Authors: Tony Gonzales
The terrain was elevated and rocky.
The most direct route east was impassable by vehicle; the longer route was a winding valley road a few dozen meters below him.
He opted to stay hidden and take the more difficult path by working the higher ground.
A few moments into his trek, his determination was rewarded: A vehicle was approaching on the road below.
Vince identified it as a Kwaal-class armored transport, and he could see that it was already damaged.
The arc cannon had enough charge left for a single shot.
* * *
DRIVING AS FAST AS THE VEHICLE
could go, Commander Bishop was planning ways in which he could kill Mack, when he was blinded by a white flash.
Unable to see, he sensed the front of the vehicle drop abruptly, then flip several times before coming to rest on its side.
Bishop became disoriented, as he was no longer concerned about killing Mack or of saving the General’s life.
Unable to remember how he got there, he felt sluggish, as though he were dreaming, and that he would wake at any moment.
* * *
VINCE CURSED AT HIMSELF
for not destroying the truck outright.
Aiming for the engine block, the plasma arc had cut through the front of the transport cleanly, all the way through the axle behind the front wheels.
But the bolt was too far behind the reactor, which escaped unscathed.
With no explosion or fire to assure casualties, he would have to get in close to finish the job.
Discarding the cannon, Vince hurried down the treacherous valley, alternating attention between his footing and the overturned vehicle.
From about forty meters out, he heard voices and snapped his sidearm forward.
* * *
GABLE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS
with the sensation of being dragged.
“Told you it protects,” she could hear Mack saying.
“Always bring
good
fortune.”
A sharp slap to the face brought her to clarity.
The deranged mercenary had propped her up against the transport’s undercarriage.
General Kintreb was facedown next to her, still unconscious.
She couldn’t tell if he was dead.
Mack was pressing a gun into her hand.
“Very simple to use,” he said, reaching into her jacket pocket and retrieving the small toy soldier he’d given her.
With delicate care, he gently placed it on the road beside her, adjusting it once to suit his preference.
Satisfied, he unhooked a grenade from his waist and slammed it down next to the toy.
“If I no return,” he said, pointing to the figurine, “find strength to die well.”
He disappeared around the side of the shattered vehicle, and the air erupted with the crackle of gunfire.
* * *
VINCE WAS CAUGHT OFF GUARD
by the speed and accuracy of the attacker.
The target’s weapon fired at the precise instant its barrel fully cleared the vehicle’s overturned rear.
Not one, but two rounds struck Vince square in the chest, sending him tumbling down the remaining incline onto the road.
While powerful enough to blast pockmarks into stone, the lead plasma bolts that struck him couldn’t penetrate the depleted uranium plating in his body armor.
Vince emerged from the forward tumble in a kneeling firing position and shot four times.
The first three missed.
The last one exploded in the attacker’s upper chest, leaving a dark mist in the air as he crashed to the ground.
He struggled once, then ceased.
Pleased with himself, Vince set out to finish off any remaining survivors.
* * *
WHEN THE GUNFIRE STOPPED,
Gable looked at the weapon in her hand and decided this wasn’t the way she wanted to die.
As the tunnel vision began to return, she tossed the gun aside, reached into her coat, and pulled out the Amarr pendant.
Raising its golden holy symbol to eye level, she began to pray.
“Lord, the hour of death is upon me,”
she said aloud.
“I have sinned and I have loved, I was wayward and then Reclaimed.
Though my flesh becomes dust, in you I am eternal; you gave me life, and now I shall return it, to you, for Amarr, everlasting.
Amen.”
“Blessed be the Prophet Kuria,”
a familiar voice said, startling her.
“Amen.”
When she saw his face, the recognition seized her.
“You are Reclaimed,” he marveled, putting his weapon aside and kneeling.
“I was moments from purging the world of you when I heard you pray.…”
She looked at his face and told herself it just couldn’t be.
And yet, it was.
“
Vince…!
” she whispered.
His eyes widened.
He was Templar One.
That is what Her Majesty had decreed and what Instructor Muros had affirmed.
But the name
Vince
was maddeningly familiar.
“I know that name,” he said.
“Who are you?”
The sound of a gun’s report and a metallic
ka-chink
filled the air.
Vince’s head rocked violently to the side in a spray of blood.
He slumped over.
The breath left Gable’s lungs, and she began to weep.
“That sound
funny,
” Mack said, emerging from the far side of the wreck.
Brownish-colored fluid was spurting from a cybernetic injury on his left side, where wrecked machinery was now exposed.
One arm was dangling from a handful of metal tendons.
The other, organic one was unharmed.
Standing over the corpse, he poked the rifle’s barrel through bits of Vince’s skull and brains until it hit something hard.
“
Very
funny,” he said, clearing the gore away to reveal the implant’s formidable size.
Mack clicked his radio.
“Wildcat-Nine, negative on ore processors.
Need pickup in valley south of there.
Three to go.”
“Ah, copy Mack,” the pilot answered.
“But if we’re not there in three mikes…”
“Understood,” Mack said, kneeling down.
“Lifegiver, you should look away.”
Before the tunnel vision overwhelmed her, Gable saw Mack reach into the cavity with his good hand and attempt to detach the implant in Vince’s mangled skull.
* * *
TEMPLAR ONE REAWAKENED,
full of rage.
He blinked away the apocalyptic visions, the desperate beings with the dark eyes, and now, a name—
Vince
—and the Believer who dared to say it.
Pushing himself through the door of the armored clone tank, he ignored the orders on his TACNET and jumped into the speeder waiting nearby.
Hovering just centimeters off the pavement, he raced south, passing the ore processors he was ordered to secure.
Approaching the bend where the wrecked Kwaal would be, he raised the stock assault rifle to firing position.
Rounding the corner at 120 kilometers per hour, his brain barely registered the Mordu’s Legion gunship idling over the wreck before its cannons swiveled in his direction.
Throwing himself off just in time, Vince crashed hard into the pavement and tumbled furiously for a dozen meters as the speeder was shredded.
He came to rest on his back, just in time to feel the downwash from the gunship as it moved overhead.
The rear hatch was still open, and the disfigured man who shot him was standing in its doorway, staring him down as the craft sped eastward.
* * *
FROM A MOUNTAIN PERCH
several kilometers away, Tatiana Czar carefully disassembled the high-powered zoom lens of her reconnaissance equipment.
Her report to CONCORD would specify that Mordu’s Legion was an active combatant in the fight for Core Freedom Colony at Pike’s Landing, and that at least one of its operatives, in addition to the Valklears, had made contact with the first immortal soldiers of New Eden.
PART IV
PRECIPICE
24
GENESIS REGION—EVE CONSTELLATION
THE NEW EDEN SYSTEM
>>
SIGNIFICANCE
MISSION LOG ENTRY
>>BEGIN RECORDING
I must have been drugged, for I awoke with no recollection of falling asleep.
For a few moments I was completely disoriented, reeling from old memories that haunted my dreams.
The cold voice of my captor brought me back to my senses.
“Sleep well, Doctor?”
Grious asked.
“You’re going to need your strength.”
The medical drone standing beside me was doing the talking.
“Communicating will be more effective this way,” Grious continued, as the drone’s hands clamped forcefully on my arm and yanked me to my feet.
Its grip was unbreakable; the machine’s three irises narrowed on me.
I was hauled in the direction of the research lab with all the courtesy due a convicted felon.
“Your Sleeper research was primitive science driven by meaningless ambition,” Grious said.
“I’m going to show you the error of your ways.”
The lab was as I remembered leaving it: Several Sleeper implants remained suspended in their diagnostic chambers.
A projection of the modified human brain, and the soldier clone I designed to accommodate it, hovered over the dissection gurney.
Then I noticed the alien-looking cables and machinery growing from the datacore housing beneath the deck grating.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Grious said, releasing his grip.
The door to the lab shut behind me.
“You have no idea.”
“I’m confident in my work,” I said.
“I don’t expect you to understand that.”
“Falek ordered you to create a monster to serve in an immortal army,” Grious said.
“You delivered a clone that will live five years at most.
Clever.”
“A soldier you can’t control is useless,” I said.
“We leashed their immortality in exchange for their service.
Their flesh is just a means to an end.”
“And what end is that?”
Grious asked, as the metallic green machinery continued to grow over the equipment like a malignant cancer.
“Amarr banners hanging from every hall in New Eden?”
The growth reached the diagnostic chambers and branched around them.
Its skin started to merge with the chamber surface, leaching into its electronics and hijacking the delicate sensors, CPUs, and nanotech pathways within.
“Of course,” I said.
“For the good of us all.”
The projection focused on the cranial anatomy, highlighting the extra lobe and Sleeper implant within.
“You couldn’t reverse-engineer this technology,” Grious said.
“So to compensate for your ineptitude, you harvested as many of them as your military could find.”
“There was no
time
to reverse-engineer them,” I said, becoming agitated.
“Her Majesty was impatient, as was Lord Grange.
The technology works with the right supporting anatomy, and if I wasn’t isolated on this damn ship—”
I was heaved off my feet and slammed onto the gurney beside the suspended implants.
Dark green metal slipped over my neck, cheek, thighs, and ankles.
“You’re fond of pointing out that I cannot feel emotions,” Grious said.
“But I want to think that if I could, I would enjoy doing this to you.”
Whether from fear or amusement I cannot say, but I broke into laughter.
“You’re so pathetic,” I snorted between wheezes.
“Of all the joys in life to envy, it’s torture that reminds you that you have no soul.…”
“I’m not going to torture you,” the Jove said, as I felt a probe insert into my neuro-interface socket.
“I’ll leave that to your own conscience.”
In a crushing rush of vertigo, the drone’s three irises pulled away as I was transported someplace else.
My self-awareness was inexplicably suppressed to the periphery.
I stood upon a mountain overlooking a spectacular metropolis that floated above the sea: What I saw was not possible within the realm of physics.
There were strange beings with me—humanoid things that my new awareness recognized and loved.
One was a child; she stood close and took my hand.
The piece of me that remained recoiled at the sight of these creatures.
Their eyes were all blue, with no whites within them at all.
They had no hair and bore translucent skin that revealed grayish veins beneath.
But the bond I felt to the ones standing beside me was overwhelming.
I did not know this emotion in my real life, for it was strong, very much maternal, and brought with it a blissful sense of belonging and harmony.
They were leading me past the spectacular view to a swirling vortex—an impossible wormhole not suspended in space but localized on the world where I stood.
I felt the little creature at my side take my hand and lead me inside, where the ground beneath my feet disappeared as we were instantly transported to its terminus.
There I couldn’t believe my eyes: We were hovering just above the galactic plane.
I knew, somehow, that New Eden was down there somewhere among its majestic, spiral arms—an insignificant cluster of stars among hundreds of millions of celestial companions.
We stayed for a moment, just long enough for the part of me that remained to feel tears of awe streaming down my cheeks.
Then we began accelerating, faster and faster toward an area near the galactic center and into a starfield.
I saw a perimeter forming; a dark sphere emerged where there should have been more points of light.
A brilliant line opened about its circumference as we accelerated closer, and it kept growing larger and larger to where my eyes could resolve the details on an impossibly colossal structure.
This line was an opening large enough for an entire planet to fit through.
As we passed, I realized this civilization had built an empire that enveloped an entire star, harnessing all its energy.
The little one gripped my hand again, looking up to me with those haunting, loving eyes, and we were transported back to the city.
I saw—no, I
felt
—the presence of billions upon billions of souls.
I felt all their beating hearts as though they were my own, and saw a home that was everything my family wanted it to be, in a society that was, in every sense of the word, heaven.
And then I saw them.
Those depraved creatures with soulless black eyes, devoid of emotion, being rightfully persecuted for threatening our way of life.
They warned us that we were all blind to a sinister truth.
They spoke of awakening to a new reality, and I found them as repulsive as poison.
The guilty were marked with a shameful sign—a symbol I could not read—and forcibly removed from the community.
I felt such hatred for them.
They were the only blemish in a perfect life.
But these outcasts somehow persevered.
The world suddenly changed: Epic, tragic calamity struck without warning, and I knew those wretches were responsible.
A horrible nightmare was unfolding: The little one was ripped from my arms, and the great floating city started to burn and crumble into the sea.
I felt anguish and pain, a sickening feeling of loss, of being unable to comprehend that this was really happening, of the thought that those black-eyed demons would prevail, and of the crushing end to me as the city of heaven collapsed for good.
I awoke screaming.
The restraints around my body retracted, leaving me to curl in anguish.
The grief I felt was indescribable, so intense as to be physically disabling.
“What was that?”
I heaved.
“Who were they?”
“That was the memory of a person,” the drone said, motioning toward the Sleeper implant.
“One perspective among trillions in a civilization fighting for its life.”
“What civilization?”
I gasped.
“What race is this?”
“The Sleeper race that you and your crusade are exterminating,” Grious said.
“You have unleashed an Armageddon in their world and your own.”