The Exxar Chronicles: Book 01 - The Erayan

by Neal Jones

  Saveck had told Ambassador Zar that he preferred to live for his beliefs instead of dying for them. But there was plenty of ways for one to die without actually ending one's life.

  Tomorrow was another day.

  Epilogue

  ____________________

  The homeworld of the Khazar Dominion, known as Kha'Skel-A by its natives, was an orb of charcoal and cream, with the occasional glimpses of crimson and emerald in the thinner spots of the normally dense, muddy atmosphere. From this far up, the planet and its smaller sibling, Kha'Skel-B, were like a pair of gray, murky oceans that lapped against the star-speckled beach of night. The rare spots of crimson-orange were the locations of active volcanoes. Through modern science and weather-control technology, the Khazar managed to diminish the effects of the occasional eruptions, which were not anywhere near as violent now as they were in Kha'Skel-A's prehistoric past.

  The Khazar themselves were a people as violent and tormented as their sibling homeworlds. Their appearance alone suggested something reptilian: bipedal monsters with thick, leathery skin the same shade of charcoal as their planets' atmospheres. No Khazar was less than two meters tall, and their foreheads were covered with raised, bony ridges that always reminded the overseer of a scarred, pocked battlefield. She considered the species as a whole to be rather barbaric and primitive when compared to most of the other alien races of the Federation, and maybe that was why the Dominion wasn't part of that alliance.

  Csalix'113 turned away from her viewport and keyed a command into her computer to call up her schedule for the day. It was her responsibility to oversee all operations within the Khazar home system. The Dominion spanned several thousand light years, and had subjugated fifteen separate species over the last three centuries. They were now a power to rival the Jha'Drok Emperium or even the Chrisarii Alliance, but the Khazar remained a xenophobic species at heart, conquering only those few non-aligned worlds who were either too weak to fight back or to whom the Federation had not yet extended an invitation of membership for whatever reason. Not only that, but their territories were located on the "eastern side" of Federation space, whereas the Chrisarii and the Jha'Drok were on the "southwestern side", if one looked at the Alpha Quadrant as a two-dimensional map. It was the Dominion's location that had caught the eye of the Krejj in the first place, and now, almost a century later, Csalix'113 had an office – a rather expansive one actually – in Orbital Station 001, a.k.a OS-1. There were currently thirty of them scattered throughout the territories.

  The young, lithe woman with dark hair and olive skin was not Krejj. Her species was named Taa'Vo, an abbreviation of a Krejj phrase that, roughly translated, meant "they that are created". The Taa'Vo were bred by Krejj scientists in large and complex laboratories. Someone had once referred to the Taa'Vo as "biological androids", which was an apt term. The number 113 meant that Csalix was the one-hundred-and-thirteenth clone of the Csalix model, and she held the title of overseer because she was genetically engineered for that position. She possessed superior intelligence, which brought with it an enhanced ability for reason, logic and tactical organization. It was her responsibility to coordinate the multiple operations that were currently in action in the home system, while not losing sight of the bigger picture, which was what the first item on her agenda pertained to. It was a response from her contact on Throlo-four, who was relaying a message to her from Senior Director Caine of Federation Central Intelligence.

  Csalix nodded with approval as she read the communiqué. It appeared that all operations within the Federation territories were proceeding on schedule, and she agreed with Caine's reassessment of Exxar-One. That entire situation was proving to be more thorny than anyone had anticipated, but the Krejj and their servants were nothing if not adaptable, and all that was required at this point was closer surveillance. She trusted Caine and his discretion, and she stored the message in a subfolder without sending a reply.

  The next item on her agenda was a meeting with General Kaamin, commandant of the military forces in home system, and he was scheduled to arrive at any minute. The overseer walked across the room to her food dispenser and requested a cup of slib juice. She stood for a minute or two at the viewport that took up most of the far wall of her office, and she admitted to herself that there was a certain beauty in the writhing, stormy atmosphere of Kha'Skel-A. For all their apparent primitiveness, the Khazar were a remarkably resourceful people, and the overseer felt a slight pity for them. Only a select few in the Dominion's government knew of the Krejj presence in their territories - General Kaamin was one of them – but not even those few knew the true agenda of the seemingly benign species who referred to themselves as the Krejj Protectorate.

  Csalix returned to her desk and keyed in the command to pull up the list of items that needed to be discussed with Kaamin. A moment later, a soft chime sounded and she pressed the command to unlock her office door and allow the Khazar officer into her presence.

  "Good morning, general."

  "Good morning, overseer."

  There was no small talk and no further pleasantries. There was only one item for them to discuss.

  "I presume you requested this meeting in answer to my requisition for twenty class-four heavy cruisers from the home fleet."

  "That is correct," Kaamin rumbled. "That is a rather large number of heavy cruisers, and if I divert them to the Heradin system, it will leave home fleet...disadvantaged."

  Csalix smiled and nodded. "I appreciate your reluctance, and you're right. In the past I have never requested that many ships, and it's only fair that you know the reason." She set aside her compad and folded her hands across her lap. "There are certain aspects of this project that have been kept from you and your military command. This was not done out of malice, but merely as a security precaution, as I'm sure you've had to do on numerous occasions with the troops under your command."

  "Yes, of course."

  Csalix leaned forward, pursing her lips thoughtfully. "This project is moving into a new phase." She tapped a key on her panel to activate the holo-display. A star map appeared in the air above her desk. "The recent destruction of the Jha'Drok invasion fleet has left the Emperium vulnerable and more embattled than ever before. Their attention has always been too focused upon the Federation, and now their gaze turns to the Chrisarii Alliance as well." Csalix highlighted a sector on the map. "All of this has left several of their outer sectors defenseless. This one is very close to the Heradin system. The Protectorate has decided to take advantage of this opportunity."

  "An invasion?"

  "Not just yet. My orders are to transfer a fleet into the Heradin system, where we are currently constructing a new orbital station, as well as a weapons depot on the planet's surface. We will wait for a few months and see what response, if any, this evokes from the Jha'Drok."

  Kaamin frowned as he examined the star map. "What is in that sector?"

  "Mostly industrial colonies and a few mining companies. Our recent surveillance and reconnaissance indicate that none of them are crucial to the larger economic and industrial health of the Emperium. This sector serves primarily its own systems and a few farming colonies."

  "Interesting." Kaamin thought for a moment and then nodded. "Thank you for sharing this with me. I will have the ships underway by this time tomorrow." He stood.

  "Very good. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

  "Not at this time."

  Kaamin left, and Csalix'113 sipped the last of her juice, savoring its tartness, as her gaze drifted once more to the viewport. The overseer wondered idly how much manpower and technological resources it would take for the Krejj to terraform the Khazar homeworlds once their operations in the Dominion were concluded. As a species, the Khazar weren't worth saving, but their twin planets surely possessed an abundance of natural resources that could be used by the Krejj to further their conquest of the Interstellar Federation of Peace. Csalix made a mental note to work up the calculations and save them for later. Th
e Krejj emissary hadn't yet asked for such a report, but it was always best to be as prepared as possible, and besides, it wouldn't be too much longer before the goals of the larger project were completed. She swiveled to face the door as the sound of the chime signaled that her next appointment had arrived.

  Afterword

  The Exxar Chronicles began as a short story titled Galaxy-Nine. Don't ask me where I got that title, I just liked it. It was 1995. I was a sophomore in high school, and I was in love with a trio of sci-fi shows on TV at that time: Babylon-5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and The X-Files. I decided that I wanted to write my own space saga. Galaxy-Nine was the name of the starship in my story, and its intrepid crew was on a mission of discovery and adventure. I went so far as to type up thirty or forty pages on my dad's old typewriter. I'm sure that if I hunted long and hard enough, I would find that manuscript buried in a box of my things from childhood in a storage shed somewhere.

  Later in high school, perhaps my junior or senior year, I changed the basic premise of Galaxy-Nine. Instead of a starship, it was now a small outpost on an alien planet. I don't remember anything about the story except that I did use the same beaming technique that Star Trek used. (Ripping off Gene Rodenberry's creation was the least of my problems at this stage of the game.) I also remember the exact time and place where I came up with the word "exxar". I was on my senior class trip, in the mountains of South Dakota. There were a total of ten in our class – I went to a private school – and us guys wanted a weekend alone. We were sick of the girls bitching and being melodramatic about everything. Brett's parents owned a cabin in the mountains, and that's where we spent three days snowmobiling, watching movies, barbecuing, and just hanging out. (Somewhere, probably in the same box that contains the Galaxy-Nine manuscript, is a VHS tape of that weekend. Brett's dad had a video camera, and we boys had a lot of fun with it.) I was walking through the woods one afternoon, and the word just came to me, out of the blue. Exxar. It was a great word, a perfect word.

  Sometime after that, the series was renamed The Exxar Chronicles. I think, at an early point in the writing of the third draft, I called the space station Exxar-Five. That moniker didn't last long. Yes, the planetary outpost was no more. I thought a space station would be more fun and offered more story possibilities. It's this third draft that set me on the path to the story you have in your hands now. Exxar-One orbited a planet called Ralor Prime. EarthCorps was assigned to assist the Ralorians in rebuilding their shattered world following the occupation of the Khazar. Sound familiar? Yeah, I was still ripping off Star Trek. This manuscript was longer than thirty pages and it was again produced on my dad's typewriter.

  It was around this time that I joined the Army and was shipped off to basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. All my stuff was put into storage, and it wasn't until six months after that – when I arrived at my permanent duty posting in Hanau, Germany – that I was able to return my attention to my sci-fi series. That's what I was calling it now: My Sci-Fi Series. I had a dream of one day moving to L.A. and producing it. But it needed more work, and even my novice muse understood that my story was not original enough. I needed to change the basic premise one more time, and it took me several weeks of frustrated dead ends before I finally struck gold.

  I began the fourth draft. This time, it was the Chrisarii and the Federation who were ending a long war, and Exxar-One was built to ensure a lasting peace. All of a sudden, as if a door had finally been unlocked to a forbidden room, I found my story and my voice. I came up with technology that was my own – the cardon field, for example. My characters began to take on 3-D appearance. It was 1999, and I now had regular access to a computer. I spent many afternoons and evenings alone with MS Word 97, and it only took a few weeks for me to finish the novel. It was now up to 180 pages, or something close to that, and I immediately dived into subsequent episodes. I outlined a whole season and fleshed out my characters and their stories with a fervor that comes only with a fresh song from the muse.

  For the next four years, I wrote my series as if I was writing a TV series. Each episode was roughly 50 pages, typed in teleplay format, not prose, and each season had twenty-six episodes. By now, I was back home in Twin Falls, attending the College of Southern Idaho, and working toward an Associates in Fine Arts. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I graduated in spring of '03, and I immediately headed up to Boise to attend Boise State University that fall. I graduated in December of '05, and somewhere in those five years I think I rewrote and/or edited that fifth draft of "Eraya" to create a sixth. Or perhaps I wrote a sixth draft of Eraya right after coming home in Christmas of '99. Either way, I'm pretty sure I was up to number six when I returned my attention once more to this first episode in spring of '06.

  I now had five years of college writing experience – as well as a BA in English – under my belt. I also had a good deal more life experience tucked under my shirt than when I'd begun writing Galaxy-Nine in high school. At this point, I'd written more than a hundred episodes of The Exxar Chronicles, and my saga was swimming along perfectly. I was finishing the 5th season in February of '06, and I was beginning to feel an itch at the back of my brain, a yearning to return to that first episode, the one that started it all. Now that I'd spent ten semesters of higher education honing my craft I knew that there were some glaring flaws with Eraya. After re-reading the first couple chapters, I was downright ashamed of that sixth draft. It was riddled with clichés, populated with two-dimensional characters, burdened with a dreary plot, and completely lacking an original voice. Put simply, it was a child's story. Still, I wanted to forge ahead with season six, while the muse was still singing his aria, while I was still "in the zone" as I like to sometimes call it.

  By spring of '07, I had paused in my work on The Exxar Chronicles to begin another sci-fi fantasy series that had grabbed my attention. The muse had changed songs and was now feeding me a new fire. Unfortunately, he led me astray, and I have since punished him for it. I was 400 pages into that other novel before I finally gave up. It was like pulling teeth, and one thing that I have learned thus far in my pitifully short career is that you do not keep forging ahead if the fire has burned out. You stop, you take stock, and you listen to your instincts. Mine were telling me to get back to my first love, to Eraya. It was finally time to begin a seventh draft.

  One of the central reasons I came back to the beginning was to correct the plethora of mistakes. Over the years, as I toiled away on the series, as I finished each season and fleshed out the character arcs and plotlines for the next one, I began to see several errors which I had made with Eraya. That story was just about a space station and its crew. There was a battle with the Jha'Drok, and a peace treaty with the Chrisarii, but that was it. There was no epic feel or scope to that story. Only later on, as I delved into the 3rd, 4th, and 5th seasons did my series assume its grand scope. I now realized that I needed to have that feel from the beginning. There was a lot more that needed to be established in that first episode, and, since I would not be producing this series for television after all, I decided to rewrite everything I had churned out thus far and transform it into a literary series.

  That, in a nutshell, is what led to the final product that you are reading now. It's been sixteen years since I conceived of Galaxy-Nine, and I originally began writing it as a way to pay homage to a genre I had fallen in love with via Star Trek and The X-Files. I didn't realize it in those exact terms at the time, but looking back now, it's easy to see why I put pen to paper back in '95. Some of that initial desire still remains. Every artist wants to create something that is wholly his/hers, not just worship and dote on everyone else's masterpieces.

  But, in the last few years, there's been another driving force behind my desire to create The Exxar Chronicles. While I am still a loyal fan of Star Trek, I have become disillusioned and annoyed with Gene Rodenberry's utopian view of the future. Gene was an idealist, a dreamer and an optimist. He firmly believed that mankind would one day rise abov
e the darker angels of our nature and explore the galaxy in true peace and harmony. You'll notice that on every single episode of The Original Series and The Next Generation the conflict always comes from without. No one on the Enterprise crew suffers from drug addiction, marital problems, alcoholism, or any of the other vices that plague us today. Gene's characters are flawless, perfect, beautiful people who exemplify the best that humanity has to offer. The Earth of the 24th century is a utopian paradise, an Eden without any war, poverty or disease, and all monetary notes of any kind have been abolished. Everyone unselfishly works together for the betterment of the whole group, and no one fights for power over anyone else.

  Give me a frakkin' break, folks. Seriously.

  Gene was obviously not the only one who bought into this bullshit, otherwise Star Trek would not be the global phenomenon that it is. But seriously, people, let's get real. By creating perfect, flawless characters, Gene shot himself in the foot by violating one of the edicts of good writing: Thou Must Have Conflict. And by forcing all of his conflict to come from an external source – i.e. the Borg, the Romulans, the Klingons, the alien-of-the-week, etc. – Gene had locked himself into a literary room with only one exit. The Original Series and The Next Generation are okay, but by the time we were tortured with the onset of Voyager, the Star Trek well had run dry. After all, there's only so many ways to say, "There's something out there, captain. I don't know what it is, but it's attacking us. Oh wait, it just wants to say hello. Misunderstanding solved, la-dee-la, and we continue on our way, all the wiser for the experience."

  The only exception to this rule was Deep Space Nine, arguably the greatest and the best of all five series. Berman and co., in the wake of Rodenberry's death, were finally free to experiment with Gene's vision and tweak it enough to finally get some real conflict from the Star Trek universe. Still, as much as I am devoted to that series, Gene's ghost was still present and his vision was as flawed as ever. Sisko and the other Starfleet characters still managed to come off as a little too pious and condescending.