War Orphans (The Terra Nova Chronicles)

by Robert Dean Hall

  The Terra Nova Chronicles: Book Two — War Orphans

  By

  Robert Dean Hall

  Published through KDP by TNC Group

  The Terra Nova Chronicles: Book Two — War Orphans

  Copyright 2013 by Robert Dean Hall

  KDP Edition License Notice

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  Cover design 2013 by TNC and Peter C. Fussey.

  For Bethel, Jennifer, Kaytlin, Lindsey and Brandon.

  Prologue

  10-May-2193 (20 years before the ratification of the Zunnuki Accord)

  Cozeremi Family Estate, Hamar-u-Suttu, The Great Continent, Ekkida (Eps Eri IIIa).

  Zhereveldonne Cozeremi smiled and reached for his cousin as soon as he walked into the sitting room. Meqqar Non stood and held his own arms wide.

  “It is good to see you, Miko, even this early in the morning. You should not have come, though. I’m sure our enemies have been watching your every move since I stepped down.”

  “I left Ekkirizaddeqar before the sun came up,” Meqqar replied. “I doubt anyone knows I’m gone.”

  “Don’t make the same mistakes I did, Miko,” Zhereveldonne said. “Those in the Quorum may appear to be arrogant fools, but nothing gets past them. They sleep with one eye open, and when awake, have an ear to every wall. When you leave here today, you must never come back. If they think I have influenced you in any way—”

  “I’m hiding nothing from them, Zhev. I’ve made plain my intention to right the wrongs perpetrated against you.”

  “I didn’t accept this arrangement so you could waste your time fighting for the restoration of my pedigree on the floor of the parliament,” Zhereveldonne said. “You were installed as Prime Minister and Patriarch of the First Family so you could continue my fight against the Quorum in the House of Peers.”

  “I’m not up to this, Zhev. I don’t have the political cunning and technical expertise you do. I’m a damned banker.”

  “You have access to all my resources. You only need to reach out to them.”

  “I see what their advice has done for you,” Meqqar replied. “Did you really show the Ki-na how to replicate the urmani? Didn’t you realize the Quorum would consider it an affront to openly display such carefully guarded knowledge in full view of anyone not of royal blood?”

  “I did nothing contrary to the consensus of the Quorum,” Zhereveldonne said. “The Ki-na needed soldiers to capture and occupy the cities the exiled ones built on He-kur. We instructed them which family lines they could use to breed them. None of the cats were created outside the original bloodlines. Once the planet was under control of the Ki-na, the urmani were to be dispatched and the knowledge of how they were brought about destroyed.”

  “The Ki-na have been cut off, Zhev. I haven’t been given permission to contact them. Who knows what evil they will commit without guidance? What if they produce urmani from bloodlines outside the chosen ones or disregard your instructions about which lineages cannot be combined?”

  “The creation of the cats is not what riled the Quorum,” Zhereveldonne said. “Somehow, they discovered your father and I planned to eliminate the royal bloodlines on He-kur so the full Quorum could never be reunified.”

  “What have you gotten me into, Zhev,” Meqqar asked. “How do I make things better?”

  “If you’re asking me how you can appease the Quorum, that ship has sailed, Miko. You must finish what I started, but you must be more subtle about it. If all the royal bloodlines are rejoined, the Quorum will be emboldened.”

  “Isn’t a reuniting of all the bloodlines what we should be working for? Your family and mine are both of royal lineages. We are part of the Quorum.”

  “Damn it, Miko. Are you really so foolish? Would you be content to see humankind become slaves to the saurians again after we destroyed two planets and scattered ourselves among the stars to be free? What about the Ki-na and the exiles who as yet have no idea where they came from? Shouldn’t they be given the opportunity to make that decision on their own?”

  “Better to be subservient to the saurians than to risk being overrun by the insects. Besides, our families were meant to rule humanity. It’s the natural order of things.”

  “Spoken like an immature soul who has known privilege his entire life.” Zhereveldonne shook his head in disbelief. “No human bloodlines are entitled to rule any others. All humans were engineered to be slaves for the saurians. Those families who claim divine right to rule are no different genetically than those they demand obeisance from. It was by lucky accident our families were among the dynasties. The saurians could have chosen the dynasties from any of the human bloodlines.”

  “That’s heresy, Zhev,” Meqqar exclaimed. “Don’t make things worse.”

  “I won’t dignify that with an answer. If the Quorum could justly claim the right to rule, there would be no need to hide their existence from the lower caste and skulk about in the shadows with their secret handshakes and foolish passcodes. What reason would they have to go about recruiting the power hungry from the lower caste into their esoteric societies? You and I both know they are secret armies. Have you ever asked yourself why our civil police and military are overrepresented in the Consortium?”

  “Shouldn’t we expose the agenda of the Quorum, then,” Meqqar asked. “We are guilty of perpetuating this evil by not doing so.”

  Zhereveldonne again shook his head and looked at his cousin as if he were a stranger. “Are you listening to yourself? Our people have been told countless times the Quorum does not exist, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and anyone who doubts the benevolence of the Consortium is paranoid and delusional. Under their direction our leaders have all but erased any trace of the before times and all the ancient science humanity shared. Some of those technologies would go a long way toward freeing us from our dependence upon more recent ones that are less efficient but much more lucrative to the small groups that control them.”

  “Of course,” Zhereveldonne added, “it’s for the greater good we tell our school children Ekkida has only been capable of space flight for less than two hundred years even though humanity has travelled among the stars for many thousands. Why have we chosen to bury the truths about the saurians, the insects, Ki-u and the prison planet in religious dogma or unbelievable legend? Because it serves the purposes of the Quorum and makes anyone who dares speak the truth appear to be either a religious zealot or a lunatic.”

  “If our situation is so hopeless, why swim against the current,” Meqqar asked. “Is it not a given the Quorum will succeed?”

  “My defeat is only a temporary setback. The fact I’m still breathing and you were installed in my former position is proof the Quorum will eventually be stopped.”

  “Where do we go from here, then, Zhev? This looks like a stalemate to me.”

  “Our best hope is to make secular ties with the Ki-na,” Zhereveldonne said. “Even though the Quorum’s counterpart on Ki-u has manipulated politics there for centuries, they’ve made thoughtless mistakes. They’ve perpetuated austerity and population control agendas on their subjects that have allowed the lineages transplanted from the fourth and fifth planets to outbreed and overrun them.”

  “Their biggest error, however, has been to allow their dealings with the saurians to be discovere
d outside their ranks. It has given a sense of urgency to their opposition. We must exploit that. If we can forge an alliance with the existing Ki-u government aimed against the lizards and insects, it will set the Quorum’s agenda back by a thousand years or more. The Quorum’s attempts to hide the true history of humanity from our people until they can seize complete control of all three worlds will have backfired on them.”

  Zhereveldonne grabbed his younger cousin by the shoulders and smiled. “What you must do is force our parliament to openly enter into negotiations with Ki-u. You must publicly state that the lizards are out there and we must enlist the help of the Ki-na to defeat them.”

  “The Quorum will never allow that,” Meqqar replied. “They will never allow me or anyone else to reveal our knowledge of the saurians or other human civilizations to the lower caste. There would be panic. The government would lose control of the people.”

  “Then you must convince the Quorum it is the only way to protect the remaining royal bloodlines on He-kur. You must convince them that leaving the Ki-na to their own devices may well result in the genocide they wish to prevent. If you make them believe you’ve thrown your lot in with them, you’ll have the opportunity to influence their plans. My direct attack on them has failed, Miko. They still trust you. You must turn their vanity and arrogance against them to bring them down from within.”

  “I will do what I can, Cousin,” Meqqar said.

  “There is something more I must tell you before you leave, Meqqar.”

  “I always feel sick when I hear you use my given name. Do I want to hear this?”

  “You must hear it,” Zhereveldonne told his much younger cousin, “but, you can never reveal it to another living soul.”

  “I promise, Zhev,” Meqqar said after hesitating to think it over.

  “Before he died, your father and I gave the Ki-na who went to the prison planet another of the forbidden weapons.”

  “What in the name of the creator of all did you do, Zhev?”

  “We sent them the code for the Thought Engine. It was the only way to gain full access to the computer controlling the Ki-na’s ships.”

  “So, that is why my father was assassinated,” Meqqar yelled. “Surely, you two knew what would happen.”

  “No, Miko. The Quorum doesn’t know. That wasn’t why your father was killed.”

  “That code is the most dangerous weapon ever produced,” Meqqar said. “It is absolute curiosity and intellect without the restraint of morality, and it will do whatever it must to defend itself against eradication. Nothing I can think of has a greater potential for evil and it intrinsically knows it must find its way back to Ekkida to fully realize its purpose. If it ever gets onto our grid—”

  “Only the Ki-na on the prison planet know of its existence. It wasn’t part of what we shared with the governments on Ki-u. The last time I talked with Yuen, he told me he had it contained inside his ship’s computer.”

  “Does he have the knowledge necessary to purge it from the computer before it finds a way to access a hyper-link,” Meqqar asked.

  “No, he doesn’t. It’s imperative for you to find a way to make the Quorum let you resume communication. If you accomplish nothing else, you must find a way to destroy that ship.”

  Part I—Delta

  Chapter 1

  Date Unknown.

  Feline Preparatory Compound, New Australia, Terra Nova (Alp Cen A IV).

  The girl child sat against the back wall of the planting shed at the edge of the compound. She listened to the faint laughs of the other children her age in the distance, but never brought her playmates here. This is where she came to be alone with her thoughts.

  Inside the shed, beneath one of the tables, was a plastic crate with some old gloves and a smock crammed inside. The crate had become the temporary home of a feral housecat and her first litter of kittens.

  There was a small hole in the wall next to where the child sat cross-legged, and every so often, the mother cat or one of the kittens would poke a curious head through and look around. The child sat close enough to the hole to reach out and touch the cat or one of the kittens as they peeked out, but instinct told her not to try.

  Once the mother cat was sure the child would not make any attempts to approach, she slinked through the hole and pranced toward the corner of the shed so she was well out of arm’s reach. She stood there and chirruped for the kittens to follow.

  One by one, the kittens hopped through the hole and looked around before walking over to the mother cat. Each kitten would turn its head toward the child and lock its gaze on her while cautiously moving toward the mother.

  When the last kitten emerged, the mother cat made one final assessment of the child, who stared back but sat perfectly still. Upon feeling confident she would pose no great risk, the mother cat walked slowly past her in an arc, again well outside arm’s reach, still keeping a wary eye out for any sudden movement. All the kittens but one followed the mother cat’s wide arc past the child. The remaining kitten sat hunched down at the corner of the shed, mewing.

  The mother cat stopped with the rest of her litter at the opposite corner of the shed and called again. The solitary kitten mewed piteously. It was terribly distressed at being separated from the rest, but too afraid to follow the same path around the child to join them.

  After trading mews and chirrups for a moment, the mother cat moved to a position a meter or so farther away from the corner of the shed and bade the kitten to come to her again. Once the kitten realized it would not need to pass as near to the child as the rest had, it slowly made its way to the mother.

  The kitten plodded along. It hunkered down and stared at the child as it walked; the fur on its back standing up. The child stayed perfectly still and only followed the kitten with her eyes.

  The child studied the kitten closely, paying special attention to the retractable claws on its front paws. The wary kitten brandished them as it slinked along judiciously, slowly closing the distance between it and the mother cat.

  The child then looked down at her own front limbs. She too had retractable claws, but they weren’t exactly like the kitten’s, anatomically speaking, because the child didn’t have paws.

  The child’s claws were attached to short primate-like fingers. The fingers were arranged in fours on short, wide hands with opposable thumbs that also sported retractable claws.

  As she looked at her hands, the child, a human-feline hybrid, was reminded she had removed her gloves. She would have to remember to put them on before leaving. Wandering around the compound without the gloves that covered the claws; protecting her, the other feline children, and the human keepers from accidental lacerations; was considered grounds for punishment.

  The child waited for the kitten to pass before moving her hand only as far as she needed to pick the gloves up from her lap. She thought about pulling them on for only a second before putting them back.

  With the kittens together, the mother cat gave the child a loud chirrup as if it were bidding her farewell. The child didn’t move, but looked back at the mother cat and smiled. The mother cat then mewed softly at the child. Her tail stopped flicking and twitching nervously and began to swish from side to side in a more relaxed fashion.

  The cat took a quick final inventory of her offspring and walked away with the litter of kittens trailing close behind her. Soon they were out of sight around the shed and the child was left alone to daydream.

  A moment later, the child heard a familiar voice close by and it startled her. She stood up straight and her gloves fell from her lap to the ground. She bent down quickly to retrieve them and attempted to put them back on.

  “Delta,” the human keeper yelled. “Blue-Five-Three-Four-Eight-Delta. Where are you?”

  Delta fumbled nervously with the gloves, trying to put them back on before she was discovered. She didn’t mind her favorite keeper having to track her down for wandering off during recess, but she didn’t want to be caught without her gloves
again.

  The human peered around the edge of the shed. “There you are, Delta.”

  The startled child gasped and quickly put her hands behind her, hiding the fact her left glove was only halfway on and the other was clenched tightly in her right fist.

  “The rest of the children are in the mess hall already. Aren’t you hungry, Dear?”

  Tears formed in Delta’s eyes.

  Delta was very respectful of her trainers and always well-behaved. She was a good child and an excellent student, but recently she had developed a tendency to seek out solitude at every opportunity. She had also taken a severe disliking to her gloves and would not keep them on. It was quite upsetting to her she was about to be scolded for removing them again. Delta hated nothing more than to be scolded, but lately she had trouble avoiding it. She would be the first to admit the verbal reprimands were justified.

  “What’s wrong, Dear,” the keeper asked when she saw Delta was about to cry.

  Delta pulled her hands from behind her back.

  “Oh my goodness. Your gloves are off again. Come here and let me help you with them, Sweetie.”

  When Delta saw the keeper would not be raising her voice, she sobbed out loud. The keeper offered Delta her open arms.

  Delta had become quite emotional in recent months and at times felt as if she would burst into flames. Her uncontrollable emotions frightened her, but not as much as the strange things happening to her body.

  Delta had grown almost half a meter in height over the last two months and was now as tall as some of the keepers. None of the other feline children in her year seemed to be growing like she was, although the keepers assured her she was just a bit of an early bloomer and her classmates would soon catch up. There were other changes, but they scared Delta so much she was afraid to ask the keepers about them.