The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
- Virgil, the Aeneid
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
- Virgil, the Aeneid
Chapter One
It was just behind her sternum, in that part of her chest that felt the most sheltered, where she could fold in on herself if she needed to. That was where she neatly wrapped the images of gore, the coppery smell of blood, the sensation of stepping on lifeless limbs. That was where she pictured storing it all away when her job demanded it.
Lieutenant Commander Jaya Mill had seen enough violence and bloodshed in her fourteen years of service that this part of her was carefully cultivated. It was a place of darkness, sealed away behind a will stronger than the alloys of the armor they wore into the field. Rarely did the door crack open and let the darkness out to sicken her. And it wasn’t the destruction around her that left the way open today, that allowed the clammy tendril of fear to wrap its way around her insides. It wasn’t the bodies strewn across the colony. It wasn’t the smell of their rotting flesh, ghostly and faint and perhaps only a trick of the mind after her suit’s filters had scrubbed the air.
It was the voice that sent a chill through her.
Beside her, Lieutenant Salman Azima picked his way through the bodies that had piled along the corridor, abandoned there once the gurneys and temporary beds had been packed two people deep. The emergency lighting still cast a flat light on the carnage. It had happened so fast.
They still didn’t understand what it was. But they understood its purpose. That was clear before Jaya and the rest of the Avalon’s company had set foot on this colony. The group that claimed responsibility for this attack called themselves the Sons of Priam. They claimed that only by razing the old could they right the wrongs of the galactic powers and bring about a new world. Their leader—although he kept his name and his image from the propaganda they broadcast to the farthest reaches of Union-controlled space—spoke with a dark power. And his voice…
It wasn’t a particularly terrifying voice by most standards. It hadn’t been altered to produce any effect. And yet, it haunted her. Slightly breathy, with the rich timbre of the lowest notes of a flute. It made the tiny hairs on her forearms stand on end. Something in his voice tugged at her subconscious and dug into the deepest secrets in her mind and pulled them forward.
Jaya crouched down, removing one of the sterile kits from her pack. This was as good a place as any she had already passed to take samples. The hospital had been the first on this colony to send out the alert, a mere twenty hours ago. The quickest of the victims had come straight here the moment they felt ill. Most had not been so fast to assume the worst, and as Jaya took in the white-walled corridor heaped with putrid corpses, she thought perhaps those who had waited had been better off. It was all over so fast, every human and alien resident on this colony dead before the first relief ship could arrive and the military could quarantine the area. At least those who had not sought medical attention had been able to die at home. Surrounded by loved ones.
Corporal Elias Thompson’s voice came over the comms. The implanted communicator in Jaya’s ear broadcast his voice crisply, the fidelity so good she could hear the tears in his throat. She closed her eyes, wishing she could grant him some privacy, but they had a job to do. His older brother had been on Yangtze, one of the other colonies hit. Just yesterday Thompson had been bragging about how the wages he sent home had allowed his brother to invest in new equipment for his farm. How bright his future would be.
Jaya understood the loss of a brother. Her own brother’s disappearance remained a jagged wound in her heart to this day, more than two decades later. But her family was one of those secrets the voice had stirred up, and they were roiling dangerously at the front of her mind right now. She held them close, her own private grief—and fear.
“No one moving on the third floor,” Thompson said. “Infrared says the bodies are all cold here too. There are some offices, though. Thought Sal might want to have a look.”
“Good work, Corporal,” Jaya replied. “Sending Lieutenant Azima to you now.”
She looked back at Sal, who nodded and began to pack up his own testing kits to join Thompson on the third floor.
“Roger, Lieutenant Commander,” Thompson said.
“Hey Mill,” Rhodes’s voice broke through, on a private line. Lieutenant Commander John Rhodes was Jaya’s counterpart, leading his own small strike team through the government buildings just a kilometer away.
“I’m listening.”
“We’re about done over here,” he said. “Are you ready for exfil?”
“Not quite,” Jaya replied. “Head to the rendezvous point and we’ll be there when we’re done. Azima is going to hit the hospital computers and see what he can find. You get anything good?”
“Negative. No sign anyone saw this coming. We’ll have to have the quants work their magic, but it’s like this place was cursed.”
“You can say that again.”
“Okay, we’re headed out. Meet you at the RP.”
Rhodes signed off and left Jaya in the silence of her biohazard suit, crouched over a body. A sudden wave of grief rushed up in her, tightening her chest. She swallowed it back down and took a deep breath, closing that door. There would be time later.
She took her last sample and checked her palm drive. The tiny computer, implanted in her skin, was wirelessly connected to a control panel on the wrist of her suit. She brought up a layout of the hospital, displayed as a three-dimensional holographic map. Two dots on the third floor showed her where Sal and Thompson were located. A third dot roamed the outside of the building. That would be Jordan Vargas, completing her perimeter check. The corporal was uncharacteristically quiet today. The team’s internal channel was usually raucous with banter between Vargas and Thompson, but today there was only Jaya’s own thinking to occupy her mind.
Jaya interrupted the silence. “Alpha team, report.”
“On my final sweep.” Vargas’s voice was still brash, though without her usual swagger.
“I’ve checked all the floors,” Thompson confirmed. “On three now with Azima.”
“This hospital’s data security is a fucking joke.”
Jaya couldn’t help a smile. That would be Sal. His sharp edges hadn’t softened at all in the ten years she had served with him.
“I take it you’ll be done soon, then?” she replied drily.
“Download in progress,” Sal said. “We’ll have all the automated data, but I’ll be shocked if anyone in this hospital made any notes once the crowds rolled in, and considering they were sick, too…”
He paused, and Jaya finished sealing up the sample bag while she waited. Long gaps in the conversation were also typical of Sal. She could picture him now, his dark brown eyes narrowed at the screen in front of him, his previous train of thought suspended indefinitely like a hung code until he finished whatever had distracted him.
“So we won’t have much in the way of on-the-ground description, but we should have lots of data to process. Could find a pattern,” Sal concluded. “I’ve got everything I need.”
“Time to go, then,” Jaya said. “Bravo team is waiting for us.” She switched to the master channel. “Avalon, this is Alpha One. Mission accomplished, all participants accounted for. Bravo team is at the RP and Alpha team is en route. Requesting exfil.”
“Lieutenant Lupo is on her way in the shuttle, Alpha One.” It was the voice of the Avalon’s captain, Peter Armstrong, warm and determined. “We’re expecting you. Come on home.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
The rendezvous point was half a kilometer outside the capital, but Arcadian Gardens was a tiny agricultural colony, and calling the capital a city would be generous. It spanned less than two kilometers north to south, and was even shorter east to west. Its population was a few thousand, nearly all humans. While other colonies boasted thriving multi-species populations, agricultural colonies like this one weren’t a draw for residents from any of the other civilizations of the galaxy. Outside the capital, agricultural compounds swept along the curve of the planet, and the remaining thirty million citizens of Arcadian Gardens lived there, managing the crops that they exported to richer colonies and stations in the United Human Nations.
Or used to. Preliminary sweeps showed a cold and desolate countryside. No heat signatures. No living beings, human or livestock. Not anymore.
It hadn’t been all that different from the colony where Jaya had spent her teen years. Her gut tightened, and she had the sudden urge to call her uncles.
They reached the rendezvous point in short time. Bravo team stood in the wheat field, four figures shrouded in bulky suits, stark against the daylight in this empty world.
“Approaching RP,” Jaya announced.
“We see you, Alpha team,” Rhodes replied. “Ready to go home?”
“Very.”
A rush of air buffeted their suits as the shuttle descended. The wheat in the field compressed and rippled — the only motion they had seen in hours — as Lieutenant Linh Lupo brought the shuttle gently down, opening the airlock aperture.
All eight of them filed in and the doors closed. Jaya blinked against the dimness of the airlock after the bright light outside. A gentle hiss announced that the decontamination procedure had begun, and they waited patiently until the warning lights above the door flashed from red to green. Still, they peeled off their external suits in grim silence, turning them inside out and stuffing them in a biohazard box. Rhodes sealed the box and stowed it before anyone even moved towards the door controls.
The faint green glow of the controls shone on Rhodes’s dark face, cheekbones and cropped hair sharp against the backlight. His characteristic soberness seemed softer in this close, quiet space, and his strike team — Shea, Mukherjee, and Martel — stood close by his side. Thompson, in contrast, looked queasy and pale in the cool light, and his eyes were bloodshot and hard. He didn’t shrug off Vargas’s hand on his shoulder when she approached him, but he closed his eyes. A wave of nausea passed over Jaya, the fear and brokenness rising momentarily to the surface. When she looked at Sal, he was already staring back at her, a dark eyebrow quirked up and his curls askew from the suit’s helmet.
She took a deep breath. It would do her team no good to see her weakness. She squashed it down and into its box, sealing it as tightly as she could.
Rhodes activated the door controls and they stepped through as the inertia tugged down on them. Lupo was taking the shuttle back up to the Avalon.
“Locking our approach,” Lupo announced, sliding out of her seat as the automated controls took over. She tossed her long black braid over her shoulder and joined them in the awkward circle they had formed, everyone standing just a little closer than normal, hesitant to break the contact. Lupo reached for Vargas’s hand, squeezing it tightly.
“We’ll be home soon,” Rhodes said.
“Then what?” Shea asked, their dark eyes flitting between Rhodes and Jaya.
“We find a way to help,” Jaya replied. “We pick up the pieces.”
Lieutenant Commander Jaya Mill had seen enough violence and bloodshed in her fourteen years of service that this part of her was carefully cultivated. It was a place of darkness, sealed away behind a will stronger than the alloys of the armor they wore into the field. Rarely did the door crack open and let the darkness out to sicken her. And it wasn’t the destruction around her that left the way open today, that allowed the clammy tendril of fear to wrap its way around her insides. It wasn’t the bodies strewn across the colony. It wasn’t the smell of their rotting flesh, ghostly and faint and perhaps only a trick of the mind after her suit’s filters had scrubbed the air.
It was the voice that sent a chill through her.
Beside her, Lieutenant Salman Azima picked his way through the bodies that had piled along the corridor, abandoned there once the gurneys and temporary beds had been packed two people deep. The emergency lighting still cast a flat light on the carnage. It had happened so fast.
They still didn’t understand what it was. But they understood its purpose. That was clear before Jaya and the rest of the Avalon’s company had set foot on this colony. The group that claimed responsibility for this attack called themselves the Sons of Priam. They claimed that only by razing the old could they right the wrongs of the galactic powers and bring about a new world. Their leader—although he kept his name and his image from the propaganda they broadcast to the farthest reaches of Union-controlled space—spoke with a dark power. And his voice…
It wasn’t a particularly terrifying voice by most standards. It hadn’t been altered to produce any effect. And yet, it haunted her. Slightly breathy, with the rich timbre of the lowest notes of a flute. It made the tiny hairs on her forearms stand on end. Something in his voice tugged at her subconscious and dug into the deepest secrets in her mind and pulled them forward.
Jaya crouched down, removing one of the sterile kits from her pack. This was as good a place as any she had already passed to take samples. The hospital had been the first on this colony to send out the alert, a mere twenty hours ago. The quickest of the victims had come straight here the moment they felt ill. Most had not been so fast to assume the worst, and as Jaya took in the white-walled corridor heaped with putrid corpses, she thought perhaps those who had waited had been better off. It was all over so fast, every human and alien resident on this colony dead before the first relief ship could arrive and the military could quarantine the area. At least those who had not sought medical attention had been able to die at home. Surrounded by loved ones.
Corporal Elias Thompson’s voice came over the comms. The implanted communicator in Jaya’s ear broadcast his voice crisply, the fidelity so good she could hear the tears in his throat. She closed her eyes, wishing she could grant him some privacy, but they had a job to do. His older brother had been on Yangtze, one of the other colonies hit. Just yesterday Thompson had been bragging about how the wages he sent home had allowed his brother to invest in new equipment for his farm. How bright his future would be.
Jaya understood the loss of a brother. Her own brother’s disappearance remained a jagged wound in her heart to this day, more than two decades later. But her family was one of those secrets the voice had stirred up, and they were roiling dangerously at the front of her mind right now. She held them close, her own private grief—and fear.
“No one moving on the third floor,” Thompson said. “Infrared says the bodies are all cold here too. There are some offices, though. Thought Sal might want to have a look.”
“Good work, Corporal,” Jaya replied. “Sending Lieutenant Azima to you now.”
She looked back at Sal, who nodded and began to pack up his own testing kits to join Thompson on the third floor.
“Roger, Lieutenant Commander,” Thompson said.
“Hey Mill,” Rhodes’s voice broke through, on a private line. Lieutenant Commander John Rhodes was Jaya’s counterpart, leading his own small strike team through the government buildings just a kilometer away.
“I’m listening.”
“We’re about done over here,” he said. “Are you ready for exfil?”
“Not quite,” Jaya replied. “Head to the rendezvous point and we’ll be there when we’re done. Azima is going to hit the hospital computers and see what he can find. You get anything good?”
“Negative. No sign anyone saw this coming. We’ll have to have the quants work their magic, but it’s like this place was cursed.”
“You can say that again.”
“Okay, we’re headed out. Meet you at the RP.”
Rhodes signed off and left Jaya in the silence of her biohazard suit, crouched over a body. A sudden wave of grief rushed up in her, tightening her chest. She swallowed it back down and took a deep breath, closing that door. There would be time later.
She took her last sample and checked her palm drive. The tiny computer, implanted in her skin, was wirelessly connected to a control panel on the wrist of her suit. She brought up a layout of the hospital, displayed as a three-dimensional holographic map. Two dots on the third floor showed her where Sal and Thompson were located. A third dot roamed the outside of the building. That would be Jordan Vargas, completing her perimeter check. The corporal was uncharacteristically quiet today. The team’s internal channel was usually raucous with banter between Vargas and Thompson, but today there was only Jaya’s own thinking to occupy her mind.
Jaya interrupted the silence. “Alpha team, report.”
“On my final sweep.” Vargas’s voice was still brash, though without her usual swagger.
“I’ve checked all the floors,” Thompson confirmed. “On three now with Azima.”
“This hospital’s data security is a fucking joke.”
Jaya couldn’t help a smile. That would be Sal. His sharp edges hadn’t softened at all in the ten years she had served with him.
“I take it you’ll be done soon, then?” she replied drily.
“Download in progress,” Sal said. “We’ll have all the automated data, but I’ll be shocked if anyone in this hospital made any notes once the crowds rolled in, and considering they were sick, too…”
He paused, and Jaya finished sealing up the sample bag while she waited. Long gaps in the conversation were also typical of Sal. She could picture him now, his dark brown eyes narrowed at the screen in front of him, his previous train of thought suspended indefinitely like a hung code until he finished whatever had distracted him.
“So we won’t have much in the way of on-the-ground description, but we should have lots of data to process. Could find a pattern,” Sal concluded. “I’ve got everything I need.”
“Time to go, then,” Jaya said. “Bravo team is waiting for us.” She switched to the master channel. “Avalon, this is Alpha One. Mission accomplished, all participants accounted for. Bravo team is at the RP and Alpha team is en route. Requesting exfil.”
“Lieutenant Lupo is on her way in the shuttle, Alpha One.” It was the voice of the Avalon’s captain, Peter Armstrong, warm and determined. “We’re expecting you. Come on home.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
The rendezvous point was half a kilometer outside the capital, but Arcadian Gardens was a tiny agricultural colony, and calling the capital a city would be generous. It spanned less than two kilometers north to south, and was even shorter east to west. Its population was a few thousand, nearly all humans. While other colonies boasted thriving multi-species populations, agricultural colonies like this one weren’t a draw for residents from any of the other civilizations of the galaxy. Outside the capital, agricultural compounds swept along the curve of the planet, and the remaining thirty million citizens of Arcadian Gardens lived there, managing the crops that they exported to richer colonies and stations in the United Human Nations.
Or used to. Preliminary sweeps showed a cold and desolate countryside. No heat signatures. No living beings, human or livestock. Not anymore.
It hadn’t been all that different from the colony where Jaya had spent her teen years. Her gut tightened, and she had the sudden urge to call her uncles.
They reached the rendezvous point in short time. Bravo team stood in the wheat field, four figures shrouded in bulky suits, stark against the daylight in this empty world.
“Approaching RP,” Jaya announced.
“We see you, Alpha team,” Rhodes replied. “Ready to go home?”
“Very.”
A rush of air buffeted their suits as the shuttle descended. The wheat in the field compressed and rippled — the only motion they had seen in hours — as Lieutenant Linh Lupo brought the shuttle gently down, opening the airlock aperture.
All eight of them filed in and the doors closed. Jaya blinked against the dimness of the airlock after the bright light outside. A gentle hiss announced that the decontamination procedure had begun, and they waited patiently until the warning lights above the door flashed from red to green. Still, they peeled off their external suits in grim silence, turning them inside out and stuffing them in a biohazard box. Rhodes sealed the box and stowed it before anyone even moved towards the door controls.
The faint green glow of the controls shone on Rhodes’s dark face, cheekbones and cropped hair sharp against the backlight. His characteristic soberness seemed softer in this close, quiet space, and his strike team — Shea, Mukherjee, and Martel — stood close by his side. Thompson, in contrast, looked queasy and pale in the cool light, and his eyes were bloodshot and hard. He didn’t shrug off Vargas’s hand on his shoulder when she approached him, but he closed his eyes. A wave of nausea passed over Jaya, the fear and brokenness rising momentarily to the surface. When she looked at Sal, he was already staring back at her, a dark eyebrow quirked up and his curls askew from the suit’s helmet.
She took a deep breath. It would do her team no good to see her weakness. She squashed it down and into its box, sealing it as tightly as she could.
Rhodes activated the door controls and they stepped through as the inertia tugged down on them. Lupo was taking the shuttle back up to the Avalon.
“Locking our approach,” Lupo announced, sliding out of her seat as the automated controls took over. She tossed her long black braid over her shoulder and joined them in the awkward circle they had formed, everyone standing just a little closer than normal, hesitant to break the contact. Lupo reached for Vargas’s hand, squeezing it tightly.
“We’ll be home soon,” Rhodes said.
“Then what?” Shea asked, their dark eyes flitting between Rhodes and Jaya.
“We find a way to help,” Jaya replied. “We pick up the pieces.”
The conference room of the Avalon was barely large enough to hold the two strike teams and their commanding officers. Four naval officers and four marines, and the room still felt small with the eight of them assembled in their service dress grays. They had barely even had time to shower and change once the samples and equipment were properly cleaned, filed, and stowed, and Jaya’s still-damp hair was gathered in a low bun.
“This is the single most pointless part of our job,” Sal grumbled. He leaned his lanky body back in his chair, shaking unruly dark curls—just barely within regulation length—out of his eyes.
Jaya just chuckled. Back on the Avalon, away from the devastation they had seen below, clean and in fresh clothing, the oppressive weight of what had happened was already beginning to lift, and a sense of normalcy was returning. The routine could be both soothing and frustrating. And debriefs could feel stuffy and pointless, for a group of people who preferred working to talking, but she accepted them as an occupational hazard.
“You don’t have to pretend to like this,” he said, responding to her laugh. “You’re Armstrong’s golden child even without sucking up.”
“If you’re any indication, attitude is not what wins promotions around here,” she said.
Sal opened his mouth, but before he could respond, Armstrong and Tully entered the room and the small assembly of naval officers and marines stood at attention. All conversation died out instantaneously at the arrival of their commanding officer.
Captain Peter Armstrong had been at the helm of the Avalon since before Jaya had graduated from the Naval Academy, and Commander Tully Coolidge had come aboard the ship as his second-in-command just a few months ago. Armstrong surveyed the crew with calm blue eyes shining bright in a weathered brown face, his broad shoulders rising above most of the personnel. Tully strolled behind him, his posture less stately, gray streaking his short, fine hair. He winked at Jaya and Sal when he met their eyes. Jaya suppressed a smile at the small scoffing noise Sal made in response.
Since his arrival, Tully had tried to connect with the crew by putting on a fun-loving uncle persona to undercut the gravitas of Armstrong’s steady leadership. It was a frankly feeble attempt. He always seemed to be playing at something, but Jaya could sense a sharp edge behind it. Like Armstrong, Tully didn’t miss anything, but unlike the captain, he mimed looking the other way.
But his attitude had a way of boosting the morale of the team. Perhaps she was just too deep in the counterintelligence game to trust easily. So she returned his wink with a mild smile.
Armstrong faced the crowded room, his brow furrowed.
“Preliminary reports from the Shambhala on Presnovodnyy and the Atlantis on Yangtze put estimated casualties at two-point-two million, but that figure is still rising. The Kilimanjaro has been rerouted to Amazonia, but we expect to find the same thing there.”
Jaya exchanged a glance with Sal. Valhalla-class frigates like the Avalon, Atlantis, and Shambhala were crewed with special IRC—Intelligence, Reconnaissance, and Counterterrorism—squads in order to be able to quickly gather information and perform precision strikes. Dispatching an Everest-class cruiser like the Kilimanjaro meant they had truly been caught off-guard.
There was a hushed murmur in the room—somewhere between resignation and empathy—and the cold wash of shock began to thaw. A new twinge followed, this one of guilt. There had been so many deaths like this, and each time the news was a blow. But the galaxy always returned to its usual patterns and ways. There was an inevitability to it, and also a pragmatism: life could not continue if it were frozen in perpetual grief. But Jaya wondered how much was lost every time they were able to turn their heads away from the tragedy and toward the daily work.
At least she could say she was working toward the end of this violence.
“I received new orders from Rear Admiral Reid,” Armstrong continued. “Now, I know this last assignment was very long, and we are all in need of some shore leave. But the timing is not in our hands, I’m afraid. The Avalon and its company has been tasked with investigating this new group responsible for the attacks, the so-called Sons of Priam.” He gave a sympathetic smile. “We’ll still get our break, but it will be a short one. We dock at Argos Station at oh-seven-hundred hours the day after tomorrow for two days of shore leave. In that time, the Shambhala, Atlantis, and Kilimanjaro will send their detailed reports from the colonies to HQ and we’ll have something to work with. All personnel should be prepared to report back to the ship forty-eight hours after we dock.”
He glanced around the room, making eye contact with every one of the officers. Then he nodded to Jaya. “Lieutenant Commander Mill, you will supervise the drills tonight.”
“Understood.”
“Dismissed,” Tully said crisply.
The rustling of starched uniforms and the murmured conversations of the officers dwindled as the room emptied.
“Well, it’s nice to know the latest threat to the galaxy is just the stuff of nightmares as usual,” Sal said, his expression wry.
“That video was awful,” Jaya said. “Something about the voice unsettles me.”
“The voice of a psychopathic mass murderer? I can’t imagine why that would be unsettling. I, personally, would like to listen to that video before bed every night because it soothes me.”
Jaya laughed at his mocking tone. “Okay. Mystery solved.”
“What would you do without me?” Sal linked arms with Jaya.
“Oh, that reminds me,” she said. “My palm drive is acting up. I was using the heat signature sweep a lot down there, and now I’m getting an alert of some sort.”
“What does the alert say?” Sal asked as they veered into the IT office and headed to his desk in the back corner of the room.
“Something something system something,” she replied, perching herself on the desk.
“Your attention to detail never ceases to amaze me.”
“Oh, you’re only pissed ‘cause I saved your ass on that recon last week.”
He flashed her a wicked grin: “You better watch what you say, or you might find your palm drive starts malfunctioning in… interesting ways.”
His threat was hollow, and she returned it with a gentle shove. He pulled out a data pad and connected to the signal from Jaya’s palm drive, then gestured for her to enter her passcode. A holographic display rose up over the tablet as his hands danced across the screen, running diagnostics.
Sal was all fine lines, tall and slender. The strength he had built in his military training never outshone the intellectualism he was so proud of. His shoulders rounded as his gaze fixed intently on the task at hand, and if she didn’t know him better, she would assume he had already dropped the train of their conversation.
She chuckled. “Okay, truce. I’ll keep saving your ass if you keep fixing my gadgets.”
“Hey, I’ve won a few rounds solidly against you in training.”
He resumed his focus on the software, flying through various screens she hadn’t even known existed in the operations menu of the palm drive.
To her, the palm drive was just a tool she used in combat. To Sal, it was a secret world full of information. She had no idea what was going on in his head when he zoned in like that, but she definitely knew that she didn’t speak the same language as Sal and the machines.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
She didn’t have to ask about what.
“It’s fucked up,” she said. “I want to know who this guy is. He’s being cryptic about his agenda. All we have is his proclamations of general corruption and a vague reference to the founding of Rome.”
Sal looked up from his work, momentarily distracted. “Wait, what about the founding of Rome? How did I miss that?”
“It’s just some things he said in the video. Fortune befriends the bold, To tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free. They’re quotes from the Aeneid. Priam was the king of Troy. They’re intentionally referencing the birth of a new empire out of the ashes of this one.”
“Oh,” Sal said. He lowered his voice, ensuring their words wouldn’t carry across the room to the other officers at their desks. “This something you got from your mom?”
“Yeah,” Jaya replied, her voice lowered as well. “She said its themes ran deep in human literature. It’s part of our culture. It was important to her.”
Sal nodded and dropped the subject. It was one of the reasons they got along so well. He was the only person who knew a few details of her childhood, and in exchange for her candor, he gave her privacy. Sal was also the only person she knew aside from herself who could keep a personal secret, if he had motive. In a ship as small as the Avalon, gossip was a favorite sport, and Sal a champion competitor, but her secrets traveled from her lips to Sal’s ears, where they remained locked inside him.
The ones she told him, at least.
“There,” he said, shutting down the data pad and unplugging it from her palm drive. “Good as new until you break it again.”
She hopped off his desk in a smooth motion.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re right—I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d be buried in broken technology with your track record,” he laughed. “Please try to remember that it’s a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.”
“Oh, look at you getting fancy with your words. I’ll be careful with it, I promise.”
He sighed and shook his head, waving her away. Her palm drive beeped, indicating a new message. She brought up the interface.
You are destined for more.
That was it. Five words. No subject. Sent from an address that appeared to be no more than random numbers.
She stared at the message, suspicion thrumming in her veins. Who would send her this message, and how in the galaxy did it get past the Navy’s stringent security protocols?
“What is it?” Sal asked.
She realized that she had stopped in her tracks and was now standing in the middle of the room, interrupting the flow of traffic. For a brief moment, she considered showing the message to Sal, but something made her stop. She closed the palm drive and headed toward the door.
“Training at eighteen hundred ship time,” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t forget!”
“I never forget,” he called back.
“This is the single most pointless part of our job,” Sal grumbled. He leaned his lanky body back in his chair, shaking unruly dark curls—just barely within regulation length—out of his eyes.
Jaya just chuckled. Back on the Avalon, away from the devastation they had seen below, clean and in fresh clothing, the oppressive weight of what had happened was already beginning to lift, and a sense of normalcy was returning. The routine could be both soothing and frustrating. And debriefs could feel stuffy and pointless, for a group of people who preferred working to talking, but she accepted them as an occupational hazard.
“You don’t have to pretend to like this,” he said, responding to her laugh. “You’re Armstrong’s golden child even without sucking up.”
“If you’re any indication, attitude is not what wins promotions around here,” she said.
Sal opened his mouth, but before he could respond, Armstrong and Tully entered the room and the small assembly of naval officers and marines stood at attention. All conversation died out instantaneously at the arrival of their commanding officer.
Captain Peter Armstrong had been at the helm of the Avalon since before Jaya had graduated from the Naval Academy, and Commander Tully Coolidge had come aboard the ship as his second-in-command just a few months ago. Armstrong surveyed the crew with calm blue eyes shining bright in a weathered brown face, his broad shoulders rising above most of the personnel. Tully strolled behind him, his posture less stately, gray streaking his short, fine hair. He winked at Jaya and Sal when he met their eyes. Jaya suppressed a smile at the small scoffing noise Sal made in response.
Since his arrival, Tully had tried to connect with the crew by putting on a fun-loving uncle persona to undercut the gravitas of Armstrong’s steady leadership. It was a frankly feeble attempt. He always seemed to be playing at something, but Jaya could sense a sharp edge behind it. Like Armstrong, Tully didn’t miss anything, but unlike the captain, he mimed looking the other way.
But his attitude had a way of boosting the morale of the team. Perhaps she was just too deep in the counterintelligence game to trust easily. So she returned his wink with a mild smile.
Armstrong faced the crowded room, his brow furrowed.
“Preliminary reports from the Shambhala on Presnovodnyy and the Atlantis on Yangtze put estimated casualties at two-point-two million, but that figure is still rising. The Kilimanjaro has been rerouted to Amazonia, but we expect to find the same thing there.”
Jaya exchanged a glance with Sal. Valhalla-class frigates like the Avalon, Atlantis, and Shambhala were crewed with special IRC—Intelligence, Reconnaissance, and Counterterrorism—squads in order to be able to quickly gather information and perform precision strikes. Dispatching an Everest-class cruiser like the Kilimanjaro meant they had truly been caught off-guard.
There was a hushed murmur in the room—somewhere between resignation and empathy—and the cold wash of shock began to thaw. A new twinge followed, this one of guilt. There had been so many deaths like this, and each time the news was a blow. But the galaxy always returned to its usual patterns and ways. There was an inevitability to it, and also a pragmatism: life could not continue if it were frozen in perpetual grief. But Jaya wondered how much was lost every time they were able to turn their heads away from the tragedy and toward the daily work.
At least she could say she was working toward the end of this violence.
“I received new orders from Rear Admiral Reid,” Armstrong continued. “Now, I know this last assignment was very long, and we are all in need of some shore leave. But the timing is not in our hands, I’m afraid. The Avalon and its company has been tasked with investigating this new group responsible for the attacks, the so-called Sons of Priam.” He gave a sympathetic smile. “We’ll still get our break, but it will be a short one. We dock at Argos Station at oh-seven-hundred hours the day after tomorrow for two days of shore leave. In that time, the Shambhala, Atlantis, and Kilimanjaro will send their detailed reports from the colonies to HQ and we’ll have something to work with. All personnel should be prepared to report back to the ship forty-eight hours after we dock.”
He glanced around the room, making eye contact with every one of the officers. Then he nodded to Jaya. “Lieutenant Commander Mill, you will supervise the drills tonight.”
“Understood.”
“Dismissed,” Tully said crisply.
The rustling of starched uniforms and the murmured conversations of the officers dwindled as the room emptied.
“Well, it’s nice to know the latest threat to the galaxy is just the stuff of nightmares as usual,” Sal said, his expression wry.
“That video was awful,” Jaya said. “Something about the voice unsettles me.”
“The voice of a psychopathic mass murderer? I can’t imagine why that would be unsettling. I, personally, would like to listen to that video before bed every night because it soothes me.”
Jaya laughed at his mocking tone. “Okay. Mystery solved.”
“What would you do without me?” Sal linked arms with Jaya.
“Oh, that reminds me,” she said. “My palm drive is acting up. I was using the heat signature sweep a lot down there, and now I’m getting an alert of some sort.”
“What does the alert say?” Sal asked as they veered into the IT office and headed to his desk in the back corner of the room.
“Something something system something,” she replied, perching herself on the desk.
“Your attention to detail never ceases to amaze me.”
“Oh, you’re only pissed ‘cause I saved your ass on that recon last week.”
He flashed her a wicked grin: “You better watch what you say, or you might find your palm drive starts malfunctioning in… interesting ways.”
His threat was hollow, and she returned it with a gentle shove. He pulled out a data pad and connected to the signal from Jaya’s palm drive, then gestured for her to enter her passcode. A holographic display rose up over the tablet as his hands danced across the screen, running diagnostics.
Sal was all fine lines, tall and slender. The strength he had built in his military training never outshone the intellectualism he was so proud of. His shoulders rounded as his gaze fixed intently on the task at hand, and if she didn’t know him better, she would assume he had already dropped the train of their conversation.
She chuckled. “Okay, truce. I’ll keep saving your ass if you keep fixing my gadgets.”
“Hey, I’ve won a few rounds solidly against you in training.”
He resumed his focus on the software, flying through various screens she hadn’t even known existed in the operations menu of the palm drive.
To her, the palm drive was just a tool she used in combat. To Sal, it was a secret world full of information. She had no idea what was going on in his head when he zoned in like that, but she definitely knew that she didn’t speak the same language as Sal and the machines.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
She didn’t have to ask about what.
“It’s fucked up,” she said. “I want to know who this guy is. He’s being cryptic about his agenda. All we have is his proclamations of general corruption and a vague reference to the founding of Rome.”
Sal looked up from his work, momentarily distracted. “Wait, what about the founding of Rome? How did I miss that?”
“It’s just some things he said in the video. Fortune befriends the bold, To tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free. They’re quotes from the Aeneid. Priam was the king of Troy. They’re intentionally referencing the birth of a new empire out of the ashes of this one.”
“Oh,” Sal said. He lowered his voice, ensuring their words wouldn’t carry across the room to the other officers at their desks. “This something you got from your mom?”
“Yeah,” Jaya replied, her voice lowered as well. “She said its themes ran deep in human literature. It’s part of our culture. It was important to her.”
Sal nodded and dropped the subject. It was one of the reasons they got along so well. He was the only person who knew a few details of her childhood, and in exchange for her candor, he gave her privacy. Sal was also the only person she knew aside from herself who could keep a personal secret, if he had motive. In a ship as small as the Avalon, gossip was a favorite sport, and Sal a champion competitor, but her secrets traveled from her lips to Sal’s ears, where they remained locked inside him.
The ones she told him, at least.
“There,” he said, shutting down the data pad and unplugging it from her palm drive. “Good as new until you break it again.”
She hopped off his desk in a smooth motion.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re right—I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d be buried in broken technology with your track record,” he laughed. “Please try to remember that it’s a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.”
“Oh, look at you getting fancy with your words. I’ll be careful with it, I promise.”
He sighed and shook his head, waving her away. Her palm drive beeped, indicating a new message. She brought up the interface.
You are destined for more.
That was it. Five words. No subject. Sent from an address that appeared to be no more than random numbers.
She stared at the message, suspicion thrumming in her veins. Who would send her this message, and how in the galaxy did it get past the Navy’s stringent security protocols?
“What is it?” Sal asked.
She realized that she had stopped in her tracks and was now standing in the middle of the room, interrupting the flow of traffic. For a brief moment, she considered showing the message to Sal, but something made her stop. She closed the palm drive and headed toward the door.
“Training at eighteen hundred ship time,” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t forget!”
“I never forget,” he called back.
