Eden's Revenge (Eden Paradox Book 3) Read online

  Silburn continued. “If the Q’Roth gave us some of their weapons, or left just a handful of warriors, or one of their flying machines, we could destroy our enemies.”

  No other Council Member spoke, all awaiting Alessia’s reply.

  “They have done this many times before, Silburn, as you know well, on a number of worlds. This is their way, and we do not question their methods. The automaton they have left behind will still be able to quicken those we judge worthy, but only at a rate of ten per year. We must be careful, bide our time and use stealth until the Q’Roth return. Remember that it is us, Silburn, whom they have chosen. We must determine a way to prevail, or else we are not worthy of their patronage.”

  But Silburn’s grim face remained set. “The Sentinels, backed by the soldiers of the Church of Rome, outnumber us ten to one. They use the witch hunt as a pretence, or any other excuse, to track us down and kill us. We have lost two hundred members of the Order this year alone, a third of our entire force! We cannot keep taking such losses. Soon they will trace us here.” He sat back, folding his silver-coated arms. “What is your grand plan, Alessia, now that our Masters are all but gone? I am sure we would all like to hear it.”

  All eyes fell on Alessia. She stood, leaned across the table on splayed fingers, russet locks tumbling over her shoulders, and glared at Silburn. “I sense you have a proposal, great warrior that you are.”

  Others shrank away from the table, knowing how quick to anger both of them were, but Silburn leaned back, the fire gone from his voice. “I have a strategy, but it requires great sacrifice.”

  Alessia righted herself. “I am listening.”

  Silburn spoke in an unusually quiet tone. He stared down at the gnarled table in front of him, for once not meeting Alessia’s eyes. “The only way to make them relax their efforts is to make them think they have won. They believe that if they cut off the head of the snake, the snake will die.”

  There were gasps in the chamber. Esma glanced from Silburn to Alessia. Surely she would not even consider it!

  Alessia glared, then spread her arms wide, addressing everyone, but keeping her eyes fixed on Silburn. “Get out, all of you, now! Leave us!”

  Esma fled along with the rest, but waited in the snow-bound arches under the meeting room. An hour later, when all the others had departed to the relative warmth of their rooms, Silburn walked out, head proud in his armour, and tramped across the courtyard’s fresh snow. Esma waited, but no one else stirred. For once the wind had stopped, leaving the prayer-wheels idle and silent. The castle’s pennants hung as if in mourning of what was to come. Quietly, Esma climbed back up the steps, wondering what she would find.

  Alessia sat alone at the great oak table, studying a wooden chessboard with carved pieces, the black queen lying down.

  Alessia looked up. “Ah, the gifted translator. Remind me your name, girl.”

  Esma bowed deeply, and told her, adding her honorific, as was appropriate.

  “Do you know this game, Sister Esma?”

  Esma nodded. “A little, Your Eminence.”

  Alessia gazed out the window into the far-off, approaching snowstorm. “What have you gleaned from their writing?”

  Esma thought carefully. She had been pondering the most recent document day and night. “That the heavens and time are curved. And this means that although the stars are very far away, our Masters can arrive in an instant.”

  Alessia turned back, giving her a searching look. “Bravo, Sister Esma.” She smiled, and picked up a pawn from the board, weighing it in her hands. “People think a pawn will always be a pawn, because they think the game is flat, in two dimensions. But it is also curved by time.” She nudged the fallen queen with a finger. “A queen cannot become a pawn. Her destiny is set. She is strong yet entrenched by her own power. But a pawn…” Alessia pursed her lips, deliberating. “Sit,” she said.

  Esma obliged, sitting next to Alessia, the chessboard in front of them.

  “Few truly understand that which you so easily grasp, Sister Esma.” She played her fingers across the king, bishops and rooks next to her fallen queen. “You see, all of these may fail, or may fall to the Sentinels. I need a pawn to stay in the background, to wait, just in case.”

  Esma stared at the pawn in Alessia’s hand. “Your Eminence, I –”

  “Five centuries hence, if your wits keep you alive that long, you will see our Masters again, and they will feed on the life energy of ordinary men, and take us to the stars, to a better future. Mankind is fatally flawed, and will be forgotten. Only we and our progeny will reach our true potential.” Her eyes gleamed momentarily. “We will travel to the very stars themselves! You understand this, don’t you Sister Esma?”

  Esma nodded.

  “Take this,” Alessia said, handing her the wooden queen. “Remember this day, but tell no one of it.” With that, she stood, carried the rest of the wooden set to the window, flung the pieces into the snowdrift outside, and stormed out.

  Six months later, a long and bloody battle ensued. Alessia was slain by the Sentinels, alongside fifty of her acolytes who defended her until the last. Alessia and her most trusted had attacked the Sentinel stronghold that held their locator device, and finally destroyed it, but during her escape she had been overwhelmed by hundreds of Sentinels.

  Sister Esma arrived the next day with Tilgar and a handful of others to retrieve their leader’s body from the battlefield, only to find it almost unrecognisable apart from strands of red hair. Esma spent hours gathering Alessia’s hacked-apart remains and assembled them into the semblance of a corpse. She wept openly during the cremation, and vowed vengeance, swearing never to forget nor forgive.

  Alessia’s sacrifice had of course been a gambit, one that worked. The Sentinels grew complacent and soft, believing they had won. But the Q’Roth-enhanced upgrades, Alessia’s chosen, lay low with Silburn, barely ageing, and never forgetting. They emerged a hundred years later with a savage pogrom against the Sentinels’ descendants, rooting out their hidden cells from the Russian Steppes all the way to the shores of Ireland, slaughtering nine tenths of their number in a single week of synchronized fury. Assassinations of key vassals in the Vatican in the same week forever broke the support of the Church of Rome. These and subsequent brutal murders were masked by a more virulent, genetically-concocted version of the plague still ravaging Europe, forever tipping the war’s balance in the Order’s favour, though enough escaped to be a constant, if greatly diminished, menace.

  Silburn was slain in one of the final raids on a Sentinel stronghold in Tibet, though those who found his body said he looked serene. Esma was not surprised – a king might sacrifice his queen, but will never be the same without her.

  In the spring of 1693, when the Order had shifted its headquarters to the New World to escape the lingering political influence of Rome, Tilgar was arrested as part of the trumped-up Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts, while he and Esma were recruiting for the Order. Esma had been in a distant village when Tilgar had been cornered by two Sentinels masquerading as witchfinders, backed up by a dozen local soldiers. Esma arrived just in time to be present in the seething throng gathered to watch him hang. Ordinary people yelled obscenities, threw rubbish at his limping, tortured and battered frame. His left arm was missing, a cut so clean just below the shoulder it could only have come from one of the fabled Sentinel nano-swords.

  Tilgar had been one of the best of their new breed she had ever known. He held his head high despite his injuries and time on the rack. He raised his remaining hand, and the crowd briefly grew quiet to hear and then spit on his last words. “Your time will come,” was all he said, looking over them, catching her eye at the end. The crowd, including men, women, children, young and old, screamed “Witch! Hang him! Torture him some more! He still has another arm, cut it off!” and other profanities she tried to close her ears to. One young man looked so much like her long-dead brother, Arnault, that Esma caught her breath. With spittle on his l
ips and an ugly snarl, he hurled abuse at Tilgar, as she knew Arnault would have done, and inside her the last vestige of her umbilical cord with humanity snapped.

  Hot tears streamed down her cheeks as she regarded Tilgar’s brave face for the last time. He could have taken half a dozen of the guards on the stage with him, but now more than ever the Order needed to snuff out the last public embers of this war, and so he accepted his fate. Her eyes met his, and she nodded the unspoken vow to avenge him. As his body twisted and turned at the end of a crude rope, bloating his face purple, she could barely breathe, long fingernails inside her fists digging so deep they drew blood. Esma wanted to kill all those cheering, stinking peasants with her bare hands, not only the two Sentinels masquerading as witch-finders, who she dispatched the following summer.

  That year was the turning point for her, when she saw how the Q’Roth classification of ordinary people as Level Three – galactic weeds that would never be fit for Grid Society, instead ripe for culling – was right and just. Humanity’s future was a dead end. Ordinary men would wage war and kill and violate each other for all eternity. More likely, men would annihilate all life once they developed the type of weapons she had read about in Q’Roth scripture, weapons that could raise the heat of the sun on Earth itself. No, the only possible future lay with the brothers and sisters of the Order of Alessia, later to be called Alicians, augmented by their Q’Roth patrons. Alicians were neither fractious nor small-minded, and worked together tirelessly toward a common goal – their salvation at the hands of the Q’Roth, deliverance from this flawed world to a new one, and a better way of life. Helping the Q’Roth to cull humanity would only bring forward mankind’s inevitable demise.

  As time passed, the balance of evidence against humanity accrued in her mind. By the nineteenth century, the Order’s numbers had swelled, and they had a stronger foothold, subtly influencing many political decisions. The Alicians fomented wars to keep mankind off-balance and divided in collective mind and spirit. However, individuals began to appear amongst the normal population, showing great intellect. This had always been a concern – that humanity was beginning to produce Level Four specimens – Leonardo, Galileo and others had until that time been statistical outliers. Now, a clear trend emerged of new men and women with genius potential, and the Alicians set about finding them, detecting them through universities and learned societies. Some were recruited, but most were unreceptive to Alician ideology and became the unfortunate victims of accidents or strange illnesses. A few inevitably slipped through the net, Darwin one of the most dangerous.

  Esma and others in the High Council realised mankind was nearing its evolutionary ‘cusp’, when it could actually advance on its own from its dismal Level Three status. The surviving and greatly weakened Sentinels grasped it too, and tried to find and protect such individuals. If another visitor from the faraway galactic society she now knew as the Grid were to come and re-evaluate the human race, and found evidence of the rising frequency of such individuals, the planned and Grid-approved Q’Roth cull would be questioned, postponed, perhaps even cancelled.

  That was when Esma and other Council members came up with the strategy of world wars as a way of killing off large sections of young people. What better way to demonstrate the prospects of humanity, than peoples’ willingness to slaughter each other in their millions without question. It was so easy to incite fascism and hate, fanning the flames of man’s pathetic innate barbarism. Those few lone voices arguing against the atrocities and insanity of war were drowned out in an orgy of bloodletting. Esma, as other Alicians, relished the arrival of each new update of casualty statistics, almost unbelieving how well the wars went. At one point, Sister Esma and other Alicians actually had to rein in the world’s leaders to prevent mankind’s total annihilation. After all, the Alicians had to hold up their end of the bargain, ensuring that the newly hatched Q’Roth, upon their return, could harvest humanity.

  Once, Esma and a group of Alicians visited the aftermath of a First World War battlefield, thousands of bodies lying in poppy fields, some of the soldiers not yet dead from fatal wounds. One man called out to her, in agony, lying in a growing pool of his own blood. She stood above him, listening to his lamentable supplications, while she recalled the bravery of Tilgar and Alessia. Her lip curled in disgust. “You deserve to die,” she said, “all of you.” Esma placed the heel of her boot on his skull, and applied her weight until his inferior brain squeezed out onto the blood-soaked grass. This single act calmed her, but only momentarily. She would need many more deaths, billions, to quench her hatred: every last human. One thing she and Darwin had agreed upon years earlier was that evolution leads to complete eradication of mal-adapted species; irrevocable de-selection. There are no half-measures in nature, and no sentimentality. A new, superior breed displaces and eradicates an inferior one. That was the way of things.

  Many years later, while reading Einstein’s brilliant, if imperfect and ultimately flawed understanding of relativity, Esma realised something else about the curved nature of time. The Alician perspective, granted by their newfound longevity, was so different from normal men and women with their short lifespans. As centuries passed, she watched nations fight bloody wars – often catalysed by the Alicians to keep humanity off-balance – then generations later, become allies, friends even. Despite losing their loved ones and sons and daughters in battle, eventually they wanted their grandchildren to find peace. But those touched by the Q’Roth did not age appreciably, did not forget, and so never forgave. The faces of Alessia, Silburn, Tilgar and dozens of other fallen comrades called out to her every day, demanding retribution. And she would deliver it.

  By the twenty-first century humanity was where the Q’Roth needed them to be, hopelessly divided by politics and religion, and on their knees after a third world war that had finally made humanity averse to nuclear weapons and nanotechnology, the only two defences against the Q’Roth.

  Esma had risen slowly and stealthily through the ranks. When new Q’Roth hatchlings stirred on Eden in 2063, right on schedule, she had taken Alessia’s place. But she never accepted any honorific other than ‘Sister’; that is what Alessia had called her, and she wanted nothing more.

  2081: Savange, Alician Homeworld

  Sister Esma sat on the Bridge of the Crucible Class battleship as it undocked from Savange’s orbital tether. Twice she had come close to completely eradicating humanity. Two had stood in her way: Blake – a rook – and Micah, a pawn, but like her, one who had grown into something more. This time there would be no mistake. She would wipe the board clean once and for all, as soon as Quarantine came down around Esperia, their pathetic excuse for a world. Never mind the war raging across half the galaxy. As the plague had helped mask their revenge on the Sentinels centuries earlier, so the galactic invasion led by Qorall would hide her intended actions. Worlds fell every day. Who would miss another one? Her hand dipped into a recess in her cloak and clasped a small wooden figure whose edges had grown smooth. Soon, Alessia, soon.

  Eden’s Aliens & Artifacts

  Alicians – neo-human race genetically altered by the Q’Roth to increase intelligence, resilience and longevity. Alicians are named after Alessia, their founder, who brokered a deal with the Q’Roth in 1053 AD to prepare humanity for culling, and to eradicate Earth-based nuclear and nano-based weaponry, in exchange for genetic advancement and patronage. Alicians are Level Five, and are led by Sister Esma. Louise is an Alician renegade imbued with too much Q’Roth DNA.

  Dark Worms – leviathan-like creatures that live in the space between galaxies, feeding off both dark and normal energy sources. They are almost impossible to kill. Normally they are kept outside by the Galactic Barrier, which was breached by Qorall’s forces.

  Esperia – formerly Ourshiwann – the spider planet serving as mankind’s home after the fall of Earth and Eden, with only two major cities: human-occupied Esperantia, and spider-occupied Shimsha.

  Finchikta – Level Nine bird-like
creatures who administrate judicial affairs for the Tla Beth, e.g. during the trial of humanity in 2063.

  Genners – following the trial of humanity, prosecuted by the Alicians and the Q’Roth, mankind was quarantined on Esperia for its own protection and all children genetically upgraded to Level Four (with Level Five potential) by the Ossyrians. ‘Genners’ surpass their parents intellectually by the age of twelve.

  Grid – ring-shaped ultra-rapid transport hub that runs around the inner rim of the galaxy, for ease of commerce. Grid Society: established by the Kalarash ten million years ago, based on a scale of levels of intelligence running from one to nineteen, with Kalarash at the top. Mankind was initially graded Level Three.

  Hohash – intelligent artifacts resembling upright oval mirrors, designed by the Kalarash, known as ‘omnipaths’ due to their powerful perception, communication and recording abilities. Their true function is unknown.

  Kalarash – Level Nineteen beings believed to have left our galaxy. Only seven remain in the universe. Little is known about them. They are called ‘the Progenitors’ by many Grid species, as the Kalarash fostered civilisation in the galaxy, based on a strictly hierarchical intelligence-ranking system.