by A. K. DuBoff
“A friend.”
“Just a ‘friend’?”
Jason kept his gaze straight ahead along their path. “Before you continue with this line of questioning, you might consider the fact that I have the authority to add another set of wind sprints to your training regimen.”
“She’s a very lovely friend, sir.”
“Yes, she is.”
The weight that had been pressing on Jason for the past couple of days began to lift. Tiff was okay and he would be, too. They had their own adventures to live.
Another two hundred meters down the concourse, they reached the gangway leading onto the Conquest. Its semi-iridescent hull gleamed under the station’s lights, reminiscent of an oil slick on water. At three hundred meters long, it wasn’t the largest ship in the fleet, but it was one of the most fearsome in appearance. Aggressive ridges adorning the side of the oval-shaped vessel flowed into the forked jump drive in the aft. Aside from the blue-hued ateron band around its circumference, the most notable exterior features were the numerous armaments as well as the fighter launch tubes in the belly of the ship, forming a ‘Y’ with two in the back and one forward. Rear tail fins served as a heat shield and also added a unique aesthetic echoed in many Taran craft. It was truly one of a kind, and Jason was proud to have it under his command.
“All right, don’t make me regret this,” Jason addressed his students. “Don’t touch anything or neural-link with the ship. It’s much more sensitive than anything you’ve come across.”
“Awww, it has feelings?” Paula jested.
“Yeah, and it will spit you out an airlock if you piss it off. Behave.”
The statement wasn’t remotely true, but it got Paula to snap to attention.
The students’ giddy excitement was infectious as the group ascended the gangway to the ship. Jason had felt a similar thrill when he’d boarded the ship for the first time, and even now he had to smile as the ship’s bioelectronic link connected with his mind.
They entered toward the middle of the vessel. Unlike civilian vessels or the TSS craft used for basic transport, the piloting and captaining was conducted from the Command Center in the heart of the ship, where it was most protected, rather than a flight deck at the exposed upper bow. In the few occasions he’d commanded the ship into battle, it was reassuring to have the extra measure of protection.
The group traversed the short distance down the interior corridor from the entry hatch to the Command Center’s entrance on the same deck. Since the ship was dormant, the Command Center didn’t have the same awe-inspiring impact as when Jason had boarded the vessel his first time. At present, the walls and floor appeared plain matte gray. Two tactical consoles at the front faced forward relative to the door at the back, and five command podiums were arranged at the center of the room. Configured as four barstool-height seats surrounding a central station, each was equipped with a retractable handhold for forming a physical bioelectronic link with the ship. The telekinetic weapon charged through that interface, as well as offering control of all other aspects of the ship’s operation.
Jason walked up to the pedestal in front of the seat closest to the entry door and brushed his fingertips along the handhold. A subtle electric spark of biofeedback tingled his hand, and a light flashed in his mind’s eye as he interfaced with the ship. With a silent command, he switched on the wrap-around viewscreen.
The walls and floor of the spherical room sprang to life in vivid color. A high-resolution screen with holographic augmentations wrapped the entire Command Center, allowing for an accurate rendering of the space surrounding the ship, as though looking through a window. Unlike a window, however, the view could be manipulated and augmented to address the evolving tactical needs of an engagement. With the transparent floor bisecting the spherical space, the resulting effect was like walking through space. All TSS battleships had a similar visualization system, but the Conquest’s was the most impressive.
The students took sharp breaths of surprise and delight as they took in the sight. Many looked down at their feet, their legs suddenly unsteady. Though Jason had long since gotten his ‘space legs’ in the room, he was familiar with the strange sense of vertigo at the convincing appearance of standing among the stars.
“Pretty incredible, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” they murmured almost in unison.
Paula cautiously approached the center of the room. She pointed at the podiums. “Is that how the weapon is controlled?”
“It is.”
“I don’t suppose we could get a demonstration of that, too?”
“Not a chance,” Jason replied. “However, I can walk you through the interface and then take you down to Engineering and the hangar.”
Paula grinned. “That will do.”
CHAPTER 9
“The question is, what’s the best way to get through the wall?” Wil mused as he examined the smooth surface.
Even once they got inside, there was no guarantee that they’d find what they were looking for. It was a longshot that the Priesthood would have a copy of the treaty locked away somewhere, forgotten through time. But he had a hunch. And his hunches rarely led him astray.
“It’s impossible to know how long a chamber may have been sealed. Any paper in there could disintegrate the moment we introduce outside air,” Saera pointed out.
“We could keep a shield up until we can assess the contents,” Cris suggested.
“Good call,” Wil agreed. “All right, Saera, take the shield. Dad, keep an eye on the structural stability while I cut us an entrance.”
They nodded their assent.
Wil instinctively formed a telepathic link with the two of them so they could coordinate their movements. Through the link, he felt Saera probing the space behind the wall to determine where to erect a shield to protect the room’s contents. She settled on a placement about a meter beyond the wall, leaving Wil plenty of room to work.
While Cris kept a light telekinetic hold on the wall and ceiling around them, Wil began to slice an opening through the wall with surgical precision. Busting a hole inward would have been a lot faster, but there might not be room for the debris, and he didn’t want to inadvertently cause structural damage. So, instead, he formed an energy saw and sliced an archway into the plastic wallcovering and stone behind. Since he was effectively breaking the molecular bonds between the materials rather than actually sawing, there was very little dust but a good deal of heat, which he vented into transdimensional space to keep the temperature under control.
Within a minute, the outline of the archway had been fully cut out. Wil then grabbed the wall segment and began sliding it toward them. The wall groaned in protest.
“This structure is solid rock. It’s not going anywhere,” Cris said.
“All right.” With his fear of a collapse assuaged, Wil gave the chunk another firm telekinetic yank.
The section came free with the rumbling grind of stone-on-stone. A spray of dust, loosened from the friction, prompted Wil to put up a shield between the three of them and the opening to cut off the chalky mist. He guided the wall chunk down the corridor in the opposite direction from their exit and set it down. A thud reverberated underfoot as it came to rest.
Through the archway, Saera had her shield intact. Invisible to anyone without Gifts, it showed up as a silver shimmer to Wil’s enhanced senses.
“It feels like there was a good seal in here,” Saera reported. “The air is stagnant.”
As the dust settled, Wil dropped his temporary shield. “I can’t say I know much about document preservation,” he admitted.
“Uh.” Cris shrugged. “I think moderate humidity and temperature.”
Wil assessed the conditions inside the chamber. “Feels okay, I think?”
“I’ll start slowly equalizing the air.” Saera made her shield slightly permeable and allowed the air to begin mixing from the hallway into the room, rather than billowing in with a single gust.
; While they waited for the process to complete, Wil shined his handheld’s light inside to start taking visual inventory of the contents.
At first glance, there wasn’t a lot to see. A thin layer of tan dust covered everything in the room. The objects appeared to be in cluttered piles and had no consistency in size and shape. Statues. Crates. Pottery. The only thing uniting the mismatched collection was that it all seemed old. Though no books or other paper were out in the open, he was thankful they had taken precautions while accessing the space.
No energy signatures jumped out at him. But a cursory glance wasn’t sufficient.
“Would something important like an ancient treaty end up here?” Cris asked.
“I don’t have a good reason why, but my gut is telling me ‘yes’.” The feeling had been insistent since Wil first got the idea to visit the island—almost like he was being drawn by a preternatural force to the place. Having looked into the nexus, he respected the universal energies and the patterns woven in complex paths. So, when he was nudged in a direction, he tried to follow the threads to see where he was being led.
“What would this thing even look like?” Saera asked.
It was a good question, and Wil didn’t have a lot to go on. During his prior conversations with the Aesir, they suggested that it would have been a physical record, probably etched in something that could stand the test of time. One would think something like that would stand out, though, and not have been tossed into a random storeroom. Except, Wil didn’t know where else it might be. The Priesthood’s many, many artifacts had already been meticulously cataloged, and there wasn’t anything that fit the description. So, either it was buried somewhere down here, or the Priesthood never had it and the treaty record might be lost forever.
“We’re probably looking for something durable,” Wil said. “I know it’s not helpful, but I think we’ll know it when we see it.”
They began going through the items as carefully as they could, using telekinesis to move around objects rather than their hands as to avoid unnecessary contamination. Nearly half an hour passed, and Wil had yet to see anything valuable.
“These items are totally random,” Cris said, echoing Wil’s thoughts.
Saera nodded. “Yeah, this all seems like useless junk. Like stuff that was dumped in a storage shed because no one knew what else to do with it.”
“Yeah.” Cris nudged a plain, bronze vase with his toe. “Things can get lost over time, but the Priesthood sealed off this room for a reason. It was the reject stuff—items that weren’t even worth removing.”
“I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s close. I don’t know why.” Wil shook his head.
“I trust your instincts,” his father said. “There could be another room like this. We haven’t yet completed this level, and there very well may be others.”
“No, I’m missing something.” He looked around the room again. All old, ugly things. None of this fits the Priesthood’s style. “Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong. We agreed that a treaty of this importance would have been documented on a material that would last. Gold. Crystal. We’re talking about something maybe a hundred thousand years old. The Priesthood, themselves, used amber and gold to preserve those bodies.” He paused for a few seconds to swallow while his stomach turned over at the thought.
“So,” he continued, “there’s a measure of innate worth to the material itself that we’re looking for, even behind the value of its content. One thing we know for certain about the Priesthood is that they enjoyed being ostentatious. Anything ‘pretty’ or valuable would be on display, not locked in a forgotten room with a bunch of reject junk.”
“Where, though?” Saera held out her arms. “You said yourself, everything else was cataloged.”
Cris pursed his lips in thought. “Could it have been sealed in a shrine or something?”
“Oh, shite.” Wil froze. “Stars, why didn’t I think of it before? We already have the foking thing!”
“What?” Cris asked.
“It’s been right there all along. Stars!” Wil ran back toward the elevator.
“Wil, what are you talking about?” Saera questioned as she ran after him.
“A material with utility. Crystal. Specifically, toradite crystal is often used as a focusing aperture for telekinetic powers; some types are the next best thing to ateron. When we seized the island and the Priesthood made their final stand, there was that column of energy. I was so focused on the telepathic link, and, well, not dying, that it never occurred to me they may have been using a relay hub, in the way we use the Conquest.”
“Okay, but what does that have to do with this?” Cris asked as he jogged behind Wil.
“The position of that beam. It was a beacon pointing us right to where we need to go. We’re almost directly under it.”
Saera’s brow furrowed. “So, it’s…?”
Wil reached the elevator and waited for the others to get in before hitting the door controls. “That’s why I had the feeling it was here. Subconsciously, I probably detected the properties of the material, and I may have even seen inscriptions. I bet the thing is written in some form of Old Taran, which was the Priesthood’s language, so it wouldn’t have stood out at the time.”
Saera was starting to look excited. “Okay, but what object are you talking about?”
Wil smiled. “I saw it during the tour yesterday! And it didn’t even occur to me it might be what we were looking for.”
“Where?!” Saera and Cris asked in unison.
“In the Sanctuary. The foking centerpiece.” Wil couldn’t help laughing to himself. I walked right past it and didn’t think twice. I was so intent on the idea that it was hidden away in a locked room that it never occurred to me it might be there in plain sight.
“Stars!” Cris breathed.
Saera laughed. “Okay, I feel like an idiot for missing that.”
“Oh, me too,” Wil agreed. “Of course a treaty with a race of transdimensional beings would be inscribed on a rare material with such unique properties.”
It made perfect sense. The Priesthood was corrupt, but they were never stupid. Their historians were always thorough in their accounting of Taran history through the ages, filtering what made it out to the public. But they knew the ‘truth’, as they chose to interpret it. So, the notion that something as important as the treaty had simply been lost was ridiculous, and he felt silly for ever thinking that was a possibility. Far more reasonable was that the Priesthood would have known the significance of the artifact and wanted it close at hand. More than that, though, they would have appreciated the utility of it. Seen it as a tangible connection to the higher dimensions, to help them achieve the ascension they so desperately wanted. So, they used it as a tool, placed at the center of their operations.
The moment the elevator doors opened, the three of them dashed toward the Sanctuary. As Raena had noted during her tour, it was the only space that had remained largely untouched since the Priesthood was ousted. By far the most striking remnant of the Priesthood’s theological roots, the Sanctuary reminded Wil of the ornate cathedrals he’d seen on Earth in historic European cities. The paintings and engravings on the walls and arched ceiling were priceless works of art, and Raena and Ryan had been right to leave it intact.
Centered in the middle of the room, positioned beneath a skylight to catch the light, was a life-sized prismatic glass statue of a robed figure with one arm reaching toward the stars. The statue was on top of a pedestal, capped with a circular piece of pale blue toradite crystal divided into thirds, each with beautiful engravings that had stood the test of time. Much of the circle was covered up by the sculpture, so it naturally wouldn’t draw attention.
Now, primed for it as they approached, Wil felt the energy radiating from the circular piece at the base. Perhaps the most important document in Taran history, and they used the thing as a bomaxed tabletop. He laughed again, shaking his head. So typical of the Priesthood. Fokers.
“Stars, that really could be it!” Cris approached the statue with new reverence.
There was a strange humor to it. The statue depicted an imagined version of the Cadicle—the symbolic figure Wil was in the flesh, as far as the Priesthood and Aesir were concerned. According to their doctrine, the Cadicle represented the next stage of Taran evolution in terms of superior genetics and abilities; though, while Wil’s Gifts were undeniably advanced, he’d never considered himself particularly iconic. Nevertheless, it figured that this ancient avatar of himself would be standing on the exact pivotal piece of history he’d been trying to locate for months.
The irony wasn’t lost on Cris and Saera, and they exchanged amused glances.
Wil sighed. “You don’t need to say it.”
Saera smirked. “What, that the fate of the galaxy is at your feet?”
“Or that you stand up on principles?” Cris chimed in.
Wil resisted the urge to wipe his hands down his face. “Yeah, something like that.”
Before any more wordplay could threaten to derail their mission, Wil telekinetically lifted the statue off the pedestal and placed it gently on the floor out of the way.
The three of them huddled around the inscribed toradite crystal. Two-thirds of the circle were incomprehensible symbols, but the other did appear to be Old Taran, as Wil suspected.
“It’s like a Rosetta Stone,” Saera said.
Cris cocked his head. “What’s that?”
“A tablet on Earth—allowed translation of a dead language. If this is Old Taran, then you might be able to make some sense of these alien languages.”
Wil nodded. “In written form, anyway. We have no idea how it’s supposed to sound.”
“Oh, good point.” She frowned.
“But what matters now is what our side says.” He began reading over the text to make sure it was what they suspected. The language was difficult to make out but readable. It appeared to be a variation of Old Taran—a language hardly spoken outside the Priesthood—and could be even an older dialect of the language than that. While he’d always been partial to mathematics over linguistics, he knew enough about the roots of Taran language to fill in the gaps.
