t a losing campaign, just as they had around the first Atlantean homeworld. For Ares, history was repeating itself. The wreckage of the sentinel spheres was slowly forming a new debris field that stretched to the sun.
Ares didn’t recognize the other ships. They weren’t Serpentine; they were much smaller and better-adapted to fighting the sentinel spheres, as if they had been built for that purpose.
The man removed his helmet. Lykos.
Ares recognized the rebel leader. Ares had negotiated with him during the revolt, and considered him the most reasonable man in an utterly unreasonable, barbaric faction.
“You betrayed us,” Lykos said.
“We have not,” Ares shot back. “Why are you attacking us?”
“You struck first, Ares. Call off the sentinels. That’s all we want.”
Ares rifled through possibilities, discarding move after move, searching for any way out. “I will,” he said, a plan taking shape in his mind. “The sentinel control systems are located inside the ark. I’ll disable the sentinels, and then we can talk about making this right.”
Lykos eyed him. “I’ll accompany you—to keep you to your word.”
The two men walked in silence past the stone edifice that housed the ark. As they passed the vast chamber, Ares realized the flaw in his plan. The tubes were filling with prominent citizens who had just been killed. The resurrection ship had been keyed to resurrect critical citizens in the event of an extinction-level catastrophe. It was the fallback point for Atlantean civilization.
More tubes filled. Some opened, and bodies poured out, falling lifeless on the floor. Resurrection syndrome, Ares thought. The trauma of their death had been too much, just as it had been for a few during the labor revolts. How much time had passed? Thousands of years? The Atlanteans had slipped so far into a utopian existence that the experience of a violent death was too much for any citizen’s psyche. They were ruined, all of them.
The tubes continued to fill and open, body after body of unmoving Atlanteans spilling out.
He had to stop the resurrection sequence, had to end their purgatory. They could never wake up. But he could make them safe. He was a soldier. It was his job… his duty.
The realization filled him with fire, purpose. Focus.
Ares rushed forward, killing Lykos in a single blow. He ran through the corridors to the ark’s bridge, where he disabled the resurrection cycle, ensuring that his people remained in stasis but didn’t emerge from the tubes.
He accessed the sentinel control program and instructed the spheres fighting the Exile ships to aid in his escape.
CHAPTER 46
For a long while, Ares stood on the ark’s bridge, watching the blue and white waves of hyperspace form and flow by on the viewscreen. The ancient relic had performed admirably, jumping out of the planet’s gravity well and in the next split second, slipping into hyperspace, away from the battlefield of the Atlantean homeworld.
Ares had wondered if the ancient ship would still function. Their benefactors had built it to last, and Ares wondered if the avatar who had provided the ark to him so long ago had known this would happen, somehow planned for it.
Ares hadn’t seen the avatar since the exodus, when he had condemned Ares’ actions, what he called his great betrayal. Ares had ignored the words, charging ahead with his own plan to secure his people. And now that plan had backfired. He was partly responsible for the destruction of his world, and the thought haunted him.
He stomped down the dark metallic corridors, deep in thought. He replayed the conversation with the avatar, specific phrases jumping out.
We allowed our society to fracture. The Serpentine Army is all that remains in your time.
Ares knew that his people had repeated the same mistake. Atlantean society had divided, but Ares had made accommodations: the anti-Serpentine laws. In the chamber that held the thousands of tubes that stretched into the darkness, Ares stopped at the tube that held Lykos. The rebel’s eyes were hard. Ares would soon know the secrets his mind held. The resurrection process had captured his memories, and Ares could watch them.
At one of the adaptive research labs, Ares stepped into the yellow light inside the large glass vat and watched Lykos’ memories flash by.
He saw Lykos board a vessel in the Exile fleet and leave the Atlantean homeworld for the colony world, where he and his people set about building a humble, yet robust society with farming and hard work at its core. Years passed, the settlements grew, leaders were selected, and Lykos became a beacon to his people.
Ares watched him hike into the hills one day. A lander, one of the Atlantean science vessels, lay in wait, and a scientist Ares recognized stood before it: Isis.
Ares saw their conversation and Lykos take the container. After it was deployed, Lykos slipped into the tube in the resurrection raft and time flowed by, interrupted at regular intervals.
The Exiles had formed a cabal of leaders who knew the truth about the accelerated evolution, and they apprised Lykos periodically. Where settlements had been, villages emerged, morphed into towns, cities, and finally into sprawling metropolises that rivaled those on the Atlantean homeworld.
To Ares, the march of civilization was like watching the time-lapse photography of a green plant spreading out and blooming into an intricate, multicolored flower.
In the next memory, Lykos charged out of the tube in the resurrection raft, past the rock outcroppings, to the side of the mountain, where he watched glowing embers streak across the sky and crash into the cities. Ash and fire consumed the horizon.
Though he could barely admit it, Ares knew the slaughter was partly his fault. In the years after the Exodus, he had programmed the sentinel drones to attack any species that advanced across a threshold, any species that didn’t contain the pure form of the Atlantis Gene. Isis hadn’t been the first to isolate what made the Atlanteans genetically distinct; the science teams in the years after the Exodus had taken samples from countless hominid species, isolating the genes that controlled Atlantean evolution. Ares had used the blueprint to distinguish any potential enemies.
The avatar had warned Ares the moment the plan had formed in his mind, condemning it as a betrayal, but Ares had thought it justified: it was merely the way of survival. Any advanced civilization would become a danger to the Atlanteans. They could break the sentinel line, just as the Atlanteans had as they ventured out, or worse, attack the new Atlantean homeworld directly. Or they could repeat the Serpentine mistake, allowing their technology to overrun them and take control of their civilization. There was room for exactly one advanced race within the new sentinel line, and Ares had programmed the sentinels to annihilate any emerging species without the Atlantis Gene—any advanced civilization that wasn’t Atlantean.
In Lykos’ memories, Ares watched the sentinels execute their programming, dropping kinetic bombardments on the Exile world as they had on many others, obliterating the cities and altering the planet’s climate, which would no doubt do in any survivors.
But Lykos’ memories revealed that the Exiles had battled hard for survival on their ruined world. The race Isis had helped create was resilient, determined. They retreated underground, building cities that receded below the surface with as much sophistication as the metropolises that previously towered above. Isis’ therapy had created a race with a run-away intellect and something far more dangerous: an uncompromising drive to survive. They overcame challenge after challenge. They replicated the Atlantean resurrection technology, and their leaders used it to leapfrog through the ages as they prepared their escape from the wasteland of their world. And they had. Thousands of ships sprang from beneath the surface, engaging the sentinels that appeared in space, eventually winning the conflict and jumping away.
The sentinels had hunted them relentlessly, and the Exile-sentinel war had ebbed and flowed for several thousands of years. The Exile fleet had eventually turned the tide enough to make a mad dash for the Atlantean homeworld, hoping to force their former persecutors to call off the sentinels that had tortured and massacred them for years.
Ares watched Lykos land his triangular ship just beyond the ancient shrine that held the ark, where he and his soldiers found Ares and the two men’s memories joined.
Ares stepped out of the yellow vat. He was only partly to blame for the fall of his world. The remainder of the fault lay with Isis, and she was the key to turning the tide.
At the chamber that held the resurrection tubes, Ares stood before the double doors. It was a great irony: the harsh measures the Atlanteans had undertaken to protect themselves had eventually grown an enemy that brought about their downfall. And in their march to a peaceful, advanced civilization, they had become psychologically unable to even fight back.
Ares wondered how he would cure his people, if they even could be fixed. But he had larger issues to deal with first. The Exile fleet was capable and growing. It would soon overwhelm the