“Frek it,” Atta muttered. “Then stop advancing! Pull back to the control center. We can’t afford to lose it! Not until our message gets out.”
“What about the Eclipssser?”
“Bring it with you! If we’re running into this much resistance already, then digging deeper is a mistake. At least we know they’ll refrain from using heavy weapons while we’re inside one of the omni-nodes, but as soon as we poke our noses out, they’re going to hit us harder than ever.”
“Yesss, you are right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
Atta watched a surge of green begin moving back up the tower, converging on her position. She hoped it would be enough. Atta ran to catch up with the two squads she’d sent to reinforce Delta squad. She heard weapons fire again, but this time it came via aural sensors rather than over the comms. The Peacekeepers were close.
Atta raced through a room full of overturned data towers, her feet crunching noisily through the debris. Up ahead, just on the other side of a shattered door she saw ripper cannons and pulse lasers flashing. Atta ran up to the door just as the squads she’d sent came boiling through. A flashing silver sphere appeared in their midst, and Atta screamed, “Grenade!”
Then it exploded, but instead of incinerating both squads with a roiling ball of fire, it picked them up and
threw
them, sending them flying and tumbling away in a radius around the grenade. Atta went flying back the way she’d come and landed with a
crunch
in a pile of shattered data towers.
Dazed, she shook her head and climbed unsteadily to her feet. Dead ahead, Peacekeepers came trudging through the rubble in their glowing, mirror-smooth armor. Their face plates shone through the gloom like flashlights. Here and there, they raised their palms to fire dazzling bursts of energy. Atta raised her arms to open fire, but the Peacekeeper nearest to her raised both his palms and hit her with a violent gust of wind from his grav guns, and she went flying once more. This time she hit the far wall. Despite the padding inside her armor, the impact was enough to stun her. The Peacekeeper walked up to her, a blue cape fluttering behind him, his palms raised and
humming
with a repelling force that held her pinned to the wall.
“Who are you?” the Peacekeeper asked, speaking in broken Versal.
Atta used her chin to flick from comms to external speakers. “Tourists,” she said.
“A sense of humor. Interesting. Let’s try again. What are you doing here? I’m going to count to three. On three, you’re either going to start talking, or we’re going to start shooting.”
Atta noted that half of the sixteen soldiers she’d come with lay motionless in the rubble, while the other half had been pinned to the walls and floor with grav guns, just like her.
“One. Two—”
“Wait, let me explain,” Atta said.
“You’ve got one minute.”
“That’s all I need.”
* * *
Ethan cut his way through door after door, to get away from the drones pursuing him. He managed to stay one step ahead of them, but the thunder of
clanking
footfalls and the
crackle
of laser fire intermittently flashing out behind him was a constant reminder that being one step ahead wasn’t good enough.
Before long he ran out of doors to carve through and ended up standing before a wall of windows, gazing out into a gaping chasm between buildings.
Clank-clank-clank!
Ethan spun around, looking for a way out. The door he’d carved open last lay right behind him, the edges of the hole he’d cut still glowing molten orange. Ethan glimpsed red HUD outlines swarming toward him. He didn’t have much time.
Remembering the grav pack strapped to his back, Ethan turned to the windows. Extending his energy blades, he carved a hole and punched out an oval section of glass. It went tumbling away, and Ethan poked his head out, staring down into the cavernous gap between buildings.
Orderly lines of air traffic sat gridlocked below him. Below that, about twenty levels down, was a pedestrian street level. Pedestrians walked along it in colorful streams. They didn’t look to be in a hurry. Clearly they had no idea what was going on, but then again, how could they? In Etheria all the news nets were controlled by Omnius and Omnius was offline.
Ethan eyed those streets, looking for a way to get down. Then the piece of glass he’d cut out hit the streets and pedestrians screamed. Ethan grimaced, but he didn’t have time to worry about them. A
screech
of laser fire sounded out behind him, followed by a crimson beam hitting the wall of glass and shattering it with explosive force. Ethan turned to see a glint of drone armor appear in the open doorway behind him. Lasers crackled out once more, and Ethan fired back with ripper cannons. Laser bolts went streaking by him.
He didn’t have time to hesitate. Ethan turned and dove through the open window. He screamed himself deaf as he fell, his arms and legs windmilling for purchase on something solid. Then he recovered his wits enough to grab his gravpack controls. He pulled them out and used a pair of miniature joysticks to right himself so he was falling feet first. As soon as he’d righted the pack’s axis of lift, he ignited the grav lifts on high power. A violent jerk sent all the blood rushing into his feet, and Ethan saw black. Terror filled him. If he blacked out now, he was dead. His heart pounding, he blinked rapidly to clear the spots from his eyes.
The ground rushed up, and he bent his legs to land with a ground-shaking
boom!
Pedestrians scattered in all directions. But one man stood frozen and staring.
“You’re a Sentinel!” the man said in broken Versal, his brown eyes wide and glowing.
“It’s not what you think,” Ethan tried to say.
“Get him!” someone else said, more distantly. Ethan turned to see a pair of Peacekeepers pushing through the crowd. They raised their palms, grav guns already powered and glowing, and Ethan turned and ran the other way, heading for the densest concentration of people. Peacekeepers wouldn’t fire on him if it meant a chance of hitting Etherians.
As Ethan ran, more people stopped and turned to point at him. Recognition spread like fire, and the crowd parted down the middle. Many of these people had come from the Imperium, but he was surprised they still recognized a Zephyr after all these years. The crowd continued to part, forming a living tunnel. At the end of it Ethan saw a whole squad of Peacekeepers charging toward him. He was trapped.
“Frek!” Ethan skidded to a stop and dove behind a bus stop. A withering rain of laser fire followed him, turning his cover to a molten ruin.
Ethan risked peering over the railing at the edge of the street. The city disappeared below him in a dizzying swirl. The next level of streets was almost too far down to see. Pulse lasers continued screaming into the ruined bus stop. The heat of that assault radiated through both the debris and Ethan’s armor. He was pinned down, and there was only one way to go.
Before he could take too long to think about it, Ethan jumped out of cover and leapt over the side of the street. Again came the sickening sensation of free fall, but this time he was in control. He fired his gravpack on low power to slow his descent while dropping past a level of gridlocked air traffic. Passengers in the cars pointed at him as he fell. A young child waved. Wind whistled by aural sensors, and they faithfully reproduced the sound inside his helmet, setting his teeth on edge.
The next level of streets came rushing up. Ethan dialed the power up to full and simultaneously bent his knees as his feet touched ground. Pedestrians backed away from him, and again the crowd parted. More Peacekeepers appeared in the distance. Ethan dashed into an alcove, and pulse lasers chased him there, digging chunks out of the bactcrete walls.
How many Peacekeepers
are
there in Etheria?
he wondered. They seemed to be everywhere he went.
Ethan risked exposing one of his arms to fire back. Red HUD outlines showed him where the enemy was even through the walls, while civilians appeared around them in receding masses of yellow. Ethan fired a solid stream of ripper rounds at the nearest enemy, and the Peacekeepers ducked into an entryway just down the street from him. They took turns firing at each other from behind cover, aiming for the pinprick-sized targets of each other’s exposed hands and arms.
Ethan missed consistently. So did the Peacekeepers. It looked like a standoff. Then one of the Peacekeepers scored a glancing hit on his arm, lighting his nerves on fire. Ethan roared and withdrew his arm to see a small, blackened hole in his armor. Determined not to repeat that incident, Ethan waited.
They had to step out of cover if they wanted to get him, and as soon as they did, he’d have a clear shot. Ethan kept an eye on his rear viewscreen, but there was no one there.
Then he saw a ghostly flicker of movement. His heart pounded and his palms began to sweat.
What was that? Some kind of glitch?
Then it reappeared, right behind him, and he recognized the outline of a man. Ethan whirled, making a fist to extend an energy blade from his right-hand gauntlet. The blade flashed out in a shimmering blue-white arc before hitting something solid and slicing through. An armored arm fell to the ground, the palm flashing with a burst of light as it fell. A belated
whoosh
of air punched Ethan in the chest and sent him flying through the entrance of the restaurant where he’d taken cover. He landed on a table and flattened it with a crash of glass and dinnerware.
Patrons screamed, and Ethan bounced to his feet to see the Peacekeeper who’d snuck up on him clutching the cauterized stump of his severed arm and swaying on his feet. The man saw him, and raised a bloody palm to shoot, but Ethan was faster. He poured a torrent of ripper fire from both gauntlets. Rounds sparked off the Peacekeeper’s armor, jumping his aim and making his body jerk and shudder like a rag doll. Then the Peacekeeper’s shields failed and rounds punched holes in his armor with crimson sprays of blood.
The man fell over backward, and Ethan grimaced, having suddenly lost his taste for violence. That Peacekeeper had tried to detain him with nonlethal force, and Ethan had killed him.
Two more red outlines appeared on his HUD, approaching the entrance of the restaurant, one from either side. Ethan tracked them with his ripper cannons, but then he stopped himself. They’d come to set Avilon’s people free, not to kill them. These Peacekeepers weren’t the enemy. He just had to buy time until Therius transmitted his message and proved that the real enemy was Omnius.
Ethan activated his external speakers. “I surrender!” he called out in Avilonian, and raised his hands above his head.
They replied in the same language. “You are under arrest for the murder of an Etherian Peacekeeper!”
“It was an accident. I need your help,” Ethan replied.
“Our help? Not even Omnius can help you now,” one of them said as he came out of cover. He strode in through the restaurant with both palms glowing and ready to shoot.
“That’s what I need your help with—Omnius. We’ve come to set you free.”
The Peacekeeper burst out laughing. “Free? From what? Paradise?”
Ethan watched the second Peacekeeper come creeping out of cover to back up the first.
“Give me a chance to explain, and I think—”
“Save the explanations for your trial. Get out of your armor.”
Ethan cracked his Zephyr open and stepped out. “Anything else?”
One of the Peacekeepers produced a pair of energy binders and snapped them around Ethan’s wrists. “Come with us,” he said, taking hold of Ethan’s arm and dragging him out the ruined doors of the restaurant.
“You’re making a mistake,” Ethan said once they were back on the street.
The Peacekeeper holding him spared a glance at his fallen colleague. “You’re right. I should have shot you, not taken you into custody.”
Ethan grimaced. He considered trying to tell these two the truth about Omnius, but they had no reason to trust him, and conspiracy theories were nothing new on Avilon. He would have to wait for Therius’s message.
As the Peacekeepers dragged him down the street, Ethan’s thoughts turned to his family. It was too late for him to help the Union take Avilon, but maybe it wasn’t too late to find Alara and Trinity. The problem was even if the Peacekeepers holding him suddenly switched sides when they got Therius’s message, he didn’t know where Alara lived.
If the Omninet were back online, all it would take is a simple query to find them. Ethan shook his head. There had to be another way….
Suddenly he had it.
Therius’s message!
In order to send it they needed to disable the Eclipser. Maybe not for long, but maybe long enough.
Ethan had to get to a computer terminal. Turning to the nearest Peacekeeper, he said, “I know why Omnius is offline.”
“Shut up.” The Peacekeeper tightened his grip and gave Ethan’s arm a violent tug.
“If you take me to a computer terminal, I can bring him back.”
The Peacekeeper stopped dragging him, and turned to glare at him. “How do I know you’re not going to make things worse?”
“The data terminals are all offline. They’re useless right now, so you have nothing to lose.”
“Why would you help us? A second ago you were trying to convince me that you were going to set us free from Omnius. Bringing him back online is the opposite of that.”
“I should have been more specific. The fleet I came with is here to set you free, but I have my own agenda. I’m here to rescue my family, and I need the Omninet to find them. Do you see me surrounded by an army of soldiers? I’m on my own down here for a reason.”
“Omnius won’t let you leave Avilon. How do you plan to rescue your family if he’s back online?”
“He’s going to be too busy fighting off the invasion to stop me. I’ll have my chance.”
The other Peacekeeper spoke up, “We’ve got nothing to lose by trying.”
The first Peacekeeper scowled and shook his head. “You do anything suspicious, and I’ll shoot you dead.”
“Agreed.”