The Exxar Chronicles: Book 02 - Emissary

by Neal Jones

  ( 1 )

  THE JHA'DROK WORLD OF TRAXIS orbited serenely about its sun, a bronze and sapphire orb that shimmered brightly against the jeweled backdrop of deep space. It was the only habitable world of its star system, which was situated at the very edge of the Graavis sector. Because of its relatively isolated location from the rest of the Emperium, the surface of Traxis was still mostly wilderness. Only three major colonies had been established on this planet, two of them farms and one industrial, and the planet's entire population was less than fifty thousand.

  The industrial colony was called S'Mina and its chief export was the wood of the dara trees, of which the surface of Traxis was covered in plenty. The forests were thick and deep, and S'Mina had been established only a century ago. In that time, its workers had harvested only a tenth of the darawood available, and since the wood was used in a wide variety of products manufactured in the core systems, the colony was quite prosperous. Its current population count was twenty thousand five hundred and twelve. Those last two digits would soon be fourteen, for a Jha'Drok mother was in the process of giving birth to twins in the delivery ward of the large hospital at the southern end of the colony. Like the other populations of the colony worlds of the Emperium, the birth rate among Traxis' females was still relatively high, but that percentage had been steadily dropping for the last two generations. The mother who had entered labor on the morning of the Khazar invasion was saying a desperate prayer to the Lords of Jha'Dar as the doctor commanded her to push.

  The first baby to emerge was a boy, healthy and strong, with good color and a vigorous cry. The doctor severed the umbilical cord and then passed him off to the nurses. He gave another command to the mother to push. The second twin was a girl, and she, too, gave a healthy wail as the nurses cleaned off the placental fluid and wrapped her in a soft green blanket. She was placed in a birthing bed and wheeled out of the room to a scanning chamber at the end of the hall. The doctor remained with the mother long enough to dispose of the afterbirth, and then left her in the care of the remaining nurses.

  The head nurse glanced up as the doctor entered the scanning chamber. The child was cooing softly, placated for the moment by the wonder of the world around her. Her eyes were large and green, the vein-like markings on the side of her face and neck not yet fully formed or colored in. Only at the onset of puberty would those markings extend the length of the entire body, and they would turn into a soft, muddy brown. This particular child, however, would not make it to puberty.

  The doctor switched on the small machine in the corner of the room and maneuvered the eye of the bioscanner above the birthing bed. The doctor watched the readout on his screen as the scanner passed slowly over every inch of the baby. He frowned, magnifying the image of the abdominal cavity. From across the room, the nurse couldn't see the readout, but the expression on the doctor's face told her all she needed to know. He glanced up and shook his head sadly.

  The nurse sighed inwardly, turning back to the newborn. She held out her finger, and the baby grasped it tightly with tiny fingers, smiling. The nurse smiled back, and the doctor left the room to deliver the bad news to the mother.

  "We forgot to ask for your name," the nurse said to the child.

  It didn't matter. Neither of them would live to see that evening's sunset.

  Across town, at the northern end of the colony, the elementary school was just dismissing its students. The children flooded from the building into the front courtyard, screaming and laughing. Some were being picked up by parents who were waiting in small flyers in the holding lot adjacent to the school. Other children were walking away from the grounds towards the habitat section of the city several blocks away. In the nearby streets, skimmers were floating by, powered by the anti-grav conductors buried beneath the roads, and some of the children waved to the cars as they passed.

  The afternoon was warm and sunny, and the air carried upon it the scent of the darawood forests in the hills just outside of town. It was an earthy, musky aroma, mingled with the fragrance of the rilom flowers that blossomed on the forest floor, all around the bases of the tall, thick trunks. As a group of boys passed a park they threw down their packs and began a game of tyccun. Their cheers and laughter carried on the breeze wafting from the hills to the north, where the grinding and sawing of the processing tractors turned the felled trunks into clean, smooth logs ready for transport to the factory.

  Thousands of kilometers above the pale sky, just outside the border of the Graavis sector, a Khazar fleet sailed towards the tiny planet. Of the forty-two ships assigned to this operation, only thirty were Dominion war spiders. The Krejj Protectorate had assigned twelve of their class two vipers to act as support craft for the spiders, which were massive, menacing battle carriers with a crew complement of nine hundred men each.

  On the bridge of the lead ship, Sub-Colonel Sikana T'Vaar stood at parade rest near the central operations console, her gaze fixed on the holo-display of the fleet's tactical formation. Around her, the spider's command crew murmured to one another as reports were exchanged, orders acknowledged, and communiqués received from stations below decks. T'Vaar's second in command, General Lantur, appeared at her elbow.

  "We will be in firing range of the planet in six minutes."

  She nodded, satisfied. "Tell the fleet to stand by for battle formation." She began typing commands into the console's computer, and the ships on the holo-display divided into seven groups. "This will be the new configuration."

  Lantur gave a curt nod of acknowledgement and passed the order to the comm officer.

  The Jha'Drok boys in S'Mina ended their game and separated to their various homes. Along the way, two of them harassed a young girl, seizing her pack and playing a game of keep-away. The girl started crying, and the boys just laughed as they tossed the pack into a nearby tree before scurrying off. The girl stood on the sidewalk and sobbed until a local police officer arrived and retrieved the pack for her. She wiped her eyes and thanked him, and he walked with her up the street to her house.

  In the lower part of the city, in the business district, the restaurants were opening for dinner, the shops were closing their doors for the day, and the factory workers had only another hour before quitting time. At the hospital, the mother of the newborn twins cradled her children, forcing back tears of despair as she looked into her daughter's face. Her husband hovered close by, murmuring words of comfort.

  "We have a son," he said softly. "We can praise the Lords for that."

  His wife nodded, leaning forward to kiss each of her babies on their tiny, pink foreheads.

  Only four Khazar spiders and two Krejj vipers arrived in orbit of Traxis. The other six groups had spread out, moving to the other nearby systems. T'Vaar gave the command to launch the missile drones. From the bellies of the Khazar warships appeared hundreds of tiny, remote controlled pods that resembled silver caskets. The four spiders had spread out as soon as they entered orbit, and now the drones appeared as hailstones falling into an ocean of copper and blue.

  In the city square of S'Mina, a pair of elderly Jha'Drok men were commiserating about their uneventful day. Suddenly, one of them paused in mid-sentence, looking up at the horizon, and cocked his head.

  "What's that?"

  "Eh?" said the other, following his companion's gaze.

  The man stood, pointing into the sky. "That! And another one over there. And over there!"

  Others passing by had stopped as well, looking up and murmuring exclamations of surprise and curiosity.

  "Are they satellites?" a woman asked.

  "No," someone replied. "They're moving too fast for that."

  The drones spread out over the city, descending within a few kilometers of the ground, hovering in the air like a hundred tiny spaceships, each no bigger than a shuttlepod. Their surfaces were utterly smooth, with no markings of any kind. The backwash of their idling engines created miniature cyclones that pushed back anyone who tried to stand directly under them.

>   "Has the Space Guard issued a warning?" a woman asked anxiously, pulling her young boy closer to her side.

  "No," a man replied. "I don't think so."

  Now some of the evening shoppers and the parents with young children were walking away from the town square, glancing nervously over the shoulders as they went. The drones continued to hover silently, waiting for the final command from the orbiting warships.

  In the hospital room outside the delivery ward, the father of the newborn twins glanced up as something flashed outside the window. He had barely enough time to rise, an exclamation of surprise on his lips, before a shockwave of tremendous energy and thunder vaporized the hospital.

  The two boys who harassed the young girl on their way home from the park were standing on a street corner, staring up at the drones with astonishment and curiosity. Suddenly, there was a rush of air as the drone above them fired its missile. It landed only two meters from them in the middle of the street, exploding with a clap of thunder that knocked the boys backward. The last thing either of them saw was a wall of plasma energy rushing towards them at lightning speed.

  All over the city, wherever the missiles landed, plasma shockwaves incinerated buildings, flyers, roads, earth, trees, flesh and bone. Within minutes, the ground where the colony of S'Mina has once stood was now a scarred wasteland. The backwash of the drones' engines as they returned to the atmosphere stirred the piles of ash, rock, and bits of bone that covered the scorched earth.

  On the bridge of her warship, Sub-General T'Vaar ordered the two vipers to remain in orbit. The Khazar spiders leaped into stardrive as soon as the missile drones returned to their launch bays, racing towards the next star system in their path.

  Afterword

  Well.

  It's finally done.

  I really don't mean to sound melodramatic, but gods, this book was a bitch to write. Three years, four months, and three weeks. Seems like it was longer than that, and yet…it feels like it was just last week that I started writing the prologue.

  For those of you interested in the writing process, I'm happy to give you the details of this recipe. But for those of you who don't care and are just happy reading the final product, go ahead and skip to the appendices.

  This book was very different from the first one. I've been working on this series in some form or another for seventeen years, and after struggling through the creative process for this book I was shocked at how little I knew my own characters. As I said in the afterword of The Erayan, I came up with the idea for this series in 1995, when I was a sophomore in high school, and six years later, while studying creative writing in college, I wrote six seasons worth of hour-long episodes. When I finally decided in 2007 to rewrite The Erayan and focus on getting it published as a novel, I thought I knew the crew of Exxar-One fairly well. I thought it would be easy to turn 100+ short stories into enough substantial material for a literary series.

  I was wrong.

  The reason that Emissary took me so long to write was because I had not gotten inside the heads of Marcus Gabriel and Kralin Saveck. The Erayan was so much easier to write because it was primarily plot driven. There were several action elements that kept the story moving along, and the main purpose for that book was to introduce the series to you, the reader. Introductions are easy, and plot that is driven by action is also fairly easy. I didn't fully realize that at the time, of course, but now I do.

  Writing Emissary was like getting to know your spouse after the honeymoon. Sure, you've been on several dates. You've known him/her for a couple years, and you've been intimate several times. That means you've both seen each other at your worst first thing in the morning, bad breath, snoring, and all. You think you know your spouse after all this time, and you're ready for a lifetime together. But, as any married couple who has been together for more than a year will tell you, you never really know your spouse at all, no matter what you might think. Give it ten, twenty, even thirty years and then you might know them well enough.

  The same is true of authors and their characters. Much of Emissary was a grind for me. I had writer's block so often that I was sure I was never going to finish this fucking story. Part of it was the fear that I was creating garbage; clichéd, derivative garbage. Commodore Gabriel's old girlfriend from twenty-three years ago showing up on Exxar-One with the daughter he never knew he had; Kralin returning to the Chrisarii homeworld to say goodbye to his dying mother and confront his domineering father; the fulfillment of religious prophecy and the whole conflict between the two Chrisarii religions; Jennifer Rosenberg's depression and her troubled marriage with Ben; Ben finally dealing with the childhood death of his sister; all of those stories have been done before. My goal with this book was to further develop the characters, flesh them out for you so that they are as real to you as they have been to me for all these years.

  The unexpected surprise in that process, however, was that I didn't know them as well as I thought I did. Take Marc, for example. Early in the writing process I asked myself several times why I had picked that particular story for him. Why the old girlfriend? Why the daughter that he had never known about? What does that mean for this character? The last thing I wanted was to churn out some crappy soap opera cliché. About halfway through the book, as I started writing the flashback scenes from Marc and Laura's two year on again-off again relationship, I realized why this story mattered for this character. Marc had always defined himself by the uniform. Being a naval officer was all he had ever wanted, and for that brief moment at the end of his junior year at the academy, he was willing to throw away his future career because of his love for Laura. How would his life have been different if he had left the academy? What would his and Laura's marriage have been like?

  Now, twenty-three years later, he's at that same crossroads. And what was really neat about this story was that Laura's arrival coincides with Marc's inability to cope with the trauma of his torture at the hands of Colonel Serehl three months earlier. Marc is suffering from PTSD, and, like most soldiers who have lived through an extreme combat situation – even the experienced veterans – he doesn't readily admit his problem and seek help. He buries his feelings in alcohol while clinging to the only life he's ever known – that of a military officer. And then, to top it all off, his ex-girlfriend shows up after twenty-three years of silence and, as if that weren't surprise enough, she tells him that he has a daughter. Suddenly, Marc is faced with the what-if scenario. What if he had married Laura twenty-three years earlier? What if they had raised Jeanette on Mars and had other children as well? What would he have been in the civilian world? A banker? A lawyer? What if, what if, what if.

  And, of course, that meant I had to delve into Laura's character as well. Why did she say yes to Marc's proposal all those years ago and then turn right around and break his heart? Why is she about to be married again for the third time? Why isn't she being honest with herself about her feelings for Marc? All of that turned out to be very tricky to write, to make it believable and serious for these characters. (I have a new found appreciation for the writers of hour-long TV dramas, and I'm thankful that I'm not on the writing staff of shows like The Good Wife or Grey's Anatomy.)

  Nor was Saveck's story any easier. I think I spent eighteen months on just part three of Emissary. Once again, the struggle was trying to understand the conflict between Kralin and his father. The teenager who rebels against his domineering and overbearing father is probably the oldest cliché in the book, right up there with the ex-girlfriend from many years ago who shows up out of the blue with the child one never knew one had. The only difference in my struggle with Kralin's story was that I was writing from personal experience. No, my mother isn't dead, but I did go several rounds in the ring with my father when I was a teenager. I was raised in a Baptist home, and my parents were the type who went to church every Sunday morning and evening, and every Wednesday night for Bible study. If the church doors were unlocked, we were front and center, it didn't matter what the occasio
n was. When I was a kid, I just accepted the weekly services and rituals as part of everyday life. But when I hit junior high, I started to resent church. It was boring, it was useless, and it was all a lot of pomp and circumstance for the same old thing: God is great, God is love, He died for your sins, praise Jesus, Hallelujah, Amen, yadda, yadda, fucking yadda. Big deal. When you've sung the same hymns and listened to the same sermons over and over for the first fifteen years of your life, it all starts to run together and get really dull after awhile. So yeah, when I hit high school, I started to really chafe and fight against my father's rules. I didn't want to go to church every Sunday, I didn't see the point to religion at all, and I hated the way that he tried to run every detail of my life. (My parents were quite strict about what me and my brothers watched on TV, what we read, who we hung out with, etc. It didn't help matters that they sent us to the private school run by the same church that we attended every week. Talk about growing up sheltered and cut off from the real world.)

  I digress. My point with all of that was that I knew some of what Kralin's story would be, and I wrote it from a personal point of view. That made it a little easier, but not much. I still struggled with making the characters real, not just plot devices and clichés. And what really surprised me about Kralin's character was the discovery that, like Marc, he, too, was at a crossroads all those years ago on the Beta Erendii colony. Until the moment when I was actually writing the scene where Kralin tells his father about the day of the massacre, I had not known that Kralin was at the university, ready to hand in his application. It was a spur-of-the-moment invention on my part, but the second I wrote it, I knew it felt right. And it also made perfect sense. In The Erayan, I had introduced Kralin as a hardened, battle-scarred warrior: solemn, quiet, introspective, and reserved. Now, in Emissary, I met Kralin as a young man, full of dreams, adolescent angst, and passion. He wanted to attend the university. He didn't know what he was going to study, but his future was unwritten and full of possibility. And then the attack on the colony changed all of that. The loss of Jran and his family shattered Kralin in a way that he never fully recovered from, and, in the same way that Marc was struggling with his PTSD, Kralin had never dealt with that loss twenty years earlier.