The Champion (17 page)

“Of course,” Bumberpuff said. “Whatever I can do to help.”

Beatrice bowed, then gestured toward the darkness, showing Bumberpuff the way.

“Hold on,” Quentin said. “Mike, Doc, go with him. Petra will want to make sure Bumberpuff stays safe.”

Kimberlin glanced at Quentin, understanding the unspoken message — Quentin didn’t trust Bumberpuff, and he didn’t trust the Portath, either.

“We’ll stay with Bumberpuff,” Kimberlin said, then stood next to the Prawatt. “Come on, Doc.”

Beatrice looked at Hulsey for permission.

“It’s fine,” Hulsey said. “Take them.”

Beatrice bowed again. Her robe was a moving spotlight as she walked deeper into the dark room. Bumberpuff and Kimberlin followed on foot, Doc Patah floating along between them.

“All right, Hulsey,” Quentin said. “Let’s hurry this up already. I want to get my sister.”

Hulsey took a step closer to him.

“No one has ever left the Cloud,” she said. “Everything will change. This is bigger than you, your family —” she gestured toward Becca, George, John and Ju “—bigger than your precious friends. There is an entire
race
here, one hunted almost to extinction, and now those same hunters are on their way to
this
galaxy. The Portath are breaking their silence for the first time in
twelve thousand years
, so maybe you could just shut up for a few minutes and
pay attention
”

She stared up at Quentin, he down at her. He’d assumed she was weak-willed — what strong person would live as a slave rather than die trying to escape? But as with so many other things, he’d been wrong. Hulsey wanted to protect her captors. She seemed to love them as much as Bumberpuff loved Petra.

Becca put her hand on Quentin’s arm.

“Q, please,” she said. “If what Petra says is true, then Hulsey is right — this isn’t just about Jeanine anymore.”

He took a deep breath. Becca’s voice and touch calmed him. He didn’t believe Petra’s story, but that didn’t matter right now. All he had to do was play along.

“Sorry, Hulsey,” he said. “I’ll pay attention.”

Hulsey nodded slightly. “Then we’ll begin.”

Her robe’s light blinked out, leaving Quentin in complete darkness.

“I can’t see nothing,” Ju said. “
Ow!
John, quit poking me.”

“Wasn’t me,” John said. “Must have been George.”

“Leave me out of it,” George said. “We are about to learn something grand, something that the firmament of the cosmos chose to eclipse from the knowledge of ...”

His words faded off as a single spot of light appeared farther into the room, a pinprick of brightness in a sea of black — a star, distant and powerful. Then another blinked on, and another. In moments, the room filled with stars. Over there, the wisps of a glowing nebula — mostly yellow, not purple, so it wasn’t the Portath Cloud.

The stars grew larger, until they were the size of golf balls. Some glowed dark orange, some red, some yellow, others a light blue. They were so detailed Quentin could see little sun spots, watch tiny solar flares blossom up in slow motion.

Then the stars began to shrink, from golf balls to marbles, then to peas, then back to dots of light. As they did, more stars appeared, racing in from the edges of the room until their light blended, merged, became tiny parts of a new shape: a spiral galaxy, curved arms glowing softly, center blazing bright.

“It’s the Milky Way,” Quentin said.

Becca shook her head. The light of a million tiny stars lit her face in pale yellow.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe it’s the Andromeda?”

The galaxy continued to shrink, from the size of the room to the size of Quentin, then Quentin’s chest. When it was the size of his head, it stopped shrinking, just hung in the room’s pitch black, so real he might have reached out and held it.

Another glow caught his eye, some twenty feet to his left: a second spiral galaxy, thicker 111 the middle where it was the brightest.

“Ah,” George said. “
That’s
the Milky Way. I’m sure of it.”

The Milky Way. The galaxy in which lay Mason, Stewart and the other planets of the Purist Nation along with Micovi, the colony where Quentin had been born. Ionath and the worlds of the Quyth Concordia, too, were somewhere in there. And Earth, capital of the Planetary Union, birthplace of his species. The Sklorno Dynasty, the Ki Empire, the Ki Rebel Establishment, the Harrah Tribal Accord, the Prawatt and Leekee and Whitokians, the Creterakian Empire — all life that was known.

And also, somewhere in that spinning disk of stars, the Portath Cloud.

From the first galaxy, a new spot of light flashed. Green this time. And it was bigger, not to scale — had it been, the dot would have represented something larger than a thousand stars lined up one behind another.

The scale shifted again, the first galaxy expanding so fast that outer stars shot past Quentin and he almost lost his equilibrium even though he was standing still.

“Cool,” John said. “This is trippy.”

“My head’s spinning,” Ju said. “I hope I don’t spew.”

The green dot stayed fixed in location and size, the focal point for the enlarging galaxy. Seconds later, as the stars there expanded until black space was between them once again, the green dot separated into three distinct individual shapes — long silvery ships, tapered at both ends. Portath vessels, not that much different from what he’d seen when Rosalind had first been surrounded.

Those ships hovered around a mostly pink planet spotted with mountain-streaked green continents. White puffs of clouds curled across land and pink oceans alike. So beautiful. So
real
.

Then, flashes all across that globe, sharp sparkles that Quentin instantly knew were massive ground-shattering explosions.

The image zoomed in again. The pink planet grew so large it towered over Quentin, almost filled the room. He saw more Portath vessels,
thousands
more, yet they were heavily outnumbered by evil-looking, angular wasp ships — it was a pitched battle of crushed hulls and shredded metal, a battle the Portath were losing.

The scale zoomed out again. The pink planet shrank. As it did, the surface darkened, changing from pink to a soft red, then to a deep crimson. Quentin knew, somehow, that the time scale had rapidly accelerated, that he was looking at hundreds of years passing by in mere seconds. The wasps had changed the planet, maybe even killed it — along with everything on it.

The entire room’s image spun again, turning and zooming farther out — those first three Portath ships, the ones that had seemed to be a single green dot, were far away from their murdered homeworld, their path represented by flickering green comet trails. They shot straight for the other galaxy: straight for the Milky Way.

The ships, their green comet trails, the individual stars and the Milky Way all dimmed, then faded out. The room returned to blackness.

Hulsey’s robe slowly illuminated, lighting up the faces of Becca, George, John, Ju and Quentin.

“Good movie,” John said. “Could have used more explosions, though.”

“And some girls,” Ju said. “I like ships and war and all, but still, some girls.”

George shook his head. “What we just saw isn’t possible. If that was the Andromeda, it’s two and a half
million
light-years away. Nothing can punch that far.”

“That we know of,” Becca said. “If the Rewall can jump from one end of the Milky Way to the other, who’s to say the Portath can’t jump between galaxies?” She looked at Hulsey. “Is that true? Did the Portath really punch that far to get here?”

Hulsey nodded solemnly. “That’s what I’ve been told. The Portath did not evolve in this galaxy.”

What she’d been told
— like that mattered. Quentin had been told all kinds of things as a child, most of which he’d believed, most of which turned out to be lies.

“So a planet was destroyed,” he said. “That’s happened in this galaxy, too. The Sklorno destroyed Ionath, and that’s now where we all live.”

“The Abernessia didn’t just destroy a couple of planets,” Hulsey said. “They exterminated entire species. The Portath knew of seven other sentient races in their galaxy. The Abernessia wiped all of them out of existence, forever. Only the Portath escaped.”

She painted a grim picture. Was Petra justified in her actions? No, no she was not — true diplomacy didn’t involve attacking innocent people.

“You asked us to watch, and we did,” Quentin said. “Now will you take me to see my sister?”

She didn’t hide her annoyance, as if she couldn’t believe the history lesson hadn’t moved Quentin to tears.

“Yes. She is in the Stretch. I’ll take you to her. Come with me.”

20

Jeanine

MORE POLISHED CORRIDORS,
more walking, more Portath swinging overhead in both directions, more silver robots scurrying along the curved walls and floors. There were other Humans, too, wearing the same red robes and slave collar that Hulsey wore.

Quentin had no interest in any of them.

Becca fell in next to Hulsey. Becca wanted to talk, which was fine, because Quentin did not. He stayed a few steps back with George. John and Ju brought up the rear.

“This
Stretch
you’re taking us to,” Becca said. “What is it?”

“It’s where we trainees live,” Hulsey said. “It’s also where we spend our time when we are not training.”

“I’ve been wondering about that,” Becca said. “Training for what, exactly?”

Hulsey pointed up. “To crew the ships on the outer hull, of course. The Portath have warned us about the Abernessia all our lives. We’ve been trained in combat, knowing that someday we might need to fight to survive.”

Quentin huffed. “What do
you
do in combat, Hulsey? Polish the hallways so the Portath can watch their own pretty colors?”

She stopped, turned suddenly.

“I am second commander of the
Polemos
, a battleship formerly of the Tower Republic. When the Abernessia come, I will sail out to face them and kill their ships by the
thousands
.”

Becca glanced doubtfully up at the corridor’s ring-lined ceiling. “Wait a minute, you’re telling us that all of those dead ships still
work
?”

“They do,” Hulsey said without looking away from Quentin. “When war comes, I will fight. What will
you
do, big man? Hide with your sister and pray someone else does the fighting for you?”

John started laughing. “Nice Lady, you annoy the hell out of me, but maybe there’s a little linebacker hidden in that tiny body of yours.”

Hulsey’s nose barely reached Quentin’s sternum. Just one of his legs probably weighed more than she did. How could she be both a slave and a
second commander
, whatever that was?

“I don’t do war,” Quentin said. “If sentients want to slaughter each other, that’s not my business. I’m a football player.”

Hulsey sneered. “Ah, so that’s why you’re an oversized eyesore. I should have guessed. Grown men and women playing a game. How noble. We’ll see how much
football
there is when the Abernessia come.”

She spun again and strode down the hallway, so fast Quentin and the others had to speed up to stay with her.

Hulsey turned right, into a narrower hallway that ended at a large oval door.

“Welcome to the Stretch,” she said.

The door opened to a brightly lit, round platform with a waist-high rail around the edge. Standing at the rail were Kimberlin, Bumberpuff and Beatrice. Doc Patah floated above them all.

At first, Quentin only had eyes for the X-Walker.

“You get what you need, Bumberpuff?”

“I believe I did,” the Prawatt said. A long fingertip tapped the center of the X-body. “It is in here. I did not see all of it, but from what I did see, the Portath have an enormous amount of data on their enemy. Rosalind also has a copy — she’s been released and is waiting for us.”

The last few words didn’t really register, because Quentin saw what was past the platform’s edge — a vast open space, so huge he reactively bent his knees for balance to keep from falling, as one might if elevator doors unexpectedly opened not to a firm floor but to a bottomless black shaft.

He silently walked to the rail and looked down upon a sprawling,
living
landscape far below.

The eight-kilometer-long ship was hollow, or at least partially so. A row of artificial suns blazed from the curved roof above, stretching far off to both the left and the right. A long, narrow lake ran lengthwise down the middle, flanked on either side by wide swaths of farmland, which in turn were flanked by thin strips of green forest. His mind told him he was looking at a
valley
, lush and verdant, yet perhaps a kilometer straight out from the platform, a gleaming ship wall curved smoothly upward from the greenery.

Quentin saw a boat on the water, three Humans in it, apparently relaxing. One light-blue-skinned woman, a pink-hued man and an all-white-skinned man. Even from this distance, where people looked like insects, Quentin could make out the black infinity tattoo on the white man’s forehead.

Near the boat, water rippled as a half-dozen black-striped blue bodies broke the surface and arced through the air. The aquatic creatures turned sideways before landing, letting the flats of their bodies kick up a spray of water that splashed the Humans in the boat. Quentin heard the faint sound of laughter echoing up from the lake.

“Leekee,” Kimberlin said, shaking his head slightly in amazement. “During the Second Galactic War, 2537 I think it was, forty-seven Leekee warships tried to travel through the Cloud to surprise Whitokian forces. The forty-seven ships were lost forever.”

Becca leaned on the rail, her face wrinkled with doubt. “They’ve been here a hundred and fifty years?”

“Can’t be the original crew,” Kimberlin said. “Leekee life spans are only about sixty years. You’re probably looking at the grandchildren or
great-
grandchildren of those crew members.”