Page 14 of Destinies of Diamond
“I don’t know, but I find it odd that you were assigned to Dr. Achebe. Your skills and future missions don’t relate too much to his specialty.”
Maybe that was the whole point, I thought as my fellow Chimera Warriors and I fell into formation. Maybe I was supposed to perfect a topic I didn’t excel at. But if that was the case, why had Commander Trevor taken over Selene’s assignment?
I was still musing over my dilemma when a distant flash drew my eye to the horizon. The systems of the chimeras started to scream, alerting us to an unexpected anomaly. “What in Gaia’s name just happened?” Selene asked through the coms. Had the flash registered on the displays of the Sphinx too or had she missed it?
“I’m not sure,” Pollux replied, “but we’re getting some anomalous readings on my systems. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Cerberus had.“There’s something wrong with the Tartarus shields around the base. We need to head back.”
“It’s the shields,” Brendan said at the same time. “We can’t be out in the open.”
Typhon must have warned him about it. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. If our chimeras had survived entering the Apsid Quasar, they wouldn’t be destroyed, no matter what happened to the shields. But on the other hand, it was better to not draw attention to the true extent of our capabilities. If we’d noticed the anomaly, our teachers must have seen it too, and they were bound to show up soon.
We returned to the hangars just in time. As the gates started closing behind the Cerberus, an almost palpable wave of heat struck us from behind. Everything in the base was resistant to high temperatures, but the mechanism of the doorway still broke.
Cerberus managed to absorb most of the blast and prevented further damage, but that didn’t remove the source of the problem. “Guys, get Selene out of here,” I shouted. “I’ll stay in the Cerberus and block the heat.”
“Will do,” August reported. “We’ll come back in a minute.”
I half-expected Selene to protest, but thankfully, she saw the sense in our approach. She left the Sphinx without comment and allowed August and Brendan to usher her away, out of the hangars. Once the rest of my fellow Chimera Warriors were safe, August returned. Sphinx, Typhon, Charybdis, and Scylla took my place and blocked the entrance, forming a tachyon-absorbing shield. Cerberus carried me to August’s side and safely let me out of the cockpit.
Even if I’d seen and felt the blast, the heat outside the Cerberus still took me by surprise. I did my best to regulate the temperature field around me using tachyon manipulation and August helped. I was still relieved when we made our way out of the hangars and met with the others outside. “What the fuck?” I asked without preamble. “Is this an apsid attack? I don’t understand.”
It didn’t make any sense. The Great Mother had peacefully sent us off with next to no issue. Jared was on Earth, and the last thing any of them wanted right now was to draw attention to him.
Could the Great Mother have lied? Had Jared been on a different mission all along? I remembered the way she’d pulled Jared aside before we’d left and admitted it was a very real possibility.
“I’m contacting my uncle now,” Brendan said, already activating his back-link. “Let’s hope he answers.”
As it turned out, Dean Chimera didn’t answer, but he came to us instead. He arrived less than a minute later, looking uncharacteristically disheveled. “Brendan, thank Tartarus. You’re all right.”
Brendan stared at his uncle in disbelief. He and Archibald had never been all that close and such a show of concern was unusual to say the least. “I was never in any real danger. We were all inside our chimeras when we caught sight of the blast.”
Archibald’s shoulders slumped in relief. I’d have honestly deemed his demeanor a lie, except for the fact that my advanced senses could detect no deceit. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
“Was there an attack on the base, Your Highness?” Selene asked. “Are there any wounded?”
“Not an attack per se. We’ve had some solar anomalies as of late. We didn’t see any real effects here, not until today. It would appear the primary Tartarus field generators were more affected than we thought.”
I was no expert at chimera technology, but I did know that such generators were crafted out of Tartarus diamonds. They were built to last centuries, if not millennia, and engineers regularly monitored the tachyon flow that circulated through them. Tartarus field generators didn’t just break, because we relied on them so much.
“I take it the secondary generators prevented any real damage?” Brendan asked.
“Fortunately, yes, although there may be injured. For the moment, we haven’t been able to reach the generator power plant. I’ve sent a team there.”
“With your permission, Your Highness, we’d like to join the rescue effort,” Pollux offered. “Our chimeras are far more resilient to radiation than a shuttle or Harpy, and we’ve taken serious damage before and survived.”
“Don’t worry about that, Flight Lieutenant Donadieu. The other teams can handle it. I had a different task in mind for you.”
As he spoke, his anxiety vanished and he returned to the impeccable prince I knew him to be. “Communications with the outside have been interrupted by the anomaly. It’s urgent for you to ensure that there isn’t more to this than just an accident. Brendan, Flight Lieutenant Alexander, you’re to travel to The Grand Judiciary in your chimeras. Flight Lieutenant Donadieu and Flight Lieutenant Cavallero, you’re in charge of dropping by the nearest asteroids. Acting Pilot Renard, you go to Terra.”
I hated the idea of letting Selene go to Terra alone. But fighting the command, now of all times, was a bad idea. Besides, Selene was aware that she needed to be careful. This visit might even come in handy since she did need to speak to her mother about a medical check-up on the baby.
“Shouldn’t we take a shuttle, Your Highness?” August inquired. “It’ll be faster than flying there with the chimeras.”
“Yes, but I prefer to keep this operation under wraps, just in case we do have something to worry about.”
That was an odd comment to make. I wasn’t sure I understood his logic. If there were enemies targeting the other asteroids, an urgent intervention was better than a stealthy, slower one.
