by Rick Partlow
I was getting a sick feeling in my stomach, an unmistakable sense of everything falling apart.
The discs, seeing the approaching ship, began to decelerate and change course, breaking into a long arc away from the cigar-shape and the planet. A pale green tendril of light extended from the larger ship's green halo and sought out the rearmost disc in the formation, enveloping it for a bare moment. The disc seemed to collapse in on itself, shrinking to only a fraction of its former size before exploding like a nova, the light from the blast filling the screen.
The picture returned to the President's face.
"Just as we had found a horribly powerful new enemy we have also discovered a powerful new---or possibly old---friend. Our unexpected benefactors who saved the colony at Caroline from sharing the fate of Grenada went from there to the nearest Patrol base and asked to be taken to the center of our government. For the past two weeks, our researchers have been examining them and their spacecraft, and we have determined their story to be true.
"They call themselves the Resscharr. We have known them for the last hundred and fifty years as the Predecessors. And now I will let them share their story with you."
The camera panned outward into a wide angle shot that revealed the tall figures standing beside him for what they were. Thin bodies that still seemed inherently powerful, with deep chests and broad shoulders, stood on long, digitigrade legs. Their arms were disproportionately short, with long, delicate, three-fingered hands, and angled oddly inward from their shoulders. Their faces were long and decidedly inhuman, with deep, dark striations running lengthwise down from large, liquid eyes. A swept-back mane of feather-like hair covered a large skull, hiding any ears that may have been there. There were three of them, virtually indistinguishable from each other but for slight color differences in their greenish-grey skin and the brief tunics that were their only clothing.
I’d only seen them dead, preserved in stasis, but they were identical to the corpses from the outpost planet.
"I am called Choss," one of the creatures said in a soft, sibilant hiss, "the selected representative for our race to you, our children." Its face was hauntingly animated, almost frighteningly human in the way its expressions mirrored his words. "I call you our children not just because our wormhole maps gave you the stars, but because of a more complex and long-lasting connection between our races---we share the same birth-world. As the scientists of your government have confirmed by their tests, our people evolved on the planet you now call Earth, nearly sixty-five million of your years ago, from a species you know as the dinosaurs.”
“Son of a bitch,” I murmured. I’d had a feeling. Almost three years ago when I’d seen them the first time, I’d had an intuition they had to be from Earth.
"In the millennia after the great asteroid wiped out most of our evolutionary tree, the plunging temperatures and changing climate forced us into a tool-using sentience. It took our primitive ancestors nearly five million years to go from stone-tipped spears to our first slower-than-light starships, and almost a million more to discover a method of producing gravity waves which could be used to travel faster than light.
"Once we had discovered a method of rapid star travel, the majority of our people elected to leave Earth altogether, as its climate was becoming increasingly hostile, and we did not wish to interfere with the new evolutionary train that was beginning to take hold. A close watch was kept, however, to ensure that our home world would experience no further such disasters as the one that had wiped out our sister species.
"As we spread through the stars, we found, to our chagrin, that life-bearing planets were rare, and our own intelligence was unique to this galaxy. We began, at this juncture in our history, to take on a task that would become the defining identity for our race. Resscharr, in our tongue, means 'the Life-Givers.'
"We dedicated ourselves to spreading life throughout the galaxy, and to nurturing it to a level of sophistication equal to our own. We began to engineer the climates of suitable planets, through methods your people can only now begin to imagine, making them habitable for us or for any oxygen breathing creature we would later introduce. We did this on thousands of worlds in the millennia that followed our exodus from the homeworld, genetically engineering flora and fauna that could flourish in each ecosystem.
"Then we undertook the most difficult task of all---engineering intelligent life. It was decided to attempt this in two different methods: a slow, more natural process of introducing key mutations in existing species over many thousands of years; and another, more rapid method of radical genetic engineering that combined artificially-grown DNA with that of a native species on one of the few planets with native life.
"The second method was attempted on a world known to you as Zeta Tucanae, and brought about the race that calls itself the Tahni. The first was used with the mammalian species on earth. You, its end result, are our cherished children.
"But before either of our experiments could come to its fruition," the creature continued, "we found that we were not alone, after all. The fringes of our vast empire were attacked by another race of oxygen-breathers---a criminal species that had been exiled from their own galaxy, and had travelled across the millions of light years in a huge fleet of massive starships.
"At first, we attempted to negotiate with these beings, confident that all lifeforms should be united. But these foul creatures were xenophobes, threatened by the thought of any other intelligent life, and they rebuffed our advances, continuing to attack our colonies. As painful as it was for us, we realized that we would have to respond in kind to the violence they had visited upon us.
"By the time we decided to mobilize for war, something our species had not done in over two million years, it was nearly too late---we had been cut off from all of our colonies from the other side of the Galactic core, and penned in to this region of the Spiral Arm and the few habitable worlds between it and the Core.
"In desperation, we decided to seal off this region to keep the invaders from reaching it, creating the gravito-inertially-connected bubble you have named the Cluster. But we couldn't leave our children without a birthright. So, we used our gravitic technology to create the wormhole gateways, and left a map of their locations on a world of the star nearest to you. We hoped that we could keep your Cluster safe long enough to allow you to spread through it and achieve your own culture before we would come to meet you as equals.
"Our meeting, unfortunately, was destined to be long delayed. The war lasted for nearly five thousand years, and by its end, our civilization was in ruins. Our population had never been that great to begin with, and more than eighty-five percent of us had been wiped out in the conflict. Our society, built over a longer span than humans have walked upright, had crumbled to dust, and the memories in that rubble were too painful to rebuild. We made a collective decision to leave this galaxy to you, our children, and pursue a new destiny in the body you call the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
"Our opponents we thought totally destroyed. In this, we were wrong. Remote sensors we had left in place over a million years ago told us of a huge battle fleet moving in from a Globular Cluster off the Galactic plane, on a slow course towards the Spiral Arm. We naturally sent probes, and discovered that a remnant of our foes had fled to this cluster and, over time, had built themselves back into a military power at the expense of the environments they called home.
"They have stripped their systems dry to make themselves mighty enough to take back the galaxy they feel is theirs by right of conquest."
Choss paused from his long monologue, gazing meaningfully at the camera.
"Some of you may think our appearance unpleasant, even frightening. Allow me to show you the visage of the enemy we both face."
The view was of a ruined city, once obviously majestic but now crumbled and burning, and still under attack. A disc-shaped craft swooped in low beside a towering spire, paused there for a second before a dazzling white beam shot out of the ship and touched t
he tower for an eyeblink. The building disintegrated where the beam hit, and the top section of the tower crumbled, toppling slowly to the ground hundreds of meters below.
The shot followed the tower to its impact, caught the dust cloud as it struck before panning away to a group of panic-stricken civilians running desperately through the streets. It took me a second to realize that they were Resscharr and not humans, and I wondered if that subtle uncertain haziness of their figures was intentional.
The camera view focused in on a particular couple---what seemed to be a male and a female, though the difference might have been in my mind alone. Their colored tunics were ripped and burned, and their feathered manes were darkened by soot, but they didn't appear to be injured. The one I had judged a female carried something in her hand that might have been a weapon, and seemed to be searching for something to point it at as they ran.
She led the male into an alley between two of the very few intact buildings, trying to get away from the fires and the falling debris on the street they had occupied. They jogged cautiously through the alleyway, glancing back over their shoulders to make sure they hadn't been followed.
As they emerged from the corridor, however, they froze, the expressions on their faces changing suddenly, their gaze frozen on whatever horror lay before them, unrevealed by the camera. Raising her hand weapon, the female pressed a touch pad on the back of its handle. The gun issued a pale, crackling beam of what seemed to be charged particles, but the discharge had lasted only a fraction of a second before some invisible energy bolt struck her in the midsection and severed her at the waist in an explosion of boiling blood.
Her companion turned in a panic, trying to run, but a large, black pincer snapped out with incredible speed to seize him by the right arm. He screamed, a curiously inhuman warbling sound that sent a shiver up my back, as the pincer lifted him high in the air, and his assailant finally came into view.
I guess, more than anything else, the thing reminded me of a huge insect. Not that I would say it was insectoid, at least not in the way that we and the Tahni are humanoid---it was actually built more like some kind of monstrous crustacean, as much as it resembled any form of life I was familiar with. Yet the impression I was left with as it held the screaming Predecessor up by his bloody arm was that of an oversized scorpion.
Its head was a flattened oblong of obsidian, inlaid with a pair of deeply-recessed red orbs that I assumed were its eyes, with a pair of horizontally-hinged jaws that clicked together almost unceasingly, creating a castanet-like rhythm. What there was of its neck was nearly swallowed up by a thick plating of what seemed to be biological armor that grew out of its shoulders, covering the joints of its smaller, upper set of arms. These limbs ended in long, multijointed fingers, made for complex manipulation, while the lower set of arms were heavy, load-bearing appendages that terminated in wicked-looking pincers. Mounted to one of the load-bearing arms, in such a manner as to be operated by the same-side manipulative limb, was the energy weapon the creature had used to cut down the female.
The thing's chitin-plated torso curved down into a complex, well-protected double-hip joint that was supported by two sets of motive limbs---I hesitated to call them legs, because they seemed to be just as dexterous as the upper sets. The forward pair were short, with well-defined digits, as if they could be used as auxiliary arms in a pinch; while the rear set were stouter and longer, curved digitigrade and clearly meant for high-speed bursts of running. The scorpion image I'd received was only enhanced by the flexible tail that waved back and forth threateningly from behind the rear set of legs, but the more dangerously threatening sting was the heavy assault cannon riding the creature's right hip.
I’d seen these before as well, and so had Sanders and Victor and Kurt, and I noticed expressions of mingled terror, disgust, and hatred on their faces that probably mirrored my own. Dozens of these things had erupted out of the alien artifact salvaged by Pirate-World scouts decades ago and buried under the barn on Gramps’ ranch on Thunderhead, and wound up killing him and Captain Yassa while the two of them covered our escape.
The castanet sound grew louder as the creature grasped the struggling Predecessor male by his other arm, then yanked sharply with both pincers. The male's arms ripped out of their sockets in a spray of blood and he fell face-first to the street, shaking in fatal shock.
"We have come to know these beings," Choss continued, taking up his monologue once again, "as the Skrela. What you have just witnessed was a Skrela warrior, a subspecies that has been their fighting class for millions of years. They are hive beings, with no real sense of individuality as you or I experience it, and the various forms their race takes are so diverse you might wonder if they were of the same evolutionary tree. Our researchers, in fact, believe that they may have been a bioengineered species, but that is no longer important. What is crucial is that they are coming this way, and unless halted, will sweep through your Commonwealth in less than five years.
"We are hopeful that, together, we may be able to conquer these abominations once more and save you, our children, from the fate that befell us. I will allow your President to outline our plan of action."
"Thank you, my friend," President Jameson said. "We must meet the enemy fleet out in interstellar space, where they can do no more damage to our colonies---I cannot allow another of our civilians to die. We will be marshaling all of our military forces, and putting the Patrol Service under central military command for the duration of the emergency.
"This would leave many of our colony worlds unprotected and unpoliced, were it not for the patriotism and foresight of our friends in the Corporate Council."
"This is the quite ingenious part,” Captain Al Amari commented drily, not without genuine admiration in his tone.
"This," the President continued as the camera panned to the left, "is Andre Damiani, the Executive Director of the Corporate Council."
The man the camera showed was handsome, with a sculpted face and immaculately-styled dark hair, yet I knew that his hand-made business suit concealed the heart of a snake. The last time I’d seen him was when I was a teenager, trying not to embarrass Mom at one of the high-brow events that brought out the crème de la crème of the Corporate Council. Though I’d been in his employ for years now, I hadn’t actually spoken to him since that day, much less met him in person, but he hadn’t changed a single bit.
"Thank you, Mr. President." Damiani looked into the video pickup. "I have offered the President the services of the Council's Corporate Security Force in order to keep order in the colonies and protect them in case of any further Skrela attacks. I will immediately place command of all CSF forces in the hands of the Commonwealth government for the duration of this struggle. God willing, they won't be needed."
“Motherfucker,” Sanders muttered as Al Amari cut off the feed.
There was a chuckle from the back of the room and I realized that another trooper had walked in while we were watching the news report.
“Concisely put,” the man commented. He was average height, lean but broad-shouldered and athletic and he had swept-back brown hair that seemed longer than military regulations allowed. I was about to ask who he was when Victor spoke up, his voice full of skepticism, his face screwed up in a frown.
“They can’t expect anyone to believe that bullshit!”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I told him, “if most of it’s true.” I shrugged. “Except the part about them coming back to the Cluster.”
“They wouldn’t kill all those people,” Vilberg protested. “Not even Damiani would do that.” He shook his head. “That’s got to be faked.”
“Maybe it is,” Al Amari cut in, “and maybe it isn’t. Either way, mission accomplished, Damiani’s timetable has been pushed up to right the hell now, and so has ours. We have to be ready to go at a minute’s notice and General Murdock would like your team attached to my command group for the backup mission.”
“When do we launch?” I wanted to kno
w.
“Right after we get word that the main fleet has left orbit around Inferno,” he told me.
“And hopefully we can get there before they’re all dead,” the other man put in, leaning casually against the desk.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked him bluntly.
“Deke Conner,” he told me with a smart-ass smirk I wanted to punch off his too-handsome face. “Captain, Fleet Intelligence, semi-retired. We’ve met before, believe it or not.”
And then I remembered. He was one of Murdock’s augmented commandos, one of the Glory Boys. He’d been on Demeter at the end, but I didn’t remember talking to him.
“You seem pretty certain that Murdock’s fleet is going to fail,” I said. “Why’s that?”
He snorted derisively, as if that should be obvious.
“Because the one who’s guiding them to their objective is Roger fucking West.”
Chapter Seventeen
Waking up from hibernation was, I discovered, unpleasantly similar to waking up from a long stint in the auto-doc. I was naked, freezing, disoriented and mildly nauseous and I hurriedly sat up in the capsule before I wound up puking in my mouth. I heard a pained groaning beside me and saw Vilberg stretched out in the capsule next to mine, hands over his eyes.
“This sucks, man,” he whined.
“Oh, get over it.” Kurt already had his legs draped over the side of his hibernation pod, his beard limp and soggy from the biotic fluid, looking like a drowned rat.
We were crammed into the Stealth-ship’s utility bay like canned rations and heads were popping up all around from the dozen pods bolted into the bulkhead. That was why we had to have the pods: this Petra place was pretty far out, and there was no way for everyone assigned to this boat to share the same air, water and food for the whole trip.