Free The Tabit Genesis by Tony Gonzales Page B

Wyllym said. ‘For millions of people, this is home. The
Archangel
was never going to bring them all to another system, let alone a new world. We should keep building here.’
    ‘Or we find the right world now, instead of trying to change one that will never be what Earth was,’ Captain Ishiin said. ‘With the
Archangel
, we can link with the Tau Ceti settlers, build more ships like her and find another pale blue dot to colonise. Who knows? Perhaps someday we can return to Earth—’
    ‘That will never happen,’ Wyllym said.
    Captain Ishiin looked at him thoughtfully.
    ‘Admiral Hedricks believes it will be possible someday,’ he insisted. ‘If we had a fleet of
Archangel
s, he’d point them—’
    Wyllym had heard enough.
    ‘If he thought it’d make him a hero, Hedricks would point a gun at his own mother.’
    Captain Ishiin was stunned.
    ‘That’s classified, of course.’ Wyllym added, fighting through the pain in his limbs to stand. ‘Best kept secret in the damn Navy.’

7
     
THE PATHFINDER
     
    Two gladiators, a man and a woman, clashed in a blaze of combat, unleashing a furious symphony of strikes and parries. Powerful muscles bulged beneath the milky-white flesh of the combatants as they danced, their bare skin exposed to the frigid cold from the waist up, save for the narrow strap that pressed the breasts of the female tightly to her muscular chest. Both combatants were armed only with Obyeran skythes in each hand: part knife, part plasma torch, the indispensable tool of spacefarers for centuries converted to deadly melee weapon.
    Worn on the wrists, the skythe was a retractable amorphous alloy blade with an edge of nanoscale-sized teeth that could saw through metal as easily as bone. At the tip of the weapon was a suspended plasma arc designed to cut through wreckage or weld breaches shut; they carved white-hot arcs through the air as the fight raged on. Beneath the armoured hexglass dome high overhead, the crash of weapons sent menacing echoes across the rock amphitheatre; a deep, sizzling shriek
that sounded like heavy cloth being ripped apart. The arena basked in soft beams cast down from orbital solar mirrors, each one a sun in the hazy night-time sky, as the bluish-yellow face of the ice giant Heracles gazed down on the spectacle.
    Hundreds had journeyed to the surface to attend the match in person, and thousands more were viewing on the local net. The cameras capturing the event split their time between the combatants and the man who sat at the highest seat in the arena: King Masaad Obyeran, the Pathfinder, founder of the House that bore his name. The Rites, revered as they were in this culture, had drawn more eyes than ever before, since the warriors battling today were the King’s own son and daughter. To claim a Lightspear command, an Obyeran had to pass the warrior trials, and his children were no exception.
    Masaad was old but unwrinkled, his pale flesh stretched across an iron jaw and high cheekbones that held the cradles of his amber-coloured eyes. Beneath his hood was a shock of thick hair, white as snow, long to the sides and back. He sat expressionless, gauntlets gripping each arm of the stone seat, unmoving since the contest began. The cadence of air exiting his mouth in long icy wisps gave the only hint that he was alive. He did not flinch, nor even blink, no matter how hard his children struck one another. He simply held his gaze, watching his bloodied, weary progeny back away from each other, circling, studying, anticipating each other as only twins could do.
    It was his son Maez who erred first, feigning a kick and then launching a savage overhand that would have cleaved his sister from neck to crotch. But his daughter Myrha countered with a spinning backstrike, avoiding the blow and meeting the base of her brother’s skythe near the ground. The blade sliced clean through his wrist, and both hand and weapon caromed away. Yet even as streams of blood spurted out, he swung his