Seren- Legends of the Galaxy

by P H Campbell

  "I'm on it," Ash promised as she went to the other console to send the message to the Botany Bay."

  "What about the colonists?" Seren wondered.

  "I'll tell the UGW… something, since I promised we'd return any colonists who want to be in the UGW," Cinder sighed. "As long as they're safe and sound in stasis, that's a back burner issue for me."

  Seren realized that the plan now fell to her to finish. Katy was MIA, and Talon hadn't reported back. Whether or not the mercenaries had reported their failure and another attack was imminent was another factor to deal with. The plan had called for a strong defense. At the moment, they had virtually none.

  But they couldn't do a lot about it.

  "I'll take care of all of that part," Seren suggested. "This plan was to help us. The cubes've been handed to us now, so it's our turn to roll them."

  "What about Talon and Katy?" Cinder asked, agreeing to Seren's suggestion. She'd already heard they were MIA after the fight.

  "We'll blow that tunnel when we get to it," Seren shrugged. "Hopefully, the UGW won't try to exploit the situation and the mercenaries won't be coming back soon. I didn't get the impression from the UGW they were that desperate as to steal what we had. The Mercenaries apparently were, though."

  "I desperately hate those fuckers," Cinder stated with more vehemence than Seren had ever seen her display. "I think the Shade have tolerated their bullshit long enough."

  "The UGW might feel the same way about them," Seren noted.

  "More bridge building negotiations?" Cinder chuckled. She thought about it and said, "As much as I'd like to space each and every one of them personally, why not share inflicting that pain on them? Maybe we can show the UGW a trick or two, and vice versa.

  "In the meantime, I'll make sure the colony ship gets turned around ASAP. Try to keep the Twins under control. They drive hard bargains. I don't want them pissing off the Fusions."

  "I heard that!" Ash shouted from the other room.

  "I'll keep you posted," Seren smiled.

  Seren and the delegation had to take a shuttle from the Botany Bay to land on their planet. It wasn't that difficult of a thing to do, but it was an indication of how vital the Destiny was to helping the Fusions deal with the attack.

  To say that their homecoming was well received would be something of an overstatement. The outcome of their tour seemed to matter much less than the two new stars in the sky. Explanations were demanded.

  "We took it upon ourselves to decide what was best for our world," Seren told the assembled council. "We have seen what both sides have to offer, and we can benefit from an association with both sides. We can also act in a capacity to aid both sides in an equal manner.

  "But we saw how both sides live, and while we may be able to eventually adapt to either side, neither side is how we operate today."

  "What's the difference?" a council member from the Electrian side demanded.

  "The biggest difference is that they have no tolerance for the racism you and the Magentians have for one another at all," Seren replied. "That may be easing among us here, but what we have here, now, under UGW law would see people having their brains altered so they didn't do that again. Under Shade Alliance law, they'd be sent to a very cold and desolate planet until they repaid any reparations and fines imposed by the Shade Alliance courts. Here, we smack someone up-side the head on the spot, tell them to knock it the fuck off and leave it at that. After enough headaches from that, people usually learn not to act on their biases."

  "Gliff, is this true?" the Electrian council member asked.

  "In a package, yeah," Gliff agreed. "We're more direct. They fook it up with laws and rules."

  "Over time, our population will become entirely Human, and if they want to join one side or the other, that's their choice," Seren went on. "But we need to pull our own weight and help ourselves as much as we can in the meantime. So we have some friends who will do that, for a slice of the wealth, and by doing that, they'll live free for the first time in their lives, pulling their weight and earning what we gave them."

  "What did "we" give them?" Thoria asked, amused by the phrasing.

  "It turns out there's another habitable planet in our system," Seren explained. "They have twenty-five million people, and understand the technology to mine the metals our system has, and the means to package it and sell it. For that planet, and part of the sales, we get everything we need to help our planet, and ourselves, should we need it from the rest of the galaxy on either side."

  "They agreed to this?" Thoria asked.

  "They all but got out and pushed their habitat to the system, yes," Seren nodded. "They are not entirely human, but they are people, and very good, hard-working people at that. They call themselves Fusions. We can have a formal relationship, or an informal one with them. Time will tell how that pans out."

  "What are they like?" Thoria wondered.

  "Like people, you, me, Gliff, Morlendrus," Seren said. "Two arms, two legs, a head and males and females. Some look almost entirely human. Some look like a creature called a "cat", but they're very beautiful in their own way. Until the racial prejudice is eliminated on this planet, I don't expect they'll be visiting us that much."

  There was a murmur of understanding. For all that they could get stuff done together, the distrust or hatred of things that were "different" extended to anything outside one's race, with the Humans being the sole exception. Except, of course, in the Borderlands, where no one had any shits to give about it.

  "What about our defenses?" Thoria asked, hitting on the one thing that Seren had hoped she'd leave alone.

  "We had what is known as a Scoutship here three days ago," Seren replied. "It prevented the Fusion's habitat from being destroyed by thousands of spacecraft equipped with weapons. That is what we planned on relying on for our defense."

  "One space craft?" Thoria asked, surprised.

  "I'm told it's the most powerful space vehicle ever created by the United Galactic Worlds," Seren replied.

  "So, it's a UGW spacecraft," Thoria surmised.

  "Not… exactly," Seren said. "The owner, or partner, to the spacecraft is not officially with the UGW anymore, nor is the spacecraft itself."

  "Partner to the spacecraft?" Thoria wondered.

  "I didn't meet it, so I can't say, but from what I understand, the spacecraft is an entity in its own right, and cooperates with the partner, each providing for the other what they can't do themselves," Seren hoped she was being accurate. "My understanding is that the human side of the partnership used to be the ship commander.

  "I had hoped to introduce her, at least, here and now, but Talon went missing during the battle and they haven't found it yet. We've also been told there's been no word from it. From what I was told, it was very close to the sky explosions when they happened. It's possible it was destroyed. We're still working on finding out."

  "Then we are defenseless against another attack?" Thoria asked.

  "We will get help from the Shade Alliance," Seren explained. "How much help is still in doubt, but they're sending all they can. They will ask us to compensate them, but I don't think it'll inconvenience us."

  "How long before that happens?" Thoria wondered.

  "Tomorrow for some of the help," Seren replied. "Another seven days for the defense. The UGW is too far away to get here with anything else sooner, or so I'm told."

  "Your actions have endangered our entire world," the Electrian Council member accused.

  "The mercenaries weren't attacking US," Seren sighed. "They attacked the Fusion habitat."

  "Then what was that explosion in th' sky all about?" the Electrian Council member demanded to know.

  "That would be our way of making sure no surprise attacks could happen here," Seren explained. "It's basically an energy field that prevents ships and portals from just appearing so close we can't mount a defense. It won't hurt us, or anyone going through it, as long as they didn't try to come to us through another dimension."<
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  "What's a dimension?" the Electrian council member wondered.

  "It's a place outside of our reality," Seren explained as best she could. "Believe it or not, the UGW and the Shade Alliance can go to those places to get to us faster than by just traveling through space. That's what the McGrew Portal did. Their spaceships can do the same thing."

  "So we'll see 'em coming, but can't stop 'em," the Electrian Council member grumbled. "I feel so much safer."

  "The odds are they're not going to even attack the planet," Seren reminded them. "The Fusion's space habit was their target before. Anything not natural in space will be what they want."

  "The mercenaries, but what about the UGW or Shade Alliance, or who knows who else?" the Electrian Council member argued.

  "At the moment, I don't think that's a problem," Seren asserted. "The Shade Alliance leader is a personal friend I made. And my impressions of the UGW is that they wouldn't resort to attack and theft. Nothing in their society, or history, told me they'd do that. The mercenaries are the only other major power in the galaxy, and they're not that major. They'd be after resources, not interested in conquest. And even if they only stayed in space and stole all our resources, it'd take them thousands of years to do it. I think we'd have plenty of time to call for help if that happened.

  "With them being so soundly defeated, they may not come back for a while."

  "May not," the Electrian Council member echoed derisively.

  "Life isn't without risk," Seren reminded him. "We stand much to gain and only need to wait seven days before help will arrive."

  "Will that help be enough?" Thoria inquired.

  "I don't know," Seren admitted. "But it's better than nothing."

  "This is unacceptable…" the Electrian Council member stated angrily.

  "This is reality," Seren replied in the same tone. "Deal with it. We can't get any help any faster."

  "That much is true," Thoria interjected into the proceedings. "Though we can rail at what the delegation has done, they did it in our best interests. Unanticipated, and indeed unforeseeable, events seem to have uprooted what sounded to me like a very viable plan.

  "Seren made certain The World had autonomy, allies, and an important place in the Galaxy alongside the two major galactic powers. That is a laudable achievement, even if we face a potentially severe short-term threat. And that threat sounds to me as if it's directed more toward those who have come to our system seeking a place of their own than toward us."

  "That much has no doubt about it," Seren nodded. "The Fusions have taken tens of thousands of casualties, and the Shade Alliance is helping deal with that. They have the most dangerous position compared to us, and they've already suffered because the mercenaries arrived before Talon did."

  "What of the Talon?" Thoria asked. "What is being done to find it?"

  "We're treating the wounded now, and doing scans to see if we can pick it up," Seren explained, though some of her phrasing escaped the understanding of many of the council members, since few knew what a "scan" was. "Space is enormous, Talon is tiny, and the reports were that Talon was moving very fast when it disappeared. So finding it may be harder than it might seem."

  "This presumes it survived?" Thoria asked.

  "Yes," Seren nodded. "We know that it didn't disintegrate, because that would have left traces we don't find. Other than that, we don't know much."

  "Thank you, Seren," Thoria told her. "I don't believe there's anything more discuss that we can settle right now." She glanced around at the rest of the council members, who didn't openly disagree, but looked a lot less than thrilled about the turn of events.

  Truth to tell, Seren wasn't feeling thrilled about it herself.

  Aboard the Destiny, while Looie handled the details of getting the mining ship configured for doing some real mining, aided by about a thousand Fusions eager to help, Ash was busy on the sensors looking for Talon.

  The scanner logs from the Botany Bay during the fight were not entirely complete thanks to the damage to their scanner arrays during the fighting. The explosions didn't do them any favors, either, leaving gaping holes in the recordings of what had gone on.

  She traced the flights of the merc fighters toward the Superhawks Talon had launched before engaging the attacking merc fighters, and the logs recorded that Talon had accelerated to a mind-numbing velocity toward those fighters, destroying at least a few of them closest to the Superhawks.

  Then there were two standard hours of gradually diminishing radiation readings swamping the scanner arrays before detecting anything cogent once again. There were no traces of Talon. And the two points where the explosions happened were curious black-holes of data – nothing showed there when there should have been something. They apparently absorbed the scanner energy and didn't allow any way to detect exactly what they were.

  Taking the last known trajectory of Talon, as a starting point, Ash mapped out an area where it might have continued going.

  That area was depressingly huge, and would take weeks, if not months, to scan in full for something as small as Talon, assuming he had no power. But she knew that a Scoutship used a micro-singularity for power, and that gravitational signature should be out there somewhere, so that might work in her favor in finding him.

  She had a strong, personal stake in finding that ship, and the person inside it. Had it not been for them, the odds were good that she, Looie and Cinder wouldn't be alive today. Ash felt she owed Katy Reynolds a life for a life. With uncharacteristic stoicism, Ash went through the region piece by piece, starting with the most likely directions out to the full range of her sensors. Ash was determined to find Talon and bring them, or what little was left of them, back.

  Unfortunately, what she picked up was not Talon, but multiple H-Space entries on the distant part of the system in that general direction. A quick check proved the signatures were consistent with Merc carriers. The ones who had transported the fighters into the system had obviously left for reinforcements. That meant they were in a very nearby system or they had moved a deep-space station near the UGC 0052 system to take its mineral wealth for themselves.

  Either way, it meant trouble.

  "Uh, guys! Incoming!" she shouted to the rest of the crew.

  At that same instant, klaxons sounded aboard the Botany Bay, calling all personnel to defense stations. They'd detected the jumps as well.

  "This is not good," Ash remarked.

  "How good are our shields?" Looie wondered.

  "Not good enough," Ash admitted.

  Ash watched as the scans indicated a swarm of fighters coming in. They were about two hours out, giving the Fusions more time to seal things up. But the efforts were likely to be futile against so many more fighters than before. Once Destiny and Botany Bay were destroyed, the carriers would then move in and begin to harvest the riches of the system, not caring if they slaughtered millions to get it.

  "If we die here, mom's gonna be so pissed," Looie remarked.

  "Let's not die, okay?" Ash suggested.

  "Good plan," Looie agreed.

  For the next two hours, the Botany Bay and Destiny could do little more than seal up, put up what shields they had and wait it out. What few weapons they had would be useless, and only provide Pyrrhic Victory at best, likely hastening their defeat. No one had any allusions about their odds of survival. They were essentially nil. Even escape pods would likely be shot out of space before they made it to a habitable planet.

  To their credit, no one panicked. No one broke down. They'd all faced death or worse in their pasts. It they felt anything, it was the profound regret of not being able to experience the rewards of a very hard-won freedom.

  "The first wave will be in firing range in ten seconds," Ash stated, her normally animated voice a dead flat monotone. She counted down the last five seconds.

  "Five… Four… Three… Two… what the fuck was that?!?!"

  A blinding arc of pure energy cut silently down from above into the approachi
ng fighters like a laser through butter. The fighters simply ceased to exist. They didn't explode. They didn't disintegrate. They simply vanished. In the blink of an eye, the first wave of fighters was gone.

  The comm crackled and a familiar voice called out, "Hi, guys! Sorry I'm late. Had to play dimensional chess to get back. Give me a few while we clean some clocks."

  A single, small ship flashed into view across the scans, and a cheer erupted throughout the Botany Bay and Destiny.

  Scoutship Talon had arrived!

  CHAPTER 17

  "Katy, no naps."

  The voice was Treah's, but the context for hearing it was… unsettling.

  Katy's awareness focused, but there was nothing other than her thoughts upon which to focus. She couldn't feel anything, had no sense of weight, and had no body to speak of.

  "So, I'm dead?" she thought to herself.

  "That depends on how you look at it," Miralenda's voice replied.

  "Oh, I'm delusional," Katy realized she was having conversations in her head.

  "It's not that, either," Treah assured her. "You're… stuck."

  "Where?" Katy wondered.

  "That's for you to decide," Miralenda unhelpfully explained. "We did what we could to protect Talon, too, but ended up only being able to protect you. Now, it's up to you."

  "To do what?" Katy asked.

  "To create your own reality, and join that reality where and when you belong," Treah explained.

  "Like a god creating her own world?" Katy asked, amused by the idea despite her disembodied state. "Create how?"

  "A world is a bit ambitious to start off with creating things," Miralenda remarked. "Try thinking of something much simpler. It helps if you know where and when you belong. That better dictates what the reality you create will be."

  Oddly, Katy understood what she meant.

  Where and when did she need to be?

  That was actually the easy part. She needed to be in command of Talon, saving lives and stopping crime. It's what she did best. It's why she stole Talon before he was "terminated" because they couldn't separate his AI unit from the ship. It's why she kept him safely away from the UGW, with only Lyle as her means of contact. It's why they dusted themselves off and joined up with Seren's group to help them achieve what, ultimately, Katy herself could not – autonomy from the UGW. It's why no one in the UGW knew what happened to her after the Scouts program ended.