by Adam Quinn
Overhead, a spiral of lights came on that Taylor recognized as a rough map of the galaxy. At first they were all red—the height of the old Galactic Government—but then a rash of light blue broke out, driven by idealism and naïveté about the costs of war. In a spastic light show that did precious little justice to the billions of lives given for every advance, the Resistance swept over three-quarters of the galaxy, and the remaining GG worlds briefly split into two shades before surrendering and turning the dull gray of the “Liberated Territories.”
Taylor tore her eyes away from the flashy display, but her mind was all too quick to fill in the rest of the story. The free and united galaxy she had struggled for lasted all of eleven days. The Kaleknarians, a vile insectoid race, were the first to break away—establishing a xenophobic theocracy much worse than the GG—but they were far from the last as every planet with a frigate to its name declared its sovereignty. Most of these baby empires were subjugated by the Kaleknarians until their theocracy stretched across a quarter of the galaxy: at this point every potential target had pre-emptively aligned themselves with one of the other four major powers—especially the Meltian Republic—for mutual protection.
Taylor shoved through an adjoining door, breath constricting. Hezekiah had been right. Why was she here? The police could handle the terrorists as soon as the drones cleared the lobby—better than she could if she kept distracting herself, wading through useless memories.
No.
This was her homeworld, and she was their MRES Branch Commander, and if this terrorist group wanted to do anything to Cryzdeklith, they would have her to contend with first. Taylor gave herself a few seconds to steady her breathing before pushing back through the door and into the map room, eyes studiously avoiding the ceiling.
A doorframe to her left was splotched with blood. By this point, it was clear that someone was leaving a trail for her to follow—which might also answer the question of why they had bothered to make this ingress at all. It could be a trap, but she suspected whoever set it up was not expecting to catch a power-armored telekinetic Order War veteran.
The door quietly slid open for her, and Taylor immediately spotted the source of her grotesque trail—a dead museum guard with blood spilling from a gash across his throat—but this sight did not throw her nearly as much as the statue the guard’s corpse was set at the feet of.
It was her.
Or, more accurately, her and Steve Cryzdeklithis fighting back to back—the pedestal read “Cryzdeklithian Heroes.”
Taylor blinked rapidly, unable to breathe. The statue was cast in gleaming metal, but it was an almost eerily accurate portrayal of her, from her functional braid to the way she held her Phase Sword, back when she carried such a weapon.
Still, it was clear that this heroic warrior was not her: the look in its eyes revealed that much. Her statue counterpart still thought a galactic war could be justified. It still had Steve and all the other victims of the war’s idealism and hubris. It knew of the Kaleknarians, but it could never imagine them reigning over an interstellar empire. It still thought it could help save the galaxy. Taylor almost felt angry on Steve’s behalf: that his statue had to share a pedestal with the naïve warrior on whose watch he had died.
A red-orange stream of heat energy curved around the statue to strike Taylor in the chest, singeing her SX-7 and knocking her from her feet. Her chain of thought shattered, and two realizations struck Taylor before she even hit the ground.
First, that the stream looked and felt a lot like the bolt from a sear gun, the galaxy’s standard heat-based weaponry.
Second, that it could not possibly be a sear gun bolt because sear gun bolts never curved.
Taylor thrust her arms forward to grasp the imaginary throttle and stick, launching herself into the air with a burst from her thrusters. Two more red-orange streams arced across the room, but she evaded them easily before swinging around to the back side of the statues. There she found her attacker, an unarmed man in a vaguely military uniform crouching next to a device encased in a meter-high metal frame. Despite the device’s high-tech exterior, Taylor’s MRES experience allowed her to recognize it immediately for what it was: a bomb.
“I’m with the Meltian Republic Emergency Service.” Taylor’s eyes flicked between the man and the bomb, ready to strike if he made a move toward it. “Stand down imm—”
The man thrust his hands forward, and a wave of superheated air billowed toward Taylor, but she jerked her controls, veering out of the scorching flow. She couldn’t easily return fire without disrupting her flight, so she dropped onto her statue counterpart’s shoulder before hitting the terrorist with a pulse of telekinetic force. He sprawled across the floor, but quickly regained his footing and took cover behind a display near the wall of the room.
“Taylor? What’s going on in there?”
“I’ve located a bomb and an… armed terrorist.” She did not know what else to call this man—all telekinetics could wield heat energy to some extent, since it was really just kinetic energy on a very small scale, but the best could barely match a good welding torch, and this terrorist was far beyond that.
“Standby,” Hezekiah said. “I’m sending in a drone.”
“Send the drone,” Taylor said, “but I’m not standing by.”
She dove off the statue, activating her thrusters at the last instant to pull out of her dive and rocket toward the bomb. The terrorist popped out of cover, sending a barrage of twisting heat streams toward her. Taylor pulled up hard—she could dodge the streams in the air, but not while disarming a bomb, and if the bomb itself was hit… that could be bad.
She banked around the statues, letting the terrorist’s streams plow harmlessly into the wall before dropping to a perch on Steve’s arm. She pummeled the display the man had been hiding behind with telekinetic energy, but he had shifted to different cover, and now hit her with a heat stream that knocked her from her perch.
Taylor grunted, and her SX-7 complained, but she managed to grasp her controls and activate her thrusters before hitting the ground. The terrorist fired another volley, but Taylor was already soaring around the room.
“Hezekiah—”
“It’s almost there.”
“What module are you sending me?”
“Decontamination.”
“How is that supposed to help?”
“I’ve found that not all decontamination agents are human-safe.”
“So what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t get in the wa—”
A heat stream scorched past Taylor’s visor, and she jerked her throttle hand backward—allowing a second stream to strike one of her main thrusters and knock it offline. The inside of her visor flashed red. The force imbalance sent her into a series of high-speed aerial cartwheels that culminated in her slamming against statue-Steve’s chest. She cut the other main thruster and dropped roughly to the ground.
The terrorist now warily approached Taylor—while her SX-7 was splotched with soot and burn marks, and sweat beaded on her forehead, he appeared no worse for the wear. His mouth was set in the same neutral line as when she first saw it, while hers hung open, gasping for breath. In a moment of adrenaline-induced delirium, Taylor wondered if he even had to breathe, seeing as his face showed no evidence of the act.
“Drone’s right outside,” Hezekiah said.
“Wait,” Taylor said. The terrorist was moving cautiously through the center of the room toward her, obviously unsure of whether she was still a threat. She didn’t know why he didn’t try to finish the job—perhaps generating those heat streams took great energy that was not worth wasting on a defeated opponent. Taylor decided to play to that uncertainty.
She allowed her head to loll to the side as if she was unconscious.
The terrorist visibly relaxed.
“Now!” Taylor set her unbalanced thrusters to full throttle, hurling her out of the danger zone just as a spherical white drone entered the room and doused the terrorist in a wave
of sea-green foam.
Taylor tumbled across the ground, coming to a stop against the wall and returning to her feet in time to watch the last of the terrorist’s movements cease as he succumbed to whatever chemical agent the drone carried.
An indicator on the bomb began to rapidly flash.
Taylor froze in place. Of course these terrorists would rig their bombs with a dead man’s switch. They should have tried to disarm it while the terrorist lived. “Hezekiah!”
“I’ve got it—get down!”
Taylor dove between a display and the wall. Twin manipulator arms extended from the drone, and it grasped the metal frame of the bomb, lifting it and flying back the way Taylor had come.
“Go up the staircase!” Taylor said. “I made a hole in the roof there—you can get far a—”
She was cut off by the roar of an explosion that seemed far too powerful for the size of the bomb.
The first thing Taylor saw was brightness.
Even through the visor of her SX-7, the Cryzdeklithian sun—and the reflections of its light off all the metal wreckage strewn around her—dominated the scene. Pushing herself up onto her hands and knees, Taylor saw that the “Cryzdeklithian Heroes” statue had been reduced to an unrecognizable mound of scorched metal, probably saving her life in the process. Taylor stood up. She was at the bottom of a manmade sinkhole, its walls formed by the parts of the outer six domes that had not been obliterated.
“Hezekiah?”
At least some of her suit’s systems had to be working, as its full weight did not rest on her shoulders, but apparently communications was not among them. Just when she thought she would have to walk back to the museum entrance, a shadow fell over her. Looking up, she thought for a moment that it was her control boat descending toward her, but it was actually a gunboat, painted royal green with the letters “CRSC” emblazoned on its side.
The gunboat settled into a hover just above the ground, and two green-uniformed CRSC officers stepped out, saluting her.
“Admiral Ghatzi,” one said. “His Majesty respectfully requests your presence.”
His Majesty?
“What’s going on?” Taylor asked.
“His Majesty will explain.” The CRSC officer nervously glanced skyward. “The media will be here any minute.”
Taylor needed no further encouragement.
As she boarded the gunboat, one of the officers spoke into a transceiver, “SR-one to base station, crown and the admiral are safe and secure, lifting off.”
Despite the officer’s allusion, Taylor was still surprised to enter the control room of the gunboat and find, swathed in a rich green cape with white trim, the King of Cryzdeklith.
Also known as Steve’s dad.
“Taylor Ghatzi—making the rest of my first responders look like fools, as usual.”
The king’s smile was warm, but Taylor still shrunk under it as she respectfully removed her SX-7 helmet. On top of letting this man’s son get killed on her watch during the war, she had just blown up half a museum in the middle of his planet’s capital city.
“Sir, I am flattered,” Taylor said, “but I’m confused. Why did you come for me? I mean, with the political situation as it is…”
Taylor knew that the king’s powers were tightly circumscribed by the Cryzdeklithian constitution—he could not even vote for the representatives who actually ran the government—so for him to intervene in a crisis like this, even in a small way, carried substantial political risks.
The king surprised her by laughing. “The ‘political situation’ is always changing; kowtowing to whatever it happens to be right now is no way to run a planet. And it’s not like the galaxy is going to fall apart if I do something that ticks off some Royal City bureaucrat—sometimes I think it will if I don’t!”
“I understand, sir,” Taylor said. “What I meant to ask is, why come for me in the first place? I mean, I just blew up your museum.”
Her face flushed slightly as she said it out loud.
“Oh, no.” The king’s voice assumed a more serious tone. “The Alliance destroyed my museum. You saved dozens—hundreds—of lives.”
Taylor took half a step back. “The ‘Alliance’? And what ‘hundreds’ of lives? The museum was empty.”
“Ours was not the only attack,” the king said. “There were a dozen when I left the palace with the Space Corps, and probably far more by now. In every case, there was an initial attack—a fire, a chemical weapon, a radiological bomb—designed to inflict casualties, but also to draw in a large response from first responders and the Emergency Service. In every case, these first responders were slaughtered by a terrorist with… abnormal abilities, before military force was called in, at which point even more lives were lost when the terrorist’s death triggered a powerful bomb. Across the Meltian Republic, there have been more deaths than on Icarus Day. On Cryzdeklith, there have been twelve.”
Taylor took in a slow breath and then let it out, unsure of how to respond to that. During Icarus Day—the deadliest single event in the galaxy since the end of the Order War—hundreds of ships inexplicably disappeared while traveling between solar systems via the seventh dimension, claiming tens of thousands of lives. If these attacks were on that scale, then of course the king would want to secrete her away from any further danger, but by the same token, this was exactly the moment when she, as MRES Branch Commander, should be doing something. She should be sending drones to help with the cleanup, or reporting her experiences to her higher-ups in order to assist them in finding the perpetrators of the attacks. A rebellious part of her suggested that she should head that investigation herself, but she quickly shot that down. Her job was to protect the Cryzdeklithian people, not to be an interstellar sleuth—it was that kind of meddling with galactic politics that caused the Order War in the first place. Still, if she was going to make a complete report, she needed to know what had already been established.
“Sir, you mentioned an alliance?” Taylor asked. “Do you have any leads on the people behind this attack?”
“We have a name and a face, not that it does us much good.” The king turned to one of the CRSC officers. “Please bring us a personal screen. Admiral Ghatzi should see the Alliance’s manifesto.”
“Yes, sir.” The officer left the control room and returned a few seconds later with a screen, which he handed to Taylor.
On the screen was a middle-aged woman in what appeared to be a Galactic Government military uniform. Taylor tapped the screen, and the woman started speaking.
“Good morning, citizens of the Meltian Empire.” The woman’s eyes shone with genuine pleasure. “And it is a very good morning because this morning the Free Alliance for Humanity has not only destroyed the idols your Meltian tyrants erected to commemorate their unjust war—we have also laid bare the false promises they made to you, their people. They promised that overturning the Galactic Government, the culmination of ten millennia of human civilization, would bring peace and prosperity, but now you live a life of fear as the Kaleknarians and other vile alien mongrels gather on your borders—is this prosperity? And now, your first responders, your Emergency Service, your supposed protectors are splattered lifelessly across the streets of your cities—is this strength?”
The woman sucked in and blew out a breath, possibly the first she had taken since the start of the video. “Fortunately, the strength of the human race is too great to be felled by such a weak and transient government, which is why I urge you to rise up against your alien oppressors! My Alliance will be the wind at your backs, and in ten days’ time, if the Meltians have not folded, we will strike again with the collective blessing of ten trillion human fists to bring them to their knees.”
The video abruptly ended.
Ten days’ time.
That put the next attack on Treaty Day, the day the Treaty of Galactica ended the Order War. The woman had not mentioned a target, but Taylor figured that the fact she and Hezekiah had defeated the Alliance’s operative to
day put Cryzdeklith on the short list.
“What do we know about this organization?” Taylor pointed at the screen. “Or this woman? For a ‘manifesto,’ that didn’t explain much about who she was or what she wanted.”
“I agree,” the king said. “The Meltian Republic Special Intelligence Service has identified her as ex-GG-commander Ann Mantradome, but then again the MRSIS also thinks she’s being backed by the Jacobins, which I find ridiculous. As for motivation, it sounds like the ‘for Humanity’ part of this Alliance’s name really means ‘death to anyone who’s not human.’”
“Hold on, who are the ‘Jacobins’?” Taylor had deliberately isolated herself from Meltian politics since joining the Cryzdeklithian MRES branch. She recognized the MRSIS as the Republic’s primary intelligence organization, but beyond that, she was lost.
“They’re a group of militant libertarians with a political wing,” the king said. “They might sympathize with Mantradome’s desire to take down the government, but they’re not xenophobes, so I doubt they’d work with the Alliance. My pet theory is that the Alliance is being backed by a group called the Human Race—that’s a political movement that seems to share Mantradome’s human-superiority beliefs—but I’m just speculating at this point.”
“Your Majesty, we’ve arrived,” one of the CRSC officers said.
“Excellent.” The king moved toward the back of the gunboat. “Your friends will be anxious to see you, Ms. Ghatzi.”
Taylor followed the king out into what she recognized as one of the hangars of the CRSC’s space station. She was glad for the chance to digest the king’s words—the Alliance, the MRSIS, the Jacobins, the Human Race—clearly she was going to have to get caught up on galactic politics. The thought made her uncomfortable, but it was not like she was actually getting involved in those politics, and with Mantradome threatening to strike again on Treaty Day, the Alliance was definitely an imminent threat to the Cryzdeklithian people.
“Taylor!”
Taylor’s head snapped up to spot Hezekiah striding toward her, trailed at a slower pace by Ciro.