The Cor Chronicles: Volume 04 - Gods and Steel

by Martin V. Parece II

  Cor took a deep breath as he started down the slight incline toward the crater. He hadn’t gone far before he pitched forward, tripped by some sort of weed or vine, and he would have landed face first into the ground if he hadn’t gotten his hands up in time. As it was, his palms burned from the friction, and he felt the blood trickle slowly from his left hand. Cor cursed himself for a fool as he pulled his left foot free of the entrapping plant, and he continued down the incline, determined to be more careful.

  The weeds thinned and disappeared completely, replaced by something that thinly carpeted the hard ground underneath. It may have been moss, but looking down in the moonlight, Cor couldn’t be sure. The incline turned into a trench and the ground began to rise on either side of him. When the walls of the trench had risen over his head, it narrowed suddenly to a width that would only allow three or four men standing abreast to continue. He could not see beyond the opening into the narrow tract; it was as if something warded away the moonlight.

  And then he heard in his mind confirmation that he’d arrived at his final destination. A male voice said, “Leave us be, Lord Dahken Cor Pelson.”

  “I won’t, and you know that,” Cor said into the night, into the hidden cleft before him. “You know why I’m here.”

  “It is a fool’s errand. Are you a fool?” asked a female with an odd accent.

  “Perhaps, but it doesn’t change what I’m here to do.”

  “You are so arrogant, to think you can end us,” replied the female. “We are eternal, with powers you cannot comprehend.”

  “And if you could stop me, you would have already,” reasoned Cor. “I know you ‘gods’ can only interfere every so often, and I think you’ve expended far too much of your strength on Nadav. Besides, would you like to know something that I’ve realized?”

  “What would that be?” asked another male.

  “You have limits!” Cor declared. “All of you do. If not, you would have struck me down before I killed Nadav -”

  “He did not matter,” interrupted the first male in explanation.

  “And Garod would have struck down Nadav or even me at birth,” Cor continued ignoring the voices that seemed very real yet he was sure were in his head. “Hykan would have never allowed Erella to imprison Thyss. A thousand thousand things in this world would have never happened, a thousand thousand people would never have been born, if the gods are all powerful. You are not gods. You may be old and powerful and even insane. But you are not gods, and you cannot stop what I do now!”

  Cor closed his eyes and simply felt the space around him. He did not raise his arms over his head as he had against the Loszians, nor held them before him as he did when he faced Nadav. Listening to Dahk’s words in his head, he could somehow feel the narrow tract, the cleft before him and a great mass beyond that. He felt what he knew to be dirt, clay and stone. Also there was metal; a massive amount of metal, steel perhaps but he couldn’t be sure, was buried underneath the ground. Inside the steel was other things, things he couldn’t identify based on how they felt in his blood, but he knew he could do them what he could do to steel and stone.

  Cor ignored the stone. He ignored everything around the somewhat spherical, giant hunk of metal that was buried beyond the cleft. He started with the smallest part, the tiniest bit of metallic surface, and became awed of himself as it turned to blood. He pushed himself, transmuting more and more. He knew it worked, for he could feel it in his own blood as it happened. It’s all the same stuff.

  Dark energy reached out from beyond his vision, a tendril of terrible power intent on wrapping itself around him. What would it do? Did they intend to infuse them with their own power as they did Nadav? It led to the death of many Dahken thousands of years ago. Just as it threatened to touch him, a shield of blinding white light sprang into being between him and the darkness. It was so bright that Cor saw it even through his eyelids, and as they battled, great shocks like lightning exploded. They distracted him from his task, and growing tired of it all, Cor dismissed both at once, turning both the shield of light and the tentacle of darkness into bloody mist which fell to the ground in a splatter.

  A half dozen panicked voices filled his mind with pleading screams. They said things like, “Stop now, before we destroy you,” and, “We offer you anything you could ever desire.” Cor ignored all of these except the last, which offered, “With us at your side, you could rule the entire world.”

  And Cor replied, “I already could.”

  The screams of the Loszian gods grew thicker, overlapping in a confused muddle that Cor only pushed out of his mind. He kept his focus on the mass of metal and its bizarre contents, the ship that had brought these beings from their home. They had come to give their chosen powers that could be bent to their own wars, their own petty purposes. No longer would he allow them to live. No longer would he allow anything or anyone to make demands of him or the people he loved. Rumedia, or whatever it was called, would finally be free, and the voices in his head winked out one by one until all was silent.

  Cor could find nothing else but the ground, nothing but stone and earth and topsoil. At his behest was blood, a mass of blood the size of a small lake or pond, buried under the ground. Cor released it from his hold and began his slow ascent from the crater. He paused as a rumble emitted from the ground beneath his feet and everything around him began to shake. The moonlight limited his vision, but he got the distinct impression that the cleft was falling into itself. Realization struck him, and Cor charged up the incline as fast as his feet could carry him. He slipped and fell once, sprawling across the moss covered ground as the sound of a great rush of water came up behind him. He turned to see the wave of blood just barely break over his boots before it began to recede back toward the tract’s terminus.

  “Damn fool,” Cor cursed himself with a smile.

  When he finally reached the top of the ridge, he looked down on the ruins of Noth’s tower. For a moment, he thought to seek out the lich, perhaps even offer the former Lord Dahken final rest. Cor shrugged and began the walk west, where he had no doubt a furious blond beauty cursed his name while saddling a horse. He only hoped she would not immediately melt the flesh from his bones, for Cor knew he had a world to rebuild.

  36.

  Christine Dixon leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes with both hands. They burned when she closed them and burned even more as she massaged the outside of her eyelids, but it felt great at the same time. The longer she rubbed, the more the burning subsided, seeming to just melt away into her blue eyes. Once it was gone completely, she climbed off of her bunk, leaving her reader behind on the foam mattress with the impression of her body that faded away.

  The lights in her lavatory blinked to life as soon as she entered just like the water that poured automatically into the basin when she inserted her hands. She shivered slightly with the cold of both the water and the metal deck under her bare feet, causing both the fine blond hairs on her arms and her bare nipples to stand erect. She rubbed her face again, savoring the crispness of the water on her skin. She opened her eyes and looked into the mirror. She looked like hell with puffy dark rings under her eyes. Leaving the lavatory, she found a clean set of deck fatigues and began to step her way into them.

  “I need Lieutenant Martinez on board Herbert Walker,” she called out into the empty room. In reality, she’d activated her subcutaneous transmitter and receiver.

  “Yes, Commander. One moment,” came the response from the comms terminal. It sounded like Liu, a pretty young man from Mars. She was nearly dressed when the voice came back, “Commander, I have Lieutenant Martinez for you. Signing off now.”

  “Thank you,” Dix replied, zipping the front of her fatigues from crotch to neck. “Lieutenant, sorry to wake you.”

  “You didn’t, Commander,” replied her receiver, the reception somewhat fuzzy, “I was reviewing Commander Chen’s transmission.”

  “How many times have you gone through it?”

  “
I skimmed it once and went through it thoroughly once.”

  Dix hesitated before she asked the next question. Dix had been promoted to command of the small fleet, and Martinez took command of the Herbert Walker. She’d read the personnel file of every single man and woman aboard the other ships and had even made a point of interviewing the officers. She knew about Martinez’s shortcomings as per the notes in his file from both Paul Chen and other commanders.

  “What do you think?” she asked, receiving staticky silence.

  “Well,” Martinez answered pensively, “are you asking me whether or not I believe it?”

  “I don’t think Paul has any reason to mislead us, do you?”

  “No, of course not,” he said hastily. “It’s just all… so much.”

  “I know,” she sighed, resisting the urge to rub her eyes again. It was the work of countless hours to read the reports, data and Chronicles as Paul called them, and there were also hours of visual and audio recordings, journals and findings. “SACA laws have been broken, Lieutenant, on so many levels, and it all points to one man as ultimately responsible.”

  “Admiral Zheng,” concluded Martinez.

  “Affirmative, and we know he received Paul’s transmission as well. I would assume he’s monitoring us right now.”

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  Dix stepped into the lavatory to check her hair in the mirror. Seeing that it was still firmly in a ponytail allowed by the dress codes, she said, “I’m going to address the fleet in one hour with my decision. Make sure your ship is ready, Lieutenant.”

  “May I ask – ready for what, sir?”

  “For whatever happens next,” Dix replied, and she cut the link. “What the fuck are you doing, Dix?”

  She snatched her reader off of the bunk, sat at her desk and began to pore over file after file. As she looked through them originally, she’d attached a synopsis to the beginning of every one, just a sentence or two to summarize its contents. Dix had gone through it all several times already, but she needed a little reinforcement, some extra courage before she took the next steps. She had to know that she was in the right, not only legal but justified in her actions.

  With a tap of the screen, she closed the video viewer and looked at the list of raw files, and an odd file extension caught her eye. It looked like garbage, a junk file created by the expansion of the other compressed files as she opened them. It had a long alphanumeric file name and an extension called zero zero one. She was about to delete it, when she saw that the file group was full of them. They were all identical except for increasing time stamps, and the extension advanced by one integer with each file. The final file had the extension zero one seven – seventeen junk files, produced as she opened certain files within the group.

  Dix created a new, empty file group she titled “Junk” and slid her finger across the screen, moving the files one by one into it. Once done, she sorted the files by time stamp, organizing them in order from oldest to newest. Less than three minutes separated the oldest file from the newest. She fondled a loose strand of hair that had escaped the ponytail, wrapping it loosely around her forefinger. She tapped the screen to back out of the file group. She considered the manila folder icon for a moment before pressing and holding her finger to it for two seconds. A menu popped up on the screen, and she selected “Run In”. This brought about a second menu from which she selected “Media Viewer”.

  The main screen of her reader disappeared as the viewer expanded. It was completely black, excluding various touch controls at the bottom of the screen. An image of a wavelength appeared, steady for a moment and then oscillating wildly as if some sort of sound played. “Dammit,” Dix said as she realized the volume was completely muted. She reset the playback to the beginning and turned the sound up to full, and her heart leapt up into her throat as Paul Chen’s voice emitted from the speaker.

  “Hey Dix. I knew you’d figure out how to play the message I hid inside the other files. Other people may too, and that’s fine, because I’m well beyond having secrets anymore.

  “I actually have two messages, and first is a short one for Lieutenant Martinez. Tell Martinez that he is a fine officer and an excellent executive officer, but he can be more. Think outside of the rigid mindset of order, rules and regulations. You do so well with compartmentalizing and handling each issue as it comes, but you need to look at everything at once, too. All the pieces fit to make a bigger picture. Martinez, no matter what you decide to do, it was a privilege serving with you.

  “Dix, I don’t even know what to say to you. I know everything I should have said, should have done, but I can’t do anything about that now. As I sit here, I know the picture you gave Hightower is still in my hand. It’s funny, because I can’t see it through my own eyes, but I can see everything as if from above. I don’t see the picture; I see me holding the picture, and I promise that as you’re hearing this, I’m watching you too. As long as you are within orbit of Arcturus V, I’ll be able to see you. You wrote that you should’ve told me how you felt. You couldn’t have made it more plain, but we men aren’t known for picking up on female subtleties, I suppose. I don’t know.

  “Right now you’re probably thinking over everything you’ve seen and heard. I assume you’ve gone through it all already; you’re one of the most thorough people I know. You’ll do what’s right, I know it. SACA was betrayed, its laws broken by a man whose place in the service means he swore to uphold them. He’ll fight you. I hope you know that.

  “Dix, I’m not going to say that I love you. How can I? I don’t even know if I know what love is, but I will say that I’ll miss finding out. I’ve spent my whole life, short as it was, looking for something that may or may not even be there. I ignored what was around me. Don’t spend your life waiting around for me, waiting around for something that will never be there for you. Go find someone to love.

  “One last thing – there’s a frequency embedded into the audio in the last second of this message. You’ll hear it as static, but you can pull it out. This is a simple carrier wave radio frequency that can be used to talk to me directly. SACA may need it in the future to clarify some of the past events. Make sure you give it only to the right people.”

  “Commander Paul Chen, out.”

  Before she knew it, Dix was out the door, her boots clanging through the corridors on her way to the command center. She knew what she had to do, and hearing Paul’s recording gave her some sort of new fortitude. As Paul’s second, Martinez would back her play, and that was all she needed. She didn’t know what the commanders of the other ships would do, and she didn’t care. It didn’t really matter. They would have to choose between their oaths to SACA and whatever loyalty they owe Zheng. Regardless, the point would be made.

  “Captain on deck,” announced the duty officer as Dix passed through the open hatch. Everyone stiffened slightly at the words, seeming to somehow pay even more attention to their jobs as usual. The command center of an Explorer is little more than a three meter by six meter room with a total of six computer stations, no less than two of which were active at any given time. Older ships like Herbert Walker had conventional keyboards and high definition displays built into stationary workstations, and each terminal had its own particular use. Guangzhou was newer, more modern; all of its computer systems and displays were interactive holographic projection, and any individual computer could display and access any system on the ship with the proper access codes. The “screen” activated immediately upon sensing someone in the workstation’s ergonomic, and very bolted to the floor, chair.

  There was no chair for the officer on deck. Dix had it removed immediately upon taking command as a test for her officers. If one could not stand for an entire eight hour shift, one was not fit to be in command.

  “Status of the fleet,” Dix demanded.

  “Unchanged, sir,” replied Lieutenant Schmidt. He was a two meter bull of a man with no neck and a red face common to people with mild hypertension. He pus
hed forty years old and covered a receding hairline by shaving his head in a cut common among the marines. In fact, he was one originally, and a very successful marine at that. Due to his exemplary service record, officer after officer pushed him to attend officer school and join Special Fleet Ops.

  “Understood, Lieutenant. You are relieved. Clear the bridge, everyone except for Chief Liu.”

  “Sir!” Schmidt saluted in what had to be the most rigid at-attention she’d ever seen and made his way out the hatch through which she had come. Four more crew members exited behind him, leaving Dix with the astonished Liu.

  “Chief, send a message to the fleet that I want the commander of every ship tuned in to the same frequency in one minute. Inform the Lin Zexu that I also require Admiral Zheng,” Dix ordered.

  “Any particular frequency, sir?” asked the Martian. As she turned to look at him, she realized he really was a good looking kid. He was an athletic twenty two year old of Chinese descent and had regulation length, straight black hair. His eyes matched his hair, and as she looked into them, she felt almost lost. If Liu felt surprise or anxiety over his commander making demands of a flag officer, he didn’t show it.

  “Surprise me.”

  “Aye, sir,” Liu replied as he set to work. In less than ten seconds, he said, “Message sent, sir.”

  Dix stood rigidly, in a wide stance with her hands on her hips, as she watched the deck clock overhead with its red LED numbers. When Liu had finished, it read 21:37:13. All SACA clocks were set to Greenwich Mean Time on Earth for the purpose of uniformity only. With Steingartner drives, singularity planes, relative speeds of light and time dilation, the actual time really didn’t matter all that much. As the seconds ticked off, Dix couldn’t help feeling like it was the longest minute of her life. It seemed almost as if it would never pass, even though she knew it must. Dix waited until the other ship’s commanders checked in, and as she began to speak, she felt like she needed to pee.