“The Weapon, the Trigger, Aurora O’Malley.” Adams turns to the viewport on the wall, stars splayed across the dark beyond. “Everything we’ve done was to ensure their presence here and now to strike the killing blow against the enemy before it blooms. And after all of that, after hundreds of years, messages and protocols passed down in secret from Founder to Commander to Successor across the centuries …” He looks down at his empty hands. “We have nothing.”
I look at the projector on my lap, my mind racing. “Founder Kim mentioned secure facilities on Epsilon Deck, Section Zero.” I swallow hard, not daring to hope. “She talked about my sister. Maybe …”
Adams slaps his Legion comm badge, speaking quick.
“Adams to de Stoy.”
“I read you, Seph,” comes the reply.
“I have more intel. Meet me in Epsilon. I’m bringing Jones.”
There’s a small pause, a tiny intake of breath. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Battle Leader de Stoy lose her chill once in the six years I’ve known her, but when she answers, she sounds positively jubilant.
“Understood,” she says. “I’ll meet you there.”
Adams nods, drops connection.
“Do you still pray, Tyler?” he asks softly. “I know when it gets dark, it can be hard to keep the f—”
“Every day, sir,” I reply. “Every day.”
“Good,” he nods. “Do it now.”
? ? ? ? ?
I’d wondered why the name Epsilon Deck sounded strange. As Adams pushes me on a grav-chair through the halls of the med facilities and into an officers’ elevator, I realize why. Looking at the hundreds of levels, subfloors, and sections of the station outlined in glowing light on the elevator controls, I understand there is no Epsilon Deck on Aurora Station.
At least, not one that exists on the schematics.
Adams reaches inside his tunic for a passkey of bio-coded platinum. He presses his thumb to the sensor, slips the key into a slot in the elevator control. A panel slides aside, a sensor sweeps his face, his irises, his handprint. When the controls buzz green, he leans back and speaks.
“Adams. One-one-seven-four-alpha-kilo-two-one-sevenbeta-indigo.”
Another beep. I feel us pivot, as if the elevator were shifting on its axis.
“Epsilon, Section Zero,” Adams commands. “Passcode: Vigilance.”
My stomach feels full of broken glass, and the right side of my face is aching—maybe I should’ve asked for another pain-blocker before we left. But though I can barely feel it, I know my heart is hammering at the thought I might see my sister again. I had no idea what happened to her after Saedii and I were captured by the GIA. The fear she might be dead was a constant weight, one I couldn’t bring myself to look at for long. The knowledge she was thrown back in time with Zila and Fin is almost incomprehensible.
But she could be alive.
Oh Maker, please let her be alive.
The elevator doors hiss apart, and I see a long, brightly lit corridor leading to a heavy door that looks strong enough to withstand atmospheric bombardment. Battle Leader de Stoy is down here in full Legion kit, ash-pale skin and snow-white hair bleached even whiter by the harsh light. She watches as Adams pushes me forward in my grav-chair, nods once as we approach, big black eyes regarding me somberly.
“Seems like you’ve been in the wars, Legionnaire Jones.”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle, ma’am.”
She smiles, thin and bloodless. Battle Leader de Stoy never smiles.
“A fine job, soldier. A fine job indeed.”
Adams has swiped his bio-key into a pad on the left of the door and nods now to de Stoy. “Ready?”
The battle leader swipes her own key and leans forward, hands splayed on the sensor glass. Scanners again roam Adams’s and de Stoy’s faces, retinas, and palms, a needle takes tissue and blood samples, and, finally, they speak a series of passkeys from Zila and Nari’s recording. The tech is old, but it’s as heavy as it could be, given that this station was built two centuries ago.
Whatever’s behind here, Zila wanted it well protected.
The door clunks, an alarm briefly flares, the lighting turns a cold deep blue. The hatchway lumbers aside, the gloom in the room beyond flickers dark to light as the overheads hum to life. And as Adams pushes me inside, I catch my breath, staring in awe at the structure before me.
Heavy conduits snake outward from banks of ancient computers, connected to a cylindrical tank of transparent plasteel in the room’s heart. And inside it, pulsing with light like a heartbeat, is …
“A probe,” I breathe. “An Eshvaren probe.”
Light begins to pulse through the chamber, coalescing within the teardrop crystal. I see it’s cracked, the point of the tear shattered and sheared away, the glow refracting from a million spiderweb scrawls in the stone.
“Maker’s breath,” Adams whispers.
An image flickers to life above the computer terminals, and my heart soars to see Zila again. She’s younger than she was a moment ago, maybe mid-forties, her back straight, her eyes keen.
“Welcome, Commanders. If you are hearing this message, the Battle of Terra has concluded, I have departed your timeline for the year 2177, and Whiplash Protocol has been enacted. Please engage all short-range scanners on Aurora Station, screen for fighter gradients, maximum intensity. Tell your scanner crews they are looking for a shuttle, Terran in origin, Osprey series, Model 7I-C. Scramble medical crews to assist the occupants, have facilities online to deal with one Betraskan male, nineteen years of age, suffering anaphylaxis, and possible pharyngeal, laryngeal, and tracheal trauma.”
My stomach twists at that, breath coming quicker.
“I have spent the last thirty years of my life perfecting these algorithms,” Zila continues. “I dreamed as a cadet of resources on this scale. I regret that I am not there to see the final result.” For just a moment, I see a glimpse of the girl who liked her Stun setting way, way too much.
“I am as certain of success as I can possibly be,” she continues. “But I am not perfect. And I am not the religious sort.” Her eyes sweep the room. “I hope you are there, Tyler. And if you are, perhaps a prayer would not be out of order. You always were the believer among us.”
Adams repeats the commands into his comm badge, engaging the scanner teams, scrambling the med crews. Zila’s image just hovers there, silent. As I watch, she begins to chew a lock of hair.
After a minute or two, the lights around us start to pulse harder. The overheads in the corridor outside grow dim and then flicker out entirely.
With no more warning, the station net drops entirely, the artificial grav cuts off, and Adams curses beneath his breath as the Eshvaren probe burns with an intensity that’s almost blinding. The hair all over my body is standing tall. A subsonic hum is building in the back of my head.
“She’s sucking power out of the entire station grid,” de Stoy hisses.
Zila’s holographic lips curl into a mischievous smile, and I reach out toward her, terrified, crying, but somehow smiling with her.
And then I do as she asks, closing my eye, picturing Finian and Scar, my friend and my twin, praying to the Maker with everything I have.
Bring them back.
Bring them back to me, please.
The hum rises to a slow scream. The Eshvaren probe burns so bright I can see it through the closed lid of my eye, turning my head as the sound rises in pitch. The station shudders, the power builds, every drop of juice from the core ripped from the grid and projected into the probe’s blazing heart.
The screaming begins to hurt, I hear Adams roaring, but through it all, I keep praying. Holding on as tight as I can to the thought Adams instilled in me when we first left for Sagan Station, before we ever discovered Aurora, got dragged into this puzzle, this war, this family hundreds of … no, a million years in the making.
You must believe, Tyler.
You must believe.
The scream goes past the edge of hearing.
The light goes through the other side of blinding.
And with one final discordant shriek, it’s over.
The glow in the Eshvaren probe fades, then dies entirely. The overheads outside flicker back to life, and I wince as gravity returns, pain shooting through my mangled body as I thump back down into my grav-chair.
Comms are coming through to Adams and de Stoy, warnings and alerts and alarms, silenced by de Stoy’s terse command, Adams’s rumbling bellow.