Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial

by Mason Elliott

  “I don’t know,” Naero erupted in frustration. “But we have to do something. All I know is that my daughter is getting further and further away from me each second. It’s like I can feel it. And the enemy has her!”

  She started to lash out and punch and kick at the furniture, the hull, anything she could reach.

  Khai rushed in. She beat at and thrashed against his solid mass for a time, even though he deflected or endured her blows.

  Finally he just held her, and she leaned against him and sobbed and whispered, “They have her, Khai. They’ve got her. And after what they did to Danner, I can only imagine what they’ll do to her, and she isn’t even born yet.”

  Khai unleashed a heavy sigh of his own. “We will find her. We shall find a way. You will find a way. I know you. For you, there is no challenge that is too great. Think. What do we know? What can we try? What do we need to go after them?”

  “Baeven. We need Baeven. If anyone can track them down, he can.”

  “That is ill-advised,” Klyne said.

  Naero pulled away from Khai and snapped, “Shut up, Klyne! Baeven has been saving our sorry asses all along; yours included. You and Intel need to deal with that, and live with it. Without him working and killing our enemies behind the scenes, all of us would be dead or enslaved–a thousand times over! He helped foil the trial plot against me. Who do you think it was that rescued Master Tree and freed the Elders from those enemy stasis pods before they could be stuffed into Darkforce generators, after I was supposed to be dead? It was Baeven and his people.”

  Klyne snarled, “He is an outlaw, a murderer, and an outcast. You cannot trust him!”

  “I trust him with my life and the life of my child. And you should trust him with the lives of our people, because every day he fights for them, in places that even Intel will not go, and he emerges–victorious! A killer? An assassin? Call him by whatever name or insult you wish, yet he fights for us all. And we need him. We need a thousand more like him against what we face!”

  “Naero, I am still bound by our laws, and so are you, even if you think you are not.”

  “I have seen the limit of our imperfect laws. They would have allowed you and our enemies to take my life unjustly, and that of my child, and curse Khai forever for doing so. Tell me, Klyne. Can you bring my child back? Do you know where the enemy is and where they have taken her? What they are doing to her?”

  Klyne said nothing.

  “And when the enemy cracks the KDM and learns its secrets, and uses them to wipe out all resistance–including our people–what will you and Intel do then?”

  Still Admiral Klyne said nothing.

  Naero glared at him and brought her voice down to a whisper. “We are friends and will always be friends, but for right now, you will get the hell out of my way and stay out of my way while I use every means at my disposal to stop the enemy and get my daughter back.”

  Klyne grimaced. “I never said I was going to stop you. Do what you must. Just keep me in the loop. We can help. And don’t forget Kalathar in all of this. We have to figure out what to with a planet full of the possessed. We’ve evacuated everyone we can who hasn’t been infected. Without anyone or anything to fight, and no ships left, many of the creatures are going dormant to conserve their energies.”

  “After I contact Baeven and get him on the scent trail, I’m going to take some time and attempt to get something out of the KDM. It’s still a part of me and always will be. If I can find any kind or part of a solution from the KDM, I will. The Kexx fought all of this stuff long ago. Has Intel isolated the possession wyrm parasite or learned anymore about it?”

  Klyne nodded. “We’ve accomplished that much, at least. We have several specimens, taken out of hosts frozen in stasis. But the parasites are insidious. Even after we remove the possession-triggering parasites, when we try to unfreeze the former hosts, the hosts still perish. Our medteks and biomancers can’t figure it out.”

  “Send a couple of the specimens and the hosts to my medical bay for study. If I can biomance anything that will help us, I will let you know. And, Klyne, I’ve never cut you out of the loop, my friend. I never will. We just disagree sometimes on certain things. I’m sorry if I sound harsh. I just don’t have anywhere else to turn right now. I’m going back to my ship. Khai, do what you can. Get any information from the real Master Tree and the real Elders, now that I hear they’re recovering. Join me when you are able.”

  Khai nodded. “Copy that, N. I will be with you in a matter of a few hours.”

  “Good. That should give me some time to work out something. Let’s all just keep working together. Something has to break for us.” She transported immediately to her private quarters and sent her urgent message out to her uncle and his odd crew of misfits and warriors.

  7

  Naero meditated inside her silent, serene dark quarters with her third eye wide open.

  So much had happened and still they had no time. Her crew had gone wild with joy when they learned that she still lived, and that she had not been executed of killed. Naero quickly explained to Rina and Enel just how dire and urgent things were for them all, and what was at stake. They would explain it all to the rest of the crew.

  Naero expanded her mind and opened her awareness within and without, and all around her. She considered going to the Astral Plane and seeking out her dragon like friend Womi of the interdimensional Kahn-Dar.

  Yet he knew nothing of the ancient and godlike race of the Kexx that would help her. It was the Kexx who had defeated the terrifying G’lothc long ago and created the Kexxian Data Matrix that was now within her. And still it defied anyone cracking its secrets. Together, she and Om, a Kexxian Defense Protocol AI, had only gleaned a few things, barely scratching the surface of that vast wealth of knowledge. But the knowledge always seemed tantalizingly incomplete in some crucial way.

  Naero tried to penetrate the KDM’s massive defenses.

  In her mind, it was as if she stood before the sheer face of a seamless vertical cliff, mountain, or wall, kilometers high. Impervious. Impenetrable.

  No, there would never be any way for anyone or anything to force a way in. The godlike Kexx had made certain of that. She instinctively knew that the terrifying G’lothc had tried, harder than anyone, and even their supreme efforts had been defeated.

  Even Om, who had been part of the KDM, could catch only fleeting glimpses of all of the secret knowledge that awaited within, beyond that impassable barrier.

  She did learn one small thing, and she nearly missed that.

  All of the KDM, the barrier, and everything within it, hummed with amazing, shifting patterns of Cosmic resonance. They were not unlike codes and frequencies, and when she tried to perceive what they were, she rebounded psionically as if given a jolt of Cosmic and psyonic force.

  The KDM…was everything. It was biomancy, it was teknomancy, and it was mystical–all in one. It was physical in nature, it was psyonic in nature, and it was Cosmic in nature. It was composed of and bound by all of the raw forces of the universe. The KDM was Order, Chaos, and Change. It was a true harmony between the forces of Destruction and the Darkforce, and of Creation and the Lifespark.

  That was part of the secret. The KDM, all of the power, wisdom, and knowledge of the Kexx–was indeed a deep harmony. Yet it still defied her, and held her back, even though she perceived and understood its true nature.

  She was still missing something important.

  A key. It suddenly came to her.

  The entire outer-thing, for all of its massive size and complexity, was a lock box. Perhaps the most intricate lockbox in the universe, but still a box with a key or keys that were needed to unlock and open it.

  But she still had no idea what those key or keys would be like, how to fashion them, or where they would fit to unlock the barrier.

  Yes, at least it came to her that she would need to fashion the keys herself and that there would be more than one. But how?

  Suddenly she r
ealized that she was interacting with the KDM directly, on a level of resonance and perception that she had never experienced before.

  In the past, she had let Om do all of that. He was her interface.

  And yet they had made scant progress.

  That had been part of the problem, she noted. As part of the KDM itself, Om was still instinctively protecting the KDM and its secrets without even knowing it. He had been a barrier on his own.

  Now, without Om present, she could directly interact with the KDM on every level, deep within herself.

  She could treat it as part of herself.

  Naero gasped as she felt something peel away, and in her mind, there was a sound–a rolling resonance like a great rumbling of thunder all around her and passing through her.

  In her vision, she focused all of her powers and abilities and placed her hands on the barrier, trying to make direct contact with it.

  Please. I need your help.

  Something flashed within her mind. A voice crashed out of the barrier, so loud that it slammed into her like a blastwall of massive force, hurling her back.

  Naero blinked and cried out, as she hurtled into the hull of her quarters and dropped down, stunned and prone upon the floor. She steamed with wisps and tendrils of psyonically charged ichor and vapor dissolving and dispersing into the air.

  That thunderous deafening voice still rang in her humming ears.

  It had spoken to her in Kexxian as if pronouncing some kind of judgment or doom.

  And that voice and the words had boomed in her mind, as if using the voice exploding within her own head:

  Unbalanced, Ignorant, and Unworthy!

  The KDM had spoken directly to her.

  Despite the fact that what it said was pretty insulting, at least she had made contact with it somehow and sort of spoken to it. This could be seen as a type of exchange. It stunned her and flung her away when it clearly could have snuffed her out like a tiny insect.

  It was a start.

  Perhaps she was going at this the wrong way. Perhaps the KDM was right after all. She was flawed and clearly unbalanced. Not so much that she couldn’t still function at a very high level–yet unbalanced, nonetheless.

  Haisha, who was she kidding? She had a Dark Beast hiding within herself, waiting to break free and go on a mad rampage of destruction. You could not get much more unbalanced than that.

  Point taken, therefore.

  Naero could also admit to being ignorant. There was clearly a great deal that she did not know and perhaps never would know. And yes, together that could very well make her unworthy of being given access to the godlike knowledge of an ancient alien race.

  So now, the question remained: How did she improve her interactions with, and her status with the KDM? How did she make herself worthy, or at the very least–worthier? That, or those things, appeared to be part of the keys involved in unlocking the KDM.

  This was a complex relationship that she was forming.

  She still needed to understand the KDM more. She could sense its own sentience. The KDM itself was like an entity. It existed with purpose, direction, and a powerful will all its own that was in fact nothing to be trifled with. But like all things that existed and were self-aware, it had a purpose, and it felt the need to be understood.

  Naero took a break and tried something else.

  If she went back to the KDM now, it would simply keep zapping her and hurling her aside, or worse.

  She picked up the nanobelt given to her by Riel during The High Crusade. Riel had been the swordmaster of the Pelani of the Gamma Quadrant, captured by their alien enemies and sent to kill Naero. Riel had nearly succeeded, but Naero destroyed the enemy’s control over the Pelani champion at the last instant.

  Before she left to return to her people on the other side of the galaxy, Riel had given Naero that nanobelt, saying that it contained the wisdom and tek secrets of the Pelani.

  Naero had turned that belt over to Intel, and they had attempted to break its encryption. But because it was Kexxian in nature, they had no better luck with the belt than with the KDM. And Riel had left in such a hurry that she had not told Naero how to unlock the belt’s secrets.

  But she did say that they were all children–wards of the Kexx. The Kexx were a race who had explored numerous galaxies and protected sentient species in their early eons and proto phases of development. If the tek of the Pelani was pseudo-Kexxian in nature, perhaps Naero should start with something simpler, such as that.

  From the moment she began studying the nanobelt of the Pelani, she sensed that it was, in fact, a Kexxian storage device at the smallest nano and pico levels of existence. It resonated with the same or at least a similar such resonance.

  She spoke to it in Kexxian. “Ekdobae! Activate!” The alien nanobelt shivered and wiggled slightly, but it did not do anything else.

  No, that wasn’t it. She wasn’t doing it right.

  Naero put the Pelani nanobelt on her own slender hips.

  Yes, she teknomanced and understood. The belt became part of the wearer in a sense. It did not respond to audible commands.

  They needed to be psyonic–telepathic in nature.

  The experience was similar to that with the KDM barrier, only much less daunting and self-aware. It was but a simple AI for a simple storage and activation device, with presets for shields and gravlifts–even a stealth mode that included cloaking. There was tek data on Pelani weapons, armor, and even warships, advanced computers, and several knowledge bases.

  And like the KDM, if one did not know what to look for, she would never find it.

  Naero thought into the nanobelt with telepathy. Ekdobae.

  Per her command, the nanobelt came online with her teknomancing and opened its presets to her.

  Dath riiba zhunru. Naero activated shields, level ten. She sensed the waves of shielding pulsing around her physical form. Kurr zhunru, shields down.

  Naero quickly dumped copies of all of this vital data into her wristcomp, shunting it through the translation matrix and passing it on to Spacer Intel for their perusal. From just glimpsing at the tek flows, they would have many useful things to gain from a hi-tek knowledge exchange with the Pelani. Their tek seemed relatively on par with current Spacer tek, and even slightly more advanced in certain aspects and applications.

  She would need to thank Riel, if they ever met again.

  Pelani tek and knowledge was very much based on Kexxian tek and principles, but it was still very simple and basic, comparatively. It was still eons behind the true complexity of the KDM. And perhaps that was how it should be. In the wrong hands, the knowledge locked within the KDM would be incredibly dangerous.

  Naero took time to study Pelani stardrives. They even had their own experimental version of the leap drive, and the enemy’s wyrmhole projection arrays.

  Yet they weren’t any more advanced than the attempts made by Spacer Intel and their teks. They seemed more or less stuck at the same places.

  If they were going to pursue or strike at the enemy in the Gamma Quadrant, Spacers and their allies needed a reliable way to travel back and forth. The enemy still had that advantage over them.

  Riel herself had left in a great hurry, not wanting to miss the chance to attach her small spyship to one of the hyper-advanced alien vessels in piggyback fashion to hitch a ride back. She desperately needed to return to the Gamma Quadrant in order to help her people there. Only vessels such as the Dakkur hordeship and the G’lothc squid-like ships, powered by the Darkforce itself, could travel back and forth across such vast distances.

  One of the G’lothc possession wyrm samples and its frozen host in a stasis tube had already been delivered to her quarters, off to one side. Naero brought the lights up in her small but spacious quarters. Now that her meditation work was done for the time being, she might as well look at what she and the Alliance were up against.

  The wyrm itself had gone dormant once removed from its host.

  She used biomancy to
study it and even that nearly made her sick. The G’lothc and everything they made and touched felt somehow violated and corrupted. It literally hurt to interact with them. That was the way the Darkforce was.

  The possession wyrms were insidious creatures–constructs, living machines no less abominable than the Darkforce generators. They took over a host and robbed them of their free will, and then their body and their life. The host body became a vessel, and the possession wyrm opened a gateway to the Void, the dark spirit realm poised upon the brink of the Darkforce dimensions of annihilation. That was where the fell spirits of the long-dead G’lothc lurked and waited, biding their time. Yearning and howling for release from the very hellish prison they had fashioned for themselves by the evil of their own actions while they had lived, seeking to destroy all life in the universe.

  That still remained their fanatical goal.

  Yet how to defeat such beings when they were already technically dead? That was a bit of a sticking point. They could still act and mar the universe through their will, and through the hands of their formidable servants, minions, and slaves.

  From what Riel had said, most of the Gamma Quadrant was under just such an assault by the enemy’s forces. And if such could be imagined, things were even worse off there than down in the Alpha Quadrant. Because the enemy had gained several footholds there in far-flung areas, and their power was expanding and on the rise.

  Just as Naero and her allies had feared when they had visited the Gamma Quadrant briefly in the past. If the foe took over the Gamma Quadrant, they would have even more power and reason to attack and subjugate the rest of the galaxy.

  Naero studied that sickening little hi-tek enemy wyrm with her biomancy. If their infestation spread, all of humanity and every sentient race could be taken over and consumed.

  And thus far, any sentients infected by the possession wyrm did not last much longer than a month or two before they were utterly consumed by its malignant Darkforce energies. They were all reduced to ash.