by Trevor Gregg
As the shuttle approached the Guardian, the Sergeant ordered the pilot to make a slow circle around the ship, giving Alis plenty of time to gawk. The Guardian was magnificent, a shining white wedge-shaped craft, coming to a point at the front. The huge ship had massive main thrusters and several large communication dishes. Sets of missile launch tubes and weapon pods bristling with barrels ran the length of the craft.
“She’s got a crew of one hundred,” the Sergeant boasted, “twenty five of that are Consortium Marines, tough as nails they are. She’s armed to the teeth too, lasers, railguns, plasma cannons, smart missiles, you name it. And she’s armored to the core. Consequently, the crew is shielded from radiation beam weapons. She has her own warp drive too and can jump one-hundred parsecs when she’s fully spun up.”
There was a bright blue flash, “So we just crossed the energy barrier, but the shields were not fully powered up, eh?” Alis queried “Otherwise we would have been fried, right?” The Sergeant nodded in confirmation.
Maneuvering to the front of the ship, the pilots lined the shuttle up for their approach to the hangar, which was mid-ship. Alis watched excitedly as the hangar bay came into view. It dwarfed the large shuttle, a great maw about to swallow them. She jumped when the shuttle jounced and shuddered as it passed through the force fields keeping the vacuum of space at bay.
The pilot deftly maneuvered the ship into line with several other shuttles of the same design, touching down lightly. Harris led them from the hangar bay through bustling corridors, deep into the ship. Walking briskly, they struggled to keep up. By the time they stopped, she was completely lost. “Here are your quarters,” he said while motioning to three doors on the right side of the corridor. Captain Kahele will meet with you later to discuss what happened aboard the Searcher.”
20
Secondary Interlude
Tharox scanned the debris-filled space around him and his fleet. They were scattered in a large perimeter around a damaged and drifting space liner. His ship had struck it in the engines, rendering it helpless. Monitoring communications, he was pleased to see the distress beacon the ship was now emitting.
Soon, the Crevak pirates would arrive to plunder, and he would decimate their fleet. Then he would pursue them to their home world Granosh Prime and burn it to cinders for what they had done to his family. They would pay with their very existence.
He detected dozens of warp signatures flashing into existence, just outside the debris field. He scanned their engine emissions and immediately identified them as Crevak war cruisers, the most formidable weapons of war brought to bear during the Millennium Wars.
The Crevak ships made a course directly for the stricken liner, the massive bulk of the dark ships blotting out the stars. The cruisers reached the edge of the debris field and disgorged several shuttles, which sped toward the disabled ship. Tharox held his fleet, primed and waiting like a coiled snake about to strike.
And then he ordered the attack, seething with malice. Black triangular ships burst forth from the detritus and swarmed the fleet of long, sleek, dark ships. The space around the ships filled with defensive fire, but Tharox anticipated each volley, directing his ships to juke and dodge, avoiding the withering barrages from laser cannons, railguns, and plasma turrets.
The Crevak cruisers were heavily armed, more so than the Consortium fleet, nearly every surface bristling with weapons. They were also more heavily armored and shielded. In fact, the Crevak ships were superior to the Consortium’s in nearly every way. But it was not enough to save them, they still fell to Tharox and his dragoons.
With a flash, the remaining ships that were still functional began warping away. With a grin, he enhanced his craft’s sensors. Just as he had foreseen, their warp signatures had revealed their destination. With a thought, he directed his fleet to make for the warp gate. He willed the gate to open, connecting it to the newly discovered Crevak home world, the star system Granosh.
His ships streamed through the portal and immediately began to engage the remainder of the fleeing fleet. Once the defenders were dispatched, he directed his fleet onward to the planet, Granosh Prime. The blue and green orb stretched out before him as he entered orbit.
He knew what was going to happen, yet it still awed him. He willed the craft to form up, composing a massive triangular dish. When all of his ships were in position, beams arced from each craft’s vertices, converging on the center of the dish. The energy collided, and streamed from the dish in a great cylinder.
The tremendous energy collided with the planet’s atmosphere, and it ignited, the very air turning into fire. A wall of fiery death radiated outward from the impact point like a ripple in a pond, scorching everything in it’s wake, leaving only charred earth behind. As the wave of destruction spread across the globe, Tharox reveled.
He laughed with glee as he imagined the Crevak burning as his family had burned. The fire had completely consumed the planet, but his rage was still unbridled. Wiping out the Crevak home world had been gratifying, indeed, but he still felt hollow. The Consortium was out there, scattered amongst the stars. He would hunt them down, destroy them to the last ship.
He looked to the future, which to him was as the past. He saw himself presiding over the elimination of the last Consortium fleet, burning their home world as he had burned the Crevak’s. But to reach that point, he had work to do. He ordered his fleet to pass through the warp gate, sending them on to the Zoralian cluster, to wipe out the next Consortium stronghold.
They would take out the heavily armed defense platform, destroy the starbase, and burn the planet to cinders. In the meantime, Tharox would take care of other business. He would attend to the matter of the troublesome rillian. Somehow, a young rillian woman offered up an unknown threat to his plans. But the why was hazy. He knew, to be victorious, she would need to meet her demise. He just didn’t understand why.
“Computer, why must I kill this rillian? What threat could one girl possibly pose?” he asked aloud.
“An unknown variable is influencing this future path. Removal of the rillian corrects the anomaly,” it replied, echoing in his mind.
21
The Revelation
There was a light rap at the door of her quarters. Elarra opened the door and poked her head out into the hall. A uniformed woman with a buzz cut was depositing packages at their doors. She performed a perfunctory check of the bundle at her feet and found hers contained a change of clothes, toiletries, and children’s toys. Ew! She thought. Tossing the package into her room, she stepped out into the hall.
As Kyren opened his door in response to the crew member’s knock, Elarra called to him, “Kyren, will you come to my room for a minute?”
“Sure, let me just change my clothes,” he said, accepting the package from the serious-looking crew member with a nod of thanks. He returned from his room a moment later wearing denim pants and a loose fitting gray shirt with red sneakers. Sitting down at a small table across from her, he asked “What’s up?”
“Do you believe in your destiny, as the savior of the galaxy?” she began, carefully measuring his response.
“Sorry, not really, to be honest. Just some coincidences and a couple of drawings doesn’t do it,” was his reply.
“Fair enough. Let me give you an explanation of my vision, it will help you to understand,” Elarra spoke, while extracting a journal from her bag and laying it on the table.
“My visions come to me as if a dream, experienced in an instant but leaving permanent impression. Not only do I see, hear, and touch, I also feel the experience. I remember it as vividly as I do any other memory.”
Elarra continued, “what I record in my journals are just a tiny snippet of the entire experience, and doesn’t convey the full weight of the vision. However, they are useful tools, as I will demonstrate now.”
She opened the tome and flipped to a page, both the right and left side depicted Kyren and his brother Athar, engaged in various activities of their youth;
wrestling and fighting, eating meals together, learning lessons on the mean streets of Magar City.
Kyren still looked skeptical, “those could be any two kids.”
“Okay,” she flipped the page.
Kyren noticeably flinched at the image portrayed there. Obviously she had struck a long-buried raw nerve. A woman was lying in a bed wasting away, while two young boys stood beside, unable to help, despair obvious on their faces. Her next two pages showed a monumental bot fight, depicting what could only be Punchy delivering the killing blow to Inferno.
She regretted what she was about to do, but Elarra knew it was necessary. She turned the page and Kyren’s eyes moistened, hot tears streaking down his cheeks. The picture showed him holding his brother as he died. She let him console himself, and he quickly pulled himself together.
“You have my life, my life in your pages… how?” he stammered.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have time for that now.” Elarra flipped the page over and Kyren’s eyes went wide.
“He has come, the bringer of death, the one you will defeat. But first we must save someone” she said gravely. “Let’s go before…”
Alarm klaxons sounded, and the main lights went out. The corridors immediately became illuminated by the diffused red glow from the emergency lighting. The open journal’s pages were illuminated in the red light, the sketch of a ship like the Guardian being destroyed by a triangular shaped craft.
22
Boarding Action
She wasn’t running from her past, Alis told herself, as she sat sulking in a corner of the observation deck. She stared out the great window which ran the entire width of the ship and occupied the wall, floor to ceiling. Positioned behind the hangar bay, it gave a great view of most of the ship, and a spectacular view of space beyond. Stars dotted the blackness of space, burning pinpoints distributed in faint clusters.
Looming in the distance was the massive warp gate, the great ring lined with blinking lights, indicating a ship was approaching from the opposite side of the wormhole. The warp gates linked two points in space via a stable wormhole. They kept the portal active indefinitely, allowing ships to pass through from one point in space to the gate’s twin in another system. They had been built many thousands of years ago, before the great millennium war tore apart the galaxy and left whole civilizations in ruins.
Systems with warp gates usually had multiple gates, but Pygar was a backwater dead-end, with only one gate. Odd that there would be incoming traffic. Must be another salvage vessel, she surmised.
Alis wished fleeing through the warp gate would leave her feelings behind, but there was no way to escape it. She missed her family. Knowing she didn’t want to live they way they lived, she had made the hard decision to leave. She wasn’t cut out to be Consortium, nor did she even want to be. So leaving to make her own way had been her only real option. But she wanted to see her parents and her brother again. Being here aboard a Consortium vessel without them made her feel lonely and alone.
The blinking lights went solid indicating the ship was about to emerge. Sailing through the gate at low velocity was a black triangular craft, larger than a fighter craft by about double. It went from low velocity drift to full acceleration in the blink of an eye. The triangular shape grew ever larger as it sped toward the Guardian. Alis had a bad feeling as the ship bore down on them.
Three pulses of blue energy burst forth from each one of the triangular ship’s vertices and impacted with the ship’s shield, dissipating it in a tremendous flash, blinding her momentarily. Bursts of blue energy poured out of the ship’s vertices and slammed into the Guardian.
The Guardian shook and trembled, and Alis felt secondary explosions as damaged equipment blew up or parts of the ship vented into space. She looked on in horror as the triangular craft kept blasting away at the Guardian’s port side.
Opening up it’s full battery of weapons, the space around the Guardian became awash in projectiles and energy beams. Alis watched in awe as the gauss cannons flung streams of armor-piercing ferrous projectiles at the craft, converging their fire on it.
And then it wasn’t there, it had somehow dodged the fire. Laser blasts appeared to have no effect, and plasma pulses just washed over it harmlessly. It seemed the Guardian’s weapons were ineffective. The strange craft zigged and zagged, dodging fire and continuing to lay a relentless barrage down on the Guardian.
Alis realized what it was doing. The craft was systematically eradicating all the weapons on the port side of the ship. So they could board. And the craft did just that, coming alongside the larger vessel and extending a docking tube, which sealed to the side of the ship.
The bridge was going to be the safest place to be, she realized. It would be the most heavily defended part of the ship, she knew. She wasn’t gonna get caught in the middle of another boarding action, not if she could help it. She sprinted for the elevator.
She had asked a crewman she had crossed paths with for directions to the bridge. Either Alis had misunderstood him or he had been wrong. She had been wandering for several minutes, searching for the secondary elevator to no avail, when she finally admitted to herself that she was lost.
Unfortunately, the halls were empty. Alis hadn’t seen a crew member since getting to this level. And now she wasn’t able to find the way back to the elevator. She turned a corner and stopped short. A man stood fifteen yards from her, standing menacingly in the middle of the corridor in the wan red emergency lighting.
He was bald and bare chested, short leather breeches covered his legs. Alis recognized the cybernetic limbs and eyes that marked his race as bathalian, one of the many races that composed the Consortium. They were born with neither limbs nor eyes, so were augmented from birth. Their cybernetics grew with them under frequent modification.
“Hey there, am I glad I ran into you. How do I get back to the elevator?” Alis called out with mock confidence.
“Today, you will die, Alis,” the bathalian said ominously in a rumbling voice.
“Um, who are you?” she asked, buying time as she scanned for her exit.
“Your resistance is futile. I have seen your destruction, and the destruction of your precious Consortium at my hand,” he continued. “You cannot stand in my way.”
She didn’t wait for another diatribe, instead she just bolted back the way she came, sprinting down the hall. She heard thundering metal footsteps across the deckplates as she ran, so she didn’t dare to look back. She dodged around corners and chose her direction at random, but still he pursued.
Then she rounded a corner into a dead-end corridor. An impassable door faced her, its control panel lit up red. She spun and quickly backed down the hall as the strange man stepped around the corner after her.
“This is where you die, Alis,” he said with a sinister air.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?” she cried, true panic setting in.
“You think your resistance will stop me? I have seen the future, and know that you die here today,” was his grim response. “I am Tharox, and your Consortium dies here with you.”
Alis backed against the sealed door, pressing herself to it as if she could will her molecules to squeeze through and emerge safely on the other side. Despair struck her as she realized she was going to die at this maniac’s hands and she didn’t even know why.
23
Gratitude
Kyren stepped out into the hall after Elarra. Everything was bathed in the red glow of the emergency lighting. He followed Elarra as she pushed her way through the passing crewmen, making for the nearest elevator. He jumped in behind her just as the doors were closing.
“Where are we going?” Kyren asked quizzically.
“We must hurry, if we are to save her,” she responded.
“Who?”
“Alis.”
“Why, what’s wrong? Where is she?” Kyren queried.
The doors dinged open and she took off at a sprint. Kyren, perplexed, followed th
e Oracle’s lead. Elarra turned a corner and skidded to a halt, immediately beginning to backpedal. Kyren nearly collided with her as he arrested his momentum.
He looked down the hall at what had given her such pause, and was instantly intimidated. The bot at the end of the hallway stood taller than a man and half again as wide, and was perched upon four spider legs. Two spindly arms extended from the torso, ending in wicked looking weapons pods. It turned its chrome skull face toward them, the eyes a baleful red.
Kyren could hear the weapons pods whining, charging up to fire, as it turned toward them. He grabbed the Oracle and jerked her back around the corner just as the air she had been occupying was shredded by high velocity projectiles.
They ran, but with horror Kyren heard the thing skittering down the passageway after them. The Oracle grabbed him and pulled him through an open doorway, into a small office. They dove behind the desk, Kyren cowering, fearing the death and destruction that must be even now bearing down on them.
He looked at the wall and noticed a large grate over an air duct. One that was perhaps big enough to fit them? He didn’t waste time, he grabbed a pair of scissors off the desk and pried the grating loose. He demanded Elarra enter first, and thankfully she conceded without a fight. Kyren wriggled in after her and pulled the grate closed behind him just as the click-clacking of the deathbot reached the office they had just occupied.
A barrage of fire tore apart the room, shredding the desk and the rest of the room’s contents. Kyren didn’t wait around to find out what the thing would do next, so he encouraged Elarra to keep moving. They wormed their way deeper and deeper into the ventilation system. Kyren was beginning to get serious claustrophobia when Elarra finally announced finding a way out.
