by Jerome Kelly
“She’s a sweet girl,” said Kalmar, “seems nice, looks like she has a few things weighing down on her though. You and her seem to have a lot of chemistry, you two weren’t ever… you know?”
“Lucy? No, we weren’t like that,” James was quick to clarify the situation, “Lucy is like a sister to me. I lost pretty much everyone I was close to in the war with the Vulians, she’s one of the last people I have left from those days.”
“I see,” said Kalmar, “I was just curious, I noticed that you seem to have something with the blonde woman from before, is she your other half?”
“Isha? Yeah, she’s my wife,” said James, “we’ve been married for three years now, quite happily too… well, I don’t know, she’s being very distant with me at the moment. Something is up with her and she’s been acting a bit weird.”
“Have you tried asking her about it?”
“Several times now,” James sighed, “she isn’t giving anything away though, I think it’s just best to wait it out, let her tell me in her own time. It could just be that she’s homesick, she’s really fed up with the admirals in the fleet working us too hard all the time, not to mention that I shifted her here from her own world and she left everything behind for me when she did.”
“I wouldn’t let it worry you too much right now,” said Kalmar, “once all of this is over, things will settle down and you’ll have a chance to get things straightened out with her. Lets just focus on dealing with the Hunters and getting the Shadow Bringer to safety for now.”
Kalmar certainly wasn’t wrong there. If Isha wasn’t willing to talk, the best he could do was focus on the real problems that all of them faced. They had not had any real problems in their three years or marriage, there was no reason to think that something could have suddenly gone wrong now.
Staying behind to help Lucy with her simulations had actually made James and Kalmar late for their own briefing, the rest of James’s command crew was already gathered and waiting for them. Kalmar wasted no time in going over the basics with everyone, explaining all about the Hunters, the Shadow Bringer and the Adeans’ plan as well as their own plan of action for dealing with the Hunters. There was almost a look of “I knew it” among those who had not been present at the meeting with the senate.
“So Artennes was keeping us in the dark all along,” Isha said as Kalmar finished his explanations, “we really could have done with knowing all of this before. Their secrets nearly cost us our lives back there.”
“You can be sure that we will approach them with this information once we get back,” said James, “that will have to come later though. For the time being, captain Kalmar has agreed to work with us to help us find the missing pieces of the Shadow Bringer. Our primary objective now is to keep this weapon out of the hands of the Hunters at all costs.”
“Do you think this course of action will work?” Melina asked, “surely if the Hunters haven’t managed to find it in thirty-five years then surely it couldn’t hurt to just leave it where it is and hope they never find it.”
“That’s what the senate also believes,” said Kalmar, “they think that because the Hunters have not found it so far, they will continue to be unsuccessful in their search. I have to disagree with them, the Hunters have been searching every system in the sector for decades now. Their search has taken them through every possible system in their path and it is my opinion that it is only a matter of time until they find it. The best course of action is to move it somewhere else entirely and keep it out of their reach.”
“I can imagine that your people may not be too happy if we arrive on scene and try to take the weapon from underneath them,” said Ansare, “if they want the place protected from outside influence, they could take some very serious action to prevent us from interfering with their plans.”
“My people will not be in attendance of the planet,” said Kalmar, “putting a fleet around the planet to guard it would simply alert the Hunters to it’s location and it’s importance. By leaving the planet unguarded and placing the fleet elsewhere, we leave a false trail to try and lead them away towards other unimportant worlds.”
“We know that this tactic can only work for so long,” said James, “the Hunters will catch on and the Adean people will eventually be forced to find an alternative.”
“Exactly. There already signs that the Hunters are moving in the relative direction of Adean itself. They have adapted to counter our tactics and they often ignore our blockades or scout parties to simply go about their search at their own pace. They are quite aware of what we are trying to do and they will not fall for our moves and our decoys any longer. Moving the pieces of the weapon will come as an unexpected move to them and if we’re lucky, we can do this without them noticing that we moved it at all.”
“So whereabouts is this piece of the weapon hidden?” Ansare asked, “I would assume that it must be a pretty remote system if the Hunters have not found it yet after more than three decades of searching.”
“Yes, it’s far in the opposite direction to the Blue Ring nebula and Hunter territory,” said Kalmar, “the planet we’re heading to is called Sharstrom, an old Jaiytid stronghold. The world was completely abandoned about seven hundred years ago but there is still a fully intact Jaiytid city on the surface, one of the last in the entire galaxy I suspect. Beneath the city is what we are looking for. It’s a hangar bay, hidden under the ground, full of Jaiytid fighters and run by an advanced artificial intelligence.”
“So Raylia wasn’t the only one of it’s kind…” James thought back to his own discovery of the hangar bay on that desolate planet that had effectively won him the war against the Vulians, “when you went there, were you able to learn anything from the AI?”
“The AI was damaged and it shut down a few hours after we discovered it,” said Kalmar, “we were only able to get the basics from it. We had already lost the major piece of the weapon to the Hunters a year earlier so we already knew as much as it could tell us. The only information that we have on the Shadow Bringer is that we must assemble all four pieces before we or anyone else can use the weapon. Tell me, did you find any references to the Shadow Bringer in the one you found?”
“No, there was no mention of it,” said James, “just a hangar full of fighters. The Iyacs was a great help to us, we were just a bit too focused on trying to win the war to really look deep into it’s memory banks. There is a lot more it could have taught us.”
“For all we know, the Jaiytids could have placed any number of these facilities around the galaxy,” said Kalmar, “what we do know for certain though is that one of these pieces of the Shadow Bringer is on Sharstrom. We simply need to pick it up and get it off the surface so that the Hunters will not find it if they should ever discover the city.”
“You make it sound so easy,” said Kosare, “I’m guessing this mission wont be as straightforward as you’re making it out to be will it?”
“No, I’m afraid it wont,” said Kalmar, “firstly, there is an environmental hazard to contend with. The planet lost some of it’s protective ozone layer about seven hundred years ago and this raised the temperatures of the surface considerably. Because the planet is tidally locked to it’s star, one side of it’s surface always faces the sun and once the protective layer was gone, it heated up so much that fires spread across the surface and burned off most of the oxygen in the atmosphere. It is now almost unbreathable.”
“We have re-breather masks, that wont be a problem,” said James, “but what about the city itself? Will we need any protection from the heat?”
“No, the city is built on the terminator between night and day, the temperature there is comfortable, even after the loss of the ozone layer,” said Kalmar, “the city is in an eternal state of twilight though. With the power mostly out, it will be dark and visibility will be poor so we will need to be very careful. It would be very easy for something hiding in the shadows to ambush us.”
“If we get in there and get the weapon without taking too much time, hopefully it wont matter,” said James, “we’ll go down there, find the hangar, bring the piece of the weapon back to the ship and we’ll try to do it with as little fuss as possible.”
Apart from Tolassa, the home of the galactic archives, there was no other record of an actual, intact, Jaiytid city, a relic of an age long gone by. In the centuries since the downfall, Tolassa had seen multiple re-constructions and it was now more in keeping with the other major cities on Tolis so it was not totally reflective of an ancient Jaiytid city. It would be fascinating to see what a real, unchanged, Jaiytid city looked like up close and in person. This would likely be their only chance to ever see one.
James dismissed the meeting there and allowed the crew to get back to the bridge and get them on course for Sharstrom. He was quick to take Isha away from the group though, he wanted to try to get through to her and get the concerns out in the open and dealt with before the next part of the mission.
“You don’t need to worry, James, I’m fine,” she insisted, knowing exactly what was coming her way, “I wont back out again.”
“I just wanted to check you were Ok,” James said to her, “we’ve barely spoken since Lahara, I’m starting to worry about you.”
“I’ve already told you, you don’t need to worry, it was a one time thing,” said Isha, “I’ve gotten over it, I’m feeling fine, I’ll be fine for the rest of the mission now.”
“I just get the feeling that there is still something you aren’t telling me,” James sighed, “I have some time to talk about it if you want, just please don’t keep me in the dark.”
“Nothing’s wrong, why would it be?” Isha said chirpily, “we should get back to the bridge, we’ve got an important mission to complete.”
“Isha, please…”
“James, don’t worry about it,” she was quick to cut him off mid-sentence, “I promise you, once all this is over, we can spend some quality time together and everything will be fine, Ok? Love you.”
“Love you too…” but he found himself talking to the back of her head once more as she joined the rest of the crew in making her way back up to the bridge. There was only so much longer he could take being kept in the dark like this.
* * * * *
The journey to Sharstrom took them a good seven hours away from Adean, far in the opposite direction from which they had first come. The planet itself reminded James a little bit of Naisus, one side unliveable, the other bearing life and civilisation. There was a narrow strip of green along the night-day divide with deserts covering the side facing the sun and ice sheets covering the side facing away from the sun.
“The city is at seventy-five degrees north of the equator, right on the night-day divide,” said Kalmar, inputting the coordinates into the ship’s main computer, “if we take the ship into a low orbit, we should have a pretty direct path down there.”
“Ivanov, what are the surface conditions like at the landing site?” James asked his tactical officer. He didn’t want any surprises once he got down there, he wanted to know exactly what conditions he and his crew would be facing.
“Surface pressure and gravity are both within normal range,” said Ivanov, “apart from the lack of oxygen, it looks pretty safe. I’m not detecting any signs of life so you should be well in the clear down there.”
“Good enough for me,” said James, “Ok, helmsman Daniels, I’ll be leaving you in charge while I’m gone, I’m gonna need everyone down there for this one. I trust you can look after the ship?”
“She’ll be fine with me, don’t you worry,” Daniels said confidently, “you go down and do what you need to do.”
“Good to hear it. As for everyone else, lets get ourselves down to the flyer.”
They were sure to make a stop at the armoury on the way down though. Lucy, taking a break from her Alliance in Chaos game, was on hand to ensure everyone was well armed as well as providing them with all the equipment they would need for a surface expedition. She had one or two extra surprises for them too.
“These are called rukhan,” she said, handing each of them a narrow black blade about one meter in length from the handle upwards, “they’re Jaiytid blades that we recovered on a recent survey of the Raylia facility. They’re made of one of the strongest materials we’ve ever encountered and they’re sharp as hell. They’ll be handy if you run into trouble.”
James hadn’t had much time for combat training in the past few years. He and Isha had both had some lessons in hand to hand combat that would allow them to stay alive in such situations but it was nothing compared to the level of training of the rest of the team. Saavoy was a blade-master, one of the greatest swordsmen in the galaxy. Morelli and Julio would both have extensive close combat training as it was part of Voronian culture while Kosare could probably take out just about anything with any weapon she chose. Kalmar meanwhile had unpacked a very sleek looking sniper rifle, Adean infiltration weapons likely being a class above their own what with the greater need for stealth tactics in this region of the galaxy.
James was less impressed with the re-breather masks. He had only had to wear one once before and it had not been overly comfortable. Still, they couldn’t go to the surface without them. They were simply made up of a mask that covered the mouth and nose attached to a small device worn on the back; not bulky or obtrusive, just a little uncomfortable to wear for hours on end.
As ever, Melina eagerly took up the controls of the Mantis flyer, never missing a chance to be in the pilot seat of a fast ship and show off her flying skills. All nine of the command crew crammed into the flyer as she lifted them off and flew them out towards the lifeless and desolate looking world of Sharstrom.
“How is it that the Hunters never found this place?” Kosare asked as the flyer made for the surface city, “I mean, you said they had been searching the sector for thirty five years. If you assume that one ship could search an entire system in a few days, thats maybe three hundred systems a year and in thirty years thats over nine thousand, per ship. Even then we don’t know how many Hunter ships there are. I mean, are there dozens? Hundreds? More even?”
“I don’t think they are very prolific,” said Kalmar, “we have never encountered more than two at any particular time and also, we’ve been thwarting them and leading them on false chases for much of those thirty years, they haven’t had the chance to search that many systems. I am confident that this place is far off of their radar, at least for now.”
“I would still advise caution,” said Ansare, “they wouldn’t have been named Hunters if they were not adept at both setting and springing traps for us to walk into.”
“We wont take any chances, we’ll be prepared if we run into anything,” said James, “we didn’t detect any signs of life so as far as we can tell, the world is completely deserted. The only thing we need to focus on is finding this weapon and then we can worry about dealing with the Hunters.”
James couldn’t help but wonder just how deadly this weapon could be or even what it might do when unleashed. There surely had to be a limit to how much damage a single weapon could do. Surely it couldn’t be powerful enough to destroy Adean itself could it? The senate had seemed worried enough about it’s potential that they were devoting their entire race to it’s protection so it’s power was clearly a concern for them.
From the passenger hold, James tried to make out his surroundings. The poor light made it difficult to see properly but from what he could tell, the landscape of the city was not too unlike that of the Tolian city of Korodon. Tall silver skyscrapers reached up hundreds of meters from the ground all around them, creating a quite magnificent skyline that looked incredibly dramatic in the twilight of it’s sun.
“Everyone make sure your re-breather is on properly,” James said to his crew, making sure everyone had properly set up their re-breather masks befor
e opening the flyer’s loading doors. It wouldn’t be doing them any good to suffocate from a lack of air at the moment they touched the ground. James did not have any intentions of letting anything happen to any of his crew while they were retrieving this weapon.
As Melina landed the flyer, the doors opened onto the landing pad and they were finally greeted with the sight of a real, intact Jaiytid city. Now that they could see it properly rather than catching glimpses through the windows of the flyer, it’s magnificence was evident for them all to see.
“Wow, this is… incredible,” Morelli said, in awe of the wonderfully constructed city around them all, “I never imagined I would see a place like this in my lifetime.”
The entire group had needed a few seconds just to take in the scenery around them. Even though each of their races was descended from the Jaiytids that had existed just over five centuries ago, it was as if they were looking on the work of an ancient and long-dead race. Everyone was taking a few moments to admire the scene, everyone except for Kosare who was fumbling about in the extra pack she had brought along with her.
“Jaiden, what is all that for?”
“I need to document this,” she said, pulling out a small recording device, “no one else at the archives has ever had a chance to see something like this, we don’t exactly have an excess of ancient Jaiytid cities laying around the galaxy.”
James could completely understand how she felt. If he wasn’t so focused on trying to retrieve the Shadow Bringer, he might have joined in with her as she explored and documented the city, he found the whole thing fascinating. They couldn’t afford to wait around for too long though, they needed to reach the underground hanger as soon as they could. As spectacular as the city was, it was also a little eerie. The place was totally abandoned and yet there was little sign of any wear and tear on the buildings around them, the city looked as if it could have been lived in as recently as a few days ago.
“Lets get moving,” he said eventually, “this isn’t a field trip, we have serious business to get down to. Kalmar, can you point us in the right direction?”
