Naero felt certain that she could defeat another Dakkur Queen now. But the other monster–most likely a Dakkur Dark King or perhaps a prince–was an enormous wild blade in the mix to consider.
32
Naero decided to wait for the planet to come out of its Time dilation before making the final assault. Yet that also meant that the enemy would have time to regroup and further prepare on Uldren for any such future attack.
And they would also have a chance to escape.
Still, there remained many good reasons for accepting such a delay. Many pockets of fierce fighting continued within their two recently acquired continents. Next, both Jan and Ra remained injured and depleted. They recovered as quickly as they were able, yet they still had room to go.
Those were also probably reasons why the enemy unleashed their own all-out attack on the Alliance, with ten days to spare.
The bulk of the enemy surprise attack began at the siege of the gigacity of Dunt, on the continent of Riyok.
The last Dakkur Queen, Golanta, led the attack. Yet she was backed up by some great, Darkforce power that rained down Cosmic death from above. It even blasted warships out of the sky, to fall burning and exploding upon the reeling Alliance ground forces below.
Naero and all of her troops arrived at Dunt, and none too soon, seeing that many of their advance forces had been destroyed, and the rest had been all but routed in the areas near and around the capital.
She looked at Ra and Jan. Both were ready to fight to the last need, but neither was fully recovered.
“I’m going to leave half of the Shetannas here to attempt to complete both of your regenerations. You’re no good to us at half-strength. Let me see if I can hold them off.”
Jan stared at her. “We don’t even know what the king Dakkur can do in combat, Naero. You can’t possibly face both of them down.”
“Jan is right,” Ra told her. “We shall fight and do what we can, even if it means our deaths.”
“No, I won’t accept that. We can’t all die here. That would serve no purpose. That is exactly what the enemy wants. I would most likely get killed trying to save one or both of you. Do as I say. Let me feel this out and stall for time. Let the replicants use combined biomancy to bring you back to full strength ASAP. It might not take very long at all.”
Jan was silent, and still brooded. He had made no promise yet to hold back, especially if she got into trouble and was in serious danger.
That was the problem; they were all in serious danger.
Ra finally responded. “I see the wisdom and logic in your plan. We will hold back and allow the replicants to do all that they can. Yet if things go badly, neither of us will stand by and watch you fall.”
Naero nodded to them. “Thank you, my brothers. Someone must assess the enemy’s strength and gauge more of what we are up against here. If that is a King Dakkur, we need to know what its powers and abilities are. And if I can isolate Queen Golanta, perhaps I can come up with a way to take her out quickly, or at least wound her.
Naero went forward, both cloaked and phazed, doing her best to confuse the enemy leaders somewhat.
She wanted to see if they could sense and track her location, enough to target her for direct attacks.
All the while, Queen Golanta continued to lead the attacks to drive off and crush the Alliance forces.
Naero had already given orders long ago for her people to withdraw in the best order possible, and perform a fighting retreat.
Yet in some hotly contested areas, it was still a rout. The enemy now controlled the air and the ground.
Golanta unleashed torrents of destructive Cosmic energy from her glutinous maw that tore up wide ruts of destruction through the Alliance forces for several kilometers into the distance. Her massive beams even punched into and penetrated hills and the solid rock of mountains.
Darkforce lightning blasted the Alliance from above in screens, sheets, and waves that obliterated everything living that they touched, whether friend of foe. As long as the Alliance people died, the enemy did not care.
Naero attempted to slow down the rapidly expanding enemy counterattack. She commanded the available members of the Shetanna Regiment to launch a combined Cosmic gigablast into the swirling, cloaking mass of energies up in that Darkforce maelstrom growing in power above them.
To her horror, the power lurking within those energies completely absorbed the blast, and then turned those same energies back against Naero’s fleeing forces, causing further, great ruin.
We cannot stop them, Naero realized.
In that instant, she saw all of them die.
Then a single, ominous chime, like that of a great deep gong or bell, resounded out from Naero with her as the center. That great note echoed and rippled throughout all of Naggoth in an instant.
Everything seemed to freeze in that exact flicker of time. Naero closed all three of her eyes and attempted to center herself, feeling her Kexxian counterpart come to her at her last need.
“Orean, these powers are too great for us to stand against. Despite all that we have accomplished on this world, we are about to perish.”
“That may very well be, Naero. Yet take a moment to study the situation better and see it more clearly. What do you see? What do you need right now to give you and your people a fighting chance?”
“I…I need the ten days to be up. I need the planet to come back into sync with our other forces. We need their help. I’m certain they will have prepared for this. They will not let us down.”
“Move an entire planet through a space of Time covering several days? The Kexxian Dreamers could do such things, Naero. Can you do such things? Are you a living miracle?”
Naero clenched her fists. “I Am!” she thundered, just like the voice of thunders, and the power of her words echoed off like a great resonating song.
“I Am!,” Naero replied. “All things are possible. If it has been done before. It can be done so again.”
“Only a Kexx…only a mighty singer…A Dreamer could move the very stars, and planets, and command the Cosmic forces of SpaceTime. Are you a Kexx, Naero?”
Naero voice merged with that of her counterpart within the depths of her mind, heart, and soul.
She merged with the Harmony about her, and brushed the outer edge of the Flame Eternal and the Great Mystery of All things with her radiant Kexxian fingertips.
She knew nothing and everything all at once. She shouted to all the universe with the voice for a third and final time. “I Am! I am Kexx, I am Spacer, I am one with all things great and small. Naero is Orean and Orean is Naero, and the Great Circle of Harmony and light makes me whole. I touch the Darkforce and I am not destroyed. I hold the Flame Eternal and I am not consumed.”
As Orean she had always known the great song of Time and sang the words without hesitation, shifting everything on Naggoth–nay, on Allondatharru to the precipice of the exact moment in time they needed to be at.
Then she studied the situation that she as Naero and all of the forces of the Alliance were still in, and all of the fierce threats that they faced. But in mere seconds, they would neither be alone, nor helpless.
Naero noticed two things which might…might help to save them.
First, Queen Golanta had a G’lothc possession wyrm concealed inside herself, at the base of her gigantic tail. In a matter of seconds, the Queen would transform and become a thousandfold more strong and deadly. They would be hard put to defeat a creature of that size, armed with such might.
Second, the immense creature hiding up in the clouds was not exactly a Dakkur King, but in fact an immature prince. Who though great in power and raw strength, his full range of Darkforce and Cosmic energies and powers remained woefully underdeveloped, and not within his full control.
From all of her experiences controlling and dealing with her Dark Beast, Naero shared with Orean all of those pitfalls and weaknesses, and how one who better understood such, might go about exploiting them in others who
did not.
At least Orean-Naero understood that they had a chance now.
There was never certainty in anything.
The best that one could ever hope for was a chance.
Fortune favor the bold!
Those were her thoughts as she transformed back into being Naero, in their current slip of Time.
But now it was a flow of Time that she as Orean, the Kexxian Dreamer, had adjusted by wishing, dreaming, and singing it so.
When all hell and Chaos broke loose and detonated everywhere around them, Naero knew exactly what to do, and moved to act.
She instantly transformed into her partial Dark Beast form, and drew Heartcleaver. Like a surgeon with a scalpel Naero carved out the possession wyrm and incinerated it, before it could trigger.
Then she shot after the Dakkur Prince hiding up that Darkforce hurricane. Time to unleash her Dark Beast in all of its fury once more.
She was never certain if she could ever regain control of it once she did fully unleash it. But this time, she could not hope to achieve victory without its full might.
Below her, Queen Golanta thrashed in agony and began to die. Nothing could save her now. Alliance forces tried to subdue her. More came down from out of the sky as the stars could be seen overhead once again. Everyone was surprised.
Let others finish off the last queen.
Naero needed to focus on the great battle she sped straight into.
33
The dark thing lurking in the Darkforce Typhoon came straight at her, roaring its name as part of its challenge.
“I am mahathrathrax, lord of worlds, devourer of my enemies. stand before me and be consumed!”
Naero shouted back at him in kind, “not this day!”
They fell to fighting, ripping, and tearing at each other up in the stormy, Darkforce-fueled typhoon swirling all about them.
Naero merged with her Dark Beast once again, yet this time she knew and understood it far more than ever before.
It was not a part of her that she liked or enjoyed, but the truth remained that it was part of her. She was it, and it was her. And even if she could not completely control it, she understood it, and knew what it could and would do.
She and the dark prince of the Dakkur were both creatures born of the Darkforce, and as such, they were nearly consumed and overwhelmed with the deep, intense desire to destroy and to draw in more power.
They saw each other not merely as enemies–but also as competing food sources–each that might absorb the other. Their food was all types of energy and Cosmic energy, even the lifeforce. And that included each other.
They glutted themselves on energy and could never have enough. Left on their own, they would devour all things, even themselves. If they could find a way they would in fact become the Great Destroyer with ravenous glee and consume the entire universe if no one stopped them.
The contest between them became an eating contest, to see which of them could devour the other and absorb the other first, like two snakes trying to gobble each other up by starting at the other’s tail.
Naero maintained barely enough control to perceive just how to defeat Mahathrathrax.
First she startapped, something the young prince was clearly incapable of doing, in his brutish, less sophisticated form.
She bloated him with Cosmic energy, and he greedily sucked it down, forgetting even to keep trying to kill her. He fed and fed, until he grew besotted and drunk upon it and for a few crucial moments, he was dazed and vulnerable.
Naero pounced upon him in that state. She ripped him apart the way RA would devour a foe, and swallowed the prince, destroying and consuming him whole.
For Mahathrathrax it was far too late. Yet even as he died, and Naero feasted on his soul, trapping its cringing spirit inside of her just as Baeven had done to a G’lothc spirit, the doomed prince taunted her.
“Your defeat of child of our race means nothing. The Masters still have your spawn, and your wretched simulacrum. Even now, as you struggle and fight on this insignificant little mudball, they use the power of your own child to open all of the gateways well ahead of schedule.”
The dark prince laughed as insane as Naero’s lost brother Danner, even as he died. “They’ll suck her dry and eat her flesh, just for the fun of consuming her, in the end. And the end shall come for all of you petty meddlers. The Armada will leap across the way between our galaxies and conquer you all. And even the Six shall be released once more. The Champions of Shadows shall rise to power again, and there is nothing you can do to stop them!”
As Naero finished consuming the dark prince, she perceived his portion of the enemy’s mind and their plans.
She saw where they had taken Naero-3, her unborn child, and Om.
She fully understood what their great and powerful foes were attempting to do.
Khai called her seconds later. But after all that they had been through, there was still no time. She hadn’t even time to consider the fact that she had just subdued her Dark Beast once more–this time on her own, and without even thinking about it.
“Beloved,” she called out to Khai over their link, with great urgency. “Hear my words. I am teknomancing these coordinates to you and the Alliance. I understand that there is still a hotly contested battle going on around Allondatharru. But listen well. I know where they have taken our daughter, and we must go there immediately. To the edge of our galaxy out this way, to the edge of the universe, at a rare nexus of the planes and galaxies.”
“My heart, you’ve been gone for an entire month. I don’t understand?”
“Please, if you have love for me, bring all our forces and Allies that you can, and summon Baeven. Bring everyone. Our dread foes use our own child against us to advance our ruin, and they will drain her energies and slay her in the process. They seek to open up vast gateways to other galaxies and dimensions where their powers and their once great masters hold sway. If they unleash these additional foes upon us before we can prepare to fight them, all shall be lost. We and perhaps all the universe will be doomed!”
“Naero, you speak as if you are leaving. Where are you going? You don’t even have a ship. How do you intend to–”
“Please, Khai. I must go ahead and do all that I can to save our girl, even if it means my life. I will die before I allow them to destroy her. I am filled with Cosmic energies from my recent battle. It will be enough to take me there. Follow hard upon my heels and bring all of our allies who can be spared. I have sent word to my admirals to confirm this and assist you. Our foes have had our child too long. It is time we take her back from them!”
With that Naero channeled all of her energies and made the wyrmhole leap across that part of the galaxy to where she needed to be.
There, at the edge of that prime nexus, on the cusp of Naero’s galaxy in that portion of the Gamma Quadrant, she saw the G’lothc ship, the large squid-like cruiser with the enormous, writhing black tentacles ending in destructive weapons.
Yet the squid ship was currently heavily damaged from with from within. It listed badly in space, trying to regenerate itself.
Large exit holes were sealed only by emergency shields.
On the edge of the prime nexus, Naero saw about a hundred foes of various species and types, working with enemy teks and a score of various Darkforce generators and powered generator mek suits.
No one noticed her appearance, her approach, or even attempted to scan for her presence yet. All of the enemy focused on what appeared to be a small Dyson sphere that they had constructed around Naero-3.
They used the sphere to syphon off huge quantitates of Cosmic energy and feed those massive amounts of energy into two separate gateway projection screens erected to the left and to the right.
As the power continued to step-up and build, the stars behind those screens flickered out, and other images flashed and blipped into view through their broad length, across those gateways.
Through the gate on the left, Naero beheld what
looked to be the interior of another galaxy. Yet in the distance, as she zeroed in, she saw wave after wave and fleet after fleet of G’lothc and Dakkur ships, many of them new configurations, or just larger versions of enemy ships they had already seen. Some of these enemy vessels were carrier and dreadnaught class and size.
These countless warships had to be part of the enemy’s Armada. And the enemy was in fact using Naero’s child to open a massive gateway between the galaxies, to allow their forces begin to pour through.
Naero had once witnessed the firepower of the guns on the squid ship cruiser during the Annexation War. One blast has taken out dozens of ships, both friends and foe. What could fleets of such warships accomplish?
Yet even worse than the Armada, on the right, the enemy was also opening a gateway to the planes. Specifically, the edge of the Plane of Destruction and Annihilation itself, where the dark spirits of the G’lothc still endured and struggled in their nearby pocket dimension of the Void that was their torturous prison. Trapped within, they still yearned and conspired to find the perfect hosts to house them once again, and allow them to them return to the universe in force and work their will.
Naero saw six large creatures held in stasis tubes out in front of all the rest. The other vessels consisted of about a hundred more sentients in stasis tubes, with all manner of hosts prepared to receive their G’lothc overlords, once that gateway could be forced open.
The six finest and most powerful vessels were undoubtedly reserved for the Champions of Shadows, the six worst and mightiest of the G’lothc who had ever been know to exist. Woe unto the universe if they were ever unleashed again.
Naero could not wait for Khai or any others.
She had to attack, even if she must do so alone.
She had to save her child, and neither of those gateways could be allowed to open.
Transporting took her into the heart of the source.
Naero entered the Dyson sphere feeding off of her daughter, and now, it also drained her.
Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial Page 27
