The silver discoloration had spread out far beyond where the rupture had been repaired. It had also darkened, almost as if it was curing. The entire belly of the ship now gleamed a deep tungsten silver in color. Thick tendrils of brighter silver snaked out from the belly to follow the curve of the hull, streaks of light cutting through the blackness.
The chemical reactions begun by the fusing of the carbon and amodiamond metamaterials were evidently continuing. Taking over her ship. She wasn’t sure what she thought about this; she had liked the way her ship looked, all dark and sinister and dangerous. Yet she couldn’t deny this new hue held a certain beauty as well.
“Wow.”
“I know. Kennedy said it was making the hull stronger, so I guess it’s not a problem.” She discerned no trace of scarring from weapons fire. The hull appeared unblemished. “Weird, though…and now my ship kind of resembles a zebra.”
“A ‘zebra’?” His eyes unfocused, and she imagined he was querying his internal data store. Two seconds later he regarded her in amusement. “Okay, maybe a little. But I doubt it will stay this way. And it’s intriguing.”
She let her hand drop from the hull and wandered out to stare at the grasslands stretching to the horizon. Behind her lay rolling hills broken up by the rocky crevasse which had provided a measure of shelter for them overnight.
“I expect to see a herd of some sort of wildlife frolicking across the plain any second now.”
“Would be the least astounding scene so far.”
She glanced over her shoulder to smile at him—
—and that was when the dragon attacked.
A faint whoosh of air behind him was the sole warning Caleb had before he was catapulted thirty meters through the air. He caught a vague impression of reflected light off burnished scales attached to a massive wing—then his head slammed to the dirt with a sharp crack.
He was out for mere seconds—four, five at most—because when he opened his eyes the dragon had barely left the ground, its wings mid-flap as they propelled it up and over the Siyane to soar into the sky.
Yes, a dragon. The lustrous crimson scales covered an enormous body dwarfed only by its wingspan; the striking thickness of the torso contrasted with almost delicate skin pulled taut between lightweight bones comprising the wings. Distinctive horns curled back over its bony skull.
He vaulted to his feet and swung the Daemon up, ignoring the multiple jarring pains of varying severity. His vision contracted to encompass a single image: Alex flailing in the grasp of the dragon’s front right claw as it flew away.
She was visibly struggling; that meant she wasn’t dead. The claws gripping her hadn’t ripped open her lovely skin and shredded the fragile human organs which gave her life. Not yet.
He could shoot a hole in the wing. The laser would shred the thin membrane. The dragon would plummet from the sky and plunge to the ground a hundred meters below. And Alex would die.
“Fuck!”
In a flash he was sprinting for the airlock, skipping through a stumble or two on the way. He recognized he was hurt but it hardly mattered.
He slammed a palm on the airlock panel, fed it the secondary key and fell through the hatch as it opened. Then he half-crawled, half-scrambled to the cockpit and up into her chair. His fingers raced over the blank ledge until by dumb luck he found the trigger to activate the HUD. Unlike Alex, he wasn’t wired into the ship, and thus it did not respond to his thoughts.
Thank you, Mia.
Once the HUD came to life the controls and screens were easily identifiable. He fired up the pulse detonation engines and rose off the ground as the dragon shrank in the sky. The unparalleled smoothness of the ship’s motion beneath his fingertips shocked him. It responded to the slightest adjustment with incredible fluidity, like a sky glider instead of a machine constructed of hard, cold metal.
He banked forty degrees starboard and climbed, the entirety of his attention focused on the tiny red dot against the pale blue sky.
It had nearly disappeared when he started to gain on it. Bit by bit, meter by meter he closed the gap. He didn’t think about what he was gaining on, or what in the bloody hell a bloody dragon was doing on an impossible planet in an impossible place on the other side of an impossible portal. Instead he concentrated on catching it.
He could see the sunlight from the nonexistent sun reflecting off the scales and the beat of its wings driving it toward the mountains now looming large in the distance. The mountains represented a problem; he risked losing the dragon in a crevasse or a shadowy valley. He’d need to draw close. Perhaps it might skim close enough to the mountainous terrain for him to risk a shot. He should—
—the world spiraled out of control, as for the second time in as many days ‘down’ and ‘up’ lost all meaning. His head spun wildly, and he pressed a palm to his forehead in an effort to impose stability. Yet the images his eyes showed him refused to comport with reality, with what he knew to be true.
Grassy plains spread placidly beneath him. No mountains were visible, even on the far horizon. Ahead and to the left rolled gentle hills, much like those they had camped at the night before. Exactly like the hills they had camped at the night before. The ship decelerated to a crawl as his hands dropped from the controls and he gazed out the viewport, confusion giving way to disbelief.
He hovered in sight of where he had been twenty minutes earlier.
Fuck it. He’d think about it on the way back. He promptly accelerated and headed in the direction of the mountains.
So there existed a barrier of some kind, one which repelled in dramatic fashion any intruders. Obviously the dragon was not an intruder.
Fine.
He knew where it was now, more or less. He’d slow when he neared and find a way past it. Somehow.
And he might have, too, if not for the two new dragons which stormed him as he neared the mountains. He cracked his neck and adjusted his posture in the chair.
Okay then. Starship vs. dragons.
He strafed to avoid the dual streams of flame shooting out of the approaching dragons’ jaws. It was going to take more than fire to damage this ship, and he was certain its weapons possessed a longer reach as well.
He flipped the ship around and accelerated in reverse to keep a distance. In the two seconds he had to observe them, he noted they appeared identical to the one that had grabbed Alex, and to each other. Clones, then? Yet another incongruity on this strange planet. He targeted the pulse laser at the dragon on the left.
It contorted in an attempt to avoid the beam, but the laser tracked it and cut a deep gash through the scales then the leathery skin beneath them and opened up its innards. The beast shrieked a roar of pain and spewed flame raggedly from its jaws. He was almost surprised to see blood and organs spill out into the air; part of him had suspected they were machines, or possibly some sort of materialized holo projection.
The first dragon tumbled flailing to crash to the ground below, but the second one used the chaos to dive and sweep under the ship. An outstretched claw nearly grabbed the nose of the Siyane as he yanked hard to port and swung up in an arc.
As soon as he had a decent vantage he fired. This one seemed to have learned from the mistakes of its companion and started moving before the laser exited the weapon casing.
Nevertheless, a dragon was simply no match for 24th century laser weaponry. The laser sliced apart the thin membrane of its left wing. The beast fell into a tailspin, and he was forced to rapidly maneuver to get clear of it—
—the world twisted inside out once more, his head following suit. He blinked roughly, choked back the bile rising in his throat and stared at the grasslands outside. In avoiding the falling dragon, he had hit the barrier again.
In a burst of frustration he slammed a fist into the dash. It being composed of a rhu/platinum nanoalloy, the dash was not impressed.
He massaged the busted knuckles and forcefully shoved aside the anger and despair which threatened to drag him down a
nd away from his goal. He did not have time to wallow, to give a moment’s thought to what may have happened to her or whether she was alive.
Turn into the punch, grab hold of the gun, leap into the arena. Attack. He had to move. Now.
He gunned the engine.
9
SENECA
CAVARE
* * *
JARON NYTHAL THREW A STACK of clothes in the bag, not bothering to achieve any semblance of order or neatness. Drawers hung open behind him; more clothes lay strewn across the floor. He scrambled into the bathroom to grab the necessities and stubbed his toe on the door frame.
“Ah!” He hobbled back to the bed while grabbing his throbbing toe. He had to hurry.
His wife and kids were on the way to her parents’ house. If nothing else they should be safe, right?
He had thought he was in the clear. He’d picked out his private downtown flat and planned to make an offer in the morning. With Volosk taken care of he should have been in the clear. How was he supposed to know Volosk’s boss was that cocksucker Delavasi? The man had been gunning for him ever since the favor-buying scandal four years earlier.
Only by a sheer stroke of luck did Jaron receive any warning at all. His ten o’clock meeting canceled at the last minute, and on a lark he had ducked out of the office to grab some expensive liquor for later tonight. When he returned to the office one of his coworkers had stopped him in the hallway.
“Hey, there was a man here looking for you. He refused to give the receptionist his name, but I recognized him from a meeting Kouris held a few weeks ago. He’s the Director of Intelligence…Delavasi’s his name I think.”
Jaron had spent thirty minutes meandering in circles in a service hallway trying to convince himself it didn’t mean anything, that the man was simply following up on Volosk’s open files. But it wasn’t true. Volosk had been suspicious of him when he showed up at his office last week and now Volosk was dead, and Delavasi knew he was behind it and knew he’d set up the assassination on Atlantis.
It didn’t matter how the man knew; in his gut Jaron was convinced he surely must.
Forty-years-to-life in prison at best. Permanent disappearance into the black hole of a covert detention facility at worst. And worst was starting to look a hell of a lot more likely.
He had to vanish.
With a brief scan around the bedroom he lugged the bag onto his shoulder and headed to the kitchen, where he quickly tossed in some drinks and snacks and closed the bag up. He forced himself to pause. He was forgetting something…possibly a lot of things. But he needed to hurry.
He jogged through the living room and foyer of the new house to the door. They had barely begun moving in, and boxes sat stacked along the walls between furniture haphazardly scattered around the floor.
His skycar was parked behind the house. He rounded the corner to see it shrouded in shadows cast by the decorative trees. He would have jogged to it—he needed to hurry—but the bag on his shoulder felt so damn heavy and he was out of breath from the panicked, rushed packing.
A man stepped out of the shadows behind the driver’s side of the car. Coffee-colored hair framed a stark, cold face…his features seemed as if they had been etched by Death itself.
Jaron froze for half a second before scurrying backward and feeling for the wall with his free hand. “Wh-what do you want?”
The man’s lips curled upward a centimeter. Jaron had never witnessed a more terrifying sight. “I’m sorry, Mr. Nythal, but we can’t have you talking.”
The assassin. It must be. Son of a….
His head shook furiously. “I won’t talk, I swear. I’m getting out of here. I’ll go to Pandora—no, I’ll go to New Babel—they’ll never find me! I’m leaving right now, see?” He held up the bag for dramatic effect. “Just let me go.”
“I cannot. The authorities are onto you, and once they have you they will break you. Our bosses won’t allow that to happen.”
The bag slid from Jaron’s grip and tumbled to the ground as he flattened against the wall. There was nowhere to go, no way to escape from the killer who approached him one quiet, calm step at a time. “Please, I beg you, I won’t—”
It didn’t even occur to him to fight back when the blade came up and sliced open his throat in one fluid motion.
Matei Uttara activated his personal concealment shield and slipped the blade hilt in its case. He left the patio via the pathway which led out into the affluent neighborhood.
The cyan-tinged late afternoon sunlight shone far too brightly for his taste. He didn’t care for risking a hit in broad daylight…but his contact had been specific on the topic. Time was short.
And it pleased him to be rid of his little white pawn. The man had been one of only three people who could conceivably lead someone to him. Now the number was two, and both of those individuals were far more savvy and clever than Jaron Nythal.
He didn’t count the alien, because it was irrelevant. He would need to find the alien in order to kill it, and he did not believe he could do so. And if he couldn’t, no one could. Besides, he harbored the sneaking suspicion that should his alien be removed from the equation, another was likely to take its place.
He reached the nearest levtram station in minutes, as the neighborhood was near the Cavare city center, and dialed down the strength of the concealment shield while he blended into the moderate crowd taking the tram bound for the spaceport.
Admittedly, executing the hit early did serve an additional purpose. He was on a tight schedule. His next and possibly last act in this chess match would be on the EAO Orbital above Earth in three days, which left little margin for error. He possessed a fast ship, but Earth was a considerable distance away. Thankfully he had procured the materials required the day before.
It would be a difficult op as well. Space stations were notoriously challenging due to their confined space and lack of refuge or hidden exits, and the Orbital occupied a class all itself. His chosen ID shouldn’t present any problems, but smuggling explosives onto an Alliance governmental installation in space, orbiting Earth and under heightened war-time security constituted a different matter.
Still, he would get it done. Then he planned to head west. Far west. Perhaps Atlantis or Ceres. He’d prefer to skate all the way west to the frontier on Nyssus, except he needed to be able to move rapidly should Marano or Solovy reemerge. Wherever he landed, he intended to find a good seat, kick back and enjoy the show.
He didn’t particularly care who won. The Alliance was using him, the Federation was using him, Zelones was using him, the aliens were using him. He was happy to do all their bidding. And when they began to turn on one another, he was happy to abet that as well.
He merely wanted to foment the rising tide of anarchy, then watch the galaxy burn to ashes.
INTELLIGENCE DIVISION HEADQUARTERS
* * *
“Ms. Marano, I’m Graham Delavasi, Director of Intelligence.” He extended his hand; the woman sitting at the table leveled an icy glare at him in response. Unfazed, he gave her a friendly smile. “Is there anything I can get you? Coffee? A snack?”
“You can get my mother out of here.”
Taking that as a ‘no,’ he pulled the chair out from the table and sat down opposite her. “I hope we can get both of you out of here soon. As I’m sure my agents have told you, we simply have a couple of questions we hope you can answer.”
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the last guy, I don’t care what you’re ‘director’ of. My mother doesn’t know anything. She’s fragile and not equipped to deal with this situation. She can’t help you. Let me talk to her, then get someone to take her home. Do that, and I’ll try to answer your questions.”
He had to wonder who was in charge of the interrogation, but frowned in genuine concern. “What’s wrong with your mother? Is she ill?”
“Physically? No. But mentally she’s…yes, she’s ill. She’s able to take care of herself, but barely. She gets distracted
, forgets things, can’t focus. Please believe me, she doesn’t know anything about Caleb. She doesn’t even understand why they keep saying his name on the news. She can’t cope under this level of stress—you have to let her go.”
He regarded the woman a moment. He had reviewed her file on the way over and mentally ticked off the high points. She had earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Tellica with top honors. The school hired her two years later as a professor, but she was currently on loan to Losice University on Krysk for a year as a visiting professor. She was a single mother of a four-year old daughter, having been widowed when her husband, a botanist, died on a research expedition to an unsettled planet in Elathan’s system. She had no criminal record or any documented history of trouble.
He didn’t need the file to see she was intelligent, self-sufficient and strong-willed. Yet on this topic he read only earnest desperation in her eyes.
“Give me ten minutes.”
She shot him a guarded look and shrugged.
He left the room and slipped along the hallway to an identical one three doors down. The two-way glass in the interrogation room allowed him to observe Francesca Marano undisturbed. Tragic as the notion was, he couldn’t help but be glad Stefan wasn’t here to see her. It would have broken his heart.
The woman looked decades older than she should. Her skin appeared pallid and drawn, hair a dull, unkempt brown. Her sweater hung lopsided over sagging, defeated shoulders. But saddest of all was her eyes—wide and confused, yet somehow vacant.
A new shard of guilt crept up to join the existing guilt over Michael’s death festering in the tiny corner of his brain he allowed them. Francesca’s state was not his fault…which wasn’t the same thing as absolving him of all responsibility.
He didn’t go in the room. He had met her once years ago, briefly and in passing; she was highly unlikely to remember him, but he couldn’t take the chance. Instead he went and found Liz.
Vertigo: Aurora Rising Book Two Page 7