Aurora Resonant: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 3)

by G. S. Jennsen

  “You are fine, Eren. Avdei has moved on to more stimulating pursuits.”

  “Is that what they call what goes on upstairs?” He cocked his head and took a real sip of the drink. “Please, continue.”

  “Joyoun’s mission took him to the Machim Hub in Sagittarius. It was his and my belief that not only were fleet distributions, routes and assignments for the Region VI Division accessible from there, standard live-updated operating code could be accessed as well.”

  “But only for the one Division?”

  “Yes. We learned in our mission preparation that the galactic hubs act as spokes on a wheel. Orders and decrees come from on high and flow outward through the spokes, and the path is by and large unidirectional. He failed for no other reason than the Machim security was too tight and pervasive to elude.”

  Eren took another generous sip of his drink and forced himself not to glance over his shoulder, up the ramp, to see if this Avdei elasson was casing him. “So if one wanted to gain access to Amaranthe-wide information about the fleets—ship specifications and capabilities, formation strengths, locations and routes, chains of command?”

  “One would have to go to either the Prótos Agora or Machimis.”

  “Right.” He grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose for good measure. This was insane. Laughably so. Too preposterous to even be worth the thrill of attempting.

  “My friend, what have you gotten yourself involved in?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Infiltrating either of those locations is impossible.”

  “Oh, clearly.”

  Thelkt studied him suspiciously for a minute. “Why don’t you stay for a while? For the night at least. Take some pleasures. I’ll arrange you a private suite with whatever and whoever you wish to populate it, on the house. You seem as if you could benefit from a respite.”

  The man wasn’t wrong. Eren had seen nothing but a string of high-risk, difficult and frequently deadly missions for months now. Years, if he started to contemplate it. When he closed his eyes and breathed in, he felt the edges fraying.

  So…maybe deciding what to do with the information he’d learned from Thelkt could wait a few hours.

  He emptied his drink. “All right. Just for the night, though. I don’t need much—a soft, cushy bed, a steaming hydra shower, some tsipouro and a bit of canapé.”

  At Thelkt’s skeptical expression, he gave in and folded a little more. “Fine. Also a mild charist hypnol bowl.” His gaze drifted across the room to where the lower ramp spiraled to disappear below. “And there was a woman downstairs.”

  22

  KATOIKIA

  TRIANGULUM GALAXY

  LGG REGION VI

  * * *

  ALEX DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT she’d expected the Katasketousya homeworld to look like. Some kind of pandimensional meta-planet, perhaps? One that changed shape and color as you stared in various directions, or created an illusion of light dancing against perfectly placed funhouse mirrors, yet hollow in the center.

  But it was just a planet, with real, tangible soil covering much of its surface and briny water covering the rest. A desolate one, yet starkly beautiful in its vast emptiness.

  The rust and caramel plains reminded her of the North American southwest region—dry and desert-like, but not overtly hostile to life. She half-expected to see cacti and other xerophytes dotting the landscape, but the only vegetation they’d spotted so far was sparse scrub grass.

  “Did they ever truly live here, I wonder? Or have they hibernated in these towers forever?”

  Caleb rested on the dash as Valkyrie guided them to the location Mesme had provided. “I think they must have at some point in their past. For all their etherealness, they are still at their core physical beings. It’s why we’re here, ultimately. They have to evacuate because their existence remains tied to their corporeal bodies.”

  “True….” She trailed off as another of the towers came into view on the horizon. The towers were the sole fabricated structures to interrupt the barren landscape, and they thrust upward into the sky like forgotten obelisks from a forsaken past.

  Up close, the towers soared to nearly reach the clouds, and their subtle, dirt-free sheen suggested they had never genuinely been forgotten. But there were no roads leading to them, no visible power sources feeding them and no adjacent civilization centers to support those who supported the towers.

  No one loved the stars so much as she; no one bore such a wanderer’s heart as she. But this…the ache in her chest invoked by the setting felt sorrowful. She shouldn’t feel sadness or pity for beings who lived for aeons and called space their playground. Yet she couldn’t help but wonder what had been lost in the journey.

  One of the Metigen superdreadnoughts—of the ilk that had evacuated the Taenarin, not the ones that had massacred millions of humans—was parked beside the tower. A line of stasis chambers floated out a side entrance of the building and up a loading ramp, supervised by two Kats hovering nearby.

  They set down on the opposite side of the tower, if only so their tiny dot of a ship wouldn’t become lost against the mammoth profile of the superdreadnought.

  She turned to Caleb with a weighty sigh. “This is going to be…”

  “Awkward? Depressing?” He gave her a rueful shrug. “Probably. But it’s…maybe important that we see this.”

  “You think it humanizes Mesme.”

  “No. Well, yes, but mostly I think the Kats are learning a hard lesson here. They’ve spent millennia evacuating endangered species from Amaranthe—out of charity and goodwill, but also for their own more shrewd reasons. Now they’re being forced into doing the same for themselves. They could use a bit of humility, and if this doesn’t teach it to them, I doubt anything will.”

  She agreed wholeheartedly, though it struck her as an unduly harsh way to learn it.

  She slipped on a breather mask before departing through the airlock. The planet’s gravity and atmospheric protection were nominal, but the air was abundant in argon, giving the horizon a pale mauve hue. The mixture was rare on life-supporting planets. Had this been one factor, if among many, which led the Kats to seek out a less physical existence? The question hinted at a complex racial history they’d likely never learn.

  It required hardly a blink on her part—a nanosecond peek into sidespace—to confirm it was Mesme who approached them as they exited the Siyane.

  Welcome to Katoikia.

  Caleb took an additional step forward. “We’re sorry it has to be under these circumstances. Can we help in any way?”

  Your presence as witnesses is sufficient. Come. Allow me to show you what is held inside before it is gone.

  They followed Mesme into the tower. The first floor resembled a hospital lobby—almost normal, almost typical, and for a moment the surrealness of the situation faded.

  At their host’s urging, they stepped into a transit tube shaped in a way that implied it was used to transport pods, not people, and soared past several hundred floors. As they whizzed by, her enhanced vision picked out endless rows upon rows upon rows of stasis chambers, silent and nameless.

  The lift finally came to a stop on the top floor, though she could only tell this by the fact that the tube ended in a ceiling above them. The collection of stasis chambers here looked no different than those on all the floors below.

  Caleb gestured respectfully into the long room. “Are all of these individuals part of the Idryma? Do they all tend to the Mosaic?”

  No. The Idryma membership numbers less than a thousand. The Anaden empire spans forty-four galaxies, Caleb. It is vast, and there is much work to be done within it. These consciousnesses can be found in Pegasus, Canes and many galaxies in between.

  She cleared her throat, feeling…yep, awkward. “Didn’t any of them want to travel here and oversee their…body…as it’s moved?”

  Why would they?

  The response captured more about the Kats’ nature than any history lesson could. “Do yo
u really think the Directorate will send warships here to destroy the towers?”

  I am only surprised they are not here already. Perhaps we have been sufficiently duplicitous to give them pause, and thus give us time.

  Caleb drew near her to murmur in a low voice. “I’m starting to get an idea of what living in this universe, under the boot of the Directorate, genuinely means. For most, it’s not about suffering—it’s about fear.”

  A sense of urgency tinged with desperation permeated the air as the stasis chambers proceeded in a nevertheless orderly, deliberate fashion out of the tower and into the belly of the superdreadnought. She assumed there were dozens of other superdreadnoughts at dozens of other towers, each one filling with slumbering bodies while the consciousnesses belonging to them wandered the cosmos.

  She shook her head. It was all so very peculiar and contradictory. Alien. She’d always known Mesme was an odd bird, but en masse and laid bare for witnesses to see, the Kats’ nature bordered on unfathomable.

  She did know one thing, however. They didn’t deserve to be slaughtered for being peculiar.

  …Okay, so they were facing slaughter for trying to overthrow the intergalactic government. But even if the government in question hadn’t been a brutal, punitive dictatorship, it still would have qualified as a gargantuan overreaction.

  Valkyrie sent them both a pulse.

  I’ve received a message from Eren asi-Idoni. He says he has some information for us and requests a meeting at the Pelinys Arx in Andromeda. It’s ten hours travel from our location.

  Standing here gawking at the soulless stasis chambers was quickly escalating from awkward to overtly uncomfortable, and Caleb nodded discreetly in unspoken agreement. Truthfully, it wasn’t even a proper nod; at this point all he needed to do to convey harmony or discord with her inclinations—which he’d usually inferred—was quirk his mouth and the corners of his eyes in a certain way.

  Tell him we’ll be on our way shortly.

  Caleb turned to Mesme. “We’ve taken up enough of your time. I’m sure you have much work to do, so we’ll take our leave. Good luck, and contact us when you’re ready to move forward, or if you need us.”

  Yes. It will not be long, I think. If you wish to explore more of Katoikia—or merely this region—before you depart, you are welcome to do so.

  They lifted off the surface but didn’t depart the planet immediately. She guided the ship into a low-atmosphere orbit of the planet, unable to tear herself away from the haunting scene quite yet.

  As expected, they passed dozens of identical towers, each with identical funeral-themed processions of stasis chambers proceeding into a hold she knew from personal experience to be cold, bleak and dark. Not that the inhabitants of the chambers would notice.

  “I wonder if it’s like this every time they evacuate a planet.”

  Caleb rejoined her in the cockpit and handed her a drink, which she gratefully accepted. “I imagine it’s usually worse—more panic, more tears. Thankfully for them, these emigrants are asleep.”

  “Right. Good point. I think I’ll skip the next one.”

  His expression grew thoughtful. “We succeed, and maybe there won’t be a next one.”

  She sank into the cockpit chair as if forced down by the weight of the statement. But it was the unvarnished truth, wasn’t it? They’d been here a few short weeks, but somewhere along the way she’d begun to recognize the residents as individuals, as no longer abstract constructs but real people.

  She’d come here to fight for the ability of Aurora to continue to exist…but it was possible she’d also begun fighting for the right of all these species to continue to exist as well. And not simply exist, but live free.

  Check her out, fighting for something good instead of just against something bad. Kennedy would be so proud of her, she mused with a touch of wryness.

  Caleb moved behind the chair and began massaging her shoulders. “It’s a heavy burden. I know.”

  She reached up and covered one of his hands with hers. “At least we can bear it together.”

  “And we do.” He brought her hand up to his lips.

  She closed her eyes briefly, soaking in the sensations his touch elicited, then started to increase their altitude in preparation to leave the planet…

  …and instead adopted a wide arc across the arid plain. They had nearly returned to where they’d begun, and on the horizon the parade of chambers from the tower they’d visited continued. But her focus was no longer on the tower.

  She slowed.

  “You see something?”

  “A…shimmer, like heat haze off pavement.”

  “It’s not particularly hot out there.”

  “No, it isn’t. Valkyrie?”

  ‘I detect nothing out of the ordinary. I saw it as well, but solely because you saw it.’

  “Mm-hmm.” The shimmer danced at the edge of her peripheral vision once more, but when she turned to it, it was gone.

  She descended until the Siyane settled the ground, then looked up at Caleb. “Fancy a little expedition?”

  “Always. I’ll get our gear. Again.”

  She smiled in thanks and stared out the viewport, studying what she sensed but could not detect, until he reappeared with the breather masks, plus tactical vests and weapons. She raised an eyebrow.

  “No one ever said the Kats were the only life forms who lived here, or that we were the only visitors here now.”

  “Fair enough.” She took her gear from him and suited up.

  They stepped onto the desolate landscape for the second time. Ahead of them, flats stretched unbroken to the horizon. Nothing to see.

  So she slipped into sidespace—and laughed.

  “Something funny?”

  She grabbed Caleb’s hand and started walking forward. “Valkyrie, we’ll be back. If the Machim fleet arrives while we’re gone, save yourself.”

  ‘The ways in which I am not amused by this proposition are legion.’

  “Oh, fine. If there’s trouble, get Mesme and stay safe.”

  She preemptively toggled off their connection and strode through the cloaking barrier.

  23

  KATOIKIA

  TRIANGULUM GALAXY

  LGG REGION VI

  * * *

  THE EDIFICE OF A LARGE, DOMED BUILDING stood in stark relief against the otherwise empty panorama. Crafted of the same smoked glass as the stasis chamber towers, the facets decorating its spherical half-polygon façade reflected the early afternoon sunlight to create flares of light upon the sky.

  “Are they hiding this place from themselves?”

  Caleb shook his head. “No. They’re hiding it from anyone and everyone else who chooses to visit the planet. This means it’s important, and I like important. Let’s see what they’re hiding.”

  “Words to melt a girl’s heart.”

  He bumped her shoulder playfully. “Well, the right girl’s, anyway.”

  Their banter continued until they drew near enough to be able to make out details of the structure—including the most important detail of all, a small panel cut differently from the surrounding exterior. A door.

  Caleb unlatched the clasp on his Daemon’s holster and kept a hand on it as he placed the other on the glass.

  It slid open, and he stepped through.

  When no shouts, thuds or weapons fire erupted, Alex followed him inside.

  An open, high-ceiling room encompassed ninety percent of the interior. The area inside the dome teemed with overlapping panoramas of…scenes, of places. The projections appeared more substantial than the most advanced holos, yet they constantly shifted and blended into one another.

  At the center of the revolving swarm of images, a Kat reclined in a cushioned lounge chair, turned away from them. Not a swirl of lights, but an actual Kat—a ‘little gray man’ wearing a gauzy, shapeless tunic.

  The chair rotated around to face them, and the Kat sat up to regard them with enormous, teardrop-shaped pitch black e
yes. “Ah. Mnemosyne informed me to expect you. I am Paratyr, Second Sentinel of the Katasketousya. Welcome to the Mirad Vigilate.” Its voice came out thin and high-pitched, but audible.

  “What is the—you’re a—Mesme knew we would find this place?” She groaned. “Are you kidding me?”

  It eased itself out of the chair to a standing position, rising to perhaps a meter and a half in height. “ ‘Kidding’ is not a behavior in which I have the luxury of engaging.”

  Oh, goodie. It has even less of a sense of humor than Mesme.

  So we should probably be nice.

  Caleb offered a conciliatory nod. “Apologies. You’re the first Katasketousya we’ve met who is…occupying their body. We thought all members of your species had abandoned the physical form aeons ago.”

  “True. Yet I have nowhere to travel, so no use to do so. I observe all from here.” Paratyr gestured to the plethora of images, which continued to move and change.

  Alex took a step closer to the center. “What is this place? What are these scenes?”

  Paratyr approached one of the frameless projections, and it grew in size in response to the Kat’s presence. It showed a horde of spidery creatures scurrying over a field of glass fibers splashed in crimson and azure.

  “This is a Machim regiment’s misbegotten attempt to conduct a targeted Eradication of some of the creatures on AD-4508b in Antlia Dwarf—creatures whose skills and acumen they did not properly respect. The Machim commander will not make the same mistake a second time.”

  The Kat moved to another. In contrast to the prior scene, this one revealed a shining city on the shore of an emerald bay. Decorative archways and other architectural flourishes lent it a markedly distinct feel from the bland utilitarianism of the Anaden architecture they’d seen so far. “The Novoloume homeworld. Interesting affairs going on there these days. Affairs the Directorate might not expect.”