He exhaled and slumped in his chair. The anti-interrogation techniques the Corps instilled in their cadets were coming in handy in the most unexpected ways, he thought wryly.
Still, they hadn’t done anything to him. Made no threats beyond the reasonable ones Garrity had already made. It was what separated the Corps from the savages outside of Sanctuary, he reflected. The worst part of it was probably the food—there was plenty of it, but it was about as flavorful as cardboard.
Hell, they’d even given him a bed. A real bed, with a heated blanket and some give in the mattress. It was downright luxurious, compared to the metal bucket he’d been living in for the last few days.
The blanket. Conrad smiled to himself. If that thing could overheat, why, it just might scramble the lock on that door enough for me to disable the access code.
Things were beginning to look up.
Time to make things worse for myself.
The flitter set down on the field, its landing gear sinking into the wet, grassy ground. Conrad hopped out of the craft, cursing as his boots sank into the mud.
A woman in brown boots and the pure white uniform of the Sanctuary Diplomatic Lyceum walked toward him, shading her eyes and squinting.
“Conrad?” she called out.
“Rose!” He strode toward her. “Did you miss me?”
She frowned. God, I missed that frown, Conrad thought.
She waved him toward the abandoned stone house in the far end of the field. “Couldn’t you have picked a better place?” she demanded. “I had to ‘borrow’ my roommate’s bike to get all the way out here in time.”
“I had to ‘borrow’ this flitter, all the way from the Academy’s orbital station,” he said. “I think I win this one.”
“Where’s Argus?” she asked, looking back toward the flitter, its door still swinging open. “Is he with you?”
“I might’ve got myself in a bit of trouble,” said Conrad, with a faint, hangdog grin. “I’m trying to keep him out of it. As usual.”
“What a surprise,” she said, letting go of his arm to brush her blonde-brown hair out of her eyes. “Conrad Redeker in trouble.”
“I love you too,” he said lightly.
“I suppose the Corps requires me to say that I love you,” she said. “Considering…”
“Nah,” he said cheerfully. “I haven’t been good at following the rules lately. Wouldn’t be fair to ask you to do the same.”
She rubbed her temples with her fingertips as if she had a headache. “Well, you’re here. What now?”
“I’m leaving the Corps, Rosie.”
“You can’t leave the Corps,” she said, her hazel eyes wide. “Have you lost your mind—again?”
He pulled her into the abandoned stone house. The roof was half gone, but its stone floors and fireplace remained. It had been a relic of the ExMach war a century ago. There was no tech here—the stone floors and rotted wooden rafters meant that it had been the home of some long-dead family that had resisted the machines.
“Remember when we used to play hooky from school here?” he asked. “We’d hack the security codes of the fences near the astrophysics lab or we’d sneak out of the dorms in the middle of the night. You’d bring hot chocolate, I’d bring whiskey, and Argus would bring a slab of raw meat. ”
She shook her head. “What does that have to do with leaving the Corps? With leaving everything you’ve worked for your entire life?”
“Do you miss those times, Rosie?” he asked. “The three of us, here. Everything in front of us. Feeling like anything was possible. I have to get out of here, Rose. Get back up there.” He looked up.
She reached for him, placing her hands on his shoulders. “What happened to you, Conrad? You’re months away from graduation. Months. You’re going to be an officer.”
“Not after the stunt I pulled off Europa.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “Argus is alive, so I won’t say that was a mistake,” she said.
“You would have done the same,” he said. “I know you. Except you probably wouldn’t have gotten caught since you’re a sneak. Besides, that ship was a piece of junk. I did Garrity a favor. They should be thanking me for getting rid of that thing. And technically, it’s not gone, it’s just in… thirty-seven nonfunctional pieces.”
She leaned back against a broken wooden wall. “If you get court-martialed…”
“They’ll kick me out anyway.”
“Or put you in prison,” she shot back.
“Then you can be my pro bono advocate and get me out in half the time.”
“Conrad.” She looked directly into his eyes. “No more joking. What happened out there? You are—were—a command track cadet. In five years you could have your own ship, if you don’t set the entire fleet on fire first. How could you throw all that away?”
He took a deep breath. “The portal dumped me in Alpha Aurigae,” he said slowly. “Then the Nu took me on board.”
“The Nu,” she interrupted. “They’re real?”
“Yes. And on board their hive, I met a… a being. It had no form of its own, no eyes, no mouth. Just… nothingness. It did something to me. When I went back through the portal, Rose, it seemed like time stood still—like there was no time. And I saw something in the dark there.”
“What did you see?”
He stared toward the far edge of the field. It was brown and green and a cool mist had settled down over it. Here, it seemed that time truly had not passed—that what he had seen was a dream. He turned back to Rose. Her face was pale with concern. She was older than he’d last seen her, on leave from the Academy during his third year. It seemed time had passed, whether or not he wanted it to.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.
“But I do.” They both turned, startled. A short, silver-haired woman stood at the threshold of the ruined house.
“Commodore Garrity,” Rose said, taking a step away from Conrad. “I—Conrad—”
The woman made a dismissive gesture. “It’s quite all right, dear. I’m not interested in whatever sordid business you and Redeker have between the two of you.”
“It’s not—we don’t—” Rose sputtered.
The commodore walked toward them, her footsteps light on the ancient floor. “The compatibility algorithms don’t make mistakes. In any case, I know that you two—and Cadet Nimitz—have been coming here for years. Since the three of you were old enough to realize you didn’t have to do what your teachers told you to do.”
“You knew!” exclaimed Rose, even more outraged.
She had a small, self-satisfied smile on her face. “Of course we did,” she said. “Since the minute Conrad climbed over the fence the first time, we knew. All three of you showed enormous promise, even then. We had our eyes on you. There were some of us who felt that giving you too much freedom would drive you away from the mission of the Corps. That it would spoil you.” She cocked her head. “I disagreed. And in the end, it was I who won the day.”
She turned to Conrad.
“I was the one, dear boy, who allowed you to steal the flitter from the orbital station. Because I knew precisely where you would go, and whom you would talk to. And I knew that you would tell Miss Christiansen here everything, where you were unwilling to tell us anything.”
Conrad stared at her, lost somewhere between shock and amazement. “You crafty old fox,” he murmured.
The commodore crossed her arms, looking smug. “Compliment accepted.”
“You spied on us!” said Rose, her cheeks turning red under her freckles. “For how long?”
Garrity looked nonplussed. “The three of you were orphans when you came to us. Conrad and Argus were named after the ships that rescued them. When the Corps takes an orphan under its wing, it assumes the role of mother and father. What kind of mother would I be if I let the three of you wander off across the Irish countryside without supervision?”
Rose looked as if she was ready to explode. Conrad moved t
o intervene. “What was it that I saw, ma’am?”
She looked to the two of them. “This is for Cadet Redeker alone,” she said to Rose in a tone that brooked no conflict. “Get yourself back to the Lyceum, Miss Christiansen. The MP I came with will take you—and your roommate’s vehicle—back. I need to speak to Conrad. Now.”
Chapter 4
“What was the creature on the Nu ship?”
Commodore Garrity pulled a worn silver flask out of her jacket, unscrewed it, took a sip, and handed it to him. Conrad took a swig and felt the pleasant burn of the whiskey as it went down his throat.
“The best intelligence we’ve got on it is that it is intimately linked to the portals,” she said. “Deeply linked.”
“I felt it,” said Conrad absently.
Her sharp eye narrowed at this.
“What do you know about the portals, Conrad?” She sat down on an old tree stump and motioned for him to sit across from her.
“Same as everyone else,” Conrad replied. “Three portals in the inner solar system, ten in the outer. Well, eleven now, if you’re counting the one you’ve been hiding.”
She nodded. “And the portals outside of our solar system?”
Conrad racked his brain. “Fewer,” he said. Two near Proxima Centauri. More in the Gliese, G. Eridani, Virgo systems.”
“Now tell me—why were the portals closed and de-mapped?”
Conrad considered. “I think you know the answer to that question better than I do,” he said.
She smiled. “Indeed. After we discovered the portals, the planet and the solar system became known throughout the quadrant as Sanctuary. And Sanctuary’s Protectorate Corps patrolled the portals, controlling access, fighting off raiders.”
Garrity toyed with her flask. “Do you recall how many people left Earth—left Sanctuary—after the discovery that the portals led to other systems in this quadrant of the galaxy? Thirty million human beings.”
His eyebrows rose. “But there’s only seven billion human beings on Earth,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “There were more then, even in the aftermath of the ExMach war. They were scattered across the solar system. Mars, Europa, the aerostat cities on Venus. People became restless after our alien visitors arrived. The opening of new solar systems meant they could do what humanity does best—explore and settle new frontiers.”
“I know about the colonies,” he said. “Proxima b. Gliese d.”
“There was unrest even there,” she said. “That is the nature of human beings. To be permanently dissatisfied, always wanting to escape into the frontier. People moved onward—from the near colonies, and from Sanctuary itself. There were hundreds of colony ships, thousands even. More than you can imagine. Some had just fifty souls aboard, and the largest had upward of twenty thousand people. They found the portals on the far edges of their own systems. You can’t imagine where these went. Even farther than the near-Sanctuary systems. Farther than we ever thought imaginable.
“Five years after it began,” she continued, “ships were going through. More ships every month, based on the numbers they sent back to Sanctuary. But suddenly the beacons stopped functioning. The ships went through, and then they never came back.”
Conrad lifted his head. “Not a one?”
“Not even a single scout ship.” She took another swig from her flask. “Every outer quadrant portal went dead. And as you know, we couldn’t send probes—the portals don’t function without sentient life aboard. Right after that, the Corps shut down transit through the portals. Not that it was needed—the people left behind weren’t keen on taking the risk. The Council made the decision to de-map and fortify all portals beyond the already settled systems in the immediate neighborhood of the Sol system. Nothing in, nothing out.”
Conrad reached for the flask, took a drink from it, and handed it back to her. “So what was that creature?”
“Our intelligence agents in the outer quadrant systems have been seeking out the Kazhad, the P’orcians, the Aretians—all the sublight nomadic species, the far traders,” she said. “We’ve been trying to find out more about the portals. Buying information if we could. Much of the material we’ve gathered is total rubbish—inaccurate coordinates of portals, and descriptions of alien species that are utterly impossible, based on the laws of physics. Starmaps that make no sense. Here be dragons, that kind of thing.
“But scattered in the stories from every nomadic species were mentions of these creatures. Locc to the Nu and the Kazhad, Loak to the Porcs, L’okh to the Aretians.” Garrity’s voice dropped, and her gaze grew intense. “They are formless beings. Sometimes they’d take the form of the being they were closest to. The oldest Aretian legends say the Locc are gods—gods of the portals. That if a species sinned too much, the Locc would close the portals as punishment.”
Conrad took it all in. “So what did I see?”
Garrity put her flask down for a moment. “You saw the very fabric of the universe,” she said. “Where space-time has weakened and warped, and showed you something that few others have ever seen.”
Conrad remembered what the Nu had said. A curse and a gift.
“We believe that if we understand the portals, we will know where our people have gone. Where all those millions of souls have disappeared to. They might all be dead,” she said, “or perhaps we’ll be able to find them. We have a responsibility to them, if they’re still alive out there.
“And there’s more,” Garrity continued. “There are rumors out there in the dark. Things that Corps intelligence has been hearing at the listening posts in the outer quadrant systems. Things that raiders have been saying in interrogation. Rumors that there’s something coming. Perhaps it’s the thing that took our people. They say it’s connected to the portals, as everything seems to be.
“We sent Argus there to speak with the Kazhad at the temporary base in that system. They’re the farthest-traveling species among the sublight nomads—they know the most but are the least likely to talk to us. We need to know what’s coming, and if we need to prepare.”
“Prepare for what?”
“For war,” she said.
Conrad stared at her. “No one could threaten the Protectorate Corps,” he said. “Nothing in this galaxy is strong enough.”
She smiled fondly. “Ah, spoken like a true child of the Corps. Did you know, Conrad, that when the PSS Redeker found you, you tried to attack the officers who rescued you from the freighter?”
He looked at her. “That doesn’t sound like me,” he said, lightly.
“You took a chunk out of my XO’s arm,” she said. “With your teeth. That’s when I knew you had it in you. You were going to be a captain. An admiral, even. You were born to be a soldier.
“That’s why I would only ask you to do this, Conrad,” she said. “We want you to go into the far systems in the quadrant. You’ll be commissioned as an agent of the Protectorate. You’ll have the authority to enter any system and requisition whatever Corps resources you need. You will be responsible for protecting and returning human refugees to Sanctuary, if you find them. More importantly, you must learn what you can about the portals and the threat that we have heard is coming. If it is coming through the portals, we must know how to defend them.”
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, still feeling the whiskey burning. “I’m really the best one you’ve got for this?”
She looked thoughtful. “I’ve known you since you were five years old,” she said. “And you were never happy when you were Earthbound, Conrad. You’d pretend to be, to make Rose happy. But I was there when you flew for the first time.”
Her eyebrows rose and her expression softened, as if recalling a fond memory. “You stopped fighting the rules, for once in your life. You flew like you’d been doing it all your life. If there’s such a thing as destiny, then yours lies up there.” She waved her flask toward the sky.
She took one last drink and tucked the flask away. “You’re meant fo
r more than a court martial and a dishonorable discharge, Redeker,” she said. “Go and become the soldier you were born to be.”
Chapter 5
He opened the comm line just as the transport ship passed Mars. He walked along the viewport, his uniform hidden under a dark coat. Argus trailed not far behind. Once they reached Mars the Corps would deliver them to their starcraft—a larger version of the Kestrel class ship that Argus had taken to Alpha Aurigae. From there they would pass through the Phobos portal to Europa, and then to Proxima Centauri.
“Garrity lied,” came Rose’s voice in his ear. “You’re a terrible soldier—you’re too hot-headed and you follow orders exactly fifty percent of the time. That kind of percentage will get you ‘accidentally’ killed by friendly fire, if you understand me.”
Conrad smiled. “You’re right, as always,” he said. “But this is cheaper for the Corps than a court martial, considering how long that would take.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Given how many rations you had to take along for Argus alone.”
"So what happens while we’re gone?”
“I’ll graduate from the Lyceum in a year and a half. I’ll join the diplomatic arm of the Corps. And if I have my way…”
“…You’ll be running the entire solar system three years later,” Conrad said, feeling a hint of pride. Rose always was the most competitive of the three of them—and the most talented. Which was probably why she’d been admitted to the Lyceum after her basic education was complete. Every high councillor of Sanctuary studied at the Lyceum before they began their career in government.
“And not a minute too soon,” she said. “The conflict between the Aretians and the Porcs is going to overrun the northern aerostat city on Jupiter. The Council should have sent the Corps there months ago to keep the peace.”
“The Corps isn’t supposed to get involved in interspecies conflict.”
“What’s the point of having a military if the Council’s too afraid to use it?” she demanded.
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