“If you had not, it would have dropped it anyway,” Donnchadh said. “I was too late in—”
A new voice cut him off. “It was no one’s fault.”
A wheelchair-bound woman in a black robe tinged with silver was wheeled into the control room. Everyone inclined their heads toward her as a sign of respect. Her name was Enan and she was the leader of the humans. Her legs and arms were gone, amputated many years ago. She had survived the X-cross and leather bands long enough to be rescued after the Airlia who had put her there thought she was dead and left her body to be picked apart by scavenger birds. Rebels had sneaked up to the cross just after dark and cut her loose. Her limbs, broken and dead from lack of blood, had been removed by a surgeon, and she’d been nursed back to health.
Enan looked slowly back and forth, taking in everyone in the room. “We have done what we did not think we coulddo—we’ve defeated the Airlia. We are free.” With the slightest inclination of her head she indicated for the young woman who pushed her wheelchair to move her to the front of the room. “I have just come from science headquarters. They’ve finally managed to access the history banks of the Master Guardian.”
The room went silent as they waited to hear the truth. Donnchadh felt both fear and anticipation. No one knew when the Airlia had come to this planet and taken over— that was lost in the fog beyond recorded human history. Some said the Airlia had always been here, but Donnchadh and the other scientists did not believe that—the small numbers, the single mothership, and other factors pointed to an occupying force, although why the Airlia had occupied their planet was also a mystery.
Enan closed her eyes and her head drooped slightly as if bearing some terrible weight. With great effort she opened her eyes and lifted her head. “We are not native to this planet as we always thought we were, and the Airlia are not alien invaders who conquered our species long ago in the past.”
A long silence followed this statement, which Enan broke with another startling piece of information. “The Airlia brought us here with them.”
Without even thinking about it, Donnchadh found her hand reaching out and taking Gwalcmai’s as they listened. She was stunned, having never considered the possibility that humans were not native to this planet.
“We always knew that we had certain genetic similarities to the Airlia, given that we breathe the same air and can eat the same food and even appear to be very similar. We thought that was what brought them to this planet and to us. But it is not so. We are similar because we are genetic cousins to them, developed by them. The first humans were grown bythe Airlia through manipulation of their own genetic mapping.”
“Why?” the word escaped someone’s lips.
Enan nodded. “That is the key question and the answer is not a good one. The Airlia have been engaged in an interstellar war against another alien species officially called the Swarm and unofficially the Ancient Enemy. This war has been going on for such a long time that those of our scientists who accessed these data from the Master Guardian could not quantify it. Spread over galaxies, this war seems to have been going on forever as far as we are concerned. At the very least beyond the scope of what we can imagine.
“We are part of a long-range Airlia plan to take part in this war. We were designed to be what we became, rather ironic in a way—soldiers. Except we were supposed to be used against the Swarm, not revolt against the Airlia. When the time came that they needed us, they would have given that generation access to the Grail so we could be better soldiers. Until that time, they kept us mortal, with short life spans. They taught us to worship them as Gods while they bred us like cattle.”
Enan smile grimly. “Except as everyone in this room knows it did not work as they planned. We became more than cannon fodder to be used by them.”
She fell silent, allowing everyone to assimilate this startling and unexpected information.
“That is not all,” Enan finally said. One of the scientists who had entered the room with her went over to the large curving control console for the mothership. He seemed to know what he was doing and Donnchadh had to assume he’d been in physical contact with the Master Guardian and directly learned information about the mothership from the alien computer. How he had done that without being takenover by the alien computer she didn’t know, but Enan had indicated it had been done safely.
They’d captured the Master Guardian two days ago,an assault on a massive underground Airlia outpost that had cost the humans over two hundred thousand casualties. Donnchadh, along with a large force of God-killers and scientists, had immediately been sent to this location to secure the mothership. Donnchadh had been glad to be detached as she had no desire to come into physical contact, which led to mind-to-computer interface, with the alien machine.
The scientist ran his hands over the panel of glowing hexagonal images. They were marked with the Airlia High Runes. The lights in the control room dimmed and the curving display on the front wall flickered, then came alive with images of a star field.
“We are here,” the scientist announced. A star glowed red. “According to the Master Guardian we were not the only planet seeded by the Airlia.” He touched a control. A dozen stars, spread out across the star map also glowed red. “By the time they came here, they had already seeded twelve other worlds. And we don’t know how many were seeded with humans after us.”
Donnchadh had assumed that the Airlia Empire stretched over vast reaches of space, but the spectrum displayed before them was staggering.
“We have won the war,” Enan continued. “But in doing so we have lost much. We may have lost our planet. I will not lie to you. Our initial environmental assessments are not promising. We do have access to the Master Guardian and the knowledge it holds. The hope is that we will find in there the scientific means to reverse what has happened. However”—Enan let the word float through the control room— “we cannot count on that. And we cannot allow our cousinson these other worlds”—she nodded toward the display—“to suffer our fate or the even worse fate of staying under Airlia control.”
Donnchadh’s fingers intertwined with Gwalcmai’s and squeezed tight.
“Therefore,” Enan said, “I propose that we get this mothership in operational condition. We bring in the ruby sphere power source that we captured over a year ago. We select and train as many God-killers and scientists as this ship can hold. Since we destroyed the Talons, we will develop our own spaceships to launch from this mothership to these worlds, with teams on board to help them defeat the Airlia in a safer manner.”
FOUR YEARS LATER
It was time.
The battle for the environment had not gone well. Since the end of the Revolution, the amount of arable land had shrunk to an acreage that could not even sustain a population severely reduced by war. Despite this, scarce resources had been allocated to developing spacecraft to be launched from the mothership.
It had not been easy. The design finally settled upon was much smaller than desired, capable of carrying only two people with their supplies, and having a maximum velocity well short of light speed. They built fifteen of the ships before the deteriorating economy could no longer support the project. The ships were loaded into one of the mothership’s holds.
Other changes had occurred.
Armed guards patrolled the rebuilt wall around the mothership. On the inside were the chosen. On the outside the rest of the survivors. Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were on the inside, paired together by Enan’s council and by their own choice. The result of their personal union was their son, who was on the outside.
They had both seen so much death that despite the condition of the planet the decision to bring forth a life had been mutual. They had held on to the hope that the scientists would find a way to reverse the damage; or that their son would be allowed to come with them when they departed on their mission. Both hopes were now as dry and fruitless as the ash that covered most of the planet.
The parting had been brutal. They left
their son in the care of Gwalcmai’s sister, having said their final farewells the previous evening, all knowing they would never see each other again.
As the final countdown for liftoff began, the troops were needed to encircle the launch site to keep out protestors who wanted to stop the launch and those not chosen in the last selection, who desperately fought to be on the ship.
Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were in one of the holds, which were full of others like them and supplies.
“Ten years,” Donnchadh said.
Gwalcmai knew what she was referring to—the best estimate by the scientists for how much longer the planet they were leaving could sustain life.
“At least it will be ten free years,” Gwalcmai said.
Both had argued long and hard with Enan to have their son allowed on board, but the leader had denied them every time. Where they were going and the mission they had been assigned was not amenable to having a child along. Once they deployed from the mothership, there was no room in the smaller spacecraft for a third person. It had been their choice to have a child, knowing their ultimate fate, and Enanhad declared they must accept the consequences of that choice.
The cargo door slowly began to close, cutting off their view of the distant crowd held at bay by the soldiers. Tears streamed down Donnchadh’s face. She knew no matter what her destiny, she would never see her child again.
She had had many discussions with her husband about the future of both the mission and their planet. He had been blunt and honest, as was his nature, hiding any emotions with a focus on preparing for the upcoming mission and the practical matters that had to be dealt with in doing so. But she noted his chest moving rapidly as the cargo door shut and their world disappeared from sight. He kept his face averted from hers as he reached out and put his arm around her shoulders. All on board had left loved ones behind; they were merely an island of misery amid a sea of pain. Large as the ship was, the five thousand chosen were tightly packed on board along with their supplies. Although only thirty would be deployed in teams of two on the fifteen spacecraft, the rest were put on board to populate any unoccupied planet amenable to human life that the craft found on its journey. In this way the line of their people could go on. If such a planet could be found quickly, perhaps the ship could be sent back to get more.
At the appointed moment, the ship lifted out of its cradle without a sound. It moved upward, accelerating through the planet’s polluted atmosphere until it was in the vacuum of space and out of sight of the millions of eyes on the planet’s surface who watched it with mixed emotions. It continued to accelerate conventionally away from the planet and the system star’s gravitational field.
After two years of travel, the star’s field was negligible and the mothership was moving at three-quarters of the speed of light. It was also far enough away that those on board hopedany sign of its passage would not be linked back to their home world and bring the Swarm.
At that point the mothership’s interstellar drive was engaged. With a massive surge of power as great as that of a brief supernova, the ship shifted into faster-than-light travel and snapped into warp speed.
III
12,362 B.C. EARTH CALENDAR: CENTAURUS SPIRAL ARM, MILKY WAY GALAXY
The scientists had been wrong in one respect. Human life still existed on Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s home planet sixty years after the mothership departed. Not much life, granted, and the existence was miserable, but man still walked the face of the planet. The people left behind had adapted as best they could, tilling the land by hand after the last of the machines had broken down and could not be repaired. They ate plants and animals their ancestors would not have even considered as food. It was the human way to cling to life and the survivors were the hardiest of the race.
Unfortunately, the scientists had been right about something else. The mothership’s warp shift had been picked up by a Swarm scout ship on patrol over twenty light-years away from the star system. While the scout ship had immediately turned in the direction of the shift, it also sent out an alert to the nearest Swarm Battle Core.
It took the Swarm some time to find the planet the mothership had come from and for the Battle Core to arrive, but the Swarm were a patient race, who had little concept of time except as an operational variable. On the planet’s surface, there were few still alive who had witnessed the mothership’s departure. Their descendants cared more about gathering their meager crops than stories of spaceships andaliens. There were fewer than twenty million humans left, down from the peak of over five billion prior to the Revolution. They were crowded into the few places on the planet’s surface where food could be grown and the land didn’t emit radiation that killed all who walked upon it.
According to the Master Guardian, the Swarm was a strange race, one whose origins were unknown even to the Airlia. There were some scientists among the races who encountered them who speculated that the Swarm was an invented species, designed as weapons, as it showed only a capacity to destroy and no inclination to create. Whatever alien race had invented the Swarm, if this was true, had long since disappeared from the universe, perhaps consumed by its own invention, the inherent danger in any form of bioweapon. And most species that encountered the Swarm no longer existed either. Only the Airlia, so far, had been powerful enough to resist the Swarm.
One of the Swarm consisted of a gray orb, four feet in diameter, with numerous eyes spaced evenly around the body. Anywhere from one to a dozen gray tentacles extended from bulbous knobs on the orb, placed next to the eyes. At maturity a tentacle was over six feet long. The orb had a massive four-hemisphere brain. Each of the tentacles had a rudimentary brain stem and could detach from the orb and operate on their own. The tentacles could infiltrate the bodies of other species and take over the cognitive functioning of intelligent creatures, a most effective means of reconnaissance. The tentacle could gather information hidden inside an alien’s body, then exit the body, reattach to the orb, and relay the information learned to the main brain. If a tentacle was lost, the orb could grow a new one from a knob.
It was speculated that the Swarm had some sort of basic telepathic capability among members of its own species when in close proximity to each other. Certainly no otherspecies had ever been able to communicate with it and no Swarm member had ever been taken alive. No prisoner taken by the Swarm had ever been recovered alive, and those who had fought the Swarm learned quickly to kill any of their own that had contact with the Swarm because of the possibility of tentacle infiltration. There was no negotiating with the Swarm—once contact was made, it was war, and a war that could only end in extinction for one side or the other. So far, except for the Airlia, the Swarm had wiped out every race it had encountered.
The Swarm scout landed on the planet and detached tentacles. They learned that this was indeed the place the mothership had departed from. Surprisingly, though, the Swarm also found no trace of the Airlia, its longtime enemy, who it knew had built the mothership. The assumption was made that the Airlia had, for some reason, fled the planet, abandoning these lesser, somewhat intelligent, creatures.
The race that still existed on the planet posed no threat to the Swarm. Indeed, it appeared that none would be left alive in another generation or two. That meant nothing to the Swarm. Over the millennia the Swarm had already wiped out numerous intelligent species in the universe.
Sixty years after the mothership’s departure, Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s son was still alive and a grandparent. He had vague memories of his parents and their departure. For years he tried to tell the generations after him the story of the mothership lifting off, but the story became more myth than real as the years went by, and even he began to wonder at his own memories. If it were not for the ruins of a nearby city, he would not believe his own stories. People who could have built such a magnificent place must have been capable of great things.
Once, his grandson, after hearing the story for the umpteenth time, asked a few questions that kept him from telling it a
gain: Why had his parents abandoned him? What was there out there in the stars more important than family?
By the time the Swarm Battle Core arrived in the planet’s system, the son was now confined to a chair and daily contemplated taking his own life rather than being a burden to his family. He ate little and his body was emaciated.
As the Core appeared in orbit overhead, it was visible to the naked eye, and for several wild moments, the son wondered if the mothership had returned. Then he realized that whatever was in orbit was far larger than even the massive mothership. In fact, though the humans had no way of knowing it, the eclipse caused by the Core cut off sunlight from half the surface of the planet.
As his family huddled around him in fright at the strange apparition, he remembered vague stories of an Ancient Enemy and a sensation of dread replaced the brief feeling of hope he had had.
The Battle Core in orbit was essentially a self-sustaining mechanical planet and starship; the Swarm had no known home world. There were hundreds of these Battle Cores spread out in the Galaxy. Each was over two thousand miles long, by a thousand wide, and two hundred in depth. Its mass was so great that it generated a discernible gravity field that affected the tides of the planet below. During the war with the Airlia several dozen of these Cores had been destroyed, but each at great cost, and their loss was offset by the annihilation of dozens of Airlia-colonized planets along the frontier.
The Swarm scout ship took off from its hide site on the planet and rendezvoused with the Core to render its report. The intelligent species on the planet below was dying out and offered no military threat. There was only one thing of value on the planet’s surface: the people themselves. Report done, the scout was dispatched to the point where the warpdrive had been initiated with orders to try to track the path of the mothership.
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