First Salik War 2: The V'Dan

by Jean Johnson

  It was her turn to deviate from the script. Drawing in a breath, Jackie offered a wry smile for the cameras. “I would gladly do so, Empress . . . but I must first confess that I am . . . overwhelmed by the size of this venue, the great Plazas of the Winter Palace, and the sheer numbers of our audience. If I were to roughly estimate the number of people here . . . the Fifth Plaza alone has at least two hundred fifty thousand people. A quarter million, at a Plaza that is around fifteen mi-nahs of walking from right here.”

  “The risers of the Fifth alone can seat three hundred thousand V’Dan citizens,” Hana’ka informed her. “With all seats claimed in all Plazas, and counting the Elite and staff who are ensuring the crowd and your greeting are managed smoothly . . . there are approximately nine hundred thousand of my people in attendance.”

  “As I said, Eternity, I am a little overwhelmed by the venue—your transportation system alone has my deep admiration. There is no shame in admitting I am made breathless by the willingness and the eagerness of so many of your people to greet mine in person in this fantastic public display,” Jackie stated, gesturing to each side of the First Tier stands. “But I must confess I underestimated just how far my presentation would need to cover. As it is a projection of my holy abilities, my personal energies, and as I would not wish to deny any of those who have patiently gathered here their chance to witness this presentation in person . . . I must respectfully request assistance in that performance.”

  Hana’ka quirked her brow just a little. “How may the Eternal Empire assist in this . . . Terran matter?”

  “I request the presence and assistance of Imperial Prince Kah’raman. In accordance with your people’s prophecies, he and I have been joined in what you call a holy pairing from our first meeting aboard the Salik warship. Together, we can do what one of us alone cannot. Together, we can give my presentation to everyone gathered here, as is the intent of my people. May I have his assistance, Empress, so that your people can see firsthand what we can accomplish when we work together?”

  Behind and to her left, she heard Robert whisper in Mandarin, “She did not just say ‘In accordance with prophecy’ . . . Please tell me she did not just say that—that one’s older than space travel!”

  On the other side, she heard al-Fulan hiss back in the same tongue, “Shhh! Do not make me laugh on camera!”

  It was now painfully hard for her to keep a straight face, too. Subtly fisting one hand, Jackie dug her thumbnail into the side of her middle finger, giving herself some pain to distract away the urge to laugh. She hadn’t even considered that archaic, clichéd joke, but there it was. At least I didn’t end my request with “. . . in accordance with prophecy.” That would’ve been the actual punch line.

  “. . . Imperial Prince Kah’raman, are you willing to assist?” Hana’ka asked after several seconds of considering it.

  “Yes, Eternity,” he confirmed. “I am both willing and ready to assist.”

  “. . . You may assist the Grand High Ambassador,” the Empress allowed, gesturing toward the waiting Terran.

  Rising, he bowed to his mother, then descended the steps. Jackie was glad there was no nonsense about turning one’s back on the sovereign being a deadly insult. Descending steps backward would have been an invitation to a broken neck.

  (More like one of my ancestresses deciding she’d rather have the extra second or so of warning from someone having to turn around to ensure an accurate ranged assassination strike. She’d seen her father killed by a traitor who had a very fast draw. Because he was backing up, he got off his shot before the Elite knew he intended to fire. He was killed in turn by those guards, but not before slaying the Emperor. Needless to say, it left an impression on his daughter,) Li’eth stated. (You haven’t forgotten the rest of your introduction to this, have you?)

  (No, I have not.) Out loud, she addressed him as he approached. “Your Highness, please stand at my side and run through your grounding and centering exercises, as you have been instructed. I should be ready for your assistance by the time you are ready to give it.”

  “As you wish, Grand High Ambassador.”

  (I will be heartily glad when all this formality is over. That title is three words too many for casual speech,) Jackie muttered mentally. Lifting her gaze, she found a discreetly hovering V’Dan camera and looked at it, making her gaze seem to look out from the projection screens to every person watching around them. “As was noted in my introduction, I am a daughter of the Mankiller line of psychics. My ancestress was able to walk on the airless, sun-scorched surface of our moon, Luna, without needing a pressure suit, or even a pair of boots.

  “Like her, I am capable of creating fields of force to lift, block, and hold things, via what we Terrans call telekinesis,” she informed the crowd. Suiting action to words, she lifted off the ground, hands stretched out, skirt panels shifting subtly as they caught the slight air currents around them. That caused a gasp from everyone, one that echoed down from the First Tier to the Fifth in the distance. “The word kinesis means ‘movement in response to a stimulus.’ Tele means to affect something at a distance.

  “Telekinesis therefore means being able to move something at a distance, without touching it directly.” Gently, Jackie lowered herself back to her feet, still speaking. “My ancestress was also known for her pyrokinesis. Pyro is a word that means ‘fire’ . . . so, like His Highness, she could ‘move’ fire. Together, the two abilities allowed Jesse James Mankiller to wrap herself in a bubble of air and remove the thermal energy of the dust and rock of our moon’s surface so that she could literally walk barefoot upon its surface without burning her feet, and without having her breath and her blood boil into the vacuum of space.

  “But what my ancestress was widely know for was holokinesis. The word originally meant ‘whole’ or ‘complete’ but which has also come to mean ‘visual’ and ‘light.’ His Highness and I have the ability to share what we call kinetic inergy, a word which in Terranglo means ‘inner energy.’ With his assistance, he will be like an amplifier to my communications broadcast, giving me the energy to increase the scale of my presentation so that all of you may see it and enjoy.”

  (Ready,) Li’eth whispered in her mind. He felt calm and centered to her. Jackie gave him a mental nod in return though she kept her gaze steadily on the camera broadcasting her face.

  “The music that has been selected to accompany this visual display of light will be projected by my sonokinesis, which means the ‘movement of sound,’ which in turn is tied to my holokinesis. Like my ancestress, I am able to paint images of sound and light for all to see . . . entirely with the power of my mind.” She shifted her gaze to the Empress seated at the center of the Imperial Tier. “This music was selected by my people to honor our location, Eternal Empress.

  “It was written by one of our great composers from our classical era roughly six centuries ago, a holy man by the name of Antonio Vivaldi. He composed many kinds of music. One of these was a symphony titled The Four Seasons. The fourth section, or concerto, is named ‘Winter.’ It has three movements to its composition. I will perform all three movements for you today.”

  Discreetly reaching into the left pocket of her trousers, she fingered the controls on the device tucked inside. At the same time, she offered her right hand to Li’eth. He accepted it, turning to face her as she turned to face him.

  (Deep breath . . . remember Sonam’s lessons on energy transferrence. You are the grounding pillar, but instead of flowing energy down into the earth of this world, you will be pulling it up out of the ground—only out of the ground—and streaming it into me.)

  (Should we kneel?) Li’eth asked her. (You knelt for the previous projection, and your fellow Terrans are still kneeling right now.)

  She nodded, bringing her left hand forward as well, control wand carefully caught between her palm and her thumb. Li’eth cupped her hand in his, helping to support the small de
vice. Together, they both lowered to one knee, then the other, almost touching each other. A swell of whispers and murmurs rose at the projected images of prince and diplomat kneeling on the stones of the Plaza, then silence descended again.

  CHAPTER 10

  Silence . . . and nightfall. A twilight that spread from the First Tier Plaza to the Imperial Tier, to the Second, Third, Fourth, and finally to the Fifth Tier a full kilometer away. That alone caused another swelling rush of sound, for it was still technically midday. The moment the noise of the crowd died down again, Jackie hit the PLAY button, and focused hard on projecting not only the soft but rising, staccato violin and harpsichord notes in her ears, but the twinkling of stars written high in the darkness overhead, a darkness that blended with the occasional skittering of sparks from force-field-zapped snowflakes.

  As the music gained in volume, layers of instruments adding in every few measures, she brought in a distant view of the Sun, at first a pinprick, then a larger, brilliant dot in the darkness. It soared from where it swooped into view of the First Tier, down and down and down, to the Fifth Tier before vanishing into the streets and buildings of the Winter City. As the music grew louder, The Earth, Our Motherworld appeared. It grew larger and larger; The Moon, Luna came briefly into view as the stars shifted, spinning so that the white-gray clouds and snowfields, blue oceans, and green-beige continents could be seen.

  When the opening violin solo spilled across the Tiers, the view of the planet grew huge, swelling to hover directly over everyone’s heads. The planet spun past, its oceans and continents and subcontinents labeled, forming a rotating reference map for everyone to study for a few bars of music, before it vanished and recoalesced by the Imperial Tier. Only the world itself shifted, enlarging and sliding seamlessly from hanging overhead to hovering beneath everyone in a great half-circle shift.

  The smooth image blurred and zoomed, dipping below the clouds of a half-sunny day, to one of a set of islands lost in that vast expanse of blue. The southern half was thick with green vegetation and carefully blended buildings, the northern half was desert-dry and red-soiled, and in a rounded crater, a cluster of iridescent, green-glazed, and spherical-petaled buildings sat. Two sets of text floated past, Terranglo lettering and V’Dan words and phonetic equivalents, spelling out: Aloha City, Island of Kaho’olawe, Hawai’ian Islands, Pacific Ocean, Earth, Capital of the Terran United Planets.

  The image whirled and swept down to the shoreline, where locals in na lei danced and played with fire on reddish-gold beaches to entertain their honored guests. The soaring images slowed as people looked up, looked at everyone there, and smiled and waved. Faces young and old, light-skinned and dark, hair that was short and long, curly and straight, white and black, blond and brown and red. The visitors on that shore, the dancers, everyone smiled and waved to the camera that was Jackie’s memories, mostly real, partially constructed to be strung together into a cohesive holokinetic display.

  The view of those illusionary people did not linger long—barely two seconds; none of these images lasted longer than that at most—before soaring down into the water past the men and women gliding along the leading slopes of the waves on colorful boards, exchanging the view of the air-filled land, for a water-filled view of the sands and the seaweed beds, the bright varieties of corals and the colorful swarms of fish. Whales breached and turtles swam, dolphins leaped, birds soared. They did not stay underwater long but leaped with those dolphins up among those birds, then arced up higher, faster, briefly retreating the vastness of the world to a slowly twisting curve. It wasn’t long before the view dove metaphorically down toward the axial center of that end of the world, albeit with a brief slowdown over a set of rugged valleys.

  There wasn’t much in the landscape to see—some briefly glimpsed penguins waddling along a mostly barren shoreline—but the view soared slowly, almost majestically along the rocky terrain. The words Antarctic Dry Valleys, Driest Spot on Earth floated past, along with Average Yearly Precipitation: None, and It Has Been 60,718 Days Since the Last Measurable Snowfall. Those letters and the rock-and-gravel valley drifted at a quick, steady pace down through the Tiers.

  Artistically, Jackie added a single snowflake, which swirled and wobbled through the air of the valleys but never quite touched the ground before swirling back upward as it bobbled along. That provoked a laugh of amusement from the V’Dan, before they gasped as the images gained speed and swept up over the ridges, onto the vast glacier plains of the remote continent.

  Bright sunlight glared up from the snow as they approached a cluster of buildings. Humans emerged from the structures, about three hundred or so, all of them wearing brightly colored cold-weather clothes and waving their heavily gloved hands, smiling in welcome. More golden lettering accompanied them, reading Amundsen-Scott Research Station, South Pole, Antarctica, Earth, Population: Varies, before the brief stop turned into another swift journey away from that place.

  A flash of sunlight rippled down the length of the Tiers while the holokinetic projections swept westward toward the Fifth Plaza. Those up by the Imperial Tier were the first to see the scene leaping up and outward, soaring past all the snow, over the rugged, increasingly narrow, hooked peninsula and the strait separating it from South America, and down to the grazing fields and narrow but steep mountains of the Andes.

  Those grassy fields filled with suntanned gauchos, cowboys and ranch hands in layered outfits tending herds of various domestic animals, gave way to high, snow-strewn mountains where locals tended herds of alpacas and showed visitors how to twist grass into ropes outside ancient ruins of their ancestors’ mighty preindustrial empires, some of them rising among sprawling neighborhoods of ancient, archaic, and advanced buildings. Those in turn became the leafy jungles of the Amazon River.

  Up along the isthmus to a system of locks and canals, supplemented by great rectangular screens that swept past, showing grainy, black-and-white images of those canals being dug, alongside full-color images of time-elapsed transits through the rising and lowering waters of those canals. Up north again, from mountainous jungles to cactus-covered deserts, to sprawling urban cities where the dark-haired, tanned, smiling faces of Mexico City—Population 19,543,250+ slowed and smiled and waved, grandfathers with grandchildren in their arms, grandmothers showing grandchildren how to make favorite foods, mothers and fathers teaching and working, walking and playing, cheering the kicking and head-butting of a white-and-black ball in a Football Game while hundreds of thousands of screaming, flag-waving sports fans cheered on their favorite teams.

  From there, the view continued northward, curving east past farmlands and wilds, towns and cities, to meet and learn the names of the vast expanse of the Mississippi River, the snow-dusted Appalachian Mountains, on to the white-marble monuments of a quiet city, Washington, District of Columbia, Former Capital of the United States of America, and its columns and domes and monolithic structures, its many solemn-faced statues. Every time the images slid farther down the Tiers, heads turned, still reading the lettering attached to each brief image.

  From there, the view slowed briefly along the sobering, white-dotted fields of Arlington Military Cemetery, before moving on to the towering megastructures of New York City, Population 26,708,350+ with its streets and skybridges thronging with people clad in layers to ward off the rain falling onto the roadways. Some of the residents stopped to smile at the projected viewpoint, while others just continued on their way, busy with their many lives.

  A leap upward and out allowed everyone to orient themselves to see themselves soaring over the Atlantic Ocean once more. The viewpoint reached a cluster of islands filled with green, rolling hills. At one particular cluster near the tip, the view slowed to see a carefully preserved, stone-constructed village built into grass-topped sand dunes, Stone Age Village of Skara Brae, Mainland, Orkney Isles, Scotland, Preserved in the Sand by a Storm Approximately 5,000 Years Ago.

  The view soared
southward past cities and villages and yet more smiling, waving people, many of them paler of face and hair than before. They came to London, England, Population 31,498,600+, which was a mix of heavily carved stone structures, modern architecture, and a wide variety of people.

  On and on it went, never, ever lingering long. Down through Europe, past a collage of images plucked from here and there, medieval castles and modern cities, vineyards and orchards, mountains and meadows. Rectangles slid past of charcoal and iron-ochre drawings of ancient Humans—listed as the Chauvet Cave Paintings from Approximately 30,000 Years Ago, France—while the surrounding images turned into a drier region and a carefully excavated city from antiquity, Pompeii, Roman Empire, Buried and Perfectly Preserved by Volcanic Tephra Ejected from Mount Vesuvius 2208 Years Ago.

  The plaster casts of the eruption’s victims sobered and quieted the murmurs and gasps of appreciation and awe from the watching crowd. But like everything else, that scene didn’t last long; Pompeii whirled away, replaced by a parabolic arc over the Mediterranean Sea to the Relics of the Ancient Egyptian Empire, Pyramids of Giza, Sphinx, and the ruins of ancient temples along The Nile, Longest River on Earth.

  Those gave way to the great Sahara Desert and its rolling dunes, before edging into the farmlands of Central Africa, the smiling, sun-darkened faces of city dwellers. As the first movement came to an end, the images took a side trip to Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania Province, Site of the Oldest Paleoanthropological Records of Mankind’s Ancestors. The arrival of their whirlwind tour to this spot was timed just as the music came to a close.

  Having practiced this in private in a slightly different way, Jackie quickly hit the pause button on her remote control. She had to do so because she had to set up five versions of the exact same thing. Applause broke out, but she didn’t drop the illusion so much as change it.