by Richard Fox
“Get decent.” Nakir walked out of the bathroom and the door slid shut behind him.
Shannon changed into a simple jumpsuit and joined Nakir in her living room. He had a slate on her coffee table with a holo of Earth projected over it. The troops were gone, but she was certain they were just outside in the hallway.
A flight path from Phoenix to the Geist ship over Juneau blinked in the projection.
“Official flight logs show the shuttle left when you say and arrived on schedule.” Nakir crossed his arms over his chest. “But Exalted Noyan is quite insistent that Hale did not arrive. Nor did the shuttle. I’ll let you guess how amused she is with the discrepancy.”
“All our efforts are to the cause.” Shannon reached into the holo and pulled out a menu. “How can the transponders be wrong? They’re linked through the satellite early-warning systems and routed through the main database here in Phoenix. We’ll just ping the transponder we implanted in the boy.”
She swiped up and a number pad appeared. She tapped in a code and a picture of Ely came up.
“He’s code vermillion. I need another Commissar to authorize the trace,” she said.
Numbers flashed across Nakir’s chrome mask and the border around Ely’s picture turned green. A few tense seconds passed and an icon popped up over Miami.
“What?” Shannon frowned. “How did he get—”
More icons with Ely’s portrait popped up across Australia and Japan.
Nakir grumbled.
“Someone’s in our system.” Shannon went pale.
“Who were the guards on his flight?” Nakir’s hands danced in the holo. “If the boy is out of their control, then they must be dead. Their trackers should have connected to the network when they flatlined.”
“Miguels,” Shannon said and joined him pulling through data. “I don’t remember their numbers, but they were from an older tranche. Here!”
A spreadsheet appeared with blinking red dates next to three names.
“Not a death alert,” Nakir said, “but that was the last time their trackers connected to the system. They’re all out of tolerance.”
“And they synched at…the node outside Seattle. Time’s on track with their original flight path,” Shannon said. “We have something to go off of, at least.”
The holo switched off suddenly and a new screen came up. Shannon glanced at Nakir, but he shrugged. A fresh-faced young man with red hair and an oversized jacket appeared, dancing along to a synthetic score.
“What the hell is this?” Nakir asked.
“We’re no strangers to love,” the man sang. “You know the rules and so…do I!”
“Ibarra.” Shannon’s face flushed red with anger. “He—he used this song as a joke. I always hated it.”
“Ibarra is in our network.” Nakir put a hand to his ear then tapped several times. “Now my comms are down.”
“That son of a bitch!” Shannon slammed a fist into the holo and shattered the slate as the crooner twirled around. The holo cut out in a hiss of static.
Nakir ran for the door.
“I’ll take care of him,” Shannon called out. “Where are you going?”
“North!”
Chapter 11
“Stop.” Hoffman shook his head. He and Ely sat on a log deep in the forest where it was pitch-black beneath the tall canopy. “You fixed the macro cannon? And then you blew the hell out of the Ultari fleet?”
“That part was easy.” Ely shrugged and took a bite from a stick of beef jerky Hoffman had given him during their rest break. “All I had to do was re-synch the cardinal gram meters running to the encabulator. Once you do that, you can overload the unilateral phase detractors and convey enough kinetic energy to your projectile.”
“Small words. Profanity.”
“If you’ve ever broken down a girdle-spring, it’s pretty easy. But that got the Ultari’s attention and they captured me.” Ely’s shoulders slumped. “Things spiraled down from there. Now I’m…here. Eating this very dry jerky. Thanks again.”
“What if you hadn’t fired off that macro cannon?”
“The Ultari would’ve taken Terra Nova. Probably. Unless Carson and the Valiant brought something else to the fight I didn’t know about.”
“Then you did good, kid. Carson, she’s the Pathfinder that went looking into the mountain made of the screaming faces?”
“That’s her. She and my dad didn’t start off on the right foot because of what happened on the Belisarius. Maybe they’re getting along better now.” Ely took another bite of his jerky.
Hoffman stood and pressed his hands against the small of his back to stretch. He snapped on his helmet and donned his cloak’s hood.
“All right, that’s enough rest for one day. Got to keep moving. The Belisarius…that was awhile back.” He took his rifle from the mag locks on his back and led Ely into the forest. Short-range infrared lasers connected their helmets to each other with a network undetectable after a few dozen feet.
“I know you’re old and all, but it was maybe five years ago. Heck, I remember when it happened. Dad was real upset about it. Funerals and trials and—”
“Kid…what year do you think it is?” Hoffman asked.
“Well, it’s…2139, right?”
Hoffman pushed through a bush and stepped over a stream.
“After your colony mission aboard the Enduring Spirit went to Terra Nova, the Union got into a sometimes-hot, sometimes-cold war with the Ibarra Nation. Then there was the Kesaht War and that…we lost a lot of good people in that fight. The Union won, but it took the Ibarrans to finish it. We got frozen out of New Bastion because the Nation kept using procedurals to fill their ranks, but the Nation also had the Ark and no other species wanted to poke the Ibarra bear after they saw what it did to the Vishrakath and the Kesaht.”
“An Ark?” Ely frowned and looked up at the sky. A hint of morning’s light grew in the east.
“Big Qa’Resh spaceship that they left behind when their race decided to leave the galaxy. Or our dimension. Or something. They ain’t around no more, but they left some bits and pieces behind. Your dad ever explain any of this to you? He was in the middle of most of the big events for the Ember War.”
“A big part of the Pathfinder Corps’ mission was finding Qa’Resh technology before anyone else could. But he didn’t like talking about it. Those missions had high casualty rates. Then the Ibarrans defected and he got real tight-lipped about anything Pathfinder-related. I think he blamed himself for them leaving. The Hale Treaty and all.”
“Heh,” Hoffman snorted, “we’ll see if that was for good or bad. The Ibarrans didn’t piss off? There’d have been no Ibarra Nation to pull the Union’s ass out of the fire during the Kesaht War. But without Stacey Ibarra out there looking for the Ark—”
“Wait, do you know Stacey Ibarra? Can you take me to her? My dad thinks she can get this thing out of my head and—”
“I knew her by reputation…but I’ve only met her once,” Hoffman’s voice got far away, “and I tried to help someone kill her.”
“Wait. What?”
Hoffman tapped his fist to his heart twice then kissed the back of his knuckles.
“We make mistakes, kid. Everyone does. I was in a bad spot and needed to lash out. So I did what I did and it led to a good man dying. Lucky for me, Lady Ibarra is the forgiving kind and she had the foresight to keep every fighter around for what was coming…not that it made much of a difference.
“After the Kesaht War, the Ibarrans pulled back. Made all their territory off-limits and started fortifying systems. They warned us to get ready for a storm, but the Union didn’t listen. The Ibarrans, they found the Geist on Nekara along with the Ark. They woke the beast by accident and they warned us. They knew what the Geist were capable of, but because there wasn’t anyone in the Union that saw it—except for a few Armor, and they were all suspect back then—no one at the commander center in Camelback Mountain believed the Ibarrans. The Nation begged
us to reopen the procedural farms and make our military even stronger, but the bigwigs in Phoenix wanted to repair the relationship with New Bastion more than they wanted to throw in with the Ibarrans. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. The Ibarrans are human. They shed their blood with us to beat the Kesaht, but President Garret didn’t ever want to admit he was wrong. And Earth paid the price.
“The Geist attack…we were warned, but we weren’t ready. They came into the Crucible network at once and hit over a hundred star systems. Earth was cut off from the colonies like that—” He snapped his fingers. “Bolt of lightning from a clear-blue sky. I was working my land in Argentina when they hit. Managed to throw on my gear and link up with the militia when the first landings swept through Buenos Aires. We fought wretches in the streets for days while the Navy tried to hold the skies. They knocked out a half-dozen of the Geist ships and that bought us some time…then the Ark jumped in over Luna.
“Stacey Ibarra and the Nation pushed the Geist past Ceres. The Ark has Qa’Resh jump drives like the Breitenfeld used to have before the Qa’Resh left and took their drives with them—something about not wanting us to accidentally destroy the galaxy the way the Xaros did theirs. But the Ark can jump and it can expand the wormhole to take a bunch of ships with it when it needs to. The Lady was there and she offered to evacuate everyone she could. Most of what was left of the Terran Navy went with her. She pulled Armor off Mars and two divisions out from where they were fighting near Atlanta.”
“Why did she take so many defenders off Earth in the middle of a battle?” Ely asked. “She didn’t try to fight and win? That Ark thing—which sounds like an amazing piece of Qa’Resh tech—couldn’t turn the tide?”
“You saw that pyramid ship over Phoenix? That’s one of the Geist’s smaller capital ships. The Geist attacked the Union with thousands and they were gating in dozens more by the hour from the closer star systems they rolled over. I’ve heard this thirdhand, but the Ark has some weird kind of power system and Stacey Ibarra can’t recharge it. Even with the Ark and the fleet she came with, it wasn’t going to be enough to beat the Geist. So she tried to save what she could from Earth. Live to fight another day.”
“Then Admiral Valdar is still alive?” Ely perked up. “He’s my godfather, about the closest thing I have to family in this galaxy. If Stacey Ibarra was going to rescue anyone, it would have been him, right?”
“I don’t know.” Hoffman quickened his pace. “After the Ark jumped out with most of our Navy, the war turned into a resistance in short order, and then we got word to surrender. We put up a better fight against the Geist than old Earth managed against the Xaros, but that’s like saying the guy that beat you up’s got sore hands from punching you in the face so hard.
“The Geist…they aren’t like the Xaros. The Xaros killed every intelligent species they came across. The Geist want something different from us. They never tried to wipe out civilians, but plenty got killed in the cross fire. They didn’t drop mass drivers to try and take out our colonies like the Vishrakath did with Iapetus. The Geist want us.”
“Maybe they want us the same way the Toth did? The Toth kept a population of humans on Nibiru that they…ate,” Ely said.
“You see this?” Hoffman stopped and pulled down the under-suit layer of his power armor over his neck. Part of the harness caught the morning light. “It captures something in our nervous system when we die. I don’t want to call it our soul, but I don’t have any other word for it. Grace tried to explain it to me with quantum probabilities. But the Geist put these harnesses on everyone. And they’re keen to collect them every time someone dies. For what, we don’t know. So the Geist have been corralling humans from across the Union’s old colonies and bringing them to Earth. Throwing them into cities with just enough to keep them alive and ordering those capable of having children to do just that or get harvested.”
“Did you leave behind your family to do this?”
“They think I’m too old now,” Hoffman chuckled. “But I’m in a key position, so I’m exempt from being harvested. I had a wife. Lost her when the Geist came.”
“Sorry.”
“I used to think it got easier to lose people…but it never does. Where was I? Geist took over and I got recruited into a cell working with the Crusade. Better option than fighting in the Andes until the Geist rolled over whatever camp I was in. Least this way, I might die doing something useful.” Hoffman glanced down at a screen on his forearm and a map appeared on Ely’s Heads-Up Display. “Almost there.”
“No counterattack to retake Earth? What was this Lady doing for all those years if she wasn’t ready for the Geist attack?” Ely asked.
“The Ibarrans shattered the Crucible network when the Geist attacked. I picked up little bits here and there from prisoners returned to Earth. One Crucible used to be connected to every other one in the galaxy, get from Earth to the last star on the Carina Arm as easy as gate-ing to Alpha Centauri. No one knows how they did it, but the effective range of a Crucible dropped to about thirty light years. Had to jump system to system, slowed everything down. Best reason I’ve heard is that the Ibarrans set a trap for the Geist when they came boiling out of whatever system they were holed up in. Geist fleets hit well-prepared Ibarran systems and got stuck there when the Ibarrans trapped them with the broken networks. They couldn’t retreat and some systems are still isolated—out of range of any other Crucible. The Geist can build new ones, but you’ve got to jump all that material out and that takes years.”
“Why didn’t the Ibarrans break the network before the Geist attacked?” Ely asked.
“Good question. Maybe the Lady will tell you when you meet her. So now the war’s ground down to a system by system fight. Crucibles are the most valuable terrain in the galaxy, but the Crusade has some tricks up its sleeves. They were keen on getting the Keystone tech during the Kesaht War. Seems they’ve been putting it to good use.”
“So how long were you working in Phoenix before our Canadian adventure?” Ely asked. “Because what you just laid out sounds a lot longer than a couple—”
“Twelve years.”
“No!” Ely stopped and raised a finger. “No, in Phoenix, they told me it was only—”
“The year is 2146, kid. You were on ice for a long time. Commissars probably lied to keep you from getting too upset.”
“Wait…” Ely breathed faster and faster and stumbled to a stop. He bent forward, elbows on his knees as hyperventilation took over. “That…means…that…”
Hoffman slapped his hands on either side of Ely’s helmet and snapped it off. Ely fell to his hands and knees, his breathing ragged and wheezing.
“I’m sorry, kid. You were going to figure it out eventually.” Hoffman went to one knee and touched Ely’s shoulder.
“Mom and Dad are…they were awake. This whole time! Jerry. Jerry’s been awake and I’ve been asleep for so long!” Ely brought a trembling hand up to his face. “Not…it’s not fair.”
“No, it isn’t. And it will never be fair, Ely. But no matter how wrong it is, how much it hurts, you have to press on. That’s winning. Life will make you hurt, son. It’ll make you watch people you love die right in front of you, and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it. But you keep going. You fight to make things as right as you can because if you’re doing that, then you’re winning. You’ll find a reason to keep fighting no matter how bad it is. So long as you don’t quit.”
Hoffman stood and offered a hand to Ely.
Ely’s breathing slowed after a few minutes, then he reached up and accepted Hoffman’s help.
Chapter 12
The crowd of hecklers had been cleared from the square before Shannon arrived with a platoon of shock troops behind her.
Marc Ibarra stood on his pedestal. His statue had shifted with one hand to his chin, his face contorted into an ugly smile.
“You are a petulant child,” Shannon said up at him. “Bring him down.”
A trooper shot out the stain
ed pedestal and Ibarra fell into the fragments, his pose unchanged. Shannon drew her pistol and flicked a switch to maximize the power. One bullet would shatter Ibarra into a thousand pieces, though it wouldn’t finally destroy him.
She kicked aside the detritus, and her foot caught against a nub. An IR receiver. She wagged a hand to a trooper and he handed her a knife. She pried the receiver up and ripped it from the fiber optic cables underneath.
“One can make a lot of assumptions,” Marc Ibarra began as he stood up, brushing caked filth and dust off his silver body. He spoke like a younger man, though the face of his ambassador body was wizened, the cheeks sunken. “When an occupying force comes in, especially one like the Geist.”
Shannon’s breath turned to fog as the air chilled around them.
“You’ve accomplished nothing.” She aimed her pistol at his chest. “We’ll find him. The Qa’Resh probe—”
“I’m an old man, Shannon, as you well know. Been neck-deep in the subversive manipulation game for a loooong time, as you know. You taught me a good number of tricks. The real you. The first one. Shannon died during the Xaros invasion and I shouldn’t have kept you around.”
“Where is Elias Hale?” Shannon asked.
“But I’m just as guilty of the same mistake you and your fascist Commissariat have made. Laziness. I kept a version of Shannon handy because I knew what she was capable of. I knew her temperament. If I let her die, then I’d have to spend years finding someone with the same sociopathic tendencies and skill set. You think that was easy?”
Shannon lowered the pistol and shot Ibarra in the knee. The bottom of his leg blew off and he stopped his fall with his hands. Smoke rose from the broken limb—a mass of fractured silver.
“You can’t hurt me, dearest. You know that.” Ibarra looked up at her.
“You were nothing but a statue when we found you,” she said. “You locked yourself deep inside the matrix within that blessed Qa’Resh frame. Now you speak? Now you act? Why?”