by L S Roebuck
“Goodnight, North. I’ll see you for lunch tomorrow?”
“No, I have a date with the other psycho ex-Chasm femme fatale on this ship.”
Sparks eyes lit up. She enjoyed sarcastic smack talk with North. They looked at each other knowingly for another moment, then North left.
As he walked back to the XO quarters, North felt as broken on the inside as Sparks looked on the outside. He hadn’t been praying as much as he used to, but he wondered if maybe providence hadn’t brought him and Sparks together.
By the time they arrived at Magellan, North calculated more than four years will have passed since he left the waypoint. Why was he sifting through the Amberly baggage? He burned that bridge pretty well when he left on the Magnus.
North compared Amberly to Sparks in his mind’s eye as he began to undress to shower. In many ways, Sparks and I have more in common…
His thought was interrupted by a message from Condi.
“North, we received an encrypted message directed to you, which was surprising considering the radio silence orders surrounding our mission. Comm officer Rhodes does not have a matching encryption chip – she said she returned it to you – so I couldn’t tell you who it was from or what is says.”
Amberly!
North tore through his footlocker to produce the encryption key Amberly had sent to him before he left Magellan. He had used it once before to warn Amberly about the Hawks.
North physically plugged the key into his infopad.
“Condi, decode and playback the message.”
North wished there was video with the message, but still it was good to hear Amberly’s voice. He felt helpless as he heard about Amberly’s trials. He felt jealous at the mentions of Skylar and Dek.
As Amberly talked about forgiveness, North felt as if he was being put back together, as if somehow life went from tasting bitter to tasting sweet.
“If you have a choice, you come home,” Amberly said, “I’ll be waiting.”
Nothing will stop me, Amberly. Nothing, North pledged.
EPILOGUE THREE
Chasm’s Utopia battleship, June 8, 2605, .9 light years from Waypoint Magellan, six months after the Battle of Marquette.
The Chairman waited patiently for the news. She sat almost perfectly still in the command chair on the bridge of a fully repaired Utopia.
The engines had been upgraded and tested. They could propel the ship faster than six-tenths of light speed. Fully repaired, Utopia was now the fastest vessel ever created, and she might actually be able to overtake Magnus. But the Chairman had to make sure that Project Brimstone was in place.
Patience was perhaps the Chairman’s greatest strength. But she was not immortal, and the delays in the creation of the chasm between Earth and Arara had cost years of her life.
She had been waiting for months since Marquette left its anchorage and moved into Arara’s orbit. The ultimate high ground, Marquette had been transformed into an orbit-to-surface weapon with the ability to obliterate any resistance to Chasm’s new control of Arara from an untouchable position.
Unable to fight back, the Earth-loyal Araran government had been be forced to surrender unconditionally to Chasm.
“Madam Chairman,” the comm officer spoke up, clearly trying to preserve her professional decorum in the face of great news. “Marquette tight beam reports Operation Brimstone is a complete success. Governor Paito sends his compliments and wishes us good hunting.”
Competing with the virtue of patience in the mind of the Chairman was her thirst for revenge – to punish those who had already slowed down her ascension. The combination of patience and vengeance made the Chairman particularly lethal.
“Navigator, prepare rapid spool up. Please transmit to fleet go orders,” the Chairman smiled. She looked out at the gleaming fleet of dual-hull warships, four in total, that matched the Utopia’s lethal form. She imagined waypoint after waypoint, destroyed by her Dark Armada. They would not return to Arara, but bring a clear, destructive message when they reached Earth: the child has supplanted the parent, and now the parent must die.
Once Utopia had completed its mission at Magellan, however, the Chairman planned on returning to Arara to oversee the engineering of a perfected humanity. Eternal peace and equality for all. She would, however indulge herself with one spoil of war.
I will savor revenge on Amberly Macready for taking away my Raven One, the Chairman thought. And when I bring her back to Arara, there will be no end to her pain. She will suffer for the greater good.
Follow the continuing stories of the brave men and women of humanity’s waypoints in The Dark Armada (working title), the next exciting novel in the Project Waypoint Series from Shadowlands Press. Sign up for e-mail news and announcements online at ShadowlandsPress.com
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