by Craig Allen
“Hang on a second,” Cody said.
As she started to ask why, Cody put a hand behind her head and pulled her close. He kissed his fiancée, and she kissed him back. How long they stood there, he didn’t know, and he didn’t care.
“Docking control to Banshee One Eight, is there a problem? Your rear hatch is not opening.”
Sonja pulled away from Cody and reached for the comm unit in the hopper bay, but Cody stopped her. “To hell with them. They can wait.”
She grinned, as did Cody. Their long wait was over. Cody could hardly believe it. From that moment forward, he could simply be happy with the woman who was about to become his wife.
Epilogue
The sky was bluer than Cody thought it would be. Their new home wasn’t Earth, but it would do nicely.
“Can I look?”
Cody grinned at a blindfolded Sonja as the air car glided along the roadway. Fortunately, the noise of the engine drowned out the sounds of their surroundings. He didn’t want her to see their new home, not yet.
The wormhole ring had, amazingly, survived the gamma-ray burst largely intact. It sat along the horizon, in orbit around Mote’s World, retracted once more to its smaller size. The engineers of the fleet in orbit around Kali Prime—at least, where Kali Prime used to be—had managed to activate it there and send it to a world that once had been on the frontlines of a war eleven years past. But being that close to Spican space no longer frightened the inhabitants of Mote’s World. In fact, many Spicans were living on the planet.
“You can see the ring, can’t you?”
Cody nodded then remembered she couldn’t see him. “Yeah. It’s a sight. I just hope no one tries to steal it.”
“Someone will try,” Sonja said. “Pirates, crime lords… that thing’s worth a bundle in the wrong hands. That’s why they stationed a garrison here. I just hope they can figure the damn thing out. I mean, how hard can it be? Humans built it.”
“But the Reed Entity designed it. You can tell a caveman what pieces go where until he finally builds a handheld viewer, but that doesn’t mean he knows what it is or what it does.”
She snickered. “Don’t turn into a philosopher on me.”
“Don’t worry,” Cody said. “It’ll take years, but we’ll learn how to build our own teleportation rings. With the help of the Spicans, of course.”
“And you get to be their primary ambassador here,” Sonja said. “At least we’re together now.”
And we always will be. “I just hope it stays boring for a while. Interesting is too damn dangerous.”
After a moment, Sonja spoke. “I wonder where the Reed Entity went. Looked like it left the galaxy.”
“It did,” Cody said. “Astrometrics on the Tokugawa had a look at our sensory data. About a thousand light years outside Kali Prime’s new home is a grouping of five singularities, each a hundred more times massive than Earth’s sun.”
“How did that happen?”
“Someone had to have placed those black holes in that configuration. The speculation is it’s a gateway of some kind.”
“The Reed Entity did say we could follow if we were brave enough.” She shook her head. “Not now and not anytime soon am I going to try.”
Cody slowed and pulled into a parking space. “We’re here.”
He brought the air car to a halt. It barely had time to settle onto the ground before he hopped out, ran around to the passenger side, and helped her out.
“Can I look now?”
Cody grinned. “Not yet.”
“I hear ocean.” Sonja sighed. “Oh my God, Cody, I can’t wait to see.”
Cody had had to hustle to make living arrangements, which meant a transfer of cash from Earth to Mote’s World. His credit was good enough, at least—the perks of having been a famous athlete.
Cody reached up and pulled off the blindfold. “There you go.”
She stared at their new home like a schoolgirl. The ocean rumbled below the house, a beautiful beach accessible by stairs. Behind the house to the east was a mountain range that would dwarf the Rocky Mountains on Earth, but they looked just as beautiful to Cody.
“I love it.” She faced him with tears in her eyes. “What about your home? Won’t you miss Earth?”
“Earth’s not going anywhere.” He held out his hands. “Besides, this is my home now.”
“Never been here before.” Sonja gazed out over the ocean. “I have to report in two weeks. Think we can get to know this place by then?”
“Two weeks is a long time,” Cody said. “The tourist attractions on Mote’s World are some of the best in the sector. I’ll show you all of them.”
“Sounds like fun, but first…” She pulled him closer. “Show me the bedroom.”
~~~
Leader-of-All looked at the younglings, who stared at their teacher as they learned the ways of their people. They barely understood the horrors that had befallen them in the past, just as they would hardly remember the tiny creatures that called their people’s leader Stripe.
Such a simple, descriptive name, but an endearing one. Those creatures hardly knew that he had the markings on his head due to his age. He would sometimes refer to himself by that name, to the amusement of the rest of his people.
He hung his wings low, frustrated by the fact that his plans would likely not come to fruition until he was long gone.
Second One sailed overhead and dropped to land on the plateau. He folded his wings close to his body out of respect to Leader-of-All.
“We found the monster,” he said. “It appears to be intact, but it does not move.”
“It’s called a ship, Second One,” Stripe corrected. “Not a monster. It is a vessel for travel beyond this world.”
“Like the small people do?”
“Yes. And the ship can move itself. I will show you how.”
Second One gave Stripe a nod and joined him to watch the record keepers do their work. They were flying back and forth along the cliff face before them, the largest they had found in that temperate area of the planet, where they could still grow the rotting meat they needed to live.
Much of the towering cliff was already covered in diagrams, words, calculations, and a myriad of symbols copied from the dozens of handheld viewers they had gathered. It was one of twenty other such locations, a place to record the knowledge acquired from the tiny people. “Humans,” they called themselves. They were small and frail but also clever. He prayed to the Maker of All that the one who spoke for Stripe’s people, Cody, would be happy with his new mate.
“Is this worth the effort?” Second One asked. “These symbols do not seem important.”
Stripe let mirth flow from himself, strong enough that even the younglings in class could feel it.
“The viewers we acquired will not last forever, so we must record their contents here.” He waved a wing across the cliff face. “These equations and diagrams will allow us to recreate what the humans had, with the help of the factory in their vessel that crashed here.”
“Crashed by your hand, Leader?”
Stripe didn’t confirm or deny that the vessel humans called Odin had crashed because of him, using technology in the orb Stripe still clutched in his central claw. Some things were best kept secret.
“It is the key to our future,” Stripe said, “and a grand one it will be.”
His second-in-command gave a head bob, imitating a human reaction of comprehension. Still, Stripe didn’t believe the young flier did understand. That was fine. Stripe understood, and he would guarantee the next generation would understand as well.
Stripe shivered as a cold wind swept across the plain. At one time, his people had known the true nature of the quasars that floated in space billions of light years away. They had known the method of bypassing the uncertainty principle and the nature of atoms whose atomic numbers stretched into the tens of thousands. They had once had science stations hovering below the event horizons of black holes. They had forgotten
all those things, but the Hive, as the humans called it, had taught Stripe much. He would teach his people, and they would build and grow and learn.
One day, once more, his people would reach for the stars, and on that day, they would truly fly.
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Craig Allen was born in Houston, Texas but has lived most of his life in Denver, Colorado. After graduating college, he spent six years working in news radio before getting into the software development industry. He has always been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy.
Also by Craig Allen:
The Kali Trilogy
Kali’s Children
Kali’s Fire
The Storm World Series
Beyond the Sky
Within the Soul
The RoSo Quartet
Hole in the Heart
The Voice As I Hear It (forthcoming)
As I Am Yours (forthcoming)
Touching at Points (forthcoming)
Goodbye Sunshine
Season of Bliss
Without You
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Kali’s Doom
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Copyright © 2019 Craig Allen.
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