Naero's Valor

by Mason Elliott

  Naero and Bodii fought back to back, blades cutting and slashing against hundreds of oncoming enemy shock troops.

  They endured heavy blows for each other when the other stumbled or faltered.

  The rush and press of foes grew very close.

  Poly roared and slammed into the enemy from the right side like a crashing green star, shredding them in her combat fury. A Shai Battle Princess was a fearsome sight to behold in the might of her full rage.

  Against such skill and power, the enemy withered and perished.

  By battle’s end everyone came out of the fighting bloodied and beaten.

  The surviving thousands of Irregular troops under General Mo Vickers swept over the last of the fleeing enemy elements and put them down.

  When Naero collapsed again, Bodii called out for healers and picked her up. She carried her fading battle sister from the bloody field in honor and triumph.

  Jia and Poly caught up to them once more, applying what aid they could with their healing powers.

  When Naero regained steady consciousness, she was back on The Star Angel on a modified medbed, like the ones used for Shetharra.

  In fact, her oldest daughter was there along with some of her friends in energy being form, as well as Shalaen, Zhen, and Trudi Cheyenne.

  Z looked down at her with her patented worried expression.

  When Zhen looked like that, it must have been bad.

  Shetharra embraced her mom. “You’ll be all right now, Mom. All of us got to you in time. Om figured part of it out, and suggested what to try. I consulted the Seven, and they explained the rest.”

  “You do happen to be pretty lucky to be alive,” Zhen added.

  “Quack,” Naero mumbled.

  Trudi and the rest all nodded in agreement, however, relief beginning to wash over all of their faces.

  Naero knitted her brows in frustration. “Haisha, is anyone going to tell me what exactly happened to me?”

  Naero, those attacks in the higher spheres that struck us were from a legendary G’lothc weapon. Even the Seven never faced it during their war. The Great Adversary was never able to perfect it in our universe. It must be from another where it was perfected.

  Shetharra jumped in at the same moment. “Mom, we think the enemy brought this weapon from another universe to ours. Even in its weakened form, it nearly killed you. Only you and perhaps Dad or Baeven could have survived those attacks for a time. Anyone else it would have killed outright.”

  Jia added, “Such attacks would have even slain Driathans like myself and Zhen. Not even our indestructible Ultrium bodies could have saved us. These lethal Darkforce energies attack and destroy all life. We isolated the Cosmic flows still at work inside of you and barely neutralized them in your system. Without Shetharra’s amazing energies and guidance, we would have lost even one of the Cosmic Guardians like you or Bae. She sang an incredible song that filled you with some kind of blinding light. The terrible energies within you could not withstand such might and finally dissolved away.”

  Shalaen shook her head in amazement. “Both of these powers–I have never seen such energies battling each other. Neither should rationally exist in our universe, but I am glad that your radiant child was with us, Naero.”

  Naero raised both eyebrows. “Then I guess I am too. What the hell were those attacks that struck me? Where did they come from?”

  Om was still linked with all of their minds.

  They were Darkforce energy concentrated into hyper rays of pure destruction–complete and total eradication of any form of life on contact. A true Death Ray. The hyper beam attacks originated somewhere deep within the Beta Quadrant. Apparently they can only strike targets within the high spheres that call attention to themselves as you did. Everything about this is impossible, N.

  “And yet it nearly killed me all the same.”

  “We’re trying to develop some kind of shielding, armor, or defense against this new threat,” Jia said.

  “Armor will not work,” Shetharra told them. “Not even Ultrium. You heard Jia. There are only two hyper metals or alloys that might offer some protection: Urtomium, or Ur-metal. Both are currently impossible for us to produce, even with the Songs of Making.”

  Naero came out and said what she knew Om was thinking. “I think we just received a calling card from the Prime enemy boss in the Beta Quadrant. Call it an opening salvo, from a being that can snipe at us from such vast distances through the higher spheres. We’ve heard rumors about this creature, named Khemathrykal. We have no idea what kind of being or G’lothc monster this thing is, but he might be even more powerful than the Dark Emperor at this rate. This weapon or attack he can pull off is some kind of Darkforce destruction beam. We might try temporal energy shielding of some kind. The SpaceTime Guardians were able to resist this power.”

  “The higher spheres are now a great risk to everyone,” Jia said.

  “We must continue exploring them,” Naero insisted. “We can try not to attract attention, and develop functioning defenses.”

  Shetharra hugged her mother again. “I’m just glad you’re alive, Mom.”

  “Me too, sweetie.”

  Naero thanked and embraced all of her good friends who had helped save her.

  Naero made a swift recovery and regen after that point. Their forces needed to track down Nahaxrathrax and Khemathrykal even more urgently than before. If the two enemy leaders were combining forces in the Beta Quadrant, that could not be allowed to stand.

  Naero and Khai helped lead four thousand of their finest fleets into the teeth of the Unknown Regions of the Beta quadrant, in pursuit of their great foes.

  The heads of those two great monsters begged to be cut off and killed.

  By this time, Naero had dozens of First Contact teams hard at work, assisted by her latest reps, who by now could shapechange almost as well as she did. These teams fanned out and assisted new sentient races that they met along the way.

  Finally they reached entirely unexplored interstellar regions that had endured the touch of the Dark Emperor and his hordes of malignant mind slaves.

  As usual, the GSA encountered raging wars, spurred on by the enemy’s repulsive manipulations. Alliance scouts found death and devastation on an unimaginable scale.

  For some sentient races it was too late.

  Naero feared it might end up that way, but they could only advance so far so fast.

  Entire species and world after unlucky world had already been completely wiped out by the Great Adversary, and their desire to obliterate all life.

  The Galactic Sentient Alliance recruited constantly among the survivors, exposing and neutralizing the real enemy at work, and putting a stop to the madness when and where they could.

  The Alliance continued to spread throughout those regions, the only hope that many of those newly encountered species had to survive.

  The intense hunt for the Prime Leaders continued as their primary objective. They tracked down every lead and every sighting.

  The clever fiends continued to maintain their strategy of devastating soft targets and then retreating. They avoided all direct contact with the elite GSA forces that might actually challenge them.

  Nahaxrathrax’s hit and run appearances caused great disruption and turmoil, even in his swift passing. His hordes protected him well.

  The Alliance Champions and their energy being allies also searched the adjacent Interdimensional spaces as they passed through.

  Sometimes they found total destruction among the new unsuspecting energy being species as well. Their mutual enemies were callous, opportunistic assailants.

  Other energy beings were spared, and further interdimensional pockets remained untouched or uninhabited. Nothing made sense. There was no reason to any of it. Some died, while others were spared.

  Then the sporadic trail of sightings, encounters, and lethal attacks suddenly veered off wildly.

  It shot straight out into an extensive swath of near dead space with fa
r fewer stars in the gap between the two major galactic spiral arms.

  Naero and Khai found that behavior particularly odd.

  What could there be in the near dead space that could possibly attract the hordes of the great enemy? With the area being so devoid of stars, there was almost nothing there to attack, subjugate, or destroy. Why go there?

  The G’lothc even ignored high value, strategic targets nearby that they could have easily overwhelmed and crushed.

  Then a long range scouting report by spyfixers revealed a clue to the enemy’s bizarre actions.

  On a far distant moon, ancient ruin sites had been blasted to dusty craters by careful enemy atomic carpet bombing.

  Naero immediately had the spyfixers begin searching for any ancient ruins, especially from the time of the past Great War. That was usually what the enemy went after in these cases.

  Not only did they roughly locate the Dark Emperor, but they found a string of ancient Drian sites that the foe appeared to be running down.

  Naero and Khai brought in Jia, Baeven, and Zhen and Ty. Ommo and Alala also came along.

  As the task forces closed in, Naero and her small group transported ahead to see what they could find.

  On an abandoned world called Zurred-9 the Drian ruins did not yield much at first. Having two Driathans with them would give them an edge. They could detected things that even Naero and Om could not, and Baeven was also very sensitive to Drian tek and residual energies.

  Drians almost never stored data in their buildings, constructs, and structures. These ruins were ruins because the original buildings and construction had been mostly destroyed during the course of the Great War of the ancient days.

  Jia, Baeven, and Zhen also pointed out that there were still barely detectable traces of the Darkforce powers that had been used to raze what might have been an important outpost system.

  This hadn’t been a city of any kind, Jia noted.

  It had once been a secret Drian military base.

  Baeven and Jia said that Drian military tek of that period was intentionally designed to dissolve into inert components in the event of just such an attack, as a failsafe to protect any secrets from falling into the wrong hands.

  Then Jia gasped slightly. “I just detected portions of a secret Drian bunker forty kilometers below the planet surface.”

  Zhen double-checked Jia’s findings. “She’s right. The Great Adversary must have overlooked it. Fortunately, the enemy back then wasn’t perfect either.”

  With their help, Om finally brought up scanned details of what to expect. Originally this deep bunker had been shielded and cloaked, but that tek broke down and dissolved after millions of years of neglect. The fixers

  First they all studied the layout and prepared for insertion.

  Next, Naero flashed them inside the old stronghold. Fixers provided lighting.

  Surprisingly, it reminded them all about being inside The Star Fox.

  Most of the Drian tek looked to be, as they suspected, already inert.

  One single backup com console remained, left behind in what must have been an old equipment storage area. The war must have overtaken the base by surprise. Jia guessed that this console had never dissolved because it might have been de-activated for replacement, or perhaps it had never been energized or activated to begin with.

  Jia alone determined how to activate it and brought it up to working order. “This was a deep space, tight transmission relay station, compact tek the likes of which I have never seen or operated.”

  To Naero, the unit was about the size of a small shipboard washer/dryer unit. They could not all get at it at once. Several of them used teknomancy to study studied and examine this relic from the distant past.

  For the Drians and the Kexx, such amazing tek was commonplace. They quickly learned that this single device could manipulate and coordinate multiple hyper coded com link and holo transmissions from across several galaxies.

  Not quadrants.

  Entire galaxies.

  If we tried to use this tek to call out to the other galaxies now, who would respond? What would we all learn?

  Ommo, Alala, and Ty took their turns and scanned and recorded the device’s intricate construction and function with their teknomancy.

  “I’m only comprehending about half of this tek.” Ty said. “But we have the specs recorded now. We can finish analyzing and unravelling their secrets later.”

  “Some of these components and their very composition of hyper materials do not currently exist,” Alala stated”

  “No longer exist,” Jia corrected, “until now. Some of those same materials still exist within this unit. With these working samples, we can create them once more.”

  Zhen gasped, somehow linking with the device. “It’s reaching out, calling out to other such devices that are no longer there. I-I swear, Haisha, on some level–it is actually–sad. No, no, no. Don’t!”

  Zhen looked up. “Jia, we’ve triggered some kind of security protocol. It’s going to dissolve itself!”

  Jia quickly moved in, glowing brightly all of the sudden. She placed her hands on the device as it began to shudder. “Halt. I command you. Priority override from the Shallahavel herself! You will obey my authority, granted to me by our creators. You will continue to function as you were designed, unless one of the great enemy or any Darkforce agent or construct tries to take you over or access your data!”

  The device shuddered once more and resumed its normal function. Jia read some of its recorded communications.

  She pointed out that there was something very bad about the data they accessed.

  There were data logs of communications from key secret Drian and Kexxian locations. There had been many other relay stations out there at the time that were still responding and transmitting data.

  Some of them, like this one, still existed.

  They would all need to be tracked down at a later date.

  “There is danger in all of this,” Jia noted. “Some of these shared records could eventually be used to locate the secret homeworld of the Driathans–at Ur-Jahal.”

  And much later, there was one single recorded message from Xanathar itself, another secret Kexxian outpost of the late Kexxian Epoch.

  Just before the Drians and the Kexx had vanished, they had finally succeeded in locating Xanathar. Yet by then, it had become too late to do anything about it.

  Of course there was no direct location or tracing information that Naero and her friends could follow up on.

  But as Jia explained, “The security protocols were in place for many good reasons. If the G’lothc could obtain just one such device, they could duplicate them and eventually find a way to triangulate passive traces through sending and pinging dummy transmissions from a series of locations to that device and any others.”

  No com tek was fool proof, once the tek itself was captured or compromised. On top of that, there were many other ways that the Drians and the Kexx stored information and data files. The KDM itself was proof of that.

  The G’lothc knew mostly where and what to look for, if any data from their ancient opponents still survived.

  “Do you think they searching for the location of Xanathar, or Ur-Jahal?” Khai asked.

  “Both,” Jia and Naero said in unison.

  “You owe me a Jett soda,” Naero said with a chuckle.

  “If they find either,” Jia noted, slightly confused by Naero’s jest, “then all of us are in serious trouble.”

  They were happy to take the Drian com unit along with them for the Alliance teks to drool over.

  They went on to Dovia-1, the next site closer to the approaching enemy hordes, and the rampaging Dark Emperor. There was some slight evidence found there that also made mention of Ur-Jahal. Whether this data was crucial in any way remained to be seen. Who could say?

  Meanwhile, the trap for Nahaxrathrax was being set, and the GSA closed in.

  Finally, they were going to have a good chance to ta
ke out that malignant creature.

  But it will all be for nothing if the enemy gains the upper hand in the search for those two key locations, both vital parts of the Cosmic Prophecies.

  Clearly that was what the enemy was after. There was no current way of knowing how much data they had already collected, and they consistently wiped out every site whether they found anything or not.

  Just as they had done after murdering Naero’s parents.

  One of the keys seemed to be the final site, on Nykur-6. As it turned out, a major Kexxian naval base had once been centered within the entire Nykur system. A fantastic battle had been fought around there long ago, covering many megaparsecs of galactic territory all around.

  This enormous base here had also been almost completely razed by a massive G’lothc counterattack during the Great War, part of a vast enemy sweep from one of their vast armadas.

  It was quite possible that some valuable data still remained there in that heavily protected area.

  Naero transported them straight into the remains of that secret location.

  They arrived in a big surviving section of the old base, right before the current enemy would.

  They only had minutes to complete their work.

  From their fresh scans, this was a formerly cloaked portion of the secret base, concealed underground. Within they located what appeared to be some kind of secret Kexxian battle computer, part of a huge com and data network. This was no relay station. This base had been a major hub for that Quadrant way back then.

  Sections of that tek had also been used by the Drians, the main allies of the Kexx, and modified for their direct use.

  Who knew what secrets that hyper computer contained?

  Naero, Om, and Ommo tried to scan and study what good only be gold mine of ancient tek, assisted by Jia, Zhen, and Ty.

  Zhen told them, “Although much of this Drian teknomancy stuff is new to me, I also studied Drian history and tek inside the KDM for many months at a time on my own as Nehz. Our studies have continued in new directions thereafter once we actually became a Driathan. Now we can see and understand many things that we did not and could not perceive before that.”