By the time the second hour passed, the Kepler picked up the presence of an Imperial command ship. Tolukei wasn’t able to confirm it since his mind was still focused on his task at keeping the goo still, only making very brief ESP scans.
The command ship had the same goo protecting it and was being led by another ship the sensors couldn’t pick up when the Kepler got close. The large size of the command ship was blocking it. Foster guessed it to be the Gerard Kuiper, they were after all still following the path it made through the ethereal clouds.
As they neared the slow-moving vessel, more ships appeared on scanners.
Draconian bio-ships, many of their weapons ports were opened and charging.
The race was on.
56 Saressea
TLS Prometheus
Terran Alliance Fleet, Interstellar Space
July 24, 2119, 05:30 SST (Sol Standard Time)
Saressea thanked the Gods fifteen times when the escape pod she managed to board wasn’t fired upon after it was ejected from the prison ferry. She wasn’t sure when it was recovered, or by who as she had fallen asleep after it drifted aimlessly for six hours. It wasn’t until she heard a recovery team outside cutting into it that she had awoken from her slumber.
Her body had weight by the time the personnel outside got a hold of her body. The escape pod was picked up by a ship that had artificial gravity. A human doctor waved a medical scanner around her body as she was placed onto a stretcher and taken to the ship’s infirmary. It felt good to be resting on something comfortable, so she put her head back, and shut her eyes.
What humans were doing in Radiance space did raise an excellent question. Her first thought was that they were Terrans, but then she cast it aside when she noticed they were concerned for her health and well-being. Later she cast away the thought that they were humans to start with, as they all spoke in the Radiance language. That discovery forced her up from the medical bed she was placed on to double check the environment she was in.
The interior of the infirmary was indeed of human design as was the equipment in it. The personnel she saw all wore uniforms clearly designed by humans. She just didn’t recognize them. They weren’t UNE military or IESA uniforms. The patches on their uniforms read ‘TLS Prometheus,’ the name of the ship. TLS wasn’t something that rang a bell, though she had a feeling the T and the L stood for Terran Legion.
Once she was cleared by the doctor, a man in an officer’s uniform escorted her to the bridge, giving her an interesting trek across the ship’s corridors. Like the infirmary, everything about its design looked human, like a warship. Her Rabuabin ears, however, picked up the soothing humming noise of what she concluded to be the engineering hall not far from them. She identified the sound of a reactor powered by ethereal energy. Only Radiance had that tech.
The bridge had a slick and aesthetically pleasing look, oval-shaped with a crew of dozens buzzing back and forth from various workstations and holograms displaying the ship’s status and their location. Once again, the crew looked human but spoke Radiance and none of them seemed to care about the traces of blood splatter on a few chairs and computers.
At the central station of the bridge stood a Rabuabin psionic, standing before a large work station with a massive 3D hologram of the galaxy rotating. Labels on the hologram were written in English listing various systems in Radiance space.
Saressea’s escort brought her to the Rabuabin psionic, and he turned around facing her with a grin. It was Michei. She wasn’t surprised to see him at all.
“Ah, Saressea, welcome aboard,” he said. “I suppose you’re wondering why there are Linl dressed as humans.”
“I was more curious about the bloodstains on the floor, the computers too. You know how much of a pain in the ass it is to clean that shit off the electronics inside?” He laughed. “Oh, yeah, and the human uniform thing raises excellent questions too.”
“I’ll try and be brief,” he said, directing his focus back to the holographic galaxy map. “The Terran Legion is funding the SOM.”
“No shit, eh?”
Michei pointed at the crew. “We are all Whisper operatives, most of these people were sent to UNE space as spies, pretty easy since Linl looked exactly like humans. When the Terrans made their threat known at Taxah, Morutrin Prime, and Amicitia Station 14, we had our Whisper spies secretly join the group to learn more. Turns out there was a member of the SOM that wanted to make a deal with the Terrans.”
“Terrans hate nonhumans, why would anyone from the Marduk cult want to ally with them?”
“Because those people knew that with the Terran’s support, they could take control of the cult, its members, and use it to their advantage. All they needed to do was topple the Radiance council, take control of the Union, handing it over to the Terrans.”
“And this ship?” Saressea said, eying the layout of the bridge again.
“It was built in secret at the Inadrai shipyards,” Michei said. “They look like a new class of Radiance ships, but on the inside, as you can see here, it’s a human design. A handful of the Terran forces in Sol traveled here in secret to take possession of these ships. Little they knew we put forth a lot of effort to ensure that most of the crew of the Prometheus were the Whisper agents we sent to infiltrate the Terrans. Those that weren’t, well . . .” He pointed at the bloodstained equipment where a few Terran brains were blown out.
“Sir,” one of the bridge officers called out to Michei. “The fleet is requesting for us to board the command ship.”
“Do it, they still think we’re with them,” Michei said.
“Command ship?” she asked him with a strange glare. “As in the Imperial one I saw on my way to the escape pod?”
“Yeah, forgot that part,” he said. “The Terrans have their hands on Taxah Hashmedai and got them to send a command ship with Imperial warships inside to assist in the operation.”
“And what operation is that?”
“As per their agreement, the Soldiers of Marduk, now under new management, will disrupt the Union from the inside out, allowing a new government to rise that will be loyal to the Terrans. In return, the Terrans will help them enter the center of the Hallowed Nebula.”
She grimaced. “The home of the Gods . . . But, that place is hundreds of light-years away.”
“And the Gerard Kuiper will lead them there,” Michei said. “It recently got an operating vortex key installed. They’re going to use it to get beyond the sacred barriers within the nebula.”
The view screen showed the fleet that attacked the Radiance ships escorting the prison ferries slowly drift inside the confines of the massive sphere-shaped command ship. One of the ships was the prison ferry she had escaped from. Byikanea and her followers must have captured it in the name of Marduk.
The Gerard Kuiper remained outside of the command ship. It was an old IESA ship with a habitat ring, a ship that vanished years ago due to an accident when she last checked. Clearly that wasn’t the case, and clearly, it was on the Terran Legion’s payroll.
“That’s an old IESA ship,” Saressea said. “Habitat ring and all, built before artificial gravity.”
“And that’s the ship that’s going to lead the way into the maelstrom,” Michei said.
“That old ass thing? How? Hell, how is this whole fleet going to survive? They need the protective gel, which I don’t see anywhere.”
“They seem to have that figured out.”
“Well then, we need to do something before the Gods slap the shit out of us with their cocks.”
“We’re one ship, Saressea. One that’s not allied with them truthfully. We can’t take the risk and lose our cover.”
“Oh Gods . . .” Saressea said, sighing and facepalming as her feline ears sagged. “So, you guys are just going to do nothing?”
“For now, yes,” he said. “I’m sure the Gods will be furious if we acted too quickly and lose our advantage. If we’re discovered too early, then there’s little else we can do
to stop this.”
“Have you contacted Radiance command?”
“We have but . . .” He pointed at the view screen, showing the wide doors of the command ship shut, cutting the Prometheus’s view of space off. The Gerard Kuiper was still outside of the command ship when a vortex flashed and opened, spewing out the clouds and thunderbolts of the maelstrom. “They won’t reach us in time, especially after we vanish through that.”
The command ship’s doors closed, only the massive interior of the sphere-shaped mother ship could be seen from the view screen. What happened next, only the command ship’s crew and the Gerard Kuiper knew. But if Saressea were to guess, both the command ship and the Kuiper entered the maelstrom, vanishing from normal space and time. The Prometheus couldn’t transmit to Radiance in secret when it left the known universe.
“Wonder how they’re operating the vortex key,” Saressea said. “Foster and her tattoos were able to on the Kepler . . . but what about the Kuiper?”
Michei brought up a holo screen containing scans of the Gerard Kuiper before the command ship’s doors shut, blocking further ones off. The glow from the blue and white flickering screen made his eyes narrow.
“Looks like there was a lot of psionic energy coming from the Gerard Kuiper when the maelstrom appeared,” he said.
“How much are we talking?” she asked him.
He pushed the holo screen to her. Her tail became firm when she read its results. It was a lot, more than what the Kepler put out during its test voyages into the maelstrom. “Holy fuck.”
“What’s the status of the command ship?” Michei asked one of the officers.
“Seems to be running fine,” a Whisper bridge officer replied with their eyes focused on their computer’s holo screen. “But we are on the inside, sir, what’s going on the outside is what we should be worried about, according to Saressea.”
Saressea nodded. “If the command ship isn’t protected, we’re all dead unless we reach their intended destination soon.”
“This isn’t an Imperial ship,” Michei said. “It can’t link with the command ship’s computers.”
She grimaced, making eye contact with Michei. “You’re a psionic. Can’t your ESP tell what’s up?”
Michei stood back, relaxed his muscles and eyes, entering an ESP trance, making the psionic cybernetics on his body shimmer with purple and blue light. When the trance finished, he said. “Everything seems fine . . .”
“Bullshit,” Saressea spat.
“Maybe the maelstrom is interfering with my ESP.”
A voyage through the maelstrom, without the protective gel that normally came from Draconian Charybdis ships, was suicide. The clouds and the wired laws of physics made all matter from the normal universe simply vanish slowly over time. If the command ship wasn’t protected, then all the ships inside, including the Prometheus, were at risk.
Saressea stormed to the bridge’s exit. She didn’t survive this long over the last year to vanish because the Terrans and their friends were too stupid to learn about the risks maelstrom travel carried.
“Which way is it to the airlock? I wanna take a look myself,” she said.
“I’ll come with you,” Michei said, following behind.
Saressea didn’t look down once as her EVA suited body drifted away from the Prometheus’s airlock. The powerful jets on the EVA suit propelled her past the sleeping fleet, below, beside, and above her, within the command ship. She left like she was flying over a city without a ship or vehicle through the night skies. Only the lights of the fleet, and a few lights lining the interior of the command ship’s gravityless storage space for the fleet reminded her where she really was.
Michei was behind, using a psionic barrier to keep himself alive, moving his body forward with telekinesis. He kept his eyes shut to focus during the voyage, his ESP working as a sixth sense to follow Saressea as she drifted past various idle Imperial and Terran ships on her way to the nearest wall. She called him a show-off. He didn’t reply, his psionic trance was something else.
Her HNI directed her to a maintenance hatch, and she followed the superimposed navigational point that appeared over her eyes. She cursed in the Rabuabin language when her hands failed to open the hatch. It was locked. Michei’s telekinetic powers were the key to opening it, crushing the locking clamps with a thought and a wave of his hand.
The pitch-black Hashmedai crafted tunnel took the two through a maze of smaller tunnels until they arrived outside of the exterior of the command ship. A layer of the protective goo was covering the doorway they forced open to the exterior. It was good news; the command ship was protected. The question was, how? Saressea had to find out.
The two floated through the layer of goo, drenching Saressea’s EVA suit in it and Michei’s psionic barrier. Her gloved hand wiped away some of the goo that smeared her helmet’s visor, unveiling what existed beyond the command ship.
She saw the colorful splendors of the maelstrom. The command ship was flying through it with the Gerard Kuiper leading them. Her magnetic boots clung to the exterior of the command ship’s hull, and she walked across it, leaving behind a trail of footprints in the goo.
Her footsteps stopped when she arrived at the forward section of the command ship, staring ominously at the Gerard Kuiper which was now ahead from her point of view. It too was covered in the goo, and six strange tendrils made of the goo exited beyond the Gerard Kuiper and touched the command ship. The tendrils touching the command ship began to spread the protective goo across it.
It looked like the goo was growing in size, multiplying, and spreading out. Someone from the Gerard Kuiper was controlling it. Someone from the Gerard Kuiper figured what the Kepler couldn’t do, use the goo to their advantage and send it to other ships. The Gerard Kuiper became an advanced form of the Charybdis.
A shadow from behind darkened the surface of the command ship Saressea and Michei stood at. She always wondered where the light in the maelstrom came from as there were no visible stars if they even existed in this universe.
She looked with concern to see what was creating the shadows above.
Bio-ships were descending upon the command ship and Gerard Kuiper.
The Draconians found them.
57 Rivera
ESRS Gerard Kuiper
Terran Alliance Fleet, Dark Energy Maelstrom
July 24, 2119, 06:52 SST (Sol Standard Time)
Rivera couldn’t believe it.
She floated in the Gerard Kuiper’s engineering bay, watching as Alisha briefly touched the vortex key Rivera was forced to bring online. Alisha had tattoos, the same ones Foster had, and they glowed blue like Foster’s, they just weren’t present on her hands. Rivera was able to see the light shimmering from the rest of the tattoos that were likely on Alisha’s body, covered up by her jumpsuit.
The remaining SOM crew Jainuzei brought aboard were tight-lipped about why Alisha had them. They said that it was the will of Marduk and continued with their duties. An Aryile woman dressed in the cult’s robes pulled Alisha’s floating body away from the key as alarms blared. There was a combat situation brewing, and nobody wanted to explain to Rivera how and why they were about to come under attack while they were still in the maelstrom. Alisha drifted out of engineering to the bridge.
Rivera managed to make a nearby computer workstation display what the various external cameras of the Gerard Kuiper saw. It was hard to see it at first since the goo was smeared across them, but when she looked closer, she made out the faint glimpse of a Draconian fleet on approach. A cold shiver traveled up her back when she saw goo-soaked wyverns fly away from several bio-ships quickly closing the gap.
“They’re fools if they think Marduk wishes this,” Sarpanit’s voice echoed in Rivera’s HNI.
“I could have told you that,” Rivera snickered.
“Those tattoos weren’t meant for a human,” Sarpanit said. “She stole them and is using them for her own gain. Alisha and Jainuzei are misleading my husband’s
loyal servants into a trap.”
“Own gain, as in the two aren’t serving Tiamat?”
“I doubt it; they would have treated that Nereid better if they were. Alisha and Jainuzei do not serve Tiamat or Marduk. We’ve been tricked; we have to get out of here.”
She mused at that statement. She and Sarpanit had to work together.
“Penelope’s hack is still restricting my power,” Sarpanit said. “Free me of your restricting HNI so I can get it back.”
Rivera looked away from the screen, and up toward the AI core, remembering Sarpanit’s previous proposal. And the last time the AI Goddess was in control of a ship like this.
She grimaced. “You still want me to put you in the EVE of this ship?”
“It’s the only way now,” Sarpanit said. “The Draconians are following this ship and the fleet it commands. What do you think they’ll do when they enter effective weapons range?”
She wasn’t wrong. Wyverns had been deployed, meaning the Draconians were minutes away from attacking. Adding to that, the Gerard Kuiper lacked FTL as did the command ship. Outrunning the Draconians wasn’t going to happen, especially when dealing with FTL weapons. The Carl Sagan tried and ended up swimming on Lake Geneva.
As much as it pained her to admit it, Sarpanit was right. Rivera wasn’t going to be able to escape alone, not after what happened when the Kepler was briefly docked with the Gerard Kuiper. Sarpanit was her only ally, one that was useless sitting inside Rivera’s HNI, limited by the hack Penelope installed. Whatever had become of Penelope? Probably dead.
Rivera had a tough choice to make.
She made it after two minutes of silence.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get you a new body.”
In the end, Sarpanit leaving her mind for good was just too good an opportunity to pass up. She hoped she’d live long enough to regret any negative actions that might come about as a result of her decision.
Hallowed Nebula Page 41
