The ship’s deck lurched badly enough that he adjusted his stance reflexively, and a few seconds later the intercom crackled to life with the voice of the ship’s Stalwart Captain, a female named Hadara, “Point transfer complete; away team to the briefing room.”
Qaz put his chain axe down, eyeing it—and reliving a dozen memories which it evoked—before making his way to the briefing room.
Ten hours later, Qaz and the rest of the away team were braking against the planet’s atmosphere aboard the Pale Sky’s shuttle.
“Turbulence,” the pilot said gruffly a second before the shuttle lurched violently to the left. Qaz’ grip on the overhead handrail was sufficient to keep him upright while the other occupants of the shuttle—two humans from the Prejudice and two Stalwart, not including the shuttle’s pilot—were pitched out of their seats.
The turbulence lasted only a few seconds and then the shuttle seemed to level out, prompting one of the humans—a supremely annoying female—to squeal in surprise.
“Final approach,” the pilot growled, “target located. Touchdown in six minutes.”
Qaz closed his eyes, ignoring the annoying human female while counting the seconds until the shuttle finally touched down with a barely-perceptible jolt.
“We’re here!” the human female declared in relief, finally breaking Qaz’s meditative focus after several minutes of incessant effort to that end. “I can’t wait to take a look at what we’ve got out there. It’s so exciting to be able to excavate—or even just examine—an archeological site of this—“ she began, only to be cut off by the pilot’s amplified voice over the intercom.
“Target is three hundred meters to the north. There are signs of organized activity in the area—there are at least twenty signatures moving this way.”
“Weapons hot,” declared the ship’s security chief, a no-nonsense Stalwart with a strong, protruding jaw whose name was Bone.
“No,” Qaz said reflexively as the two Stalwart gripped blaster pistols. “I will deal with them.”
“You don’t even know who ‘they’ are,” Bone countered. “My orders are to return this team to the Sky—intact and unmolested.”
“Are you part of this team?” Qaz challenged, and Bone glared at him.
“I don’t like your tone, cow-boy.”
“If you are not part of this team,” Qaz stepped toward him deliberately, “then you are unneeded. If you are part of this team, you guarantee your own…molestation,” he sneered, “by defying me during this mission.”
Bone jutted that proud jaw out defiantly, “I won’t be spoken to like that—“
“Then remain here and let me pass,” Qaz interrupted. “I will signal for you after I have done what I came to do.”
“That’s madness,” Bone snarled. “Just because the air is breathable out there doesn’t mean this place is safe. Did you not hear Tem? The area is riddled with signs of activity.”
“I know,” Qaz slapped the shuttle’s cargo door panel, causing it to slowly lower. “Remain here.”
“Can I come and watch—“ the annoying human female began.
“No!” Qaz boomed as he stepped down the still-lowering ramp and put his hooves onto the reddish dirt of the world which had haunted his waking moments since receiving the maddening memories which were not truly his.
He breathed in deeply, closing his eyes and savoring the sharp smell of the air. There was something familiar about it and yet he could not place that familiarity anywhere in his memories.
He opened his eyes and looked up to the sky, seeing the majestic rings stretching from left to right across the pale blue sky. Qaz gripped his chain axe and stepped around the shuttle, immediately seeing the massive, pyramidal structure from the memories he had inherited from the Crafter’s shuttle computer.
The structure towered above him like a mountain—which, to Qaz’s eye, was precisely what it was.
It soared higher into the sky than any artificial structure had a right to climb, with perfectly smooth and tapered sides leading to the narrow, flattened tip several thousand feet above the ground upon which he now stood. After gazing up at it in reverent awe, he realized the mountainous pyramid was carved out of solid stone! It was not constructed of individual blocks, but somehow it had been hewn from an unbroken piece of the planet’s rocky crust.
Qaz had no idea how much work must have gone into carving such a structure, but his curiosity on that particular matter was cut short when he smelled a familiar odor wafting over his shoulder.
Gripping his chain axe loosely, he turned to see a pair of reptilian eyes looking at him from behind dense foliage. Qaz took two purposeful steps toward the hidden creature, but those reptilian eyes did not waver even a fraction of an inch. He soon saw another pair of eyes a few meters from the first, then he spotted another…and another.
“Surrounded,” Qaz grunted before realizing that these creatures—creatures whose eyes bore a striking resemblance to those of the many lizard men he had defeated in the Crafter’s arena—were making their presence known to him. That they had not attacked yet suggested that they were watching…or waiting. He cast a brief look over his shoulder to the pyramidal mountain behind him and thought he understood the reason for their reluctance.
The memories he had inherited from the shuttle contained a few glimpses of the humanoid reptilians on this particular world, but he had been unable to trust those memories since it seemed that they—like so many others—were merely mash-ups of his real memories and those from the shuttle.
“Fine,” he turned, “I will go.”
His com-link crackled to life in his earbud, and the annoyed voice of Bone filled his hearing, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To find answers,” Qaz replied. “Wait here—the lizards will not attack while I am on the mountain.”
“You’re actually climbing that thing?” Bone asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Qaz spat before tearing his earbud out and tossing it onto the ground. With one last look at the pyramid before him, he slung his chain axe over his shoulder and set off to climb the nearest ridge.
After nearly an hour of full speed climbing—full speed for an eight foot minotaur with a heart that weighed nearly twenty pounds, and lungs to match—Qaz finally reached the peak.
His muscles burned and his hands were raw, but climbing the ridge had been no worse than he had anticipated. The platform at the top of the pyramid was nearly a hundred meters across, and was perfectly flattened stone with no visible features.
Qaz’ hooves clattering against the stone supplied the only sound which graced his ears. He turned to look down at the shuttle on which he had arrived, and was surprised by just how large it still looked from this vantage. He could make out the details of the craft’s main window, and could even see the movements of what he assumed were lizardfolk moving around the shuttle’s clearing.
Taking deep, measured breaths he turned to the platform’s center and strode purposefully toward it. When he arrived, he saw that the platform was not entirely featureless—at what seemed to be the absolute center were a pair of hoof-shaped indentations.
Far from surprised that they perfectly matched his own hooves in dimension, he did not hesitate for a second before stepping into the two inch deep grooves in the stone.
At first nothing happened. For several seconds it seemed as though nothing was going to happen.
Then he heard it.
It was a rushing sound just at the edge of his hearing, and it slowly built until it was a dull roar. He could not pinpoint the sound’s location—until, that is, the sky darkened overhead.
Qaz looked up and saw a giant square of golden metal descending down from the clouds. It was directly overhead, and the closer it came the more details he could make out on the underside of the massive object—an object which he realized was a ship only after seeing several thrusters fire along its edges.
He tried to extricate himself from the hoofprints, but he was unab
le to do so. After a pair of unsuccessful attempts, he looked up defiantly at the giant, golden ship as it drew ever nearer. It slowed its descent until it was moving just a few inches per second, and came to a near stop just a meter above his head. He saw what looked to be pictographs engraved all along the underside of the vessel, and some of them seemed oddly familiar—familiar enough that he spent several precious seconds gazing stupidly at them before realizing he had been distracted.
Qaz growled angrily before bellowing, “Enough games!”
The patch of intricately inscribed, golden metal directly above him began to shimmer. Soon a quartet of panels slid away from each other to reveal a man-sized—or even minotaur-sized—hole directly above him.
Before he could react, the ship slid down over him and landed on the flat, hewn stone on top of the pyramid.
His feet came free from their stone moorings and Qaz growled angrily as a light appeared overhead. Rungs of a ladder were illuminated by that light, and he climbed the ladder nearly ten meters before reaching what looked suspiciously like an airlock.
“Greetings, Asterion’s Heir,” he heard the Crafter’s voice say from behind him, and he whirled around in a practiced motion which saw him heft—and activate—his chain axe before putting eyes on the source of the voice.
He saw a hologram of the Crafter slowly coalesce before him, except there was something oddly…different about the Crafter in this image. The image’s facial bones, the swell of its breast and the flare of its hips were unmistakable feminine. The Crafter Qaz had known, however, had been decidedly androgynous.
“You have many questions,” the Crafter’s image continued, “ask them and I will do my best to answer.”
“Are you real?” Qaz asked warily.
“No,” the Crafter shook her head. “This is a virtual facsimile which I constructed specifically to assist you in the reintegration of your new memories.”
“Whose memories are they?” Qaz asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.
“They belonged to Asterion,” the image said as a crestfallen look came over her features.
“Was Asterion also your slave?” Qaz demanded.
“Slave?!” the Crafter’s image flared angrily, infusing her digital features with every bit of the fiery vengeance which Qaz himself had often felt when thinking of the Crafter’s cruelty. “Asterion was no more a slave than you are,” the image hissed. “Asterion was everything to me—he was my very reason for existing.”
“Did he anger you?” Qaz asked. “Is that why you forced his descendants to fight in the arena?”
The Crafter’s fiery countenance softened significantly, “The arena was not my idea…it was his.”
“What?” Qaz asked with narrowed eyes, uncertain he could trust this hologram to do anything but confuse and deceive him.
“You do not yet understand,” the image explained. “His memories will require much time for you to understand—or even recognize—them for what they are. That is why he insisted on the arena; it was a controlled environment where I…or the Crafter,” she spat as her visage darkened, “could ensure your readiness for what lies ahead.”
Before he could ask what she meant by that, a second hologram sprang into being beside her. It showed a planet with three moons—this planet—and the image zoomed in on the same patch of ground where the Pale Sky’s shuttle was now landed. The shuttle’s image was replaced, however, by that of a badly damaged ship of unfamiliar origin—unfamiliar to Qaz’s mind, that is, but strangely reminiscent of something from Asterion’s memories which Qaz could not yet identify.
“Asterion and I came here,” the Crafter explained, gesturing to the pyramid beside the damaged ship, “to carry out our plan.”
“What plan?” Qaz demanded.
“A plan to save the Gorgon Sectors from annihilation in the coming war,” the Crafter said steadily, and something in her voice spoke of honesty far surpassing that which Qaz had come to expect from the Crafter. “Your people—Asterion’s people,” she clarified, “were truly born as slaves. Asterion’s life was much as yours was: full of meaningless conflict, subject to the whims of others, and unnecessarily brutal. Again,” she reiterated as her expression hardened, “this was Asterion’s life, and so it needed to become yours.”
“Why?” Qaz asked bitterly. “Why inflict this suffering on others?”
Tears seemed to well up in the Crafter’s eyes as the image spoke, “It was the only way to ensure that Asterion’s memories would be effectively passed from him to you. Without common points of reference—points like violence, fear, victory, and even love,” she said distantly, “a memory has no meaning to the mind which holds it.”
Qaz cocked his head dubiously, more intrigued by her reply than he had expected he could have been by anything the simulacrum might have said. “You made me suffer so that I would understand Asterion’s memories?”
“Primarily, yes,” the Crafter agreed. “But Asterion was a fierce warrior; his Heir needed to be equally fierce.”
“I am from the thirty seventh batch of Asterion’s Line,” Qaz growled, prompting the image’s eyebrows to rise in surprise. “My forebears suffered more than you—or Asterion—had any right to inflict upon us!”
“The thirty seventh batch?” the Crafter repeated somberly. “But…then I must have encountered problems with the neural re-sequencing…” Upon seeing his confused look, she gestured to the image of the damaged ship resting almost exactly where the Pale Sky’s shuttle now sat, “He arrived here thirty one years ago, just as Asterion and I had already completed the ship in which you now stand.”
“Who was he?” he asked, peering around the dark interior of the large airlock.
“He called himself a Seer,” she explained, and a third hologram appeared. It seemed as though he was human—and it was clear that he was badly wounded—but there was something about him which made Qaz doubt that he truly was human. “He said he was being chased by something called ‘the Dark’ and that he did not have much time left to him. We treated his wounds and were surprised to find this,” she waved a hand and the man’s haggard face was replaced with an overlay of a human nervous system.
Qaz knew as much about the basic structure of human physiology as most doctors—with special emphasis on his knowledge of critical failure points like the brain stem, phrenic nerve, the electrical conduction systems of the heart and other vital points—and he saw that there appeared to be two entirely separate nervous systems overlain one atop the other in the hologram which now rotated before him.
“This bio-material itself is not unknown to the Combine,” the Crafter explained, gesturing to the “since it is what much of our—or their, since I am no longer party to it—technology is built on. But it has never been successfully integrated into a human’s nervous system, or into any other sentient’s nervous system as far as I am aware. But this man, this Seer,” she said, causing the man’s battered face to replace the nervous system overlays, “somehow accomplished it.”
Qaz nodded slowly, “You studied him.”
“Of course,” the Crafter agreed dismissively, “at first I even thought we had reversed some of the damage to his primary nervous system. But there was a sort of cascade failure,” she explained. “It seemed like some of the organo-tech had been forcibly removed from his body, specifically a patch here,” she explained, causing the man’s head to rotate until a wound near the base of his neck was visible, “and that there was something of supreme importance there which, once removed, caused the rest of his nervous system to go into some sort of electro-chemical feedback loop. He died less than one week after crashing his ship here, and I was content to bury and forget him. But Asterion…”
Qaz thought he knew what she was about to say, “He wanted to investigate further.”
“He did,” she nodded. “Without asking for my consent—or even forewarning me of his choice—he extracted some of the tissue and implanted it into his own body. I only learned he ha
d done so after the tissue had fully infiltrated his own nervous system, where it became inextricably intertwined.”
“What happened to him?” Qaz asked neutrally.
“Initially he reported nothing, but after some time he claimed to have experienced…prescience,” she replied hesitantly. “His body attempted to reject the grafts after the episodes of foresight first occurred. We were ultimately unequal to the task of combating the rejection process and he died.”
“How long did he survive?” Qaz asked, finding nothing—absolutely nothing—in Asterion’s fractured memories to corroborate these claims.
“Three months,” the image said distantly. “During that time we attempted to transcribe his ‘prescient’ episodes using simple neural mapping, but we could not succeed in doing so. His reports of the episodes’ details were frequently ambiguous—a characteristic which Asterion despised. We thought that neural mapping would—“
“Spare me those details,” Qaz grunted. “He died because of the infection.”
“Yes,” the Crafter allowed, “but only after he had seen things…so many things. He called the predictions foreseen in these visions ‘strings,’ and in each string he foresaw possible futures. We tested the accuracy of these predictions and were both well beyond surprised to find that they were largely accurate. Occasionally a minor detail would be different, but the majority of phenomena he could predict ended up playing out as he predicted they would. It was…remarkable.”
Qaz nodded knowingly, “So you attempted to use this foresight to predict the future of the war you wished to prevent.”
“Precisely,” the Crafter’s image nodded. “And brave, bold Asterion…he survived long enough to render a complete thread. It took three weeks—his final three weeks—but eventually we put together our great plan. It is a plan in which you will now play a significant part.”
“I am no slave,” Qaz growled.
“Of course not,” the Crafter said adamantly. “You are the Heir of Asterion, the boldest and fiercest Taurine ever to stride the stars. Your people have suffered greatly—as you have suffered greatly—and now it is time for you to take up the means of your retribution.”
The Middle Road (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 7) Page 27