Naero's Valor

by Mason Elliott

  Then Elta, the Radiant, blinked in and gave them her counsel. “This healing process that we teach you shall create a protective veil, a thin hyper nanyte suit of indestructible Urtomium all around the light child. This is a hyper Cosmic metal alloy that exists half way between Ur-metal and Ultrium. Shetharra must wear such a protective suit as this for all of her days during the rest of her life among you.

  “Her Urtomium veil will automatically act to dampen and limit her powers just enough so that she can sustain her existence in the Prime Material Plane. She can still take energy being forms as needed, but the suit will adapt and function to keep her from destroying herself with her own energies. But you must understand. Such a suit, once created, is indestructible. Once it is formed around her, there is no way in this universe to remove her veil or reverse the process—even within Alat itself. No power that we know of can do so. It will keep her alive for the rest of her days, yet her dampening suit will not make her immortal.”

  Finally mighty Juri spoke, The Word, the absolute leader of the Seven and the greatest of them by far. “We fear that there is no perfect solution for our light child, but this extreme method will keep our beloved Shetharra alive to live out her destiny. She will still be able to accomplish great and miraculous things with the considerable stabilized powers that will remain available to her, yet there will still be a finite limit to them…and to her existence.

  “Go forth now and perform all of these things that we have instructed you to do. We shall open the way to the core, across vast distances of SpaceTime, beyond a near infinite number of galaxies to the proper sphere. There is no fault or blame. Even the Cosmic Prophecies could not have predicted this dilemma. Yet it is up to you to deal with this matter. You must perform these tasks. We can only advise you, guide you, and show you the way.”

  Orean and Iahk thanked them all profusely, but took their leave in a great hurry.

  Outside of the KDM, the two parents assumed their strongest energy being forms and waited for the unique portal from the Seven to appear.

  The portal materialized, as promised, within one standard hour, focused in Naero’s quarters.

  Strangely, nothing about this portal registered on any scans or teknomancy. Even Om could not detect anything about such a gateway.

  Yet the portal was there, ready to whisk them across near infinite SpaceTime to the core of their universe itself.

  Naero and Khai swept into it with Shetharra unconscious and failing each second that ticked by on a medbed between them.

  Four of the Seven Dreamers, Orith, Vez, Adae, and Hiil sang to them all the while that they sped through a strange type of SpaceTime aether that they had never encountered before.

  It was a mostly opaque mist-like substance that had the properties similar to water vapor, but it was in no way chemical water.

  It was comprised of hyper-specialized Cosmic construct energy particles that functioned much like a vapor.

  They were passing rapidly through a Cosmic energy mist.

  Those of the Seven told them to focus on what turned out to be the Song of Making #22.

  Initially there were only twenty-one such songs of power.

  They had already stumbled upon one other secret song–#23. That song would eventually allow them to create the Second Cosmic Sword of Power, Jaa.

  Khai had barely started the long journey that it would require to master that music.

  It was extremely difficult to perfect any of these songs out of order.

  Now they were explicitly being forced to do so.

  But they had the spirits of four of the mightiest Dreamers who had ever existed as their quick-learn tutors.

  The journey itself took almost three standard hours.

  Not bad for an impossible journey.

  By that time they still worked diligently on the song, but they were very close to having it down.

  Shetharra grew weaker, yet she was still stable.

  Then Juri gave them a stressful psyonic warning. “You will have less than fifty of your minutes to complete the entire process and make it back out of the first star. Alat is a highly dangerous hyper star—unique in its composition and existence. Any more time than that, and all three of you will be consumed. The powers at work in that star are simply too volatile for even your strongest energy forms.”

  Om would track their time and handle the count down.

  Finally, after multiple practice sessions, the Dreamers told them that they had the song down good enough to make it work.

  Shetharra still faded.

  They transported out to the hyper star Alat.

  It was impossible to look at and comprehend.

  It was as if there were several completely new colors there in that rarefied environment that had never existed anywhere else.

  Naero and Khai penetrated the surface of the star and transported straight to the core.

  Juri was indeed correct.

  This was the most intense stellar body that Naero and Khai had ever encountered, beyond any known category of star. It’s composition of immense flows and Cosmic ultra-matter should not even exist.

  How had such a star been created, by whom, and for what purpose?

  It was ancient, even for a star. How did it still exist?

  But they had no time for stellar classification anomalies.

  Not only did Shetharra weaken even faster, but they had less than twenty-six minutes to complete a complex Cosmic process they had never attempted before.

  They went through the steps of the process, one by one, while Om monitored their progress and the timer counted down.

  First they used a combination of biomancy and teknomancy to sustain and stabilize their oldest daughter’s failing Cosmic energies.

  Her form had been hemorrhaging unbelievable amounts of Cosmic and other energies, dumping them into the aether itself.

  Finally those highly dangerous levels stabilized.

  Next they sang the designated Song of Making, channeling the flows to initiate the advanced Kexxian healing process.

  They waited for something to happen, for something to kick in and begin to work.

  It did not work, and they were nearly out of time.

  They tried singing the song again, but even they knew that it was too hurried.

  The powers all around them forced them to retreat from Alat or be destroyed.

  Depleted and exhausted, they struggled nearby to tap and regenerate as quickly as they could. Naero even tapped into the Red and Brown Dwarf level of energies once more, so rich in power and easy to connect to. Khai attempted to do the same thing.

  Shetharra began to destabilize faster.

  This time her energies threatened to overload, detonate, and vaporize them all.

  Naero used psyonics to cry out to the Seven Dreamers.

  They calmly told her that she and Khai were still making errors in the execution of the complex Song of Making.

  They went over it three more times.

  By that time, Shetharra had nearly reached a critical phase once again.

  They plunged back into the volatile core of Alat.

  They focused on singing the song as best they could, while the energies all around them slowly wore them down.

  They were dying right along with Shetharra now.

  Still nothing happened.

  Then small hyper nanyte particles of Urtomium began to form, link up with each other, fuse, and spread all over her body, like a thin, dark silver foil. Then it became a metallic film.

  When the near liquid nanyte suit covered everything but her head, hands, and feet, Shetharra came to.

  It was she who saw the danger they were in and transported them out of Alat.

  The nanyte suit quickly covered her entire body like liquid armor. She was one with it now, and focused her own energies through it.

  The suit transformed into a form more like thin armor. It sustained her and regulated her energies, keeping them from fading or racing out of control
on overload.

  Naero was still mindlinked with Shetharra and could sense all of this, but by that time, she and Khai were spent and failing.

  Shetharra saved them when they could not save themselves.

  They shot back through the portal to their own SpaceTime.

  All three continued to heal, regen, and stabilize further along the way.

  Shetharra still needed some time to adjust to her new Urtomium lifesuit. The suit was amazing and indestructible, yet it would also eventually limit her powers and abilities in order to keep her from burning out her Prime Material form.

  As Shetharra continued to develop and test her still expanding abilities, perhaps her new limits would come to be known.

  The Alliance breathed a collective sigh of relief, and was very happy to have all three of their best Champions whole and hale among them once more.

  And if truth was told, there were many who were glad now that there would be some finite limit to Shetharra’s ever-increasing powers.

  Many still feared her in private, especially after the astounding demonstration she had put on with the Sologene system.

  If she ever decided to turn against them for any reason, who could stand before her in any way?

  26

  Naero helped the Alliance concentrate their search for Xanathar, now that Shetharra and their regular family and friends were squared away and safely hidden.

  The Second Sword had to be forged. That was their next Cosmic task.

  With all of the new information and coordinates that she and Om had gathered from the KDM and her own time stream explorations, she and many fleets went out exploring in earnest. They would retrace the paths that her parents took, before they died.

  Perhaps something had been missed.

  Those very parts of the Unknown Regions that her parents ventured off in were still for the most part unexplored. Some of them were empty, vast reaches of dead space without stars, between the great spiral arms of their galaxy.

  Many ships went out into the depths of those empty black voids and never returned.

  After the loss of her parent’s exploration fleet, further travel out that way had been suspended.

  Or at least that had been the standard account to ward off bumbling colonists.

  No one actually knew what the real story was.

  Naero and Khai retraced the last paths of The Omaria.

  They searched each location that her parents had recorded and described.

  Yet everywhere they went, instead of the reported Kexxian ruins, they found immense craters of powerful hyper blasts.

  This was the work of the G’lothc, trying to obscure the trail, but she did not speak it.

  Any possible remaining evidence was obliterated years ago, according to all of our scans. This is the work of the enemy, covering their own tracks after they screened and searched these same locations.

  One site after the next had been blasted and wiped clean of any possible evidence or data. They might not ever locate Xanathar now. The GSA might not even know about these sites, if it hadn’t been for Naero’s trips back into her own time stream.

  Naero knew of all of the locations up to the point of the deathtrap that her folks had blundered into.

  But what good would all of that do her now? Neither the Kexx, nor her parents, or even the enemy had ever located lost Xanathar.

  Her parents had been ambushed on their way to locate a secret wyrmhole. That gateway would supposedly take them into the region where it was hoped, that they would find the lost planet of the final Cosmic obelisk.

  This was already on the border regions of a section of the galactic spiral arms that went from the Alpha Quadrant into the almost completely unknown Delta Quadrant.

  Even in the present, the Delta Quadrant remained more of a mystery than the Beta Quadrant, and next the contested Gamma Quadrant. But that would all change. Naero had helped see to that.

  Only the Alpha Quadrant had largely been explored and mostly mapped in detail by the galactic cartography drones and teams.

  N, The new self-replicating, deep space mapping and survey stealth fixer nebulae are hard at work, but it would still be a few centuries before they cover everything. And it will also take another few centuries of study by many, after that, to analyze all of that survey data on even a cursory level. Our galaxy is simply too big.

  Thanks, Om. But Naero didn’t need to know everything.

  She and Khai just had to locate that one wyrmhole in the middle of nowhere, something no one else had done.

  If that wyrmhole was unique, it should have some kind of special Cosmic signature. Technically, all wyrmholes were odd, by their very nature.

  But many wyrmholes, by their very nature, could also be extremely tricky to find.

  Some even phazed in and out of the Prime Material Plane at either regular or random intervals all on their own.

  Even for the gateways that were stable, they often had profiles that were only one or two dimensional. Seekers couldn’t detect them unless they scanned them from the correct, viable angle or orientation. Still other wyrmholes were easily concealed by stars, nebulae, or other commonly found stellar phenomena clustered around them.

  Nothing turned up, after many standard days of intense, painstaking searching and scanning throughout the expected region.

  Naero time slipped back into her own SpaceTime time stream once again, attempting to focus on locating that key stepping stone.

  Her parents and their entire fleet, however, had been destroyed before they actually reached the expected wyrmhole in question.

  They only knew the general proximity of where to look for it, and were on their way to do so when they perished.

  In her ghost like state, Naero watched her parents closely, studying their consoles and scanning array feeds, processing the same search data that they pulled in.

  Almost 1.5 days exactly from Zero-Hour for her parents.

  Surprisingly enough, her folks’ advanced probes were thought to be actually close to locating what they thought was the actual area to search in to find the wyrmhole to the Xanathar Region.

  They were waiting anxiously for the data from those probes when the attack struck them and wiped them all out.

  Naero returned to her own current time stream with as much data as her folks had to work with.

  They located one strange wyrmhole all right.

  Yet this one was tiny–hardly large enough for a ship or a fleet to pass through. Naero herself or anyone else would have to shrink down just to be able to pass through in energy being form.

  Unfortunately, this turned out to be just one more dead end.

  They kept searching; they had no choice.

  They came very close to the actual site where her parent’s fleet had been wiped out.

  For reasons that she could not herself describe, Naero could not bring herself to go to that exact location.

  Just the thought of it depressed, sickened, and enraged her.

  “By all scan and report histories,” Khai said, “any wreckage or debris from the actual battle had been painstakingly collected, most likely taken away or destroyed by formerly unknown forces. All of these things had also taken place many years before.”

  There was literally nothing to search but sparse atoms.

  Our foes have always been notoriously thorough.

  Naero still could not bring herself to the actual location.

  She and Khai resorted to searching the region from the vantage point of certain spheres where unique energy signatures could be detected more readily.

  Finally she hit upon trying to study the sphere of Cosmic energies that tiny wyrmhole was attuned to.

  When that revealed nothing, they expanded out from there.

  At one of the near-galactic level spheres, Khai spotted something.

  There was another tiny wyrmhole with the exact same signatures, far out to the left, deep within the Delta Quadrant.

  Why would there be two such
phenomena with the same Cosmic flows and signatures? That wasn’t at all natural.

  Then Naero followed a hunch and located the third one.

  The distance between all three was precisely the same. Together they formed a near perfect isosceles triangle.

  But there wasn’t a larger, fully-functional wyrmhole at or near the center of their triangulation. At least there wasn’t one that could be detected at any known level.

  Yet that did not mean that such a thing wasn’t there.

  Their new target area took them even deeper within the Delta Quadrant.

  It would take them weeks, perhaps even months to reach that objective at their current rates.

  They had their fixer clouds fabricate new wyrmhole relays out that way.

  From their experiences in the Gamma Quadrant, and even more recently in the Beta Quadrant, such exploration attempts could be extremely risky.

  The deeper they penetrated the Unknown, the greater the risks multiplied. No matter what forces they brought with them, especially with the Great Adversary waiting for them out there in huge numbers, the odds were not in their favor.

  They could easily be cut off and annihilated just like her parents. No aid would be able to reach them in time. Even the relays they were setting up could only reduce that factor.

  They had a definite area to search now, but they also needed to pause and re-assess this and all of their other current situations to determine if they had the time and the fleets to commit a sizeable force to such a deep space hunting expedition. Would it even be feasible for many of their best Cosmic Champions to go off into the black and be gone for so long?

  What could happen to them?

  What else could happen in other strategic areas while they were away?

  All of these matters had to be weighed very carefully.

  Only so much search time had been allotted to them.

  All too soon that time was up, and they had to return via the new relays, to make a full report to Intel and the High Command.