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  Casper borrowed a username and ran some encryption from his smart device. He kept apps that interfaced with the old systems, because part of the navy’s job had been to deal with the eventuality of a Savage encounter—which meant encountering the old-timey operating systems used by the formerly state-of-the-art lighthuggers.

  In thirty seconds, the app had decrypted the password and gotten him access to the logs.

  Twelve standard days ago, he learned from the system, the doors had been opened for a prisoner transfer. Casper already knew that thirteen days ago, the Moirai had raided a science colony at Al-Baquar Seven, taking Reina hostage.

  He beckoned Rechs over and pointed toward the entry. “Could be her?” he whispered.

  For a long moment Rechs stared at the highlighted log entry on the screen. Then he nodded.

  As one, what remained of the Martian infantry stacked itself against the security door that led into the complex beyond. LeRoy hacked the lock, the door shhussshed open, and weapons out, they entered the brightly lit halls beyond.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  In the days that followed their long trek through the depths of the unforgiving desert, there was only the sun, the wind, and the memories. And at night, the moons, the cold, and the nightmares.

  Two days into the wastes, with the water in the canteen long gone, they found a well. An ancient well. There was no bucket or rope, for how long could those things survive? A hundred years? Maybe two. But not more. Not eons. All that remained now was the well’s shallow sandblasted stone lip.

  Casper, lips chapped and skin scorched, peeled off his jacket and fell to his knees, wondering briefly if he would ever get up again. Even little Urmo seemed on the edge of being finished. THK-133 watched all this from the default position of passive judgment inherent to all bots.

  On the distant horizon lay the bleached skeletons of massive monsters seemingly drowning in the sand.

  Casper pulled off his ruck and dug through it. He had a memory of there being a knotted length of survival cord. All legionnaires carried the stuff in the same spot, and Casper had once been a legionnaire. One of the first, in fact, when Rechs was building his famous fighting unit to stop the Savage Tide that was on the verge of conquering the known galaxy. Casper had gone through Rechs’s hellish training. He and Rechs had been well aware that if the Savages won, it would be Earth all over again.

  He felt one hand find the almost silken knots of the survival cord. He pulled it out clumsily and held it aloft in triumph.

  Urmo stared at him in incomprehension.

  “This!” croak-shouted Casper over the howling wind that had come up in the afternoon. “We’re not finished yet!” he added triumphantly. And then he laughed. He didn’t know when—maybe he’d begun doing it in the swamp of hallucinogenic mushrooms—but he’d begun to talk to Urmo, to converse with him. His sun-blasted brain ignored the creature’s inevitable one-word replies, instead making up its own responses. And thus a conversation had followed.

  “Urmo! Urmo! Urmo!” the little beast shouted above the wind’s moan.

  “That’s right,” said Casper. “With this, and…” He turned wildly about, seeking THK-133. “And with him holding it, I can go down and see if there’s water for us at the bottom.”

  “Urmo! Urmo! Urmo!”

  And so, with the survival cord unknotted and at length, THK-133 lowered Casper down into the dark well rather easily.

  In was cool and quiet down there, and only a small patch of sunlight-illuminated red dirt could be seen at the bottom. The constant hurl of the wind across the dune sea found the circular opening in the well and caused a single deep note, wavering, but always on pitch. To Casper it was like being lowered into some quiet temple—some place of peace and reflection beyond the assault of heat, light, and wind above.

  The first thing he saw was the skeleton. The bottom of the well widened into a shallow cave, low-ceilinged, and the skeleton lay within it, on its side. It was fully intact, with only a few shreds of ancient disintegrating rags draped across its chalky white bones.

  Casper felt the sand beneath his dry fingers. It was wet. He checked his surroundings, felt it was safe enough, and began to dig, breathing heavily in ragged, desperate gasps. Soon water began to collect inside his small depression. He filled his canteen cup, letting it analyze and remove anything harmful that it could detect, then raised it to his lips.

  It was cold.

  He tasted iron with a hint of sulfur.

  But it was water.

  “Water!” he shouted up the tube to the well’s mouth. “We found water!”

  He heard Urmo triumphantly repeating his own name.

  And then Casper drank more.

  Urmo shinnied down the rope, Casper handed the little thing his cup, and the creature drank greedily, slurping at the water. When it was finished, it sat down on its butt and burped. It held out the canteen cup, and again Casper was amazed that it was, in some way, intelligent. Very much like some kind of house pet, some barely domesticated animal that required only sustenance and company.

  Casper refilled the cup, processed it, and handed it over. And as Urmo slurped once more, Casper crawled over to the skeleton on his hands and knees.

  Although it was curled up and lying on its side, he could see that it was immense—nine feet tall at least. Its one lone eye socket stared out from beneath a bony forehead ridge. And that was what made the skeleton unusual. Yes, there were some intelligent races within the galaxy that reached a height of over nine feet, but none of them had one eye.

  So perhaps this skeleton belonged to a race that was extra-galactic?

  Casper leaned closer to study the eye socket, to make sure it wasn’t actually some kind of wound that had opened a big hole in the skeleton’s head. It was not. It was a massive orbital socket where once some eye had looked out upon the galaxy—and of course, in the end, had looked upon this cave beneath this well.

  “It’s like a Cyclops,” whispered Casper, remembering his ancient myths from Earth’s lost past.

  “Urmo!” said Urmo, then burped.

  Casper cast a quick look back at his companion. The little monster’s belly was tight and swollen with water.

  “Don’t drink too much or you’ll get a tummyache. And you’re right. No such thing as a Cyclops ever existed. No known race in the galaxy fits this profile. And yet… here we are. Staring at the skeleton of something that once was.”

  He touched one of the bones. It wasn’t just dry and brittle, it was turning to chalk.

  Casper sat back and stared at the amazing skeleton, wondering who, or what, it had once been. And inevitably he thought of the mystery that had plagued the galaxy since the discovery of the pyramids on almost every world. The mystery of the Ancients. Was Casper looking at the skeleton of a member of that race? About which nothing was known.

  Not almost nothing.

  But actual nothing.

  He liked thinking about this for the few minutes he sat staring at the bones found in the bottom of a lost well. It was a break from the examination of his memory of the Moirai that all his dreams and almost every waking thought had become fixated on. As though he were being tested in order to be found worthy, or wanting, as his memories were trawled and held out to the light of examination.

  As though this needed to be done if he were to…

  Continue?

  Survive?

  Find the Temple of Morghul?

  But this mystery, the mystery of the ancient one-eyed skeleton that might or might not be the answer to the greatest question that had plagued the galaxy, collectively, since the dawn of light speed… this mystery seemed to be part of the something that had lured Casper to this lost planet far beyond galaxy’s edge.

  He lay back in the cool dark and closed his eyes.

  He heard Urmo gurgling at more of the water, app
arently having figured out the cup between mutterings of his own name.

  Casper was tired, and as he drifted off to sleep, he tried to think about the Cyclops instead of the Moirai and…

  ***

  Casper found himself in the dream once more. Following Rechs and his soldiers, moving tactically, hall by hall, corner to corner, clearing pristine rooms full of ancient medical and science equipment. Vintage terminals a couple of hundred years old and working as though they’d just been installed by the shipbuilders. All the rooms empty of life, yet humming with current as long as the ship’s reactors kept generating power.

  They found her, as easy as that.

  They found Reina Benedetti.

  It was Barr, on point, who moved first onto a balcony that overlooked an open level. Below, massive processors, lit blue and humming so powerfully that the electricity within them could be felt on one’s skin, stood on the edges of a vast medical operating theater.

  She was down there.

  Reina Benedetti.

  The woman who’d led the revolt on the Obsidia. The woman who’d freed Rechs and Casper and so many others from a dreamy hell that was all too real in moments of horrible stark screaming madness.

  Like Casper and Rechs, Reina was old. But she barely looked to be approaching a fit and vivacious forty, for she, too, had been a victim of the longevity experiments aboard the Obsidia. It was hard to tell what she was doing down there, center stage, but she definitely wasn’t afraid. In fact, it looked like she was organizing things.

  It looked like she was in charge.

  Seeing her down there, among the Savages, took Casper instantly back to memories of the Obsidia. Memories he’d worked hard to bury, deal with, or even erase through therapy. He’d tried it all. And yet they were still there. Taunting him with what should never be. Convincing him to cross a line he’d sworn on his life he’d never cross.

  The memories of that ancient celebrity who’d wanted to be a god, turning herself into a horror show of beauty and desire, mindlessly drugging her thralls so they’d worship her, validate her, and of course obey her every whim. He’d been a puppet, and nothing more.

  The shame of it had never left him.

  And then he remembered that Reina had freed him. He told himself that. Reminded himself that he was no longer a slave, but free.

  “It’s her,” whispered Rechs over the comm. Casper and Rechs had hung back with the others, but they were all watching Barr’s feed via HUD. “Scan for entrances,” Rechs ordered the hidden soldier on point. “Slow pan.”

  The image shifted across the room below.

  There were easily ten Savages in there. And they were wearing some type of advanced armor system like nothing Casper had ever seen before. Because, thought Casper as he watched himself watching all this once more from the future in the desert, because this is the version of armor that came before the Mark I legionnaire armor. The legendary armor Rechs would take for his own. The armor the Legion techs and scientists would try to reproduce, but would never really be able to.

  There it was.

  It was like some ancient mythical artifact from a time of legends and heroes long gone. Armor they’d forged inside the Quantum Palace.

  Maybe that was the reason it could never be reproduced. Because it had been built inside a place that existed in a different reality. A reality that was like a universe constructed totally of information and data.

  Rechs relayed the plan over comm. They would sweep in, double-tap as many of the Savages as they could, grab Reina, then exit the complex, making best speed back to the Lex.

  As he spoke, two lesser Savages, obviously some kind of tech class, wheeled in a prophetess on a stainless steel gurney. She was strapped down, and they quickly hooked her up to crude biometric contacts—things that would’ve been state-of-the-art in the years before the Exodus.

  She looked like… just a girl. A skinny, underfed waif. Nothing like the terrible prophetesses who’d tried to flay them alive with their witchy mental powers. This one looked frightened, even—and resigned to some fate in the offing.

  A voice came across the speakers below. “Are we ready, Doctor?”

  The voice was rich. Powerful. And yet full of some cold and inhuman menace that knew neither sympathy nor mercy.

  The girl they once knew stepped back from the table and nodded as she took up a tablet of some sort.

  Casper asked Barr to pan back to the girl on the table. Barr zoomed in. Her lips were moving, and Casper had a pretty good idea what she was saying, over and over.

  “I embrace the Quantum… and it embraces me.”

  A surgery bot like some mechanical spider lowered itself from the ceiling high overhead. Blades and hacksaws deployed, as did the barrel of a surgery laser.

  Reina looked up from her tablet and studied the girl on the gurney for a long moment.

  “Are they going to…?” whispered the medic.

  “Yeah, girl,” answered LeRoy over the comm. “They gonna do somethin’ real bad.”

  “We goin’ in, Major?” Barr asked. As though half a squad and one naval officer were some kind of cavalry that had to ride in at the last moment and rescue the damsel on the table.

  Casper knew the answer, because he knew Rechs. A man some had called “hard to know” and others had called “cold.”

  The witch on the table was no damsel.

  And they weren’t here for her.

  “She’s not our target. We’re here for Red Queen.” Rechs tagged her in the HUD.

  “Uh, yeah,” said LeRoy slowly. “But Red Queen looks like she in on it and stuff, Major.”

  ”Stand by. We might get a moment to snatch her once they start whatever it is they’re going to do.”

  But they didn’t. What happened next was so beyond conception that it seemed to mesmerize them into inaction. The plan they’d been ready to enact simply faded away.

  The show commenced via Barr’s HUD feed. And what a horror show it was. The gleaming robot spider surgeon lowered one of its cutting saws and severed the girl’s head from her neck in an instant. There was no hesitation once it began. The cutting laser followed, cauterizing and touching up any bleeding with short, bright bursts of fire.

  Even here, up in the balcony, a terrible stench rose up in their nostrils. The stench of burning flesh.

  Casper tried to forget the moment, just before the cutting saw had begun to cut, when the restrained girl opened her mouth to scream. The cut had been made so fast no sound had come out.

  The laser couldn’t cauterize the wound quickly enough, and now other arms moved in, holding loud whirring vacuums at the ends of industrial-grade suction pucker-tentacles. They greedily cleaned the mess of the girl’s lifeblood while the laser finished its work.

  Barr’s cam zoomed in for an extreme close-up of the girl’s head, and they could see only Reina’s torso and hands diving in and out of frame.

  “What the hell are they doing, Major?” asked someone over comm. Casper couldn’t tell who it was. He too was too horrified at what they were seeing to pay attention to the notifications coming up.

  Then something happened.

  The girl blinked.

  Once, twice. Then rapidly.

  “We have consciousness,” said Reina in her heavily accented English. She’d been Italian, once, long ago. But what did that mean anymore out here in the galaxy?

  She rattled off a few vitals, and Casper knew she was speaking to that voice—the voice that had spoken so loud and clear across the surgery amphitheater—and what she was saying was that, for all intents and purposes… the girl on the table was alive. The head. The body. Separately.

  “My child,” erupted the cold and imperious voice out of the ether. Its low baritone made one of the speakers pop and whine on a pitch that became a hum fading into nothingness. “Do you know where
you are?”

  The girl’s lips moved. But there was no sound.

  “She said, ‘I’m here,’” Reina said.

  Reina must be using an app to read lips, Casper thought. Of course the head on the table couldn’t speak—her vocal cords were severed.

  Casper wondered what in the hell, exactly, was going on.

  Reina Benedetti had been a science officer aboard the Challenger. She’d specialized in xenopsychiatry. After their escape from the Obsidia, she’d devoted herself to research, but Casper hadn’t paid all that much attention to the details. He’d had only brief contacts with her over the years.

  Reina and Rechs, on the other hand… they’d been something more. Something Casper had needed to force himself to stop imagining, for his own sanity.

  Casper had loved her, and had known they would only ever be friends.

  And now, watching her, he wondered if he’d ever really known her. The woman he’d known had been a champion of freedom. And what he was seeing here was a monster, a ghoul, slicing up a living, breathing person. No matter how terrible that person was, or had become, it was still a person. And the woman he’d known, the woman who’d rescued them all, never would have willingly taken part in something like this.

  “What do you think is going on here?” he asked Rechs over the command comm, away from the ears of what remained of their unit. “This isn’t her.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Rechs replied.

  And then the carnival of horrors moved into its next act. An act that would be far worse than the sword-swallowing girl or the monkey-faced boy.

  Reina leaned forward with a hypo.

  “Injecting now,” she announced.

  And that, too, to Casper then, and to the Casper of now watching as he tramped across the moonlit desert beyond the well, was as much a part of this quest as the Cyclops skeleton. The injection had been the revelation of something much larger than he’d ever considered. Like that skeleton in the well, it was a simple bit of evidence that revealed so much. The injection had opened up the invisible world of a power no one had ever known.