“Negative, First Specialist. You have been reassigned.” The captain sighed. “I know what this chase meant to you. I am sorry.”
The holocube disappeared. The whisper of a Scramjet’s Carbedyne fuel nacelles preceded a whoosh. The crab-like mobile transport rose above the escarpment and fixed spotlights upon Valentin and the crippled quarry who lay twenty meters away. The Scramjet hovered before unleashing a yellow energy slew which turned Valentin’s target to ash.
He cursed. “Cudfrucking …”
Valentin consumed his anger and stood at attention as the Scramjet landed within ten feet. He saw the red dragon-like insignia of the Unification Guard’s Admiralty embedded on the side. The entry cascade dissolved, revealing three silhouettes. The two on either side stepped off, their blast rifles at rest. They wore the thin, crimson bodysuit of combat – something rarely seen on or near Earth. He handed over his knife.
They stood silent next to Valentin and faced the third silhouette. They overshadowed Valentin, who long ago conquered the sense of inferiority generated by his meager 6-foot-9 frame. He followed them to the entry.
Medals shined and stripes of honorarium glowed before Valentin recognized the face of one of the five most important commanders in the forty-planet UG fleet. He stepped onboard and offered the obligatory side-nod. Valentin caught his breath.
“Admiral, I am at your beckon.”
“Yes, you are, First Specialist.” Rear Admiral Augustus Perrone extended his hand in a surprising gesture. “Valentin, yes?” Valentin nodded. “Outstanding. I have one question, peacekeeper.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you fond of your family?”
Valentin’s heart skipped. “Excuse me, sir? I mean, yes, sir.”
“And what of your brother?”
“Sir, I have no brother.”
The admiral laughed. “Then your reunion will be fascinating.”
Valentin could think of nothing to say. This made no sense.
“Re-uniform, First Specialist. We are about to go into battle. If I am correct, your brother might pose a considerable problem.”
3
J AMIE GAVE OPHELIA TOMELIN AN ORDER, but she did not have the chance to express her indignation. The ground jolted, sending both of them onto their backs. The cavern rumbled – above, around, and from what Jamie sensed, deep into the Earth beneath them. The small round drones bobbed and whirred. The glistening lattice walls crackled like sheet ice unable to bear the weight.
Behind them, the tunnel without support lattice or lighting collapsed. Jamie lifted Sammie, whose right shoulder was blackened by the assassin’s weapon, and turned to Michael.
“Time to high-tail it, Coop,” he said, struggling to find balance on the shuddering ground. “Can you take her?” Michael nodded, wrapping an arm around Sammie while fumbling with his gun.
“What the hell, J? This shit’s all coming down on us.”
“Not yet, dude.” His eyes scanned every possibility. The Jewel guided him as it had since the forest chase near Ginny’s Creek and inside the Austin Springs Police Department. It showed him every detail, five steps ahead. “Take her out, but steady. Keep the gun aimed. There’s more of them. I’ll be right behind.”
He caught Sammie’s dazed, drifting eyes. For an instant, she moved her lips, and Jamie thought she tried to say, “I’m sorry.”
There she was: The innocent, love-struck girl he knew in Albion, always hoping to please. Not the trained killer who lied to him for years.
We missed our chance, he thought. Jamie accepted that he’d never find his way back into her heart. “We will show them the way home, then the dark will follow.” Even now, as the cavern rumbled and the Earth prepared to bury them alive, Jamie could not escape Lydia’s warning. Smug, manipulative Lydia.
Dammit, J. Focus. You will do this.
As Michael and Sammie stumbled forward into the tunnel, Jamie examined the guard hit twice by the assassin’s weapon. Blood trickled from the man’s ears, and he wore a twisted smile, as if confronted by life’s cruelest joke. But his eyes – locked in a deathly stare – said he posed no threat.
Jamie lifted the weapon – a silver, oblong device not much larger than an oven mitten but without the arching five-finger design. Yet it wrapped over the dead man’s left hand, as if he were born to it. Jamie remembered Mr. Harman’s shop class – for which he managed a D – and recognized this as a titanium alloy.
He tugged at the weapon until it gave. He jiggered until it slid off the man’s hand, leaving a viscous fluid behind. Jamie understood: survival required adaptation. He tucked the pistol between pants and waist, then took a reassuring breath before sliding his right hand inside the titanium weapon.
“No,” Ophelia said, now regaining her balance. “Take your hand out of there now. The bio-fit will reject you. You will lose your hand. James, we have to leave. I promise, I’ll take you to your parents.”
Jamie ignored her as the weapon’s internal systems engaged, a liquid filling the spaces between his fingers. And then, a green pulse flashed twice through the titanium surface. An energy spike sent a directive through the nerves in his arm, until reaching a destination at the rear of his temporal lobe. Jamie saw everything, as if highway directions mapped out on a phone. He made his next move.
Jamie stopped Ophelia before she ran, twisting one arm around her back and holding the weapon against her head.
“I’m already figuring out how to use this,” he said, as the earthquake maintained a steady intensity. “I won’t kill anybody else unless I have to. Move.”
They caught up to Michael and Sammie.
“How many are waiting for us?” He asked Ophelia.
“I cannot be sure, James. If our defense perimeter is holding, no one at the entrance will be a threat to you.”
“You mean like the fella who just tried to kill us all? I’m betting you didn’t see that coming, Ophelia.”
Just before they rounded a sharp bend, she replied, “No. He was working both sides. We did not recognize his …”
“You’re not as smart as you think. Your observers had the same problem. They turned on each other.” He caught his friends’ desperate remembrance. “Sammie and me, we got nobody left from back there. Michael’s parents think he’s dead. And I killed …” He choked up, focusing on the path ahead without losing pace with his plan.
“Those Shock Units you sent in, Ophelia? If they hadn’t come … I stopped them, but I killed thousands of people when I did. I can’t ever come back from that. You understand what I’m saying?”
The trembling subsided.
“To be honest, James, I do not,” she said. “If you are the Jewel reborn, whatever you did was always part of your potential.”
Jamie stopped. The others did likewise. “A Berserker. My brother told me. A whole army of us. That’s what you Chancellors been waiting for. Guess what, Ophelia? I got other plans, and I got nothing to lose.”
“Except them,” she said with defiance, pointing to Michael and Sammie. “You want nothing to happen to them, James. I will give you every assurance of their safety, even the ability to assimilate into the Collectorate and forge productive lives. Although that one,” she pointed to Michael, “will need to vacate Earth in due course.”
Michael turned his gun on her, as he kept Sammie close.
“Seriously, lady? Did I piss in your Corn Flakes? First, you make that African comment, now …”
“Coop …” Jamie started, but Sammie cut him off.
“Michael, it’s OK.” Her voice slurred. “You don’t know everything. We can’t do this now.” She cleared her throat and told Ophelia, “He doesn’t understand. Just keep us safe and get us out of here. We’ll work out the details later.”
Jamie saw a colder, hardened shadow in her eyes. The girl who shot down a helicopter, who spent years in paramilitary training with her parents, had reawakened. Ophelia must have also seen the Chancellor arise in Sammie, given her change of tone.
“Precisely, Miss Pynn. The four of us share a common purpose.” She looked down her nose at Michael. “Corn Flakes? James, if you will release me, I will lead us to the defense perimeter and with good fortune, to our transport. Yes?”
He let her go. “Just don’t forget. I’m new with this thing.” He held up the weapon. “It could go off any second.”
Michael cocked the pistol. “Tell you something else. I’ll bet the bullets in here can make a mess of you just as bad as that …”
“Thump gun,” Ophelia said.
“Seriously?” Michael chirped. “Stupid name. And besides, I killed a guy, too. So, yeah. Wonder Woman here, she took out at least a couple dudes. Yeah. So, we’re all killers here, right? Just saying.”
Jamie heard Michael’s panic. “We’re good, Coop. We’re good. The quake is over. We’ll make it.” He offered a thumbs up.
Sammie told Michael she could walk on her own now, but she held her right arm limp against her side.
“Give me your pistol, J,” she told Jamie, flexing her firing hand. “We need to be ready.”
“Are you sure?” He asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“I’ll be fine.” Sammie grabbed the weapon and motioned it toward Ophelia. “She knows she’s in trouble if anything happens to us. She’s our best bet, right now.”
Jamie rubbed her injured shoulder. He did not experience the loss of energy like before, when he healed his friends’ mortal injuries, but he realized the Jewel would not deny him this gift.
They approached to ten meters of a huge, double-sided metallic door that reminded Jamie of bank vaults in heist movies.
“Can you open that from inside?”
“The panel is to the immediate left,” Ophelia said.
“And your people on the other side?”
“Defending the perimeter. If the shield beacons held during the quake, we have a parabolic grid extending one hundred meters. We recover our team and board our ship.”
“Easy enough.” Jamie stopped her from reaching the panel. “Too easy. Who knows we’re here?” He tapped his temple to remind Ophelia of her holographic transmission.
“My team outside, plus a handful of others, all trustworthy.”
“And who are the ones who want me dead?”
“Mercenaries for other Chancellors.”
“The Jewel told me something about an opposition and why the observers hid me. The United Green. Is it them?”
“In part. The Green is hardly united anymore. Chancellors have many agendas these days, James. Whatever the Jewel told you, it cannot know about the past fifteen years. This is a far more dangerous world than the one you were born into.”
“That’s what I figured.” Jamie shifted to Michael. “Coop, are you sure about this? You can still go back.”
“Alone? Dude. Seriously. Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because you got family that loves you. And this world? I shouldn’t have let you come.”
He shrugged, but Jamie sensed the conflict.
“Tough shit, J. I’m here. I ain’t going back, no matter what. Besides, I still got to come up with a new catchphrase, and I need to see all the cool future-y crap they got going on, right? Then I can think up something with style.”
Michael’s eyes watered. He’s losing it, Jamie thought.
“This is it, Coop. Last chance.”
He turned from Jamie, cocked his pistol, and aimed at the door.
“Let’s go, J. You ready, GI Jane? Time to check out the new digs.”
Jamie stepped up, joined Michael and Sammie with weapons extended. He nodded to Ophelia. She did the rest.
Every instinct told Jamie he should have forced Michael to return home. This was not going to end well.
4
U.G. Admiralty Scramjet Ericsson
T WENTY MINUTES AFTER HE JOINED the attachment to one of the Collectorate’s most powerful military commanders, Valentin Bouchet – two weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday – stood alone, a neglected piece of furniture onboard a mobile command-and-control vessel en route to destination unknown.
Admiral Perrone offered no information after his obtuse greeting but ordered Valentin in silentium after re-uniforming for combat.
Valentin did as told, though dressing for combat on Earth was unheard of. He entered a ReCon tube, which took sixty seconds to disintegrate his Dacha clothing, laser-pulse his 295-pound, battle-hearty mass for proper measurement, and weave the crimson combat bodysuit of the peacekeepers upon him – foot to neck, an immaculate fit for every ripple and contortion. Lighter and smoother than silk, stronger than steel, adaptable to all environments. The tube also synthesized his helmet, which he retrieved before exiting.
Valentin stood at full attention near the forward hull, helmet cupped under one arm, his breaths undetectable as he held the pose meant for peacekeepers facing sharp disciplinary consequences.
As the minutes passed, his anxiety rose. In the center of the compartment, the officers studied a holocube battlefield projection for a site somewhere on Earth. They walked around the floating bubble which had been discharged from an officer’s amp and tapped inside the projection, where data rose and fell. They nodded, their lips shut while speaking instream. The admiral vanished behind a cloaked sound field to his own workstation at the rear.
Is this how you test me? Valentin wondered whether his failure at the battle on Zwahili Kingdom caught up with him. He never expected to receive a pass for his fatal lapse and couldn’t believe he’d gone without a reprimand.
In his impatience, Valentin suspected his own father might be to blame for this reversal of fortune. You never believed in me, Valentin thought. You never understood my thirst for service. His father never stated his opposition directly – at least not in the Tier-3 runup to induction – but Valentin knew. He saw the sideways glances, heard the hushed tones, the occasional commentary about “hard-liners who could not let go of the past.”
Although Valentin steered clear of politics, he wondered whether his father lost faith in Elevation Philosophy, which stated the Chancellors’ birthright to reign over humanity’s other ethnicities and tribes.
His paranoia assembled the pieces. His father knew the admiral and orchestrated a back-channel deal to increase the admiral’s influence with Earth’s most powerful presidium. In exchange, the admiral agreed to accept Valentin’s reassignment to a cushy position as attaché, with the inevitable promotion to a political position in a regional Sanctum. No more battlefield glory, no command postings, only the minefield of the Chancellory’s corporate bureaucracy.
You will not get away with this, Father.
The admiral brought down his cloak and emerged into the compartment. He spoke to his officers and redirected a new schematic from his own holocube. Even at twenty feet, Valentin recognized the geography: The Ukrainian Expanse.
“The reports are conflicting,” the admiral told them. “Three fools went across to make an extraction. The prototype emerged despite their efforts. But there is fighting on both sides of the IDF. If they do not resolve this matter inside the hour, we will engage Scorch protocol. Understood?” The officers side-nodded. “Alert Commander Narmette to place his ADB cannons on standby.”
The admiral turned his attention to Valentin.
“First Specialist, at ease. Join me at my station.”
“Yes, sir.”
The admiral take a seat behind a simple desk and poured himself a cup of café from a built-in dispensary on the rear bulkhead. He nodded in satisfaction after the first sip.
“Simple pleasures manage difficult chores.” He smiled. “My brother used to say that. Worked well for him until he died onboard the Nephesian. He and twenty-four thousand others. Thirty years ago tomorrow. We have never recovered. Have we, First Specialist?”
“No, sir.”
The admiral laughed. “And what would you know of it? For you, it was two lifetimes ago.” He sipped café. “But I wallow in pointless sentiment
. Time to focus on more urgent concerns. Yes?”
“Sir, if I may inquire, why did you reassign me?”
“You may not inquire, Mr. Bouchet. All you need to recognize is that your skillset will be valuable for the operation in front of us.”
“Yes, sir. And that operation?”
“A combat rescue, and an opportunity to add Chancellor insurgents to your kill record. Far more impressive than knifing an indigo in the Mongolian Desolation, yes?”
“Chancellor insurgents? You mean, the Green?”
“If that’s what they still call themselves.” The admiral enjoyed his café. “Civil war is bad for business, Mr. Bouchet. For the moment, let us focus on the rescue component.” He tapped his temple. “Spin up your amp. Bring down your CF Wall, allow incursion for Admiralty A-6 mods.” As Valentin tapped his stream amp and produced his holocube, the admiral added, “And prepare to be entertained.”
Valentin twisted his fingers through the holographic corridors of his highest security filters and grabbed the visual feed just arriving.
“Before you watch this, Mr. Bouchet, I want you to understand that we are both vested in what happens on this operation. As I promised, you will meet a brother you never had, all of which might make for fascinating dinner conversation the next time you see your parents. For me, this is far more personal. Pay close attention, Mr. Bouchet. This transpired fifteen minutes ago.”
Valentin played the transmission. He read the stream stamp of an unfamiliar woman, Ophelia Tomelin. The video focused on three children, underdressed but aggressive, their strange weapons aimed high to either side of Tomelin. The questions began. “You are the daughter of Walter and Grace Pynn of the Americus Presidium?” The girl answered, confused. Yet Valentin recognized that family name from somewhere. Then the video focused on a taller boy, white-skinned, close-cropped blond hair. “You are James Bouchet, son of Emil and Frances Bouchet?” And the response: “That’s what I been told.”
Valentin caught the admiral’s eyes. “This can’t be.”
“It gets better,” Admiral Perrone said.
Valentin followed the next tense minutes. Something about a Jewel of Eternity, next stage of evolution. “You can’t control me. You can’t trust anybody.” And then, without warning, chaos. Thump guns, the boy claiming to be Valentin’s brother falling to one knee and …
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