The small ship landed nearby, and I jogged out to meet Hades as the loading ramp lowered to the ground. Hades appeared, descending the ramp, and I slowed to a walk.
“Glad you’re back,” I said, reaching out to grip his arm when I reached him.
He stared down at me, his ice-blue eyes filled with warmth. “Glad to be back.” The corner of his mouth ticked upward, and the silence stretched out between us, turning expectant.
I cleared my throat and released his arm. “They're, um, all waiting for you in the lobby,” I told him, pointing over my shoulder with my thumb.
Hades nodded. “Good. I’m eager to speak with them.”
I turned and started back to the central tower, Hades falling in step beside me. Raiden stood in the doorway ahead, holding the door open as he waited for us. Something had shifted between Raiden and Hades. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was more respect between them now, as though they were both able to fully grasp what the other meant to me. I wasn’t sure what it would mean for us moving forward, but I was hopeful that the big, scary either-or I had been dreading wasn’t quite so hard and fast.
“Raiden and I are packed and ready to go through the gephyra,” I told Hades as we drew near Raiden and the open door. “Do you want us to wait for you, or . . .?”
Hades shook his head. “You should go. Make sure the Elysium is prepped. I'll brief our people on the situation and give them guidance on what to work on while they await our return.”
I glanced at him sidelong. “And you'll make sure they understand why they need to stay down here . . . no matter what?” I said. “I already told them as much, but I’m sure it will mean more coming from you.”
Hades nodded once. “And Tammy should be here,” he said, a soft smile curving his lips and warm fondness in his voice. “She'll keep everyone in line.” He spoke of his long-time Genetec second-in-command, Tammyris, who had been placed into the body of an unassuming middle-aged woman. The body was perfect, emulating everything I remembered about Tammyris. She was easy to overlook, but one glimpse into her eyes, and there was no mistaking her keen intelligence or iron will.
Raiden stepped out of the way as Hades and I passed through the doorway into the lobby. Transplanted Olympians rose to their feet all around us.
I stopped and turned to Hades. “Don't take too long. The sooner we can get the Elysium off the ground, the sooner we'll get back here to load up the rest of our people.” And hopefully, do something to avert the approaching shitstorm that didn’t involve nuking this whole planet, I thought but didn’t voice.
Now that we had “Henry” on our side, there was a chance we could sway the UN Security Council to our way of thinking. The Tsakali were a plague on the universe, and if the world leaders couldn’t see that, there wasn’t anything we could do to save this planet.
Hades nodded, his lips curving into an all-business smile. “As you say.” He looked at Raiden, and the two men exchanged a nod.
Raiden started for the stairs at the back of the lobby that would carry us up to the gephyra chamber.
I turned to follow but hesitated. Keenly aware of the Olympian eyes watching us, I kept my hands to myself and touched the comms patch stuck behind my ear, meeting Hades’ watchful gaze. These people were researchers and scientists, not fighters. I hated leaving them here to fend for themselves. “If you catch even the slightest whiff of trouble . . .” I raised my eyebrows to emphasize my implied directive.
Hades smiled, warmth in his expression this time. “You'll be the first to know.”
I held his stare for a long moment, not liking the idea of splitting up again. But it had to be done. I nodded and turned away, jogging to catch up with Raiden. We hurried up the spiral staircase and into the gephyra chamber, where the quicksilver orb marking the opening of the bridge to the frozen settlement shimmered on the golden platform.
We made a beeline for our packs and weapons propped up against the back of the control panel. Once we were geared up and ready to go, we headed for the gephyra in the center of the room.
“You ready for the next adventure?” Raiden asked as we closed in on the opening to the bridge.
With him by my side, how could I not be? I grinned, shooting him a sideways glance. “Wouldn't miss it for the world.”
31
Hades and I stood side by side on the balcony overlooking the command center of the Elysium, the gephyra dormant behind us while the command stations spread out below us blinked and beeped with activity. The passing stars and other celestial bodies were visible on the massive viewscreen ahead, looking like multi-hued laser beams all converging on some distant point.
I stood facing the viewscreen, gripping the handrail with both hands, my regulator activated to give the others aboard the ship their privacy. Hades stood with his back to the screen, his arms crossed over his chest. My mom sat at the navigation terminal below, while Raiden and Meg were in one of the ship’s many training rooms, sparring. Emi and Fiona were huddled together in the lab where the Tsakali scout was being held captive, studying the strange creature.
I hadn't traveled aboard a ship moving at faster-than-light speeds since the Tartarus arrived on Earth some fourteen thousand years ago. I had lived at least a dozen lifetimes since, but the lurch of the ship as the FTL engines fired spurred emotions in me that felt a lot like the nostalgia of coming home after having been gone too long.
I had been born aboard the Tartarus—or rather, created—and my first lifetime had been lived in that relative captivity. Back then, slipping into and out of faster-than-light travel had been a regular and predictable part of my day, like the rising and setting of the sun. It was a strange comfort to once again be contained within a cage of orichalcum-reinforced steel, hurtling across the universe. I wondered if this was what it was like for seafarers when they returned to their beloved ships, to their beloved ocean, after too long on land. Only my ocean was not composed of salt and water, but of space dust and stars.
I glanced at Hades, studying the slight furrow between his eyebrows. He was deep in thought, his stare locked on the gephyra’s golden platform, though I had the impression he wasn’t really looking at the machine so much as using it as a focal point for his wandering thoughts.
“Do you ever miss it?” I asked him.
Blinking, Hades looked at me, confusion clouding his stare.
I gestured to the viewscreen behind him, a small, dreamy smile touching my lips. “Soaring among the stars . . .”
Hades glanced over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows. “Not really, no,” he said and returned to staring ahead. After a moment, his attention slid back to me. “You miss it?”
I shrugged. “For a long time, it was all I knew,” I reminded him.
Unlike almost all other engineered Olympians created during the multi-cycle trip from Olympus to Earth, my eyes had been opened to the truth of our existence early on during my first lifetime, thanks to being chosen by Demeter to be brought into the Order of Amazons. I had still been a relative child when I learned that my world was really a ship and was shown my first, terrifyingly beautiful glimpse of the endless depths of Earth's strange blue sky. By the time we had finally reached Earth, I walked off the Tartarus and didn't look back. I was done with walls, with cages. Or so I had thought.
But living under Demeter's rule was a cage of its own, and I hadn't known true freedom until the day I defied her. Until the day I died to save our people. And now the Tsakali were coming to Earth once more, a swarm of destruction driven by a warped sense of revenge burning in their hearts.
I sighed and bowed my head. “We're not going to be able to do anything to prevent the Tsakali invasion, are we?” I could feel myself slowly, reluctantly accepting the truth.
A soft, bitter laugh escaped from Hades’ chest, and his stare wandered back to the gephyra. “No, I don’t believe so.”
I frowned, still hoping there was a way to save Earth. To save all those people. In a sense, they were my people, t
oo. “But what if Henry was onto something—about the Tsakali’s hatred of our people?” I said, rushing to say more before Hades could dismiss the idea outright. “If we leave and destroy all traces of Olympians and chaos stones from the planet, and all that the Tsakali find when they arrive are humans and their relatively primitive technology, maybe the Tsakali will just move on?”
Hades’ shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. But the truth of the matter is that humans have too much of us in them.”
I looked at Hades, my brows bunching together.
“As we tweaked the humans’ genetic code over the years to make them compatible hosts for Olympian consciousnesses,” he explained, “we inserted pieces of our own DNA. Too many pieces, I’m afraid. The Tsakali will detect our touch. They will know we were here, and they will hold this world hostage until they get what they want . . . or until they destroy it out of misguided retribution.”
I faced Hades, leaning my hip against the railing and crossing my arms over my chest. “So, humanity can either cooperate with the Tsakali—and doom the universe—or fight them and die.” Of course, I knew we couldn’t let them cooperate. “Excluding those lucky few we evacuate aboard this ship.”
Hades took a moment to respond. “Pretty much,” he said grimly.
I pursed my lips, quirking them to the side as possibilities danced through my mind. “What if there's another option?”
Hades looked at me sidelong, his eyebrows raised.
“How many souls can the Elysium hold?” I asked. I wasn't talking about people with physical bodies, but disembodied consciousnesses, like those still contained within the Vault of Souls in the Omega site.
Hades narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “A little over two billion,” he said, then added, “Minus the spots taken by the millions of Olympians already residing here and those we’ll be adding.” The ship hadn’t been empty when we had found it. Far from it, in fact. It looked like the people who had abandoned the frozen settlement mid-construction had all uploaded their consciousnesses into the Elysium’s supersized Vault of Souls, though we still didn’t know why they had fled into the ship.
I nodded to myself. There wouldn’t be enough room to fit all of humanity, but there would be space for a good chunk. Far more than we could carry bodily. Enough that humans of Earth could live on, elsewhere, even if their world died.
“If we let the humans share their knowledge of the chaos stones with the Tsakali, then the universe is doomed,” I said, thinking out loud. “And if we leave them to fend for themselves, all traces of chaos stones wiped from the planet, then their world is doomed. But if we evacuate as many as we can into the Vault of Souls here, aboard this ship, they have a real chance of surviving.”
Hades’ expression turned thoughtful, considering.
“I think we owe them that much, at least,” I said, turning partway as my gaze drifted down to where my mom sat at the navigation terminal. “This war may never have reached them, if not for us.”
My mom didn’t know about the last resort—unleashing a weapon that would turn Earth into something resembling the first colony we had visited. None of the humans aboard the Elysium knew, and I was terrified of telling them what we might have to do. At least this way, I might be able to offer something of a consolation prize—far greater than what we had thought was possible.
I could feel Hades’ stare on the side of my face. “It won't be easy, convincing the humans to abandon everything they know to come with us.”
I blew out a breath, relieved that he was open to the idea.
“To many, they will be unable to see existence in the Vault of Souls as anything other than death,” he continued. “I don’t know that many will choose to come. Unless you mean to take them unwillingly . . .”
I shook my head, still looking down on my mom. “No, we give them a choice . . .” I glanced at Hades, the corner of my mouth tensing. “We just don't tell them their bodies won't be coming with their minds when they board the ship.”
After all, we had Fiona and all of Hades' techies—how hard could it really be to create a new world for humanity within the Elysium's Vault of Souls? A virtual world, as real as the one they had left behind, where they would be safe while we searched for a new place to call home. Or better yet, while we searched for a way to defeat the Tsakali, once and for all. They wouldn’t need to know the truth until it was all over and done with.
And more importantly, they would survive.
Thanks for reading! You’ve reached the end of Dreams of the Damned, but the story continues in Song of the Soulless.
Go to lindseyfairleigh.com/sacrifice to grab a free copy of Sacrifice of the Sinners, the Atlantis Legacy prequel.
More Book By Lindsey Fairleigh
www.lindseyfairleigh.com
ATLANTIS LEGACY
Sacrifice of the Sinners
Legacy of the Lost
Fate of the Fallen
Dreams of the Damned
Song of the Soulless
ALLWORLD ONLINE
AO: Pride & Prejudice
ECHO TRILOGY
Echo in Time
Resonance
Time Anomaly
Dissonance
Ricochet Through Time
KAT DUBOIS CHRONICLES
Ink Witch
Outcast
Underground
Soul Eater
Judgement
Afterlife
THE ENDING SERIES
The Ending Beginnings: Omnibus Edition
After The Ending
Into The Fire
Out Of The Ashes
Before The Dawn
World Before
THE ENDING LEGACY
World After
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About the Author
www.lindseyfairleigh.com
Lindsey Fairleigh is a bestselling Science Fiction and Fantasy author who lives her life with one foot in a book—so long as that book transports her to a magical world or bends the rules of science. Her novels, from Post-apocalyptic to Time Travel Romance, always offer up a hearty dose of unreality, along with plenty of history, mystery, adventure, and romance. When she's not working on her next novel, Lindsey spends her time walking around the foothills surrounding her home, playing video games, and trying out new recipes in the kitchen. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family and their small pack of cats and dogs.
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Dreams of the Damned (Atlantis Legacy Book 3) Page 20