James tussled his hand through Peter’s hair. He recognized Valentin’s consternation, but turned to Benjamin.
“And why, my son, is Peter correct?”
“Because everyone is afraid of us, Father. We can strike them anywhere, and they know it. Even if we take out a whole city, nobody will fight back because they know we’ll come for them too.”
“Excellent points, both of you. Thoughts, Admiral?”
Valentin massaged his left temple with two fingers, a giveaway to his impatience. James knew all his brother’s quirks and how to leverage each to his advantage. As he predicted, Valentin waited for a five-count after dropping his fingers.
“My nephews are eager, but we all know a good general does not attack simply because he can. The objective must be clear and the strategic value certain. At the moment, we only suspect our enemy is developing a new weapon at one of those locations. But what if they borrowed from our script? There are dozens of empty systems along the Fulcrum. What if they're working off-book far away from prying eyes, as we did for two years? Major, how many casualties will the indigos suffer if we annihilate every colonial target?”
Kane produced the number instantly. “Seventy-three thousand, sir.”
“A small price for …” James began, but Valentin surprised him.
“No, Brother. There are no small prices. We promised to be their liberators. If we change our tactics now, we will destabilize our support, which I should note is far shy of the majority on any of these worlds. What message would these strikes deliver to the undecided?”
“A message of strength. And what, Brother, do you propose?”
“A three-pronged strategy. One, we reanalyze data from the twenty-two sites and narrow the field. Chancellors have predictable patterns of movement and communication. The clues will be visible. Second, we end our deep-system sorties. Those ships and crews can be put to better work shoring up Hiebimini. If the Guard has developed anything similar to Slope, their fleet will arrive as close to the planet as they can calculate. Third, we slow the rate of our colonial diplomatic missions by half and divert those resources to tightening planetary defenses. Our people are stretched too thin.”
James saw the curled brow. Valentin was holding back.
“Perhaps your people would not be under so much pressure if we ended the liberation program for immortals and focused those resources on home world defense. Should that become the fourth prong in your strategy, Brother?”
Benjamin and Peter did not withhold their glee. No one spoke until they stopped applauding.
“James, we decided months ago that growing our society was an imperative. As long as the hybrids can reproduce, the immortals will rescue others of our kind. We will not use this forum to reexamine the imperative, Brother. Our purpose today is to determine our military options. I have made my proposal as your Admiral.”
James wasn’t going to accede to Valentin in front of his sons.
“I will agree to eliminate the deep-system sorties, but I will only cease diplomatic missions on Inauguration Day. I will give you seven standard days to root out where our enemy is developing their new weapon. I expect a full report that includes attack plans. If you’re right, I’ll hold you up as heroes of Salvation. If you’re wrong …” James looked around the bridge and thought for a moment. This edict needed bluster with a tangible threat.
“If you are wrong, I will incinerate Major Kane, and you will need to rescue another immortal to make up the difference.”
He saw Kane’s features whiten, but Valentin’s executive officer neither back stepped nor took his eyes off James.
“Yes, sir,” Kane said, his shoulders firm. “It will be done.”
“We will meet later,” Valentin told his XO. “I’ll return to Lioness on a Scramjet and …”
“No,” James interjected. “You are best suited to prepare the city for my return. This conference proves you’re not needed here. You and the Major can stream intelligence data. Yes?”
Valentin cast his eyes downward. “Brother, you wouldn’t be attempting to usurp the chain of command?”
“Never, Admiral Valentin. What I am is practical.”
James ordered his brother planetside twenty days ago and celebrated each moment. Valentin stopped pursuing questions of Hiebimini’s civic hierarchy and why hybrids appeared to be observers rather than contributors to the work of establishing a new home. Major Kane, a softer personality, accepted his shipboard role without comment.
“If we are talking in practical terms,” Valentin responded, “I’m sure you’ll agree any attempt to castigate our senior leadership would devastate morale. Thank you in advance, Brother, for allowing me to promote the Major when this operation concludes.”
James allowed the momentary insolence to pass, though he longed for the days when his younger brother behaved as such. He bid Valentin farewell and scrapped the holowindow. He stared down Kane, who worked hard to toe a diplomatic line between the brothers.
“Don’t fear, Major. I won’t incinerate you if the mission fails. I’ll give you the choice of who I burn. Consider the candidates carefully. You are dismissed.” He pivoted to his sons. “What have you learned today?”
“It’s good to be the older brother,” said Peter, who arrived three minutes before Benjamin. “I have the last word.”
“Try it,” Benjamin said with a buoyant smirk. “I dare you.”
James escorted the boys off the command bridge, and they bickered all the way to the lift. Their father might have intervened, but James shifted his eyes to another distraction.
Crack. Rip. Rumble.
The three sounds followed in a sequence equidistant apart. At first, he thought the sounds signaled trouble for Lioness. Quickly, he realized they were buried deep inside his mind. He swung about and caught blurred movement in the white forest.
The crystalline surface cracked like ice on a thawing lake. A tree’s massive trunk ripped open as if gashed from the opposite side. A rumble followed, less than a tremor and more like a warning.
“There. Over there!”
James saw movement. A fabric – no, a cloak in gray – disappearing behind the bursting tree.
“Finally. Finally. You’re here, Ignatius.”
Then the white forest dissolved into silence, leaving only the bickering of his sons to attend.
It was just as the algorithm predicted in one of its countless futures: He will return in gray, and you will hunt him down. He will be the final answer. All paths will intersect with him.
Resolution.
James was eager to begin the hunt.
16
F IRST, JAMES HAD TO DEAL WITH HIS WIFE, a task almost as daunting as commanding an insurrection. He knew the moment would require delicacy; he had hoped to withhold the news about Samantha Pynn until after Rayna delivered the babies. Yet Rayna made a habit of probing deeply into the collective mind of her fellow Jewel hybrids.
The Queen of Salvation, as she liked to call herself, was buoyant upon return from her latest diplomatic chores on the colonies. She reported great successes on New Ecuador, Bolivar, and Brasilia Major, where Salvation’s message carried growing weight among the working classes. She used her bulging belly as a prop to symbolize the new future.
However, her mood shifted into knives-out when she heard Samantha Pynn was living in a city meant only for Jewel hybrids and immortals. She saved her rage for the private residence on Lioness.
“I give you children,” she told James, her fingernails boring into his mammoth neck. “You bring me shame.”
“We don’t trade, Rayna.” He pushed delicacy aside. “We take, we kill, and we conquer as husband and wife. Your shame is petty jealousy, and I am not to blame.”
“You do not fool me, James Bouchet. I know you best. You are typical man. Always to use women as tools for pleasure.”
She broke through his leather-taut skin and drew blood. The pain excited James.
“I have allowed you to be
a warrior for long enough. Your job now is to be a mother to our people.”
“You mean to make babies like factory. No?”
“Our people have to grow, Rayna. We have cities to fill.”
“After I give you these babies,” she said, rubbing her stomach, “how soon will you come inside me to make more?”
He yanked her claws out of his neck and twisted her hands backward until he heard the bones crack in each wrist. As usual, since the day he first beat Rayna in order to grow her body to its full potential, his wife showed no outward response to the pain. However, the pistils in her eyes grew fiery orange, which he loved to see.
“I will push myself inside you as soon as I am goddamn ready. And you will give me as many children as I want. Like a factory. Yes.”
“You will turn me into woman with big stomach and no voice.”
“You are the Queen of Salvation. What else can you want?”
“To see Samantha Pynn burned by your breath.”
“She did her job, Rayna. Now, she is where the future dictates she must be.”
Rayna pushed him away and laid a broken hand over her belly.
“What is this future, James Bouchet? I thought you were the dictator of our fate.”
He seethed, balling his fists, ready to strike.
“I am not a Bouchet. That family line is dead. Never say the word again, Rayna. And never question the future.”
“You are such liar, husband. You tell them, ‘I am the first day and the last day,’ because it is poetic line. You do not explain what it means. Not even to your wife.”
“A god does not have to explain anything.”
Rayna laughed so hard, she bit her lip. She took amusement from the dribble of blood.
“You are no god. You can be killed by flash pegs. Your miracles are applications of energies given to you by Jewels. A true god will not grow old and die. Your brother is a true god.”
James swung and connected. Blood gushed from Rayna’s nose, but she returned with a hook of her own, its force not blunted by broken bones. Indeed, she followed with another shot to her husband’s concrete abdomen.
“I was ordained,” James roared. He allowed no one – not even Rayna – to question his ascension. “The Jewels allowed me to evolve unlike the other hybrids because they knew I alone would change history. I defied time itself to earn my godhood. I slaughtered millions to stand above them all. If you ever suggest I am less than Valentin, I will find a new Queen of Salvation.”
“Samantha Pynn, perhaps?”
James, an eight-foot mass at four hundred pounds, lunged toward his wife, a woman of almost equal proportion. She braced – a tactic James encountered in their many previous showdowns – and he prepared to go high, swinging both arms. Yet he didn’t see her subtle shift, reaching into one of many pouches on her bodysuit.
The magnetic pulse threw James off his feet. He crashed on his back, the world around him appearing to shift dimensions. Rayna stood over James, her wrists bent at grotesque angles. She licked the blood from her bit lip. He thought his wife was as beautiful and dangerous as the first time he saw her on the island of Seneca.
“If I ended you now,” she said, “the others would follow me. I like Ulrich Rahm. He is beautiful man. No? Perhaps I take him as new husband?”
“If you killed me, you’d miss our fights. Ulrich would never challenge you, not even in bed.”
“But he is good to our boys. He will be as new father to them.”
“So long as they don’t find out what happened to the old one.”
Rayna stepped away, turning her back on James, but not before he caught a hint of an ironic smile.
“Do you miss the days before we became important?” She said.
A sudden turn toward sentiment always signaled she was standing down. James didn’t bother to sit up.
“When the only goals,” he asked, “were to kill and make love?”
“The best days. No?”
“The best, Rayna.”
“But now is different. All is politics and diplomacy and commerce.”
“Remember where we came from, Rayna. Three years ago, we were angry children. The Chancellors planned to wipe away our personalities and turn us into their servant monsters. Soon, we will be as powerful as the Chancellory and far more terrifying.”
Rayna laughed. “And for this, I should not kill you, husband?”
“No. You should not kill me.”
“And what of Samantha Pynn? The next time I see her, I might not be able to control myself. If I shoot her through the heart, will you try to save her with your energies?”
“Yes, Rayna. She has a role to play. Trust me.”
“What promise can you make?”
“When her time is played out, I will stand her in front of you and turn Samantha into ash.”
She pivoted then bent down beside James.
“You make me so angry, husband. But you say sometimes the sweetest things. Yes?”
He sat up and leaned over to kiss her.
“You will always be the love of my life. Now, give me your wrists so I can repair them. Afterward, I want to be inside you.”
James longed for the day when solving disputes with his wife did not involve blood or broken bones, but the whole sorted business grew into a familiar theater. They became monsters through violent trials and savage force; any other method seemed dull and pointless. She was right: The days of killing and making love in tandem were the most liberating. The beasts within had to be nurtured before they dared wear the crowns of political power.
Moments after he healed her bones, they removed their clothes and recalled the most enjoyable techniques from those early days. James entered from behind, one of Rayna’s favorite positions, especially while she was pregnant. Their screams, once the stuff of legend before sound dampeners were added to their bedroom, delivered a blend of the erotic and the psychotic. The room quaked as eight hundred pounds of Jewel hybrids unleashed not only unrivaled sexual energy but also the streaming blue glows that distinguished them from almost every human in history.
The more James let go of his simultaneous mental tasks, dropping himself from the hybrid collective mind and even the great algorithm of the future, he focused more energy on the white forest. It seemed less a construct than a real place and time. The trees had depth, the cracking ground seemed less like crystal and more like a clay field painted white. And then there was an odor. Not from the environment, but the putrid scent of a man.
Shadows moved between the trees, sliding east then west as if trying to hide.
“Is that you, Ignatius? Show yourself.”
The perpetrator of the shadows grew in definition but also moved farther afield. There it was again: The gray cloak. A hood.
Gone. A tease.
Perhaps Ignatius needed time to recover his wits. After all, James killed him once then transformed into a god able to see across time and space. The hesitation made sense.
He will return in gray, the algorithm said. You will hunt him down.
Good. First part acknowledged. Now, to the hunt. Which way to proceed? Through the forest, one tree at a time? Did each tree hold a special mystery, as if to be its own tiny universe? Should he proceed with caution or utmost aggression?
The climax neared; James felt it in the air.
Speed. He needed speed.
James took the stance of a sprinter and prepared to chase down this timid fiend in the gray cloak.
Yet as he did so, the clay field splintered into thousands of hairline cracks as far as he could see. James waited for the tremor, but it didn’t come this time. In its place, a glistening sheen emerged through the cracks – tiny beads of water the size of dew on morning grass.
He will be the final answer, the algorithm said. All paths will intersect with him.
At once, millions of jagged, malformed paths morphed into miniscule rivers. Beads coalesced, and gushes of blue water climbed out of the darkness beneath the clay
and raced toward each other.
That’s when James recognized the odor, which no longer struck him as putrid. Rather, it was sweet and blended with floral fragrances. Yet nothing bloomed in the white forest.
James understood why.
He opened his eyes and turned to his wife, who was sleeping next to him, exhausted from their riotous lovemaking.
James reconnected with the hybrid mind and told them what he learned then grabbed his bicomm and interrupted whatever his brother was doing. James didn’t care about his appearance.
“Two days,” he announced.
“For what, James? We agreed not to attack …”
“We inaugurate the city in two days.”
“We’ll have to expedite our timetable. What changed?”
“I always knew the final paths would intersect on Hiebimini, but I never knew when. Now I do. Two days, Valentin. You have two days.”
He swiped shut the bicomm and locked on his wife, whose eyes were wide open, her pistils red and relaxed. He slipped an arm beneath the sheets.
“More?” He asked with a sly smile.
“From a god? Always more, my love.”
17
2 days later
Landing bay, Lioness
B ROTHER JAMES ORDERED HIS FAMILY onto Spearhead and turned to the flagship’s senior officer. Maj. Rafael Kane took a knee and bowed his head.
“When I leave,” James said, “there will be no Jewel hybrid onboard Lioness for the first time since we liberated this ship at Port Baghdad. I trust you will manage the fleet without me. Stand.”
James knew Kane’s ultimate allegiance lay with Valentin; those two formed a close working bond. Instinct told James to be cautious but not yet paranoid. A simple act of bribery would ensure fealty in the short term.
“Major, I appreciate you and the other immortals who chose to man the fleet during Inauguration. Your sacrifice will be rewarded.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The Chancellors are locked down in their cabins?”
“Yes, Brother James. Absolute quarantine until the full ship’s complement has returned from the surface.”
The Impossible Future: Complete set Page 118
