That’s when I see the man.
Or I guess it’s a man. He’s dressed oddly, carrying a helmet under his arm. It appears to be a uniform of some sort, but it’s too short for him. More to the point, he’s too tall for it. He’s taller than anyone I’ve ever seen, with a small head and abnormally small eyes. His skin is an odd golden shade. He looks deformed. Not scary, exactly, just not… normal.
Alien, but humanoid. I’ve seen this type, or at least one like it, in one of Ryn’s diaries from back when he was a diplomatic adjutant. But maybe not.
You don’t generally see an alien running down a street where people live. Especially where a member of the Voshti lives. They occasionally have business at the government building, and I’ve seen several varieties on news feeds, but never one as large as this.
And even odder than the alien’s height is that he seemed to appear out of nowhere.
He puts on the helmet as he rushes toward the car. “Mila! Friend. You sent.”
His voice is choppy, maybe because he’s running and the translator in the helmet is having a tough time catching the words. But I’m almost certain he said my name.
I take several quick steps backward, bumping my shoulder against the edge of the transport.
When he reaches me, he holds out a recorder, and I hear a woman’s voice. It sounds a little like mine, but the voice is almost immediately drowned out by a loud beeping noise coming from where Ryn is standing.
The alien starts shoving the recorder in front of me. The style seems strange. I’ve never seen that model before.
I don’t look at the man. I’m looking back at Ryn, back at the beeping noise, which I think must be coming from the guard who was helping with my mother. Ryn is just staring at me, his mouth open as the guard draws a laser from inside his coat and points it at the strange man.
“Lor agent!” he yells. “Drop the weapon.”
I don’t see a weapon. Just the recorder. But maybe the guard saw something I didn’t.
“No!” The alien looks from me to Ryn, who’s now only a few yards away. His eyes are tiny and hard to see through the helmet. That makes his expressions hard to read, but I think he’s afraid.
It’s probably a natural response under the circumstances.
“Mila!” He pushes the recorder toward me again, but I can’t hear anything over the alarm. And the guards are apparently done with warnings, because a blue arc of light shoots out of the weapon of the guard closest to me, connecting with the alien’s shoulder and incapacitating him.
The alien’s mouth opens and his body shakes, then the recorder tumbles to the ground. Something else tumbles, too… a brownish circle of metal. It lands next to the recorder.
As the guards grab him, the alien man’s eyes connect with mine one last time. He struggles to speak.
“Bri… arche…”
I feel Ryn’s arms encircle me. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think he knew me, Ryn. I think…”
“Yeah,” Ryn says. “And… it almost sounded like he said Briarche.” His eyes twinkle slightly, but there’s a touch of embarrassment there, too. “Weird.”
One of the two guards taps me on the shoulder. “We’re going to have to get some information from you before you go into the party.”
“Who… what… was that?” I ask.
“Must be working with the Lor. You’ve probably heard the recent rumors of espionage, and the possible military buildup in the Astreegee sector. The translator the alien was using is Lor design. That’s what set off our security alarm.”
My mother is still sitting in her chair, facing the entrance, but straining her neck around so she can see what’s going on.
“Could you take Mother inside, Ryn? I’ll join you once I’m done answering his questions.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks.
I give him a reassuring smile. “I’m fine. But Mother’s going to be really cranky if she misses any more of the party.”
He squeezes my shoulder again and then heads off to my mother’s rescue.
I confirm my identity to the guard, show him my invitation, and tell him my mother is a close friend of Vosht Baydel. He calls something in on his comm, and then I’m free to go.
As I turn to leave, I catch one more glimpse of the alien. He’s huddled on his side in the back of the security transport. He’s still looking at me.
I can’t shake the feeling he was trying to tell me something.
And it did sound like he was saying Briarche.
Weird, indeed.
Chapter 8
Elisi Shuttle Falgert
Date: 9023.23.19
“You’d think they’d just give up at this point,” Ryn says, flicking off the bottom row of news feeds in annoyance. “I mean, rational creatures would give up, wouldn’t they? The Lor have no chance of winning. We’ve cut off their trade routes and they’re reduced to scavenging off planets that haven’t even reached interstellar travel. What resources could they be after on this little rock?”
“I don’t know.”
I relay to the nearest battle cruiser the coordinates of the Lor fighter we’ve just spotted orbiting planet XE7. We’re not here to engage. Our mission is simply to observe, report, and then drop back.
Once I receive confirmation, I slide into the chair next to Ryn and give him a kiss. “My shift to watch these things. Get some rest.”
I turn the bottom row of screens back on and unmute the one on the left. It’s an official government channel, reporting yet another Lor attack. Usually they focus on industrial areas, just swooping in, taking whatever raw materials they need, and getting out. But this time, they’ve targeted a government building. The report says that one wing of the U.S. Capitol Building has been destroyed.
That seems odd. I pull the location up on another comm screen, zooming in to see if the building is near an industrial or even an agricultural area. It’s unlikely, given the size of this particular government and the city, but I can’t imagine why the Lor would be attacking government buildings otherwise. They’re so close to defeated that they lack the resources to take over even one of the more remote areas of XE7, let alone its largest country.
That’s when I notice a faint light pulsing several miles away from the Capitol, near the University of Maryland. I haven’t seen this in any of our other surveillance missions. Curious, I roll the time back to earlier in this cycle and watch as the tiny light moves toward the Capitol Building—in fact, to the very side of the building the Lor wiped out.
“Ryn?”
He mumbles something unintelligible, already halfway asleep.
“Could you come pull up the background data on XE7 for me? I’m not sure, but I think I’ve detected a chronotron pulse.”
Q&A with Rysa Walker
Where did this story come from and how does it relate to other books you’ve written?
Space opera is not my usual genre. I generally write Earth-bound stories of time travel and other speculative fiction. But I’m a hard-core Trekker and loved the idea of heading into a new galaxy.
I’ve also been wanting to tell one story that never made it into The CHRONOS Files. Readers often ask me what really happened in Washington, DC in 2092. Katherine always told Kate that it was need-to-know only, and Kate (along with the readers) will still be left hanging on that front when the final CHRONOS book, Time’s Divide, comes out in October. And since none of the Kindle Worlds authors who write CHRONOS Files stories have tackled that one yet, I decided this would be a perfect opportunity.
Tell us something we might not know about you.
I used to act in a melodrama theater, years ago. I played the character of Sweet Peggy Macree, running from the mustachioed villain.
How can readers find you?
My blog is www.rysa.com. You can find all of my books on my Amazon page and my Kindle Worlds stories here. I’m on Facebook and Twitter (@rysawalker) way too often. If you see me there, say hi and then tell
me to get back into the writing cave.
Works in progress?
The last book in The CHRONOS Files comes out in October, and then I’ll be moving on to The Delphi Project, a three-book series that I like to think of as X-Files meets X-Men. The first book in that series will be published by Skyscape in the fall of 2016.
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Acknowledgments
What a great adventure we had in putting this anthology together! I’m looking forward to doing it again. Be on alert for the second book in the Beyond the Stars series of science fiction anthologies, to be released in November 2015.
I want to thank Samuel Peralta, the mastermind behind the Future Chronicles series, for inspiring me to coordinate this first collection of space opera shorts.
Thanks also to Kendall Roderick, who designed our cover, and to Hugo Award-winning artist Julie Dillon, who created the glorious art.
We had the benefit of prompt and professional work by Jason and Marina Anderson of Polgarus Studio, who formatted both the digital and print editions of this collection for us.
Julie E. Czerneda, an award-winning author in her own right, was kind enough to write an inspiring foreword that summed up precisely the feeling we were going for in this collection, and we thank her for lending her talents to our enterprise.
I particularly want to thank David Gatewood, editor extraordinaire, whose keen eye and excellent sense of story made everything he touched even better.
And of course I have to thank our wonderful authors. Each and every one of them helped shape this collection by contributing not only her words but her ideas on how to produce an anthology that is entertaining and worthy.
Finally, I want to thank the larger indie author community, which continues to supply enthusiasm and support for the exciting new ventures springing forth on the digital frontier. It’s a wonderful time to be a writer.
And readers, I always love to hear from you! Feel free to email me with thoughts or feedback at [email protected].
Patrice Fitzgerald
Series Editor, Beyond the Stars
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the appropriate copyright owner listed below, unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal and international copyright law. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein.
The contents of this book are fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, place, or event is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed by the authors are their own and do not reflect those of the editor or publisher.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Series name Beyond the Stars, copyright © 2015 Patrice Fitzgerald.
Foreword, copyright © 2015 Julie E. Czerneda. Used by permission of the author.
“Containment” by Susan Kaye Quinn, copyright © 2015 Susan Kaye Quinn. Used by permission of the author.
“Nos Morituri Te Salutamus” by Annie Bellet, copyright © 2014 Annie Bellet. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Protocol A235” by Theresa Kay, copyright © 2015 Theresa Kay. Used by permission of the author.
“Winner Takes All” by Elle Casey, copyright © 2015 Elle Casey. Used by permission of the author.
“Carindi” by Jennifer Foehner Wells, copyright © 2015 Jennifer Foehner Wells. Used by permission of the author.
“Animal Planet” by Patrice Fitzgerald, copyright © 2015 Patrice Fitzgerald. Used by permission of the author.
“The Event” by Autumn Kalquist, copyright © 2015 Autumn Kalquist. Used by permission of the author.
“Dragonet” by Sara Reine, copyright © 2015 Sara Reine. Used by permission of the author.
“Lulu Ad Infinitum” by Ann Christy, copyright © 2015 Ann Christy. Used by permission of the author.
“To Catch an Actor” by Blair C. Babylon, copyright © 2015 Malachite Publishing LLC. Used by permission of the author.
“2092” by Rysa Walker, copyright © 2015 Rysa Walker. Used by permission of the author.
Acknowledgments, copyright © 2015 Patrice Fitzgerald.
All other text, copyright © 2015 David Gatewood.
Edited by David Gatewood (www.lonetrout.com)
Cover art by Julie Dillon
Cover designed by Kendall Roderick (www.RMind-Design.com)
Formatted by Polgarus Studio (www.polgarusstudio.com)
Dark Beyond the Stars Page 26