The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) Read Free Page A

opened for Stacey. The immense lab was empty but for a single, unsupported staircase extended to a small platform in the center of the room. A holo projection of the Milky Way filled space around the platform as the shadow of a slight figure moved within.
    Stacey walked up the stairs, her eyes glancing over the thousands of star systems marked by icons for known Crucible star gates. Thick tendrils of billion-strong Xaros drone fleets advanced into the last unconquered swath of stars in the galaxy, each moving inexorably toward an inhabited system.
    A single Crucible marking glowed blue just behind the tip of a tendril: Earth. A dashed line of a projected Xaros invasion reached from Barnard’s Star toward Earth, still more than a decade away. Her home world was behind enemy lines.
    “Stacey,” said a young woman with coffee-colored skin and curly hair as she waved to the human ambassador, “thank you for coming so quickly.” Stacey hurried up the stairway to join Darcy. The other ambassador looked human, an illusion projected by Bastion to help the many different species on the station better relate to each other. The Ruhaald alien beneath Darcy’s mask was an amphibious species with segmented flippers and toothy feeder tentacles in place of a mouth. Not for the first time, Stacey wondered what her Bastion-provided Ruhaald form looked like.
    “You said it was urgent.” Stacey stopped next to her fellow ambassador on the raised platform and looked across the galaxy. Bastion’s hologram of the hundreds of billions of stars was as near perfect as science could achieve. Qa’Resh probes scattered across the galaxy constantly fed data to the space station. The lab could zoom in to each star and access a lifetime’s worth of data on the stellar system and known planets.
    Stacey had loved the stars and astrophysics since before she could walk. To have such an immense font of knowledge at her fingertips was beyond her wildest childhood dreams.
    “It might be,” Darcy sighed, “if the data is right. I don’t know what you did, but while you were on Earth, the Qa’Resh removed the data locks on the graviton surveys.”
    “The data we thought might help us find the Xaros colonization fleet,” Stacey said, “if there is one.”
    “The initial data was a bit inconsistent.” Darcy’s fingertips danced across a floating control screen. “Then I used your idea for filtering raw graviton data through a brane simulation…”
    The holo field shifted to bring the edge of the galaxy in front of the two ambassadors. A Crucible marker floated amongst a halo of stars along the galactic rim.  
    “So I was right about that?” Stacey reached to the marker and flicked her thumb and forefinger apart to zoom in. A deep-green star with two planets in its habitable Goldilocks Zone materialized, a Crucible orbiting a world with snow-covered mountains and wide swaths of desert.
    “Yes,” Darcy said through grit teeth, “you were right and I was…not yet correct.”
    “This is Crucible 0-1, isn’t it? The first the Xaros ever built,” Stacey said.
    “That’s right. Mok’Tor colony world. The first advanced civilization to encounter the Xaros, and the first to fall to them,” Darcy said. “‘Xaros’ is the Mok’Tor word for ‘death,’ ‘balance’ and the number zero. They were a poetic species.”
    “Fascinating, but didn’t you say something about this being urgent?” Stacey asked.
    The holo shifted. The edge of the galaxy moved away and a red dot appeared in the deep space just beyond the galactic rim.
    “I thought it was an error in the data,” Darcy said quietly, “but it’s there.”
    Stacey tried to zoom in and got an error buzz in return.
    “All we have is a depression in the fabric of space-time,” Darcy said. “No light, no heat, nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum at all from…it.”
    Stacey swiped a finger next to the dot and a screen full of data appeared next to it.
    “The mass on this