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  Copyright © JACOB I. N. WOLCOTT 2019

  The right of JACOB I. N. WOLCOTT to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design & Interior book design by Eight Little Pages

  To Mom and Dad, thank you for everything. Thank you for encouraging me to pursue this wholeheartedly, for the countless times you listened to my ramblings and the many times you read and reread my work.

  To Grandpa, thank you for being the first person to read my first draft all the way through. Your time and feedback meant the world to me. Thank you for all the Wednesday talks. I cherish every word.

  To Caleb, thank you for teaming up with me on YouTube and beyond. Our drills will pierce the heavens!!

  To you, the reader, thank you for supporting me in my dream. Whoever you are, wherever you are, however you found me, thank you. Really, thank you.

  Now let’s go on a journey!

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  MERCURY

  Age 10

  The piercing cold air of the trayite mining tunnel stung Mercury’s face and invaded his lungs. When Sol administered the PerfectMemory serum, the ten-year-old boy barely felt the injection. His vision shifted, sharpening to become hyper-focused. The drug must be taking effect. The next several minutes would be forever burned into his brain. PerfectMemories only worked on children, and only once or twice at that. Whatever was about to happen, it must be important. Sol must be about to give him some vital lesson. With the injection over, Mercury put his helmet back on. The click and hiss as his helmet resealed itself was even more pronounced than normal.

  The cave was perfectly silent. Mercury’s breath turned to half a dozen thin jets of fog as it filtered through his helmet’s respiration system. His ThermSuit’s temperature was well within the safe zone despite the external temperatures being cold enough to freeze his eyes in their sockets. All was dark, except for the light from Sol’s visor casting a blue filter over his world. Glittering stalagmites and stalactites filled the dead-end mining tunnel and amidst them on the rippling icy ground sat the hero of his childhood.

  Not that Mercury could remember much of his childhood, or even his real name. He knew he had run away from home, but that had been almost four months ago. Four months since joining the Air Navy and Ground Elite. Now, he was an Angel. He had his nights in the DreamTank and his days in Forging. Nothing else mattered.

  Even though the tunnel they were in was massive and Sol was sitting down, he seemed to fill every centimeter of frozen space. Was that a side-effect of the PerfectMemory? Before him, the old general looked more machine than man in his full-body trayite armor. That bright blue visor shone down from atop the tower of interlocking bands made from the rarest metal in this universe. There was not another suit like it in existence. A sword lay across his lap, gleaming shards of ice still clinging to it along its impossibly sharp edge. The weapon was also forged from trayite. Sol was clad in the sum total of this harsh planet’s wealth.

  To the Federation’s masses the man was Genrik Rauss, the Minister of War. To the military, he was the Supreme Commander, call sign “Archangel.” He was the man who had almost singlehandedly won the Second Taurusian War. Mercury called him Sol, but he was more than that. He was a teacher. He was a leader. He was like a father. He was larger than life in every way Mercury could imagine. He was the hero of the weak that fought the good fight without asking for anything in return. He was the personification of everything Mercury hoped to one day become.

  Picking up the sword on his lap, Sol gestured at the cracked hole in the icy floor where the blade had until just recently been embedded, “Sit.” As always, his voice was steel.

  Mercury obeyed. The first thing Sol had hammered into his skull when he took Mercury in was to always obey without question. Silence filled the air as Mercury waited for Sol to speak.

  “I’ve killed thousands with my own hands because of my sworn duty to the Federation. By my orders, millions of innocents have died for the sake of billions.”

  The boy blinked under his helmet. Had he heard that right? “…What?”

  Sol’s helmet did not shift in the slightest. The only sound was Mercury’s own breath humming out his helmet. He knew Sol had killed people. He was a soldier after all. But he only killed bad guys, right? “I-Innocents?” Mercury asked. “What do you mean?”

  “War is…messy, Mercury. There’s no way around that. One day you will be in a position where you have to weigh lives on a scale.” Mercury shifted uncomfortably on the ice as he heard Sol’s words.

  “Nations fall under indecisive leadership,” Sol went on. “You must be decisive. When you have the weight of a hundred billion souls resting on your shoulders, you can’t afford to make mistakes.”

  That was wrong. Mercury could feel his chest getting tight. “What do you mean Sol? Are you saying I’ll have to kill innocent people?”

  “Yes,” Sol’s voice chilled Mercury even inside his ThermSuit. “You must not hesitate.”

  “No,” Mercury blurted out.

  Sol’s helmet slowly tilted to the side. “What did you say?”

  Mercury’s skin crawled at the memories of the last time he had said “no” to Sol. He would take a week of Forging rather than relive that experience. “That’s wrong.” The boy stood up quickly. “When I joined you, you said I would be helping people.”

  “You swore to follow my every order.” Sol was stern. “It doesn’t matter what you think is right or wrong. You are my subordinate and you will follow orders.”

  “But-,”

  “Sit.”

  Mercury hesitated. He could feel the PerfectMemory opening up his mind. There would be no forgetting this conversation. If Sol discharged him now, he would probably be okay. His family would probably take him back in. But he had left them behind. He became an Angel because he wanted to help people like Sol did. He sat down.

  “Listen to me Mercury,” Sol’s voice was stern, but not angry. Sol never got angry. “Inaction is the luxury of the complacent. Those with the power to take action have a duty to take action.” He gestured at his armor. “You know this suit was instrumental to winning the Second Taurusian War, but where do you think it came from? You know the inhabit
ants of this planet are worked like slaves.”

  “…Yes,” Mercury pulled his legs close to his chest.

  “You know how rare trayite is. How many people do you think died to mine it?”

  Mercury did not know. He did not want to know. He simply stared at the feet of his ThermSuit. He felt tears start to run down his face. Killing people to help people? What did that even mean?

  “Today I just commissioned enough trayite for six more suits,” Sol said. “One of them is for you.”

  The boy’s eyes darted up. “Why would you do that?” he demanded, voice rising in anger.

  “There’s another war coming,” Sol said. “A bigger war. And it’s a very real possibility this will be humanity’s last war. If we do survive, it will be the end of life as we know it.”

  Mercury swallowed as the weight of Sol’s words sunk in. So this was why the general chose to turn this moment into a PerfectMemory.

  “You agreed to sacrifice whatever you had to in order to help people. Did you lie?”

  “No,” Mercury choked up. “I meant it. You know I meant it. But,”

  “Don’t spout excuses Mercury. You’re better than that.”

  He had been ready to give up his own comforts, but not to take the lives of good people. “But it’s wrong!” Mercury felt the silence consume his words.

  “You’re right,” Sol said. “Killing is never justified. Never. Every time you take a life you must remember that person had family, friends. Sometimes we have to do terrible things in order to prevent something even more horrible. You understood that when you decided to become a soldier.”

  Mercury started crying inside his helmet. “That’s different. I wanted to fight bad guys. I wanted to help people.”

  “Listen Mercury,” Sol spoke slowly. “There’s no such thing as good guys and bad guys. Just people. Everyone does bad things sometimes, some more than others. They’re still people. We don’t fight and kill monsters, but people.”

  “I-I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “So, will you force someone else to bear the burden?” Sol challenged. “Is that the kind of person you are?”

  Mercury gritted his teeth and swallowed a sob. “N-No.”

  “Who are you?” Sol demanded.

  “I’m Mercury,” the boy said with a sniff. How many thousands of times had he repeated those words over the past few months?

  “And why are you here Mercury?” The glowing blue visor of Sol’s helmet terrified the boy, but it also bolstered him. Although Sol was beyond harsh, the man treated him like an equal.

  “To help people,” he said.

  “Are you willing to do what is necessary to help people? Even if it means killing?”

  Mercury knew that if he said no, Sol would be finished with him. He would find someone else to be his protégé. “Yes,” he answered.

  “No matter who?”

  Mercury sniffed, then he nodded. He looked up at Sol. The helmeted face of his hero filled him with the resolve he needed. He would do whatever was necessary to help people. If that meant killing…then he would kill whoever it was that needed killing. “No matter who.”

  “Good,” Sol stood and Mercury did likewise. The general was so tall that he barely came up to his waist. “One day Mercury you will have to make the hard choices. Until that day, let the morality of what you do rest on my shoulders. A weapon isn’t responsible for the actions of the person using it.”

  “Yes sir,” Mercury nodded.

  “You said it was wrong to sacrifice others,” Sol said as they walked back up the winding tunnel towards Bjornhal’s surface. “You’re right, Mercury. It is wrong. You must never let yourself become numb to the choices you make, so hold onto that strong sense of right and wrong.” He looked over his shoulder and locked Mercury’s gaze. “Hold on to it and never let go, because once you do, you’re lost.”

  With those words, Mercury was put at ease. There was something about Sol’s overwhelming confidence that assured him the old general could not possibly be wrong; an inexplicable, deep sense that Sol had everything under control. Though Mercury did not understand why, he had never trusted Sol more completely than he did now. He would follow this man to the ends of the universe. He would jump feet-first into the fiery bullet storms of Hel itself if Sol asked him to.

  A couple minutes later Mercury felt the PerfectMemory serum start to fade. Sol had chosen this moment to burn into his brain. As long as Mercury lived, he would never forget what Sol taught him here.

  CHAPTER ONE

  One Year Later…

  MERCURY

  Age 11

  “The worlds are in danger Mercury. Revolution is here. How would you save them?”

  The eleven-year-old boy shifted uneasily from one foot to another in the darkness. He was keenly aware of Sol standing behind him. The aging general carried a presence that commanded the attention of others, even at times like this when he could not be seen. Sol had been predicting a revolution for several years; that’s why he had recruited Mercury. The job of saving the worlds would eventually be his, and the pressure of the task threatened to crush him.

  Mercury stood in the epicenter of Erithian’s Eye staring up at a plethora of figures and numbers spread across a spherical diorama of the Hel System. Erithian was their resident artificial intelligence built for macroscopic information analysis. Every possible piece of information Mercury could wish to know about the five planets of the Hel system and their moons was organized before his eyes by Erithian. Economic data about the Maraccan nobility? No problem. Socio-political trends on Taurus? Of course. Mortality rates of the Bjornish miners? Absolutely. The rise and fall of every known empire in the last twenty thousand years and the effect each one had on humanity? Child’s play. Everything was primed to convey the maximum possible information at just a glance. The magnum opus of the Supreme Federation’s most brilliant minds.

  Sol had named the machine after one of the Taurusian gods in the Trinity of Time. The idea was that if you gathered enough information about the past and present, then you could predict the future, albeit in very broad strokes. Normally, the holographic avatar of the AI would simply tell them the important information, but for this test Sol had deactivated that particular function.

  Ever since Mercury arrived, the machine had been predicting a revolution that would plunge humanity into a civil war unlike any other in history. All that had been missing was a catalyzing event to turn the mobs into organized militant forces. Just today, Erithian’s Eye told them the catalyst had happened.

  On Taurus, a young woman named Elizabeth “Liberty” Tormen had been decrying the discrimination against her people and was shot by an unknown shooter as the military marched in. People died every day, but when this person had called out for non-violent revolution, millions came to hear her speak and billions listened from all over the Federation. As soon as her heart stopped beating, her enraged followers stormed the soldiers at the scene and killed them all. Led by the martyr’s sister, Vera Tormen, the Sons of Liberty publicly declared war on the Supreme Federation.

  Mercury took a breath and felt the PsyMitter at the base of his neck begin to hum. Willing his thoughts to become reality, he could almost feel them being siphoned off by the tiny device. As he did so, the holographic display above him shifted, sifting through the layers upon layers of data provided by the Eye for everything relevant to the Sons of Liberty. Eight hours in the DreamTank every night for the past year had given Mercury a mind far beyond what someone his age should possess, more than most adults in fact. The hyper-dense mass of information the machine was feeding him both visually and through the PsyMitter would be simply too much for a normal person to process. But not him.

  “Okay,” Mercury said to Sol as he began mentally forming his words. “Her death is blowing up all over the Federation. There’s video footage of the shooting being spread across every news station and all over the Virtual. The effect seems the worst for the Taurusians then Maraccans and
Tarencians last. The majority of the uproar is from lower to middle class citizens, but more than a few of the upper class are decrying the Federation as well.”

  Sol’s presence was stoic as always and his voice steel. “What scale of civil war are we looking at?”

  Erithian’s Eye shifted its display to accommodate Sol’s question. The information was fed to Mercury in an instant. The boy inhaled sharply. “Full infrastructure collapse,” he said. “The entire Federation, gone.”

  “Exactly,” Sol said. “Erithian, what are the estimated casualties?”

  The machine’s mechanical voice answered. “Estimated casualties between twenty-two and twenty-nine billion.” Mercury squirmed where he stood.

  “A fourth of humanity gone,” Sol’s voice was grave. “That is what we’re dealing with.”

  Sol had not needed to ask the machine what the casualties would be. Mercury could see the data just fine. The general was making sure he understood the immense gravity of the situation.

  “Is that why you commissioned the trayite?” Mercury asked.

  “Yes,” Sol said. “That is also why I recruited the other five.”

  Trayite was the rarest and most durable substance in the universe as far as humanity knew. The Federation had monopolized it in order to build Sol a suit of armor twenty years ago, and it had been instrumental in winning the Second Taurusian War. A month after recruiting Mercury, Sol had taken him to Bjornhal to commission enough trayite for six more suits of armor. Now Mercury understood why.

  The others were five kids Sol had rescued from across the Hel System to train to become Angels alongside Mercury. Until now they had been in DreamTanks to help them recover from their previous lives and prepare them for Forging. Now that the foretold revolution had begun, they would need to be awakened.

  “Sol,” Mercury hesitated.