by Rick Partlow
Led into the room by armed guards, we'd sat evenly spaced around it, taking our cue from Murdock, and had immediately gone into an almost military briefing, with Kara starting it and Deke and I finishing up. I held my breath as I waited for the General to speak again, waiting for the judgement that could mean our immediate deaths. I didn't particularly care if I died, not with Rachel gone, but I did plan on taking quite few of them with me.
"Unfortunately," he went on, "what you've told me fits with our current assessment of the situation."
I heard Kara beside me letting out a breath in relief.
"Just one thing." Murdock raised a finger, turning to Cowboy. "You. You know, Roger," Murdock was the only one involved with the team that didn't use Cowboy's nickname, "I make it a policy to keep an eye on all the surviving teammembers to follow their careers and," he shot Deke a meaningful glance, "to make sure that they don't get into too much trouble. But you---for the last five years, it's as if you don't even exist, like you left the Cluster entirely. How is it that you turn up at such a critical juncture, out of nowhere, as it were?"
"I've been running bounties in the Worlds, General," Cowboy drawled. "Doesn't pay to have a high profile. I heard about the price on Captain McIntire, followed it up. That led me to Canaan. Once I saw what was really going on, I decided I had to lend a hand."
"Commendable," Murdock said, cocking an eyebrow.
"General Murdock," Kara spoke up, unable to contain herself, "can you tell us what's really happening? Are the aliens the Corporates produced for the Cultists really living Predecessors? And what's the purpose of all this? Why go through all this posturing and deception? Why not just try to exploit the new technology they've discovered?"
"Mat told us about the election coming up," Deke said, "but what's the connection?"
"And what could we know," I put in, "that's important enough to go to this much trouble to try to kill us?"
Murdock regarded us silently for a long moment before he spoke.
"By way of an answer to most of your questions," he said, reaching up to a control on the table and punching in a code, "let me run back a newsfeed we picked up yesterday through the Centauri Instel Comsat."
The holomap of the Cluster faded, replaced by a shimmering nothingness that coalesced into the golden Mercury of the Trans-Commonwealth News Network, the largest provider of newsholos and ViRfeed in the Cluster. The symbol evaporated into an image straight out of Hell, a devastated landscape of crumbling buildings that protruded from the charred soil like bleached bones. The very air seemed to shimmer with heat, and I wondered what uninhabitable moonscape this was.
"This," came a voiceover in the well-modulated, authoritative tones of a computer construct, "was Grenada, a small but prosperous colony near the inner frontier of the Cluster...up until three weeks ago. Today, it is a radioactive nightmare, and it would seem that all of its three million inhabitants are dead."
"God," I heard Kara whisper hoarsely.
"Footage of Grenada's destruction was presented as part of a stunning press release delivered to the major news agencies today by the Jameson administration, following an emergency cession of the Commonwealth Senate."
The scene switched to a huge conference room deep within the Capital City complex on Earth, the overview clearly showing the eagle seal of the Commonwealth that covered most of the floor. The cameras panned inward to a large podium near the center of the room, focusing on a stocky, broad-bodied man whose shoulders strained the fabric of his grey suit. He had the jutting jaw, high cheekbones and wavy dark hair of a ViRdrama construct, but President Gregory Jameson was the real McCoy---I'd met him once.
The camera view showed the blurry shadows of figures standing next to him, just out of camera range, and as I focused on the blurs, I began to get a prickling down my spine. There was something Not Right about them, something just out of reach, like an itch I couldn't scratch.
"Fellow citizens of the Commonwealth," Jameson began, his voice was as deep and sonorous as I remembered, "in the past few weeks, we have received news that represents both the greatest opportunity and the greatest danger the human race has ever faced. Three weeks ago, a small but prosperous colony on the inner edge of the Commonwealth was totally destroyed by an unknown force, captured on video by an automatic telescope in orbit."
A holo appeared beside Jameson's right shoulder of a blue-green planet, which grew until it filled the picture, squeezing out the President's image. The image focused in on a small section of the planet's arc, magnifying until a ship was clearly visible against the blue-white of the atmosphere.
It was basically disc-shaped, and glowed a pale, crackling blue, showing no signs of a reaction drive.
"This ship," the President went on in a voiceover, "is barely a hundred meters across."
Suddenly a coruscating line of white fire shot out from the craft, connecting it with the surface for nearly thirty seconds. Where it touched, the surface turned from blue-green to lava-red and char-black, spreading across the planet as it revolved beneath.
"There were only four of these ships in orbit around Grenada," Jameson announced grimly, "yet they managed to reduce its surface to slag in less than an hour. They then left the system, travelling through realspace, at an acceleration of several million gravities, with an estimated velocity of some three hundred times the speed of light. They headed in a direct line for the next inhabited system, but this time they were stopped."
The image shifted to a high orbital view of another blue-green habitable, then focused in to the approaching enemy ships. The discs were coming toward the world in a tight wedge, ready to fan out and take up firing positions, when another craft came into the picture from around the curve of the planet. It was a glowing, green cigar-shape, and seemed to be several times larger than its counterparts, though moving with similar acceleration and maneuverability.
The discs, seeing the approaching ship, began to decelerate and change course, breaking into a long arc away from the cigar-shape and the planet. A pale green tendril of light extended from the larger ship's green halo and sought out the rearmost disc in the formation, enveloping it for a bare moment. The disc seemed to collapse in on itself, shrinking to only a fraction of its former size before exploding like a nova, the light from the blast filling the screen.
The picture returned to the President's face. "Just as we had found a horribly powerful new enemy we have also discovered a powerful new---or possibly old---friend. Our unexpected benefactors who saved the colony at Caroline from sharing the fate of Grenada went from there to the nearest Patrol base and asked to be taken to the center of our government. For the past two weeks, our researchers have been examining them and their spacecraft, and we have determined their story to be true.
"They call themselves the Resscharr. We have known them for the last hundred and fifty years as the Predecessors. And now I will let them share their story with you."
The camera panned outward into a wide angle shot that revealed the tall figures standing beside him for what they were. Thin bodies that still seemed inherently powerful, with deep chests and broad shoulders, stood on long, digitigrade legs. Their arms were disproportionately short, with long, delicate, three-fingered hands, and angled oddly inward from their shoulders. Their faces were long and decidedly inhuman, with deep, dark striations running lengthwise down from large, liquid eyes. A swept-back mane of feather-like hair covered a large skull, hiding any ears that may have been there. There were three of them, virtually indistinguishable from each other but for slight color differences in their greenish-grey skin and the brief tunics that were their only clothing.
They were the same beings that Fourcade had been shown---the same ones Kara had discovered on the outpost planet. I had a sick feeling we were too late.
"I am called Choss," one of the creatures said in a soft, sibilant hiss, "the selected representative for our race to you, our children." Its face was hauntingly animated, almost frighteningly human in the
way its expressions mirrored his words. "I call you our children not just because our wormhole maps gave you the stars, but because of a more complex and long-lasting connections between our races---we share the same birth-world. As the scientists of your government have confirmed by their tests, our people evolved on the planet you now call Earth, nearly sixty-five million of your years ago, from a species you know as the dinosaurs.
"In the millennia after the great asteroid wiped out most of our evolutionary tree, the plunging temperatures and changing climate forced us into a tool-using sentience. It took our primitive ancestors nearly five million years to go from stone-tipped spears to our first slower-than-light starships, and almost a million more to discover a method of producing gravity waves which could be used to travel faster than light.
"Once we had discovered a method of rapid star travel, the majority of our people elected to leave Earth altogether, as its climate was becoming increasingly hostile, and we did not wish to interfere with the new evolutionary train that was beginning to take hold. A close watch was kept, however, to ensure that our home world would experience no further such disasters as the one that had wiped out our sister species.
"As we spread through the stars, we found, to our chagrin, that life-bearing planets were rare, and our own intelligence was unique to this galaxy. We began, at this juncture in our history, to take on a task that would become the defining identity for our race. Resscharr, in our tongue, means 'the Life-Givers.'
"We dedicated ourselves to spreading life throughout the galaxy, and to nurturing it to a level of sophistication equal to our own. We began to engineer the climates of suitable planets, through methods your people can only now begin to imagine, making them habitable for us or for any oxygen breathing creature we would later introduce. We did this on thousands of worlds in the millennia that followed our exodus from the homeworld, genetically engineering flora and fauna that could flourish in each ecosystem.
"Then we undertook the most difficult task of all---engineering intelligent life. It was decided to attempt this in two different methods: a slow, more natural process of introducing key mutations in existing species over many thousands of years; and another, more rapid method of radical genetic engineering that combined artificially-grown DNA with that of a native species on one of the few planets with native life.
"The second method was attempted on a world known to you as Zeta Tucanae, and brought about the race that calls itself the Tahni. The first was used with the mammalian species on earth. You, its end result, are our cherished children."
"Fuck me," I could hear Deke whisper beside me, half in awe, half in defiance.
"But before either of our experiments could come to its fruition," the creature continued, "we found that we were not alone, after all. The fringes of our vast empire were attacked by another race of oxygen-breathers---a criminal species that had been exiled from their own galaxy, and had travelled across the millions of light years in a huge fleet of massive starships.
"At first, we attempted to negotiate with these beings, confident that all lifeforms should be united. But these foul creatures were xenophobes, threatened by the thought of any other intelligent life, and they rebuffed our advances, continuing to attack our colonies. As painful as it was for us, we realized that we would have to respond in kind to the violence they had visited upon us.
"By the time we decided to mobilize for war, something our species had not done in over two million years, it was nearly too late---we had been cut off from all of our colonies from the other side of the Galactic core, and penned in to this region of the Spiral Arm and the few habitable worlds between it and the Core.
"In desperation, we decided to seal off this region to keep the invaders from reaching it, creating the gravitoinertially-connected bubble you have named the Cluster. But we couldn't leave our children without a birthright. So we used our gravitic technology to create the wormhole gateways, and left a map of their locations on a world of the star nearest to you. We hoped that we could keep your Cluster safe long enough to allow you to spread through it and achieve your own culture before we would come to meet you as equals.
"Our meeting, unfortunately, was destined to be long delayed. The war lasted for nearly five thousand years, and by its end, our civilization was in ruins. Our population had never been that great to begin with, and more than eighty-five percent of us had been wiped out in the conflict. Our society, built over a longer span than humans have walked upright, had crumbled to dust, and the memories in that rubble were too painful to rebuild. We made a collective decision to leave this galaxy to you, our children, and pursue a new destiny in the body you call the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
"Our opponents we thought totally destroyed. In this, we were wrong. Remote sensors we had left in place over a million years ago told us of a huge battle fleet moving in from a Globular Cluster off the Galactic plane, on a slow course towards the Spiral Arm. We naturally sent probes, and discovered that a remnant of our foes had fled to this cluster and, over time, had built themselves back into a military power at the expense of the environments they called home.
"They have stripped their systems dry to make themselves mighty enough to take back the galaxy they feel is theirs by right of conquest."
Choss paused from his long monologue, gazing meaningfully at the camera.
"Some of you may think our appearance unpleasant, even frightening. Allow me to show you the visage of the enemy we both face."
The view was of a ruined city, once obviously majestic but now crumbled and burning, and still under attack. A disc-shaped craft swooped in low beside a towering spire, paused there for a second before a dazzling white beam shot out of the ship and touched the tower for an eyeblink. The building disintegrated where the beam hit, and the top section of the tower crumbled, toppling slowly to the ground hundreds of meters below.
The shot followed the tower to its impact, caught the dust cloud as it struck before panning away to a group of panic-stricken civilians running desperately through the streets. It took me a second to realize that they were Resscharr and not humans, and I wondered if that subtle uncertain haziness of their figures was intentional.
The camera view focused in on a particular couple---what seemed to be a male and a female, though the difference might have been in my mind alone. Their colored tunics were ripped and burned, and their feathered manes were darkened by soot, but they didn't appear to be injured. The one I had judged a female carried something in her hand that might have been a weapon, and seemed to be searching for something to point it at as they ran.
She led the male into an alley between two of the very few intact buildings, trying to get away from the fires and the falling debris on the street they had occupied. They jogged cautiously through the alleyway, glancing back over their shoulders to make sure they hadn't been followed.
As they emerged from the corridor, however, they froze, the expressions on their faces changing suddenly, their gaze frozen on whatever horror lay before them, unrevealed by the camera. Raising her hand weapon, the female pressed a touch pad on the back of its handle. The gun issued a pale, crackling beam of what seemed to be charged particles, but the discharge had lasted only a fraction of a second before some invisible energy bolt struck her in the midsection and severed her at the waist in an explosion of boiling blood.
Her companion turned in a panic, trying to run, but a large, black pincer snapped out with incredible speed to seize him by the right arm. He screamed, a curiously inhuman warbling sound that sent a shiver up my back, as the pincer lifted him high in the air, and his assailant finally came into view.
I guess, more than anything else, the thing reminded me of a huge insect. Not that I would say it was insectoid, at least not in the way that we and the Tahni are humanoid---it was actually built more like some kind of monstrous crustacean, as much as it resembled any form of life I was familiar with. Yet the impression I was left with as it held the screaming Predecessor up by his
bloody arm was that of an oversized scorpion.
Its head was a flattened oblong of obsidian, inlaid with a pair of deeply-recessed red orbs that I assumed were its eyes, with a pair of horizontally-hinged jaws that clicked together almost unceasingly, creating a castanet-like rhythm. What there was of its neck was nearly swallowed up by a thick plating of what seemed to be biological armor that grew out of its shoulders, covering the joints of its smaller, upper set of arms. These limbs ended in long, multijointed fingers, made for complex manipulation, while the lower set of arms were heavy, load-bearing appendages that terminated in wicked-looking pincers. Mounted to one of the load-bearing arms, in such a manner as to be operated by the same-side manipulative limb, was the energy weapon the creature had used to cut down the female---if I had to guess, I'd say it was some kind of laser.
The thing's chitin-plated torso curved down into a complex, well-protected double-hip joint that was supported by two sets of motive limbs---I hesitated to call them legs, because they seemed to be just as dexterous as the upper sets. The forward pair were short, with well-defined digits, as if they could be used as auxiliary arms in a pinch; while the rear set were stouter and longer, curved digitigrade and clearly meant for high-speed bursts of running. The scorpion image I'd received was only enhanced by the flexible tail that waved back and forth threateningly from behind the rear set of legs, but the more dangerously threatening sting was the heavy assault cannon riding the creature's right hip.
The castanet sound grew louder as the creature grasped the struggling Predecessor male by his other arm, then yanked sharply with both pincers. The male's arms ripped out of their sockets in a spray of blood and he fell face-first to the street, shaking in fatal shock.
"We have come to know these beings," Choss continued, taking up his monologue once again, "as the Skrela. What you have just witnessed was a Skrela warrior, a subspecies that has been their fighting class for millions of years. They are hive beings, with no real sense of individuality as you or I experience it, and the various forms their race takes are so diverse you might wonder if they were of the same evolutionary tree. Our researchers, in fact, believe that they may have been a bioengineered species, but that is no longer important. What is crucial is that they are coming this way, and unless halted, will sweep through your Commonwealth in less than five years.