The Impossible Future: Complete set

by Frank Kennedy

  “James touched him?”

  “After much consideration. Yes.”

  She stretched a hand toward the boy, but he ignored her.

  “Rikhi, please. This was not what you wanted. You can be free.”

  “I am, Dr. Tomelin. I have been set free by Admiral Valentin and Brother James. I fight for the light of Salvation. You should be happy for me.”

  “You’re not a killer, Rikhi.”

  Valentin focused on Ophelia. He owed her his life. Salvation would not exist without her. But the movement could not move forward with her in the fleet. James made his position clear.

  “You always knew it would end this way,” he told her. “Either the Guard would destroy you or we would. I protected you as long as you were useful. I am sorry, Ophelia. I don’t do this out of malice.”

  A scowl broke her tears. “Monsters never do.”

  “But it must be public. My brother demands it.” He shifted his focus to Magnus. “You must ask yourself this: Do I have a heart black enough to kill a woman bearing three children? Am I so committed, I will press the trigger button faster than a flash peg can tear a hole through my head?”

  Magnus turned red, the perspiration soaking his features. Valentin knew he was about to surrender, but he feared a loss of control over the trigger finger. Ursula, who never said a word since entering the ship, appeared stoic. She hid her fear with resolute eyes and a partial nod giving Valentin permission to finish this.

  Instead, his eyes met Harrison, who obeyed and aimed his own weapon at Magnus.

  “End this madness,” Valentin said. “End your life like a man, not a coward.”

  Magnus dropped his weapon and let Ursula go. Rikhi moved forward and collected both Ophelia’s and Magnus’s pistols. He reached out a hand to Harrison, who threw confusion at Valentin.

  “It’s fine, Mr. Malwood. You have no more need of it. Yes?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Valentin stepped lively and raised his voice.

  “Col. Lennox, you may enter.”

  The soldier who escorted them to the Scramjet ordered Ophelia and Magnus to exit at once.

  “Well done, Soldier Syed,” Lennox told the boy. “You’ll make a fine addition to our army. Hand the weapons to the quartermaster and wait outside for further orders.”

  Rikhi saluted.

  Valentin lowered his blast rifle but shot a nasty look at Harrison.

  “Why didn’t you abort when you saw Ursula was the hostage?”

  “I do apologize, Admiral, but frankly, we were too far along. Had I pulled back, I would have raised suspicions. Yes?”

  The point was fair but unacceptable. “Why James felt the need to put you in the middle of this lunacy is beyond me. We had them on conspiracy and treason. This could have been handled quietly.”

  “True. But your brother wished otherwise, and he is the ultimate commander of Salvation. Yes?”

  Valentin refused to say another word to this cretin. He stepped off Gamma and reviewed the gathering crowd. Work in the landing bay came to a stop. More than fifty gathered – soldiers, rogues, Chancellor engineers. Valentin gave in to his brother’s demands.

  “Listen carefully,” he told the crowd. “Today, we have uncovered a conspiracy to sabotage the fleet and make us vulnerable to attack by the Unification Guard. These two,” he pointed to Ophelia and Magnus, who stood apart with heads bowed, “attempted to commandeer this craft and escape not only with vital secrets but also with Sister Ursula, though she is only days from giving birth.

  “Tell others what you are about to see and let them know: any attempt at treason will be met with the ultimate penalty. But all those who remain loyal to the goals of Salvation will be rewarded with the ultimate prize. For some, that prize will be a home world. For others, a chance to return to the Collectorate as heroes to their people.”

  He pivoted. “Col. Lennox. Now.”

  Lennox aimed his blast rifle chest-high. Magnus hyperventilated as he lifted his head and stared into the face of his executioner.

  “No …”

  Lennox shredded his chest with flash pegs. Magnus flopped to the deck, his body contorted in a manic pose. Lennox lowered his weapon and turned to the admiral.

  Valentin looked down at Rikhi, who stood at his side.

  “Are you ready?” He asked the boy.

  “I am, Admiral Valentin.”

  He directed Rikhi to Lennox, who handed over the blast rifle.

  “No,” Ophelia shouted. “Oh, please. Not you! Valentin, don’t do this to him. He’s not a killer.”

  Valentin didn’t want to look, but he had no choice. Rikhi turned back, as if asking for permission to ignore Ophelia’s pleas.

  Valentin nodded.

  Ophelia fell to her knees.

  Rikhi did not hesitate.

  Flash pegs blew her skull apart.

  The landing bay fell into abject silence. They all knew Ophelia before they met her. She made Collectorate-wide headlines in the weeks following the SkyTower disaster. To some, she was a legend. And then, in the final months, a ghost. A non-entity banished to a few sectors of Lioness.

  Valentin cursed James for demanding this spectacle. Yet he wasn’t done. He didn’t care what his brother thought about the next one.

  “Col. Lennox, please escort Mr. Malwood to the forward deck for execution.”

  Harrison did a double-take and started babbling.

  “I’m sorry, what? Admiral, what are you playing at?”

  Valentin raised his voice. “This man was planning to betray Brother James directly.” Harrison cackled, but Valentin drowned him out. “He took part in today’s capture of traitors in order to hide his true purpose. He intended to take advantage of Brother James’s goodwill by securing a ship that would take him to the closest Guard outpost. There, he would reveal the coordinates of Black Forest, allowing the Guard to assault our position.”

  “No, no, no!” Harrison shouted for all to hear. “This is madness. I have done nothing but risk my life for Salvation. He doesn’t like me.” Harrison pointed to Valentin. “He’s insane. This is revenge because his brother favors me.”

  Col. Lennox pushed the feverish, ranting intelligence chief closer to the corpses of traitors. That’s when the disconnect hit Valentin. He saw it when they entered the Scramjet. One weapon in Malwood’s hand, the other an outline visible inside a pouch.

  He yanked the blast rifle from Rikhi then turned and aimed.

  He was too late.

  Harrison shot Lennox twice, the blast wounds opening in the colonel’s back near his spine. Lennox collapsed as Harrison brandished his weapon.

  Valentin fired.

  Harrison quaked as flash pegs tore him apart, his weapon discharging as he fell. Ricochets splattered off the Scramjet’s hull.

  “Cud.” Again, he cursed his brother’s arrogance. This should have been tidy, not a spectacle. Now, he needed to order cleanup on the deck and bodies vented into space. He …

  Shouts and desperate cries grew behind him. Fingers pointed.

  Valentin pivoted. At first, it made no sense.

  But he knew. From the vacant, staring eyes. The large, bloody hole. What have I done?

  Sister Ursula Amondala lay dead on the deck of Lioness.

  65

  On approach to Great Plains Metroplex

  S AM PRAYED FOR THE LOVE OF HER LIFE. If Michael’s God was real, perhaps He would hear her words. Perhaps He might forgive her for not contacting Michael in almost ninety minutes. How to explain her decision? How to tell him she was sure of nothing, that all her plans might fall apart before sunrise and kill them both? That help might not reach him in time or be enough to hold off the enemy?

  “One more soldier will not have made a difference,” Lucinda Blanche said, sitting at Sam’s side and holding her hand like the grandmother Sam never had. “We have to be unified, Samantha. Have you not been saying this all along?”

  “The only thing I said when he transmitted
his coordinates was that I loved him, and I was sending help.”

  “I’m sure he understood. The longer you streamed, the greater chance to compromise him. Michael is in a war zone.”

  “He’s fighting for his life, and I’m making a political stand. I should be with him.”

  Lucinda, though more than sixty years older, giggled like a schoolgirl. She dismissed Sam’s comments with a wave.

  “Oh, please. What of it, if you kill a mercenary on the streets of Harrisboro? You’ll be no closer to ending this war. You and I possess something Michael does not: leverage. If we do not use our status and intelligence to push out Grandover, what good are we? I know little of war, but it is not won solely by those on the battlefield.”

  “I know. And even if we stop this invasion, there’s no guarantee we stop the war.”

  Lucinda opened a holocube. Another ally, Evan Augustine of the Vancouver Presidium, stared back, along with Malcolm Rainier of the Coronado Presidium. She had them on circastream since bringing Sam onboard her personal Scram, along with Ezekiel Mollett of Americus. All were en route with their Presidium officers.

  “What is our status, my friends?” She asked.

  Sam thought all of them appeared pale, as if they knew this was a do-or-die proposition. Failure almost certainly meant none would leave the GPM alive. Best case, they’d be “disappeared” into the notorious subterranean cells beneath the complex.

  “I’m still working San Mateo,” Malcolm said. “Their loyalties are divided, to say the least.”

  “I have reasonably good news,” Evan added. “My grandson has just finished convincing Len Danielsson of the Delta Presidium into standing behind us. They’re sending five representatives now.”

  Sam was impressed. Evan, the most aged of her allies, earlier seemed reticent about risking his descendancy’s fortune. Now, it was as if he found new life.

  Lucinda looked ahead to Ezekiel, who was trying to make contact with officers inside the GPM.

  “Any movement, Zeke?”

  “I’ve only been able to reach officers off-duty, outside the amping temperate zone. Best I can determine, there are a number of mid-level officers who want to make a move, but mutiny is out of the question. It’s like we discussed before. Our best bet is Rear Admiral Angela Poussard. She’s next in line to Grandover, and there’s no clear indication she was onboard when Celia Marsche pulled off the coup. A couple of majors say she’s been largely invisible the past few days, working mostly as an administrator.”

  Sam remembered her, after a fashion. She was there when Supreme Admiral Tolliver announced his resignation. She took a position at one end of the conference room while Grandover handled the other. At that point, Celia entered, full of bluster. She all but pushed then-Step Admiral Poussard out of her way. Sam did not see Poussard during her detention after the coup. Perhaps …

  “Do they know we’re coming?” Lucinda asked.

  “Not from me,” Ezekiel replied. “I’ve just been trying to take the temperature. But they might make assumptions, especially if our other allies have been inquiring.”

  “Would they be more likely to take a stand alongside us?”

  “Civilians?” Malcolm interjected. “I doubt it. They’re already disgusted enough that a certain Scandinavian civilian may be pulling strings. They need to be motivated by military law. One, that these are illegal orders, and two, that the Guard is violating its duty to protect the Chancellory. Bastian Grandover is well-liked down the chain of command. The others won’t so easily turn.”

  “Which is why we need Poussard,” Ezekiel said. “She is the only one who can legally usurp Grandover of his command.”

  Sam grew impatient. “But we don’t know that she’d change anything if she had the reins. Do we?”

  Shaking heads. Sam felt the indecision and pushed forward.

  “If we could deliver our evidence to Poussard – or all the officers, for that matter – surely they’d lose confidence in the man. They’d see his true nature.”

  While everyone visually agreed, hesitation remained.

  Lucinda put this idea into perspective. “If we had access to stream directly inside the Admiralty firewall, we’d have the man cold. But we don’t, and the GPM’s temperate zone for amping extends ten kilometers outside its gates. Zeke, do you trust the officers you interviewed well enough to share the evidence with them?”

  “I served in the same battalion as one, but not on the same tour. I’m not sure he’d feel loyal to me.”

  “But if he did, he could transmit on the Guard stream.” She addressed her pilot. “Adina, how far out are we?”

  “Two hundred forty kilometers, Miss.”

  Lucinda sighed. Sam leaned over to her.

  “Every second matters. What do we have to lose?”

  Malcolm nodded. “Since we agree that public dissemination of our evidence will fall under attack by the hardliners and probably exacerbate the civil war until an inquest is conducted, I say we take this chance. The rest we’ll discover inside the temperate zone.”

  Ezekiel streamed to his contact. Sam listened as he changed his tone and became more transparent. Often over the next ten minutes, the conversation took heated turns. She gathered from Ezekiel that the officer in question had been drinking steadily for hours. Then, Ezekiel asked the questions she suspected would seal the deal: How many years of reserve brontinium extract does your family have? What would you give for another generation’s worth?

  Ezekiel held a stoic pose, even as he double-blinked and delivered the data on the Artemis Refinery Explosion. When the conversation ended, Ezekiel shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said, preempting their obvious question. “Most mid-level officers place their Guard standing above their descendancies. Let’s hope he’s not one of them.”

  They couldn’t do much more over the next ten minutes of the flight except push for solidarity among more Presidiums. Once they flew inside the temperate zone, their contact with the outside world might be shut down. Two minutes before they reached the ten-kilometer window, Sam tapped her amp.

  First, she dropped a simple audio message on Michael’s admin stack, but timed it to notify him later, in case she failed. Lucinda held her hand tight throughout the message.

  Second, she streamed David Ellstrom, who left the Moss estate shortly after Sam.

  “Any word from Finnegan?”

  She heard it in his voice. She caught him in a moment of panic.

  “I don’t understand what I’m seeing, Samantha.”

  “Tell me. Hurry, David.”

  “I am receiving Finnegan’s entire admin stack. Private, business, family. Everything. If I don’t offload some of this data, my own stack will shut down.”

  “The entire stack? David, how is that possible? Why would …”

  “He wouldn’t, unless he programmed it to do so in the event of his death. I’m sorry, Samantha. I think she killed him.”

  Sam tried to keep her poise. She was not speaking to a cube, so the others didn’t hear David. If they thought Finnegan was dead at Celia’s hand, would they consider retreat? Celia Marsche scared the hell out of every otherwise arrogant, imperial Chancellor on the planet. If Sam’s friends thought she was on to their strategy, would they make a choice to fight another day?

  “It’s probably not what you think, David. Perhaps there’s something … useful … in there. Yes? David?”

  She heard breathing on the other end, but he didn’t respond at first, as if he assumed the connection had broken. Or perhaps he was calculating how soon before his own stack would shut down.

  “Wait.” He uttered it like a whisper. “What is this? No, this isn’t possible. Samantha, I don’t understand. Why would Celia …?”

  The stream dropped. The holocubes containing their circastream allies also failed. The pilot, Adina, announced they crossed inside the temperate zone.

  “We’re in it now,” Ezekiel said. “Guarantee they know we’re coming. We
won’t make it there without a greeting party.”

  Lucinda leaned over to Sam. “What’s happening with Finnegan?”

  “I don’t think he can help us anymore.”

  “I see. He’s already done an outstanding job. Above and beyond. When we finish this business …”

  Lucinda must have seen a pall cast over Sam. She grabbed Sam by the chin and turned her. Sam couldn’t hold back a tear.

  Lucinda saw the truth. She cursed.

  “Someone should have murdered that creature years ago.”

  Sam was paralyzed. What was David trying to tell her?

  “Is this how it ends, Lucinda? Does she just kill us all?”

  “I will not give my life to Celia Marsche. Neither will you, dear.”

  That possibility turned moot for the moment, as their Scram and the other two on approach with them intercepted the anticipated gauntlet of Guard Scramjets.

  “Attention, civilian vessels,” a stern voice broadcast through the navigation cylinder. “You are hereby ordered by the Admiralty to retreat at once from this airspace. Failure to do so will be considered an act of insurrection. You have one minute to comply.”

  Lucinda’s pilot turned to her three passengers. They didn’t need to say a word. Forward was the only option.

  66

  Harrisboro Prefecture

  M ICHAEL NEVER SAW A ROOFTOP ESCAPE scene finish well in the movies, so he figured this was a bad idea. Hans Bricker insisted they couldn’t descend the Sanctum tower without being intercepted at the ground (assuming they made it that far). How about stairs? Michael asked. Hans winced at the idea. Why would the building have stairs when the lifts were infallible? Michael mentioned fire code, but Hans never heard such a fantastical concept. So, they ascended in a lift with Maya Fontaine, their blast rifles ready in case the enemy came at them from both directions.

  “This will work,” Hans said. “Oliver will be here in minutes.”

  Though Hans spoke confidently of his brother, who was an uplift pilot, Michael heard the hesitation in his brand new friend’s voice. Maya, normally stoic, checked her weapons with an urgency that said trouble was about to greet them.