“Slow down,” David said. He looked around the communications bay at everyone assembled. He was right: Kate was laying down the revelations too fast for everyone, except maybe for Mary, who looked almost hypnotized.
“It’s a transmission—coming from the battlefield,” Kate said.
“How?” David asked.
“It must be from the wreckage.” Kate activated the screen, scrolling the message quickly, as if anyone could actually read it. “It’s just like the one Mary received on Earth—a binary number sequence at the start and a body with four base codes.”
“Is it the same message?” Mary asked quickly.
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “It’s the same format though.”
“So at the very least, the sender could be the same,” Paul said.
Kate nodded.
“What do we know?” David asked. “I mean, you said information about this place is classified.”
“Yes,” Kate said, focusing on David. “And I checked: the scientist, Janus’ partner, never visited this place. In fact, she has no recollection of the Serpentine Army at all.”
“Yet Janus sent a transmission to someone in his final seconds, and then sends his partner’s memories here—to a battlefield she never visited, where a signal strangely like the response to his message has been transmitted on repeat for thousands of years.” David scratched his head. It didn’t add up to him. What was he missing? There was something wrong here. “They put these beacons in places they didn’t want anyone to find, right?”
“Right,” Kate confirmed. “Or to keep what’s inside from seeing out.”
Yes, that was it. David was sure of it.
A mechanical sound on the top floor, just above them broke the silence.
David’s eyes snapped to Kate. “The portal.”
“It’s not me,” she shot back.
“Keep this door locked,” David said, as he ran out of the communications bay, Sonja close on his heels.
A single stairwell led from the bottom floor to the top floor, which held the portal, large storage bays, and the residential pods. The bottom floor housed the communications bay and a series of small storage rooms.
David’s options were bad and worse: climb the stairwell and face Dorian and whatever men he had left on the second floor or wait here, hoping to ambush them when they descended.
He quickly decided on the ambush. He motioned for Sonja to take up position inside one small storage room; he moved quickly to another. They would fire on Dorian from those two positions, waiting until he reached the bottom of the stairway to open fire.
David heard a metallic clang coming down the stairway, like tin cans rolling. Surely Sloane wasn’t stupid enough to… Across the way, David saw Sonja peek out from her doorway. Three black round cylinders bounced from the stairs into the narrow corridor. Flash grenades.
David spun, hiding behind the door frame, covering his ears, closing his eyes tightly. A split second later, the flash and boom consumed his sight and hearing. Everything moved in slow motion. David pushed against the wall, opened his jaw, and blinked, trying to regain his senses.
He glanced out. Sonja. The blast had caught her full on. She staggered forward, into the corridor.
A figure barreled down the stairwell, taking the stairs three at a time. He began firing at Sonja before he reached the bottom.
David raised his rifle, firing on the man, but it was too late.
Sonja fell, blood pouring out of her. The man rolled on the floor across from her, convulsing, still pulling the trigger, spraying bullets in every direction, including back into the stair well.
A small object ricocheted off the stairwell wall, then another. They bounced and rolled. David’s eyes grew wide. Grenades.
He stepped back and tripped over a crate. He sat up just enough to see out of the narrow doorway, into the blood-filled corridor, where Sonja and Dorian’s soldier lay lifeless. For a moment, there was no sound. Then… an orange wall of light formed, crackling, glistening, containing the grenade blast. A forcefield.
The small door of the storage room closed, and the force of motion threw David against the back wall. The artificial gravity in the room released its grip, and he slowly floated upward, joining the silver boxes.
It was all like a bizarre dream with no sound. David rotated, staring out the window at the military beacon. The room wasn’t for storage. They had just used it for storage. It was an emergency escape pod. And it was floating into the vast debris field, joining the millions of other pieces of wreckage from battles fought and lost. He simply stared out the window, the view and silence feeling bizarre and unsettling. Sadness. Sloane would reach Kate and the others. He had failed. His final defeat. And he would never see Kate again.
CHAPTER 34
Kate waited in the communications bay with Milo, Paul, and Mary, listening as the gunfire gave way to explosions. The wall screen erupted, a red dialog covering it.
Decompression Imminent
Containment Protocols Initiated
A single word blinked.
Evacuate
Kate surveyed the state of the beacon. It had been ripped in half. Forcefields were holding the vacuum of space at bay, but the beacon couldn’t power them much longer. All the escape pods had been on the other side of the forcefield, and the beacon had deployed them.
She had no choice. She quickly keyed the portal to the next beacon location Janus had sent memories to. She downloaded the memories from the current beacon onto a portable memory core and moved to the door.
“Come on,” she said, trying to fake as much bravery as she could. “Stay behind me.”
The doors slid open. Sonja and another soldier lay dead on the black floor. Sorrow and joy filled Kate. David wasn’t there. Still a chance.
A glowing orange forcefield obscured the view of space and the debris field beyond.
Kate glanced around. One way out. The stairwell. She stepped through the blood, over the bodies, and onto the first stair. She hesitated, wondering if she should grab a gun. Paul’s eyes lingered on the fallen soldier’s rifle a second before he tore it free from the man, and then moved forward, taking position in front of Kate.
“You know how to use that?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “Not really. You?”
“Not really.”
They stood for a second. There was no sound above. At the back of her mind, Kate kept hoping David would round the corner, peek his head into the stairwell and say, “Coast is clear. Let’s go.”
But he never came. She crept up the metallic stairwell, the others following her, Paul at her side.
The blast of sound from the emergency evacuation message almost threw her off her feet and back down the stairway.
At the top of the steps, she could see the glowing portal, and through the reflection of the small glass window opposite it, a soldier lying in the corridor on the other side of the portal. It wasn’t David. She glanced out the window, at the now growing debris field. Pieces of the beacon slowly floated past.
She couldn’t move.
She felt Paul’s hand around her arm.
“We need to go, Kate,” he said.
Her mind was moving in slow motion now, but she forced herself to trudge through the portal.
The portal’s destination wasn’t a beacon. Kate knew it instantly. The place was expansive, huge, so unlike the cramped, utilitarian beacons.
She, Paul, Mary, and Milo stood in a massive room with a window that stretched at least a hundred feet wide and fifty feet tall.
The scene beyond left the entire group speechless, utterly spellbound. Horrified. For Kate, the view of Earth had been awe-inspiring. The Serpentine battlefield had been terrifying but distant, a danger long-since extinct. This place was very much alive.
Row after row of black spheres stretched out, unmoving, small lights hovering just above, like cars lined up in a parking lot at night.
In the middle row, above the stacks of st
ationary spheres, a long cylinder stretched out into space with no end that Kate could see. Spheres were moving through it, coming out the other side larger, more complete. This was an assembly line for the spheres, and it was producing thousands per second. Maybe millions, depending on how far the manufacturing cylinders stretched. Large ships moved across the lines, docking with the cylinders. Supply ships? Emptying minerals and raw materials for the manufacturing process?
This wasn’t a beacon. It was a factory in space. A factory making an army of spheres.
The scale was unimaginable.
Kate tried to focus. They couldn’t stay here.
She was fairly certain the soldier lying in the corridor at the last beacon had been Dorian. She thought he was dead. Hoped. But she couldn’t help thinking about David, whether they could go back, save him somehow. She would be risking all their lives. And David might already be dead. She had to focus. What do I know?
Dorian had found the last beacon—out of a thousand in her diversionary rotation. He could easily find this one if he had discovered Janus’ transmission.
They had to move, get to safety somehow. Maybe the third beacon would offer some refuge.
She activated the portable data core and downloaded the memories Janus had transmitted here.
She programmed the portal to the final destination.
She stepped through, and the others followed without a word.
The moment Kate stepped into the third and final beacon Janus had transmitted memories to, she knew they were in trouble. Heat. The place was burning up. And it was another military beacon.
She peered out the window, which seemed tiny compared to the view from the factory.
A dead world, red and rocky, loomed below. Black burn marks pocked the surface. Kate knew this place. Yes. She had seen it before—in the last memory she had accessed in the Alpha Lander, when David had saved her. The thought of that brought a new pang of sadness, but she pushed it out of her mind. Janus had tried to erase the memory of what had happened to this world. In the memory, this world had been under a military quarantine. Janus’ partner had taken the Beta Lander to the surface to investigate…
“I think we should get out of here,” Paul said.
Everyone was sweating now, and no one strayed far from the portal, hoping, thinking there was another destination.
Kate interfaced with the beacon. Yes. It had an address, local, close. The Beta Lander was still on the surface. She programmed another sequence of beacon connections—ten thousand this time—just in case Sloane made his way here. If she was right and Sloane didn’t know about the Beta Lander on the surface, they would be safe. It was their only move.
She stepped through the portal, followed by Paul, Mary, and Milo.
Around them, the beady floor and ceiling lights of the Beta Lander grew brighter, the ship around them waking up.
“Are we safe here?” Paul asked.
“I think so.” Kate looked around. The ship seemed intact. Her neural link told her its systems were all online now. She focused on the memory. It had ended with her outside, a burning impact. “Don’t go outside though.”
She walked away from them without another word, wandering lifelessly into the crew quarters section. She picked a residential pod at random and sat on the bed, staring for a moment. It was exactly like the one she and David had shared on the Alpha Lander.
She curled up on the bed, but sleep wouldn’t come.
Dorian rolled onto his back, wishing the beacon’s emergency voice would shut up. It was quite apparent to him that he needed to evacuate.
The “assault” hadn’t gone as planned. He blamed two things. First, Victor had continued shooting as he had died, not necessarily in any direction. The imbecile couldn’t even die properly. Dorian had him and his errant gunfire to thank for pushing Dorian back, away from the assault, forcing him to throw the grenades in a desperate attempt to finish off his enemy. It hadn’t worked. The beacon and its forcefields had repelled the impact of the blast back up through the stairwell, into the small space on the first floor, throwing Dorian into a wall. He didn’t remember anything after that, but he knew this: he was okay, he had his gun, and Kate and company were gone.
But… he knew where they were going. She had only two options. He stepped to the portal, working the panel. A break: she hadn’t done a random portal rotation before they had stepped off. Haste makes waste, Kate, Dorian thought. He could follow them now.
He glanced back, seeing the Serpentine battlefield for the first time. Incredible. How had Ares survived? The mystery would have to wait. Dorian stepped through the portal.
The sentinel assembly line that stretched out instantly struck fear into him. He raised his gun instinctively, and then paused, realization dawning on him. This was an Atlantean portal—at the sentinel assembly line. Were they manufacturing sentinels to fight the sentinels he had seen? Or had the Atlanteans conquered the sentinel army? Was it their army now? Or had it turned on them, destroying their homeworld?
Focus on the task at hand, he thought. He quickly searched the factory. Empty. Kate and her friends couldn’t go back to the Serpentine battlefield. Dorian had them. He keyed the portal for the final destination and stepped through.
The heat greeted him, and the view from the window confirmed that the beacon was falling into the planet’s atmosphere. And it was accelerating.
Dorian raced through the dark metallic corridors of the military beacon, quickly searching both floors. Empty.
The screen in the communications bay flashed a red warning message.
Orbit Decaying. Atmospheric Entry Imminent.
Evacuate
Dorian checked the computer. Kate had been more careful this time. Ten thousand portal entries. Ten thousand possibilities. The portal connections had sapped the beacon’s last bit of power. It was falling faster now. Dorian had to move.
He stepped through the portal again, back to the only place he thought was safe.
He stared at the sentinel assembly line. He was trapped, but perhaps there were answers here, something he could use.
Kate simply stared at the wall opposite the narrow bed, for how long she didn’t know.
The door opened, and Paul stepped in. “You should see this.”
He led her back to the bridge, a cramped space with several workstations and room for about five people. The small screen showed a glowing ember moving through the clouds.
“Is it the beacon?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” Kate said.
As the beacon burned in the sky, she realized that they were truly trapped now. The Beta Lander had been designed for moving between ships and planetary surfaces. So had its portal. They couldn’t leave this world.
“What are you thinking, Kate?” Mary asked.
“I think we have to throw the long ball.”
PART III:
A TALE OF TWO WORLDS
CHAPTER 35
Dorian had searched the sentinel factory again. It was truly empty and had been for some time. To him, the massive base floating in space felt like a hospital except it wasn’t clinical or clean; it was industrial and rugged, utilitarian, yet precise. A symmetrical grid of wide hallways led through the four-story complex, opening onto rooms with strange equipment and mechanical pieces he assumed belonged to prototype sentinels. It was like a workshop. That’s what it was: a place where they tweaked the sentinels, revising the formula for distribution to the assembly line for “the next version.” A research lab.
All the terminals recognized him as General Ares, and the entire facility opened for him without restrictions.
Dorian had been over his options. They amounted to porting back to the beacon around Earth and returning to Ares for help or sorting through the rest of the memories. He felt as though death awaited him down either path, but one held answers, and possibly an opportunity to unravel the mystery behind Ares and change Earth’s fate. It was an easy decision.
He loaded the data co
re with Ares’ memories into the conference booth and stepped inside.
For Ares, time was like a river: flowing, unstoppable, washing away the last grains of his emotional core. He felt less every second, every minute, every hour.
He watched the Serpentine Army battle the sentinels, which swarmed into the breach. The black sentinel spheres seemed to multiply exponentially. But the serpent grew faster. The black ring of Serpentine ships that harnessed the power of the star formed a blue and white portal in its interior, almost blotting out the sun, except for a thin ring of yellow and orange fire peeking around its edges like a solar eclipse. The great serpent that poured through the portal shed its outer layer as its pieces—ships—sheared off, engaging the sentinels. The spheres dug into the main cord of the serpent and the ships that separated, shredding them, ripping them into tiny specks of black and gray which drifted down to the enormous debris field like ash falling on a highway.
The momentum of the battle coursed back and forth, the serpent growing wide, extending then receding as a new wave of spheres devoured its sides and forced it to collapse back and regain its size. Finally, the serpent pushed through. Its head formed another ring on the other side of the battlefield, and another portal took shape. The great snake flowed through the battlefield, an endless procession of ships moving between the two portals. The remaining spheres winked away, the battle apparently lost.
Ares ignored his hunger. The desire to quench it never rose inside him.
He watched a small group of Serpentine ships prowl the wreckage. Were they searching for Atlantean survivors to assimilate? Or their own kind, now converted Atlanteans? What had Myra called them? The ring. Thinking of her, what they had done to her and his unborn child made Ares ache, reminded him that not all feeling had left. He glanced away from the Serpentine ships, refusing to watch.