The scene ahead of them changed a little, revealing almost the entirety of Earth Prime covered in thick clouds of white and grey. This looked to be some monumental climatic event, but Cassandra couldn’t precisely guess what. Then something speared out of the darkness, hitting the Earth like a fallen star.
“A comet,” she said, but the Q’Lot beside her said nothing.
There was another flash, and another, and it looked as though her home world was being bombarded by a meteor storm. It was kind of pretty, in a way, but Cassandra had never heard of such a volatile event happening with such magnitude.
Unless it happened before the records began, or there were humans there to observe it, she thought with crystal-clear clarity. This wasn’t a scene of Earth a thousand years ago, this was a scene of Earth millions of years ago.
“How old are you?” she said, and to this, the spokesperson deigned to turn slightly toward her.
“Cycles. Seasons. Soil,” it said in that strange bird language, and Cassandra still had no idea what he was going on about.
With another gesture of the praying mantis claw, the season changed once more, revealing a solar system. But not Earth Prime or the Sol System she knew. This one had too many gas giants, for one. She waited for a moment, until the reason became clear. A bright star shot over the viewpoint, spilling glittering cosmic dust as it roared, and the viewpoint of the—drone? Satellite? Computer render? Cassandra didn’t know—arced and rose to reveal many thousands of similar meteor-like flashes arcing, from multiple angles, toward a small world that had been hidden behind the gas giants. More flashes across its bright dome of atmosphere, and she could see the climate reacting, clouds forming and spreading across the world.
Another scene, and another world. The same thing happened again, and again, and again.
“Okay, I think I get the idea. This is an event that happens often, right? Maybe you made it happen?” she asked.
“Soil,” the spokesperson Q’Lot said, as her Archival mind whirred. What were the differences and the similarities in all of these images? What thread linked them together, or contrasted between them?
“They are all carbon-rich worlds, with water and atmospheric conditions,” she said, before she suddenly grasped what it was the Q’Lot was trying to show her. “They are all capable of harboring organic life.”
“Soil,” the spokesperson said again, seeming happy as it gestured for the screen to go black. Blacker than night. Blacker than the void.
Purple-crimson fire arced across the scene like bracket lightening, making her jump even though there was no noise. All of a sudden, the explosion of energy faded as the viewpoint drew away, and she saw that there were many, many more crackles of this energy discharge, and it was happening between the blackened hulls of gigantic space craft.
“Holy stars…” she breathed, as a passing moonlet or asteroid revealed some of the scope of these things.
They were huge. Larger than Adiba Research Station. Larger than an Armcore war cruiser. Larger than most Imperial Coalition habitats. They were roughly barrel shaped, although their ends had a pronounced hump like a snail’s shell, and their sides were thick and encrusted with crenulations. Along their form were spread thin gauzes like triangles, flattened, torn, and ragged against their sides although none of them flapped or moved. They looked like the many, many fins of some strange underwater creature.
The metal of the ships was so dark as to almost absorb light, but they weren’t made out of the sleek blacks of an Armcore intelligence craft, she could see. No. These mega-cruisers seemed to have been a matte, mottled dark color as if from countless, countless burn and scorch marks, and degradation. Cassandra knew that these ships must be truly ancient if they had got to such a state, as space viruses and spores could thrive in deep space and on a space craft’s hull if they didn’t get it regularly irradiated.
A different glimmer of light fell into the scene, and Cassandra saw that she was looking at the dance of stars and nebula—a spiral disk.
A galaxy.
No, not just any galaxy. Her galaxy.
“Is that your people?” she asked, and the reaction she gained from the spokesperson was sudden and dramatic.
It made a hissing, shrieking sort of a noise that did not translate, and it hurt her ears with its high-pitched tenor, and his two wizened mantis arms flared outwards, high on either side of the thing’s face as if it were about to pounce and attack her.
“I’m sorry, sorry! I guess it’s not you then…” Cassandra made placating motions to the Q’Lot, who said in a bird call that was as full of indignation as it could be:
“Val. y. En.”
“Oh.” Cassandra turned back to the scene, to see the ships now powering on strange red-colored drives, their massive fleet swaying as it swept perpendicular toward her home galaxy. They still probably had thousands of lightyears to travel to get there, especially if they weren’t using warp travel, but she could see from their craft that time was not a thing that the Valyien were worried about.
“They come from another galaxy,” she murmured to herself as the scene faded. She had of course read the distant theoretical histories of the Valyien compiled in House Archival’s vaults, but none of them had surmised this. Even with warp travel, the journey could take an estimated time of hundreds to a thousand years—and so far, all analysis had pointed to the fact that no ship would be able to last that long or maintain order over the many generations that it would take to fulfil their mission. And if the Valyien had indeed accomplished this feat without warp travel, then they could have indeed been traveling for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years.
The scene darkened to black, but again grew bright once more, with the brightness of fire and death. The point of view swept over worlds that were breaking out in fire as massive detonations were let off on their surfaces. Cassandra saw entire continents engulfed in flame, and multiple mushroom clouds running along the coasts of what must be cities, settlements, and spaceports.
Hanging over some of these war-torn worlds were habitats—many were round, and others were as simple as the ones that Earth Prime had started out with, interconnected tubes of metal, slowly rotating and docking with strange alien ships. Bright crimson and purple lines of burning light tore through them or punctured them in moments.
“War,” the spokesperson indicated, which Cassandra thought must be a bit of an understatement.
“Your two races were at war, we know. The Duergar told us,” she said gravely. She still didn’t see how these all meshed together however. Where was the thread?
“Soil.” As if the Q’Lot spokesperson had read her thoughts, it gestured at the screen and there appeared one of the many worlds that she had seen engulfed in meteor strikes, only now it was a barren rock. There was no atmosphere to speak of aside from a haze of sickly-looking gasses, and Cassandra would never have recognized it if she hadn’t also seen its attendant gas giant worlds.
“The Valyien were attacking those worlds that could support life, that did support life,” Cassandra said, and the Q’Lot, in typical style, turned to the next point in the lecture. She was starting to get the hang of these little chats. That meant that she must have gotten something right, for once.
But then the view changed, and instantly, Cassandra felt sick. She was looking at some kind of room, if that word could be used for such a vast space. Its walls were arched, like the inside of a massive pyramid she surmised, and there appeared to be columns and statues racing up the sides of the walls and overlooking the distant, chasm-like floor. As the viewpoint swept into this room, the details of the inscribed carvings and statues became clearer: she saw strange, four-legged creatures rearing and raised in poses that she might have expected to see in a temple. She couldn’t tell what part of them were clothes or else other parts of their strange body stuff. Their necks were long, but their heads appeared small, and with long mandibles that could, it appeared, flare out from each other. It gave Cassandra the creep
s, and that was before she saw what the Q’Lot spokesman wanted her to see.
The bottom of the chamber was a sighing, moving, trudging mass of aliens. Most bipedal, but some not. The vast majority of them were Duergar, but she saw other strange races in there too. Some that appeared to be made entirely out of plant material, some that looked like two bears, a smaller piggybacking the other but still grafted together, as well as gigantic forms and miniature ones.
“I’ve never even seen some of these races,” she breathed.
“Extinct,” the Q’Lot spokesperson said seriously, gesturing for Cassandra to continue watching the strange screen.
The mass of aliens looked like a migration, and that was when Cassandra saw that each and every one of them was manacled and chained, the thick links running from braces around their throats to the alien in front. Their heads were bowed, and this did not seem to be a willing experience.
Cassandra looked up the long march to see that they were approaching a much smaller ziggurat, though still many stories high, at the far end of the chamber. It was built out of a shining gold metal and had a wide set of steps running up its center, meeting various flatter terrace levels, where more of the odd four-legged aliens, each almost nine feet tall with their long necks, stood. Cassandra saw their splaying, mandible mouth parts opening and closing as if tasting the scent of the victims coming toward them.
“What are they doing to them? Where are they going?” Cassandra asked, but the Q’Lot spokesperson said nothing, just regarded the screen with an expression that Cassandra thought was near sadness.
At the top of the ziggurat stood two tall golden columns, taller even than the Valyien, and cast into strange humps and whirls. As she watched, she saw something spark across the void between them. Washes of that same purple and crimson lightening, and suddenly, a fierce gale was blowing out from the cosmic reaction. Light started to flood from the strange device, as drifts of red and blue clouds started to form a vortex.
“That’s a warp field,” Cassandra said in awe. She recognized the way the picture lensed around it, the pillars seeming to fold and distort, the ziggurat blurring and changing magnification. “But that is madness. It’s an open warp field…” she stated in alarm. Cassandra Milan was no great technician or engineer, but she knew just enough to get by. Warp fields were in fact tiny subatomic reactions, happening all the time, but under the right conditions, or subject to truly massive pressures, they could expand at cataclysmic rates. It was believed that black holes were a form of warp field, or that they generated one, and some theorists had even speculated that warp fields were created in the heart of stars, or when they go supernova.
Around a warp field, light was caught and slowed down. Even time itself became a strange impossibility. It was in a warp field that, by applying precisely the right forces at the right time, these qualities could be used to create a tunneling wormhole, and thus enable a warp jump within that ‘removed space’ of the field.
But they were dangerous, Cassandra knew. History was filled with stories of accidents and sometimes cataclysmic explosions as warp cores went wrong. There were also the stranger stories of when the warp cores worked, but malfunctioned—of people arriving in the same place several years out of time, although for them, they just left the previous moment, or of vanishing and never being seen again, not in this universe, anyway.
But why isn’t everyone in that structure, and that structure itself, being torn apart? she thought, before answering herself. It was from old Valyien technology that the Imperial Coalition had discovered how to utilize a warp field. It was from wrecked Valyien engines that they built their first, highly dangerous warp core.
These creatures were the very best at what they did, she thought. If anyone could manipulate an open warp field to such a high degree of precision, it would be them.
But what happened next shocked her. She saw the march start to bunch and slow as the first few lines that had been driven up the ziggurat steps saw what waited for them.
“They can’t mean to…” Cassandra said. Not only was it cruel, it was also paradoxical.
But the waiting Valyien guards jabbed and struck at the line of people with their sharp legs, rising to a bipedal stance to do so. Some of the crowd reacted, tried to run, but they were struck down, leaving just the cowed and demoralized left. In lines of ten or more, they mounted the steps and walked into the warp field.
There were no screams that Cassandra could hear. Maybe there were, but the shriek of the warp winds was too high to hear them. She watched as the slaves of the Valyien were engulfed in the strange, morphing light, and instantly, their forms started to change. All the color and contrast of their physical bodies seemed to go crazy, their edges blurred as they tried to turn back or raise their arms—
The people were disintegrating into shimmering clouds of golden-white light, eddying briefly in their humanoid or alien shapes before being torn apart by the warp vortex.
“But…why are they killing them like that? What good does it do?” she asked in horror as wave after wave of people were thrown into the warp field, and many hundreds if not thousands were sacrificed for some insane Valyien idea.
It was with this scene as the backdrop, with the crimson and purple light highlighting her features, that Cassandra saw the spokesperson Q’Lot turn to her and gesture to the tragedy.
“Energy,” it said at first, gesturing to her body. “Valyien go beyond. Valyien conquer…beyond.”
Cassandra shook, although she didn’t know why. She didn’t understand what the Q’Lot was saying to her, but her mind could still scrabble at the shape of something vast and terrifying. A deep, deep wrong that was so different to anything that she had ever encountered, as the Q’Lot and the Valyien were different to the Imperial Coalition.
There had always been talk of other dimensions, other universes on the other side of the particles and electrons, and existing at the same time somehow of a different order.
“Are you telling me that was where the Valyien went?” Cassandra asked.
“Seeds,” the Q’Lot said, moving one of his more normal long-fingered hands to make a gesture as if pulling something in half. “New soil,” it said seriously, looking back at the grisly scene ahead of them. Cassandra was still trying to comprehend what this meant. That the Valyien had somehow found a way to that other side of the universe? To that other dimension? That they existed in quantum space, but as what? Ghosts? Shades? It couldn’t be anything like what they had been here, in the physical galaxy.
The spokesperson Q’Lot turned to her at last, letting the screen fade back into blackness. If Cassandra was starting to recognize anything at all about these people, then she was starting to see that it was annoyed and sad and very, very serious, as it said to her:
“Valyien lose. Valyien go. Valyien come back.”
10
Uprising
“That’s where they’ll be keeping him,” Erkig murmured in a low growl from his heavy hood. The captain could see that his back still pained him, but he had insisted on coming with Ko, Irie, and Eliard to be the first to break into the arena to free Val. The trio stood in one of the wide, busy cobbled streets of Duric, dressed in heavy canvas robes of a deep ochre and tan color.
‘Everyone will think that we’re Chief’s Watch,’ Ko had said, and the irony of using the war chief’s secret police as a disguise to stop them was clearly delicious to the small Duergar. The Chief’s Watch were apparently figures to be feared, even by this warlike people, and as they stood by the shadows of a Gabor-stall, they were left alone by the other Duergar and pointedly avoided.
There was no disguising the captain and Irie’s limited stature in comparison to the others however, and instead, the two humans had been dressed in simple robes of dirty linen and wore large collars around their necks, which they had been told, the captain grimaced slightly, were actually the collars of some of the dissidents who had been thralls, before they were freed.
‘Yo
u will look like our servants, and we’re taking you for questioning.’ Ko had seemed apologetic at the imposition, but the greener-scaled Erkig had only cheerfully grinned as he had locked them in place. It was obvious that Erkig was still no lover of humans, but the captain and Irie’s bravery and their skill at shooting down the war chief’s attack craft had at least earned them some respect.
It was nearing midday, and the sun was high and the market street busy. Somewhere nearby there was a loud argument, and the captain watched nervously as two Duergar proceeded to roughhouse and brawl right there, in the center of the market street. No one seemed to think that this was out of the ordinary or cause for alarm, so he did his best to ignore the heavy impacts of fists on pebble-scales. On the other side of the street, at other stalls and the heads of smaller, winding streets, the captain could see other similarly disguised dissidents, waiting for their cue. At the end of the street stood a trio, with their thrall, Irie.
“Are you sure?” he mouthed the words at her, not knowing if she would make them out across the distance and noise, but in return, he received a quick nod, and then the three left the street and disappeared into the press of Duergar, heading for Duric’s only spaceport.
“Then the stars go with you,” Eliard murmured under his breath, turning back to his two companions. He hadn’t liked Irie’s idea of separating, intending to complete the second half of their mission, but he could agree that it was necessary, and he hardly had the technical know-how that she did.
No, he thought, looking down at the bulky shape of the Device under his robes. Even with his injuries, and his fatigue, he had other skills that were needed right now.
Insurrection Page 10
