There was a long vine that stretched out from the white haired man and stopped directly in front of Kale. It had hints of green and purple intertwined with the mostly brown color. It looked like a plant vine. The old man took a hold of the vine and wrapped a portion of it around his arm and pointed at the end of the vine at Kale’s end. Kale picked up the vine and felt warmth emanating from it. He looked back at the old man who went through the motion of wrapping it around his forearm again. Kale followed suit. As he wrapped the vine, he felt a tingle run through his arm, almost as if he’d hit a nerve.
“Now we can speak?” Kale heard the old man say.
“You can understand me?” Kale asked back. The old man nodded. “This is like that brown slime?”
“The Agyota has several forms. The salve is from its seed. This vine is still growing from the creature itself.”
Kale was about to ask more clarification on the word creature, but he let it go.
“Are you the head chief?” Kale asked, thinking how foolish he sounded.
“I am one of many such chiefs. Behind me are the six other chiefs of our people. For this cycle I am the one who speaks for all of us in such matters of high importance.”
“How should I address you?” Kale asked.
“You may call me Quiet Waters,” he replied.
Kale thought for a moment. “You don’t have a different sounding name, like her?” He said, pointing back at Uli.
“Her name is Black Star. But she wanted you to know her name as it sounds to us. That is the property of the Agyota. It lets us communicate what we want to, and not just what is spoken.”
Kale looked directly at Uli, who kept her gaze away from the Captain.
“Well, my name is Kale,” he said plainly.
“No other names? No family, no description of where you are from?”
“No other name,” he said. The chief squinted, as if he were trying to look deep into the captains eyes, searching for the truth.
“But you have a family,” he pointed out.
“In a fashion,” Kale agreed, “unlike any other, I think.”
“Very well, Kale of no family,” Quiet Waters said.
“Are we prisoners?” the Captain asked.
“Only if you come to harm us,” the chief answered.
“But you brought us here,” Kale countered. The chief smiled at the response.
“Black Star brought you here. She is one of our greatest Threadweavers, and we trust her choices. You were also the first white man to survive an encounter with our people.”
“Survive?” Kale asked.
“You saw what contact with us can do,” the chief answered. Kale nodded. He still remembered nearly dying.
“So there have been others?”
“There have been lost ships we have come across, but those have never lived. The spirits within us are very jealous indeed. But the last couple of nights, we have seen more and more of your ships coming through the dark web. And the black spirits, the spheres you saw, they have grown bold indeed in their attacks. Long have they tried to find out home.”
Kale tried to take it all in. He really wished that Gheno was in here with him. He had a far greater capacity to make sense of what seemed to him to be just poetic rhetoric. But he was here alone, and for the moment, apparently the lone representative for the rest of mankind in this odd reunion.
“Chief. I have to apologize, but, you are using words and terms that I simply cannot understand. I know we speak different languages and some thoughts are being confused as we speak back and forth. I am grateful that your people saved us from the attack by those black spheres and we are very amazed that we have found fellow humans living so far out here, but we, well, I, I want to know who you really are.”
“You do not know?” the chief asked.
“One of my crew members thinks that you are Indians, the people we called Natives of the new world. He is a little bit of a history nut, but the little I knew is that they were wiped out.”
There was a hint of pain in the chief’s eyes. He turned slowly, and almost painfully, to look at his other fellow chiefs. The youngest of the group, a large man, who was sitting at the edge of their half circle, nodded. Quiet Water turned back and faced the Captain.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Whatever you can say that will make sense of this all,” he replied.
“We are, as you say, those people, and ours was a sad tale…” he began.
They were the people of the North American continent and had gone by many names: Cherokee, Lakota, Navaho, among many. Their history prior to the discovery of interstellar space travel was common among all of them. European explorers had discovered their lands, and had through aggression and diseases, nearly eliminated all of them. They had been retired to small swathes of land throughout the continent, and left dependent on the local governments and bereft of their natural culture and way of life. Some had adapted to the new cultures and their culture had nearly vanished except for those few small pockets. At the end of the 21st century, there was at least some stability to their existence. The formation of the North American Federation had brought about a brief stint of prosperity as they were allowed to have a voice, albeit, a small one.
It was the last world war, just as the hook was discovered, that changed everything.
The mass exodus that began with the discovery of travel between the stars left a tense vacuum back on Earth. Unemployment disappeared because the labor force vanished to new planets. Countries declared war on each other for the control of the labor force. There was no one to plant food as farmers were the number one labor unit to leave Earth for new planets. Within a few years, the entire planet was engulfed in a war that further increased the exodus. New weapons were developed, and none more deadly and terrifying than genetic nano-annihilators. Spread through the air and water, and carried by anyone that wasn’t affect, these microscopic invaders were designed to attack specific genetic groups. Earth’s greatest experiment into eugenics warfare was about to leave a devastating effect. Hate groups attacked minorities all across the globe, leaving them sterile at best, deformed or dead at its worst.
Governments banned this form of warfare, but the technology allowed small groups of far right or far left terrorists to continue their attacks. Small communities all over the globe that had some kind of unique genetic trait pertaining to their race were the targets of attacks of hatred and discrimination. At some point in that war, the natives of the North American continent became a target as well. Within a few weeks, nearly eighty percent of their population succumbed to horrible deaths. Those that were able to survive had to disappear into the countryside and avoid all contact with anyone else.
The chief was not able to remember the details, but someone, somewhere, with some amount of power and influence, financed the discovery and conversion of a large asteroid. At that time, these were the best method of sending large amounts of people across the distances in space. They were hollowed out and transformed into self-contained living environments that could survive for centuries if properly maintained. Those Natives that had survived were given the opportunity to leave earth. Nearly all did.
“There is a legend we hold. One of the Cherokee’s last chiefs was not able to board the ship as he carried the artificial plague. But he was allowed to come up to the rock we would call home. He uttered a prophecy to one of our young children. He said that we would have three guardian spirits, the eagle, the wolf and the bear. These would guide us to a new home and would return again when we most needed them to.”
Only 120,000 American Indians survived to make it on board the asteroid. Of those, nearly ten thousand were very elderly, and were going on board to provide their bodies as resource for the internal carbon cycle on the ship. Those would die of old age in the first five years of travel. Among that group were also one hundred volunteers of varying races, scientists, doctors and engineers, trained to fly the rock. They swore an oath to integrate int
o the population once a new home planet was discovered.
A target was picked out with a system that had a planet that appeared to hold life. It was at the very limits of space flight at that time, and would take the asteroid several generations to reach it: seventy-three years. It was their hope that they would remain as distant from earth as possible. Any human with an Indian genetic trait that remained behind, ultimately fell to the genetic nano warfare, and none were left on Earth. Only history books would remember them.
Kale knew a few of these details, although certainly had no idea that this group had been able to escape the horrors of the last world war on Earth. What he learned next was entirely new and equally amazing.
They don’t have the exact records, but when they arrived at the system they had targeted, they were severely disappointed. The system was a Binary system. There were no planets. The images from earth had confused one of the suns, a much smaller sun, as a planetary object. The asteroid also didn’t have the means to search out other systems. Plans were made to create a fully working internal system within the asteroid and the tribes would live out their existence within this closed environment. What happened next was clearly the thing of legends.
“Even this far from home, spirits dwelled. Dark spirits indeed. Beings alone and cold, that lay waiting for anything they could possess. Our people began to darken in mood. Some took their lives. The dark spirits began to take them and dry their lives. It was then that the great eagle, our guide, came to us again. It took the rock in its talons like an egg, and carried us through that dark web. We could not see the web, but the eagle could. It flew through the web with us in its claws and through the dark caves. When next we looked, we were here
on Gadoni.”
There was one among them who was greater than most. He was the child that had heard the last chief’s prophecy. He had grown into a chief himself and had promoted the trust in the eagle. At nearly eighty years old, he was nearing the end of his life, but he was still the leader among them. When they found Gadoni he was the first down into the beautiful home. He was the first to walk out, and the first to suffer under the weight of the spirits that took hold of his blood. He was also the first to survive and become one with the spirits of Gadoni and from his blood, everyone else was able to survive.
The world was amazing. Far more than they ever could have expected. Life was extremely abundant here in forms they never could have imagined. The lines between plant and animal were blended everywhere they saw. The spirit in the sacrificial chief’s blood now inhabited their blood, and it began to change them. They found theirs skin turning hues of green, and some purple. The three suns that rounded their skies provided them energy above and beyond that which they ate. While the first generation suffered greatly with the transformations, the next generations and on were fully adapted to this new world. They lived longer. In different parts of the planet, many found themselves developing different changes to their bodies.
As they spread out through the planet, they had more land than they could deal with. The separate tribes on board the asteroid had blended, and now could spread out as they felt. They kept and enhanced their cultures and dialects. They found they could be separate, but with the discoveries on the planet, like they Agyota, they could still be one. Never had they found themselves as part of nature as now.
Yet they never forgot their past. The one-hundred original men and woman who were not Indians also became their own tribe, unique in their own way. They warned that someday, a technological superior human being might find them, and the cycle would begin again. So they advocated for the development of technology in unison with the incredible resources and energy on Gadoni. They discovered how to literally grow the Vahe into ships that could go into space. They found ways to transport energy through an underground network of living beings and how to communicate through the use of a strange being that opened their eyes to the threads.
The threads of the universe. The threads that gave those like Black Star, Ulisike, her power.
Kale turned and saw Uli in a new light. She continued to look away.
“What about the black spheres?” Kale asked, turning back to the chief.
“The dark spirits,” Quiet Waters explained. When they had first started taking the Vahe out beyond their planet and through the caves into the dark web, they had come across them. At first, their encounters were peaceful. There was no interaction, and the spheres appeared to have no interest in them. They aren’t sure what changed. They had never attacked the spheres, but in one encounter, far larger spheres appeared, and began trying to attack their Vahe. All attempts to communicate with them failed. For the people, the imagery of the dark spirits that inhabited the recesses of space came back. There was no trace of living material on the spheres. Attacks became frequent whenever they came across each other and it became apparent after some of the spheres were discovered following the Vahe that they were trying to find Gadoni.
They began to study them and to change their Vahe. They developed weapons they could use to defend themselves against them. For nearly one-hundred nights they had been fighting the black spirits but in the past two, the spirits had increased in numbers dramatically and the people were starting to stay out of the dark web in order to avoid contact with them.
“We continue to wait for our three spirit guides, the eagle, bear and wolf, to return to guide us against these evil spirits.”
The dark spirits had no way of seeing the threads like Uli could, and never seemed to find the right cave to travel through to reach Gadoni. The people counted on Threadweavers to navigate through space.
“We live in the fear that the spirits may one day see the threads as well,” the chief said.
“You said two nights?” Kale asked. He had heard this term many times already, but needed confirmation of what he thought it meant.
“We measure the passing of time by the number of nights. We only have one time in each cycle between the suns where a half of our planet has night.”
“It’s your year,” Kale said, almost tripping himself up on the words.
Kale began to think back. He couldn’t be certain at the length of their years compared to his, but if it was anything even remotely close, there was an odd coincidence. It was almost four Earth years ago that they had come across the Magyo, and awakened an ancient intelligence. That had turned into a little girl with a divine nature and arguably, the most reliable crew mate he had ever had. Kale struggled to try find any relevance between the two events. He would need Gheno to help him with that.
“You are able to see the caves?” the chief asked.
Kale thought for a moment.
“The holes, the natural hook holes,” he realized, “yes, we can see them.”
“But you cannot see the threads?”
“Not like you can, no.”
“Then it stands to think that the black spirits may find a way, as well,” the chief lamented.
Kale became suddenly conflicted. He knew more about the black spheres than the chief did. It wasn’t much. Kale felt a kindred soul with these people, persecuted as they had been. But telling them what he knew would reveal Sentinel to them. How they would react to him was something he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. They considered the black spheres evil spirits. What would they think of his AI?
“The spirits were very effective in fighting us. I am not sure we can help much,” Kale said.
“But you survived,” the chief said.
Could he tell Kale was hiding something? “We are very resourceful.”
“And what of more following you? We have a very large amount of white men in a ship above our skies,” Quite Waters added.
“Probably not white men anymore. We are all very mixed, but, that’s something else. Perhaps one of my crew members could be allowed to fly up there and speak to them, find their intentions. They come from the same planet I am from. My people there are not known for aggression.” Kale also wanted to find out why a
n Alioth Navy ship was here.
“There are many among us that say that when the white man finally shows up, to kill them and be done with it,” the chief said, surprising Kale with a mixture of anger and fear. What do you say to that?”
“Umm, I’d rather you didn’t kill me,” he said sheepishly.
“Can you say that your people won’t come here to take our home away from us?”
“All I can say is that you seem very prepared for that,” Kale pointed out. He continued by saying that he had never seen such like the Vahe before. He also left out the part of the Magyo or the Harmoa.
“There are some among us that say that our gods are indeed very powerful,” the chief said. It was the first time he had used the word gods.
“I’ve seen god. She’s a little girl with the propensity to explode people with her hands,” Kale said, knowing the full meaning of what he said wouldn’t be grasped. Kale couldn’t assure the chiefs that they were completely safe from any human incursions. He knew full well the aggressive expansionist capacity of the Dominion, although perhaps that would be different under new leadership.
“The only thing I know for sure,” Kale offered, “is that humanity has many more problems within itself to worry about, than trying to take land away from a small group like yours. And, they may never find this place.”
“You would never tell others about Gadoni?” the chief asked.
“Tell them about it? Yes. Tell them where it is? Never.”
“What about that ship above us?” the chief asked.
That could be another problem.
***
Ayia got the short end of the straw. Not literally though. Someone had to fly back up to the Alioth ship and find out what they were about and act as a go between them, Kale’s crew and the Gadoni, as they were now calling them.
It didn’t seem right to call them Indians, or any other word that had at one time be associated with them. Kale had retold the crew every single detail he could remember from his meeting with the chiefs. Gheno had taken it all in with the greed of a historian. He was busy digging up any records the ship might have to corroborate their story, and everything seemed to fit. The only thing he couldn’t find, even with Sentinel’s help, was where in the galaxy they were. Or if they were still even in their galaxy.
The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 20
