by Greg Dragon
The Geralos that he was made him shudder at the thought of it. On Helysian he had spent a lifetime with the humans, working with them, listening to them, and making love to them. The last bit of that thought made him want to retch. Did he have it in him to go through with that again? Would it be pleasant now that he would genetically become human, or would it still give him nightmares?
The warrior inside of him grinned at the opportunity. If the body was as young and strong as the other Phasers he would be more than a match for Rafian VCA. He could get the Supreme Leader alone, call him out, and duel him properly instead of the defeat he’d suffered while lying half-dead next to a burned-out ship.
His eyes rolled back in his head and he found himself on that familiar mental plane that would lead to the psychic connection needed for the takeover.
Inside of the psychic plane that Maes took to complete the ritual, the ground was a muted grey that dusted up wherever his feet—now whole in this alternate reality—would step. The horizon was shapeless, a line of black shadow that merged into a pink sky littered with loose, whimsical black clouds and flying creatures. The only other forms on this plane were shadowy things off in the distance. He knew that these were the Phasers, strong of mind and ready for one such as him to try and invade their mind.
Next to him, not fifteen paces away, was a man seated on the ground with his chin on his knees rocking back and forth. He looked like a child awaiting punishment after some sort of discovery had been made by his parents. This had to be his host, and Maes strolled over to him and reached for his head.
When his hand passed through the figure it felt wonderful, and Maes let his hand linger there for a time, loving the feeling of life that sent electricity throughout his entire body. He walked forward and sat within the shadow, taking on the same pose and letting the electricity consume him to the point where it felt as if every part of his body was in ecstasy.
The merging completed and everything went bright. Maes, now human and awake, opened his eyes and found that he was inside another tank. The water tickled his nose, and he felt the strange sensation of its harsh properties being forced down into his lungs and then out again through his nostrils. His eyes could only see a blurry version of the outside of the tank and he immediately missed his own Geralos eyes.
But he felt strong, and he moved around to test this and it felt good. When he kicked his arms and legs he noticed that one of his arms was stronger than the other. He wanted to look down, to see what his whole body looked like, but the memory of what he had seen earlier frightened him and it took him several attempts to glance down at it.
If the female Geralos that stood watching the floating body of what used to be Laern Cobo—now Maes Van Senthyn—had been less composed she would have bust out laughing. Here in front of her was the greatest spymaster of the Geralos military in the body of a human, floating around in a tank but fascinated with the size of his own—
Maes Van Senthyn looked up quickly when he felt eyes on him and remembered that his rescuer was still in the vicinity. He swam to the top of the tank, tried to push open the lid, and then gestured to her to get him out. She nodded obediently and went back to the panel. After several slides and pushes of objects on the hovering display, she finally managed to activate the right mechanism and the liquid started to drain slowly from his tank.
When the water was only as high as his torso, Maes’s lungs rebelled against the forced oxygen he was trying to breathe. The pain inside his chest was worse than anything he had ever felt and he fell to his knees and plunged his face into the diminishing liquid, sucking in as much as he could manage. This, of course, was futile and before long he was rolling around on the bottom of the tank, vomiting pink liquid and screaming in pain at the torture tearing up his chest.
This lasted for five long minutes.
When he could open his eyes and enjoy the air that now worked its way in and out of his lungs, he saw that the Geralos woman was an older officer. She had on a pilot’s mask and an air-filter mechanism on her back, and she was handing him a towel and the clothes of a Phaser. He snatched the towel and did his best to dry himself before slipping on a 3B suit. When he was finished he walked over to a mirror and examined the face that looked back at him.
“Is this one considered handsome by the humans?” he mused, and the woman walked around to the side of the mirror and regarded him.
“It’s hard to tell with these soft skins, my lord. Forgive my words but all I see when I look at you is a disgusting human that I should be eating.”
Maes looked over at her and grinned proudly. He was thinking the same thing when he first saw himself but then a wave of surprise came over him. He recognized the face as one of the last Phasers that had tried to fight him prior to losing Meluvia. He considered the irony and found it fitting. Wouldn’t it be glorious to use this body, this identity that was no doubt seen as some sort of hero, as a pawn to bring about the reclamation of Vestalia? He backed up and made a sweeping gesture of thanks to the Makers, and the female Geralos did the same.
“What is your name, officer? I would like to know how to address my future partner in the destruction of the human race,” he said.
“I am Lasae Almont, lord, second officer to—”
“To me,” Maes interrupted, his human face so strange in the way it looked speaking their language that Lasae could barely contain herself. “You want no part of our military, Lasae. They are blind, weak, and fat from all the Rilas fruit. I will need you to return and inform them of what I am and what I intend to do. Find Ari Groatrath of the Crak-Ti Corps; he is the only one I will speak to besides yourself, and he will know what to do.”
“How will I get there, lord? How am I to leave this human place to get back to our world?”
Maes looked at her quizzically, wondering why she was asking such a stupid question. She had to have come in with a raiding party, right? The signal he sent up to the general would have brought in the cavalry; all she had to do was fly back out.
“Are you here by yourself, Lasae?”
“It was strange, I came in with the raiders. We were to retake Zynec Prime from the humans, but something happened to us up there. They had suicidal pilots who flew into our fleet while we hovered and caused a chain reaction that destroyed us all … But we got teleported somehow, and I found myself down here, counting my blessings that I had kept my mask on when they attacked.”
“That is part of their power, Lasae; that is what these Phasers can do, which makes them difficult to kill.” He paused suddenly and his eyes flicked one way and then another, like an ancient machine calculating a decision through a series of algorithms. “So they got one up on you, eh, and you ended up down here? Surviving due to your discipline and not much more. I wonder how you got teleported. The Phasers have that power but what you describe sounds almost accidental.”
Lasae looked around quickly, as if she heard something, and then focused on Maes Van Senthyn. “There were many of us. Some have gone off to kill as many humans as they can, and others have gone looking for a ship to escape in. I came upon this place and saw where they had you. I have a background in the medical sciences, so I did what I could to bring you out of the comatose state you were in.”
“You did well, Lasae. When I am successful our people will owe you the glorious debt.”
Her face lit up with pleasant surprise and Maes could see the ambition reflected across her face at the prospect. For a spy of her rank to be given the immortal blessings of the ancestors was the greatest honor.
Lasae was smiling but she was mildly annoyed by Maes Van Senthyn’s arrogance. She had expected him to be grateful and promise her the life debt, but even if he didn’t she had expected him to be a little bit nicer to her than he was being. The Geralos-turned-human had come out of his screaming to bark orders at her, question her bravery, and wonder at her intelligence. She wondered if she had made a terrible mistake in saving him.
As if seeing that his savior had gro
wn tired of his posturing, Maes saluted and then touched her shoulder in the gesture of gratitude. She forgave him instantly when he did this even though it repulsed her to have a human touch her place of honor.
Maes Van Senthyn walked to the tank that had his lifeless and soulless body and motioned her over. He asked her to drain the fluid as she had done with his tank, and he watched the entire sequence until the wet corpse was on the floor of the glass tank. He unlocked a hatch and dragged it out, and then looked over at Lasae, who looked like she was about to vomit.
“The place where they kept me imprisoned; show it to me, Lasae. We must delay their realization of what happened here as long as possible,”
Lasae nodded and led him out the door to a dark corridor, which seemed to take them deeper into the underground of the facility. He hoisted the body up by the underarms and walked so that it was suspended in front of him and the water was dripping away from his body. Lasae touched a panel and then another. They were in another place filled of tanks, but these held no water and were surrounded by chairs.
They placed the body of the former Maes Van Senthyn in the preservation tank that he was originally in and used the towel to wipe up the water marks as they retraced their steps.
“These Phasers, they are sloppy for being masters of espionage and combat,” Lasae said as they walked through the hallway, wiping up the puddles. “I have been here for over four hours and not one of them has come to check on their comrade.”
“Perhaps they didn’t like him,” Maes said dryly. “Does this face look like someone you could call a friend?”
“It looks like someone I would call a meal,” Lasae joked and then laughed with so much gusto that Maes had to stop to admire her.
“You’re not as hard as you come off, Lasae; I admire that. It leads me to think that you’re competent, a good fighter. Am I right?”
“I’ve seen sixty-five tours, and I have all of my teeth, lord. This would make me Anstractor’s luckiest Geralos, or, as you say, I am quite competent.”
Maes Van Senthyn smiled. “The Phasers are good. You are not seeing them here because they have Geralos in their city, killing and eating their babies!”
They laughed cheerfully as they opened the door to the tank room, but when they stepped through, Maes—who had moved ahead of Lasae—stepped right in front of Marika Tsuno.
Her movement was so fast that even a trained professional like Maes Van Senthyn was frozen in shock as it happened. Marika Tsuno—trained-assassin-turned-Phaser—had removed the head of the Geralos female and was staring at the man she thought to be Laern Cobo, as if he had agreed to explain himself.
The hot, sticky blood of Maes’s savior was all over the walls and his face, and as he reached up to wipe it from off of his smooth human face, he feigned terror and backed himself into a wall. The woman was a Casanian, which surprised him. Typically Casanians were not the type to be living in metal structures—like the humans—let alone using las-swords…
A loud noise took him out of his shock as Val Tracker came into the room and saw the carnage. “Laern, you’re alive!” he exclaimed, and as he made to reach for Maes, Marika placed her hand in the center of his chest and stopped him.
“What are you?” she asked Maes. Her eyes were large, black pools of mistrust, and the Geralos spy knew that if he made a mistake, she would snatch the life from out of his body.
“Rika, what’s going on?” Val asked as Maes tried to calculate what he would say to calm the Casanian’s nerves.
“This one was coming up from the cell area, giggling and carrying on with the headless lizard you see next to him. He’s either an abomination, or we have a Phaser that likes to stick it in lizard chiern.”
“While that physically makes no sense, I don’t want to hear about it if that’s what he’s been up to. Come on, Laern, you’re not even defending yourself? She’s saying that you like Geralos chiern, bro. Speak up for yourself, dammit.” He began to laugh and it annoyed Marika.
“HEY, meathead! What part of this stand-off are you not getting? This is a breach, erm, I mean this could be a breach. The lizards take over the minds of the weak. I saw him talking to one; get a grip!”
Maes saw his chance to escape when Marika turned on Val. He bolted back down the hall towards the cells, hoping within his heart that there was another way out. The Casanian was on to his ruse but the rest would be ignorant. If he could get to Rafian, or one of the other major Phasers before he died, he could bring honor to his family’s name.
He heard the sound of Marika descending the sloped floor behind him, and as he got to the cells he realized that he was not going to be able to outrun her. Spinning around to face her with his fists at the ready, he couldn’t see her appear behind him and deliver a kick that rendered him unconscious.
06 | Familiar Faces
ARI GROATRATH climbed from his sleek, black, specialist skiff to stand in the yellow dirt of a Virulian valley. The ruins of the temple was spread out in front of him, but what he focused on was the sheer loneliness of the place and the spirits that he felt haunting the land. He was never a religious man, but he felt something both alien and frightening. He quickly wished that he had brought along his wife or his troops, and he assumed that what he was feeling were the fingers of death.
Walking forward he scanned the mountains. They were tall giants that broke the dusty atmosphere, keeping the valley in an eternal shadow that blocked out the low-hanging suns. He walked up the slope of the hill that held the temple, and he scanned the pieces of stone that lay strewn about the valley. Whatever had blown it up had been a bomb of remarkable strength, and from what he had seen upon entry, it had been fired from space down towards the surface.
His mask gave him readouts on what was hopeless rubble versus what could be studied, and he found himself kneeling to look over artifacts or to collect them before rising to walk several more yards again. It was a grueling exercise and again he regretted coming alone, but what he came here for was his own secret and he didn’t want any other Geralos involved.
After a while he grew tired, so he sat on an old column to rest. Taking in the sheer size of the temple’s footprint, he reasoned that the place had been big enough to house over 1,000 people. It made him wonder at the size of the Phaser army. They had managed to destroy a whole troop of Crak-Ti, but the survivors had reported that their number was in the twenties.
He pulled out the crystal and held it up to his mask. One of the suns, Celith, shone a light that made it glow with a magical radiance. He lowered it to examine it clearly and he thought that he felt it throb, so he got up and held it out in front of him. The clear features of the crystal grew dark within his palm. It looked as if someone had injected black ink into its translucent center.
It throbbed and tugged at Ari, and he followed its prompts through the rubble. Celith dipped behind the mountains and the smaller suns, Windry and Laithe, began to climb into the sky. A planet of constant daylight, he thought, and then glanced down at the crystal. When he removed it from the light it began to react. They kept the crystals here in order to keep their power dormant, he surmised. That means the temple housed the crystals; it was there that they could learn how to manipulate their powers.
The crystal led him to the outline of a room which was well preserved despite the destruction. Inside of the broken down walls was what appeared to be the ruins of a stone chair. In front of the chair was a podium outlined with a number of glyphs, and on top of the podium was a cup-shaped orifice that looked to have held something of considerable size.
Walking up to the chair, Ari sat down on it and the crystal stopped its pulsing. He sat for a long time expecting something to happen, but when nothing did he stared down at it again. His neuro-messenger flared to life and he recognized Siern’s signal. “What?” he barked into his wrist comm, and several voices began to apologize. “What is it that you all want?” he asked. “It’s obviously an emergency!”
“Minister, they … our flee
t was wiped out,” Siern said, his voice trembling in fear.
“What fleet? The Crak-Ti? That is old news, Siern. It is the main reason we put Maes on the mission to find out about these annoying Phaser fighters.”
“No, Minister, see, that’s why we had to disturb you. The fleet that flew in to investigate their base on Vestalia. It got wiped out by a Phaser weapon of some sort.”
“All of our fighters wiped out, you say?”
“All of them, Minister. We checked their life signs on the central database and only three of them remain.”
Ari cursed under his breath, and wondered how his luck had gone so bad in just a few days. Over a hundred Geralos were sent to take the Phaser base, and now he was being told that ninety-seven of them had been killed in action. Worse still was that he had sent his personal apprentice, Lasae Almont. He had invested years into her training and now—
“Lasae Almont, is she one of the three, Siern? Tell me now.”
“I am sorry, Minister, her life went dark just a few minutes ago.”
There was a long silence and then Ari screamed. It was a scream borne of both rage and frustration, and it went on for so long that he felt it sap his energy and weaken his limbs. “Get back to your duties. We will handle this when I return to Geral,” Ari said slowly before touching his wrist to cut off their communication.
Lasae Almont was more than an apprentice to him. He had spent many nights with women inside of his Crak-Ti corps during his younger years but slowed down when he made the life bond with his wife, Saya. But his sleeping around had produced numerous children, and to avoid the scandal he had personally paid the women with his children to retire and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
