by Aer-ki Jyr
“I will make available what we have.”
Riax nodded his thanks, then looked at the fourth individual on the platform with him.
“Ley-Jupret, once I can supply sufficient elements, I want you to resume construction of your Erantric line of warships. It will be some time before I can field a decent defense force, until then I must rely on the strength of the Cres fleet, which I need as strong as possible.”
The Jupret exchanged glances with the Braga and Kepra. “Those designs are currently beyond our understanding.”
“I’ll get your scientists up to speed, but understand this . . . in the years to come numbers will be against us, therefore we must field superior units. Mass production is a luxury we unfortunately are not going to possess for some time.”
“It has been that way for us since the fall of your Empire,” the Prefect noted. “We are prepared for and well experienced in such endeavors.”
“I hope so,” Riax cautioned. “Because right now I am vulnerable and my enemies, whoever they are, know it. I need time to build and I need that freighter before I can set the process in motion.”
“You will have both,” the Ley-Prefect said firmly. “I’ll see to it personally.”
Riax glanced up at the assembled junior members of the Conclave. “You have done well in the Empire’s absence. The others have not been so fortunate. I know that the Junta have disintegrated and many of our former associates have lost their way. What I do not know is the fate of our other allies. In order to piece back together what we once had, we need to know what is left. When I have built up sufficient defenses here I will need you to build and launch expeditionary fleets with the intent of locating the Illar, Provarat, Nevar, and Dallek.”
“Simultaneously, we will begin scouting out and claiming new territory to fuel the growth of the Empire. The time for reclusion is over. Through the Cres, the Empire will be reborn and we will reclaim and right this galaxy. At which time your assistance will not be forgotten.”
Riax turned back to the four Cres leaders. “Are you up to the challenge?”
The four leaders exchanged glances and brief telepathic conversations with the others assembled in the Conclave, but there was no need for debate. Each and every one of them was resolute in their support of the Human and they would either succeed or die trying to help him reestablish the Empire.
The Ley-Prefect responded for them all, with a slight rise of her chin.
“We are, Darmek. Give the order and we will follow.”
“I need more than that,” Riax said, walking up to the Prefect and grabbing her by the shoulders. He held her at arm’s length and looked at her startled eyes. “Followers are not enough. I need the Cres to grow up,” he said firmly, releasing his grip and standing toe to toe with the orange-haired ally.
“I need you to become peers.”
TWO WEEKS LATER Riax sat in a small dome-like structure on the seafloor, far from any of the Cres cities. He was alone, save for Ella, and had the unused storage complex to himself as he battled with the program remnant inside his mind, systematically tearing it apart as Ella watched from another compartment. She had insisted on being present, but Riax had demanded some physical distance to diminish the intensity of his involuntary telepathic outbursts. He was fully committing his focus on the internal battle, which left his external senses and barriers virtually nonexistent.
The remnant was aggressive and well entrenched, but never truly had a chance. It did require a great deal of effort and time to destroy, with Riax being forced to take breaks in between bouts. This was his fourth and had already run six tumultuous hours before a large wave of telepathic energy burst out . . . before reducing down to nothing as far as Ella could see.
After a few seconds of no activity she got up from the chair she’d been tensely sitting in and walked across the facility to Riax’s room, finding him sitting on the edge of his bed cradling his head in his hands.
“What happened?” she asked, kneeling down next to him and gently probing his mind. He had already reestablished rudimentary blocks, but was allowing her access. She felt a lot of damage and exhaustion, but the hard knob that had been the contained remnant was gone.
“It’s over,” Riax said, his hands shaking slightly. Ella gently grabbed hold of one of them, sensing intense anger inside of him.
“Tell me,” she insisted.
Riax took a long time to respond. “The remnant is dead, but the inactive pieces remain.”
“Can’t you purge them?” she asked, confused. Her own meager telepathic skills gave her that ability.
“They include some of its memories,” he said, finally releasing his head and looking at her. “We were always confused why we couldn’t find their homeworld, shipyards, or even a single population center. All we could find in the core were recently constructed staging areas and outposts. Even after I was put in stasis they never could identify the source of the attack.”
“You’ve seen their homeworld?” Ella asked, realizing how important this was.
“I think that’s what I saw in the dream on the battleship,” he said, trying to hold onto the memories. The more he focused the more they slipped away.
“Do you know where it is, or who they are?”
“No . . . not yet. I’m not sure how much is left and I may have destroyed some of it.”
“What did you see?” Ella whispered.
“They jumped the core to get here,” he said, grinding out each word between clenched jaws.
“The core?” she asked, not immediately understanding. A moment later her eyes went wide with disbelief. “They’re extra-galactic?”
“Which means,” Riax said, standing up and releasing some of his anger with a long slow breath, “in order to win this war we not only have to retake this galaxy, we have to conquer two.”
Epilogue
“TWENTY SEVEN,” JALIA said, pausing slightly before she leapt into the air again, flipping over backwards and landing on her hands. She cartwheeled over onto her feet and stood up again, mentally counting the next number and starting another jump. Working through her set with the vocal markers on every third one as Riax had taught her, Jalia flipped over in sequence trying not to give herself breaks other than to utter the numbers.
“Thirty,” she said, finishing the set then trying to catch her breath. It wasn’t as if these drills were complicated or taxing, but putting them at the end of another long day of training added an extra element of difficulty. Riax had said that her agility was one of her greatest assets, and that to be truly agile one must be able to move gracefully while still fatigued, hence the skill work coming at the end of today’s endurance sequences.
Jalia laughed once, more an awkward bellow than anything funny as she stood with the sweat rolling down her skin and into her already soaked training garb. That was the end of today’s workouts, and she was feeling the painful bliss that few ever experienced. Up until recently she’d never pushed herself this hard, or long, to feel the effects in this way, but now that she had she was starting to understand the Humans a bit more. Training wasn’t a hobby, it was a war, and this momentary aura of fatigue-laden victory marked a small trial of passage being completed.
Riax had said this was when the body and mind made the fastest advancements, and to maximize the effect one had to go into recovery mode immediately, else additional stress would trigger coping mechanisms that essentially prolonged the fight rather than allowed the person to process what had already been accomplished. If pushed too far damage would incur, but right now Jalia wasn’t worried about that, for she was following Riax’s workouts to the letter and trusted that he knew what he was doing.
He was Human, after all, and 12,000 years old. He wasn’t going to make any rookie mistakes.
Jalia left cargo bay 2, which she’d converted into a workout room, and headed for the cafeteri
a, needing to refuel before she went to bed. The Cres and Kayna were elsewhere, doing whatever it was that occupied their time during the long, boring trip, with her keeping busy almost exclusively with training and a bit of reading through the data files that Riax had also left her.
Normally the space travel wouldn’t have been bothersome, but the longer she was away from Riax the more it made her feel empty inside. That, combined with the fact that even though they were being hounded by fleets of pursuing ships that couldn’t get near them given their navigational advantage, made for a very dull trip. The cargo she was carrying was more valuable than anything she’d ever seen before, yet without Riax here it didn’t seem to matter.
She’d been reluctant to admit it at first but now, given plenty of time to think, she’d come to the conclusion that she’d been naïve to just how much the galaxy sucked before she’d met him, and there was no way for her to unlearn what she had learned, seen, and experienced.
And she still had the hots for him.
Sitting down at the small table with a pile of foodstuffs nearing the amount that Riax would have eaten, Jalia downed it all quickly and efficiently. Food was fuel, not a social activity, and there was no point in lingering over it. Filling herself up without stretching her stomach too far, she sucked down a third bottle of water and headed back to her quarters, promptly climbing into the cleansing chamber.
Jalia gave herself some time to linger there, for this transition between action and rest was important and she’d learned that even the small action of standing provided a bridge between the two. That and she liked the feel of the warm water on her slightly aching muscles. Her tail felt it the most, for while she rarely grasped anything with it during training, she did use it for balance.
And given how much agility work she was doing, it was understandably being overworked.
It would adjust, as would the rest of her body and mind. The mind was the part that surprised her the most when Riax had talked about training, citing that a necessary interlink had to be cultivated and that every physical action she took needed to be accompanied by a mental filter. Jalia hadn’t understood at first, but now every workout she did came with a mental state she was trying to get herself into and maintain.
So in essence, she was pulling double workouts.
Her head didn’t hurt like her body, but her attention easily flagged when she wasn’t focusing, as it was doing now in the comforting water and mood lighting. Mentally prodding herself to make sure she didn’t fall asleep, the Junta got thoroughly clean then reluctantly flicked on the drying cycle.
Finding herself well out of active mode, she let the air jets do their work then summoned up a trickle of energy sufficient to walk out of the cleansing chamber to the other side of her quarters where her information terminal was. Riax had built it specifically for Jalia, and on it was all the files he’d left her, including her workouts. On the upper left corner of the desktop was an unlit orb that was linked to the ship’s comm systems, specifically the beacon call that the Cres would be using to identify themselves when they finally got to them.
Jalia reached above it to the wall behind the Human tech and the primitive grid calendar that she’d made, checking off day number 378 of their journey post-Riax. It might have been number 10,000 for all she could tell, with the days blurring together with all the training she was doing, but she preferred that over excessive boredom.
The calendar was also using Human units of measurement, which she’d been training herself to think in. It hadn’t been easy initially, but between the ship systems being converted and the Cres accommodating her request to not use commerce measurements, she was beginning to accept the Human units. Maybe by the time this journey was over they’d come to her naturally. Right now she still had to focus a bit, but at least she’d got herself to stop calculating the mathematical translations and accept the units for what they were at face value.
Jalia put the writing stick back on the desktop and turned off the lights, not bothering to let her eyes adjust before walking over to her sleep pod and climbing inside by feel. Slipping through the force field and immediately feeling the warm air on her bare flesh, Jalia began to fall asleep before she’d even fully lain down. By the time she did her mind was wandering off into the rest mode that her workouts had prompted, in which her body would consume the workout experience she’d fed it.
To her it just felt like a blissful crash nap.
How long she slept she didn’t know, but somewhere during her unconscious period she was woken by a strange sound. It wasn’t her alarm and as such only partially pulled her back to a waking state. Jalia rolled over onto her shoulder, pinching one of her headtails under her arm in the process, and awkwardly looked into her dark room to see where the sound was coming from.
Her eyes squinted away the harsh light, for the room wasn’t dark. A bright blue flare was bathing her sleep tube and it took a long moment for her to wake up enough to identify where it was coming from.
It took another few seconds for her to mentally accept what she was seeing, then staring at the beacon orb and hearing the repetitive chime-like sound it was making she grinned widely, fully waking up and springing out of her sleep pod as she headed for the bridge.
Jalia was out the door and down the corridor for twenty seconds before she returned to her quarters and headed to her closet, belatedly realizing that she was still naked.
About the Author
AER-KI JYR is a science fiction writer whose work crosses over many different genres, but is typically centered around Space Opera with a heavy Action slant. He began with writing fanfiction, starting with Star Wars then going on to develop a Stargate series called Return of the Ancients that gained a tremendous fan response.
Jyr took the episodic format from ROTA and delved into the self-publishing realm with his ebook serial ‘Star Force,’ not expecting any sales at all. His first week saw a half dozen purchases that eventually grew into full-time job over the course of the next two years, with a new Star Force novella coming out every two weeks and slated to continue till episode 100, which will occur in mid 2016.
Apex is Jyr’s first professionally published full novel, set in its own unique and expansive universe, which he plans to continue in many subsequent books.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
APEX. Copyright © 2015 by Aer-ki Jyr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780062396440
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062396457
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