Lunara: The Original Trilogy

by Wyatt Davenport

  She balled her hands into her fists. She had let her father manipulate her even after death. His final words had warped her reason and her sanity. And her unbridled rage must have been her conscience fighting the manipulation.

  She had to get to the holotube to beg for forgiveness from the people. She had to reinstate the Principles of Man as the founding doctrine of the people.

  She turned around and stopped short.

  She gasped. "You are dead. I killed you."

  Chapter 42

  Parker McCloud watched as Samantha Burns stood by the bay window behind Gwen Arwell’s desk. She was alone. The guards he thought had been following him had turned back; an evacuation order rang through the colony, and they were off in a hurry—possibly a signal that the MSA was coming to an end, and they didn’t want to be around to be caught in the backwash of retribution from the Alliance.

  Samantha stared downward and to her left, eyeing something intently.

  Bent forward from the waist, and feeling a twinge in his back and a kink in his left knee, Parker crept along the right side of the room, keeping his shadow and his movements shielded from Samantha Burns’s peripheral vision.

  He stopped when he reached the step that led up to where Gwen’s desk was.

  This room showed off the grandness of the Majestic Tower. He noticed the niceties: a wood table, etched marble inlays along the wall, and a fresco of the First Landing painted across the wall.

  He swallowed. With Chloe gone, Seth’s hatred, and Gwen’s retreat into oblivion, he had no chance to fulfill Eamonn’s request to bring the crew back. But Samantha Burns was here and within gunshot range. This was his opportunity to avenge what had happened to Eamonn and Shannon.

  He raised his gun toward her, aiming for her head. Sweat dropped along the back of his neck.

  His finger gradually pulled back on the trigger, tightening ever more slightly. There was hesitation. Why?

  "Closer, you fool!" Samantha screamed toward the window.

  Parker started, and he relaxed his finger. What was she up to? He edged closer, foot over foot, stepping to the level platform where the desk lay. He was ten paces from her.

  "Come on," she said.

  "Back away," Parker said with a frog in his throat. He squeezed his hands against the handle of the gun, the sweat from his palms lubricating his grip.

  Samantha spun around, half surprised and half angry. Her face was awash with confusion and urgency. Impulsively, as if she didn’t see the gun, she looked back out of the window.

  Interested in what she saw, Parker hurried toward the window, keeping the gun on her.

  Below, he saw Gwen on the landing pad. A figure loomed in the entrance; scattered around him were the dead bodies of the MSA elite guards for the chancellor.

  "You sent this assassin to kill Gwen," Parker snapped.

  "I am doing you a favor, Parker McCloud," Samantha said with the venom of a snake. Her eyes narrowed. "With both of them gone, I will have total control of Mars. You can become my lieutenant."

  Both? "Making a deal with the person who hates you most in the solar system? You are truly insane, Samantha."

  "Hate the most?" she replied. "A strong statement. I do the job I am asked to do. Someone has to do the dirty work to make the government work."

  "Perhaps I was a little strong. I am the person who hates you the second most. Shannon Buckley would kill you instantly." He looked down at Samantha’s hand. She was holding something—a small electronic device.

  She saw his eyes looking down and spoke immediately. "Shannon Buckley is a space jockey who got in over her head. It is a small wonder she hasn’t died yet."

  "She is the finest soldier to come out of this war. There is no person I trust with my life more than her." He stepped toward her. She backed away a step before he warned her with a thrust of his gun. She stopped.

  He reached along her left hip, grabbed the small electrostick and sonic pistol from her belt, and dropped them on the desk. He went to grab the device from her hand, but she pulled it away, looking again out of the window.

  "Gimme it," he said, pointing the gun at her. She raised her hand and dropped the device into his outstretched hand. Pulling it toward him, he studied it for a moment. It was a detonator. The landing pad. Why wait to blow it with Gwen vulnerable?

  He looked back to the landing pad. The shadowy figure and Gwen stood off from one another. What was the shadow waiting for? Hesitation from an assassin?

  He stared at them for a long moment. There was hesitation. It wasn’t a trained assassin.

  The shadowy figure was Seth.

  Parker looked back at Samantha. She was setting them up. She had sent Seth to kill Gwen, but she planned to kill both of them. Even Seth couldn’t survive a fall from the Majestic Tower.

  "You are going to kill Seth and Gwen," Parker said, intending to gauge her reaction. He already knew the truth.

  Her body stiffened, and her face turned ashen. She fidgeted in her place. Parker held his gaze on her.

  Samantha spoke quickly, "Look, if you press that button now, I will lift the bounty on both you and Shannon. I am doing this to make it right again. The MSA is wrong."

  "Save your lies for someone else," he said. "Beguiling me is futile. I should kill you now."

  Her face hardened. The façade of a fidgeting, naïve little girl went away as the anger within her rose. Her eyes flared. "Gwen killed your wife, and she will kill you if you don’t press that button."

  "Lies."

  She thrust her pointing finger across the desk and toward the doorway at the front of the office. "Look at her body."

  Parker moved his eyes along the trajectory of her pointed finger. He held his composure in the face of grief hitting him in the midsection like a hammer against an anvil. Sarah deserved better. She was strung up by her neck across the far wall. She was dead; in that, Samantha had told the truth.

  The first wave of grief for Parker was that he didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to her. He was too ashamed of what she had done to the Alliance. Her love for Aethpis and her deceased family was great, and he was jealous of it.

  His throat constricted. He looked up at her limp body, her pale face, and her torn, tattered clothes, dangling from her naked body like a showcase for the chancellor. It was too childish to him. Gwen had gone too far in her vengeance. Staring far off into the deepest, darkest parts of his mind, he considered the opportunity of vengeance given to him by Samantha. A single push of a button and Sarah’s memory would be avenged.

  He wanted to push the button. He craned his neck toward the landing pad. The Alliance wanted him to push the button.

  Then it happened so suddenly. He had to hold back his finger from depressing the trigger. A third figure appeared on the pad. Parker turned fully toward the window, wanting to scream toward the new figure.

  It was Chloe.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Samantha lunge for him. It was a desperate attempt to grab the detonator from his hands. Easily, slyly, he sidestepped her lunge, and with a quick motion downward, he slammed the back of her neck with the butt of his gun.

  She fell to the floor, groaning.

  "Bad news. I have to keep you alive, Samantha. As long as you are alive, the landing pad will be safe for Chloe."

  "How so?"

  "If you have any backup assassins with similar detonators, they will trigger the explosions in your absence. So what we are going to do is go down to the landing pad and put you on it. That way I can be assured that Chloe will be safe because they won’t kill you."

  She rubbed the back of her neck. "You bastard. It is the only detonator. We can rule Mars with a simple pressing of that button."

  Parker looked at his dead wife once again, looking for her guidance. Although she was a traitor to the Alliance, she didn’t deserve to die like a traitor. She loved Aethpis and its people more than anything. She would do anything to save it; and she became a traitor to the Alliance to try and do that ver
y thing. No one in the Alliance, aside from Chloe, knew she was a traitor. He would make sure it stayed that way. Her love for her family and her colony was unsurpassed. Her actions—before this all began—would remain an everlasting legacy on Mars—not her McCloud legacy, but her Cortez legacy. People should remember the love she had for her colony and for Mars.

  He fingered the button on the detonator. He looked down at the cowering Samantha Burns. His finger slid the safety shield down, covering the button.

  "Chloe needs my help. Let’s go." He waved his gun toward the access door to the side of the room.

  Samantha walked out of the room with the barrel of his gun against the small of her back.

  He took in a deep breath as he stepped through the doorway leading to the access stairway. When the five people crowded on the landing pad, in all likelihood, a majority of them would not survive. He couldn’t explain why, but he was sure who would die first.

  It scared him fiercely.

  Chapter 43

  Gwen—the chancellor of the MSA, the leader of the people of Mars, and crewmate—stood in front of Seth Smith: legs shoulder width apart, body erect, one green eye appearing beneath the hood that shrouded the left side of her face. They stared at one another, both knowing what each other was thinking. He wanted her dead, and she wondered how he was still alive.

  Seth squeezed the handle of his sonic pistol as he leaned into a gust of wind. The dust bit into the gash along his temple.

  "You tried to kill me," he said, seeing the haunting shadows around her face flicker with the wind.

  She was scared. She didn’t want to die…but there was resignation in her stance. He controlled her fate.

  She averted her eyes, looking to his right.

  And he felt a presence tickle the back of his mind. He swung his head around and saw Chloe standing on the landing pad, moving toward him. He stabbed the pistol toward Gwen, banishing from her mind any thought of escape. Continuing their silence, they both waited as Chloe moved toward them.

  "Gwen is going to die," Seth called to Chloe. "It is the only way I can ensure my survival on this planet. She tried to kill me. And then I will kill Samantha Burns."

  "Gwen failed," Chloe replied. "Once the Alliance takes control of the planet, which is already under way, she will receive her justice. Don’t stain your hands with her blood as you’ve done to so many. She was once your friend."

  "I’ll stop the Alliance’s control of Mars. You know that."

  "The Alliance has the ideals the planet craves. You can’t force your paradise onto Mars. Humans have tried to change Mars, but we can’t do it until Mars allows us to do it. The algae farms and the water mining are a step toward soothing its extremes, but it will always be a struggle for us, for our children, for many generations to come. You must learn to navigate the course it allows for us. Jonathan Norse and his Principles of Man allow us to adapt to the planet to which we are alien."

  "With my power, I can control the harshness of this forsaken planet. I will bring the reins in on its wildness."

  "You can’t, and you know that. Or else you wouldn’t be so scared of it," she said. "Take the path for your family and come back to your daughter and raise her. I will be dead shortly."

  "No!" he screamed. "The doctors are wrong. Hans will find a cure. There is nothing I won’t do to save you."

  "Hans Bauer is dead."

  He felt a loneliness creep into his thoughts. For the first time, life without Chloe entered his mind. The possibility hadn’t been an option for him.

  Chloe pulled her coat tight against her chest. "To save me, you would slam yourself into the sun, but it isn’t an option. The option to save me is to raise your daughter the way I want her raised. She is the product of our love."

  "What do I know of raising a daughter?"

  "What do any of us know about raising a daughter? But when you return to your family, she will have a parent…unlike you and me. You are Alexandria’s only hope. She loves her dad. I have told her of how great you are."

  "She can’t live on this world. It is against everything I wanted for you."

  "Then I have truly failed. I allowed my impregnation to happen because I foresaw where your thoughts were going, and I thought she would change your mind about Mars. Instead, it drove you deeper toward evil."

  "She is right," Gwen replied. "The MSA was a horrible mistake, and I perpetuated the entire organization, and I manipulated you. I wanted to build the paradise my father wanted. Instead, I killed thousands of innocent Martians, destroyed the wonderful colony of Aethpis, and I murdered Sarah McCloud. In cold blood."

  Seth was beside himself, unable to speak for a moment. They were manipulating him again. "How can you say that, Gwen? We worked so hard to build our vision."

  "I was wrong. Horribly, catastrophically wrong."

  Chloe stepped toward him. "And I was wrong as well. In the Hydroxygen Plant, I shouldn’t have said that Mars could do what it wants with you. I knew how Mars hurt you in the past, and I shouldn’t have left you alone to fight it. I drove you to the MSA."

  "You didn’t drive me to anything I didn’t want for myself. A paradise on Mars is what I wanted. All you had to do was follow me. And you decided to stay with the Alliance and with Parker McCloud."

  Hurt welled in Seth’s eyes. He pushed back the urge to shed a tear and wiped his sleeve across his eyes.

  Chloe thrashed her arms across her chest, frustrated. "Parker is a great man. Your hatred for him seeps from your mind, but it isn’t justified. He didn’t drive me to anything I didn’t want for myself. In fact, I used him, and I hurt him, but he still loves the both of us. He loves the crew."

  "That is a lie," Gwen said. "You latched onto Parker like you were in love with him."

  "I do love him more than any friend."

  "Only because you were scared of what might happen to you if Hans Bauer ever got hold of you. Seth threatened your safety, and you came to Mars on a mission to stop the war. You thought your ability was so strong that you could drive the MSA into ruin. But it backfired when Seth wanted more. You admitted you drove Seth to the MSA. You were scared of what might happen if you dared to chase after him. So you clung to the strongest man you knew, Parker McCloud."

  "Parker didn’t force me to stay anywhere."

  Gwen shook her head violently. "You could have gone anywhere in the solar system and had protection. Why Aethpis?"

  "Seth ordered me to Aethpis."

  "Seth wanted it, but you obeyed it. The treaty was your excuse to stay close to the strength Parker provided and away from Seth and Hans Bauer."

  "Fearing Hans Bauer isn’t a stretch. He did torture me. Besides, I have a daughter. I can’t run around Mars and the solar system doing insane things like you and the rest of your MSA. If I was cautious and held onto the safety Aethpis ensured, it was only because I didn’t want Alexandria to turn out like an MSA automaton."

  "A scarlet woman, a killer, or a liar. You are all three, and you question our morality in the face of your own immorality. Some argue that your immorality is far worse than our desires to fight for what we believe in. I know Jan would never speak to you again if she knew your seductive past and present."

  Chloe avoided gazing at Seth. "I…I don’t have to answer you about why I did what I did. You have admitted just moments ago that the MSA was wrong, so my reasons for staying in Aethpis are justified. Either your MSA is right, or your MSA is wrong."

  "The MSA is irrelevant to why Seth was tortured by Mars, why you stayed in Aethpis, with Parker, and why you did what you did in Old Zephyria," said Gwen. "Seth’s problems stem from how you have been manipulating him since you were both children. Your secret and your fright forced no choice on his part. He either joined the MSA, or else he would have had to live with the torture you created within him. He was always forced, by you, to submit to this planet. Why don’t you tell Seth about his abilities? About the safety you provided for him over the years. How you didn’t allow him to crea
te anything for the both of you because of your constant fear?"

  Chloe’s face turned white. "I don’t know what you are talking about. Stop confusing us."

  "You went back to be a scarlet woman," Seth said. "I thought we agreed that going to Lunara ended that life for the both of us—forever."

  "Things change," she replied. "I needed cover within Zephyria, and it was the best that I could come up with. Peruzzi didn’t even recognize me. The scarlet women are afterthoughts, and I used this to manipulate the situation that you forced me into."

  "You sold your body to hide from Mars," Seth replied. "Gwen is right. My purging of the Alliance is more righteous. Trying to convert me to your ways when you are a scarlet woman—I am sickened."

  Chloe scoffed. "You sold your body to Gwen Arwell for the chance to take power away from her. You have sickened me for the last two years."

  "I did it to help find a cure for you and to keep you safe."

  "There is no cure!" Chloe screamed. "And that statement is hypocritical to the nth degree. Don’t lecture me about my methods and trying to get you back."

  Seth and Chloe stared at each other, a million thoughts passing through their minds. Seth felt her anger, but also her love. The mix of emotions confused him further. What had she done to him?

  After a long pause, Gwen turned toward Chloe. "Tell Seth what I have learned about you. How you are the reason for what he is. I wasn’t sure until I saw you at Trivium, but your reaction to my mention of it was the same as it is now. You are scared; your face is white and the hollowness in your voice demands we change the subject. We will not. Tell him of your power over him, or I will."

  "She has no control over me," Seth protested.

  "But she does," Gwen said. There was no hesitation in her reply. "Subtly, using her abilities and propelled by her fear, she has created your uneasiness with Mars and an obsession of an illusory paradise. Her mind is the reason for your abilities, and the reason for your torment." Gwen paused for a moment. "My love for you blinded me, as your love for her has blinded you. I should have stopped you from gaining power within the MSA. You used it to wield your frustration with Mars. You—"