Armageddon (13 page)

E
than sat behind the wheel of his air car, staring at the solid wall of tail lights, unbroken lines of red shining feebly into the never-ending night of the Null Zone. Apartment windows glowed in rows of gold to either side. Ethan sighed, rolling his neck and shoulders, trying to work some of the tension out of his muscles.

Traffic had been stuck for half an hour already, with no signs of letting up. While waiting, he’d tuned into the news nets for an explanation. Enforcers had set up blockades all over Sutterfold District, looking for a pair of children who had been abducted from the district councilor’s home a few hours earlier. Theories abounded about who had abducted them and why, but Ethan didn’t have time to worry about their fate. At the moment, he had his own child to worry about.

A tiny cough interrupted his thoughts.

“Her fever isn’t going down,” Alara said from the backseat of the car. “We need to get her to the hospital
now,
Ethan.”

He shook his head and gestured helplessly to the traffic. “How?” Ethan twisted around to look at his wife. Tears glistened on her cheeks, and her face looked ashen.

Trinity coughed again, drawing both of their gazes to her. Her car seat wasn’t facing him, but Ethan could imagine her tiny cheeks flushed and blotchy, her body burning itself up from the inside. By now the medication they’d given her should have worked.

“Why isn’t she crying?” Alara asked. “She should be crying! We should have called an ambulance,” she said, looking at him as if the traffic were his fault. “We can’t just wait here until Enforcers search every car in the city!”

“No, we can’t,” Ethan said, turning back around. He disengaged the lane-lock setting of the autopilot and set the car over to full manual control.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m getting us to the hospital,” he said, dialing the car’s inertial compensator up to 100%. That done, he pulled up and gunned the throttle. The car’s thrusters roared and they rose swiftly above the endless lines of traffic. Dead ahead lay the hazy blue ceiling of the Styx, cutting the city off at level 50.

A crackle of static roared through the car’s speakers. “Stop your car and submit to inspection immediately!”

Ethan spared a hand from the flight yoke to reply. “I have a sick baby on board. I need to get her to the hospital.”

“You are not authorized to leave the inspection area. If you don’t comply, we will disable your vehicle. I repeat—”

Ethan muted the comms, and pushed the throttle into overdrive. They jetted up through clear air, racing between a pair of foot bridges crossing the elevated streets on level 45.

Flashing lights strobed through the car’s rear window, and a pair of dazzling blue lasers flashed by.

“Frek!” Ethan pushed the car into a sudden dive. Airspeed quickly climbed past 700 kilometers per hour, and the car shuddered as windshear threatened to rip something off the fuselage.

“Ethan!” Alara yelled.

He pulled up and flipped the car on its side to skate through a narrow alley between buildings. Windows raced by in a blur of golden light. Collision warnings blared, and Trinity began wailing with them.

At least she’s crying now,
Ethan thought.

Behind them, the Enforcers’ flashing lights were back. Another pair of blue lasers flickered by, hitting the building to Ethan’s left. They were shooting to disable, not to kill, but at this speed disabling their car would be deadly anyway.

The car’s headlights lit up the end of the alley. Flashing red brackets highlighted the gap, and an accompanying alarm screeched from the car’s collision warning system. The alley narrowed to a thin slice at the end. It wasn’t wide enough.

“Ethan!”

“I see it!”

He rolled back to level and pulled up hard, applying dorsal maneuvering jets to nose up further. Firing the grav lifts, Ethan bounced the car off the end of the alley and raced straight up, riding on a thin cushion of air.

A dozen floors up, the space between the buildings grew, and Ethan flew out into the clear. The rear-view display showed that he’d lost his pursuit.

Ethan grinned and risked a glance over his shoulder to make sure Alara and Trinity were both fine. As he did so, he saw the headlights of an approaching vehicle heading straight for them.

A loud blast from the other driver’s horn emphasized the danger. Another warning screamed from the car’s collision warning system. Adrenaline sparked in Ethan’s fingertips, and he slammed the flight yoke forward, diving straight down. Alara screamed, Trinity wailed, and then the lights were gone. The approaching vehicle roared overhead, rattling their windows with its passing.

“That was too close!” Alara said, sounding breathless.

Ethan swallowed thickly and nodded. He raced back up to the streets on level 45, keeping an eye out for stray traffic this time. He used the car’s nav system to guide him to the upper levels hospital where Alara had given birth just a few short months ago.

Enforcers found them again just as Ethan hovered down in front of the ER. “Get her to a doctor, Alara; I’ll deal with this.”

“Deal with it
how?
They’re going to arrest you!”

Ethan shook his head. “I’ll make a call to my boss. She has connections.”

Alara looked uncertain, but she hurried to unbuckle Trinity and climb out of the car. Behind them, Enforcers climbed out of their vehicles, too, sidearms at the ready.

“Come out with your hands up!” one of them said over his vehicle’s PA system.

Ethan complied, but Alara ignored them and raced toward the crystal pillars flanking the entrance of the hospital. A pair of EMTs went to greet her.

One of the Enforcers called for Alara to stop, his voice simultaneously muffled and amplified by his helmet as he stepped out of his vehicle to give chase, but when he saw the baby in Alara’s arms, he decided to focus his attention on Ethan instead. The district councilor’s missing children were older than Trinity.

Ethan greeted the Enforcers with a smile. One of them came and bound his hands with stun cords.

“Sorry about the chase,” he said. “But as you can see, I wasn’t lying about the sick baby.”

“You should have called an ambulance,” the Enforcer replied.

Ethan smirked. “Funny, my wife said the same thing.”

One of the officers led him to a patrol car, while the other began a perfunctory search of Ethan’s vehicle for the district councilor’s missing children.

Ethan caught Alara’s eye as he was pushed down into the patrol car. She made a move to go after him, but he shook his head.

“Look after Trinity!” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

* * *

The wait was long and agonizing. Not knowing how Trinity was doing made every second seem like an hour. Ethan’s brain buzzed with worry as he lay on the bunk inside his cell, desperately wishing Admiral Vee would wake up and find the message he’d left on her comms. As the night grew impossibly long, Ethan felt his eyelids growing heavy. Despite all the adrenaline and stress, he drifted off into a troubled sleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the back of an ambulance with EMTs attending him. Neither his wife nor his daughter were anywhere to be seen.

“What happened? Where am I?” Ethan croaked. His heart pounded, and his head throbbed painfully with every beat.

“Don’t move, please,” one of the EMTs said.

Ethan rocked his head from side to side. With that movement, he felt a stab of pain go shooting through his neck. He winced with the pain, and something pulled tight on his forehead. Ethan reached up and found that it was a bandage. Horrified, he pulled on it, and his head throbbed more insistently. Something warm trickled past his ear, causing a maddening itch.

“I said don’t move!” the EMT said, slapping his hands away from his head.

“What happened?” Ethan demanded, trying to sit up. Strong hands forced him back down.

“You were in an accident,” the nearest EMT replied, an upside down face bobbing into view as he adjusted Ethan’s bandage.

A second EMT appeared behind the first, holding a syringe and waiting to assist his colleague.

“Alara?” Ethan asked, his eyes darting to look for her. He hoped she was somewhere in the back of the ambulance with him, a passenger rather than a patient.

She didn’t answer.

“Where’s my wife?” he demanded.

“She didn’t make it,” the second EMT said. “Her injuries were too severe. She… chose to go to Etheria.”

“You idiot!” the first EMT replied. “Are you trying to send him into shock?”

“Alara died?” Ethan rocked his head back and forth again, feeling sick. He broke out in a cold sweat all over his body.

“He deserves to know. He might want to follow her,” the second EMT replied.

A life signs monitor squealed with an alarm.

“He’s going into shock!”

“Get him up!” another voice said, sounding strange and faraway.

The EMTs began lifting him from the gurney and shaking him by his shoulders.

“Wake up!” the voice demanded.

Ethan’s eyes sprang open, and suddenly he was back inside his cell, staring up at a prison guard with a crooked lip and bad breath.

“He’s awake,” the guard said, letting him fall back onto to his bunk.

Ethan grunted and sat up, blinking against the glaring light above his bunk.

Standing in the open door of Ethan’s cell was none other than Admiral Vee. The prison guard brushed by her and waited outside the cell, looking impatient.

“I was beginning to think you didn’t care,” Ethan said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he rose from the bunk and shuffled out.

Valari smirked as he approached. “You know better than that by now, Ethan,” she said.

The prison guard led them down a long, dismal gray corridor. As they followed him, Valari leaned over to whisper in his ear, “You owe me, Ortane.”

Ethan frowned and nodded.

Outside the station, Alara and Trinity waited for him beside Admiral Vee’s limousine. Ethan ran to them.

“How is she?” he asked, his eyes on the bundle of blankets in Alara’s arms.

“She’s fine,” Alara replied.

When he drew near enough to peek inside the blankets, he saw that now Trinity’s violet eyes were bright, and her cheeks were a more normal shade of pink. Gone was the spotty, flushed complexion she’d had earlier.

“Hey there, Trin,” Ethan said, tickling her belly. She giggled appreciatively and smiled. Looking up, he asked, “What was it?”

“A virus. A bad one. The doctor said if we’d left her with that fever until morning, she could have died.”

“Worth it, then,” Ethan decided, nodding.

“I called Valari as soon as Trinity was stable,” Alara said. “She came and picked us up to get you. I don’t know what she did to get you out, but it worked. We owe her a big
thank you,
” Alara said, nodding to Valari over Ethan’s shoulder.

Ethan’s turned to see Admiral Vee standing behind him. “Thanks again, Vee,” he said.

She just shook her head and smiled. “The commander of the precinct is an old friend of mine. It was no trouble.” Vee walked up to them and went to see the baby. “You have a beautiful daughter. I can see why you risked so much to get her to the hospital. It would be terrible if something happened to her.”

Ethan felt a sharp spike of dread with those words. Surely she wasn’t threatening Trinity? He looked up to find Alara nodding gravely. Admiral Vee reached out to stroke Trinity’s forehead, and Ethan cringed.

“Keep your daughter safe, Mr. Ortane.” Looking up, Valari favored him with a grim smile. “And next time, I suggest you call an ambulance before you end up in one yourself. That stunt you pulled with the Enforcers could have gotten you all killed.”

Ethan’s eyes drifted out of focus as his mind flashed back to the dream he’d had. A horrible feeling of déjà vu came over him. He’d had that dream before… right after The Choosing, after he and Alara decided to become Nulls. Alara had the exact same dream, and the medic who’d de-linked them explained that it was a final warning from Omnius, a vision of the future.

“What’s the matter?” Admiral Vee asked, looking puzzled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Ethan?” Alara said.

He blinked and his gaze snapped into focus. He forced a thin smile onto his lips. “I’m fine. If you don’t mind, Valari, we’d better get Trinity home now so that she can rest.”

“Of course,” Valari purred. “Climb in. I’ll have my driver take you both home right away.”

Chapter 13

H
off watched his partner, Galan Rovik, scroll through the list of crimes to prevent. The holo display hovering above the patrol car’s dash was filled with mundane misdemeanors, written up like headlines from a news site on the omninet. After each description was the time it would occur, followed by the address. Right now they were on patrol in the Daveroth District. Hoff scanned the list of crimes in the area.

Infidelity, wife plans to cheat on husband | 14:12 | D3-4-21.

Friends come to blows over mutual love interest | 14:13 | D1-17-12