It worked.
Not only did it slow down the aging process, it actually reversed the process significantly. The star reverted back to a state of stability, saving the planet, the star system and many others.
Once the war started, the civilian ships were grounded for their own safety and the navy started sending out ships to chart new areas of space in an expensive and sometimes dangerous exploration operation. But, it was a big galaxy and with a majority of the navy committed to the war effort, much of the galaxy was left unexplored. In fact, less than ten percent of the charted galaxy was charted after the war began.
The pig-faced foreman clambered into the hole and inspected the surface Khai had hit with the jackhammer. Pulling out a magnifying glass and crawling on his hands and knees over the surface, he examined it closely.
“Get our geologist over here on the double!” he shouted.
A lengthy hover ride, and forty minutes later, the geologist showed up with all his gear.
“Where the hell were you, Gor’Tsu Gorn Planet?”
“Might as well have been,” the geologist scoffed. “Most of the sky lanes are down until the shield has been successfully tested. I had to stick to the surface roads.”
“Whatever. Just get in the hole and tell me what that is in my way,” the foreman ordered, pointing a chubby finger at the hole.
The geologist climbed down and put on a helmet with built-in microscopes and geological scanners of all kinds. Within seconds, he knew exactly what it was. Using a high-powered, ultra-fine cutting laser and extracting a small piece to be sure, he scrutinized it very closely.
“I don’t believe it…” he said.
“Well? What is it?” the foreman asked impatiently. “Hello! What is it?”
Chapter Two
“Ti’tan’lium,” said the Minister of Planetary Affairs, Tran’Ri Trall, a tall, lanky man of sixty-two years, whose sunken-in green eyes and gaunt features gave him a sickly look.
Ti’tan’lium was discovered during the golden age of Seryys history. The metal was discovered by accident during a mining operation that was digging for gold and silver. At first, the metal was discarded as a nuisance, as it was impossible to cut because it absorbed laser energy and was insufferably resilient, so cutting through with jackhammers and chisels simply wasn’t an option, and it was ridiculously time consuming. The mere presence of Ti’tan’lium on a site could bankrupt a mining or excavation company. Places where it was discovered were marked as useless wastes of land where nothing could be built or harvested.
Roughly fifty years later, an inventor and registered genius, developed a cutting laser of high-energy that could slowly cut through the metal. He became an overnight billionaire for both developing the technique and using it to make over-priced jewelry. He could charge such high prices because of the extreme difficulty to extract and manipulate the metal. Before long, the crème de la crème were all wearing rings and bracelets of the precious metal.
The Prime Minister at that time had approached the maker of this revolutionary method because his advisors saw another application for the metal… currency. With a value of ten times what gold or platinum was worth, it had very attractive monetary value. Eventually, after several failed attempts at trying to buy the patent from him, the Prime Minister ordered a seizure of all assets and had the inventor thrown in jail to rot. Of course, the general public was told that he sold the patent, bought an island and fell of the grid. Prime Minister Puar was not proud of the things his government had done. But he was determined not to make those kinds of mistakes.
Later on, the government found another more relevant use for the metal. Given its resilience to laser energy and physical damage, it was eventually used as hull plating for warships, as ablative armor for a second line of defense after a ship’s shields failed. This made Ti’tan’lium even more valuable. That was when Seryys began really exploring the stars. Being able to move through space and avoid being pulverized by a meteor, or being able to get detailed sensor readings of a sun from within its corona doubled the efficiency of the navy to chart the galaxy.
“What?” Prime Minister Pual’Kin Puar asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. Department of Planetary Agriculture and Geology confirms it.”
“The entire city?”
“That’s right,” Trall said dryly.
“How did something like this go unnoticed for so long?”
“I can tell you that, sir,” said a young man, thirty-something years old, with black hair parted on the left side, lean, roughly five and a half feet tall, wearing the clothes of a professional, pressed trousers and a shirt of black with a high collar. It was nothing fancy, nothing like what the Prime Minister wore.
“Prime Minister, may I present Sam’Ule San, Director of D-PAG.”
“Pleasure, sir,” Prime Minister Puar said, standing to his full height of six and a half feet and extending his muscular hand in greeting. “Please, proceed,” he said, his pale green eyes beneath groomed eyebrows met the young man’s calm blue eyes.
A holographic image of Seryys City was hanging in the middle of the room. It was an over-head image taken by satellite. With the press of button on a laser pointer, the image rotated ninety degrees on its y-axis to reveal a three-dimensional side view of the city. The image also included points of interest beneath the ground, like watersheds, sewer systems and superstructures. Considerably lower than any watershed or basement was a pulsating blue section. Only one spot on the map showed a point where something reached the depth of the pulsating blue section of the underground map.
“As you can see here, Prime Minister, this slab of Ti’tan’lium is far below any structure in the city and was never touched-”
“Until now,” the Prime Minister interrupted.
“Yes, sir.” San agreed. “The sheer size of the casino demanded a superstructure bigger and deeper than any building in recorded history.”
“Surely, you can’t expect me to believe that this whole time we’ve been sitting on top of the biggest vein of Ti’tan’lium in Seryys history.”
Ti’tan’lium was forged much the same way gold was. The only real difference being that the veins developed horizontally rather than vertically, forming “plates” of ore between sections of crust. It was public knowledge that Seryys was mined completely out of Ti’tan’lium; the Naval Corps of Engineers were mining other uninhabited worlds to feed the ever growing military demand for the metal.
“Seryys city has stood for over a millennium, sir. We simply didn’t have the technology back then to detect such a large deposit. Hell, we didn’t even know what Ti’tan’lium was until a thousand years ago.”
He was right. Smart kid, Prime Minster Puar thought.
“So, what do we do?” Puar asked the young director.
“Well, nothing,” he said very matter-of-factly. “To mine it would be to destroy the whole city.”
“I see,” Puar said, leaning back in his seat in an almost defeated posture. “There’s no way to tunnel to it from the east, here?” Puar clicked a button on his desk and the map zoomed out to reveal a cliff ten miles to the east Seryys City. “Kal’Hoom Karr Canyon could make a very good staging point.”
“It’s not a matter of how to approach it,” San said. “It has everything to do with size of the plate. To excavate that much material from under the city would cause the whole city to collapse into the ground.”
“Can we relocate the city?” Trall chimed in.
“Relocate the city? Are you crazy?” the director asked. “You’re talking more money to rebuild the city than the worth of what’s down there.”
“Indeed.” Trall said.
“Besides,” Puar said, “aside from the physical impossibility of relocation, the council would never go with it. I couldn’t even begin to think of all the red tape involved with something like that. I would be buried in paperwork for years—no decades.” Puar leaned forward and leaned on his elbows. “That’s w
hy I still prefer combat to politics. No committees, no councils, just you and your enemy. No rules. Kill or be killed.”
Prime Minister Pual’Kin Puar had been in his position for two terms of a maximum four-term presidency. Each term was five years long. He was hugely popular among the people and was highly regarded, respected and admired by the military as he was the first retired war veteran to serve in office. He was highly decorated in his lifetime career in the SCGF (Seryys Combat Ground Forces). Now, at the age of seventy-eight, he was still an active man—far too busy to ever marry. He was tall, dashing and still muscle-bound after all these years with a graying goatee and military-style haircut. He was less than two-thirds through his life, as most Seryysans lived to be roughly a hundred and twenty-five years old.
Suddenly a klaxon filled the air and red lights started flashing around the Honorifical Office.
“Finally!” Puar barked.
“What?” San asked.
“The Vyysarri are attacking,” Trall said.
“We can finally see if our new line of defense works.”
“Oh, the new shield!” San said with sudden realization.
From the Honorifical Office, the three watched the battle’s progress on a holomonitor in the center of the room where the map of Seryys City had been floating. A Vyysarri capital ship, a fierce-looking battle cruiser which was comprised of two elongated, wedge-shaped hulls with sharp angles, bristled with cannons, mounted side-by-side like wings on top of a larger elongated wedge-shaped hull with a curved stern that housed powerful sub-light engines, a Fang-Class destroyer, broke the line and commenced fire on the planet. The cannons unleashed hell, the shield shimmered as the energy was absorbed and shunted to the energy collectors lined around the parameter of the city and stored for future use in powering the shield.
From the streets, people dazzled at the spectacle as if it was a fireworks display. There was cheering and clapping as people flooded the streets to see the marvel at work. To not have to cower in designated bunkers during an attack was a blessing the residents of Seryys City rarely enjoyed. The fireworks were punctuated by blossoms in the sky high above the shield, as giant titans winked out of existence in the blink of an eye.
“Admiral! The drop ships are debarking!” a young tactical officer announced.
Let’s hope that shield holds. “Focus the cannons on them!”
“Aye, sir.”
The cannons on a Seryys Dagger-Class dreadnaught, a standard warship shaped much like the ships of old that used to sail the seas of Seryys, blasted away at the drop ships. The Dagger-Class dreadnaught was over a thousand feet long and two hundred feet wide. The belly of the ship was curved with a flatter top and the gunwale of the ship was lined with cannons. Where the mast should have been, the bridge, com tower, sensor array and shield generator sat. The deck of the ship was a runway for smaller dogfighters. The aft of the ship curved inward like a boomerang and housed the ship’s propulsion.
The battle was going well. With the shield up and holding, the navy was able to focus on shooting them down, rather than trying to shoot them down all the while maneuvering themselves between the Vyysarri gun boats and Seryys. The same scene was playing out for hundreds of Seryysan ships in orbit over Seryys City.
Once the Vyysarri realized that they couldn’t punch through the shield, and all their drop ships were reduced to debris, they cut their losses and retreated in a hurry. Cheering rang through the ship and com channel as the first major victory was won against a hostile, brutally violent adversary.
“I would say that was successful test,” Trall said almost casually.
“Yes, I agree!” Puar said very happily. “Not a single civilian was killed.”
“Congratulations, Prime Minister.” San said with a smile and hearty handshake.
“Thank you.” he beamed with pride, like the father of a kid who scored the winning goal at the buzzer. “Thank you very much. Now, would you like to continue our conversation?”
“Uh, no, thank you. Watching that battle wore me out. I think I should retire, but thank you for your audience and I will leave the technical details with Minister Trall for you to review at your earliest convenience.”
“Again, Director, you have my thanks. Good evening.”
“Prime Minister,” San said cordially with a slight dip of the head.
He took one last look upward through the skylights in the office and strolled out to the lift car.
Khai strode through a large alley, his fists balled up ready for a fight… possibly the fight of his life. He could hear footsteps behind him, heavy ones. Suddenly, he realized that he could not win this fight- not by a long shot. So he did the only thing he could… hide. He wriggled in between two giant trash receptacles and tried his best not to breathe. He shook uncontrollably. Whether it was the cool, winter night of the Seryys Slums or the sheer terror he felt, he couldn’t tell. What he knew at that point was that he was going to die that night and there was nothing he could do about it.
His father would have saved him, had he still been alive. He was dead, killed by a burglar who was simply looking for money to get his fix a few years ago. Now, without his father, Khai roamed the streets, sifting through garbage for food and discarded clothes; collecting useless trinkets he could use to barter for other things he needed.
So there he was, cowering from a stranger who was most likely going to kill him or worse… The giant boots stalked past, clumping with every step. They paused. Then, they started stalking down the street again. Khai let out a whimpering sigh of relief. He dared not move. Instead, he gathered whatever filth there was around and bundled up to stay warm. His little, watery eyes began to grow heavier and heavier. His eyes were about to close.
A giant hand wrapped around his neck. He yelped in pain and terror as the hand yanked him out from between the bins. Little Khai’Xander Khail kicked and cried as the hand held him by the back of his neck. An evil giggle clucked up from the man’s belly as he shook the boy violently.
“Hold still, you little shit, or this is gonna hurt even more,” he said with a high-pitched voice.
The man reached for the boy with his other hand to do who-knows-what.
“Hey!” a deep, commanding voice shouted, stopping the man from his dark deeds.
He dropped little Khai. He hit the ground with a thud.
Khai sat up in his soaked sheets, his heart pounding and sweat dripping down his face, chest and back. His chest heaved deep breaths as he swung his feet around and planted them on the cool, hardwood floor beneath his bed. The floor thumped under his feet and he rolled his eyes as an elderly voice shouted at him.
“Hey! Keep it down! I’m trying to sleep, damn it!”
“You and me both, pal,” Khai growled.
Rubbing the back of his neck, he zombie-walked to the bathroom. The door hissed open and a dull light turned on, casting a soft glow over the sink. He dipped his hands into the sink and cold water automatically poured into them, cupped together. Khai splashed it on his face; the cool stream crept comfortably down his chest and back and all the way to his feet where it pooled on the floor.
Taking a good look at his doppelganger in the mirror, his cold, gray eyes stared back at him above prominent cheek bones and below an even more prominent brow. He took another dip from the sink and ran the cool water on his fingers over his military-style buzzed head, which was already mostly gray, but had some flecks of brown still left. As the water slowly dripped down, it paused on a large scar that ran horizontally over his left eyebrow, one of many wounds he sustained over his years of service. Now there’s the nightmare, he said silently to himself. Though he was only forty-six years old—not even midlife by Seryysan standards—he looked old and haggard from the hard life he had lived. Sometimes, he was mistaken for someone twice his age.
He was still in top physical shape, though. Muscled from neck to feet, he was the epitome of military physique. On Seryys, it was harder for him to keep his strength up to wh
at it used to be—which is why he chose a job of hard labor. A man of his background was naturally—or unnaturally, depending on whom you asked—stronger than most people his age, and was a viable threat well into his eighties.
On his left arm just above his bicep, was a tattoo. His entire platoon got the same one. It was a picture of crossing swords behind the roaring face of a Seryysan Panther with “SCGF” in script over the top and “109” beneath it. He was part of the 109th Mobile Infantry Division of the Seryys Combat Ground Forces. After his mandatory five-year term of service, he stayed on for an additional twenty years to fight the hated Vyysarri.
Khai pressed and held his finger on a hidden button next to the mirror. A little chime dinged and then the sound of whirring servos filled the bathroom. The mirror slid back and to the left into the wall, revealing a secret compartment within. He reached in and pulled out his service sidearm, a high-caliber pistol with hundreds of notches in sets of five along the barrel and grip. These notches didn’t necessarily denote kills as much as it did kills by headshots from that gun.
That gun held more meaning to him than any trinket or Medal of Honor he had ever been awarded. It was proof that he was good at what he did… what he used to do. Now, he was just a lonely construction worker whose friends were dead, killed in an ongoing, bloody and costly war. After holding the familiar and oddly comforting weight of that weapon for a while, he re-engaged the safety and put it back. The mirror slid back into place and he left the bathroom, completely forgetting that the whole reason he went in there to begin with was to take his pills.
The Seryys Chronicles: Death Wish Page 2
