While he waited, Ethan found the nearest planet and set course for it. A mottled blue sphere came into view. He magnified that view and queried his ship’s sensors for details on the planet. It was a water world with 1.25 times standard gravity, a breathable atmosphere, and approximately 2% of its surface dotted with small islands. The equatorial temperature was 317 degrees Kelvin, making it on the hot side of balmy, and although it was listed on his star charts, the world didn’t even have a name, just a designation—GK-465. That was a good indication that it was worthless. Even barren rocks had names.
Ethan felt a crushing weight of despair. He worked hard to calm his racing heart as a sweaty surge of anxiety pulsed through him. If this was the Avilonians’ forward base, then where were they?
They must be hiding. If they’d gone to so much trouble to hide themselves from the rest of the galaxy, then of course they wouldn’t just suddenly change their minds about it now. Ethan keyed his comm to broadcast on an open channel and then he said, “This is Ethan Ortane, Captain of the Trinity, hailing from what remains of the Imperium of Star Systems. If anyone can hear this message, please respond; we are in urgent need of assistance.”
He waited a full minute with the comms open, listening for a reply. When none came, he tried repeating the message, but again, there was no response. Ethan accepted that with a frown. You want to hide? All right, I’ll play that game.
Fifteen minutes later, his ship finished updating the grid, now to a range of one tenth of a light year, but besides a few more planets and some outlying asteroid belts, there was still nothing out there. Cold dread began trickling through Ethan’s gut.
Now the planet was all he could see out the forward viewport. It lay close beneath his ship. A moment later, the Trinity began to shudder and shake around him as it hit the upper atmosphere. “Frek . . .” he hissed, fumbling with the dial to set the IMS from 98% to 100%. The shuddering stopped. He hoped he’d adjusted the controls in time to keep from waking Alara, but he supposed he’d know the answer to that soon.
A carpet of angry storm clouds appeared below him, racing up to greet his ship. The Trinity sliced into them and everything turned a dark, purplish blue. Raindrops began pelting the forward viewports, and then a blinding flash of lightning lit up the clouds from within, followed by a crack of thunder which rumbled through the cockpit. Ethan grimaced at that. Alara had to be awake by now. Decreasing the ship’s angle of descent, he began configuring the autopilot for a grid search of the planet. He couldn’t assume that the Avilonians were hiding on one of the planet’s islands; they were just as likely to be found hovering above the surface, or floating beneath it in some type of underwater facility.
While he was still configuring the autopilot, Ethan heard the cockpit door swish open behind him, followed by Alara’s voice: “What’s going on?”
He turned to her with a smile. “Hello, Darling.”
“Darling, hoi? Why didn’t you tell me we’d arrived?”
“I thought you could use the sleep.”
“Thanks, I guess. Have you made contact yet?” Alara asked as she slid into the copilot’s station.
Ethan cleared his throat. “I’m working on it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I haven’t found them yet.”
“Well haven’t they found you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did you try the comms?”
“Yes—no reply.”
“Are you sure we’re at the right coordinates?”
Ethan sighed. “Look, I’ve checked everything, and tried everything—my guess is they don’t want to reveal themselves until they have no other choice.”
“Either that or your ex-wife sent us on a one-way trip into the middle of frekking nowhere.”
The clouds parted and an angry black sea appeared below them. Even from several kilometers up, the waves were marked wrinkles on the face of the water. Lightning flashed overhead and another rumble of thunder roared through the cockpit.
“Why would she do that?” Ethan asked.
“Maybe she’s jealous. You saw the way she was looking at us—like we have everything she wants.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
“Our son is missing. Dark Space is overrun. Hoff is dead. Even if she is jealous, she has bigger issues to deal with. Whatever else Destra may be, she’s not that petty. The Avilonians are here. We just have to find them. Think about it, if you were trying to hide from the rest of the galaxy, why would you leave your forward base out in the open where everyone could find it? You’d find a way to hide it from nosey passersby.”
“Yea, well there aren’t exactly a lot of passersby left in the galaxy, so what are they hiding from now?”
“Maybe they’re hiding from the same thing we were—” Ethan suggested. “—Sythians.”
“Maybe,” Alara replied. A frown graced her smooth, pearly white skin, and she bent over her control station. “Or maybe you’re just not asking nicely enough. Let me try the comms.”
Ethan watched with one eyebrow skeptically raised as Alara set the comms to broadcast on all channels and then spoke into the audio pickups. “This is Alara Ortane of the Trinity, we know you’re out there, you motherfrekkers!”
“Hoi!” Ethan slapped the mute button. “What are doing?”
“What?”
“We want to find them so we can talk, not so they can blow us out of the sky!”
All the same, Ethan found himself listening to the crackle and hiss of the comms, hoping to hear a reply.
None came.
“Look,” Ethan said. “We’ll grid search the planet. I’ll put it on auto and set an alert to notify us when something comes up on the scopes. A few days from now when we’ve scanned every square meter of this planet, we’re bound to have something to go on.”
Alara shook her head slowly and turned to him with wide, frightened eyes. “What if we don’t?”
Ethan noticed that she had one arm wrapped around her belly as if to protect their unborn child from some unseen threat. He reached for her other hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “We will. Everything is going to be all right, Alara. I promise.” Ethan forced a smile for her sake and then leaned over to kiss her. His lips brushed hers, softly at first, but she returned his kiss with unexpected force. Ethan let himself be carried away by the moment until they broke apart, panting and gasping for air. “Why don’t you go back to our quarters,” he said. “I’ll finish setting up the autopilot and then meet you there.”
Alara nodded and shot him a wan smile. “Don’t be late . . .”
Her hand trailed lightly up his thigh as she left, and he turned to watch her leave. The tight black leggings she wore clung to her in a way which left nothing to the imagination. Ethan let out his frustration in a long, slow breath. Alara opened the cockpit and turned from the open doorway with a sly grin. “See you soon, handsome.”
He nodded and returned that grin. If nothing else, at least they could distract themselves from the fact that their future, which had looked so bright a month ago, now teetered on a knife’s edge above an uncertain abyss.
Chapter 22
112 standard galactic hours since last contact with unknown vessel . . .
Captain Caldin stared at the grid, her eyes fixed on the enemy warship. They were still trailing behind the Intrepid by more than a hundred klicks, safely out of range. Now that they’d slowed down, torpedoes were no longer out of the question, but Caldin didn’t think a volley of torpedoes would get past whatever passed for the Avilonians’ AMS (anti-missile system). No, they were defenseless and at the Avilonians’ mercy. The Intrepid had spent the last four and a half days decelerating from over one tenth the speed of light to their present velocity of just over one kilometer per second.
“Stand by to lower our shields,” Caldin said.
“Standing by . . .” Delayn replied from the engineering station.
“Lower them.”
“Shields disabled.”
Caldin waited, chewing her lower lip and tapping her foot. A full minute passed like that. She looked up from the star map to find her comms officer. Now that the crew was awake, Corpsman Terl was back in med bay with the other medical staff, and her regular comms officer was sitting in his place.
“What are they waiting for?” Caldin asked.
“Maybe they haven’t noticed yet?” Delayn suggested.
“I’d hail them to let them know, but they’re either unwilling or unable to receive comms from us. Are the Gors standing by at the hangar?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the comms officer replied.
“Good, and our Novas?”
“Ready and waiting to launch.”
“Then I suppose all we can do is wait for the krak to hit the turbines.”
“Or us,” Delayn added.
“Mind your station, Commander.”
Another minute later the bridge speakers squealed in protest and the gravelly voice from four days ago returned. “We are coming aboard now . . .” it said.
“This is it, people!” Caldin called out, starting from the captain’s table at a run. “I’m going to the hangar bay to greet them. Let me know the instant anything changes.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the comm officer replied.
But Caldin never made it off the bridge. The air in front of the doors began to shimmer, and she skidded to a stop a dozen meters from them. A sound like rushing water filled the air, and then she was slapped in the face by a strong gust of wind. That gust almost knocked her off her feet, and the shock of what she saw next left her gaping in silence.
Three men in dazzling suits of armor had just appeared out of nowhere.
Caldin’s brain hurried to fill in the blanks. They must have sent a cloaked ship to board the Intrepid and then somehow snuck aboard and made their way to the bridge using cloaking armor.
Their armor was highly reflective and it glowed a brilliant blue-white, dazzling her eyes. They wore matching helmets with even more brilliantly glowing visors. The taller man, who stood in the middle of the three, wore a shimmering blue cape that cascaded down from his shoulders, and a strange emblem was etched into his breastplate. The emblem glowed a deep blue, the same color as his cape, and was comprised of the letter A—A for Avilon? Caldin wondered. In the center was a spiral suggestive of a spiral galaxy with brilliant white points of light that resembled stars, and in the center of that was a pattern which looked disturbingly like an eye.
The man whose armor bore that emblem stepped forward, and the same deep gravelly voice which they had heard only a few minutes ago now echoed out across the bridge. “In the name of the Ascendancy and the almighty Omnius, I accept your surrender. You stand in breach of ancient covenants. Not only have you trespassed, but you have told others to do the same. Have you anything to say in your defense?”
Caldin shut her gaping mouth and shook her head. “Who are you?” she asked.
“That is irrelevant to these proceedings.”
“No, it’s not. You are accusing us of crimes we know nothing about. We have a right to know who our judge is.”
“I am not your judge. Your judge is the same as ours—he is Omnius.”
“And who is this Omnius?”
Suddenly the room flashed with a blinding light, Caldin winced and looked away. When she looked back again, she saw that the center of the symbol on the taller Avilonian’s breast plate was now glowing as bright as a sun, and the entire bridge was awash with the light.
“I am,” a new voice boomed. The voice was so loud and resonant that it sounded like rolling thunder.
“You are what?” Caldin asked in a small voice.
One of the other Avilonians took a sudden step forward and raised glowing palms toward her. Before Caldin could wonder what he was doing, she heard a whoosh of air; her stomach lurched, and she saw the ceiling rushing up to greet her. She hit with a crunch, and a sharp spike of pain erupted in her shoulder. Caldin began falling back to the deck, but an invisible hand seized her just before she could land on her knees and shatter them, too. The hand released her and she was left kneeling on all fours. Afraid to move and aggravate her throbbing shoulder, Caldin stayed down, panting heavily and working hard to suppress the pain. Her shoulder was almost certainly broken. What the frek was that? she wondered. Some type of grav gun?
“That is better,” the deep, gravelly voice said. “Now you are showing the proper respect. Do not speak again unless Omnius asks you a direct question.”
Caldin shook her head and gritted her teeth. She heard murmurs of discontent rumbling across the bridge as crew members took umbrage at the way their captain was being treated. It was tough to see through the blinding light, but Caldin thought she saw a few officers getting up from their control stations to kneel on the deck along with her. Seeing that only infuriated her more. Under the guise of checking her injured shoulder, she raised a hand to her ear to activate her comm piece. They needed the Gors up here ASAP. Things were already going to the netherworld.
“You do not know me,” the voice like thunder began as Caldin whispered orders into her comm piece, “but I know all of you. I know all of you as if you were my own children. Yet you are not my children, because my children know me.”
Caldin was tempted to say she was happy not to be one of those children. Of all the things she had expected from the Avilonians when they came aboard, this was the last thing she had imagined. Clearly the glowing eye in the center of the Avilonian leader’s chest was a symbol of this Omnius they spoke of. Now he, or it . . . whatever it was, was somehow communicating with them remotely.
Caldin finished whispering orders into her comm piece. While she waited for the Gors to arrive, her mind turned to wondering about the eye, but she was at a loss to understand who or what was speaking to them. Whatever it was, the Avilonians were treating it like a deity.
“You have come to my kingdom uninvited,” the thunderous voice said. “And your Sythians came with you.”
“Sythians are here?” Caldin couldn’t help from blurting out.
“Do not speak!” the gravelly voice of the taller Avilonian warned once more.
Thunder rolled again, “No, let her defend herself. She does not yet understand our customs, so she cannot be held accountable for her disrespect.”
Caldin took that as her excuse to say everything else that was on her mind. “I don’t know who or what you are, and I don’t know what you want with us, but I do know that you are mistaken,” she said. At that, Caldin heard the Avilonians gasp.
The thunder was quiet for a long moment. When it returned, it was much softer than before, “Go on.”
Caldin tried to look up into the blinding light, but her eyes began tearing almost immediately, and she was forced to look away. “We have not brought any Sythians with us. None that we are aware of, at least. We were sent to find Avilon, but until recently only one of us knew that. Allegedly, we were sent out here to look for survivors, but our mission was cut short when we ran into Sythians. We made a blind jump and accidentally ran into this gravity field. We’ve been stranded here for the past three weeks.”
“You are telling the truth, but one of your people is responsible for the Sythians’ presence here.”
Caldin shook her head. “Who?”
“He is not aboard this ship.”
“If you knew that, then why did you accuse us?”
“I didn’t. I told you the Sythians came with you. You assumed I was accusing you of bringing them here. As for why you are stranded, it is because I determined that you should be. No one shall enter the light without being first invited, and I would know had I invited you.”
Caldin shook her head. “You trapped us here?”
“There are twelve overlapping gravity fields surrounding my kingdom. When an intruder is detected, the nearest field turns on and they are forced to turn around. I then decide whether or not to meet with them. I
n the past I would do so to make them forget what they had discovered here. Now with so few of your people left, it is rare that anyone happens upon us by accident, so I meet with everyone. So far, the only trespassers have been refugees. In my mercy I allow them a chance to prove that they are worthy to become children of the light.”
Caldin felt shock coursing through her. She opened her mouth to say something, but the words got stuck in her throat, leaving her mouth agape. The Avilonians’ technology was astounding—artificial gravity fields several light years across, sensors that could passively detect a ship moving through SLS . . . Caldin shut her gaping mouth in an effort to contain her awe. She didn’t want to give this Omnius any more justification for arrogance than it already had.
“What makes a person worthy?” she asked, trying but failing to suppress her scorn. It bled clearly into her tone of voice.
“I can see that you do not like me,” the thunder said. “I also know that you have called for help and that the ones you called are standing outside right now, about to burst in and kill my three servants here.”
Caldin’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest. How could Omnius possibly know that? Had he overheard her speaking into her comm piece?
“Tell your . . . Gors to surrender before they get hurt.”
Caldin forced herself to look up at the blinding light just as the doors behind the three Avilonians swished open. She smiled. “Too late, Omni-frek. Tell your men to stand down before they get hurt. They’re trespassing on my ship.”
Suddenly the blinding light diminished as the three Avilonians turned away from her. Nothing appeared to have come in, and the bridge doors swished shut almost as soon as they had opened, but Caldin knew better than to let that fool her. The Gors were all cloaked.
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