Dusk (66 page)

“But…”

Paeryl just raised his hand to stop Cyrus’s
rebuttal, and then he turned to take his betrothed’s hand and stand
in the fleeting rays of the orange sun.

• • • • •

—
Dada, why do I have to learn Farsi?

—
Because it’s part of your heritage. You are half
Persian.

—
I don’t understand. The whole Uni uses
Commonspeak. Why do I have to spend Saturdays in class learning
something for no reason?

—
Well, it’s not for no reason. Your mother speaks
Farsi. Uncle Xander speaks Farsi. Your grandmother and grandfather
spoke it.

—
Well, you and mommy only speak Commonspeak to
each other.

—
True, but I understand the most basic things she
says. I learned in college as a courtesy to her and your
grandparents. I’m just not comfortable speaking it.

—
Do you ever feel jealous when Uncle Xander
speaks Farsi to mommy?

—
Not really. I trust your uncle. He’s a little
too, what’s the word, bombastic to hide what he’s saying about
someone.

—
You think when you leave, he and mommy might get
together?

—
Why would you think something like that
Dari?

—
Well, mom’s really pretty, and sometimes she and
Uncle Xander seem to get along better than you and her. Just
sayin’. It’s not that I want it, but why wouldn’t any man want to
be with mommy? And if you’re not here, who’s to stop them?

—
Well, your mother will either play Penelope or
she won’t. But if she doesn’t, I expect you to play
Telemachus.

—
I don’t know what that means Dada. Who are
Penelope and Telemachus?

—
Penelope and Telemachus are characters in
Homer’s Odyssey. There’s a holofilm version you and I should watch
some day. But what it means is, if your mother wants someone else,
Uncle Xander or otherwise, no amount of Farsi could stop
it.

—
Why would she want someone other than you,
Dada?

—
One of these days, Dari, you’ll understand that
your Dada is human, and he makes mistakes too.

—
So if you make mistakes too, why are you so hard
on me?

—
Because I don’t want you to make the same
mistakes I did.

—
Oh, I can see that, but it’s still hard to see
the mistakes you make.

—
Sometimes it’s hard for me too until it’s too
late. But I can give you some advice Dari. Try not to take anything
good you have for granted, because there may come a day when taking
it for granted makes it not good any more.

—
I’m not really sure what that means.

—
Well Dari, I sincerely hope you never have to
learn.

• • • • •

Cyrus walked over to Jang, who was basking in the
sun and holding hands with Doree. Jang brushed his hair to the side
and she giggled as Cyrus approached. Jang seem to notice the intent
in Cyrus’s face, and he himself began to look more serious before
Cyrus even opened his mouth, “How soon could you, Doree, and Fenrir
get the gravity drives off all but two levs in Paeryl’s fleet?”

Jang seemed stymied by the question and only
muttered, but Doree answered for him, “Perhaps twenty hors if we
work nonstop, and if we have help.” she smiled and looked to
Jang.

Jang simply nodded.

“And how long would it take to bury them out
there,” Cyrus pointed to the path that led into the compound, “and
then connect power lines to them and cover them in concrete?”

Evidently they were both stymied by that
question as they could only manage to look at each other and
murmur, which, as far as Cyrus was concerned, was an excellent
sign. Jang was one of the sharpest human beings Cyrus ever knew,
and Doree seemed to be his match. If the two of them had no idea
what he was talking about from those two questions, then the
likelihood that the Echelon would figure it out before it was too
late was virtually nil—and those were odds Cyrus was willing to
gamble on.

• • • • •

As Torus Denali stood at the helm of the
command barge, he relished the warm anticipation that spread
through his body. The thirty fighters that cruised before him
across the Ashan plain, skimming the ground to avoid early visual
detection, filled his mind with comfort knowing that justice,
today, would be served. Justice for this pride at the containment
facility. Justice for the men who died at the pyramid hangar. And
justice for the men still stranded in deep orbit on the detached
J.L. Orbital. For this DC would be the final DC of reckoning for
those loathsome Apostates. And the prospect of watching their too
long eluded demise first-hand almost broke his composure.

And it had been so simple. They had just been
looking for the wrong things. In all their searches they had looked
for constructs and shelters, some sign of civilized life in the
barren wastes. But in a land where the meaning of predation had
been all but lost, where the rains only occurred underground, there
was no need for shelter, especially not for photosynthesizing
savages who lived only to gorgejack and pillage.

And now, the Apostates’ greatest heist would
prove their downfall and Denali’s glory. As his battalion cruised
no more than fifteen meters from the ground, less than four
kilometers away from the constant signal the Ark transmitted,
Denali prepared to give the command for the fleet to rise to
detection altitude in order to triumphantly blot out the Apostates’
beloved sun as they approached. But there was something odd in the
distance.

Denali squinted and leaned forward to get a
better glimpse, but only saw the fighter on point flip in an almost
comical motion and then careen into two fighters behind it. The
three fighters caromed into a large fighter as the laws of reality
seemed to distort. And then Denali saw the dust and rocks, along
with debris from the spinning wreck before him, falling
upward
just before another fighter exploded, catching those
around it in a chain reaction as the outermost fighters spread to
either side to evade the chaos. And then he saw the rocks around
his ship suddenly rise from the ground, and before he was tossed
from his perch on the helm, he knew that, once and for all, he had
been beaten. And as the world contorted around him, and the air
inside the bridge began to scald, he realized, it was not as bad as
he imagined.

• • • • •

—
Dada, do you think you could beat Uncle Xander
in chess?

—
Maybe. We’ve never played.

—
Kinda strange that you guys are old friends and
you never played.

—
Don’t think he wants to risk it.

—
Why not?

—
Because he doesn’t like to lose.

—
Last time I checked, you don’t like to lose
either Dada.

—
Well, your Uncle is different. He has held a
grudge against everyone who has ever beaten him.

—
So you’ve never beaten him?

—
Like I said, he avoids competition with
me.

—
He always beats me at chess.

—
Well, I always beat you at chess too.

—
Yeah, but he’s more like a machine. You’re
different every time.

—
That’s because I adjust to you. I take what I
know about you and I use it against you.

—
Like what?

—
Like the fact that you always try to think too
far ahead, and because of that, sometimes, you miss things right in
front of you.

—
Yeah, I guess so, huh.

—
Your uncle is a lot like that too. If he did
lose, it would be because I frustrated him into a loss.

—
Yeah, you are kinda frustrating to play.

—
Well, I’m glad to be of service.

—
Ha. Well, one of these days, it would be
interesting to see you go up against Uncle Xander, but you might
have to let him win.

—
You should know by now Dari, I never let anyone,
and that means anyone, win. Anyone who ever beat me earned
it.

—
Well, maybe he would earn it.

—
Maybe, Dari, but friendship is hard to come by,
and pride comes and goes. I personally would never want to be in a
situation where I let my pride ruin a friendship, and I would be
hard-pressed to forgive a friend who did.

• • • • •

They had sat on the edge of the Miasma with Set
barely visible on the horizon for four hours, absorbing the last
rays of the orange sun they would ever feel before they began the
march to their destination. The Ace of Wands and Taeryn had led the
caravan that had left them there and had flown back to have their
levs dismantled. Now Six was on his own far outside the earwig
network. This plan had no contingency; it would either succeed or
fail epically, and Taewook of Cups did not want to risk any chance
of his own signal being phreaked. So Six led the bulk of the
Apostate clan into the Miasma at a jog, dual-tipped spear in hand,
toward the gilded tip of the pyramid that peaked just above the
darkened horizon. He was not comfortable bringing the children and
elders with him, but there was no other way. So he marched, at the
point of his own phalanx, and he hoped with every optimistic nerve
in his body that this plan would go smoother than the last.

Several hours later, the Ace of Wands flew next to
Taeryn, attacking the pyramid again. They had waited until one of
the Echelon levs had left, and Jang had phreaked the opening codes
again. They were sure there would be some sort of countermeasures
to keep the same attack from happening twice, but this time it
wouldn’t matter. This time they were equipped with only three
weapons each—one pulse missile, one mining laser taken from the
craft they had stolen earlier, and one directional bomb that
Fenrir, Aerik, and Davidson had made from the processed waste
products brought back in the soil processing lev they were now
using to carry the Eos. It made it very hard to dodge the laser
batteries now spread around the pyramid, but thanks to Taewook
spoofing the imaging system, the Echelon could not use their
computer to lock on to targets, and they had to fire the lasers
manually. The controls of the crafts they now powered were
familiar, but the ships themselves were sluggish and did not
respond to commands as smoothly as the grav-levs of Asha did. They
had needed all the grav-drives to set the trap for the Echelon
attack force, which according to the last earwig transmission, had
worked beautifully. And as Taewook of Cups advised the Ace of Wands
and Taeryn to get ready, the bay door to the pyramid opened just as
they swooped down side-by-side, dropping their bombs when their
HUDs gave them the mark. The Ace hoped that the rest of this plan
would work as beautifully because all the lives that meant anything
to him were at stake.

When Azariah, Paulice, and Cyrus had devised
the plan, Cyrus said they would use a tactic the Echelon could not
anticipate because they had no reason to have ever seen it. Six
could not fathom what a small band of outcasts, resourceful as they
may have been, could come up with that was outside of the Echelon’s
understanding. Cyrus’s van had assaulted the pyramid immediately
after the fighter attack. Six had to wait for their mark to give
his own command to action. The ten minutes Six had to wait after
the bombing of the door seemed like an Eos-age. The time and
anticipation filled Six with doubt as he could hear the calamity
inside the hangar. But when Six blew his horn to signal the entire
band of Apostates, some two hundred men, women, and children, to
pour in through the smoke from the ruined blast door, he himself
understood the power of a Fringe-rush.

• • • • •

Cyrus’s van had entered the pyramid ahead of
the Apostates and stormed the hangar to clear a path for Six and
the others. They had cleared a thin swath through the guards in the
hangar and had proceeded on to prep the ship they were going to
apportion. Six marveled at the sheer size of the hangar, but was
almost floored as they reached the door that had been blasted open
on the opposite side, revealing an even larger holding area. Six
could hear the whine of the lasers as the two fighters piloted by
Taeryn and the Ace of Wands drew fire and cut down the foremost
guards beyond the second bay door. By the time the Echelon soldiers
inside had gathered themselves, the Apostate men, women, and
children they had terrorized for more than half a century descended
upon them in a swarm—it was a satisfying sight, but it was not
pretty.

By the time the Apostates had reached the
furthest ship marked with Greek letters that spelled ‘Grigori,’
Cyrus and all the members of his van except Taewook had already
powered up the ship. The guards inside the hangar seemed to have
been lower vertices, and by the time their commanders had realized
they had been counter-attacked, and that their Torus had fallen to
a trap, the Apostates had already filed into the gargantuan cargo
hold of the apportioned ship, and it was passing through the
smoldering bay doorway that had opened directly in front of it.

Six waited behind the others inside the massive ship
as it pulled away from the pyramid. And as they skirted the ground,
moving out of the hangar as Taeryn and the Ace of Wands met their
ship outside the range of the Echelon lasers, Six wondered if he
really would miss this miserable ball of errant rock and was
surprised by his answer.

The Ashan desert became lighter as they sped
further from the Miasma. Three Earth mag-levs, which had been
retrieved from the Paracelsus, cruised behind them, closing in
slowly on the open cargo door so as not to alarm the Apostates
being ushered into the barracks quarters. The soil processor
carrying the Eos settled first, followed by the dozer carrying the
supplies and suncasters that would keep them alive during the trip
to Earth. Finally, Jang pulled in behind the other two levs in the
dragon lorry they had stolen in their escape. Just as he settled
the lev between the others, Uzziah asked where the Ace of Wands and
Taeryn were over the earwig, but before Jang could answer, two
Echelon fighters jumped in behind them and positioned themselves to
fire.