Lee cross-checked with Wylon and Katahl. Both consented.
So, apparently everyone knows somethin’ I don’t. Fantastic. Lee chewed his lip. “All right, Danny; if that’s what you need, I’ll do it. Now, put Masterson back on.”
Another pause, then the chancellor returned. “So, do we have an agreement?”
“I don’t have what you want,” Lee said. “It’s on the Praetorian. I’ll need to double back there to pick it up, then I presume you want me to bring it aboard?”
“Astutely done, Captain,” Masterson said.
“Fair enough.” Lee gripped his flight stick and laid in a course. “I’ll need about an hour.”
“You have thirty minutes,” Masterson countered. “Oh, and Captain Summerston?”
The chancellor’s voice sent needles up Lee’s spine.
“I do so look forward to meeting you.”
Lee grimaced. Yeah, ’cause that ain’t creepy at all. “Sure, whatever. Summerston out.”
* * * * *
Chapter 37: Face-to-Face
“Kingmaker, this is Banshee One. Go secure.” Briggs’ voice was barely a whisper in Lee’s ear as he winged his Mako across the front line toward the Vanxus. He’d just left Doc and Katie on the Praetorian’s flight deck, and he’d been counting the seconds, hoping to hear this before he lost the chance.
“Banshee One, this is Kingmaker.” Katahl matched the other’s volume. “Line is secure. What’s your status?”
“Phase One is complete. Revenant Team has atmo.”
Lee sighed with relief. They made it aboard the Kamuir.
“Copy that, Banshee One,” Katahl said. “Daredevil is inbound to Queen Bee as we speak. The clock is stopped for now, but that could change at any time. Proceed with the utmost caution and expediency.”
“Stand by, Kingmaker.”
An eerie silence fell over the line, followed by four rapid-fire pops, all suppressed. There were no shouts, no alerts, no shuffling of feet. Not even the thud of a single tranqued body hitting the floor. Just pops.
“Targets are down; Revenant Team is clear.” The captain’s voice was a metronome.
Damn, Briggs, you are one smooth operator. Lee’s anxiety eased a bit.
“Banshee One copies the order, Kingmaker,” Briggs said. “Next comm check in fifteen mikes by triple-squelch only. Repeat, triple-squelch only; silence is golden. Revenant Team out.”
And just like that, the comm returned to static while Briggs and his team moved on to the Kamuir’s bridge.
A few minutes later, Lee docked his Mako in the designated bay aboard the Vanxus and dismounted from his cockpit to find two centurions waiting for him. He was thoroughly searched then escorted out of the area and into a series of corridors that let out into some kind of weird central atrium.
Lee covered his mouth with his left hand to cough, and two pulse rifles filled the air in front of his face. He stared, frozen, into their barrels. “Apologies, fellas, but your air in here kinda sucks.”
The escorts lowered their weapons and proceeded through the opening ahead. Peering upward past the thirty-plus levels between him and the ceiling, Lee marveled at the colossal scope and sprawling, biomechanical oddity of the chamber. And here I thought these things looked weird on the outside.
Something prodded his back—I swear, hoss, I’m gonna make you eat that rifle before this is over—and Lee was herded onto a lift. The centurions boarded behind him, and the platform began its ascent through the atrium.
Level twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one…and stop. Lee risked a quick glance over the guardrail and figured it to be a hundred-meter drop, minimum, back to the bay level where he’d entered. Scratch that escape route.
Another prod at his back, and Lee was getting off the lift and walking down a hallway. He was halted at a pair of metasteel doors. One of the centurions waved its palm in front of an access panel, which shone in red light, then green. The doors swooshed open.
“Captain Summerston.” Masterson was waiting at center floor inside the Vanxus CIC, his posture—upright, with hands clasped at his back in a formal pose—confident as ever. He gestured Lee inside. “Won’t you join us?”
Slowly, Lee entered, casting a quick side-to-side sweep of the room with his eyes. Oddly enough, most of the stations were manned by imperial officers, not Kurgorians, each one using a tablet or some other device as an operations intermediary. Ahead was a massive forward viewport, behind which rested both fleets—Auran and Alystierian—gridlocked in their stalemated positions. In the background was the Eno asteroid belt, in the foreground the right side of the imperial fleet, the Kamuir among them. Come on, Briggs.
Lee’s search halted abruptly upon spotting Danny—pale, weak, and scarred as though from a recent beating, his hands chained above his head to a rail on the starboard wall.
“Hey, bro.” Danny’s head twitched to one side, dried blood spotting the corners of his mouth. “Good of you to join the party.”
“Danny.” Lee tipped his friend a small wave. “You look like crap.”
“You know, I get that a lot lately.” Danny coughed then grimaced in anguish.
Hang on, buddy. Lee turned back to Masterson. “All right, Chancellor, you got your wish. I’m aboard your ship. So, where do we go from here?”
Masterson flashed a wraith-like smile. “We’ll get to that. First things first: did you bring it?”
Lee raised his right palm to show his intention then slowly reached into the left breast pocket of his flight suit. From it he fished out two vials, each one containing a gold-colored solution like diluted honey, and a capped syringe.
Masterson stared at the vials. “Is that it?”
“Yep. One of these is for your people to analyze. The other is for Danny.” Lee presented the syringe. “With your permission, I’d like to give it to him now.”
Masterson glided across the deck and plucked one of the vials from Lee’s grasp. He held it up and examined it under the starlight. “You may proceed.”
Again moving slowly, watchful of everything around him, Lee approached Danny and slid the syringe into the second vial. “Doc says takin’ this stuff ain’t exactly a picnic. You need anything before I hit you with this?”
Danny inhaled a few breaths then braced himself against the wall. “Nope. Just do it.”
Lee nodded and gently slid the needle into Danny’s skull port. He plunged then removed it.
Danny’s entire body wrenched in a hard seizure, eyes bulging like carnival balloons, and Lee threw his hands over Danny’s to keep him from harming his wrists in the restraints.
“Step back.” Masterson’s order was both a command and a clear warning.
Lee put up his hands and moved away. “Sorry, reflex. Didn’t mean to upset the apple cart.” He glanced back at Danny, whose muscles began to relax.
Danny’s hands, however, remained clenched as fists in his restraints.
Lee breathed easy then caught his friend’s gaze with his. Don’t you drop that hairpin, Slick. I almost swallowed it twice on my way in here.
Danny squeezed his hands, and Lee knew he understood.
“Dr. Kerns.” Masterson returned to the command chair at center floor, where he was met by a slender man in black slacks with long, curly hair, pointed features, and a crooked nose. Masterson handed him the vial. “Begin your analysis on this at once along with the scans you took of Sergeant Tucker’s spine. I want both of them replicated and human trials underway as soon as possible.”
“Yes, Sire. It shall be done.” The doctor took the vial and vanished from the CIC.
“So, gentlemen.” Masterson clapped his hands. “What shall we talk about?”
Lee and Danny traded looks. Raiders.
“Well,” Lee said. “I reckon you could be a sport and start by lettin’ us go.”
Masterson nodded to one of the centurions, who planted a rifle-stock to Lee’s face. Lee crumpled to the floor.
“Sorry, bro,” Danny said. “Guess
I shoulda told ya. The hospitality around here is a bit lacking.”
“It ain’t the Ritz in Amelia Island, that’s for sure.” Lee cradled his jaw and got to his feet. “So, I guess that’s a no, then, on the release?”
Lee hit the deck again, this time compliments of the second escort. Yeah, that hurt.
Masterson loomed over him. “What, Captain Summerston? No more pithy banter between you and your friend?”
Seeing both centurions train their rifle barrels on his head, Lee opted to hold his spot on the floor and keep his mouth shut.
“Yes, I didn’t think so.” Masterson stood up straight and spun back to his chair, cloak fluttering behind him as he went. “Don’t worry, Captain Summerston; I have no wish to see you dead—not yet anyway.”
Thanks for the clarification. Lee kept that one to himself, too.
“On the contrary,” Masterson said. “I have every intention of letting you live for quite the foreseeable future.”
Lee dabbed at a speck of blood on his lip. “That’s rightly generous of you.”
“Oh, don’t mistake my meaning,” Masterson added. “It’s not a matter of charity at all. No, no. It’s about fairness. My suffering over the loss of my son has endured for years, and I think it only right to repay the favor. You see, Captain, I intend for you to experience every bit of the pain and agony I’ve suffered through these last five years, and then some.” Masterson pointed to the motionless ASC fleet beyond the viewport shield. “I want you to live every single day, from this one forward, knowing that I alone have taken everything and everyone you ever cared about, just as you did for me. After today, the ASC will be no more, and Aura will stand in ruin along with everyone on it—your friends, your comrades.” He scoffed. “Your family…I will personally see to it that every single one of them precedes you to the grave—and I want you, my friend, to be watching when it happens. Then I want you to live with that, every day saturating yourself in the misery of it for as long as I decree. That could be days, years, or even decades. It will end when I say it ends and not a moment sooner. Then, once I’ve had my fill of your anguish, I’ll consider sending you to the afterlife.”
A morbid chill danced down Lee’s spine. He knew Masterson meant what he said about Aura. But his fear ran far deeper than that. Were Masterson to seize Aura, he’d also seize everything the Aurans knew, and that included not only intel about Earth but also its very location. There wasn’t a doubt in Lee’s mind that Masterson would go there, either, just for spite.
Dear God in Heaven; it’d be genocide. Lee bowed his head. “What do you want from me?”
Masterson’s expression twisted into a tight snarl. “Now, shall we begin?” He hammered a finger onto his chair’s comm button. “All imperial ships, this is your chancellor. Today is the day when our enemies kneel, once and for all, at our feet. Commanders, you may fire when ready.”
“Belay that order!”
* * * * *
Chapter 38: Voices from Beyond
Masterson’s head snapped down to leer at his tablet. “It can’t be.”
Lee craned his neck toward the officer nearest him and saw that his tablet, along with every other in the room, had been commandeered by an all-too-familiar figure on the bridge of the Kamuir.
“This is Lucius Zier,” the figure said, “son of Clayton, and the rightful chancellor of our great empire. My kinsmen, I beseech you to hear me now and hear me well. Everything you know about Chancellor Alec Masterson, most notably his dealings with the race of beings you know as the Kurgorians, is a lie. It was all part of a carefully crafted ruse to fool you into supporting his takeover of our government. The primary means through which he did this was Alystier’s treaty with these aliens, a people who, I’d add, are not who they claim to be.”
A pair of officers matched grumbles to Lee’s left, one of them saying, “We’ve heard this nonsense before.”
“In the generations since The Great War,” Zier continued, “the term Beyonder has devolved into little more than household slang to be thrown about by our youth. It’s a general term now, used to describe any being from a world other than our own—beings from the beyond, as it were. But it wasn’t always that way, was it? Once, not that long ago, the term Beyonder was anything but casual. It was the stuff of nightmares, a term that was irrevocably tied, in the minds of some, to the darkest hour of our history. That hour, friends—and moreover the war and the atrocities that came with it—was not the work of some faceless group of beings but rather a single being with horrifyingly explicit intentions.”
Zier’s implication hung in the air with the weight of a thousand anvils.
“You think our first contact with the Kurgorians came when then Commandant Masterson took his crew into the Rynzer Expanse on a hunt for caldrasite. It didn’t. Our first contact with these people took place long before that…just over a century ago, to be exact.”
This time, no one said a word.
“Yes, brothers, that is correct,” Zier said. “Your chancellor, Alec Masterson, has made a pact with the very same devils that nearly ended our civilization before it ever even began. He then packaged that pact into a neatly fabricated narrative—filled with glorious tales of Kurgorian history, nobility, and charity—and sold it to you by way of the press in order to turn your fears toward ‘the real threat,’ as he calls them: the Aurans.” Zier scoffed aloud. “There was no threat to your families or mine. There never was. Not even in the beginning when I failed you as chancellor and allowed myself to be backed into telling you otherwise for the sake of keeping my job. Know this, gentlemen: Masterson has known who these people are for years. It’s why he took the Kamuir into the expanse to begin with. He sought them out.”
The helmsman, a black-haired corporal, turned to Masterson and dared to speak. “Is this true?”
The chancellor couldn’t answer; Zier did it for him. “The file I play for you now was pulled directly from your chancellor’s private server in the imperial alcazar. He took this information with him on the expanse run. It’s how he found the empire’s messianic allies.”
The tablet screens around Lee flickered from the image of Zier to that of a blue screen with the Auran seal and a subspace buoy code, 512.2. There were also spectral-feed and time-code indexes, per regulation, but it was that first metric that had Lee’s attention. The 500-series buoys were among the first Aura had ever launched, and most of them had been destroyed in service years ago or decommissioned for newer tech. That meant whatever the forthcoming message was, it was old, very old.
The blue screen flickered off, and the image of a man appeared. He was middle-aged, in his midforties or so, and wore the filthy remains of a vintage Auran pilot’s uniform. Behind him, a blood-red sky filled the viewport as multiple sets of very familiar black-armored fists pounded its cover.
“Can’t you red-skinned demons give me a damn minute?” The pilot scowled. The piecemeal cockpit around him was shrouded in shadow, leaving his face scantly visible save for those portions illuminated by two small sources: a cabin light above his seat and an instrument panel at his right palm. The latter blinked a single word in its display: armed.
“Fort Manning Control, this is Inferno One,” the pilot said. “As of just past 2200 hours on the above spectral date, I have successfully located and infiltrated the Beyonder homeworld using the shuttle we took from them at Retaun.”
Lee thought he heard a pin drop.
“I have uploaded all relevant materials regarding its location into this data stream,” the pilot went on. “Spectral coordinates, atmospheric scans, topography. It’s all in here, and, by my count, it should reach you in the next twelve to eighteen months. That’s assuming, of course, that our new subspace relay network holds and none of the buoys drifts too far out of alignment.”
Lee hung his head as the stranger relayed his last wishes for his logs and a message of good-bye to his family. Sorry, partner, but they never got it.
The ruckus beyond the pilot’s
viewport intensified.
“Make our people strong again, Manning,” he said, almost pleading. “But do it the right way, not that of General Zier and his pack of war-mongering thugs. When this conflict is finally over, and the scholars of tomorrow look back on Aura a thousand years from now, let them remember us for who we were as a people and who we can be yet again…not the unholy monsters we’re forced to be today.”
His point made, the pilot reached into his uniform and retrieved a tattered photograph, presumably of his family. He placed it on the dash and stared at it. “This is Tomys Rayner signing off. Operation World Scorch is officially a go.”
The tablets flickered as they went dark, and silence filled the CIC as every officer there fought to process what they’d just been shown. Lee knew they were thinking that the buoy codes and the spectral dates could’ve been bogus. The same went for the pilot as no credible pictures of Tomys Rayner had survived the war.
The data in the stream, however—the star charts of Kurgoria, the maps of its surface—couldn’t have been faked. The ASC didn’t have that information, and everyone knew it. The Kamuir’s data banks, on the other hand, were an entirely different story. If the scans she’d taken of the expanse planet matched those in Rayner’s stream, this whole debate was over.
With any luck, Mac was already running the comparisons.
A handful of voices stirred when a digital scan depicting a bright-red planet appeared on their tablets. It was tagged “Rayner 1” and flanked by a second, seemingly identical image of the same planet. That was tagged “Kamuir 1.” The two images blinked in a side-by-side presentation then gradually slid atop one another to form a single, unified image.
And the truth shall set you free.
The word Match flashed in every screen.
Slowly, the imperials rose from their seats and began to turn on their chancellor.
“You son of a bitch,” one of them muttered.
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