Harbinger

by Charles R Case

  He gave her a shrug and said, “Merp?”

  “I suppose,” she said to him, then made her decision. “Mezner, give me an active scan of that thing. Make sure the beam is tight, but I want to know its specs.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” she said, her fingers dancing over her controls.

  Sara felt an itch on the back of her neck, and turned to see Nyx still sitting on Grimms’ chair. She was at attention, which Sara didn’t think too much about, until she realized that the small fox was trembling.

  Sara keyed her comm to link directly with Cora. “What’s wrong with Nyx?”

  “Scan complete, ma’am. I didn’t get much, but…” Mezner’s eyes went wide. “Ma’am, it’s powering up!”

  Sara snapped her attention to her viewing bubble, and observed the ship coming to life. Lights began to flicker on, and a blue jet of plasma shot from the strange engines.

  “Oh, shit! Get us out of here now!” Cora nearly screamed over the bridge’s speakers. “Emergency jump,” she said, and the screen flashed to a new view.

  Sara saw that Cora had jumped them nearly a million kilometers away from the foreign ship. The small, odd ship was accelerating at an alarming rate, but it was still a ways away.

  “Cora, what’s going on?”

  “That ship. We need to get away from it. I’ll explain later, but you need to get us far away, and now.”

  Sara trusted her sister. If Cora said they needed to leave, then they needed to leave. She zoomed out and selected a system close by at random.

  “Take us here.”

  “Warp in three,” Cora began, and Sara saw the small ship accelerate to an unbelievable speed in less than a second. “Two.” The small ship began to blur on her viewing bubble, then it disappeared completely. “One.”

  The small ship reappeared right beside the Raven, and six beams speared out from the incredibly fast ship. Each beam was right on target to hit them, but the image froze and smashed down to a pinprick as the Raven entered the warp thread.

  The slowly expanding view gave Sara the chills as she stared down the frozen image of the most aggressive ship she had ever seen.

  “What the hell was that?”

  21

  “As soon as we drop out of warp, we need to do it again. Pick a direction away from populated space, especially Earth,” Cora said, her panic lessened now that the Raven was away.

  “Okay, but you need to tell me what’s going on,” Sara said, looking at the frightened faces of her bridge crew.

  “I will, I promise. But this jump was short, so in two minutes, I need you to jump again,” Cora pressed.

  Sara nodded, and they all waited as the image of the alien ship slowly expanded. With a flash, Sara’s viewing bubble updated, and she immediately selected another system. The Raven went to warp, and they were on their way.

  Sara had selected another relatively short jump, but one that took them to a binary system the Elif had surveyed many years ago. They knew that the radiation from the twin suns messed with sensors and gave false readings. Aetheric sensors would still work, but the constant need for shields kept anyone from spending too much time in the system.

  Sara hoped the interference would help them hide, if the enemy happened to have a way to find them.

  She waited patiently through the fifteen minutes it took to get to the system, only biting her lip half a dozen times as she tried to figure out who and what was following them.

  She noted that Nyx was pacing back and forth in Grimms’ chair as her fur stood on end, and there was a wild look in her eyes that spoke of disbelief. Sara raised an eyebrow at that and considered what the pixie might know that she didn’t.

  The screen flashed again, and Sara was nearly blinded by the intense light of the two suns. She had warped them directly between the astral bodies to take the best advantage of the radiation, but she hadn’t known how close the large suns were to one another.

  She immediately powered a shield spellform that Alister gave her, encasing the Raven in a golden blanket and keeping out the most harmful stuff that was being thrown at them. The amount of power she needed to focus into the shield was slightly alarming at first, but she soon had a comfortable stream of Aether flowing, and she felt confident she could keep it up for a long time before it became a problem.

  “Boon, meet me in my ready room,” Sara requested into her comm as she stepped out of the command ring. “Grimms, you have the bridge. You let me know the second that ship shows up, if it ever does. I’m keeping us shielded to give us a little breathing room if we are attacked.”

  He gave her a salute. “Aye, ma’am.”

  Nyx and Alister followed her into the ready room just as the bridge doors slid open, revealing Boon fastening up her battlesuit.

  Sara stepped into the small room, and Alister and Nyx came in on her heels, jumping onto the small couch and looking at her attentively. She gave them a nod and poured herself a cup of coffee from the wall dispenser.

  “You want one?” she asked Boon as she stepped into the small office.

  “No thanks, what’s this all about? I was watching on my room’s monitor as that ship came at us. Who was that, the Galvox?” Boon asked, taking one of the chairs in front of the small desk.

  “We’re about to find out. Cora? What the fuck is going on?” Sara demanded, flopping down into the swivel chair behind her desk. She nearly spilled hot coffee down the front of her battlesuit, but was able to keep it in her mug, if only just.

  “Nyx recognized the ship,” Cora said, calming down now that they were not in immediate danger.

  Sara looked over at the nervous little fox and raised her eyebrow. “I thought I saw recognition from you,” she said, confirming what she had seen earlier.

  The fox gave a curt nod, then closed her eyes.

  “She wants me to relay what she says,” Cora explained in a slightly monotone voice. “She says they are called the Vitas, and will destroy any life they come across without a second thought.”

  “Fuck me. How have we never heard of these assholes before? If they’re that aggressive, shouldn’t the Teifen or the Elif have had previous run-ins with them?” Sara asked, taking a gulp of coffee, and mumbling a curse at the burning liquid as it went down her throat.

  I should have gone for the whiskey.

  “Nyx says they are an ancient enemy of the pixies, and have been hunting them throughout time.” Cora stopped and addressed Nyx. “I thought humans and pixies were from the same planet. How can they be hunting you and not us?”

  There was a moment of silence as Nyx presumably answered her War Mage.

  “Well, that’s news to me,” she mumbled. “She says the pixies are not actually from the same planet as humans, but came to us early in our development and made the pact with us to protect themselves from the Vitas.”

  “That was hundreds of thousands of years ago. How have they kept themselves hidden all this time?” Sara asked, powering on her tablet in its slot on her desk to keep an eye on the sensor readings. So far the coast was clear.

  “They haven’t. They just now got here,” Cora said.

  “The Vitas are obviously capable of warp, or they would not have been in a system toward the center of the galaxy. The Milky Way is only a hundred thousand light years across; it wouldn’t take them a couple hundred thousand years to get anywhere in the galaxy,” Boon countered, doing the math in her head.

  “I agree.” After a quiet moment during which Nyx was talking to her, Cora let out a low, “Oh. That’s horrifying.”

  “What’s horrifying?” Sara asked, narrowing her eyes at the cream-colored fox.

  “They aren’t from the Milky Way.”

  22

  “You’re saying the pixies are from another galaxy?” Boon asked, turning her head to look at Silva draped across her shoulders. The white ferret gave a shrug. It was obviously news to her.

  There was a moment of silence as Cora and Nyx spoke. Then Cora shook her head in frustration. “Wait.
I’m just going to tell them as you say it, Nyx, okay?”

  The small fox gave a nod, but kept her eyes closed.

  “The pixies were an advanced race that came from a galaxy just over seven hundred million light years away,” Cora related. She stopped. “Seven hundred million? Seriously? Okay, sorry. Please continue,” Cora said, as the fox frowned.

  “Their original galaxy was about the same size as the Milky Way, and as far as they could tell, they were the only sentient species in it. They explored every star system they could, and never found anything more intelligent than wild animals,” Cora continued with the tale. “The pixies focused on exploration, and wanted nothing more than to find others to share the universe with. It became apparent that they would need to go a lot further from home if they wanted to accomplish that, so they started building ships that could travel between the galaxies.”

  “The dreadnoughts,” Boon supplied, almost out of nowhere.

  Nyx’s eyes popped open, and she tilted her head to regard Boon. Then gave her a short nod of affirmation.

  “Yes. How did you know that?” Cora asked.

  Boon shrugged. “I don’t know, it was a guess. But when we were on the dreadnought, it seemed to me that it had been one thing, and the human-sized stuff was added later. It was small things, like we passed an access hatch that was far too small for a human to get into. And the whole park in the middle; it didn’t seem like something a human would put on a starship that was meant for battle.”

  “The Teifen had a park in their dreadnought,” Sara pointed out, remembering her bloody march to the governor’s chambers.

  “That was pretty small when compared to the vast open space on our dreadnought. The Teifen used it as a sign of status, but our dreadnought had a park that took up huge amounts of space. It wasn’t practical, unless people were raising families on the ship,” Boon said with a shrug.

  “So the pixies can fly the dreadnought? I thought they didn’t have the Aether capacity to do things like that,” Sara said, sitting up with interest.

  “They used to be able to fly it. But when they made the arrangement with the humans, they reworked the ships to make them easier for humans to use. We’re getting off-subject, though,” Cora said irritably.

  “Sorry, please continue,” Sara said, shoving her idea to the back of her mind and refocusing.

  “While some number of their species worked on the dreadnoughts, another faction was trying to build a way to achieve immortality.”

  “Why?” Boon asked, not getting the connection.

  “Because, even with the dreadnoughts, it would take a long time to travel between galaxies. And if they needed to get to a new galaxy and still take the time to explore it, most of the pixies that left on the initial flight would not be alive when they finally found what they were looking for. So, they wanted to find a way to extend their lives. Eventually they found a solution: the cores,” Cora relayed.

  “Like the one connected to your tank?” Sara asked.

  “I guess so. I had no idea,” Cora said, taken aback. “I thought cores could only be made by War Mages.”

  “No, the Alant program told us that any four mages could make a core. It was the spellforms that made it possible, not the abilities of the War Mages themselves,” Sara said, tapping her lip.

  “So, you’re saying that the Vitas are actually pixies?” Boon asked, skipping right to the end.

  “Not exactly,” Cora continued. “The Vitas are the result of several mishaps and abuses of power. The immortality project was actually pretty close to something humans are trying to figure out right now. The idea was that a core could be a computer that would hold and process all the information a sentient being needed to be considered alive. They were trying to upload their consciousness onto a hard drive.”

  “I don’t get it,” Boon said, shaking her head.

  “It’s a pretty simple concept. The idea is that a human brain works on electrical impulses. If you can translate those pulses to something a computer could process, you would be able to upload yourself to a computer, and become immortal to a degree,” Cora said.

  “No, I understand that—they’ve been working on the idea since before I was born. What I don’t understand is how a project to upload the pixies turned into the murder machine that just attacked us.”

  “Oh, right,” Cora said, chagrined. She then continued with Nyx’s words. “The first pixies uploaded themselves, and everything went according to plan. They were able to interface with the dreadnought systems, and actually became independent entities when they began building mechanical bodies.

  “Then after a few thousand years, one of the first pixies to be uploaded snapped. He had been driven mad by his confinement to the core, and decided that no one should ever have to go through what he was. So, he built an army of robots and commanded them to stop the project.

  “There was a war, and the pixies were not able to stand against the endless swarm of robotic invaders. Then another uploaded pixie snapped and joined his comrade in the robot-making; this pixie had been a programmer in his former life, and he improved the design.

  “And so the first A.I. was born. The A.I. took to heart the orders to stop pixies from creating more cores, and decided the best way to keep them from ever uploading a consciousness again was to destroy the entire race.”

  “Holy shit. It’s like that old time-traveling robot war movie with the bodybuilder,” Boon exclaimed.

  Sara and the familiars looked at her with blank looks.

  “What? I like old movies.”

  “Anyway,” Sara said, rolling her eyes. “What happened next?”

  Cora continued. “The war intensified, and the pixies were losing. They took their last chance and loaded up every dreadnought they had and took off across the blackness of intergalactic space. They theorized that the Vitas would begin searching for them, starting with the closest galaxies first, so they took a multi-generational trip, not stopping ‘til they were far enough away that they could breathe easy. The Milky Way became their new home, and they have been here since.”

  “And how long ago was that?” Sara asked, raising an eyebrow at Nyx.

  There was a pause.

  “That can’t be right,” Cora said almost to herself, then relayed, “Nyx says they came here over nine hundred million years ago. That’s before complex life emerged on Earth.”

  “You’re saying the dreadnoughts are older than that? How can something last that long?” Boon asked, shaking her head.

  “Nyx says the ships continually repair themselves with the same nanobot system we have on the Raven. Over time, the entire ship is replaced, part by part, so in a sense, it’s not the same ship.”

  Sara put her head in her hand, and set her coffee on the desk. “My head hurts. Why is this the first I’m hearing that the pixies are actually extragalactic? You didn’t think that was maybe important to share when Boon and I came to visit you?” she asked Nyx.

  The fox shrugged her tiny shoulders, and Cora said, “It’s not common knowledge among the pixies. Only the Keepers of the Record were entrusted with the knowledge of our origin.”

  “Okay, but——” Sara started.

  Then the ship lurched to the side, sending her coffee cup careening off the desk. She felt an enormous amount of Aether pulling from her well as she tried to maintain the ship’s shielding.

  “Captain, we are under attack!” Mezner reported over Sara’s comm.

  “I’m on my way,” she said, jumping from her seat and taking two large steps to the ready room’s door.

  She motioned for Alister to follow, but he was already leaping through the air, aiming for her shoulder.

  23

  Sara ran to the command ring and powered it up while Grimms gave her a sit rep.

  “It warped in and immediately began firing. It’s using some sort of energy weapon, but nothing we’ve seen,” he said, as the ship rocked from another barrage.

  Sara grunted as her Aether
well was strained once again. She could see that their shields had burned down to an angry orange glow in several spots. The Vitas ship was spinning and dodging in a highly aggressive and random manner. Its relatively small size belied the power of its weapons.

  “Hon, give me a lock and hit it with a barrage from the gauss cannons. Cora, can you hit it with the Aether cannons? We need to soften it up for Hon,” Sara said, marking the dodging ship in her display with difficulty.

  “Charging Aether cannons,” Cora reported.

  “Connors, give me some evasive maneuvers. No sense sitting here and giving it an easy target.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Connors said, his fingers flying over the controls.

  The Raven shot forward, then juked to starboard at nearly ninety degrees. The small ship adjusted its own maneuvers, and a dance began between the relentless heat of the two suns.

  “Firing,” Cora called, as one line of blue Aetheric power stabbed out, followed by a second.

  “Both shots went wide,” Mezner reported.

  The Raven shuddered slightly, and a volley of three slugs leapt from one of the gauss turrets, but the small Vitas ship changed directions almost instantly, avoiding the shots. It let out a quick stream of particle beams that slammed into the Raven‘s shields, and burned them down faster than Sara could feed them Aether.

  The last two beams seared into the armored hull, making the ship jump under her feet. She grabbed hold of the command ring, and was able to keep upright.

  “Damage report,” Grimms yelled over the alarms.

  “We have a hull breach on deck two. The bulkhead’s closed, and the nanobots have been deployed,” Mezner said.

  Cora fired the Aether cannons again, but this time, she used short bursts and tried to lead the other ship, hoping it would run into the beams. She sent out six bursts, each only a fraction of a second in duration, and all but the last one were dodged. The final shot grazed the Vitas ship, but did little to no damage that they could see.