by Taki Drake
The partying diners broke out of their astonishment, screeching in a cacophony of alien sounds. Many reached for the torture whips at their sides. A few had more powerful weapons. One of the closest companions to the large Insectoid drew what appeared to be a huge bore energy weapon and aimed it at Ruth. She stood unnoticing, inside an intensifying shell of brilliant light.
The weapon came to bear directly at Ruth and the alien fired. Both of Pawlik’s unencumbered men dove in front of Ruth in an attempt to protect their lord’s friend with their own bodies. One of them succeeded. The energy beam hit the man in the upper left shoulder and slid diagonally down his body. As his torso was cleaved it spun and spewed blood and body parts in a wide circle.
The alien cursed as he saw that his target was still there. Straightening up, he re-aimed at the woman and prepared to fire. But somehow he was too late.
The sacrifice of Pawlik’s man was the last straw. Ruth’s steadfast calm, her forced cheerfulness, and her forlorn hope, all fractured into a violent and angry explosion of emotion. Flinging her hands to either side of her shoulders she said in a great voice, “We…Are…Not…Prey!”
There was the sound of a great bell ringing somewhere in the back of everyone’s head. Light seem to run up either side of the woman’s body and down her arms to her hands. Bringing them together in front of her she made a motion that looked like she was cupping water, a red light built in a mound of viscous matter. Her eyes flashed blue, her hands flung the red light in a circular motion around her, and the world exploded.
Chapter 3 – Mage Crisis
The light came back slowly, filtered through powdery, falling ash. There was no sound except harsh breathing. The amphitheater was covered with ash. Ranging in color from white to almost black it was arranged in concentric rings radiating out from the center of the quiet sand floor.
Ruth still stood in the center, amid the dust and debris of a great fire. None of the slaves in the center were touched. Amazed to find themselves still alive, they remained motionless, unsure of what had just happened. Shocked into numbed silence.
The air was acrid with unidentifiable odors and floating with the soft fluff of floating ash. The slaves, now former slaves, were the only living things in the room. Where the Insectoids had been seated and standing there were piles of unidentifiable residue. Rapidly shifting air currents moved the light matter into different stacks of varying shades of gray.
Pawlik was the first to move. Gently putting Troyer down, he carefully approached Cal and examined his wounds. Gesturing to one of his men to continue what aid that they could provide, Pawlik turned back toward Ruth. He moved toward her tentatively, unsure of her for the first time since they had met. The woman that he had admired for her resilience and mental strength had become an unknown. His wild surmise of what had happened frightened him, something that had seldom happened before.
Her eyes were still blue, but the incandescence had gentled to a softer, shifting glow. They seemed to be windows into a soul, one that would easily pull him into their depths. Stories from his childhood rose in his mind, ones that both intrigued him and frightened him badly. If she had become what he thought, the world as he knew it would radically change. And he was not sure if that was good or bad.
She looked at him, really looked at him. He felt as if his soul had been laid bare before her, all of his weaknesses exposed. His moments of jealousy, times of stupidity, all were there in the story of his life, open to her reading. It was almost too much to endure. Torture, agony, fear – those were easier to bear than the stark honesty of that gaze.
He breathed a sigh of relief when she looked past him toward her son. A small twitch of her lips was all that moved her frozen face, but it felt like some great danger had been averted. She turned her head to check on the rest of their party, and her smile broadened slightly as she saw Troyer and Techla huddled together against Mary’s side. Pawlik took another deep breath.
Cal stumbled toward his son. Grabbing the boy, he searched him frantically for damage. Finding none, Cal turned his attention to Techla, whom he also checked and hugged. The little girl snuggled deep into his arms for a brief moment, before she reached up and patted his face. He bent down to catch her whisper. She said, “Is Nana alright?”
He answered, “I don’t think so, sweetheart, but I will check,” before turning his attention to his motionless mother.
She still stood in the middle of the room, unmoving. Pawlik had stopped about two meters away from her, standing slightly to her right. Cal walked over slowly and stopped a few feet from the front of his mother. Tears were running down her face in a steady stream. He asked gently, “Mom?”
Agony dotted her words like blood drops of punctuation, “Why? Why only after so many deaths?”
The survivors were in shock. Too much had happened in too short of a time for any of them to actually accept the fact that they were not going to die at any second. Pawlik and his men, aided by Cal, started to organize and evaluate the makeup and content of their surviving group.
The first thing they did was to get all of the survivors out of the room. For lack of any place better to go, the survivors carefully moved back to the original slaveholding room. At least it was a familiar place for people to sit and rest. Along the path between ashy death and the dubious comfort of familiar confinement, the sounds of the spaceship seemed magnified. Perhaps it was because that the sounds of occupancy that the Insectoids had provided were only noticeable by their absence. Without the noise of the spaceship’s crew working quietly in the background, the corridors echoed. Pawlik and his men ranged from side to side of their pitifully small column of people, ever on the alert.
On their way to the amphitheater, they had been rushed. They had had no time to consider their surroundings in that mad push but instead were dealing with panic and fear about the immediate future. With less urgency driving them on the return, they noticed more details.
The ship’s corridors were sleek and finished looking. A seamless joining of walls to ceiling and floors made the wide passageway appear almost organic in nature. There were indications of concealed doorways in some areas of the walls. Faint lines of demarcation showed that the doors were sized for the Insectoids. Small indentations at three heights along the left-hand door line appeared to have pushbuttons. Such investigation would have to wait.
Cal incorporated into Pawlik’s small command group effortlessly. Mary seemed to have the shepherding of the remaining children and women under control, moving them forward by gesture alone. But no one touched or approached Ruth.
She accompanied the group, yet seem to be separate from it. Her face was set, introspective. Standing very erect, she kept pace toward the back of the group. She did not speak even when Techla took her hand and walked with her.
Pawlik carefully kept his eye on Ruth. Wherever he was in relation to her, his vision touched her face every minute or so. There was a watchfulness about him that seemed alert for some sign or indicator that either he had not mentioned or one of which he was unsure. The constant monitoring of his mother worried Cal, but he trusted Pawlik to tell him when the time was right.
The group arrived back at the holding room. The survivors divided into their usual groups, hunkered down, and either collapsed or started talking with each other quietly. Several men and two women approached Pawlik and quietly asked how they could help. He assigned small groups of them to scout and explore the ship. If they have become the sole possessors of this spaceship, it made sense for them to figure out what it was that they now possessed and what dangers were facing them.
Ruth had seated herself in the position that she had before they were rushed out of the room. Troyer leaned on one side of his grandmother, while Techla sat on the other. Ruth still had not spoken. Her eyes still swirled with multicolor lights and her hands still glowed with a more muted one. She joined all of them in waiting. Everyone waited. Waited for the scouting parties to return, waited for something to happen, waited f
or danger to reemerge.
Chapter 4 – Taking Control
All of the scouts reported back. There were no Insectoids anywhere on the ship. They had combed the ship from the engine room all the way to the command bridge. There were piles of ash in various places, some small, some large, some dark, some light, but no bodies, no other living entities besides their group. They were the sole possessors of a huge spaceship. The slaves now controlled the prison.
More of the former slaves had recovered enough to become animated. They wanted to know what was going on, and nearly all of them had strong opinions on what to do. Pawlik’s scouting group and active participants in his de facto command staff had grown to more than 15 people. This was still a pitifully small group to control a starship. With the recovery of their equilibrium and the lessening of numbness, the expected tussling for control started. While most of the people seem to accept that Pawlik was in command, there was one group of men that thought otherwise.
This group was comprised of three males, two of one race, one of another. The leader of the group was bipedal and just short of Pawlik’s height. His skin tone was golden, with elaborately braided-looking hair shading to a dark gold. His black eyes communicated his arrogance and sense of entitlement. He marched up to Pawlik and said “Obviously I am the most suited for heading up this effort. I’ll have you know that I’m a very wealthy merchant prince and have run many companies. This effort will require organization.” He expounded on his qualifications, finishing, “You cannot possibly be as qualified to deal with our needed comfort or safety. And you obviously do not know how to manage this many people.”
Pawlik continued to direct his staff while the man ranted at him. Effectively ignoring him, Cal and the others carried out Pawlik’s directions until one of the two smaller men with the merchant attempted to stop Cal. In a lightning quick movement, the smaller of the two dark-skinned, white-haired men grabbed hold of Cal’s upper arm and shook him, shouting into his face. “Pay attention to Bartha, you unschooled barbarian!”
Cal shrugged the man off and walked past him without bothering to respond. Faces hardening in anger, both of the merchant’s associates lunged toward Cal’s back. They took only two steps toward him when a small bolt of red light speared the deck and scored deeply into the metal directly in front of their feet.
They crouched and spun in place, looking back toward the source of the bolts. Ruth was on her feet. She no longer looked introspective, she no longer looked calm. Ice crackling in anger showed on her face as she stared at the arguing men and spoke, “Pawlik is in charge! There will be no argument!”
Bartha shouted at her, his voice crackling with a combination of anger and fear. “Who are you to command all?” he demanded.
“I am the one that just committed murder. I am the one who now owns this spaceship and all the others that used to belong to the Insectoids. I suppose, technically I am also the one that owns the Insectoids slaves.”
“What do you mean you own everything that the Insectoids owned? If we don’t hurry and get away in the spaceship, the others of their race will find us and take us back into captivity. They’ll be free to torture and kill and eat us,” the frightened man yelled.
Ruth replied, “There are no more Insectoids. They are all dead. By my hand, by my thought, my will. I have broken my mind. The deaths of many are on my conscience, and my heart and brain are grieving. But when it came to a choice of letting my child be killed, I did what any mother would do. And that was to give up everything, so that my child could live.”
The merchant backed up a couple of steps his hands protectively held in front of his body. “What are you?”
Ruth opened her mouth and paused. Her look of confusion shaded with grief was hurtful to see.
Cal moved toward his mother quickly and put an arm around her shoulders giving her slight hug. He said, “She is my mom, and that is all I need to know.”
Troyer grabbed hold of her hand on the other side from his father, saying, “She’s my grandma.” Techla put one achingly slender arm around Ruth's waist and whispered, “Nonna.”
Pawlik walked over in front of Ruth looked her in the eyes and turned to stare down Bartha. “She is a Mage,” he stated in a hard voice that sounded like the clash of invisible weapons.
There was the sound of many indrawn breaths around the room. Then silence. In the quiet, Bartha blustered, “Mages are a myth! There hasn’t been a real one for millennia!!”
Pawlik responded, “The last Mage died over five millennia ago. His Anchor died 50 years after him. There has been no Mage since then that lived to adulthood.”
Cal interrupted, “But I’ve never heard of a Mage before on Earth. Magic to our culture is fiction, a story to tell children, but not something real. How could my mother be a Mage?”
“Mages are formed when they break their minds. Some massive emotional trauma forces them to sacrifice a connection to the harmonics of their own world so that they can access forces that the rest of us cannot touch. If your race has been confined to a single planet, there is no way to do that and survive.”
Trying to take some vestige of control back, Bartha demanded, “How do you know so much about this supposed Mage thing? How can you possibly decide that she’s one of them?”
With a strange expression on his face, Pawlik answered, “My family line goes back for a very, very long time. My many times removed grandfather was the Anchor of the last Mage. There are multiple Mage Anchors in our history, so the old stories are part of our family education.”
Cal exclaimed, “That’s why you asked me if there were any Mages in our family when we were on the blood sands! That’s why you are watching mom so carefully!”
“Yes. The lights in the eyes were taught to us as a sign of someone going into a Mage crisis. I was concerned that if she did manifest that the Insectoids would kill her.”
Ruth voice quietly crackled in the air around them, reverberating like the sound of a smaller kettle drum to a beat that they couldn’t quite hear, “But more people apparently had to die before I became a Mage?”
“No one has ever known what triggers a Mage crisis, Lady. There is no guilt, no responsibility for the timing.”
Ruth looked at Pawlik, consideringly. After a moment, she took a deep breath, straightened her back, and arranged her expression to better mimic her usual calm demeanor. “Then I guess we had better get organized, hadn’t we?
“Pawlik, I would like you to take overall command and oversight of the investigation into our resources. Since you understand what I would consider as war footing better than anyone here, I think it’s best that you be the person that acts as the overall military head. Cal, can you please organize an inventory of assets? We need to know how many people, what their skills are, food availability, etc.
“Mary, can you go around and make sure that those that need medical treatment and help are connected with whomever we have that is trained in those areas?”
Mary nodded and turned to start to check the exhausted and frightened people scattered around the room. Cal gave his mother a small, relieved smile before heading off towards the largest group of people closest to them. He figured that since they had been eavesdropping shamelessly on the conversation, that he could start with them. Hopefully, there would be some people in that group that were capable of helping with his tasks. A somewhat irreverent bubble of amusement rose inside of him as he recognized the same feeling that he had when his mother would assign chores to him as a teenager.
Pawlik waited until both Mary and Cal had moved away. Lowering his voice to a quieter tone, he asked, “How do you want me to handle dissension and troublemakers?”
“Handle them as best you see fit, Pawlik. At this point, any method of dealing with them is probably going to be better than ignoring the problem. I simply don’t know enough to give any direction. You probably already know more about the temperament and personalities of these people than I do. In this case, my trust is in you to do wha
t’s best.”
Acknowledging Ruth’s comment with a nod of his head, Pawlik moved confidently and quickly toward a group of mostly men similar in bearing to his sergeants, who automatically had followed him. Although Ruth could not hear exactly what he said to them, she saw them all straighten into a more military stance and most of them saluted Pawlik. He returned their salutes and started gesturing and talking rapidly.
Turning her head to check on Cal, Ruth was startled to see that he had already organized several teams that were moving from group to group in the room, recording information on a variety of notebooks and electronic devices. Cal was directing another group of people burdened with armfuls of items toward the doorway. He seemed to have his situation under control also.
Mary had already gathered a trio of beings, one another quadruped that looked somewhat similar to her and two vaguely human-looking entities, one male, and one female. All of her team was engaged in helping people that appeared to have some level of injury toward the door.
“Well, I guess that I have just made myself superfluous,” murmured Ruth. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or a little miffed on how easily the others seem to know what to do. Relief was winning out.
Since there didn’t seem to be anything that was urgent right then and since no one appeared to be bleeding or dying, Ruth dropped thankfully to a sitting position on the floor. Troyer and Techla huddled close to her, and the three of them happily enjoyed a moment of peace together.
Chapter 5 - Transformation
Both children had fallen asleep, draped bonelessly over Ruth’s knees. She could remember when Cal and his brother would do the very same thing. A wave of tenderness washed over her as she gently brushed the hair back from Techla’s face and straightened Troyer’s limbs. Such moments were to be treasured, stored up and replayed when times were bad. She was just thankful that this was a storing up moment rather than a playing back one.
