“There’s an easy solution to that—don’t give the fleet to them,” Garek said. “By rights of salvage it’s ours, so they can’t force us to hand it over. After we arrive, we can ask the people of Astralis to join us, or not. Anyone who wants to come, can, and those who don’t are welcome to stay. It’ll be a second chance for everyone, a way to go back safely. After everything we’ve been through with the Faros, I think most people will want out of Astralis’s mission. Besides, with what we’ve learned from the Etherians’ Universal Map, Astralis’s mission is somewhat redundant now, anyway.”
“Agreed,” Addy said. “I can’t see any risks associated with this plan. In fact, right now we’re sitting along the outermost edge of the universe, near the Great Abyss. By flying back to Astralis first we’ll be covering almost half of the distance back to the Red Line. Astralis is actually on the way to Etheria, so there’s no reason not to go there first. In fact, if our comms are instant, we could use them to send Astralis a message,” Addy suggested. “Let them know we’re coming.”
“Bad idea,” Garek replied. “Instant or not, we don’t know if the Faros will be able to detect any message we send.”
“True,” Lucien said, and let go of his misgivings with a sigh. As he did so, a smile crept onto his face. “I guess it will be nice to see some fresh faces.”
“What’s wrong with our faces?” Addy asked, arching an eyebrow at him behind her helmet.
Lucien laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do,” she replied with an audible smile. She twisted off her helmet, and Brak did the same.
Lucien followed suit, and took in a deep breath of the ship’s air. Despite how stale and sterile it smelled, somehow it still smelled sweet. “We’re going home,” he whispered.
Chapter 38
Astralis
“Is something wrong?” Atara asked, her gaze flicking from her mother to her father and back again.
“No sweetheart, I just need to have a talk with your father about grown-up stuff. We’ll be right outside on the deck, okay? If you need us, all you have to do is come get us.”
“How come Theola gets to listen?”
Lucien adjusted his grip to keep her from sliding down his hip.
“Because she’s just a baby, and you’re too young to babysit,” Tyra explained.
“It’s about me, isn’t it.” Atara crossed her arms over her chest and pouted.
“No, sweetheart, it’s not,” Tyra replied, shaking her head. “Why don’t you go play in your room? We won’t be long.” With that, Tyra led the way to the balcony. She opened the sliding door and a blast of frigid air hit them.
Lucien shivered as he turned and shut the door behind them. Tyra wasted no time activating the balcony’s heat shield. While she did that, Lucien waved at the fire pit to ignite it. The artificial logs burst into flames, and they sat on a bench by the fire, warming their hands and feet. The sky was clear and blue today. No wonder it was so cold.
“Are your ARCs offline?” Tyra asked.
Lucien nodded.
“Good. Then it’s safe to speak.”
“What are we going to do?” Lucien asked.
Tyra appeared to consider that. “We don’t know how many people have been affected by this, but we do know who the key ones are.”
“Chief Ellis, Admiral Stavos, General Graves... and someone in the Resurrection Center, possibly Director Helios,” Lucien said.
“And Atara,” Tyra said.
“But why her? She’s just a kid. What’s she got to do with anything?” Lucien asked.
Tyra shook her head. “I don’t know, but I do know how to fix it. We need to get to the Resurrection Center. From there we can roll back the changes to the people we know are infected.”
“We’re not going to have an easy time securing the Resurrection Center,” Lucien said. “It has better security than almost anywhere else on Astralis, and you can bet that as soon as we trip the alarms, General Graves is going to send thousands of Marines in after us.”
“How long do you think we’ll have?”
Lucien shook his head. “Not long enough to get access to the data or roll back any changes.”
“Maybe we don’t need to. All we really need to do is prove that there’s been tampering with people’s memories, and identify what the Faros did to Ellis and the others. At that point even the Marines will stop following their orders.
“You haven’t had a lot of experience with military discipline, have you? The squad sergeants aren’t just going to take our word for it.”
“So we show them,” Tyra said. “We find a way to convince them. We have to. The question is how do we hold them off until we’ve had a chance to find incriminating evidence?”
“Hold the center ransom,” Lucien decided. “If we’re threatening to destroy everyone’s clones and the backups of their consciousness, the Marines will have to negotiate. We demand that one or more of them come and witness what we’ve found, giving us a chance to prove our suspicions. That should get their attention. What kind of terrorists would make demands like that? At the very least they’ll have to concede that we believe Astralis has been taken over by Faros.”
“That might just work,” Tyra said. “But we’re going to need help, and we don’t even know who we can trust.”
“We know we can trust ourselves, and I know I can trust Brak.”
“How do you know that?” Tyra asked.
“He was with me the whole time when the Faros were invading, and they never touched him.”
“Are there any others you could ask?”
“That I know for sure haven’t been compromised?” Lucien shook his head. “No.”
“I might know someone,” Tyra said. “Commander Wheeler. She was with me on the bridge when the others were affected. They didn’t get to her. She was the acting commander of Astralis while Admiral Stavos was out of commission.”
“You think you can convince her to help us? If you can’t, she could have us arrested.”
“Then we’ll have to make sure we’re convincing,” Tyra said.
“What would she add to our team?”
“She has access to the bridge. She could let us know when the Marines have been alerted, how many, and where they’re coming from,” Tyra said. “She might even be able to help us get into the center.”
“She’s an asset, then. What about you?” Lucien asked, staring pointedly at her.
Tyra blinked. “What about me?”
“You’re not trained for this kind of thing. You’re a politician, and before that, a scientist.”
“I’m not sitting on the sidelines.”
“I didn’t say you were, but you could compromise the whole operation by coming along.”
“So what do you propose I do?”
Lucien considered that for a moment. “We could use a distraction, something that will also allow us to get Ellis, Stavos, Graves, and maybe even Director Helios all in one place. Can you think of anything that might work for that?”
Tyra’s brow furrowed. “They’ve all been subverted by the Faros, so we might just raise their suspicions by trying to do that.”
“There’s got to be some kind of legitimate excuse to get them all in one place, but not just them.”
“What about a charity banquet to raise funds for the families who lost their homes in Fallside?”
Lucien smiled. “That sounds perfect. And as the councilor of Fallside, it makes sense that you’d suggest and organize such an event. While you’re hosting the banquet, you’ll be able to keep an eye on everyone for us. At the same time that you’re doing that, Brak and I will find a way to sneak in to the center and plant our bomb.”
Tyra blinked. “I thought you were just going to threaten to blow the center?”
“I am, but if it’s a bluff, it won’t be long before the ship’s cameras and sensors give us away and Marines storm the place. We need a real bomb, or this isn’t going to work.”
Tyra’s eyes went huge. “Where are you going to get a bomb?”
“I know a few illegal arms dealers.”
“Aren’t all of them in the correctional center?”
“Some. Not all. One guy was particularly slick. We couldn’t pin him with anything. Joe Coretti.”
Tyra’s eyes got even bigger. “Of the Coretti Brothers?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re responsible for half of the crime on Astralis!”
“More than half on a good day,” Lucien said.
“Why would they want to help you?”
“Because I can take the heat off them for a while.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can in Fallside, after it’s rebuilt, but if that’s not good enough for them, then I’ll appeal to their sense of greed. Alien dictators are bad for business.”
Tyra didn’t look convinced.
“Don’t worry, I’ll have Brak with me,” he said.
“Another cop.”
“A scary cop.”
“What about the girls? What do we do with them?”
“They’ll stay with you at the benefit.”
“And how are we going to explain the fact that you’re not there?”
“Food poisoning.”
“Why don’t you just get an injection?”
“Bad timing. Even injections take an hour or two to purge the toxins.”
Tyra still didn’t look convinced.
“You’re the politician. Come up with something that sounds good to you.”
“All right,” Tyra said. “Fine.” Theola began to complain, squirming in Lucien’s arms. “She must be hungry,” Tyra said.
Lucien passed Theola to her and stood up from the bench. “I’m going to get Brak and go see Joe.”
“Now?” Tyra asked.
“The Corettis are easier to track down at night. They’re usually hanging out at one of their clubs. Meanwhile, start getting that charity banquet organized—and talk to Commander Wheeler, but feel her out first before you tell her about our plan. We don’t need her trying to stop us.”
Tyra nodded, and Lucien leaned in for a quick kiss.
“Be careful,” Tyra said as he withdrew.
“I will,” Lucien said as he went back inside.
“What were you and Mom talking about?”
Lucien froze, and turned to see Atara watching him from the armchair in the living room. She’d turned it away from the fireplace to face the deck. She’d been watching them all this time. Reading our lips? Lucien wondered. Atara didn’t know how to read lips, but without knowing what the Faros had done to her, it was hard to be sure what she was and wasn’t capable of.
“Grown-up stuff,” Lucien said.
“Like what?” Atara asked, hands folded over her chest, looking too grown-up for her age.
Tyra came in then. “I thought I told you to go play in your room,” she said, putting on her best Mom voice.
Atara shrugged. “Didn’t feel like it.”
“I’m going to let you deal with this,” Lucien said, and breezed on through to the front door. As he went, he heard Tyra switch from bad cop to good cop, offering ice cream to distract Atara. That seemed to work, but Lucien couldn’t get over the feeling that he was somehow exposed, like Ellis already knew what they were planning.
He pushed those thoughts aside. Ellis wasn’t god. He couldn’t have eyes and ears everywhere at once. And Atara, even if she could read lips, couldn’t have caught more than a handful of words from their conversation on the deck. Not enough to string together their plot.
They still had the element of surprise.
For now.
* * *
Astralis
Lucien interrupted Brak just as he was sitting down to dinner—a pile of fresh-grown, uncooked steaks. “Come in,” Brak said, waving him through the door as he bit off a chunk of one of the steaks.
Lucien looked around as he walked inside. There wasn’t much to the place. One small room for a cooking, eating, and living space. A door led to what might have been an adjoining bedroom. Lucien took a seat in an old chair beside the couch where Brak had sat back down to eat.
“Nice place,” Lucien said.
“Liar,” Brak replied, while biting off another chunk of steak.
A holoscreen in front of the couch showed Ellis, making an announcement about the War Measures Act. Based on the color of the sky, this particular press conference had obviously been taped earlier in the day. Ellis was busy promising to use his new political powers to keep Astralis safe.
“You believe this?” Brak asked, pointing to the screen with a bloody hand.
Lucien began nodding slowly. “Power can be good in the right hands. At least he’s getting us back out there with the changes he’s making to the cloning laws.” While he said that, Lucien mimed with his hands, indicating his own eyes with two fingers, then Brak’s, followed by a cutting-off gesture at his throat. Brak got the idea, and his eyes grew dark as the subtle glow of light from his ARCs disappeared.
“Speak,” Brak indicated.
And Lucien did. He explained about Atara’s strange behavior, followed by Tyra’s planted-memory experience with Ellis’s War Measures Act.
“I kill him. I rip out his throat,” Brak said, baring his bloody black teeth in a fearsome display.
Lucien shook his head. “Assassination will get you blown out the airlock with no chance of resurrection. And it won’t do any good, because they’ll just bring Ellis back the very next day. Not to mention he’s not the only one we have to worry about.”
“Then what can we do?”
Lucien explained the plan he and Tyra had come up with.
“Yesss, this could work...” Brak agreed, and absentmindedly bit off another chunk of steak.
“Glad you approve, because I need your help.”
Brak grinned, revealing red bits of raw meat stuck between his dagger-sharp teeth. Blood dribbled down his bony gray chin. He wiped it on a massive forearm. “Where do we start?”
“Now. Tonight. We need to go get a bomb from Joe Coretti.”
“Joe?” Brak’s enthusiasm disappeared. “We’re going to criminals for help?”
“We’re about to become criminals, so getting help from them seems appropriate.”
“I do not think Joe will help us,” Brak said.
“Well it’s our job to convince him.”
“Hmmm. I do not like your plan.”
“Got a better one?”
Brak tore off another giant bite of steak while he thought about it. He chewed briefly, then swallowed. “No,” he decided. “I do not.”
“Then let’s go.”
Chapter 39
Astralis
Joseph Coretti wasn’t hard to find. Lucien and Brak had each spent plenty of time tracking him and his brothers across Astralis, so they already knew all of the Corettis’ favorite haunts.
This particular club, the Crack of Dawn, was located in Sub-District Two, the same district where Brak was currently renting his apartment. As Lucien walked in, he was greeted to a dozen topless girls in thongs, all wrapped around poles, swinging their hips and baring everything but their souls for the men drooling into their drinks around the stage.
This was definitely one of the sleazier joints that the Corettis owned. Music thumped in a fast, primal beat, setting the pace for the patrons’ racing hearts. Illuminated strips lit the floor, but overhead lights were nonexistent—except for up on the stage, where they glared at the dancers from every possible angle. The setup was meant to give the illusion of a private show and to protect the anonymity of the club’s patrons by reducing them to ambiguous shadows.
These guys could have been literally anyone—councilors, lawyers, security officers... even Ellis could have been there, but Lucien didn’t think he’d risk coming to a place like this. If he wanted a show, he could afford to order a truly private one.
As they walked through the club to the back, two
illuminated waitresses with hovering trays of drinks wove to intercept them. The waitresses were clothed with clinging, transparent dresses and illuminated by hovering spotlights that followed them wherever they went. The waitresses, one brunette and one blond, sauntered up to him and Brak.
“Hey there, big guy,” the brunette said while rubbing Brak’s arm. “You look thirsty,” she licked her lips as she said that, and stretched sensuously. All of that was lost on Brak. He leaned into the cone of light projected by her spotlight, revealing his skull-shaped gray face, and bared his black teeth at her. The girl paled dramatically, and her mouth popped open in a silent scream.
The blond actually did scream, and she ran back through the club with her spotlight chasing after her. The commotion was all but swallowed by the thumping music, but a few heads turned from the bar to watch her run. For her part, the brunette was frozen in place.
Lucien leaned into view of her spotlight and smiled reassuringly. “We’re looking for Joe Coretti. You know where we can find him?”
The girl shook her head, and Lucien shrugged. “Thanks, anyway.”
They continued through the club, and this time no waitresses appeared to offer them drinks, but Lucien spied the blond they’d scared talking to a pair of hulking shadows at the back.
After just a second, those goons peeled away from the wall and came to block the way in front of Lucien and Brak.
“We don’t want trouble in here, boys,” one of them said in a gruff whisper that was somehow audible above the music.
“Neither do we,” Lucien said. “We’re looking for Joe.”
“He’s not in.”
“I saw his car out front.”
The goons had no reply for that.
“Look, it’s business. He’ll be happy you sent me.”
“He expectin’ you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then you’re not gonna see him. I suggest you leave. Or stay and enjoy the show. Up to you.”
Lucien grew tired of the runaround. He elbowed Brak in the ribs, and the Gor took a long step toward the two men. He grabbed the one who’d been talking and hoisted him off his feet, letting him dangle by one arm.
Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within Page 30