The Xaros Reckoning (The Ember War Saga Book 9)

by Richard Fox

  “And he didn’t take our standard ‘keep quiet or else’ spiel to heart?” Ibarra asked.

  “He saw right through me. Swore he’d expose the whole conspiracy, yadda yadda, tinfoil hat, etcetera,” she said.

  “I hate it when the conspiracy theorists are right. We need the Ruhaald for what comes next. Why didn’t you just liquidate him then and there?” Ibarra asked.

  “Jesus, Grandpa,” Stacey said, crossing her arms over her chest, “do you always murder people who get in the way of your plans?”

  “Not always. Bribes. Gaslighting. Sudden real or manufactured revelations of deviant conduct. Killing is a last resort, but if Shannon’s here, then the situation is more complicated than she’s let on.”

  “Howlett has incriminating evidence squirrelled away online and hinted at a number of dead-man switches,” Shannon said. “I need you to wipe it before I close his file.”

  “You mean murder him,” Stacey said.

  “My dear,” Ibarra said as he clasped his hands behind his back and walked around the holo tank, “the Ruhaald fleet sits at void anchor many thousands of miles away from Earth. Macro cannons on Ceres and Luna are trained on them, ready to blow them into chum if they so much as move without our permission. We’ve got them at our mercy. It’s bad enough that lives were lost both when they turned on us and during their little…biological incident with the doughboys. If the general public learns they tried to nuke us, the little people will start screaming for blood, trials, all manner of distractions that we don’t need right now. So if I send Shannon to nip this problem in the bud, I won’t lose any sleep.”

  “Why can’t we resolve issues with a bit of openness? That man holds the truth. Why stifle it?” Stacy asked.

  “High-minded ideas and honor work until they don’t. Ask Caesar. You saw what happened on Bastion when the Vishrakath decided the rules needn’t apply to them anymore.” Ibarra nodded to Shannon. “Take care of him. Oh, and send the Dotok over when you see them in the shuttle bay.”

  The agent gave a half smile and left the room.

  The Qa’Resh probe’s surface shifted to ocean blue and it descended slowly. The holo display vanished as the probe came to a stop.

  “The Crucible functions at 98.887% efficiency,” the probe said. “The wormhole disruption field extends to the inner Oort cloud but will not go much farther, given the many uncharted comets and dense asteroids. I will remind you of my suggestion to better map the outer solar system four years, two months and eight day—”

  “Yes, I remember.” Ibarra waved a hand in the air. “You don’t have to be right about everything.”

  “Is there a point to your bickering?” Stacey asked.

  “Assuming the Xaros do not have a way to overcome the disruption field, the Crucible will be fully assembled and operational within three days,” the probe said. “We will be able to access the entire Xaros gate network.”

  “If Malal’s codex can deliver,” Stacey said.

  “He’s already had some success. More on that later,” Ibarra said. “Jimmy, are you ready?”

  The probe floated toward a waist-high plinth in the center of the room. A ring of light broke around the base as the plinth rose into the air. Bright clouds of steam spat from the base, forming into a thin fog. A clear cylinder came up beneath the plinth. Ibarra made out a silhouette of a woman within the cylinder.

  He walked through the fog and stopped a few steps from the tube containing his granddaughter’s true body. Stacey’s eyes were closed, her form perfectly still.

  “What…” said the Stacey inside the simulacrum body from behind Ibarra. “What did you do to me?”

  Ibarra turned around. Fog coalesced into snow and fell around the feet of Stacey’s simulacrum. Her perfect doll face held firm as a sculpture. Even without seeing emotion on her face, Ibarra knew that his granddaughter was distraught.

  “Stasis,” Ibarra said. “Your flesh and blood remained here while your consciousness went through a conduit to Bastion where a simulacrum body waited.”

  “The quantum entanglements needed to transfer so much data are fragile and time-consuming to establish,” the probe said. “Sending ambassadors to and from Bastion was the only viable solution the Qa’Resh had to coordinate the resistance to the Xaros.”

  Stacey leaned toward the cylinder, peering at herself.

  “I’m in there…and I’m out here. Which one is the real me?”

  “I’m not Confucius or Saint Augustine, Stacey. All I cared about was that it worked,” Ibarra said.

  “You cared about something?” Stacey’s face snapped toward her grandfather. “If only you’d taken the time to ever care about me. You think I grew up wanting to be your damn science experiment? Sent off to God knows where to play politics with a bunch of aliens that saw us as nothing more than a means to an end? Get me out.” Stacey thrust a finger at the probe. “Get me out of this thing right now so I can live my life like a human being.”

  “Stand still,” the probe said. A tendril of light stabbed out of the probe and into the top of Stacey’s head. Her spine straightened and her face tilted up.

  “You have her?” Ibarra asked.

  “The transfer won’t take long. Her reactions don’t conform to our models.”

  “That’s because we were going to wait a few more years before telling her the truth. Give her time to want to be effectively immortal. Realize the importance of what she did for us on Bastion. Unfortunately, the enemy had a vote.”

  “Will she cooperate with the next phase? Her presence raises the probability of success significantly.”

  Ibarra gestured at the holo tank. Video feed of the Breitenfeld’s cargo bay came up. Rows of crew members were frozen in place, enthralled by Malal’s stasis field that would keep them alive during the years it took for the ship’s jump engines to recharge in deep space. Ibarra would have thought the video was paused, were it not for Stacey walking through the ranks. She stopped in front of Hale, his mouth open in mid-command, his hand pointed at Cortaro.

  Stacey reached out and gently ran her fingers down the side of Hale’s face.

  “You will leverage her hormonal imbalance to gain her compliance?” the probe asked.

  “She has a crush on him, a crush she doesn’t know what to do with. Stacey was always shy around boys. Growing up surrounded by many armed and unfriendly bodyguards with specific instructions to dissuade any suitors didn’t help her social skills.” Ibarra dismissed the video.

  “So I’ll drop a few hints that Hale needs her. She’ll volunteer to go and then we’ll cross our fingers. Tell me, Jimmy, am I going to hell?” Ibarra asked.

  “Your concept of a positive or negative post-biological state has never been my concern,” the probe said.

  “The question might not even be valid. My body died decades ago. Maybe my soul is in the afterlife reaping what it sowed and this consciousness is all just an elaborate fake of the man it used to be.”

  “During our partnership you resisted such discussions, claiming they drove you to imbibe alcohol. Such an outcome is impossible in your current state,” the probe said as the ribbon of light flowing to Stacey’s head thinned.

  Within the cylinder, Stacey’s flesh-and-blood body awakened with a gasp. A panel slid down and Stacey stumbled out.

  “I was…was in the white abyss again,” she said. Her fingers pressed against her cheeks as her lips smacked over dry gums. “I’m thirsty. Hungry. Cramps. I never thought I’d be so happy to feel so miserable.”

  Stacey turned around and found herself face-to-face with the simulacrum body. She let out a brief scream and backed away.

  “I’ll have some food brought up,” Ibarra said.

  Stacey didn’t respond. Instead she raised a hand and hesitantly reached toward the statuesque doppelgänger. There was a slight hiss as her finger touched her other forehead. Stacey yelped in pain and snapped her hand back.

  “Why is it so cold?” she asked.

  “Th
e details of the simulacrum hosts are not available to me,” the probe said. “Please step aside.”

  The Stacey’s previous body place inside the cylinder and the dais sank back into the floor.

  “Will you destroy that…thing…for me?” Stacey asked.

  Ibarra glanced at the probe.

  “Stacey,” he said, “just because Bastion was destroyed doesn’t mean the Alliance is gone forever. There’s still a chance we could—”

  “No. I’m a real girl now. No more strings on me.”

  Light rippled up and down the probe. “The simulacrum were built to withstand degradation. Disposal is not a simple option.”

  “Toss it into the sun,” Stacey said, shaking her head from side to side. “Use it as target practice. Open a wormhole into the center of God-knows-where and maybe some alien race of anthropomorphic hamsters will find it and worship it as a deity. I don’t care. I never want to see it again. Understand?”

  A door along the outer ring opened and a pair of doughboys pushed a cylinder identical to the one beneath the dais into the room on an anti-grav sled. Frost covered the cylinder’s surface.

  Ambassador Pa’lon followed the doughboys. His simulacrum self was tall, straight backed and wearing a white tunic over brown pants with loose, wide legs. He carried a walking cane of gnarled wood but didn’t use it for support.

  “Stacey…I believe this is the first time I’ve actually met the real you,” Pa’lon said.

  “Likewise,” she said.

  “Not quite.” Pa’lon tapped the walking cane against the cylinder the doughboys had pushed down the wide steps and knocked a hunk of loose ice away. Inside was the aged version of the Dotok ambassador. Patches of white mottled the skin and quills of the alien within.

  “Your intended biological vessel is near the end of its usefulness,” the probe said. “Given the tumors present in your lungs and failing lymphatic system, you have an eighty-nine percent chance of expiration within the next six months. Heroic measures increase the rate of survival to—”

  “Cease your prattle.” Pa’lon’s thick “hair” furled in annoyance, knocking a tuft of snow loose from the ice-cold quills. “I know what this means.”

  “Pa’lon, the council of Firsts and the Dotok have stood beside us against the Xaros and the Naroosha treachery,” Ibarra said, “but you and Stacey were the first to forge our partnership. We would hate to lose you to something so mundane as old age.”

  “The council already approves of the Qa’Resh plan to end the war…or lose it in a very slow and painful fashion. The Dotok populace on Hawaii and our space-borne military will need more convincing, and I can’t do it in this…what did you call it, Stacey?”

  “A golem,” she said.

  “We Dotok may be a spacefaring civilization, but we have our foibles,” Pa’lon said. “We believe the soul and body to be in perfect unison until death. My bifurcated existence is the stuff of old stories told around the hearth to frighten children. Trying to convince any of my people looking like this would be the same as you going on TV with feathery wings and a hoop of light over your head.”

  “No, Pa’lon, the other one,” Stacey said.

  “Leather wings and horns? Red skins?”

  “That’s it.”

  “So confusing. My toddler grandchildren are terrified of me,” Pa’lon said, raising his hands in front of his chest and squeezing his fingers together with a squeak of rubbing ice, “and I can’t even hold them. I would rather die in bed surrounded by their fat, smiling faces than live forever like this.”

  “At least you two have options,” Ibarra said with a snort.

  “It will be a few more minutes before I can conduct the transfer. Your mind has significantly more information present than the younger Ibarra,” the probe said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Stacey asked.

  “That I’m old and tempered with wisdom,” Pa’lon said. “Convincing others of that is much easier when I look like a wizened sage. I never thought I’d be happy to return to this broken-down old thing.” The Dotok ambassador wiped frost off the cylinder and leaned close to his flesh-and-blood body. His beak clicked twice.

  “Ibarra,” Pa’lon said as he stood up and turned to the hologram, “there is some concern among my people regarding the Qa’Resh plan. It deals with Malal. Is putting so much trust in him wise?”

  “Like it or not,” Ibarra said, “Malal has upheld his side of the bargain—can’t say the same of our ‘allies’ on Bastion. We need him to finish construction on the Crucible and lead us to the Apex, where we can strike at the heart of the Xaros.”

  “We don’t need him,” Pa’lon said. “Torni can finish the Crucible. We have the codex Malal recovered from his vault hidden in the void between the stars. The Dotok concern deals with what comes next. Could you share why Malal is even helping us?”

  “The Xaros can open wormholes to anywhere in the galaxy,” Ibarra said. “If they aren’t sending another invasion force here through their gate on Barnard’s Star, then they could still jump in beyond our disruption bubble. Time is not on our side.”

  “You gave an answer, but not to the question I asked,” Pa’lon said.

  “I like you, Pa’lon, but you’d never make it as a human politician.” Ibarra looked at Stacey and raised an eyebrow to her. Stacey knew the price of Malal’s cooperation; she was the one that had negotiated the particulars with the ancient entity. Crossing her arms over her stomach, she looked away.

  “You’ll have to take that question up with the Qa’Resh,” Ibarra said. “Everything’s on a need-to-know basis with them, but all I need to know is that we’ve got a shot at ending this war before we all drown beneath a tidal wave of drones.”

  “So you want me to go back to my terrified people and tell them not to worry?” Pa’lon asked.

  “Fear doesn’t do any one of us any good right now,” Stacey said. “Malal only wants one thing—revenge. And we are not the target of his vendetta. Also, we have a device in his chest that will melt him down to subatomic goo if he steps out of line. So there’s that.”

  “What did you say when the Xaros and the banshees charged toward Takeni?” Ibarra asked.

  “I told them the mightiest ship in the galaxy, the Breitenfeld, was coming to save us. That humans were warriors without peer and singlehandedly beat the Xaros to save their own world,” Pa’lon said. “I may have embellished a bit about how tall you were and he size of Captain Valdar’s ship. No one has complained.”

  “Then ‘embellish’ some more,” Ibarra said. “Success needs no explanation. Defeat allows none.”

  The probe blinked several times. “Please step closer. I am ready to begin.”

  Pa’lon set the walking cane against the cylinder holding his true body.

  “One last time,” the Dotok said as he gave the glass a quick tap.

  Chapter 5

  Shannon hurried down the stairs of the small shuttle cooling beneath an overcast sky. The Phoenix spaceport serviced 24/7 traffic coming into and out of the planet’s de facto capital, but her landing pad was almost eerily silent. A steady stream of Mule and Destrier transports rumbled overhead, each flown by pilots that knew her tarmac was “no-go” terrain. When he was alive, Marc Ibarra cultivated an air of secrecy. The richest man in human history claimed—in public—that he valued privacy, while using his considerable influence—in private—to affect world events for decades on end. The reputation remained even after his consciousness took up residence in the Qa’Resh probe, which suited Shannon’s purposes quite nicely.

  She strode toward a waiting ground car, the door already open and in-engine wheels humming with energy. The car came with an auto-driver that asked no questions and had its logs altered or erased after every trip. Anonymity and deniability had served Shannon well during her decades of service to Marc Ibarra. The same perks made her mission for her Naroosha masters even easier.

  “Broadway and Gilbert,” Shannon said as she sunk into th
e leather-bound seat. The door went opaque as it slid down and shut with a thunk. The car pulled ahead with a whine of electric motors.

  This Shannon—a procedurally generated person molded off the memories and form of a long-dead woman named Shannon Martel—had awoken knowing exactly what she was and her true purpose. Previous iterations believed they were the original woman in every respect, but not this one. Why Ibarra decided to keep up that charade was of no concern to this Shannon. The Naroosha had brought her to life with a mission: deliver Earth and the proccie technology to her alien masters at any cost.

  Serving as Ibarra’s enforcer only made that mission easier. Her team of like-minded individuals, all from the same batch of proccies that came out of the crèche on the Crucible just after the Naroosha defeat, held positions across the solar system—positions of increasing importance as time went on—and Shannon provided an invisible hand to maneuver them through the solar system’s military and nascent civilian government.

  Her car zipped around traffic and breezed through intersections where the stoplights conveniently changed out of sequence to facilitate her passage. Bars of shadow swept over the cabin, cast by broken beams from the remains of a skyscraper. The Xaros attack had wrecked whole swaths of the city. With the populace safely underground, the defenders had little compulsion to prevent collateral damage. She shook her head at a collapsed munitions factory, the roof caved in like a spoiled soufflé. An armor soldier’s rail-cannon shot had torn through the entire factory and ruined the delicate machinery inside.

  Probably worth it, she thought, most of the city survived.

  Ibarra Corporation robots and work crews began reconstruction soon after the Ruhaald ships had retreated from the sky, sectioning off whole city blocks at a time. While she knew she was functionally invisible to the surveillance systems across the city, thanks to facial-recognition protocols that automatically erased signs of her passage, field-craft traits from decades of espionage still guided her. Shannon waved a hand across the windshield and brought up a map. She double-tapped a damaged building near her destination and rerouted the car to stop near a demolitions work crew.