by M. R. Forbes
Isolation
Forgotten Vengeance, Book Two
M.R. Forbes
Published by Quirky Algorithms
Seattle, Washington
This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by M.R. Forbes
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Geronimo Ribaya
geronimoribaya.com
1
Aeron
The small transport slowed to a stop at the foot of the Proxima Civilian Council building. The center was in the Government District located in the massive hold of the generation starship Dove. The hold had once been home to an entire city with a population of nearly forty-thousand. Today, in a condensed square of splits and strands surrounded by greenery, it served as the seat of the planetary government. Below the sprawl were the atmospheric generators that produced relatively close approximations of weather patterns as they appeared on Earth.
General Aeron Haeri didn’t wait for the valet to make it to his transport before pushing the door open and climbing out. He made eye contact with the young man as they crossed paths.
“Always be ready,” he said, offering the advice that might prevent the valet from missing his next tip as well. Traffic inside the district was limited to VIPs, so the opportunities were typically few and far between.
Not today. Today, the valet would have at least a half-dozen more chances, and maybe more. The Civilian Council had called an emergency meeting to discuss the recent attack on the government center, an attack that had left a number of security personnel dead and the entire district on high alert.
An attack that he had helped stop.
But also helped create.
Aeron glanced up at the false sky. Overcast, with dark, heavy clouds keeping the ambient lighting dim. It seemed suitable.
Events had spiraled out of hand more quickly than he had guessed they would, the interference of someone from outside the Organization not unexpected, but also not welcomed. He had sent Rico and Bennett in as prepared as he could’ve, and they had succeeded in getting Isaac out alive and making it off the planet.
But not without paying a heavy price.
He had been forced to show his hand, to incapacitate an entire squad of his own Centurions and push a hack through the planetary defense systems. These were measures that had prevented them from blasting Able, Rico, Isaac and the other members of his Black Ops team from the sky. The job had been rushed, leaving digital arteries open and bleeding information that would lead to his contact.
And that contact would lead to him.
Aeron deftly pulled his Oracle from his pocket as he approached the Council building, refocusing on the small piece of glass that now covered his left eye. He squinted to scroll through an overlay of news that appeared ahead of the steps in front of him, quickly scanning for anything of note. A further round of eye controls brought him to his private messages, and he scanned them quickly too, ensuring there were no fires to put out before he entered.
Satisfied to find nothing pending, he removed the Oracle from his face and tucked it away again. A pair of glass doors slid open ahead of him, revealing the well-appointed lobby beyond. It had as many Centurions standing guard in it as it did politicians, and they straightened noticeably when they saw him coming.
They wouldn’t for much longer. After all these years, the first support had slipped from his house of cards, and soon enough the entire thing would topple. He had played every side for nearly two decades, and sworn his allegiance to the Organization long before that. From the day he had stumbled across the hidden partition on one of Praeton’s many data servers and learned the truth about the invasion of Earth, he had worked tirelessly to protect humankind—all of humankind—from the constant threat their alien enemies posed.
It was still difficult for him to think of the Relyeh and the Axon as enemies, even after all this time. Not because they weren’t on opposite sides, but because the two races were so much further ahead of humans in terms of science and technology. They were far, far superior.
And yet, they were flawed.
In some ways, their intelligence and superiority became weaknesses. They were both accustomed to mastering every challenge, and the stalemate of their conflict had created cracks in both facades. Cracks too small for them to notice, but just big enough for humanity to begin to slip through. Even today, they treated humans like a footnote on their war. Earth was an important strategic planet for both, but neither one was willing to commit the resources to take it resoundingly. They preferred subterfuge and manipulation, and while at first Aeron believed the strategy was nonsense, over time he had come to appreciate the nuances. The two alien races were learning a lot about one another from their secret skirmishes on Earth and were no doubt applying that data to their war efforts.
What they didn’t realize was that humankind was learning a lot too and were taking the opportunity to broaden those cracks. Potentially filling in that middle ground of intellect to outsmart the two advanced cultures using the greatest strengths of their kind. While the Relyeh were driven by an endless need to conquer and feed and the Axon were motivated by logic and algorithms, humans still operated on a more basic level. Self-preservation. Emotion. It was their weakness.
And also their strength.
He needed that strength now more than ever. Twenty years of his own forms of manipulation and deception were about to come to an end. He had done his best to prepare both Earth and Proxima for the gathering storm while keeping all of those preparations hidden within the confines of his position and the laws of the Civilian Council. Of course, he had circumvented many of them. And broken many more.
But it wasn’t illegal until you got caught. And he would be caught. If not today, then tomorrow. Or a week from now.
If he made it that long. It was only a matter of time.
The assassins who had nearly killed Isaac were clones, but none of them were in the registry. They were illegal duplicates. A dangerous development he had quickly swept under the rug. It wasn’t enough to prevent exposing the Organization to the light of day. If the enemy was on Proxima and had decided to come out of hiding, the truth of the situation could tear down everything the original settlers had worked so hard to build.
“General Haeri.”
Aeron’s eyes shifted toward the speaker, a middle-aged woman in a knee-length dress, conservatively cut around her petite frame. His mind dropped one more bomb on him before he came completely out of it.
The house of cards wasn’t entirely his. The first settlers had built it when they chose to hide the past. To abandon Earth and bury the truth. To pretend they had come here to escape persecution and not because aliens had overrun the planet. To the average Proxima civilian, hell, to the average Centurion Marine, there was no such thing as aliens, and thousands of sorties into the universe surrounding the planet had proven as much.
Only now a Relyeh starship was coming, on a direct course for Earth with a near-miss of Proxima in approximately twenty-six hours. Once the ship went past, the truth would be impossible to hide or ignore.
And the Council still had no idea.
“Yes?” Aeron replied.
“I’m Special Judicus Love.” She put out her hand. “I don’t believe we’ve ever been formally introduced.”
“Love,” Aeron said. “I’ve heard of you.” He took her hand, holding it while he continued. “You report directly to the Chair, instead of to me.”
“I do,” she replied with a smirk. She didn’t try to pull her hand away. “Chair
LaMont wanted me to intercept you for a brief conversation ahead of the Council meeting.”
Aeron locked eyes with her, searching for a hint of discomfort or dishonesty. He didn’t find any, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It just meant she was good at hiding it. No surprise there. The Judicus were highly trained and specialized law enforcement personnel. The fact that Love was the first to greet him served as his first warning that the next few hours would play out reasonably close to his assumptions.
The only question was whether he would be alive by the end of it.
“Lead the way,” he said.
2
Aeron
Special Judicus Love led Aeron through an unmarked door at the side of the lobby and into a small atrium. She turned to a door on her right and swiped her wrist over the control pad, the door unlocking in response. She pushed it open, bringing him into a short, sterile white corridor leading to a hidden lift in the corner of the building.
The door closed behind them as soon as they entered, the LEDs along the ceiling dimming and turning a soft red. None of it bothered Aeron. He had been through the area before. Sensors in the room would scan him for contraband. Weapons. Poisons. Anything that could potentially be used to harm the Chair of the Civilian Council. He had always thought it was a strange setup. Since the founding of Praeton, there had never been a single assassination attempt on a sitting Chair.
And if the people ever discovered the massive, centuries-long cover-up of hostile aliens, it would take a lot more than this scanner to keep the Chair or anyone else on the Council alive for long.
Telling a lie was easy. Maintaining it was the hard part.
“You aren’t armed?” Aeron asked as they crossed the corridor, the sensors revealing their findings not only to the guards sitting on the other side of the wall but to the people they were scanning as well.
“I didn’t think there was a need,” Judicus Love replied. “You’re the closest thing we have to a war hero. If we can’t trust you, who can we trust?”
Aeron smiled. Was her choice of words intentional? “It’s hard to have true war heroes without war, isn’t it?”
“It’s hard to have a war without an enemy.”
“And yet we have the Centurions, and we train them to fight.”
“Always be ready,” Love said, using his earlier words against him. Had she heard him say it to the valet? She hadn’t been standing close by.
The sensors didn’t capture anything threatening, which allowed the lift doors to open by the time they reached them. Aeron and Judicus Love stepped into the cab. Love scanned her id over the control pad and tapped to take them to the fortieth level, the building’s top floor.
“I have to admit,” Judicus Love said. “I’m a bit of a fangirl. I’ve read all of your reports.”
“All of them?” Aeron replied.
She half-winked in response. “Yes.”
Aeron knew everyone in the Organization, but he didn’t know every member of the Trust. The members kept a web of secrecy around their identities by design. She was suggesting she was part of that web, and that she knew he was too.
Then again, he had figured as much. He had long suspected Chair LaMont as one of the Trust’s biggest supporters. The Chair wouldn’t want to have to choose his words too carefully whenever a Judicus was around.
“I see,” he replied. “And I have your support?”
“As long as your goals align with the needs of Proxima and Chair LaMont.”
Aeron nodded. The goals of the Organization were in line with those needs by default. But not everyone would see it that way. He didn’t know where LaMont stood. He was about to find out.
The lift reached the top floor, the doors opening into a large marble foyer. The walls were crowded with old paintings, some of which had been priceless before the invasion. Most of the artwork the settlers had brought with them was in the museum further forward in the ship, but some remained with the Council, out of sight of the general public.
“This way,” Love said, leading him from the foyer into a large, open living space. Aeron wasn’t surprised LaMont was meeting him in his apartment, rather than his offices closer to the base of the building. The public offices were all monitored. Whatever was said up here would remain up here.
Theoretically, anyway.
Chair LaMont was an older man, bald and overweight, with a small nose, big smile, and kind eyes that didn’t reflect any of his thoughts. He was sitting in an old leather recliner, seat back and feet up when Judicus Love and Aeron entered. Deciding not to get to his feet, he pushed the chair into an upright position and assumed what appeared to be a relaxed position, one elbow resting on the arm of the chair. The white collared shirt beneath his gray council uniform was unbuttoned to give his paunch more room to breathe.
“Aeron,” he said with a laugh. “Good of you to show up so late. We only have a few minutes before the Council meeting.”
“Then you should cut to the meat,” Aeron replied.
“Never one to waste words. I admire that. Fine. Short version. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The vitriol behind the statement almost caught Aeron off-guard. Almost. He reacted calmly. “Do you care to elaborate, Francois?”
“Elaborate? You know what I mean. Sergeant Pine. Special Officer Rodriguez. The Capricorn.”
“I tried to stop them.”
“Bullshit. You helped them escape. Don’t try to deny it. My people have already traced it back to you.”
“That was faster than I anticipated,” Aeron admitted.
LaMont laughed. “You aren’t the only competent person on Proxima, though it feels like you are sometimes. I’ll ask again. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Pine had a wealth of intel, and you sent him packing without getting any of it. How does that help Proxima? How does that help the Trust?”
“I didn’t use Pine for what Pine knew. I used him for what he could bring us.”
“Which is?”
“Sheriff Duke.”
“You have this weird fascination with that Earth savage. I don’t understand it.”
“He isn’t a savage. He came off a ship.”
“We have three minutes. Don’t stall with semantics.”
“I’ve been General of the Centurion Space Force for twenty years,” Aeron said. “I have access to intel you don’t even know exists. Intel I’m prepared to share with the Council.”
“I know you do. That’s why you’re here.”
Aeron’s eyebrows raised slightly. LaMont pushed himself to his feet.
“That’s right. I know all about the alien spacecraft headed our way. And I know what’s going to happen to this planet when the population realizes we aren’t alone out here. If we handle it the wrong way, there will be riots in the streets. We have to be very careful about what we reveal, how we reveal it, and when we reveal it.” He paused. “Or if we reveal it at all.”
“You want me to stay silent?”
“No. I want you to address the issue that led to a meeting in the first place. How did a few rogue Centurions manage to take Sergeant Pine and steal a starship on your watch? And where do they think they’re going? I can help protect you, but you need to have all the answers.”
“My answer is the truth. We can’t hide it anymore. I’m sure you saw the recording of my interview with Ike. The look on his face when I turned on him. We’ve tried to deny this war for as long as I’ve been alive. To pretend it doesn’t exist at the same time we try to fight it. Nobody will be able to ignore that alien ship, especially if it slows at all.”
“That answer isn’t acceptable. The Council needs to be as surprised by the ship as the civilians are, or they’ll know we already knew. They’ll want more than answers. They’ll want our heads.”
“Rightfully.”
“Not your decision, General. That’s why I called you up here. Whatever you were going to say, stuff it. Answer the questions as the Council asks them and then
quietly take your seat.”
Aeron stared at LaMont. He wasn’t surprised by the request. Anyone who knew about the Relyeh ship was bound to be afraid, regardless of their reasons. But was there more to it than that?
“What do you know about the unregistered clones?” he asked.
“I know to keep my mouth shut. Nothing has to change here, Aeron. I have assurances that Proxima will remain a free planet.”
“Assurances from whom?”
“It doesn’t matter. We can keep things the way they are. Nothing changes. Life on Proxima goes on the way it always has.”
“What about the ship?”
“The ship will be a flash in the sky. We tell the people a comet’s going to pass and we call it a day. They won’t question it unless someone gives them reason to question it.”
“And what about Earth?”
“Earth is on their own, the same way they’ve been for the last two hundred years. We can’t stop what’s coming to them, and neither can they. We need to look out for ourselves. It’s bad enough you sent SO Rodriguez to warn them. It won’t make a difference to the outcome, and it got us involved. It isn’t like you to make such a reckless mistake.” He paused, staring up at Aeron. “Unless it wasn’t a mistake?”
“The Relyeh aren’t our allies, Francois. Neither are the Axon. Whatever deal you made, whoever you made it with, it’s a lie as bad as the one we keep feeding to the people.”
“The Trust is decided on this. Keep your mouth shut about the ship and I can save your life. And your career.”
Aeron was silent. His heart beat calmly despite the pressure LaMont was putting him under. None of this was outside the boundaries of what he thought might happen.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I value humans, all humans, more than I value my life.”
“That’s a shame,” LaMont replied. “Judicus?”