“They didn’t tell me the location of the secondary piloting station and I no longer have access to the ship’s information systems, what we call the esolace. You shut it down, didn’t you?” Matthew replied.
Orin snorted. “No. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. This stuff is way too advanced for us. Deliverance must have shut it down themselves.”
“Then I don’t see how you’ll ever find them, not in time at least.”
“Great,” Orin exclaimed, pressing his hand into his forehead. “So we’re still as blind as—”
“Wait. There is one possibility,” Matthew interrupted, an idea suddenly popping into his mind.
“Well? Out with it,” Orin said.
“There is a device on board which can trace people’s actions back through time. We could use it to find their location.”
The sentinel responded with a blank look. “A device that what?”
“It plays back past events. It’s called a chronotrace. We could use it to find out where the people on the bridge went,” Matthew said.
“Okay. We’ve already hit every view we can access a dozen times over so if you think it’s worth a try, I’m game. Where’s this device of yours?”
“In the lab where your men found me,” Matthew said.
“All right, then. Get this soldier a weapon, officer.” Orin gestured to the man on his right who had one of the silver stars on his chest. The man went over to a black case resting on the floor. Opening it up, Matthew saw that it had four extra pulsers. They had transparent, copper-tinted bodies with what looked like liquid inside them. The standard pulled one out and handed it to Matthew. Though he had no recollection of ever firing such a weapon, it felt surprisingly natural in his hand.
Orin swung his arm towards the direction of the exit. “All right, we’ll divide up the strike teams. Officer Ferris, you keep the Tungsten unit here on the bridge. I’ll head to the lab with Xenon. If this chrono gizmo of Yin’s doesn’t work, we’ll need to keep looking. Let me know if you find anything.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the officer, who went back to the soldiers surveying the screens. “What do you want us to do with the target we chased into the storage vaults? It looks like he’s started reviving the people in stasis and he’s engaged the locus fields surrounding the entrance so we can’t get in.”
“He is no longer a priority,” Orin said. “We’ve got escalon Yin to help us track down our targets. The vaults are detachable are they not?”
“Yes sir,” Ferris responded.
“Then just eject them. Send him and the rest of that Deliverance brood to rot out in the nothing. We don’t have time to waste on them.”
Matthew stared at the screen trained on Gavin as Orin and Ferris discussed the man’s fate. He had mixed feelings about Gavin now. Was the enemy of his enemy his friend, or just another enemy? He barely even knew which side he was on anymore. Whoever Gavin was, it didn’t seem right letting his section of the ship float off into space.
Gavin leaned over a woman with short-cropped hair. Her eyes fluttered open. Her face had gone blue from the cold, but even so, something stirred in Matthew at the sight of her, making him wonder who she was.
“Gavin,” she said, her lips moving stiffly. “Praise Numinae you’re here.”
“I’ll get us out of here, don’t worry. Every single one of you,” he said, his breath puffing clouds of frozen air.
“And Adan? Have you found him too?” she asked. The look in her eyes showed that this Adan, whoever he was, was someone she cared deeply about.
Gavin’s eyes dropped and his expression grew as frigid as the surrounding air. “It’s complicated, Sierra…It’s complicated.”
The room jerked to the side at that moment. “What was that?” Sierra asked.
Matthew already knew the answer to her question and he didn’t have the heart to stay and hear Gavin’s reply. The vault had been released from the ship, cast adrift in space with only a limited time before the life support would exhaust itself, killing everyone inside.
Instruments and equipment from the lab littered the floor from the scuffle with the Delegation soldiers. The chronotrace remained intact, however, still resting on top of the ebony column of celerium.
“So this little thing is going to show us the past?” Orin asked, scratching his wooly beard.
“It should,” Matthew said. “It’s still relatively untested, though, a prototype, really. I can’t guarantee we’ll find them before they charge up the omniclast or find some other way to stop you.” It still felt like he was betraying Cyrith and the Collective. He wasn’t sure who was in the right anymore.
Matthew used his mind to restart the chronotrace. Orin stared at the whirring half sphere and the white lights which filled the room as the device went through its initial scan. Once complete, Matthew sent the trace’s point of origin in motion, heading towards the bridge to get the last recorded moment when the Collective was in control. From there, he could track them to see where they went.
Orin and the rest of the unit could see nothing but the flashing lights. The sentinel’s face grew skeptical as more and more time went by and nothing happened.
“Sir, we’ve been monitoring the ship’s sub matter intensifiers through the view screens,” Ferris reported over Orin’s in-suit audio. “Based on what we’ve seen, there are indications that the omniclast is charging.”
“How long until it’s ready to fire?” Orin asked.
“Less than thirty microslices by our estimation,” Ferris answered.
Orin shook his head. “They won’t fire,” he said. “The Torrent is too close. They may be butchers, but they won’t blow themselves up just to get us off the ship. That’s insanity.”
That reasoning made sense, but knowing the leaders of the Collective, Matthew didn’t want to wait around and find out. They had little to no regard for human life. He wouldn’t put anything past them.
Matthew sent for a snapshot from the chronotrace. It had gotten as far as events on the main bridge just before Cyrith and Xander left. Donovan was there with them, along with Trey, the chief engineer, and twenty somatarchs.
As Matthew engaged the playback and the lab transformed into the scene from the chronotrace Sentinel Orin nodded in wonder and satisfaction.
“I have lost contact with the praxis,” Cyrith informed those present.
“The escalons are closing in on us from all directions. I don’t think we have enough somatarchs to survive if they come en masse, even with us directly controlling them.” Xander’s eyes flitted between half a dozen screens depicting the Delegation units advancing uncontested towards the bridge. Whenever groups of somatarchs did oppose them, their oscillathe guns lacked the range to take out the Delegation forces and they had little difficulty with the contingency probes. The conflicts inevitably ended as soon as the Delegation forces got close enough to fire their pulsers.
“We must retire to the auxiliary bridge,” Cyrith declared. The somatarchs began filing out the door in response to Cyrith’s mental order. The lead Developer continued, “If they find and attempt to breach it as well, we will have no choice but to fire the omniclast. We will not let them take the Nebula, no matter the cost.”
Xander, Donovan, and Trey followed the somatarchs out, but Cyrith lingered, casting one last glance back at the bridge.
“I despise this planet. I should never have come back here.” His silver coat shimmered with what would have appeared to be the beginnings of a terrible rage were it not for the look of complete impassivity which dominated his face. But the anger passed away as quickly as it came and Cyrith fled through the doorway, determined to maintain his fragile hold on the ship until the very end.
Thirty-Six
Insubordination
Matthew waited just long enough for the chronotrace to confirm that Cyrith and the others had arrived at the secondary bridge before he ended the trace. The device spun to a stop and its white lights faded. As it did so he refl
ected on the irony that it had been Cyrith and Xander who pushed him to finish the device in order to stop the Delegation and now that very same organization was using the device against them.
“That’s an amazing piece of technology you’ve got there,” Orin said. “Who invented it?”
“It was created by the man you chased into the storage vaults,” Matthew replied, trying to push from his mind the recollection of what the Delegation had done to Gavin.
“Well, I’ll give them this much, Deliverance had us beat when it came to non-military technology. We didn’t realize just how advanced they were back on Kess until it was too late. But there is one force in the universe that no technology can overcome and that is man’s thirst for vengeance.”
Matthew wasn’t sure he agreed with that last statement, but the edge in the sentinel’s voice told him that, whatever the Developers had done to Orin and his people, the emotions were still fresh.
“Have you seen enough?” Matthew asked.
“More than enough,” Orin said. “The longer we tarry, the more time we give them to charge up the omniclast and blast our fleet into micro-dust.”
“Let me take this with us, just in case.” Matthew reached up and dislodged the chronotrace from its clamps on top of the celerium column. He shoved it inside a polymeric satchel he found in a drawer.
The sentinel cleared his throat and pointed at the door. “All right, escalons, let’s move.”
Everyone filed out of the lab, Orin and Matthew bringing up the rear. As they set out at a brisk pace through the corridors, Matthew addressed his new commander.
“Sir, if I may, you keep referring to me and the others as escalons. Is that some sort of rank?”
“Fair question. We’re all escalons, actually,” Orin said, speaking between breaths. “Towards the end of the Delegation’s rule on our home world most of our army was converted into escalons. Without going into the details, they grafted anacite into our bones and juiced up our metabolism. That means we heal pretty fast if we get injured and we don’t get affected by low frequency energy weapons like neutralizers and other stun based weapons. But don’t go thinking you’re invincible just because you got a body upgrade. As I always tell my men, the heart of a soldier is his greatest weapon, not his gear.”
“Understood,” Matthew said. As a member of the Collective, he was accustomed to the idea of being something more than human, but he was surprised to learn that the Delegation had their own forms of augmentation. He wondered if there were any natural humans left on this world or any other.
The escalons soon ran into the first of many passages blocked by glowing blue walls of locus energy. This was the Nebula’s means of dealing with the breaches the venators had made in the hull, sealing off certain sections of the ship. The barriers meant that they were not able to take a direct route to the control center. Orin and his team seemed unfazed by this. They left the passage, finding an entrance to the maintenance shafts which ran beneath the ship. They were narrow enough that in most places the soldiers had to go single file, but they were relatively free of clutter so the soldiers kept up a brisk pace.
After running through the underbelly of the ship for several microslices they reached an access hatch, but it refused to budge. Their pulser weapons only damaged living things so they couldn’t shoot their way through.
One of the soldiers pulled a small tube off his belt and twisted it. A thin blade of yellow light sprang from the end. The soldier used the utility cutter to open up a hole in the doorway similar to the way Gavin had broken into the lab.
Sentinel Orin spit on the floor in an odd display of excitement. “Soon, boys, soon. These Deliverance scabs will be ours.”
Several of the soldiers nodded in response, but Matthew couldn’t read their expressions behind their visored masks. It was odd not being able to read their thoughts. Everything felt so unfamiliar, so unnatural, like a puzzle with all the pieces put together, but in the wrong place.
“You keep talking about ‘Deliverance,’” Matthew said while the soldier made the incision. “You’re referring to the Collective, right?”
“Deliverance is the name they called themselves back on Kess,” Orin answered. “They were a revolutionary group back then, new and influential, but the Delegation had so many enemies we barely noticed them. We had no idea what they were up to until it was too late.”
“Cyrith told us that it was the Delegation that started the war.”
“Humph. That’s a load of tripe and he knows it.”
“You looked like you recognized him when you saw him in the chronotrace. Is that right?”
“Oh yeah. Cyrith Crane. He was a brilliant generational scientist—one of the Delegation’s brightest minds before Deliverance got a hold of him. I never thought he’d be the one leading this mess.”
“So Cyrith wasn’t the original leader of Deliverance? Do you know who was?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Orin said. “Our intelligence says that he was known primarily as ‘The Doctor,’ but our knowledge is extremely dated. I assume a lot has changed since the Purge.”
The escalon soldier finished cutting the hole through the hatch. Two more men carried away the slab he cut out, but a second hatch lay beyond the first. It was also sealed shut so the escalon set about carving another opening.
“Well, I certainly haven’t met or heard about anyone who goes by that title,” Matthew stated.
“Let’s hope for his sake that he suffered a slow and miserable death out in the deep dark of space.” A threatening look burned in Orin’s eyes.
“You really hate him, don’t you? Though you don’t even know who he is,” Matthew observed.
“I’ll know him if I find him. And if he’s still alive, I will find him,” the sentinel said. “Deliverance, led by this man, fired the omniclast into our planet and set off a paroxysm that destroyed ninety-eight percent of life on Kess. The Purge left our planet a lifeless husk. The only deliverance they ever achieved was for themselves.”
Not for the first time since hearing the mnemonic, Matthew found Sentinel Orin’s words difficult to comprehend. The destruction of an entire planet? That did not seem possible to him. The Developers were cold and efficient but this…he couldn’t fathom anyone committing such an atrocity.
“How did you find us—I mean, them? Kess must be half way across the galaxy,” Matthew asked.
Orin’s eyes sparkled in the dark, as if he had been waiting for Matthew to ask him the question.
“No one believed we would find them, but I refused to let them escape the consequences of their actions. So we sent out scouts. Space travel without using sidereal portals is extremely slow so we couldn’t send off our ships until we knew where they were. We sent multiple scouts out to different systems, staggering the missions to give them time to track our enemy down. You were one of several we sent to this planet. We got word only yesterday from one of our scouts that this was where Deliverance fled to.”
The escalon finished cutting the hole in the second hatch. His fellow soldiers silently removed the slab, pulling it through the first hole. Then the men of Xenon unit poured through.
“This is it.” Orin’s eyes lit up with a vengeful glimmer. “This is what we came for.” He reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out an orange pellet and popped it in his mouth. “Want some solec?” he asked, offering Matthew a second pellet.
“No thanks,” Matthew said. A powerful drug like that would have certainly calmed his nerves, but it seemed like overkill. It would have been better to save it in case someone got injured.
Everyone kept quiet after that. As they pressed forward, Matthew grew anxious, wondering what he would feel when he saw Cyrith and the others. He didn’t despise them the way Orin seemed to, but if they really had killed billions of people, perhaps he should. It still all seemed so unreal.
A quarter of a slice later the soldiers of Xenon unit arrived at the final hatch, the one leading into the auxiliary control room.
They had expected to find it guarded, or at least sealed, but it was neither. Instead the door to the opening sat off to the side, blackened on the edge so that it looked like it had been blown off its hinges. The charred body of a somatarch lay sprawled across the threshold, killed by pulser fire. Though it was no longer a threat, everyone instinctively pulled out their weapons.
Beyond the body, a ramp led down into the control room. More signs of battle littered the passage there. The burned bodies of at least a dozen somatarchs lay strewn about. The lead soldiers filed through, two abreast, picking their way through the scorched remains. In many cases, only snatches of the somatarchs’ white uniforms gave any indication of their identity.
Even more surprising than the presence of the somatarchs, several Delegation uniforms lay scattered amongst the bodies. They must have been hit by oscillathe blasts, but how did they get here in the first place? And why hadn’t they contacted Orin when they found the auxiliary bridge? Whoever they were, the number of scorched somatarchs scattered around the room showed they had not gone down without a fight.
The sentinel’s team quietly descended towards the control room. They left the ramp, the soldiers fanning out to either side. The room was circular like the main bridge and almost as large. A ring of instrumentation occupied the center. This inner ring was divided into three sections with wide gaps between each. The panels were lit up with navigation data and status screens for all the ship’s systems. Above those, curved view screens hung from the ceiling, each of them depicting the sub matter intensifiers for the omniclast on top of the ship. A curved polymeric chair sat in front of each section.
Matthew’s eyes scanned the room for any sign of Cyrith and the other Developers, but he spotted nothing until one of the soldiers pointed at the instrument panel to their left. There, the upper part of Cyrith’s body peeked out from the base. His silvery lab coat as charred, as was most of his face, but enough was left to see that it was unmistakably the remains of the lead Developer. An odd mix of emotions rushed through him at the sight. On some level Matthew knew that justice had been served, but even though his connection to the Collective had been entirely fabricated, he could not shake a sense of guilt for having joined their enemies.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 97