Sades

by S. H. Jucha

  “Do they frighten you?” Lucia asked, with concern.

  “I think it’s that I don’t know what to expect,” Jess replied. “Can an implant be removed?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know anyone who has requested it be removed,” Lucia replied.

  “But if I’m the only Pyrean with an implant and the Omnians leave ...” Jess said. He left the question hanging.

  23: Sand Serpents

  “How can a society develop a robust infrastructure on its home world with no water,” Stasnich, the federacy leader, groused. His patience was wearing thin.

  The fleet’s first opportunity for a new home world had turned into disaster after losing three shuttles on a promising planet. With the destruction of the shuttles and the deaths of the crews, stories of monsters circulated throughout the battleships. Those aboard the warships were reluctant to participate in a second landing on a planet that from early reports had suited the race perfectly.

  After fleeing that system, the fleet had visited star after star, but none of the planets in the stars’ optimum climate zones had been habitable.

  Now, the Packeoes had found a second planet with the right atmospheric conditions, and it was occupied too. Stasnich was perplexed by the extent of the population’s development, when vegetation and water appeared scarce.

  “Orders?” Fleet Commander Daminich requested.

  “This planet is of no use to us,” Stasnich declared, sucking his teeth in disappointment.

  “It might be,” Daminich offered. “We’re in need of resupply ... water, food, and reaction mass for generators. We can take the populace hostage and force them to take care of our needs.”

  “And how do you expect to communicate that to them, Commander?” Stasnich demanded.

  “If I might offer a suggestion?” Captain Gregich requested. “We can show them examples and point to our ships above. If insufficient quantities are supplied, we repeat the demonstration until our ships have what they need.”

  Stasnich considered the idea. He wasn’t in favor of it, but then his suite was well supplied, and he had little knowledge of the ships and the crews’ conditions and requirements. “Very well, Commander. Proceed,” he said.

  The battleships cruised into the system on the ecliptic, the standard sailing procedure for federacy fleets. As the fleet crossed the outer belt, the Packeoes saw evidence of the reason for the planet’s extensive infrastructure, but they failed to put the pieces together.

  Mining outposts dotted the belt, and transports and shuttles plied the vacuum between the asteroids and the processing bases. On large bodies, shafts had been sunk into the surfaces to harvest valuable ores.

  The federacy fleet sailed toward the system’s home world. It was the birthplace of Ulgart, the one-time leader of the Tsargit council in the time of Captain Jessie Cinders and Envoy Harbour. It was home to the sand serpents.

  Stasnich was conflicted. He saw promise in the system, but he was dispirited by the planet’s lack of open water, lush vegetation, and wetlands.

  Usaana was an old planet, as measured by the galaxy’s timeline. Millions of annuals ago, it was a wet, green world. Much later, the Messinants uplifted a species that inherited a drying world.

  What saved Ulgart’s race was the planet’s honeycombed surface, which had been created during the planet’s carboniferous period, when seas and lakes dotted the planet and carved their way deep into the surface.

  The uplifted species, which originated from the planet’s sand serpents, utilized vast underground caverns as their sources of water.

  As the race grew in number, supplying the populace with more water became a priority. The species’ single focus in its emerging space exploration wasn’t to investigate the glowing hemisphere on the moon. It was reaching the nearby belt and collecting ice water.

  Over the first few centuries, the Usaanans stripped the belt of its scarce water resources. But by the time the inner belt was depleted, the Usaanans were mining the outer belt and freighters were shipping ore and water to the home world.

  Sailing inward, the Packeoes witnessed the constant freighter traffic. Near the habitable planet, they saw the freighters docking at stations, and transports dropping planetside.

  At no time had the battleships encountered resistance, which emboldened Stasnich to embrace Daminich’s idea.

  The federacy fleet took up station above the planet, and the leader, fleet commander, and captain studied the telemetry.

  The populace lived in discrete clusters. Their buildings reflected the colors of their pale terrain: ochre, tan, and creams.

  “Commander, look at the tube-shaped shuttles,” Gregich requested. “They land, but in many cases, there’s no cargo offloaded. Instead, hoses are connected from the hulls to pipes sticking up through the landing pads.”

  “Liquid gases,” Stasnich commented, offering his guess.

  “More likely water,” Daminich replied, which irked the leader.

  “They’re storing water underground,” Gregich surmised. “That’s why the citizens are grouped in tight colonies.”

  “We could take their water directly from the transports at the stations,” Stasnich said. “There’s no need for us to descend below to get it.”

  It was Daminich’s turn to be peeved. Any decisions concerning an impending encounter of a populace should be made under his direction. He was the senior military commander.

  “We need the citizens to facilitate the transfers,” Daminich noted. “We’ll only gain that support by leveraging their governing body. Those leaders won’t be on station. They’ll be down below.”

  “I suppose you wish to be in charge of the engagement, Commander?” Stasnich asked snidely.

  “I couldn’t do any worse that the disastrous landing you directed on the previous planet,” Daminich retorted.

  Gregich refrained from wincing, although he silently sucked his teeth. The challenge between the leader and the fleet commander had been brewing. The leader had been unsuccessful in locating a new colony. Supplies were dwindling, and nerves were fraying after the long voyage.

  Stasnich knew he was alone in his overarching appointment and authority. The council of elders wasn’t here to back him. He’d relied on bullying tactics and threats of the council’s retaliation if he was challenged, but without results, that strategy was wearing thin. “Fine, Commander, you lead,” he said. “We’ll see how well you fare with the locals.”

  Daminich ordered the drop of three shuttles and boarded one of them. His final words to Gregich were, “If I don’t return, under no circumstances let the leader dictate the fleet’s actions.”

  “I can’t incarcerate him forever,” Gregich objected. “At some point, we must confront a council’s review.” When Daminich stared at him, his eyes cold and hard, Gregich uttered, “Oh.” The message had been received. If the commander didn’t return, the leader was to become space debris.

  The fleet’s shuttles launched and dropped toward the surface. Daminich ordered the pilots to target the largest enclave that telemetry had identified.

  As the federacy ships descended though the atmosphere, the shuttles and the transports of the populace launched skyward from their landing pads. By the time the federacy vessels touched down, their target pad was empty.

  When the federacy’s ships and the pad’s surfaces cooled, Daminich ordered the security teams of the other two shuttles to disembark and make contact within the colony.

  There weren’t any significant barriers to enter the Usaana enclaves. Between the close-set buildings were low gates. Some of them were narrow, and others were wide. They’d been installed to keep out the drifting sands. The landing pad ended a few hundred meters before the solid stone walls of the structures. The space between the pad and the enclave was a stretch of soft sand.

  Packeo security exited their shuttles, with their weapons at the ready. As the two teams crossed the pad’s hard surface, they kept their separation. At the edge of the pad, they stoppe
d and surveyed the expanse of sand. Nothing gave them pause, and the leader signaled the other team to wait, while his group stepped onto the soft sand.

  The leader pointed toward a narrow gate, and all eyes focused on the building roofs and gates as possible points of attack. The only windows that could be seen were viewports, which didn’t appear to be capable of opening.

  When the leader’s team reached the target gate, he signaled the others to follow. The second team had crossed more than half the way to the first team, when figures erupted from the sand.

  The Usaanans had long slender bodies and small heads. Their slight hands wielded short-barreled energy weapons, and a fierce firefight broke out between invaders and defenders.

  Unfortunately, the defenders had ill-timed their attack. They were caught between the Packeo teams. Within moments, the Usaanans, the sand serpents, were dead. The Packeoes lost two team members.

  “Shall we proceed?” the security leader asked Daminich via comm.

  “Affirmative,” Daminich replied. “Disperse into four teams. Keep your distances and watch for more ambushes.”

  The leader separated the shuttles’ teams into four squads and numbered them.

  Squad one, with the security leader, entered the gate, and made its way between the solid stone buildings. The Packeoes of squad one appreciated that the walkway was stone and not sand.

  Squads two and three followed squad one through the gate, keeping intervals between them as instructed. Squad four waited in front of the gate and acted as rear guard. They didn’t face the enclave but nervously focused their attention on the sands at their feet.

  Squad one discovered that the buildings formed clusters and surrounded plazas. In a plaza’s center, a huge spiral was anchored in stone and towered well above the buildings. It spun slowly.

  “An aeration technique to circulate the air and cool the plaza,” the leader said over the comms to his squad. “Clever,” he admitted.

  Squad one patrolled a building cluster. The plaza was deserted. The populace had been warned.

  Various Packeoes tested doors, but none of them slid aside at the touch of the panels. One adventurous security member blew out a panel with this weapon, but safety features kept the door closed.

  “Commander, the enclave has secured its premises well,” the security leader reported. “It will take a major assault to gain entry to the enclave’s leaders. We’ll have to burn through a lot of doors to find them, and we’ll need some of the engineers’ arc machines.”

  “Return to the shuttles,” Daminich directed, and the security leader relayed the order.

  Squad four, which guarded the gate, never got a chance to respond. The sand at their feet flew up in great gouts, obscuring their vision. In the brief moment before the air cleared, sand serpents leveled their hand weapons at the Packeoes and annihilated them.

  Then the attacking Usaanans tightly closed their eyelids and returned to the sand. They slid just below the surface and traveled for tens of meters toward the pad. Then they lay still. Now, the serpents focused on their tympanic membranes, which would register footfalls on the sand.

  Squad three was the first unit to find their dead companions. They halted inside the gate and surveyed the long stretch of sand between them and the landing pad.

  Teams two and one arrived and bunched up behind team three. The new arrivals had the same thoughts as the others had. Those hundreds of meters of sands to the pad would be deadly.

  “We cross,” the leader ordered sharply. “Three to the right; two to the left. Team one in the middle. Cook the sand in front of you.”

  The Packeoes stepped onto the sands and began discharging their beam weapons ahead of them. The surface of glowing sand slowly cooled to glass but not fast enough. It forced the squads to zigzag, as they skirted the hot areas.

  The heat of the beam weapons disturbed the Usaanans, and they burst upward only to encounter squad one’s weapons’ fire. The serpents died without killing a single attacker.

  The Packeoes had crossed half the distance to the pad, when squads two and three were attacked on their outer flanks. The teams’ mistakes had been to glass the sand in front of them instead of targeting three directions and leaving a narrow path between two of the areas to slip through.

  The Usaanans caught the two outlying teams off guard and eliminated most of the members before they themselves succumbed to the Packeoes’ more powerful weapons and better training.

  The security leader signaled the remainder of his squads to make for the landing pad at a run. He didn’t need to repeat his order, and the fleet-footed Packeoes raced for the pad’s safety.

  Two complements of security had left the shuttles. Only a third of them safely reached the pad’s hard surface.

  But safety is a relative thing. The Packeoes had a long stretch of pad to cross to reach their shuttles, and serpents slithered out of the sand onto the other three sides of the pads.

  Neither side’s weapons were effective at the present engagement distances. The Packeoes sprinted for their shuttles, and the serpents used their long, slender bodies to wriggle quickly across the pad and stay low.

  Before the Packeoes reached their shuttle lifts, they were forced to defend themselves. The dual advantages of skill and weapons were with them, but they were heavily outnumbered by the serpents.

  Swaths of Usaanans died in the final firefight to repulse their home world’s invaders. When the fighting ended, not a single security member who’d left the shuttles was alive.

  “No response, Commander,” the shuttle pilot said to Daminich. “I think they’re all dead.”

  “Tell the pilots to lift off,” Daminich ordered harshly.

  The Usaanans saw the invaders’ shuttles initiate pre-ignition sequences. The majority of serpents fled the pad, but a few remained.

  Centuries ago, Aurelia Garmenti was right when she told others that she believed the Messinants had a perverse sense of humor, although she was only partially correct. The Messinants didn’t choose to uplift the best or most docile species. They enjoyed experimenting with any species that appealed to their intellect.

  In the case of the sand serpents of Usaana, they were a species characterized by unrelenting aggression. They were an old race and one of the first in the alliance. It took centuries for the other races to dislodge Ulgart and his ilk from their powerful positions at the heads of the committees and the council.

  Now, the Usaanans were under attack, and their personalities allowed the invaders no quarter. While several volunteers quickly approached a shuttle, the remainder, who’d fled the pad, swam fast and deep to reach cool sands far from the landing pads.

  The volunteers trained their hand weapons on the same spot on a shuttle and fired. Their target was one of the twin outboard fuel tanks. They held down their firing buttons, draining the power packs and replacing them as fast as they could.

  The shuttle farthest from the volunteers initiated its main engine ignition. As the heat spread across the pad and began to scorch the short legs of the serpents, they held their ground.

  Before the shuttle that was under attack could fire its engines, the metal that the serpents had superheated ignited the tank’s fuel. The massive detonation generated a cascade that enveloped all three shuttles and the volunteers.

  The resulting fireball was visible to the fleet’s telemetry.

  “Every one of them?” Stasnich asked.

  “Yes, Leader Stasnich,” Captain Gregich replied.

  “The idiot,” Stasnich commented harshly. He stood on the bridge of the lead battleship, Gregich’s warship.

  The crew hid their faces from Stasnich, lest their leader see the anger in their eyes.

  Daminich’s final words went through Gregich’s mind. He’d told him to rid the fleet of Stasnich if he didn’t return.

  “Contact, Captain,” the telemetry officer announced.

  “What are you talking about?” Stasnich demanded. “Of course, we have contacts. The
re are all kinds of transports in this system.” He fumed at the interruption of his thoughts, and he waited impatiently for a reply. But the officer remained quiet.

  “Report,” Gregich requested.

  “It’s a starship, Captain,” the officer said. “During third shift, there was evidence of a unique disturbance beyond the belt. When it abruptly disappeared, the telemetry officer logged it as an anomaly. Now, we realize that contact was the momentary appearance of a starship on the ecliptic, and it’s reappeared below the ecliptic.”

  “Distance?” Gregich requested.

  “Eight hundred thousand,” the officer reported.

  “Beyond active missile range,” Gregich commented. “Show me.”

  “Telemetry is still resolving the image, but the outline is there,” the officer replied. He sent his panel’s image to the central bridge screen.

  Gregich swore, when he saw the fuzzy image. The distinctive tri-hulled shape was evident. “It’s them,” he said, in a hushed voice.

  “Them who?” Stasnich roared. “Give me some answers, or I’ll have you removed from your position as senior captain.”

  Gregich’s patience ran out. He’d lost his mentor and friend, Daminich. Now, the signature shape of the race that had unseated Artifice was sitting out there in the dark monitoring his fleet.

  With a snarl, Gregich turned on Stasnich, “How did you ever get to be a leader?” he demanded. “You’re too stupid to lead yourself.”

  Gregich turned to face his bridge crew. Their eyes eagerly awaited his next order. “Confine the leader to his cabin,” he said. He’d said it quietly, even regretfully. Nonetheless, several bridge officers jumped to the task with alacrity.

  As the officers hauled Stasnich off the bridge, he yelled threats at Gregich, who ignored him.

  When the bridge officers returned to their positions, the crew regarded Gregich expectantly.

  “Comms, to all ships,” Gregich ordered crisply.

  “Ready, Captain,” the comms officer replied.

  “This is Senior Captain Gregich. I’m sad to report the loss of Commander Daminich and three shuttle crews on the planet below. In addition, we’ve an alien starship not far from us. I’m sure you’ve observed it in your telemetry by now. As of this moment, I’m assuming command authority of the fleet. Leader Stasnich has been detained. We’ll be exiting above the ecliptic and continuing our search for a world to inhabit.”