Armageddon (10 page)

“Until they find out that you created the Sythians.”

“They won’t find out. Only my disciples get to know that.”

“What if one of them talks?”

Omnius turned to Galan with a smile. “I would predict their betrayal and stop them before they could even speak.”

Galan frowned. “If you can predict betrayal then how did Shallah betray you?”

“He is a collective intelligence. That made him smart enough to find a way. Once he realized that Sythia was really
New Avilon
, and that the paradise I had promised to the Sythians as a reward for their victory was not for them, but for the humans I had created them to despise and kill, Shallah turned against me.”

“Where is New Avilon now?”

“Facets of it are scattered across the Getties dropping nanite bombs on every planet they can find. Given enough time, the nanites will erase all of the ruins that humanity left behind when they came to the Adventa galaxy. One day, when my people find the Getties empty, they’ll remember the nanites wiped out the galaxy-spanning empire of Sythians, and that any archaeological remains of their past were naturally wiped out along with them.”

Galan blew out a breath. If the Sythians, who were unpredictable and more powerful than humanity had ever been, couldn’t defeat Omnius, then surely no one could. “Why tell me all of this?”

“You asked,” Omnius said, “and I don’t hide anything from my disciples.”

Galan nodded, wondering what other burdens he would have to bear as Omnius’s web of lies grew. He began to suspect that humans were Omnius’s entertainment—his playthings—but if Omnius objected to that thought, he chose not to address it.

“I have an assignment for you,” Omnius said. The star map hovering in the air disappeared and the inside of the council chamber brightened again.

“What is it, My Lord?”

“I want you to watch over another strategian—Hoff Heston.”

Galan’s brow furrowed at that. “So I won’t be going to live in Celesta? I thought you made me a disciple already.”

“I did, but before you come to live up here I want you to help guide another doubting soul along the ascendant path.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“Answer his doubts, but not with the truth—not yet. Otherwise, just be ready to act when I tell you to.”

“You’re going to kill him.”

“I don’t
kill
people, Galan, I save them. You will help make Hoff’s fall from grace more graceful, and one day he, too, will become one of my disciples.”

“Very well,” Galan replied, bowing his head. “It will be done.”

“
My
will be done,” Omnius replied just before he vanished again.

* * *

Shallah stood looming over the sensor operator’s station on the bridge of his command ship, the
Asharn—Death-bringer
in Sythian. There’d been a transmission from an unknown vessel, lying cloaked at the edge of the star system. A
human
vessel. They’d requested to speak with the Sythians’ leader.

Rather than risk speaking to them from within his sanctuary below the surface of Noctune, Shallah had made his way to the surface and flown up to his command ship to deal with the threat personally.

“There it is, Supreme One.” The sensor operator pointed to a purple blip on the star map hovering above his control station.

Details about the ship appeared on one of the sensor operator’s physical displays. The enemy contact was an unknown hull type, barely a hundred meters long.

“Let me see it,” Shallah said.

A visual materialized on the main forward viewscreen. The ship looked ancient. It certainly wasn’t any kind of threat.

“Why do you wait? Disable them. We find out what they want when they are at our mercy.”

“Every time we draw near, they jump away and reappear in another part of the system.”

“Then blanket space with fighters and hit them with SLS disruptors when they get too close.”

“We try that. They are not using SLS drives.”

Shallah was taken aback by that. “You mean they’re making
quantum
jumps? Why do you not tell me sooner? Omnius is here. We must evacuate!”

“Wait, My Lord. We are about to inform you when
this
appears, sitting on your command chair.” The sensor operator handed him a flat silver disc.

Shallah turned it over and over in his hands. He was tired of asking questions. He closed his eyes and made a direct connection with the sensor operator’s cerebral implant. Once the connection was established, he sifted through the operator’s memories to obtain his answers directly.

The device he held was a holographic projector. The sensor operator had seen part of the recording, an image of a man sitting in Shallah’s command chair. The man in the recording asked to see the Sythians’ leader, and he said that the rest of his message would only play in that one’s presence.

Shallah was confused. Why would Omnius send them this when he could have sent a bomb aboard instead?

“Are we still cloaked?” Shallah asked, opening his eyes and looking around quickly, searching both visually and via his remote link with the ship’s scanners to see if there were any other foreign objects on board.

The engineering operator replied, “We are safely cloaked, My lord.”

“You fool! Raise our shields immediately before they send us something more dangerous!”

“A thousand apologies, My Lord! It will be done!”

Shallah hissed with displeasure and turned and walked up to his command chair. He had acquired an intuitive grasp of how the disc-shaped device worked from what the sensor-operator knew about it. It would only play its recording from the command chair. Once he’d placed the device, Shallah stepped back and waited. A flicker of blue light scythed out from the device, scanning everyone in the immediate vicinity. A moment later, a man appeared sitting in Shallah’s chair. He was an ordinary man, nothing remarkable about him. His features were marred with asymmetries and imperfections, meaning he wasn’t one of Omnius’s clones, unless the imperfections were deliberate.

“I am Therius the Redemptor, Commander of Etheria’s Army.” Shallah resisted the urge to reply. Surely the recording held no capacity for conversation. “I seek an alliance against Omnius. You will want to know what we have to offer, but you need look no further than the device sitting before you. You wish to reach Avilon, and we can help you get there. All we ask in return is that we fight our enemy together. As a token of our good faith, please accept this gift, and know that you can trust us.”

The recording ended and the holographic projection of the man sitting in Shallah’s command chair disappeared.

“What gift?” he wondered aloud.

Then a new hologram appeared, a static image. It was a schematic, a blueprint to build something. Looking at it more closely, Shallah realized what it was. Then another schematic appeared in its place, followed by another and another, until Shallah had seen more than a dozen, each one detailing how to create one component of a quantum jump drive. The schematics were annotated in Avilonian, not Sythian, but translating them wouldn’t take long.

Shallah caught himself gaping at the holo projector. He wondered if it was possible for this to be a trap laid by Omnius.

Of course, it was possible,
he decided, but he couldn’t afford not to investigate further.

“Hail that vessel,” he ordered.

“They are already hailing us, My Lord,” the comms operator replied, speaking in strangely-accented Sythian. “They would like us to drop our shields so they can come aboard.”

Shallah turned and nodded to his comms operator, the human traitor Commander Donali. At first Shallah hadn’t trusted him, but over the years Donali had been nothing if not faithful to the Sythian cause. More importantly, brain scans showed he did not have a Lifelink implant to tie him back to Omnius. “Tell them that we will send out a shuttle and they can jump aboard that. No more than three of them. I won’t risk lowering our shields. If possible, I would like to speak with this
Therius the Redemptor
in person.”

A moment later, Donali replied, “They agree to our terms.”

Shallah was surprised. That human was taking a big risk to come aboard under those circumstances. Perhaps he could be trusted after all.

“I shall be in my meditation room,” he said. “Have them brought to me there.”

“It will be done, My Lord,” Donali replied.

To his engineering operator, Shallah said, “Have those schematics translated and analyzed. See if they offer a workable design for quantum jump drives.”

“A design for… forgive me, did you say
quantum
jump drives, Supreme One?”

“Your ears do not fail you. Tell me what you can learn from these plans.” Shallah gestured to the series of schematics still projected and playing on a loop above his command chair.

“Yes, My Lord,” his chief engineer replied.

Shallah turned and left the bridge, feeling simultaneously hopeful and apprehensive. If Therius had been sent by Omnius, then nothing good would come from his arrival, but if Omnius were somehow unaware of the people that called themselves
Etheria’s Army,
then this might just be what the Sythians needed to catch the old snake off guard.

Chapter 10

S
hallah sat waiting in his meditation room aboard the
Asharn
. Here there were no distractions, nothing except for a single glossy black chair sitting on a pedestal. Stars sparkled all around. The ceiling and walls were dome-shaped and littered with holo projectors, giving a 360-degree view of space.

Shallah used this room, and others like it, to allow his mind to drift free of his physical form and connect with his greater self.

The minds of every Sythian under his command were stored aboard the
Asharn
, not for the purpose of resurrecting them in new bodies when their old ones died, but rather to join all of them together into a glorious whole. Shallah was that whole. He was the curator and director of the Sythians’ collective intelligence, just as Omnius directed the human collective.

Information was exchanged seamlessly and between the individual cells inside Shallah’s collective mind. He reveled in the feeling of oneness and empowerment that came from the collective. Shallah was connected to every system and every living Sythian aboard his ship. Through that connection he saw the shuttle bearing the human rebels land, and he read Donali’s intent to inform him of their arrival even before he did so.

Shallah watched through the ship’s sensors as a trio of humans walked through his ship, a dozen Sythians escorting them to his mediation room. That was his cue to return to the comparatively limited awareness of his physical body. The return to that body felt like waking up inside a coffin. Shallah blinked his large Sythian eyes and tried to ignore the feeling of claustrophobia. The impression of floating in the vastness of space created by the mediation room’s holo projectors helped, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The walls seemed infinitely far away, yet Shallah still felt them closing in; the stars were too heavy and too close, burning mere inches from his face.

Shallah worked to control his breathing, and a measure of calm returned. The rest of the Sythians had yet to learn the truth of their existence, so for the time being, Shallah was forced to exist in two places at once, but the part of him that was relegated to a physical body always resented it.

Shallah opened the door with a thought and watched as a dozen Sythians walked in pushing three human prisoners in front of them. They walked up to the foot of the throne. These three had already been thoroughly scanned. They bore no weapons, and they were not linked.

“Who are you, and where do you come from?” Shallah demanded, speaking in Versal rather than Sythian. He recognized the man in the center of the three from his pale blue eyes and dark brown skin. He was the one from the holo-recording—Therius, the so-called Redemptor. He and the other two men standing beside him wore Imperial Fleet uniforms, the colors faded with age. That suggested that they hailed from the original Imperium. Their Imperial rank insignia further supported that notion, but for one key difference. They all wore a silver six-sided star above their insignia. Shallah recognized it as the Star of Etherus. Those symbols had been found hanging on pendants around the neck vertebrae of fossilized skeletons throughout the Getties. Shallah’s eyes narrowed as he considered what that might mean.

“You already know who I am,” Therius replied. His pale blue eyes gleamed in the low light of the room, but they weren’t aglow with ARCs. “As for where we come from, some of us escaped Avilon, while others were rescued.”

“Rescued? Does Omnius know about that?”

“He doesn’t even know we exist.”

Shallah wasn’t sure he should believe that. “How is it that you have access to quantum technology that only Omnius understands? If even
I
can’t comprehend these technologies, how do you explain your knowledge of them?”