The Impossible Future: Complete set Frank Kennedy (freenovel24 .TXT) 📖

him, skidded off his helmet, and hit him once in the gut and once above his liver, Michael ignored the burns and tore apart his enemy with more precise aim. He cut down the driver first, flash pegs severing the Mongol’s head from his body. The middle fighter took an Ingmar blast to the stomach and crumpled, as the comrade behind him contorted with a chest full of flash pegs. Their bodies fell away, but the rifter did not.

He calculated then moved three steps to his right. The rifter crashed into the tree, shrapnel splintering in every direction as it erupted in flames. The branch lit up, the fire working its way toward him. Again, Michael plotted his next move; only one way to go.

The mountainside blew up in a cascade of laser fire and automatic rounds of flash pegs. From tree to tree, slope to ridge, and back again, rifters hurtling toward Guard positions, some exploding, and bodies tossed. Ground fire intensified. The enemy below was doing exactly as intended: Moving forward while the rifters drew most of the attention.

Michael looked toward the peaks of a mountain range most people on Tamarind feared. Beyond these rocky crags of burnt orange, the Void shimmered a thousand feet high as an aurora of greens and reds, with splashes of yellow lightning hurtling outward. It was beautiful. It was impossible. It was the source of all this death; of the secrets that might change history; of a path to lead Michael into Samantha’s arms.

He had waited four months for a miracle. Close, they insisted. We’ll be there any day now, the engineers said. Hold on a little while longer. Michael grew tired of hearing the same platitudes, but not of doing a job he learned to enjoy.

He reset his gravmod boots and stowed his Ingmar. In its place, he grabbed the hilt of a Lin’taava sword. Then he ran his calculations through the DR29.

Michael jumped into a rising tide of laser fire.

“When we’re done with you, and assuming you live,” Rachel told him on the first day of training, “You will never feel fear again.”

She was right. These Mongols couldn’t kill him, no matter how hard they tried. But he was damned well going to obliterate them.

3

E IGHT DAYS EN ROUTE TO TAMARIND, Michael (and those not part of the inner circle) learned the truth of their mission at last. He was among many who openly complained about lack of transparency. The only thing he knew was what Supreme Admiral Poussard told him before he left Earth: “There may be another way in.” Her statement was a sudden reversal, after having rejected all overtures to mount a mission against the terrorists on Hiebimini. Three days into the voyage of the Praxis, the dead arose when Emil and Frances Bouchet walked back into everyone’s lives, their role on this mission unclear but apparently vital.

Michael and the other Presidium representatives protested the clandestine meetings between Capt. Forsythe, the Bouchets, and a small team of engineers. He never knew whether Forsythe or the Bouchets gave in first, but when he saw what lay ahead, Michael didn’t care. He absorbed their presentation with the same level of stunned incredulity as everyone else made privy to the scheme.

“This is the Void,” Forsythe said in front of a massive holowindow.

CVids captured the phenomenon from orbit and in close aerial surveillance. At first, it appeared as if Tamarind had been gashed open to reveal a glowing crevasse one hundred miles long. Closer images doubled down on the notion of an open wound: Mountains rose on either side, as if a god’s knife flayed the land open.

“Its presence is well-known throughout the Collectorate, but its origin and purpose are not,” Forsythe said. “Chancellory scientists have been investigating it off and on for more than five hundred years. The local population used to send its own teams there, but enough accidents and disappearances compelled them to avoid it at all costs. In fact, they were so terrified by it, more than a century ago, they outlawed inhabitants living within five hundred kilometers. They did not mind if we Chancellors put our own people at risk.”

“So, what is it?” Michael asked.

Forsythe turned to the Bouchets. “This is where I defer to the experts who have a long history with the Void.”

Emil and Frances, the parents who turned their sons into abominations and escaped Earth under cover of a nuclear explosion, glided into positions on either side of the window. Michael did not say ten words to them since they arrived five days earlier, but he passed them twice in corridors. He saw it in their eyes both times: The arrogance, the loathing, the suspicion. He knew it well after almost three years living among Chancellors. It was everything he could do to stow his anger and listen to the “experts.”

“I will assume not everyone present,” Emil began, “has sufficient quantum background to understand the terminology. My wife and I have graciously chosen to simplify the language.” He offered a curt half-smile that reminded Michael of Agatha “Queen Bee” Bidwell, his former English teacher from hell – the woman whose son Michael shot in the chest with a rifle.

“The Void,” Emil continued, “is a phenomenon that in all respects should not exist. It is embedded inside the planet, and yet it is not part of the planet.” He changed the view to show a simulated cross-section of the Void, which appeared like a dagger plunging fifty miles inside Tamarind at a sharp angle, as if it had been thrust into the planet. “Our study reveals its energy epidermis makes no physical contact with Tamarind. There is a transitional phase between the Void and planet, equidistant throughout.”

Michael couldn’t stuff his tongue. “So, I’m asking again. What the hell is this?”

Frances bared her teeth, unable to withhold a chuckle.

“Oh, Mr. Cooper.