Eden's Revenge (Eden Paradox Book 3)

by Barry Kirwan

  “She is taking Kat to Qorall. You know why, don’t you Micah?”

  He stared at the floor. “Her node. She can communicate with the Hohash.”

  Antonia stared at Micah. “So what?”

  Only he, Blake and Chahat-Me knew about the Kalarash having been on Esperia. They’d agreed to keep it quiet; another reason he had wanted to see Blake. From what little he knew, and what scraps of intel he’d gleaned from Chahat-Me on the historical legends of the Grid, only the Kalarash could stop a force such as Qorall. Maybe it was time everyone else knew, it might give them some hope.

  Petra continued. “Chahat-Me said you believed the Kalarash were here once, on this planet, when we first arrived.”

  Antonia took her cup and leaned back in her chair. “I thought they were pure myth, bedtime-story material for Grid parents to lull their young to sleep. Well, Micah?”

  He reached over and picked up his dripping cup, blew across the top of the steaming liquid, then inhaled: lemon and ginger. He shook his head. “One of them was here. It left just before Quarantine.”

  Antonia’s mouth dropped open.

  Petra closed on him. “Do you love Sandy, Micah?”

  He cast her a look of disdain, but her eyes were defiant, and he felt Antonia’s on him too. “Same answer: why do you do this, Petra?”

  “Mom said – before she was abducted – you’re the saddest man she knows. You love two women you can’t have, and do nothing with the half-dozen others interested in you. Sit back down!” Her eyes flared. “And you’re the closest thing I have to a father, so I’m sick of seeing you miserable.”

  Micah sipped the tea, cradling the cup in both hands, and closed his eyes.

  Petra’s voice quavered. “Do you think of me as a daughter? You’ve never said it.”

  He leaned forward, head bowed, so she couldn’t see his eyes, controlling his breathing. He’d never had children, never been in a relationship long enough. Most kids… he found it difficult to interact with them, though he could smile at them from afar. He wasn’t what he considered great ‘father material’, until Petra had come along. If he’d had a daughter, he’d have wanted her to be just like Petra.

  He nodded.

  “I need to hear you say it!”

  His eyes met hers. She looked vulnerable, and he wanted more than anything to protect her from the savage jungle outside Quarantine. “I think of you as the daughter I never had.”

  “Thank you.” She said it in her small voice, the one he remembered from her second birthday, when he’d brought her a present, a toy horse, something which made no sense on a world without horses, and she’d looked up at him with such intelligence and understanding, and undemanding love, it had taken his breath away.

  Petra continued. “I know where Qorall is. Chahat-Me showed me the latest projections from the front line. Where he is doesn’t really matter, of course. But I know when he’ll be here.”

  Micah stood. “Okay, Petra, that’s enough, we need to know, now. Stop this game!” Antonia joined him, so that they loomed over her like two parents.

  Petra rose slowly. “You must stop your games first. Do you have any idea what it’s like surpassing your parents intellectually at the age of twelve? Watching the futile games you play, watching you suffer all the time? Listening to you lie to each other and yourselves all the time, every second of every fucking day?”

  Antonia advanced on Petra. “That’s enough, Petra! You may be way ahead of me intellectually, but your emotional IQ needs a lot of work. Go to your room!”

  “Do you love Micah? I mean even a little bit?”

  Antonia turned her back on Petra, facing Micah. “She’s utterly impossible!”

  “Mother, answer me!”

  Antonia’s eyes rolled, but Micah thought he detected moisture there as she turned away from them both, and spoke to the wall. “What do you want from me, Petra, from us?”

  “I want you to go to your room, Mom. You haven’t had a lover for two years, Micah more like seven. You’re both hurting, it eats away at you, and we’re all probably dead in the next week once Quarantine comes down and lets in whoever’s waiting for us out there, with Qorall’s army just six months behind. That’s your answer, by the way, as I already have mine, even if you’re both too weak to answer me directly. I’m going to leave for a few hours. I’ll be back in the morning. It’s your lives.” She stormed out.

  Micah half-expected to hear the door slam, but it didn’t. He stood motionless in the silence which descended.

  Antonia broke it, facing him again. “Do you think she’s right? Are we such a lost cause?”

  Micah frowned. “I’m afraid that one is usually right, even if she’s sometimes emotionally immature. But at least she has emotions. I think that’s why I put up with her quirky nature. You’ve done a good job raising her, Antonia. I often wish she was the leader of the Genners, not Gabriel.”

  Antonia nodded. She stood within arms’ reach. “Has there really been no one these past seven years, Micah?”

  Micah suddenly felt fragile, like he was made of glass. “I’ve been… busy, you know, being President and all that. Listen, it’s late, I should go. I’m sorry for… Well, I should leave, Antonia.”

  But he didn’t move.

  “A goodnight kiss, Micah. Please.”

  Micah felt the glass crack. “If I kiss you now, Antonia, it won’t stop there.”

  Antonia moved closer to him, took his hands. “I know.”

  * * *

  Petra sat cross-legged outside Gabriel’s home, underneath his bedroom window. She’d hoped to find him alone, but Virginia was there. The pre-dawn air was chilly. A robin was singing somewhere close by, one of the few birds to have been rescued from the destruction of Earth. Beneath its chirping, she heard Virginia’s soft moans, Gabriel’s gasps of rapture. She carved the Greek letter Phi into a piece of driftwood with her knife. When she and Gabe had been five years old, she’d cut it into the bark of a tree, told him it was like a ‘g’ and a ‘p’ back-to-back, that they were like brother and sister, like Apollo and Artemis, and they would never be apart.

  She heard Virginia tell him she loved him, and paused her whittling, straining to hear his reply, but couldn’t make it out. The piece of wood was wet. She wanted to kick herself, having just berated Micah and Antonia for not telling each other their feelings, when she herself had never once let Gabriel know how she really felt. Not for the first time she wondered why she was more emotional than other Genners. She’d been the first one to be genned; maybe the Ossyrians hadn’t quite got it right. More advanced, my ass. Hell, I’m even sitting here like a goddammed stalker. She got up silently and wiped her eyes, and walked towards Carlson Plaza as the first rays of dawn breached the tops of the slate-grey prefab housing units. Ramires was doing some form of martial arts exercise.

  “Do those techniques really work?”

  He paused from his kata. “Petra, hello.” He studied her. “Are you okay?”

  She took out her knife and threw it so that it thwacked into the wall of one of the zinc-coated units. “I’m fine. I could use a workout, though.” She took off her jacket, and hung it on her home-made coat-hook. “Apparently you have the best fighting skills left in the human race. Let’s see how you fare with a little Genner girl like me, shall we?” Without waiting for a reply, she launched her attack.

  Chapter Five

  Surgical Procedures

  Kilaney – formerly Jorann – stared at his hand for the umpteenth time, curling his fingers, watching supple skin stretch and contract over fresh knuckles. He still had difficulty believing it had happened. It had all been so fast, so matter of fact, almost as if being fitted for a new uniform, not changing his body for God’s sake. Becoming human again had been something he’d literally dreamt of during his early years as a Q’Roth. He remembered – though it was difficult for him to go back there – how he’d tried to commit suicide more than once in that first awful year. He nearly succeeded, but t
hen the local station commander executed the Q’Roth surgeon supervising Kilaney’s ‘transition’. Kilaney hadn’t wanted any more blood spilled on his account, so he gave up hope and accepted his fate. Yet now, within a couple of days, they’d simply changed him back. He stared at his hands again.

  But his new skin felt terribly flimsy after Q’Roth armoured flesh. His arms, however, still had the appearance of corrugated iron, blue-grey from shoulder to wrist, petering out into pinkish hands. Good enough. He held his breath as he pulled the sheet off to reveal his legs. A metallic blue sheen glistened over powerful, hairless musculature, tailing off in sturdy feet with five toes, all of them prehensile.

  But he was missing a second pair of Q’Roth legs – he could feel the ghost limbs where they should have been attached at hip level. Kilaney closed his eyes. It was done. The DNA transplant, supercharged by Pierre’s specialised nannites, would override the Q’Roth signature, given enough time. His brain would remain quadro-spherical, but he could live with that.

  He lay back on the pillow, inspecting the stars through windows on the domed roof. The vast hangar containing him and other alien patients was so unusual that at first he thought the eye surgery had gone awry. Swathes of colour – violet, red, teal, and apple, swirled in the air as far as he could see, never mixing. Each layer was grainy, with fine particles that moved like sand beneath a wave, shifting and flowing, occasionally surging from one spot to another. The ‘air’ around him was a pale blue, had no taste or texture, and he had no idea of its function. The surgeons – squid-shaped creatures, transparent so that he could see all their organs and watch their two hearts twitch – drifted and surfed in the currents. When they had worked on him it had felt like a feather-touch, even when they had peeled back his armoured ribcage as if it were made of silk. He’d expected terrible pain when the anaesthetic wore off, but there was none at all, not even an itch.

  One of the squids had gurgled to him in Largyl 6. “Sure want this? Q’Roth physiology beautiful design – human arrangement clumsy.”

  Kilaney told him it was necessary for political reasons. The surgeon made a strange gulping motion, then got back to work. Afterwards, the squid whispered that he understood, and continued that he had added some refinements to make it more bearable. Kilaney wondered what those might be, but no surgeon had approached him again since the operation, several hours ago.

  He guessed the various coloured layers were for different patient species on the hospital ship, run by the Level Twelve Ngankfushtora – he could no longer pronounce it properly with a human tongue – and that the swirling sediment had multiple purposes including bio-containment, regeneration, sterilisation, and monitoring of recovery progress and health parameters.

  He’d encountered the Level Eight Ossyrian medical race during his time as Q’Roth, and had been impressed, but the Nganks were something else: massive surgery and rewriting DNA while keeping cognitive faculties and memories intact in a matter of a couple of days – he’d assumed it was impossible. Pierre had told him that the Ossyrians were advanced medically, but fundamentally they were triage doctors, relieving planets beset by new plagues, or assisting wounded in Grid wars. The Nganks, however, were more like cosmetic surgeons, called upon by the higher races, up to Level Fifteen, for specialised work. When Ukrull had first brought him to the hospital ship, Kilaney has asked who tended higher species like the Level Seventeen Tla Beth. As usual, the reptilian Ranger had grunted and refused to answer.

  The Nganks’ ship had looked impressive from space, a large purple lozenge studded with ghostly translucent struts, stretching outwards to eight luminous jade globes. Pierre had said that when it travelled, the outer spheres emitted a trail of fluorescent waves in their wake. Evidently, Level Twelve species weren’t beyond a little panache.

  Kilaney fidgeted, scratching idly at non-existent scars. He’d always hated hospitals, and wanted to get to Esperia as soon as possible. While on Ukrull’s ship, assisted by Pierre, he’d accessed and interrogated Q’Roth news data-streams, and found that Sister Esma had been loaned a warship for a ‘tactical mission’ of unspecified intentions. He didn’t like the sound of that one bit; the timing couldn’t be coincidental.

  The teal-coloured channel around him throbbed, as if sensing his antagonism. Cooling rain tinkled down his spine, massaging him, and he realized they had drugged him again. His consciousness winked out.

  Kilaney awoke to see something shimmer to the left of his cot. As he propped himself up on his elbows, an avatar of Pierre coalesced out of the ether.

  “General, it’s good to see you human again. How do you feel?”

  “Fine. Where are you? When do we leave?”

  “Better, I see. That’s good. Can you run?”

  Kilaney tried to shake the fuzz out of his head. “Excuse me?”

  “Run, General, now, to the left end of the chamber, as fast as you can. This is not a joke or a test.”

  Kilaney blinked, then rolled off the cot, meaning to break his fall with the mid-legs he no longer possessed, instead slamming hard onto the floor with his knees and hands, feeling sharp stabbing pains. He staggered in the direction Pierre had said, following the avatar, trying to remember how bipeds walked, let alone ran.

  “Pierre, mind telling me what the hell –”

  “Take a deep breath now, and grab something fixed!”

  He’d barely inflated his lungs when space outside lit up, and a thunderclap behind him announced a hull breach. Hellfire, we’re under attack! Kilaney gripped a metal pole next to an empty bed, but as a sandstorm of swirling colours fled through Pierre’s holo-avatar, another alien patient resembling an eight-legged rhino buffeted past him, snapping the rod in two. Kilaney began travelling back towards open space, longing for his Q’Roth claws that could have easily dug into the floor.

  The suction stopped with a ‘phtum’ sound, and he crashed to the floor. Gasping in the scant air left in the room, he turned and saw the snagged rhino’s legs flailing. The screaming alien was being slowly sucked through the gash, no doubt being bled dry on the part of its body exposed to hard vacuum.

  Kilaney remembered how to run this time, and sprinted to the automatic airlock door, which was trying to close, Pierre’s avatar somehow preventing it from doing so. One of the squid surgeons zipped past him, swimming in the violet channel. On instinct he swerved into it too, just as the rhino’s scream spiked and was lost in the rush of air vortexing out of the chamber. Kilaney felt like he was running in slow motion, but at least was not being tugged backwards, and his urge to breathe ceased. The squid turned back to glance at him, then swished through the gap into the cylindrical strut. Kilaney made it through three seconds later, suddenly accelerating so fast that he smacked into a wall on the other side, hearing the airlock door clamp into place behind him. He remembered how to sit up against a wall, and his new lungs had no trouble recalling how to pant.

  Pierre’s platinum avatar lost no time. “Ukrull and I are seventeen long-range transits from your position. We got a lead on Hellera’s location while you were being remixed, she’s the Kalarash –”

  “My memory is fine, Pierre, you told me about her yesterday. Who’s attacking, what do I do?”

  “Mannekhi raiding party; grab one of the Nganks and don’t let go, no matter what happens.” Pierre’s avatar started fizzing. “Interference. Losing transmission. Good lu–” The avatar vanished.

  Kilaney got to his feet. He was at the juncture of two major struts – the squid had bolted down one of the connecting tubes, but he didn’t know which. He charged down the left one.

  Midway, he passed rectangular windows, and saw a black sea urchin ship spitting fire at the Ngank lozenge. Normally, Ossyrians or Nganks should have been able to use bio-weapons, eradicating a certain DNA-type within a five million kilometre radius, but if there was one thing Qorall knew about, it was biological warfare, and he’d evidently handed down a few tricks to his Mannekhi foot-soldiers.

  Kilaney’s conduit l
urched, throwing him to the ceiling, enabling him to see a Mannekhi beam slice a clean break through the opposite strut half a kilometre away. The central purple ovoid was criss-crossed with breaches: equipment, patients and no doubt medical staff haemorrhaged from energy-beam incisions. They’re dismembering the ship.

  Artificial gravity failed, and he began to drift away from the ceiling. He managed to kick against it just in time to avoid floating uselessly mid-tube. He drifted to the opposite floor, allowed himself to crouch on it, then kicked off hard. Flying ten metres along the strut, he reached the ceiling again, and shoved his hands against it, effecting an upside-down handspring, making less distance this time, but heading to the floor. As he spun, he saw the Mannekhi ship lance another strut. He kicked off again and reckoned he had just another fifty metres to go. Six struts left, so if I’m lucky…

  His ears filled with a noise somewhere between a blow-torch and a rocket engine, and he reached ground just in time to grab a conduit as once again air whipped past him. He squinted through the howling rush of air towards the auto-sealing shield door at the end of the strut. No way would he make it. Then he spied the squid surgeon, tentacles flapping, as if trying to swim against the current. As it tumbled towards him, he remembered what Pierre had said. Timing it carefully, just as the Ngank passed over his head, he let go of the conduit and seized the slippery creature’s tentacles with both hands.

  His fingers and palms burned, then his eyeballs felt like they were aflame, then his whole body. Don’t let go! Kilaney’s eyes scrunched closed against the freezing pull of space, while the bastard squid sent electric shocks through its tentacles till Kilaney tasted blood in his mouth. Still he held on. He knew he had only seconds of consciousness. Sorry Blake, looks like I’m not going to…

  “Where are we?” Kilaney saw black everywhere except for the luminous squid he still gripped with bleeding hands.