The Atlantis World (The Origin Mystery, Book 3) (21 page)

Metal creaked as the raft doors opened wide. Air rushed in, and light crashed down on him, hurting his eyes.

He was inside a ship, in a large cargo bay. Dozens of officers stood around, gawking. White and blue clothed medical staff rushed onto the raft’s platform, nodding to him expectantly.

He pushed out of the recessed medical pod and stepped out. His legs wobbled, and he tried with all his might to stand as he sank to the floor. He felt himself wrap his arms around his shins, curling into a ball as he fell onto his side. The med techs lifted him onto a gurney and moved him away from the raft. The other nine officers remained in their alcoves, their eyes closed. “Why aren’t you extracting my officers?”

The tech pressed a device to his neck, and he was unconscious.

C
HAPTER
28

When Ares’ memory had ended, Dorian found himself back in the shimmering room of white light inside the beacon that orbited Earth. Like Ares had been, he was curled into a ball on the floor, his body shaking. Blood ran from his nose, and nausea washed over him. His heartbeat accelerated and more blood flowed from his nose, as though his own fear would pump every last drop of blood out of his body.

He fought to stay conscious. What had the memory done to him? For weeks, Dorian had seen Ares’ memories. During the Atlantis Plague, he had seen Ares’ attack on the
Alpha Lander
as well as events that had shaped human evolution for the last thirteen thousand years. He knew Ares had revealed those memories to him, allowed him to see what he needed to see in order to rescue Ares.

In the weeks that had followed, the nose bleeds and night sweats had started. He awoke frequently from nightmares that faded instantly.

Dorian wondered if reliving these memories would kill him. And he wondered what choice he had. He had to know the full truth of Ares’ past, and he desperately wanted to see these repressed memories that had driven his own life, the monster in his subconscious.

He glanced around. The room seemed to have no beginning or end; Dorian couldn’t remember where the door was, but that didn’t matter: he had no intention of leaving.

One thing about the memory was certain: there was an enemy out there. Ares hadn’t lied about that.

Something didn’t add up though. In the memory, Dorian had the distinct impression that Ares wasn’t a soldier, at least not at that time. The battle with the hundreds of spheres had seemed improvised: asteroid charges, gravity mines—they sounded like tools of exploration, not weapons. The crews and ships hadn’t been prepared or made for battle.

Dorian used the voice commands to reactivate the resurrection memory simulation. At the simulated train station, he loaded the next memory, beginning where the last had left off.

Ares opened his eyes. He lay in a bed in an infirmary room.

A middle-aged doctor rose from a chair in the corner and walked to him. “How do you feel?”

“My staff?”

“We’re working on them.”

“Status?” Ares asked.

“Uncertain.”

“Tell me,” Ares commanded.

“Each of them is in a coma. Physiologically, they’re fine. They should wake up, but none of them will.”

“Why did I wake up?”

“We don’t know. Our working theory is that your threshold for psychological pain, your mental endurance is higher.”

Ares stared at the white sheet covering him.

“How do you feel?”

“Stop asking me that. I want to see my wife.”

The doctor averted his eyes.

“What?”

“The fleet council needs to debrief you—”

“I’ll see my wife first.”

The doctor edged to the door. “The guards will escort you. I’m here if you need me.”

Ares stepped out of the bed cautiously, wondering if his limbs would fail him, but they were stable this time.

The table held a folded standard service uniform. He wondered where his expeditionary fleet uniform was, with his rank and insignia. He unfolded the flimsy garment and reluctantly slipped it on.

Outside, the guards led him to an auditorium. A dozen admirals sat at a raised table at the center, just off the stage, and two hundred more citizens, wearing a variety of uniforms and insignia, filled every seat behind them. An admiral Ares didn’t recognize instructed him to provide a full mission report.

“My name is Targen Ares, officer of the line, Seventh Expeditionary Fleet. Current commission…” An image of his destroyed fleet flashed through his mind. “My most recent commission was Captain of the
Helios
and sub-fleet commander of the Seventh Expeditionary Fleet’s Sigma group. Our mission was to collect one of the spheres currently referred to as sentinels.”

“And you were successful?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like to reconcile your report with the ship’s logs and telemetry we recovered from the life raft.”

Behind Ares, the giant screen transformed from black to a view of Ares on the bridge of his destroyed ship. The screen showed a single sphere, floating alone.

The video showed his four ships following the sphere, then it following them.

“How did you lure it away from the sentinel line?”

“We studied the line for weeks. Our survey spanned eighty light years and confirmed the working theory that the sentinel network completely surrounds a large swath of our galaxy. The spheres are evenly spaced, like a spider web, but they’re moving, collapsing in on us. It’s not an immediate threat, but if the rate of movement holds, in the distant future, about a hundred thousand years, the sentinels will reach our solar system.”

Murmurs went up around the room.

“How did you capture the sphere?”

“We noticed spheres occasionally breaking the line, but they quickly returned. We correlated these occurrences with errant space probes—usually ancient derelicts from extinct civilizations. Most were solar powered and emitted simplistic universal greetings. Each time, the spheres would intercept the probes, perform some analysis, and then destroy them. Our mission briefing noted that the spheres have attacked any ship attempting to cross the sentinel line. But no ship had ever been destroyed, so the sphere’s destruction of the probes was curious to us. We should have taken it as a warning. We created a probe of our own that repeated a simple binary ping. We used it to lure a sphere away.”

The screen showed footage of a sphere following the fleet, gaining ground on a small object floating ahead of it. It cut to a scene in the future with the ships circling the sphere, then several sequences in which spheres were destroyed.

“Several attempts to capture the sphere failed. We finally managed to capture one, though we disabled it in the process.”

The screen changed to the cargo hold of Ares’ ship, where a massive black sphere towered above him. The ship shook, and Ares braced against the wall.

“This is the beginning of the assault. A dozen spheres targeted the
Helios
, firing plasma charges. We were able to outrun them. The line sentinels seem to be very simplistic. They’re much slower than our ships. Our mission parameters called for comm silence, which we maintained. A few hours later, stable wormholes opened, and a new kind of sentinel arrived. Hundreds of them. They were much more… advanced. And aggressive.”

The screen behind him replayed the battle.

“Why didn’t you port to the fleet?”

“Fear. I feared I would lead these new sentinels to the Seventh Fleet and eventually home. I reasoned that our loss was justified. I had the same concern about transmitting our data to the fleet. I deployed the life rafts hoping the commanding officers might survive and that we could bring this intel back. I hoped the gravity mines would destroy the fleet of sentinels, and the subsequent wave would push the rafts far out of range of any sentinels late to join the battle. I spaced the rafts so that if one were destroyed, our evac tags would port us to the next raft in the chain. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but I hoped that the rafts could at least carry our logs and telemetry.”

“In that regard, we judge your mission to be a success, Ares. The intel you delivered may save us in this war.”

“War?”

The auditorium was silent.

“Am I to be briefed on the aftermath of my mission?”

“Yes. In private. By someone who’s very eager to see you.”

C
HAPTER
29

The guards led Ares to a large stateroom that was much grander than his captain’s quarters on the
Helios
. They were treating him like a member of the admiralty. He tried the data terminal, hoping for answers, but it was off. What were they hiding?

The expeditionary fleet had known about the sentinels for over a hundred years but had assumed the spheres were simply relics of a long-extinct civilization, possibly science buoys studying stellar phenomena.

They were clearly much more.

The door opened, and his wife, Myra, stepped inside, tears welling in her bloodshot eyes.

Ares ran to her but stopped short. He stared at her protruding belly, trying to comprehend.

She closed the distance between them and hugged him tightly. He hugged her back, a million questions fighting a war in his mind, with a single thought winning out:
I am alive, and she is here
.

They moved to the couch, and she spoke first.

“I found out right after you deployed. I submitted several requests to override the comm silence order, but they were denied.”

“I’ve only been gone point one years.”

She swallowed. “They wanted me to tell you. You’ve actually been gone for point seven years. Missing, assumed killed in the line of duty for point five. We had your funeral.”

Ares stared at the floor. Gone for over half a year? What had happened to him? He should have been able to exit the medical pod in the life raft when the wave had passed, once he had stopped porting between the life rafts in the chain. But awareness hadn’t returned to him. It was as if time had disappeared, and his mind had broken from reality.

“I don’t understand.”

“The doctors think a part of your mind essentially shut down—it happened to all the officers. The others are still in a vegetative state, but physically, they’re fine. The doctors are very concerned about you. They want me to… assess you.”

“For what?”

“Any mental changes. They think the experience may have changed you—psychologically.”

“How?”

“They’re unsure. They think the experience may have expanded your mind’s pain tolerance and even permanently altered your brain wiring, making you capable of all kinds of… I don’t want to repeat it. They’re worried.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m the same man I was.”

“I see that. I’ll tell them. And even if there is… an issue, we’ll fix it—together.”

There was something different about him. Ares felt a low simmering rage growing inside him.

His wife broke the awkward silence. “After you went missing, I transferred to the
Pylos
. They searched for point two years. The funeral followed, but I convinced the captain to allow me to take one of the survey clippers to continue searching. I used up all my leave. I think fleet medical thought if I searched long enough, until I was satisfied, it would be healthier for me and for the pregnancy.”

“You found me?”

“No. I probably never would have. With the wide expanse of space and with the raft’s emergency signal off…”

“I had to.”

“I know. The sentinels would have found you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I found something else. My long-range scans showed massive changes in the sentinel line. Their alignment has broken. They’re retreating. We believe you opened a hole in the line, and someone is trying to come through. The sentinels are fighting them. The admiralty and global council think the sentinel’s enemy could be an ally for us—if we could join up with them.”

She took a pad out of her bag and handed it to Ares. “What I found out about the sentinel lines convinced fleet command to send all the expeditionary fleets to this side of the sentinel line. Every ship has been searching for you, deploying probes. The combined surveys revealed that the opening in the sentinel line is getting bigger.” She pulled up an image. “Here’s why.”

Ares almost drew back when he saw it. A battlefield with the debris of thousands of ships stretched out to a massive star.

“What—”

“This battlefield, it’s where our potential ally is trying to break through. And there’s more. They’re trying to contact us. Our probes have picked up a signal. It’s simplistic. Binary followed by some cipher with four base codes. We’re still working on it. We think this army has sacrificed a great deal to open this hole in the line—they concentrated on the place you first opened, where you led the spheres away from the line. The entire fleet is on their way there. We’ll reach it tomorrow.”

“Our mission?”

“Make contact. See if we have an ally and how we can help in the sentinel war.”

“What else do we know?”

“Not much. The sentinels have destroyed every one of our probes, but we have one image.” She tapped the pad, and a grainy image of a floating piece of a ship appeared. Ares stared at the round insignia, a serpent, eating its own tail.