by T. R. Harris
Tactoria was next in line. Adam had come to witness the event in a morbid attempt to learn more about his enemy.
“With respect, Adam Cain, we cannot hang idle as this occurs,” said the Tactorian commander, Kanik G’ks. He clung to a rail above his station, looking down at the smaller Human through eyes like black marbles. The aliens never sat; instead, they used a pair of long appendages extending from their shoulders to hang like bats from bars placed throughout the ship. Other, more articulated arms and hands, worked the controls below. The ship’s odd layout left Adam with no place to sit, constantly needing to shift his weight for relief. After three hours, his feet were killing him.
“Trust me, Commander G’ks, if you fire on that ship it will only serve to energize their laser weapons. At the moment, they don’t have the power to attack your fleet.”
Adam was unable to read the expression on the slick black face of the alien, with its hard crust and solid black eye orbs resting on the surface of a pointy head. But the tiny, round mouth was producing sounds that Adam’s universal language bug translated. They were words of desperation and panic.
“Yet they traverse unopposed to Tactoria, where billions will die unless we stop them.”
“You’ve seen the data, Commander. I wish there were more we could—”
“Yes! There should be more the Expansion could do to protect us.”
“I don’t represent the Expansion.”
“It matters not! You move within the branches of power. You have access to strength that we do not.”
“Believe me, G’ks, if we could do something, we would. But it’s early in this war with the Klin. We’re still working on countermeasures.”
“Yet you come here this day with none, not even to test. You are here to observe, to observe the death of a civilization.”
Adam fell silent, intimidated by the unblinking glare from the alien’s eyes. For a moment, his sickness shifted from the pungent smell to the regret he felt for G’ks and his people. Although several million would survive the attack, as the Tactorian said billions more would not, along with their structures, monuments, historical relics, and more. For all intents and purposes, this was the day the Tactorian race would go extinct.
“Those aboard your fleet—as well as the thousands you’re taking from the planet as we speak—they’ll form the core of a new Tactorian civilization—”
“Why did they not accept our offer of surrender and cooperation?” the alien questioned, ignoring Adam’s words of hope. “Others have been granted such, yet not the Tactorians.”
He was right. Every world approached by the Klin had offered unconditional surrender, along with the cooperation of the population to build their killer robots and black delivery ships. Thirty-two were approached; six were granted clemency, while twenty-six civilizations perished. Even the Tactorians had begged the Klin to accept their surrender—as they were continuing to do even as the black ship approached their homeworld. But the Klin remained silent, resolute. The black ship continued along its path, moving through the system at nine-tenths the speed of light, scheduled to arrive at Tactoria in four hours.
“Perhaps the Klin have not faced such fire as we can deliver. Perhaps—”
“Twice your number of defending ships met the Klin at Si-on Three. But they opened fire and lost over three hundred ships before the fleet could retreat out of range. I implore you: Do not make the situation worse—”
A small flash through the forward viewscreen caught Adam’s attention. He turned in time to see a thin shaft of light streak across the black of space. The line reached a point in space where it stopped and spread out, wrapping an invisible object in a faint green iridescence glow. Before he knew it, a hundred other streaks all converged on the same point in space.
“Get us out of here—now!” Adam cried out.
“Leave? We have only just begun the battle.”
“All you’ve done is charge their weapons. Their shields absorb energy and feed it back into the ship. The Klin don’t have a choice now but to attack your ships to bleed off the excess. And they’ll do it with a weapon far more powerful than any of your shields can withstand. Get your people out of here!”
All eyes shifted to the drone cameras tracking the Klin warship. The vessel was now encased in a shimmering shell of green light, while torrents of white and blue energy flared away from the shields, only to arc back and reenter at the forward and rear tips of the vessel. As the Klin ship absorbed the energy, a dozen powerful laser beams shot out from points on the hull, targeting Tactorian ships located several thousand miles away. Traveling at nearly the speed of light, the beams reached their targets a split second later, passing through overloaded diffusion shields and burning through helpless hulls with impunity.
None of the initial targets were spared; the Tactorians were too close. Those farther away began to change course as they witnessed the fate of their comrades. All the while, the defenders continued releasing salvo after salvo of flash cannon fire from their rear turrets. The Klin ship didn’t attempt to evade the incoming balls of plasma energy. Instead, it took them in, repurposed the energy, and sent it back out to destroy even more Tactorian ships.
G’ks realized now the truth in Adam’s words. The laser weapons of the Klin had a hundred times the range of flash bolts; the Klin ship didn’t even have to change course to attack the defenders. The lasers simply locked onto other targets a million miles away and unleashed more beams. Some of the lasers even tracked across space before coming in contact with their prey, something unheard of with flash weapons. The Tactorians were outmatched. Of the two hundred twenty defenders, only ninety remained space-worthy after the first minute of battle.
Just then, a brilliant flash of light filled the bridge. Adam raised his arm to shield his eyes from the blinding assault.
“You have nuclear weapons?” he asked, stunned at the revelation. Most worlds within the Expansion were restricted from having or developing such devices. They weren’t needed in the era of space travel and gravity drives. At a moment’s notice, a targeted vessel could enter a gravity-well and be a half a light-year away and safe from the weapon’s limited influence. They were effective, however, if used in a nuclear sphere, but only against stationary targets and when fifty or more bombs detonated simultaneously.
“They are from a past time,” G’ks explained. “However, we will use any measures to save our world.”
Adam had never seen a Klin black ship square off against a nuclear explosion. Although he feared the worst, he was hoping for the best.
Most of the drone cameras didn’t survive the explosion, yet a few did, those at the outskirts of the weapon’s range. They showed the Klin ship being bombarded by sheets of yellow energy, interlaced with lightning bolts of blue and white. The arcing beams of energy feeding the black ship were triple in thickness and intensity, yet the hull appeared to be intact and unaffected by the intense radiation surrounding it.
Just then, an incredibly bright beam of light erupted from the top of the vessel amidships. It streaked off into space perpendicular to the length of the hull. Then it began to move. On G’ks threat board, the huge beam was seen slashing across space, targeting and slicing through four more of his ships. These vessels were three million miles from the Klin vessel, yet still they fell to the deadly laser beam. At that distance, it took the beam sixteen seconds to reach its target, but once established, it remained charged and able to shift from one defender to another. Every rock, piece of space junk, even clouds of gas and dust were vaporized as the steady beam raked across the heavens between Tactorian ships.
And now it was moving toward the flagship.
“Reverse course!” G’ks yelled. Hanging from their bars, half a dozen Tactorians began operating controls. The ship was in mid-turn when the beam reached it. Diffusion shields flared once as the energy from the laser overwhelmed them instantly. And then the star-hot light sliced off the rear third of the ship.
Fortunat
ely, most interior compartments within the ship were sealed at the onset of the battle, so the forward section—and even the rear third beyond the cut—remained airtight. But gravity was lost, along with internal power, engines, communications and life support. Battery-powered emergency lights flashed on, revealing a bridge crew in panic.
With gravity down, the Tactorians used the various grasping bars to move through the room, all in a headlong rush to reach emergency air tanks held in storage compartments along the base of the interior bulkheads. Adam held onto the side of a console to keep from floating away, both amused and saddened by the reaction of the crew. The room was airtight and large, with enough residual atmosphere to last a couple of hours. Yet already, the Tactorians were pulling out small, personal air tanks and placing masks over their faces, using up emergency reserves before they were needed. At this rate, Adam would have enough air to last five or six hours…even without an emergency tank.
The Tactorians huddled near the deck, sucking on air tanks and shivering from fright and the gathering cold. All electronics were down, including communications, and any ships within range would consider the drifting flagship to be a lost cause. Adam had to do something about that.
Using the Artificial Telepathy Device embedded beneath his right armpit, he reached out mentally, searching for electronic signals within range. His ATD allowed him to connect with control modules designed and built by the Formilian race, which amounted to about ninety-nine percent of all electronics in the galaxy. He was rewarded with the detection of a nearby source.
It was a starship, located about four hundred thousand miles away and just now charging its gravity generators, preparing for a deep-well jump out of the area. Adam’s mental intrusion raced through computers and circuits until he found the gravity drive controls. He shut down the generators, leaving the ship dead in space and the crew frightened and confused.
He accessed the ship’s comm controls and opened a channel.
“This is Adam Cain aboard the Tactorian flagship.” His voice boomed from bridge speakers, even as operators were at a loss to pinpoint the source of the incoming transmission. “Just open a channel, and I’ll hear you. Please respond.”
A moment later, a weak voice sounded in Adam’s mind.
This is H’can, commander of this vessel. I do not understand.
“You don’t have to at this point. Just know that Commander G’ks and most of his crew are alive and trapped in secure compartments aboard the flagship. We’re in desperate need of a rescue operation.”
We read no power output...and no communication signals originating from the flagship. We cannot proceed without confidence. And add to that our generators are malfunctioning; we are in no position to assist.
“I shut down your engines so you wouldn’t bolt out of the area. Your chemical engines are still operating. Now stop thinking and get your asses over here!”
To punctuate his sentence, Adam ignited the chem drive of the Tactorian starship, not at full power, but just enough to let them know he had the means to make his request-slash-command a reality. The oblong spaceship cycled around and headed for Adam and the bifurcated flagship.
Three hours later, most of the crew from both sections of the flagship had been rescued. Adam even managed to salvage his personal starship from the landing bay. This did involve some rather abrupt depressurization of the chamber since all the controls were dead. But once the outer door was open, he remotely activated the ship’s controls with his ATD and coaxed it out of the flagship’s bay and into that of H’can’s ship.
Half an hour later, Adam was on the bridge of the second Tactorian ship, listening as H’can briefed his commander on the status of the battle.
“A total of five atom weapons were sent against the Klin warship. At that point, it left the system.”
“It left? Was it able to create a gravity-well?” Adam asked H’can.
“The ability to or not cannot be discerned. I report that it did not leave in a gravity-well,” said the alien.
Nuclear explosions had a nasty habit of interfering with gravity-well creation. Apparently, the Klin had not solved that problem. But that wasn’t what excited Adam the most. The Klin had been driven away. This was great news.
“Their energy absorption must have limits,” he said. “They split before their systems overloaded.”
“Correction: The Klin ship remained intact as one unit during its departure,” H’can pointed out. Adam gave the beetle-like alien a full-tooth smile. He figured he was safe with the whole exposed-teeth-mean-a-death-challenge thing…since the Tactorians didn’t have teeth.
“That is true, my friend, but they aren’t gone, not for good. They probably retreated just so they could dump some of their excess energy. We’ll need more nukes if we want to keep them away from your planet for good.”
“Confused as to your meaning, Adam Cain?” H’can said. Again, the solid black eye orbs made reading his expression impossible. “The second Klin ship delivered the conquering robots to the surface.”
“What second ship?”
“The second Klin ship. It appeared from the opposite direction as the first vessel. It reached Tactoria unopposed.”
“They used two ships to attack your system?”
Both H’can and G’ks shared a look. “Was the meaning not clear?” H’can asked.
“Yes, it was. It’s just that I’ve never heard of the Klin using two ships for one system. I didn’t know they had that many available.”
According to command intelligence sources, the Klin only had seven completed black ships to deliver their deadly cargo of killer robots to a target world. With a galaxy to conquer, they shouldn’t be in a position to allocate more than one ship per system—at least not yet. Even factoring in a reasonable build-out rate, it would take decades to accomplish the Klin’s Final Solution—the annihilation of all Prime life in the galaxy.
“In spite of our efforts, our homeworld is in the process of being destroyed,” G’ks stated. “There is nothing more for us to do.”
“You can gather up the survivors and start over,” Adam snapped. “The Klin never kill everyone on a planet. Eventually, their robots shut down. But warn your people, as the machines power-down, they also explode. So, don’t go near any dormant robots.”
“We have been so briefed,” G’ks replied. “A warning conveyed in words I add, which is all the Expansion has given us to this point.”
Adam didn’t have a response. He’d heard the same complaint a dozen times before. ‘The Expansion should have done more.’ ‘The Expansion should be able to protect its member planets.’
Adam bowed slightly. “I’m sorry for your loss, G’ks, but I’ll be leaving now—”
“So, you can relay your observations?” asked the Tactorian commander. “It should be a short report, repeated often. I assist: Another world destroyed, billions of dead.”
2
Adam’s two-person command-class transport starship was not much more than a secure crew pod stuck between two of the largest gravity generators he’d ever seen on a ship this size. The craft was Juirean-built and extremely fast. They’d loaned it to him the last time he was on Formil, desperate for real-time intelligence regarding the Klin and recognizing Adam’s mastery of strategy and tactics. He also had the most up-to-date working knowledge of the Klin, making him the acknowledged ‘expert’ in this war and, once again, the default savior of the Milky Way Galaxy.
As he steered the ship to a safe distance from the Tactorian starship before engaging a deep gravity-well, Adam gnashed his teeth out of frustration. Once more, he felt the weight of the galaxy pressing down on his shoulders, with all eyes looking to him to pull a rabbit out of his hat. For once—just once—he wished someone else would come to the rescue. He was getting too old for all this hero shit.
The trip to Formil took eight days, even in the Juirean’s just-get-me-to-my-destination-as-fast-as-possible starship. During the journey, Adam had time to organize
his thoughts, and using the omnipresent galactic Library, he was able to pull up data to support his hypothesis. He would be ready to present his findings and recommendations as soon as he arrived on Arieel Bol’s home planet.
His team had arrived on Formil thirty days earlier, assembling there for a specific purpose unique only to them. As a result, when Adam entered the main hall on the twenty-first floor of the Trimen O’lac Building, he was greeted with a frustrating sight.
The lights in the room were flickering on and off.
“Knock it off, Jym!” Copernicus Smith snapped. “We get it; you can control the lights.”
“I can control more than that,” the tiny bear-like creature responded with gusto. “I can work elevators and food processors—I could even pilot a starship without touching the controls.”
“Yeah, we all can,” Sherri chimed in, frustrated as well by the alien’s obsession with his new Artificial Telepathy Device. “But I wouldn’t recommend trying to pilot a starship with your ATD, not until you’ve had more training.”
Several years ago, both Sherri Valentine and Riyad Tarazi had been fitted with ATDs and received on-the-job training from Adam and Arieel. Since then Riyad’s old unit had been removed, while Sherri’s burned out during one of the team’s many adventures. Now they were both proud owners of new units, as was every member of the team who didn’t already have one.
The Formilian Temple priests had raised holly-hell over the plan, but Arieel and Adam’s persistence proved more than they could resist. Considering the desperate state the galaxy was in facing the genocidal Klin, having a team of operatives equipped with the secret brain-interface devices was the only advantage the allies had going for them. Even so, there were seven team members against a whole army of alien-built killer robots and their ever-growing fleet of invincible warships.
Yet a year ago, Adam—with the help of his ATD—had proved effective during his only encounter with the Klin in this new war. It was argued that having six other people so equipped couldn’t hurt.
