by Brandt Legg
“That’s an Eysen!” Gale said, her voice almost unrecognizable with giddy awe.
“And look!” Cira exclaimed, now holding half the wood casing. “Today’s date.”
Rip and Gale took their eyes off the black sphere to look at the date. “How could they have known?” Gale whispered.
“This is an Eysen,” Rip said. “It belonged to Jesus . . . How could they not have known?”
Seventy-Three
Mairis spotted the guardians a second before they saw her.
“It might be enough,” she said out loud as she dove over the side of the hill, tucking into a roll, wondering if they’d use their infer-guns on her. The idea of a laser slicing through her skull left her feeling suddenly sick.
It didn’t matter, she was in the trees before they got a shot off. She came out of the roll and broke into a run, zipping between trees like a frightened fox. She tried to keep concealed, but there were also visuals flying through the trees.
With her Etheren-like skills, she managed to put more distance between herself and the pursuers, but the visuals were going to be much more difficult to outrun.
“Out maneuver,” she said through gritted teeth as she jumped down a ravine and tunneled into a root cave, “is the best I can do.”
But a visual flew in there and, flashing a bright light she had no idea they were equipped with, captured an image.
“One of the visuals got a facial lock on her,” a guardian reported.
“What’s the holograph show?” Tracer asked as the display filtered millions of identities, finally settling on one that both shocked and delighted the veteran guardian.
“Mairis, daughter of Trynn,” Tracer said, an almost sinister grin on his face. “Nice to meet you.”
“Call in air support?” one of the other guardians asked.
“No, I think we can handle this little girl.”
“Little girl running with the wolves.”
“Yes, but she’s done running now.”
Cardd found Trynn and Ovan among the projections, deep in a tense conversation.
“Sorry to interrupt, but the archaeologist just found the Jesus Eysen.”
Trynn looked into the rippling ceiling. “That explains it.”
“When did the insertion team place it?” Ovan asked.
Cardd pulled up a display and showed the data to the old scientist.
“And this is when he found it.” Ovan pointed to another entry. “That means we have ninety-seven minutes to link it.”
“Or what?” Cardd asked.
“Or we’ll lose that Eysen forever.”
“We’ll lose more than the Eysen,” Trynn said, pointing to the ceiling.
Cardd wanted to scream that he had warned them, that there was no chance of getting the globotite in time, that it was all over, but instead he asked, “What can I do?”
“Get to Solas,” Trynn said, still staring at the ceiling ripples. “You need to meet the Havloses, pay for the globotite.”
“What if they didn’t get it?”
Trynn looked down from the ceiling and made eye contact with his most trusted assistant. “Then stay in Solas. Say goodbye to your loved ones.”
Rip looked out of the opening and didn’t see Avery. Then he saw the blood. For an instant, he didn’t know what to do. Clearly they were in danger, but the idea of getting locked in the crypt was almost as bad as facing whatever trouble was waiting for them.
“Problem,” he whispered back down the ladder to Gale and Cira. “Avery’s gone. There’s signs of a struggle.”
“Oh no,” Gale whispered.
“Is Avery okay?” Cira asked.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Let’s go,” Gale said. “We do not want to be trapped in here.”
Rip climbed out, and was helping Gale when he heard his name.
“Rip,” the woman repeated. “It’s Harmer. We have to go now!”
“Am I glad to see you,” he said to the Blaxer. Harmer had saved their lives many times over the years, helping to keep them alive against all odds.
“What about Avery?” Gale asked.
“The old man?” Harmer asked, waving to Cira as she jumped from the opening.
“Yes.”
“He’s alive, but I don’t know for how much longer. Ambush came from the same people you saw in Italy.”
“Is it the Foundation?” Rip asked as they followed Harmer back to the exterior door.
“No, worse.”
“Worse than the Foundation?” Rip asked, not wanting to know what could be worse than the organization that singlehandedly was pushing the world to a dystopian nightmare.
“Kalor Locke.”
“Never heard of him.”
“No one has, by design. He used to run a top secret government agency. I’ll let Booker fill you in,” she said as they broke out into daylight. Rip, Gale, and Cira’s eyes all strained against the glare. “We think we’ve cleared all of Locke’s people, but cops are rolling in.”
“What about Avery?” Cira asked.
“I suspect he’s in that ambulance,” Harmer said, nodding to several Blaxers who joined with her to shield Rip and his family. Seconds later, they were pushed into an SUV. As it sped away, Rip couldn’t believe what was inside the pack on his lap. Feeling triumphant, yet sad about Avery, he had no idea the forces he had just unleashed by pulling that Eysen from its long time resting place under the North Church.
“I can’t wait to get back to the island and light this one up,” he said.
“Maybe we’ll finally be able to connect with Crying Man again,” Gale added.
“He’ll be surprised we have four Eysens now. Imagine the power . . . maybe we have enough to save the Cosegans.”
“And us.”
Seventy-Four
Fray checked the window again. “The golds are here. Do it now!”
“This goes wrong a hundred times,” Shanoah said, thinking of the tens of thousands of hours she had spent in simulations, never facing anything quite like this because the spectrum belt was never going to be safe. The spectrum belt didn’t respond to normal rules, and even with all the data they’d gathered from the last mission, the ultra-advanced AI controlling the simulators couldn’t construct the bent reality of what the belt was really like. Yet the simulators got close, and she knew a hundred ways, a hundred times, they would die. They always died.
The only solution was if the seismic-seven went just perfectly, yet one had never gone perfectly in the simulation, or in real life.
Shanoah was scared. The dangerous maneuver might be the only chance to escape the field and death. She recalled Stave trying to save them on the last mission, and it killed him and several others. “You’ve only read about the accounts,” she yelled. “You don’t understand the violence of it.”
“I understand the violence of the Terminus Doom,” Fray shouted shakily, trying to maintain his composure among the endless spinning and threats. “A decision must be made!”
“A seismic-seven is suicide. If we don’t do it, we might make it through.” The maneuver involved shutting down the AI; all crystal-mind assisted operations would cease. “Once I throw it into retrograde, we’ll stall. It’ll feel like a giant has snatched the ship. You can’t begin to imagine the horror as it shakes us, trying to break us. And there’ll be no air.” Seven minutes without oxygen, no engine power, no lights . . . total darkness aside from the eerie hue of the glowing asteroids and pulsers. “There’s no way to warn the others . . . If we somehow survive that, trying to get the ship started and all the life-support re-initiated is almost impossible.”
“Almost,” Fray called out. “You’ve done it before Shanoah, and you did it while Stave lay dead.”
“I didn’t know he was dead yet.”
“He died for this. To teach you this. For right now . . . Do it!”
The ship, already wildly spinning out of control, fought her intentions. Each movement had to be perfectly timed.
She strained to get the heads up displays to come into focus. “The takeover sequence is unforgivable!”
One . . . The sliding range edit.
Two . . . AI silenced and archived.
Three . . . Life support systems forced down.
The incident happened faster than it should; she remembered it from before.
“That’s why it’s called retrograde!”
Suddenly, their argument was rehashed in a verbal explosion that rippled through the air. Everything they had done in the past few hours whipped around in a kaleidoscope of compressed torment. It flashed like a horrifying display with deadly colors and lights.
Then . . . blackness.
Lurching and tossing the ship, them, all of everything.
Fray, suddenly torn from the wall that had held him like a prisoner, flew into the vaporous mix, stunned by the agony. Each blow could not prepare him for the next, worse, unbearable slam. A kind of catatonic state ensued, where all he knew was hellish pain with no reference to his former life, to life at all.
As they were brutalized in the airless void, catapulted through a lifeless vacuum, Shanoah used her prior seismic-seven experience to keep focus.
The event was named because it lasted seven minutes—or at least because the last one had. Under normal conditions, holding their breath for that span of time would not have been so difficult for a Cosegan. However, the turmoil and fear, combined with the disoriented space, sonic reverberations, pulsers, and cold, made it feel endless.
She felt frozen. Careening through the bitter darkness, Shanoah gasped. Dizzy, and unable to regain control, wondering if she’d done the right thing as dozens of gold pulsers swirled and ricocheted, magnifying with purple streaks and electric-teal bolts.
“We’re cooking!” Fray yelled, as the air came back . . . the terror, though, just beginning.
The build up of frenetic energy amongst an explosion of searing colors blinded them.
“What is that?” Fray yelled. “The sound is killing me!”
A growing siren mixed with a spitting groan—as if an entire planet were cracking in half—stole the silence, creating a shattering sonic burst until there was nothing but noise, indescribably loud. They both screamed anguished, terrified cries, but no one could hear them, not even themselves. The intense phantasmagoria of lucent colors became a hallucinatory glare as they drowned in the blaring cacophony—
And all at once, everything went dark. As if it had never been before, as if they had never existed, as if existence itself was totally forgotten. The blackness consumed all in an instant.
Seventy-Five
The third most senior Eysen Maker walked into the projections and stood silently for several moments before Trynn noticed her. Trynn, assuming the woman was there to help, pointed to a cluster of at least two thousand projections.
“Take that quadrant,” he said.
“I have news,” she said.
“Do I want to hear it?” Trynn asked, not even glancing at her.
“No.”
Ovan, who had been studying the consequences and interactions of the Eysen ripples related to the third insertion, stopped his work and walked over to join them.
“What is it?” Trynn asked.
The woman stared at him, seemingly deciding how to deliver the message.
“It’s bad then?” Trynn asked.
“Very.”
“The Havloses were caught?”
“Yes,” she said. “They were taken into custody, along with Cardd.”
“Cardd knows our location,” Ovan said. “It won’t take them long to get the details of High-peak out of him. The guardians will be here soon.”
“Keep working,” Trynn said, taking another Revon. “We still have time.”
“There’s not enough globotite,” Ovan protested.
“We’ll have to do what we can with what we have.”
“There’s more,” the woman said.
“More what?”
“They’ve . . . lost contact with the Imazes,” she said, knowing the impact of her words would be brutal on many levels to all of them, but especially for Trynn. “ISS believes the two lead ships are . . . are lost.”
Markol stared at the 3D image in front of him. There he is, he thought. The great archaeologist, Ripley Gaines . . . He doesn’t look so dangerous to me. Could he really be worth all this trouble?
Markol could tell that Rip was studying something in the Eysen, searching for answers, desperate to find Trynn. But it wasn’t Rip’s Eysen, it was a different one, one that Markol could communicate with. It was a globotite configuration, a newer design, somehow more efficient.
Fascinating . . . how did Trynn manage that?
Too bad I’m going to have to kill this man in front of his family. Markol didn’t know yet that this was the Jesus Eysen, nor that Rip had only been back at his secret research center on the island for less than an hour. None of that mattered to him. He had a job to do. Rip was never going to exist.
I can speak to someone in the far future, he thought, letting the ramifications and possibilities dance in his mind. All I have to do is touch this sensor and I would be revealed. Rip would suddenly see another Cosegan. Not the one he wished to see, but I bet he would be ecstatic all the same.
He studied the man, could see his amazement with the Eysen.
I might even talk to him for a minute, answer some questions before I end his life.
Markol closed his eyes for a moment, trying to digest that idea, wanting to spare Rip, but he had his orders.
It is necessary . . .
Everything was configured. It would be the same command that had taken out Huang.
Rip had decided to forgo the use of his Eysen, the one that had killed Huang, until there was time to investigate further, but he had chosen to risk it with the new ones. So far, the one recovered from the wall in Italy had not initiated.
“It remains dark,” Rip reported on the recorded journal.
Gale and Cira were behind a crystal alloy shield—completely safe, the scientists explained. Savina had come up with a protocol to avoid the sections of the Eysen where Huang had gone.
“We can’t just ignore them,” Rip had argued. “We need to know.”
“What, exactly?” Gale had asked.
“Everything.”
Markol continued watching Rip for a minute while deciding exactly when to do it. He flicked his fingers through projections so he could see what Rip was viewing. The image startled him.
“Shank will want to know about that,” Vide said, suddenly standing behind him.
“Yes,” Markol agreed, trying to figure out the images at the same time Rip was. “Another Eysen is coming. A fifth one. The descriptions talk about globotite, and the direct plight of our times . . . ” he said, baffled by the revelations. “Who put this into the Eysen? It’s current data.”
“We can figure that out later,” the man said. “Right now, you need to end the archaeologist before he learns more, or worse, gets away.”
“Yes,” Markol said, at once fascinated and disturbed by what Rip had discovered inside the Jesus Eysen, and what it meant. “But there is a link.”
“It’s probably Trynn.”
“No,” Markol said, “he doesn’t have the globotite. And even if he did, he couldn’t—”
The assistant moved to the Eysen. “Let’s do this now.”
Markol had no doubt now that the man’s loyalties were to Shank, but it didn’t matter. This had to be done, more so now than ever. A direct link . . . it had to be cut immediately.
“Okay, the settings are in place.” Markol hovered his finger over the holographic power override sensor. “I just need to hit this, and he’ll die instantly.”
A group of masked intruders burst into the lab. Vide swung around too fast. Weals shot him with an infer-gun. Vide died instantly.
“Who are you?” Markol demanded as they grabbed him and shoved him into a large bag made of a dark, high-tech
material.
Weals saw that Rip was still alive as he shut down Markol’s Eysen, tossed it in a case, and exited the way he’d come in. Four of his crew followed, carrying the bagged body of Vide, and Markol’s now still body. In the course of taking him down, he’d been injected with an immediate-acting sedative.
Seventy-Six
The Arc paced through a section of the great hall filled with space scientists and command specialists linked directly to ISS, all monitoring the Imaze mission.
“Two ships are lost,” a woman announced in an anguished whisper.
The Arc slapped a fist into her other palm and pursed her lips, then walked to her private office without a word. She contacted Weals. “Take care of that situation immediately,” she said.
Before she could return to the others, a guardian report came in about the arrest of the Havloses and Cardd, who they informed her was one of Trynn’s right hands.
“Lock them down,” she ordered. “No word out, or we’re going to have an incident with the Havloses. All we need now is a war. And find out where Trynn is operating from. I don’t care what must be done to the prisoner, get that information.”
Tracer smiled as he looked through the viewfinder, then clicked the sequence in the heads up display floating in the air next to him.
It wasn’t long before the Arc’s image came through.
“You have something?” she asked impatiently.
“You wanted us to inform you of any globe runners. We have a visual on one—a rather special one.”
“Excellent. What makes this one different?”
“We have a confirmation that it is Trynn’s daughter, Mairis.”
“Really?”
“I assume you want her taken into custody immediately?” he asked thinking there was a slight chance the Arc would order something more serious to be done.