Dissonance: Aurora Renegades Book Two (Aurora Rhapsody 5) Read online

  * * *

  “THIS IS VERY…STRANGE,” Caleb muttered, shaking his head. He turned in a slow circle, eyes scanning the horizon as his brain tried to reconcile what he saw with a lifetime of memories.

  Untamed forest encroached all the way to the shore of Lake Fuori. Across the water, the forest picked up where it had left off, shrouding the opposite shore in deepening shades of pine. Not only was there no sign of civilization, there was no sign civilization had ever existed here. No broken slabs of stone or jutting beams of metal, no crumbled stairs or felled statues.

  And maybe it hadn’t. “Maybe humans never came to Seneca in this universe. With over twenty billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way, it’s entirely possible they never discovered it.”

  Alex kicked idly at the dirt, chuckling ruefully when a wave lapped at the shore and soaked her boot. “I’m beginning to think there’s simply no one here. We haven’t picked up any indication of a space-faring civilization on the longest-range scans, or of any life at all for that matter.”

  “Four hundred million years is a long time—in truth long enough to erode away visible vestiges of civilization. Left neglected, eventually even the most durable creations fade away.”

  “Four hundred million years from now we damn well better be a Kardashev Type III civilization, and such a high level of technology is easily detectable. So if there are or were humans here, their development went badly awry.”

  “Or they’ve already transformed into your beings of light.” He walked a few meters and located a fallen limb, then returned to the water’s edge and drew it through the water. “No bioluminescence. Could there genuinely be no life here at all? I suppose the passage of time can explain it—perhaps there was an extinction-level event at some point—but Seneca was teeming with native life when we colonized it. It’s peculiar.”

  Alex snorted. “ ‘Peculiar’ is the Metigens’ stock in trade. Right after wholesale slaughter.”

  “True.” He inhaled deeply. Though wilderness pervaded where a vibrant city should stand, in some small way it still felt like home. The air tasted of remembrances, of ghosts flitting just out of reach on the breeze.

  The Siyane hovered above the water a little way down the shore. There was no clearing near the lake wide enough to land, so they’d leapt off the end of the ramp and would have to climb back up to re-board.

  He grasped Alex’s hand in his. “Come on. There’s one more place I want to visit.”

  “Sure. Where is it?”

  “Up in the mountains to the north. It’s hard to describe…I’ll need to fly us there by sight.”

  Once he oriented himself properly, the outcropping wasn’t difficult to spot. Even on the Seneca he grew up on, this area was undeveloped and only lightly monitored by the Senecan Wilderness Service.

  In contrast to the lakeshore, here a wide clearing a few hundred meters away provided plenty of room to touch down.

  Alex donned a pullover while he grabbed his jacket, and they left the ship in Valkyrie’s capable hands.

  His gaze darted around in growing bewilderment as they trekked through the woods toward the ledge. “No, this is strange. It looks exactly the same. If I don’t overthink it, I could be convinced I was home.”

  “Did you spend a lot of time up here—the other ‘here’—growing up?”

  “As a teenager I did. The region I worked in during the summers included much of this mountain.”

  Her voice was soft. “With the elafali.”

  “Something tells me all the wildlife is missing, including elafali. A shame…I’d like for you to get to see one.”

  “When we go home, it’s a date. Still, this is beautiful.”

  “But not as beautiful as…” the trees thinned out as the ground beneath their feet turned to stone “…this.”

  She let out a gasp. “Wow.”

  A rich pelt of hunter green forest spread out across rolling mountains and lush valleys, pristine and untouched to the horizon, where it met a cloudless cornflower blue sky. Tendrils of sparkling azure water carved circuitous paths through the gorges.

  He sat down on the stone outcropping a meter or so from the edge and draped his arms over his knees. He breathed in the air, clean and cool, and found it more comforting than at the lake. Soothing. Familiar.

  Alex joined him, scooting closer until their shoulders touched. “So is it solely the admittedly magnificent view, or is this place special to you for another reason?”

  “I came here a few times to mull over momentous decisions—or they seemed momentous when I was a teenager. In retrospect, some of them weren’t so grandiose. I never managed to find the opportunity to get up this way once I went to work, though. In fact…the last time I ventured up here was when I needed to decide whether to accept Samuel’s offer to come to work for Division.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” He’d not bothered to grace this wonderful place with his presence in almost nineteen years, yet when presented a Seneca devoid of life, it was the only place he’d wanted to see.

  He tried to recall the outlook he’d embraced when he last came here. But it seemed that of a child, naïve and myopic, with no appreciation for what waited ahead of him. Which he suspected wasn’t too far off.

  Samuel had known all the right buttons to push, flattering him with praise for his observational and analytical skills then luring him in with tales of adventure, intrigue and daring heroics. Given the benefit of hindsight, he realized it was because the man knew everything about him prior to ever meeting him. His father would have told Samuel over the years, before he died—a tragedy Caleb had accepted as truth, if only in the abstract. His father had been as good as dead to him for two decades, so the difference was only semantics.

  It was never mine, and I don’t want it.

  In the months since learning the deluge of lies surrounding his father, Samuel and Division, Caleb had tried hard to make peace with a past that wasn’t what he’d believed it to be. And he’d nearly succeeded. Coming here, revisiting this place—or a reasonable facsimile of ‘this place’—felt like a way to put the final touches on his peace.

  “I’m not sorry I said yes. I loved my job most days—a lot more days than I hated it—and I can’t imagine taking a different path would have brought me as much…I don’t want to say fulfillment. Satisfaction will do. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have met you. Everything which came before is what led to me being here, now, and I wouldn’t trade this for anything.”

  Alex wound her arm around his and rested her head on his shoulder. “Good. But?”

  “But…I wish I could talk to Samuel for five minutes. I wish I could ask him why he never told me about my father. I’d wish I could ask my father why he never told me what he did, but I know that answer. I understand why an agent believes they need to lie to their family and loved ones. But with Samuel? I was doing the job. I didn’t need to be lied to. I didn’t need to be protected.”

  “Despite the secrets, you knew him well. What do you think he would say?” Her voice was gentle. She was prodding, but he suspected she hoped talking about it would help him find closure.

  “I think he would say he was protecting me—protecting me from the pain and angst that came with betrayal, protecting my childhood and my memories.”

  He blew out a harsh breath; sometimes closure stung like a vicious bitch. “And he would be lying. I think the reality was he felt guilty, if not responsible, for my father’s death…and he didn’t tell me the truth because he was a coward.” He gave her a quick, close-mouthed frown. “It’s a hard thing to accept about someone I considered my closest friend for many years. But no one said life was always easy.”

  Her expression conveyed untempered sympathy…and possibly a tinge of uncertainty, of frustration at being unable to conjure the elusive words needed to give him comfort. But her presence here beside him was worth far more than any mere words.

  He reached over to draw the pad of his thumb along
her jaw then her lower lip. “I have an idea. Want to help me make a new memory, a better memory, for this place?”

  Her lips parted into a sultry smile full of promises. Her voice dropped low, and she adopted an improving imitation of his accent. “It would be my genuine pleasure.”

  11

  SIYANE

  SOL-PAR STELLAR SYSTEM

  GEMINA PORTAL SPACE

  * * *

  INHABITING THE SIYANE WHILE the ship inhabited a superluminal bubble was akin to being on a chimeral high that hovered at the cusp of turning bad. The exotic particles maintaining the bubble moved in a space which simultaneously was and wasn’t, dancing in and out like they might surge inward at any moment and drag her into the blackness. Just beyond them, blurry and indistinct, lay a domain removed from space, a nothingness which seemed wrong.

  Alex experienced none of these sensations when looking out the viewport during superluminal transit; they were tied to this elemental venture.

  If you do not enjoy the sensation, you should return to your body.

  It’s fine. I don’t want to recoil from it out of fear. I want to get past the unease.

  Perhaps this is not a realm humans were meant to experience or comprehend.

  When has that ever stopped me, Valkyrie?

  Granted. More a challenge than a barrier in your case. Still, I derive no pleasure from the apprehension you feel.

  I’m sorry.

  Not enough to cease the activity, however.

  No.

  She powered through the anxiety bordering on low-grade terror and struggled to orient what she saw and perceived into the laws of science she knew, but she’d made little progress when they reached the doppelganger Sol system.

  She dropped herself out of superluminal inside the Main Asteroid Belt, intending to approach Earth in a way she never before had: through the senses of the ship. Space warped into normalcy all around her—

  —searing heat tore through her borrowed skin, and a million pinpricks of agony drove her to retreat into the illusive safety of her tiny, confining body.

  ‘Radiation and heat shield strength increased to maximum. Visible light filter increased sixty percent. I recommend both of you administer radiation meds in the next half hour to combat the gamma ray exposure.’

  Her eyes popped open with a gasp of pain. Was she hurt? Her head throbbed from transferred anguish, but her eVi flashed no warnings of injury. She allowed Valkyrie to calm her racing pulse.

  You are unharmed.

  If you say so.

  She shot Caleb a weak, forced smile in response to his concerned stare, then focused on Valkyrie’s barrage of reports while gaping at the scene outside the viewport in disbelief.

  The surrounding space was dominated by bright teal and citron gaseous clouds. Was this some sort of nebula? “I don’t understand. Were our calculations off due to expansion displacement? Is the Sol system somewhere else now?”

  ‘No. The star known as Sol is located 1.6 AU from us. It is now a neutron star.’

  “That’s impossible.”

  ‘I tend to agree. Nevertheless, it is what the instruments are telling me.’

  “Wait. Are you saying this—” she gestured haphazardly toward the viewport “—is a supernova remnant? That’s—”

  ‘Also impossible.’

  “Yes!”

  Caleb was still frowning at her; it was possible the impetus for it had transitioned to the mystery outside, but too much was going on for her to be sure. “Clearly the timing’s off, but why is it impossible?”

  “Sol doesn’t have nearly enough mass to go supernova. It will expand into a red giant then eventually become a white dwarf—in about eight billion years. Long after Seneca’s sun will exit main sequence, I’ll note, which it hasn’t yet done here.”

  She pressed a palm to her forehead and grimaced. If she closed her eyes she could still feel the burn of the radiation. “So Earth’s gone, then, disintegrated in a supernova shockwave. How long ago, Valkyrie?”

  ‘Based on the data we’ve captured so far, seven to ten thousand years ago as measured in this universe.’

  She peered at Caleb through splayed fingers. “Thoughts?”

  He gave her a prevaricating shrug. “I’d reconsider whether this truly is an exact replica of our home universe, except yesterday we stood on an exact replica of Seneca. So there’s really only one other explanation: Metigen manipulation. We’re in another one of their playgrounds. Here, instead of experimenting with species they’re experimenting with stars, and possibly with the fabric of space itself.”

  “I’m an idiot.” She spun the chair around and leapt up to go to the data center. Once there she began pulling in a variety of wide-spectrum survey data they’d collected since arriving, arranging and grouping the data sets above the table.

  ‘Alex, I can conduct whatever analysis you wish on the data.’

  “I know, but I’m not certain I can articulate what I’m looking for.” She shifted her weight onto her back leg and brought a hand to her chin. She was vaguely cognizant of Caleb coming over to lean against the wall and watch her with interest.

  “The last thing you are is an idiot, so what do you think you missed?”

  “We’ve been fixated on star positions, since they jumped out as immediately familiar yet noticeably off-kilter—so familiar we overlooked all the other aspects of this universe that don’t fit with our own.”

  She enlarged one of the data sets. “There are way too many heavy elements here. Not uniformly, though. They’re clumped into regional clusters all over the place. And metals—nothing on the level of the Rudan universe, but too many. Valkyrie, measure the neutrino concentration—never mind, not here. We’re obviously swimming in them here. But I’m willing to bet we’ll be swimming in them everywhere.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at Caleb. “This pocket universe, or at a minimum the Milky Way in this pocket universe, is flooded with supernova remnants. Valkyrie, take us out of this system to somewhere neutral. Somewhere we can gather less tainted data.”

  ‘The interstellar medium between Demeter and Arcadia is relatively free of activity compared to other nearby regions.’

  “That will work.”

  Caleb planted his hands on the rim of the table and leaned into it, now fully engaged in the mystery. “So why supernovas?”

  “It might not be only supernovas. We need to search for evidence of other out-of-balance phenomena.”

  “Okay, but for now let’s assume it’s primarily supernovas. Why? What makes them special?”

  “Well, I doubt it’s because the Metigens like to make pretty explosions to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at. Supernovas…inject a lot of new material into the surrounding space, especially heavy elements and neutrinos. Also often gamma rays, which we know the Metigens do like. Supernovas create neutron stars or black holes depending on the characteristics of the star, both of which are…among the more interesting astronomical objects. They also kill the progenitor star and everything in the vicinity of the star: planets, moons, asteroids, comets, everything. In the long run they often lead to many new stars forming, but it takes a while.”

  He nodded. “The Metigens can create universes. Maybe this is part of how they shape them to look the way they want—a test field of sorts, where they try out new techniques.”

  “That almost makes sense. But artificially inducing a supernova? No, altering a star’s makeup then artificially inducing a supernova? I suppose if they can create entire universes then ipso facto they possess the capability to do it, but the technology required? I’m having trouble fathoming it.”

  12

  SIYANE

  GEMINA PORTAL SPACE

  * * *

  THEY PUT THE GAMUT OF THE SIYANE’S scientific equipment, most of which had been upgraded before they returned to the portal network, to full use. They put Valkyrie’s computation and analytical talents to yet more fulsome use.

  Caleb watched Alex be a scientist for a t
ime, watched her work the data with an enthusiasm and zeal he hadn’t seen since their early days together. He took inordinate pleasure in doing it. So much of this happened in her head these days, out of view and outside his ability to appreciate. But when she was puzzling something out or testing theories, she still talked aloud, muttering and grumbling and implicitly inviting him into the process.

  He may not know astrophysics the way she did, but he did know patterns and logic. He knew how to step back, observe the big picture and see the thread dangling out of place. He thought she’d probably realized this about him by now, which was one reason for the invitation. That, and she enjoyed the varied amused expressions he awarded her.

  Like this one.

  “Caleb, they’re creating supernovas that trigger in a manner of months—weeks—not millennia. And pulsars and superflares and coronal mass ejections. Of course we have to discover how they’re doing it!”

  In wandering this distorted replica of the Milky Way, they’d found evidence of each of those phenomena and others, all in greater quantities than should logically exist.

  He shrugged, but he was also smiling a touch, enjoying the passion behind her indignation. “Say we find tangible evidence of how they’re accomplishing all this. We still won’t understand it. This is far beyond anything we grasp about physics, or any science.”

  Her lips pursed as she rocked against the worktable behind her. “True, but we can take readings. And visuals. And once we have them we can study them at our leisure, and one day we will understand them—even if ‘we’ isn’t actually you and I.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I bet it’s us.”

  She rolled her eyes but regarded him hopefully.

  He threw his hands in the air as if giving in, but the truth was he hadn’t been putting up a fight, merely playing devil’s advocate. “Okay. Valkyrie, work your magic and locate us a star which shows signs of actively undergoing…some transformation, at a faster rate than normal.”

  ‘With parameters such as those, I expect to have a suitable target by dinner time. Next year.’