The Drellic Saga: Books One, Two and Three

by Mike Marlinski

Chapter Twenty Five

  Aia’s “Great Storm” condemned her children to eternal darkness, while the remnants of one of the Architect’s final creations remained dormant, yet alert, protected by the thick outer layers of Tyrran. From within the bowels of The Depths, “The Incomplete” banded together as one united, endangered species. The survivors of the crash caused by Daelon, managed to patch the tears in the hull with their transparent force field technology, just prior to impact. This minimized the damage to their vessel and allowed for more than half of the entities on board, to survive and endure the next several weeks.

  The ship’s propulsion system was damaged beyond repair, and none of their scout ships or escape pods could even attempt making the journey to the next habitable world, which was hundreds of light years away. They were stranded and those who had survived were badly injured. But they were not without sustenance. The Architects had made a sizable delivery of the nourishing chemical that kept the Incomplete alive, just before they abandoned their planet, to engage the humans. Thousands of black barrels, containing the same glowing, purple liquid, present in their cocoons at the moment of their collective birth, lined the walls of their storage compartment, located on their bottom deck.

  The Incomplete also possessed another source of life replenishing nectar. Although Daelon had destroyed the bulk of their human blood supply, they still possessed a single feeding drone, filled with the blood and nutrients they had extracted from Core. A member of their ranks bred to be a scientific advisor, put its knowledge of chemistry to good use and spent years finding a way to fuse Core’s blood with their dwindling supply of food from the Architects.

  It didn’t take the Incomplete long to realize that human blood was far more nourishing than the mediocre bitter tasting stew, concocted by their creators. They had been genetically engineered by the Architects, just as the humans had been. And after years of trials and study, determined that although humans came from a distant gene pool, human DNA seemed to bond with their own, consequently making their bodies more durable and their minds generally more efficient.

  After synthesizing a liquid element that combined the two sources of life energy, the Incomplete discovered that they did not have to consume nearly as much as they had in the past, in order to survive. The Architects had given them the presence of mind to construct self-sustaining technology aboard their ships. They never had to worry about the loss of power, gravity or oxygen, as long as the ship remained sealed underground. And now with their newly found food source, they were able to survive and reproduce as a normally functioning asexual species, beneath the Tyrran surface, for the next one thousand years.

  They gave birth by secreting a fungus from their rows of nostrils, which doubled as smell receptors and reproductive organs. The fungus rapidly evolved into an organism with a genetic makeup, identical to its parent, thus producing a being identical to Yin or their leader, at the time of the crash. This allowed them to remain numbered in the thousands, over the centuries.

  Even after a full millennium had passed since the crash, they still had no way of leaving Tyrran and were then faced with the challenge of a rapidly diminishing food supply. Out of necessity, they used the last of their available technological resources, to build thousands of rectangular life pods, hooked up directly to the ship’s main power grid. They then made the decision, as a species, to go into an indefinite state of hibernation, which could only be interrupted by their ship detecting a viable organic presence, within a close proximity.

  After locking themselves away on the lowest deck of their stranded vessel, two billion years passed before Aia’s “Great Storm” shook the twelve existing galaxies to their core, igniting the spark of life in the meadows of dark matter between them. The universe-wide destruction of the Architects, and the abrupt presence of new galaxies, caused pieces of the pre-existing galaxies to be ejected out into new territories. As “The Incomplete” slept soundly in their hibernation chambers, Tyrran, Siren and Drellic’s unnamed ice world, were cast out into the cold in close succession, keeping them held firmly together by the bond of gravity.

  Afterwards, an eight billion year journey, at light barrier breaking speeds, was abruptly ended by the gravitational influence of the recently formed Milky Way galaxy. The celestial titan welcomed the three minuscule rocks to its company with open arms, depositing them into elliptical orbits around a newly born, main sequence star, already long in its charge.

  Five billion years of pleasantries were exchanged between the planetary bodies and their adopted parent star, before two primitive mechanical devices crashed into a reformed, unrecognizable Tyrran. The year was 1971, according to the modern human calendar, which had been established on neighboring planet Earth, formerly known as Siren. Two poorly constructed probes, designed to take samples of the planet’s surface, crashed a few thousand feet away from the Incomplete ship’s burial site.

  Although the Incomplete’s automated computer system was programmed to detect organic signatures, the presence of the failed landers, triggered the ship’s long range antennae. Radio transmissions from Earth were picked up by the ship’s computer, and were immediately identified as being the product of human vocal chords. The Incomplete were immediately awakened by their ship and the ancient leaders of their long forgotten race, quickly educated themselves about Earth and its inhabitants.

  More human probes successfully landed on Tyrran, which the humans referred to as Mars, in the following years. The Incomplete used these probes to communicate with human governments. It began as a series of distress calls, which were kept secret from the general public on Earth and led to the creation of Darkside.

  An Incomplete soldier called Phaetos, who had ingested a rather generous amount of Core’s genetic material, had come out of its life pod with unexpected deformities, making it appear much more human than alien. Phaetos became their ambassador to Earth and was the only member of their race allowed to show its face to the ignorant humans via video transmission.

  It learned English, the most commonly spoken human language, and was instructed by its superiors to masquerade as a descendant of ancient humanity. The Incomplete had learned all there was to know about ancient man, after crash landing on Tyrran, eons before. It was Phaetos who first informed the leaders of Darkside of the existence of man, billions of years prior, of the Architect War and most importantly, of Starblood. Starblood was the unobtainable dream elixir that had brought about their imprisonment, and the Incomplete knew that if anything could lure the humans to come to their aid, it was the promise of ultimate power.