“Our home is tearing itself apart. Down there, somewhere, may be enough males to allow us a chance to continue. If not and all the males are gone, we are now a dead race.”
Silence reigned. Knuckles clenched and backs straightened. Several bared their teeth, showing their gleaming fangs.
The display changed again to highlight the group of destroyers and cruisers. Over one hundred and fifty huge warships were losing ground behind the faster and more agile scouts and frigates.
“If we take these vessels intact, we can take the fight to Sanctuary.” She took a deep breath, “And when we attack, we will not be the only dead race in this universe.”
A deep growl sounded across the bridge as multiple voices joined in determination and fury.
Zjorja joined her voice to them as they screamed their defiance.
*
“See how the cowards reduce their speed?” Y’ran said. “I’m surprised they haven’t put their tails between their legs and retreated to hide in a hole somewhere.”
Crell sneered at his superior’s glee. He tired of pointing out how wrong he was. When he’d been hired to lead this ‘fleet,’ he’d been told he would be in command.
Shortly after his arrival, however, a shuttle had arrived from the surface, bringing this pompous idiot who had no more idea of deep space combat, than his terrible fashion sense.
“Y’ran, we should recall our screen.” Crell decided he’d make one last attempt to save this idiot’s life before he escaped on the ship currently warming up in the hanger bay.
“Nonsense, Crell.” Y’ran’s superior tone left no doubt about who he considered to be the expert in space warfare. He pointed toward the system view on the holo.
“They have little over one hundred ships. We have over three hundred attacking them in the first wave alone.” Y’ran smacked a bulkhead, too hard. Crell suppressed a laugh as he rubbed his hand.
“If only this junk pile could go faster, we might get to the battle sooner,” Y’ran moaned.
Crell pressed a stub on his wrist comm, informing his crew of pirates in the ship to prepare to depart.
“Y’ran, I must leave you for a while, to walk the ship before battle. I trust you can manage while I’m gone?”
Y’ran barely acknowledged him, dismissing his comment with a flourish of his hand.
Idiot. He and his crew deserved to die. Crell had done all he could. It was time to go.
*
“Enemy is launching missiles, Captain!” Zlotta expanded the holo to display the incoming swarm.
Zjorja grinned, “They really are that stupid, aren’t they?”
The question was rhetorical but nonetheless drew laughter from the bridge crew.
The enemy was so far away the missiles they’d just fired would run out of propellant before even acquiring a target. They’d continue on like so many dumb bullets, with the slightest move of their targets guaranteeing a miss.
“Captain, we have a lock on the enemy ships,” said Zlotta. “Drones are launching and deploying countermeasures.”
“Delay the countermeasures, Zlotta,” said the Captain. “There’s no point in wasting ordnance. We need to preserve it for more deserving targets.”
As expected, the missiles passed millions of miles in their wake.
“Launch our response, Zlotta.” Protocol stated the attack had to be initiated by the ship’s sub-commander. Zlotta flushed with pride as she leaned in to activate the prearranged launch. Zjokara beamed across at her.
The Seliaer shuddered as two hundred missiles erupted from her flanks. They joined with the other ships’ ordnance to become a swarm of over four thousand warheads bearing down on only three hundred small and fragile vessels.
“They should have fired a second salvo by now,” muttered Zlotta.
“What?” Zjokara snorted. “Captain, I believe Zlotta has discovered something interesting.”
The Captain nodded to proceed.
“Zlotta, perhaps you could tell the Captain what you’ve found?”
Zlotta beamed at her friend. “Captain, the enemy ships should have fired another salvo by now. In fact any one of our crews would be readying a third.
“As you know, the reload process on our smaller ships is a manual procedure carried out by the crew. Captain, what if there isn’t enough crew aboard to do it?”
“Captain, I have information which backs that up,” said Zjokara. She pressed a control and the holo focused in on one of Zhi’s moons, around which orbited their missing ships.
“Power and life support are minimal on these ships. I suspect they are empty, or almost so, and that they’ve been stripped of manpower to man this fleet attacking us now.”
Zlotta nodded, “This would also tie in with low number of countermeasures. As you know, this is a manual process as well.”
The Captain rubbed her chin for a moment before speaking. “Thank you, ladies. If those ships in orbit are indeed derelict, they represent our best chance for survival. It appears we should revert to our original plan, and destroy this fleet completely. We must do so, however, with as few losses to our own forces as possible. We will need everyone we have to man them.”
A tone sounded again. “Captain, our missiles have acquired and are closing on their targets,” said Zlotta.
The holo expanded to show the disorganized flotilla scatter to evade the incoming angels of death. Countermeasures and jamming caused a few to fade from view, only to reappear an instant later as the crew compensated for systems they knew intimately.
Their maneuvers neither avoided, nor even delayed their fate, as icons flashed the red of fatal damage. Inside half a minute, all that remained of over three hundred spacecraft was an expanding collection of plasma. There would be no Liberi porting across from these ships.
*
Y’ran stood open mouthed and motionless, watching his ships die by the dozen.
The bridge was silent, identical expressions returning from the few stations which were manned.
“Crell, what do we do now?” he squeaked, as he turned around. Crell was nowhere to be seen. Y’ran turned to the operations station.
“Get me Crell, now!” he spat.
The technician bent to his task, but turned around only a few moments later, his face ghostly white.
“Sir, Crell’s ship is gone. It’s no longer in the hangar bay, and none of his crew is present at their posts.
“WHAT?!” Y’ran ran to the console, staring at it as if he might magically understand anything about it. “Find him, you idiot! Find him and blow him out of space! That treacherous scum!”
The technician’s face drained of any remaining blood. “Sir, we can’t. It appears short range sensors have been placed in calibration mode. We can’t interrupt the process…”
His sentence was broken off as Y’ran dragged him out of his chair, and threw him across the console. He fell hard against the bulkhead, and lay motionless on the deck.
“Crell, you bastard! If I die today, I swear my ghost will hunt you down and haunt you forever!”
*
On a small ship, over a million miles behind the fleet, Crell smiled.
Idiot!
*
“Captain!” shouted Zlotta. “We have a portal forming on the main bridge.
The screen on the auxiliary bridge switched to show the most likely target for any Liberi attack.
A figure jumped through the shimmering circle, and Zjokara pressed a stud on her console. The Liberi began to float in the zero gravity.
A gasp escaped her lips as she saw the intruders face contort when the atmosphere vented. It was a child, a little boy, no more than twelve or thirteen.
Damn them. Damn them for making us do this, she thought, as a tear ran down her cheek.
It didn’t take long. The Liberi might be elite warriors, but they were biologics. Vacuum was as lethal to them as any other.
“Report.” The Captain’s voice was thick with emotion. Muffled sobs a
ccompanied hers.
Zjokara turned her chair to face Zjorja. “We are clear of the debris, Captain. On course for Zhi. Orbit in four hours, forty minutes.”
They’d adopted a sledgehammer attack and thrown four huge salvos at the enemy capital ships. Most of their heavy weapons were gone, the ships magazines exhausted, but the Sanctuary ships had only got one salvo away.
Even better, the enemy used preset electronic warfare aids, easily spoofed by her crews.
Of the five thousand plus missiles fired at them, thirty four broke through and impacted. One scout and four frigates were gone, though distress signals flooded the airwaves. At least some crew had escaped. Several capital ships had suffered minimal damage, with no loss to life.
Only four Liberi survived long enough to attack. All were now dead, with only one ship lost, but even then the crew was floating in lifeboats, ready to take up their new charges.
Now they had one last task. The portal would be destroyed by far orbit bombardment. They couldn’t risk their ships being boarded again, so they would contribute to the destruction already visited upon their world.
Once they were finished, they would heal and prepare. Sanctuary would suffer for what they had done. Over seven billion beings had died.
Someone would pay.
Chapter Five
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Katheryne wept, clinging onto Derren’s hand. Perri held her other. This funeral service bore similarities to one over two years before. The casket there had also been closed, but in this case, at least there was a body inside.
When Katheryne's mother disappeared during a disastrous experiment, there had been nothing left. Her service was one of remembrance only. This time, Katheryne didn’t contain her grief, as she had done for months after her mother’s funeral.
Both her parents were gone, and she hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to either of them. While her mother wasn't truly dead, her father definitely was. There was no doubt of that, and the circumstances leading to his death made it all the more tragic.
The breakdown that drove him to his final reckless act had taken not just his life, but the life of a person who Katheryne had loved like a big sister.
Jules, who had kept in touch with Katheryne over the two years she was estranged from her father, had apparently been exaggerating his sanity when she assured her he was okay.
The slow procession of people passed them by. She cried so much, she didn’t even see them. It was a collection of gentle smiles and glances, as her family friends and Father's work colleagues walked in single file past the three of them. It took a while, as her father had been a prominent scientist, a leader in his field of particle physics, but more than that, he’d been a friend to so many of them.
Finally, the hangers on departed. The day was bright, but a bitter wind blew across the cemetery. Katheryne gathered her senses as Derren pulled her into his embrace.
“I can’t believe he’s gone.” She sniffed.
“Me neither,” said Perri, glumly. “I mean who’d have thought that your dad could have___”
She broke off the sentence sharply, as she realized yet again her mouth had begun speaking before her brain engaged.
“Kat, I’m so sorry...I didn’t mean,” she stammered.
Katheryne touched her flustered friend gently on the arm.
“Relax, Perri,” she said, “it’s not as if you aren’t right. I guess my mom’s death made him a little mad.”
She snorted. “Well, maybe more than a little.”
Perri grimaced, but reached up to hold Katheryne’s hand tightly.
“He loved you, Katheryne. No matter what, he always loved you; you know that.”
“Do I?” Katheryne replied bitterly. “I don’t think he loved anyone at the end.”
Tears ran down her face as she sobbed. Derren drew her and Perri into his arms.
“Grief can do strange things to a person,” he whispered. Even with his voice muted, it sounded musical. He drew Katheryne’s gaze to his own and they shared a moment of silent communication.
Perri was aware of the feelings passing between her two friends, but her fledgling awareness hadn’t developed enough for her to discern any detail. She knew Derren was projecting his love and support into Katheryne, through the bond that only they shared.
They truly were one soul, but instead of being split between two bodies, the energies entwined them, running through both physical beings simultaneously. Perri watched in awe at the image.
“Katheryne, you of all people should know how grief can change you,” he said.
Katheryne had thought only a few weeks earlier, that she betrayed her unborn baby sister when she failed to protect her from being captured by Tenybris. She’d spent a week in a downward spiral of self-loathing, before Perri dragged her kicking and squealing back to reality. It wasn’t her fault.
“God, I wish I’d tried harder to reach him,” she said, “if only I hadn’t been so wrapped up in myself, maybe I could have gotten to him before he did this. Maybe___”
Derren’s finger touched her lips and silenced her. “Didn’t we agree you were going to stop this nasty habit of blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong in the universe?” He smiled, and that was enough to elicit a similar softening of Katheryne’s features.
Perri also took the opportunity and butted in. “And let’s face it, Kat, you couldn’t really have done much more. Your dad wouldn’t return your calls, remember?”
Katheryne knew they were right. When they’d returned from Sanctuary, one of her first actions was to call her father to explain how his wife, her mother, was still alive. He wouldn’t talk to her.
So, as she stood there, she knew it would be a long time before she could forgive her father, not just for leaving her, but for taking Jules as well.
Derren felt the grief give way partially into melancholy, so he hugged her tightly.
“I know you two may not take much comfort from this,” he began, “but your father’s and Jules’ energies are now in the Never, mingling with millions of others, waiting to be reborn again.”
Perri looked at Katheryne with uncertainty. Even with what they had gone through over the last few weeks, Perri wasn’t about to write off her whole belief system without a lot more thought. The whole thing sounded a bit like the karma mumbo jumbo some people on Earth believed in. She really hoped it wasn’t too similar to this, and your new life didn’t depend on the actions in your previous one. She didn’t want to come back as a slug.
Katheryne, however, had seen and done so much more than Perri, so she accepted the incontrovertible truth, even though even she couldn’t even begin to understand it.
All religion was a lie; at least the ones she knew about here on Earth. There was a creator, a great Maker as some of the races called it, who had made Sanctuary and spun the Never outwards to surround it. Everyone thought the Never was infinite, but Katheryne had travelled outside its boundaries, and held the entire Never in the palm of her hand. She knew there must be other similar universes out there, and she was certain they were not naturally occurring phenomena.
“At least they died free,” she said, more firmly this time. “It’s not like we have to chase after them and free them from Hell."
Old habits die hard it seemed. It made sense for her to refer to what her sister was currently experiencing, as the imagined underworld of torment. Indeed, nothing could have described her predicament better. She was trapped inside a creature that Tenybris had created from her soul, a soul he had tortured and twisted beyond all recognition. The innocent part, which remained trapped within, had been no accident. Tenybris had left her there, helplessly bound to the creature, and damned to witness the heinous acts being performed before her. Through it all, she still existed, and Katheryne was determined to do all in her power to save her.
Derren groaned, “Couldn't we extend our deal to include a promise to not embark upon hopeless quests? I mean, it's only been a little un
der a month since we defeated B’ran and Dwenn. I thought we might be allowed a brief pause.”
As they walked toward the car, Perri snorted. “Like the pause Krista and Toshi are taking?”
Derren wilted visibly. His twin sister and his best friend were off-world, trying to find out how far the leadership of Sanctuary had expanded its influence. They had been gone only two days, but sent word back using the island, the astral world Katheryne had created, of several attacks on worlds that were allied to the Walkers.
Toshi had told them of the invasion forces assembled, in the central gathering plaza on Sanctuary, the last time he and Laren, his girlfriend travelled through it. There had been thousands of troops concealed behind diffraction shields, ready to flood through the massive portals to betray and slaughter the unsuspecting worlds beyond.
Now it looked like whatever plan the Leadership had was in motion. Their small band of rebels needed all the intelligence they could get if they were to mount a resistance. To an outsider, given what they faced, a whole world of advanced soldiers who had at their core the most lethal warriors that ever existed, any thought of resistance might have been absurd.
Unfortunately for them, they had no idea how powerful Katheryne was. She was what the Walkers had been searching for, for thousands of years. In the prophecy left behind by Olumé, before he returned to his home world and died, it was foreseen that a being would be born who would unite the other Powers.
These beings existed throughout the myriad alternate realities, and she was to use their combined power to defeat Tenybris once and for all.
Unfortunately, the prophecy also highlighted one of their biggest problems; whatever had to be done to unite all these beings, had to be done from Sanctuary; which at the moment would be a very unpleasant place for any of them.
Worlds of the Never: A book with Dragons, Faeries and Elves, mixed with Science Fiction and Time Travel, for Young Adults and Teens. (Tales of the Neverwar 2) Page 3
