Kalian could feel Li’ara’s anxiety at being physically separated from him. She was still operating under her UDC parameters and felt out of control if she couldn’t get to him.
“It seems I have an audience,” Kalian said out loud to the omnipresent AI.
ALF’s voice replied but his holographic body wasn’t present. “It’s good that you are aware. That’s progress.”
Three hard-light Gomar in full armour came into life in a circle around him. He had already felt the coalescing of the holo-particles and felt no surprise seeing them. It was eerie how life-like they always appeared as they paced the sparring mat.
“This time I want you to use as many abilities as you can, they will attack you in every way I can replicate.”
Kalian already knew the cannons were to recreate the organic plasma. He noticed the copy on his right was wielding a blade similar to Li’ara’s. He performed one last check of the surrounding walls and was happy to see the one between him and his friends was two-feet of reinforced nanocelium. He smiled at the idea of being able to just let go and not hurt anyone.
There was no countdown or signal as the three attacked at once. Inside his mind where everything worked at the speed of a firing synapse, he had already run the scenario through. He released a small burst of electromagnetic fields in every direction rather than lose concentration by focusing on the blade. The first swing of the blade missed as the nanocelium retracted back into the hilt. Knowing this would be the case, Kalian’s first move was to punch the Gomar in front while at the same time kick the one behind. Flipping back from this position like a trained gymnast, he flicked his leg out and kicked the recently punched Gomar. He briefly balanced on hand before completely back-flipping onto his feet.
By this point, two of the Gomar were flat on their back while the other one threw away his broken hilt and charged Kalian. The Gomar lifted him off the floor and piled him back down until Kalian was buried underneath. The armour had prevented any major pain while the telekinetic field around his head protected him against concussion. He felt Li’ara’s heart rate increase through the wall and instantly shut off his connection to her feelings; he needed to focus.
He quickly flexed his hands out and launched the Gomar high into the air until he impacted the ceiling. He rolled out of the way before the heavy body landed on top of him. With the newly acquired agility, Kalian propelled himself onto his feet to see the broken dome in the ceiling. His mind filtered the feedback from the room and he became aware of the cannons building up energy. He didn’t have time to react however as the other Gomar advanced. They became a flurry of limbs as the two remaining Gomar attacked and countered Kalian. He felt the occasional bolt of plasma hit his armour and knew the nanocelium was reacting appropriately where his field lost cohesion. One struck him in the back of the knee, dropping him to it where he then received a blow to the face from the Gomar. The surprise made him lose concentration and he felt the pain as his telekinetic field weakened.
Taking advantage of this, the Gomar picked him up by the scruff of his neck so the other could pound his armour down. Every blow put a crack in his field and strained his focus. He retreated for a fraction of a second and replayed a memory that wasn’t his. He witnessed a Terran learning to fight, much like he was, and absorbed the specific techniques she implored to defeat her attackers. The move was complex but after seeing it he felt like he had already done it a thousand times. Before the next blow made contact, he executed the move and created a tangle of arms. He removed the locking grip around his neck and arm while also blocking the next punch. He reinforced the telekinetic field around his face and headbutted the Gomar to his side before driving his foot into the knee-joint of the other. With the new space, Kalian shot his left hand out and released a ball of organic plasma into the chest of the Gomar. The desired effect was achieved as the armour crumpled inwards and sent the Gomar across the room.
From what he had learned inside the subconducer, he knew the best way to use plasma was with a telekinetic field around his hand. Kalian impressed himself with the speed he created the plasma, not to mention the lack of a burnt hand.
The remaining Gomar shook off the simulated effects of the headbutt and attacked again. Kalian whipped around, bringing his arm with him as he did. Again this was all instinct, he didn’t actually need his arm for what he was doing but he thought it helped him to focus. The Gomar was swept aside until he crashed into the adjacent wall before Kalian lifted his arm, sending him into the ceiling with a crack. To completely finish him off, Kalian pulled his arm down and clenched his fist. The Gomar was dragged back to the floor with a greater speed than gravity was capable of. His leg and head fell at an awkward angle and his body lay perfectly still.
The cannons slotted back into their housing and the holographic Gomar disappeared. All that was left was a room fall of dented walls and a broken ceiling. He took more control of his subconscious functions and expanded into the room beyond, focusing on Li’ara. He dipped into her brainwaves, delicately this time, and felt her emotions churn like a stormy ocean. She was somewhere between awe and horror. This was to be expected, he supposed; he wasn’t exactly the same person she had met on Earth. He knew she would be struggling with the idea of protecting someone who didn’t really need protection anymore.
“You’re not using your full potential.” ALF was suddenly behind him wearing his normal robes. “You felt pain when you should have shut off all of your receptors. Your grasp of telekinesis is crude and blunt.” The AI looked over the various impact sites. “And by now that kind of fight should have taken you half the time.”
Kalian turned away in frustration at never being able to please the AI. “It’s not easy using everything at once!”
Kalian had already begun the process of regenerating his cells, specifically his adenosine triphosphate for energy reserves. He knew if he needed to he could increase the normal 250g of ATP into 400g, nearly doubling his rate of metabolism. His laboured breathing had already stopped and his lactic acid was being broken down to prevent spasms in his muscles.
“How very human of you,” ALF replied dryly.
“I am human!”
“No, you’re not! You are more than that now. You have to be more. Savrick will not hold back. You are the final insult, Kalian. He will use everything he knows to make you suffer, to make her suffer!”
With that, Kalian gave into his frustration and waved his hand across ALF’s form. The hologram was shattered into its individual atoms as he disrupted the emitters.
“It will take more than that to silence me.” His voice came over the hidden speakers again.
Kalian sighed at the lecturing voice. “Just leave me alone for a while.” Kalian made for the wall where it melted away to a circular door.
“You have an hour, and then you must return to the subconducer. The Helion’s transmitter has been disabled so I cannot calculate their time of arrival, but it will be soon.”
Kalian didn’t care right now. He just wanted to see the sun.
Roland struggled to his feet, fighting through the pain in his ribs. He quickly tracked back to the previous corridor and retrieved his animal-hide coat. He could see now the sphere of devastation his MID had caused. The edges of the three levels the bomb had cut through were glowing orange, with steam rising off them. He could hear the thousands of voices above and realised he had forgotten about the other armoured goon. With the glowing edges, there was no way he could climb up. Let the Novaarians deal with it, he thought. He was exhausted.
He returned to the naked woman and draped the large coat over her pale form. In the time he had been gone, she had removed the majority of the tubes which now lay in a tangled mess. Using both hands she pulled up on the tube attached to her thigh. It made a sticky sound as it came free, followed by a stream of blood. He attempted to cover it with his hand before she snatched his wrist in mid-air.
“Wait...” Her voice sounded less croaky but still laboured.
&n
bsp; He watched in wonder as the flow stopped and the tissue began to regenerate. Within moments the wound was gone entirely. He helped her up supporting her by the arms. Her deep blue eyes scanned the room absently.
“Who the hell are you? And don’t say Esabelle, we’ve covered that.”
She certainly wasn’t one of the terraforming crew; none of them could crush a man with their mind. Was she some kind of prisoner? One of their own maybe?
“I am the pilot.” Her voice got better with every word.
He looked over her shoulder at the room she had come from. It wasn’t too dissimilar from the bridge on the Hammer or any other UDC vessel for that matter. It had various consoles with chairs at every station and one central seat for the captain. It looked darker than most bridges though, with bronze holograms and black touch screens. The overhead spotlights gave it a very atmospheric look. None of it explained how she could pilot the epic ship or why she had been covered in tubes.
“You’re not like any pilot I’ve ever seen.” If she was the pilot, why was she helping him?
“We don’t have long. I overloaded their link to the Gommarian before I disconnected. You will need the help of the others to retrieve them all and secure them. If they wake up they will take back the ship.”
Roland had no idea what she was talking about. “Did you hit your head back there?”
She turned on him with a frustrated look he was used to seeing from women. “This is the Gommarian.” She looked around, meaning the ship they were standing in. “They are all connected to me, to it, through a cerebral link. Before I disconnected, I reconfigured the ship so it could be manually controlled and internally navigated. But I also overloaded their link with a looping thought-bomb.” To his confused look she elaborated. “Like a computer virus for the brain. But they will recover soon. I know where they are on the ship, we must contain them quickly.”
“Is that what you meant by, ‘they are coming’?” It sounded much creepier the way she had said it.
“No...” She had a confused look as if she was recollecting a dream. “That was something else. But we don’t have time for that now.”
She left the support of his arms and strode out of the door towards the wreckage of the MID.
Not entirely sure of her motives, Roland kept his blade close.
16
The beast had caught up with them on their way back to the hangar. He was covered in blood that dripped from every plate of armour. Savrick could even see organic matter stuck between the segments, where the beast had most likely used his hands or rammed through the corridors. The ramp to their ship descended as they approached. It looked completely out of place against the sleek polished crafts of the Conclave.
The beast remained in the hold of the craft, while the other three took their positions on the smaller bridge. The Helion would emerge from subspace shortly since Sef had made all the arrangements. Savrick had considered arriving in the system and slagging the planet and moon with everything the security vessel had, but that would be too quick. He wanted to know if there was a surviving Terran living on that moon, apart from Kalian Gaines. It amused and frustrated him that he could kill billions of humans in a single day, but continued to fail in killing this one.
Sef set his controls, readying the ship for immediate departure. Having gleaned the knowledge of The Wall, they knew exactly where to go. He knew that Sef had been forced to override most of the Helion’s safety protocols for this jump. The ship had built-in measures to ensure that anything emerging from subspace impacted at five hundred thousand kilometres or more from the main planetary body. Thanks to Sef’s superior knowledge of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, they were going to emerge in a tight orbit around Naveen. These types of calculations could not be done by any other being except an AI, which in the Conclave’s case followed strict rules.
Lilander was standing in front of a full-length hologram that acted as sensor feedback with a view of the approaching system.
“Long-range scans show an increase in activity around Nova Prime. They’re all Novaarian ships, no Conclave security. They will be no more powerful than the one we have been chasing,” Lilander informed him.
“How many are there?” He was being lazy; he could easily have acquired that information via his link.
“Six at present.” She looked at him with a questioning expression. Lilander was right to expect some new orders, however. There was no way they could survive an encounter with six Novaarian cruisers.
“It changes nothing. By the time they react, we will already be on the surface. Sef?” His covered head turned to silently regard his leader. “Set the ship to create a mesh.”
Sef turned back to his console and made the adjustments. It had been the Terran who first developed the mesh for protection against orbital bombardment. The ship would produce an invisible dome over a designated area; this mesh would then disrupt and deflect the targeting systems of the ships above. A ship like the Helion could produce a beam capable of obliterating a single individual from orbit. Savrick wouldn’t take the chance that the Novaarian vessels were equally well equipped.
Soon, he thought, soon it would all be over. With the last Terran finally dead he could rest, they all could. And with the prisoners from the Laronian ship, they would have enough breeding partners to start again. The programs Elandar had run showed that his DNA combined with a female human DNA would produce a complete Terran zygote, with no primitive throwbacks from the human mother or father. He reasoned that their superior genes simply overwhelmed the human DNA to create the perfect Terran. With this new world, he could lead them into the golden era that ALF had prevented them from reaching. He had no intention of being some overbearing god like the Criterion had. He would make things right, the way they should have been. He would free Esabelle and send the Gommarian into the nearest star. If they went deep enough into the galaxy, they could survive what was coming; he would make sure of that.
But first, he would have his revenge.
Kalian heard the grating rock as the solid door parted into the ground behind him. He could feel the very human presence of Li’ara as her physical body displaced the atmospheric molecules around her. The feeling reminded him of the way a shark could detect other organisms in the water. To this effect he now found his memory to be as easy as entering a word into a search engine. His current thought presented him with all the information he had ever seen or heard about sharks; this one being a comparison of their ampullae of Lorenzini and his ability to detect the electromagnetic fields of other beings. A quick introspection showed that he now possessed similar but biologically different electroreceptors either side of his nose.
Feeling her unease, he reduced the pressure beneath him and slowly descended back to the desert sand. It felt natural to him during his meditative sleep to float with his legs crossed, it felt great to finally understand why he often woke up above his bed and to have control of his telekinesis. He was on his feet by the time she reached him when he noticed the words on The Wall behind her. As the door closed, the sentence came back together where he read: The Stars Are Your Birthright. Here Begins The Path Home. We Are Forever.
The lines were separated by the karyotype of the very DNA that made up his every cell. When had he learned to read Terran? He was grateful for the use of the subconducer but felt unsure of the way it changed whole parts of his mind and uploaded anything it liked. Of course, when he thought about it, it was ALF. The AI had a way of making you feel like you were speaking with just another human being, but the truth was far more terrifying. Despite only being a third of the whole, he was still an engineered god with capabilities even Kalian couldn’t comprehend. Conversing with him felt to Kalian like he was only seeing the surface of ALF, that there was far more going on behind the hologram and the words.
Following his gaze, Li’ara inspected the door herself before giving him a questioning look.
“Apparently I know Terran,” He explained.
; “You understand the hieroglyphs?”
Kalian read the words out loud for her.
“A little pretentious,” Li’ara added.
They both shared a laugh and Kalian couldn’t remember the last time they had.
“I guess there are some similarities between us and them,” Kalian replied.
Li’ara turned and gave him a coy smile. “You mean between you and me?”
It took Kalian a moment to understand her meaning, she saw him as a Terran now. He judged from her expression that this wasn’t something she was going to let come between them. After all, the differences were only on the inside.
“I mean you’re not exactly human anymore, now you’re just another alien.” She gave him a playful smile and he decided to go with it.
“Well technically, I’m the human and you’re the caveman in this scenario.” They both laughed as Li’ara pushed him away.
Why hadn’t he spent more time making her laugh? He loved the sound of her laugh but he remembered not long ago that he didn’t think her capable of it. She did have a pretty big UDC stick up her ass though. He preferred this new Li’ara; she was more relatable and didn’t give him orders every two minutes… and she smiled. But he couldn’t deny that other side to her wasn’t useful, she had saved his lifetime and again.
“Here, a gift from ALF.” Li’ara handed Kalian a small transparent piece of what felt like plastic. She turned her head and tapped her ear, where he saw an identical object. “This way we’ll all be in communication when Savrick arrives.”
The Terran Cycle Boxset Page 43