Star Matters
Page 11
Kyra was held in an assimilator podule, one of many lining the interior walls of the laboratories housed in the high-value abductee levels of the control tower itself. She was fully conscious and aware both of her situation, tethered by tubes and electricals that drained and imprisoned her, and the red threads to the oncoming Keeran and Amily who were now really close by. She feared for the Pointers of Dawn coming to her aid but unlike Omeyn MuneMei she knew that they would be undeterred by mortal danger. If only she could effect her own release then she could join Amily and Keeran and the three could then escape together by methods unknown and unimaginable to the Zarnha of Spargar agents. Kyra shivered in her bonds, helpless and frustrated in her inability to help her rescuers. All she could do was turn her neck slightly within the skull-control apparatus and swivel her hazel eyes desperately into the room towards the exit wall leading to the outer edge of the building. There were a few Zarnha security guards positioned in the room, surprising as assimilation rooms were routinely unattended unless an abductee was in transit to or from the podules.
Omeyn MuneMei had stationed many other Zarnha guards of highest caste in the rooms directly adjacent to the one holding Kyra. This was the opportunity she had planned to take out the key Gayan agents opposing her progress to assimilate planet Earth in the star system Sol. This planet was claimed by the Spargar empire as being so close to its immediate home range of stars. Gaya always deployed an order of magnitude fewer agents than Spargar when competing to annex a new world. Neutralising these Gayan agents would give much freer access to her agents on planet Earth at this critical moment in the campaign. Hopefully they would be captured alive and assimilated to try yet again to discover the secrets of these pestilential Gayans that were so difficult to uncover. She would dearly love to understand their methods and utilise the knowledge to benefit Spargar.
Keeran paused briefly when his elevator opened for Amily to arrive. He quickly assessed the corridor that ran arcing away to right and left. Doors on the internal wall were closed to rooms of varying sizes without windows or other forms of access. The corridor was five metres wide and an invisible floor-to-ceiling force field framed the exterior view, bounded only by an occasional structural pillar supporting the outside walls. Red threads to Kyra ran obliquely to his right and penetrated into the walls of the laboratory where she was restrained. When he triangulated which doors gave access to the room containing Kyra, he saw the doors were protected by a pair of dark-suited guards. He headed towards the guards as he heard the hissing doors of another elevator opening behind him. He did not need to turn and look to know it was Amily backing him up and that she was alone and fully capable.
The guards saw them coming and spoke briefly into their helmet microphones to their controllers in the higher levels. Keeran and Amily were moving fast. Projectiles flew from the guards’ weapons and sparked off the Gayan ripallo defences with metallic screeches. Keeran and Amily were in full energy flow driven by the high stakes and danger of the moment. They released fight-and-flight hormones available from deep within these bodies and added their Gayan martial songs at soul-to-soul level, multiplying their reactions and strengthening their musculature. They closed with the guards and quickly achieved arm locks in a flurry of hand feints and strikes. Amily forced her guard’s face towards the line of the door and ordered the guard to open it with exquisite breaking strain on the guard’s elbow joint. He commanded the door to open with a squawk and the double doors drew back the full width of the room and then slid out perpendicularly to close the corridor off on both sides. Amily and Keeran were left holding their captives immobile in arm locks on the exterior side of the assimilator laboratory containing Kyra and many others; behind them was a view out over the pinnacles of the lesser towers and the twisting columns of space traffic.
In the centre of the room, Omeyn MuneMei was projecting her appearance as a hologram from her controlling position on the upper deck. She was looking out towards Amily and Keeran. Behind her the wall was segmented into floor-to-ceiling podules with clear doors, most housing a single high-level abductee. Red threads ran straight to the podule containing Kyra. Kyra was struggling to crane her neck to see what was happening now she knew Amily and Keeran had arrived. Keeran had not met even a projection of Omeyn MuneMei previously and her calm assessment of him and Amily surprised him momentarily since he was combat-ready. She was flanked by a line of Zarnha guards to right and left whom they would have to disable to reach Kyra’s assimilator. Amily and Keeran simultaneously incapacitated their captive guards and they slumped to the floor in front of them. Keeran and Amily looked impressive, backlit from the newly exposed exterior, facing the extended Spargar line.
“Screw this!”‘ shouted Keeran simultaneously, not interested in waiting any longer for Omeyn MuneMei to demonstrate her self-control, the chemical hormones and anthems singing through his body raising him up; Amily was the same. As Keeran moved towards where Kyra was held, the floor hinged from the rear and began tilting down towards the exterior. Amily and Keeran pushed forward for grip but they were already moving up the newly formed slope and their momentum battled against the growing ascent. The guards they had despatched, lying prone on the floor, started to slide down and to their rear like bundles of dark rags. Keeran did not see them slide out toward the outside and implausibly fetch up against the invisible force field outer wall but some sense connecting to Amily shared this knowledge with her. The guards in the room moved down towards them from their superior position higher up the slope but they were hindered by the strangeness of the grade they had not been expecting. They stepped cautiously down the slope to the exterior and kept away from Omeyn MuneMei, afraid even to infringe the space around a projection of their Omeyn. To Keeran’s annoyance side walls opened also and more guards streamed out in ambush from the immediately adjacent rooms. It was all a set-up to capture them.
The guards were intent on swarming over the two Gayans. The outrage of Kyra’s confinement inspired Keeran and Amily to even greater efforts as they closed with the Zarnha guards. They were highly aware that the greatest danger was being bogged down by the oncoming wave of guards trying to sweep them down the slope. Both Gayans were a blur of counterstrikes to despatch guards past them down the slope as they strove towards Omeyn MuneMei and Kyra imprisoned in the quasi-medical contraptions at the rear. Omeyn MuneMei was closely monitoring the flow of her guards over the Gayans, hopeful that they could be captured intact and assimilated in vacant pods next to Kyra behind her. A tic of frustration was working in Omeyn MuneMei’s left eye, which was the height of emotion for her as she directed events. Omeyn MuneMei wanted to deal out immediate punishment to her incompetent guards, as if the Gayans were not already meting it out faster than she could have done herself.
Amily felt the clawing fingers and binding arms and legs of the guards all around and freed herself to divert them away and down the slope past her. This tactic was working yet the floor slope continued to increase and the double task of fighting the oncoming guards and the slope meant that she and Keeran were starting to lose forward momentum. More guards streamed in from the side rooms and the weight of numbers started to overwhelm the much superior hand-to-hand skills of the Gayan pair.
Omeyn MuneMei could see the affray was moving in her favour despite the
dispiriting show of her elite guards. Still, there was a massive numbers advantage on her side and she could commit as many as it took to defeat these two Gayans. As she monitored the affray the heaving mass of bodies started to reverse and slide away from her towards the invisible wall where there were now many of her beaten guards lying scarcely moving against the force field wall. As the struggle moved away from her position a wide space of polished floor opened between Omeyn MuneMei and the mound of strugglers around Amily and Keeran. The melee slid en masse towards the foot of the downslope.
Keeran and Amily were still impelled by the powerful forces that were unleashed in their bodies for the conflict. This allowed them to fight each of the clawing limbs that sought to immobilise them and gradually they were turning the tide and climbing out of the melee using skilled hands and feet driven by superior strength and speed.
Omeyn MuneMei realised that the Gayans were slowly extricating themselves from the mass of her fighters. It was scarcely possible to believe that two humans could emerge victorious from so many of her own agents. How could it be that the race of Spargar could be the superior force in the whole galaxy and yet these Gayan rivals could show such superior capability against them? The frustration of it all drove her to demonstrate her overriding control of the situation. She decided to tilt the rules in her favour and eliminated the shield wall holding the struggling bodies back from the void. She decided that at least the DNA of the dead Gayans could be harvested from the street below if their live bodies were to be denied to her.
The earliest guards to fall toppled unconscious into the void as Omeyn MuneMei disabled the shield and they slid straight over the edge. The inert guards just went over the edge to fall limply, loose limbs flapping in the up draught. Those still aware went over screaming and clawing on to their compatriots pulling them over the edge with them. Soon the whole struggling mass was convulsed in panic as those higher up the slope were dragged along by those lower down. Keeran and Amily continued to battle but the realisation dawned that this was an inevitable liquid flow over the edge. They gave up struggling as all hands, arms and legs in the mass locked together in desperation like a log jam at the head of the rapids.
‘Pass through well, Amily and Keeran. Thank you so much for making the effort to rescue me. Until we meet again, farewell.’ Kyra sent out this thought before turning to her own despair, locked in this infernal machine on the planet Spargan amongst enemies that had no thought for her. She wanted nothing more than to fly out with Keeran and Amily.
‘We came so close, Kyra, and we will not forget. We are so sorry to fall short… we will return,’ Keeran emoted to Kyra and then Keeran flew out into space with Amily and the mass of Zarnha guards. It was going to be a very long fall. Keeran’s rage subsided quickly and was replaced with the chill of the high winds and the return of his vertigo. He knew Keeran’s soul would survive the fall but the earthly body that was Darryl would be broken and he grieved for that coming loss. It was Amily who calmed him, communicating that they needed to end their lives and pass through before hitting the ground. Thus it was that the two Gayans embraced, each closing the other’s mouth and pinching the other’s nose to stop them breathing. This prevented them from breaking free of the self-preservation of taking another breath as they were doing it to each other rather than to themselves. They stared in to each other’s eyes as they fell the long drop of the shining control tower and fought to control growing demands of their bodies screaming to breathe for life. The conscious Zharna guards tumbling with them continued to thrash and scream as the light faded to a hypoxic point in the vision of Keeran and Amily. Their red threads to Kyra and the Cavallos waiting in the river faded and died. Just before they hit the ground two tendrils of light reached down from the heavens and briefly flickered out to them as their souls passed through this life and were drawn back home to Gaya.
In the control room at the top of the control tower the manifestation of Omeyn MuneMei that was controlling this situation was satisfied the objective was accomplished. The Gayan Agents had been eliminated if not captured alive and assimilated. She commanded workers to cordon off the impact area of the fallers and any unfortunate fell-upons that had been passing by at ground level. A lab team would have the very messy job of disentangling the body parts and then extracting the DNA of the individuals who had all perished together. Like an air crash but without the broken craft mixed in. At least they could isolate the DNA of the Gayans and assimilate that to the machine. Omeyn MuneMei was not hopeful they would learn that much about the capabilities of the Gayans. There she was quite correct. Indeed Amily was Spargan-born and Keeran Earth-born so that was the maximum that could be learned. The DNA would only contain the blueprint to build that particular body and the general instincts the DNA passed down the generations to provide basic rules the body needed to survive. The soul itself, which provided everything else, had left the building and was currently flying home to Gaya. Omeyn MuneMei knew nothing of this and her technical rule of Spargar never allowed such thoughts to cross her Mind. She would be forever closed to this understanding of the true nature of life itself.
FIVE
The Omeyn MuneMei controlling the ambush of Amily and Keeran in The Spyre in Braganza immediately sent the news that the Gayan rescue attempt had been repulsed to all her sister manifestations across the Mind network. The message transmitted out from the Mind in The Spyre at close to light speed then propagated through banks of warpnodes8 at the edge of dark matter in deep space closest to Spargan. The message arrived nearly instantaneously at receiving warpnodes in dark matter across the Spargar empire. The message was received at a warpnode off the Solar System, passed on from there at light speed to the Spargar space station off Saturn and down to the Omeyn on planet Earth. The whole message distribution system was analogous to letters in the Post Office except the postman that delivers the letter the last mile travels at light speed and the delivery between Post Offices is instantaneous. Omeyn MuneMei’s message from Braganza stated she had permanently neutralised the Gayan threat that had been Darryl on Earth. Her sister manifestation in San Jose, California considered the import of this message and concluded that any remaining Gayan agents acting locally should also be neutralised urgently to remove any residual threats. This would clear the way for Evrisoft to be uncontested in spreading the internet ahead of Spargar domination of the planet.
Meanwhile, Amily and Keerans’ souls had travelled even faster back to planet Chamarel, the chosen world of residence for the Worders of Dawn located close to their home planet, Gaya. The Gayan soul and messaging transport system had no equivalent in Spargar. Omeyn MuneMei did not acknowledge the solely-soul state and their message transport system broke messages into fast batch, precluding sending entire souls across the Spargar empire even had they been aware it was possible. The Worders of Dawn debriefed Keeran and Amily, empathised about Kyra’s continuing incarceration and planned Keeran and Amily’s next incarnation on Earth. It was clear that the battle for hearts and minds between the Gayan cultural enlightenment long game and the Spargar technological age smash and grab for leadership on Earth was coming to a head. The ‘passing through’ their recent bodies for Keeran and Amily in Braganza was always a difficult transition no matter how accustomed their souls were to the effects. The joy of the combination of the Gayan soul developing through childhood in the youthful local body was very powerful and hard to sever especially when cut off in its prime. Not so difficult in infancy before the new person was aware of their full being and not so difficult in old age when body and soul reached awareness that it was time to move on because of decrepitude, but desolate indeed if a life ended in early adulthood at the height of its vitality. The Gayan soul would grieve for its lost vivacity and the wasted potential for that lost life. Keeran and Amily suffered this separation grief from their powerful earthly bodies that they now had to consign to the album of the previous lives they had already passed through.
Amily,
Keeran and the Worders framed the message to send to Alron, living as Robert, waiting to hear back from Keeran in Los Gatos, California back on Earth. Robert would be saddened by their news but unsurprised. Keeran’s rescue mission was fraught with danger and the likelihood was that he would not succeed.
So it was that Robert received the message that Keeran’s mission to Spargan to rescue Kyra had failed and that Keeran and Amily’s souls had returned to Chamarel. Robert recognised the unspoken choice that he could continue with his current role challenging Evrisoft by commercial means or return to Chamarel to join up with his friends for the next stage of the Gayan campaign back on Earth. As far as Robert’s position at Pengey was concerned it was always good corporate management to have succession planning in place as business people on Earth often changed their career plans or most likely had their plans changed for them. This succession planning was even more important for Darryl and Robert as leaders of Pengey as they were quite aware that their stay would be likely to be curtailed at short notice under pressure from their higher mission from Dawn. Thus they had an able and committed management team in place that Robert could call on to take over the running of the company, and he spent a few hours tidying up finances and plans for their handover from his office in their house in Los Gatos. The management team would later look quizzically at their detailed individual emails laying out Robert’s advice and guidance. They would discuss the strange disappearance of their management duo over drinks and dinners in bars but would go no further than that. IT leaders were famously mercurial. People disappeared all the time. The new team would have EvrisSoft to compete with and they would immerse themselves in the opportunity to run Pengey and try to succeed against the corporate software Goliath.