Lucien stared at Katawa. To him, a century was fast. How long was he expecting this search to take? A thousand years? Another ten thousand? Lucien’s heart sank. What have we gotten ourselves into?
Chapter 21
The Specter
“Still think this was a good idea?” Garek asked, looking smug despite the alien features projected by his holoskin.
Lucien glanced at him. “Your objection was based on not trusting Katawa, not on the viability of his search.”
“It was based on both, but you didn’t give me a chance to voice my concerns,” Garek replied.
“Well, now you’ve got your chance. Voice away,” Lucien replied. They were all sitting in the galley at the back of the ship while Katawa finished whatever he was doing on the bridge.
“Too late now,” Garek replied. “We’re at Katawa’s mercy, trapped on his ship. How do you think he’s going to react if we have a change of heart after all the work he’s put into our disguises? Assuming he doesn’t kill us, he might just dump us on the nearest uninhabitable planet and let nature take its course.”
“He’s from Etheria, so he’s incapable of doing anything wrong,” Lucien said.
“Assuming he told us the truth about that,” Garek pointed out.
“This isn’t the time for I-told-you-so’s,” Addy put in. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do. We can’t spend the next few millennia searching for a lost fleet that might not even exist.”
“No, we can’t,” Lucien agreed. “So what do we do?”
“This is still a good opportunity to learn about the universe,” Garek said. “Your plan of signing on with a Marauder crew to find out where the slave markets are is even more workable now that we look and sound like Faros. We might even be able to legitimately purchase some of our people—assuming we can find a way to make enough money.”
“That’s true...” Lucien said. “All right, new plan—while we’re following leads and rumors to search for Katawa’s lost fleet, we do some investigating of our own to find our people, and maybe find a way to make some money on the side.”
Garek nodded.
“Agreed,” Addy said.
“Brak? Do you have anything to add?”
The Gor stood in the far corner of the galley, a hulking shadow, easy to miss in the poorly-lit confines of the Specter. “I like this plan,” Brak replied, speaking barely passable Faro. He’d learned the language, but not the accent. He was posing as a Faro slave, so no one would expect him to be fluent.
“We’re all agreed, then,” Lucien said. “We help Katawa as best we can, but we help ourselves while we’re at it.”
Everyone nodded along with that. Lucien felt bad using Katawa, but in a way he was also using them. The trick would be making sure the little gray alien didn’t find out what they were doing.
“Jump is calculating.”
Lucien jumped at the sound of Katawa’s voice and turned to see him standing in the entrance of the galley. “Great,” Lucien said, with an innocent smile.
“What were you talking about?” Katawa asked as he entered the galley.
“We were trying to guess what we’d find in the Gakol system.”
“Oh. Dangerous place,” Katawa said, shaking his over-sized head as he went to sit beside Addy in one of the galley’s two booths.
“I thought you said you haven’t been there,” Addy said.
“I have not. Others have. Much is written about Gakol in the ship’s databanks.”
Lucien blinked. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“You did not ask,” Katawa replied, blinking innocently up at him.
Lucien offered the alien a dry look. “Where can we access the ship’s databanks?”
“In the data center.”
Lucien stared a while longer, waiting for Katawa to anticipate his next request. When he didn’t, Lucien asked, “Could you take us there, please?”
“Of course. This way,” Katawa replied, walking back through the galley.
They all followed him to a small room with a data terminal and one chair. Katawa showed them how to use the terminal—by wearing a band much like the universal translator bands, and thinking their queries at the console. The console responded with holographic texts, holo-videos, and a variety of other multimedia.
Lucien sat at the terminal first to peruse the data on Gakol. There were seven planets, of which three were inhabited by three different sentient alien races, each of them more barbaric than the last. They lived in hostile environments where everything was constantly trying to kill them, so of course they’d evolved with the same killer instinct. Their cultures were obscene, and they’d apparently escaped slavery to the Faros by offering their services as mercenary soldiers and assassins. Making matters more complicated, none of the three alien species were humanoid.
The lizard-like Deggrans from Deggros lived in burrows underground, never seeing daylight on their scorched desert planet. The Mokari from Mokar, were avian, and had their nests high in the mountaintops overlooking the plains where they hunted. And the third species was even less relatable: the Kivians from Kiva were Crab-like monsters that stood on two legs, four, or six. Each of them was the size of a hover car, and they could live interchangeably on land or in the tropical waters of their archipelago planet.
None of the three races liked each other, but since all three depended on the Faros for high technology like spaceships, they’d been unable to go to war with one another.
Lucien asked the obvious question after scanning through all the data. “How can any of these species know about a lost fleet of starships if they’re not independently space-faring?”
“There are legends on all three worlds about small gray gods from the sky.”
“If the fleet went there, wouldn’t the Faros have captured it?” Addy asked.
Katawa shook his head. “Ten thousand years ago they had not yet discovered Gakol. I believe the fleet stayed here for some time before the Faros arrived.”
Lucien nodded, trying to hide his disappointment. According to the ship’s databanks, the Faros didn’t have a colony in Gakol. That meant no slave markets.
“Even if the fleet was here, what makes you think we’ll be able to find any clues about where it went next?” Lucien asked. “They probably left in a hurry once the Faros arrived.”
Katawa inclined his head to that. “I believe that is what happened, yes, but the Mokari have a song about one who flew among the stars with the gray gods from the sky. This legend is much more recent. Only one hundred and sixty years old.”
“A song?” Lucien asked.
Katawa nodded. “That is how they tell their legends. In song.”
“Bird songs,” Lucien pressed.
“Yes,” Katawa replied.
“So you think the fleet took one of the locals with them and he came back to tell about it?”
“Correct.”
Lucien had to admit that was a lot more promising as far as rumors went.
“You think that Mokari will still be alive?”
“They are immortal.”
“Then it sounds like Mokar should be our first stop,” Garek said.
“It is,” Katawa replied.
“The bird people are hunters,” Brak put in. “I shall enjoy hunting with them.”
“We’re not going there to sample the local cuisine,” Lucien said.
Addy turned to him. “Maybe not, but we’ll need to make friends if we’re going to find this Mokari who flew among the stars with the gray gods from the sky. And to do that, it’s not a bad idea for us to look for things we might have in common.”
“I think there might be an easier way,” Lucien replied. “They’re all immortals, so they should recognize your species, Katawa—assuming the gray gods that visited them really were your people.”
“They will have forgotten, but perhaps they will recognize me from their songs.”
Lucien frowned. “What do you mean they will have forgotten? H
ow do you forget first contact?”
“No one can possibly remember everything that happened over ten thousand years,” Garek said. “Immortal or not, biological beings only have so much capacity to remember things. That’s part of the reason we take backups of our memories and keep the old ones in storage.”
Addy sighed. “So we have to find one bird in particular on a planet of millions by asking about a hundred and sixty year old bird song that may or may not even be true.”
“Why would the Mokari lie?” Katawa asked.
“Not lie,” Lucien explained. “But over time and countless re-tellings, some details of the events might have been altered.”
Katawa nodded. “This is possible. Let us hope enough details remain factual for us to find the fleet. I will leave you now. I must rest before we arrive. Feel free to stay here or use any of the other facilities on my ship.”
Lucien nodded. “Thank you.”
After the alien left, he turned to Garek and said, “If he were hiding something, he wouldn’t let us wander around his ship without supervision.”
“Hiding something?” Addy asked. “Like what?”
Garek shrugged. “He’s lying about something.”
Lucien shook his head. “And you’re basing this on what exactly? A gut feeling?”
“How about this: Katawa offered to give us an entire fleet of a thousand advanced warships in exchange for our help in finding them. Does that sound like a fair trade to you?”
“That depends how long it takes us to find the fleet,” Addy replied dryly.
Garek waved that concern aside. “I’m telling you, he’s up to something. He’s got shifty eyes. Maybe he wants us to help him find the fleet so he can take it for himself and sell it to the highest bidder?”
“It’s possible,” Addy admitted.
“The point is, we only know what Katawa’s told us, and without being able to verify his story, the truth could be very different. He might not be trying to get back to Etheria at all.”
Lucien nodded, his lips pressed into a grim line. “Fair enough. We’ll keep our eyes open. Is that good enough for you, Garek?”
He grunted. “No, but it’ll have to do.”
Chapter 22
Astralis
—TWO HOURS LATER—
Chief Councilor Ellis called an emergency session of council as soon as he was released from hospital. Not long after that, gravity was restored to all of Astralis, with the exception of Fallside, where it was being ramped up very slowly to prevent more damage from falling debris.
Tyra took a quantum junction up to the Council chambers at the zenith of the artificial sky, on Level One, directly above Hubble Mountain. The room had a heavily reinforced and shielded glass floor, giving an unparalleled view of all four cities on the surface below (as well as a bad case of vertigo).
Tyra reached the double-story golden doors of the room to find a full platoon of Marine bots and their sergeant guarding the entrance. She stopped in front of them and waited while a pair of bots scanned her from head to toe. Ellis wasn’t taking any chances after what had happened on the bridge.
The doors swung wide, revealing a vast chamber, and Tyra sucked in a shuddery breath. Even after all these years, the chamber still inspired awe and fear. The glass floor made every step feel like her last, while the dome-shaped, star-studded ceiling reminded her how much more there was to the universe than this tiny speck they called Astralis.
Tyra headed for her chair, empty and hovering above the glass floor. All of the other councilors had already arrived—one from each of the surface level cities, as well as another eight—four for the districts in the fifteen hundred levels above the surface, and four for the sub-districts in the fifteen hundred levels below.
The councilors sat on floating grav chairs around the circumference of the chamber, thirteen in all counting Tyra, but this time the circle was wider than usual with the addition of extra chairs for Admiral Stavos and General Graves, seated on either side of Ellis. There were also two strangers in the center of the chamber: a woman sitting on a grav chair with her back turned to Tyra, and the other, a doctor in a white lab coat standing beside her with a gurney full of medical equipment.
As Tyra took her seat, her gaze flicked back to the woman in the center of the room. That woman was dressed in a naval officer’s white uniform, and her black shoulder boards were marked with the four white bars and golden star of a captain’s insignia. If that wasn’t enough to identify her, the woman also had familiar raven black hair, tied up in a bun at the back of her head.
“Thank you for joining us,” Ellis said, with a hint of annoyance at Tyra’s tardiness. She was twenty minutes late—Lucien’s fault. He’d insisted she finish lunch with him and the girls before she left. “Council is now in session,” Ellis said. “First on the agenda, we have—”
“What’s she doing here?” Tyra demanded, pointing to the woman in the center of the circle.
The woman turned around, her grav chair rotating soundlessly. One look at her face confirmed Tyra’s suspicions about her identity. “Way to make a woman feel welcome. I believe we spoke earlier on the comms, Madam Councilor.”
Tyra nodded slowly. “A lot has happened since then.”
Her clone nodded back. “I got the summary from a nurse after I woke up.”
“If you’re both done trading pleasantries, we have some serious issues on the agenda,” Ellis said.
“What is she doing here?” Tyra asked again.
“She is the sole surviving witness of first contact with the Faros, so it’s fair to say she knows more about them than any of us, and hopefully, she also knows something more of what they want.”
“They want to make us all their slaves,” Tyra’s clone said.
“Captain Forster, please hold your answers until the probe has been initiated,” Ellis said.
“Sorry,” the captain replied.
“You’re subjecting her to a mind probe,” Tyra said, noting now that the doctor standing beside Captain Forster was actually a probe technician.
“It’s the only way we can be sure she’s telling the truth. Doctor Exeter, you may start whenever you’re ready.”
The doctor nodded, and took a moment to configure his probe machine on the gurney beside Captain Forster. The probe would be conducted via her AR implant, so no invasive mechanisms or scanners were required, just programming one machine to talk to another. When he was finished, he turned to Captain Forster and said, “Please lay back and count backward from ten.”
Captain Forster reclined her chair and began counting. “Ten, nine, eight...” When she reached five, she stopped talking, and her eyes glazed over. She stared fixedly at the stars shining down from the ceiling.
“She’s ready, Chief Councilor,” Doctor Exeter said.
“Good. Miss Forster, please tell us exactly what happened during first contact with the Faros. Don’t leave anything out.”
The captain explained how they’d landed on a jungle world and found a holographic history of a race of sentient spiders. The history depicted them being enslaved by a sentient humanoid race, and it marked the planet where they’d been taken. Captain Forster and her crew had decided to follow them and meet the slavers. The slavers’ fleet was waiting for them when they arrived, and one of the humanoid aliens contacted them, speaking in Versal. He claimed his name was Lucien and that his people were called Faros. The alien asked to meet with the crew of the Inquisitor on the surface of the planet where his fleet was orbiting. They agreed to meet with him, whereupon Faro-Lucien explained who the Faros were and all about their long history with Etherus and the Etherians.
Apparently the Faros had been created by Etherus to be the army of Etheria. Back at the beginning of the universe they’d argued for the creation of a free, chaotic universe, while Etherus and the majority of the Etherians had envisioned a paradise like Etheria. The Faros insisted on a vote, and the majority decided in favor of paradise, but the Faros hadn’t
been allowed to participate in the vote. Feeling overruled, they started the Great War and tried to take over Etheria for themselves. The entire galaxy of Etheria was decimated by the war, but the Faros lost that war, and the Etherians exiled them beyond the Red Line.
With the majority of the universe at their disposal, the Faros went on to create the free, chaotic place they’d envisioned—except their idea of freedom was to enslave all other sentient races, including a green-skinned caste of their own people, making them the only free beings in the universe. When Captain Forster raised objections to the Faros’ selective application of freedom, and indicated that she and her crew were leaving, Faro-Lucien gleefully informed them that they could not leave because he’d decided to make them slaves of the Farosien Empire, too. They’d barely escaped with their lives, and two of them had been killed.
They successfully fled in their ship, evading the Faros; but the aliens repeatedly chased them until they finally realized they had a spy in their midst. They managed to extract the timer implants that should have killed them after a month by making first contact with a friendly species of what they assumed to be higher-dimensional beings.
Soon after that, the entire crew submitted themselves to stasis, obviating the need to find the spy and leaving their navigator bot at the helm to guide them to Astralis’s destination at the cosmic horizon. When they arrived, they arranged for a rendezvous with Astralis, thinking that they’d left the Faros far behind them, but of course, that hadn’t been the case.
Councilor Ellis leaned back in his hovering chair and folded his hands in front of his mouth, both forefingers pressed to his lips as if to shush anyone who might dare to interrupt his thoughts.
Tyra nodded slowly to herself. This was all consistent with what they’d already learned.
Ellis stopped making the shushing gesture. “Quite an elaborate tale, Captain, but I suppose we can’t doubt any of what you’ve said, since you’re under the influence of a probe. It sounds to me like there’s no case for misconduct here. The Faros are slavers; when you refused to condone their culture, they decided to subject you to it.”
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