Authors: Bennett R. Coles
He’d leapt through a bathroom window, and the rest of the night he’d focused entirely on disappearing, just in case she’d somehow managed to escape the armored police. Lying low for a day, he’d done a cautious scan of the Terran security network, but the only mention of Emmes had come from the report of her arrest. No record of incarceration, no formal charges, not even a transfer order.
Looking wider, he’d realized very quickly that her ID hadn’t registered anywhere beyond the police station to which she was taken. It was as if she’d never left the station, but was no longer being held. Eventually Kete had drawn the grim, logical conclusion—Katja Emmes had been quietly executed.
Kete knew that summary executions happened on Terra, but he’d never heard of a decorated veteran meeting that fate. Perhaps something had gone terribly wrong, back in the night club. Or perhaps Emmes had become a liability to someone at a higher level, a trouble-making soldier who threatened the State-imposed harmony.
The thought chilled him even more than the damp, cool air of the tunnel. He shrugged it off.
Setting his backpack down, he carefully removed the cloaking device. Designed to create an interference zone that masked activities within, it contained technology that was already battle-proven against Terran forces. The projector itself looked like a simple wedge of concrete, and when he placed it against the wall it all but disappeared in the dim light. Even if a passing worker saw it they’d assume it was just another bit of minor repair work, done at some point over the years.
It was almost a shame, he realized, that he hadn’t had more time to investigate Emmes’s apparent ability to tap in to the Cloud. No doubt her collapsing mental faculties had precluded her from responding beyond instinct, but it might mean that some Terrans were spontaneously developing an affinity for Cloud communications. In Centauria all citizens were trained to access the Cloud, but Kete had never heard of an individual acquiring the ability on their own. The thought was intriguing.
He checked the settings for the area the cloak would affect, ensuring that it was large enough to conceal both him and his activities. With a simple activation command, he felt the interference field wash over him and create an invisible, opaque bubble around him.
Safely ensconced, he removed another piece of equipment. It resembled a needle-fine horseshoe shape of polished brass, but it was heavier than lead. Kete felt his heart thumping as he placed the device carefully on the ground, truly hating the need to put his life in the hands of such an unknown. With another simple command he powered it up. A deep, almost sub-audible hum pulsed outward from the device. Kete watched as the air in front of him shimmered and danced, and he strained to detect the multi-dimensional signals that whispered on the quantum winds.
Then, in a sign almost comical in its banality, a tiny green light shone to life at the base of the horseshoe. The path was open.
Faced with the reality of what he was doing, Kete began to question what would come next. Pushing aside his trepidation, he lifted his backpack and, watching the air in front of him very carefully, threw the pack toward the concrete wall.
It shrank away and vanished from sight.
He exhaled, and raised slightly trembling hands.
The backpack reappeared, almost too tiny to see, then exploded to full size and flew into his grasp. He paused for only a moment, procrastinating by putting the backpack over his shoulders. Then, forcing his mind to go completely blank, he walked forward.
The dark, humid tunnel faded away, and he shielded his eyes from the brilliant light. Something pushed against the side of his body as a wave of dizziness washed over him. He staggered to his knees, feeling a soft, cool surface as his hands blocked his collapse. He blinked, looked down at the green, uneven surface.
Grass. It was grass.
He vomited, translucent bile splashing out over the well-groomed lawn. A hand gripped his shoulder firmly, and he felt a familiar presence looming in his mind.
“Kete, can you hear me?” The words, he realized, were external. Wiping his mouth, he sat back and looked up.
The brilliant light was Centauria A in the sky. The force pushing against him was the breeze off the sea. The grass was in a park at the top of a ridge, with a spectacular view down on his home city of Riverport. He was back on Abeona, and it was like stepping into heaven.
He looked up toward the voice, and the hand on his shoulder. It was Valeria Moretti. Beyond her, he saw, were other faces he knew well. Beyond them were three giant APR robots, weapon pods only now lowering away from him.
“Hi, Val,” he said. “It’s good to be home.”
She smiled in relief, her eyes darting unconsciously to where he’d been sick.
“Do you feel okay?”
He nodded. “The jump gate didn’t make me sick—I’m pretty sure that’s just a release from the overwhelming fear I felt—at stepping through a trans-dimensional dark-energy gateway without any shielding.” He took stock of all his limbs. “But here I am. I guess science works.”
She helped him to his feet, mechanical frames whirring softly over spindly, regenerating limbs. He nodded politely to the waiting group of agents. Beyond them was what looked like a construction site, where some buildings appeared to be in the process of being demolished, while others were being built to take their place.
He cast his gaze out again toward Riverport below, breathed in the fresh air with its mix of flowers, herbs, and a faint hint of the sea, and suddenly realized that he knew this spot well.
This was where his home had stood.
Or, precisely, it was across the street from where his home had stood. His gaze snapped over to what he now recognized as the remains of the crater where his beloved Rupa and his precious Olivia and Jess had been killed. Construction materials were piled next to the crater, and down the ruined street he could see those few houses of his neighbors that were still standing.
Valeria slipped her arm through his.
“It’s going to be a beautiful monument,” she said quietly. “The entire ridge is going to be dedicated to those who were lost. The main plinth is going to be placed where your house was, with a memorial wall naming everyone who died.”
Ignoring the insistent mental calls by voices from the Cloud, he stared down the blasted, cratered road, at the half-collapsed houses still bearing the burn marks from the violence. This was where Katja Emmes had ordered the strike that had killed his family. Impotent rage burned within him, but a wave of overwhelming sorrow damped it down.
And then, for the first time, he even felt a moment of pity. Emmes was gone, perhaps even dead, cast aside by her own people. Her short life had been filled with pain and misery, and while Terra appeared to have wiped away her existence, Kete’s family would be remembered forever.
Perhaps there was justice after all.
He turned to Valeria, giving her arm a squeeze. “Thanks for showing me this.”
“We thought you’d want to see it.”
Turning to the others who had waited patiently, he greeted the agents and various officials from within the department. There was much to discuss.
* * *
His return to Abeona was painfully brief, but Kete knew that if he’d stayed for even a night he would risk losing the will to return. After only a few hours—just long enough to download his complete report on the structure and weaknesses of the Terran military network and receive a briefing on the next stage of the plan—he stepped back through the person-sized jump gate and onto the concrete floor of the Longreach municipal aquifer.
His backpack was weighed down with two new jump gate anchors, and the entirety of the mission was buried deep beneath multiple protective layers in his mind. Now it was going to become truly dangerous, and he had to maintain the lowest possible profile.
Pausing within the cloaking bubble, he shivered off the unnerving aftereffects of passing through multi-dimensional spacetime, and looked left and right down the access tunnel. He listened carefully, but there was no sound of movement. Deactivating both the jump gate anchor and the cloaking projector, he stuffed them into his backpack, and moved silently back along the subterranean corridor.
When he emerged from the aquifer complex, he saw at least a dozen city workers in the courtyard, and not one of them glanced his way. No one challenged him, no one even noticed him. All it took to clear security was to wear the right uniform. It gave him greater confidence that the plan might actually work.
In a public washroom he stripped off the municipal uniform to reveal stylish hiking clothes underneath. The outfit matched his backpack, and no one looked twice at him as he strolled out to the street and hailed a cab. His next objective wasn’t a precise location—it just had to be within a certain distance of the Astral Force Headquarters complex.
He’d been meticulous in his research, identifying locations that would serve his needs. The greatest difficulty had been that the target sector was so heavily populated, and the risk of being spotted was high. Nevertheless, as he climbed into the cab he reviewed the most likely candidates.
With a touch of irony, he realized that he knew the perfect spot.
* * *
Kete exited the cab outside a series of low-rise buildings on a pleasant street. The ground level was bustling with a wide range of shops, and he slipped easily into the throng of pedestrians. He strolled at an easy pace, casting unseeing eyes over the various shop windows as his mind sought the electronic code to one particular set of doors.
By the time he arrived he’d cracked the code and, with a show of swiping his own, irrelevant card past the sensor, he pulled the door open and walked into the lobby. His hiking boots thudded softly on the polished floor as he approached the elevator. A balding man in a suit was waiting, and Kete nodded politely to him as they entered the lift and selected their floors. Very soon Kete was walking along an upper floor corridor, senses focused intently on one particular door.
The lock was standard issue, but Kete wanted to make sure that the rest of the apartment hadn’t been rigged with other surveillance gear or alarms. He didn’t really know what the Terran State did with the assets of “disappeared” citizens. At the same time he established internal scans that would repeat at regular intervals, and alert him should certain keywords appear.
This was no time for surprises.
He opened the door and stepped through. The furniture, decor, and entertainment equipment were new and stylish, but it didn’t take long to notice the subtle signs of a poor housekeeper. Tiny shoes littered the floor of the front hall. Throw pillows were bunched at one end of the couch in a way that suggested they’d actually been used for sleeping on. The empty beer bottle on the coffee table was matched by half a dozen more on the counter, and as he stepped into the kitchen Kete saw still more stacked in their cases on the floor. He wrinkled his nose at the smell from unwashed dishes, and guessed that the apartment had been unoccupied since the night of the incident.
He swiftly searched the bedroom and bathroom to confirm that the apartment was clear. The clothes strewn everywhere were surprising for their small size, and Kete wondered for a moment if a young girl hadn’t lived here as well. He saw a framed picture of her entire family on the dresser, recalling each face from the interview at the gala. The proud Emmes family, and a proud legacy young Katja had clearly struggled to maintain.
He paused, a sudden surge of guilt sickening him at his blatant invasion of this woman’s privacy. He closed his eyes and recalled the bulldozers pushing the soil back over the crater where his home had once stood, where his wife and children had died.
Where Katja Emmes had killed them.
He nodded to himself. This was the perfect spot for the next part of the plan. Terra would pay, and the fate of humanity would shift here in the home of the person he hated most in the universe.
Pushing the furniture against the walls, he created an open space in the living room where he set up the smaller of his new jump gate anchors, and with it the cloaking device. Then, settling himself into the available armchair, he closed his eyes and reached out carefully to locate the vast Astral security network.
It throbbed through the Terran proto-Cloud like an iron fortress, wrapping the space elevators, the Astral College, and the headquarters complex in a powerful web of detectors. He hadn’t dared such an incursion before now—had he been detected, it would have meant an instant end to his mission.
Hidden throughout the city sector, defensive weaponry sat crouched in passive anticipation, but Kete wasn’t concerned about the defenses against an external assault. His focus was on the available arcs of fire the weaponry could achieve once brought into play. Forcing his thoughts to remain disciplined, he slowly and carefully tracked each weapon system to its associated detection points, identifying the network strands that connected the entire system.
The electronic safeguards were robust, but thanks to the time he’d spent dissecting the data wrenched from the
Armstrong
, it was relatively easy to establish a series of false signal generators. In doing so he was able to isolate the network immediately around this apartment. As he set the last false relay to automatic, a timing alarm alerted him to an imminent arrival.
Rising from the armchair, he stepped through into the cloaking bubble and activated the jump gate anchor. The light signaled green and he stepped back. Moments later, Valeria warbled into view through the cloak, followed in short order by five other Centauris.
Each of them was dressed in unremarkable Terran civilian clothes, and each of them sported a backpack. They took in their surroundings with the calm professionalism of their trade. The last one knelt next to the anchor as both devices deactivated and the cloak vanished. The transit accomplished, Kete reached out to the Astral security network and removed his false signals and relays.
“Welcome to Earth,” he said.
“Nice place.” Valeria sat down in the armchair. “Yours?”