Joining the Navy was a far less extreme way to go.
Alexander watched a dark circle rise up under them and sweep away the stars. Then Lunar City appeared, creeping up from the horizon like a luminous spider crouching over the Moon.
“The dark side of the Moon is a lot brighter than I remember it,” Alexander said.
“It’s been thirty years since you last saw it, Admiral,” McAdams said from the acceleration couch beside his. “You have some catching up to do.”
“Admiral, I’m getting a clearer fix on that signal…” Hayes reported from the comms.
“Good. Any idea where it’s coming from?”
“Still calculating, but I should have an answer for you in about a minute, sir.”
Alexander nodded. This mission was the latest in a series of make work projects from fleet command—investigate a mystery signal that Lunar City had reported coming from somewhere out in deep space; help them triangulate it and decrypt it if possible. Alexander sighed. He supposed the fleet had to look busy if they wanted to hang on to what little funding they had left.
“Got it!”
“Give me coordinates.”
“It’s… that can’t be right.”
“Start talking, Hayes. Where is it?”
“It’s coming from the Looking Glass.”
“The wormhole? How can a wormhole produce a comm signal?”
“It looks like the signal is using an old Confederate encryption.”
Alexander’s eyes widened. “The Confederacy doesn’t have a fleet anymore. It was disbanded in 2793. I should know, I helped negotiate the treaty.”
“I’m not arguing with that, sir, just reporting the facts.”
“Well, can we decrypt the signal?”
“Sure. Computers have come a long way in the last thirty years. Easy as cracking an egg.”
“Then get cracking.”
“Aye, sir.”
Alexander nodded to McAdams. “What’s your take on this?”
She turned to him, blue eyes wide and blinking. “Either someone’s spoofing that signal, or some part of the Confederate fleet we sent down the gullet of the wormhole all those years ago actually made it to the other side.”
Alexander shook his head. “Try again. We saw their ships get ripped apart with our own eyes. Besides—the wormhole isn’t traversable. That’s why we tricked the Reds into flying through it in the first place.”
McAdams shrugged. “Then what’s your theory?”
“Someone’s spoofing the signal with a ship or comm drone that they parked in the mouth of the wormhole.”
“Got it!” Hayes announced. “It’s audio-visual.”
“On-screen, Lieutenant.”
“Aye-aye.”
“Time to meet our secret admirer,” Lieutenant Stone said from his control station.
Alexander saw a snowy image appear. Front and center was a woman of Chinese descent, wearing a stained and torn Confederate uniform. In the background, he recognized the CIC of an ancient-looking warship. Flickering lights revealed floating debris, but for some reason the woman standing in front of the camera wasn’t floating. Magnetic boots, Alexander decided. “If this is someone’s idea of a joke…” he began.
Then he saw the woman’s eyes. They were completely black, as if she didn’t even have eyes—that, or her pupils had dilated to the size of overripe grapes. “What the hell?” Alexander shook his head.
“Hello wretched creatures. We invite you to look upon your legacy.” The voice was deep and inflectionless, not a woman’s voice at all.
The camera switched from the dilapidated CIC to a darkened space, crammed with floating debris. Alexander sat forward in his couch and peered at the main holo display, trying to decide what he was looking at. Lights flickered between the floating bits of debris as they shifted through the room. Based on the ceiling height and openness of the space, Alexander decided he was looking into some kind of hangar bay or cargo hold.
“Hayes, can you shine some light on the feed?”
“On it, sir. Here comes the sun…”
A second later the darkness peeled away and everything snapped into focus. A few of the crew gasped, and Alexander felt his gut churn.
The debris was bodies, hundreds of them, all floating in zero-G, limbs tangling, mops of hair drifting like seaweed. Fully half of the bodies were children, and all of them wore pressure suits emblazoned with a familiar hammer-and-sickle pattern of gold stars on a red background—the old Confederate emblem.
The scene lingered there a moment longer before cutting back to the woman with the black eyes. “Any race that can do this to its own kind will do worse to others. You have been judged and found guilty. Your sentence will be delivered soon.”
The transmission faded to black, and Alexander scowled. “Hayes—analyze that recording.”
“What am I looking for, sir?”
“‘Scapers tags, signatures, anomalies—any sign that what we just saw is part of a mindscape, and if possible, some clue that might lead us to the ‘scaper who built it.”
“On it, sir.”
“You don’t believe it’s real,” McAdams said.
Alexander regarded her with eyebrows raised. “Do you?”
“I guess not, but if this was the work of some rogue ‘scaper terrorist, why were there no demands?”
“What if someone from the Confederate colony fleet actually did make it?” Bishop suggested from the helm.
Alexander shook his head. “Even if that were possible, it would mean that that bit about passing judgment and delivering a sentence was just to make us wet our pants. There’s nothing they can do to us from the other side of the wormhole.”
“Her voice was off,” McAdams said.
“And her eyes,” Cardinal added from gunnery.
Alexander considered that. “Assuming I believe this signal is real—which I don’t—those features could be explained by implants used to repair physical damage after traveling through high radiation and high gravity zones inside the wormhole.”
“Her word choice was also wrong,” Hayes added. “She called us wretched creatures, as if she didn’t consider herself to be one of us. Then there’s that part about how a race that kills its own will do worse to others. It’s almost like she was trying to say that she isn’t human.”
“So what is she then?” Alexander asked. “An alien? She looked human enough.”
“Maybe that’s what it wanted us to think,” Hayes said. “We still don’t know who created the wormhole. We’ve known from the start that it can’t be a natural phenomenon.”
Alexander shook his head, incredulous. “Come on people—there’s a rational explanation here, and we’re going to find it. Remember Wonderland? Fool us once, shame on them. Fool us twice—I’ll be damned if there’s going to be a second time. Things aren’t always what they appear to be. Someone, somewhere, wants us jumping at shadows. The question is who, and why. It’s our job to find out. Hayes, pass that recording back to fleet command. Maybe they can make more out of it than we can.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
Alexander frowned, and went back to studying the view from the Adamantine’s bow cameras. Lunar City was now almost directly below them. Alexander absently watched the towering spires, all glittering with lights. He remembered when Lunar City had been nothing but an Alliance naval base. Now it was a bustling city with a population of more than two million.
The day side of the Moon appeared in the distance, a dazzling silver crescent rushing toward them like a tidal wave. Beautiful… Alexander saw a ring of stars wink at him.
“Admiral, we’ve got incoming! Looks like ordnance!” Lieutenant Frost reported from sensors.
Those aren’t stars, Alexander realized with a jolt. A second later, the ship’s combat computer highlighted those winking pinpricks of light with bright red target boxes.
“McAdams, sound general quarters! Frost, get me vectors!”
“Aye, sir.”
“Bishop, take evasive action! Ten Gs to port.”
“Wait—” McAdams said. “—the rest of the crew isn’t strapped in yet!”
“Tell them to belt in at emergency anchor points! They’ve got thirty seconds. Bishop, set thrusters to fire in thirty-one.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Vectors calculated!”
“On screen,” Alexander ordered.
Hair-thin red vector lines appeared between the incoming missiles and their target. Those lines all converged on…
Lunar City.
“They’re not headed for us,” McAdams whispered.
“One million klicks and closing… They’re moving at relativistic speeds! Over one third the speed of light!” Frost reported.
“Cardinal, intercept those missiles now!” Alexander roared.
“Aye!”
“Hayes—warn Lunar City. They need to get their defenses tracking.”
Alexander watched bright golden streams of hypervelocity rounds go streaking out from his ship along the paths of the incoming ordnance. Lasers snapped out in a flurry of dazzling electric-blue beams of light. Seven out of ten missiles winked off the display with pinpricks of fire. The remaining three sailed on.
“Too late!” McAdams screamed.
Lunar City became a bright smear of light that briefly illuminated the dark side of the Moon. When the light faded, Lunar City was gone, a funnel-shaped cloud of dust and debris jetting into space in its place.
Alexander gaped at the dust-shrouded crater where more than two million people used to live. He slammed his fists against his armrests.
“Bishop, get us away from the debris!”
“Aye, sir!”
“Incoming transmission—audio only,” Hayes reported.
“Patch it through!”
The deep, toneless voice was the same as before. It said, “This is only the beginning.”
Alexander turned to his XO. McAdams stared back at him with wide eyes and a furrowed brow.
“Hayes—trace that signal!” Alexander ordered.
“It came from the wormhole again, sir. Same source.”
“You don’t think she fired those missiles, do you?” McAdams asked.
Alexander shook his head. “I don’t know who fired them, Commander, but whoever it was, they just declared war on Earth.”
Chapter 2
2819 A.D.
—Five Years Earlier—
“I want to take our relationship to the next level,” Skylar Phoenix said between bites of her steak.
Dorian de Leon, A.K.A. Angel Hunter, glanced up from his plate, his brows drawing together in wary confusion. The next level? he wondered.
“We already live together…” he said, as if that were the highest possible level any relationship could reach. Surely she doesn’t mean marriage. His parents hadn’t exactly set a stellar example of that. Then again, they’d been married in the real world, not a virtual one. Regardless, Dorian wasn’t ready for either kind of marriage. He was only 25 and just recently earned his masters in synaptic processing.
“You look frightened.”
Dorian shook his head as if to deny it.
“Clear skies, Angel. I don’t mean marriage,” she clarified.
Dorian blew out a breath. “You had me worried for a minute.”
Skylar’s luminous features lifted in a smile. Her skin was an attractive, opalescent white that sparkled wherever the light hit, her eyes like liquid amber and her hair a river of gold.
This particular mindscape, Galaxy, was one of the more popular ones. There were over a hundred million players—not counting the billions of procedurally-generated AI characters. In Galaxy you could choose to be any of more than a dozen humanoid and alien races in a galactic civilization set somewhere in the distant future. He and Skylar had both chosen to be Seraphs—beautiful, human-looking aliens with luminous skin and hair, and feathery white wings.
Dorian turned his head to the view. They sat on the balcony of a restaurant on Eyria, the Seraphs home world. There were no railings to interrupt the view from the balcony, nothing but clear blue skies draped high above the colorful fields of flowers and dense forests below. The ocean sparkled in the dying rays of Eyria’s sun. Thin slivers of cloud drifted over the horizon in fiery reds and yellows, while stars pricked holes high in the evening sky as the sun sank below the horizon.
Dorian’s momentary distraction ended, and he turned back to Skylar. Her steak lay forgotten and steaming on her heated plate, but her wine glass was conspicuously empty. She was still looking at him, her gaze exactly where he’d left it. While he’d been watching the view, she’d been watching him, waiting for him to ask the obvious question.
“Then what do you mean by taking our relationship to the next level?”
Skylar’s smile broadened, and she nodded. “Let’s meet.”
“We’re meeting now…”
“In the real world, Dorian.”
“Don’t you mean Angel?”
“Dorian is your real name, isn’t it?”
“Yes…”
“Then I mean Dorian.”
“Sky…” he began, shaking his head.
She reached for his hand again, and he stared absently at it. Five slender, sparkling fingers wrapped around his. “Before you say no, you need to hear my reasons.”
“What reasons?” he blurted, looking up from their hands. “Do you know how many virtual relationships end when people try to carry them over into their real lives? I don’t even know what you look like! You don’t know what I look like either.”
“Does it matter?”
“That depends on your expectations.”
“I want you to know me. The real me. I don’t want any secrets between us.”
“The real you? What’s real, anyway?” Dorian asked. He gestured to their surroundings, his wings flexing with agitation as he did so. “This is real. You are real. Reality is just a bundle of sensory data collected by our bodies and interpreted by our brains. What does it matter where and how that data is generated?”
“It wouldn’t matter if we never had to wake up, but we do. The real world exists, and until we can spend every available second in the Mindscape, the real world will still be important. One measure of that importance can be determined by how much time we spend living in each reality. How many hours a day do you spend in Galaxy with me?”
“I don’t know… four, maybe five, I guess.”
“And in other mindscapes?”
“A few more hours. But in my defense, I don’t have a job yet.”
Skylar nodded. “Jobs are hard to come by. Do you know how many hours a day I spend in here?”
“Six?” he guessed.
“Twenty-two.”
Dorian felt his eyes grow round. “That’s impossible. It’s also illegal.”
Skylar smiled. “Are you planning to report me to the authorities?”
“You’d need life support to manage that.”
Skylar nodded.
“And you want me to meet you? Your body must be a shriveled up husk!”
A muscle in Skylar’s cheek twitched and she looked away. The stars were out in full now. So was Eyria’s moon, a bright purple orb casting a pale lavender glow over the valley below. “Never mind. This was a bad idea.” Skylar pushed out her chair and stood up. Her amber eyes were suddenly vacant, and her expression looked like it might have been chiseled from a rock. “Would you get the bill? I’ve lost my appetite.”
Dorian gaped at her. “You’re leaving?” Rather than reply, she turned and walked toward the edge of the balcony. “Hold on! Sky! I’m sorry!”
When she reached the edge, she paused to glance back his way. “If you change your mind, you can meet me tomorrow. I’ll send the details to your comm band.”
Skylar spread her wings in a fla
sh of white feathers and then dove off the balcony, disappearing in an instant. Not sticking around to pay for their meal, Dorian pushed out from the table and ran after her. He reached the edge of the balcony and dove headfirst after her.
His stomach lurched. He felt weightless. A warm wind roared in his ears, ripping at his clothes and hair, and ruffling his feathers, threatening to open his wings. He stubbornly held them flat against his back so he would fall faster and catch up to Skylar.
It was at least a kilometer down to the field of flowering grasses below, once bright and variegated with color, now dim and monochromatic in the light of the moon and stars. Dorian searched desperately for a bright white speck—moonlight reflecting off her wings—but there were dozens of specks below him, some near, some far… Dorian focused on them one at a time to read their comm beacons and check their names, but none of the names that flashed up on his holo lenses read Skylar Phoenix.
Where did she go?
Confused, desperate, he looked up, and found a few pale gray specks, seraph wings shading themselves from the moon and stars. As he focused on the nearest one, Skylar’s name appeared, taunting him in bright green letters. Dorian cursed his stupidity. Why had he assumed she’d continued down? She must have dived at an angle and then come back up.
Now spreading his own wings, he angled them to slow his descent and then flapped hard to gain altitude. The air felt like a physical wall pushing back, and the pressure of his considerable momentum threatened to snap his wings like twigs.
He gritted his teeth and strained against those forces. By the time he’d mostly arrested his momentum, he could no longer see Skylar. Activating his comms, he tried sending her a message. “Sky, where are you?”
No answer.
“Talk to me!”
But all he heard was the relentless buffeting of the wind. Clearly she wanted to be alone.
New Frontiers- The Complete Series Page 39