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

  “I’m sorry, Micah, she’s upset, she doesn’t –”

  “She does, Ramires, and we both know it. And she’s right.”

  Ramires seized Micah’s shoulders. “If you hadn’t agreed with the Tla Beth ruling, we wouldn’t even be standing here today, and Gabriel would never have been born.”

  Micah felt hollow, as if his innards had been sucked out, as if he might collapse, like walls of empty skin. Only Sandy could do this to him. He stared towards the cottage, then tore his eyesight back to Ramires, and collected himself. “But she’s wrong about the other part. I won’t deny the Youngbloods that right. When the time comes...” An idea struck him. “We have to train them, Ramires.”

  Ramires shrugged. “I do train them, you know that. I teach them Sentinel fighting arts every day.”

  “No, more than that.” The idea took flight in his head. “Battle simulations, space warfare…”

  That was how the annual duel had started. But still the Youngbloods weren’t ready. Micah knew that these would-be avengers would rush off at the first opportunity to attack the Alicians, and get themselves killed. The Ossyrians hadn’t managed to breed hubris out of the children’s DNA; which brought him back to the impending contest, and the last lesson he could give Gabriel, one that might save the boy’s life. A light breeze whispering up the mountain told him evening was approaching. Micah already knew he was cutting it fine; it started in ten minutes.

  He turned and squinted westwards towards the adjacent valley where Shimsha lay, humanity’s refuge for its first two years on Ourshiwann – renamed Esperia – before the spiders who’d lain dormant for a millennium hatched and reclaimed their home. The spiders hadn’t been violent about it, just moved back as inexorably as a tide. No one wanted to stick around after the first night of their return, and besides, Esperantia had been ready, just. Now the alabaster spider city, with its trapezoidal buildings like upside-down cake moulds, and its ivory minarets, bustled with metre-high, four-legged spiders. Micah could just make out a few spiders in the city, milling about, going about their business, whatever that was. Their black, furry, headless bodies were circumscribed by a jagged band that fluoresced rainbow hues. It was how they communicated, and since the band was three-sixty degrees, any spider within sight could see what any other spider was ‘saying’. Blake, the only human allowed to live in Shimsha, and the only one they trusted, had pointed out that the spiders never lied, never deceived each other. How could they? Micah wondered if humanity would have been better off with such a mode of communication, especially since he was about to perpetrate a lie.

  Shimsha glimmered, its light display twinkling in the approaching dusk. Micah wondered what the spiders would do if war came, whether they would fight this time. He doubted it.

  His resident pressed, initiating a nagging buzz inside his skull, and so Micah got up, dusted off his trousers, and headed down the slope towards the dome.

  As Micah neared one of the side entrances, he spied one of Esperantia’s staunch citizens, Albert Schwartz, gaunt and stiff as if walking to attention, but still strong for a sixty year old. Albert cut directly across Micah’s path, blocking his route. This wasn’t Micah’s first encounter with Albert, and as usual, he guessed it wasn’t going to be pleasant. Micah’s resident pressed.

  “Good day, Mr. President,” Albert said.

  “Mr. Schwartz. Can I help you? I’m running a little late.”

  “You don’t have children, do you, Mr. President?”

  It was a rhetorical question, as they both knew, but Micah shook his head anyway, sensing what was coming.

  Albert’s lips squeezed together, almost white. Then he spat it out, while staring at the distant blue mountains. “Do you know what it’s like to have your own daughter look at you as if…” He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. “As if,” he continued, “you’re some kind of dumb animal to be pitied?” He glanced up at Micah, his face flushed.

  Micah shook his head again, then spoke quietly. “No, Mr. Schwarz, I do not.”

  Albert swallowed. “That’s not the end of it. After pity, which usually comes when they’re aged about ten, well, by twelve they lose respect.”

  “Mr. Schwartz, I’m sure –”

  “You hold your tongue, Mr. President. You hear me out!”

  Micah nodded. This had happened before. It could be any of a hundred parents in Albert’s place, standing there, trembling with bottled-up frustration verging on desperation.

  “Their eyes go cold, indifferent. Crushes our hearts! My wife’s…” His voice cracked. He closed his eyes again.

  Micah took a risk, and spoke. “Your daughter Virginia is probably the brightest of all the Genners, maybe even more so than Gabriel. She’s solved more technical and engineering problems on Esperia than I can remember. I can’t pretend to know how you and your wife feel, but… I’m not blind to it, Mr. Schwartz, and I wish with all my heart I could change it. But you should be proud of her.” He lowered his voice. “God knows, I am.”

  Albert stood, chest heaving, head bowed. He gave Micah a sideways glance. “You know why you keep getting re-elected?”

  Micah smiled. “If I did, I would do something about it.”

  “It’s because you’re the only one who can win these damned duels.”

  Micah raised an eyebrow.

  Albert walked up to Micah and grabbed him by the arm, with a surprisingly strong grip. “You go in there, and you win, Mr President, because it’s one of the few things that enables us normal folk, us Steaders as our children call us, to retain some dignity.” Albert let go, as if realising how hard he held Micah, then sagged, the anger drained out of him, making him seem older, more fragile.

  Micah touched him gently on the shoulder. “I’ll do my best, Sir, for all of us, Steaders and Genners alike.”

  Micah noticed his resident had given up warning him how late he was. He broke into a run.

  The arena was brim-full of people in tan clothes with brightly coloured scarves and hats to stave off the chill autumn breeze outside. Murmurings subsided as he headed straight for the central stage, shaped like an old-style boxing ring. Two high-backed wooden chairs faced each other; one was empty, Colonel Vasquez standing bolt upright behind it, with his shock of white hair and eagle-sharp eyes. Gabriel waited in the other, fingers loosely curled around the ends of the arm-rests, calm, confident, his blond hair reaching square shoulders, a mauve maze tattooed around his left eye and temple. He had a presence – with Gabriel sitting in it, the chair became a throne.

  Just below the stage, on the far side of the ‘ring’, fifteen other Youngbloods sat, headsets in place, already immersed in the simulation. Above the ring a darkened cylindrical holoscreen glittered with stars, awaiting game activation.

  Micah overheard a Genner somewhere in the front rows of the audience, speaking in Hremsta, the fast-click dialect that only Genners – and Micah via his resident – understood: “Twenty seconds before you forfeit the match, Mr. Asshole President.”

  Micah shrugged it off, leapt up to the stage and dropped into the seat facing Gabriel. He nodded to Vasquez. “Ready.”

  Vasquez planted the headset on Micah, clicked the trodes into active mode, then leaned forward towards Micah’s ear. “Are you sure you don’t want any human backup this time?”

  Micah shook his head. This time he preferred to have simulated human generals and fighter pilots, because he’d need them to obey tough orders without hesitation. He met Gabriel’s almost black eyes head on, resisting the urge to look at Sandy, sitting in the front row just behind her son. He and Gabriel both raised their right hands, the crowd hushing. The rule was, the first one to blink had to start the game. Within thirty seconds, the crowd began stamping their feet to a slow drumbeat rhythm, gradually getting faster. Still Micah held Gabriel’s eyes. Whistles flew forth from the crowd, cheering, shouting. Genners chanted Gabriel’s name, all the time his face not showing the tiniest crack of emotion. Micah knew he could win this part
of the game courtesy of his nannites, but instead he tilted his head back, raised his hand a little higher to a cheer from the crowd, let a smile spread across his face, nodded slightly to Gabriel, and slammed his hand down on the start button.

  Micah found himself on the bridge of an Axion Class Battlestar, orbiting dust-brown Esperia with its Spartan patches of malachite – the great lakes – overflows from the planet’s underground oceans. A small patch of light indicated Esperantia and Shimsha. Micah winced – they looked so fragile from up here, such easy targets.

  His data-screens told him he had six Blaze Class Destroyers, a hundred single-man Reapers, and four thousand remote Shuriken drones at his disposal. Defence, he gathered. Which meant Gabriel would be leading a simulated attack on Esperia. Micah eschewed the standard strategy of arranging his resources in a defence grid around the planet and moon; Gabriel was far too smart. In such a tactical battle, with Gabriel’s heightened reflexes, Micah would lose.

  “Long range,” he instructed the bridge comp, then studied the unfolding hologram. Nothing. No sign of Gabriel and his genetically advanced crew. He knew people back in the dome could see avatars of him on the battle-bridge, Gabriel on his ship, wherever it was, and the general situation on a star-field map, along with a digital score of the number of remaining ships on both sides. Custom was for each opponent to talk through his thoughts, but Micah didn’t feel like talking today, and the taciturn Gabriel habitually flouted that particular tradition.

  Micah had anguished for months over what he was about to do, had almost decided against it. He despised any form of cheating. But he knew that politically – a word he grew to hate more with each year of his Presidency – he could not afford to lose this match; it would destabilize everything just when they were most vulnerable. Besides, the information from the program would only give him an edge, nothing more. Gabriel was still a formidable opponent. Micah instructed his resident to activate the search program he’d installed the night before into the simulation software, using Presidential access codes, and waited.

  Within seconds a set of coordinates appeared, and Micah did all the necessary calcs in his head, assisted by his resident. Leaning forward in his command chair, he tapped in a set of commands, then sat back and steepled his fingers, a habit he’d borrowed from Blake. Two of his destroyers peeled off and took up position on the other side of the larger of Esperia’s two moons. The other four destroyers blinked bright then vanished into transit, the arrowhead-shaped Reapers and three quarters of the Shuriken – spherical drones spiked with laser turrets – following in their wake. The remaining Shuriken streaked out of Esperia’s system.

  He imagined the consternation in the dome; it appeared he’d left Esperia almost defenceless, and he couldn’t know from which direction Gabriel would attack. Except that he did. He stared at the screens, then walked up to the bridge’s starmap holo and moved inside it, so that his eyes were close to a particular star, as if inspecting it. Micah knew he was giving the game away. But he’d decided that if he was going to cheat, he was going to be honest about it. He wondered if Petra was out there somewhere, watching, and whether she would hate him for cheating, or, being a Genner, be impressed. Reluctantly he realized that of all the people who would judge his performance tonight, her opinion – and Sandy’s – mattered most.

  * * *

  Petra leaned against the dome’s rear wall, hands sunk into dungaree pockets, observing everything from a distance. With her genned eyesight she had no need to be up front, easily able to pick out the stars and the expressions on Micah or Gabriel’s closed-eyed faces. She gazed across the seated crowd, all of them bent forward, eager to see the outcome; a lot was riding on this particular game. As for her, she didn’t care who won, but she didn’t want either of them to lose. She switched back to the holo-screen.

  Gabriel’s small attack force of sixteen ships arranged themselves into formation, his hundred-metre-long, javelin-shaped Starpiercer in front, encircled by three waves of five single-pilot, delta wing Hawks. The overall effect was of a skeletal bullet. The ships winked out as they entered Transpace on an attack vector towards Esperia that would take a minimum of two jumps.

  Inside the dome, chatter subsided as everyone watched Micah’s avatar saunter over to where Gabriel’s fleet had been moments before. Four Youngbloods rose to their sandaled feet, shouting first in their own language, Hremsta, then in English. But for once the Steaders needed no translation.

  “Cheat! He knew Gabriel’s location! He should forfeit the match!”

  Petra felt the temperature rise in the throng. She studied Micah’s simulated face. He’s doing this on purpose. A crooked smile spread across her lips. “Sneaky, Uncle,” she said to no one in particular. Her smile faded. “Mum would have been amused.” But she noticed a couple of the Steaders were now on their feet, too, shouting back.

  Brandt, one of her fellow Genners near the front row, a Youngblood nicknamed ‘Hulk’ due to his size, caught her eye. She used the face-code Genners had developed as kids so they could communicate without their Steader parents knowing, to tell Brandt to cool the Genners down. Brandt gave the barest of nods, then turned back to his friends, clicked a command, and his colleagues silenced themselves in an instant, regaining their seats. The two Steaders who’d got up looked pleased with themselves, and with much fuss regained their seats.

  The bridge shot of Micah receded to reveal an open section of space, halfway to Esperia. Gabriel’s golden attack fleet burst into the space just as two of Micah’s vermillion Blaze destroyers popped out of transit and opened fire. Petra had studied enough of transit hyper-maths to know that two ships on a converging vector would both be pushed back into normal space-time by their bow waves nullifying the warp effect, like two waves colliding and cancelling each other out. But what was Micah playing at? In a straight, evenly matched fight, Genners always won against Steaders.

  Gabriel’s fifteen Hawks dodged the much larger Blaze destroyers’ particle beam sweeps, even when Micah’s simulated generals used coordinated lattices, but the Hawks couldn’t get close enough to fire. Petra figured it was a matter of time before one or two Hawks would be hit. But then Gabriel’s Starpiercer shot off at an angle, as if running away. One of the Blazes turned in pursuit, and Petra saw what was coming. “Nice one, Gabe,” she uttered under her breath, as his ship spun around and micro-jumped, evading the beams and punching straight through both destroyers’ hulls. Every Genner, Youngblood or not, was on their feet yelling and whooping. Through the melee, she regarded Micah again. He hardly followed the battle. What are you up to, Uncle?

  She sighed and walked forward. Small as she was, the runt in the Genner litter as she called herself to save everyone else the trouble, she made her way nimbly towards the front, a little to the side. She watched Gabriel’s beautiful face, calm as marble, blond locks tumbling down to his shoulders. Virginia, Gabriel’s tall, tawny-haired girlfriend, glanced in her direction, so Petra switched instead to staring at Sandy, Gabriel’s mother, and her partner Ramires. Though Sandy held Ramires’ hand throughout, and cheered along as Gabriel’s forces outwitted Micah’s, Sandy’s eyes often flicked towards Micah’s inert face. Although Petra was a natural at reading people, she couldn’t work out what was going on behind Sandy’s eyes.

  Gabriel’s ship and his Hawks winked out – not bothering to engage Micah’s foundering destroyers – for the last transit toward Esperia. She had no clue how Gabriel would face down an Axion Class Battleship with a Starpiercer, but knew he must have a good plan. His Hawks could take out the Reapers, even though they were outnumbered more than six to one.

  Petra’s gaze again swept over the expectant faces in the dome. Everyone knew what was hanging in the balance. Gabriel wanted to hunt down the Alicians as soon as Quarantine came down. Micah had said for years that they weren’t ready, but she’d heard that some of the Council members were wavering as the end of Quarantine approached. If Micah lost this simulation, there would be more defections
towards Gabriel’s ambitions, represented by Ramires in Council. Colonel Vasquez, the militia commander, would never vote against Micah, but others could be persuaded.

  She and her fellow Genners outstripped their human parents on every parameter and desperately sought their own destiny, their freedom. Technically, no parent could force their genned child to do anything, nor win any argument with them. But emotionally – though branded even by their parents as cold fish – the Genners needed the stamp of approval from their elders. Most of all, though few would care to admit it, they needed it from Micah, who had continued to win these matches against the odds each year. She’d tried to tell him the day before when she’d cornered him arriving for a Council meeting by the rear entrance...

  “I thought Presidents wanted to be seen, Uncle.”

  Micah frowned. “I’m late, Petra.”

  Leaning against the wall, Petra glanced at her antique watch, a present he’d given her on her eighteenth birthday three months ago. “Not quite, actually.”

  Micah shook his head. “What’s on your mind?”

  She jerked a thumb towards a poster next to her advertising the duel. “Why do you do this every year?”

  He sighed. “Ramires, Vasquez and I developed the simulated battles seven years ago to prepare you Genners for the eventuality of attack, either in Esperia’s system or in deep space.”

  “But why you? Why the President? Why not Vasquez, for example? He’s the military leader in the absence of Blake.”

  “Maybe –”

  “I’ll tell you what I think, Uncle.” She gave him a measured stare. “I think you don’t like being President anymore. I don’t blame you, no one would. This annual ritual isn’t exactly an election, but if you lost, it might get you off the hook eventually, maybe at the next poll.”