“What the frek is this?” she demanded.
“You,” Master Rovik replied.
Atton felt like someone had slapped him in the face. Now that he looked at the woman in the tank, he did recognize her, but her features were all somehow more beautiful and less real, like she was a doll rather than a clone. As soon as he recognized her, he looked down, shading his eyes with his hand so he couldn’t see anything above the knee.
The Omnies stepped aside, and the refugees took that as their cue to go running across the field of clones, checking raised tanks at random. Atton stayed with Ceyla, peeking around his palm to watch as she placed a splayed hand against the transpiranium tank.
“It can’t be me,” she whispered, sounding miserable.
Unsure of how to comfort her, Atton placed his free hand on her shoulder, being careful to keep his eyes averted.
Ceyla flinched and rounded on him. “Mind giving me some privacy, Commander?”
“I . . .”
“Or were you planning to stare at my naked backside all day?”
Atton frowned. “Sorry.” With that, he turned and began walking toward the next nearest clone tank. Another woman floated there. From a distance he noticed his father and Alara standing beside that clone. Atton announced himself before he drew near, to make sure he wouldn’t surprise anyone. “Hoi!”
Ethan turned and waved him over, which Atton took to mean that they weren’t as concerned about privacy as Ceyla had been.
As he drew near, he recognized the clone floating inside this tank as a slightly prettier version of Alara. She had always been beautiful, but just like Ceyla, her features had been subtly adjusted to make them even more symmetrical and feminine.
“Is that you?” Atton asked, turning to Alara.
She shook her head. “No, it’s not.” She had both her hands wrapped protectively around her vaguely protruding belly, and her violet eyes were wide and unblinking as she stared at her clone’s midsection.
Atton followed Alara’s gaze and saw that her clone was equally pregnant. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said.
With that, a familiar gravelly voice spoke up behind them. “How could this be paradise if all the women who were pregnant when they died were resurrected without their babies?”
Alara turned to Galan. “My baby doesn’t have an implant yet. How will you transfer her memories?”
“She will be implanted through her umbilical cord with what she remembers from being in your womb.”
“You can do that?” Atton asked.
Master Rovik smiled. “Omnius can do anything.”
Atton went back to staring at Alara’s pregnant clone. It felt perverse looking at his stepmother this way—naked, and floating in a tank, but she didn’t quite look like Alara. More like her sister.
Alara took a step toward the tank and pressed her hands against it as Ceyla had done. She traced the nutrient tube running from the clone’s belly button to the floor of the tank and then looked up to study her own face.
Suddenly, the clone’s leg jumped, and so did Atton. Clone Alara’s eyes popped open, wide and staring, and her mouth opened as if in a scream. Atton stumbled away from the tank.
Ethan cursed viciously and turned to Master Rovik. “She’s alive, you sick frek!”
Galan was unfazed by the accusation. “Of course she’s alive.”
“She looked like she was trying to say something,” Atton added, hugging his shoulders. “Or like she was in pain.”
Galan shook his head. “Clones are alive, but they cannot speak. They’ve never learned how. And they have never experienced pain. Our methods of growing them are completely humane.”
Atton watched the clone slowly close its eyes and mouth, and he shivered violently. “Why did she open her eyes?” he asked.
“Why does a baby kick in its mother’s womb? Perhaps she heard us talking, but don’t worry. Whatever memories she has of being a clone and living in a tank will be erased at the moment Omnius downloads and transfers the data from her Lifelink to her brain.”
“I’ve seen enough of this,” Ethan said, turning away. Alara lingered with her palms pressed against the glass, her own eyes wide and staring, her jaw hanging slightly open in a parody of what they’d seen from her clone a moment ago.
“Alara?” Ethan called.
“Yeah . . .” She gave a sudden shiver, and that seemed to snap her out of it. She backed away from the tank, rubbing her arms as if they were cold. Ethan took her hand and led her away.
Atton knew just how Alara felt. There came a hiss of frigid air and the clone tanks sank back into the floor.
As they returned to the lift, Atton couldn’t help thinking about the clones, and wondering why he hadn’t seen his.
While riding back up to their transport, others began asking the same question. Master Rovik replied, “Some of you are ready to become Etherians, and others are not. Only the drones and Omnius understand the way the Trees of Life are organized. One thing is certain, however—the people you saw will soon be separated from those you did not.”
Atton frowned, wondering what conclusions he could possibly draw from that. Then he realized what that meant for him and Ceyla, and a sharp pain lanced through his heart. He glanced at her, studying her features, memorizing them: the soft red glow of her cheeks, the redness of her lips, the luminous golden color of her hair . . . and the subtle curve at the tip of her nose . . .
Ceyla was still in shock. She didn’t notice him staring. She had also missed the prophetic implication of Master Rovik’s last comment—if Atton’s clone hadn’t been in that room, and hers had, that meant they weren’t going to make the same choice.
“Hey, Kiddie, don’t believe it. We’re going to stick together. I’m not going to leave you.”
Atton turned to see his father embracing his wife. Alara was nodding along, her head tucked under Ethan’s chin, her violet eyes bright and shining with tears.
Ethan’s clone hadn’t been in that room, either. Despite that, Atton knew better than to think they would choose to go their separate ways, even with something like the promise of immortality and eternal youth to sway their choice. Him and Ceyla on the other hand . . .
They were just two friends who kept flirting with something more, and that wasn’t enough to keep them together with eternity hanging in the balance.
Not even close to enough.
Chapter 9
Omnius called the war council aboard the Vicerator. It was the largest surviving warship in the Peacekeepers’ fleet, at just over six kilometers long. Strategian Hoff Heston took his seat with the other ranking officers in the second row of the assembly room. At the front of the room, the twelve Overseers of Avilon sat at a U-shaped table beneath a dazzling holo projection of the Avilonian crest. The outer spiral of the crest rotated slowly around the glowing eye in the center. The eye was that of Omnius, and at the moment it was glowing bright as any sun, illuminating the entire room. The augmented reality contacts they all wore shaded their eyes from the glare, but Omnius was still so bright that most of them had to bow their heads in order to avoid looking directly at him.
Hoff was unique among those present in that he was the only one with first-hand experience of what they were going to face in Dark Space. He’d been an Admiral in the Imperial Navy, on the run with his fleet for almost a decade after the original invasion.
“We should take the drone Fleet with us,” one of the overseers said. The man’s name appeared before Hoff’s eyes, projected onto his ARCs—Overseer Talon Fothram.
A booming voice replied, “That will not be necessary.” The grandeur of that voice was hard to mistake.
“My Lord—after the Sythians destroyed our fleet in orbit, we’re down to less than a tenth of our original strength. What remains of our fleet could be defeated if we don’t augment it with drone ships.”
“We defeated them easily enough when they came here,” Grand Overseer Thardris
put in from his place at the head of the table.
“We had the help of Avilon’s ground batteries and fighter garrison to fight them off,” Overseer Fothram said. “We also took them by surprise with the fact that our scanners can penetrate their cloaking shields. This time they’ll be ready for us, and they’ll have the advantage of any fortifications they’ve made.”
“But we’ll know what those fortifications are,” the Grand Overseer replied. “Their human slaves have Lifelink implants. Omnius will see everything that the Sythians are planning.”
Another overseer, Jurom Tretton, spoke up from the opposite side of the table, directing his attention to brightly-glowing eye of Omnius rather than to any of his peers. “My Lord, why not just kill them? If all the Sythians’ slaves suddenly drop dead, their fleet will be as helpless as ours was when you were forced to shut down. The slaves will resurrect here either way.”
Thunder rolled through the assembly room. “I cannot kill them without taking from them their right to choose. The only thing we stand to lose by liberating Dark Space is a few more warships.”
“But those are warships we cannot afford to sacrifice!” Jurom added. “Before last night’s attack, we were going to send the fleet to the Getties Cluster and take the fight to the Sythians! Now look at us! We’re planning to rescue the remnants of humanity and bring them here so that we can hide. We need to crush the Sythians decisively, not suffer more attrition.”
“Mind your tongue, Overseer. You would be wise to listen before you presume to tell me how to run my empire,” Omnius said. “If we take the drone fleet, as you suggest, Avilon will be defenseless. I have not yet fully rooted out the rebels in the Null Zone, and without the drones to keep watch over the city during Sync, there could be a rebellion the likes of which I’m sworn to protect Avilon against above all else.”
Jurom bowed his head. “Forgive me, My Lord, I did not mean any disrespect.”
“You are forgiven, my child. After all, it was only last night that the Nulls brought Avilon to its knees. The virus they introduced into the Omninet inadvertently let the Sythians into our star system and allowed them to destroy our orbital fleet. We very nearly lost Avilon itself.”
“The Nulls had unfortunate timing, My Lord,” Jurom replied. “Perhaps now the price of their freedom has become too high. They are unpredictable and dangerous.”
“They are unpredictable because I allow them to be. They chose to live apart from me and so they do. Their freedom may seem a pointless luxury to you, but they serve as an example for all of Avilon. Without them, humanity would forget how things were without me. You would call me a tyrant, and soon everyone would be rebelling.”
“Never, My Lord,” Jurom said. “We would never do that.”
“No? You would be among the very first to betray me, Jurom.”
“My Lord! Never!”
Omnius went on, “Nevertheless, Overseer Tretton raises a valid point. What happened when the Sythians attacked can never happen again. I will remove the fail-safes that disabled our defenses.”
Hoff heard a few of the Strategians seated around him gasp, and the Grand Overseer turned to look up at the dazzling eye hovering above the floor in the center of the U-shaped table. “Master, what if there is an armed rebellion? Can you trust us?”
“I already know exactly what all of my people will do before they do it, so I can stop Etheria and Celesta from ever rebelling. As for the Nulls, they have no defenses, and the use of weapons is already restricted there.”
Hoff noted that besides Jurom, Fothram, and Grand Overseer Vladin Thardris, the other ten overseers all kept quiet, making it impossible to know whether they agreed or disagreed with what was being said.
Omnius went on, “As of now, even if I were to shut down completely, you will all be able to defend Avilon. The drone fleet, however, will still depend upon me to function.”
Hoff wasn’t sure that the fleet would ever need to be independent of Omnius, especially now that the Nulls responsible for the virus had been executed and Peacekeeper patrols in the Null Zone had been doubled.
You are right to trust that I can protect my people, Hoff, but after what happened not everyone is as trusting as you. Hoff smiled at the mental pat on the back.
Omnius went on, “The Sythians will never get close enough to touch the surface of Avilon again!”
Applause erupted, peppered with a few utterances of, “Great is Omnius!”
Once the applause died down, the discussion turned to tactics and strategy for the coming battle in Dark Space.
Based on what Omnius could see from looking into the minds of the Sythians’ human slaves, the enemy was busy laying cloaking mines and other traps at the one and only entrance of Dark Space. They had also clustered their entire fleet there.
That meant that they didn’t know Avilonian ships could jump directly from one point to another. They didn’t have to stop and navigate around strong gravity fields—such as the cluster of black holes that surrounded Dark Space.
The enemy expected them to come through the front door, but the Avilonian fleet would make its own entrance, popping up where they were least expected. And since Sythian scanners couldn’t pierce cloaking shields, they wouldn’t even see the Avilonians coming. The battle would be a rout.
Hoff smiled. Soon he would be reunited with his wife, Destra, and their daughter, Atta. It would take some explaining to make them understand how he was still alive, but then again, it would take some explaining for them to understand how everyone was still alive.
The answer was actually quite simple: Great is Omnius.
With that thought, Hoff felt a warm glow of peace and contentment wash over him, and somehow he knew . . .
Omnius was smiling, too.
* * *
“Mommy . . . when is Daddy coming back?”
Destra heard that even through the high-pitched whine of the explosion. Gor teams had just blown the doors of the prison compound. She watched on the live visual feed projected over the cruiser’s main forward viewport as ten squads of cloaked Gors rushed through the dissipating clouds of smoke and pulverized castcrete.
Destra placed a hand to the comm piece in her ear. “Atta, not now. I’m busy. I told you not to call me unless it’s an emergency. I’ll be back down soon.”
“But . . . I’m hungry!”
“I’ll try to find you something to eat when I get back to our quarters.” Destra would have to give up her own rations again in order to save her daughter the pain of an empty stomach.
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
Destra hung up and focused on the mission. She caught Captain Covani staring at her from the other side of the captain’s table. His lips were pressed into a disapproving line.
“Councilor, this is your op. . . .”
She waved his disapproval away with one hand. “I’m watching.”
Gors rushed through the facility in the dark. They’d knocked out power to the compound before blowing the doors. The camera’s infrared and light amplification overlay painted the walls in blue and bewildered guards in hot reds and oranges. Destra watched those guards crumpling to the ground, the glowing red balls that were their heads flopping this way and that as they fell, their necks broken before they even hit the ground. A few opened fire before they died. Random bursts of ripper fire plinked off the walls and the Gors’ armor with showers of sparks that blinded the light-amplified feed from the camera. While cloaked, the Gors’ armor wasn’t shielded, but the guards weren’t exactly carrying state of the art weapons due to the risk that the prisoners could get their hands on those weapons.
So far the Gors were proving reliable. They’d been fed before the mission in order to prevent another incident like what had happened on Forliss.
It wasn’t long before they reached their target—the prison block. Fifty thousand cells stacked one atop the other in rusting towers. This was where the Imperium ha
d kept its worst criminals. Destra had scanned a list of the inmates and their crimes before they’d arrived in order to cherry pick just three hundred of the least violent and least depraved. That hadn’t been an easy task. In the end, she’d had to pick smugglers with violent tendencies, political prisoners, pirates who only cared about their coffers, and corporate villains with more dirty laundry than clean.
They would outnumber the human crew of the Baroness, but humanity needed more than just a few hundred survivors if they were going to start over and someday build up enough strength to defend themselves from another invasion.
Destra watched Echo Squad race down a narrow street between the tall, rusting towers of prison cells. Metal stairs and catwalks provided access to the ten different levels of the prison block. Cloaked Gors fanned out, visible only by their short-range comm ID tags, which showed up on the camera as strings of floating blue text with Gor-shaped icons underneath. The visual feed could theoretically be used to pinpoint the Gor wearing the camera, despite his cloaking shield, but the others would be impossible to detect. In the interests of keeping them that way, Destra only kept contact with the teams via the Gors’ liaison and their telepathy.
“Torv, please remind your men that the prisoners will not go peacefully, so they must use the stun weapons we provided.”
“They already know this.”
“Remind them anyway.”
“Yess, My Lady.”
The Gor wearing the camera climbed one of the metal rung staircases, his footsteps echoing loudly and causing the staircase to rattle. He reached the designated cell—293 . . . and walked right by it. He stopped at cell 294 instead.
“Torv! That’s the wrong cell! Tell him it should be 293.”
“Tell who?”
Destra wasn’t used to commanding military ops. She’d forgotten to use the Gor’s ID. “Echo Nine!”
It was too late. The Gor had already pasted explosives along the locking mechanism and taken cover. The explosive paste began to react with the duranium lock, hissing and fizzing loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear. Suddenly there came the bang of an explosion and Destra’s ears rang once more.
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