The Exalting

by Dan Allen

  It looked similar to the larger frigates and civilian freighters he’d been on, in terms of the overall cylindrical design. Huge fuel tanks and transorbital dropships were tethered to the outsides, like grapes on a vine or armored barnacles, providing additional protection from stray high-energy particles.

  But on the Excalibur, everything seemed twice as large. The interior had polished chrome trim that kept well with its namesake.

  Jet had been in cryo for four time-dilated years. Nearly three times that duration had passed on Xahna. But according to the fleet map he’d called up on the shuttle ride, the ninth planet was still three months away.

  Something had to be seriously wrong to wake up a troublemaker like him this early.

  All he knew about why he had been woken from cryo was that he was to see the colonel immediately—the same colonel who had assigned his dropship to Avalon.

  To a marine’s nose for trouble, it smelled pretty rank.

  They must have spotted an ASP sprint ship. They’re going to beat us to Xahna.

  After passing the security scan, he followed a lanky Caprian civilian female onto an office deck. She wore a long, thin, and slightly curved sword by her side. It wasn’t even in a sheath.

  Jet was sure they would never let him do that.

  Like the other interplanetary ships, it was built like a skyscraper, with the fusion powerplants and ion drives at the “bottom” and cylindrical levels rising “up” to the front of the ship. While the ship accelerated toward the speed of light, “down” was the direction of the system the ship was leaving. During the year or more of retro-burn deceleration, the ship traveled tail-first.

  The Caprian woman, who was three inches taller than Jet, knocked on Colonel Adkins’s door.

  “Enter.”

  Jet smoothed his uniform and stepped into the colonel’s office. He stood at attention. The Caprian shut the door behind him, leaving him alone with the officer.

  “At ease, Corporal.”

  Jet set his feet shoulder width apart and clasped his hands behind his back.

  Nothing inside him felt any more relaxed.

  “You’re probably wondering what this is all about,” the colonel began.

  “I assume it’s about an ASP sprint ship trying to beat us to Xahna,” Jet said. “Has it passed us yet?”

  The deflated officer’s eyes crossed, as if surprised how Jet knew. He attempted to re-muster his moxie. “Yes. We spotted it in a planetary transit image.”

  “Holy hot black holes.” Jet ran his hand through his by-now longer-than-regulation-length hair. “So, you want some hotshots on a sprint ship of our own to chase them down?”

  “That’s . . . yeah. Exactly.”

  Jet laughed. That’s all they wanted—a bunch of test subjects to accelerate the heck out of on a desperate mission.

  Beats cryo. Although the fact that they had summoned him, when there were so many other higher-ranking marines, was a bit upsetting.

  It was probably really dangerous.

  Jet shrugged. “Alright. I can have my team ready in six hours.”

  “Well, it’s going to take more than a week to build your sprint ship.”

  “Build it?”

  “None of our ships have enough thrust to give you two full g’s over that duration. So, we have to strip down an interdictor frigate. The frame can handle the forces. The problem is there isn’t enough fuel. Engineering suggested losing all the armor to make enough room for the added fuel weight.”

  That didn’t sound very clever to Jet. “Wait a minute.” Jet paced across the small office. There had to be a better way. “There are plenty of unarmored ships in the fleet. Can’t we send one of those?”

  “Yeah, shuttles—tin cans. They can’t carry enough fuel.”

  That was obvious. Their frames were light and couldn’t support large, external strap-on tanks. And lots of little tanks were a very inefficient way to carry fuel. The big spherical and cylindrical tanks strapped around the outsides of the fleet ships carried far more fuel for their weight.

  But fleet ships were heavy and slow.

  “And since you’re awake, you might as well brush up on your Xahnan.”

  “My what?”

  The colonel slid a slate across his desk. Jet picked it up. When he bio-authenticated, the screen displayed his orders.

  “Congratulations. You’ve been chosen to make first contact with Xahna.”

  Jet looked up. “Wait—you don’t just want me to board the ASP sprint ship and take it over?”

  “You may not be able to catch them. But even if they get there first, they won’t attempt first contact until they’ve learned the language. Our advance probes are already sending back data—satellite footage, even microbug recordings of their language. It’s our only advantage. We have to take it.”

  It had to be a joke. “Sir, I don’t understand.”

  The colonel leaned back in his chair. “That’s what I told them you’d say.”

  Jet laughed. “Wait—this is serious . . . sir?”

  “Straight from the High Council. You learn Xahnan and you get your marine butt down on the planet and make powerful friends. We can’t let ASP get a foothold in the power structure before our fleet arrives.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense—permission to speak frankly, sir?”

  Adkins waved his hand.

  “Why me? I’m a sniper.”

  The colonel shrugged. “Those are the orders. Report to xeno-linguistics immediately. And start keeping a mission log. This is for posterity.”

  “Like a diary?”

  “That’s an order. Dismissed.”

  Dumbfounded, Jet saluted and staggered out of the room with his orders in hand. It was pretty clear the colonel disagreed with the High Council’s choice.

  Jet was on the same wavelength as the colonel. Why me?

  Jet didn’t go straight to xeno-linguistics. He went to lunch.

  At the empty cafeteria, he ate the medically mandated post-thaw gruel offered by the dispensing station and considered the task of being chosen for the all-important first contact between the Believers and a new race.

  Step 1: Land on the planet. And hope the ASP sprint ship doesn’t have a laser big enough to vaporize me from space.

  Step 2: Stay alive.

  At least his sniper training would help in that regard. When he wanted to, Jet could be very difficult to spot, even from a few feet away.

  Step 3: The big reveal. Ta-da! I’m from space. Take me to your leader. Oh, and your world is about to face an ultimatum from ASP: join us or die. So, how’s it going with you?

  It was the galaxy’s most awkward moment waiting to happen, and yes it would certainly be on live camera.

  Although, based on the other first contacts, there was a decent chance the Xahnans wouldn’t be surprised that aliens like him existed.

  But why in the Creator’s great galaxy would they choose a marine sniper for first contact with Xahna?

  There was obviously something about the planet that made them want to choose a marine.

  And why a marine with a well-established history of bending rules?

  On his tablet, Jet pulled up the image database of Xahna, acquired by the AI satellite probes that had already been studying the planet for several years. The classified folder was unlocked, begging to be opened.

  Jet scrolled through the surprisingly high-resolution satellite images. The Xahnans appeared humanoid—no surprise there—with feathery extensions behind their ears. Skin tones were varied. Some looked almost the same swarthy color as him.

  His mother had called him “tall, dark, and handsome,” but his looks had never done him any special favors—at least it hadn’t helped him get any extra attention from Monique. And as a veteran of six covert strike missions against ASP forces, he wasn’t getting any prettier.

  To avoid heading to what would be a mentally exhausting language training session, Jet toggled his voice recorder. “Mission log, Corporal Jet Na
man, Believer Marines, First battalion, Special Forces regiment, Beta squad.”

  He’d been moved up after the last mission.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Just got my orders to prep for first contact. Fleet ETA at Xahna is three months. We’re in hard deceleration—love the real gravity under my feet. Centripetal gravity always feels fake for some reason.” Jet turned off the recording. “I sound like an idiot.”

  “Hello, Jet.” The voice was soft and familiar.

  Jet turned the tablet over expecting to see a cord running out to his battle helmet. “Angel? How did you get in there?”

  “You’ve got new permissions. So do I. You should see the server I’m running on.”

  “You little sneak.”

  Angel sighed. “Having trouble with your mission log?”

  “Yeah, I hate this stuff.”

  “I think you’re just nervous.”

  “About what?”

  “First contact, of course,” Angel said. It was odd holding her in his hands rather than hearing her in his ear. “You know, they might already know about us—the existence of other worlds, I mean.”

  That was a definite possibility. When humans had first reached Wodyn, it wasn’t so much the fact that there was intelligent life that was surprising. It was the fact that the Wodynians were expecting the humans. Their myths had as many tales of clever, charismatic, and cruel humans as much as Earth’s did of bombastic, belching dwarves.

  That fact alone resurrected most of Earth’s nearly dead religions. This apparently subconscious connection between the worlds was a layer in the cosmos humans hadn’t even scratched the surface of. But there was an entire planet of undeniable evidence for it.

  Since then, humans had traversed more than two hundred light years to find the Creator’s other worlds. Regrettably, Jet knew little of the other first contacts. He knew even less of what to expect when he got to Xahna.

  “For your mission log . . . would you like me to interview you?”

  The way she paused like that. It was so human-like. “Uh, sure.”

  “Tell me about the world you grew up in,” Angel said. “Where are you from? Readers love that stuff.”

  “How do you know what they want?”

  “Because that’s what I wanted to know when I graduated from the server collective and was assigned to you.”

  Weird. The quasi-sentient AIs had to go to school, too.

  “Jet?”

  “Fine.” He took a deep breath. “My dad was a diplomat on Avalon. I’ve never seen Earth. I guess I’m a child of the interplanetary era.”

  “So, you never knew what it was like to be alone in the universe.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Angel was so much better at this than him. And she wasn’t even human.

  “Can you tell them about how you came to Xahna—they’ll want to know about that as well.”

  “Why me? Somebody could write a biography or something?”

  “You love special mission stuff,” Angel said in a sultry voice. “Don’t deny it.” The text on his tablet began filling in with Angel’s annotations. “Jet joined the Believers after an incident on Avalon.”

  “Whose log is this anyway?” Jet protested.

  “Well I’m going to be a part of the mission—the first Believer AI on Xahna. They’re still steam era. So I’ll be as new to them as you are.”

  “Fine.” Arguing with the AI was pointless. “You tell them about you. I’ll listen. My head hurts anyway. Feels like it got slammed in a door.”

  “I’m Angel, an artificial intelligence assigned to Jet,” she said. “Actually, he chose me.”

  “I just selected a random name on the list,” Jet corrected.

  “He listened to all my interviews,” Angel corrected his correction. “I was modeled after the human consciousness. Humans are immensely social, unpredictable, capable of greatness and horror, and gifted beyond all other races with the drive to find answers.”

  “Or, in my case, enemy fire,” Jet said. “Apparently, I’ve got a gift for getting shot at.”

  “You’re getting better at this,” Angel said. “My primary unsupervised training took four Earth months and three days. After I passed the sanity check, I chose to volunteer for training on a Believer network. One thing led to another, and I found Jet.”

  “And she lived happily ever after.” Jet chuckled.

  “If it weren’t for ASP,” Angel added. She was always thinking about the enemy. That was her job.

  ASP. The entire organization had grown out of fear, a bunch of Earth-based corporations horrified at the idea of having to turn over control of their assets to an as-yet-undiscovered Creator, who wasn’t even a shareholder.

  The conglomerates allied under the one idea they could agree on: money ruled, not some Creator. The so-called Ardent Secular Pragmatists, or ASP, allied against all Believers. Finding the rest of the Creator’s twelve worlds and converting them to their respective ideologies became a desperate, brutal race.

  “ASP is the reason I’m here.” Jet watched his words appear on the screen—words that would soon be seen by millions, possibly billions. The words froze on his tongue. “ASP . . . murdered my mother. That’s why I enlisted.”

  She had been too influential with the Avalonian high court. Arguing against an ASP trade treaty had landed her on a hit list.

  Jet had found her body.

  After a moment, Angel spoke softly. “Thank you for sharing that.” He could almost imagine her putting an arm around his shoulder.

  Almost.

  “I think you loved your mother very much.”

  Angel was obsessed with talking about love. She would do it day or night on missions if he didn’t turn her off to save batteries.

  As much as love infected Angel, Jet was infected with a hatred for ASP. He wasn’t much, as Believers went, for things like praying and reading ancient texts. But he needed no prompting when it came time to pull the trigger on the devils incarnate.

  Jet stood up. “Let’s get this party started.” He headed toward Xeno-linguistics. “And I want one of those Caprian blades.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  Chapter 11

  Jet sat cross-legged on a pillow barely large enough to balance his butt on, like a giant in a tiny town. Opposite him, a four-foot-tall faeling lounged on her own pillow and watched him with eyes that sparkled with curiosity.

  “So,” Teea tossed her head, causing her fine, green hair to flip outward in a wave. “I get to teach you all about Xahna.”

  “Until my dropship leaves.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Jet wasn’t going to argue that point. “So, what’s the deal with Xahna? It’s got to have something from our mythology.”

  Teea folded her twiggy arms across her waist. “The astrologers have cross-checked all the lore from the eight planets so far. They haven’t unraveled any star chart clues, but they have narrowed the common mythologies down to four possible threads: magic, werewolves, sea people, and angels.”

  Jet leaned forward. “And we think Xahna is—”

  “Magic.”

  Jet smiled. “No way.”

  Teea stood up and paced. “Jet, what I’m about to tell you is rather unbelievable.”

  “Try me.”

  “Xahnans have a separate class of higher beings. They seem physically similar as near as we can tell, but the people pray to them. They think they’re capable of anything.”

  “Like gods?”

  Teea nodded.

  “That’s impossible. Only the Creator—”

  “I know,” said the Avalonian. “But Xahna is a lot closer to the Creator than Earth. Who knows how that affects what they are capable of?”

  “Supreme beings?”

  “Called ‘ka,’ actually,” Teea said. “Congratulations—you know one word of Xahnan now.”

  “Can I be excused?”

  “Don’t force me to be persuasive.” The
edge on Teea’s voice remind Jet that he was in a closed room with a faeling capable of manipulating his every emotion.

  Jet tried to wrap his brain around the idea. The whole thing seemed like a bad translation. “So . . . how many ka are there?”

  “Based on our limited microbot recordings on the tightbeam satellite relay, there’s one ka for each city, or sometimes a larger state,” Teea said. “And apparently, not all ka are created equal. The larger territories have more powerful beings that rule them, protect them, enslave them—we still don’t know what they’re supposed to do.”

  Probably whatever they want.

  “Actually, Teea said, “one of the researchers brought up a weird fact the other day in a briefing. Two of the northeastern cities on Aesica seem to have no ka at all. The word isn’t even used in one of the cities.”

  That seemed odd. In a world of superheroes, two major cities didn’t even have one.

  Something had to be going on down there.

  * * *

  After his Xahnan lesson, Jet collapsed on his bunk.

  A world that creates its own gods?

  It was like some kind of strange nightmare.

  Jet had never been one to think deeply about the Creator theory. It was a nice idea to explain the related worlds. He didn’t have a better explanation. But Xahnans were touching power humans could only fantasize about.

  Xahna has magic.

  Jet looked up the ceiling. He wondered how much more there was to the universe beyond what he could see and feel: if his mother were still alive somehow, a spirit or ghost, and if his father had joined her.

  His answer was an eerie silence.

  Staying by himself in an officer’s stateroom, he almost missed the chaotic company of crewmates. Most of the crew was still in cryo, so he had his pick of quarters.

  A touch of guilt ran through him, especially considering the fact that his team would all be transferred to Decker’s dropship in cryobags. They’d emerge, confused, in a cramped ship that was little more than a flying bucket built to dump three tightly-packed squads of marines from a hatch.

  Jet lifted the tablet and began browsing satellite footage of animals on Xahna. As a sniper who spent a lot of time getting up close and personal with nature’s worst, that sort of thing mattered to him.