Jetta, listen—
Pausing mid-step, she held her breath and focused. Through the droning insect sound, she heard a rhythmic chant rising in intensity with every heartbeat.
I sense no malice, Jaeia observed.
“I feel...” Jetta began, then stopped. Her.
Running ahead, Jetta slipped on the floor, catching herself on a Liiker half-torso. She jerked away but lost her footing again, this time falling against a clump of tissue.
“Jetta!”
“Commander!”
As her sister and SMT yelled for her, the clump of tissue expanded, encompassing her body. Before she could react, the walls contracted, pumping her down an oily tube.
Jetta shot out of the tube and landed in a soft, nodular mass. Gagging and spitting, she wiped the oily biofilm from her face.
“The Apparax,” a deep voice announced.
The Apparax, echoed across the psionic plane.
Jetta put out her hand to stop the attacker, but none came. In the back of her mind she could hear her sister’s reassurances. Don’t worry; the path you traveled has clamped off, but we’ll find you. Just stay where you are.
She was on her own.
Breathe, she told herself. Assess your surroundings.
Floor lights barely lit the red-walled chamber. Looking up, she saw dried-up cocoons dangling from the ceiling, and semi-mechanical loops of bowel twisting across the floor. Shadows played tricks on her mind. Everything felt alive and watching her.
“Triel?” Jetta whispered. “Where are you?”
“Do not be afraid,” the same voice intoned. “We cannot help our appearance.”
Jetta held her breath. “Show yourself.”
A tall figure stepped out of the shadows. Machinery carved into his face and body, sapping the color from his skin and giving him the appearance of a bloodless corpse. But Jetta saw the markings adorning his suppurating flesh and knew.
“Corbas of Algardrien,” she whispered.
The Prodgy Liiker nodded. “Jetta Kyron of Earth. Apparax. Triorion. It is an honor to meet you.”
Jetta’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. Awakened from slumber, hundreds of others mutilated like Corbas lingered in the dark, afraid of their new skin.
“Where is—” Another bout of coughing stole her words, making her chest spasm. After it subsided, she asked in a hoarse voice: “Where is Triel? I feel her. I know she’s here.”
Corbas’s look of confusion resolved into a kind smile pierced by wiring. “Of course you feel her, my friend. You were instrumental in her transcendence into the next Great Mother. If it weren’t for you, we would not be saved, and she would have not realized the path to Cudal.”
“What do you mean?” Jetta said, falling to her knees. She could barely keep her head up. Exertion and fatigue set in, gnawing at her bones and joints.
Corbas knelt beside her, helping her sit up. “Jetta, Triel is not gone. She lives inside you. That is why she performed the ritual of Ne’topat’h. Your spirits are now one.”
“No,” Jetta said, shaking her head. “I feel her. She’s here. She’s not dead.”
Closing her eyes, Jetta summoned all her strength. She expanded her mind, searching for her love across the parallel planes, as far as she could reach. “I believe...”
Corbas looked at her through an eye punctured with ribbed catheters. “Then open your eyes and see.”
Jetta opened her eyes. Am I hallucinating? Her skin was shining, streaked with glowing blue veins. But as soon as she blinked, they vanished.
“She is not gone,” he said quietly. “And when you find peace, my friend, you will see her again.”
JAEIA FOUND HER WAY to her sister via an alternate, and revolting, route through the waste disposal systems, but forgot her disgust when she found her sister talking to a massive Liiker.
Jetta!
Before panic could set in, she garnered her sister’s experience with the converted Prodgies. Overwhelmed at the miracle of their rescue, she shared her joy with her twin. There’s hope now.
As she wiped off the sticky debris for her visor, she joined her sister’s conversation with Corbas.
“We can’t leave,” he said, “not without setting the rest of the Motti free from their own bonds.”
When her sister balked, he pushed harder. “Their suffering cannot be ignored.”
“I’ll talk to my SMT,” Jetta said.
“We’ll do everything we can,” Jaeia assured Corbas before joining her sister’s side as she briefed the team.
“I’m sorry, Sir; I don’t understand,” Ferraway said when Jetta tried to explain the situation.
“The remaining Motti are Josef Stein’s friends and colleagues in the field of nanotechnology and biochemical design,” she repeated.
Jaeia added: “They were infected by both the Necro Plague and the life-extending Smart Cell Series #117.”
Cursing under his breath as he stepped in an oozing pustule, Ferraway, along with the rest of the slimed team, looked more than eager to complete the mission and get out of the living ship. “Yes, Sir. We’re with you all the way.”
Corbas led them straight to the center of the hive, where the remaining twelve Motti huddled together in confusion. Without M’ah Pae to oversee their work and dictate their direction, they appeared as lost as their Liikers.
“Have Billy talk to them,” Jetta said, hanging on Ferraway’s shoulder and avoiding the steaming tubules protruding from the floor. “Tell them... we mean them no harm.”
Jaeia could feel and appreciate her sister’s difficulty in wanting to save the Motti that were responsible for their dehumanizing torture and the death of their brother.
Victor was the puppet master, she reminded herself, not these Motti.
They were victims too, their torment profound and much more visceral. They barely retained a vestige of life, and even as attuned as the twins were, Jaeia could sense very little in the way of recognizable human thought patterns.
I think Billy Don’t remembers, too, her sister commented as Billy threw a fit. Wailing at the top of his lungs, he twisted and turned so Tech couldn’t access the override to his communication ports.
“Billy,” Jaeia spoke softly, touching the skin on his face. “They weren’t the bad guys who hurt you. They were good guys that got hurt too. They need your help. If we can help them, then maybe they can help all the boys and girls that feel like you do.”
Frowning, Billy chomped on his tongue. He looked to Tech. The engineer sighed heavily and nodded to him.
With a chirp, Billy’s eyes rolled back into their sockets, and the Motti Overlord’s ocular implant gyrated on his shoulder. A sound like insect stridulations poured from his open mouth. Jaeia covered her ears, as did the rest of the party. Finally, it ceased.
One of the Motti lumbered forward on spidery legs. Jaeia’s heart thumped loudly in her ears as he bent down to inspect her with jointed silver antennae. She felt some kind of recognition, and perhaps remorse.
Tech checked his monitor readout of Billy’s internal communications.
“They understand us.”
Leaning forward, the Motti offered her an ear translator on a pronged extender. Jaeia shuddered, remembering a time when it would have been forced down her ear canal without her consent.
“And they want to talk.”
“Who wants to talk to us?” Jetta asked, her hands twitching for her firearm.
Tech mumbled to himself, reading Billy’s feedback twice before sharing what he saw. “It says here... Dr. Albert Marx.”
Jaeia sifted through acquired memories, but Jetta remembered first.
With a strange, quivering smile, Jetta announced to the group. “Head of Biological Integration, PhD, MD; The Institute of Advanced Science, New Berlin. Best man at Josef Stein’s wedding.”
Jaeia looked again at the Motti. She thought she saw him smile.
JETTA AND HER SISTER returned with the SMT to the Nyrok. With them came the salvaged P
rodgies, leaving Dr. Marx and the rest of the Motti behind with the Liikers. To the twins there was no need to take the rest of them. Billy had copied and transposed the programming Tech had engineered years ago to help rehabilitate and restore his memories from before his biomechanical transition. Many had already begun to remember a life apart from twisted machinery.
My sister would have loved to work with Dr. Marx on the restitution and reintegration efforts, Jetta thought. She pretended to scroll through the command chair’s armrest interface as Ferraway instructed the bridge crew on the docking process. Or help forge peace between the Sentients and the Motti—
“Hey.” Jaeia leaned over her seat and touched her sister’s arm as locking clamps gently rocked the ship. We’re still here, okay?
Okay.
As the twins disembarked from the SMT stealth ship, a voice came over the com. “Attention all crew. As your officially appointed Military Minister, I, Gaeshin Wren, am pleased to announce the promotion of two of our finest officers, Jetta and Jaeia Kyron, to Chief Commanding Officers of the Alliance Fleet.”
“Ha!” Jetta said, nudging her sister as the docking crew and SMT gave them a round of applause. “You may have gotten captain first, but I just jumped more ranks than you.”
The grim truth set in before she could finish razzing her sister. Even if they were the most intellectually qualified for the position, their age and history would have precluded the General Assembly from approving their appointment. It’s just going to create a political firestorm to push us into that position over Unipoesa.
Unless it was Unipoesa that pushed our promotion. Jetta felt the weight of her sister’s realization as she shared it through their bond: This is his way of saying thanks. And goodbye.
“Jeez... I finally make chief commanding officer, and I’m only going to get to wear the stars for what—a few more hours?” Jetta said as a soldier helped her onto a lift.
“Yeah, you don’t know anything. I made chief commanding officer, and I have to share it with you,” Jaeia said with a chuckle.
Grinning, Jetta batted her lightly on the arm. “Jerk.”
“Hey, is that Reht?” Jaeia said, pointing to the third port in the docking bay. With arms wide open, the dog-soldier captain welcomed Tech and Billy Don’t back to the Wraith. No amount of money had swayed the nervous engineer to help with the continued relations between the Motti and the Alliance, though Jaeia had convinced him to stay in contact as a consultant. After all, the twins may have copied his knowledge on Liiker programming, but their abilities could not replicate his invention.
Jetta stopped the lift before they could take off. Only by sheer determination did she manage to get to her feet and let herself down to the docking platform. “I’ll meet you in the infirmary.”
Gleaning her sister’s intentions, Jaeia smiled. “Don’t be long.”
Jetta used the support of a motorized cart to get her over to the Wraith as a deck officer gave Reht and his remaining crew the final approval for departure. From the bitter feel of their thoughts, the Sleeper Program had been erased from their brains—but not the lasting effects.
At least the Alliance did something right for the dog-soldiers, she thought, watching Mom lug a few thousand bundles of hard cash up the ramp. She hoped that their newfound riches would settle the unrest that had been brewing within the ranks, or allow the individual crew members to go their own way without any bad blood.
Spotting her, Reht hopped down from the ramp. “Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?”
“I came to say goodbye.”
Reht smirked, his incisors popping over his lips. “Hard to imagine how I met you anymore. A scared little stick of a launnie, beat up and dirty. Now you’re all grown up, I guess, and not half-bad looking. At least for a human.”
Jetta didn’t let him get away with it. “When I first met you, you were a cocky, dog-soldier assino. I didn’t think you cared about anything or anybody else. But I was wrong. You’re not half-bad. Even for a non-human.”
Smile fading, he cleared his throat. “You never found her?”
Her response came in a whisper. “No.”
Looking away from her, Reht pulled at the bandages on his hands. Jetta expected him to accept the news with the same clowning front she remembered, but instead he gave her some unexpected advice. “Well, for whatever it’s worth, Starfox was a fighter. She had grit and resourcefulness like you. If there weren’t no body—and there weren’t—then she ain’t dead.”
With tears in her eyes, Jetta nodded.
“Alright then, kiddo, I gotta go. It’s time for me to settle some scores.”
Skimming the surface of his thoughts, she saw Elia and the ghosts of Reht’s past dance across her retinas. He’s not planning another deal; his next job is a personal one. Jetta sensed his uncertainty about the continuation of his crew, but his most loyal companion, the blue-furred Talian, would never leave his side, even with what he had planned.
“Reht, you did a great thing by helping the Alliance. We couldn’t have done it without you and your crew. You saved this galaxy.” Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t going to be enough to settle his demons. The peace he needed would be found only on his own journey.
Reht surprised her with a hug, though it turned into a smart rub on the head. Jetta both hated it and appreciated the affection.
“Stop getting all gooey on me, kid. You wanna make me soft?” he said, leaping up onto the ramp. Mom growled and rolled his eyes as he walked past with another bundle.
“Call me if you ever need a hand,” Jetta said. “I can hold my own.”
“That’s the rumor on the street,” Reht winked. “Oh,” he said, snapping his fingers and dropping his chest down to the ramp to be eye level with her. He twisted his finger in his ear and made a funny face. “You gotta get this dream out of my head. Drivin’ me nuts. That lady at the bar put it there forever ago. Triel tried to help, but she never really got it out of my head. Doctors say it ain’t part of the Sleeper Program. I think Triel said it was a message for you or somethin’...?”
Jetta had nearly forgotten about that. Of course, she thought, the memory stain left by my mother. She had never seen the original message, and she and her siblings were probably the only people who could fully extract it. It would be nice to see her mother again, even if it was only an echo. Maybe it would fill in the missing pieces of that puzzle.
Jetta lifted her hand to his forehead.
Reht pulled back a bit. “This is sorta my virgin experience with this, okay?”
“I’ll be gentle, I promise,” Jetta said, grinning.
Reht laughed. “Stop stealing my lines, kid.”
ON OLD EARTH, DEEP in the heart of Paradise City, stands a shop tucked away in a back alley, protected from the day-to-day travelers. Inside, the shopkeeper, an elderly man wearing a dark apron and bracers, and a green visor atop his finely combed white hair, stays true to his daily routine. He hums the same old tune to himself, stacking copper pennies and counting his receipts, unworried about when his next customer will arrive.
Only hand-selected and authenticated antiques line his shelves and occupy his drawers, and unless he finds a buyer truly deserving, he will not sell any of his prizes. After all, he didn’t just carry relics of the past—these were connections to a time and place that many wished still existed. And for him, they were proof that there was a way back.
His only means of getting by was the private funding he received through Earth’s conservation groups. Even with their support and continued inquiry into his wares, he seldom gave them any hints of the real treasures he possessed. Especially after a Reptili and his canine crossbreed stopped by his store eight years ago, and he happened upon his most interesting find.
“You buy Earth junk?”
“Yes, I do,” he had responded, frightened and skeptical of the outerworlder’s claim to have found rare terrestrial artifacts. As the Reptili laid down parts and equipment from an ancient escape pod,
the shopkeeper noticed the real treasure. A stuffed bear. A gold cross necklace; too small to be worth much. A scrap of paper with a note written in ancient English. Ashya, Ryen, and Tierin—we love you with all our hearts. Mom and Dad.
“I’ll give you seventy.”
“You’ll give me two fifty and that contraption over there,” he said, pointing to a crossbow holding up a stack of books.
The shopkeeper had been too afraid to argue much with the Reptili, but he knew if he let on that he possessed that kind of money, he would probably be robbed and killed.
“How about eighty, the crossbow, and this,” he said, reaching for the object that lay atop a mound of old sheet music. Since it was a gift from a former customer, he had allowed in his shop even though it was an imitation model. It had no value to him, so he used it as a paperweight. To an untrained eye, it was a genuine World War II German Sauer double-action automatic pistol.
Easily swayed by devices of violence, the Reptili’s eyes grew wide with anticipation.
“Deal.”
After the authentication process yielded strange results, the shopkeeper decided to keep the bear sealed in a glass case in the back of the store with the gold cross around its neck. Both items originated in the twentieth century, but they had not suffered the ravages of time like most of his items. This only added to his intrigue. He didn’t believe in much, but he knew that the bear and the necklace had been special to someone. And, of all the antiques he owned, treasures that came from all over the Earth, the stuffed bear seemed to have the most mystery, and the most presence.
The grandfather clock kept the rhythm of his humming as he continued his usual business. To his surprise, the door bell jingled. He looked over the rim of his glasses to see a gaunt-looking woman standing in his shop.
“Is this ‘Old Earth Antiques’?”
The shopkeeper kept the curiosity out of his voice. He had been wrong before. He didn’t want to get himself overly excited. “Yes, it is. How can I help you?”
A second later there were two of them. Identical. As they approached, he realized the gravity of their illness. Bereft of any color, they looked like cancer patients in the last stages of life.
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