The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Read online

  Whoever had built this place evidently had better low-light vision than humans. Or whatever powered these lights was running out of power. Darius wondered why Ragnar hadn’t ordered them to use night vision. Maybe spec ops didn’t need to, with their bionic eyes.

  As the team made its way down the hallway, the gloom slowly receded before their rifle-mounted flashlights and revealed a staircase. It scaled far above them; whatever was at the top was out of view.

  The team paused at the base of the stairs and looked back at Ragnar.

  He took a moment to weigh his options, then he signaled for them to continue further in.

  When they got to the top, Akanna was the first to say something. “Shitballs...”

  The chamber before them was circular, and it must have been hundreds of meters across. The walls were lined with evenly spaced statues of bipedal creatures. Each was easily 10 meters tall. The vague shape suggested a humanoid with its head bent down and its hands folded in front of them. In prayer? In thought? It was hard to tell.

  The center of the space was dominated by a raised platform about one meter high. Its surface was black and mirror-polished. It seemed to be more obsidian at first, but when Darius shone his light on it, it proved to be translucent. In fact, he saw flecks of silvery metal suspended within it.

  Holy shit, he thought. This is glitterdark. It was more than he’d even imagined he could find in one place, and it was in extraordinary condition.

  Several sets of stairs ringed the platform. Evidently, this incredible mass of glitterdark was meant to be stood on. The idea of being on top of this much of it was hard for Darius to take in.

  But unlike Baloneth, there were no floating chairs or shadowy voids anywhere that he could see. No control room consoles. No racks of equipment. Whatever purpose this room had, it was an entirely different one. If he had seen only this room and not the intel that the empire had gathered on the location, he would not have guessed that it had a connection to the other ruins.

  The team proceeded to the center of the platform to get a better view of the chamber.

  When they stopped at the center, the walls of the chamber began to fade before their eyes. Soon, they were staring up at the night sky of Hephaestus.

  “Holy shit,” said Ollie. “Where the fuck is the mountain? Are we exposed?”

  “Amenhotep actual,” said Ragnar, “this is Talon squad, do you copy? Amenhotep, do you read? Come in, over.”

  Silence.

  “No,” said Ragnar, “I think we’re still under the mountain.”

  “Either that, or the Amenhotep has been blasted into scrap...sir.”

  “Keep it together, Ollie,” said Ragnar.

  A massive holo projection began to appear above their heads. Its circumference took up the whole of the platform.

  It appeared to be the Milky Way galaxy.

  “Okay, that’s pretty,” said Akanna.

  A ring of lights appeared at the midway point between the core and the edge. Darius’s visor counted 113 of them. One of them blinked red. Another light appeared outside of the ring, blinking green. If the projection was to scale, then the green light was a little over 100 light-years edgeward. Darius would not have been surprised if the exact number was 113 as well.

  Then another light appeared, a little over 100 light-years coreward. It blinked blue.

  Darius opened up an imperial map of the known galaxy and projected the holo in front of him. After some fiddling and rotating, he could correlate two of the lights. The coreward green light appeared to be in the area of Dvorak, which was the home system of Telamat. The blue light appeared to be in the area of Guanyin, which is where they were now.

  This precision should not have been possible. In the time since this structure had been built, the stars should have shifted out of alignment. Talon squad should have needed a team of astronomers to calculate trajectories and make sense of the data. And indeed, some things had moved...but not all of it.

  So what was the red light? What was the ring that threaded through the middle of the galaxy? Why were there 113 of them?

  “Bakari,” said Ragnar, “what have you got there?”

  “I’m looking at some stellar cartography, sir.” He explained the apparent correlations.

  “Interesting,” said Ragnar. He opened up his own map and began experimenting with it.

  “I don’t get how this whole map thing would work during the day,” said Ollie. “You wouldn’t be able to see this display in direct sunlight.”

  “Maybe it only does this at night,” said Akanna.

  “Then we came at the wrong flippin’ time, if you ask me.”

  “Cut the chatter,” said Ragnar. He turned off his holo. “All right, let’s sweep for more doors or seams. Ollie and Akanna, head to the opposite wall and scan clockwise. Bakari and I will head there and scan counterclockwise. We’ll meet up at the door we came in from. Be sure to check both the floor and the ceiling for anything interesting.”

  But their sweep turned up nothing more.

  “Great,” said Ollie, “so all we got is this planetarium with some blinkin’ lights?”

  “This is just an initial inspection, Ollie,” said Ragnar. “Our main priority was to secure the location, not to find buried treasure.”

  “Yeah, the science geeks will do the real analysis,” said Akanna. “And I think it’s pretty cool already.”

  Ollie shook his head.

  “All right, team,” said Ragnar. “Let’s head back to the Ikona. Ollie and Akanna in front.”

  The team headed back to the cave entrance. As they came to the mouth, Ragnar turned to Darius and asked, “By the way, how did agent Markosian say she located Baloneth?”

  “The same way the intel division found this place, sir. By cross-referencing some ancient star maps.”

  “Hmm. And we opened this vault just by you touching that carving in the floor?”

  Darius shrugged. “Looks that way.”

  “And based on what we saw on the map projection here, what do you think the red blinking light represents?”

  “I don’t know,” Darius lied.

  “All right.” Ragnar nodded to Ollie, who raised his rifle and pointed it at Darius.

  Darius’s eyes widened. “Hey wait a minute—”

  “Sorry, kiddo,” said Ollie.

  But before Ollie could take the shot, a high-caliber round blew through his facemask and out of the back of his head. Darius’s faceplate was covered in blood.

  “Fall back!” said Ragnar. “Fall back!”

  Ragnar clearly wasn’t talking to Darius at this point. He decided to make a break for it, into what was quickly turning into a blizzard. He slipped and fell as he scrambled down the slope. Bullets whizzed over his head that surely would have hit him if he’d remained standing. He slid down the hill and crashed headfirst into a snowbank. He didn’t want to die by way of a bullet up his ass, so he wriggled and wrenched, and he prayed that he wouldn’t go out in one of the worst ways possible.

  As soon as he was free, a grenade landed at his feet.

  He’d learned the hard way in the sims: If you can’t immediately find cover, you immediately do the next best thing: Throw it back.

  Praying to every god he could think of that it hadn’t been cooked, he scooped up the grenade and hurled it right back at the cave mouth. Ragnar was just coming into view and about to give him a burst of rifle fire when he caught a faceful of his own shrapnel. He went flying back into the tunnel and out of sight.

  Darius’s comms crackled to life. “Bakari, this is Lieutenant Cahill. I’m a friend of Nadira’s. I need to extract you. Fall back to my position, over.”

  A location marked CAHILL popped up on his visor.

  That sounded like a better deal than sticking around as target practice. He lumbered through deep snow in the direction of the marker until he found someone in combat armor crouched behind a tree. They were busy putting down suppressing fire on the cave mouth.

&nbs
p; “Pleased to meet you, Cahill, now let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “One second, private.” Cahill picked a rocket launcher off the ground and scoped the cave mouth. “Fire in the hole!”

  The rocket smashed into the top of the cave entrance and reduced it to rubble.

  “That’ll slow ‘em down,” said Cahill. “Now follow me, I’ve got a skiff just over the hill.”

  She turned and began trudging over a rise. She did not look back. Darius stared at her, then at the crumbling cave mouth, then back at her. In a few more moments, the storm would swallow her up. It looked like he had no choice now but to follow.

  They fought their way through the snow for several minutes before Darius turned a bend and beheld a small two-person ship.

  “She ain’t fancy,” said Cahill, “but she’s almost impossible to track. Get in and strap in.”

  Cahill made a gesture, and two cockpit doors opened up; one for the pilot, and one for him. Those two seats were really all the lean and angular craft had space for. It would be hard to track, all right, but the tradeoff was a little claustrophobia. Maybe a lot.

  “How the hell did you find me?” he asked. “I mean, thank you for saving my ass, but—”

  “You got a tracker in your armor. Chandra put it there.”

  “What? When?” Darius climbed into his seat and began buckling himself in. There were a lot of straps, indicative of an agile ship that needed its occupants to slide around as little as possible.

  He thought back to that last chat he'd had with the PFC...when Chandra had slapped his shoulder, right after Darius told him that he’d gotten the assignment. “Gods,” he said. “Chandra knew all this shit was gonna go down, didn’t he?”

  Cahill finished her pre-flight check and fired up the main engines. “Sort of. I’ll explain on the way. Now brace yourself, this baby’s got some kick.”

  With a thrust of G-force that felt like it was trying to pull his face off of his head, they were darting skyward. As soon as the acceleration eased enough for him to be able to speak, he said, “On the way to where?”

  Cahill glanced back at him and smiled. “Dharma Base. Welcome to the resistance.”

  -11-

  Cahill plotted a course that would link them up with the cargo ship Kav Adari, which was on its way to the Temecula system. She said there were too many eyes on the telegates for her to slip past in the skiff, so the Kav would be used to smuggle them through instead. Its captain was apparently a part of the resistance effort.

  At the least, his people were not at war with humans, and their diplomatic status with the empire was such that attempting to search the vessel would be a political quagmire. The frog-like Indiri people supplied a few rare and valuable manufacturing goods to Sar-Zin, so it was a bad idea even for him to behave aggressively. Because most of the manufacturing in question was military, and Sar-Zin was a militant kind of guy.

  “So the resistance sent you to extract me?” he asked.

  “Not exactly. The Federation just wanted me to monitor and report. So I tracked you down to that cave, and I staked it out. But when I saw you standing around with those guys at the entrance, I got a bad feeling, so I readied my rifle. Good thing I did. By the way,” she added, “I need you to put that mitt on your right hand.”

  She nodded to a large glove sitting in a net to his right.

  “What’s it do?” he asked.

  “It blocks the signal in a transceiver that’s implanted in your wrist. You’ve got a killswitch embedded in you, Darius.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Wish I was. They put them in all PMU personnel. If you abandon a post, retreat against orders, attack an officer...command can flip a switch and set off an explosion that severs your hand. Tends to do the trick.”

  He didn’t need much convincing. The mitt went halfway up his forearm. “So why didn’t they just use that, if they wanted to get rid of me? Why would they shoot me?”

  “Less paperwork, I guess.”

  “And how do we get rid of this killswitch?”

  “First things first, Darius. We gotta get you to Dharma base for a debrief and to introduce you to some people. Then we can deal with your hand.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. “I still don’t get how Chandra knew what was going on.”

  “He knows some of it. We knew that you’d been working with Nadira, who is one of our top agents. Maybe the top agent. We suspected that you had some intel from Baloneth. So we approached him and asked him to keep an eye on you.”

  “You turned the guy?”

  “He didn’t need much convincing to join the cause. Getting thrown in a PMU for smuggling medical supplies to a charity didn’t make him a fan of the empire. We sent him our tracker, and we told him to slap it on you if he got word that you were shipping out. He doesn’t know anything about Baloneth, or Nadira. That’s deliberate. In this line of work, compartmentalization is essential. For our safety, and that of the asset.”

  “So how did you get to him in the middle of a war front?”

  “Darius, we’re outnumbered, but...we have a network. That’s all I can tell you about that. By design, I have no idea who may or may not be working for us on the Shiza war front. I just know that someone on our side brought him in.”

  Cahill leveled off the skiff and set it on a path to get a gravity assist from Sarderis, a relatively close gas giant. It would cut their travel time to the Kav Adari by one-third.

  “This is a lot to take in,” said Darius.

  “No doubt.”

  Just like that, he was back on somebody’s shit list. And this time it wasn’t just a regional gang. It was the entire blasted empire.

  “What about my mom?” he asked. “And my uncle. Are they okay? If the empire really wants me dead, they will come after what’s left of my family. If they’re willing to shoot me like a dog to keep their secrets, there’s really no ceiling.”

  “I don’t have any details on that right now, Darius. I’m sorry. If something comes in over the wire, I’ll let you know.”

  He stared out the cockpit window and watched the AR-projected distance markers tick by. According to the display, their ETA was twelve hours from now, and the skiff was moving at top speed.

  There was time to do some stargazing.

  A cloudy belt of stars ran across the sky from right to left. It was the edge-on view of the Milky Way. Darius thought about the sheer number of suns like his own, and the other worlds that orbited—the societies and their layered histories. The scale of it was overwhelming.

  A civilization could spend a million years spinning around just one of those tiny glowing specks in the sky, and they might never go to another. Not everyone had humanity’s curiosity—its drive to know what was beyond the horizon.

  He looked at a reddish-purple nebula at two o’clock high, and he contemplated how many eons it had floated in the sky before he was born, and how many more it would linger after he was gone. He wondered how many other beings had looked upon this same ink blot in the heavens and imagined what it meant. What it all meant.

  I am a thin slice in time.

  “What was that, Darius?”

  “Nothing, just...taking it all in, I guess.” It was better than thinking about his hand.

  “Yeah...when you’re on a Navy boat, you don’t get a cockpit or a bridge. Just a CIC and a few airlock portholes. May as well be on a submarine. Not my thing. I like to see the sights.”

  “I take it that you served?”

  “I spent twenty-five years as a Marine. A long time, I know. I was bending the curve on the survival rate. I wanted to retire back on Vanati where I was born and be with my parents and sisters. Maybe start a family of my own. I was less than a year away from my discharge papers when a Zerayed raiding party swept through Vanati and killed hundreds of people. My older sister among them.

  “The empire sent a few boats to secure the area, but not for long enough. I knew it wouldn’t be enough,
and I begged the brass to extend the detail. Eventually, they were sent off to reinforce the Gemini front instead. And the Vanati attacked again, this time killing my father. We’ve had boats on patrol in that system ever since, but the damage was done.

  “I didn’t sign up for eternal warfare or sacrificial lambs. So I reached out to the resistance—or the Federation, as they like to call themselves—to see what they were about. And long story short, it was everything I had wanted that I was missing. So here we are. I figure the more I fight on this side, the more we can all work towards making sure that stories like mine never need to be told again.”

  “So what about the rest of your family?” asked Darius. “Do they know where you are? What you do now?”

  “Officially, I was killed in action. I’m a ghost, Darius. My people are safer that way. They don’t come looking for me, and neither does the empire. I have nieces and nephews who only know me from stories, and grandnieces and grandnephews who don’t know I ever existed. I only know them from pictures and holos that our people have skimmed off the wire for me.

  “But I can’t walk away from this. Not after I saw how much more the empire cares about its wars than about the people who fight them. If and when we bring down the empire, I can go home. Not a day before.”

  They sat in silence for a time, and Darius contemplated the cosmos once more.

  “Maybe I should become a ghost as well,” he said.

  “I don’t recommend it. I don’t get invited to many parties.”

  That made him chuckle, despite everything.

  “I joke,” she said, “but it’s a lonely life, by necessity. I can’t blend back into society. I suppose I could get one of those facial reconstructions, but I don’t have the money, and our people can’t justify the expense. And even then, I would have to stay on the fringes of Sar-Zin space, where genetic verification is less common.”

  They fell into silence again. Darius found he was tired, and he drifted in and out of sleep and troubled dreams.

  The next thing he knew, they were on approach to the Kav Adari. After some radio chatter, Cahill eased her skiff into the docking bay and landed it inside a sizable shipping container. The bay crew closed and locked the container doors behind them.