by Ivan Kal
They had sought more than they were ready for, had acted with violence and greed, had helped kill an entire World-ship of the People. It had taken the Partenai a long time recover from their guilt, and more even to again reach the stars–this time on their own. It was humbling for them to realize how much they had been given. The first time they had lived among the stars they had done so on the backs of the People, never quite understanding the technology they were using. It was why by the time they reached the stars, intent on asking for forgiveness, hoping to make amends, the People were nowhere to be found. And they had searched for a long time, finding only rumors from the other races that had since emerged. There was nothing aside from the black machine ships or small pieces of technology that offered no insight into the question they yearned to know the answer to. Where had the People gone?
And now she knew the answer, and it was terrible; the only thing more so was the Enlightened. The Partenai had always known that the machine ships and armies had been left by the People. At first they had thought that they were left as a plague for the galaxy that had betrayed them. But over time patterns and new ideas arose. Now she knew why they existed–and she was terrified.
The Josanti League had taken in several races that had been running from the machine ships, and tales of the things that they had done were horrible. But to know that such measures were taken in order to prevent something even worse… It was truly terrifying.
But so was what the Emperor had asked of her: his idea was almost as ridiculous as his notion that they were to fight the Enlightened. Even if that was the reason his race was created, Levisomaerni did not think that they stood a chance against something even the People could not defeat.
Yet she had given her word, and so she would grant her aid. The Emperor wanted an ambassador to the star-nations of the galaxy, someone who other rulers will listen to. And she would be that, even if she did not believe that his message would be truly listened to.
In any case, the diplomats were still engaged in talks and would eventually get to an agreement. She might’ve bullied the Josanti to let her take this mission here, but that decision would still have repercussions. The Josanti could not be seen just suddenly making a great amount of deals with a rimward power, she knew, and she did not have the influence to make such a thing happen alone. That meant that while the diplomats had been convinced that there was enough here to make at the very least a basic trade agreement, their request for their forces to pass through the Josanti League’s territory had to be denied. Perhaps in time they would be able to grant that request, but it would not be soon. The galactic powers took matters at a far slower pace than the Empire might want.
But she, as a private citizen, would be able to act as she wished–and the plan that the Emperor proposed had intrigued her, even though she did not quite believe that it would work. On the other hand, she had spent far too long isolated in the core.
Now she would go out and try to inform the galaxy of the threat–and perhaps, she thought, they could even manage to unite before whatever the Enlightened were planning came to fruition.
Interlude III
Union of Species ~ Fifteen thousand years ago
“Did you hear, Gar? We got one!” Vorash said as he entered his brother’s room.
Garash was sitting on a side of a bed, an open hologram containing text in front of him.
“I heard,” Garash said softly.
“Why are you not celebrating?”
“Vor, we lost one hundred ships just to take that one out. We isolated it, and fired everything that we had as it slowly killed our ships one by one. None of our weapons worked…it died because one of our ships rammed it,” Garash said.
“But we now know that they can be destroyed!”
“It was surrounded by debris, couldn’t escape.”
“This is a victory!”
“We’ve already lost,” Garash said sadly. “Half of our territory is under their control. Four hundred years, and all we have to show for it is one black ship destroyed and fifty billion dead.”
Vorash opened his mouth to speak, but nothing was coming out. He walked over and took a seat next to his brother.
“What are we going to do?” Vorash asked.
Garash raised one of his arms and pointed at the hologram. “That.”
Vorash turned his attention to it and saw blueprints for what looked like a ship, and several other things. “What is that?”
“A new type of ship–long range, fast, able to carry thousands. A new type of stasis unit, and a few other things.”
“What?”
Garash turned to his brother. “We are running away.”
Vorash looked at his brother in disbelief. “We can’t! No matter how many ships we get we will never be able to take everyone, not even most!”
“And we are not–we are taking just enough to start again. Somewhere else, away from them. Far away enough that we have time to bridge the gap between us, so that the next time we meet, we will not need to run again,” Garash said, his voice resolute.
Chapter Fifteen
Sanctuary
Hyeon Seo-yun had been many things in her life: a scientist, a professor, a mother, and in some ways even a ruler. But she had always been most comfortable in a small private room, with a board and a pen in her hand. The pen had been removed, and the board replaced by holograms, but it still worked in much the same way.
And so she found herself in her private office looking at a wall filled with holograms of equations, graphs, and old records. This particular problem had been on that wall for a long time, but she did feel like she was getting close.
She was attempting to understand what the Sha was. She had all the data from the People, but even there she had started seeing holes. There were things that made her question what it was, and what could be done with it and why. The biggest reason for her research were the Enlightened–the People’s records attributed incredible deeds to them, all done through the Sha, and she was certain that not everything was put in the sphere, as she had noticed holes in the data. However, most of it was there.
In any case, the Enlightened seemed to be capable of so much more, and it did not initially make sense. According to history, the People had fallen prey to an illness, something that they could not find a cure for. Eventually most of them had died off, leaving only a handful of them remaining. Three of them were attempting to find the cure by creating artificial organisms, ones that had been created so that they were in a constant state of evolution, of mutation. Then they spliced their own genetic code with the organisms, hoping that the mutation would give them insight into a cure.
Something went wrong, and the three were infected with one organism. It changed them somehow, and in doing so gave them enormous power. That was something that had bothered her immensely. Originally, they had believed that in order to use the Sha, one needed to have a certain biological aid, organs and tissue that could facilitate the abilities. And to be fair in many ways that was true, as every human, Shara Daim, and Nel had a special organ that converted a small part of the energy their bodies created and stored it inside itself. That was the energy one needed to spend in order to use any Sha ability. They had conduits from it going all over their bodies, as well as emitters in the skin that allowed them to expel that energy with ease. It was all biological hardware that seemed necessary in order to use the Sha.
But the more she learned, the more she started to think that they had been wrong. It was not necessary–it simply made things easier. There was something else that facilitated the use of Sha. But in the end, it all came down to energy. One could not do anything with the Sha without expending energy. One could not break the laws of the universe, could not make something appear out of nothing. It was all bound by the law. But therein lay the problem: Seo-yun was certain that they did not really know the ultimate law that governed the universe.
Her suspicions were that the law was the Sha itself. According to the Peop
le, Sha was what enabled everything; it was the building block of creation. And they did know that the Sha was what kept the bonds of even the smallest particles. But Seo-yun had always imagined the Sha as a particle of its own, perhaps the smallest particle in the universe that made up everything. Yet the more she studied and tried to understand, the more she came to think of it as an endless calm sea, with reality submerged just beneath the surface. From that point of view, the Sha was the Universe.
She was certain that all other laws of physics simply came from the Sha. It was everywhere, always present, in the air, in her blood, in every molecule, every atom, all of creation. When one used the Sha, it seemed like one was breaking the laws of physics, but they weren’t, not really. Many of the laws they had once thought absolute had been shown false in the centuries since the scientists on Earth had thought them up, just like their own theories had disproven those from the people in their own past.
If one wanted to move something with telekinesis, one focused the mind on the object and then expended energy to move it by moving the Sha that held the object together–that made it real. The particles that made the object simply moved when the Sha moved. It was akin to moving a piece of paper with writing on it. In order to move the ink around, one simply moved the paper it was written on.
The Sha did not care for what they thought possible; it in fact did not care for anything. It just stood there, unmoving. When someone used an ability to interact with the Sha, one actually spent energy in order to move it according to one’s will, and moving Sha moved reality. The Sha could change, as well, but according to rules no one really knew the true breadth of.
The organs that seemed to give the ability were simply there to make it easier to use, to reduce the amount of energy that it required and help a sentient being grasp a concept that was beyond them. The Sha did not need that.
But while one could bend the laws, one could not break them. The Sha could not create something out of nothing. One can’t raise one’s hand and just turn something into something else–the act needs to abide by the laws of the Universe. Those laws could be bent, but never broken, and they always required energy. The Sha seemed to respond only to that: a conscious effort that spent energy. It did not care what kind of energy it was.
Some of her peers who were working on the same thing, the more spiritual ones at least, had come up with a theory–one that Seo-yun was not certain she agreed with, although it was appealing.
They believed that all intelligent beings in the universe were a manifestation of the Sha’s will, for lack of a better word. They insisted that because it had been proven that the greater amount of Sha in a living being was what triggered intelligence, that it proved the existence of what could be called a soul, which was a piece of something divine–the Sha, the Universe.
Seo-yun, however, was not quite convinced. She did, however, find it interesting. If all it took to actively use Sha was to use a conduit to it that every intelligent being had, then she would’ve thought that they would have seen and would see far more people develop such abilities, even when reaching far into the past. If biological aid was not required, then anyone at any point, after they had intelligence, could theoretically use it.
Which Seo-yun was reluctant to agree, her colleagues had found an answer to this concern as well–whether it was credible or not. Every race had myths, legends, of extraordinary people who could do things others could not. Human history included stories of gods and angels throughout the ancient mythologies. Such things always got twisted by people and time, of course, but she could not abandon the explanation as a data point. Not when such things were present in the histories of every race they had encountered.
So, if she was to believe that, she would have to say that use of Sha stretched back into the history of almost every race. And while such things were exceptionally rare, they were still possible. But the other question still remained: what energy was required to actually use it? The human body had always had a mechanism for storing energy; indeed, every race had it. The organ they now possessed was simply a more efficient one.
Which brought her to the problem of the Enlightened. Their changed natures seemed to have given them a power far beyond anything previously documented, and that was not supposed to be possible. The law that governed the use of Sha required energy, and no matter how much they evolved, she refused to believe that they could access such a massive amount of energy. They would need to be able to gather and transform almost every kind of energy in order to gain enough.
Seo-yun had read the classified report, sent to her by Adrian, of how he had used the Sha to destroy an entire Erasi warship. The only people aware of the feat were the crew that had witnessed it, Seo-yun and a few higher up people in the Fleet, Adrian did not want it to be common knowledge. But even that, as impressive as it sounded, was not really all that impressive when one understood what he had actually done. He had used the Sha to split two bound particles, nothing more, something almost any human engineer could do. The difference was only the technology used to accomplish the action. The reaction that destroyed the ship happened without the influence of the Sha. Besides, the act had drained Adrian to exhaustion.
The things attributed to the Enlightened, however, were much greater–and that was what bothered her. They had another way of accessing energy that they could spend to bend Sha to their will, or they knew something that she and everyone else was missing.
Something that was a direct result of their change–and Seo-yun felt that that was the key to everything, to their power and their motives.
The key to stopping them from destroying everything she held dear.
Chapter Sixteen
Interstellar space
Ryaana woke up slowly, groggily, in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar bed. It took her a few moments to remember how she had come to be here, and then, as the last of her memories returned, she lurched up, only to be pushed back to the bed.
“It’s all right, Ryaana. Slowly now,” a familiar voice said.
She turned to look and saw Vas standing over her. Immediately she felt safer, but she still needed answers. “What happened? Where are we?”
Vas grimaced sadly, then looked her in the eyes. “We are on one of the Gallant’s frigates. As to what happened… What is the last thing that you remember?”
“We were fighting the Erasi–they had a new ship, a new weapon. It…it destroyed my fleet. We were abandoning ship,” Ryaana said, trying to appear calm, but inside, her heart was pounding in her chest.
“We did abandon the ship. The landing bay was hit, and decompressed. I managed to hold on to the grounding gear until the field kicked in and closed the hole, then I got us to the ship. The rest…they were not so lucky. We are the only survivors from the Gallant.”
Ryaana swallowed hard. “What about the other ships?”
“There were some who tried to escape…the Erasi hunted them down. I don’t know if anyone else survived,” Vas told her, his hand on her shoulder giving her a small squeeze.
“But…how did we escape?”
“Luck, I guess. We were at the back of the formation, the furthest away from the Erasi. And I…I shut down as much of the ship as possible, pretending to be a piece of debris until we were far enough away. The Erasi eventually took down their skim disruptors and I skimmed us to the edge of the hyperspace barrier and…well, here we are.”
“And where is here?”
“On our way to the territory we hold. I think that it will be another month in hyperspace until we reach our destination.”
Ryaana closed her eyes to prevent tears from leaking out. “I lost everyone.”
“The Erasi were waiting for us, and they had technology none of knew anything about. It was not your fault.”
“Of course it was!” she yelled out. “I had hundreds of thousands of living beings under my command, and all of them are dead!”
“Some might’ve survived,” Vas said emptily, and she felt a spike
of anger. She knew that he was trying to make her feel better, but it was not helping. Even if someone else had managed to survive and escape, she had still lost almost everyone else.
The Erasi weapon had been terrible and devastating, and she couldn’t even imagine what it was, but she knew that her parents needed to know about it. Pushing Vas’s hand away, she slowly stood up. Wiping her tears, she calmed herself, pushing her feelings deep inside. She was a Sentinel; she could grieve later. For now, she needed to make sure that this information reached her people, and that meant that she needed to survive.
* * *
Aranis was very impressed with Ryaana. After the initial emotional outburst she had calmed down and set herself to making sure that they reached safety. The first day she spent mostly to herself, going over the sensor data, of which there was little. Aranis had turned it off before he had left the small ship, but she went through it nevertheless, as well as the copy of the Gallant’s sensors that she had in her implant.
The day after, she had started questioning him, and he gave answers as Vas would have. He told her that he didn’t know much, that he had been hiding in the ship with its sensors turned off. He didn’t think that she suspected anything, and he could see that she was still dealing emotionally with what had happened.
On the third day he found her trying to figure out a tactic to be utilized against the Erasi warship. That had almost brought a smile to his face, as he knew there would be no need for that–unless the Erasi had another one of those ships. As far as he could tell, that was possible, but at least the one that had destroyed her force no longer existed.
After he had finished with that ship, he had destroyed every Erasi warship in the system, followed by every one of the fleeing alliance ones. He could not let anyone leave the system. Most probably hadn’t even seen anything, except perhaps the massive ship exploding, but there was no point in taking the chance. Afterward, he had taken care of the Erasi military installations on the moons and the planet by throwing several massive pieces of the Erasi warships at them.