“He was a space farmer like you,” Kat mused, resisting the urge to touch his freckles as she traced the beautiful places of his face.
“I wonder if that was really his occupation, for all Tonya loves to embellish her histories,” Lee mused. She watched the pigment of his eyes shift from the sharp edges of an emerald to more of a thoughtful spring. They’d returned to a billowing tree-green, before she contracted the muscles in her stomach, arching up onto her elbows.
“So how many phonecalls were we talking?” Kat winked.
“Come here, you.”
CHAPTER 28: LEE
LEE DREAMED he was flying. Skating across a sea of blue-green lights on aFlyer6000.The neutrino-powered seascape interrupted every dozen meters or so by a copper bit of cording or the towering levels of the stacks jutting out from the haze below…
The imagery was still fresh in his mind as he slipped on his all-terrain suit, getting ready for the Laser Rounds competition later this morning.
He supposed he could blame all the research they’d been doing on the General the last few weeks. It was rubbing against barely healed scars and over-exposing fading memories. But the ship, and those lights. Those still gleamed all too vividly.
He couldn’t shake the dream. So instead of heading down to breakfast, Lee slipped down a floor lower.
The soft aromas of warm earth, jasmine, and garana oils cushioned his senses as Lee took on a plot of cross-pollination testing for a new vitamin supplement. If only life was as simple as splicing these garanas. Maybe he really should consider an alternate career in space farming.
He blamed Kat for that second tangent. He’d even sent his mom a message last night asking what she knew about Leland I. His ancestor had lived decades and eras before him. A centuryeven. The galaxy had probably been a very different place back then. Perhaps one that had favored curiosity, and exploration…
Back before they figured out the more lethal dark ray properties. And the plans had all switched over to words like “Desperation” and “Preservation…”
The unfaltering blue-green lights fanned out over his gloves, creating little water-like ripples of light as he collected more of the garana oils in a dropper, carrying it over to the jasmine samples he had waiting.
Scientists.
Segura, Gaia, all of her crew—they hadn’t been rebels, or radicals out to defy the AMG. They’d merely been scientists who’d fallen for the wrong idea at the wrong time. That it was dangerous was an understatement. Lee could still picture the rows of holding cells that had lined the walls down in that basement lab by their particle accelerator. The readings of joules and delta-grays displayed on those monitors. It gave him chills just to think about the amount of energy and power they’d had at their fingertips with those shields. And although he begrudged General Narron’s motivations and his methods, it was smart to question their validity.
Whether or not harnessing the dark rays was the solution to their galaxy, they’d known what they were doing. Segura wasn’t another half-baked experiment fresh from the shadow markets, a frantic response to a new star system claimed by dark radiation. They’d figured it out. They’d probably learned more about them than anyone else alive.
Lee picked up a trowel from the plot before him as a message came through on his hyperband, their lab results from their last raid. But as he glanced back up at the dirt, and the blue-green lights above it, his hands stilled.They’d learned more about them than anyone else alive.
They’d known about the dark rays.
They’d known about the AMG’s stance on harnessing them.
Lee was willing to wager they knew of, or had been in very close conversation with, the other dark radiation experiments that had gone full supernova. One of which a young General Narron had also been a part…
And in the aftermath, they’d known enough to go under the radar to hide it—to protect what they knew. A knowledge they feared someone might find threatening.
Lee set the trowel back down into the soil. Letting his elbow rest there at the soft-curve metal encasing the plot, he expanded the holographic message above his wrist, scanning through the various lists of tests ordered by the AMG for their dark ray samples.
And there, once again, beside General Narron’s signature, was the notation for a radiation signature of which he was all too familiar.
00:00:00
The alarm blared out over the arena, leaving a hollowness in its wake as the holodisks cut across the darkened landscape, whistling and whirring in neon color. Blazing reds. Blizzards of blue. Torrents and waves of pink and green and orange.
The Gammas claiming the floating islands around him with their glowing vests painted a very different fervor from the last time he’d been in here. They fought for the upper hand, for ground, for glory, flitting around like the buzzing static from the RIMs.
Lee played their game for a while. It was a game he knew well.
For seven years, Lee had participated in the Academy’s exercises and fulfilled her quotas. He’d let himself be molded and shaped with each rigorous AMG training proposal, taking it in stride—taking it to heart. He’d made himself the best of the best to honor the paradigm he represented, for the hopes and possibilities they wielded.
And when he had needed that ideal—that honor to count the most, it had betrayed him, crumbling down around him. A fortress made of salt. What was an acolyte who no longer believed in his cause?
Raider.
