by JK Stone
Terrah nodded and said, “That makes sense, Eneria said the battleship had some of its systems repaired around a thousand years ago, and she was unable to successfully send probes down afterward.”
“I had the same signal on my end of the data, see here,” Doran pointed it out.
Terrah looked at the data before asking, “Is that the correct date coding?”
Doran looked down and performed a quick analysis then he said, “Yes, why do you ask?”
“Because Calia told all of us that she dated the ship to be nine hundred thousand years old, and the data here goes back nearly three million years… wait a moment,” Terrah brought up both of the displays and asked, “What’s that? It looks like another energy wave on your end, and it was present on my scans from six thousand years ago, but after that, the signal was gone.”
Doran seemed to be examining the signal carefully, and then he said, “We need to create another Science display here; it looks as if that energy has a multi-spacial variant to it.”
Terrah created a science console and routed the data from the probe through it. She sucked in a breath and said, “You were right. That ship had a time dilation field around it. It appears to have dropped almost a thousand years before Gebb located the battleship. Apparently, it was the TD field that was blocking the distress signal when it was at full power.” Terrah uploaded more of the scans and asked, “What are these signals?”
Terrah no sooner got the words out of her mouth when her display began flashing red reading, “Nefastus… Evasion Protocol Engaged!” then the ship began phase shifting and took off on an unknown heading.
Terrah stood and rushed to the control room with Doran hot on her heels as he shouted, “What is going on? I cannot control the ship, and I am locked out.”
Terrah shouted over her shoulder as she entered the control room, “I don’t know, I can’t access the ship either,” She took her seat in front of the mission prep console and tried to access it, but said, “I’m locked out of the system from here as well.”
Terrah activated her suit’s communications and desperately called, “Jason can you hear me?!” And Terrah could have sworn her heart had stopped while she was waiting for a reply.
“What’s wrong?” Jason asked with a bit of trepidation to his voice.
The moment Terrah heard Jason’s voice she exhaled and her heart began pounding vigorously in her chest. “We just encountered an issue. We put some of our collected data through the Science console and our ship went nuts… we’re phase shifting and on an unknown heading, and we’re locked out of the controls!—
“Remain…calm...Show…them,” Inola’s voice sounded in a strangely disjointed manner.
Terrah’s heart was racing a mile a minute until Inola spoke. Taking a calming breath, Terrah asked, “Did you hear Inola as well?”
“Yes, I think we all heard it… Justin just asked if I knew what it was about. One second,” Jason replied.
Jason was speaking in the background and Terrah could hear him talking to Alise, “Tell them we all need to go to TDS 4 to look at the data Terrah collected…Terrah, can you set up a meeting room and show us what you’ve found?”
Terrah let out a sigh of relief and said, “Our meeting room is still set up. I just have to set up the displays, we’ll be ready in a couple of minutes.”
“We’re on our way,” Jason replied.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Terrah and Doran were waiting at the table when everyone arrived, the table was in the shape of a pentagon and Terrah soon realized it was not going to be large enough to accommodate all of the occupants, so she reformed the table into a hexagon and adding the additional chairs, she had everyone take their seats.
Saleria drew Terrah’s attention as she introduced the man who was accompanying her. Pointing to each of them in turn Saleria said, “You’ve already met Alise and Jason, of TDS 1. To our right, we have Calia and Justin who are the commanders of TDS 3. Next to them we have Terrah and Doran who are the commanders of TDS 4. Then we have Eneria and Jerren who are the commanders of TDS 5. Finally, we have Vellia who you’ve also already met. Everyone this is Braun.”
Braun stood up saying, “It is a pleasure to meet all of you. I have to admit, it was a surprise to be reactivated and find out I was out of commission for so long and then to discover that we are a collective now.”
Doran laughed, drawing Braun’s attention. “I know that feeling all too well. Terrah told me my ship was taken out of commission a year after yours was,” Doran said.
Braun nodded. “The last thing I remember was the collision alarm going off as we were charging, then being reactivated a few days ago,” he said with the shake of his head.
Doran smiled and sighed before saying, “That is good to know.”
They all looked at Doran and Braun asked, “Why is that a good thing?”
Doran turned and asked Terrah, “You did not tell them?”
Terrah took his hand as she said, “I figured it was personal, and if you wanted to speak of it then you would.”
Doran nodded in understanding.
“What didn’t she tell us?” Jason asked.
Doran took a deep breath then he said, “When our ship was knocked off of the beam, I was not deactivated. We had received a message from Horuisis to meet at Terra. The commander and I were in Observation and were charging on the beam when what we now know is the GoW showed up.
“I saw the ship was on a collision course and in the instant after the ship collided with us I attempted to reset the ship’s systems, but there was a technical issue that prevented it. I knew the ship would not restart on its own so I uploaded into Baelac’s binding disk and attempted to transport us off of the ship, but that failed and we crashed on Terra.”
Doran paused a moment then forced himself to continue, “Baelac survived the crash and healed due to the chlorophyll, and we waited for one of these ships to rescue us.”
“How long?” Saleria had asked of him with a look that was akin to dread.
The other AI’s seemed to understand Saleria’s question but Her brothers and Vellia looked at a loss. Doran looked at Saleria and said, “We waited in anticipation for a hundred years, after that we figured we were lost, and we had to wait out the process.
“We did not have a sufficient source of nourishment, radiation or other and it took almost a thousand years before the Bio interface degraded and it finally ended. I think the binding disk prolonged Baelac’s life.”
The group looked back at Doran in what appeared to him to be absolute horror, and he really didn’t know what to say after that, so he sat there quietly.
Terrah was apparently uncomfortable with the silence because she changed the topic a little and said, “Baelac’s ethereal form told me that the sacrifice Doran made, enabled him to endure.”
Their looks of horror changed to ones of apparent sorrow. Doran had no idea what to say to that either, and luckily Terrah continued speaking.
“Anyway, the reason we’re all here…” all eyes flew to Terrah, and she continued speaking, “We found one of Calia’s probes on Anukan and it could only be interfaced on her ship, so I set our probe to scan the rest of Anukan then we took Calia’s probe over to TDS 3 to analyze it.
“When Doran and I returned, we found that our probe had been redirected into a ventilation shaft where it interfaced with some sort of computer, so we brought the probe back and I set up an isolated workstation to examine the data.
“Doran and I found a discrepancy from what we’ve been told,” Terrah looked toward Calia. “You dated the battleship at nine hundred thousand years old, correct?” she asked.
Calia nodded and said, “Yes, maybe a few thousand years older or younger, the molecular decay of the soil surrounding the battleship was not responding properly for an exact dating.”
Terrah nodded and brought up the data from their probe and said, “That would be because there was a Time Dilation field in effect surrounding the vessel.
It was deactivated a thousand years before Gebb found the battleship. Did you upload the data from your probe to the master control room yet?”
Calia nodded and asked, “What was the TD?”
“It was negative three point three,” Terrah directed her answer to Calia.
“So, that would place that ship crashing on Anukan between two point nine and three million years ago,” Calia said.
Terrah nodded and said, “Yes, well the age of the ships aside, we analyzed the data from the planet near the beginning when it first crashed and just as it took off and I saw another signal. I tried to determine what it was and the ship went nuts. The displays flashed red and showed ‘Nefastus… Evasion Protocol Engaged!’ we’re currently unable to change course or even determine our heading.
“We were trying to figure out a solution when Inola said to ‘Remain calm, and Show them.’ So, that’s why you’re all here. I guess we all need to view the data. There are several files at the beginning of the data that are encrypted. But the scan data is readily available,” Terrah stated to the group.
Braun looked confusedly around the table and asked, “Who, or what are the Nefastus?” I know it means Forbidden in the ancient Imortum language, but why is it of concern to us?”
Doran got everyone’s attention as he said, “From what I could find, there was an ancient war between the Imortum and a race called the Nefastus. Gallos, my second commander found in an ancient text, stating that before the change, which we took as their immortality, that the Imortum people had made cloned bodies and transferred their consciousness into them like we do on these ships.”
Doran gestured to the other AI’s and continued, “It was only for the ultra-influential, and a civil war ensued. We only ever found one point in that text that they were referred to as Nefastus, and Gallos just figured the Nefastus were the cloned ones... In later discoveries, we found that the Nefastus had engineered the perfect soldiers who almost wiped the Imortum race out of existence.
“The Imortum had created ships to combat this new scourge, and barely managed to defeat the enemy. But very little is known of the Imortum from that point in history, and until they assisted the Lantins and turned these ships over to them, it looked as if the Imortum had just vanished,” Doran said as he peered amongst the others.
“Why is it of concern to us now? Surely the clones are dead by now,” Braun stated.
“While reviewing the probe’s data, this ship detected Nefastus onboard the battleship just after the battleship launched from Anukan and took off,” Doran replied.
Terrah said, “I don’t know if you have scanned our prisoner’s memories yet, but the AI on the battleship brought the commander out of stasis after they repaired some systems.” Terrah brought up the data from Calia’s probe and said, “You see there, the few seconds of data TDS 3 received before their probe was knocked out of commission from the launched shows only an AI on the battleship, along with five humanoid corpses.”
Terrah then brought up the scans from TDS 4 and said, “The scans that were uploaded to our probe from the bunker, went a few seconds longer than that, and on my scans, it showed that several thousand life signs appeared moments later. Those appear to be the Nefastus super soldiers, if our ship going nuts is any indicator.”
Doran spoke again, “I know from some of the old texts that the Imortum banned cloning, in many cultures created people are referred to as Nefastus, which is why Gallos figured that they were clones. Those super soldiers may be the very reason for cloning being banned.”
Terrah was looking at the data and brought up the encrypted files, then she asked her youngest brother, “Justin, you were in crypto, what do you make of these files?”
Justin chuckled and said, “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Each of the six codes horizontal lines have thirteen digits that seem to be randomly shifting through at least thirty different languages, and the outer ring has a hundred and fifty-six digits and I keep seeing some characters that look more like pictograms. Without the correct cipher key, there’s no… What the hell just happened? Did any of you see that?”
Justin had been explaining the encryption when Doran reached over and took Terrah’s hand, in a flash a code line changed to a readable text and Terrah let out a gasp. Looking around she tried to figure out what had transpired. Realizing what just happened she said, “Doran just touched my hand and I could have sworn it read ‘TERRA-DORAN’ for a moment. Everyone give it a try.”
Each of the pairs did the same with the same results. The code line would flash with the two commander’s names momentarily and then began shifting once again. Terrah had a thought come to her and said, “I wonder.”
The group looked at her and asked at the same time, “What?”
Terrah let out a chuckle and said, “You know how nuclear silos require two keys to launch? Well, it may be the same for us; we may need to do it at the same time.”
Terrah counted it down, and for the briefest of moments, most of their names were locked in place. Looking around in frustration Terrah shrugged and said, “So much for that idea.”
“What if you all join hands kind of like when we healed Doran?” Vellia asked a moment later.
“It couldn’t hurt … on three,” Jason said as he and Alise began the chain. One by one as they made the connection, their names locked into place. The final two lines were still shifting through the code when Jason and Jerren each took one of Vellia’s hands.
Vellia’s name locked into place, but the outer ring remained shifting. Terrah thought they may have had it for a nanosecond, then a moment later all of the lines shifted back to encrypted and with a massive jolt of energy, Terrah was pulled out of consciousness.
Chapter Thirty
It only took a moment for Terrah to realize that the jolt of power had thrust her into another memory. She was seeing events playing out from Inola’s point of view again, and Terrah could feel Inola’s stunned disbelief at whatever had been said to her. Inola was amongst the group with three other people.
The person to her left asked, “Why would you do that? You heard what their leader said. They believe they are superior to us and we need to die for the betterment of the universe. They have already killed off the others in our council. What were you thinking?”
The person to Inola’s right replied, “Their leader Ardis, told me if I gave them the technology they and their people would move to a far off galaxy and leave us alone. They were only angry because we banned making any more of their kind. They will leave us be now that they can—
Inola shouted, “They will not leave! I have already shown you what they are capable of, and what they are going to do. They believe they are superior to all of us and they will destroy any race that they feel is inferior or a threat to them. Which will be every race and all species! After that last attack on the temple, I am the last of the time weavers, and if you do not do as I have instructed there will be no place you can hide and we will all perish.
“Our only hope is to go back and prevent the Nefastus from gaining a foothold. I made the mistake of not stopping this when it first happened. Because of this non-interference policy set up by the prior council, our hands are tied.”
Inola looked between each of the three people and added, “You are the final members of the council now, and I will abide by your decision. But know this, if events continue on the same temporal course, everyone that is not Nefastus in this universe will be eradicated. I have seen it! We created the problem, and now we have to fix it, or live the rest of our lives knowing we have doomed all other life our ancestors have created throughout this universe.”
The three looked to each other and the leader said to Inola, “We need to commune in private.”
Inola stepped away, but could still see the argument brewing. After a few minutes, the leader approached with the other two behind her and said, “We have decided to rescind the Non-interference protocol. You are to do whatever it takes to prevent this Nefastu
s scourge from progressing, and they are to be stopped at all cost.
“This is not a dictate to save the Imortum race, but to prevent the destruction of all our ancestors have created. The protectorate has already commissioned new ships to fight the scourge, but you say they will be ineffective. What do you need us to do?”
Inola sighed and handed her a tablet. “This tome needs to be capable of traveling Vellia N’Solis. And we will also need ships commissioned with the same abilities, I have the designs for the ships and I will need a Temporal Writ with your official seal. We cannot make the items or recruit the forces we need in this timeline, there is not enough of it left. The Protectorate’s ships will not be created in time.”
The leader looked at Inola then placed her hand on a tablet and emblazoned her mark on it. With a flash, the scene changed and Terrah was taking in the surroundings as Inola was walking between two others and Terrah could feel that Inola was haggard.
Inola peered to her left at someone fully covered in the same kind of shimmering golden body suit Terrah and the others were wearing, then Inola looked back to the person on her right. “Our ships are ineffective against their new battleships. No weapon we have fired even makes a mark upon them. You said you had a new technology?” Inola asked.
The person on Inola’s right said, “Yes, it has a similar result as the chlorophyll procedure that you re-discovered, there are very few of us left that can be affected by it though, only those with at least one strand of triple helix DNA can use it effectively. Our chemists have come up with a suspension, that if you eat it, it will force the replication of the Triple helix DNA throughout your entire body.”
Terrah could feel that Inola was doubtful but Inola asked, “What will it do?”
“We know that those with the Triple helix DNA can withstand electrocution, but after the change, your body will be able to retain a charge. That will allow you to use one of these suits,” The lady handed the body suit to Inola who ran it through her fingers like fine silk.