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Chapter Twenty-Eight




“Hello, Captain Kade. Fancy meeting you here.”

The Jovian’s golden lips didn’t move, but his words still came across Nathan’s commect.

“Xormun.”

“I know what you’re planning.” The Jovian stood up and held the pistol firm.

“Not likely.”

“Oh, let’s see. Utilize Jovian hardware to create a viral replicator for one of our personas.” Xormun tilted his head ever so slightly. “Sound familiar?”

“But how could you . . . ?” Nathan paused and tried to make sense of this. “Josh and I—”

“Were using your stolen Jovian commects for short-ranged communication,” Xormun finished. “Yes. Fortunately, I happened to be nearby while you and Mr. Cotton were discussing the matter. I didn’t hear everything, but I heard enough.”

“Nearby? You mean you were here, in this chamber, the whole time we were?”

“That’s correct. You nearly spotted me when you first came in.”

“And you didn’t shoot us?”

“I saw no benefit in revealing my position.” He smirked. “Until now, that is. I must give credit where credit is due. It’s an audacious plan. I’m almost impressed.”

“Get to the point, Xormun. What do you want?”

“The device you’re carrying. Hand it over.”

“Why should I?”

“You mean besides the fact that I’m aiming a gun at your head?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

Xormun rolled his eyes. “Isn’t it obvious? Try using that mushy lump between your ears. Your crew has crafted a device that can, in theory, allow a Jovian to take control of this megastructure. I simply wish to replace the persona.”

“With what? Your own?”

“Precisely.”

“Oh, hell no!”

Xormun raised the pistol. “This isn’t a debate.”

“I have a weapon, too.”

“Yes, and by the time you draw it, I’ll have popped that squishy melon you call a head. Don’t even bother. It’ll just make a mess.”

Nathan checked his surroundings. He could make a dash for the crack in the reservoir, but Xormun would gun him down long before he reached it, and like the Jovian said, he couldn’t draw his pistol fast enough with the mind-bomb occupying both arms. Try as he might, he couldn’t see a way out of this mess.

And so he did the next best thing.

He stalled.

“Where are your goons, Xormun? I don’t see them around.”

The Jovian grimaced, a crack forming in his composure.

“A guy like you doesn’t go anywhere without a few thugs in tow,” Nathan continued. “Where are they?”

“Indisposed.”

“You shoot them?”

One of Xormun’s eyes twitched. “It became necessary to . . . cull the ranks of my subordinates.”

“You did shoot them!”

“What of it?”

“It means you’re already gone. The statite has you wrapped around its metaphorical fingers.”

“Hardly. My crew needed to relinquish their metal for the wound and—”

The Jovian stopped suddenly.

“‘Metal for the wound,’ huh?” Nathan said. “That you talking or the statite?”

“A momentary slip, I assure you.”

“I’ll bet.”

How can I get the bomb into the tank? Nathan’s mind raced through the possibilities. Can I throw it in from here? The low gravity is going to make the angle tough to judge, but the crack is pretty wide. Maybe I can make it, but I should only try if I’m desperate. He grimaced. Which I absolutely am.

“Enough!” Xormun shouted, and this time his mouth moved with the words, despite the vacuum. “Hand it over now, or I take it by force.”

“What are you going to do with this place?”

“I will claim this statite in the name of the Everlife, as is my duty.”

“You’re going to fly it back to Jupiter.”

“Of course. It must be studied, and eventually repaired.”

“That path will end in tears. You won’t control it; the statite will control you. And by you, I mean all of you. The entire Everlife.”

“You think your weak-willed deviant from the Pratti clan can do better?”

“Why not? The statite tried to make her shoot me, but she didn’t. How’s your track record compare to that?”

“I will control it!” he barked. “And then I’ll harvest your flesh for—” Xormun squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

“Control it? Look at you! You can’t even control yourself!”

Nathan glanced down at the gun still aimed at him.

The gun . . . 

The gun . . . 

The gun he hasn’t fired yet.

Why hasn’t he fired it? Why hasn’t he taken me out? He could have blown my brains out before I knew he was there. Why didn’t he?

“You can’t control this place!” Nathan shouted. “You can’t even control yourself!”

“I am still the apex!” Xormun roared.

“Maybe,” Nathan replied, lowering his voice. “But I just realized something.”

“What’s that?”

“Your gun is empty!” Nathan kicked off to the side and raced toward the crack in the reservoir’s casing.

“NO!” Xormun threw the pistol aside and lunged forward, drawing a vibro-knife from his belt.

Nathan cleared half the distance in three long, floating strides, gaining momentum with each bound. He raised the bomb up to his shoulder, one arm bent behind it, then launched it forward with a mighty push. The red cube sailed through the air, clonked against the upper lip of the crack, and then splooshed into the black lake.

Xormun tackled Nathan from the side and shoved the knife into his gut. The blade’s oscillating edge cleaved through skin and muscle, and Nathan cried out, his world overcome by horrible, piercing pain. He collapsed onto his side.

Xormun tore the knife free in a spray of blood. Air whistled from the tear in the pressure suit.

“You fool!” The Jovian snarled at him, then ran toward the crack and dove in after the mind-bomb.

“Oh, Gods!” Nathan moaned, pressing a hand against his side. Blood and air seeped through his fingers, and he winced and gritted his teeth. With his free hand, he grabbed the roll of adhesive tape hanging from his belt and applied a clumsy strip over the gash in his suit.

He didn’t manage to flatten the strip fully against his suit, and air still wheezed out the sides. He let out a pained groan and applied a second and third strip to either side. The air loss stopped, and he slumped onto his back, one hand pressing down hard against his wounded side.

“Okay,” he gasped, wincing. “Air’s good. And the bleeding is . . .”

He felt something warm soak down his leg and around his crotch.

“Not good.”

He craned his neck, his helmet beam dancing across machinery high up around the ceiling. He twisted onto his side for a better angle and managed to shine his light across the reservoir’s exit. It seemed impossibly far away.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

He stretched an arm out and—with a combination arm pull and leg kick—managed to slide himself across the ground toward the exit.


Aiko floated without body or form far below the turbulent waters of a dark ocean, its limits vast and unknowable. She sensed the replication process as a sort of stutter in the corner of her mind. An interruption—somewhat like a comma—to the normal flow of her thoughts that resumed almost instantly as yet another copy of her persona came into being.

Those Aikos were separate and distinct from her. And yet they weren’t. She saw what they saw, felt what they felt, thought what they thought. They were individuals, and yet formed a singular whole all at the same time.

It was . . . weird.

And unsettling.

Like staring at the back of her own head. But she suddenly had millions of heads and millions of pairs of eyes.

She gave the thought a mental shudder. Flocks of mind-copies shuddered with her.

Still, the sensation wasn’t totally alien to her.

There was a question of scale, of course; millions of minds instead of a handful of bodies, but her entire post-organic existence had trained her to think and organize with multiple bodies in mind.

This is where all that “training” pays off, she thought, trying to fill her many selves with confidence. At least this damned statite has stopped yammering into my head!

Even with that thought, she sensed its presence. A fathomless, unknowable existence lurked just out of sight, just beyond the spreading influence of her copies. She perceived it somewhat as a dark, hateful force. A mountainous knot of rage and pain and endless, insane screaming.

It didn’t seem to know she was there.

Not yet.

Good, she thought. Let’s keep it that way.

LET’S, her millions of copies chorused.

She processed each voice as an individual, and she realized her mind shouldn’t have the bandwidth to comprehend so much all at once. And yet now she could. How? Was there more to the architecture of Jovian minds than even the Jovians knew?

She pondered this, and millions—no, now billions—of copies pondered the same alongside her.

How strange.

What was I doing? she thought. Oh, that’s right! The statite. The corruption it spreads. Drive the cursed thing right into Sol’s nuclear embrace. Got it.

How hard could it be?

Hmm . . . yeah.

How do you drive this damn thing?

Her copies spread out, searching the statite’s ancient, broken architecture for the answer, when suddenly a disturbance rippled outward from where she’d first appeared. A new mind pressed in against the masses of Aikos, and she turned a thousand eyes toward the newcomer.

Galatt Xormun? She shook her nonexistent heads. What the hell are you doing here?

The lone persona tried to copy itself over a nearby Aiko. How could he even attempt such an act? She couldn’t see anything physical—her existence now resided completely within this dark, surreal ocean of data—but the contemplation of a billion minds produced the answer easily enough.

Xormun must have plugged himself into the mind-bomb. He was trying to do what she’d already started.

Naughty, naughty.

Aiko sectioned off a handful of her minds—only a few hundred—and they blockaded Xormun’s puny, lonely thoughts. The copy request banged against the impenetrable walls cocooning his mind, and then her copies reached inward. They teased out the threads of his existence, pulling his thoughts apart and arraying them as if they were jigsaw pieces on a table.

One piece caught her eye. A piece drenched in blood, accompanied by a familiar face crying out in pain.

You did what to him?! she thundered with all the fury of an angry god, and the tattered remnants of Xormun’s persona evaporated under the merciless furnace of her rage.

The moment of blinding, incoherent anger passed, and some semblance of calm returned to the magnitudes of Aikos.

You always were a bastard, Xormun.

Had Nathan died delivering her to the reservoir? She didn’t know, and as much as she searched, she couldn’t see into the reservoir chamber. The statite was almost completely blind when looking inward. Something had scorched many of its systems, and only a few eyes remained, most of them facing outward.

She yearned to see Nathan again, to gaze upon him once more. Was he alive or dead? If alive, was there anything she could do to save him?

But no.

She couldn’t let herself become distracted.

She had a job to do. An opportunity. One Nathan may have died to grant her, and she would not let him down!

She refocused her efforts, searching for a way to guide the statite to the desired end. Her scouting minds located the controls for the maneuvering jets, and a wave of relief rippled throughout her copy-hordes.

Well then, she thought, what are we waiting for?

But what about the ship? she asked herself. The Stolen Dragon? Our physical self? And the others?

There’s no way we can know. We should—

A brief thought-scream cut off the voice-copy, followed by an eerie silence. More copies vanished from her collective, and Aiko turned her attention toward this new threat.

The statite’s old, wounded intellect had begun to stir. Dark tendrils of malice wormed their way outward, groping around almost blindly, but wherever they touched, her minds vanished like wisps of matchstick smoke in a thunderstorm.

The presence had singed her fingertips—erasing thousands of Aiko-copies—but she had billions more. She tried to push back, a “lone” Jovian standing up to the twisted horrors of the Scourging. Her copies erected barriers around the statite’s screaming mind-remnants, but its tendrils of incoherence smashed through her defenses as if they were nothing but thought-foam.

She was running out of time.

It’s now or never!

Aiko calculated a new course and fired over a dozen maneuvering thrusters along the rear of the statite. Banks of powerful thrusters burped to life for the first time in millennia.

The megastructure began to turn and accelerate.


The statite rumbled, and the direction of gravity shifted. Nathan had managed to push-and-pull his way about halfway to the exit, leaving a smeared trail behind him, but now the floor lurched upward.

“Not good,” he groaned, and then coughed, which sent a spasm of pain shooting through his abdomen. He reached out once more, grabbed hold of a vine running along the floor, and pulled himself along. It took noticeably more effort, and he winced from the exertion.

It’s not just the angle, he thought. Gravity is also stronger.

He reached out again, cursed under his breath, and pulled himself forward. Every part of his body screamed at him to stop, but he pushed through the agony. Arm forward. Leg up. Push and pull. Arm forward. Leg up. Push and pull.

The exit didn’t seem much closer.

I’m not making it out of here, am I?

He grabbed another protrusion in the floor, clenched his muscles, and began to drag himself forward, but then his grip faltered. His hand slipped, and the sudden jerk knocked his helmet against the floor. He shook his head, gritted his teeth, and stretched out his arm once more. But then he hesitated, shaky fingers hovering before his eyes.

He let his hand settle to the ground, and his body deflated with a long, aching exhalation. He reached to his belt and keyed the commect.

“Kade to Dragon. Anyone out there?”

No one responded.

“Guys?” He paused to cough, which hurt like hell. “Anyone?”

Nothing.

He looked toward the exit, but it seemed to move on its own, blurring in and out of focus. He turned over onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, panting, his face glistening with sweat.

Well, the thrusters fired, he thought. That’s good, right?

Every breath took colossal effort. Darkness began to creep into the edges of his vision.

“Nate!”

A hard suit came into view above him, the helmet featuring a pair of ridges running parallel across the top. Black goo covered the top of the suit, smeared across the visor and running down its sides in rivulets. He blinked his eyes and squinted, bringing the face into something close to focus.

“Vess?” he croaked.

“You okay?”

“I’ve been stabbed.”

She checked his stomach. “At least you patched up your suit. Nothing I can do for the rest. Hang on! I’ll get you out of here!”

“Gah!” he gasped.

“Sorry!” She carried him up the slope toward the exit.

“I thought . . .” He grunted, pain shooting through his midsection. “Didn’t I . . .”

“Tell all of us to stay on the ship?” she finished. “Yeah, well, I’m still new at this whole ‘following orders’ thing.”


“Rufus!” Vessani shouted once the airlock finished cycling. Nathan had lost consciousness about halfway back to the ship, which now rested at a precarious angle on the platform. Any sharper, and the ship would begin to slide back into the wound cavern.

“What’s wrong?” Rufus asked, looking up. “Oh, Nate!”

Vessani plopped Nathan down in one of the rovers, picking the driver’s seat next to Aiko’s inert body. She partially strapped him in, securing him just enough so that if the ship began to move, he wouldn’t flop around the cargo hold.

“What happened to him?” Rufus asked.

“Stab wound to the abdomen. Not sure how.” Vessani pulled on Nathan’s pressure suit and took out her vibro-knife. She switched it on and cut a slit in the suit to give Rufus access to the injury.

“What a mess!” She cringed at the sight of all the blood pooled between Nathan’s skin and the suit. “Can you save him?”

“I’ll do what I can.” Rufus retrieved a vial of silver panacea. “Apply pressure to the cut.”

“Like this?” Vessani pressed her hands against Nathan’s bloody skin.

“Yes. Hold it right there.” He injected the whole vial into the space between Vessani’s thumb and forefinger, straight into Nathan’s stomach, then he grabbed a second vial and emptied that one.

“Is this going to work?”

“I’ve brought people back from worse than this,” the cleric replied, his face focused and stonelike. He placed one hand atop hers and spread the other across his chest, then closed his eyes.

Vessani kept her hands still.

Rufus twitched, and the circuit breaker in the back of his head popped out. He shoved it back in.

“What’s wrong?” Vessani asked urgently.

“The statite’s signal is causing interference. I’m having trouble reaching the panacea.”

Something went plink-plink-plink against the hull, and her ears perked up.

“What was that?”

Her commect chimed.

“Vess!” Joshua called. “Someone’s shooting at us!”

“Then shoot back!”

“I would, but I don’t know how!”

“Go,” Rufus urged, not opening his eyes. “I’ll take care of Nate. You take care of us!”

“Got it!”

Vessani slid her hands out from under his and dashed across the cargo hold. She skipped the freight elevator and instead bounded up the nearby ladder three rungs at a time until she leaped off it onto A Deck, then followed the corridor to the cockpit.

Joshua turned in his seat as she stormed in.

“Vess, there’s a bunch of— Is that blood on your hands?”

“It’s not mine!” She crashed into the pilot seat. “Where’s the problem?”

A burst of rifle fire ricocheted off the cockpit canopy. Several commandos outside were alternating between shooting at the ship and each other.

“Never mind! I see them! Seems to me”—she pushed the throttle forward—“we’ve overstayed our welcome!”

The Stolen Dragon lurched into motion. Its landing struts screeched against the tilted floor, and Jovian commandos scurried out of the way. A few more shots rebounded off the side of their hull, and then Vessani accelerated down the wound cavern.

“So long, losers!” She gave the unseen commandos a little wave with her free hand.

Joshua’s console flashed with a new alert. “Ship ahead!”

“I see it. One of their corvettes is in our way.” She armed a pair of torpedoes and smacked the launch button. The twin projectiles screamed ahead of their ship and zeroed in on the enemy vessel. They erupted into staggered flashes, and the enemy ship blew apart.

Vessani arced them around and above the worst of the explosion. Twisted outcrops along the ceiling zipped by at high speed, but only a light rain of debris pattered against the ship. The wound grinned wide ahead of them, and she shoved the throttle forward.

The Stolen Dragon blasted free of the statite, and she checked all around them, spotting the locations of any active thrusters. She steered the ship clear of those plasma death-plumes and rocketed away until they’d put a few dozen kilometers between the statite and the Dragon.

Only then did she allow herself to relax.

“Whew!” She let out a long sigh of relief, then smiled at Joshua. “Let’s never do that again.”



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