The Siege of Sirius: A Splintered Galaxy Space Fantasy Novel

by Eddie R. Hicks

  She used her psionic powers to slip past the force field and entered the chamber where Pierce had been held. The sound of her entering caused him to slither backward to the end of the chamber like a frightened caged animal. She felt a sense of empathy toward him, it was likely the first time in two years he was able to see someone face-to-face. The other Undine that questioned him over the last two years used their telepathy to speak with him or forcibly created engram orbs from his memories to study, orbs that had a high failure rate as he wasn’t a psionic. It was because of that form of forced communication Nereid was convinced he didn’t give up the information they wished to gather from him.

  It was now her turn to try, her opportunity to impress the Architect, so that it may allow her peoples’ continued existence. Nereid stepped closer to him and left behind a trail of water that dripped away from her soaked body and robe. A body that had never been out of water until this very moment. Pierce trembled as he cowered in the corner. Nereid stopped before him, and extended her hand outward to show she was harmless.

  “You are afraid?” she asked, then paused. She had spoken aloud for the first time. Her fingers lightly touched the top of her lips, surprised at how it felt to utilize her vocal cords.

  “Tired of having my mind picked apart,” Pierce said. “I told you everything. I’m an explorer to this system.”

  “You have learnt a lot about our people since you arrived.”

  “Your mind-rape sessions rubbed off bits of your peoples’ memories into my brain.”

  “Yet, we know so little about your people.” A lie since she had McDowell’s memories, although most were fuzzy. “I am honestly curious, however. How much about my people do you know?”

  “You know the answer to that, why do you care anyways?”

  “You are a man of wisdom, one that wants to learn more about the universe. Don’t you wish to know why we visited your kind in the past?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “We did, and you know it, you deny it out of fear your colleagues would become strangers.” Her mind briefly flashed back to the copies of the engram orbs given to her from the previous interrogators, tiny fragments of Pierce’s past appeared. “You even tried to spread that limited information about my people to your own kind through literature.”

  “You’re not the Nommo.”

  “Open your mind, please don’t deny it.” She sat next to him as if they were close friends. “Let me tell you a story. A goddess and her husband discovered a planet not far from here. They were interested in it as life on it evolved on its own, unlike here in this system and other worlds in which terraforming was required. That, and the Lyonria species had taken an interest in this particular world and the primitive species that began to walk on its surface, that world was Earth.”

  “Right . . .”

  “The goddess sent ships to Earth carrying many of my people, the Undine aboard them, they landed at the western edge of a large continent and revealed themselves to the humans living there, I believe you called them—”

  “The Dogan.”

  She smiled at him, progress was being made. “Don’t you see the connection, Travis? We Undine are the Nommo. We were sent as messengers from the goddess to speak on her behalf. We told them that Sirius was a trinary system, we told them that Saturn had rings, we tried to teach them about what existed beyond the realm of Earth.”

  “What became of your goddess?” Pierce grunted.

  “She and her husband explored Earth and tried to earn the devotion of your species, while the rest of the Undine made the oceans of Earth our home away from Sirius.” She pointed to herself, still maintaining the charming smile. “The result is what you now see, Human-Undine hybrids, your people called them Sirens. We’re not so different, human blood flows through my body as it does in several others who have a humanlike appearance, though their numbers have swelled over the years. Most of the humanoid Undine you see are actually crossbred from Poniga.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Nereid faced the ceiling giving it a somber look. “War took our goddess away. There was an uprising and the goddess and her husband had been slain, their ships taken over by their enemies. Humans were forced to accept the enemy of the goddess as their god, some had been taken aboard ships to be used as servants. The Undine on Earth tried to fight back and found a means to enhance the potency of their psionic powers, but it came at a cost, rapid aging, it’s rare for us to live past age seven. With shorter life spans and a war to fight, we needed to reproduce quickly. Humans became the source of that.”

  “Legends on Earth told stories of sea nymphs that would lure sailors to their death if they heard their songs.”

  “All legends have roots in reality; those stories were true. We mated with them but as you know, males always perish afterward; it’s just the way our species had evolved.”

  “By the looks of things, I’d say you didn’t win the war.”

  “We had a chance when the first Nereids had been born. But in the end, our enemy had starships that gave them a major advantage. They captured us and imprisoned us on this world, only those that worship him and fully dedicate their lives to them are allowed to leave. Even then, it’s only to carry out their bidding.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Now that I’ve told you that. Why not tell me more about you?”

  Pierce became distant once again. “I have nothing more to tell you, I’m sorry.”

  Her progress toward getting him to open up was crumbling away.

  Perhaps a pleasant picture will cheer him up, she thought, and stretched her hand toward him.

  She used her psionic powers to create a lifelike projection of a woman with long, blue hair, based on what she learnt from the engrams. “Not even about this woman?”

  “Stop . . .” He pushed the projection away. “You have no right to probe my mind like this!”

  “She isn’t human, is she? What’s her name?”

  “Pernoy . . . there, are you happy?”

  “She’s very beautiful. Hashmedai if I’m not mistaken? Where do they come from?” She asked, Pierce snorted. “They attacked your world in the past with a great fleet. How many ships do you think they have in total?”

  She saw his head tilt upward suddenly as she leaned in closer. Looking down she saw why. The robe she wore still wasn’t tied up, and her breasts had slipped out due to her movement. She wrapped the robe up against her body better, then began to ask a question her superiors insisted she ask.

  “I can’t tell you that.” A reply he typically gave when asked about the location of Earth as well.

  “If I gave you a star map, would it help?” Another question her superiors wanted answered, having discovered the existence of other space travelling species beyond Sirius. She continued to press him for answers, including a personal one she had been yearning to have answered since birth. “What was McDowell like?”

  Pierce grunted. “Why do you care about him? You people killed him and Kingston.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You brainwashed us, we just wanted to go back to our ship!” Nereid tried to console Pierce, he acted quickly by slapping her hand away and got up to his feet. “Don’t cross the human race like this again. We have nukes, we have ships, and we have crazy military brass that wouldn’t hesitate to use them like we did against the Hashmedai!”

  She winced, sat up, and took a step backward from him knowing that due to his incarceration and loneliness he was acting abnormally, saying things he wouldn’t usually say. Her vague memories of him were of a peaceful man that loved science. His outburst, however, was interesting. Atomic weapons, warships, aggressive military leaders. It helped her to remember more of McDowell’s past life on Earth, and that humans typically responded to threats with violence. McDowell’s job was to search for threats.

  She bowed to him and held onto her robe to ensure her breasts didn’t fall out again. “Thank you for your time.”
>
  She took her leave to process what had been experienced, and swam back into the residential district of the city, larger multilevel chambers. There were many entrances around it which Undine swam in and out of. Inside was where her people slept, clustered together tightly within the darkened waters.

  It was a natural state. Ancient Undine on their home world often slept in this manner to discourage other forms of aquatic life from attacking them in their sleep. All it took was an Undine to awake and make the call to rouse the hundreds of others nearby to jump to action, killing any unwanted guest instantly. Unless of course it was the Architect’s soldiers, their weapons, technology, and numbers were unmatched.

  Nereid looked at the two to three hundred people in her designated chamber grouped together as they slept, and wondered how she was going to get a comfortable sleep. There was no privacy, and as far back as she could remember she was fine with that. But the talk with the human, Pierce, it not only triggered more of her father’s memories, but also human habits such as having a private place to rest.

  She swam over to one of the less densely packed areas of the chamber, and turned her face away from the rest of her slumbering people. She tried to imagine that she was alone and that she had her own quarters aboard a human-made starship in the cosmos.

  Nereid returned to her superiors the next day, and presented them with an engram orb, the copy of her recent memories in the form of pure psionic power. The thoughts within the orb she presented showed the brief conversation she had with Pierce. Impressed with the progress she had made, she was ordered to return and pester him with more questions, namely the ones he refused to answer.

  When Nereid returned, Pierce replied with subtle grunts as he sat on the floor of his chamber with his back to the wall, and his hands up to his knees. Nereid tried everything to get him to open up, and reveal more about Earth, humans, their mission, and the empire. Who do humans worship? Pierce refused to cooperate, Nereid thought back at some of the memories McDowell had, memories of him interrogating a terrorist. People were more forthcoming if you either tortured them, or found a way to earn their trust. Torture was out of the question, what he been through for the last two years was enough pain, and even then, they had made little progress.

  Nereid offered her hand to Pierce, and smiled at him. “Come with me.”

  He looked up at her with his rough appearance. “To where?”

  “Outside of these walls, I suspect you haven’t been let out since your arrival.”

  “I can’t swim very well in water, and as for breathing under it . . .”

  She touched his hand and thought briefly about a psionic shield protecting the two of them. As her eyes opened, her gifts had brought it into reality. The two shared a psionic barrier; one that had enough heat and oxygen within it to keep him alive.

  “You will be fine with me,” she reassured him as she guided him out of his cell, through the palace and into the undersea city.

  Swimming wasn’t necessary as her telekinetic powers allowed them to glide above the various structures that adorned the ocean surface below. She spent hours showing Pierce the marvels of the city he had been imprisoned in for two years. The arching towers, the enormous sleeping chambers, the elegant central palace. A school of fish floundered past them as they traveled toward the city limits while extremely faint white light from the surface above beamed down upon them.

  “This is outstanding,” Pierce said.

  “Most of our species resides here,” she said as they hovered up top of a nearby sunken mountain, wormlike aquatic creatures slithered away in fear of their presence. “The rest of us exist in smaller cities throughout the planet.”

  The two watched the city from their higher prospective as Nereid explained to Pierce more about her people, the goddess that brought them here, how the cities were created; by extracting silicon and other minerals out from the sands below, and fusing it together with the aid of adept psionics. The more they talked, the more McDowell’s recent memories of arriving in the system formed in her head. She had to remind herself several times she wasn’t an EISS agent masquerading as a UNE Hammerhead officer.

  “So, in some ways we’re just like your species,” Nereid said. “We arrived here from the stars and were faced with the challenge of making it our home.”

  “It has most certainly been a challenge for us,” Pierce said, and sat down within their psionic bubble. “Us . . . I’m likely the last one left of my ship.”

  “Your ship was destroyed?”

  “We arrived at the white dwarf, the star we call Sirius B. There was a planet with abandoned structures on it; we traveled inside one to explore it. That’s the last I saw of the ship, we were attacked by aliens.”

  “How did they look?”

  “They were armored, they attacked us with lasers; some had spears and shields and the others had laser cannons attached to their hands.”

  Nereid grimaced, what Pierce described to her sounded exactly like the Architect’s loyal followers. She tried to recall more of McDowell’s memories, hoping that she could confirm the attack Pierce talked about. She saw the fortress . . . no tomb, tomb of the goddess. Its layout and design. It was built by the goddess and then later converted into a tomb for her in the aftermath of her demise, and therefore was the foundation of the Architect’s rise to power with the technology that existed within it.

  The information he revealed helped her unlock more of McDowell’s past before arriving at the system. He was a rather important agent within EISS, even had access to secret command codes and security protocols in regard to Earth’s defenses. Her superiors wanted her to gather everything about Earth and while Pierce didn’t reveal much, the memories within her did. But most importantly, Pierce revealed that the Architect’s control over the system could come to an end, provided humans lent their support.

  The Undine lacked ships of their own after the fall of the goddess. Wormholes didn’t help either without the aid of EVA suits and from what Pierce told her, they would need one to travel to that planet where the tomb was located. The educational engrams she received as a child did suggest that the tomb was where the Architect forced the Nereids to activate the goddess’s technology, and was where the trap to keep the Architect in the system was activated. There must have been something there that could be used against the Architect, something that could result in the Undine and Poniga being free of their slavery. And humans could be the ones that could make that happen. They just needed guidance.

  Nereid submitted her engram orb to her superiors the next day, though she carefully doctored it to omit memories of Earth from McDowell’s mind and her wavering devotion to the Architect in light of her new discovery. The more she looked at her superiors and the elders that controlled their society, the more she was reminded of the situation McDowell had to deal with living on Earth. A collective of five species known as the Radiance Union had quite a bit of influence over the UNE government to the point where some laws were passed, not because the UNE deemed it necessary, but rather Radiance wanted it done to slowly ease the human race into joining their collective. Agents like McDowell were periodically tasked with assignments to prevent Radiance from gaining too much control over Earth via covert-op missions. As much as humans valued the friendship between them and Radiance, they valued freedom more.

  Nereid saw a similar situation brewing as the elders of her people submitted to the will of the Architect, and allowed its armies to inspect the city at random times to search for any signs of a resistance growing. The elders saw it as a means of keeping their people alive as the Architect could have them wiped out in a bloody siege that would turn the oceans of their world red. The Undine and the Poniga were not free, freedom being something humans greatly valued. Freedom being something all species living in the system must be able to experience.

  Her superiors once again pressed her to obtain more information regarding Earth, or reveal new details she might have remembered from McDowell’s memori
es. Superiors who were taking orders from the elders, elders who are trying to please the Architect as if it was some sort of angry god.

  Nereid and Pierce continued their swim through the city once again. The more she showed him, the more he began to open up and converse with her. This in turn helped her recover more of the hidden memories and emotions in her head regarding McDowell’s past. He lived in one of the many countries that once divided the planet Earth. He had the choice to study at college or university to better himself. He had access to many privileges none of her people had. True, not all humans were lucky to have the level of freedom he had, but not all humans were oppressed either. The Hashmedai Empire tried to take that away, but the humans fought back and won.

  “I was thinking about this planet,” Pierce said, interrupting her thoughts. “Everything my people knows about the system suggests that life here would not have had enough time to evolve given the youth of the system. But if your people came here from across the stars then that would explain that, but what about the sea life? Where did that come from? And what about the life on the other planets in this system?”

  “Come with me,” she said, and guided him with her psionic thoughts closer to the surface.

  Their ascent came to an end as they arrived at a blockade consisting of several patrolling ships capable of undersea travel. Between those ships were circular shaped platforms where heavily armed Architect soldiers stood watch at the entrance alongside Undine that devoted their lives to the Architect.

  “Your people are correct, this is a young star system,” Nereid said.

  “Then why is there life? Surely not all of it was transplanted here from other worlds?”

  “It was the Architect’s doing.”

  “There’s that name again.”

  “The Architect has had complete dominance over this system for thousands of years, molding every planet in their image.”