The Exiled Earthborn (17 page)

Kiati always went through these motions as quickly as she was able, and she hadn’t warmed to him any in the past few weeks. During their little recovery sessions like these, he’d been able to extract exactly three pieces of information from her: her birthplace (Gahren, off the Shining Coast), her length of service (twelve years so far), and the cost of her “kit,” i.e., the pool of custom-tailored genes used to create nearly all Guardians. She rang in at a cool 42.8 billion marks, as the intelligence required for master medical training cost extra. All of that was spent on utility, with little going to inconsequential things like cosmetic appearance. Her severe features and pale skin reminded Lucas of the intimidating statues that stood guarding the Grand Palace promenade back home. She wasn’t unattractive, but was certainly no Asha or Corinthia Vale. If she could ever hear these sorts of thoughts, she would likely beat him so badly even she wouldn’t be able to put him back together again.

“Done,” she said flatly as she finished wrapping a numbing bandage around his forearm.

“Hey,” Lucas said as she turned to leave, curious to get at least one more piece of information out of her, “how long have you known Silo?”

She stopped and considered whether to answer or keep walking. She usually chose the latter whenever he asked her anything.

“We were in the same graduating class at the academy. We ran the Cell together.”

The Cell was the place where Guardians were normally trained on an off-world moon, and pieces of the program had been replicated on the Spear, which was what Lucas was currently enduring.

“Was it this bad? Honestly?”

She scoffed.

“Worse. Gravity is 1.1 there. Imagine doing everything you’ve done here with twenty pounds of allium attached to each of your limbs.”

Lucas wasn’t sure what allium was, but he got the point. Just when he thought Kiati was being unusually chatty, she was already walking out of the room.

He struggled to bring himself to his feet. The treatments wouldn’t really start to subdue his pain for another hour or two.

With all the battles he’d won over the past few months and years, it had been easy to feel almost invincible. Like there wasn’t anything he couldn’t beat with enough firepower, luck, or skill.

He didn’t feel that way anymore. Despite being treated like a god on Sora, he had now been thoroughly reminded of how mortal he truly was.

After comparing bruises and war stories of the day with Asha over dinner, which consisted of an amorphous, protein-rich goo said to help muscle regeneration, Lucas searched the ship for a quiet place to do his homework in the precious two hours he had before cryosleep. The after-hours work assigned to him was mostly technical, like how to hack a virtual lock or understand the various readouts on his power armor.

He’d been exploring the ship a lot recently, and was interested to see which sections had been stripped and retrofitted for Sorans and which had been left in their original Xalan state. The craft was far larger than the Ark. That ship, though a trusty steed, had been a junk heap of a transport, while this was one of the finest weapons in the Xalan arsenal. The difference in quality from materials to design was very noticeable, and when he could, he talked to Alpha, who loved to explain all the detail that had been packed into the ship at the hands of his father. Lucas didn’t understand half of it most times, but it was clear he was residing in the pinnacle of Xalan ingenuity. It was shockingly advanced for a race barely ten thousand years old.

The room Lucas stood in front of today was on the highest level of the ship, and the holocontrols informed him that it was restricted. Every inch of the ship had been searched by the Sorans, so the lock was crafted by them, rather than being of Xalan origin. Lucas got an early start on his homework by cracking it in a matter of minutes using a circuit overload technique and soon found the metal barricade sliding open in front of him.

Like many of the areas of the ship, the room was all but empty. Everything from foreign technology to harmless decoration had been stripped away and was likely currently housed in either a museum or a laboratory, much like what had happened with their own ship after they arrived. The only objects that remained here were a large metal desk fused to the ground and an attached chair, a wall-mounted Xalan sleeping pod, and a mural that could not be removed, as it was carved into the surface of the far wall.

Lucas knew where he was.

The figure depicted in the image was unmistakable. It was Commander Omicron, clad in his slim armor, one arm raised to the heavens, the other clutching what appeared to be a dead Soran. Beams of light, or some other energy, were being emitted from his triumphant form, and Lucas could translate the inscription above it.

H
ONOR
. C
OURAGE
. P
OWER
.

Quite the egoist,
Lucas thought to himself as he ran his fingers over the grooves of the mural, which he could now feel was carved an inch deep into the surrounding metal. He supposed Omicron wanted a permanent mark on his flagship, and what better place to put it than in his private quarters?

Lucas kept tracing the curves when he felt one of the standalone pieces near Omicron’s kneecap click. It was a subtle, momentary feeling, but pressing his face to the wall, he could see that the piece was just slightly more indented into the surface now. He tried to push it in further and pull it back out to no avail. But it had moved, he was sure of it.

He started scanning the mural for more individual pieces that might also move. There were a large number, as the picture was an exceptionally detailed carving. Some were a few inches thick, others merely millimeters.

It took him a half hour to find the next one, buried in a cluster near the dead Soran’s shoulder. Twenty minutes after that, he found another in the gravel beneath Omicron’s feet, and again, a familiar click could be felt. Eventually, he had to grab a nearby storage cube to stand on to reach the top of the mural. There was one in a particle of an energy ray, another nestled in the creature’s breastplate. Lucas found a final switch in the seemingly obvious location of Omicron’s eye. He pressed it, and heard five other simultaneous clicks. Looking around, he could see that every switch had reset.

Shit.

Every piece he’d found had popped back out, and he’d almost lost track of where one or two had been. He stopped to think.

There must be an order to them.

Six switches. Six ways he could press all of them. He brought up his wrist readout and quickly calculated that there were hundreds of possible combinations. It was strange to see a manual lock in a world where almost everything was secured electronically, but he supposed in many ways this was far more secure. And what the hell was it guarding? Surely the sweeper team had missed this when they stripped the ship. Lucas ignored the pain of the day’s training wracking his body and set to work.

Gravel. Knee. Breastplate. Eye. Particle. Shoulder.

Click click.

Gravel. Knee. Breastplate. Eye. Shoulder. Particle.

Click click.

Gravel. Knee. Breastplate. Shoulder. Eye. Particle.

Click click.

Each time Lucas recorded the sequence on a scroll so he wouldn’t repeat it. What was apparent was that this was going to take a very long time.

Lucas eventually stopped looking at his wrist; he didn’t even want to know what time it was anymore. He was dreading dealing with a Survival Day on nonexistent sleep, but he’d become obsessed with the puzzle before him.

Particle. Eye. Knee. Gravel. Shoulder. Breastplate.

Click click.

Particle. Eye. Knee. Gravel. Breastplate. Shoulder.

Click click.

According the scroll, this was attempt number 435. He had gotten the movement down to a science over the past few hours, hopping up and down the storage crate to monkey around to the various areas on the massive mural. It had become both a mental and physical workout, and the constant pumping of his heart was expelling blood from a few of his wounds from earlier in the day.

And then—

Particle. Knee. Breastplate. Shoulder. Gravel. Eye.

Click. KA-CHUNG.

Lucas almost fell backward off the crate as the entire wall sank backward a solid few inches. Every piece he’d pressed remained fixed in place. This was it.

He stepped down and put his fingers in the grooves of Omicron’s leg armor. He pulled hard to the left and the metal plating groaned as it slowly shifted sideways.

Before him was a series of glass cubes that protruded from a metal wall a foot or two behind where the mural had been. It wasn’t a vault, but appeared to be a display case of sorts. Each glass box had an object floating inside it and a Xalan number above it. Underneath “1” was an ornately painted gold-and-black musket pistol unlike any Lucas had seen in Earth’s history books. “2” was a sharpened stone axe held together by fine leather strips with long red feathers dangling off the grip. “3” was a curved hand scythe with what appeared to be a solid diamond blade, while “4” was the broken head of a ridged bronze spear. “5” was an obsidian ceremonial knife with a human skull as the pommel. “6” sat vacant. Lucas tapped on the boxes, but if there was a way to open them, he couldn’t see it. The weapons looked permanently encased inside.

After a minute of delirium due to a lack of sleep despite utter exhaustion, he suddenly understood what was before him.

Trophies.

The five items had to be from the colony worlds Xala had conquered and occupied over the years. Judging by the fine design of each piece, a great warrior had likely wielded each of them at one point, defending their planet from the Xalan horde. Either Omicron had taken these personally, or he’d collected them. Surely he wasn’t old enough to have traveled to each planet himself.

Earth’s “6” box sat empty, but Lucas had a feeling that, had the fight aboard this ship gone differently, it would have been Natalie encased in the clear material before him. Three more numbered boxes sat underneath the first six.
Never hurts to plan for the future, I guess.

Below them all, near his waist, was one more fixture on the wall. It was a single small pane of transparent glass propped up on a pair of small hooks. Lucas took the object into his hands and turned it over. It was completely blank and somehow felt smoother than glass. Soft, almost, yet simultaneously solid. After sliding his fingers across it with no response, Lucas attempted to put it into his pocket. The lack of sleep was now affecting him deeply in the ghostly hours of the night, and it slipped across his pants and clattered to the floor. After a second of his stomach being flipped upside down, it was apparent that the object hadn’t cracked or even suffered a scratch, despite being exceptionally thin. Lucas breathed a sigh of relief. He turned to the display case and pulled the metal mural over it, leaving the trophies to sit idly in the darkness, trillions of miles away from their vanquished owners.

After cramming in a precious few hours of cryo, Lucas had to wait until dinner the next day to find Alpha. Still drenched after a marathon session in the water tank, he made liquid footprints as he trudged to the CIC on legs that would barely support him. Alpha sat flipping through star maps and signal patterns in the central chair. His eyes widened when Lucas showed him the glass square.

“You got this from a covert compartment in Omicron’s quarters?” he repeated, still skeptical of Lucas’s detective abilities.

“Yes,” Lucas said, suddenly chilled from being damp. “The only other things in there were trophies from the colonies. Preserved period weapons the Soran civilizations wiped out there.”

Alpha nodded.

“Depending on their age and who owned them, they are likely invaluable artifacts. It is no wonder he kept them secure.”

“But what is this?” Lucas said as he jabbed his finger into the glass square. It left no fingerprint.

“A [garbled]. Again, I am not sure of the translation. A personal … log, perhaps?”

“A journal?” Lucas said helpfully.

“That may be an apt description. Though the [garbled] is no simple scroll or book.”

“What do you mean?”

“It only responds to the biological signature of the person who ordered its creation, without exception. There is no amount of hacking or decrypting I could possibly do to activate it. And any trace amounts of Omicron’s DNA would not be sufficient either. A substantive sample is required.”

“That means …” Lucas said warily.

“We would have to wait until we return to Sora to extract Omicron’s body out of storage. I would likely have to reanimate some of his cells to get the [garbled] to recognize his presence.”

“Well shit,” Lucas said, disappointed that his treasure hunt had yielded a dead end. But at least Alpha seemed to think it was possible to unlock at some point, provided they survived the trip.

On the way back to the makeshift mess hall, Lucas saw a battered Asha talking to Maston in the hallway. Lucas shoved the glass square into his pocket so Maston wouldn’t ask about it. He’d decided it would be best to keep its existence secret from the Sorans, should they confiscate it before he got a chance to see what was on it. Asha smiled painfully as he approached, her chin bruised. Maston wore a familiar scowl.

“How’s Alpha?” she asked, seeing where he’d just come from.

“Fine,” Lucas nodded. Her face looked how his felt, and it was clear they weren’t going any easier on her. “Calibrations. The usual.”

“The bond you have with that creature is … disturbing,” Maston said piously.

“
That creature,
as you call him, has advanced your tactical military knowledge of Xala more than anyone in your history,” Lucas countered. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Maston is heading up my training squad now,” Asha replied.

“That’s Watchman Maston to you,” he corrected.

Asha rolled her eyes.

Maston was training Asha now?

“Why?” Lucas blurted out.