by Barry Kirwan
Louise shrugged. “Shrell wires happened to three of them. Two of them were on target, but disappeared just before impact. I honestly don’t know. Still, seems like you could use some help here. Your orders?”
Sister Esma knew the destruction of Esperia had become personal, her judgement biased, when it was not the Alicians’ priority. But Louise was like her; she would get the job done.
“The human cargo: take them to the relief ship and head to Savange immediately. Take the Ossyrian doctor with you, too. Alanis, go with Louise, brief her on the way. You take orders from Louise now.”
Sister Esma met her errant protégé’s eyes: defiant, confident. There was something else, too – Louise had grown. Sister Esma wondered what Level she was, knowing that if they both survived there would be a power struggle between them. Good, that was the Alician way; better for the community.
“Good to see you again, Sister Esma, it’s been too long,” Louise said, then added, “Please crush Micah and the others. See you on Savange, we have much to discuss.”
Sister Esma let her smile broaden and watched her favourite turn to leave, interrupted by a blast of Q’Roth clicks flooding the ship-wide comms system; Sister Esma couldn’t follow it. She felt a tingling in her spine; there had been more than enough surprises for one day. “What is that?”
Louise, poised to leave, cocked her head to one side. “Largyl Nine, Captain’s privilege level for the Q’Roth High Guard.”
Sister Esma waited; she didn’t know this dialect, no Alician did; except Louise, apparently.
Louise turned to face Sister Esma after the rasping noise shut off. “Problem, I’m afraid.”
“Jorann,” Sister Esma murmured through tightened lips.
Louise nodded. “He has instructed the Q’Roth Commander to switch off the cutter, using an emergency Tla Beth priority code, which appears to be valid.” Louise glanced away.
“The rest; all of it.”
Louise wandered over to the weapons rack and pulled out two heavy assault rifles, passing one to Alanis. “They’ve been instructed to relieve you of command by any means necessary.”
Sister Esma shouted at the comms officer. “Block all off-ship comms now!”
“Your Eminence, the only way I can do that is to terminate –”
“Do it!” Sister Esma advanced on the Alician woman’s console, standing over her while the terrified woman entered a comms termination sequence at lightning speed.
“Done,” she said, her shoulders sinking with relief.
Sister Esma pointed to another crewmember. “Seal all blast doors between the Q’Roth and us, then open the escape hatches to space in the connecting corridors.”
Louise armed her rifle. “The Q’Roth will fight to the death against the Mannekhi – too much bad blood between them. It’ll keep them both occupied. You could come with us.”
Her voice had a trace of concern in it, which touched Sister Esma. “A few things to wrap up here first. We’ll be ten minutes behind you in the next Raptor. Go.”
Louise stared for a moment then left the Bridge, accompanied by Alanis. Sister Esma retook her chair. She called up a display showing Esperia, Esperantia on the other side relative to the Crucible. Overlaid on the display was a parabolic missile trajectory, the firing window of opportunity through the Shrell mesh drawing closer every second.
For five hundred years she had plotted humanity’s extinction, and it would take just another few minutes. Yet her right palm was clammy, and her claw flexed and unflexed, making a noise like grinding teeth. For the first time in centuries she had a bad feeling that her plan might fail. She never second-guessed herself, but this time her Level Five mind began cataloguing the unpredicted variables that had already transpired in the last hours. She shut that train of thought off, a futile weakness. As long as nothing else –
“Your Eminence, there’s something odd… off our starboard side.”
Sister Esma’s voice sounded like a sword being drawn. “If you value your life, girl, be specific.”
The woman coughed. “I… I noticed some debris a few minutes ago, which I assumed was from the moon’s break up. But it’s heading towards us, and… it’s accelerating.”
Sister Esma clicked her right finger and thumb, and pointed to the viewscreen. The image shifted to space, the lacerated moon glowing behind, rocks of indeterminable size drifting here and there, moving away from the moon, towards Esperia. At first she didn’t see it, but then she detected grains of dust moving like sand beneath a wave, always in the same direction, towards the Crucible.
“Magnify.”
She stood and walked closer to the viewscreen. The motes refused to resolve, which could only mean stealth tech. “Target them with charges.”
“Our weapons are offline. The Q’Roth have shut them down from their location.”
Sister Esma stormed over to the tactical console, the officer there blanching before jumping aside. “Damn them! So be it, they leave me no choice.” She began typing a long command code, her right fingers chopping fast at the console.
The tactical officer moved closer, her eyes widening. “Your Eminence –”
Sister Esma spoke calmly, her claw resting on the officer’s shoulder, close to her neck. “No one will know.” She completed the sequence that triggered a release of Q’Roth-targeted killer nannites into the ventilation system in the planet-cutter control centre and surrounding corridors. She turned to the woman. “Will they?” The officer shook her head vehemently.
One less variable. But the motes in space drew closer. She felt a trickle of ice down her spine, not a feeling to which she was accustomed. Calculating their arrival time at the hull – though she had no idea what they would do then – they would be there shortly after the missiles were launched. Yet still the foreboding hung about her. In her mind’s eye, she suddenly imagined seven billion slaughtered humans watching silently, willing her to fail, waiting for her to die so they could lay their bony fingers on her. She shook herself. Action was required; this waiting was unravelling her. “All of you leave the Bridge now. Arm yourselves and head to areas thirty through forty-five, decks seven to nine, in case we are boarded there.”
All of them except one grabbed weapons and fled the Bridge.
The tactical officer spoke. “Your Eminence, I would like to stay, to assist, in case…”
Sister Esma looked at her. Young, eager, completely devoted to the Alician cause. It reminded her of her own brief time with Alessia over five hundred years ago, and it comforted her. But then she remembered that Alessia had been slain shortly afterwards.
“Stay,” she said. For the first time in her life she didn’t want to be alone. No, she realised, she didn’t want to die alone. Her right hand slid into her pocket and clasped the wooden chess figure of the queen, given to her all those years ago by Alessia herself.
“Esperia launch window,” she said, re-taking her chair. The screen shifted again, and she enabled an audible countdown. Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight… She tapped out the last seconds of humanity’s existence with her finger on the arm of her chair. Whoever you are out there, you are too late. I may well die today, but I’m taking all of humanity with me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Revenge
Gabriel realised he was midway through a subspace jump. Usually it was instantaneous: there was no perception until one ‘exited’ the transit. Now, every surface of the inside of the Hohash ship was silver, like frozen mercury, except for the wave-like shadows shimmering in front of him on the inside of the airlock hatch. But he couldn’t move. A young woman’s voice spoke to him, clearly, as if standing right behind him – no, he thought, exactly where the Hohash mirror had been just before they jumped. But the Hohash were mute – weren’t they?
“Gabriel, please listen to me.”
He tried to clear the radiation-induced fuzz from his mind, and hypothesised: the Hohash belonged to the Kalarash; the voice sounded human, but not with the authority he�
��d anticipate from a Level Nineteen being; he only knew of one woman linked to the Kalarash. He couldn’t turn around, but his mouth and vocal chords worked.
“Jennifer?”
She uttered a noise somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. “You’re smart, like… your father.” Her voice stumbled over the last two words.
His stepfather Ramires had told him how distraught Jennifer had been when her brother, the Sentinel assassin Gabriel – the father he’d never known – had been killed, and the treacherous path down which it had propelled her.
Hearing her voice, that of an aunt he’d never met, resurfaced long-buried thoughts about his father, emotional dead-ends he’d walled off years ago. Sandy had often said how much he resembled his father, though she’d barely known him herself. Plenty of other kids had lost parents during the Q’Roth sacking of Earth, but they had memories, usually holos too, anchors to cling to. Gabriel had nothing, save his own reflection. He listened intently.
“Gabriel – there’s so much I want to say…”
He could sense the pain in her voice. “What was he like?”
There was a pause. “Brave and beautiful. People were wary of him, though; they sensed the inherent danger even in his teens. One of his teachers once described him as an unexploded mine.” She laughed.
He smiled, but it stirred the suppressed emotions deep inside him, chipping away at those walls. “Go on,” he said, almost a whisper.
“Serious, always looking for a cause, interested in politics when boys his age were discovering girls, though he had quite a few girlfriends in his teens. No-one close. He would come out with these profound but enigmatic sayings. My favourite was ‘where there is thought, there is power.’ Kalaran thought that was pretty deep for a human. Sorry, I’m rambling.” She cleared her throat. “Your father found his cause, the only one that mattered in the end.”
Gabriel felt the need to sit, but still couldn’t move. He tried to picture his father as a boy, as a young man back in Ireland before the nuclear devastation had blackened that once emerald Isle. He’d watched the history holos over and over, secretly searching the running, confused, screaming crowds for a face like his own. He’d distanced himself from the Steaders, but if his father had lived… He couldn’t see where that path would have led him, but he would have liked to have had the choice. For the first time he didn’t discount that Genners and Steaders could co-exist amicably, could make it work better than it had. Maybe afterwards, the rift could be healed – if there was going to be an afterwards.
Jennifer continued. “Ramires probably knew more about him as a man than I did, even though he didn’t know him personally – I thought he’d been killed in the first round of nuclear detonations. Apparently, he was the perfect assassin, no ego, played the double agent for the Alicians for years before Sister Esma unmasked him. He died fighting to save us.”
Gabriel had heard it said before, but this time, hearing it from family, from someone that actually knew his father, made it resonate. It firmed his purpose. But he guessed there was little time, and that this wasn’t purely a social call.
“You want me to do something, don’t you?”
Jennifer’s voice steeled. “The Hohash is taking you directly to the Crucible Bridge. Sister Esma is about to launch an attack on Esperia. There are only seconds remaining in real time. As soon as you arrive …”
“I’ll take my finger off the switch.”
Again a pause. “Don’t let her talk to you or anything, just –”
“Once I see her, I will kill her.” He wished he could turn around. He’d seen a holo-record of Jennifer, but wondered what she looked like now. He tried to push such questions aside, to stay focused on the task – to be like his father would have been. Besides, there was something else he wanted to know.
“Jennifer, why is this important to the Kalarash?” He heard a low, grinding noise in the background; Jennifer wasn’t alone.
“The spiders, they are important in the war against Qorall, though I don’t yet know how; Kalaran won’t tell me.”
“Can they defeat Qorall? Can… can we win this time?”
During the unwanted pause, he recalled the latent taste of defeat inherited by all Genners, the feeling of inadequacy and its allied need to prove themselves. It wasn’t even about revenge or justice. They just needed to stand up and fight, to make their mark; to achieve some victory, even if a small one. Gabriel almost laughed – how human.
“Maybe,” she said. “At least we have a shot.”
He relaxed a little. “And us… humanity? Do we figure in the Kalarash plans?”
“Definitely,” she said, in a drawn out way. “But it’s hard to –”
“That’s all I need to know, Jennifer.” That what I’m dying for is worth something, not just delaying the inevitable. If the Kalarash have a stake in humanity, for whatever reason, then we have a chance. Like his father, he’d found his cause.
“I wish…” her voice cracked.
“Me too,” he said, feeling closer to this woman he’d never met, never seen, than most people back on Esperia. But he didn’t want to die in a maudlin state.
“Where are you?”
She sniffed, clearing her throat again. “Just inside the galaxy, trying to get back. Qorall figured out where our entrance portal was – we think via Louise’s Hohash, which she coerced in some way – and sent an armada of dark worms to block us. We broke through, but they’ve slowed us down.”
The mercurial surfaces began to flicker. Time was running out.
“Must this Hohash be destroyed as well? They’re not just artifacts are they?”
There was that noise again on her side of the mirror, like a distant rumbling.
“That Hohash is almost depleted, and it needs to be there because I’ve demanded a favour from Kalaran.”
Gabriel wondered how a human could demand anything from a Level Nineteen being. “A favour?”
“Yes. You see, I –” her voice cracked.
A deeper baritone voice spoke. “She cannot bear to see you die, Gabriel. Not again, like your father.”
The accent was strange. He recalled a conversation once with his mother about two men reportedly with Jennifer on the ship – Dimitri, her Greek lover, and Rashid, an Indistani. But the man spoke with tenderness; Dimitri then.
“We must all die,” Gabriel said, “and I am riddled with gamma ray damage. I will collapse within minutes once I come out of transit.” He wasn’t sure where this was going. Having accepted his death, and that it had meaning, he wanted to get on with it, fulfil his and his father’s mission to kill the Alician High Priestess. That was enough. Anger simmered at this pointless exchange. The quicksilver surfaces shivered.
Jennifer spoke again, her composure restored. “Even now, the Hohash is scanning you in ways you can’t imagine. At the point of death, in the nanoseconds before you are obliterated, the Hohash will transmit your personality string to our ship’s Hohash. Kalaran can restore you… after a fashion.”
Gabriel didn’t like the sound of it. “Like a Transpar,” he said, flat.
“No, much more than that, Gabriel.”
The mercury was evaporating fast from the hatch door, the white metal surface peering through. Gabriel simultaneously wondered just how much time had been slowed down, and if what she was suggesting was possible.
“Gabriel,” she said, “what do you say?”
“You mean I have a choice?”
“Of course! But please say yes.”
The pain in her voice touched him – and he reminded himself she was family, a concept he’d never fully grasped before. He figured his father would want him to try, for her sake. “Okay, Jennifer, but only after Sister Esma is dead.” The last traces of mercury shrank into vanishing puddles. “Look after her, Dimitri.”
She sniffed again. “Good–”
Gabriel and the Hohash materialised silently onto the Crucible’s bridge, the skeletal outline of the craft around them appearing
like lines of shadow before the Hohash vehicle disappeared back into Transpace. Two women were before him, five metres away, one standing at a console, the other sitting with her back to him in a command chair – she had a claw where her left arm should be, and was tapping in time to an audio countdown: “Thirty-seven, thirty-six...”
“Sister Esma,” he said.
The two women spun around, and Gabriel removed his finger from the deadman switch. Nothing happened. The thought-stream flashed through his mind: intelligent weapon – knows it has been violated – it is refusing to detonate. The woman at the console reached for her pistol. Gabriel dropped down to a crouch and flung the studded metal ball at her. It caught her chin with its full force, snapping a vertebra in her neck. She crashed backwards onto the ground.
The claw-arm woman – he presumed it was Sister Esma, had not moved.
“Gabriel?” she said, a sneer spreading across her lips. “Ah, his son! Come to watch mankind snuffed out again?”
Gabriel’s right arm was useless, so he reached across his body for his right-holstered pulse pistol with his left hand, just as she shot at his chest. The impact of the pulse round lifted him clean off the ground, slamming him back into another console. He ended up on the floor, coughing blood, struggling to breathe. His arm had been in the way of the pulse round and so had protected his heart from its electrical discharge, but that arm was now dead too, and enough damage had been done to his nervous system for him to know he was finished.
She walked over and towered above him.
“Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen,” the countdown continued.
Gabriel choked on some blood, tried to sit up, but her heel pushed his barbecued chest down. “You have failed, as your father did before you. Stay there; just a few seconds longer.”
Sister Esma swivelled and walked over to what Gabriel assumed was the tactical console, shoving the other woman’s body away with her boot.