SPACE STATION TERRA NOVA
Plumes of velvet smoke billowed upwards into the enclosed sky. The grassy carpet rustled anxiously in the afternoon breeze. Craters large and small littered the field-turned-war zone.
The two opponents faced each other, both teetering on the verge of collapse. One of them, Major Helden Krauser, gripped the handle of his massive photon blade for support. He was leaking blood from a dozen places, though his crimson armor camouflaged the extent of his wounds. A pile of severed Darker tentacles lay at his feet.
Opposite him, the twenty-story behemoth known as Typhon had fallen to one knee. Its jet black armor was scratched and broken, the tip of its left horn sliced cleanly off. Dark fluid oozed from a long diagonal gouge across its chest.
The beast needed to heal, but couldn’t do so aboard
Terra Nova. Not with the HELIOS emitters pumping the air full of anti-Darker energy. So instead, it did the only thing it could. A hazy black and red portal—a tear in the fabric of space itself—materialized and swallowed Typhon before vanishing again. The great Darker had opted to retreat, presumably back to
Orpheus.
Left alone in the middle of the field, Krauser cracked a faint smile. “Looks like my work here is done,” he said to himself, and promptly died on the spot.
* * * * * * * * *
SECTOR PRIME, CORE REGIONS: A THOUSAND KILOMETERS FROM TERRA NOVA
Deep space.
A different sort of portal, a warp portal, interrupted the endless starry curtain. It appeared as if from nowhere, a mirror-like pool of shimmering liquid crystal. From within the pool emerged one of Oracle’s great colony ships, the second ship of the First Fleet. Its name was
Ur.
In the heart of
Ur’s domed city there was a particular tower, the home of ARKS Command. Buried deep inside that tower was a command center reserved for emergency situations—and this certainly qualified as an emergency. At the moment it was bustling with a flurry of activity. Administrators and their aides hustled back and forth. Various duty stations were manned by tense-looking officers.
In the center of it all stood General Rayn Valias. He was the rock in the middle of that raging river, the calm in the midst of the storm. Interim Chief Executive Bradbow had granted him temporary authority to take charge of the situation, and he intended to use it. He would save
Terra Nova by destroying
Orpheus—no matter what.
“Five hundred kilometers to
Terra Nova,” one of the senior officers announced.
Valias breathed in. It was time. “Shields to maximum. Keep all docking bays on lockdown. And get me a visual.”
At the front of the room, a large two-dimensional holoscreen flickered on. Most of that screen was dominated by an inky starfield. But at its center, growing rapidly larger, was a cylindrical space station with a pair of concentric docking rings. Valias had never seen it in person before. Few had, aside from the construction crews and a few high-ranking individuals, yet he recognized it right away:
Terra Nova.
Attached to one of the docking rings like a leech was another familiar sight, less welcoming but no less impressive. It was the Darkers’ greatest instrument of terror and destruction, the fallen colony ship
Orpheus. Since its capture by the Darkers,
Orpheus had undergone a radical transformation. It was covered in a patchwork of rough, organic-looking armor plates. From the crevices between the plates pulsed an ominous crimson glow.
“The scans of
Terra Nova are complete,” said Lieutenant Arkon, Valias’ trusted subordinate. “Zero Darker readings aboard the station. Major Krauser’s team appears to have been successful in routing Typhon.”
Then why is Orpheus
still around? Valias wondered. He couldn’t figure it out. With the HELIOS system active, the Darkers wouldn’t return to
Terra Nova. They couldn’t. And there was nothing else for them to do. So why hadn’t they left?
“Tell the gunnery crews to standby. Be ready to fire on my mark,” he said.
Arkon nodded. He understood what was about to happen. On the holoscreen,
Terra Nova and
Orpheus continued to grow larger. Together they practically filled the screen.
“Distance?”
“A hundred forty-six kilometers and closing.”
A little closer. Just a little closer… Valias swallowed hard. The next few minutes would determine everything. The fates of
Terra Nova,
Orpheus, and
Ur hung in the balance. It all came down to this.
There was no turning back.
“Fire.”
Arkon relayed the order to the various gunnery crews stationed aboard
Ur. Each crew was charged with manning one of the heavy gun batteries lining the sides of the ship. The target coordinates were already locked in. Upon receiving Valias’ signal, each gunner pulled their respective trigger lever.
The space between
Ur and
Orpheus was suddenly ablaze with a hundred streams of pure destructive force. Large-caliber photon-infused shells rocketed one after another into the void. With no air resistance to slow them and no gravity to pull them, they sailed to their target straight and true.
Thousands of projectiles slammed into
Orpheus’s broadside. They danced over the armor-plated hull, exploding on impact. A string of fiery blossoms erupted along the ship’s pitch black surface. Gradually, the streams of fire converged on a single point—the Great Dome housing
Orpheus’s city area. The Dome itself was armored like the rest of the ship, but
Ur’s tacticians calculated they had the best shot at penetration if they focused on that one crucial spot.
Not that they needed to. All they needed to do was lure
Orpheus away from
Terra Nova. The nuclear warhead inserted by Colton’s team would do the rest.
Back in the ARKS command center, General Valias waited in breathless anticipation.
Come on, you bastards. Come at us already! We’re ready for you this time.
But
Orpheus didn’t take the bait. It sat there quietly, taking the relentless beating with apparent disinterest. Despite the firepower being thrown at it, the Darker flagship had sustained little to no damage. Valias grew increasingly concerned. He was about change tactics when one of the officers called out, “
Orpheus is on the move, General! Its engines are coming online!”
Valias watched the holoscreen as
Orpheus’s bow began swinging in their direction. The Darkers didn’t bother retracting the docking tube connecting the ship to
Terra Nova. They simply let it snap off like a brittle umbilical cord.
“Evasive maneuvers,
now!” the general barked at the navigation officer. “We can’t afford to give them a direct line of fire!”
As
Ur picked up speed, it began slewing hard to port. Off in the distance,
Orpheus kept trying to meet them head-on. It was a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. And all the while,
Ur’s guns kept hammering away at the other ship. A futile effort, perhaps, but they refused to give up. At the very least, it kept the Darkers’ attention right where they wanted it: on
Ur.
“Darker missiles incoming!” shouted the weapons officer.
The general turned to regard him. “How many?”
“Too many to count, General. Thousands.”
Valias ran through all the probable scenarios in his mind. None were good, but none were fatal. “The shields will hold,” he replied. “Our guns will get the rest.”
The officer nodded in acknowledgement, then did a double take as new information appeared on his console. “Sir, there’s… there’s some kind of energy buildup coming from the front of the ship. I think
Orpheus is charging its main cannon.”
The color drained from the general’s face. One hit from the main cannon and they were done for, no question about it. He’d seen proof of that in the wreckage of Admiral Ramos’ naval fleet. No warship had ever survived an encounter with
Orpheus, so no one had lived to tell the tale. But the charred husks of cruisers drifting through space told a convincing story. From what Valias’ team had gathered, it was clear that
Orpheus’s cannon had enough raw power to punch through any shield, no matter how strong. Even that of a colony ship.
And at that moment,
Ur was directly in its crosshairs.
Colony ships are big, sluggish beasts, at least compared to most other ships in the fleet. Certainly they hadn’t been designed with mobility in mind. And so, despite the efforts of
Ur’s best navigators, the colony ship couldn’t quite escape the giant gun barrel aimed in its direction. There was a huge buildup inside the cannon, a glowing red ball of pure destructive energy. It grew brighter and brighter, more and more intense. Then a pulsing crimson beam shot forth, crossing the expanse in the blink of an eye.
Ur’s protective energy shield was completely overwhelmed. It never even stood a chance. The beam shot through it like a bullet through paper, overloading and collapsing it instantly.
And kept going. But because
Ur was in the process of swerving away, the beam failed to puncture the ship. Instead it amounted to a glancing blow that just barely grazed the starboard arm, superheating and liquefying a long strip of hull plating along its trajectory.
Even so, the entire colony ship shuddered from the near-impact. Inside the ARKS command center, Valias had to steady himself. The entire room—no, the entire ship—shook and rumbled. The lights flickered briefly. Then everyone realized they were still alive and the room let out a collective breath. A moment later the damage assessments began flooding in.
“General, the shield’s down! We’re totally exposed!”
“Structural integrity intact, sir. The starboard arm sustained minor damage but no critical systems have been compromised.”
“Darker missiles still inbound! Dorsal gunners set to engage in fifteen seconds.”
Valias turned to Lieutenant Arkon. “How long until that main cannon can fire again?”
“Unknown, sir. Best guess… ninety seconds.”
Ninety seconds to recharge. That didn’t give them much time. One way or another, they had to settle things by then. It was going to be close.
Fifteen seconds in,
Ur’s gunners switched their target from
Orpheus to the inbound missile cloud. The swarm of Darker projectiles was so thick that when one exploded, the others nearby often got caught up in the blast. But there were thousands of them.
Ur’s right flank was suddenly surrounded by a fiery curtain of approaching death, explosions so numerous they appeared as a great tidal wave of fire, ready to wash over the great colony ship and devour it whole.
Valias didn’t have time to worry about that at the moment. He was focused on the bigger picture:
Orpheus. He needed to get the Darker ship further away from
Terra Nova, but there wasn’t time. The clock was ticking. And sooner or later, he was going to have to pull the trigger.
Then, from behind him: “General, I’m detecting another energy spike from
Orpheus. Their main cannon is preparing to fire!”
It had been ninety-three seconds. Valias had maybe three seconds to decide, one to act. If he didn’t, he probably wouldn’t live to see the fifth.
So he acted. He made the only decision he possibly could: saving
Ur from total annihilation.
Valias pressed the red button on the console in front of him. A fraction of a second later, a self-destruct signal was sent to the nuclear warhead buried deep in
Orpheus’s belly…
* * * * * * * * *
UR, SECRET KAI-OS BUNKER
It was ruined, all of it.
That damned Typhon! Those damned ARKS! It was all their fault. Lee watched the
Terra Nova video feeds with increasing dismay. He watched as Typhon, resistant to the HELIOS system, corrupted it with negative photons. That hadn’t been part of the plan. He watched as the ARKS reactivated HELIOS and drove all the Darkers back to
Orpheus. That hadn’t been part of the plan, either. Now the ARKS controlled
Terra Nova and all of Lee’s hard work was in shambles.
His Deuman eye itched, as it always did when he got angry. The itching was driving him mad. With an exasperated growl, Lee tore the sunglasses from his head and hurled them across the room. He stood alone in the dimly-lit bunker, panting and fuming, a dozen screens showcasing his failure. Practically laughing at him.
So much planning, and plotting, and scheming. This was to be his crowning achievement, his turn to step onto the galactic stage. Instead he felt the one thing he hated most of all—powerless. Powerless to stop his carefully-laid plans from collapsing before his eyes.
The Darkers were supposed to control
Terra Nova. And through Shankar, Lee was supposed to control the Darkers. He had it all worked out. Using a series of coordinated attacks, he would instill fear in the public. A sharp reminder that the Darker threat was very real and very close at hand. And, as the new master of
Terra Nova, he would be there to offer people something they couldn’t possibly resist: a safe and secure future. Accommodations aboard the first and only space station of its kind, a place where they could finally live in peace. He could charge whatever he wanted and they would gladly pay it. They would line up in droves for that kind of deal. They would even give up their precious freedom for it, if Lee so desired.
But it had all fallen apart in the final hour. Like a house of cards, tumbling down, down, down…
One of Lee’s philosophies was to always have a Plan B. He’d already considered the possibility that the ARKS would somehow reclaim
Terra Nova. That’s why he had gone to great lengths to wrest control of the ARKS forces aboard
Ur, ousting General Valias and installing his own puppet leader—Colonel Aki01. With the ARKS under Lee’s thumb, no one could’ve gotten in his way.
Terra Nova would have been his for the taking.
But Aki01 had failed. A small rebel force led by her own sisters had infiltrated the Command tower and put a stop to Zero One’s plans—and by extension, Lee’s plans. Now Lee had no backup, nothing and no one to rely on when everything went wrong. He was starting to regret doing away with the masked bounty hunter. At least Kolba usually got the job done.
“You’re a disgrace, a failure. Just as I always knew you were.” That was the voice of Lee’s father, taunting him from beyond the grave.
“You don’t have what it takes to be my successor, a true King of KAI-OS. You never did… and you never will.”
Lee knocked his chair over in a fit of rage and swung around to face the empty room. “Shut up, shut up,
shut up, you old fool!” he bellowed. “I don’t want to hear it! I’ve already accomplished more than you ever did. KAI-OS belongs to me and me alone. I did that! Me, not you! While you were content dealing in petty politics, to seek appeasement like a neutered dog, I destroyed my rivals and took their crowns for myself! This thing with
Terra Nova is merely a setback. A hiccup. A bump in the road, nothing more. I will not be denied my greatness. Neither the ARKS, nor the Darkers, nor
you, can keep it from me!”
He turned back to the bank of video monitors—just in time to watch
Orpheus explode from the inside out. One of his screens was patched into
Ur’s external video feed. He was seeing the same thing General Valias was seeing in the ARKS Command tower high above. And what he saw was a great flower blooming in space, a beautiful rose of bluish-white. It expanded outward from
Orpheus’s Great Dome, consuming the ship and everything inside it. Not even the ship’s thick armor plating could contain the blast. With a blinding flash,
Orpheus was blown into a million pieces.
It didn’t take a genius to understand what happened. The warhead planted by the ARKS forces had gone off, igniting the former colony ship’s main reactor. The nuclear explosion, mixed with the reactor’s photon energy reserves, had created an explosion large enough to obliterate
Orpheus once and for all.
Lee’s mouth twisted into a sinister snarl. There was madness in his eyes, a previously-hidden glint finally come to light. Yet he’d never felt more sane, more sure of his purpose. He was seeing everything clearly now. And he knew what he had to do. If the ARKS were going to take everything from him, he would take something of theirs in return. He would take the most precious thing of all: their hope.
Lee stepped over to the console and brought up
Terra Nova’s control systems. Thanks to his elite team of hackers, he had full control of the station at his fingertips. A few keyboard taps brought him to the screen he wanted. He entered a command and waited. A prompt appeared asking for confirmation: “Deactivate station energy shields? Y/N.” He pressed “Y,” then stood back and waited for the fireworks to begin.
* * * * * * * * *
ARKS COMMAND TOWER
A hearty cheer rose up in the command center as images of
Orpheus’s demise appeared on the holographic vidscreen. The air was practically electric with excitement. The relief was palpable. Despite several close calls, they had done it! Victory at last!
Then, a voice from the back of the room: “Sir,
Terra Nova’s shields, they’re… they’re down!”
General Valias whirled around to face the woman at the sensor station. “Impossible. Was
Terra Nova hit by something?”
“No, sir. The shields just… went down on their own. I’m trying to access the station’s systems remotely, but it’s not letting me. Someone or something has locked me out.”
“Find a way to get those shields back up, now!”
The sensor officer looked frantic. “There’s no time! It’s too late…”
She looked up and Valias followed her gaze. On the large screen behind him, events were unfolding beyond their control…
* * * * * * * * *
Following the explosion, the million pieces of
Orpheus were sent hurtling in all directions. Nearly a quarter of them were on a collision course with
Terra Nova. The debris consisted of hull fragments, pieces of organic armor plating, and components too large or too durable to be vaporized into space dust.
Normally the station’s energy shields would have deflected or disintegrated the bulk of that debris. It wouldn’t have posed a serious threat. But thanks to Lee Okada’s intervention, the shields had been disabled. For
Terra Nova, it was like being caught in the middle of a hailstorm without an umbrella… and the result was largely the same. The wave of metal and organic matter slammed into the station at full speed, its damage absolute. The smaller pieces merely left dents and scratches on the surface, but the bigger chunks—those a dozen meters and larger—tore straight through the station’s outer wall, through its structural supports, and finally through the inner wall as well. The breach, which consisted of a hundred jagged holes of varying shapes and sizes, immediately depressurized the habitable zone. A trillion kiloliters of breathable air were sucked out into the void. Inside the station, the temperature dropped rapidly. The trees, grass, and vast fields of crops all froze and died. The few thousand remaining construction workers, in hiding since the arrival of the Darkers, all suffocated as their air supply was stolen away.
But Shankar, tucked away in the subrail station beneath the city, managed to avoid the horrors that befell those poor souls. By the time the station walls were breached, he was already dead.
* * * * * * * * *
In the command center, General Valias watched it happen. He watched as
Terra Nova was pummeled by the wave of debris from
Orpheus. He watched the holes in its hull multiply and grow like the effects of some degenerative disease. He watched the future of Oracle being shredded from both inside and out, a mirror to the shredding of his own spirit. It nearly broke him.
He also listened as his officers relayed their damage reports. Large sections of the station’s central spine had been destroyed. The HELIOS reactor was ruined. One by one,
Terra Nova’s core systems were shutting down. Soon the thing would be nothing more than a massive tomb floating in space. A reminder that life, as well as hope, can be fleeting.
Terra Nova wasn’t destroyed that day, however. Not completely. But it would take years, maybe decades, before it would be operational again, if it ever was.
The ARKS command center fell deathly quiet. Like the air aboard
Terra Nova, all hope had been sucked out of the room. Valias and the others kept their eyes glued to the screen… which is why no one immediately noticed the flashing red light on a console in the back of the room. Next to the light was a label that read: “
UR DARKER WARNING SYSTEM.”
CHAPTER 19: END
Author's Notes:
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