by Ivan Kal
Beth had spent all of that time on the front, and even though she was allowed to take time and return to Sanctuary, she never did, which had only put more strain on the relationship with her husband, Harry. Technically, they were separated, but during their last conversation in person they had decided to try and fix their marriage. But Beth and Harry both knew that their hearts just weren’t in it. Their lives were too different. Harry never could make peace with the nature of Bethany’s calling, and he knew that she would never sacrifice it for him. Over the years, they had a few conversations over the comms, but they were always short, filled with awkward silences. In a way, she knew that she had been avoiding the problem. She didn’t want to admit that she had been wrong when she’d agreed to marry him. But now, years later, she knew that she did not marry him for love. She did it because she was simply going through the motions; it was what one was supposed to do. And no matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise, she had done it because of Adrian.
She was in love with him once. But their relationship was never traditional, not even back in the Sol system when they’d attended the Academy together. And she had waited for him, until Harry had come along and she’d decided not to wait any longer. Ironically, it was her getting married to Harry that had made Adrian confess his feelings to her. And her reaction hadn’t been so good. She’d been cruel, as she had been when they first met. She had lashed out at him, hurt him. She knew that, and yet she had convinced herself that it didn’t matter, that she would be happy with Harry. And she’d been wrong. She had lost her best friend in Adrian, and slowly over time had lost contact with her other classmates. She had never even attempted to mend fences, to reach out; instead, she’d allowed her pride to govern her decisions.
She knew that she needed to change, to try and make up for her actions over the years. And she had decided to do that after the war was over. She was aware that in a way that was cowardly of her, but as Fleet Commander, she couldn’t allow any distractions. Especially now, as she could feel that the time for another offensive was near. The facilities they had acquired were more than what they needed; already a few shipyards had been upgraded with fabricating technology and would soon start production. And the next offensive was going to be very different, as now they didn’t need to take additional Sowir facilities. Soon, the short respite would reach an end, and this time the Empire was going to roll over them and destroy them for good.
Bethany hurried and cleaned up in the bathroom, then made her way to her desk and turned on her holo table. The space in front of her came to life, with dozens of holo windows, saved work from last night. With a gesture, she cleared them and brought up the message from the Fleet. She had been expecting it, and hoped that it was the order for the new offensive.
She read the message from the Fleet and then slumped, disappointed. It was not what she had expected. She frowned as she read through it again. Her orders were to take all of the Second Fleet’s Mark Two dreadnoughts and return with them to Sanctuary. Her fleet’s Kraken-class dreadnoughts, along with the auxiliaries, were to stay and protect the front.
Bethany had no doubt that the Kraken-class dreadnoughts were up to the task, especially when all of the systems that had been taken had already been reinforced with defense platforms and the Third Fleet. Her orders made it clear that it was only her ships that were being recalled.
Beth sighed, then formed messages for her staff, organizing a meeting; she would need to inform them of their orders. Looking at the message one last time, she felt a taste of trepidation. She would be going to Sanctuary, and now she couldn’t hide behind the war. She would need to face Harry, and a lot sooner than she had planned.
PART ONE – WHAT WAR HAD WROUGHT
Chapter One
October; Year 35 of the Empire – Sanctuary
Adrian Farkas Reiss turned his eyes upwards towards dark, teal-colored night sky of Sanctuary. The color came from the reflected light of the gas nebula that surrounded the Sanctuary system and the two moons orbiting the planet. There were a few stars in the sky, other planets in the system and their moons. But there were more of them than there had been when humanity had first arrived on this planet. Since then the system had grown, and many of those stars were in fact stations or shipyards.
And he too was different. He had come a long way from the small orphan boy on Earth. Now, he commanded a fleet, he was one of the greatest fighters in the Empire, and he was the leader of Warpath, one of the six Clans of the Empire. When he looked back on the time he’d spent on Earth, almost a century ago, it seemed like such a small part of his life.
Adrian sighed and continued walking down the streets of Olympus City towards his destination. His arm was bent at the elbow, and above his open palm a small lead ball floated, held there with his telekinesis. At his sides followed two massive beasts. Akash and Sora, twin wolions, animals native to Sanctuary. Adrian had adopted them long ago just after they’d been born, because their mother had died. The two were empaths, capable of communication by sharing emotions. He had raised them, and they had become a kind of a family. They followed him everywhere.
As he walked, he readjusted his coat over his skin-suit. Everyone in the Empire now wore them; the clothes of old had been mostly left behind, with the exception of overcoats, which served to satisfy the need for individuality and fashion. The suits were skin tight, based on the skin-suits that Nel invented; they looked to be one piece, but were actually two, lower and upper. When not used, they were loose, and could be put on like any other piece of clothing. Once on, with a command from the wearer’s imp, the suit would become skin tight and meld into one piece. The clothing had some solid pieces that satisfied the need for modesty, for women across their chest, and both for men and women over the groin. The suits were superior to anything else, as they could protect from both cold and heat. The overcoats were simply for fashion, and Adrian’s overcoat was dark blue with black sleeves.
Walking down the street, he reflected on the fact that he had spent the last three years on Sanctuary. The reason was the many changes that occurred to his body as he’d triggered the failsafe engineered into human genetic code, and gained psionic abilities, what his ancestors had called the Sha. And that power came with a big price. He had spent eight months in a bed after the change truly kicked in.
The change had occurred in stages, with the first one being what he’d experienced after he’d pushed himself to the limit during the battle with the Sowir. His brain and nervous system had ‘evolved,’ changed, and lain the groundwork for future changes. That first change had resulted in him spending a month unconscious. The second stage had come after he’d heard the telepathic beacon from Axull Darr’s sphere. A growth had appeared inside his body, below his left collarbone, inside his ribcage. At first, his doctors had assumed it was a fast-growing tumor, until Axull Darr had told them that it was actually a newly formed organ. The growth had then made connections to his bloodstream and nervous system, which had put Adrian in bed for another three months as the doctors watched and recorded every second of the change.
The third stage had started as soon as the second had ended, which resulted in him getting random muscle cramps that could last anywhere from a moment to hours, itching across every single part of his body, random pains that radiated out of the new organ, and headaches that lasted for days. The last stage had lasted for about four months. But thankfully it had ended, and Adrian had received the Sha. Each of the psionics required energy in order to be used, which was stored inside the Nursha, the organ that was the part of the package. The organ took a small part of the energy that the body got from food or drink and body heat, and stored it to be used later.
The first psionic that he’d discovered was telepathy, which he’d received after the first stage. Each psionic had a name that Axull Darr had provided from his records, but Adrian had decided to call them by their human names. Humanity already had knowledge of such, or similar, abilities, whether from fiction or
examples from nature.
Telepathy, as it appeared, wasn’t as easy to use as he’d thought it would be. The beacon he’d heard had been specifically designed to reach past a person’s innate defenses, and he’d answered it instinctually. Trying to enter someone else’s mind was another story. No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t make it work. Occasionally, he could reach the point where he was almost there, when it felt like he was listening to a conversation but was just a step outside of the hearing range. In those instances, he could hear a kind of noise, and every now and then he could make out a word, but nothing more. Telepathy was like another sense, only no one around him could emit anything that he could pick up. But always when he tried to reach someone’s mind, when he opened himself up, he could feel a kind of noise that his mind usually filtered out. He’d learned from the data in the sphere that that was actually called a telepathic echo. Noise of the galaxy—supernovas, black holes, and other events all created noise similar to radio noise. But thankfully he didn’t need to hear it all the time.
Telepathy wasn’t like some invisible mystical power. The People had had devices that could detect it, measure it, and even boost it.
The second was telekinesis, which had come to him after stage three. Only, it too was not what he’d expected. He couldn’t use it to lift heavy objects and throw them around as he’d hoped; at most, he could lift a few rocks. But according to Axull Darr, every psionic was like a muscle and could be strengthened through training, meaning he could theoretically train his telekinesis to the heights where he could do that, which was why he was starting with ‘lifting’ the heavy lead ball with his mind. He didn’t really need to use his arm, but it made the exercise easier, as his mind associated the ability with the movement of his arm.
But the third was the one that Adrian liked the most, an ability to expel a kinetic blast—or kinetikinesis. That was the only psionic that he could use fairly well, probably because it was very simple. He now had microscopic emitters on the palms of his hands, which he could use to expel kinetic force directly, using the energy stored in his body. The problem was that the more energy he used, the greater the feedback, as he’d learned two years ago when he, along with the researchers who had been helping him develop the psionics, had tried to see how strong of a blast he could fire off.
Up until that point, he had been trying out small blasts, barely using any of the energy that his newly formed organ stored. The strongest one he’d used had had the equivalent kinetic power of a very strong punch. The feedback from those was not all that bad; his arms would usually feel as if he had punched something relatively hard, the bones and muscles in his arms would vibrate a bit, and his palms would go numb for a moment. So naturally they’d wanted to see what would happen if he tried to use as much energy as he could. That, as it turned out, had been a very bad idea.
They’d been inside the testing room that was some five meters across, with Adrian standing on the one side of the room and the pressure machine placed on the other. Adrian had braced himself, pulled as much energy as he could, and then let it go through his right arm. Immediately, he’d known that something was wrong as he emptied all of the energy his body had stored. As the energy traveled through the channels in his arm, he’d felt pain that lasted for only a moment as the energy reached the emitters on his palms. Already, he could feel the vibrations in his bones, and then as the blast left his arm, the feedback started.
His fingers had bent backwards, and every bone in his hand had broken as the cascading effect traveled from the emitters backwards. Then the vibrations had torn through his arm, shattering the bones of his forearm, then his elbow. The feedback had been so powerful that his arm had been slung backwards; the force of it had ripped his arm out of the shoulder socket with such strength that it had broken his right collarbone. The feedback had then moved further, now diminished, but still powerful enough to crack the top of his ribcage and send small bone fragments to pierce his lungs.
The violent feedback had thrown him spinning to the floor in agony, which he’d hit with his back. He’d had the strength to look at his mangled arm before he blacked out—there had been bones sticking out of it and blood flowing freely through the punctures in his skin. Fortunately for him, the Empire’s medical technology had advanced far enough that he hadn’t needed to spend the rest of his life with one arm. He’d spent the next six months unconscious in a healing tank, as medical nanites worked tirelessly to regrow and rebuild his arm. This was aided by another psionic that he’d gotten access to unconsciously, as his body had tried to heal itself: vitakinesis—the ability to accelerate and guide his body’s healing processes. But even with that, it hadn’t been an easy endeavor. On the upside, his blast had cracked the pressure plate and sent the measuring device smashing into the wall, which he’d found out six months later when he’d finally awoken.
Thankfully, the time he’d spent in the tank hadn’t been wasted. Long before he’d gained psionics, he had developed another ability, what he called mind space. It was born from the unique interactions between his brain and his implant, which had at the time been experimental. The ability allowed him to retreat inside his own mind, where time moved at a different pace than that outside, which gave him the chance to shadow train his martial arts well ahead of anyone else in the Empire. What he learned and trained inside transferred over into the waking world, because Adrian had complete control over his body. There was very little that his mind did that he was not aware of or able to control in some way. He could use the full strength of his body without the limits that the brain unconsciously put on it. He didn’t need muscle memory when he could execute any movement exactly as he imagined it.
His hospitalization had given him years of training and self-reflection. There was more to it than just the ability to shadow train. He could relive old memories, refresh pathways in his brain leading to memories long forgotten. Although, ever since his brain had been altered and he’d gained psionics, the memories were easier to reach, and didn’t fade away as quickly as they once had once he left mind space. And no longer did he need to have his implant and Iris, his AI, take control of his body’s functions when he was inside. His mind now had the capacity to do both.
After they’d gained access to the sphere and the knowledge of the People, Adrian had lost days trying to find any information on his ability. But in the end, he couldn’t find anything; the People had had nothing like mind space, which to Adrian suggested that it was an ability that was born out of the human evolutionary path. There was a lot of evidence in the data that suggested that human imagination was more developed than that of the People. Mind space might just be the next evolutionary step from that.
But the reason why he was walking the streets of Olympus City was because his body wasn’t at the same level as that of his ancestors, for whom the psionic abilities had been intended. His body simply couldn’t handle the stress that the full use of the psionics entailed. He could push his natural limits by training, but he would never be able to use them to the same extent as the People were. Which was why he was now standing in front of the Empire’s leading research center.
“Nervous?” A shape appeared in front of him. A holographic representation of Adrian’s personal AI, Iris. She appeared as a small, fiery woman clothed in a dress, something like fairies from the old stories. Her features were a meld of Laura Reiss, Adrian’s adoptive mother, and Bethany, his first and only love.
The two of them had been through a lot together. Her previous home had been an AI core inside the implant in Adrian’s head. But once he had triggered the change, the implant had been in the way, so Iris had ordered the nanites in his body to remove them. Thankfully, her core had survived, and she now had a new home in the form of a bracer that Adrian wore. It came with a few upgrades, one of which was the ability to project holograms in the two-meter radius around the bracer. The drawback was that she could no longer talk inside his head, as at the time he hadn’t had an implant inside his
head. Since then the Empire had gained a lot of knowledge from Axull Darr’s sphere, and they had managed to build an implant that could interface with his slightly changed brain, so now Adrian once again had an implant inside his head, which Iris could access from the outside, so they could talk internally again. But Iris and he had decided not to transfer her core back inside; there was no need, and with her being external, they could upgrade her hardware easily.
“A bit,” Adrian responded, looking fondly at the fiery shape floating in front him.
“Don’t worry, I doubt that Seo-yun would have called you if she wasn’t sure that they had something,” she said, and then disappeared.
Adrian nodded, then let the small, heavy ball fall into his palm and put it into his pocket. He entered the building and made his way to the second floor, already knowing the way. A minute later, he arrived at his destination. He approached the desk clerk and announced himself.
“You can go in, Clan Leader. She is expecting you,” the clerk said.
Adrian smiled and entered the office, Akash and Sora following behind him. Inside, he was met by a short woman who, upon noticing him, got up and walked around to meet him.
“Ah, Adrian. Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I couldn’t refuse a call from you, Seo-yun,” Adrian said, smiling at the older woman. Hyeon Seo-yun was the Empire’s Minister of Science and the partner of Emperor Tomas Klein. Also, one of Adrian’s closest friends. She and Tomas had been together for a long time, and although they’d never married, they did make their relationship public. Marriage was something that occurred less and less in the Empire; people didn’t feel the need to validate their feelings with a written agreement. They just started being a family. Adrian was envious of their relationship; it was something that he desired for himself, yet had never found.