The Agathon: Reign of Arturo (21 page)

“They lived on Mars?” she asked.

Tyrell raised his eyebrows.

“More than just lived on, Carrie. They were the first,” he said.

“First what?” Carrie said.

“First everything,” he replied, “please let me take the controls and you will find out. They have your answers.”

“Not good enough, Tyrell, first what?” Carrie said frowning.

Tyrell looked up at the cocooned planet looming outside.

“Before your race, before the Targlagdu, before what you call the Signal Makers and long before I was created, there were the others,” Tyrell said.

“Why are they here alone? Is this their home world?” Carrie asked.

“No. Here they hide,” Tyrell said.

“Are you one of these others?” Carrie asked.

Tyrell looked at her.

“Not quite,” he said smiling.

There was something off about his smile. It had a sinister quality to it, but it could simply have been because The Black was inexperienced with using human form.

“What are they hiding from?” Carrie asked, “The Targlagdu?”

“The Targlagdu your people encountered in the Aristaeus system were one of many. And they were by far one of the smallest.”

Carrie couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“What?” she said, “you mean there are more of those things floating around?”

“Many more, most are located in a remote part of your galaxy, but for millennia they have been spreading. Your species encounter with them has come far sooner than it should have,” Tyrell said.

Carrie suddenly realised the obvious.

“Why didn’t you tell my father?” she asked.

“You can only run for so long. Without assistance, your people will not survive,” Tyrell said.

Carrie lurched up suddenly and grabbed Tyrell by the top of his jumpsuit pressing her fist hard into his chest.

“You should have told them, Tyrell! They could be flying right into the mouth of one of those things,” she said.

Tyrell looked calmly into her eyes.

“Your anger towards me is doing you harm. If you wish to resume our fight, I can certainly oblige, but we both know how futile that is. Carrie, we must make contact with the others now,” he said.

Carrie wondered if the strength he had shown in his lab could truly match her abilities, but she was certain that the shuttle craft would probably not, so she released him. It was becoming clear that the scale of what was going on was far greater than she could imagine. Now she wanted answers. She was not going to get them on this shuttle craft.

She turned around and reactivated the engines. She took a deep breath and set a course for an equatorial orbit of the planet.

“Where to?” she asked Tyrell without looking at him.

Tyrell typed in a set of coordinates into the navigation computer and relayed the information to Carrie’s flight controls.

14

The Agathon

“M
y name is Aron Elstone, to whom am I speaking with?” said the male voice on the other end of the comm link.

Charly Boyett sat in the centre seat and looked around the bridge at the other crew members, who had all eyes locked firmly on the lieutenant. She turned to Kevin Ferrate behind her who was shaking his head looking clueless.

“Eh … This is Lieutenant Charly Boyett on board The Agathon, do you read?” she asked.

There was a moment of static.

“I repeat this is …” said Boyett suddenly interrupted.

“Please repeat your last, did you say The Agathon?” said Aron’s voice sounding suspicious.

“Yes, Mr Elstone, I said The Agathon. Are you transmitting from the Jycorp Orbital?” she asked.

“The what?” said Aron.

Boyett looked at Chavel and frowned.

“The Jycorp Orbital? Where are you transmitting from?” asked Boyett.

“My ship is called The Unity,” said Aron.

Boyett looked at Chavel who shook his head indicating he had no idea what The Unity was. Boyett turned back to Ferrate.

“Go get the captain,” she said, “I don’t care if he’s in a coma, get him up here now.”

Ferrate nodded and left the bridge.

“Hello?” said Aron.

Boyett turned her attention back to the front of the bridge. It was an audio signal, so she let her eyes wander around the images of the planet outside.

“Yes, hello, can you tell me where you are?” she asked.

“Is this really The Agathon? We thought you were a myth,” said Aron.

Boyett raised her eyebrows.

“A myth?” she said.

“Yes, I, we, had always heard stories, but I never thought you could have survived for so long,” Aron said.

“How long do you think we have been gone? What year do you think this is?” Boyett asked.

“What year?” Aron asked.

There was a slight crackling on the audio and Boyett looked at Chavel and nodded indicating that he keep an eye on the signal. He waved a hand in acknowledgment and turned to his computer and began monitoring the transmission.

“It is the thirty ninth year of the Reign of Arturo,” he replied.

Boyett frowned, completely baffled by what was going on.

“Mr Elstone, how long do you think The Agathon has been gone?” she asked.

There was a moment of silence on the comm system. “It is hard to know exactly. A lot of the data from the old systems were lost in the war during the Reign of Clark. Some say thousands of years, some say less,” he said.

Boyett leaned forward and placed her elbows on her knees. She was tired. The captain had isolated himself and the strain of being
left in command was making her back ache. She missed her parents and she missed Landon Emerson. She was feeling alone and scared and this voice filling the bridge was making no sense. She rubbed her brow and took a breath. Where the hell was the captain?

“Tell me about yourself, Aron,” she said quietly.

Some of the bridge crew looked at her curiously, but she did not know what else to ask. Her mind was spinning.

“I am a pilot,” he said after a moment, “I am sitting here next to India Walder, my second in command and a huge pain in the ass.”

“Hey!” came a female voice.

Boyett looked up.

“There are others with you?” she asked.

“Just three of us at the moment in the cockpit. My engineer Oliver Jones is on the ground under my legs. He’s the one you should thank for our little chat,” he said.

“How many of you are alive? Where are you living?” Boyett asked.

“We live on Earth One,” he replied.

“You found a planet?” Boyett asked.

“Eh, not exactly, no. We still live on the original space stations. What was left after the destruction of Earth. The records of the old world were left intact after the great war. We have been drifting in interstellar space since you left,” he said.

Boyett could not believe it.

“How is that possible?” she asked, “How many of you are still alive?”

“Just over twelve thousand,” Aron replied.

She decided it was time to tell him.

“Aron, when The Agathon first made its FTL jump to find the Signal Makers, there was an error in our engines. It created a time dilation. For us, it has only been a few months since we left The Jycorp Orbital Station,” she said.

“What?” Aron said.

“It’s true, Aron,” she said.

There was silence on the comm system.

“So, let me get this straight. You have a functioning Faster than Light drive?” he asked.

“Yes,” Boyett said.

“That’s why he wants you,” Aron said.

Boyett frowned puzzled.

“Who?” she asked.

There was a moment of silence again on the comm system. She thought she heard the female voice mumble something to him.

“Aron?” Boyett asked.

“Listen to me very carefully,” Aron said, “you are in great danger. We are ruled by a man called Arturo Verge. He is the chancellor of the colony. He has killed more of us than you can imagine. He is insane. He is coming here now in a heavily armoured ship called The Kandinsky. More than likely he is going to destroy The Unity with all of us on board. If that happens and he makes contact with you, you must not believe anything he says to you. He wants your ship. He wants it for himself. The world in which we live in, is in a dire condition. We are slaves. We need your help.”

His voice was stern. Resolute. Boyett knew fear and desperation when she heard it and his tone was thick with it.

“Wait, Aron, just slow down,” she said.

“Listen to me, Charly Boyett,” he said interrupting her, “I do not know how long I have here. Whatever he says to you, do not bring that ship here. You will all be killed,” he said.

There was mumbling on the comm channel.

“Shit, he’s here,” Aron said, “I know you do not know me, nor have you any reason to trust me, but heed my warning. We need your help. If I survive the next few days, I will try to contact you again. Please do nothing that he asks. My people depend on it. You could be our last hope. Do you hear me, Charly?” he asked.

Boyett was now sitting on the edge of the captain’s chair.

“I hear you, Aron, loud and clear,” she said.

“Do not listen to him!” Aron said.

There was a loud screech on the bridge which made Boyett block her ears. She looked over at Chavel. Then the comm link went dead.

“We’ve lost the transmission, Charly,” Chavel said.

There was a sharp silence on the bridge as all eyes turned to Boyett. She bit her lip and tried to process the desperate pleas of the man on the other end of the radio signal.

Where the hell was the captain?

The Agathon

Medical Bay

“Easy, Captain, this may take a few hours to get used to,” Brubaker said easing the captain into a seated position on the bio bed. He had just woken up, and was disorientated by actually being able to see three dimensional objects again. It all seemed out of focus though and hazy and he had a splitting headache.

“Water,” he said to Brubaker.

“Of course,” she said giving him a glass from a bedside table, “the headache’s will pass, hang on, let me get you something.”

She moved away from Barrington and his eyes drifted upwards towards the surface of a medical computer behind her. He stared at his reflection and saw his new eye for the first time. It looked completely normal. As if his own had merely been misplaced and not torn out by a mechanical creature. He looked around the medical bay, at all the little details of the room. The hypo sprays and liquid drug capsules of all colours sat neatly on a tray of scanners and treatment devices. It all looked normal. There was a light buzzing noise like that of a bumblebee when he turned his new eye, but it was so faint that he barely noticed it at all.

“Okay, here you go,” Brubaker said returning to the bed and placing a hypo on his neck. There was a slight pinch as whatever it was she was giving him, entered his blood stream.

“Might help a little with the nausea,” she said.

“I don’t have any nausea,” Barrington said.

Brubaker smiled.

“You will,” she said.

Barrington frowned.

“You ready?” she said.

Barrington placed his hands on the corner of the bed expecting some sort of sudden onset of vomiting. There was a light playfulness in Brubaker’s eye that he did not like. He nodded slowly.

“Okay, on the count of three, I want you to flick your eyes as far to the left as they will go, then flick them back to centre. It’s gonna take some practice, but once you get the hang of it, it will be second nature,” she said.

She lifted up a small pad and tapped some commands in it watching his eyes carefully as she did it. Barrington was beginning to regret this decision. An eye patch would have done the job.

“Okay, and three … two … one,” she said.

The captain flicked his eyes left and back to centre. Instantly the world around him changed into an array of hovering digital information.

“Whoa,” he said recoiling for a moment at what he was seeing. He looked at Brubaker who now had a white outline around her whole body, with biological information streaming to a three dimensional text box. It showed her name at the top, with rank, position, heart rate, respiration, age, and pupil dilation listed below. He looked directly at her eyes and the white outline shifted and highlighted only the outline of her face. A hovering text box appeared beside her head with the name Facial Recognition at the top.

“Okay, now this is really cool, ask me a question,” she said.

“Alright, how old are you?” asked the captain.

“Twenty-one,” she said smiling.

The computer generated outline, which had highlighted the doctor’s face, changed shape with her facial movements and suddenly turned a bright red hue for a moment, before returning to white. In the hovering text box beside her, the letters changed to a blinking red word.

‘Untruthful’

“What are you seeing?” she asked.

“Apparently you are not twenty-one,” Barrington said smiling.

“Well, maybe there are a few bugs to work out, because according to Carrie, that’s exactly how young I look,” she said.

Barrington suddenly looked at the ground and felt a pang of pain in his chest again, at Carrie’s seemingly ludicrous decision to blow herself and Tyrell up in a shuttle craft.

He felt a hand on his lap and looked up.

“She knew what she was doing, John. We don’t know what happened, she may have saved the ship. Again,” Brubaker said.

The white outline flickered to green momentarily.

‘Truth’ said the flickering green word in the floating text box.

“Okay, how do you turn this damn thing off,” he asked.

Brubaker sat back.

“Hang on, it has a few little tricks left to test. You turn it off the same way that you turned it on. A quick flick of both eyes to the left. There is also built-in voice recognition, which activate three other modes. This mode is what you will get when you first activate the heads up display. If you say ‘Tactical’, it brings up a whole host of useful information as if you are in the field, much like the Jycorp Eyewear that you are used to. When you say ‘Night Vision’, it switches to infrared, ties in with the tactical function and one more, which is my personal favourite, Open Comms. That activates a communications system which should bring up a holographic representation of whoever you are talking with. Very neat.”