by K A Carter
She gripped under Jericho’s chin and guided toward her eyes. “Who are you?” she said again. This time with more grit.
Jericho’s was looking for an escape all the while trying to process everything at once. He couldn’t worry about his crew. As she shook his chin to get his attention he couldn’t help belting out the answer. “My name is Alfred Jericho.”
She let go and stood up, turning her back to him and tinkering with a gun on the workbench that hung off the wall behind her.
“I’m Captain of the Icarus. It brought us here. Sure enough that crazed lunatic followed us and I doubt he’s dead. Even after the cavern entrance collapsed.” He spouted out quickly.
The woman shrugged and grunted. “I can promise he’s not. Still, can’t get how you managed to walk right into the lion’s den. But, you’re here now, and that must mean you’re meant to have been. Better late than never - that whole thing.” She turned around began releasing the restraints on Jericho’s wrists.
As they came loose, he rubbed his wrists to make sure no permanent damage had taken place and said. “We aren’t from Orcus,”
“Well that ship is Orcus property.” Her words hung in the air. A silence followed. She stopped in her tracks glancing at them all. “You stole it?”
“We ain’t thieves lady,” Morris said. “It was given to us.”
Jericho stood up and gestured to the rest of his crew. “And you are?”
“Well since rank doesn’t matter right now, you can just call me Rain.
“Okay,” Jericho responded. Rain tossed him the lock releasers. Jericho began getting his crew unshackled. “What happened here?”
“What it looks like. Zael-“
“You know him?” Anda asked curiously.
“Know him, we’ve been fighting Ixorians for the past year.” Rain leaned against her workbench and slipped a nutrient yogurt pack out of a side patch on her armor. “I can’t give you the whole story but Dortrus is the first corporate sponsored colony outside of the known space. Its first come first serve and we got the only drive that can get here; some tech they got off some real ‘out there’ bastards.”
Everyone stood up, Morris attempted to wake Keon, finally his eyes fluttering as he gathered consciousness. “So you know about Vennok? The banished? And how to get home?”
Rain gave a confused look. “I don’t know what either of those two things are. All I know is we got hit with a wave of their army overnight. I came back to look for survivors but I’m guessing you didn’t see any.”
“Not one,” Zen said.
Rain nodded. “Yeah, well my team has made contact with CHQ. If you guys got a ship they can get us through the GAW. By the dumb look on your faces I can see you wasn’t meant to come. All the same, I can get you through.”
“GAW?” Zen asked.
“A wormhole.” Rain responded quickly.
“Woah, a fucking wormhole?” Scud belted out.
“Uh, yeah. A GAW. Gate Access Wormhole. If you can get me and my team off this rock. I have transmitted codes to locate it. unless you would like to stay here.
“What will be on the other side?” Jericho asked. He showed his reluctance even though his crew silently cheered around him. It was a more solid plan than taking their chances jumping again with whatever it was that was being used as a warp conduit. It also beat out tinkering with anything the Nexus had to say until they were in a more familiar place.
“CHQ is the base the Draul - I think they’re called - helped us establish. The wormhole is just out of orbit of the planet it’s on.”
“Why’re you telling us all this?” Anda interrupted, it took her a moment but Jericho knew she was as tentative as he was. One of the many reasons why he loved her so much.
“Look, I don’t want to die, and if I stay, that’s what’s going to happen. End of story. Whatever you tell my superiors on the other side to save your ass? Between you and yours.”
It was blunt and simply put. Jericho liked that. He nodded at the thought and said the magic words. “Grab your team and let’s go.”
Rain lead them up a staircase that opened into a room only a fraction bigger than the one they had just came from. There were three similarly armed soldiers conversing by a hard shell door. Their sight bounced toward Jericho and his people.
“Alright, Captain Jericho and his crew have agreed to get us to the G.A.W.” Rain approached them ambling without any haste. “As of now it’s what he says goes ‘til we get to CH Q.
The group of soldiers nodded and one of them walked up. A slick-haired man. Young in the face with no visible facial hair. “Sorry for the concussive shot,” he said, addressing all of them. “No hard feelings?”
“We’ll try not to hold it against you,” Jericho said.
Each of them slotted their helmets. As Jericho placed on his, a sound of suction below his beard fell and the HUD booted on.
Jericho placed his on slowly and turned to Rain as she sat waiting. “You can breathe out there?”
Rain nodded ,her group nodding with her at separate times. “Perks of Orcus, it would’ve been expensive getting terraforming tech into Omega Toriga. So, the Joint Corporations invested in expedited acclamation. It worked but well theirs side effects.”
“Like what?” Anda asked.
“Just minor stuff,” one of the soldiers shrugged.
Once the group had left the small outpost. Jericho checked his com link to the ship to see if anyone would answer. “Come in Icarus.”
The response was immediate. “Jericho?” Freya yelled. “Where the fuck have you been?! You all have been gone for hours. Gideon and I were debating on whether to go, we figured you were dead.”
“Good thing you didn’t,” Jericho said, his voice cracking.
“Araime wouldn’t let us anyway. She said she could still feel your presence. Whatever the fuck that means. Besides, that AI kept the landing clamps locked.”
Jericho didn’t care what it meant, he was relieved the words allowed him and the rest of the crew a chance to get back. With Zael looming around, almost certainly still at large, time was the most important resource. Something that he thought he had too much of before.
“We have four survivors with us. We’re bringing them aboard.”
Jericho kept his eyes on the wild life and vegetation that thickened in the distance. His HUD readouts were reading remarkable figures on the amount of animal and plant life balances. If it weren’t for the harshly populated microbial atmosphere, Dortrus was a rather plush vacationing prospect. If only it were closer to home. Jericho kept mentally swearing to himself that if he got back to Sol, he wouldn’t leave past the Kuiper Belt for any number of units.
He looked back, Rain giving a small smile to assure she was following. The other soldiers ahead of him looking out as they all slowly trotted.
Finally, the vastness opened and a small patch revealed itself. The black ship rested at the opposite edge. No visible windows. Jericho didn’t notice it before. Anything that resemble looking out must have just been cameras.
He stopped as the others approached it. Realizing the true size of the Icarus. Giant in its own right.
He had been staring for a long enough period that Anda stopped behind the rest of them. “Al, let’s go.”
Aboard, the three soldiers were put in the quarantine section of the airlock. It was roomy enough that they didn’t complain. Rain stood by the blue tinted plex that kept the rest of the airlock away. While the inner airlock alerts blared about a foreign organism, the decontamination process initiated. It was a forceful gaseous charge from nozzles above that gave the airlock a sort of fog. It didn’t hurt. It did however, have an accompanying smell that reminded Jericho of Titan bedrock. A sort of musky smell.
Jericho could feel the rise of exhaustion in his eyes, the bags tugging on his eyelids like a gradual gravitational pull.
Rain looked dead into them. The eyes of someone who could kill easily, without remorse. Despite the agreement, Jeric
ho didn’t trust them. Not for the life of his crew. There was a hidden agenda somewhere in her promises.
He didn’t want to give away too much, he only told the others that were with him to play along and gave slight details to the rest of them. Just so that things didn’t get confusing. Araime entered the compartment, carefully pacing behind Jericho. He acknowledged her with a jolt of the neck and sat down at a retractable bench. It locked into place; he tested it for good measure. It was sturdy. Jericho pulled out a degradable towel from the compartment under the bench and wiped at his face.
Rain sat at the bench on the other side of the containment leaning her back against the wall it hugged.
“So,” Jericho started. “Where is this wormhole?”
Chapter 37: Nario
There a was a rush that Nario hadn’t felt in a long time. Something that stringed from his days as an adolescent teen. Some sort of defiance to everything that held up the functioning galactic totems. Though he stopped at his third drink, he could feel the after effects. Lortain was smart and cut off at just one. It was his job not to be incompetent. Nario characterized as being a boy scout. Still, when he was Lortain’s age, he was the same way.
Sitting there watching Rowland spike up her scripts and a small league of femme hackers take her side, was like seeing behind the curtain the federation kept keenly veiled. A remarkable group of people on the other side of the law. Still admirable. Still very dangerous.
“I’m in.” she said. Her fingers violently dancing atop holographic keys. The backdrop of the lights streaming from carefully placed holo-cubes that were an array of the rainbow but only translating into a few blue streams. The data casted in between Nario and Rowland.
“Good,” Nario responded. He conjured up a voice to say something else but didn’t know what else to say.
What would be ideal information included anything on Vacura’s operations. Where outside of Sol the companies and their subsidiaries were based. Most importantly, Orcus’ connection with the Draul.
He focused on the harmonious taps of feedback from the hackers typing away. It was one of the only times he had felt genuinely useless and a bystander. It wasn’t a feeling he liked. To remedy it he stood up, pacing next to them. “So, what do you see. Anything on the on Vacura. On something called the Draul?”
Rowland shook her head with a shrug. “Cascade reports. Shipyard locations and manifests. Hell, even a few joint trade documents with other species.”
“That’s not it. It’s not enough. There is something else. Deeper I know it.”
Rowland looked up at him. Her eyes pondering why a man was going to these lengths or why it would leave him this tense. Nario didn’t hide his body language. It was like a waterfall drowning his shoulders with weight. He barely knew it but the whole galaxy was in true danger. And somehow one small piece of it that linked to Orcus could help him see the bigger picture. Maybe give an opportunity to stop whatever was on its way.
“I can go deeper,” she said. “Orcus is a careful company, but I know the ins and outs of the systems like my own skin.”
“You’re an expert no doubt,” said Nario. “If anyone could crack it I’m sure it’s you.”
“Well it’s not cracking, but yeah I am the only one.”
Nario stopped from his pacing. “What do you mean?”
“I wrote the system. Some many whiles ago.”
In some way, it didn’t shock Nario but did discombobulate his thoughts. Before he could respond she murmured. “I know, I should be dead/ That’s why it pays in life to have your own setup.”
One of the hackers stopped and whispered something in Rowlands ear. It sounded like old earth German, but Nario was no expert in languages.
The hacker flung her fingers at her screen and the images swooped over to Row’s. She started typing away and chuckled dryly. “This is bad.”
Nario unfolded is arms. “What? How bad? What is it?”
“Like we’re all screwed bad, but only if you believe in the whole superbeings to take over the galaxy sort of thing.”
Lortain kept looking at Nario then to Rowland and back again. “What?” he said in a childish voice.
“Take a seat ambassador,” Rowland said. “I have some bad news and some even more bad news.”
“Spit it out.”
“Orcus has numerous black projects outside the Kuiper belt and much of those are linked with other species.”
“That’s the worst part?” he said sarcastically.
“Wait there’s more. A lot more. The Draul are a subspecies of an arid planet destroyed about fifty years ago. Orcus is working with them by order of a ‘superbeing’ known as Xefacus. There’s more in here but it would take all your minds over at headquarters to sift through this info.”
Nario face lit up with a worry he usually never had. “What does it mean?”
“Well I’m putting it plainly but if – and only if – I believed in interdimensional beings that have the power to envelope whole worlds, I would say there is no winning this war.”
Nario only responded with silence.
“But I don’t believe in that,” she said. “By the look on your face, clearly you do.”
That was it. That was the jackpot on information; no matter how bad it sounded. If he gave this to the Investigative Diplomacy Office back on Earth, it would blow the solar system wide open. Corporate greed would translate into an appearance of treason against the human race. It sounded melodramatic when he said it in his head but it was that serious. He could see it playing out now. Erusha would have no choice but to call a vote and it would almost certainly be in favor of full scale annexation of the Brink and the fragmentation of the corporations. That part wouldn’t matter as much, all of them would likely land on their feet for the most part. On top of all of that, Nario’s fears were confirmed. An actual threat to multiple civilizations.
“Transfer the data to a data tablet.” Nario said as he frowned.
Rowland waived at a guard and he exited the room through the back and minutes later returned with a stack. All of them on top of each other no thicker than his fingernail. She slipped one of them out of the stack. It was fluid and folded and bent when she applied enough pressure to it.
“I am uploading everything on here. I think you know not to tell your friends where you go it from.” Rowland shot a glance at him but didn’t keep it.
Nario shook his head affirmatively. All he could really think about was what was on it and what it meant for him now.
What about his family. His father had passed but his mother was still living out her later years at a retirement community on Venus. She always said she loved the sunset there. And Corrinne, there had to be a way to get her out of harm’s way. If it meant
“This is it,” she said. The hackers stopped their typing and Rowland swiped the information to a data tablet and handed it to Nario.
A header was labeled Project Mobius.
The first part of it Nario could identify, was outpost designations and security protocols. Nario glossed over and read through to where he saw a few names. Vacura being the first and another he didn’t recognize at all. Sarjana. Whoever it was appeared mentioned further in the read. Sometimes in reference to Vacura and others times with the Draul.
It became apparent that it was what was driving everything. “Sarjana.” Nario said it to himself and it kept feeling more and more darker. Like the mention of evil.
Rowland popped up and stood in front of him. Nario ,so enamored by the information that he was no longer unnerved by her shear nakedness peering through the robe, looked her directly in her eyes.
“I don’t know what mess CPF has managed to get mankind in. Whatever it is. Clearly it is only directed to the authorities.” Her voice was coarse and steady. “This is your key. This is what they are helping them with.”
Nario looked up at the data tablet. What is the Un’haise? He read further an it explained itself. The Draul on a siege to imbalance certain powers
in the known galaxy was only getting them dismantled enough for what was to come later.
∆∆∆
“A gateway,” he said aloud. He was on a channel with Rhion. His face displaying the distraught passion that ran through both of them simultaneously like a free-flowing stream. The more Nario thought about it, it wasn’t something he could handle under the guise of his sworn leadership. It made sense in a discombobulated way. He was doing most of the work anyway. He himself a war hero and ambassador, was the only duel experience he needed. Much of the military officials were decorated yet ornery when it came to relations with anyone outside of the asteroid belt. That meant the corporations and straggling settlers included. With the new-found information, the interests of the common people – both in the inner planets and beyond the brink – would be null and void. Nario had ideas of how things would play out. None of them consisted of a good outcome.
“A gateway to where?” Rhion asked.
Nario didn’t respond right away. He didn’t know the answer to that question. None of the rest of the data gave any indication of what it was the Draul were opening a gate to.
Only a few things were certain. The attacks were a smoke screen. It would effectively scramble armies. That much was clear. Those tagged as foreseeable threats were immediately engaged. Not out of coincidence, Nario had met with and spoken to delegates from each of those groups. The Lanx, who he had still yet to hear back from, and the Irinans. It had been pretty long since their government reached out as well. It was all in the Orcus data. Thankfully, Rhion had gotten it right with contacting Rowland.
Specifically, targeted groups. The list went on. At least a hundred civilizations. A hundred more that seemed to be in league with the dangerous beings. To no surprise the Moranthian Empire was instinctively on the opposing side of things. Choosing to side with an apparent evil. It couldn’t have been as simple as that but it was anyone’s guess.
