by Richard Fox
“Jimmy, I think there’s a bomb somewhere on the Crucible. Find it.”
“My available cognition is focused on saving Stacey and maintaining the field that keeps the Xaros out of our solar system. You have hands. Use them.”
“Right. Forgot.” Ibarra went to a workstation and swiped his hands through the holo field. He accessed systems slowly; he was used to simply willing the information to himself while he was part and parcel of the Qa’Resh probe.
Ibarra looked to his granddaughter, caught so close to death within the stasis chamber. A wavering ribbon of energy connected the probe to the ice-cold simulacrum standing nearby.
“Focus, Marc, focus,” Ibarra said to himself as he scanned through station logs, flicking reports up around the holo field. “Jimmy, we made sure Shannon’s personality matrix was utterly loyal to me and Stacey. What…one of them just did should’ve been impossible. The other kept to her conditioning.”
“Your reasoning is sound,” the probe said. “I am unable to assist with a deeper analysis during the transfer.”
Ibarra swiped his hands through the holo field and tapped the icon for the procedural-generation crèche aboard the Crucible. Data scrolled through the field.
“The last Shannon to come off the line had her behavior conditioning altered…just before we took the station back from the Naroosha.” Ibarra highlighted segments of text and opened a new search query. Profiles popped out of the Crucible’s crèche file, each with red bands of text within their procedural-generation report.
“They’ve all been altered,” Ibarra said. The holo field filled with an avalanche of profiles as they spawned from the crèche. “Every single proccie out of those tubes is compromised.” Ibarra stepped away from the holo field, his hands balled in fists against his waist.
“Examine the other crèches,” the probe said.
Ibarra stepped forward and pulled up the fifty different procedural-generation facilities across the planet. “No…,” he said, “can’t be…”
Compromised profiles by the tens of thousands came up. Ibarra accessed the data from Mars and the outlying planets; that data returned clean.
“She’s been busy,” Ibarra said. “We worked hard, Jimmy, so hard to convince everyone that the proccies were safe. That something like this could never happen. Now we’ve got an insurrection just waiting in the wings.”
“The transfer is nearly complete. Do you have a suggestion to deal with those compromised by the Naroosha?”
“They’re a cancer. We must cut them out before they infect and destroy everything,” Ibarra said.
Stacey’s simulacrum let out a gasp. Her hand shot up, mirroring the gesture of the body frozen in the stasis chamber.
“Grand—” Stacey pulled her hand close to her face, looking over the frost along the gray metal of her fingers. Her head snapped to the stasis chamber. “No…I can’t stay like this.”
Ibarra closed the holo with a flick of a wrist and went to her. He put his hands over her shoulders and she recoiled slightly.
“Wait, how’re you…you stole Pa’lon’s body?”
“You were dying. Options were limited. It’s not like he wants it back.”
“Your body is seconds from death,” the probe said. “Its condition remains stable so long as it remains in stasis.”
“You mean I’m trapped like this?” she asked.
“I’ll get you out of there, Stacey. I promise. But right now we’ve got a serious problem to deal with.” Ibarra went back to the workstation.
“Why the hell are there two Aunt Shannons? Why did one shoot me?” Stacey grabbed the curtain off the floor and draped it over the dead women. “There aren’t any more, are there?”
“Stacey,” Ibarra said, “this day is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We have to find a bomb and then you need to get to Admiral Garret’s conference before you lose any and all plausible deniability for what’s going to come next.”
Chapter 7
The Engineer existed within the Crucible network, his consciousness spread across the thousands upon thousands of gates connecting the many stars with habitable worlds and locations of archeological interest within Xaros-controlled space. He adjusted the quantum space between the gates, compensating for gravity tides and stellar events straining the connections.
The gates could compensate for the discrepancies on their own, but the Engineer took pleasure in perfecting his work. He sent an update for the entire network, increasing the overall efficiency by several tenths of a percentage.
He extricated himself from the network and was about to leave the Crucible in the system with the much larger and single-purpose gate connecting to the Apex…and felt something out of place in his near-perfect creation. A subtle fluctuation traveled through the network seemingly at random, a fluctuation resonating with the quantum state of omnium.
Rage coursed through the Engineer. That another being could meddle in his sanctuary appalled him to the core. He readied an energy pulse that would burn out the offending message…then hesitated. Who, aside from Xaros, could trespass here? The Engineer sent out his own fluctuation, an inverse wave that cancelled out the anomaly, answering the signal with his own.
A new fluctuation appeared, this one in the language of a long-dead civilization. A ripple of excitement coursed through the Crucible network as the Engineer responded to Malal.
****
Hale squeezed past a huddle of naval officers to the back of the auditorium aboard the Constantine. His shuttle had been en route to the Crucible for this briefing when the location was changed due to “scheduling conflicts”—according to the announcement that directed them to Admiral Garret’s flag ship.
How someone could screw up when and where to have a meeting with the senior-most members of the military and other leadership figures nagged at Hale, but at least he knew where he—a junior Marine captain—was supposed to sit: as far toward the back of the room as possible.
Steuben towered over a section of mostly vacant seats in the back two rows and gave Hale a slight nod as he arrived. Lieutenants Jacobs, Bronx, Matthias and First Sergeant Cortaro rose to their feet when they saw Hale.
“Sir, you have some idea what’s in store for us?” Jacobs asked. “I thought we’d overhear something but everyone’s too scared of the XO to come close.”
“You asked me to secure seats,” Steuben said. “One ship’s officer asked me for a ‘selfie.’ I ate her data slate. No one has approached our position since then.”
“He did,” Cortaro said. “I don’t think he even chewed it.”
“Steuben, do I really have to ask you not to eat things like that?” Hale pressed fingers against his temples as a headache formed.
“You will note the many available seats,” Steuben said.
“Any word why we had to come to the Constantine?” Bronx asked. “I kind of wanted to see the Crucible while not being shot at.”
“None. I want you all to listen for the implied tasks of this mission. We have to do a HOLO jump then be thinking about…” A shiver passed through Hale as the air temperature suddenly plummeted. His breath formed into fog.
“Ken?” came from behind.
He turned and found Stacey Ibarra and a Ranger with an opaque facemask standing behind her. Stacey wore a standard void-ship uniform, coveralls and a thin vac suit bereft of markings, but her pale gray skin and still eyes made Hale uneasy.
“Stacey? I’m not surprised you’ve got a part in this,” Hale said. He took a hesitant half step backward.
“Yeah, this…” she said, touching her porcelain-smooth skin, “this is kind of how the others know me. I’ll be back to normal. Soon. Hopefully. I just wanted to thank you in advance for coming along. I know diplomatic missions aren’t really your thing.”
“Wait…why am I going on a diplomatic mission?” Hale asked.
“Is it the Toth?” Steuben let out a panther-like growl.
“No, not them.” She glanced at the
Ranger behind her.
“Who’s this?” Hale asked.
“Oh, my new…new bodyguard! Grandfather insisted. This is C-Cletus. Yes, Cletus.”
A murmur spread through the conference room as a pair of armed Marines stepped into the room. A tall Ruhaald followed and adrenaline dumped into Hale’s bloodstream. The markings on the alien’s armor depicted an unknown solar system carved into the chest plate. It wasn’t a match for the armor of the Ruhaald that had killed so many doughboys in the desert outside Phoenix, one by the name of Tuk.
If Tuk had walked through the door, Hale would have taken a weapon from one of the guards and shot that alien in the head. Tuk had led an extermination against the bio-constructs to satisfy some sort of blood debt, killing many Marines as well as doughboys in the process. Hale’s insistence that the Ruhaald be held responsible for war crimes had fallen on deaf ears.
“There’s Septon Jarilla,” Stacey said. “We’re about to start. I’ll see you…soon.” She reached out and tapped Hale on the arm, her touch bringing a bite of cold with it. She and Cletus made their way to the front of the auditorium.
“Hale, there was something wrong with the Ranger,” Steuben said. “He had no scent. Neither did she.”
Hale rubbed his arm and sat down.
“Somehow I doubt that’s the last oddity we’ll encounter today.”
****
Stacey kept her back to the wall just off to the stand of flags near the front of the auditorium. The political entities represented by the flags no longer existed, but the sailors aboard the Constantine—and every other ship—clung to tradition. She could have sat in one of the front-row seats with the rest of the senior staff officers, but her body’s cold aura had a noticeable effect on those around her. Her first attempt at a suit meant to insulate against the temperature difference had failed miserably.
Now she stood in front of nearly a hundred people, their eyes darting between her and the Ruhaald officer on the other side of the room. The mood was upbeat, almost excited. She understood: surviving the Xaros attack and wresting control of Earth back from traitorous hands deserved a celebration. Too bad their joy would be short-lived.
Did they know what she was? What kind of rumors would spread after enough people got a look at the perfect doll she’d become? She’d grown up the only heir of the richest man in human history. The nagging suspicion that people never looked at her, only at the mountain of baggage that came with her lineage, had plagued her since childhood.
Now…
“Look at them,” her bodyguard said through her earpiece. “So full of hope. I almost regret bursting their bubble.”
Stacey swiped a thumb over the throat mic on her suit to open a channel to the black-clad soldier and spoke softly. “We don’t have a choice. Do we? Wait…I thought Jimmy was going to give the bad news.”
“It’ll be me, as far as they know,” Ibarra said. “All the blame will fall on ghost me, which is fine. I’ve been a scapegoat since the fleet returned to Earth and found the place scoured clean of nearly every trace of human existence. Just keep up the ruse that I’m your bodyguard for a bit longer. If folks realize I’ve actually got an ass to kick, I might find myself thrown out of the nearest air lock. And ‘Cletus’? Really?”
“I panicked. Shut up.”
The room snapped to attention as Admiral Garret entered. The man looked like he’d aged a decade in the past weeks. The stress of coordinating an entire solar system against the Xaros attack while overdosing on stimulants had finally broken the man. A few days of forced bed rest and a regimen of nervous-system depressants had brought him back to normal. Whether his pride had recovered from the fact that Captain Valdar led the effort that saved Earth from the Ruhaald and Naroosha remained to be seen.
“Be seated.” Garret took a stylus off his sleeve and stretched it into a pointer. “First, I must thank you all for your heroic efforts. We have survived because of you. The same Xaros that murdered billions have been beaten by us not once, but twice. Lives were lost. Ships destroyed, but the human spirit endured. As much as I’d like for us to take a well-deserved rest and appreciate the victory…we don’t have that luxury.”
A chill fell over the room as the implication of Garret’s last words hit home. The lights darkened and a holo projector came to life.
“Here we go,” Ibarra said.
“You worried?” she asked.
“You barely know Jimmy. Think after a few decades of working together he can’t do a good impersonation?”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“You barely know Jimmy.”
A hologram of Marc Ibarra appeared behind a podium. A scale model of the solar system stretching out to the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud came up next to him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, in the past hours the Crucible detected a number of quantum events out beyond the heliopause,” the hologram said. Six ruby-red points appeared along the ecliptic solar system’s plane. “The energy signature is consistent with wormhole gates. Telescopes captured these images.”
Screens popped up over the hologram’s head, each showing a white plane of energy over the backdrop of deep space. Tiny black specks flooded out of the wormholes, Xaros drones coming through by the tens of thousands each second.
Stacey watched as the once-confident faces of those assembled fell to reveal fear, or shifted into the expressionless mask of command used to hide any and all emotion.
“The drones arrive with very little velocity,” the Ibarra hologram said. “Given their documented acceleration rates, I estimate it will take forty-nine weeks before the drones breach Pluto’s orbit. Earth, days after that.”
“Can we shut down the gates?” came from the audience.
“If I alter the Crucible’s disruption field, it will leave us vulnerable to a closer incursion,” the hologram said. “We cannot stop the Xaros from here. We can slow them down with graviton mines…those are already factored into the timeline.”
“They’ll never stop,” Captain Valdar said from the first row. “The Xaros will flood the system unless we find a way to cut them off at the source.”
“You tell him to say that?” Ibarra asked Stacey.
“Not everything is theater. Shut up,” she hissed at him.
“That is our current assessment,” the hologram said. Murmurs spread through the crowd.
Garret rapped his pointer against the side of the podium and the room fell silent.
“We are here for two reasons,” Garret said loudly. “The first is to prepare for the evacuation of the solar system.”
Stacey expected an uproar of defiance, outrage. The room stayed dead silent.
“We cannot defeat an enemy without number,” Garret said. “Even with the procedural-generation facilities and automated fleet yards running at full capacity, the Xaros will either bleed us white through attrition or bury us beneath a flood of drones. We must save what we can.”
Garret began outlining changes to ship construction and screening criteria for those who would—and would not—be selected for the outbound fleet.
“It doesn’t matter,” Stacey said to Ibarra. “The Xaros can open a wormhole to anywhere in the galaxy they want. We can run but we can’t hide.”
“Torni says the Xaros are reluctant to use wormholes outside their Crucible network,” Ibarra said. “They destroyed their home when a wormhole created a quantum fissure that annihilated all the matter in their galaxy. For them to take the risk of attacking Bastion and now here…it means they’re desperate.”
“So are we.” Stacey squared her shoulders and cleared her throat as Garret gave her a quick glance. “Wish me luck.”
“More details will come out as available,” Garret said to his stunned audience, “but tell your command that there is hope. The second reason for this conference is to lay out a plan that can end this war once and for all. Ms. Ibarra?”
Stacey went to the podium and grabbed the side with both hands. She hoped the darkene
d room would hide the truth of her appearance as she tapped a small screen on the podium.
A map of the galaxy appeared next to her. Thousands of tiny red dots filled four-fifths of the star field; the remaining slice held the portion of the galaxy that the Xaros had yet to conquer.
“What you see are the known Crucible gates across the galaxy,” she said. “Only one is under our control, and once it is complete, it can tap into the entire network. Malal, a…technical expert, has managed to tap into the network and detected command directives that came through the noise of normal drone operations. The drones within star systems that have a Crucible send an enormous amount of data to each other and—through a light-speed-based broadcast system—to the maniples moving through free space. It’s all automated and—”
Garret cleared his throat.
“Yes, my point. Here are the command directives.” A jagged line bounced from a Crucible just at the edge of occupied space back to the far end of the galaxy. Another line began several hundred light-years from the first and traced back to the same star where the first message ended. A dozen more lines appeared, all taking different paths across the galaxy but either beginning or terminating in the same place.
Stacey flicked her fingers in the star field and the image zoomed in on a red dot on the very edge of the galaxy.
“This is Sletari, the first world to fall to the Xaros many thousands of years ago,” she said. “This is the first Crucible gate they ever created, a place known as the Apex.”
The galaxy shrank and a pulsing red dot appeared within the void beyond the Milky Way galaxy.
“While Sergeant Torni was a prisoner of war, she learned of the Apex’s existence and that it houses nearly the entirety of the Xaros leadership. Most are in stasis. One of their leader caste was destroyed on Earth. At least one more is active and directing the war against us.” Stacey shoulders drooped. “As for what the Apex is…”
The holo zoomed in on the pulsing red dot and a many-sided polyhedron made of pearlescent crystal came into view. A yellow dot a mere fraction of the size appeared next to it. A label next to the dot read THE SUN.