The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (21 page)

“Scanlan, I want you to put me here,” Jav said, pointing to the screen. “You are here. Raus here. Icsain here.”

Scanlan began typing information into a small keyboard set within a podium to convey target choices to the launch system.

“Vays,” Jav said, “You can make your own choices or let Scanlan do it for you.”

Vays shrugged. “Send us where you will, Scanlan.”

Scanlan nodded and continued typing without a break.

“This should be simple, but I’ll say good luck just the same,” Jav said.

Hilene approached him, took both his hands in hers briefly, before stepping away to press through the fibers of one of the walls so that she disappeared between and beyond them.

Witchlan, alone in the war room, shook his head in disbelief. Did Jav Holson even know that he’d selected for himself the exact ship he’d pointed out earlier when discussing the Kalnia? The exact ship Salton Stoakes was already aboard?

Though he realized that he may come to regret it, Witchlan—the Emperor—decided not to alter the course of Jav’s torpedo. Things were tenuous enough with Jav’s memory and would become even more so the closer they got to
The Place with Many Doors
. The Emperor was now certain that the source of the soul echo must originate there. The way had become thick with echoes and probability screamed against it being a mere fluke. He would take steps to prepare for the day Jav remembered all, but right now was not that time. Jav must be allowed to act naturally. If anything besides Stoakes got in the way of his reuniting with one of those echoes, it might serve as an unwelcome prod to recollection. That was an eventuality the Emperor was expecting, but he wanted to deal with it properly and on his own terms if possible. Besides, Stoakes had proven himself quite able. The Emperor would trust in that ability, if only for a bit longer.

Jav had never been in a phloem tube before, hadn’t even known they existed. After a wild ride and being expelled wet from one into a red-lit, claustrophobic chamber, he wished he were still ignorant of them. Their instructions had been clear: enter the phloem tubes; climb into the very phallic insertion craft; hold on to the support grips inside; on successful breach of the target’s hull, collect Scanlan’s device from the rear of the craft; connect Scanlan’s device to the ship’s computer system, preferably to the ship’s bridge interface; leave the ship by any means necessary. As he ran through these instructions in his head, he was startled by an instant of explosive velocity that brought him crashing into the side of one of ships that looked just like the Kalnia.

The front of the torpedo exploded outward to reveal a cavernous space not unlike their own war room—the bridge, if he wasn’t mistaken. Jav eased himself from the slackening grip of the torpedo’s interior, and stepped onto the bridge. To his right, he could see a curved viewport standing four meters tall by eight meters wide, with skeletal metal supports shot throughout. Below this were six seated work stations which were occupied by men in long, heavy coats who were staring at him stupidly. To Jav’s left was a raised platform that backed against the wall. Low stairs led up to it on either side. This area housed a total of three work stations. The two foremost were occupied by a man and a woman, both dressed as the others, and also gawking. The third station, raised yet higher and most likely the captain’s chair, was empty. He scanned the room for exits, noting one on the left wall, with easy access to the raised platform. Immediately across from the stairs leading up to the platform were more stairs leading down. He thought it safe to assume that, though out of view, both of these were mirrored on the other side of the bridge.

“Warning,” an automated voice rang out. “Unauthorized weapons discharge detected at bridge access one. Warning. . .”

Jav glanced back at his torpedo in response to the announcement then to the woman’s sudden frenzied movement high to his left.

“Warning,” a second automated voice sounded over the first. “Unauthorized presence on the bridge. This is a security alert. All available hands to the bridge. Warning. . .”

Their heads cleared by the blaring alert telling them what they already knew, all the bridge personnel scrambled to draw their Farmingtons, some with ease and grace, some with almost comical clumsiness. A red light flashed, and a klaxon joined the repeating bridge warning.

“What the hell is a man in a skeleton suit doing on the bridge?” one of the crewmen cried.

Jav didn’t move for a moment. He felt a strange kind of pleasant calm working through him. He hadn’t felt like this in a very long time. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. He watched as each of the bridge crew settled into whatever actions they had decided on. Would they try to subdue him or kill him?

The first shot came, and Jav was ready, bending the course of the raging energy with Approaching Infinity. All watched as the coherent light veered off of true, struck high on the wall behind Jav and brought forth a bright rain of sparks. In an eye blink, Jav was standing before the one who’d fired, his clawed hand poking out through the man’s back. Another shot flashed, but Jav was gone, flipping backwards through the space afforded by the vaulted ceiling over the beam so that his victim—in the unlikely event that he’d survived—was dealt a second fatal blow. The blast from the Farmington burst the man’s torso and continued through to give birth to another fountain of sparks upon the opposite wall. More men were coming up the stairs from both sides of the bridge now, and the exit door Jav had first noted hissed open.

As the pressure door opened, Jav felt his eyes strangely and inexorably drawn to what lay beyond. Caution was, of course, advisable, but that wasn’t what snared him. He thought for a fleeting instant that his heart and his head would explode in synchronization. It was like the threshold of orgasm, but there was no climax, just a sudden build, like the unfulfilled promise of all questions answered, of blissful eternity, of true, realized infinity. The build was sudden and expansive, dwarfing his experience—his
existence
—and left him suddenly empty, more empty than he had ever consciously known. Or was it comparable to something he
had
known? His world was a hollow abyss furnished with nothing but dread and dull, insatiable anger. Something that belonged to him had been taken.
Again
. Each time that something was taken, a part of him died. Like cells in an organism, winking out one at a time until all that remained was a series of empty husks bound together in a parody of meaning, haunted by the mocking memory of loss. The anger, he knew, would grow, would take up residence in all the places that were once filled with light and hope until anger was all there was. Perhaps this was
not
unknown to him. . .

Something dark fluttered at the door, but the men and their dangerous arms were filling the bridge, demanding his attention. He cracked his knuckles, ignoring several poorly aimed Farmington shots, bent low, and swept through the bridge, his fingers tearing through skin, muscle, and bone in a bloody riot, just as they had on the Kalnia.

Though it became too crowded and chaotic for effective use of Farmingtons, shots still blazed out. Some of the crew fell to this friendly fire. Jav was struck three times, but didn’t realize it until after he’d killed everyone who’d poured into the bridge from the multiple entryways. One shot, which his conscious mind refused to accept, struck him full in the face, or would have if it hadn’t been turned away somehow. He’d been too caught up in the savage moment to use AI, and he was too late to acknowledge the threat of certain death to invoke the Ghost Kaiser, so he conveniently forgot about the incident to the tune of familiar laughter—surely not his own—buried down deep within him.

When he was done, and the red haze of rage had died down, somewhat placated now by the dead at his feet, he calmly shook his fingers clean of blood, walked back to the torpedo, and collected Scanlan’s device.

The highest concentration of instrumentation was just below the viewport. Jav assumed this would be the best place to connect the machine. As he lowered the dark metal cube down onto the instrument panel, it jerked with awareness. Gears started to turn, and he felt its internal structure shift. From the bottom of the cube, small probing bits of metal descended in anticipation of contact with the alien ship’s technology. He set it down, making sure that it was stable, and stepped away with a little hop. Its component parts shifted again and again, adapting as it reached down into the instrument panel, making contact with the ship’s computer to assert its control. This kind of power was new to him, or at least his acknowledgement of it was. For so long, he’d known nothing that could surpass his fists, but he had to admit that if not for Scanlan, the Empire would have come up short more than once now.

He backed away from the panel, careful not to trip over any of the carnage he’d spread over the floor, and went to the pressure door that had caught his attention earlier. The emptiness hadn’t left him. The anger was still there, throbbing and ready for provocation, but he was in control now. His part of the plan was done. He had but to return. There was no hurry, though. He could and would investigate at his leisure.

Immediately beyond the door was a young woman sitting on the floor, leaning up against the wall. She turned in his direction, but nothing registered on her face. He knelt down to look at her closely. Her eyes followed his black sockets, but she didn’t appear to see anything that would be cause for reaction.

She was beautiful. She had long, wild black hair that covered her like a silk throw. An image of Mai Pardine flashed in his head. Behind his skull helmet, he squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head in an attempt to banish the image. This was not Mai Pardine. Except for the black hair, there was no resemblance, and yet. . .

He reached out with his right hand, ran his fingers along the delicate line of her jaw. He thought he saw the spark of recognition in her eyes, but when he looked, really looked, he saw that she was gone, dead in some fundamental way. She surprised him then by taking his hand in hers and nuzzling it.

A strange combination of attraction and revulsion, both equally powerful, sprang up within him. He didn’t want to leave her, but at the same time, he couldn’t stand to be close to her. It didn’t make sense, though. What had happened to her? He saw that her right hand was bleeding, followed the red trail upon the floor with his eyes to her ruined Farmington.

He stood, walked over to where the lower handle lay, dropped down into crouch again, picked up the perfectly cut chunk of metal and examined it. Shorn clean through. He looked back to the woman’s wounded hand. He stood again, casting the handle back to the floor.

It didn’t matter.

Jav was in a strange mood. An icy black calm, very different from the kind he’d experienced a short time before, befell him and his mind wandered into what he thought was new thinking ground for him. He’d never consciously known hatred on this order before. He hated this ship and all the rest in the two fleets for the fragile obstacle they presented. He hated the men and women who’d raised arms to stop him, but not because they’d tried. He hated that he would now have to roust the rest from their hidey-holes to give them a chance and would surely see them fail. He hated the hollowed out woman on the floor for failing to fix him. But most of all, he hated himself for the parody he’d become. The noble F-Gene Fighter. Killer. Mass murderer.

His chest heaved with a great sigh at the realization of this truth.

The universe had a pulse and it beat with a purpose. Jav had seen evidence of this more than once. The very existence of life, of intellect, were strong indicators, but then there were the abilities of F-Gene Fighters, of psychics, of beings like the Emperor, the existence of soul echoes. All of these things, it could be argued, were born into the universe by accident, gifted by some strange combination and confluence of genetics or an abnormal atomic structure, and made supernatural. But any fool could see that the frequency with which these anomalies occurred was far beyond any probability a statistician could quote comfortably and still refer to as random. No, it may not be personal, it may not be moral, but there was a pattern in place, a ghostly machine that worked just beneath the skin of reality. Maybe it was Fate. Maybe it was just a set of laws—some as yet unfathomable—that worked together, grinding forever like cogs and gears, but Jav could feel them moving with a purpose.

This purpose had put him on the path he now walked and despite the emptiness that gnawed at the core of his being like insatiable hunger, despite his hatred for what he’d become, he would not step from that path without being made to. If he wasn’t what he was supposed to be, then the universe needed to tell him so. He’d always tried to convince himself, whenever he fought (killed) that he was engaging in a fair contest. Not fair in the sense of equal, but fair in the sense that he always insisted on meeting his opponents face to face; fair in the sense that he put himself up as collateral and if he lost, he lost. There was a time when he felt he’d slipped a bit with Garlin Braams, but maybe not. He’d had the means in the end to defeat Braams. He needed to find an opponent he couldn’t beat, and Braams hadn’t been it. Since Scanlan’s plan didn’t require the crew on this ship to live, he would start looking, though in vain, he was quite sure, right here, for the means to his own destruction.

Hilene Tanser emerged from her torpedo into darkness. Moving through the Patrol ship was a simple matter, though. She ghosted effortlessly through open corridors and intricate meshings of reinforced steel. In less than twenty minutes she found the computer core, accessed by a conduit that ran in an unbroken ring around the ship’s hub. She kept out of sight not because she was afraid, but because the mission didn’t particularly interest her. None of the crew would prove to be opponents of worth and being hung up by the struts and these fleets out here in interstellar space made her nervous. She was anxious for the Palace to resume its progress.