“Do it! When we’ve cleared the rafts, order the auxiliaries to eject their gravity mines and all ships to release their asteroid charges.”
On the screen, a thousand little discs slipped out of the remaining ships in the fleet, a tiny few connecting with the round balls that swarmed the ships. The explosions ripped the spheres apart, but there were too many of them.
We die protecting our fleet, Ares thought as the screen filled with light and searing heat ripped the vessel open and pressed into him.
He opened his eyes. He stood in a small rectangular vessel with a single window that looked out on a surging wave of light—the remnants of the battle he had just fought.
He was on one of the life rafts—his emergency evac tag had ported him to the raft, along with nine others: the first officer from his own bridge and the captains and first officers of the other vessels in his sub-fleet. They were all standing, recessed into their medical pods. A few heads poked out, taking stock.
The wave reached them, and the flash of heat, pain, and bone-rattling force blew through Ares again.
He opened his eyes. Another life raft. The wave was farther away. The evac tag had ported them to the next raft when the wave had destroyed the last. Ares didn’t bother cowering as the wave rushed forward. He watched, waited, bracing himself. The force, heat, and pain washed over him again, and he stood in the third life raft. In the fifth raft, he started dreading the wave.
At the tenth, he could no longer open his eyes. Time seemed to disappear. There was only the oscillating wave of agony and nothingness. Then the ship shook, but the heat and pain never came. He opened his eyes. The raft was twirling in space. It rotated, and he saw the gravity wave, no longer nearly as strong, rolling away, curving the tiny dots of light that were distant stars.
Ares closed his eyes. He wondered if the life raft would initiate a medical coma or simply let him die. He didn’t know which he preferred. He wasn’t sure what followed after that, but he experienced only nothingness, an abyss of time without feeling or thought.
Metal creaked as the raft doors opened wide. Air rushed in, and light crashed down on him, hurting his eyes.
He was inside a ship, in a large cargo bay. Dozens of officers stood around, gawking. White and blue clothed medical staff rushed onto the raft’s platform, nodding to him expectantly.
He pushed out of the recessed medical pod and stepped out. His legs wobbled, and he tried with all his might to stand as he sank to the floor. He felt himself wrap his arms around his shins, curling into a ball as he fell onto his side. The med techs lifted him onto a gurney and moved him away from the raft. The other nine officers remained in their alcoves, their eyes closed. “Why aren’t you extracting my officers?”
The tech pressed a device to his neck, and he was unconscious.
CHAPTER 28
When Ares’ memory had ended, Dorian found himself back in the shimmering room of white light inside the beacon that orbited Earth. Like Ares had been, he was curled into a ball on the floor, his body shaking. Blood ran from his nose, and nausea washed over him. His heartbeat accelerated and more blood flowed from his nose, as though his own fear would pump every last drop of blood out of his body.
He fought to stay conscious. What had the memory done to him? For weeks, Dorian had seen Ares’ memories. During the Atlantis Plague, he had seen Ares’ attack on the Alpha Lander as well as events that had shaped human evolution for the last thirteen thousand years. He knew Ares had revealed those memories to him, allowed him to see what he needed to see in order to rescue Ares.
In the weeks that had followed, the nose bleeds and night sweats had started. He awoke frequently from nightmares that faded instantly.
Dorian wondered if reliving these memories would kill him. And he wondered what choice he had. He had to know the full truth of Ares’ past, and he desperately wanted to see these repressed memories that had driven his own life, the monster in his subconscious.
He glanced around. The room seemed to have no beginning or end; Dorian couldn’t remember where the door was, but that didn’t matter: he had no intention of leaving.
One thing about the memory was certain: there was an enemy out there. Ares hadn’t lied about that.
Something didn’t add up though. In the memory, Dorian had the distinct impression that Ares wasn’t a soldier, at least not at that time. The battle with the hundreds of spheres had seemed improvised: asteroid charges, gravity mines—they sounded like tools of exploration, not weapons. The crews and ships hadn’t been prepared or made for battle.
Dorian used the voice commands to reactivate the resurrection memory simulation. At the simulated train station, he loaded the next memory, beginning where the last had left off.
Ares opened his eyes. He lay in a bed in an infirmary room.
A middle-aged doctor rose from a chair in the corner and walked to him. “How do you feel?”
“My staff?”
“We’re working on them.”
“Status?” Ares asked.
“Uncertain.”
“Tell me,” Ares commanded.
“Each of them is in a coma. Physiologically, they’re fine. They should wake up, but none of them will.”
“Why did I wake up?”
“We don’t know. Our working theory is that your threshold for psychological pain, your mental endurance is higher.”
Ares stared at the white sheet covering him.
“How do you feel?”
“Stop asking me that. I want to see my wife.”
The doctor averted his eyes.
“What?”
“The fleet council needs to debrief you—”
“I’ll see my wife first.”
The doctor edged to the door. “The guards will escort you. I’m here if you need me.”
Ares stepped out of the bed cautiously, wondering if his limbs would fail him, but they were stable this time.
The table held a folded standard service uniform. He wondered where his expeditionary fleet uniform was, with his rank and insignia. He unfolded the flimsy garment and reluctantly slipped it on.
Outside, the guards led him to an auditorium. A dozen admirals sat at a raised table at the center, just off the stage, and two hundred more citizens, wearing a variety of uniforms and insignia, filled every seat behind them. An admiral Ares didn’t recognize instructed him to provide a full mission report.
“My name is Targen Ares, officer of the line, Seventh Expeditionary Fleet. Current commission…” An image of his destroyed fleet flashed through his mind. “My most recent commission was Captain of the Helios and sub-fleet commander of the Seventh Expeditionary Fleet’s Sigma group. Our mission was to collect one of the spheres currently referred to as sentinels.”
“And you were successful?”
“Yes.”
“We’d like to reconcile your report with the ship’s logs and telemetry we recovered from the life raft.”
Behind Ares, the giant screen transformed from black to a view of Ares on the bridge of his destroyed ship. The screen showed a single sphere, floating alone.
The video showed his four ships following the sphere, then it following them.
“How did you lure it away from the sentinel line?”
“We studied the line for weeks. Our survey spanned eighty light years and confirmed the working theory that the sentinel network completely surrounds a large swath of our galaxy. The spheres are evenly spaced, like a spider web, but they’re moving, collapsing in on us. It’s not an immediate threat, but if the rate of movement holds, in the distant future, about a hundred thousand years, the sentinels will reach our solar system.”
Murmurs went up around the room.
“How did you capture the sphere?”
“We noticed spheres occasionally breaking the line, but they quickly returned. We correlated these occurrences with errant space probes—usually ancient derelicts from extinct civilizations. Most were solar powered and emitted simplistic universal greetings. Each time, the spheres would intercept the probes, perform some analysis, and then destroy them. Our mission briefing noted that the spheres have attacked any ship attempting to cross the sentinel line. But no ship had ever been destroyed, so the sphere’s destruction of the probes was curious to us. We should have taken it as a warning. We created a probe of our own that repeated a simple binary ping. We used it to lure a sphere away.”
The screen showed footage of a sphere following the fleet, gaining ground on a small object floating ahead of it. It cut to a scene in the future with the ships circling the sphere, then several sequences in which spheres were destroyed.
“Several attempts to capture the sphere failed. We finally managed to capture one, though we disabled it in the process.”
The screen changed to the cargo hold of Ares’ ship, where a massive black sphere towered above him. The ship shook, and Ares braced against the wall.
“This is the beginning of the assault. A dozen spheres targe