Prologue
250 years ago
“I don’t need this right now, Ezekiel.”
“We don’t need to talk about it, Ben.”
“If they catch you doing it—”
“It was a one-time thing. They won’t.”
“Sure.” Dr. Ben Bellamy shook his head as he walked toward the main lab, with Dr. Ezekiel Lattimore in tow like a chastised child. He couldn’t decide how upset he should be with Zeke. Ben saw one of the assistants from the Harmonizing team and nodded as she passed. She was all business, and barely acknowledged him. That was the way Ben wanted it. He wanted people who were too engrossed in their jobs to worry about all the hierarchy and seniority squabbles. He didn’t need his rank acknowledged like he was some military man. They didn’t run the lab.
Not yet, anyway.
“I’ll just tell them the great Ben Bellamy gave me permission.”
Ben guffawed. “Let me know how much currency that has.”
“They respect you,” Zeke said.
Ben was sick of how much Zeke worried about who was respecting who. Why was it so important to him? He glanced back at Zeke, but didn’t break his stride. “They put up with me. They put up with me because I run a tight ship. Because I don’t let a member of my team sneak into the power fusion room and cycle his own auric in there.”
“Like it matters—” Zeke started to say.
“I can practically see it in your eyes!” Ben snapped, causing a couple of nearby people in lab coats to take a quick glance their way.
“Let’s have this conversation elsewhere,” Zeke said.
Ben shook his head. “We don’t have time. We’re late. The point is, I can see you're younger today than you were yesterday. I can see it. Do you understand? I can see that you’re using the auric to reverse your aging. And nobody can know that we’ve cracked that.”
“Nobody in the lab will care, and nobody outside the lab will know.”
So far, that was true. How long it would last, Ben wasn’t sure. The breakthroughs here were so many levels beyond what anyone else was doing anywhere, it was only a matter of time. And they had to perfect it before the word got out.
Ben stopped, in spite of how late they were. “Zeke, tell me you aren’t going to do it anymore.”
Zeke held up his hands. “Honest, I’m done. It was just a one-time thing.”
They both knew that was a lie. It wasn’t even the first time this week, but Ben didn’t have time to extend the conversation. Why Zeke felt the need to use it was beyond him. There were possible repercussions that hadn’t been studied yet. Was it really that important for Zeke to look a few years younger? Besides, wasn’t he the one that wanted more respect around here? Younger wasn’t the play for that in the lab.
“We’ve been waiting,” said the familiar voice of Samantha Kellem as a pair of automated doors slid open to reveal the main lab testing center. Ben felt a tingle as he walked through. He was now encircled by an invisible mesh only a few molecules thick. It provided a membrane similar to the one around everyone in the clean room to work without contaminating the perfect auric power base.
“Hi, Sam,” Zeke said as he followed Ben through. “We were just checking on something in the power linkage room.”
“Huh,” said Sam. “And here I thought you were busted hitting the fountain of youth again.”
Ben could feel Zeke tighten up behind him. The only thing that seemed to upset Zeke more than a challenge to his authority was a woman challenging his authority.
“Sam,” Ben said soothingly. “Dr. Lattimore and I are very busy. Can you just show us what you’ve got?” He stifled the urge to add, “We aren’t getting any younger,” as he glanced at his vain colleague.
“You bet, Dr. Bellamy,” she said, spinning around to fire up the long tube of paired energy fields that were required to do what they were attempting to do here. “So, as you know, we’re less than two months out from our deadline.”
“Military-imposed deadline,” Ben said. “You’re only a month away from our internal target.”
“Which you won’t hit,” Zeke said snidely.
“Oh, really?” Sam said. She glanced over at one of her assistants and nodded. He made a quick motion and called over his comm to the other two stations. Power started to pour into the test room immediately. Harmonics started to modulate it shortly thereafter.
There were four streams of steady auric power now. Everyone in the testing room could feel it, even though the super-thin enmeshing. Even in a clean room where not a single particle could interact with the auric power, they could feel the reflection of all of it.
“You're pulling in all the streams?” Zeke asked incredulously. “You shouldn’t be calling them in until you have a full solution.”
“What can I say? Everyone wanted to chip in and help out.”
Sam technically only ran the Joiners team. Along with Harmonics and Power, she was just one of 3 VPs who ran the lab, but she was effectively the boss on the floor. Since the joiner was the caboose for the whole experiment, she got to call the shots.
“Have you made a breakthrough?” Ben asked.
Sam winked at him and then turned back around. Ben chuckled. Everybody liked Sam, including Ben. He was happy to cede authority on the floor to Sam. The other scientists liked her, and she got results. Only Zeke couldn’t stand her. There was no good reason for it, except the obvious one. She was gunning for his job, which was an insane thing for him to be jealous of. Ben was stuck with Zeke, and he had to know that. Zeke was the only other person who knew the truth about the lab. He knew what they were really building here. And he was the only other person in the world who knew where the knowledge had really come from.
“Fire it up,” Sam said.
In a moment, the four separate threads of power merged into one. There was a moment of harmonic fluctuation where it looked like it might break down, but then it stabilized and started to grow stronger.
Exponentially stronger by the moment.
“How?” Zeke breathed, looking at the power output frame. It rose and rose as they watched. It was soon off the chart.
“We can’t even put a number on it,” Sam said proudly. “That’s more auric power than anyone has ever seen, by several magnitudes.” She nodded. “And it’s still going.”
Ben shook his head, a big smile on his face. “You did it.”
“We did it,” Sam said.
And then one of the technicians raised his hand. “Uh, Dr. Kellem, we’ve got a problem here.”
Sam furrowed her brow as she walked toward the tech. “What is it—”
“Whoa!” someone snapped as a spark flew from one of the control surfaces.
Then another sparked. And another.
“Back away from the console!” Sam shouted, a moment before all the electronics in the room exploded. “What the hell is going on?”
“Kill the power!” Ben shouted over the sound of multiple power units around the room exploding.
“We’re trying!” said Sam. “It should be powering down. There’s nothing powering it!”
“It doesn’t look like it to me,” snarled Zeke. “It looks to me like—”
A final explosion of power seemed to erupt from every power source at the same moment. Ben was blinded by a pure white light.
Then everything went pitch black.
For a moment, Ben thought he was blind. He groped around wildly in the air, searching for anything to grab onto. Then he realized it was the lab room itself that had gone dark. Inside the testing room, there were no windows or external lights. The space was strictly clean and sterile, with absolutely no energy leaks of any kind. So with the power out, it was completely dark.
“Guess we’ll hold off on throwing you that parade, eh?” Zeke growled sarcastically.
“Nobody move,” Sam shouted. “Temmor, can you get anyone on comms?”
“No, I don’t think so … no, they're out.”
“Lockdown protocol,” Ben said, careful to keep his voice measured. No reason to freak out folks more than being plunged into pitch-black would do.
“Everybody stay where you’re at,” Sam said. “Aiden, can you execute the protocol?”
“We’ll need to do it manually,” Aiden said.
“Somebody get a damn flashlight!” Zeke shouted.
“It’s not working!” said Aiden. “I’ve got the handheld, but it’s not working.”
“Same thing with this one,” said Temmor. “Totally dead.”
“Alrighty, let’s not panic,” Sam said. “There should be emergency lights kicking on soon.”
There sure should be, Ben thought. So where are they? “Got a take on this?” he murmured in Zeke's direction.
“Maybe she screwed everything up so much that even the backup power is gone,” Zeke offered.
“What is that?” Aiden said.
“We’re kinda blind here,” Sam said sarcastically. “Maybe you could be more specific?”
“The light! In the test room!”
Now Ben saw it. Right above the huge joiner device was a single source of light on the ceiling. As they watched, it started to grow brighter; then it started to move.
It took Ben several seconds to realize what was happening. “The roof! Someone is cutting through the roof!”
The torch completed its circuit, and a chunk of ceiling tile roughly the size of thruster paneling fell down. It smashed against the edge of the joiner, and something snapped off.
“Hey!” Sam screamed. “Be careful!”
Before Ben could grab her arm, Sam was running through the lab door and into the main testing floor. She cast huge shadows as she ran toward the twilight streaming through the hole in the roof.
Sam was waving wildly. “Stop!” she screamed. “Stop! We’re fine!”
Ben realized that Sam must think these were rescuers of some kind. But the power had scarcely gone off a moment ago. It was clear to Ben that this had nothing to do with that. In fact, he thought it more likely that whoever was cutting that hole was actually responsible for whatever had happened.
“Sam!” Ben shouted as he ran after her onto the testing floor. “Get the hell back from that hole!” Zeke trailed a few steps behind him.
Sam was now under the hole. She looked up and stopped.
“Holy hell,” she breathed as Ben finally caught up to her. He grabbed her by the arm, expecting her to jerk away. Sam wasn’t one for being manhandled.
But she just stood there, staring upward.
Ben followed her gaze. Through the hole in the roof, he could see a spaceship.
Ships like this weren’t an everyday thing to see on Nar. They'd only begun construction on a space dock outside Nar’s atmosphere within Ben’s lifetime. There were probably fifty spaceworthy craft on the planet. Only a handful were privately held, which would make their make and design hard to know.
But this wasn’t one of them. Ben knew that for sure. Because he knew exactly what ship it was. It was one of dozens that he’d built on another world for a group of people he hoped to never see again.
“Wh-what is that?” Sam asked.
Ben felt Zeke arrive at his shoulder. “Destroyr,” Zeke whispered incredulously. “How?”
“Sam, go get the security guards,” Ben ordered.
Sam turned to Zeke, her eyes as big as saucers. “He knows what those ships are. Did you hear that?”
“I heard him,” Ben said coolly. “And I told you to go get the security guards.”
Sam hesitated.
“Go now! Use the manual overrides on the main doors.”
“But—”
“Dr. Bellamy gave you an order, Dr. Hammond,” Zeke said coldly. “Don’t make him repeat it.”
Sam gave him a dirty look. “You’re up to something, you bastard.” But she spun around and ran back toward the lab room.
“How did they find us?” Zeke hissed when she was out of earshot.
“How should I know?” Ben snapped back. “We hid the whole project under a ton of rock.”
“This test was too powerful,” Zeke said.
Ben cursed. He was right. In her haste to impress, Sam must have been running experiments up here for weeks that were well beyond the scope of what Ben and Zeke knew about. Anything this powerful should have been running deep underground. They had testing beds miles down where this should happen. They were there for this very reason: so nobody watching could see them.
Or sense them.
“Dr. Bellamy and Dr. Lattimore,” said a commanding voice from the lip of the opening above. “Just the two men of Nar I was hoping to speak with.”
Ben raised his head slowly, to look into the eyes of the man he never wanted to see again.
“Administrator Cama,” he said hoarsely. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Cama chuckled. Then he jumped right down through the hole. He balanced himself carefully in midair with his auric and landed light as a feather. Two other men leaped down through the hole and landed just as gently. Their uniforms gave them away, even if their features looked like anyone else you’d see on Nar.
“And how are things on Dagua?” Ben asked.
Cama ignored him. “It seems your experiment has failed,” he said, waving his hand over the equipment around him. “And here it seemed that you were just about to master it.”
Ben felt the cool sensation of auric probing him, and he instantly began to cycle his own auric to fend off the probing. But nothing appeared in his mind. His auric was dead. Completely gone.
He stared down at his hands, as if the answer would lie there.
“My auric,” he said.
Cama stepped forward. “Oh my, what’s happened?” he asked.
“What the hell did you do?” Zeke growled.
Ben glanced over and saw his fists were balled up in anger. He knew instantly that Zeke had no auric power either, or he’d be cycling his.
“What did I do?” Cama said. “You mean, what did you do?” He shrugged. “Because what I think you did is exactly what we told you not to do.”
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
