Eden's Revenge (Eden Paradox Book 3)

by Barry Kirwan

“None of that. You are both wrong because you stopped trusting each other years ago. Genners and Steaders. That says it all, doesn’t it? We’re a divided community. We have to re-integrate. Now would seem a good time to start.”

  Micah ran his fingers through his mat of salt-and-pepper hair. He sighed, and turned to Gabriel. “I can never win with that one.”

  Gabriel turned to his console. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  Petra smiled. Now that would have made her mother proud.

  “It’s time,” Gabriel said.

  Micah spoke more softly than before. “Once you take the shield down, there’s no fast way to get it back up. Are you sure about this?”

  Gabriel turned back to Petra. “Anything on long range scans?”

  She shook her head.

  “How long will it take to deploy the mines?” Micah asked.

  Gabriel touched the console panel in front of him. “Araik and the others below are preparing them. The first batch is ready.” He turned to Micah. “You’re not going to try and stop me?”

  Micah leant against the hull. “I want warning beacons in Grid Standard posted at all entry points, including a subspace one to alert ships in transit.”

  “That will alert the Tla Beth, or at least the Rangers.”

  Micah pursed his lips. “Zack used to say something: the deeper you are in the shit, the cleaner you’d better dress.”

  “Very well,” Gabriel said. As soon as deployment is complete. It will add another hour.”

  “What about the Ossyrians?”

  Petra joined in. “We release them, of course. I’ll talk with Chahat-me. But the mines are going to be locked in stealth mode. They won’t be able to undo them.”

  “The Tla Beth will,” Micah said.

  Petra thought Micah was taking this well, all things considered. She still expected his tone to be harsh with her, yet it wasn’t. “That’s where you come in, Uncle. You can blame us Genners –”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “You could, though, Uncle. The Tla Beth made you accept the ‘upgrade’ of all human kids. You had no choice. Anyway, by the time they get here we’ll either have destroyed the enemy or we’ll all be dead, and if nobody’s out there we’ll have had plenty of time to think up excuses for deploying mines. You’re good at that.”

  Micah uttered a short laugh. “Thanks, I’m sure.”

  Gabriel addressed her. “Take the barrier down, Petra.”

  She stared at the button.

  Eighteen years of protection. They’d thought about trying to keep the barrier up beyond its fixed lifetime, but it had proven well beyond their technical know-how, even that of the Ossyrians, apparently. The Level Twelve shield’s make-up was founded on a strict energy decay cycle that would need a transfusion of fresh barrier energy to replenish it and keep it going, none of which existed on the planet. The only solution had been to bring it down early. That had always been an Ossyrian option in case of catastrophic events either on Esperia or in its solar system. Now the option was theirs, the Genners’, and in that precise moment, it was hers.

  Having decided everything logically, still a part of Petra’s emotional mind had doubts. She prayed they were doing the right thing, and held her breath. Her finger hovered, as if questioning, then she pressed it down firmly, and entered the command. She gazed out the viewscreen at the starlit sky. There was a shimmer for a second, and then it was as if a thin film dissipated. The stars looked brighter; she was sure she could see more of them now.

  Inside the ship, a screeching noise began, rising in intensity. She glanced back at the internal scans and saw Chahat-me’s snout in the air, her jaw open, the blue fibres within stretched taut; she was howling. Not only her; Petra saw that all the Ossyrians had woken, including the three they’d removed from the bridge, all of them were screaming the same high-pitched, single word. The grating sound jangled down her spine.

  Reports came in from all over the ship, from Gabriel’s people, trying to speak above the din. Abruptly it stopped.

  Gabriel moved over to Petra’s console. “Are they all still contained?”

  “Yes.”

  Micah came over to them. “What did they just shout, Petra?”

  Her hand trembled, the one that had tapped in the final command. “It was a single word,” she said, forcing herself to keep her voice steady. She prayed they hadn’t all just made a fatal mistake.

  Gabriel placed a hand on her shoulder. “What did they say, Petra?”

  She hoped her mother Kat would return soon, not caring if Louise was with her. She looked into Gabriel’s eyes. “They said… that is… they screamed… ‘No’.”

  PART TWO

  BATTLEFIELD

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kalarash

  Jen watched their ship’s entrance into the Hourglass Galaxy, courtesy of the scout-drone sent ahead. In the pure darkness of the inter-galactic void, a ruby gash opened in the fabric of space. The tear widened, like a bloodshot eye, an obsidian pupil irising open at its centre. The Kalarash ship, the Memento, her home for the past year, emerged, shaped like an elongated crossbow. Metallic hues of aquamarine and scarlet rippled back along its ten-kilometre shaft. Her two comrades Dimitri and Rashid had gotten bored watching these events – it was their thirty-third galaxy after all – and busied themselves elsewhere. Jen never missed one. The eye-like portal blinked and was gone, space around it snapping closed as if the portal had never been there. They were in.

  The Memento hung outside the shimmering galactic barrier that billowed like a giant, translucent sail, buffeted by dark energy riptides. Sitting in the arrowhead fore-section, Jen stared in awe at the tumble of stars speckled with orange and azure nebulae, the galaxy’s tightening ‘waist’ visible as a brightness that hurt her eyes after nine more days inside a trans-galactic shunt. The ship’s fourth occupant, and its Master, Kalaran, was elsewhere and everywhere, his mind long since melded with the ship’s organic-metal physiology. She saw from the console that he had sent the access codes, but the barrier stayed up.

  On instruction, Jen fired the quantum-tunnelling syringe into the barrier, and it set to work, quiet and invisible. She imagined it chewing its way through the barrier’s epidermis, numbing the galactic sheath as it bit deeper, to prevent alarms being raised. She confirmed that the hollow moon they had hauled all the way from the Silverback Galaxy – which she’d known since a child as the ‘Milky Way’ – was intact, and remained masked in its null-entropy field. Kalaran hoped he wouldn’t need it, but it was insurance; none of them were prepared to return empty-handed.

  Jen put her feet up on the console. They had some waiting to do, especially as during the previous thirty-two visits they had had no response. Kalaran was looking for the Kalarash known as Darkur. Considering there were only seven Kalarash left in the entire universe, they were pretty anti-social and good at covering their tracks. Still, Kalaran believed that this time he would be there.

  She trawled her hands through her hair, and wondered how things were going back home. Intergalactic time dilation was a tricky business, especially using these shunts, and whenever she asked Kalaran what year it was back ‘home’ he’d answer the same – he could only tell her when they headed back. But she knew his agenda was getting tight. In fact both their schedules converged on the same point – Quarantine disablement. For her, her lover Dimitri and comrade-in-arms Rashid, they wanted to be back in time to help protect whatever had become of humanity from those Alician bastards and their Q’Roth locust friends. For Kalaran, he wanted to save Hellera – though she hadn’t talked to him for half a million years – and defeat Qorall. It all came down to the spiders, apparently, and having at least two Kalarash ships, ideally three. Hellera no longer had one, and so Kalaran needed to borrow one.

  For Jen it was more personal. She had never fit in socially, and had burned most of her bridges with people back home. But the one anchor that kept pulling at her was Gabriel, the namesake and son of her dead brot
her. She wondered if he was a tall boy by now, or even a grown man, how he looked, if he had his father’s voice...

  She got up and paced. As if on cue, Kalaran spoke to her. As always, he used her brother’s voice, sometimes an avatar of him. She both hated and loved it; hated it because Kalaran manipulated her, was assured of her complete attention and compliance when he took her brother’s form, and loved it because it was just as if her brother was alive again.

  “Are you okay, Jen? I picked up a drop in your psycho-emotive state.”

  “Uh-huh. Like I’m ever stable for more than five minutes. What do you really want?”

  “Darkur is here. He’s coming. Get ready. Tell the others.”

  He ‘choired’ the last four sentences so they hit her all at the same time, something he’d been teaching her since he ‘messed with her brain’ as she put it, trying to advance her to Level 5. He’d asked her at the time if he could quash some of her emotions to make room for higher order thinking. She’d told him to fuck off. He’d inquired as to whether that meant yes or no. Jen always had to remind herself to be careful whenever communicating with Level Nineteen beings.

  She whirled to the comms station he’d created for her, and connected the neural interface. “We’ve found Darkur. You guys better get up here.” She used the interface to scan the other side of the barrier – and felt, as well as saw, the bow-wave of Darkur’s crossbow ship, sleek, elegant, subtly muscled with space-field manipulation weaponry that even Qorall didn’t possess. It reminded her of her martial arts training years ago, when she studied the classic Art of War by Sun Tzu and the Book of Five Rings by the most famous swordsman of all time, Miyamoto Musashi. The first rule was ‘ground’; you should know the terrain you are fighting on. And if you can control it, all the better. The Kalarash could alter space and gravity fields. With that kind of power, they didn’t need conventional weapons, though they could make them on demand. Unfortunately, Qorall had those damned dark worms…

  Dimitri arrived first, his large frame, goat-black hair and huge smile tumbling into the cockpit. She grinned.

  He saw the interface node clipped to her right ear, and beamed. “Oh, how marvellous! You finally got it to work! How I hate you!” But he swung her into his arms and lifted her feet off the floor in an embrace, kissing her fully. She closed her eyes, wondering how she had ever even thought of giving him up back on Esperia when she’d gone off the rails.

  He put her down, but still had his burly arms locked around her. “I’m handling the stent. I want to be able to tell Micah and Blake when we get back that I broke through a galactic barrier!” He laughed and she had no choice but to acquiesce.

  An Indian voice intruded. “Then I will monitor the moon. Please, excuse my interruption.”

  Jen disentangled herself from Dimitri’s grasp. “Thanks Rashid, that leaves me with comms, and my new toy.” She tapped her ear, smiling.

  Rashid took the third station. She briefly studied his thin frame, tight black curls, and gleaming white-toothed smile that was the most genuine she had ever encountered. But it was the eyes that drew her. All black. Rashid had been blinded during the escape from Earth, in the initial assault by Louise. When Rashid had joined her and Dimitri just before Kalaran departed Esperia, Rashid had been wearing a ‘dolphin’, a rainbow-hued band of metal around his eyes and head that acted as a ‘sensurround’ system to replace normal vision. A month ago Kalaran had given Rashid new eyes, but they were all black, like the Mannekhi. Kalaran didn’t say why, only that it might come in useful later.

  Kalaran’s voice spoke just to her, via the interface. “Jen, I’m going to be communicating with Darkur. I’m going to give you filtered access so it does not hurt you or scramble your brain. You’ll also pick up thought remnants – filtering such communications all the way from Level Nineteen to Level Five is messy, but this means you will feel some of the context as well. Is this acceptable?”

  “Are you kidding me? I get to see inside your head, what you’re thinking?”

  “It will be a gross translation, that is all. Our thought patterns are far too nuanced for you to ever fully comprehend.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said.

  She sat down, leaned back in her chair, beaming.

  Dimitri glanced at her. “What’s going on, my love?”

  “Oh nothing much,” she lied.

  * * *

  After reaching the age of two and a half billion years, Kalaran had hoped he was done with arguing. But within the first pico-second of his former colleague arriving at the other side of the barrier, the bickering began. Kalaran had at least expected a “Hello”. The truth was, when there were only seven of your species left in the entire universe, each in its own adopted galaxy or like Darkur and two others, itinerant, and all of them leagues ahead of every other registered species, privacy became a premium, irritability a reflex.

  He didn’t stop Darkur’s thought-probe from interrogating every facet of the ship, including downloading the entire thought structure of the three humans onboard. As if that wasn’t rude enough, Darkur refused to follow protocol and drop the barrier. The Kalarash species weren’t big on reunions, and evidently a ship-to-ship meeting was off the agenda. But Kalaran relaxed – Darkur’s scans failed to detect the moon, which now drifted a couple of hundred thousand kilometres away in the starless void. Darkur – your complacency will be your undoing.

  Kalaran was tired from the long journey – he’d had to fight off dark worm attacks in the interstitial void whenever there were breaks in the shunt system. He had certain visitor’s rights, however, and demanded linear communication. It would vex Darkur, but after a year of talking to Jen, Dimitri and Rashid in human language, he’d gotten used to it.

  “Whatever you want, the answer’s no,” Darkur grumbled.

  Not exactly a good start. “I’ve come a long way, Darkur. At least hear me out.”

  “Kalaran, this distraction has just cost me the Saccardian Sector rebellion. I’d been keeping an eye on them. It’s cusp time. Two thousand years of careful social manipulation are now careening down a black hole! Literally!”

  Kalarash made it a policy of never saying sorry. They did what they did and accepted responsibility for it, unless they decided not to, of course. Being at the top of the species pyramid had its perks.

  Kalaran took advantage of the few nanoseconds’ pause that followed to make his case personally. “Qorall is winning the War in the Silverback galaxy, and racking up an impressive death toll, even by our standards.”

  “Kalaran, when will you ever learn? We’ve seeded hundreds of galaxies. Some work, some fail. You’re losing perspective.”

  Or finding it again. “Qorall is our responsibility. We set him on this path.” That was below the belt, but true enough.

  Darkur sidestepped it. “What’s with the low-bred company you’re keeping? They’re barely Level Four.”

  Kalaran didn’t have a good answer. There was something about this race calling itself ‘human’. He’d always been a sucker for the underdog, and humanity had lost everything, including its home planet. But Darkur had a point – why should he care? There were millions of races scattered across the universe, most of whom were more intelligent than this one. But even a Level Nineteen race such as the Kalarash had to rely on instinct once in an aeon.

  “What exactly is it you want from me, Kalaran? I’d like to get back to my work and see what I can salvage in Saccardia.”

  Kalaran aimed high. “Recall the others. Fight Qorall, destroy him once and for all.”

  Darkur’s voice lost its grumpiness. “Not sure we can destroy him anymore. We could defeat him, maybe. But the others are busy and will be less hospitable than I. Also, if we did wage war on him again, the galaxy likely wouldn’t survive – you do remember what happened last time?”

  Kalaran considered the Jannahi galaxy: dark, inert, devoid of life, its stars extinguished.

  “Kalaran, tell me your mind hasn’t entered the scatteri
ng stage. You must have anticipated my answer. In any case, why don’t you talk to Hellera? Rumour has it she’s in your precious Silverback galaxy at the moment.”

  Kalaran would have kicked something if he’d had a foot handy. “We’re not talking at the moment.” He reflected that in this case, ‘moment’ signified half a million years. Kalaran wondered if he had more in common with these humans than he’d thought.

  But Darkur was right, he had considered that he would get no personal help. He checked the moon. Rashid was ready, Dimitri, too. “Darkur, I need to borrow your ship.”

  The expletives that followed had no human equivalent.

  Kalaran’s scanners snapped into action, latching onto the comms spike on the sub-space frequency used only by Kalarash. He located Darkur’s ship on the other side of the barrier. He primed the moon, then hesitated, deciding to try one last time.

  “Darkur, I’ll have it back before you know it.”

  “I swear you’ve really lost it this time, Kalaran. Aside from Hellera, who likes hanging out in nebulas, we haven’t been separated from our ships for two billion years! Not since we defeated Qorall last time, back when your little human friends were amino acid goo waiting for something special to happen. The answer is –”

  Kalaran’s mind unleashed a set of synchronous commands: the syringe punctured the barrier; a liquid diamond stent widened it in nanoseconds; gravitic hooks leapt through like gossamer lampreys, fixing onto Darkur’s hull; the moon catapulted forward through the fissure, its mass used as the counterweight to pull Darkur’s ship through the other way. Last, an extraction program Hellera had first used on Kalaran several million years ago stripped Darkur’s mind and physical correlates from his ship and deposited them inside the moon. Kalaran smiled – as far as his residual anatomy would allow – a trick he’d learned from his human associates.

  The moon drifted along the inner edge of the galactic barrier. The stent collapsed. Kalaran knew that Darkur would waken soon, really pissed off, so much so that he might actually chase him all the way back to the Silverback Galaxy. But first he’d have to build another ship. Until then, the hollow moon would do – Kalaran had made it Kalarash-friendly, even tearing out some of the guts of his own ship to make the moon comfortable and functionally advanced. He instructed the moon’s navigational array to head to Saccardia at maximum speed.