Armageddon (21 page)

Atton wanted to say more, but he kept silent. He had no trouble looking outraged, but deep down he was actually terrified. What could he say? She was right. He shook his head and turned away. “I need to get to work.”

“If you’re telling the truth, what do you have to be afraid of?” Ceyla called after him.

Back in the bedroom, Atton waved open the closet and hurried to put on his work clothes. He forewent a shower and shave in order to avoid further discussion.

“Well?” Ceyla demanded.

“This conversation is over,” he said as he shrugged into a black trench coat that concealed the sidearm holstered to his waist.

Ceyla gave a bitter smile and crossed her arms over her chest. “You can’t answer me, can you?”

Atton stormed out through the living room and dining room. He waved open the front door, but Ceyla’s words followed him out. “You can’t answer me, because you’re lying!”

The door swished shut and Atton turned to stare at it. His angry scowl evaporated, and in its place came wide-eyed fear. She wasn’t going to give up until he brought her proof that he was a mortal, but to do that he needed help.

Atton turned and started down the hallway to the building’s lift tubes. On his way down to the parking levels, he began rehearsing what he would say to convince Admiral Vee to do him another favor.

* * *

“You already owe me a favor, Atton,” Admiral Vee said, crossing her long, smooth legs and sitting back against her plush, white sofa.

Atton remained standing and pressed his lips into a grim line. “Add it to my tab.”

Valari laughed. “Well, I suppose there is something you can do to repay me…”

“What would you like me to do?”

“When you’ve lived as long as I have, there’s very little left that amuses you. Do you know what amuses me, Atton?”

He shook his head, staring into her deep turquoise eyes and trying in vain to find a spark of humanity there. “I have no idea.”

“Your
father
amuses me.”

Atton blinked, taken aback by that. “Which one?”

“Ethan, of course.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ethan is a faithful husband,” Vee went on. “Omnius tells me he’ll never leave his wife to be with me, or even experience a momentary lapse of his inhibitions. Do you know how unusual it is for me to come across something I can’t have?”

Atton felt an angry heat rising around his collar. His right hand twitched beside his sidearm. “You want me to help you get my own father to commit adultery. Who do you think you are?”

Admiral Vee’s amusement vanished and a scowl abruptly darkened her features. “A simple
no
would suffice.”

“You don’t need my help. If there’s a way, then Omnius knows what it is, and
he
can help you.”

“True, but then you wouldn’t have a chance to repay the favor you owe me. I pretended to be your mother, so that you could trick your girlfriend into marrying you. How is that any better than adultery?”

“It was one night.”

“And that’s all I’m asking for,” Vee replied, smiling up at him.

“I refuse.”

“Even if you refuse, as you pointed out, I don’t need your help. I’ll get what I want either way.”

Atton clenched his teeth. “What is
wrong
with you? What do you gain from my involvement?”

Admiral Vee laughed lightly and rose from the couch. “I told you, Atton, when you’ve lived as long as I have, there’s very little left that amuses you.”

Atton ground his teeth, considering the matter. If he didn’t help her, he stood to lose his wife, and Ethan would be delivered into Admiral Vee’s clutches just as surely by someone else. There was no way to make things any better for his father, but he could at least find a way to make things better for himself.

Admiral Vee watched him, her teeth bared in a broad grin, her eyes bright with needle-sharp points of reflected light.

“What would I have to do?” he asked.

“Come to my office, and I’ll tell you.”

Chapter 20

“T
his is the plan,” Therius said.

All eyes were on the hologram rising from the long, black holo table in the operations center of the
Liberator
, but Farah’s eyes were on the people in the room. Therius sat at the head of the table. To his right sat Shara, High Matriarch of the Gors, and down at the opposite end of the table sat Shallah with his Sythian second-in-command, Queen Tavia. All three factions were present to watch as Therius outlined the plan to conquer Avilon.

A glowing blue wireframe represented Avilon. The Union Fleet appeared as a fine haze of green dots orbiting in clusters above the planet, while their objectives were marked on the surface in three different colors. Green diamonds marked primary objectives, yellow marked secondary, and orange marked tertiary. The primary targets were enemy garrisons and omni-nodes—hubs in the quantum comms network that spanned the globe.

“The key to our battle plan is a quantum comms jammer that will disrupt Omnius throughout Avilon.”

Farah blinked. “One jammer for the entire planet? Is that even possible?”

Therius nodded. “We’ve code-named it the
Eclipser
. As soon as we activate it, everyone will be free of Omnius’s influence. He’ll be unable to harm them through their Lifelinks or speak to them. Even drones will be cut off, and they’ll have to revert to secondary programming that makes human Peacekeepers their commanders.”

“Will not the jamming also affect our fleet?” Shallah asked.

“We’ll have line of sight communications via conventional comms. Once our teams are on the ground they will lose contact with one another, so we will have to coordinate everything very carefully ahead of time. Making matters worse, the Gors’ telepathy will not work until we turn off the Eclipser.”

Shara hissed and bared her teeth. “How are we to fight like thiss?”

“You will use conventional comms to communicate between the members of your ground teams. It will work as long as your people remain within a short range of each other.”

“And Omniusss?” Shara hissed, blinking large, slitted yellow eyes.

“Avilon no longer maintains an orbital comms network. Coordinating a proper defense will be all but impossible.

“We’re going to jump straight into orbit, directly above the known locations of Omnius’s drone garrisons.” Therius pointed to one green diamond after another, identifying the fleet’s primary objectives. “We’ll destroy approximately 90% of the garrison before it even has a chance to get airborne.”

“What about ground defensesss?” Shallah asked.

“Most of the ground defenses are controlled via quantum links by Omnius, so we should see only a small fraction of them still active. It will take some time before drones or Peacekeepers can get to the ones that do have manual controls.”

Farah let out a long breath. “There’s a lot riding on this Eclipser. What if the enemy finds it?”

“There’s no way to pinpoint the origin of the jamming field, so unless we have a traitor in our midst, it will be impossible to find.”

Farah glanced around the room, looking from Therius to Shara and then to the Sythians. Her gaze lingered on Shallah, and her eyes narrowed swiftly.

Shallah caught that look and hissed at her. “I have no reason to betray the Union,” he replied. “I would surely die as well asss you.”

“Everyone here can be trusted,” Therius said, “But as an extra measure of security, the actual location of the jammer will only be known to myself and the general of the ground team in charge of defending it.”

Farah nodded. “How long will the jammer be able to maintain the field?”

“A month or more.”

“Then all we have to do is keep it safe,” Farah replied.

“Yes.” Therius pointed to the next series of objectives, marked with yellow diamonds. “Stage two of our plan is to infiltrate the Omninet. These locations have been identified as nodes in the network. From here we’ll be able to hijack the quantum network and send a brief message to the entire planet, straight to their Lifelinks. That is how we’ll reveal Omnius’s lies. I fully expect our message to incite a violent civil war.”

“Won’t you have to disable the Eclipser to send a message via the quantum network?”

“The Eclipser will only be offline for a minute or two, and during that time we’ll keep Omnius busy defending himself from a virus.”

“A few minutes might still be enough time for him to organize a proper defense,” Farah said.

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

“What about the Icosahedron? New Avilon?”

“Based on what we have seen of Omnius’s movements in the Getties, we know that it will take him approximately a week to jump back to Avilon with all the Facets of his Icosahedron. During that week we will use Omnius’s own weapon against him. He’s spent the past eight years seeding the Getties with self-replicating nanites to erase the evidence of his lies. Over that same period of time we’ve managed to capture a sufficient number of nanites to weaponize them for our own purposes.

“Our plan is to plant nanite bombs in strategic locations throughout Avilon.” Therius pointed to the third and final set of objectives, the orange-colored diamonds. “If need be, as proof of our intent, we’ll detonate one of the bombs and allow Omnius to purge the area from orbit before the nanites can spread out of control. After that, Omnius will have no choice but to acknowledge that the threat is real.”

Farah’s blood turned to ice. “You’re going to use the human race as blackmail.”

Therius nodded. “We will offer to release Omnius’s faithful people if he will allow the rest of Avilon to be free. If he does not agree to that, then we will detonate the bombs and destroy the entire planet. Based on his need to be worshiped by his creators, it is unlikely that is an outcome he will be willing to accept.”

Farah frowned. Negotiating with a deceitful, manipulative, super-intelligent AI seemed like a lost cause to her. “No matter what agreement we come to, Omnius can always go back on it later.”

“Which is why we will keep the bombs in place, and we will also keep The Choosing. We will give our people the same choice that Omnius does now, except that the ones who don’t choose him really will be free, and the ones who do will know exactly what he is like. Every Human, Gor, and Sythian, will have to decide whether or not they would like to join Omnius and live with him in an artificial paradise on New Avilon.”

“Eventually he will have enough followers that he may feel like he can do without us,” Farah replied.

“Perhaps.”

“What if Omnius doesn’t enjoy humanity’s company as much as you think? What if he decides to let us destroy ourselves? If he’s lonely, he could always create a new species or even clone one of ours from DNA samples and start over.”

“He could do that, yes.”

“Then our threats are empty.”

“Omnius won’t like to be defeated. He would rather bide his time and wait for the day when he can have his revenge.”

“That doesn’t sound any better.”

“It’s the best we have. And if Omnius doesn’t back down, then we
will
detonate the bombs. Better that we all die and go to Etheria than that Omnius continues to bend every living soul to his will.”

Farah went cold. Silence reigned for a long, terrible moment, and she held Therius’s pale blue gaze, weighing the man’s resolve. The fanatic gleam she saw shining there was all she needed to see to know that he was serious.

By the time she recovered enough to speak, all Farah could manage was a whisper, but it still sounded loud in the pregnant silence of the operations center. “You’re prepared to commit a triple genocide?”

“Death is not the end, Miss Hale.”

“It is for us! We’re all clones! We’re not going to Etheria when we die. All that will be left of us is a cloud of nanite-eaten dust!”

“You’re wrong. Even clones have souls.”

“Really. Do you have any evidence of that? Actually, I’d even settle for evidence of souls in mortals. Souls are a hypothetical construct to explain how we can go on living after our bodies die, but there’s no evidence that they actually exist.”

“Faith is the evidence of things not seen.”

“I’m talking about evidence we can
all
appreciate.”

Therius sighed. “Even if I show you physical evidence, you will not accept it for what it is.”

“Telling me that just makes me think you don’t have any evidence.”

“But I do.”

“Prove it.”

“The Human isss telling the truth,” Shallah hissed from the other end of the table.

Farah turned to him with narrowed eyes. “And how do you know that?”

“I know the things about which he speakss.”

“If the Redemptor says that we are to live again, then it is true,” High Matriarch Shara growled.

Farah turned back to Therius to find him smiling approvingly at Shara.

“Show me your proof,” Farah said.

“Very well,” Therius replied. He stabbed a series of keys on the holo table’s control panel, and the image of Avilon disappeared, replaced by something else.