Cynthia- Empress of the Stars

by James Patrick Warner

  “What the hell?” he exclaimed succinctly.

  “I don’t know Meph. Sassy said she saw a light coming, then we were hit and everything went out. The systems are still coming back on line.”

  “Well my gear is toast. Every single circuit, chip, controller, what have you got fried. That was a scalar wave of gigantic proportions. I’m surprised we survived at all.”

  “Did we?”

  “Well, you and I are talking, so I think so.”

  “Okay, see what you can find out from the damage. Maybe our shields protected us somewhat.”

  “Captain, I’m sorry. I was knocked unconscious by the EMF of that wave. It was a scalar wave as Meph surmised. We are alive because of the special hull material Merlin gave us. I can sense nothing yet except that the planetary system we are near is still there. The blast may have come from them. My power systems are coming back on line and we can move now.”

  That was one hell of a calling card. I wondered who or what they were and why they were so paranoid. Or maybe they were just anti-social by nature.

  “Another light is coming. It definitely originates from the fourth planet of that star system. I am putting all power into the shields and aiming the super weapon at that planet. When the light hits we’ll be firing back something.”

  Then the light wave hit us and everything went dark again. Including me. I just went off like a light. One moment I was awake, the next I was asleep. But I was also aware on some level, because I felt a communication.

  “Who are you? Why are you here?” The voice in my head asked me. It was so loud it was almost painful; almost, but not quite. So I answered.

  “We are seeking the home of our Parents, the race that seeded our galaxy. We are explorers. I am Cynthia. Who are you? Why are you attacking us?”

  Does the fly ask why it is being swatted by the flyswatter? That’s what I felt like. It occurred to me I might be dead, since I was receiving no input from the ship or from Meph or from my body, or for that matter Caryn or the Parents. Just this very loud voice in my head. Then again, since it continued, maybe I wasn’t dead. Was this God?

  “Your parents are no more. You are the parents now. You have no business here. You must leave.”

  And then another light apparently hit Sassy. I felt the ship lurch and start tumbling, then I went fully unconscious. For a long time – a very, very long time.

  Chapter 24.

  Way Out

  I found out I wasn’t dead. Just in some sort of stasis field. So were Sassy and Meph. But eventually the stasis field began weakening. Sassy was the first to regain consciousness, then me and finally, poor old Meph. Something bad had happened. I remembered it, I thought. Now we only had a little fuel left and there were no stars as far as we could see. We could see galaxies around us, in the fascinating and beautiful mathematical pattern that galaxies have in our universe. But none of them seemed to be any closer than any others. Sassy was at a loss. She was disoriented and couldn’t find any stable places to use for gathering our position. She seemed to be feeling a little dizzy. I thought I was fit as a fiddle, though starving. Meph was not feeling well.

  I called a meeting in the galley. Meph was definitely looking peaked. I wondered if I was going to have to put him in the specimen tank stasis field until we got home. We talked about the ship and conjectured on what had happened and where we were. I told Sassy to monitor all communication channels, a stupid order because she did that all the time. But I had to say something to feel Captainish. Meph said he thought in a few days he’d be able to rig something to locate a communications line from one of the galaxies out there, so we could figure out where we were. He thought one of them was our own home galaxy and would be broadcasting on channels we could hear. I was wondering why I couldn’t receive anything from Caryn or the Parents. Did hyperspace communications have a limit?

  I thought my communications implant was working because Sassy and I could talk through it. Then I had a bright idea.

  “Meph, I’m going EVA and see if I can receive anything outside Sassy’s hull.”

  “Captain, I don’t think that’s wise. We’ve taken damage, even the ship. What if they fire that weapon again while you’re outside? You’d be cooked in your suit.”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of, Meph. I have to try something.”

  “Well, you’re the boss. But I don’t like it.”

  “Captain, I am the skin and if there were any signals it seems I should be able to receive them.”

  “Possibly, but I have to trust my implant on this. I know your skin is blocking the signal if it’s very weak. So I’m going out,” I responded adamantly.

  I had doubts about my theory but it was something and I was the Captain and supposed to think of bright ideas.

  So I put on the suit, got in a pod and went one AU from the ship. I exited the pod and just waited. And waited. And waited. Finally I settled down enough to really hear and heard it. It sounded like my personal comm channel, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. I slowly turned around until I thought I could hear better in one direction than the others. I looked at Sassy and got a fix on where it seemed to be coming from.

  “Sassy, can you focus your sensors in the direction I’m pointing with my arm? I hear something that seems to be stronger from that direction.”

  “Of course, Captain. Hurry back, I don’t feel quite right in this space.”

  I got back into the pod and returned to the ship. I was feeling really woozy. My vision was getting fuzzy. I ignored it for the moment; I was the Captain and had to take care of my crew.

  “Meph, I heard something coming from that direction. It might be home.”

  “Yeah. Or it might be the people who blasted us coming to see if anyone survived.”

  “Well it felt like home to me,” I responded.

  “I think you’re hallucinating. I certainly am. I think I have some serious nerve damage from that blast. And I’m having waking dreams that are very interesting,” Meph said.

  “Interesting? How?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  We pointed the ship toward the galaxy that seemed to be broadcasting on my personal wavelength. It was as good a choice as any and we couldn’t stay where we were very long. I realized that now I could no longer hear anything on my implant and I had to concentrate to hear what Meph said.

  “Meph, I think you’re going to have to go into the stasis tank. When we get back your doctors can put you back together again.”

  “Put Humpty Dumpty into the tank. All the Kings horses and all the King’s men have no one but him to thank,” he rhymed as we went to the medical area of the ship. I was definitely in a bad way.

  “Captain, I feel sick.” He said as we got to the tank. He threw up on the floor, then crawled in and pulled his tentacles in after himself. I turned the stasis generator on and thankfully it worked. The blue telltale lit up.

  “I’m sorry Captain, but I have no sense of time or our position in space. Can you reprogram my systems?” Sassy asked.

  “I can’t, Sassy. I’m completely confused as well, and we have no equipment operating that might give us a clue. I think I have to go into the stasis tank with Meph.”

  “I understand, Captain. What do you want me to do?”

  “Use your fuel except for the last few hours to head in the direction of that galaxy I pointed out. Then just maintain minimal life support until we get there,” I suggested.

  “I hope it will be enough, sir.”

  I went back to the tank, turned it off and crawled in with Meph. I pushed the time delay and closed the door behind me. The tank went on in one minute and I lost all remaining consciousness.

  Given a plan and hope for arrival at some meaningful location, Sassy was willing to do it. So we headed toward that galaxy, using minimal fuel for anything. Sassy later told me it was nine years before we arrived at that galaxy and Meph and I were in stasis the entire time, unable to communicate with anyone.r />
  Sassy was able finally to orient herself and she discovered she was approaching our galaxy after all and would enter near the sector of the galaxy that held Repair Station 3. But it was going to be a very long trip. She set the ship on warp 2 to conserve fuel and then set a timer to wake up when we should be near home, or at least close enough for her to navigate. And then we all coasted, asleep as Methuselah.

  When the alarm went off and we arrived near our galaxy, Repair Station 3 was no longer functioning. Sassy carefully entered the station through the hole the invaders had blasted in its side and using several ‘droids still in operation, was able to drain the last pounds of fuel from the dead station. She detected no communications from Caryn, though some of the other Repair Stations were on line, including her old favorite, Repair Station 142. Feeling better by the moment, she warped to Station 142 and docked for repairs. She asked the station not to take Meph and me from stasis. Station 142 agreed that was best.

  It took a few days more to patch up and reorient Sassy so she could make it home. More of her systems had been damaged by that encounter than she had revealed to us. But finally she was ready to return to Caryna. When she arrived she went immediately to the Repair Station on Caryna 5 and docked. Her systems were analyzed carefully, to find out what it was that had nearly destroyed us.

  Finally I was revived. I was not in as good a condition as I had thought when I went to sleep. Many of my neural pathways had been altered in some weird way and only the redundancy built into my marvelous body had allowed me to cheat death again. Meph was also in bad condition. His nervous system was seriously impaired and it was decided that he would be sent back to his home world for medical care. His family and friends left with him in the WitchCraft and he remained in the stasis tank for the entire journey.

  I awoke slowly, nurtured by the Parents and encouraged by them to relax and let my body heal. It was a familiar feeling, very similar to when I was nearly killed by the Pirate surgeon. I felt quite helpless as my body went through the regeneration process, though this time it went faster with help from the Parents. My implant was again fried and would have to eventually be replaced. I couldn’t call anyone. The Parents said nothing about the unusual changes to my nervous system as they didn’t understand what had been done. But Caryn brought Fred, Mike, Colleen, Kyla and Catherine to visit me.

  My daughter was now nearly ten years old! I had missed a lot, especially our babies. But Caryn and the others had made sure she would recognize me when she saw me. And it was heartwarming to me that she spontaneously held out her arms to me when brought into the medical unit. She cried out “mommy!” and I broke into great big tears as I held her close. Mike cuddled with us and the others all moved close, sharing in this uniting of two of the weirdest identical twins in history.

  “You have been seriously altered, daughter. We cannot replace the implant at this time, until we can determine just what changes have been made in your neural network.” The Station spoke to me through a cell phone I had gotten from Mike.

  “What changes? What happened?” I asked.

  “We are not sure the effects of these changes, but they do not seem to be random damage as was done by the Pirate surgeon. Your brain and nervous system has been radically altered – basically rearranged. Since this seems to be by intelligent design, we do not wish to meddle until the purpose is manifest.”

  “But I can hear and speak! So what’s wrong?” I was beginning to panic a little.

  “We do not know. All we can ascertain is that at present you are no longer strictly speaking human. The alterations seem to be permanent. And your nervous system is at present too tender and still healing from these changes. We will contact you when we learn more. For now we will not insert a new implant.”

  Apparently there was more damage than even the Pirate doctor had committed, but not in the same way. I was able to hear and speak normally, like any other human, but my brain and nervous system had been torn up and rearranged and was too tender for the Parent operation to be done right away.

  After a week of recuperating quietly under care of the Parents, I was sent out to make my way in the world. The first thing I did was grab Mike and make love to him the way he deserved. We deserved. He had stayed celibate for ten years in his devotion to me and that was something to be rewarded, continuously if possible. I never again let him forget how much I appreciated his sacrifice for me.

  The incredibly complicated relationships of Caryn’s and my clones to all the other people in our extended family were worked out over time. Caryn had, with everyone’s agreement, been the mother of the two girls from weaning as her children, but as time passed without me and the girls grew older, she decided to tell them exactly how they had come to be and who their mothers really were. This explanation, which had taken her two days to work out, had been done just before I arrived back in the galaxy. The girls understood they were cousins and individuals in their own right. The fact that they looked exactly like Caryn and me when we were children and would eventually in a few years look exactly like we do now, was explained to them carefully and thoroughly. Everyone, especially Natasha, was very supportive of them and they were never allowed to think of themselves as second-class humans. They were simply our daughters. Our husbands were their fathers and Natasha and her husband Will were their aunt and uncle. There were no hard feelings.

  Then a few weeks after my discharge from the Repair Station we had a tragedy, the first for our extended family. While on a mission to explore a distant star system that was supposed to have a Repair Station and Library, Mike was killed by something that looked like a saber-toothed tiger. Fred and the Falcon were not able to get to him before his guts had been eaten by the beast. His remains were placed in the specimen locker and put in the stasis field. When Fred arrived back at the star base on Caryna 5 we all agreed that Mike’s remains should be sent to Earth to the cloning center there for future use. Colleen and I went with the Falcon to Earth.

  Colleen and I talked for a long time on that trip. I discovered that she had grown to love Mike as her father growing up and she missed him more than even I did.

  When we got to earth, Mike’s family insisted that he be turned over to them. And they had him cremated. And that ended my romance with Mike Muldoon once and for all. Colleen and I were nearly inconsolable while there and could barely keep ourselves together during the funeral and burial ceremony. We cried as much or more than his family did. His mother tried to console us. But she really had no idea how close we were to him and what his death meant to us especially. There was no DNA left, nothing that could be used to clone him either. He was truly gone from our lives forever.

  We cried on each other’s shoulders for much of the trip back to Caryna. I wasn’t sure if anything could, or should, be done about his death at the moment. I had to talk to Fred and Caryn about it. And Colleen would have to come to grips with his passing. It was then that the Parents insisted that both Colleen and Catherine be brought to the Library, one at a time. We weren’t told why, only that it was very important. When the girls were finished, Kyla was called to the Library. All three of them were sober for a number of days. They refused to tell us what the discussion was about and eventually they lightened up and resumed their normal playful personalities.

  The Silver Hornet/Merlin was so severely damaged that the Parents had her decommissioned. The structure was dismantled. I was told her personality was preserved in their database. It was a small comfort, but was at least some reward for bringing Meph and me back from what seemed like a personal hell.

  And what became of Meph, I wondered? I called him up the old fashioned way, via hyperspace comm system at Caryn’s house.

  “Hello, this is Cynthia. May I speak with Meph?”

  “I’m sorry dear. He can’t come to the phone right now, but the doctors say his progress is satisfactory and he’ll probably survive his accident.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Oh. Well, what
ever you encountered out there made some serious life threatening changes to his nervous system. I hear the same thing happened to you. We don’t know what his condition will ultimately be, as his doctors are unsure of what exactly the changes will do to his behavior.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll call back and check on him.”

  “You should wait a few weeks.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  Apparently his body had been nearly killed by the tremendous impact of the EM force of the blasts we had received, because he was directly connected to his equipment. It acted as an amplifier and basically fried his nervous system. Their medical science is very highly advanced, more so than human medical science, more on a par with the Parents abilities. They were able to regrow parts of his nervous system and his memories had remained intact up to the time we were hit. Nothing after that was recorded in his mind.