadow crept back into the world. The breakaway filaments faded away, the divergent stream returned home, and the vortex of melted Reor resolidified and sealed itself up. An eerie silence fell upon the nebula.
Mesme’s barrier dissipated, gradually reforming into a semblance of its virtual avatar above the slab to their left.
The instant it gave her a definable shape to lock on to, Alex whipped around on the Kat, fury burning in her eyes. “Mesme, you have got some explaining to do. A great fucking deal of it. Start now.”
MIRAI
The presence of walls made of steel metamaterials and concrete and glass composites felt cold and restricting. Nika stopped herself from fleeing back to the colony’s vibrant embrace only by forcibly reminding herself that this was home. She’d chosen to come here for a reason: to feel something real and tangible amidst the tsunami consuming her
mind and body.
Her toes touched a solid surface. Natural wood, polished and smooth. Wait, where had her boots gone? Where had her suit gone? Had it all dissolved, burned away by the kyoseil’s flames?
“You’re glowing like a seraph.” Dashiel’s voice was soft and husky, and a touch reverential.
“So are you.” Her arms were still wrapped around him, and her lips hovered a centimeter from his. She kissed him again, and sparks literally flew when their lips touched, for their bodies were charged to the brim with power and crackling light.
“How did we get here?”
“I opened up a wormhole and flung us through it.”
“You can do that now?”
“Of course I can. So can you. Merely consider wanting to do so. The kyoseil will listen to you.”
His brow furrowed, and his gaze diverted to a spot in the living room behind her. A second later, the faint glow of a tear in the fabric of the cosmos lit the room. “I’ll be damned.”
“I don’t think so.”
He took a step back, out of her grasp, then another. Disbelieving eyes of searing amber stared at her in growing confusion. “You’re more than glowing, you’re…Nika, what did it do to you? What are you now?”
What did he see that she could not? Her thoughts were a jumble, chaotic and unordered, but beneath all the turbulence, she sensed that the entirety of the universe had now become open to her. “I think perhaps I’m something new.”
His throat worked; he started to reach for her, but instead let his hand fall away. “Or something unfathomably ancient.”
The Story Continues In
CHAOTICA
RIVEN WORLDS BOOK FIVE
(Amaranthe ♦ 18)
Coming In 2022
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
I published my first novel, Starshine, in 2014. In the back of the book I put a short note asking readers to consider leaving a review or talking about the book with their friends. Watching my readers do that and so much more has been the most rewarding and humbling experience in my life.
So if you loved ALL OUR TOMORROWS, tell someone. Leave a review, share your thoughts on social media, annoy your coworkers in the break room by talking about your favorite characters. Reviews are the backbone of a book’s success, but there is no single act that will sell a book better than word-of-mouth.
My part of this deal is to write a book worth talking about—your part of the deal is to do the talking. If you keep doing your bit, I get to write a lot more books for you.
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APPENDIX
The Story So Far
View a more detailed summary of the events of the Amaranthe novels online at gsjennsen.com/synopsis.
AURORA RISING
The history of humanity is the history of conflict. This proved no less true in the 24th century than in ancient times.
By 2322, humanity inhabited over 100 worlds spread across a third of the galaxy. When a group of colonies rebelled two decades earlier, it set off the First Crux War. Once the dust cleared, three factions emerged: the Earth Alliance, consisting of the unified Earth government and most of the colonies; the Senecan Federation, which had won its independence in the war; and a handful of scattered non-aligned worlds, home to criminal cartels, corporate interests and people who made their living outside the system.
Alexis Solovy was a space explorer. Her father gave his life in the war against the Federation, leading her to reject the government and military. Estranged from her mother, an Alliance military leader, Alex instead sought the freedom of space and made a fortune chasing the hidden wonders of the stars.
A chance encounter between Alex and a Federation intelligence agent, Caleb Marano, led them to discover an armada of alien warships emerging from a mysterious portal in the Metis Nebula.
The Metigens had been watching humanity via the portal for millenia; in an effort to forestall their discovery, they used traitors among civilization’s elite to divert people’s focus. When their plans failed, they invaded in order to protect their secrets.
The wars that ensued were brutal—first an engineered war between the Alliance and the Federation, then once it was revealed to be built on false pretenses, devasting clashes against the Metigen invaders as they advanced across settled space, destroying every colony in their path and killing tens of millions.
Alex and Caleb breached the aliens’ portal in an effort to find a way to stop the invaders. There they encountered the Metigen watcher of the Aurora universe, Mnemosyne. Though enigmatic and evasive, the alien revealed the invading ships were driven by AIs and hinted the answer to defeating them lay in the merger of individuals with the powerful but dangerous quantum computers known as Artificials.
Before leaving, Alex and Caleb discovered a colossal master gateway that generated 51 unique signals, each one leading to a new portal and a new universe. But with humanity facing extinction, they returned home armed with a daring plan to win the war.
Four Prevos (human-synthetic meldings) were created in a desperate gambit to vanquish the enemy invaders before they reached the heart of civilization; then they were given command of the combined might of the Alliance and Federation militaries. Alex and her Artificial, Valkyrie, led the other Prevos and the military forces against the alien AI warships in climactic battles above Seneca and Romane. The invaders were defeated and ordered to withdraw through their portal, cease their observation of Aurora and not return.
During the battle, hints of the consciousness of her deceased father manifested in the shared connection between Alex and Valkyrie. Alex reconciled with her mother during the final hours of the war, and following their victory Alex and Caleb married and attempted to resume a normal life.
But new mysteries waited through the Metis portal. Six months later, Caleb, Alex and Valkyrie traversed it once more, determined to learn the secrets of the portal network and the multiverses it held, leaving humanity behind to struggle with a new world of powerful quantum synthetics, posthumans, and an uneasy peace.
And in the realm beyond the portal, Mnemosyne watched.
* * *
AURORA RENEGADES
Following the victory over the Metigens, Alex, Caleb and Valkyrie set off to unlock the secrets of the Metigens’ portal network. Discovering worlds of infinite wonder, they made both enemies and friends. A sentient planet, Akeso, that left a lasting mark on Alex and Caleb both. Silica-based beings attempting to grow organic life. A race of cat-like warriors locked in conflict with their brethren.
Behind them all, the whispered machinations of the Metigen puppet masters pervaded everything. In some universes, the Metigens tested weapons. In some, they set aliens against each other in new forms of combat. In yet more, they harvested food and materials to send through the massive portal at the heart of the maze.
But Alex and Caleb found yet another layer to the puzzle. In o
ne universe, they discovered a gentle race of underground beings with a strange history. Their species was smuggled out of the universe beyond the master portal by the Metigens. They watched as their homeworld was destroyed by a powerful species known as Anadens; but for the Metigens, they would have perished as well.
Back home in Aurora, the peace proved difficult to maintain. The heroes of the war—the Prevos who melded their minds with AIs—found themselves targeted by politicians and a restless population desperate for a place to pin their fears. Under the direction of a new, power-hungry Earth Alliance PM, the government moved to cage and shackle them.
In desperation, the Prevos uploaded the AIs’ consciousnesses into their own minds, fled from their governments’ grasp and disappeared onto independent colonies. Devon published the details of the Prevo link to the exanet, unleashing its capabilities for anyone who wanted to follow in their footsteps.
Meanwhile, an anti-synthetic terrorist group emerged to oppose them, fueled by the rise of Olivia Montegreu as a Prevo. While the private face of Prevos was the heroes who defeated the Metigens, the public face became the image of Olivia killing a colonial governor and tossing him off of a building in front of the world.
Unaware of the struggles her fellow Prevos faced, Alex forged her own path forward. Rather than bringing the AI into herself, she pushed out and through Valkyrie, into the walls of the Siyane. Piloting her ship in a way she never dreamed, Alex was able to feel the photonic brilliance of space itself. Over time, however, that bond began to capture more of her spirit and mind.
All Our Tomorrows Page 43
