“There were three,” she told others on the line as a new pile of potatoes were dumped between them. Sam stood across from her. “Now, Miguel and I were supposed to stay quiet the whole time because only Samantha was allowed to talk.”
Horst Yaeger interrupted. “I’ll wager you were biting your tongue so hard, you were drawing blood, Rosa.”
“What are you implying, Horst?”
“Nothing. I’m surprised they didn’t send along somebody whose lips don’t move so much.”
“Horst. Really? You have an opinion for every occasion.”
Sam enjoyed the back-and-forth. The children never took offense; a far cry from her own schooling, where Drama was always capitalized.
“Yes,” the boy continued, “and my opinion is they should have selected me because I volunteered to train for the diplomatic corps. When we negotiate a treaty with Forster’s Alliance, I’ll be there. You wait. I’ll show those cudfruckers what I made of myself.”
“Good luck,” Rosa replied. “We haven’t even opened diplomatic relations with Forster’s. I heard it might be years. Anyway, I’m sitting there listening to Samantha talk to these Chancellors.” Rosa chased the phasic driver over the potatoes without looking, her technique now ingrained as automatic. “I knew these were horrible human beings when they came onboard. They looked at us like we were … oh …”
She held up a peel. “This!”
“Typical Chancellors,” another girl said, launching into a story about her nasty experience onboard an Ark Carrier above Brahma. Two boys raised eyebrows and nodded in unison. Rosa tried to refocus attention back to herself.
“Gyselle, we heard this story befo …”
“They’re the worst,” Gyselle LaMarsh continued. “All of you are so fortunate. Be glad you were fostered by indigos. Carrier Chancellors are such nasty people, they even look down their noses at Earth Chancellors. But they don’t do anything. They don’t have jobs. They live off the fat of the colonies. They’re always drinking and …”
“Yes, yes,” Rosa interrupted, raising her voice. “Raising nasty children. We know, Gyselle. You tell us at least once a week. Besides, those Chancellors are all dead. Our refractors took out the entire Brahman Noose last year. Can I finish now?”
“OK, but make it exciting this time, Rosa.”
“I will. Our talks were almost finished, and Samantha was amazing. She defended us even though she didn’t really know us. One of these Chancellors – he was from Earth, but he sounded like a Carrier Chancellor – he asked me a question. He said, ‘How do you know you’re immortal?’ So, I told him. I was proud to describe our rebirth after liberation. He didn’t understand. Typical.
“But the whole time I was speaking,” Rosa said, dragging out the story, “I was thinking about what I should do to him.”
“What?” Horst said. “Right then and there?”
“Yes. I wished I had a phasic driver like this one.” She held it up in one hand, a potato in the other. “I wanted to leap off the table and throw him to the ground. Then this,” she said, her tool bearing down on the potato, “would have been his head. One. Two. Three.”
She tossed the potato on a conveyor to be washed with hundreds of others and held up a perfectly stripped skin. Laughter and applause greeted her final execution.
Sam forced a polite smile. This wasn’t the first Chancellor scalp story she heard, and no one on the line wrote it off as a joke.
Their rage was real, perhaps even justified given what some of these children endured. All were created inside SkyTower and most hidden on colonies where they did not mix well with the indigo populations. Discussions like this unsettled Sam. She knew what her own people were, having learned those lessons the hard way after growing up indoctrinated into Chancellor ideology. But she didn’t want these children to paint all Chancellors with the same brush.
Sam also realized the production line was not the time to interrupt their reverie with lecture. These were smart children, but they trained with blast rifles in live-fire exercises and studied holomanuals on ground combat techniques. Sam did not want to feel like a prisoner again.
Yet she waded into dangerous water at the evening dine.
“I wonder,” she asked over a meal of stewed fish and tomatoes with herbs, steamed potatoes, and a fruit bowl. “You’ve been given such a beautiful world, do any of you think about living here in peace instead of fighting wars against the Chancellors?”
Horst, Gyselle, and Rosa, whose assignment schedule kept them together all day long, smiled at each other without responding. She couldn’t tell if the question aggravated them or was simply outside their frame of reference. Like Sam, they were shown Brother James’s light shortly after liberation. Unlike Sam, its impact remained ever-present through their single-minded devotion.
Finally, Horst responded. “Sure. Everybody wants to live in peace. That’s obvious. But it’s not practical.”
“Why not?” Sam said.
“We can’t build an empire without killing our enemies.”
“I see. Do you need an empire?”
“Not yet. But the Chancellors want what we have, so we’ll kill them until they stop trying to take it.”
Gyselle nodded. “After we get rid of them, other people will learn what we have on Aeterna. They’ll build armies, too.”
“The indigos, you mean?”
“Yes. We have many allies already, but most indigos hate us.”
“Right,” Horst agreed. “That’s where a strong empire comes in. We liberate the other immortals, recruit allies, fill out our cities, and build an armada of Slope ships. We’ll use wormholes and refractors to crush any opposition. Then we’ll have an empire and we can live in peace.”
“And how many years,” Sam said, “will this take, Horst?”
He mulled it over. “I’m thinking thirty or forty years. Tops. How about you lot?”
Gyselle estimated fifty, while Rosa proposed a more optimistic twenty. Eleven-year-old Rikhi Syed, who arrived here on a Scramjet with Sam and who executed Ophelia Tomelin last year onboard Lioness, spoke up for the first time since the meal began.
“You’re wrong. All of you. We’ll be done in five years. Look how fast Brother James and Admiral Valentin threw them off the colonies. People used to think Chancellors were gods, but they’re weak. We killed two million in hours.” He snapped his fingers. “They’re afraid.”
Horst wasn’t convinced. “Yes, Rikhi, they can’t match our singularity weapons, but two million is nothing. That’s one fifth of one percent. We can’t neutralize the Chancellors for good until we invade Earth, and we’ll need ages to build a galactic fleet that’s big enough.”
They talked around Sam as if they’d forgotten her background. Or maybe, Sam reasoned, they didn’t care what she heard because they knew she would die on Aeterna. They rattled on about body counts, favorite weapons and ship designs, new refractors using larger singularities, and applying to become Slope navigators. The word ‘peace’ never returned to the conversation.
She sat at this table before, except it was the kitchen of her home in Albion, Alabama. Her father Walt spoke often of military tactics and principles, glowing as he waxed nostalgic about his own Guard service. He infused Sam with dreams of peacekeeper glory on distant battlefields. Unable to discuss these matters outside the home, he encouraged Sam to ask questions at the dinner table. Her mother never interjected. Grace Pynn spent her formative years in the politicorporate world, as far removed from the Guard as a Chancellor might be. Not once did she offer Sam another life path, conceding a military destiny for her daughter.
The irony did not escape Sam. These children had two fathers, both of whom preached a destiny of vengeance achieved through slaughter and conquest. Like her mother, Sam did not try to force this bellicose dialogue in another direction. Nor did any of them ask her for tips on how to defeat the Chancellors.
They smiled through the evening dine and the post-meal cleanup, their joy and optimism unmatched by any
thing Sam experienced on either Earth. Yet their numbers were few, and Sam feared the early victories were, as her father used to say, fool’s gold. After the meal, they strolled JaRa’s broad avenues during the final minutes before sunset then said their goodbyes. Next stop: Their habitat domes for evening studies. Sam caught up to Rosa.
“Same assignments tomorrow?”
“No, Samantha. We’ll be planting. I love the soil here. Don’t you?”
Sam had yet to get her hands dirty. Any answer would have been moot, however, for JaRa’s blissful reality ended ten seconds later.
48
A CHILD’S CRY OF TERROR BROKE THE evening’s peace, though Sam couldn’t decipher its origin. Within seconds, others shouted in horror, and an earthquake of cheers interceded, creating a strange, chaotic crucible. Rosa froze, looking for anyone who knew what was happening, as if Sam might somehow have a clue.
“This is it!” A boy shouted two domes away.
“Check your amp,” another said. “It’s Admiral Valentin.”
Rosa tapped above her temple and threw open a cube, but no broadcast yet.
“I know what’s happening,” the girl said. “He always said when it was time, we’d be alerted by rank and deployment.”
“Time for what?” Sam asked, suspecting the answer.
“War.”
The neighborhood cries dimmed into an eerie calm as Valentin’s image appeared. Sam, whose own amp was removed after her capture, asked Rosa to throw open a window. The girl complied.
“Warriors of Salvation,” he said. “The moment to take your stand against the might of the Chancellory has arrived. The destiny of our city and our world will be in your courageous hands. Soon, the Unification Guard will invade the Aeterna system. We must assume they will arrive with overwhelming numbers and weapon systems they have not previously used in combat. Their goal will be no less than the annihilation of every immortal and Jewel hybrid. They intend to steal our world and use it to further subjugate the colonies of the Collectorate and extend their empire for another three thousand years. But we will shame them.
“You have been trained. You will oppose them with body armor, weapons, and a resolve far exceeding their own. Our defenses will meet them in space and in JaRa. This world is a gift to our people because we represent the future of humanity. We will not be denied. Our seven hundred will defeat their thousands.
“To this end, each of you will soon receive an emergency deployment. Teams responsible for building the secondary defense perimeter will have sixteen hours from this moment to install the final substrata field generators. All rifters in the city will be commandeered for military needs only. By this time tomorrow, all soldiers and hybrids of fighting age will be fully armored and positioned to defend our city.
“Admiral Kane and I will deliver deployment orders over the next few hours. Tonight, you will abandon your traditional studies and focus on the tactical details of the plan Homeland Fortress, which will momentarily arrive on every admin stack.
“It is with a heavy heart that I inform you of difficult news. Today, seventy-three of our bravest warriors attacked two Chancellor bases in an effort to defend our interests. We succeeded in eliminating those facilities. However, because of a savage act of cowardice by Guard forces, fifty-one of our soldiers lost their lives forever. In addition, Ulrich Rahm, one of the original ten hybrids, was lost.
“I know you are heartbroken by this news, as am I. They were our brothers and sisters who were created in Chancellor laboratories then cast away as abominations. They believed in the dream of Aeterna, and they will be memorialized after we win the coming battle. Now is not the time for grief. Now is the time for courage and conviction. Now is the time for precision and perseverance.
“Before I finish, I wish to tell you of another great victory achieved by our warriors. Today, one of the worst criminals among Chancellors – Emil Bouchet, my father – was slaughtered. He died screaming for mercy. We gave him none. We will treat our invaders no differently. I believe in you. Say after me:
“We see the first day and the last day.”
Rosa repeated the line through streaming tears.
“We rise as they fall.”
Nearby voices grew louder in reciting the second line.
“We are The Promised Few.”
Shouts of the final line rolled like thunder.
The immortals stood around in stunned silence when Valentin’s broadcast ended, but only for a few seconds. As ordered, they scattered toward their habitat domes.
“Rosa, I …”
“You need to go, Samantha, and stay inside your dome.”
Sam nodded, her stomach in knots.
“It’s not going to be safe for me, is it?”
“Don’t come out for anyone. Your people killed fifty-one of us. Go, Sam. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
Sam stood alone. The city’s joy disappeared with the setting sun. She heard nothing. The evening breeze seemed to wither with the sudden turn of events.
Calm before the storm? She despised moments like this. They never ended well. There was the night before her first Dacha hunt and kill. Then the nerve-wracking wait when her parents detected the Caryllan pulse at 1:56 a.m., beginning the eight-hour countdown on Jamie Sheridan’s life. Standing on the platform at Hinton Station three years ago as James prepared to leave with his brother and Rayna. On final approach to Vasily Station last year, sitting next to Patricia Wylehan.
She rushed to her dome, her eyes alert to the potential for someone seeking quick vengeance. The path proved clear.
Sam was trembling when she entered the dome, the terror now in full focus and her fate all but sealed. It was an ending without meaning. Tortured in absolute darkness for three months, pushed forward before her own people as a tool for James and his mad powerplays, then given a reprieve in a truly beautiful place with misguided children who were surely doomed.
And no Michael.
“Are you even alive?” Sam said.
She received an answer.
“To the best of my knowledge.”
A shadowy figure emerged from behind her wardrobe, cloaked in gray from head to toe.
Sam backed away, looking for a way to defend herself.
“Who are you?”
“My name is irrelevant. You don’t know me, and my story would take longer than I can safely tell it.”
The man threw back his hood. His withered and pockmarked face was ancient, and a scar stretched from his left ear down his neck. His eyes were uneven, his long hair both silver and tangled.
“You’re not a hybrid or immortal. How did you get in here?”
“I’ve been watching the city from the day it was settled. I know every routine. The streets empty during the evening dine.”
“Why are you here?”
“Now that, Ms. Pynn, is the question most worth my time and yours. Please, have a seat. You look pale.”
Sam expected the old man was right. She reached her bed but felt no less terrified off her feet.
“How do you know my name?”
“They told me. But the question is not important, nor is your next one regarding who they are. The most vital questions always begin with why. In all my journeys, I’ve never reached a satisfactory answer unless I confront the why.”
“Fine. Why are you here?”
“They will not allow me to die until I have made amends for the nightmares I visited on this world.” He reached into his cloak and removed an object inside a tight fist. “It’s a just punishment, but I suppose in a way it’s also a gift. For the longest time, I didn’t believe I deserved the chance. Then they showed me what was possible. Still, I wasn’t convinced. So, they made me walk the planet four times until my mind was clear.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Not necessary. The why only needs to be clear to me. You will see the rest of it in time, in your own way. They told me so.”
Her heart skipped. “They. The Jewels o
f Eternity?”
“It’s an exotic name. Yes?”
The old man moved toward her, and Sam tensed. He opened his fist to reveal a white cube no larger than a thimble.
“It’s all here. Everything you need to know.”
“About what?”
“Something impossible.”
“I don’t understand.”
The old man laughed as he handed over the cube.
“All paths intersect at the impossible future. It’s what they told me. If you say, ‘I don’t understand’ one more time, I will lose patience.”
She studied the cube, which was feather-soft.
“I get the feeling you aren’t going to explain how I’m supposed to use this.”
“Good instinct. You’ll know the solution soon enough. Now, I should leave. The streets will not be empty for long. I don’t wish to be chased by one of those rifters.”
The madness of the moment gave Sam new energy. She sprung from the bed.
“That’s it? You appear from out of nowhere, and you’re going to leave me like this? At least tell me your name.”
“Hmmph. From my perspective, I leave you in a better place than you were a few moments ago. Listen to me, Ms. Pynn. I don’t know if this will work. The Jewels are not infallible, and they are dealing with a variable not of their making. Then there’s the other one – he must acknowledge the signs as well. This is what they told me. If the paths intersect as predicted, I will see you one more time. It will be the end of my life, mercifully, and the beginning of yours.
“As for my name, you’ll never need to know. History has forgotten it. My death will be overdue but perhaps with more meaning than I deserve. Please, Ms. Pynn. Don’t dwell on me.”
He started toward the exit. Sam sorted through a hundred unanswered questions and asked none of them. He stopped at the threshold and threw on his hood. He looked back at Sam.
“Ah, yes. One other message I was asked to pass along. ‘He is coming. Wait for him.’”
“What? Who?”
He smiled, twisting his weary features.
“You already know the answer.”
He disappeared into the night and Sam fell to her knees.
The Impossible Future: Complete set Page 135
