by Kyle Noe
22
War Without End
There are things once seen, that cannot be unseen. The murder of billions of people, for instance. The destruction of worlds, the eradication of life on once vibrant planets. The Potentate had witnessed these things before, he’d seen death and devastation on so many occasions that sometimes it no longer seemed real. As he stood in a chamber in the underbelly of the command ship, unbidden passages from a holy book came to him, words about a ruler from an abyss, a force that would come forth and bring about the end of times. The first woe had passed, the Potentate thought to himself, but one more was still to come.
He turned and waved a hand at a control lock on a metallic door and a red light kissed the palm of his hand. The red light turned green and the door opened with a pneumatic hiss. The Potentate strolled over a moving walkway through an area of the ship that only he and one other had access to. The walkway deposited him in a gallery that lay hidden beneath the ship’s powerful engines. Striding from the walkway, he was soon standing over a balcony and peering down into a well that housed the device that allowed him to peel back the layers of time.
While he had access to a much larger version of the device, one that could physically thrust an entire ship back through time, the one before him was miniaturized. It was imbued with the same technology that had been discovered several years before the Syndicate had initially invaded and improved upon once they arrived. The machine resembled a human centrifuge flanked by two enormous generators: one of which produced a gravitational field sufficient to bend time itself, the other designed to manipulate the resulting field. At the heart of the centrifuge was a translucent cockpit of sorts. Once inside the cockpit, the user would lie on a bench made of exotic alloys with their head tipped down at a six percent tilt. The machine had been perfected, having been examined and reexamined and reengineered hundreds, possibly thousands of times. It was too small to allow an individual to physically travel back in time, but sufficiently sized to allow one to examine the compressed loops, to essentially sift or trawl through the days before.
Something about the sight of the machine awoke memories in the Potentate of days long past. Of his time back on Earth; his work; the family he once knew and loved. There was a remembrance, however fleeting, of his mother, the woman who’d died giving him life. She was there for an instant like a ghost, and then gone. There came to him next images of his father, his siblings, his home, his place of work, the propulsion laboratory where he spent his most important years. There were recollections of having a security clearance, a laminated card marked with a green “G,” which stood for gamma, the highest classification of all security clearances. He remembered the men and women he worked with, and the day they discovered a way to bend and manipulate space time.
Occasionally there were times such as this when the Potentate felt the old stirrings, witnessed the flashstorm of imagery from his past, and felt the prick of emotion. These were the little things that made him remember the man he had once been, but they were, especially of late, few and far between. The Potentate knew that the past wasn’t simply dead, it had been murdered, vaporized by the marauding force that he alone was working to prevent from annihilating the galaxy. Absent his ability to alter the past, there would be nothing left, but he was running out of time. He was losing the battle and the war, and something had to be done. He entered a clear tube powered by jets of air that lowered him below the balcony and into the well of the gallery until he was standing aside the machine.
He entered sequencing information into a raised touch pad and heard the generators on either side of the machine roar to life. He eased himself into the cockpit and laid his head back, cognizant of the fact that a loop in time was similar to the rings on an old tree, each one was unique. He hoped that the decisions he’d made, particularly as to the Marines and the resistance back on Earth, had brought about the desired change. In short, he hoped that this time would indeed be different.
He removed his semi-transparent mask, bringing it down and across his face. Gas filled the cockpit along with a dimpled yellow light that was filled with streamers of what looked like pure light. The light filled the room and the Potentate felt an uncontrollable shudder pass through his body. Spatial and temporal distortions ensued as the cockpit and the walls of the command ship fell away. A silence descended, one that seemed heavy, as if freighted with stones and then—
WONK!
A burst of light, nearly blinding.
The Potentate quieted his conscious mind as layers of energy streamed past him. He forced up one arm, then another. Time and sound slowed and he found himself bobbing in the murk, as if suspended in an immersion chamber.
The rings of time had become unbound, stacked atop each other like rubber bands.
The Potentate had been here before, countless times.
He knew what to look for.
Each ring was uniquely sized and colored by age. By the changes in color, the Potentate could discern which one to try, which period to examine. With one finger, he reached out and pulled back one of the rings and snapped it to produce a vibration, like a plucked tuning fork.
The air rippled like the surface on a pond after a rock is tossed into it.
From the ripples and the attendant light, which was hazy and silted with dust, images from the past emerged. The Potentate held up a hand and began swiping through the images like people had once done with the screens on their tablet computers.
Decades could be viewed in seconds, the Potentate searching for telltale clues.
He watched the Syndicate invasion, saw the forces of Earth fight back. He glimpsed Quinn and the Marines and the resistance, saw the Marines escape from the command ship and attack the outpost on Hygiea. Samantha was there, flickering in the grainy light, squaring off against Hadrian.
More images whipped by, the Marines and resistance harnessing the power of the temporal totem, taking the fight to the Syndicate. These things were good, part of the plan, the years increasing, no signs of the wholesale devastation that had occurred in earlier loops.
Soon the Potentate’s hand was moving faster than a blackjack dealer’s. He was fast-forwarding, moving closer in time until the Earth seemed smothered in a tsunami of fire. His eyes peeled, he took in images of his own ships blasted apart in space, listing, crashing into the Earth as the new invaders, the marauding force without a name, ran amok, cutting down anything that moved.
The Potentate saw fields and cities running red, witnessed the ground carpeted with bodies that writhed, shiny from sweat and blood. The sky turned an angry red, set on fire by the weapons of the new invaders. He was familiar with the daily depravity of combat, of killing, but this was something else entirely. The funk of smoke and burned flesh filled the cockpit, the odor danced across his tongue, telling him a tale of what was to come.
He held his hands up in front of his face and the images and light evaporated.
It was evident that there’d been improvements, that his decision to alter his approach to past events had changed things, but the end result was still the same. It might take longer, but eventually they would lose. The Syndicate and the forces on Earth would be defeated by the new invaders who would snuff out every living thing on every habitable planet in the Universe.
But not if he had anything to say about it. Somehow, he would keep resetting the loops, making changes as necessary, until their survival was ensured.
The Potentate closed his eyes and reached over to run the palm of his hand over a command pad. The growl of generators powered down and he could feel the energy in the cockpit beginning to ebb.
When the cockpit was open, the Potentate lowered himself to the ground and stood there, his immense figure slumped over the human centrifuge.
“The girl is strong,” a voice said.
The Potentate looked back to see Hadrian standing in the shadows, looking like a dark cutout come to life.
The Potentate nodded. “I witnessed your confrontati
on. I saw you testing her.”
“And yet the war is still lost, yes?”
“Yes,” the Potentate replied, glancing back at the centrifuge.
“So then let us think the unthinkable.”
The Potentate motioned at Hadrian as if to stop him from continuing. “You talk of the unthinkable yet, what would you have me do?”
“What must be done,” Hadrian replied. “You must give them more latitude. You must allow them to harness the power of the object they secured.”
“They will in due time,” the Potentate said. “But I can’t allow them to perceive that the invisible hand guiding them has been mine.”
“You’ve made it difficult for them. The asteroid for instance …”
“How could I do otherwise?” the Potentate asked. “I had to stiffen their resolve, I had to make them overcome obstacles so that they would be prepared for what is to come.”
“And what might that be?” Hadrian asked.
“We both know what it is. The war to end all wars.”
Silenced stretched between the two.
“When the time comes, will you stand with me?” the Potentate asked.
“Haven’t I always?’
“But this time I’ll ask you to stand with her as well. Will you do these things for me?”
Hadrian held the Potentate’s look. “I am all that remains of my people. I will do whatever you ask of me, even if that should mean my own demise. There are no other options. What you say is true. The past must be altered and the future corrected. And when that is done, when the evil comes for us, we will be ready this time. We will fight. We will do this or die trying.”
The Potentate nodded, satisfied with this answer. Whatever it took, for the greater good. No matter how many times it took, and how many had to die, over and over… and over. His burden was greater than all of theirs—the burden of knowing this was happening and that it was up to him to stop it.
Author Notes
George Mahaffey
Any time you write a book that features battles on distant planets with advanced technology, you’re asking for trouble. You’ve got to walk an exceedingly fine line between telling a commercial tale while also presenting the technological side of things in a sufficiently realistic manner without losing the reader. I always loved the stories in the old Tom Clancy books, but often found myself nodding off at the “weapons porn” aspect of them, the tendency of Clancy to get so far down in the weeds with the technology that he lost me as a reader. In writing the first draft of the third Syndicate Wars book, I fought to strike the right balance between the science/tech and the story.
I wanted to make things plausible, but also on the lighter side in keeping with the tone of the earlier books (which tend to have a distinctly “Guardians of the Galaxy”-like vibe to them). I also wanted to strike the balance between the sci-fi and swashbuckling aspects of the books. To that end, I kind of imagined an “Indiana Jones” in space aspect to the battle and adventures on the asteroid Hygiea, with Quinn leading her charges through hostile terrain to basically find a buried treasure.
Introducing our new mysterious character Hadrian also proved challenging, because I didn’t want to reveal his ultimate role in the overall story immediately. Rather, I wanted to portray him as a three-dimensional character, neither all good, nor all bad, who is playing a very important role in the manipulation of events, and ultimately time itself. Hopefully he’ll be viewed as a compelling character, a figure who’s experienced significant trauma in the past because of a new evil that will be explored in future books. At this point, Hadrian is someone who could be the Marines best friend, or their worst enemy, a character who will ultimately play a more prominent role in Book 4, along with Potentate Benno, whose true identity is only hinted at in Book 3, but will soon be fully revealed.
Kyle Noe
The most exciting part about writing book three of the Syndicate Wars was the opportunity to research how battles would take place on an asteroid. I’m not a scientist, but love science as a hobby, and my best friend is a nuclear engineer. So, luckily, I had a nice resource to draw from. Some of the initial ideas and ways that I wanted the story to play out just wouldn’t work. It needed to be both realistic, or at least possible, and exciting.
To that end, picking which asteroid the Space Marines carried out a mission on was the first task. What I’ve seen often in other sci-fi novels is the use of Ceres. A good size asteroid and potentially habitable if we could create an artificial magnetic field which would give the asteroid, which is almost a micro planet, an atmosphere. To make that happen, we’d need to be a solid hundred years into the future, and I didn’t see that as feasible when what we really wanted was to create a story that was less than fifty years into the future. Second, I wanted the surface and the surrounding ‘atmosphere’ to be full of dangerous obstacles to overcome as well. So the Marines are both fighting the enemy and the elements.
That led me to Hygiea, an ice asteroid with gaseous clouds all around it with a surface mostly made of graphite which would make it useful to the Syndicate war machine. Making possible two things that wouldn’t have worked on Ceres. Hygiea’s gaseous clouds, however, make a submarine-like chase in the darkness a real possibility, something we could see as a reality in the near future. Second, once on the surface, the Marines would have to contend with an icy surface changing the way they fight, giving us a new type of battle and making for some interesting visuals that were fun to imagine. And tapping into our imaginations is half the fun of reading and writing sci-fi stories. And to be blunt, writing battle scenes on the slippery ice was as exciting as any pages we’ve put together so far.
There was one other cool advantage to picking Hygiea as the Marines’ target. I wondered what could be a distinctive and new way to hide an outpost on an asteroid that would be challenging to find and break into. Underground asteroid rock is a decent way to go. But fighting your way through a surface that has both lava and freezing temperatures makes for an adventure that’s hard to top! Most importantly, Hygiea’s surface could theoretically change from time to time, heating and cooling, creating an uncertain battlefield.
Would love to hear more of your thoughts. I’m at http://twitter.com/bookrumors
Justin Sloan
Wow, these guys have been plowing through this book! Kyle and George did a lot of work here, and I'm amazed they pulled it off. As you know if you've read it, we're not only getting into the time travel elements more, we had some really cool moments - like that cool reveal with the ice (right?!).
But here's some behind the scenes - this stuff is tough! Sometimes writing with more than one author can be more work than just by yourself, but the end result is much more thought out. We're like a television writers' room, where we brainstorm ideas and all that fun stuff. But we're also all considering what series we can each do individually when this series is done (not there yet, don't worry!). We'd love to hear from you all what you enjoyed about this series and what more you'd like to see. Head over to the Syndicate Wars Facebook page and let us know! We already have cool ideas floating around, but love to learn from what we did well (and what might not have worked for certain readers).
Here's an interesting fact about the series so far: We've made way more from Kindle Unlimited page reads than purchases. So of course we appreciate all of you who bought the book, especially those of you who read it in KU first and then bought it, but we especially appreciate the KU crowd and the fact that Amazon offers that program. Did you know that, supposedly, KU is the second biggest online book market after Amazon (if you count them separately). I think it's followed by iBooks, though not so closely. That means we would be very dumb to leave the KU program anytime soon, so -- you don't have to worry about that!
You fans are amazing. We've been blown away with the success of these books and how much you all have supported us.
More snippets (sneak previews) of the next books will keep coming, so check out the Facebook site or Jus
tin's website at www.JustinSloanAuthor.com. Enjoy!
SYNDICATE WARS: THE RESISTANCE
The Team
Beta Readers / JIT Team
Alex Wilson
Becky Young
Holly Lenz
Kelly O’Donnell
If I missed anyone, please let me know!
Editors
Diane Newton
About the Author
KYLE NOE
Kyle spent five years at the FBI working in counterintelligence, espionage, arms trafficking, CyberWarfare, CT, human trafficking, a stint building the Director's Briefing, a stint working with the National Security Council on an international case, and a stint on Presidential Transition Briefs. He spent five years in Marine Intelligence, specifically Light Armored Recon Intel. During this time, he mostly spent his time building profiles, targeting portfolios on individuals, and targeting portfolios on groups and specific military units and off-the-radar non-gov militarized teams owned by corporations or governments. He left the intel world behind to pursue his passion for storytelling and has since co-created a TV show for Sony Studios and Barry Josephson.
GEORGE MAHAFFEY
George S. Mahaffey Jr. is a practicing lawyer, author, and screenwriter. As an author he’s written AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS, AMITYVILLE: REVENANTS, RAZORBACKS I, RAZORBACKS II, RAZORBACKS III, THE PACT, FAMILIARS (Book 1), THE DEVIL’S ARK, and VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (Parts 1 through 4). In addition, his script HEATSEEKERS was bought by Paramount with Michael Bay producing and Timur Bekmambetov directing. He’s also sold or written scripts for Arnold Kopelson, Blumhouse, Benderspink, Thousand Words, directors Louis Leterrier and Paul McGuigan, has co-created a TV show for Sony and Barry Josephson, and is the creator of IN THE DUST, a kick-ass action-horror graphic novel in the vein of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT to be published by Top Cow with art by Christian Duce.