Wipe a man’s memories and give him a fresh slate, and watch him slide back into his old ways. Abaddon, Lucien, the Devil... Ellis, Stavos, Graves... he went by many names, and all of those instances of his existence had a common body of experiences and memories to draw upon. All except for a few scattered individuals in human bodies.
Etherus had told him what he was doing, recreating him in human bodies to see what they would do. When those people hadn’t turned into sociopaths, Etherus had shared the results of the experiment, as if to say, this is who you could have been.
Abaddon sneered.
Etherus thought he was proving a point with that, but it proved nothing. The experiment was still in its infancy. It had taken more than a billion years before he’d grown bored enough with paradise to rebel against Etherus.
And how long had humans been around? Better yet, how long had they been immortal, with lives long enough to truly appreciate the fathomless boredom that he had suffered?
No, Etherus hadn’t proved anything yet. Lucien Ortane and his father, Ethan, might have had all the same initial conditions as he, but they were missing the critical factor of his experiences.
Give them the same life to live, and they’ll make all of the same so-called evil choices as I have.
But where was the root of that evil? In the choices that he, Abaddon, had made? Or in the person that Etherus had created to command his army?
The problem was simple: if Etherus was good, and God, and all-powerful, then how was it possible that he had created Abaddon, who was evil?
It was nature versus nurture. If the flaw lay in Etherus’s creation and the initial characteristics of Abaddon’s being, then Etherus was to blame, but if the flaw lay in Abaddon’s choices, then Abaddon was to blame.
But of course, then comes determinism to prove that free will doesn’t exist, and therefore good and evil don’t exist, so either way Etherus can’t judge me. Deep down he knows it. That’s why he and his people are all hiding in a corner while the rest of the universe burns. It’s impossible to lead a crusade without the strength of true conviction.
In that moment the lights snapped back on, and the darkness fled. Blinking spots from his eyes, Ellis arched an eyebrow at the ceiling. Listening to my thoughts, were you?
But he smirked at the absurdity of that thought. He’d long since stopped believing that Etherus was the almighty deity he claimed to be. Ghostly extra-dimensional allies notwithstanding, Abaddon was far more powerful than Etherus. Of the two of them, the only one who’d achieved anything close to omnipresence was him, Abaddon, with his billions of simultaneous instances.
Yet another reason for you to hide in your corner, Abaddon thought. But you won’t stay hidden for long. I’m coming for you, Etherus.
Chapter 37
The Lost Etherian Fleet
Lucien emerged from the portal a split second before the others did. The negligible gravity in the center of the underworld was suddenly replaced by a much stronger force, pulling him down to the deck of the ship. He tried to land feet-first, but ended up on his back, sprawled out against one of the bridge control stations. He watched as the others fell out of the shimmering portal, their arms and legs windmilling. Garek and Brak landed one on top of each other in a pile of tangled limbs and clattering armor, while Addy managed to perform a controlled somersault. She brushed off her suit and offered a hand to help Lucien up.
He took her hand and stood up, surveying the bridge. It was a perfect circle with two levels separated by a short flight of stairs. A dome-shaped viewport lay overhead, revealing a vast sea of stars and space. Lucien felt as if he were standing on an airless platform, adrift in deep space. Unnerved by the sensation, he walked around aimlessly to remind himself that there was gravity. He noted the warm glow of lights emanating from control stations, and from the glow strips in the floor. Gravity and lights meant power, so they weren’t adrift in space. Looking behind them, Lucien saw the portal to the underworld shimmering, still open.
“I don’t get it,” Garek said. “This ship looks as new as the day it was built. I thought it’s supposed to have been here for over ten thousand years?”
Lucien nodded and looked away from the portal. Had they left the lights and gravity on all this time? Did Etherian ships have unlimited fuel in their reactors? Most ships that Lucien had encountered ran on fusion power, but even fusion required a ready supply of fusionable materials.
“Do you think there’s anyone on board?” Addy asked.
“There might be an easy way to find out,” Lucien replied, and went to the control station in the center of the bridge. It was on the upper level where they’d emerged, and he guessed it had to be the captain’s station.
He took a seat there, and holographic displays sprang to life all around him, emitted from projectors in the floor. The alphabet and language was Etherian, but thanks to the translator band he wore under his helmet, he was able to understand everything perfectly.
Lucien located the ship’s sensor display where a 3D star map appeared, crowded with green icons of friendly vessels. At the center of the map was a particularly large vessel, highlighted white. Lucien selected it, and found that the ship was called the Gideon. Ship schematics and technical readouts appeared on that screen. Lucien scanned through the information until he found what he was looking for.
“The ship’s sensors show exactly four lifeforms on board,” he said.
Garek and Addy walked into Lucien’s periphery, appearing to either side of his chair.
“What else can you see?” Garek asked, while peering over Lucien’s shoulder at the sensor display.
Returning to the star map with all the green icons on it, he found a contacts panel in the top left of the display. A long list of contacts appeared, all of them green and friendly.
“There’s one thousand and fifty seven friendly ships around us,” Lucien said, reading the total number of friendly contacts at the bottom of the contacts panel. Sensors indicate they’re all cloaked.”
“Obviously not very well if we can detect them from here,” Garek said.
Lucien nodded, still scanning the contact panel. “Most cloaking shields only hide ships from a distance. The fleet looks to be in a close formation...” Lucien trailed off. “These ships are all named after prominent figures in the Etherian codices.”
“Makes sense, given where they came from,” Garek replied.
Lucien selected the fleet as a group. It was called Gideon’s Army. A table with information about the fleet appeared, giving each ship’s name, range away from them, mass, ship class, shield strength, hull integrity, and crew.
Lucien scrolled through the list and found all of the ships to be in pristine condition with hull integrity and shields at a hundred percent. He also found the active crew count for each of the ships to be 0/###. The second number varied, but the first was always zero and highlighted in red. All except for one ship—the Gideon. It had a crew count of 4/9750. There were just four people on board the entire fleet—the four of them. “The fleet really is abandoned,” Lucien said.
“How big are the ships in the fleet?” Garek asked.
Lucien turned back to the display. He tapped the top of the column labeled mass, and a set of alternative categories for size appeared—beam, draft, length, and tonnage. Lucien selected length and tapped the little arrow beside the column, assuming it would order the list by that category.
It did. “The smallest ships are only a few hundred meters long...” he said, scrolling down again, “but it looks like most of them are over a kilometer long.” As he reached the bottom of the list he found more than a dozen ships that were even larger than that. “The biggest ones are over ten kilometers from bow to stern, and we’re sitting on the largest of those, the Gideon, at fourteen kilometers long.”
Garek nodded. “Well, well, looks like Katawa held up his end of the deal, after all. We’ve got our fleet: one thousand capital-class ships. I think it’s time we go find Astralis
and take the fight to the Faros, don’t you?”
Lucien turned to Garek. “The Polypuses were clear. They only let us get here because we agreed to take the fleet back to Etheria.”
“And we’ll do that, but why not go get our people first? Then we won’t have to come back and rescue them later.”
“Because we might be detected by the Faros while we’re out looking for them,” Lucien said.
“We might also be detected along the way to Etheria. And if we are, it would be good to have these ships properly crewed so we stand a fighting chance.”
Addy began nodding. “Garek has a point.”
“The Polypuses wanted us to go straight back to Etheria. They showed us what would happen if the Faros found the fleet.”
“And they showed me that Astralis escaped,” Garek replied. “They must have known how I would react to that. If they’re safe, then what’s the harm in us going there first?”
“They showed you that they’re safe to put your mind at ease, so you wouldn’t think there was an urgent rush to go rescue them. We talked to the Polypuses about this. They clearly told us to go back to Etheria first.”
Garek snorted. “Yeah... it was like having a conversation with a light bulb. How do you even know they understood us? Or that we understood them? What if they thought brighter was no and darker was yes?”
“You’re deliberately confusing the issue,” Lucien said. “I get your personal stake in all of this, but we’re going to Etheria first. You want to do something else?” Lucien turned and pointed to the open portal behind him. “Go ahead. The door’s still open.”
But just as Lucien said that, the shimmering portal vanished. “Someone must have heard you,” Garek said, smiling. “I guess they don’t want me to go back.”
“I think it is my fault,” Brak said, and Lucien turned to see him on the level below, holding up the silver ball that was the key to the gateway.
Garek barked a laugh. “Nice job, big guy.”
“There might still be a way to open the portal from here,” Lucien said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re not going back—and we’re not going to Astralis.”
“How about we vote on that?” Garek suggested. “We voted to join Katawa on this crazy quest in the first place, so it seems only fitting that we should vote to decide where we go next. All in favor of going to find Astralis?”
Garek raised his hand.
Addy’s eyes flicked from him to Lucien and back. “I think Lucien’s right. If the Polypuses can see the future and they wanted us to go to Etheria first, then it must be for a reason.”
“Brak?” Garek prompted. “What do you think?”
“My people must never become slaves again. If that is what we risk by Abaddon finding the fleet, then we must return it to Etheria as quickly as possible.”
“Fine,” Garek gritted out and thrust an accusing finger in Lucien’s face. “But if something happens to Astralis, it’s on all of your heads!” With that, he stalked away, fuming.
“What’s that?” Addy asked, as Lucien closed the contacts panel and returned to the star map. She pointed to one side of the cluster of green blips that was the Etherian fleet, to a region of brightness that dominated the right side of the map. “Are we orbiting a sun?”
“I don’t know,” Lucien admitted. He zoomed out the display until all one thousand and fifty seven green blips clustered together into a single green speck. From there he continued zooming out until that region of brightness coalesced into the familiar shape of an accretion disk. “Uh oh...” Lucien whispered.
“Uh oh, what? What’s going on?” Garek demanded, stalking back over to them. Upon seeing the map, he went suddenly very still. “Krak...” he whispered.
Brak came up from the lower level of the bridge to see what had everyone so concerned. When he saw the display, he hissed with displeasure.
They all had enough experience with space travel to know what they were looking at. Accretion disks formed around black holes. Lucien tried selecting the black hole, and a pair of brackets appeared around it. Sensors reported its size to be more than a hundred million standard solar masses. Making matters worse, this black hole was spinning very fast.
Lucien remembered dealing with this type of black hole on a theoretical level at school while he’d been training to become a Paragon. They were dubbed time machines because the time dilation around them could be severe even at the range of safe, stable orbits. Most black holes only had extreme time dilation close to their event horizons, where the orbital velocity required to maintain a stable orbit was too high for any ship to safely reach.
“What’s our time dilation?” Garek asked quietly.
Lucien spied a link at the bottom of the sensor display to something called gravimetric readings. He touched that with his index finger, and the display changed, showing a wireframe visual of the black hole’s gravity field. The field was depicted as an infinitely deep funnel, which was technically only accurate in two-dimensions, but it worked well enough to illustrate the shape of space-time around the black hole. The green dot that represented the Etherian fleet lay along the steep, inward-sloping curve of the funnel. Radial lines in the wireframe were each marked a value for t=___, and according to the legend at the bottom of the display, the “t” was for the time dilation factor.
The t values grew progressively larger as they approached the red radial line that coincided with the event horizon of the black hole, while the line closest to the fleet’s location was marked with t=700, but they were sitting just past that line, heading toward the next one, marked t=800. Lucien tried selecting the green dot that represented the fleet, and he got a new value for t.
“Seven hundred and seventeen...” Garek whispered, reading the value. “So every second we spend here is...” he trailed off, and Lucien saw images flickering over his eyes as he ran the calculation on his ARCs. “Almost 12 minutes for a stationary observer!” Garek burst out.
“That means every minute is almost twelve hours,” Addy said.
“What if we have to spend a day trying to figure out how to fly the fleet out of here?” Garek demanded. He paused, and Lucien saw images flickering over his eyes once more. “Almost two years will have passed for everyone on Astralis!”
“And Etheria,” Addy said.
“Yeah, and then we still have to calculate the jump to Etheria for more than a thousand ships, and who knows how long that will take,” Garek said.
Lucien shook his head, speechless. This definitely threw a corkscrew in their plans.
“What’s ten thousand years with that time dilation factor?” Addy thought to ask.
Lucien ran the calculation on his ARCs—10,000 divided by 717. “A little less than fourteen years.”
“So that’s how long the fleet has been here from its own frame of reference,” Addy said. “No wonder the Grays left the lights on. By the time these ships run out of power, another hundred thousand years will have passed for the rest of the universe.”
“We’d better get started, then,” Lucien said. “Every moment we spend here trying to figure out how to get the fleet back to Etheria, Abaddon’s going to have seven hundred and seventeen moments to find us. Addy—see if you can find the nav station.”
“What’s the point?” Garek demanded. “We can’t move more than a thousand ships by ourselves! Even if we could, it would take too long.”
“The Polypuses must have thought we could do it,” Lucien countered. “I’m betting the ships are all set to follow each other, and since the gateway led to the largest ship in the fleet, it’s probably the one that all the others are set to follow.”
“That’s just a wild guess!” Garek said. “The Grays might have had a pilot on board each of these ships when they maneuvered them into position.”
“I found the nav station!” Addy called out.
Lucien turned from Garek to see Addy now seated at a control station on the level below. “Good. See if you can break orbit—away from
the black hole.”
“That goes without saying... powering engines...” A whirring noise started up somewhere deep below their feet, and quickly rose in pitch until it became a steady thrumming sound. “Setting thrust to seventy-five percent, and nosing up twenty degrees.”
“What’s up?” Lucien asked.
“Away from the black hole,” Addy replied.
“Just checking.”
Addy was figuring out the nav systems fast. As a Paragon she had plenty of flight training, but Lucien was surprised that the Etherian control systems were so intuitive.
“And?” Lucien prompted after a few seconds had passed. It was hard to believe each of those seconds was twelve minutes back on Astralis.
“You were right!” Addy said. “The other ships are following us!”
Lucien flashed a triumphant grin at Garek. “What’d I tell you?”
“Lucky guess,” Garek mumbled.
Lucien shrugged. “It’s what I would have done if I were planning to leave just one person at the helm of an entire fleet. He would have needed to be able to move the fleet easily by himself in case its location was discovered.”
Garek snorted and turned his attention to Addy. “See if you can figure out how to plot a micro-jump and get us out of the time dilation zone.”
“Yeah... I’ve already figured that out.”
“That was fast,” Lucien said.
“The controls are highly intuitive,” Addy said. “Anyway, that’s not the point. We can’t jump out of here. Not yet, anyway.”
Garek’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why not?”
“We’re inside the magnetic field of the black hole.”
Lucien grimaced.
“How far does the field reach?” Garek asked.
“That depends how much of a risk you want to take,” Addy replied. “The chance of scattering if we jump from here is sixty-five percent.”
“We can’t risk that,” Lucien said.
“The chances drop the farther out we get. If we plot a jump at five hundred light seconds from here, the probability of scattering drops to just ten percent.”
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 53