Zahn thought he could see the outline of the ship, a haunting shape that froze his thinking for a moment.
“Keep firing, Zahn! We’re almost in the moon’s shadow.”
As Oonak maneuvered, Zahn felt disoriented as the stars streaked across his vision, yet the red grid remained oriented on their foes, making it somewhat easier to keep his aim. He also felt Asha’s support.
The mindcap made Zahn’s thoughts seem sharper and more solid somehow. He fired on where he guessed the first craft was and then back at the second. Oonak had to maneuver wildly to keep from being pulled into the gravity wells that were multiplying around the ship. Ahead, Zahn saw that they were heading straight toward one.
Oonak accelerated and narrowly missed the edge of the vortex, and the two shadows pulled far ahead of them.
“Are they retreating?” Zahn said.
“Unknown. Stay focused.”
Once they were a certain distance away, both ships held position ahead of them, and Zahn took that opportunity to fire on them both. As he did, plasma bolts impacted onto their hulls.
But it was too easy. Why weren’t they moving?
Zahn continued firing, theoretically doing more damage to their ships. Exactly how much, he was unsure because they were so completely dark. For a spilt second between pulsar pulses, they disappeared once more, and Zahn caught a glimpse of what they were in front of.
They weren’t creating a blockade, they were in front of an enormous vortex that was forming right behind them.
Both of them fired piercingly green beams into the vortex, causing it to grow at an alarming pace.
The circular disc of the moon was now clearly visible ahead as four more massive shadows approached them from behind.
“Oonak, do you see that? That’s the largest vortex I’ve seen them make yet.”
“And four more are approaching behind us,” Asha said.
“What do we do?”
“Improvise.” Oonak abruptly sent the ship racing upwards. Zahn realized that there was no ‘up’ in space, but relative to the cabin, he perceived their course as heading upward.
“Brace yourselves. We’re going to make a hyper-local timespace jump.”
“What does that mean?” Asha said.
Before he could answer, the space around the ship became stretched and unreal, as if a child had painted the scene in watercolor and left it out in the rain.
The interior of the ship roared, and Zahn watched as the moon below slowly faded away. They weren’t flying away. It was simply dematerializing.
“Oonak, what’s happening?”
“As we accelerate,” Oonak said over the growing roar, “it may appear that everything is dematerializing around us, but in truth, we are what is dematerializing.”
“Isn’t that bad?!” Zahn yelled over the roar.
“No!” Oonak yelled. “Don’t worry. As we phase out of spacetime, we phase into timespace.”
Although they couldn’t feel it, Asha and Zahn guessed that the ship was accelerating to fantastic speeds. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem fast enough. Four of the Vakragha ships were growing closer.
Zahn looked back at Oonak and noticed that his eyes were once again closed. He was smiling, and although no one could see it, bright flecks of light raced within Navika’s nucleus at a frenzied pace.
As if they were a bad dream fading away, the four ships and everything around them faded to darkness as a narrow vortex formed in front of the ship. As it formed, Zahn felt as though the vortex was somehow inside of his own mind, as well.
In a flash, Zahn caught a glimpse of a blinding corridor of pure light. An instant later, there was another flash as they reentered the Ocean of Space, and the roar of the ship gradually returned to a hum.
Below them was the night side of a large, barren moon.
“Whew, that was close.” Zahn looked around. “We’re still in the nebula?”
“Yes,” Oonak said. “We have jumped to the dark side of one of the nearby moons. The prison moon that we seek is on the other side of this planetary system. Thankfully though, here we are shielded from the pulsar’s radiation so our cloaking cells will work properly.”
Asha and Zahn breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“So that was the timespace drive in action? Kind of takes the idea of a shortcut to a whole new level. Why didn’t you do that sooner?” Asha said.
“The timespace drive needs time to calibrate. Once ready, the ship needs to reach a certain relative velocity to dematerialize.”
Zahn looked down to the dark surface of the moon.
“I’m just glad we got out of that alive. Those ships weren’t just dark. They completely absorbed all light that touched them. Do all Vakragha ships look like that?”
“Navika and I have only come into contact with a few, but all of them followed that pattern, yes.”
“So what do we do? If we can’t fly to our destination from here because the Vakragha ships will suck us into oblivion, how are we going to get to where my mother is?”
“What about the gate system?” Asha said. “Is it possible that there’s a gate down on the moon that we could use?”
“Not just possible, it’s provable,” Oonak said. “Navika has already detected a gate on the surface below, and no life signs are present. We are about to begin our descent.”
As Zahn removed the mindcap and slowly folded it up, Asha sensed his anxiety and looked over to him.
“Don’t worry, Zahn. If she’s survived out here this long, it means that she has been holding on, and if she’s been holding on, it means she still has the will to live.” Asha paused for a moment. “No matter how good of a healer I could ever become, I could never give someone that. It’s a choice only they can make.”
Zahn looked over and considered her words. He thought about how things could be different after he returned home. Would she ever consider living on Avani? Was it worth asking?
Below, the moon became larger.
The surface of the moon was barren and rusty with a peppering of small, eroded mountains. Once they were near the ground, Oonak surveyed the area that the gate’s gravity signature was emanating from, finding a small cave leading into the side of one of the mountains. They followed it down a few hundred meters, blasted through part of a collapsed tunnel, and followed it into a large, dark cavern.
Upon illuminating the space, they found that the gate was covered in debris and dust. It looked as though it hadn’t been touched in millennia.
When Oonak set the ship down beside the gate and told Zahn and Asha to put spacesuits on, Zahn was confused.
“Aren’t we going to fly in?”
“No. We have no way of knowing the full reality of the situation on the other side. For all we know, it leads to a narrow passage, in which case Navika would have no way to maneuver without attracting the attention of every creature within 100 klicks of the gate. Even worse, that gate may lead to the daytime side of the moon, exposing us to the pulsar and causing our cloaking cells to become useless. If that were to happen, we would have to face the Hataazans directly.”
“Who?” Zahn asked.
“On the other side of that gate is Hataaza Darad, a world completely controlled by the Vakragha Dominion. The Hataazans are their tortured slaves, massive and vicious. Some even claim that the Vakragha created them. We must be vigilant. I have placed each of your resonators in your suits’ holsters. They do not fit perfectly, but they are adequate for now.”
“Thanks.” Asha patted her holster. “Much better than pockets, that’s for sure.”
“We’ll be fine,” Zahn said.
After doing a quick check to confirm that they could hear each other through their suits’ comms, they headed outside where their suits quickly confirmed that the air was far from breathable. The place was so dusty that Zahn wouldn’t want to breathe the air even if he could. Every time they moved, they kicked up a small cloud of reddish dust which stuck to their boots.
�
�Oon, I just realized something, ” Zahn said as he stared at the gate’s lifeless controls.
“What is it, Zahn?”
“Well, how are we going to get this gate to work? After all, you said that these gates are tuned for their inhabitants, and none of us were born on this moon. We don’t even know what kind of life might have lived here.”
“None of us are tuned to activate this gate. I’ve already tried each of our patterns, so I’ve instructed Navika to broadcast every DNA pattern in his memory to it. He has been transmitting codes to the gate since we landed, so I’m sure—”
As Asha examined it, the console flared to life, and the flash startled her for a moment.
“There!” Asha said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“But Oon,” Zahn said, “why didn’t you do that when you crashed on Avani? Why ask for my help?”
“Have you so quickly forgotten? The gate would not respond to me, no matter what I tried.”
“So what DNA worked just now?” Zahn said.
Oonak looked up, as though he were trying to remember something, but by now Zahn knew that was the face he made when Navika was telling him something through his mental link. While he watched Oonak, he heard a ringing in his right ear, but since he was wearing a space suit he couldn’t do much about it.
“Taarakani DNA?” Oonak said. “That cannot be true…”
Asha walked up to them, carrying the jagrul in a colorless, airtight sphere. “Why? Where is Taarakani?”
“The Taarakani are race of people who live on the world of Taarakalis. It appears someone has taken this moon from that system, roughly 16,000 light-years from this nebula.”
“But why steal an entire moon?” Zahn said.
“Because that is how the Vakragha Dominion grows its power. They have worked this way for millennia, corrupting the natural order of the galaxy.”
Asha’s eyes widened. “They stole an entire world from its cradle? That’s insane…”
“Now you see why it is crucial that they be stopped, at all costs. Does everyone have their cloaking fields integrated?”
One by one, they tested the cloaking devices that Yantrik had given them. Asha had integrated them into their suits’ systems so that Zahn only needed to make three quiet clicking noises with his teeth and the cloaking field would be activated or deactivated.
Luckily, there was only one other moon indicated on the gate’s console, which made deducing their destination much simpler. Oonak chose the appropriate symbol on the console, the vortex opened up, and they walked through, one by one, directly into the unknown.
Walking through a gate was similar to flying through one, except that Zahn felt rather nauseous afterwards. Yet his discomfort was soon forgotten once he saw what was on the other side.
To everyone’s surprise, the gate on the other end wasn’t being guarded at all. The cavern was dark, and their suits detected no movement. Even so, they kept their suit lights off and quietly headed over to an opening where light filtered in.
When they reached the opening, they realized that they had just emerged from the inside of a mountain. The surface of the moon was utterly tortured and dry, and rusty rock formations towered high above them. In the brown hazy sky, Zahn could see the tiny disk of the pulsar, and in the distance he saw that the mountain they had just emerged from was part of a severely eroded mountain range that continued down to the horizon.
Zahn turned around and was alarmed to see Asha and Oonak completely clearly for a fraction of a second.
“Oonak! Our cloaking fields are flickering. I think they may be damaged.”
Oonak looked up at the sky in disappointment.
“No, Zahn. The pulsar is the cause. I’m sorry. As I predicted, we will not be safe in the daylight. As long as it is daytime, the pulsar will be raining radiation down upon us every few seconds. This also may explain why the landscape is so tortured.”
“So what do we do?” Zahn said.
“We find your mother as fast as we can and try not to die. Follow me!” Asha ran ahead with the jagrul under her arm.
They followed her, and soon they were running along a narrow path that was carved into the side of the mountain. The gravity was weaker here, so they made longer leaps as they ran. Above them, the sky grew orange, and around them huge boulders and crumbled rock filled the landscape.
The jagrul continued to project a beam of light toward Darshana’s energy signature but in infrared light so they could be as covert as possible. Since their suits’ visors could easily see this light, the system worked well.
After a few minutes, they came to a fork in the rocky path, followed the jagrul’s waypoint up and to the right, and came to a spiral ramp that led up, into a tunnel. Out of the corner of Zahn’s eye, he thought he saw a large figure lumbering around at the bottom of the mountain, but when he looked back, he saw nothing. For a moment, he wondered how much this day was affecting his sanity.
At the end of a short tunnel, they found a long, rusty cavern which stretched down hundreds of meters. Zahn noticed that the jagrul was indicating toward the far end of the room. He was thankful for the light filtering down from above, but he didn’t like what he saw.
Along the wall, embedded into the rock itself, were hundreds of bodies.
CHAPTER 29
ESCAPING HATAAZA DARAD
Frantically, Zahn ran up to the wall and searched for his mother. There were people of all colors, all shapes, and all sizes. They appeared to be from all over the galaxy, but most of them looked dead or near death. Why bring them all here?
Zahn ran, despite the fact that he knew he should be quiet. He ran past hundreds of people. Where was she? He kept running. She had to be here. She had to.
The mad dash seemed never-ending, until something made him stop in his tracks.
It wasn’t his mother.
Kneeling on the ground in front of one of the bodies was a massive figure, clothed in cold, grey armor. When it turned around, his first instinct was to run as fast as he could, but he controlled himself. Zahn knew that there was no way that the Hataazan could see him now that he was inside the cavern and shielded from the pulsar’s radiation. At least, that’s what Oonak had said.
Now that it had turned around and was standing tall, Zahn realized it was nearly twice his height. Its face was grotesque with tiny pupils and huge, curling lips which revealed blood-stained teeth. It growled and moved toward him.
Zahn wondered if he should doubt the reliability of the cloaking field for a moment and slowly stepped aside to see if the beast would react. It didn’t. Instead, it growled past him and kept heading down the cavern, and Zahn breathed a sigh of great relief. He didn’t want to face one of those in combat, even with his resonator.
Curious, he walked over to where it had been and examined the floor. The creature had been standing in front of what appeared to be an old man. The man was completely naked, embedded solidly into the rusty wall. Beside him, protruding from the wall, was a narrow tube with a few drops of red liquid inside of it. Zahn noticed that there were some red drops on the ground as well.
Terrified at what his mother must have been going through during her years of captivity, he continued his frantic search, and just behind him he caught a glimpse of Asha and Oonak. They were straining to keep up with him.
He ran again. He could sense her near now and ran faster than he ever had before. Soon, he felt as though he had seen a thousand faces, and outside of the cavern, he heard the howl of a sinister wind. He was nearly out of breath now.
And then, at the end of the cavern, he saw her.
He ran over and examined her body. Over her mouth was an air mask connected to a small tube that led into the wall. She was quite frail, and her light brown hair was very short.
Here was his mother at last. Here was Darshana.
He felt her pulse. She was alive, but only barely. Oonak rushed over with his scanner, and Asha was right behind him.
“She is stable, bu
t extremely weak,” Oonak said. “Asha, do you have the air mask ready?”
Asha carefully removed the air mask that was over Darshana’s mouth and placed their air mask over her mouth instead. As she did this, Oonak held his resonator close to the rocky wall where it met her arm, the resonator making a high pitched hum as he squeezed the trigger.
After a few seconds, some rock broke away, and he continued doing this systematically around her entire body. But Zahn felt overwhelmed. After so many years, finally seeing his mother again filled him with a storm of different emotions, but he knew that she wasn’t truly rescued until they got her out alive.
Along the other side of her body, he used his resonator to help Oonak loosen the rock around her flesh. As they did this, Asha injected a green liquid into her arm and uttered strange words that Zahn had never heard before. At first, Zahn felt alarmed, but Asha explained that the council had taught her what to do at this moment. He didn’t question her again, and instead of panicking, Zahn asked his guides for help.
When the last of the stone was loosed from her body, she tumbled forward out of the rocky alcove. Zahn was in front of her when she fell and caught her in his arms. She felt as limp as a dead fish, and he struggled to hold back tears.
“It’s all right, Mom. I’ve got you now. I’ve got you now.”
Zahn made sure the air mask was fastened around her mouth securely and carried her toward the exit.
Far below them, they felt the ground shake violently.
“We need to leave here as soon as possible,” Oonak said over the comm.
Outside, they noticed that it was dusk, and smoke was oozing from the top of the mountain. They weren’t on a mountain at all. For the first time, Zahn realized the full gravity of the situation: they had been inside of an active volcano.
Epic of Aravinda 1: The Truth Beyond the Sky Page 20
