by A. G. Riddle
Soldiers. Here.
Ares’ tried to process it. It was impossible. The sentinels…
One of the soldiers stepped forward and projected a hologram into the area between him and Ares. A violent battle raged in the space around the Atlantean homeworld. Tens of thousands of sentinel spheres fought a losing campaign, just as they had around the first Atlantean homeworld. For Ares, history was repeating itself. The wreckage of the sentinel spheres was slowly forming a new debris field that stretched to the sun.
Ares didn’t recognize the other ships. They weren’t Serpentine; they were much smaller and better-adapted to fighting the sentinel spheres, as if they had been built for that purpose.
The man removed his helmet. Lykos.
Ares recognized the rebel leader. Ares had negotiated with him during the revolt, and considered him the most reasonable man in an utterly unreasonable, barbaric faction.
“You betrayed us,” Lykos said.
“We have not,” Ares shot back. “Why are you attacking us?”
“You struck first, Ares. Call off the sentinels. That’s all we want.”
Ares rifled through possibilities, discarding move after move, searching for any way out. “I will,” he said, a plan taking shape in his mind. “The sentinel control systems are located inside the ark. I’ll disable the sentinels, and then we can talk about making this right.”
Lykos eyed him. “I’ll accompany you—to keep you to your word.”
The two men walked in silence past the stone edifice that housed the ark. As they passed the vast chamber, Ares realized the flaw in his plan. The tubes were filling with prominent citizens who had just been killed. The resurrection ship had been keyed to resurrect critical citizens in the event of an extinction-level catastrophe. It was the fallback point for Atlantean civilization.
More tubes filled. Some opened, and bodies poured out, falling lifeless on the floor. Resurrection syndrome, Ares thought. The trauma of their death had been too much, just as it had been for a few during the labor revolts. How much time had passed? Thousands of years? The Atlanteans had slipped so far into a utopian existence that the experience of a violent death was too much for any citizen’s psyche. They were ruined, all of them.
The tubes continued to fill and open, body after body of unmoving Atlanteans spilling out.
He had to stop the resurrection sequence, had to end their purgatory. They could never wake up. But he could make them safe. He was a soldier. It was his job… his duty.
The realization filled him with fire, purpose. Focus.
Ares rushed forward, killing Lykos in a single blow. He ran through the corridors to the ark’s bridge, where he disabled the resurrection cycle, ensuring that his people remained in stasis but didn’t emerge from the tubes.
He accessed the sentinel control program and instructed the spheres fighting the Exile ships to aid in his escape.
46
For a long while, Ares stood on the ark’s bridge, watching the blue and white waves of hyperspace form and flow by on the viewscreen. The ancient relic had performed admirably, jumping out of the planet’s gravity well and in the next split second, slipping into hyperspace, away from the battlefield of the Atlantean homeworld.
Ares had wondered if the ancient ship would still function. Their benefactors had built it to last, and Ares wondered if the avatar who had provided the ark to him so long ago had known this would happen, somehow planned for it.
Ares hadn’t seen the avatar since the exodus, when he had condemned Ares’ actions, what he called his great betrayal. Ares had ignored the words, charging ahead with his own plan to secure his people. And now that plan had backfired. He was partly responsible for the destruction of his world, and the thought haunted him.
He stomped down the dark metallic corridors, deep in thought. He replayed the conversation with the avatar, specific phrases jumping out.
We allowed our society to fracture. The Serpentine Army is all that remains in your time.
Ares knew that his people had repeated the same mistake. Atlantean society had divided, but Ares had made accommodations: the anti-Serpentine laws. In the chamber that held the thousands of tubes that stretched into the darkness, Ares stopped at the tube that held Lykos. The rebel’s eyes were hard. Ares would soon know the secrets his mind held. The resurrection process had captured his memories, and Ares could watch them.
At one of the adaptive research labs, Ares stepped into the yellow light inside the large glass vat and watched Lykos’ memories flash by.
He saw Lykos board a vessel in the Exile fleet and leave the Atlantean homeworld for the colony world, where he and his people set about building a humble, yet robust society with farming and hard work at its core. Years passed, the settlements grew, leaders were selected, and Lykos became a beacon to his people.
Ares watched him hike into the hills one day. A lander, one of the Atlantean science vessels, lay in wait, and a scientist Ares recognized stood before it: Isis.
Ares saw their conversation and Lykos take the container. After it was deployed, Lykos slipped into the tube in the resurrection raft and time flowed by, interrupted at regular intervals.
The Exiles had formed a cabal of leaders who knew the truth about the accelerated evolution, and they apprised Lykos periodically. Where settlements had been, villages emerged, morphed into towns, cities, and finally into sprawling metropolises that rivaled those on the Atlantean homeworld.
To Ares, the march of civilization was like watching the time-lapse photography of a green plant spreading out and blooming into an intricate, multicolored flower.
In the next memory, Lykos charged out of the tube in the resurrection raft, past the rock outcroppings, to the side of the mountain, where he watched glowing embers streak across the sky and crash into the cities. Ash and fire consumed the horizon.
Though he could barely admit it, Ares knew the slaughter was partly his fault. In the years after the Exodus, he had programmed the sentinel drones to attack any species that advanced across a threshold, any species that didn’t contain the pure form of the Atlantis Gene. Isis hadn’t been the first to isolate what made the Atlanteans genetically distinct; the science teams in the years after the Exodus had taken samples from countless hominid species, isolating the genes that controlled Atlantean evolution. Ares had used the blueprint to distinguish any potential enemies.
The avatar had warned Ares the moment the plan had formed in his mind, condemning it as a betrayal, but Ares had thought it justified: it was merely the way of survival. Any advanced civilization would become a danger to the Atlanteans. They could break the sentinel line, just as the Atlanteans had as they ventured out, or worse, attack the new Atlantean homeworld directly. Or they could repeat the Serpentine mistake, allowing their technology to overrun them and take control of their civilization. There was room for exactly one advanced race within the new sentinel line, and Ares had programmed the sentinels to annihilate any emerging species without the Atlantis Gene—any advanced civilization that wasn’t Atlantean.
In Lykos’ memories, Ares watched the sentinels execute their programming, dropping kinetic bombardments on the Exile world as they had on many others, obliterating the cities and altering the planet’s climate, which would no doubt do in any survivors.
But Lykos’ memories revealed that the Exiles had battled hard for survival on their ruined world. The race Isis had helped create was resilient, determined. They retreated underground, building cities that receded below the surface with as much sophistication as the metropolises that previously towered above. Isis’ therapy had created a race with a run-away intellect and something far more dangerous: an uncompromising drive to survive. They overcame challenge after challenge. They replicated the Atlantean resurrection technology, and their leaders used it to leapfrog through the ages as they prepared their escape from the wasteland of their world. And they had. Thousands of ships sprang from beneath the surface, engaging the sentinels that appeared in sp
ace, eventually winning the conflict and jumping away.
The sentinels had hunted them relentlessly, and the Exile-sentinel war had ebbed and flowed for several thousands of years. The Exile fleet had eventually turned the tide enough to make a mad dash for the Atlantean homeworld, hoping to force their former persecutors to call off the sentinels that had tortured and massacred them for years.
Ares watched Lykos land his triangular ship just beyond the ancient shrine that held the ark, where he and his soldiers found Ares and the two men’s memories joined.
Ares stepped out of the yellow vat. He was only partly to blame for the fall of his world. The remainder of the fault lay with Isis, and she was the key to turning the tide.
At the chamber that held the resurrection tubes, Ares stood before the double doors. It was a great irony: the harsh measures the Atlanteans had undertaken to protect themselves had eventually grown an enemy that brought about their downfall. And in their march to a peaceful, advanced civilization, they had become psychologically unable to even fight back.
Ares wondered how he would cure his people, if they even could be fixed. But he had larger issues to deal with first. The Exile fleet was capable and growing. It would soon overwhelm the sentinels, and then find the ark. Time was short. And when the sentinels were gone, the Serpentine Army would pour through, wiping out the Exiles and Atlanteans alike.
His options were limited. He needed a new weapon, a technology that would strike the final blow.
Isis. She was the key.
47
Kate stared out of the yellow vat, steeling herself for one final journey into Isis’ past. The next memories would reveal the truth of the Atlantean presence on Earth, and she hoped, the key to stopping Ares.
Isis felt that the years after the distress call from home seemed to drag on. Every time she and Janus awoke from their tubes, there was no update waiting. The only clue of the march of time was the readings from the hominid subspecies they had come here to study. They had watched their initial groups spread out across the world, rise, adapt, die out, and rebound countless times. Their logs charted the progress, and they settled into the only routine they knew: analyzing the data, designing new experiments, and periodically venturing out to conduct them. Janus remained detached, clinical, his only emotion directed at Isis. Even with their circumstances, she didn’t reciprocate. But she was changing, growing more connected to the emerging species on the planet. Perhaps it had been the drama on the Atlantean homeworld or her time with Lykos, but something had broken loose inside her, an emotional cataclysm that couldn’t be stopped. But there was no outlet for it. She focused on the science and bided her time, hoping for an update.
A new group of hominids evolved on the central continent, and they assigned a new catalog number: subspecies 8472. They were advancing rapidly, developing remarkable tool making and communication abilities.
“They’re one to watch,” Janus said.
“I agree.”
Like the others, they tagged the new subspecies and checked their population levels each time she and Janus awoke from their hibernation cycles.
An alarm woke them, and Isis quickly saw the source: a supervolcano on an island near the planet’s equator had thrown ash into the atmosphere, lowering temperatures on several continents. The volcanic winter had decimated the new subspecies’ population. They were on the brink of extinction.
When Isis ventured out to take a sample from the last two survivors, she made a fateful decision. In a cave, staring at the survivors, she was unable to simply watch them die. She could save them. For all she knew, the strike on the Atlantean homeworld could have been part of a series of attacks on hundreds of human populations on worlds across the new sentinel line. She wouldn’t watch this species slip into extinction, especially when her research could save them.
She brought the survivors back to the Alpha Lander and administered a modified version of the Atlantis Gene therapy she had treated the Exiles with.
She turned to find Janus in the research lab.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m… conducting an experiment.”
“What kind?”
“Modifying a few genes that control brain wiring. I think I can give them a greater chance at survival. It’s my research—”
“You can’t.”
“We have to,” Isis said. “They could be the last of our kind. We can’t watch them go extinct.”
Janus continued his protests but had finally agreed, provided they monitored the experiment closely.
Several hibernation cycles passed without incident. Isis and Janus watched the subspecies’ population rebound and venture out of the central continent, advancing geographically and intellectually. Their progress was breathtaking, and Isis felt a sense of pride that matched Janus’ growing apprehensiveness.
“This could slip out of our hands,” Janus said.
“It won’t.”
“We need to consolidate and control the genome. Mutations could occur during the hibernation intervals. We could awaken to a hostile, advanced civilization.”
This time Isis relented. They placed a radiation beacon in the Alpha’s bones and ensured that the first tribe kept it close.
Several cycles later, they awoke to another alarm: an incoming ship.
“It’s General Ares,” Janus said. “The ark.”
Ares buried the ship under the thick ice cap that covered the continent at the southern pole, and Janus and Isis ported to his ship.
Ares stood waiting for them in the portal room and spoke without preamble, his enraged eyes boring into Isis. “You massacred our people.”
“We’ve been here the entire time,” Janus shot back.
Ares activated a wall panel, and a hologram emerged, replaying the memories from Lykos. The three of them watched Isis land on the Exile world and provide the genetic therapy. The Exile civilization advanced rapidly after that, until its near annihilation by the sentinels. Years after the massacre, the Exiles rose from the ashes, into space, where they bested the sentinels lying in wait. The final sequences were of the Exiles laying siege to the new Atlantean homeworld, killing countless inhabitants.
Isis felt her legs go weak. Her attempt to reunite the Atlantean race had led to its downfall, a war beyond imagination.
No words came. She felt listless.
Janus’ voice was harsh. “It’s a fake.”
“It’s not. I have Lykos in a tube. He’ll verify it.”
Isis tried but failed to hide her response. Awareness came back to her in a crash, and she desperately wanted to charge out of the communications bay. Janus read her expression, and his reaction was the most emotion Isis had ever seen him display. His hurt was almost as crushing as seeing the holomovie.
“The memories are accurate,” Isis said quietly.
“If so,” Janus said, focusing on Ares, “it means you unleashed the sentinels on our own people. You caused the downfall.”
“The sentinels were built to protect us from any threats.”
“The Exiles were no threat. Just an advanced civilization. We saw another, on another world. Also bombarded. Will you deny it?”
“I will not,” Ares said. “I’ve protected us from countless threats. We’d be long extinct if it weren’t for me. Her therapy made them a threat. Had she not altered their genome, they would have been left alone.”
Isis stood there, still stunned.
“What do you want from us?” Janus asked.
“I read your research logs. You’ve performed a similar genetic alteration on a human species here.”
“Yes,” Janus said. “To prevent their extinction.”
“Well, your last science experiment almost caused our extinction. I’m joining your little expedition to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.”
Ares and Janus had argued for what felt to Isis like hours. Ultimately, Janus had yielded. Before they left the ark, Isis turned to Ares. “I’d like to see Lykos.”
“I think you two have seen enough of each other. And besides, we don’t allow visitation for prisoners of war.”
48
In the weeks after Ares arrived, life almost went back to normal for Isis and Janus. They conducted their experiments as they had, except now Ares was constantly present, always looking over their shoulders, rarely saying a word. And neither did Janus. When he did speak, it was only about the task at hand, and there was no excitement, no passion for the work he had dedicated his life to. That, along with the knowledge of what she had done to her own people, drove Isis into a well of darkness. With each passing day, the walls of the lander and the small world they could never leave seemed to collapse in on her. She felt trapped, truly alone.
She often turned to find Ares’ cold eyes staring at her, but he never approached her or said anything.
One day, when Janus was in the field, Ares sent for her. She reluctantly ported to the resurrection ark. In the back of her mind, a hope lingered: he’s reconsidered. He’s going to let me see Lykos. She followed the ship’s directive to report to the auxiliary stasis bay. It made sense to keep Lykos there, separate from the primary stasis bay. Her hope grew.
The doors parted, and Isis’s mouth fell open. A dozen tubes stood in a semicircle, and each held a different hominid.
“Just wanted to get your attention. I know you have an affinity for barbarians.”
Isis spun around. “You had no right to take them.”
“They’re in danger. In fact, thanks to you, they’re the most endangered species in the universe. The Serpentine Army will assimilate them one day. Unless the sentinels find this world and obliterate them first. Assuming, of course, the Exiles don’t find us all—”
“You’re wrong—”
“You weren’t there, Isis. You should have seen the Exile fleet sacking our world. They’re savages. Savages with incredible abilities but no control. Monsters, created by your therapy. Victims of your experiments. Just like subspecies 8472.”
