"I was. Not anymore."
"You're part of a resistance movement against the established government of the planet where you live. That's about as far outside of the law as you can get."
"You know what I meant."
"Ethan, when you're fighting against an all-seeing, all-knowing, god-like intelligence, who would you rather sign up for the cause—people who keep their noses clean and live ordinary lives, trying to stay safe and warm in their shells, or people who are used to living in the shadows? People who are actually good enough at hiding their affairs from prying eyes that they've become professional outlaws."
"You're saying that the ends justify the means, and the means are criminals."
"Until Omnius is defeated we don't have the luxury of being law-abiding citizens."
Ethan narrowed his eyes and Valari uncrossed her arms long enough to make a grab for his hand. He'd already tightened both of them into fists, but she seemed content to rub his whitened knuckles. As much as he hated to admit it, her logic made a lot of sense, but he wasn't ready to back down yet. "Vee, if I find out I'm being used as a mule to transport Bliss, I swear I'll—"
"What? Have a tantrum? At the risk of repeating myself, you can't stay above it all, Ethan. That said, I'll keep any shipments of Bliss for our other couriers. Satisfied?"
Ethan hesitated. "I have your word on that?"
"Of course." Vee withdrew her hand from his and produced a credit chip from the bosom of her gown. "Two thousand bytes. Not bad for a four day week."
Ethan snatched his credit chip from her and gave a curt nod. "Thanks. See you next week." He turned and crossed the hangar to his own air car, a modest AR12—a lease.
Admiral Vee's words found him before he could escape. "You can't fix your mistakes by painting your world in black and white, Ethan. There's a reason we see in color."
"Tell that to dogs! They seem to get by just fine, and they're probably the nicest creatures I've met."
A long silence followed while Ethan fumbled in his pockets for his car's ignition chip. He assumed Vee had left the hangar. Then a hand reached around and grabbed him below the waist. She squeezed, and Ethan's breath caught in his throat. Every muscle in his body went rigid. Vee's violating touch was followed by a sibilant whisper in his ear. "Dogs also frek everything that moves. Is that a part of your moral code now, Ethan? Because if so..."
Ethan rounded on her, his nostrils flaring and chest heaving. He had to force himself to keep calm, but it took everything he had not to yell at her. He could handle this. It was just more of the same, and Vee couldn't force him to do anything.
"I've told you already—I'm married. Happily married. So knock it off, or I really will quit. Money isn't everything."
"No? But safety is, isn't it? In this crime-ridden city, your beautiful wife wouldn't last long if you had to go back to living below level ten. She might even make some interesting entertainment for a few lowlifes before she dies. Are you sure that's what you want?"
Ethan gritted his teeth and loomed toward her. "Are you threatening me?"
Suddenly the playful, sarcastic spark left Vee's turquoise eyes, and something ugly took its place. "No, I'm stating the facts. I pay you enough money to keep your family safe, while I pay the rest of my couriers half of what you get. You want to point fingers about misspending the Resistance's funding? You can start by pointing one at yourself. I'm doing you a favor, Ethan, not the other way around. Don't forget that."
"I won't sell my soul for you."
Valari gave a short yip of laughter. "You'll do whatever I say, or else all you'll have left is your soul, and considering souls don't exist, that's about as poor as you can get in this life."
Ethan scowled. "Just keep your hands to yourself, Vee," he said as he opened the car door and climbed in.
"Very well," Vee said. The playful spark was back.
Annoyed and speechless, Ethan slammed the door in her face and flicked the ignition. The car thrummed to life, and Admiral Vee took a few steps back. She stood waving at him while he gunned the car's grav lifts and ignited the thrusters to get away.
On the way home, the tail lights of other cars left a bloody trail between him and the witch's lair. Maybe dealing with the seedier side of Avilon in order to lead a resistance movement had left Admiral Vee jaded and cold, but he didn't have to follow her down that road.
It took him the better part of the drive home just to get his breathing under control. Ethan reached the apartment he shared with Alara in less than half an hour. Thankfully, they'd managed to move up from the rat hole they'd been renting on level nine of Sutterfold East to level twenty of Sutterfold West. It was more than twice as much per month, but thanks to the Resistance, Ethan could afford it now—even with Alara on maternity leave and looking after their newborn baby, Trinity.
Quitting was a bluff, and the admiral knew it. He had to Keep Alara and Trinity safe. They were everything to him. Moving up in life is easy. Going back down is the hard part.
Ethan pulled into the garage just below his apartment. The blue haze of static shields fizzed against his car as it slid inside; then the outer door of the garage began rolling down, and he killed the engine. The car's running lights snapped off and plunged him into a momentary darkness before the garage lights came on, swelling to a dim, soothing golden hue.
Ethan climbed out and made his way over to the steps. A shiny silver door at the top swished open, and Alara appeared in the opening, looking more beautiful than ever as the light turned the finer strands of her dark hair to liquid gold. Ethan smiled and Alara's cheeks dimpled as she matched that smile. In her arms she held a beauty to rival her own.
Trinity.
Ethan hurried up the steps.
"We missed you," Alara said as he drew near.
He reached the top of the stairs and lifted her chin for a kiss. Then he bent to drop another kiss on Trinity's nose. Bright violet eyes cracked open, followed by a baby squeal and a toothless grin. Ethan stroked her tiny hand as she kicked her feet with excitement. In that moment all of the day's worries seemed to melt away, and he sighed.
"I missed you two even more," he said, enfolding Alara in a one-armed hug.
She walked inside, and he followed. They made their way to the living room and sat down on the couch to watch a bright and sparkling view. Air cars raced soundlessly by their twentieth-floor window, casting fleeting shimmers of light against dark mirror-glazed office windows on the face of the building opposite theirs.
"How was your day?" Alara asked.
"Great," he lied.
"Payday today, wasn't it?"
"It was."
"And?"
"Two kilobytes."
Alara gasped. "That's even more than last week!"
"Depends on how many hours I work, how far I have to drive..." Ethan was at a loss to explain any better than that without also revealing what he was really doing.
"Why would Valari pay you so much to be a limo driver?"
Ethan shrugged. "I think it's a form of charity for her. She has so much money that she can afford it. That, and I guess she pays well to ensure loyalty and good service. We got lucky."
Alara took a deep breath and turned to look at him. "There's nothing else? No catch?"
Ethan furrowed his brow and played innocent. "Like what?"
"I don't know... like some reason why she might be paying you more than she should."
"I haven't noticed anything strange yet, but if I do, you'll be the first to know." Ethan felt a deadly weight settle on his shoulders with those lies, but lying was the only way to keep his job and protect his family. If Alara knew everything that went on in his job, she'd force him to quit, and then she'd go scratch Vee's eyes out for even daring to look at him.
Alara let out a breath and relaxed against his shoulder, getting comfortable. She rolled her head against a hard knot of muscle in the crook of his arm. "You're tense."
Ethan forced himself to relax. "Sorry. It was a tough
day."
"I thought it was Great?" Alara shot him a suspicious look.
He replied with a cocky grin. "Payday's always great."
Alara snorted and subsided once more.
They passed a minute or two in silence before Trinity began making discontented noises and grabbing at the air, looking for something. It wasn't until Alara bared one of her swollen breasts that Ethan realized what that something was.
He watched as Alara fed their daughter. After a while both Alara and Trinity fell asleep, and Ethan smiled. A warmth of contentment spread through his chest. Seeing his family safe and at ease made everything else somehow worth it. He couldn't afford to jeopardize that.
No matter what.
Chapter 4
Farah awoke staring up at a dark castcrete ceiling. The last thing she remembered was Sythians in their glossy black armor storming the bridge of the Baroness, shooting at her with radiant blue fire.
She'd surrendered, and they'd taken her alive. But where was she now?
Disoriented, Farah sat up to see that she was inside of a small, windowless room with two cots, a wash basin, shower, toilet, and a heavy door with a suspicious-looking hatch at the bottom. Two people sat on one of the cots, staring down at her. It took Farah a moment to recognize their gaunt, dirty faces. One of them was a little girl, and Farah recalled that the other was her mother. Farah struggled to remember the woman's name...
Destra Heston. The little girl was harder to place. Both of them had gone with Bretton and the Gors to Noctune. If they made it, then surely Bretton did, too! she thought.
"You're alive!" was all Farah could think to say.
"So are you," Destra replied in a whisper of a voice. "We were beginning to wonder." Farah watched as the older woman crossed the space between them. "Who are you?" Destra asked, getting down on her haunches and meeting Farah at eye level.
"I'm Captain Farah Hale of the Baroness—" she said, rubbing a painful lump beneath her curly blond hair. She must have taken a bad fall when the Sythians shot her. "Or I was anyway," she amended. "Now I'm just Farah. The Sythians have my ship."
Destra's eyes widened. "I remember you... the admiral sent you back for us?"
An icy weight settled in Farah's gut. Her head felt suddenly airy and light. "The admiral didn't send me. I came looking for him. You mean he's not with you? Where is he?"
Destra shook her head. "I went with the Gors to the surface. The admiral stayed in orbit. We lost contact with the Tempest, and our shuttles on the surface were attacked while we were out exploring the planet. We assumed that maybe the admiral ran, but if he didn't send you..."
Farah shook her head. "He can't be dead," she said, suddenly fascinated by the hard-bitten stubs she called fingernails.
"Maybe he isn't," Destra replied.
But she knew better. She'd seen the debris in orbit. If he wasn't here as one of the Sythians' prisoners, then he wasn't anywhere.
"I came here looking for him," Farah explained. "I delivered my entire crew to the Sythians, thinking that he was still alive and that I could do something to help him if I came."
"I'm sorry," Destra replied, as if her apology could wipe Farah's conscience clean.
Suddenly she felt the full weight of her foolishness, and despair gripped her. "I shouldn't have come."
"You didn't find the admiral, but you did find us. We're alive, and we do need help."
Farah glanced up from her nails and saw kindly blue eyes looking back at her. "I'm a prisoner now, too," she said. "I can't help you."
"You couldn't have known you'd be captured."
"No, but I didn't have any grand plans for a rescue either. We didn't have enough fuel for a two-way trip."
"Mistakes always look worse in hindsight."
The older woman sat down beside her, and after a moment the little girl joined them on the floor, too. Farah looked from one to the other and saw two smiling faces. They were happy to see her. Misery loves company, she supposed.
"Don't worry, things will look better in the morning," Destra said.
"How can you even tell what time it is?" Farah asked.
"We're about to go to sleep," the little girl explained. "When we wake up, it will be morning."
"Yes," her mother agreed.
Farah's brow furrowed at that. "What do the Sythians want with us?" she asked.
Destra shook her head. "We don't know."
"It's been more than six months and you don't know?"
"They bring us food and a few supplies, but that's it. They never ask questions, and they don't give any answers."
"Then we're frekked! They want to see us rot in here. This must be our punishment for our war crimes—as if we ever killed any of them!"
"That's enough!" Destra said. "You're scaring Atta."
Farah noticed that the little girl's eyes were suddenly full of tears. She took a deep breath and shook her head. "Sorry. I came a long way for nothing, that's all."
"There's always hope."
"I spent six months thinking that. Now I'm not so sure." Bretton is dead, a solemn voice whispered inside her head, and another wave of despair hit her, causing a painful lump to rise in her throat.
"Can you keep a secret?" Destra asked.
Farah shook her head. "Who am I going to tell?"
Then Destra smiled and leaned over to whisper in her ear. The woman's breath smelled like an open sewer, but her words were as sweet as any honey. "We have a tunnel."
"What? How?" Farah breathed, eyeing the solid castcrete walls of their cell.
Destra smiled, revealing yellow teeth. "They took the Gors prisoner, too, and they're not as easy to contain as we are."
Farah blinked and blinked again. Then something strange happened. In spite of everything—the crushing sadness from Bretton's passing, and the guilt she felt over her crew—Farah's lips stretched taut and she matched Destra's smile with one of her own. The grin on her lips felt manic, and it probably wouldn't last, but mania was still better than despair.
"There's always hope," Farah decided, nodding slowly.
* * *
Captain Marla Picara of the Resistance stood inside the echoing jump core of a derelict judgment-class cruiser. They'd managed to bring the ship's backup generator online, so at least they had light to see by.
The rest of Marla's crew were scattered around the core, using handheld scanners to image the different components so that they could disassemble a digital model before they disassembled the real jump core.
Sythians stood guard all around the circumference of the room, their glossy black armor making them look like diminutive Gors.
This was Marla and her crew's reward for surviving the battle in Dark Space—being forced to reverse-engineer quantum jump drives so that the Sythians could reach Avilon and finish what they'd started.
There was just one problem: only Omnius knew how quantum jump tech worked. The Sythians had spent enough time probing her mind to see that she wasn't on Omnius's side, that she was de-linked, and that one of her recent roles in the Resistance had been to help refit old human warships with quantum tech. But somehow the Sythians refused to believe that Marla had no idea how to make a quantum jump drive from scratch. The Resistance had smuggled the components for their jump drives off Avilon using a quantum junction that they'd stolen from Omnius. No one actually knew how to create those components.
Marla blew out a breath, and a nearby pair of Sythians turned toward the noise. They appeared to notice her idleness, so Marla smiled and took out her scanner.
It was time for her to look busy again.
She walked up to the component she was supposed to be imaging, absently wondering how long it would be before the Sythians realized that their prisoners had outlived their usefulness. She began scanning the giant silver rod coming down from the center of the dome-shaped core. As she did so, she saw that the internal structure of the rod was like that of a supercollider. It appeared to curve away from the aft of the ship, disa
ppearing both above and below the jump core. Marla recalled seeing cylinders like this one in Avilonian ship schematics. They ran in rings through the drone decks that made up the insulating outer hulls of Peacekeeper ships. Marla studied the scan of the silver rod in the center of the jump core, wondering what purpose a supercollider might serve. Marla began to formulate a hypothesis, as if she'd known the answer all along.
The jump core used black holes generated by the particle accelerator to... do what exactly? Power the jump drive?
Her hypothesis ended there. It wasn't much to go on, but it was a start, and it might just be enough to keep her and her crew alive for a while longer. Marla whistled and waved her hand in the air to get her crew's attention. They came over in a hurry. "What is it?" her chief engineer asked, sounding painfully hopeful.
Marla turned to him with a smile. "I found something."
Chapter 5
Strategian Hoff Heston sat in his office on the second level of his apartment in Etheria. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows running adjacent to his desk gave a sprawling view of pristine towers, shining bright and majestic in the fading light of the Celestial Wall overhead. That shield layer served as Etheria's sky, but it was also the highest level of segregation on Avilon. It separated Omnius's children from his chosen ones—the Celestials. Those white-robed men and women rarely ventured below Celesta, and it wasn't hard to understand why. Their city lay basked in real sunlight, with so many green, growing parks planted on its rooftops that from above it looked almost like the natural surface of Avilon.
Hoff sent a mental command to the room's control system via his augmented reality contacts, and the windows polarized until the only thing he could see was the holographic star map hovering above his desk.
Ever since the Sythians had defeated Omnius's Peacekeepers in Dark Space, Hoff had felt restless. Stargazing helped diminish that anxiety. For as long as he could remember, he'd been fighting the Sythians, and now Omnius had declared that He would defeat them with the help of the drone fleet and an army of self-replicating nanites. The Peacekeepers were grounded.
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