The Truth

by Robert Doherty

  While he knew there was nothing he could use effectively against the mothership, this spaceship was another matter. Artad slid his hands into holes on either side of the command chair. His six fingers made connections with the controls.

  A portal opened amidships on the Talon. In rapid succession, a half dozen small pods were ejected. The portal shut as the pods moved through space on an interception course with the third spaceship.

  CHAPTER 17: THE PRESENT

  * * *

  SPACE

  Turcotte walked down the main corridor, taking note of the activity on board the mothership. He had Excalibur in one hand and the sheath in the other. Directly behind the control room, the Space Command troops were billeted in one of the many large holds. The doorway was open and Turcotte could see that most of the men were asleep, lying on pads they had rolled out on the floor. That seemed like a good idea to him.

  On the other side of the corridor, through the open door, he could see Professor Leahy and Major Quinn holed up with their pallets of equipment. He was tempted to go in and ask about the weapon and whether they could do it — and if so, when it would be done. But he held back, knowing his asking wouldn't make any difference. Either they would get it done in time and it would work, or they wouldn't. He'd deal with it when the time came.

  Turcotte continued down the corridor and stopped at the entrance to the Master Guardian room. The door slid open and he entered. He walked across the narrow metal bridge to the platform on which the red pyramid rested. The surface glowed from within.

  Turcotte slid the sword into the sheath and the glow faded. He put the sword down, leaning it against the pyramid. Then he turned to the other objects in the room: the Grail and the thummin and urim.

  Turcotte sat down cross-legged, his back against the

  Master Guardian, Excalibur by his side. He picked up the Grail. It was surprisingly heavy. He placed it right in front of him.

  When he reached for the thummin and urim the stones began to give off a green glow and he paused, his hands over them. Gingerly he picked them up, feeling their warmth seep into his flesh. He held his hands out in front, as if weighing the stones. He lowered his left hand toward the Grail and the top irised open, revealing a slight depression in which the stone would fit snugly. His hand hovered over the opening, then he shook his head, putting the stones back down.

  "My friend."

  The words startled Turcotte, who had not noticed Yakov entering the chamber. The Russian walked across the gangway until he was right in front of Turcotte, towering over him.

  "What are you doing?" Yakov indicated the Grail. "I don't know."

  "It draws you, doesn't it?" Yakov asked as he also sat down.

  "It is a dangerous thing."

  Yakov nodded. "All powerful things are dangerous. And this" — he reached out and tapped the Grail — "this is the most dangerous thing."

  "I believe what I told Aspasia's Shadow," Turcotte said. "This will destroy the world if we bring it back to Earth."

  "Yet here you are," Yakov said.

  "Yes."

  "What should we do with it?"

  "If we partake, it will give us an advantage in our upcoming battles," Turcotte said.

  Yakov frowned. "But you said you believed what you told Aspasia's Shadow. If we go back to Earth after partaking and don't bring the Grail then" — Yakov paused as the implications sank in — "you don't plan on returning to Earth?"

  "The thought has crossed my mind. I don't think any of this" — Turcotte indicated the mothership, the Master Guardian, Excalibur, the Grail and stones — "should be brought back. It's caused so much trouble over the years and will cause much more in the future now that some of the truth is out. And if we partake, then we don't belong either."

  "Then we will not partake," Yakov said simply.

  "We might need the advantage immortality will give us."

  "We haven't yet. It did not help Aspasia's Shadow much, did it?" Yakov stood. "My friend, do not doubt yourself now."

  Turcotte tapped the side of his head. "What about this thing inside?"

  "It hasn't impaired you yet, I would not worry about it."

  Turcotte laughed. "You have very easy answers."

  "It is the Russian way." Yakov reached down and offered his hand to Turcotte, who took it. Yakov pulled him to his feet. "I say we rest."

  "Agreed."

  She had failed. More than failed.

  Duncan numbly watched the tentacle detach from the Swarm orb and enter Garlin's mouth. He walked over to the gurney and picked up the crown, setting it on her head. Through the dried blood on her face, her tears had cut their own course, leaving tracks of uncovered skin.

  She looked over at the tubes. Despite her best efforts, her chest began to heave as uncontrolled sobs tore through her. Garlin noted this reaction and went over to the tubes. He hit a button and the lid swung up on the one that was occupied. A puff of air escaping indicated the tube had been sealed against the outside environment. A body lay inside, wrapped tightly in linen bandages from head to toe. From the form, it was a human male.

  "Leave him alone!" Duncan screamed.

  Garlin ignored her, taking a pair of scissors and cutting through the cloth covering the head. He peeled back the linen exposing the man's face. He was the same one from the early images, except very young, with unmarred skin. The man who had escaped the planet with Duncan. His eyes were blank and the body was perfectly preserved. His features bore a striking resemblance to Mike Turcotte, but younger.

  Garlin walked over to Duncan, tossing the scissors onto a table. "We destroyed your home world."

  Duncan closed her eyes. "When?"

  "Seventy-two revolutions around the star after you departed on the mothership."

  She could only hope her son had been dead when the Swarm arrived. The scientists' calculations had said it was doubtful many of those left behind would still be alive that many years into the future.

  "We will show you, through your own memories and records recovered from your planet." He took one of the lines from the top of the Ark and connected it to a small black circle. Duncan felt a spike of pain and then she "saw," beginning with what she now knew were her own memories:

  Hard times require hard choices. A simple and easy to understand maxim until the time comes and the choices are personal. For those who still survived on the ravaged planet located in the Centaurus Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, forty thousand light-years away from the Sol System, the hard times had brought about many hard decisions, and the current one being implemented was not only the latest but also the most far-reaching.

  Set in what had once been a desert area, but now resembling most of the planet, a massive alien spacecraft — an Airlia mothership — rested on large struts. Military forces patrolled the perimeter while thousands on the inside of the barriers that surrounded the ship waited on the final lots to be chosen to separate the select few who would be on the mothership from the greater majority who would stay behind. It was hotly debated among the inhabitants of the planet which of the options was the more desirable.

  It was a harsh planet, made even harsher by the ravages of war and revolution. Those who had survived had made the difficult decision to launch the mothership the previous year and there was still much argument about the wisdom of the act. There were many who wished to do nothing — except hope. That despite the billions who had already died.

  Two things had forced the action — one was logical, the other emotional The cold facts laid out by the scientists indicated that the devastated planet could not sustain the current population beyond another generation. They had won the war but lost the following peace in the process. The burning emotion was to ensure that what had happened to them would not happen to others. And there were others out there. That startling fact had been uncovered when they gained control of the alien mothership and accessed its star map. There was also the unspoken fear that others from the alien race they had defeated would
come to investigate the lack of communication from their kin. They had defeated those who had come on the ship at the cost of their own planet. Another ship, with more Airlia, would be too much to fight.

  Those who were in the running for the final selection were the best the planet had to offer. Men and women who were at the pinnacle of their chosen fields whether they were scientists or soldiers — and the selection was heavy with the latter, based on their experiences.

  Besides people, the mothership would be loaded with ships and weapons that those on the planet had developed under the dire necessity of combat along with scavenged technology from the aliens against whom they had successfully rebelled.

  When the final countdown for liftoff began, troops were needed to encircle the launch site to keep out protestors who wanted to stop the launch and those not chosen who desperately fought to be on the ship. Over a mile long and a quarter mile in beam at the center, the black craft rested in a cradle made of the same practically impenetrable metal. Despite the excellent construction of the ship, there were scars on the skin where heavy weapons fire had played along the surface, indicative of the brutal fighting the inhabitants of the planet had waged against those who had flown the ship here. They had captured the mothership during the final assault, overwhelming the last of the aliens who had taken refuge aboard it before they could escape. The war had been savage and the costs almost beyond bearing. For every alien they'd killed, tens of thousands of their own had died.

  Among those who crowded onto the interstellar craft, was a young woman, a scientist by training and a mother by love. Also with her was her husband, a soldier who had fought in the Revolution. Their young son was among those who ringed the departure field. The decision to leave their son had not been easy, but where they were going and the mission they had been given precluded the presence of children. That was the cold reasoning of those in power, but the tears streaming down the scientist's face as the cargo door slowly closed, cutting off her view of the distant crowd, indicated emotion warred against intellect. She knew no matter what her destiny, she would never see her child again.

  She had had many long 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. But she noted his chest moving rapidly as the 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, and they were merely an island of misery among a sea of pain. Large as the ship was, the five thousand chosen were tightly packed on board along with their supplies.

  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 hoped any sign of its passage would not be linked back to their home world.

  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.

  As had been feared by those left behind on the planet, the warp shift was eventually noted by sensors on board a Swarm scout ship over twenty light-years away. The scout immediately turned in the direction of the disturbance. It recognized the pattern as that of a mothership belonging to a race it had fought against for millennia.

  Star maps were brought up on the scout's control room display and all nearby star systems were marked for reconnaissance. An alert was sent to the nearest battle core.

  The planet had circled the star over sixty times since the departure of the mothership, which was equal to the now average life span of those who survived there. Those who remembered its launch were few and far between and their words little heeded by their offspring, who struggled to eke out their survival among further diminished resources. The civilization, what was left of it, was barely at a subsistence level, so there was no technology sufficient to notice when the Swarm scout ship finally entered the star system, the fourth on its list to be checked. Signs of intelligent life were immediately noted on one of the planets. The small ship swung around the star and took a long time to decelerate so that when it reached the planet it could move into a stable orbit.

  Once in position, probes were sent down to the planet's surface. The population of the planet was by then less than twenty million, a small number on the intergalactic scale, but the crew of the scout ship didn't concern itself with numbers, only with the fact that there was intelligent life on the planet. The scout descended to the planet and secreted itself beneath one of the seas while the crew did a closer and more intimate inspection of the populace.

  While the crew continued to gather information and infiltrate the population, a probe was launched. It moved into space a sufficient distance from the planet, then transmitted a message into the vastness of space from which the scout had come. The nearest battle core had already been alerted when the scout had picked up the mothership transition and it was already on its way. This message updated the strategic situation and pinpointed which star system and planet was to be targeted.

  The Swarm orbs and tentacles sent to the planet's surface to infiltrate the people learned some things of value. That there had indeed been a mothership, of a type they were familiar with, but there was no sign of the race — the Airlia — that had built the mothership. They also learned that the mothership had departed just prior to the time of the interstellar shift nearby so the logical assumption was that the mothership had departed, abandoning the planet for some reason. They also learned that the remaining population — not Airlia, but rather an apparently rudimentary intelligent species — was not currently capable of spaceflight and offered no interstellar threat.

  The son of the couple who had departed on board the mothership had only vague memories of his parents. He was a grandparent. He worked the land, his body bent and worn by the physical labor of trying to produce enough food to survive. Once in a while he told his own offspring of watching the mothership depart, but with each passing year the story became more myth than real. Even the Revolution that had preceded the launch seemed distant, though the ruins of a city destroyed during the fighting could be seen on the western horizon. For those who lived in grass huts and caves, even the ruins of the city were overwhelming.

  There were even those who wondered if their forbears had been right to revolt against the "gods." Things must have been better when man could inhabit such glories as the ruined city indicated had once existed. The word freedom lost much of its strength when one's back was weighted down with field work. Even the son wondered once in a while why his parents had abandoned him. What was out there among the stars that was more important than family?

  Twelve years after the scout ship had landed on the planet, the Swarm Battle Core arrived. The couple's son's wife had died several years previously, her heart giving out as she worked in the fields. The son was confined to a chair and daily considered taking his own life rather than be a burden to his family.

  When the Core appeared overheard, at first he thought it was the mothership returning, but then seeing how high up it was, he realized with a shudder that whatever was overhead dwarfed the size of the mothership. The shadow of the Battle Core covered half the planet, causing an unnatural eclipse.

  The son remembered tales he had been told as a child and he spoke of the Ancient Enemy in whispers, but such babble meant little to his children and grandchildren who had not seen the mothership depart with their own eyes or remembered the wars and devastation that had pr
eceded that event. Still, a feeling of dread swept over the surviving people as they gazed up at the behemoth.

  The scout ship left the planet's surface and rendezvoused with the Battle Core. The Core was in essence a self-sustaining mechanical planet with a star drive. Over six thousand miles long, by four thousand high, and two hundred wide, it was massive enough to generate a discernible gravity field.

  The scout's report indicated there was only one thing of value on the surface of the planet and that the inhabitants were no technological threat given the regression that had occurred. The report also said that the planet's ecosystem had been so damaged by war that the intelligent life would not last beyond another two generations.

  Report done, the scout was dispatched toward the site where the faster-than-light shift had occurred so many years previously and instructed to follow the track of the mother-ship.

  Warships deployed from the Battle Core. The fleet spread out in equidistant orbit, bracketing the planet. Each capital ship was twice as large as a mothership and shaped differently, in the form of massive orbs with eight protruding arms bristling with weapons and launch portals. What was coming was exactly what they had been designed to do. The scout's estimate that the intelligent life would be extinct in what was for those in the fleet a relatively short time mattered little. There was intelligent life there now.

  Every arm on each ship launched planetary craft, spewing them out, smaller versions of the larger interstellar craft until there were over two million of them dropping down toward the planet's surface. Like large black rain they descended, through daylight on one side of the planet and in darkness on the other, targeted toward population centers that had been mapped out by the scout's infiltrators.