Ethan nodded.
“Fine, so you’re staying, and we’re going,” Jena said. “Nice to meet you all…”
“Hold on!” Ethan caught her by the arm and yanked her up to within an inch of his face. “You can’t fly
my
ship out of here without my launch codes, and we’re not going to sit around here waiting for nanites to kill us. You’re going to take us up to the Icosahedron so that we can speak with Omnius in person.”
“Forget it.”
“I’m not asking you,” Ethan said. “I’m
telling
you. Now let’s go.”
Jena started to object, but Ethan silenced her with a venomous look. “She’s my
daughter
. End of discussion.”
Alara surprised him by slipping her hand into his.
She hadn’t forgiven him yet, but it was a start.
Jena held Ethan’s gaze for a long moment. Then she scowled and nodded. “Fine.”
They ran to the
Trinity
and straight up the ramp. Ethan led the way to the cockpit and found the Rictans already there, trying to bypass his launch codes.
“Out of the way,” Ethan said, yanking Magnum out of the pilot’s chair. He sat down and entered the codes; then he ran a quick check on the ship’s systems. To his amazement, all ship’s systems were in the green, even after almost a decade of disuse. Feeling suddenly more positive, Ethan fired up the grav lifts and then the thrusters, cold-starting them both. The ship’s only complaint was a mild shudder before it hovered up from the landing pad.
“Still purrs like a kitten,” he said, and rotated the ship until it faced the shattered wall of glass. Alara sat in the copilot’s seat beside him, and Jena Faros hovered over their shoulders.
“We’re not going to board the Icosahedron,” Jena said. “You can send a message to Omnius and then launch yourselves in an escape pod so he can pick you up.”
“Sure,” Ethan replied, and dialed the inertial management system back to eighty percent. Then he pushed the throttle up past the stops and rocketed out over Avilon. The ship’s sudden acceleration pinned him and Alara both to their seats, while Jena Faros and the Rictans all went tumbling backward, screaming as they went. He heard someone cursing, and risked a glance over his shoulder to see Magnum clinging to the open hatch by his fingernails.
“Motherfrekker!” Magnum gritted out.
“Guess I forgot to warn you guys to strap in,” Ethan said. Then he pulled up, adding the planet’s gravity to accentuate their momentum. Magnum lost his grip with a curse and a shout, and Ethan sealed the cockpit from the pilot’s station. Now that they were alone he brought inertial management up to 100%.
“Are they okay?” Alara asked.
“I don’t know,” Ethan said.
That uncertainty hung between them as the
Trinity
clawed for orbit in a near-vertical climb. Thousands of fighters danced above them, their thrusters tracing neon swirls behind the clouds—Nova blue, Shell fighter orange, and drone fighter red. The colors mingled and swirled together in buzzing swarms. Streams of red and purple lasers crisscrossed between the fighters, and explosions speckled the sky with fiery bursts of light.
Ethan keyed the comms and set them for an open channel, about to ask Omnius for permission to approach the Icosahedron and land, but Alara touched his hand and shook her head. For a split second he was afraid she’d had a change of heart about bringing Trinity back.
“I’ve already told him,” she said. “Omnius knows we’re coming. He’s going to send a drone escort to get us there safely.”
Ethan remembered her Lifelink implant, and he nodded. “Good.”
They raced through the clouds and emerged in the middle of a dazzling firefight between a pair of Gor cruisers and a few thousand drone fighters.
One of the Gor ships exploded with a titanic
boom,
spraying their shields with supersonic debris, and Ethan grimaced as their forward shields went from blue to green. Laser fire flickered by them, so close that it actually made the corvette
shudder
. No, something else had to have caused that shudder. Lasers didn’t impart kinetic energy with their passing. Ethan checked the threat detection system to identify their attackers, but there weren’t any. Then the deck shuddered once more, and another dazzling flicker of laser light stole Ethan’s attention. This time he noticed the source.
The lasers were coming from
them.
“What the frek?” Ethan’s hands flew over the controls as he hurried to shut down the ship’s weapons systems.
“What is it?” Alara asked.
“Looks like our passengers are okay after all. They’ve found the turrets and they’re using them to get some target practice.”
“They’re trying to shoot down drones? Are they crazy?”
Another flash of lasers streaked out from them. This time Ethan saw the lasers impact on the side of a nearby cruiser—a
Gor
cruiser. He gaped at that.
“Ethan?” Alara asked.
He braced himself for return fire. “They’re not shooting at drones,” he explained. “They’re shooting at Gors!”
“Aren’t the Gors their allies? Why would they shoot them?”
“To get us all killed! Why else?” Ethan finished shutting down the weapon systems and then keyed the intercom. “I hope you’re happy, Magnum!”
Laughter rippled back over the intercom. “No guts, no glory, motherfrekker! And I’m gonna spill yours if it’s the last thing I do.”
The TDS screeched out a belated warning, and a blinding light suffused the deck. A muffed explosion sounded somewhere aft of the cockpit, and damage alerts screamed. Ethan threw the ship into an evasive pattern.
“Damn you, Magnum!” he breathed.
“What was that?” Alara asked.
Another explosion roared through the cockpit and the
Trinity
rocked violently once more.
“The Gors are firing at us!” he said.
The TDS chirped out a series of rapid fire warnings, and Ethan saw half a dozen Shell Fighters lining up behind them, vying for missile locks. That wasn’t good. Evading energy-based Pirakla missiles came down to speed and sudden, last-minute changes in momentum, but they were still in atmosphere, clawing for orbit, and the
Trinity’s
lack of aerodynamic properties made it a sitting duck.
“Ethan, if those fighters get missile locks on us—”
The chirping warnings from the TDS became solid tones, and Ethan’s hands tingled with adrenaline, getting ready to throw them into a last-ditch maneuver.
“Hang on…” he warned, watching the grid for the warning flash of light as the Shell fighters pursuing them launched their missiles. That flash of light came, but not from the star map. It suffused the entire deck, washing everything a dazzling white and making all of their concerns moot.
* * *
Farah Hale lay pinned to the main forward viewport with the rest of her crew, held there by a mysterious force of deceleration that had gripped their ship as they drew near to the Icosahedron. Farah could only assume that Omnius was arresting their approach with some type of grav gun. Most of the crew was content to lie against the viewport and wait for the inevitable, but Farah had twisted around onto her belly so that she could watch. It took all of her strength just to keep her face from being smashed against the viewport.
She was rewarded for her effort with a breathtaking view of New Avilon. They were finally close enough to pick out details on the inner side of it. The most curious detail were the thousands of giant, bristling towers pointing down toward Avilon. They looked like the barrels of giant laser cannons.
Farah remembered that the Icosahedron was supposed to be capable of mining entire planets for resources, and she wondered if those towers were massive beam weapons. She estimated by the size and number of them that Omnius could have wiped out the entire Union fleet in seconds.
So why hasn’t he?
Even as she was thinking that, one of those towers opened fire and a thick white beam shot by them to hit some unseen target coming up from the surface of Avilon. Farah blinked the spots from her eyes. Whatever that beam had hit, it was gone now, but Omnius had fired just one beam out of thousands. He was cherry-picking the targets he wished to destroy and capturing others. She wondered what criteria Omnius was using. Was he capturing only human ships, or Sythian and Gor ones, too?
Farah watched as one of the Trees of Life reached the Icosahedron. It had rotated to dock with its engines facing the inner side of the sphere. As soon as the bright red glow of its thrusters disappeared and it finished docking, that tower became just one more out of thousands already aimed at the surface of Avilon.
Farah blinked. All of those towers weren’t just weapons emplacements. They were New Avilon’s cloning facilities and Lifelink data centers.
“We’ve stopped moving,” Therius whispered, announcing the fact just a split second before Farah realized that the crushing weight on her back had disappeared.
She pushed gently off the main forward viewport and turned to see her crew all drifting and tumbling through the bridge. “I thought you said Omnius was going to take us aboard?” she said, eager to poke a hole in Therius’s smug insanity.
“He will, but first drones will board us, scan us, and carry us away in one of Omnius’s ships. He would never trust us to come aboard in one of our own vessels.”
Farah smirked. “Of course not. So what exactly
is
your plan? Or don’t you have one anymore?”
“I plan to wait until we are captured.”
“And then?”
“Then we’re going to meet with Omnius face-to-face, and I’m going to speak with him one last time.”
Farah snorted. “Going to beg for mercy? We should kill ourselves now before Omnius finds a more painful way to do it.”
“I’m going to give him one last chance to back down,” Therius replied.
Farah stared at him, unable to believe what he’d just said. He refused to admit defeat even while looking down the barrels of a thousand planet-mining beam weapons. That, she decided, was the very definition of insanity.
“Would you please cut my bonds and help me power up your uncle’s drone?” Therius asked.
“Seven Sixty Seven? Why?”
“Trust me, Farah.”
Farah eyed Therius through the darkness. His eyes shone with reflected light from the Icosahedron, making him look even more insane than usual. She took a deep breath and shook her head. “If you’re planning some kind of last stand, you’re going to have to count me out of it. I’m done.”
“Very well,” Therius said, sounding disappointed. He turned away from her, and Farah saw his gaze settle on Torv next. “I brought your people back from the brink of extinction. The Gors are an honorable people, and I promised your matriarch they would be rewarded. My promise stands, despite what you might think. Will you help me?”
Hissss.
Farah’s translator spat out a single word. “No.”
“What do you have to lose?”
“He dropped nanites on Avilon, Torv. There are millions of Gors on the surface, and now they’re all going to die.”
“Not everything here is what it seems, Miss Hale. Torv, you need to make up your mind for yourself. Will you trust me?”
Torv replied with a sibilant stream of hisses and used the grav guns in his boots to regain his footing on the deck below.
Farah’s translator whispered in her ear. “I trust. But if you lie, I eat you alive.”
“Torv…” Farah said, shaking her head.
She saw Therius smile. “I accept your terms.”
Torv walked over to Therius and reached up to grab his ankle and pull him down.
“Take me to the drone,” Therius instructed.
Torv dragged Therius over to 767, who was floating a few feet above the captain’s table.
“Please cut my bonds, Torv.”
The Gor cut them with a brief flash of light from his scythe-shaped energy blade.
“Thank you.” Therius stood on Torv’s shoulders and reached around the back of the drone’s head to turn it on. A beam of crimson light shot out from 767’s optical sensor and washed across the deck.
“Welcome back, Seven Sixty Seven. It’s time for us to leave the bridge.”
“Where are we going, Admiral?”
“I’ll show you.”
Therius wrapped his arms around the drone’s neck and 767 powered his own grav guns to join Torv on the deck. Therius nodded to the Gor. “Thank you, my friend. Your part in this is over, but you will not be disappointed. Have faith.”
Torv hissed once more. “I go with you.”
“If you insist.”
Farah’s brow furrowed, and she watched as the three of them made their way down the gangway, walking by the crimson light of 767’s optical sensor. The bridge doors swished open and then shut behind them. Farah scowled, hoping Torv would get a chance to make good on his threat to eat Therius alive, but she had a bad feeling that the Union leader would doublecross him before long. Gors were too trusting, particularly the males. Farah was sure that if Matriarch Shara had been aboard in Torv’s stead, she would have ripped Therius’s throat out by now. Of course, that was probably why she wasn’t aboard. Farah wondered where Therius was headed.
Critical systems like doors were running in low-power mode on battery backups alone. That meant they would be able to reach the escape pods, but abandoning ship wouldn’t get them anywhere. Omnius would see their escape pod and either vaporize them or pick them up.
Still, the thought of Therius running from the mess he’d created made Farah’s blood boil.
This was all his fault! The entire attack had been a lie. He’d never planned to defeat Omnius. His idea of setting humanity free was to
kill
them. Farah spent the next fifteen minutes dwelling on that and imagining ways she could get revenge on Therius for what he’d done.
The bridge doors
swished
open once more and a squad of drones came
clanking
in. Their optical sensors cast bright red fans of light through the air as they scanned the surviving crew.
Seeing her chance, Farah called out to them, “Our leader escaped! Check the escape pods. If there aren’t any missing, then he’s still aboard.”