Hallowed Nebula

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “Williams, have Chang take cover behind the refinery,” Foster transmitted. “I don’t think they want it destroyed, use it as a barricade.”

  “Understood.”

  Standing on the exterior of the refinery allowed her to see the Kepler in action for once on the outside. Chang’s skills as a trained fighter pilot were at work, steering the Kepler to make quick, evasive moves. Hard turns to the left and a dive saw it escape from six white-hot beams of tachyon fire, while three beams made the Kepler’s overshield ripple with purple waves.

  Weapons fire from the Draconian fleet let up after two minutes when the Kepler pulled itself behind the station, using it as cover. Foster was right, they didn’t want the station destroyed. There was something valuable on it to them. Or someone. The black box EVE carried no doubt had those answers. Foster continued the slow drag of her magnetic boots across the refinery hull to the location of the lone android.

  Four minutes into her trek and she saw the bio-ship fleet fan out in various directions, all looking to reposition themselves to reacquire the Kepler as a target from an angle that wouldn’t damage the station. Time was ticking away. EVE needed to be recovered ASAP, and the Kepler needed to not be in the sector anymore.

  Foster stood at the edge of the refinery where an explosive blast had split it in two from the previous assault. Mangled wires and debris spun aimlessly as she looked at the second half of the station where EVE was seen making her escape. From Foster’s point of view, EVE was walking upside down on the exterior of the second half of the refinery.

  Bolts of white light flashed near EVE. Foster made out two, maybe three Draconian soldiers taking aim at her. They didn’t see Foster’s rifle rise to aim at them. The vaporization of their bodies ended at the waist, while their magnetic boots remained clinging to the hull. The soldiers that sought to end EVE were now just pairs of legs still standing.

  A bunch of legs, seemingly standing with no upper body attached, wasn’t the frightening thing, however. It was when Foster had to make the leap off the one half of the refinery she stood on, and float over to the next. She had to deactivate her magnetic boots, use her EVA suit’s jets to send her upward, then hope she could spin her body around fast enough to reactivate the boots and get a grip on the second half of the station before she bounced off it and drifted off into space.

  Foster wanted to cheer when she felt her boots cling to its surface after the leap and float across was complete. But she knew her recent actions only attracted the attention of the remaining soldiers and patrolling wyverns. The countdown to bad things happening jumped ahead a few minutes.

  “Tolukei, where the hell are ya?!” Foster frantically cried out.

  There was no reply at first while Foster used a small communication array as cover when four Draconian soldiers marched into view. The weapons exchange between her and the four went on without end. It was a gunfight during a spacewalk, her training as an explorer did not cover that topic. Foster was forced to drift to new cover when the one she hid behind melted into slag from repeated tachyon shots.

  Tolukei made a late-as-hell appearance midway into the fray. His hovering presence made him look like he was a floating sorcerer. His cybernetically augmented chest glowed blue, and the cables and parts that covered his fists turned orange, conjuring purple orbs of plasma. Tolukei hurled the orbs of psionic plasma at the Draconians below him. His psionic barrier flashed purple in retaliation by those that weren’t vaporized by his powers, and the wyverns that swooped in with psionic plasma spraying out their mouths. Tolukei was drawing their fire, and it allowed Foster to move closer to EVE.

  Two soldiers were knocked into space and tumbled aimlessly from telekinetic pushes delivered by Tolukei. Foster pointed and laughed at their flailing arms and legs, until one of them faced the hull, aimed their arm at it, and fired a grappling hook. The tumbling Draconians were back on their feet and shooting at Tolukei, Foster, and EVE. Foster stop laughing and pointing at that moment.

  Knocking them off into space wasn’t going to help, if anything, it made the battle more complex. Drifting soldiers gained a height advantage, taking aim at Foster or EVE who remained on the hull, and then used the grappling hooks to stabilize themselves. Some soldiers used the large hulks of debris orbiting them as cover. It was a tricky battle with way too many things to account for. Swooping wyverns, Draconian soldiers that might drift up above Foster, all while making sure Foster herself didn’t drift away when the refinery’s hull started to come apart below her feet, thanks to missed tachyon shots.

  She needed fewer things to worry about. Looking up, she found a means to make that happen. A Draconian soldier floated behind a large piece of flesh, probably the remains of a bio-ship that didn’t survive the first ambush. The soldier behind the floating flesh aimed his rifle at the Javnis psionic waving his hands about, continuing to unleash his psionic light show. Foster cut her magnetic boots and fired her jets. She blasted off aiming her body in the direction of the fleshy hulk, blindsiding the Draconian soldier behind it with the butt of her rifle. A zero-g fistfight broke out.

  It didn’t last long, however, when Foster felt her body get warm with her tattoos attempting to interface with the Draconian’s armor. With her mind at one with the Draconian’s armor, she forced it to disable all safety protocols, and the helmet to loosen and open. Dragons might be able to thrive in space, but their half-dragon brothers? Not so much.

  With the Draconian soldier’s body now permanently adrift in space, Foster removed its grappling hook and then grabbed her rifle. She felt her tattoos link with the device, and it automatically merged with her EVA suit’s right wrist. She now had the advantage the soldiers had. It made her smile. Foster took the grappling hook for a test run, shooting it at floating metallic debris ahead of her.

  The device magnetically clung to the hulk of metal, and retracted, pulling her to it. She liked it. Foster used the debris as cover, took aim with her tachyon rifle, and sniped the various unsuspecting soldiers below. When a wyvern put Foster in their sights, she let the hook yank her body away from the torrent of wyvern plasma breath, taking cover behind another spinning hulk of metal. She liked that too.

  Had the situation not been as dire, she might have tried to communicate with the wyvern like she had with a drake, using her tattoos’ powers. Convincing a wyvern to protect and fly with her would have been bad ass. Maybe next time.

  “Tolukei, get to EVE,” Foster said over the comm line. “I’ll cover you.”

  His voice replied back. “Are you sure that is a safe idea?”

  She held up her wrist that had the hook attached to it, not that Tolukei could see. Foster had been bouncing about all over the place to the point where he had no idea where she was.

  “I’ll be fine if I get knocked off,” she said.

  Tolukei folded his arms across his chest, shutting all four of his lizard eyes. Blue light enveloped him and turned him into a quick-moving stream of psionic energy landing behind EVE. Tolukei’s appearance reformed seconds later, casting a protective purple barrier around him and EVE. His timing was perfect as three wyverns came to swoop down, green waves of plasma leaving their mouths, forcing the barrier to flash and ripple its beautiful lavender colors.

  Large shadows darkened the hull of the refinery, blocking out the red and magenta light from the maelstrom and its flickering thunderbolts. Foster saw the source of it as she looked up. The Draconian fleet was over top of them, dispersing the organic drop pods Draconian soldiers were known to pull themselves out from once they landed. Other ships adding to the darkening horizon spewed out dozens of wyverns.

  Time was up.

  Her rifle rose to shoot at the wyverns that were focused on shattering Tolukei’s psionic barrier. The fewer things trying to kill him, the easier it would be for him to teleport them to safety. Bad enough the newly arrived soldiers were seconds away, shooting.

  When it became clear to the wyverns and soldiers that the only one shooting at them was F
oster, they ignored Tolukei and EVE. Foster, not so much. She found herself back on the hull of the refinery thanks to the hook. The floating metal she had used as cover turned into red glowing slag a second later.

  There was a bright flash, visible from the corner of her helmet’s visor. Tolukei must have escaped with EVE. Her HUD reported EVE’s signal had changed location, she was aboard the Kepler. Now it was Foster’s turn to be rescued.

  “Tolukei,” she said in a panic. “Any time now!”

  Foster retreated as far as she could get from the horde of Draconians and the randomly dropping pods of flesh around her. Everyone wanted a piece of her. The extra mobility her captured grappling hook gave her denied them that as she used it to pull herself closer to a source of cover or pull her out of range of an attack she couldn’t evade.

  A streak of blue light flashed, and Tolukei’s presence appeared. A telekinetic pull forced Foster into his embrace, and then the two became blue energy vanishing from sight. Four seconds later, so Foster guessed, as it was impossible to tell the passage of time when your body was psionically taken apart atom by atom, then quickly put back together. The two rematerialized from the quick jump port and appeared inside the refinery, safe from the threat outside. There was enough darkness and silence that covered the two for Tolukei to focus his mind, making his implants glow with blue light and teleport the two off the refinery.

  When the bright light that covered Foster’s eyes vanished, she saw the various metal crates and the lone transport that remained idle inside of the Kepler’s cargo bay.

  “All aboard?” she asked Tolukei.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Bridge, we’s good,” Foster said. “Get us out of here!”

  The Johannes Kepler maneuvered away from the refinery. Its overshields flickered purple as the ship ate a barrage of tachyon fire from the bio-ship fleet. The Kepler positioned itself opposite of the growing maelstrom behind, shining its light on the sector, and then vanished from sight with a dive into the ethereal fissure the remains of the refinery was orbiting, leaving the dragons and their bio-ship fleet behind.

  And the questions as to what they were doing in Radiance space that was so important that they couldn’t risk destroying that one particular refinery.

  44 Saressea

  Tribunal Halls

  Vinpavis, Talsyk, Avalon System

  July 19, 2119, 01:12 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  The Avalon system was studied heavily by the young Radiance Union when it only consisted of the Aryile and Javnis races. The system, in reality, was a binary system with two bright white stars. However, unlike most binary systems, where there was a considerable amount of distance between the pair, the twin stars of Avalon shared an orbit so close to each other, those looking at it from telescopes would have argued it was just one star. It took thirteen days for the stars to make a complete orbit around each other. The twin stars of Alpha Centauri, known as Lejorania to the people in Radiance, took eighty years to complete an orbit.

  Radiance came to the system to study this rare star, not the Rabuabin civilization on the planet Talsyk, one of its orbiting planets, though, they ended up doing that as well when it was discovered. Saressea wondered if the brief view of Talsyk in orbit she saw, when she was escorted in cuffs to a transport, was the same one the early Radiance explorers saw when they took a break from studying the star.

  By the time the transport she was forced on came to a landing near the tribunal halls in the city of Vinpavis, it was the pearl hour. Nobody remembered why it was called that, probably because the stars of Avalon looked like a massive white gleaming pearl in the skies, shining white light across the planet’s surface experiencing daylight.

  Pearl hour was a special time of the day to the Rabuabin. Talsyk had most of its solid land on one side of the planet, while the opposite end of the world was covered in an expansive ocean. Pearl hour meant that the rotation of the planet got to the point where 100 percent of all solid land was seeing some form of daylight, while the rest of the planet, which was experiencing night, were the oceans, nothing else.

  Because all of Talsyk’s land mass was clustered together on one half of the planet, it took the Rabuabin centuries longer, when compared to humans, to discover their world was round. The Rabuabin that tried to sail across the oceans never returned, leading to rumors that they fell off the edge of the planet. In reality, the oceans were way too big for wooden sailboats to cross with the limited stores of food they could bring.

  The city of Vinpavis was located in the mountains, all Rabuabin cities on the planet were. The sight of a sprawling metropolis that covered the sides, insides, and tops of arching high mountains always made human tourists lose their minds. Saressea overheard a tour guide explain to a group of humans, as she was escorted away from the starport, the origins of the mountain cities. The tour guide reminded her of the lectures her school teachers gave her in the classrooms located out in grassy fields.

  In the early days, Rabuabin only left the mountains to hunt or gather food. Floods from hurricanes were the leading causes of death among Rabuabin. The size of the ocean allowed hurricanes to grow to sizes that were two to three times more devastating than what hurricanes on Earth could deliver. If the storms didn’t kill the Rabuabin, then the destruction of livestock and farms did after the hurricanes left the region. It’s the sole reason why monitoring and celebrating the changes in the seasons was important to Rabuabin, knowing when hurricanes were coming to batter the world led to longer lives for everyone.

  Because of that, it didn’t take a lot of convincing for the Rabuabin people to accept the word of the Radiance Gods when the Union’s ships landed and made first contact. Radiance offered them a means to travel the stars, and escape from the deadly hurricanes or build structures that could withstand them. Just build temples, get on your knees and pray, and Radiance will handle the rest with the blessing of the Gods.

  Praying was something Saressea wished the armored Templars behind her would let her do. She was on her way to a tribunal and spent the last couple of months giving the Gods radio silence. The least they could have done, as far as she was concerned, was allow her to have a quick one on one session with the men in the Hallowed Nebula now she was ready to talk.

  She thought she got her wish after they entered the generously lit tribunal halls and she was pushed into an empty room. She was still chained at the legs and wrists when she approached a small desk with a Rabuabin man sitting at it. His back was turned to her as he read various holo screens.

  She cleared her throat, and the man spun in his chair looking up at her. His hair was soft and light brown, and his hands and arms were dressed in cybernetics. He was a psionic from what she could tell, and an old one at that, judging by the type of implants he had. Celestial Order war era, just like Tolukei.

  He offered her a chair. The only place she was able to sit at for the past couple of months was the bed in her cell and the prison ferry mess hall chairs. Byikanea was always around whenever she got comfortable sitting, waiting to do something to her body. Saressea felt safer standing.

  “Za Saressea,” the man said, reading what she guessed was her dossier via a holo screen. “You are the only child of Tessei and Ryliea. Born and raised here on Talsyk, happy pearl hour by the way.” The man continued scrolling through the contents of the flickering screen. “You left Talsyk to pursue a career in space, working in the Union Navy as a combat engineer. Is that correct?”

  “Well,” she said slowly with a smirk. “Someone did their homework.”

  “I’m with the Whisper, I have to,” he said. “My name is Michei. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you more questions?”

  “Knock yourself out, pal,” Saressea said. “The longer you do, the longer it takes for the tribunal to start.”

  “I don’t have many, actually,” Michei said. “Your life and career are pretty straight forward, too straight forward if you ask me.”

  “Why’s that?”


  “Given your age and the time you spent in the Navy, you should have had at least one encounter with the Celestial Order.”

  “I got lucky, spent most of my time at the edge of Radiance space, far away from what is now Earth controlled territory. You know?”

  “Some of those planets are hundreds of light-years away.”

  “Yeah and?”

  “FTL technology has been around for about fifty years,” Michei said, and reached for his tea sitting at the edge the desk. She could go for one herself, it had a sweet scent. “The ships in some of those colonies are only now receiving FTL updated ships. How did you make it to Amicitia Station 14 to become part of the Kepler’s testing team so fast?”

  “You know, some remote colonies built their FTL drives from scratch, right? Psionics gave them step-by-step telepathic instructions.”

  On that note of scratch, she wanted to scratch an itch behind her left horn, and then realized the chains that bound her wouldn’t allow it. It made her tail twitch with frustration.

  “Like the Degar system?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Michei sipped his drink reclining back, allowing his tail hanging off the edge of his chair to relax. “What ship were you on, Saressea?”

  It took her a while to recall the name of it as she felt her tongue brush up and down the inside of her left cheek. Referring back to her HNI wasn’t an option since the slave collar rendered it inactive still. She had to rely on her two hundred plus-year-old memory.