“I’m guessing it’s worse than you expected.”
Ham sighed. “If this is what I believe it to be, and it came here the way I suspect, then they’ve conquered the last great hurdle.”
“Which is what? And who are they?”
Ham pulled back his DL band, his eyes wide in disbelief. The most confident man Ryllen ever knew was terrified.
30
W E CANNOT ALLOW THIS THING to leave,” Ham said before tapping his mic. “Mei, you and the twins have a broader view of the port. Reposition to the best sight lines and begin recording. I want closeups of everyone. We’ll need to compare facial recognition against the IntraNex and the Global Wave. Once your job is finished, retreat to a safe position and transmit your vids to the Queen Mab.”
“Will do,” she said. “And after that?”
“Prepare for an assault. There’s an outstanding chance we’ll leave bodies on the deck tonight.”
Ryllen was as stunned as he was giddy. Yes, he wanted blood, and yes, he expected a colder version of Ham to emerge. But he assumed Ham wouldn’t condone anything beyond defensive action or targeted kills. Now, he suggested a bloodbath. Ryllen saw at least two dozen people milling about or crisscrossing the port.
“Spill it, Ham. What is that thing?”
“The original designer called it Invictus. It derived from a word out of pre-history meaning ‘invincible.’ He based the shape on an ancient planetary model called an armillary sphere. I never imagined the project would go beyond holomapping.”
“A Chancellor design? What does it do?”
“An overzealous engineer revealed it to me when I was stationed on Tamarind. His team believed an energy formation called the Void offered the secret to jump travel across the Collectorate – anywhere in the known universe, actually. The ideas appeared ludicrous, but they caught the eye of hardline zealots in the Chancellory.”
“What’s jump travel?”
“If mastered, the ability to target any coordinate in the universe using its quantum signature, pass through a manmade jumpgate, and emerge instantly on the other side. Ark Carriers, Guard battalions, wormholes, and FTL drives are trifles by comparison. The plan was monstrous, RJ. The Chancellors had no interest in commerce or exploration. Jump travel was about the ultimate form of control. I thought they were all mad – more so than the norm.
“I transferred to duty above Hokkaido. That didn’t work out so well, either. What I don’t understand is how we can be looking at this … thing. The Void was destroyed eight years ago during the Guard’s fight against the Aeternans. The Void ate ten percent of Tamarind’s surface area. Millions died. My contacts collected reports saying the Aeternans destroyed a prototype jumpgate and everyone associated with the program. I never gave it another thought.
“This ship is impractical without jump travel. Its propulsion system can’t outrun a rifter. But those two reflective bands? They create artificial gravity and worse, contain a weapons array. If it follows the original design, the array unleashes particle energy. One of these can destroy Pinchon in minutes. In, attack, out.”
Ryllen felt a cold shiver. “For all the rings! You Chancellors were a bunch of crazy cudfruckers.”
“You have no idea.”
“Wait. You don’t think …?”
“No. Whatever this thing is designed to attack, it’s not Hokkaido. Look at those crowding close to Invictus. Two-thirds aren’t Hokki. Those ethnics represent at least three planets. I don’t see any Chancellors. But there, at the front: Sho Parke. High Cannon’s Chairman. This ship is one piece to a larger design.”
“Huh. Think they’ll spill the details if we surround them and threaten to butcher the whole sorry lot?”
Ham paused, as if taking in the notion.
“You’ve had worse ideas. We need to know what’s happening, but we must prevent that ship from leaving. We need physical evidence. A pile of corpses alone will not make our case.”
Ham tapped his mic. “Mei, report.”
“Transmitting everything now. Can’t believe we haven’t been spotted. Ham, we need to act before they do.”
“Agree. How many armed security do you see?”
“Four. All Hokki. HCC uniforms.”
“I’m going to pose a question, Mei. I need an honest answer, not a brave one. If we take out those four guards, will we trip a noose?”
Ryllen didn’t understand his meaning; Mei’s hesitation troubled him. He never knew Mei to speak from anywhere other than the gut.
“We will,” she said. “Maybe already have. It can’t be this easy.”
“That’s logic speaking. But if these people believe they’re untouchable, they will not act logically. In my experience, those who believe they’re free from consequence possess a blind spot. The Chancellors did. That’s how a thousand children on a few ships brought down an empire. I see one vessel here, and it’s worthless on the ground. These people are not military.”
Ryllen chimed in. “Just assholes.”
“Mei, prepare to engage. At my signal, take out security.”
Ham turned to Ryllen, Po Wynn, and Myra Faun.
“Our objective is to drop these people to their knees. We are not executioners. Unless I say otherwise, only fire in defense. Clear?”
Ryllen thought the other Green Sun agents were unimpressed by his instructions, too. Wouldn’t a few token bodies make their point clear to the rest?
“These people are not illegals,” Ham said. “They possess valuable information – far more than we can hope to ascertain on this port, but enough – I hope – to expose a conspiracy.”
“Where are the Chancellors?” Po said. “You told us Chancellors were behind this plot.”
Ham smiled. “They’re here. Not visible, but here. One challenge at a time. Yes?”
He laid out his plan and notified Mei, ordering her squad into position. As they prepared to enter the fray, Ryllen grabbed Ham by the arm and whispered:
“If I see Shin Wain, I’ll kill him straightaway. You can have the others, but not him.”
“As long as you don’t put your team in danger.”
They neared the port’s edge, their movements through the shadows visible to the eagle-eyed, but not to four HCC guards with long guns slung over shoulders. Like the two dozen who crowded near Invictus, they seemed distracted. Ham gave the signal.
As his squad surrounded the civilians, Ryllen looked for one face. He recalled the moment where he lay on his back in Ronin Swallows, eyes open after being killed once by flash pegs. Helplessness. Endless questions. Desperate worry for Kai. And then the man – casual, smarmy, nonchalant – standing above him. Seconds later, another flash, his skull cracking. And death. Again.
Ryllen heard Ham instruct the men and women to their knees while blasts from collider pistols reflected off the spherical ship’s deadly bands. Mei’s squad did their job. These strangers – surrounded by seven attackers well versed in the art of killing – raised their arms with hesitance. Ryllen saw tension in their faces but not fear. Worse, none of them was Shin Wain.
Maybe …
That’s when he saw it: An oblong opening in the sphere, and a sunset red glow inside. The crowd was moving toward that door when the team exposed itself. What had them so excited? Or who?
31
A T FIFTEEN, UNIFICATION GUARD Lt. Nathaniel Loomis grew weary of torturing a prisoner on Mariabella. The terrorist’s cell proved particularly stubborn to ferret out from its many hiding places. Yet the man’s swagger impressed Lt. Loomis. Rather than divulge secrets, the man – whose Portuguese ancestors forcibly migrated here from Earth – made jokes about the Chancellory. He recited witty poems and unleashed a barrage of analogies comparing Guard soldiers to rodents, spiders, and leeches. Four hours into this losing battle of words, Lt. Loomis slit the throat of Hamilton Cortez.
Fourteen years later, when he arrived in Pinchon and donned a Sak’ne suit, the rechristened Hamilton Cortez vowed never to take another life, thou
gh he knew the likely folly of such a promise. He left too much blood in his wake to think the red river wouldn’t follow him to the ancient neighborhood of Zozo.
Maybe his silly plan might have worked had he avoided the most human mistake of all: He allowed himself to feel.
Mi Cha Woo.
She wasn’t convinced of his noble intent when he “rescued” her.
“Saving me will not redeem you,” Mi Cha insisted long before falling in love with the man. “I’ll only remind you of your guilt.”
“I don’t seek redemption,” he said, tucking her into bed. “Everything I’ve done, I was trained for. I despise it, but I won’t apologize for it.”
“Is that what Chancellors are taught? Never to say sorry?”
He kissed her on the cheek, and she cringed.
“From the time we can walk.”
It should have been a simple life with occasional indulgence. Be a good resident of Zozo, walk the fresh air market with a confident stride, a sweet word to vendors, and ample tips for everyone he needed as allies. Run simple intel-gathering jobs for the seamasters. Keep an ear to the ground for possible Chancellor retribution, though they rarely bothered coming after rogues who went native.
Ham wasn’t stupid, but he was naïve.
“Chancellors don’t live simple lives, no matter their course corrections,” he confessed to Ryllen a few months after the boy came to him in desperate straits. “The burdens our parents instill are meant to weigh so heavily, we dispense them to our own children in the hopes of relieving the pressure. I heard it rarely works, but I never had an heir to experiment upon.”
“Feel free to beat up on me,” Ryllen told him. “I got nowhere else to be, and I need to learn some new tricks.”
Ham obliged, even as he saw the young immortal harden. He listened as Ryllen described his murders with increasing indifference and offered the boy use of Ham’s special tools in advance of the next kill. Ryllen’s tone reflected the id of a sociopath, of someone who would not be able to stop killing after finishing his crusade for revenge. In another life, Ryllen would have been a perfect soldier of the Guard. Raised to slaughter without regret.
“RJ knows death from the inside,” Ham confessed to Mi Cha. “He can’t separate it from life because it is his life. He will see death as the only option rather than the last.”
“Then it’s your job to save him,” Mi Cha said.
“No. That job belongs to his own people. Every time I bring it up, he insists he’ll never leave Hokkaido, despite all the pain this world brought him.”
“Never stop trying.”
“I won’t, but my efforts might be less than tenacious. The truth is, he’s important. No one sees him coming. And someday, I might need him to be at his worst.”
Now, on Magnum Island, aiming a modified blast rifle at representatives from four different worlds of the former Collectorate, Ham knew the worst was about to come. Having Ryllen here was an unexpected comfort.
“If you plan to survive the night,” he told the men and women on their knees, “do not fight back and do not hold your lip when I ask you a question. Judging from your looks, I’d say most of you came here from Moroccan Prime, Boer, and Bolivar. You’re far from home, and your families already miss you. I don’t plan to extend their anxiety into a lifetime of grief. But my six friends might not be as generous. Yes?”
These indigos did not respond the way he expected. Their eyes were shallow, not clouded by fear of death. They looked at each other with a certainty of purpose. No tears. No whines. No cowers.
He focused on the one man whose face he recognized.
“Sho Parke. On your feet.”
The Chairman of High Cannon Collective was tall and thin, a silver beard framing a steel jaw and dark, hopeful eyes. He popped up on command, wiped himself off, and dropped his hands behind his back as if he were the one in charge.
“I’m sure you’re not the mastermind, but you are the host,” Ham said. “Answer my questions, or we kill your guests.”
Parke crinkled his lips. “I invited no one. My friends came because they could. You’re making your last mistake, Chancellor. And these Hokkis who follow your command will soon be lying at the bottom of the ocean. If given a choice, I’m sure they’d much rather survive to witness a promising future for all Hokkis.”
“Ah. Promising future for all. I think that’s the line my people used a thousand years ago when they forced yours to migrate from Earth. But it was never really about your future, was it? I know what that ship is, and I know what it was designed for. Fill out the picture, Sho Parke. What’s really going on here, and who’s behind it?”
Parke wasn’t going to answer. Ham interrogated enough indigo zealots in his time to recognize the signs. This old man might as well have been the original Hamilton Cortez, leader of the MB Freedom Corps, which disrupted mining operations on dozens of asteroids.
Ryllen made Ham’s next strategy clear when the immortal started toward the oblong door in the sphere.
“If you won’t talk, Mr. Parke, I’m going to allow my young friend to destroy whatever’s inside that ship.”
Parke responded with a smirk. “We have others.”
“I’ve no doubt. Whoever is leading the charge wouldn’t expose his one and only off-world. But I think this combination is very unusual.” Ham glanced at his new hostages. “Moroccan Prime and Boer don’t surprise me. But Bolivar? Now, that’s a trick. How did the poorest colony in the Collectorate get mixed up in this madness?”
As Ryllen looked inside the door, Ham turned his weapon to a trio of tan-skinned descendants of South American indigenous tribes. They responded with defiant eyes and stiff upper lips. He never served a tour above Bolivar, but Ham heard nothing good about the tiny, metal-poor planet which trafficked in gems, wood products, and textiles.
“You,” he told a short, stout woman of about thirty. “Stand.” She did without hesitance. “What is your name?”
“Issa Norales.”
“So, tell me, Issa. Why are you here?”
“Am I?”
Not the answer he expected, but it was better than none.
“Witty. Why are you here, Issa?”
“Because I can be.”
“That’s no answer. Do you want to go home at some point?”
“I already am, and I will be forever.”
“Nonsense answers won’t help you, Issa. Do you care if I kill the man next to you?”
The man, who could have passed for her brother, showed no reaction as he remained on his knees.
“Laot cannot be killed,” she said. “He was never here.”
“What?”
Ham put aside his traditional assumptions about zealots to realize he stumbled upon something far beyond his expectations. He nodded toward Mei, who was closest to the Bolivarians. He needed to try something to get their attention. Mei complied.
She stepped forward, aimed, and shot the man through the back of the head. The exit wound split his face open before he crumpled.
Issa did not flinch, nor did anyone else on the ground.
Ham first thought he was walking into a meeting of high-level powerbrokers for an intergalactic conspiracy. Yet none of them, with the possible exception of Sho Parke, carried the aura of political or corporate leaders. None were royalty. And all were docile.
Brainwashed? Hypnotized? Lobotomized?
These people were as nonsensical as the sphere itself.
“He’s not dead,” Sho Parke said, pointing to the dead man on the deck. “He was never here. Nor were you or your friends. But the difference is, Laot has a future. You do not.”
In that moment, Ham did something which went against every principle of being a Chancellor: He admitted he was in over his head. Whatever their obsession, these people were too far gone. If Chancellor factions were behind this madness, all his assumptions about their motives could no longer be trusted.
He also made note of two important developments. Sho Pa
rke held a small round communicator in his left hand. It was flashing. And Ryllen had disappeared inside the sphere.
A familiar but terrifying thunder cracked the night sky.
32
R YLLEN DIDN’T CARE WHAT HE FOUND inside this thing called Invictus, so long as he found the correct who. He moved with cat’s feet to the oblong door without Ham’s objection. The ex-Chancellor wasn’t making progress with his questions, but interrogation was not Ryllen’s specialty. He preferred the blunt-hammer approach. If Shin Wain was inside, his crusade was over. He’d shred the bastard then make final peace with Kai. If not, Ryllen carried the firepower to disable the sphere. He wasn’t walking away empty-handed.
Up close, the sphere’s intricate surface features came into view. Tiny nodes – perhaps thousands – interlinked in a perfect geometric alignment. Within inches of the door, the air thickened. As he reached into the opening, Ryllen felt an electrical pulse surging through his body. He stepped back then forward. The energy field was inches thick, coating the ship’s epidermis. Did the field keep Invictus hovering?
He gripped a laser pistol in each hand and leaped onboard. A narrow corridor ascended four steps into the heart. Above him, the red sunset glow deepened, overwhelming any structural details.
Come on, RJ. It’s your turn to be lucky.
He flung himself up the stairs and onto the ship’s flight deck, weapons covering every angle as he twisted about in a frenzy.
Empty.
But this vessel was designed unlike any he saw on the Global Wave or learned about in school during his Year 5 class: Chancellor Military Supremacy. Specifically, it didn’t look like a ship at all.
Four wide, gleaming columns curved up along the interior walls like a skeleton, with padded chairs fit for pilots braced against the columns. Ryllen saw the mechanisms that allowed the chairs to slide vertically along the skeletal structure. Robotic arms reached from behind the chairs to rest at a pilot’s face level. The holotech was recognizable and used exclusively in Chancellor navigation cylinders.
A narrow shaft descended from the top center of the vessel to the deck where Ryllen stood, but it was interrupted halfway by a long translucent tube perhaps a meter in diameter. Upon closer inspection, Ryllen saw the swivel mechanism in the shaft that allowed the cylinder to rotate. It was aligned to the pilot’s chairs.
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