by Jim Rudnick
Alver grinned, tossed back beer after beer, laughing with the rest of them, and added some stories of his own about life as a marine. Captain Templeton joshed back at Alver about how marines on his ship couldn’t hold their liquor, and that got a round of shots all around.
They laughed a lot, Tanner saw as he too told a story or two. One story was about a night on Conclusion that he barely remembered and how he’d stolen a robo-cab from right under the Lady St. August’s nose—and he got a bigger laugh when he reminded them that she never let him forget it either.
Bram, however, was pretty quiet he noticed. The drinks and sharing of stories were slowing down, and a couple of the hunting party had already retired.
Tanner went over to sit beside his best friend. “You okay, there, Bram?” he said quietly as Alver was imitating a dance he said he’d seen over on Lurdar called the LuLuLurch, and that was getting roars from the smaller group gathered down at the far end of the table.
Bram nodded but he said, “Can I just touch your arm—I’ve news and I want you to see it as plainly as possible?”
Tanner nodded and he stuck out his arm. Bram slid a hand over his forearm and squeezed. Tanner’s mind was slowly gripped by a tendril from Bram’s mind, and he kept calm.
From what he could see, he realized it was from days ago, and as he watched, he saw Bram resign from the Issian faith and the Master Adept acknowledging same. He also saw Bram had stated the truth to the head of his faith. He meant what he said about not using his mind reading talent to enrich himself but to help others.
As that was the last thing that Bram sent to him, Tanner smiled at his friend. He turned slightly to face Bram. “I am surprised at your choice—not that you felt like you needed to leave the faith, but that it happened now?”
Bram nodded. “It was because I felt that it would be more honest to you to leave the Issian faith. As you know, we swear allegiance within that faith to the Master Adept—and I felt that anything that I learned and knew no longer should be passed along to the Master whenever she asked for updates. So I left. But that just means that I take off the ringed planet badge. I am no longer an Adept officer in the Duchy Navy ... so ...” he said.
“No matter, still my best lieutenant commander—don’t even worry about it,” Tanner said. Though Bram had given up—resigned actually from—the Issian faith, his mind was still a working organ and he was loyal to Tanner.
Bram half-turned to face the duke. “But there is one more thing too ... it’s Gia,” he said stoically.
Tanner stopped cold. “Gia? What about her?” he asked, his blood pressure rising as he went red in the face.
“Your Grace, you should know that I intend to woo and then wed your sister,” Bram said, his voice now fervent.
Tanner froze. He sputtered for a moment or two. His face emptied of blood, as he got his psyche moving backward toward equilibrium.
He noted that his left hand was tapping a one-two, one-two pattern over and over on his knee, which was the PTSD aid he’d been taught by the doctor. He breathed slowly.
Bram was in love with Gia—having never been alone with her or seeing her anywhere besides at Tanner’s wedding and in court at her trial. That was a shock.
Wonder what will happen with this whole schmozzle? he thought as he looked over at Bram. “Bram ... then that might mean we’d be brothers-in-law, would it not?” he asked, a grin appearing on his face.
Bram looked so relieved that his face was aglow, and then he gripped Tanner by the shoulders and hugged him.
Big hug, Tanner thought, Big hug that lasts and lasts ...
He hugged his friend back, and they called for two more drinks—a scotch for Bram and a juice shooter for Tanner.
Brothers-in-law ... that has a nice, nice sound to it ...
#####
Captain McDonald sat in the station cafeteria, nursing his smoothie. It had taken a few months for the station to be barged into its low orbit around Ghayth from the shipyards in Neres. He’d been lax these past few months and had skipped the gym completely. Now, he went every day before his shift on the bridge, and he tore the hell out of the rowing machine and the free weights.
He had been more than a little surprised with the changes that came from three months of inactivity. He could no longer do a standing military press of two hundred and forty pounds in countdown repetitions from five to one. He had been okay for the first set of repetitions, but then the second was painful, and he couldn’t even get to the three-two-one set at all. His triceps burned, and his poorly repaired rotator cuff on his left arm screamed at him. And once again, he said the hell with the gym and working out.
Instead of being in the gym, he sat at a table in the cafeteria with a smoothie. At least I chose a healthy smoothie, he thought, but he didn’t know for sure since he had stopped the juice bar attendant from rattling off the list of ingredients and health benefits. He slowly consumed his smoothie. By the end of the week, I should be okay with the reps and sets for my standing military press.
At least he hoped so, and he turned to look out the big viewport window on the exterior bulkhead that showed, as it had now for nineteen days, the alien ship.
Still poised where it had appeared.
Still totally quiet and sealed off.
Still an unknown.
He knew that the last shuttle to go over there had also met the force field and had been unable to penetrate same, of course. But whether or not the aliens could even see them and acknowledge them was the real question.
He shook his head. It was above his pay grade to worry about anything else but the space station, the Wilson, and himself.
His job was to run and manage same.
Of course, he’d not ever considered this kind of an alien occurrence with the resulting parade of RIM Confederacy bigwigs dropping by for a look-see. Not at all.
The chairman of the RIM Confederacy Council had arrived and taken a shuttle. While he had heard the repeated request from Chairman Gramsci to acknowledge that the RIM Confederacy wanted to talk, the aliens were incommunicado.
Not a peep. Nor was there any response for the Baroness who’d done almost the same thing, nor for Admiral McQueen, the head of the RIM Navy, nor the new Duke d’Avigdor, nor the Narrisol of Tillion, nor the Gerent Northos of KappaD. Not a single bigwig could get a thing out of the aliens.
However, the Baroness had issued a martial law edict on Ghayth, and all nonessential Barony staff was being sent off planet, back to Neres, he’d heard. There was still a large contingent up in the arctic and a smaller group exploring the southern hemisphere too.
He also knew there had been a large influx—a full division—of Barony marines. They had arrived and had moved down to the planet mostly. Almost a company and a half were, however, being billeted here on the station, and that resulted in traffic increases at the cafeterias at meal times. But, as he knew, that was a good thing. Having marines all over did make for a more settled type of feeling for the station staff, and he’d been told that by many here too.
He slurped more of his smoothie, noting that once in a while, pieces of something went by his tongue, and he refused to try to think about what it might have been. Instead, he just shook his head and thought, Healthy ... it’s healthy ... and he grinned to no one in particular.
His thoughts drifted back to the recent meeting arranged by the Baroness. Even though he felt it was above his pay grade, McDonald had been invited to attend. Chairman Gramsci and the other important higher-ups had discussed what to do about the alien ship.
Bomb them, set a shot over their bows, and completely enclose them with mines were some options presented. All adversarial options had been dismissed.
The chairman had put it best, he thought, when he had said, “We are going to wait for what they want to happen and react. We are not going to be proactive at all.”
“At least for starters,” the station captain said to himself as he slurped the tail endings of the smoothie. He stood and t
ossed the empty cup into the recycling bin at the doorway, on his way back to his quarters.
Shower, put on my uniform, and go to the bridge are what lay in front of me now.
He wished he knew what was coming from the mile-long alien ship off the station’s bow. He had a feeling it would be unlike anything they had ever encountered before.
#####
As the Master Adept stepped into the normally hidden and sealed room off her private study and quarters in the tower, she shuddered for a second. “Someone must have just walked on my grave,” she said to herself and then laughed out loud. “That superstition is as old as the last few millennia,” she said to herself, and she went in to sit at the small table inside the secret room.
She knew that she had to go into that room.
How she knew, she did not know, but she knew it was time.
Like all citizens of the RIM Confederacy, she knew there was a ship moored off Ghayth, and while others thought of it as an alien ship, she knew it was the Praix.
When they had “winked into being” those seventy lights away from Eons, she had felt them arrive and had known they had a problem. They were fleeing from an enemy they could not defeat. An enemy who, for whatever reason, was moving from system to system, and after some kind of a hidden audit of the world within that system, the enemy usually set the world’s sun to explode in a nova via a bomb that made the star explode.
These invaders in SagD were slowly working on turning out the lights all across that galaxy.
The Praix were unable to stop them. Each time they went in for an attack, the invader ships were invulnerable, and they destroyed the Praix ships with some kind of a weapon that exploded the ships entirely.
The Master Adept had received that information about twenty days ago; it was knowledge that was sent to the Issian race from their masters, the Praix, via a mind send message.
Since then, the Praix had been silent, but she knew, or at least she thought she knew, what it was they were awaiting.
She had convened a mind group meeting immediately. The Issian inner circle—the twelve most talented Issians—had met to discuss this new emergency and what they could do.
The large tome had been passed down to her from the previous Master Adept and was filled with more than twenty thousand years of the secrets of her race and the Praix all spelled out. As she pulled the book onto her lap, she remembered the yelling at that first mind group meeting of the Issian inner circle. Some were all for out and out war with the Praix, beside and with the RIM Confederacy realms. Others preached to wait, to see what would happen, and to pick a side when the winner could be foreseen to hedge their bets. One had said to just leave—get in ships and go inwards perhaps all the way through the Milky Way Galaxy to the RIM on the other side.
Nothing had been decided.
As the Master Adept, she had information via the book on her lap that the rest did not have, but she had not shared any of the information with the others.
Every day now, for more than three weeks almost, the inner circle had met, and the arguments had gone one way and then the other; some days, the arguments had gone in a totally new direction.
One thing that could not be missed by all was that the Praix were doing nothing but sitting off Ghayth. Alone. Solitary. And waiting.
She had thought her own position through many times and had no one else to go to for counsel. But yesterday, she had finally known that she could not keep silent any longer.
She was concerned with the future of her Issian race, and that meant she had to tell all ... and the only way for that to happen was to open up her mind to the inner circle—in its entirety.
The link yesterday was strong but made so because she had demanded they all attend to her here, on Eons, in the tower in the walled city. That got some squawks, but she had been insistent, and as she was the Master Adept, they had to obey. Most had arrived quickly with the new Barony Drive, and only one had been a bit late coming in from Faraway via a trader vessel.
They had sat, and she had spoken first.
She had tried to tell them about the need for secrecy about what she was going to divulge to them.
She had tried to let them know that she was, as far as she knew, the first Master Adept who had allowed others to know about the Praix and their book and their secrets.
She had played for them the video that showed the spokesperson for the Praix, who had shown the viewer their home world and cities.
She had let them know that the Praix were a different race, body-wise, and there had been a couple of gasps when the Praix had shown himself at the start of that video. The Praix was avian with a fifteen-foot-wide wingspan, a small orange beak on a balding head, and full-feathered growth on the body and wings.
“Sort of a vulture but huge,” she said to herself, but she did not share that analogy with the others.
She had let the video play through to the end, and some had said the Praix home world in SagD was beautiful, and they were right.
She had then had them all link hands, and she had opened up her mind completely to let them see—as only a skin-to-skin contact between Issians can—what she knew that they did not.
In any such link of twelve minds, there was always an ebb and flow, and in this case, the feeling she got was one of draining her, her psyche, her own consciousness, as the inner circle learned what secrets the book held.
There were many things therein that now, twenty thousand years later, she was ashamed of, shuddered to even consider, and could not even countenance. The death of races and planets, and yes, the Issian way of helping the Praix subdue planet after planet of newly conquered aliens. She had read the book completely over the past year since she’d inherited the Master Adept role, and she opened up for everything to be freely seen by the other minds now linked to her mind.
In less than a minute, the complete contents of the Praix book had been shared, and she dropped the hands of the inner circle members on either side of her, signifying that the deepest part of their mind meld was over.
They sat. Not a single word was said until she spoke after almost ten minutes of silence.
“So you see the issue we now face. This Praix ship with less than a hundred souls on board is here. This is a new galaxy to them. Their technology is superior to all that we have, and from what we know, for any other races here as well.
“The fact that they are evading a superior race back in their own galaxy does not matter to us or to them. They are here to assume the top of the food chain position they know, or think they know, is rightfully theirs,” she said.
“And, they want us to acknowledge our presence and to once again swear allegiance to them as our masters—and to help them to conquer this galaxy beginning, I believe, with the RIM Confederacy.”
She stopped then, and there had been no talk at all.She sighed. It was too much most likely to digest all at once. It had taken her a full year to read the book and to fathom out the details that were unwritten about the relationship between the Praix and the Issians.
They were our masters, and we were their slave keepers, she thought as she shivered a second or two. And do we want to re-enact our roles as such, at the top of the food chain, but as slave masters for the Praix?
Today, she had called them all back to get the communal decision made, and the last ones had just left.
The message from them all—the eleven other members of the inner circle—had weighed the import of what Issians had been and were now. And what they might become.
There had been no equivocation or ambiguity from all of the inner circle minds.
No. The Issians would not allow themselves to be subjugated by the Praix once again and return to the role of helping them conquer a new galaxy.
Instead, they would help the RIM Confederacy to fight and defeat the Praix and rid the Milky Way of this foe.
She had nodded and she agreed.
But that final point that they would help fight the Praix was the one
thing she knew would be impossible at this point. With drastically superior technology, anyone could defeat those with lesser weapons and defenses too.
The Praix were the most advanced, and the RIM would need to find a way to take the fight to them ... and win.
She sighed, as she once again opened the big tome on her knees and began to read the book again. Maybe t she’d missed something; maybe if she read “between the lines,” something would pop out.
There had to be a way to defeat the Praix. With more than three hundred million inhabitants on Eons, I have more than some skin in this game ...
#####
Hunting Guide Master Koenig smiled at them as he dropped his rifle on his shoulder and pointed out to the left of where the two hunting parties stood. The helicopter ride had taken only a half hour, and they had been deposited on a meadow partway up a large set of ridges to their left while below them were the ravines and drop-offs that were wooded almost completely. Ahead of them, the meadow slanted up slightly to an area where there were copses of trees and thick cover, and when Tanner turned his head to the rear, he saw the same behind him.
“What we’re going to do is to split up here. This meadow—I’ve sent the coordinates to each team member’s PDA in case you get lost—is home base. I’ll take the duke, Bram, the doc, and Captain Templeton ahead slowly working our way up the slopes. The other team of the major, Admirals McQueen and Higgins, and Ahanu will go with Hunting Guide Enola toward the rear, working their way down the slopes. We intend to cover almost ten miles today—five out and then back. And no, we can’t get the copter in any closer to pick up any lazybones,” he said with a smile.
That got some grins, and Bram elbowed the doctor in the ribs, and that too got a laugh.
Once everyone settled down, Koenig finished with his instructions. “So, let’s get some things straight. We’re going to move quietly—we’re going to not talk or laugh. We will spread out and we walk with a degree of caution. An Oved is big—at least ten feet at the shoulder and weighing half a ton—and those racks of horns are not carried by them to put up on our hunting lodge walls. They use them to attack—something you must always have in mind. Rifles on safety, please, don’t take it off ‘til I okay your shot,” he finished off, and moments later, the two teams were walking away from the home base meadow toward their quarry.