Galaxy Under Siege
Page 8
“How did you find us?” Dakroth asked, assuming the satyr was heading up a rescue mission.
“I didn’t find you, per se,” Grendok answered. “I was merely returning to basecamp when your biosignatures spontaneously appeared on my scanners as if out of nowhere. Just to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me, I swung back around to see who it was. Needless to say, I am more than a little shocked to find that it was you two.”
“How long?” Dakroth asked in a grim voice. “How long has it been?”
The satyr stroked his chin reflectively for a moment and then answered the question. “It’s been over a year since you both disappeared. Vanished into thin air, just like that. We all assumed you’d been taken captive, though plenty had all but given up hope that either of you were still alive.”
“And yet, here we are,” Dakroth said with a wide grin.
“And here you are,” Grendok answered, throwing his arms onto his hips and letting forth another raucous laugh.
“I don’t know about either of you,” Callestra informed them, “but I’m ready to get off this nightmare world.” She turned sharply upon her heel, tossing her hair, and without saying another word began making her way to the ship.
Dakroth turned back toward the satyr and they looked at each other with blank expressions. Slowly, they turned to watch Callestra sashay back toward the shuttle craft, her deerskin loincloth and halter top barely concealing her voluptuous form.
Grendok cleared his throat and then gestured for Dakroth to follow suit and board his shuttle. Dakroth nodded his head with gratitude and the two of them walked together back toward the shuttle craft.
“I’m sure you’re both exhausted. Most probably on the malnourished side. I did three years in a Dagon labor camp after the campaigns, so I recognize the signs.”
“Apologies, for any hardship my people may have caused you,” Dakroth said.
Grendok knew he was merely being diplomatic and playing his cards close to his chest. Right now they were allies, not enemies, and there was no reason for bad blood between them. The past was in the past.
“Water under the bridge,” Grendok assured the emperor. “For now, however, we’d best get you back to camp and have you fed and cleaned up. It looks like you’ve been roughing it for quite a while.”
“Roughing it may be the understatement of the century,” Dakroth said, following the satyr aboard the shuttle. “It’s one thing to take a trek through the wilderness. But when the environment is designed to kill you at every turn, ‘roughing it’ doesn’t quite seem to catch the full extent of how awfully dreadful it all was.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” Grendok answered.
Callestra stood by the open doors of the craft, waiting for them and nodded as the satyr strode passed her and climbed into his shuttle.
Dakroth paused by the two stairs that led up into the shuttle and placed his hand on Callestra’s shoulder. She reached up and touched it. After a moment, he withdrew his hand and boarded the ship behind her.
Still feeling a bit skeptical, Callestra glanced back over her shoulder and looked back out at the strange door that stood in an open field and led into a multi-dimensional prison one last time just to be sure she wasn’t just imagining things.
In the time they’d been prisoners, they’d each experienced their fair share of hallucinations. If it wasn’t poisonous mushrooms they’d found, it was poisonous flowers. And, the truth was, she wanted to be sure they weren’t still trapped in the jungle somewhere, imagining their freedom...only to wake back up in the nightmare.
All she knew was, if this was a dream, it was a good one; she was simply glad to be done with it. She turned back and climbed onboard the satyr’s quaint little vessel. The clamshell doors clamped shut behind her and, with a roar of the plasma-coil turbines, the shuttle slowly rose up into the air.
Once the ship was in motion, Dakroth cleared his throat as though he had a question and then leaned forward to speak into the ear of the satyr. “I’m afraid I’m not exactly up to speed on current affairs. How goes the war effort?” he asked.
Grendok laughed out loud. “What effort? H’aaztre’s forces have obliterated the Dagon fleet. They’ve laid siege to every system in the Commonwealth. They’ve rounded up all persons of interest for questioning and have managed to cripple all means of transit between the allied worlds.”
“That grim, is it?” Dakroth interjected.
“I’m afraid it’s much worse than that,” Grendok answered. “Interplanetary communication is banned and all ships leaving or entering the system are boarded and searched. Non-compliance equals instant arrest and seizure of all your property. I’m afraid the galaxy has fallen upon desperate times, Lord Emperor. Most desperate times, indeed.”
“In lieu of the emperor’s absence, it’s the duty of the empress to protect the empire,” Callestra stated, reciting Dagon Imperial protocol to the satyr. Scowling at the satyr, she snidely asked, “Has she not upheld her responsibilities as sovereign ruler and designated protector?”
“I’m afraid that Jegra’s confrontation with H’aaztre left her in pretty bad shape. Not for lack of trying, either, mind you. She managed to destroy a quarter of his fleet before things went south. But, alas, the empress barely made it out alive and has been in a coma ever since. Like I said, desperate times.”
“It would seem so,” Dakroth said contemplatively as he stroked his chin.
A scowl settled over his brow, darkening his eyes, and he leaned back and folded his arms across his chest in displeasure. This unfortunate news wasn’t filling him with optimism, and he felt somewhat responsible for the current state of affairs. If only he had been there to aid Jegra in her fight against H’aaztre, then, maybe, things would be different.
But the truth was H’aaztre was a cunning statistician and knew exactly what pieces to knock off the chess board. Not only that, he seemed to predict every possible move anyone could make well in advance, which gave him a definite advantage.
“It’s a pity everyone just rolled over,” Callestra said in a melancholy voice, lamenting the anti-climactic way in which the entire galaxy had succumbed to H’aaztre’s forces.
“It’s the smallest of our worries, Vice Admiral Van Morgan, I can assure you,” informed the satyr. “Reports have been coming in from all over the Alliance that inhabitable moons and worlds beyond the Outer Rim are being drained of their resources and destroyed.”
“Outer Rim worlds? Why?”
“If I had to venture a guess, I’d say because—”
“—The enemy is creating choke points for us,” Dakroth said. “In every war, in every occupation, the occupied know their home turf better than the invaders. They will use this to their advantage to throw off the shackles of tyranny. But if you have the power to physically change the terrain, well, then it’s an entirely different game altogether.”
“So, he’s preventing any insurgency by literally wiping out all the places a rebellion could hide or convene and thereby tightening the invisible noose around all of our necks,” Callestra mused aloud.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself, Vice Admiral Van Morgan,” the satyr said, nodding along with her summation of current events as he understood them.
“And the tiger, with its terrible gleaming eyes, shredded all of our hope,” Dakroth said in a quiet aside.
“I beg your pardon?” Callestra asked, tilting her head with a vague expression.
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s merely something Jegra once said to me about the nature of terrible beasts that only care about power. She said you could see it in their eyes. I asked her what she saw in my eyes. She answered...something more.”
A subtle smile spread across his lips as he reflected fondly on his past with Jegra and Callestra’s jealously flared red-hot.
“How romantic,” she mumbled to herself in a tone dripping of sarcasm. She flicked her hair angrily and then looked out the opposite window as she sulked quietly by herself.
“Without a united front, it’s only a matter of time before different agendas arise and in-fighting begins to fracture a unified resistance.”
“That’s how it always goes,” Grendok said, nodding along with the wisdom of experience.
“Then the resistance cannibalizes itself from the inside out,” Callestra interjected, finishing his train of thought for him. Dakroth nodded somberly.
“If you can get the Alliance worlds to crumble without ever having to lift a finger against them, then there’s very little you need to do in the way of defeating those you wish to conquer. Once they turn inward on themselves, all H’aaztre needs to do is sit back and wait till the dust settles and then march in, plant his sigil, and lay claim to the broken worlds.”
Callestra reached over and placed her hand on the emperor’s forearm. “If this gilded prick thinks he can simply lay claim to your empire without so much as getting the fight of his life, then he has another think coming.”
“Of that you can be sure, my luv.” Dakroth reached over and placed his hand on her thigh and then turned his face away from her and peered out the shuttle’s window. “And we shall take the fight to him. Of that I can promise you.”
Grendok produced a yellow toothed grin as he listened to the emperor vow to fight the cancer poisoning their sector of the galaxy. If anyone had the strength and sheer willpower to mount a resistance and surgically remove this blight from all existence, it would be Emperor Dakroth.
9
It took Jegra nearly the full three hours of waiting for the Earth-Mars delegation to arrive for her to read through the backlog of reports on her holovid tablet, a translucent glass plate that could manifest high resolution images but also project holograms for holographic vid-conferencing.
The first step of reacclimating to life after being in a comma for a year was to get herself brought up to speed on everything that had transpired in the past year, and she read through all the log entries by Lianica, checked the status reports of the Imperial armada, and reviewed more than a dozen of the important news feeds for the past ten months. She even checked on the status of the gladiatorial games.
While reading through the information, she came across two encrypted files that caught her attention and used her Imperial Access Code to unlock them. She was pleased to discover that, contained in the classified documents, was the summary of Brei’Alas’s training and the discoveries and theories behind her unique time manipulation abilities.
She was pleased to learn that Brei’Alas had been practicing honing her time warping skills and that, according to the file, they were triggered anytime she experienced hyper-arousal. As such, she’d been conditioning herself to anticipate high-stress events and also how to trigger them herself.
Jegra had been so engrossed in her reading that she hadn’t even heard the first door chime. It was only on the second one that she’d looked up from the holovid pad and said, “Enter.”
Brei’Alas stood in the empress’s doorway, hemming and hawing and looking as nervous as ever. “I’m here to accompany you to the banquet hall, Your Grace.”
It was only fitting, Jegra thought, that Brei’Alas should be the one to come and fetch her when the time had finally come to meet their guests. “Well, don’t just darken my doorway! Please come in,” Jegra said in a casual fashion, her eyes settling back onto the glowing text of her holovid pad.
Brei’Alas timidly stepped into the empress’s room and patiently waited, startling only slightly as the doors closed behind her.
After a few more moments, brief enough not to constitute any kind of inconvenience, Jegra finished her article and tossed the pad beside her on the sofa. She swung herself out of her roost and stood up.
As she sauntered from the sofa and cozy reading nook in the corner over to her king-sized bed at the head of the room, she nodded at the dress hanging on the rack nearby and said, “I have my dress picked out—over here. But seeing as it’s custom tailored to fit my figure precisely, I’ll need your help getting into it.”
Brei’Alas gave an affirming nod as Jegra peeled off her clothes right in front of her as she arrived at the edge of the bed. Her discarded clothes piled up on the floor at her feet and she stepped out of them and fetched the dress from the rack.
Stripped bare, she slid one shapely leg into the dress followed by the other. With a wobble of her hips, she wiggled into it. She nodded at Brei who took the fabric in both hands and pulled it up like a tube top until it became taut. She then bent before the empress, grabbed the hemline and gave it a tug, pulling it back down to its appropriate length, slightly above the knees.
Jegra adjusted her ample breasts until they were lifted and the fabric stretched smoothly across them. With a sideways glance, she turned and cleared her throat for Brei’Alas to help her zip it up from behind.
By the deep purple and hot pink of Brei’s cheeks, Jegra could see that she was flushing bright with embarrassment at having seen the empress’s nakedness with her bare eyes. It was the third or fourth time she’d managed to glimpse the empress in a compromising and quite revealing manner of dress or, rather, lack thereof.
Even so, Brei was one of the few people that Jegra trusted enough to consider part of her inner circle. There was something about the girl’s primness; it didn’t fit with the Dagon mold of always puffing up one’s chest and walking around with one’s nose stuck up in the air all of the time. She seemed almost...well...human, in a manner of speaking. And Jegra found that comforting.
“Are you excited to see your own kind again?” Brei’Alas asked, filling the awkward moment with some general small talk. She began zipping up Jegra’s dress only to pause half way when the empress looked over her shoulder and shot her what felt like an exacting look.
Brei’Alas tensed and, her hand pausing midway up Jegra’s back, she began apologizing profusely for overstepping her bounds. “Sorry, Your Grace. It’s not my place to stick my nose in your personal affairs. Please forgive the intrusion.”
“It’s quite alright, Lieutenant,” Jegra reassured her, flashing her a lighthearted grin before turning away again to look at herself in the standing mirror by her bed. “I feel more nervous than anything. I guess, I just don’t know how to be or act around them anymore. I mean, I’m the Imperatrix of the Galaxy, for crying out loud. They’re refugees from a dead world. I don’t know...it just feels...” she paused and took a breath. “It’s all so surreal.”
“But they’re your people, the few that survived the destruction of your planet,” she said exuberantly. She finished zipping up the back of Jegra’s dress and then turned toward the mirror. She peered over the empress’s shoulder; her eyes met Jegra’s, which stared back at her from the reflection. “That has to be a good thing, right?”
Jegra smiled to herself but did not respond. She honestly hadn’t given it much thought beyond the present moment. The truth was, she’d grown quite comfortable having become the token Human Being in the far end of the galaxy. Apart from the random stray, like Homer, whom she’d run into at the Cove, she really hadn’t given the fate of her species much consideration.
After everything she’d been through, she didn’t feel fully human anymore. She had mixed feelings as to what her existence even meant in the grander scheme of things. Considering the multitude of species she’d encountered, what part of the galactic neighborhood she happened to be from didn’t seem to matter all that much.
On top of this, she couldn’t imagine rejoining the petty, self-centered squabbles of her race. The meaningless wars, the endless greed, the disregard for nature and one another. Not to mention all the terrible memes and selfies that dominated the fleeting, yet reflexively vain, existence of so many of her people.
Sure, she understood not all humans were crap specimens. Some were compassionate, had a surplus of empathy, and genuinely cared about making the world a better place. But they were far an
d few between.
But considering how hard the Human race seemed to struggle against its own better interests, she was always discouraged by the reality of it. For every four strides humanity made toward progress...be it technological, intellectual, moral, or otherwise...they always took three steps backward again. It was disappointing, to say the least.
She didn’t feel that she could relate to any of that any more. The Human Condition, so to speak, was no longer her concern. And it hadn’t been for quite a while. Her mind had been opened to a whole hidden universe just beyond the veil of cosmic understanding, and she wouldn’t trade that for all the Earths in the cosmos.
Yet, even with her own personal reservations, it was as Brei said. These were, for better or for worse, her people.
Fate had given her a second lease on life, but now it seemed it had dealt her another challenge as well—the challenge to safeguard the entire Human race.
It wasn’t the job she wanted. Not right now, at any rate. Not with everything else that was going on. But it was a job she’d been handed. Besides, not acting would only make her implicitly guilty in the genocide of an entire species. Her species. And regardless of her feelings about any of it, she couldn’t sit by and let the uncaring indifference of inaction be the final arbiter on whether or not the Human race thrived or, ultimately, met their ruin.
“The truth is, Brei,” Jegra informed the young Dagon woman, using her nickname to let her know she was speaking personally to her, as a friend, “I’ve always felt like the odd duck out. Like, I just didn’t quite belong. I guess I was just happy to distance myself from my people and forget all about them because, for me, they didn’t represent how I felt inside, or who I truly was or, for that matter, who I wanted to become.”
“But they’re a part of you,” Brei said, watching Jegra’s reflection in the mirror, which gazed back at her holding her hand over her heart in a subconscious gesture of solidarity.
Jegra turned around somewhat abruptly and the girl drew back so she could meet Jegra’s towering gaze.