Complete Atopia Chronicles by Matthew Mather Read Free Book Online Page A

green gem beneath the wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed amid the endless seas below. From here, lacking any surface buildings except for the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center, Atopia appeared as a forested island a mile across, fringed by white sand beaches.
    Returning my focus to the job at hand, I did another sweep of the area. But still nothing. I zeroed in on one of our UAVs, a giant but gossamer–winged creature whose photovoltaics glittered and reflected the morning sunshine back into the emptiness. I followed it with my projected visual point of view, watching its massive transparent propeller swing slowly around and around, urging it onwards into the edge of space.
    “Good enough?” I asked.
    “Yeah, I think that’s far enough,” responded Echo, my proxxi.
    “Well, no hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”
    I was kind of enjoying this lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas from between the clouds below, trying to force a sense of relaxation into my body. The silence was serene and complete up here. I should come up more often, I thought to myself.
    Just then, the new metasense I’d had installed prickled the back of my neck.
    I looked around to see Patricia and her gaggle of reporters rising up from Atopia. In this augmented display space, each of their points-of-presence blinked and then brightened to a steady glow as they assembled around the test range. To me they appeared as a halo of tiny stars, hanging nearly ninety thousand feet up here with me.
    They were waiting for the show to begin.
    “Okay Adriana, let’s light this thing up,” I said to one of my system operators, pushing my focus back down to the dot of Atopia below and leaving the UAV to spin off into the distance.
    Immediately, the speck of Atopia began pulsing with intense flickers of light, and I waited for the show to begin. I counted; one, two, three, four, and then the first flashes began to glitter in the near distance.
    Tiny concentric shockwaves flashed outwards and away and the empty space began to shimmer, filling with hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of white hot streaks that pancaked and mushroomed into a wall of flame. The inferno spread and engulfed me in a booming roar. I back-pedaled downwards and away, watching the sheet of flame envelope the sky.
    “Very nice,” I declared, snapping back into my body at Atopia Defense Force Command.
    Everyone was watching a three-dimensional display of the firestorm hovering over the center of the room, surrounded by the floating control systems of the slingshot battery.
    “Would have been nice on that mission back in Nanda Devi, huh?” suggested Echo, standing with his arms folded beside me and admiring the show with the rest of the ADF Command team.
    I took a deep breath.
    “That’s just what I was thinking.”
    Jimmy, my up-and-coming protégé, laughed, pointing towards his temple. “The wars of the future are going to be fought in here.”
    “Wars have always been fought in there,” I chuckled back, “but even so, these babies sure make me feel better.”
    The slingshot batteries were rotating platforms that could sling tens of thousands of explosive pellets per second into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles a second. The pellets were set to disintegrate and spread their incendiary contents at preset distances, creating a shield effect weapon that could put up an almost impenetrable wall of super heated plasma at ranges of up to a hundred or more miles away. This bad boy could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way. Heck, I could have even taken out a mean looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks if I felt like it.
    So far, seagulls were about all that dared come near us.
    Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome