Web of Truth (Cadicle #4): An Epic Space Opera Series

by DuBoff, Amy

  Wil was escorted down the hall and ushered into an airy conference room. The far wall was glass, and a clear, circular table occupied the center of the room. The same eerie lights from the hallway were inset in the ceiling above the conference table, branching down like a chandelier.

  Several robed Aesir were standing by the window, and they encircled the table when Wil entered the room. They had the same translucent skin and pale, glowing eyes of his escorts.

  Wil removed his tinted glasses and placed them in his jacket pocket. The expressions on the faces of the Aesir didn’t change, but Wil felt like they were pleased with the action. He waited in front of the table for one of his hosts to take charge. As they stood watching each other, Wil felt a vibration through the floor—preparations for a spatial jump. Within moments, the view outside the window changed from a starscape to shifting blues and greens. The Aesir all closed their eyes for a moment as the ship eased into subspace, and when they opened their eyes they seemed more relaxed.

  “We have waited so long for this moment, Cadicle,” said one of the Aesir on the far side of the table. “We are the highest order of Oracles among the Aesir, and we have been tasked with evaluating your worthiness of the title Tarans have bestowed upon you.”

  “I am honored to be in your presence,” Wil said and bowed to them. How will they evaluate me?

  “We have awaited the Cadicle since before we ventured into the stars so many years ago. For generations we have willed true balance to return, and now we have reason to hope that day will finally come,” the Oracle continued.

  What is he talking about? “I will play my part as best I can.”

  “I am Daehl,” said the Oracle. “I have been selected as the representative for the Aesir.”

  “Pleased to meet you. You can call me ‘Wil.’”

  “If you truly are the Cadicle, no other name is necessary,” Daehl replied.

  Clearly, ‘Cadicle’ means more to them than to anyone on Tararia. “As you wish.”

  The ship dropped out of subspace.

  “We have arrived,” said Daehl.

  Wil gazed out the window. There was a black pit marring the starscape—not a black hole gravity well, but more like a tear in reality. He was inexplicably drawn to the void. “Where are we?”

  Daehl’s face remained expressionless. “The nexus. Can’t you feel it?”

  Wil did feel it, though he couldn’t place exactly what it was. The pull toward the void grew stronger the longer he looked at it—his sense of self drifting away. He yanked himself back. “What is it?”

  “It is a window to everything that was and everything that can be,” Daehl said as he came around the table toward Wil. “Come, it is time.”

  Daehl led Wil and the other Oracles into the hall and down the corridor. At the end of the hall, they passed through a set of double doors that slid open when Daehl held up his hand. The room was fully glass—a bubble positioned below the cone that likely contained the jump drive. The void loomed outside to the right of the room.

  The Aesir lined up on the left facing the void. Wil walked to the middle of the glass enclosure.

  “All Oracles must learn to read the energy patterns woven into the fundamentals of our existence,” Daehl said. “To be named among us, you too must perform this rite.”

  Is that my test? Wil glanced at the void. “What will I see?”

  “In time, you will be able to read all that is there to be known. But at first, you will see a truth that will forever change you. The truth will be revealed based on what is in your innermost self—what you need to see most. It is different for everyone. Some cannot bear what they see and are driven mad. Others simply lose themselves in the void and their consciousness never returns to their body.”

  No wonder this test is feared. Wil looked at the void again with renewed seriousness.

  “Proceed whenever you are ready,” instructed Daehl.

  What am I supposed to do? Wil’s heart pounded in his ears, his mind jumbled with thoughts of his life back home. I need to succeed here. For my family. For the TSS. For Tararia.

  Trying to refocus, he began the process of spatial dislocation—that seemed like the most appropriate action. Still weighed down by trepidation, he found it difficult to achieve the state hovering on the brink of subspace. He wanted to hang onto himself, where he had some sense of control. To let go from the physical world was not freeing as it had once been, but was rather a step toward a dangerous unknown in the presence of the void.

  He forced himself to let go, despite his internal cries to turn back. As he pierced the dimensional veil, he balked. The sweet call of the rift wasn’t there—no glow of energy to fuel him or give him a sense of direction. He was drifting.

  Without thinking, he retraced the path back to himself while he still knew where to go.

  He gasped as he returned to normal space, drinking in the air and energy around him. The familiar—the tangible.

  The Aesir watched him with sadness in their eyes, though their impassive expressions remained otherwise unchanged.

  They think I’ve failed. He couldn’t give up. Wil took a deep breath and closed his eyes. I have to let go—I need to trust. I am one with the pattern. I can’t lose myself, because it is part of me. The fear and doubts melted away, replaced by a commitment to fulfill his purpose for being. He opened his eyes again and gazed into the void.

  At first, he drifted in its emptiness. He was a single speck in an infinite sea of blackness. Alone, lost. He looked around himself and found nothing. Desperate to feel connected, he searched—not with panic this time, but driven by a profound need to find grounding.

  The emptiness sprawled before him, open and infinite. Then, a pattern started to emerge. The blackness became a web. Initially, it was jumbled, chaotic. But as he continued to stare at the silvery tendrils branching through the limitless beyond, he saw a new kind of order. What was once an empty void came alive as a woven tapestry.

  He was bound to the tendrils, as though he could reach out and tug the snaking forms to send a ripple through the fabric of the energy field underlying reality. The tendrils shifted and twisted around one another, with no beginning and no end. Wil delved further into his place within the energy network, tracing the tendrils that held the strongest ties to himself. But couldn’t see where the tendrils led. He let go from his sense of self just enough to gain a better vantage. As he drifted outward, he saw branches spanning the Taran worlds—tightly woven tendrils through the fabric, amid holes and fainter connections. It was as if the lines of an ancient, uniform grid had been pulled and stretched to strengthen the corridors of communications and transit between the dominant worlds. Some corridors between the epicenters of activity were new, while others were so old that they were almost indistinguishable from the very foundation of the fabric.

  The more he explored his place in the vast network, he felt pulled in two directions. The first was to Tararia, the home of his parents and countless generations of ancestors before. The other was out into a part of space he couldn’t place at first, but then he knew—the Bakzen. Yet, there was something mitigating the opposite pulls, maintaining tentative balance within his own existence even as it changed the shape of the larger network. He searched, grasping for the answer in the depths of the void. And then, the key emerged. The opposing forces on Wil—to his homeland and his enemy—were balanced through a connection between the Bakzen and Tararia. They were three points of a triad within the network.

  Looking closer, Wil saw that the fabric around Bakzen Territory was twisted and deformed. Whereas the corridors between other worlds were woven by freely flowing tendrils that bent from the ancient uniform grid, the tendrils to Bakzen space were pulled taught—leaving holes in spaces where it seemed that the natural grid should flow. The tendrils were being rearranged before his eyes, being torn away. As each tendril was yanked from its proper place, a shudder ran down the surrounding tendrils, straining the connections. The fabric was fraying.


  Wil’s eyes shot open. What does it mean? He turned around to face the Aesir.

  Now they were watching him with fascination. “What did you see?” Daehl asked.

  “I saw a cosmic energy field,” Wil replied. “But I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  “If you know the question, you already know the answer.”

  “I’m not sure I do. What is the connection between the Bakzen and Tararia? Some kind of common history?” Do I exist to maintain the balance between them? It looked like the pattern was trying to right itself—make order out of new chaos that has upset ancient ways.

  “You already know,” Daehl said.

  A common ancestry… “Are the Bakzen of Taran descent?”

  “It is more than that. Did you not see the age of the connection?”

  True. It was linked to new tears in the fabric—not anything born of systematic progression. “If they aren’t a natural divergent race, then… they were made.” So, Tarans made the Bakzen?

  Daehl nodded. “You do indeed have the gift of sight.” The Aesir bowed their heads to Wil.

  Is that possible? “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would Tarans manufacture such an enemy?”

  Daehl raised his gaze to look Wil in the eye. “Now you are asking the wrong question.”

  Wil thought for a moment. “What turned the Bakzen into our enemy?”

  “That is the right question. But the answer is something you must find on your own. The Aesir left Tararia to escape the path that led to the Bakzen. You must seek truth from those still bound to Tararia and the Bakzen’s creators.”

  Who are their creators?

  “You already know,” the Aesir Oracles answered in unison inside his mind, reading his deepest thoughts through his safeguards.

  The Priesthood?

  “Our brethren. Too blinded by impatience to see the consequences of their actions.”

  Wil shook his head, his brow furrowing. “What was the Priesthood trying to accomplish?”

  “Your High Commander knows,” Daehl said.

  Has such a truth been kept from me all these years…?

  Daehl nodded. “They worry that you will not do what needs to be done.”

  “What, defeat the Bakzen?” Even if I don’t want to.

  The Aesir voices once again echoed in his mind, “You must. The Bakzen should never have come to be.”

  “But they were created.” You can’t unmake what is already alive.

  “They do not belong,” stated Daehl. “Their existence is an anomaly. So long as they remain, there will not be balance in the greater pattern. You saw how they are ripping it apart. They have such power, yet they use it to tear rifts in the fabric of reality. Driven by hate, they will stop at nothing. They will destroy us all.”

  Wil took a deep breath. “So I must do what the Priesthood commands? Eliminate the Bakzen to rectify their creators’ mistakes.”

  “And to restore Tarans to the true path.” Daehl looked at him levelly. “It must be you to do it.”

  It is what I was born to do, apparently.

  “You misunderstand. It must be you, because you are what the Bakzen should have been. Through you, their legacy can live on as it was meant to be.”

  Wil’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  Daehl looked down. “We have already said too much. We are but observers.”

  “No, please,” pleaded Wil. “If I must do this, then I need to know why.”

  “You need only know this: you must fulfill your destiny. Only then can Tarans move forward.”

  “I can’t see my own future path in the pattern.” Only what ties me to the Bakzen and my people.

  “You will see it once you are ready,” Daehl assured. He looked around at the other Oracles, who nodded solemnly. “You are what we have been waiting for since we left Tararia a thousand years ago. You, Cadicle, are the Enlightened One who can take Tarans from their infancy and realize the full potential of what is held within. You are the first of what Tarans can become. The Bakzen must die so that we can begin to truly live.”

  “What of the Aesir? Will you continue to watch from afar as the Taran future is rewritten?”

  The Oracles shook their heads. “Not rewritten,” Daehl said. “It is a return to what should have been all along. There is no longer a place for us on Tararia. Eventually, others may join us here. You will always have a home with us, if you wish it.”

  “My ties to others are too strong to become one of the Aesir.”

  Daehl nodded. “It is an open offer. But for now, you must go back to complete what the Priesthood started.”

  * * *

  The door to the office flew open, startling Banks.

  Wil barged in. “Banks, we need to talk. Now.”

  That isn’t the return home I envisioned. What happened out there? Banks stood up behind his desk. “Wil, I’m glad they got you home so quickly. It’s only been a few hours—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Wil’s eyes narrowed behind his tinted glasses, accusing. He slammed the door closed.

  “Tell you what?”

  “About the Bakzen.”

  Stars! Banks held up his hand to silence Wil. “There’s nothing to discuss,” he said as cover while he hurriedly used his desktop to activate a communications shield to keep the conversation private from potential Priesthood ears and eyes. “The room is secure. Now, what about them?”

  “That Tarans made them. That we made them and now we’re trying to wipe them out of existence!”

  “Wil, there’s a lot more to it than that—”

  “There have been enough excuses and justifications. I want the straight truth for once.” Even with the dampeners in Headquarters, there was still a telekinetic hum in the air as Wil struggled to maintain composure.

  Banks looked down. Our greatest secret. “Yes, Taran scientists made the Bakzen.”

  “What the fok is going on? How did we end up at war with each other?” The hurt was written on Wil’s face.

  He won’t back down now. Banks’ chest tightened. We have tried to prevent him knowing for his whole life, and now he finds out just before we need him most in the war. So that was the Aesir’s plan… “We kept the truth from you because it’s easier to think of the Bakzen as an alien enemy. Knowing they were once close to us makes what we must do that much more difficult.”

  Wil shook his head. “Is that why the entire war has been kept secret? Because it would eventually trace back to that truth?”

  “That’s part of it,” Banks confirmed. “But the creation of the Bakzen is only a fraction of the history the Priesthood is hiding.”

  Wil looked on, expectant.

  Banks sat back down. “It all traces back to the Taran revolution a thousand years ago,” he explained. “Back then, the Priesthood was a religious order, dealing primarily in philosophical and metaphysical pursuits. However, the organization became divided. One branch was more drawn to spiritual growth, the other to science. At the core of both ideologies was the foretelling of the Cadicle—one who would be a prototype for a new generation of Tarans that would be one step closer to true ascension and enlightenment. The more spiritual branch—who became the Aesir—believed that the Cadicle would emerge in due time, when Tarans were ready to ascend into a higher state of being. The other branch—who became the Priesthood we know today—sought to bring about the coming of the Cadicle through deliberate scientific intervention.”

  Wil sat down in one of chairs on the other side of Banks’ desk. “What kind of intervention?”

  “Dissection of the Taran genetic code. The Priesthood became convinced that the answer to ascension must be buried somewhere in the genome, so they began manipulating the DNA sequences related to telekinetic and telepathic abilities to find a combination that strengthened those traits. Eventually, they did. But, the physical form of Tarans struggled to command the power unlocked by those enhanced abilities. They needed a vessel with which to imbue the abilities.�
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  “The Bakzen.”

  Banks nodded. “Yes.”

  “What went so wrong?” Wil asked.

  Everything. Banks took a deep breath. Telling him all of this might get us both killed if the Priesthood finds out. “The Priesthood forced evolution too strongly. It was not enough to create the Bakzen—they also wanted to take the existing population into a new era. The Aesir opposed this course, warning that such direct manipulation of Taran evolution would not be sustainable, but the Priesthood insisted on forging ahead. The Priesthood’s scientists synthesized a biological nanoagent to adjust the genetic code of every living person within the known Taran worlds. When the Aesir learned of the plan, they departed Tararia before they were ‘infected.’ That split marked the beginning of the Taran Revolution.”

  “An era of cultural advancement and rapid colonization,” Wil said.

  That’s what the history records state, anyway. “And nearly 350 years passed in this new age of prosperity. The Taran people had embraced their heightened abilities, and meanwhile, the Priesthood had cultivated the Bakzen subspecies to be our guardians. The Bakzen were an icon of perfection—cloned from a master copy to ensure the proper transmittal of the traits, and sterile to make sure it stayed that way. But then, everything changed. Without warning, after the twelfth generation of children born to Taran descendants who had received the nanoagent, the telekinetic abilities suddenly disappeared.

  “There was public outcry, and the Priesthood desperately tried to find a solution. But they couldn’t figure out what happened. At first, they called it a fluke, but the abilities remained absent in subsequent generations. Outcry turned to dejection, and eventually to apathy. Just when telekinetic and telepathic feats were a distant memory for all but the Bakzen—who had by that point been relegated to the outskirts of society—the eighth generation after the loss once again expressed abilities. Those abilities grew stronger for the next two generations, before dwindling. By the thirteenth generation, the abilities were absent again. That cycle of twelve generations, with only the last five expressing any ability, has repeated ever since.”