Redemption of Light (The Light Trilogy) (2 page)

Terrified, Mastema quavered, “What do you want?”

“I came to warn you, Magistrate.”

“Warn me?” Mastema blinked hard and his vision cleared a little more. He could make out a face, amber and glowing as though from an inner fire. The image caught at his throat like a strangling hand—because, God forbid, it did seem familiar.

“The Law I gave you allowed you to find and collect the sapphires in this galaxy so that you could use them to build worlds, to feed billions, to power your starships—and to gain the prestige you sought so desperately. I gave you the sword to damn all your enemies to oblivion. And so you did—except for Gamant enemies. And why?” Milcom held up a condemning finger. “Because you let one critically important divine sapphire escape your clutches.”

“But … I don’t understand. Why would that fact influence the course of history?”

Milcom’s brilliant eyes sparkled like suns. “Gamants have a different use for the sapphires, that’s why. They utilize them as gateways to God.”

“Don’t patronize me! There is no God.”

Milcom’s pointing finger coalesced into a shaking fist.
“Verily, verily I say unto you, Magistrate, that single drop of heavenly dew will plunge your empire into the eternal pit of darkness unless you capture it.”

Mastema’s heart throbbed. The tone, the archaic speech pattern … glimpses of the past abruptly flitted through his mind: He saw himself young, terrified, staring wide-eyed over simple, magnificent equations delivered out of the air by a being of pure gold. He saw himself locating thousands of quantum black holes,
schethiyas
in the Giclasian language, and sending out tugs to retrieve them. They’d constructed a special containment vessel—Palaia Station—and moved the center of government there for added protection. The very foundation of his galactic empire had risen upon those tiny power plants.

Fear pounded a hard fist into Mastema’s stomach. He swallowed convulsively. “Milcom. Yes.
Yes, I remember.
It’s been a very long time, but … Milcom. Milcom. What have I done that you would come here? I kept my part of the bargain!”

“Yes. Indeed, you did,” Milcom agreed softly. “You caged Gamants so brutally they couldn’t wait to slit your throat. You did well, Magistrate. I didn’t come to torment you about our bargain.” In a magnetically tender voice, Milcom continued, “On the contrary, I came to help you—to give you the head of the Gamant leader on a silver platter, if you want it. It’s the only way to stop the Revolt.”

“Calas is a twenty-year-old youth. I can’t believe he’s the real threat. There must be another Gamant, a military genius, who’s responsible for this fiasco that Slothen faces.”

“The boy is the real danger, for he wears around his neck the
Gehenna
gate, Magistrate—a special sapphire. Millions of Gamants have died protecting it, passing it down through the centuries from one leader to the next. And when Mikael stands in the mountains on high and opens that gate, all that you and yours have built will come crashing down.” A hazy smile adorned Milcom’s glowing face. “He’ll destroy you.”

Mastema fought to control the quaking of his six limbs.

The last time he’d dealt with Milcom, he’d gained an empire and lost everything in the galaxy that meant anything to him: his wife, beautiful Ethnarch, with whom he spent all his dreams, his children, his home…. The wounds inside him would bleed forever.

“Come, come, Magistrate,” Milcom said impatiently. He walked the book-lined room, fluidly graceful, cloak fluttering behind him. “You know very well that the fist of survival often gets dirtied with blood and marrow. Do you want Giclasian rule of the galaxy to collapse? Would you like to have your home world destroyed and Palaia Station taken over by Gamant fanatics? Do you know what they could do with the resources there?”

“They could turn the singularities into weapons and destroy every civilized system in the galaxy.”

“Of course.”

Mastema steeled himself and gazed up into that sinfully magnificent alien face. It seemed to glow brighter, casting a glimmering amber halo over the vault. “What do you want?”

“I ask nothing, Magistrate. I offer
everything.”

“You never give without expecting your pound of flesh. Tell me your demands.”

Milcom hesitated for a long time, as though considering what could be said safely. Then, in a violent gesture, he lifted a shining hand to the invisible heavens. Mastema saw the whirling maw of blackness spin out from the wall to swallow the library. A rush of warm wind flooded the room. Mastema choked on the scents of darkness and decay.

Terrified, Mastema screamed,
“What do you want?”

Milcom stood resolutely still, his chin tipped as though contemplating the rippling arc of the black vortex. Power encircled him like a thrumming electromagnetic aura. Mastema’s flesh prickled from the impact. After an eternity, Milcom quietly responded, “I want you to save yourself by finding that sapphire.”

“How?” Mastema weakly inquired.

“You must do two things. First, you must go to the fields of Anai and seize Cole Patrick Tahn, a former captain in your own fleet. Second, you must find Mikael Calas. Then you must bring both men
alive
to Palaia Station. If you fail to deliver either one, Mastema—you are lost.”

“What are you talking about? Are you telling me that all Giclasians will die if I don’t?”

“No, Magistrate.” Milcom’s voice caressed him like a lover’s warm hand. “I’m telling you that this entire universe will die.”

Milcom started to step into the whirling vortex and Mastema shouted, “Wait! Tell me more!” He reached out to the golden alien with a trembling hand. “I need to know more about this … this divine sapphire that Calas has.”

Milcom bowed his head and shook it slightly. “No,” he answered and his voice seemed to echo through the room. “You know far too much already.” Then he walked into the roiling night of the Void. For a split second, Mastema saw a flash of cerulean blue, and the light of what seemed a hundred torches wavering in the wind.

The Void spun closed.

In that same instant, four guards burst through Mastema’s door, eyes wide with wonder and fear. These soldiers had undoubtedly been standing guard their entire lives and never expected him to wake, to call out to them. They looked stunned. They wore heavy armor over their six-legged blue bodies, and each held a rifle across his chest. Mastema waved them over with a weak hand.

In a dreadful voice, he murmured. “Call me a physician. I have urgent business to discuss with Magistrate Slothen. We have to find the best captain in the fleet to handle this.”

CHAPTER 1

“Well?” Captain Amirah Jossel demanded tersely. “I was ordered to abandon a critical mission around Calistus and appear here for a psych evaluation, Doctor. We’ve done that up nicely over the past three days. So why the hell am I still here?”

She fixed Doctor Hans Lucerne with a fiery gaze. He paced the hospital floor, uneasily flipping through the pages of her psychological report while she got dressed. “You’re still here, Captain, because you’re sick. It’s a good thing Slothen saw fit to order you in.” He was a middle-aged man with thick black brows and wavy salt-and-pepper hair. A shaggy mustache draped down over Lucerne’s upper lip.

Jossel’s smile ridiculed his words. “I’ve never felt better in my life, Doctor. I’m just having some minor problems adjusting to the tension of the past several months. I’m—”

“The hell you are.”

She bristled and he straightened to give her stare for stare. He’d gone over and over the data in her report and still remained mystified as to the source of her mental disturbances. But one thing he did know—she was deeply ill and the stress of this top secret mission that Slothen had just given her could well send her over the edge.

Jossel looked him up and down distastefully, as though trying to decide whether or not to court-martial him. Not that she could—he outranked her. Jossel just had a knack for making people’s skin crawl. She was a tall woman with long blonde hair. Her button nose rode over full lips. She would have been beautiful, Lucerne had to admit, if she could ever get rid of that impaling glint in her turquoise eyes that made people wriggle as if she’d skewered them with a dull lance. Her caustic tone of voice didn’t help much either. Typical, though. Brusque, impatient habits inevitably came to a woman of her military prestige and talent. She’d been personally curried by the Magistrates in Academy and since getting out had distinguished herself as a superior officer. She’d won medals that Lucerne had never even heard of and he’d been a physician on Palaia for thirty years.

Lucerne turned away while she took off her hospital gown and tugged on her uniform pants. Around him, Palaia’s finest hospital pulsed with the hum and buzz of sophisticated equipment. Antiseptic scents twined through the small examination room like pernicious serpents. Two other beds lined the opposite wall, both empty. Through the far door, a gray-haired nurse in a white form-fitting jumpsuit entered and jangled a table of silver instruments and vials of blood.

“Explain, Doctor,” Jossel ordered. “I think I’m just so goddamned tired of war duty that my mind is playing tricks on me. What do you think is wrong?” She sat on the edge of the examination table and reached for her uniform shirt. The golden captain’s bars on the epaulets sparkled with an unnatural brilliance in the stark glare cast by the lustreglobes that blanketed the ceiling.

“It could be the war duty,” Lucerne answered honestly. “You’ve had some tough missions in the past two years. But I doubt that’s the source of the problem.” He folded his arms as ominously as he could. His gray sleeves shimmered like gossamer mist at sunrise. “How long have these ‘flashbacks’ been bothering you?”

“They’re not ‘flashbacks,’“ she corrected impatiently, lifting a condemning brow. Lucerne fought the urge to squirm. “Flashbacks are memories. These are … well, I don’t what they are. That’s
your
job. But they’re not scenes from real time. They’re fantasy images. We’re sitting in the same wing where most of those images take place and I don’t see any interconnected net of lights or a Devouring Creature of Darkness either.” A tiny shiver went down her back before she tightened her muscles to kill the fear response.

Lucerne noted the action and vented an exasperated sigh. “For the sake of argument, let’s call them flashbacks. They certainly have the characteristics of confused memories. Your grandmother is always there, correct?”

She slipped her shirt over her head, then tucked it into her purple pants. Bitterly, she answered, “Yes.”

Lucerne ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair. He had to tread lightly with her or she’d undoubtedly get up and stalk out before he’d gleaned even half the information he needed to relieve her of command of her ship. The very thought made him swallow convulsively. Unconsciously, he glanced toward the ceiling, seeing the winged battle cruiser in his mind. The
Sargonid
floated vigilantly in orbit around Palaia Station. What would her crew do if he succeeded? They had a reputation for irrational loyalty to their captain. Would they mutiny? Try to break her out of the psych ward? It was a possibility he’d have to take up with the military advisory council
if
the time came—which was unlikely after his last conversation with Magistrate Slothen. Slothen, too, seemed irrationally loyal to Jossel.

“Let’s go through it one more time,” Lucerne said. He lifted the report and shook it emphatically. “Most of the flashbacks begin with you hearing your grandmother shouting at you that the savior is coming, then you smell the metallic scent of blood. You’re covered with it, your uniform is sticking to your body in clammy folds. The halls are pitch black. You’re supporting your wounded grandmother, dragging her through smoke-filled corridors here on Palaia, and you’re being pursued by a ‘Devouring Creature of Darkness.’ From everywhere you hear voices, mostly speaking in the Gamant language. An unknown man yells at you to hurry. Explosions rock the building. You see Magistrate Slothen. You shout at him, begging him to help you. Your grandmother changes into a huge serpent and wraps around you, squeezing the life from you. But the serpent still speaks with your grandmother’s voice. It screams at you over and over, but you can’t understand what it’s saying. You kill the serpent, cutting off its head. Is that the extent of the images?”

Jossel shrugged. “Pretty much. Sometimes I see the sparkling net of lights burst from my grandmother’s face to engulf us both. Occasionally her face turns into … into a man’s face—or a Giclasian’s.”

Lucerne frowned. For a moment he’d thought she was going to give him a name. “Do you know the man?”

“No, no, not for certain. He seems to be a collage of different great military officers throughout history.”

“For example?”

Irritably, she waved it off. “I can’t tell you. I don’t know who they are. They’re just—familiar.”

“And these are all recent developments? Since your psych evaluation last year? They must have something to do with your scorch attacks on Gamant—”

“Not …” Jossel hesitated, her mouth ajar. “No. The images first started coming when I was fourteen.”

Lucerne leaned forward in stunned disbelief.
“What?”
She unquestionably knew the penalties for withholding such information from Palaia’s medical staff. If he reported the cover-up, the military advisory council could take away her command and throw her into the brig, or worse, for years. Jossel lifted her chin defiantly and Lucerne squeezed the bridge of his nose. He asked simply, “Fourteen, huh? Was that a traumatic year for you?”

“Not especially. My parents had been killed the year before during the Pegasan attack on Rusel 3, my home world. But the shock had worn off by then. I’d say I was a fairly normal youth going through the throes of puberty.”

“You were living with your grandmother, weren’t you? When the first flashback occurred, I mean?”

Jossel pulled long blonde hair out of her shirt and quietly walked to the foot of the examination table to retrieve her cap. She twisted the purple bill anxiously. Her beautiful face had contorted so much at the mention of her grandmother that Lucerne felt the intensity of her emotion throbbing in his own breast. He smoothed his fingers over the tangled black briar of his mustache, contemplating the implications. The nurse across the room mumbled something that sounded profane and hurriedly left the room. Lucerne took advantage of the opportune distraction and stared absently in her direction, hoping Jossel would settle down in the interim. The woman had an almost violent aversion to discussing her grandmother. “Captain, I have administered your annual psych evaluation every year for the past ten years. Why have you never reported these incapacitating flashbacks—”

“They’re not incapacitating!” Jossel swiftly swung around to stand nose to nose with him. “My duties have
never
suffered because of the flashbacks’!”

Lucerne stood resolutely still. Beneath her stony exterior, he thought he perceived a twinge of very real fear. She must realize his reasons for probing her personal history so thoroughly. Did she know he’d already requested she be relieved? She might have guessed it. One corner of her mouth twitched uncontrollably, though she fought to suppress it.

“Captain—” he thumped the psych report in his hand and tried to speak gently, “—the last time you had one of these attacks, your own officers had to help you off the bridge of the
Sargonid.
Your second in command, First Lieutenant Jason Woloc, reported that you were raving. If I’m ever to cure you of these flashbacks, you must help me!”

Jossel’s smooth freckled cheeks vibrated with the grinding of her molars. After a moment, she dropped her gaze and adopted a letter-perfect “at ease” position. Her blonde hair glinted with a silver sheen in the light. “I meant, Doctor, that the flashbacks have never affected me seriously until recently.”

“How
recently?”

She shook her head as though aggravated by his questioning. “Doctor, why can’t you just use the mind probes, trace the neural circuitry of the disturbances, and alter the dendritic connections to eliminate the flashbacks?”

Lucerne fidgeted. That was a hell of a good question. They’d advanced so far in medical science—especially with the astounding leaps in the past three months—that not even death was final anymore, not if they caught the situation quickly enough. “Captain, we’ve known since your entrance into Academy that your brain is organized and constructed differently than other human brains. Very much like Gamants’ brains, actually.” Seeing her hot glare, he hurriedly continued, “I’m not accusing you of having Gamant blood, Captain. We’ve found that same recessive trait in humans with no Gamant ancestry whatsoever—as is your case. But that’s not the issue here. The reason we can’t locate the source of your mental disturbances is that you seem to have a—” he threw up his hands, “—a
compartment
in your brain that is impervious to probing. We don’t know why it exists, but
I—”

“Where is it located? What part of my brain?”

“In the hippocampus. You have some other interesting anomalies there, too: Upside-down dendrites, misaligned pyramid-shaped cells, there’s even some neurofibrillary … uh, scar tissue.”

Jossel’s turquoise eyes narrowed. She remained silent a moment, scanning the white walls and beds in the hospital. “Scar tissue? From what? I was rarely sick when I was young and I never suffered a severe impact to my skull that I can remember.”

“We don’t know why. We’ve never noted it before. Which is truly a surprise since Magistrate Slothen himself has insisted on being present at every one of your psych evaluations since you entered the service—and he
knows
the neuro systems of humans. Anyway, it appears to be a progressive phenomena. I suspect that the scar tissue expands each time you have one of these flashback events. The tissue seems to respond to endogenous events to form a stronger and stronger fence around the compartment. It acts almost as though it were programmed to lay down scar tissue to
protect
the area where the flashbacks originate. Very peculiar. Now, Captain, let’s get back to my former question. How long have you been seriously plagued by these attacks?”

“Doctor Lucerne,” she challenged. “If I remember my neurobiology course work correctly, all of these specific anomalies, the upside-down dendrites, etc., suggest schizophrenia. Are you saying that I’m—”

“No, no. I wish I could make that diagnosis.” Indeed, he did. He’d have no problems getting her into an institution if that were clearly the case. “Other than the flashbacks, you show no behavioral symptoms of such a disease. I simply mentioned those facts to try and explain why we are unable to probe and eliminate your disturbances.
How, long, Captain?”

Indignantly, she asked, “Are you recommending I be relieved of command?”

Lucerne pretended not to notice that her nostrils had begun to flare with her suddenly rapid breathing. Her face remained inscrutably blank. He clamped his teeth. Angrily, he lifted the psych report and slapped it down on the examination table. “I made that request three days ago, Captain. Magistrate Slothen himself denied it. He said that other than
one
fainting spell on the bridge, he saw no clear evidence of instability in your evaluation. He also told me that you were being assigned to a secret mission and would be coordinating some difficult strategy and tactics in the Anai system and then you and your crew would be heading for the Gamant planet of Horeb to aid in containing the insurrection that’s raging there. He—”

“Horeb is a quagmire of dissent and insanity,” she affirmed sourly. “Slothen’s patience with that idiot governor who’s ruling the planet has finally run thin.”

“Captain, do you know how Slothen defended you?”

“I’ve no idea, Doctor.”

“He said he was certain the reason you’d fainted’ on the bridge was because you’d had no sleep for sixty hours. He assured
me
that exhaustion and stress were the root of your delusions and I was to drop the matter immediately!”