by Sam Coulson
I reached out my hands to hold his as they quivered.
“Filian, you have been a faithful daughter and a true leader. You have strength well beyond my own. Take the Slaver’s ships and their weapons. Take their knowledge, and use what we have taken to protect our people. I let my hope blind me. I trusted like a child. Go, and do not make the same mistakes that I have made. They have cost us far too many lives. And now there are few of us, far too few. Keep your people safe.”
“I will,” I spoke the words softly.
“Now leave me,” Kand pulled back his hands. “You have your own weights to carry. You should not be burdened by this dying man’s mind. Go. This is the last order I will give you. Leave and let my Charon be free.”
I stood up, silently and slowly. My cheek was hot as a tear slid down my face. With one more look, I turned, left, and closed the door behind me.
“Eli!” A high-pitched voice was calling.
My cheek stung, it was the soft warmth of my tear. It came again, no, it wasn’t the tear, it was far more acute and painful. My cheek stung, something hit me. I shook my head as the memories I had seen began to fade away.
“Eli!” The voice said again. “You’re having some kind of fit.”
With effort, I opened my eyes. Piter was crouched over me her brow furrowed.
“What happened?” I was laying on the floor.
“You alright?” Piter asked. “Sorry about the slaps, but you were in some kind of trance, babbling about war, slaves, ships, and justice.”
“I saw memories,” I fumbled. As I recovered my mind I was relieved to know that I had not absorbed all of Filian’s mind as it had been with Lor’ten. Only the brief flashes of her memory remained in my mind.
“You saw them?” Piter asked. I saw a spark of realization in her eyes.
I sat up and looked around. The object that Piter had handed me lie a few feet away, rolling on the ground. It was still intact. I knew then what it was. These were Charons that my teacher had spoken of. These were the Charons that the elders kept. In my memories I had imagined that all Charons had to be held within a living mind. But now, I realized, that that wasn’t true. I looked back at the center stone. I saw six, eight, thirteen, sixteen, more. There were dozens. This was a time capsule, a collection of memories somehow imprinted into the objects and stored here.
“You also said ships, weapons, and technology.” Growd’s back was to one of the lights, and his face was cast in shadows, but I could see a glint in his eyes. “You said ‘lets take their technology.’ What did you see? And how did you see it?”
As I fumbled for a reply, Growd stepped over and tentatively picked up the Charon. He closed his eyes and stood quietly for several seconds, and then opened them back up and shook it.
“How?” he demanded.
With Piter’s help, I got to my feet, my legs were still shaky.
“I-I don’t know, I just grabbed it, you saw,” I answered. “You know as much as I do.”
“Piter, scan it,” he said, as he handed her the Charon.
She took it, sat it down on the floor in front of her, and pulled her hand-held scanner from her pack. She swiped a few commands on the touch screen, pointed the scanner at the Charon and slowly moved it up and down as it processed.
Growd stood over her shoulder, watching hungrily, while the two guards stood back at a distance, their weapons were holstered as they watched with interest. With the memory still fresh I could still feel the strength of Filian’s legs as she leapt onto the wall. They were close enough, I could be on the first before he would have time to draw his weapon. I caught myself and reigned in my thoughts. I was not Filian, I did not have the body of a Thar’esh. I was human.
“The scanner can’t get a consistent reading,” Piter responded. “I’m getting intermittent biological signs in there, but it’s not because it’s biomatter. The material is reading as non-organic.”
“But you’re getting positive readings?” Growd pressed.
“Positive for life signs, yes,” Piter answered. “But it’s not consistent. One second it detects a life sign, the next it doesn’t. I’m getting some residual energy fluctuations too. When I get this back to a fully equipped lab I can make more sense of it.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Growd snapped. “Wait, how can residual energy flux? Residual energy should show decay. You’re saying its residual energy is increasing? I’m no physicist but I understand enough to know that that shouldn’t happen.”
“Yes, well, yes and no,” she answered. “That’s what the scanner is telling me, but I think it’s just not equipped to make sense of the signals. As I said, when I get this back to a fully equipped lab I can make sense of it. In-depth analysis of alien artifacts is as much guesswork as it is science when you’re out in the field. I need instruments, a control group, experimentation.”
“Experimentation,” Growd interrupted. “Good idea. Eli, go grab another.”
“What?” I asked.
“You heard me, go grab another one and tell me what you see.”
“You can’t be serious,” Piter said. “You saw him last time, he fell and his eyes went all glazed and he fell and started convulsing.”
“He didn’t fall,” Dex interjected. “I saw it, he was standing just fine until you came up and pulled it out of his hand.”
Piter shot him a scathing look.
“Well,” Dex continued. “It happened pretty quick, but he was just standing there dreamy-eyed and jabbering, then you took it out of his hand and his body went all rigid, like you unplugged him.”
“Unplugged him?” Piter echoed. “We’re talking about a person here. This isn’t science, we don’t know why he’s seeing whatever it is he’s seeing. Who knows if he will even see anything if he picks up another. All of this needs to be done in a controlled environment, right Eli?”
I heard her gasp as she turned to find that I was standing back at the center stone. I looked from one to another, deciding which Charon to hold. I knew that Growd wanted me to access the Charon’s for his own greed, but I had my own reasons. The burning question of who I was and where I came from had been consuming me. I needed to know more.
“You can’t be serious!” Piter gasped.
“Have at it boy,” Growd said softly.
I took a breath reached for the Charon on my left.
The blue-green haze of the Charon closed over my eyes again. But this time I was ready.
As I held it, I realized that each Charon was an imprint of a living thing, complete with our primal instincts: fear, happiness, anger, and love. Filian’s Charon had thrust her most powerful and potent memories upon me in response to my resistance. It met my fear with fear. Instead of fighting to maintain control, I submitted my will to the Charon, and I was rewarded.
The memories knew the mind that bore them. This Charon belonged to a man named Taro. His self-image swirled around my mind. His presence was nervous and cold. He held a mantle of power and responsibility, but he did not have the depth of strength that I had felt when I was within Filian’s memories. Taro’s mind was clouded in fear. The fear all sprung from one place in his memory, I reached for that moment:
I stood on the bridge of a ship to the left hand of the captain’s seat. The ship was similar to the one I had seen in Filian’s memories, but things were changed. The technology was improved, vastly so. Each display and console was so different from the last that my only conclusion was that the ship had become a collage of alien technology. New wiring was run along the bulkheads. There were new terminals and high resolution holographic displays throughout the command deck that were not there before. A dozen Thar’esh sat at their terminals.
I looked up, my eyes scanning the displays. There were ships approaching, several dozen. They were Celestrial. The captain gave on order, clear and calm, and I stood and watched as fire streaked out from above and one by one, the Celestrial ships dissolved into dust. The Captain gave a satisfied grunt, and directed t
he ship toward the nearest world. As the ship turned, I saw a blue star blazing in the distance.
The memory shifted, time had passed. I was still on the command deck, though the air was changed. Two of the consoles were unmanned, blood was on the floor, and a section of the viewport was blackened from fire. In the distance I could see spinning hulks of red-hot debris floating out in the black. One Celestrial ship remained, alone and distant.
The Captain keyed a command and a holographic face appeared in front of us. It was a Celestrial, female. She was young, but her eyes looked hard.
“I am Navali, commander of the Celestrial defense forces,” I saw her arm was in a sling, her shoulder bleeding. “I want to negotiate.”
“We do not seek your surrender,” my Captain said icily.
“I do not intend to,” she snapped back. “I demand yours.”
My chest rumbled with laughter, and several of our crew clicked their tongues in response.
“Surrender? Our surrender?” the Commander replied, his eyes widened fractionally. “You fleet is lost. You are beaten. Take your end with dignity.”
“So be it. I will,” her response was barely more than a whisper, the display blinked black.
“She is firing,” a voice said.
“Evasive action and return fire, finish them,” the Captain barked.
“They aren’t firing at us, sir,” the voice replied. “She fired at the star.”
“Idiot children,” the Captain muttered. “Close in, destroy her.”
As we closed in on her ship, I watched her missile as it hurled through space. It was closing in on the system’s star. Just as we came into range of her vessel, the missile disappeared into the sun.
The memory dissolved into blinding light and debilitating pain. When, at last, it cleared, I was lying on the cold steel of the floor. I opened my eyes to see the Captain lying in front of me, his eyes open but lifeless, blood dripping from his mouth.
Alarms were sounding as I rose to my feet. Systems were offline, most of the ship’s armor was dissolved. Entire decks of the ship had been swept away. I looked out the viewport and saw darkness and a cloud of smoldering ash. All of it was gone, the Celestrial ship, the star, the worlds, all of it. Gone.
With my hand shaking, I put the Charon back in its place.
“Well?” Growd’s voice sounded distant.
Growd, the Collegiate, all of them were wrong. It hadn’t been the Thar’esh. The Celestrials themselves had destroyed Vasudeva. The thought of that kind of power in the hands of the Collegiate gave me a chill up my spine, but then, if they had the technology, surely the Collegiate would know about it? How could they not know? Navali and her people must have developed it. When they destroyed the system, the secret died with them. Perhaps Navali decided to destroy her entire star system than risk the Thar’esh gaining control of such a weapon, and in doing so, she killed billions of her own people and all but destroyed the Thar’esh.
“Boy!” Growd called again. “What did you see?”
I struggled to sort out the new memories, there was still something missing, something that didn’t fit. The Draugari. Why were they here? Why was their fleet far above, fighting the Celestrials and defending this world? Taro would have known. He survived that day. He must have taken the ship and slipped through the flux point before it collapsed with what was left of the Thar’esh.
I reached back for the Charon, but Dex caught me and pulled me back, pinning my arms painfully behind me.
“No, no more,” Growd’s face was inches from my own, his eyes narrow, his breath smelled like stale coffee. “Now you talk.”
“Dammit!” I yelled, struggling against Dex’s grip. “I need to know what happened!”
“You need to know?” Growd howled back as he swung back his hand and hit me with a backhand across the mouth. “What you need, is to tell me everything you saw, now.”
The inside of my cheek was bleeding where it had cut against my teeth.
“It wasn’t the Thar’esh who destroyed Vasudeva,” I stopped to spit blood on his shoes. “It was the Celestrials.”
“Bullshit.”
“I saw a Celestrial, I heard her say her name was Navali. Her ship launched the weapon into the star to hide their secrets and destroy the Thar’esh, but they survived, a few survived.”
“Navali?” Piter broke in. “Navali Can’tar? She was one of the most celebrated and revered scientists in their history.”
“You’ve heard of her?” Growd paused.
“Of course,” Piter sounded annoyed. “She’s well known. Famous even if you know anything about the history of fusion systems.”
Growd scoffed.
“She was the Emperor’s granddaughter and a genius,” Piter ignored him. “Her research on power systems was what helped the Celestrial to redesign and optimize their fusion drives. When the Earthborn came in contact with the Celestrials their fusion technology was centuries ahead of our own because of it. Of course, that was over 500 years ago.”
“A genius with power systems?” Growd turned back to me. “So I’m supposed to believe that you just had some out-of-body experience where you saw a dead Celestrial scientist blow up her own star and kill billions of her own people? Do you have any idea how absurd that is?”
“Given the mix of biological and energy readings I’m getting off of those things,” Piter said nodding toward the Charon that Growd had set aside “It may be possible they are some sort of memory storage device. I have no idea how, but it is possible.”
“Then why can’t you or I see or access them?” Growd retorted. “And don’t tell me you need to get back to a lab to find out. There has to be some reason why nowhere-boy here can experience them but nobody else can.”
Nowhere boy. His words hung heavy in the air. I think I preferred being referred to as Twig and Berries.
I felt Dex’s grip slacken.
Taro’s Charon was just two feet away, I thought. I would only need seconds to draw out his memories of the Draugari.
“So tell me now, where did you come from?” Growd pressed. “Who are you?”
Growd hit me again across the face. Harder this time. Blood began running from my nose. I allowed myself to slump back. Dex shifted his feet and adjusted his grip to hold me up rather than restrain me.
I glanced over at Piter. She was a historian. She would know the legends. She may have put it together. If she knew, her dark eyes didn’t betray it. She just stood there, watching me with cold, dispassionate eyes.
“Someone’s coming,” Lars called. “The passageway, they’re running in.”
Growd, Dex, and Piter turned their attention to the hall. I knew it was the only opportunity I would have, so I set my feet and jabbed my elbow backward, knocking Dex backwards and off balance. Then, with a desperate lunge, I leapt forward and grabbed Taro’s Charon and called on it to show me the memory I sought.
I was back on the ship’s command deck. I was older now, and stood in front of the Captain’s seat. I bowed gravely. As I rose, I saw four Draugari warriors in front of me. A dozen Thar’esh stood around the room, quiet and solemn. I stepped forward and stood face to face with the leader of the Draugari. His armor was simple and not nearly as advanced as Lor’ten’s had been, on his belt was a gun, but no blade.
“Why did you call us here?” the Draugari said in a low growl.
“We will give you the technology you need to feed and protect your people,” I spoke evenly in the Draugari tongue. “We will show you how to make powerful ships, and navigate deeper into space than you have ever been before.”
“You will give us ships like yours? Ships like this one?”
“Yes, this very ship,” I responded. “But this is more than just a ship, it is also a factory. We have fighter craft, small, agile, and powerful. We will not just give you this ship. We will show you how use it to build starfighters by the dozen, even the hundred. We will show you how to survive.”
As I spoke, a holographic displa
y activated and the image of an asymmetrical fighter craft hovered in the air between us.
The Draugari studied the image, nodding his head in approval, “A powerful gift, what do you demand in exchange?”
“Your silence,” I said. “Your silence, and your protection. Like you were once, we are a hunted people, and there are few of us left. Far, far too few. We are traveling to a world.”
The display changed to a star map, a bright blue light isolated a single system.
“We mean to live there, quietly, where our enemies will not find us.”
“You have power and ships such as this,” the Draugari said, gesturing his arms around the room. “You do not need to hide.”
“We do not need to,” I answered. “But we choose to.”
“Why?”
“Our reasons are ours,” I answered. “Perhaps your people will one day follow in our footsteps, but not today I think. Your species is young. Impossibly young. Do you accept?”
“We accept,” he replied without hesitation. “Your secret will be kept, and your world will be protected by me and my kin, I swear it.”
With that, the Draugari reached for the pistol on his hip. I felt Taro’s heart quicken for a moment before the Draugari reached out and offered the gun to me. He explained: “When my people make an oath, the two leaders exchange that which is most dear to them: their weapons. This pistol has been passed down from chieftain to chieftain for four hundred years. It has slain foes beyond number. Take it as a symbol of my trust.”
I looked down at the gun. It was primitive, but the gesture was not.
“This blade was forged on my home world, far, far away. It has been carried by my predecessors for generations beyond counting.” I said as I reached down to my belt and withdrew my dagger.
The Draugari eyes widened as the golden inlay flashed in the lights.
“It is the weapon of a warrior,” I said solemnly. “I have no more use of it.”
The Draugari bowed as he took my blade. He began to turn away when I stopped him.
“And take this as well,” I pulled a pure-white stone from its place on my belt. “This is the bladestone. My people use to forge and sharpen our blades to keep them honed to kill.”
