by TylerRose.
Fatigued from the sleepless night and the intensity of the vision she’d sent, she sat on the floor to wait. Running and stomping of many pairs of boots, with Solomon shouting her name and cursing and threatening to beat the piss out of her when he found her. But all from the distance of the corridor. The broom closet was overlooked and not checked.
Then a commotion of a different sort with energy weapons and Landers announcing themselves loudly and repeatedly. Some weapons fired. Some shouts of pain and dying.
[Femina, where are you?] came through her mind.
Shestna. If he was here, then it was safe.
[I’m here!] she thought back, rushing to her feet to unbar the door.
“Sta!” she blurted, seeing him through the glass of the control room.
She saw Speenar and Solomon on their knees in cuffs. She was there by the time Shestna had crossed the bay, backhanding Solomon with a fist that she brought forward to slug Speenar across the jaw. She kicked Speenar in the chest to send him flying to the floor before Shestna grabbed her around the waist and carried her backwards. Still she kicked Solomon in the face.
“I claim ownership of this station for myself and on behalf of all the Rolcha now present,” she spat, and turned away from them. Then to Arran. “Get all the access everything to me. Cards, keys, codes, everything. I’m going to change clothes. I have to go back with them and take care of a few things. Kick all non-employees not paying for rooms off the station and start cleaning up. We’re shut down until I get back. Buy food and make repairs as necessary. And keep your hands and your dicks off my girls!”
“You cannot own the station,” Shestna said, following her.
“The hell I can’t. What room is Solomon’s?” she asked the computer.
It flashed on the control panel, floor and room number. She teleported to it, Shestna following with his personal transporter. Glancing around the front room while she searched the racks, he saw the leather bit on buckled straps. He saw the knee braces. The leash connected to the wall.
With a hand on her arm, he stopped her looking through her clothes.
“His scent is all over you. What did he do to you?”
“Nothing he didn’t pay for with every penny in his account,” she replied, and took down the floor length gown with short train. “Which I now own.”
She dropped the halter dress to the floor and kicked the sandals so hard they hit the far wall, and pulled on the purple satin with glitter and sequin trim, the zipper going up under her own power rather than ask for help. Into her preferred three inch heel boots and she pulled the stick from her hair to release the knot he’d made her put in.
“I’m sure I have to file a report or something,” she said. “Then I’m coming right back here to deal with this place.”
“Let me teleport us. I have the correct time coordinates for return. It’s several weeks later than expected,” he said, concerned for her but keeping anything more to himself.
“Why?”
“Because we had to wait for Amy to actually be taken. When the burst packet arrived, she’d not yet been kidnapped. The crime had to be committed on our end before we could come back here to make the arrests.”
She let it go and let him do the teleporting. On arrival, she felt a hard, gripping pain in her chest. Chalking it up to the jolt of time travel, she tried to shake it off as she followed Julian into the next room. Solomon was there, still on his knees and with a black eye and a fat lip, having arrived with the Congressional security force. Speenar was not there.
“He was tried in his own time,” Julian informed her when she asked. “In the Landers courts. You can look it up and see. It’s there now, having already been done.”
“Do you need me to make any reports?” she asked.
He waited for Solomon to be taken out. Amy went as well, crying her eyes out and finally free of the shackles.
“No, actually. Your burst packet is your testimony. Amy was found exactly as your packet showed. Solomon will be tried for his double-dealing using the other information in the burst packet.”
“What other information?”
“You know what, Tyler. He held you against your will and raped you. He told you he’d show you what was being done and then conveniently disappear so he could stay and take over the station. That is in direct violation of his employment contract and makes it a crime against the Congress.”
Tyler said nothing. She didn’t see it as a rape. She liked sex. Forced sex was all the better, thanks to Nails; but they could not know any of that.
“Fine. I’m going to Earth for a few days. I need to see someone back home in Toledo. I can feel something is wrong with her.”
At once the atmosphere in the room changed. Julian and Shestna exchanged glances.
“What? Something happen?”
“Toledo is all but gone, Tyler,” Julian said.
“Gone? How gone? What are you talking about?”
“View screen. Earth from near orbit. North America.”
The planet in slow rotation, a wide burn carved into the surface from Toledo, Ohio straight down to Columbus, Ohio and then across to Washington DC, which was a big black spot of scorch. Visible from orbit, which meant that scar was a hundred miles wide.
“What the hell happened?!” she demanded, going up to the wall to look more closely, the pain in her chest increasing to a nauseating intensity.
A path of complete and utter destruction, she saw as the image went closer with her hand taps. Buildings gone. Highways gone. They’d marched directly down I-75.
“What the hell happened?” she repeated.
“Something we didn’t know was coming. A man from very deep into Gamma quadrant, someone who had always stayed out of Congressional reach. He had a tremendous energy source. Shestna says it is very similar to the Emperor’s Crystal on Voran III. He attacked Earth, landed in Downtown Toledo and started destroying things. A small Earth force of several extraterrestrials and an android fought back. A couple dozen motorcycle clubmen joined in but they weren’t very effective. Davis Besse blew up,” he pointed to the big splotch. “Sun Oil blew up,” he pointed to a splotch in the southeast of the city, on the edge of the East Side. “Every refinery in the area and along their path south was blown up. Millions of people dead. Trillions of dollars in damage. Part of the home force met the invasion again in DC.”
Images flashed up on the screen.
“Jerome,” she said.
Throwing lightning bolts from his fingers while his car zoomed around the scene below him, destroying machines and ground soldiers. The final moment when he killed the leader of the invasion, and was all but dead himself. His car came for him, a honey-haired woman and – Tyler’s uncle Radames? – pulled him into the car. The vehicle roared off, heading to the south.
Tyler needed to sit down. Anything that had happened to her in the last day was erased.
“When did this happen?” she asked, breath and strength taken from her.
“February eighteenth. Today is March sixth.”
March sixth. The one year anniversary of the day she left Toledo for California.
“No one knew this was coming?” she asked.
“No one,” Julian repeated.
“How could no one have known?!” she thundered, thrusting up to her feet. “Someone knew! If there was a force in place to take it on, then someone knew! I should have been there! Where is my mother?”
“She’s dead, Tyler. Along with 80% of the population of the region.”
She teleported to where her home used to stand. There was nothing but charred remains as far as the eye could see. Blackened everything. Burned everything. The stench of death, the wailing moan of the dead on the wind. Houses were burned down to the foundations. Trees…just gone. In the shock of seeing this complete and total desolation, she felt no cold. She felt nothing but the pain in her chest growing harder and more dense with every beat of her heart.
After a moment of turning in circles
to see in all directions, where Sun Oil used to be, where the school used to be, the train tracks…it was incomprehensible… a new sensation began to well up in and around her heart.
The depth of this loss, the gravity of the moment, realizing everyone she’d ever known was likely dead. Going lightheaded, the sensation increased, intensified, and a hand went to her chest. The pain grew to stab through from front to back, like a spear on a pole. Gasping for air as the pain only continued, she went down to a knee.
She lost consciousness, felt herself falling. The familiar warmth and smell of Dicer…cigarettes, marijuana and bourbon…and then she was flying.
“I’ve got you, little girl.”
Julian watched the ancient messenger Hermes fly up into the sky and vanish with her, and waited. Either they would bring her back in a few minutes, or in a few minutes he’d be brought a message of what to do.
“We should take her now,”Thor said, pacing the foot of the sofa on which Hermes had placed her. “She’s been nearly two days in this slumber.”
“She’s very tired. The galaxy’s daily clock doesn’t let her take the rest she truly needs. We cannot succeed right now,” Odin replied. “Not with Hades dead and Tiberius in his weakened condition. We need to replace them first. Not to mention she’s too angry now. Far too angry. She’s going to wake up just as furious as when she fell unconscious and we’ll spend decades draining that from her.”
“Then what do we do?” Hermes asked from his seat.
“What we’re doing. Let her sleep. Then let her get through the loss of the bond with Hades and see what happens in the future. There might be another power source one of us can use.”
“What about the crystal on Voran?” Hermes asked. “It’s easy enough to get to.”
“We might,” Odin nodded. “At some point. She needs time to pull herself out of this setback. It could be decades before she can bond with any of us. This has happened too soon after the Widening. Her bond with Hades was still fresh.”
“She said she’s going back to Crecorday,” Thor said. “I can send myself a message to keep an eye on her back then, five hundred years in the past, to watch from a distance. It might be that our best chance lies there and not here. I could even intercept the staff from Taverages and take it for myself.”
“Watch her, yes; but do not interfere with the staff,” Odin insisted. “We have to let the invasion happen even if it disrupts our own plans and sets us back another five hundred years. You could not hope to defeat Adamantine. He would alter his course to come after you and a whole new era of galactic destruction would ensue. It would completely destroy any chance for the Congress to succeed, and we need the Congress. No. It must be as it is. She’ll be waking soon. Take her back to Julian, where you left him, so he can take her to the station.”
Chapter Eight
Encapsulated in comfort and safety,she slept motionless until the physical pain passed. When she awoke, she was in her room on the station with Shestna looking on worriedly from a chair pulled in close.
“What happened?” she asked, a lingering pain in her chest reminding her.
“The shock of the loss,” he said. “The doctor said you were already in a state of exhaustion from sleep deprivation. The intense astonishment of so many people dead at once put you over the edge.”
She put that same dress back on, equally as furious as she’d been when seeing the video footage of Jerome fighting to save Earth.
“Nimrod! Where’s Earnol?” she demanded.
“Administrator Earnol is in his office,” came the androgynous voice.
She teleported directly to it, ignoring the fact that he had two Congressmen in the room. Baener and another from Deek’Trai IV.
“You fucking son of a bitch! That’s why you were so pissy that I be off Earth. Those people would have lived and I would have helped to save Earth? You knew that was coming and you didn’t want me to take part. Why? Because humans with abilities would be known and your station might have been discovered? Why?!”
“Stop it. This must wait, Tyler.”
“No! It will not wait, you fucker. You sent me back in time five hundred years to be sure I was out of the way. You put it on poor Amy to get kidnapped, to keep me there until it was too late and I couldn’t do anything about it. Mother fucker. I will go back and I will be there. I will put this right.”
“No you will not. I forbid it.”
“Who the fuck are you to forbid me a god damn thing?!” she shouted.
“Femina, this does not help you,” Shestna said from behind her.
“Shut up, Sta. This doesn’t concern you.”
“I’m the one with authority here and you are a little girl who has no business interfering in the way anything is done or supposed to be!” Earnol said, loud but not quite shouting. “It is as it must be and you must let it be. Period. If you attempt to travel back to alter these events, you will at once be guilty of unauthorized interference with the flow of time and will go immediately to Quarint and die in the mines. Go back to your whorehouse casino and keep out of my sight until you can behave in a civil manner or I will banish you permanently from all territories of the Congress.”
She stopped. She went dead calm, staring at him as the energies aligned around her. She saw it clearly. Too clearly. Perfectly clear.
“Why are you so afraid of me?”
She had him. He stared at her mutely for several seconds before regathering his wits.
“Get out of my office.”
“You’re going to regret being my enemy. With every fiber of your being. I will make you regret what you’ve done.”
She teleported back to her room to pack the rest of her belongings, throwing her clothes into her suitcase and muttering under her breath about two-faced back-stabbing assholes. The door chimed and she ignored it.
“Tyler, please. Let me in and let’s discuss this,” came over the door speaker.
She stopped, stalked over to the door to open it and Julian knew he was looking into the eyes of Death itself. Her fury was that potent.
“Did you know?” she demanded.
“Know what?”
“Why he wanted me off Earth so badly.”
He steeled his nerves and took the one step inside so the door would close behind him.
“I did not, Tyler. I promise you. He told me to make it happen but not why. He lied to me too. I am not your enemy. He is enemy to us both.”
“You would have your own father as your enemy? I doubt that. More lies,” she sneered, and zipped up the suitcase. “I’m going back to Crecorday and I’m going to stay there until I no longer have the urge to choke the life out of the lot of ya.”
He took her wrists in his hands to still her.
“Tyler, look at me.”
Hard, furious eyes he did not flinch away from. She was a force to be reckoned with, no doubting that.
“Look deep and hear my truth. I did not know the attack was going to happen. If my father knew, he told no one.”
The door chimed again.
“Who is it?” she snapped.
“Councilman Baener.”
“Baener?” she repeated, Julian letting go her hands. “He’s never come to see me before. Door open.”
“Lady Tyler, please forgive the intrusion,” he said as the door closed again. “I think I’m here for the same reason Julian is. I’m very sorry for the attack on your home world. Very sorry for how you had to hear of it. It was such a terrible week. A very terrible thing. The ship that came was extremely advanced. More so than almost any of the ships from planets within the Congress. Only the Balnaatrus and Drakkorians have ships its equal in size and firepower. The ship was cloaked, almost untraceable. It travelled outside of normal shipping lanes so no one was looking for it in the first place. It stayed outside the boundaries of the Congress. We knew nothing until it revealed itself and the carnage began. There was no time to pull together our forces.
“The first day’s battle took
place in about twenty minutes and then the invasion immediately marched south,” he continued with genuine regret. “Hundreds of thousands of them. It would have taken a week or more to get that many soldiers gathered and moved, and they were making more of their own machines at every factory along the way. Our Congress is largely peaceful. There are very few planets with a standing army. There is no Congressional army. There was nothing we could do. On the third day, the man in the video—“
“His name is Jerome Black. And I knew him,” she said with a point so fine it etched the air as she spoke.
“Know him,” Baener corrected gently. “He is alive. He escaped to the area known as Mexico with the woman in the car. She is an extra-terrestrial. We have determined she came from a planet called Taverages. There was another female, with the same energy source as the invader and Jerome. She was from the sister planet called Bomars. We traced the exhaust trail of their ship back to Taverages, once we were able to identify it.”
“On the third day?” she prompted irritably.
“Jerome went to your country’s capital and demanded a rematch. He won, as you saw. The machines ceased to work when he killed the little man with the control panel. The ship in orbit exploded a few minutes after the leader died. That was the end of it.”
“How would he know to stay out of shipping lanes and outside Congressional borders?” she demanded. “If this guy could so easily lay waste to this much of Earth, practically without trying, then there would be nothing to prevent him from doing so to every planet within the Congress. Someone made a deal with him. Someone allowed it. Someone told him to keep out of Congressional space. I’ll tell you who. Earnol allowed it. Earnol made the deal. Earnol wanted Earth to be destroyed completely. Not just torn up a little. He expected Jerome would fail and the entire planet would be gone.”
“That is a large assumption,” Baener said without accusation.
“It’s the only answer that satisfies all the criteria. He can forbid me all he wants. I will fix this. I was supposed to be there and he knows it. He manipulated me to get me off the planet and out of the way so it could be destroyed. All I want to know is why. Do you have the appropriate device for me to travel back to Crecorday a few minutes after I left?” she asked Julian.