by A. G. Riddle
“You know how to use that?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “Not really. You?”
“Not really.”
They stood for a second. There was no sound above. At the back of her mind, Kate kept hoping David would round the corner, peek his head into the stairwell and say, “Coast is clear. Let’s go.”
But he never came. She crept up the metallic stairwell, the others following her, Paul at her side.
The blast of sound from the emergency evacuation message almost threw her off her feet and back down the stairway.
At the top of the steps, she could see the glowing portal, and through the reflection of the small glass window opposite it, a soldier lying in the corridor on the other side of the portal. It wasn’t David. She glanced out the window, at the now growing debris field. Pieces of the beacon slowly floated past.
She couldn’t move.
She felt Paul’s hand around her arm.
“We need to go, Kate,” he said.
Her mind was moving in slow motion now, but she forced herself to trudge through the portal.
The portal’s destination wasn’t a beacon. Kate knew it instantly. The place was expansive, huge, so unlike the cramped, utilitarian beacons.
She, Paul, Mary, and Milo stood in a massive room with a window that stretched at least a hundred feet wide and fifty feet tall.
The scene beyond left the entire group speechless, utterly spellbound. Horrified. For Kate, the view of Earth had been awe-inspiring. The Serpentine battlefield had been terrifying but distant, a danger long-since extinct. This place was very much alive.
Row after row of black spheres stretched out, unmoving, small lights hovering just above, like cars lined up in a parking lot at night.
In the middle row, above the stacks of stationary spheres, a long cylinder stretched out into space with no end that Kate could see. Spheres were moving through it, coming out the other side larger, more complete. This was an assembly line for the spheres, and it was producing thousands per second. Maybe millions, depending on how far the manufacturing cylinders stretched. Large ships moved across the lines, docking with the cylinders. Supply ships? Emptying minerals and raw materials for the manufacturing process?
This wasn’t a beacon. It was a factory in space. A factory making an army of spheres.
The scale was unimaginable.
Kate tried to focus. They couldn’t stay here.
She was fairly certain the soldier lying in the corridor at the last beacon had been Dorian. She thought he was dead. Hoped. But she couldn’t help thinking about David, whether they could go back, save him somehow. She would be risking all their lives. And David might already be dead. She had to focus. What do I know?
Dorian had found the last beacon—out of a thousand in her diversionary rotation. He could easily find this one if he had discovered Janus’ transmission.
They had to move, get to safety somehow. Maybe the third beacon would offer some refuge.
She activated the portable data core and downloaded the memories Janus had transmitted here.
She programmed the portal to the final destination.
She stepped through, and the others followed without a word.
The moment Kate stepped into the third and final beacon Janus had transmitted memories to, she knew they were in trouble. Heat. The place was burning up. And it was another military beacon.
She peered out the window, which seemed tiny compared to the view from the factory.
A dead world, red and rocky, loomed below. Black burn marks pocked the surface. Kate knew this place. Yes. She had seen it before—in the last memory she had accessed in the Alpha Lander, when David had saved her. The thought of that brought a new pang of sadness, but she pushed it out of her mind. Janus had tried to erase the memory of what had happened to this world. In the memory, this world had been under a military quarantine. Janus’ partner had taken the Beta Lander to the surface to investigate…
“I think we should get out of here,” Paul said.
Everyone was sweating now, and no one strayed far from the portal, hoping, thinking there was another destination.
Kate interfaced with the beacon. Yes. It had an address, local, close. The Beta Lander was still on the surface. She programmed another sequence of beacon connections—ten thousand this time—just in case Sloane made his way here. If she was right and Sloane didn’t know about the Beta Lander on the surface, they would be safe. It was their only move.
She stepped through the portal, followed by Paul, Mary, and Milo.
Around them, the beady floor and ceiling lights of the Beta Lander grew brighter, the ship around them waking up.
“Are we safe here?” Paul asked.
“I think so.” Kate looked around. The ship seemed intact. Her neural link told her its systems were all online now. She focused on the memory. It had ended with her outside, a burning impact. “Don’t go outside though.”
She walked away from them without another word, wandering lifelessly into the crew quarters section. She picked a residential pod at random and sat on the bed, staring for a moment. It was exactly like the one she and David had shared on the Alpha Lander.
She curled up on the bed, but sleep wouldn’t come.
Dorian rolled onto his back, wishing the beacon’s emergency voice would shut up. It was quite apparent to him that he needed to evacuate.
The “assault” hadn’t gone as planned. He blamed two things. First, Victor had continued shooting as he had died, not necessarily in any direction. The imbecile couldn’t even die properly. Dorian had him and his errant gunfire to thank for pushing Dorian back, away from the assault, forcing him to throw the grenades in a desperate attempt to finish off his enemy. It hadn’t worked. The beacon and its forcefields had repelled the impact of the blast back up through the stairwell, into the small space on the first floor, throwing Dorian into a wall. He didn’t remember anything after that, but he knew this: he was okay, he had his gun, and Kate and company were gone.
But… he knew where they were going. She had only two options. He stepped to the portal, working the panel. A break: she hadn’t done a random portal rotation before they had stepped off. Haste makes waste, Kate, Dorian thought. He could follow them now.
He glanced back, seeing the Serpentine battlefield for the first time. Incredible. How had Ares survived? The mystery would have to wait. Dorian stepped through the portal.
The sentinel assembly line that stretched out instantly struck fear into him. He raised his gun instinctively, and then paused, realization dawning on him. This was an Atlantean portal—at the sentinel assembly line. Were they manufacturing sentinels to fight the sentinels he had seen? Or had the Atlanteans conquered the sentinel army? Was it their army now? Or had it turned on them, destroying their homeworld?
Focus on the task at hand, he thought. He quickly searched the factory. Empty. Kate and her friends couldn’t go back to the Serpentine battlefield. Dorian had them. He keyed the portal for the final destination and stepped through.
The heat greeted him, and the view from the window confirmed that the beacon was falling into the planet’s atmosphere. And it was accelerating.
Dorian raced through the dark metallic corridors of the military beacon, quickly searching both floors. Empty.
The screen in the communications bay flashed a red warning message.
Orbit Decaying. Atmospheric Entry Imminent.
Evacuate
Dorian checked the computer. Kate had been more careful this time. Ten thousand portal entries. Ten thousand possibilities. The portal connections had sapped the beacon’s last bit of power. It was falling faster now. Dorian had to move.
He stepped through the portal again, back to the only place he thought was safe.
He stared at the sentinel assembly line. He was trapped, but perhaps there were answers here, something he could use.
Kate simply stared at the wall opposite the narrow bed, for how long she didn’t know.
The door opened, and Paul stepped in. “You should see this.”
He led her back to the bridge, a cramped space with several workstations and room for about five people. The small screen showed a glowing ember moving through the clouds.
“Is it the beacon?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” Kate said.
As the beacon burned in the sky, she realized that they were truly trapped now. The Beta Lander had been designed for moving between ships and planetary surfaces. So had its portal. They couldn’t leave this world.
“What are you thinking, Kate?” Mary asked.
“I think we have to throw the long ball.”
Part II
A Tale Of Two Worlds
35
Dorian had searched the sentinel factory again. It was truly empty and had been for some time. To him, the massive base floating in space felt like a hospital except it wasn’t clinical or clean; it was industrial and rugged, utilitarian, yet precise. A symmetrical grid of wide hallways led through the four-story complex, opening onto rooms with strange equipment and mechanical pieces he assumed belonged to prototype sentinels. It was like a workshop. That’s what it was: a place where they tweaked the sentinels, revising the formula for distribution to the assembly line for “the next version.” A research lab.
All the terminals recognized him as General Ares, and the entire facility opened for him without restrictions.
Dorian had been over his options. They amounted to porting back to the beacon around Earth and returning to Ares for help or sorting through the rest of the memories. He felt as though death awaited him down either path, but one held answers, and possibly an opportunity to unravel the mystery behind Ares and change Earth’s fate. It was an easy decision.
He loaded the data core with Ares’ memories into the conference booth and stepped inside.
For Ares, time was like a river: flowing, unstoppable, washing away the last grains of his emotional core. He felt less every second, every minute, every hour.
He watched the Serpentine Army battle the sentinels, which swarmed into the breach. The black sentinel spheres seemed to multiply exponentially. But the serpent grew faster. The black ring of Serpentine ships that harnessed the power of the star formed a blue and white portal in its interior, almost blotting out the sun, except for a thin ring of yellow and orange fire peeking around its edges like a solar eclipse. The great serpent that poured through the portal shed its outer layer as its pieces—ships—sheared off, engaging the sentinels. The spheres dug into the main cord of the serpent and the ships that separated, shredding them, ripping them into tiny specks of black and gray which drifted down to the enormous debris field like ash falling on a highway.
The momentum of the battle coursed back and forth, the serpent growing wide, extending then receding as a new wave of spheres devoured its sides and forced it to collapse back and regain its size. Finally, the serpent pushed through. Its head formed another ring on the other side of the battlefield, and another portal took shape. The great snake flowed through the battlefield, an endless procession of ships moving between the two portals. The remaining spheres winked away, the battle apparently lost.
Ares ignored his hunger. The desire to quench it never rose inside him.
He watched a small group of Serpentine ships prowl the wreckage. Were they searching for Atlantean survivors to assimilate? Or their own kind, now converted Atlanteans? What had Myra called them? The ring. Thinking of her, what they had done to her and his unborn child made Ares ache, reminded him that not all feeling had left. He glanced away from the Serpentine ships, refusing to watch.
Ares had thought all the sentinels were gone, but he realized one was hovering close to his ship, seeming to stare at him, reading his soul.
Ares stared back with no emotion, only a single thought, Do it.
A slot in the sphere opened, and it moved forward, swallowing Ares’ ship.
The darkness was complete. Ares floated in his EVA suit. There was only a vague curiosity about his fate.
The light that breached the darkness was blinding. Ares raised his arm to cover his eyes. The shard of the lander that held him floated free as the sphere backed away.
Ares’ eyes adjusted a little, and through the ship’s cockpit window, he could just make out a fleet of sentinel spheres, but it was the enormous ship that took his breath away. Three distant stars shone enough light for him to make out its shape but not its features. It was elongated, and Ares wondered if it was the control ship for the sentinels or perhaps a carrier or factory.
Several small spheres attached to his derelict ship and ushered him toward the waiting super ship. A bay opened, and the sentinels deposited his ship inside.
When the bay door closed, the rush of artificial gravity threw Ares into the ship’s floor. For a moment, he thought the impact would knock him out, but the EVA suit had cushioned the blow.
He pushed up and wandered out of the ship, into the vast, empty chamber. It was illuminated, and the artificial gravity seemed to be Atlantean standard, which Ares found to be a bizarre, slightly unnerving coincidence. His EVA suit told him the air was breathable, but he decided not to remove the suit.
Double doors opened at the end of the bay, and Ares exited into a corridor that was narrow, with gray-metallic walls, and beady lights at the floor and ceiling.
He hesitated for a moment, not sure whether to push forward or retreat back to his ship. Curiosity got the better of him. He wandered deeper into the corridor, which ended in a large intersection where two other corridors split off to the left and right, and a set of large double doors stood dead ahead. The doors opened, revealing a cavern in the interior of the ship, much larger than the bay his ship had landed in.
Ares proceeded slowly, half-wondering if he were wading deeper into some trap. The contents of the chamber puzzled him. Glass tubes, row after row, stacked from the floor into the darkness above and as far as he could see into the chamber. Each tube looked large enough to hold a single Atlantean.
“You can remove your suit.”
Ares turned, getting his first look at his captor.
36
Ares glanced from his captor to the endless rows of glass tubes. The man, or at least Ares thought he was a man, stood at the entrance of the chamber, just inside the double doors, the glow of the lights from the corridor forming a halo behind him.
“What is this?” Ares asked, not daring to remove his suit.
“You already know.”
Ares glanced back at the tubes. Stasis chambers. For deep space travel. A colony ship?
“Yes.”
Ares stepped backwards involuntarily. It can read my thoughts.
“Yes, it can. Your body emits radiation this vessel can read, allowing me to see it as an organized data feed.”
“What are you?”
“I’m the same as you, except I’ve been dead for millions of years.”
Ares tried to organize his thoughts. He said the first question that popped into his head. “You’re not… here? Not alive?”
“No. What you see is my avatar, a reflection of what I used to be. My race has been extinct for a long time. All that remains of us is the Serpentine Army.”
“You’re one of them?”
“No. I never was. I am merely one of the ones they slaughtered in their march across time. Long ago, my world made a great mistake. We sought the ultimate answer, the truth about our origins and the destiny of the universe. We chose the wrong tools to find it: science and technology. Methods beyond your comprehension. In our pursuit for the ultimate knowledge, the technologies we created eventually enslaved us, taking the last of our humanity before we even knew it was slipping away. Our civilization fractured. Those who resisted were assimilated. The Serpentine Army is what’s left. The members call themselves the ring. They believe that they are the fate of this universe and the beginning of a new one, a ring that runs through space and time.
“They believe th
eir ring will one day circle all human worlds, binding every last human life, and in doing so, harness a force they call the origin entity, enabling them to create a new universe, with new laws, where they can never be destroyed.”
Ares exhaled and pulled his suit off. He was in way over his head, and he figured if this ghost of humanity’s past wanted him dead, he wouldn’t even be here.
“What do you want from me?” Ares said flatly.
“Salvation. An opportunity to right the wrong my people are committing against yours right now.”
A holographic image rose in the dark space between them. Ares’ homeworld hung there, a ring of black ships forming a portal before it. A thick rope of Serpentine ships poured out. The end of the rope frayed, spraying ships onto the surface like dark tear drops falling on Ares’ world.
Thousands of sentinel ships fought the serpent, but just as they had at the Serpentine battlefield, they were losing. The Atlantean homeworld was falling.
“In our final days, when we realized our folly, we created what you call the sentinels, hoping to save the other human worlds from our mistake. As you’ve seen, the sentinels are greatly outmatched in the Serpentine war. As a last resort, we shifted our strategy to hiding the human worlds.”
“The sentinel line.”
“Yes. It forms a barrier, a sort of beacon network that cloaks your space, preventing the Serpentine Army from seeing worlds that harbor human life. The line also prevents hyperspace tunnels from crossing it.”
Comprehension dawned on Ares. “I created a hole in the sentinel line that allowed the Serpentine Army to come through.”
“Yes. But that is the way of the cycle.”
Anger rose within Ares. “You could have warned us.”
