CHAPTER ONE
ROSLYN RESEARCH FACILITY: The Cradle Chamber 5 Days Remaining
[SYSTEM MESSAGE:]
Congratulations, Champions. You have completed the objective to quell the rebellion in Maelun and secure the progression node.
The progression node has been captured and converted into a Territory Outpost. Your territory’s influence has been anchored to this point and Its coverage now extends across the ancient metropolis. All technologies and schematics recovered up to this moment have been preserved and catalogued.
Because no active champions were lost during this operation you qualify for an extraction of a single active entity to your home civilization via a compatible cradle.
All participants must return to the Cradle before the deadline!
You may choose any single active entity present and eligible for transfer.
Warning: Selecting Your Guide for extraction may have unforeseen consequences. When this entity leaves the Cradle on your home world she will do so in her current form and maintain all knowledge and abilities granted via the Ascendancy. All participants must have an active guide. Your guide will become a human female. All rules in regards to participant death would apply to your guide the same as they apply to you. However loss of a guide in this form while not in the Cradle will result in permanent death and forfeiture.
Return to Earth.
[YES] [NO]
The last thing I remembered from Adaeya was ARi’s hand in mine. Then the blinding white ripped me from where I stood and pulled me into the void. I was almost becoming familiar with the void by now. The dark, the weightlessness. That stomach-dropping sensation of falling with no direction to fall toward. And nothing to grab onto no matter how hard your instincts screamed. The first time it happened, I panicked, but at this point, I was starting to think of it more like a lobby. Like an in-between for your consciousness while in transit from one place to another.
Unlike the first time going in, there were no system windows, no prompts, nothing to pour my focus into. Just the dark and the falling and my own thoughts. I wondered how long we’d actually been gone. I thought about my father, about my mother, about whether any of the things we’d left behind were still the same when we got back.
Then the world flashed, and it felt like something had grabbed me by the chest and slammed me back into the cradle. Something had knocked the air from my lungs, and I lay there in the dark, struggling to find a breath.
I could hear the hum of the cradle and feel a vibration running up through the platform and into my spine. The surface beneath me was cold and hard, and the air was acrid with a metallic smell thick enough to taste. Every nerve in my body was firing at once. I hadn’t realized my eyes were closed until I pulled them open and found the same darkness waiting, pressing in from every direction. I laid still and let it all wash over me.
With a loud hiss, I felt the cradle slowly sink as the cover began to rotate open. I coughed, choking for air. I forced myself upright as the cradle lowered itself onto the platform. I tried to get out only to crash like a ragdoll onto the floor. After a moment, I dragged myself onto my hands and knees and made my way toward the empty cradles.
Through a shortness of breath, I tried to call out to ARi. I was afraid something had happened, that she might not have come through. I scrambled, half-crawling and half-falling, across the chamber to the end of the platform. I pulled myself up into the first cradle, and my heart sank. It was empty; then I heard a gasp coming from one cradle over.
I stumbled again as I made my way to the side, leaning over to see ARi trying to find the strength to push herself up. Her arms weren’t cooperating either.
“I’m fine, Gavin,” she said, barely able to get the words out. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”
I reached in and grabbed her hands and helped pull her up and over the edge, and the two of us dropped down with our backs against the side.
Behind us, Tim’s voice cut through the dark. “Why the hell aren’t any of the lights on? Where is everybody?”
“I’m here,” Tanya called from somewhere across the room.
“What the hell was that?” Kyle said from inside his cradle. He pulled himself over the side, leaning forward just in time to puke.
Suddenly aware of the missing voice in the dark, Kyle called out for Yumi.
“Yumi!” Tanya repeated a moment later.
Kyle rolled out of his cradle, barely missing the mess on the floor, and made his way over to Yumi’s cradle. He grabbed the edge, pulled himself up, and looked inside.
“No,” Yumi said from inside. “I’m still sleeping. Can you come back in five minutes?”
“Dammit, Yumi,” Kyle said. “You scared the hell out of me.”
Yumi reached up in the dark, grabbed Kyle, and pulled him down into the cradle with her.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “Just let me catch my breath, okay?”
I checked over ARi to make sure she was okay, but I could see she was completely distracted. She looked around the room, then stared off into the distance for a moment.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where is everybody? Where’s my father?”
“I can’t sense or sync with the AI I left here.” She paused. “I’m pretty sure she’s offline.”
She gasped, and I felt her tremble beside me. I could tell she was reaching out with her senses, trying to get a read on the facility.
“There’s battle damage just past the door,” she said, her voice tight. “There’s bullet holes, scoring on the walls, debris everywhere. I can barely see past the threshold. It’s like my senses are completely restricted.”
With the AI she’d left behind offline, she was completely reliant on the abilities she’d brought back from the Ascendancy. But those abilities needed an anchor point to work from. Back on Adaeya she’d always had one, either Bishop or the territory anchor I’d established when I used the tablet inside the den. One of those had always been there, radiating her range outward from a fixed origin. She’d never had to operate without one. Even though Earth was our territory, that designation alone wasn’t enough. The system needed a physical anchor, a reference point. Without it, she was working from nothing but her own innate abilities. I wasn’t sure any of us knew what those actually were yet.
I reached into my inventory, half expecting nothing to happen, and felt the familiar weight of my armor in my hands. So that still worked. I looked around at the others, most of them still pulling themselves up off the floor or leaning against their cradles.
“Everyone, check your inventory,” I said, already pulling my chest piece on. “Get your armor and weapons out. We might be walking into something here.”
“Are you serious right now?” Yumi said as she helped pull Kyle out of her cradle.
As I finished putting on my armor, I was thinking about how to create an anchor. If I could drop a control node, it might give ARi something to work from and push her range out far enough to tell us what we were actually dealing with. Earth was already ours after all; all it needed was the starting point. I straightened up and started to raise my hand; I could feel the ability pulling at my energy reserves.
ARi reached over and grabbed my arm.
“Gavin, don’t! I know exactly what you’re thinking!”
I glanced down at her and couldn’t help feeling annoyed that she’d guessed my intentions.
“Yeah, nice one, Cowboy. I bet you thought you would just throw up a control node, right?” Tanya said, shaking her head, as she pulled on her pants.
“Fine,” I said. “If I can’t throw a control node down to extend ARi’s range, then I’m bringing a couple of cohorts in to scout ahead.”
I pulled my architect window up, and was surprised at what I saw. The cost of spawning existing cohorts was dramatically less than what summoning them from scratch would cost. I found Erica and Maddie in the list, and selected them both. They appeared in front of us and immediately began looking around the cradle chamber.
“Well, I gotta tell you guys, after fighting so hard for Earth, I thought Earth would be a little nicer, you know?” Erica said as she knelt in front of ARi.
“We’re underground,” I said. “This is the facility where our cradles are, and this isn’t what it looked like when we left.”
“ARi, is there any way to tell how long we’ve been gone?” Tanya asked as she walked over.
“I’ve already looked as far into the facility as I can. All the systems outside this chamber are either powered off or destroyed. I’m afraid we’re in the dark for the moment.”
Yumi tapped her spear on the ground, and three of her small shield drones phased in, lighting up the room with a soft blue glow.
“Maddie, Erica, we’re trapped inside the chamber right now and we need eyes on what’s going on outside. There was a battle here, but we don’t know who the bad guys are. We need to make sure our people are safe.”
Maddie walked over and kicked the vault door a couple of times. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Listen, girls,” Yumi said as she joined us. “This isn’t Adaeya. The humans here have never seen a kobold, and we don’t know what attacked the facility. You have to stay hidden, okay?”
“And their weapons are different from the ones we were using back on Adaeya,” Tim added. “They’re dangerous.”
ARi reached up and grabbed Erica’s hand. “Please be careful.”
Erica tapped her chest twice with her fist and pulled her hood up over her face. She and Maddie shimmered and phased through the vault door into the corridor beyond.
“Gavin, I gotta tell you, I love their new look,” Yumi said, watching the spot where they’d been. “Those little shadow wisps moving around them? It’s freakin’ awesome.”
“Yeah, well, those girls are terrifying,” Kyle said as he knelt down in front of us. “What gives, ARi? Why are we so messed up? I feel like I can’t catch my breath.”
I could see the hesitation on ARi’s face. “I don’t know how to say this without it being an uncomfortable conversation, so we might as well get it over with. Our bodies weren’t residing in the cradles while we were gone. They were scanned, stored, and rebuilt when we returned.”
“If you want to get technical,” she continued, “the reason it’s so hard to breathe is because your lungs have never done it before.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then I heard Kyle let out a slow breath, and when I looked over at him, he was shaking his head, somewhere between stunned and something else entirely.
“We got Star Trek’d,” he said quietly, almost to himself. Then again, louder. “We got straight-up Star Trek’d. Do you realize that every time Kirk and Spock stepped into that transporter, they were annihilated. Broken down into nothing and cloned back together on the other side. Star Trek has been mass-murdering its entire cast and crew for sixty years, and nobody ever talks about it.”
Yumi stared at Kyle for a moment, then slowly nodded, the faintest smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.
“At least we didn’t get redshirted!”
“I still don’t understand why somebody would attack this place, though,” ARi said.
I looked over at Kyle and Tim. Kyle had gone still, staring at the floor, turning it over in his head. Tim had the same look, both of them circling the same thought.
“Kobolkai?” Tim said quietly, looking at Kyle.
Kyle shook his head slowly. “I don’t know if you’d call them that here.”
Neither of them said anything else, but they didn’t need to. We were all thinking about it.
Before long, Maddie and Erica phased back through the vault door. One look at their faces said everything.
“We didn’t find anybody alive,” Erica said, her eyes dropping to the floor.
I looked over at ARi. Her jaw tightened.
“Tell us what you found,” she said.
“Three bodies, two of them were in the corridor, dressed differently from the others. The third one was up there.” She pointed toward the observation room above us.
ARi was already moving. She crossed the chamber and looked up at the observation room windows, her hand flat against the wall, face tilted up toward the glass.
“ARi,” I said quietly. “Who is it?”
She stayed there for a moment, her hand still against the wall. When she finally turned to look at me, her voice held steady, but her eyes were wet.
“One of the technicians,” she said.
Maddie stepped forward and held up what looked like a piece of broken glass. Up close, it was a device, and it didn’t look human. The design, the material, the way it had been built; it was closer to the crystal tablets we’d seen inside the Ascendancy than anything made on Earth.
The effect on ARi was immediate. Something shifted behind her eyes, fast and cold, and I watched the grief fold itself into something harder.
“What is it?” I asked.
Tim moved to the vault door. He reached back over his shoulder and drew his khopesh. The blade caught the soft blue light from Yumi’s drones as he turned it in his hand.
“ARi,” his voice was cold and calm. “Tell the Wraiths where the bypass is and open the door.”
ARi looked at him for a moment, then looked at Maddie, and that’s when I saw it. The device in Maddie’s hand. The blood running down the side of the broken crystal, red and dark, dripping from the fractured edge onto the floor.
A battle hadn’t taken place here; it was still happening. It was happening right now.
I was already on my feet, my hand raised, pulling six more Wraiths, the remainder of Maddie and Erica’s squads, and the last of my energy reserves. They materialized around us in the blue-lit room, shadows bleeding off their armor. They stood and waited for orders.
“Designate one squad member as a forward scout,” I snapped, keeping my voice low. “Push forward toward the back of the corridor, and find the hatch on the far end; there’s a ladder up to the next level. I want to know what we’re walking into before we move.”
Maddie and Erica turned to their squads and issued orders, and moments later, two of the Wraiths dissolved into the shadows beyond the door.
ARi moved to the vault and spoke to Maddie, pointing out the location of the manual release in the wall. Maddie pressed herself against the door and phased through. A moment later we heard the heavy clang of the mechanism releasing, followed by the long squeal of bolts pulling back. Tim and Kyle moved to the gap and leaned into it, prying the vault open just wide enough for us to get through one at a time.
“ARi, we need a plan. We can’t just go running through the facility without one.”
She stopped at the door and turned to look at me. I could see the rage on her face. She wasn’t angry at me, but the real fury behind those beautiful eyes was terrifying.
“The plan is to get to the lab,” she said. “We find the AI, and get her back online. We use whatever systems are still running to get eyes on this facility. And then we find out where the professor is, the Colonel, and we find our families.”
She took a breath, and I watched her pull herself together.
I gave her hand a light squeeze and followed her through the door.