Tempest: Book Two of the Terran Cycle

by Philip C. Quaintrell

  The Criterion would adapt to war and eventually so would the population under its care. It seemed ALF already had a better understanding of Terran abilities than any actual Terran. Savrick would need an army and a weapon they wouldn’t see coming. The cube had known all this and already had plans.

  He looked down on Kaldor and knew this would be the beginning of the end. His instructions had been clear - retrieve a single canister of nanocelium and return it directly to the cube. After that he would have his weapon and the next phase could begin. There were Gomar on every planet being oppressed, and he was wearing the answer. The plan was simple enough but the cube had emphasised the time pressures. After this attack, ALF would respond with contingencies they couldn’t even fathom, so he had to be fast. Savrick pushed out his awareness feeling the complex glow with every being below. He recoiled momentarily, still coming to grips with his extra senses. Their arrogance made his blood boil with rage. They had taken everything from him and he would make them pay for it. His new found power made him feel bold and invincible. He was about to change the face of the galaxy, and he felt exhilarated at the thought of a Gomar at the heart of that change.

  He felt the warm breeze wash over his face with a scent of sulphur. He looked over the tip of the curving spike and knew there were just over two kilometres from its tip to the floor of Kaldor. With a smirk of wicked glee he crouched like a stalking predator, burying his armoured fingers into the rock.

  “We are forever...” Savrick mockingly whispered the Terran motto as he launched himself off the great spike. His feet kicked up plumes of black rock before the momentum ran out, leaving him to plummet vertically head first. Twisting spires and hovering platforms passed him by at a blurring speed until a single glass dome was all he could see. He cocooned himself inside an impenetrable bubble of telekinesis, using it to increase his speed as well.

  The dome’s covering shattered under his impact, blowing away the metal frames and raining shards of glass down on the inhabitants. At the last second, Savrick twisted his body bringing his full force down on his bent knee. The stone floor cracked like a spider’s web around him while he remained crouched in the crater. There were screams from all around as unsuspecting Terran were cut down by the larger shards and debris.

  Savrick slowly stood up, impressed with the exo-skeleton he had made. Combined with the telekinesis he hadn’t felt a thing as he punched through the building. Everyone was staring at him in shock and disbelief. A woman directly in front of him quickly grabbed her daughter and protectively placed herself between them. There were others who had reacted quicker with their hands over their head as they maintained the broken glass in suspended animation.

  Kill them all!

  The thought had come from nowhere but it was his voice he heard. He looked out over the sea of faces and saw the people who had forced him to love T’lea in secret. The people who had forbidden them from having a child, the people who had tried to take their child. They would all pay the price.

  The crowd was filling up, but not with people. In between the faces, hard light holograms were appearing in flashes of light. Every hologram bore the face of ALF wearing his usual floor length robe. They slowly moved through the crowd edging closer to Savrick. He clenched his armoured fists at the sight of the ancient A.I. Everything that had ever happened to him, to the Gomar, could be laid at the feet of the Criterion.

  It was an infuriating thought that the A.I. could not feel pain. Pain was the only thing ALF deserved. It was an injustice that it could not be made to suffer as he had. Savrick looked around at the scared faces of his Terran cousins, and knew that there was another way to make the machine feel pain.

  He would take his time.

  From within the crowd a single figure became clearer than the rest as she made her way to the front.

  “Kalian...” Esabelle was looking at him with disappointment on her face. Reality flickered and his head split with pain as two lives collided in a tangled web of memories. “Kalian!” his daughter shouted. The Terran environment fell apart, giving way to his true surroundings, his identity coming back.

  “It happened again, didn’t it?” Esabelle’s question brought Kalian back to reality.

  They were running side by side along one of the Gommarian’s many miles of corridor. This had become part of his training routine over the last five and a half months. Esabelle had taken it upon herself to continue Kalian’s training after the Outpost had been buried under a hundred thousand tons of the Conclave vessel, Helion.

  “Who was it this time?” she pressed.

  “Savrick...”

  Ever since his mind had been invaded by Esabelle’s father, he had struggled to separate their thoughts and memories. Of course he now had the issue of separating Li’ara’s mind as well, since saving her life on Naveen. It was becoming awfully crowded in his head. Esabelle had been teaching him to compartmentalise his mind and file the different memories like a computer program. After compiling them he could then choose to save or delete. Most of Savrick’s he was more than happy to destroy, but Li’ara’s were harder to part with.

  “I was on Hadrok, he was on Hadrok,” Kalian corrected himself. “You were only a child.” Having run almost twenty miles, he was finding it hard to articulate through his laboured breaths. “He had already found the cube and was about to attack Kaldor.” He was continuously amazed at the feats his body was capable of. He had never run so far and so fast in his life, and yet he had only begun to sweat five miles back.

  “You need to focus. When you feel your mind going there, pull back, but keep hold of the memory. You need to contain the memory without becoming a part of it.”

  She barely sounded out of breath. In fairness, he thought, Esabelle had been training herself for thousands of years inside Elandar’s virtuality. In a way she was the most amazing of all the Terran. Born of two Gomar she should have been so uncontrollable as to be dangerous. But instead she had done what no other Gomar had achieved and mastered her mind, utilising her abilities without ever wearing a harness or one of Savrick’s armoured exo-skeletons.

  In a way she was better than ALF when it came to teaching control. He thought of the ancient A.I. for a moment. There had been no word from him since they left Naveen, and they all wondered if he could have survived the Helion’s impact.

  They continued their run down the numerous corridors, having run almost the entire length of the ship. In comparison to the Conclave ships, the Gommarian had a very human feel to its design. In place of the cathedral sized walkways, they ran through corridors with four flat edges. The overhead spotlights gave it an ominous gloom that never felt quite bright enough. Of course there is more to the great ship than meets the eye.

  Using systems set up by Esabelle, the bridge crew had the power to alter the internal and external structure, allowing for different rooms in every size depending on the need. The six factories, however, were larger than a lot of Conclave ships, ready for the capture and breakdown of raw materials. Kalian was also aware of the changes made to the ship’s engine in terms of propulsion. With no interactive pilot to power the many systems, using Terran abilities, Esabelle had created a massive port at the rear of the ship. This port was connected to the Starillium, an engine capable of faster-than-light travel, since they needed to use a more common form of transport. Kalian still found it mind boggling that, with the right amount of energy supply, a Terran could actually generate a sub-space wormhole and push a ship through it. That was an ability he knew he would never unlock without a power-source the size of a star at his disposal.

  Kalian mentally controlled every cell in his body, commanding them to replenish his energy supplies to prevent any fatiguing poisons. He could feel his muscles rapidly breaking down the lactic acid and filtering it through various organs. He tasked his bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells, in order to carry the required oxygen to his starving lungs. Small adjustments such as these made compartmentalisation harder.

 
; Rounding the next corner, Kalian could again feel reality blending into the surreal memories. He had no choice but to stop running and concentrate on neurological control. Esabelle shot past him as he re-filed the memory belonging to Li’ara. He had glimpsed a red-headed girl wandering the halls of a museum on Earth, before pulling back from the moment that wasn’t his. He tried not to dwell on the images of Earth; he had convinced himself that looking to the future was the only way to cope with the loss of his home world.

  He stood, doubled over with his hands resting on his knees, his breath laboured. Kalian saw the judging feet of Esabelle step into view before him.

  “This is why we train.” It was not the voice of a woman who had just run twenty miles. “You must learn control over your mind and body while performing low level tasks.”

  Kalian couldn’t help but crack a sarcastic smile at her notion of low level tasks. He was still struggling with his mind/body connection when it came to the finer things. He was happy with his progress during their sparring matches though. By opening up a virtuality inside his mind he could retreat and assess new threats and possibilities in a fraction of time. It was also the only thing he could beat Esabelle at. However, once their abilities come into play, Esabelle would always gain the advantage.

  Kalian managed to stand up straight as his respiratory rate decreased. Different gauges and receptors in his blood informed him of a steady heart rate as well as new stores of Adenosine Triphosphate from converted lactic acid. The only thing he craved now was a drink and something to eat. The Gommarian was capable of replicating almost any food or drink from its memory banks though, in truth, Kalian actually preferred some of the Novaarian delicacies Telarrek brought onboard. Thinking of food gave him a particular taste in his mouth, and somehow he just knew it was Rorstack, a six legged creature native to Hadrok. It was the first time one of Savrick’s memories had imprinted into a sense, rather than remaining firmly in his head. He decided to keep it to himself.

  “We should head to the bridge.” Kalian attempted to change the subject, “Li’ara said there was another ship arriving today.” He could tell from her look that his training could not be overlooked for long.

  “Fine, but we’re sprinting there.” Kalian grimaced at the prospect of running another three miles. “And we’re going to use telekinesis to increase our speed.” He threw his head back in mock disgust. When they ran at such speeds he was forced to continually expand his awareness into the surrounding space. If either of them collided with another person they were likely to break bones.

  Before setting off again, Kalian noticed the large circular door that sat forebodingly at the end of a branching corridor. The door concealed a containment bay filled with twelve Rem-stores, and twelve sleeping Gomar.

  Kalian pushed his awareness into the chamber and registered the feedback of a dozen unconscious beings. Just feeling their presence made his spine tighten with the build-up of energy. Any one of them could tear a Conclave vessel apart with their mind.

  “You don’t like them being onboard.” Esabelle wasn’t asking; she knew Kalian’s position on the subject.

  “They’re dangerous.” Kalian had survived his encounter with Lilander and the beast by the skin of his teeth. If ALF hadn’t obliterated the beast with a Novaarian orbital cannon, he would have certainly died at the old Avatar’s hand. And to his luck, Lilander had followed Li’ara onto the Helion where she met a similar fate to Savrick. Kalian tried not to think about it, but he knew Savrick would have killed him had ALF not dropped the Nexus class ship onto Naveen. In a way he had done nothing but distract the Gomar until ALF and Li’ara could spring the trap. Against any other being he was a force to be reckoned with, but a Gomar?

  He needed to train.

  “You still think the Highclave suspect?” Esabelle asked.

  The council had been informed by the Laronian prisoners, taken along with the humans, that some of the Gomar had remained on the Gommarian when the Valoran’s Starrillium went supernova. With Telarrek’s help they had managed to conceal the fact that the Gomar were still alive. Thankfully, the last thing the Laronians saw before their rescue was the armoured bodies of their captors fall to the floor. Esabelle had overloaded their cerebral links but hadn’t actually killed them. Telarrek and Ilyseal agreed that the Gomar were too powerful to be handed over to the Conclave. If they ever lost control of them, it could be disastrous without either Kalian or Esabelle around to even the odds.

  “I think if I were them, I’d be pretty paranoid. There’s too much they don’t understand about us. We’re two halves of the same species, but all they see are the Terran, not the human. There are only fourteen people in the whole galaxy that are technically Terran now, and twelve of them should have been ejected into the nearest star.” Kalian had never agreed with keeping them alive, not after the genocide they wrought.

  “We have to plan for all eventualities, Kalian. They may still prove useful.” Esabelle placed her leg high on to the wall while she leaned into it, stretching the muscle.

  Kalian knew she didn’t need to physically stretch the muscle, but it was typical of Esabelle. She could mentally command her muscles the same way any Terran could, she just preferred the human way. He had questioned her on it only once; her answer had been explanation enough.

  “Do you know why the Terran lost against, Savrick?” she had asked. “Hubris. They believed themselves to be untouchable, that death was a myth. They took their abilities for granted, and in their arrogance they became soft. They were too reliant on their artificial god and their own ability to manipulate the universe. The way we are right now is what we need to be to maintain our existence. There’s still enough human in you to make you appreciate what you have. Don’t always rely on the Terran way of doing things.”

  Kalian had agreed with her point of view. With the things he could do it was easy to think of himself as more than human.

  “Do you think they ever recovered any of the bodies?”

  Esabelle appeared doubtful at Kalian’s question. “Not this again. They were pulverised under all that weight, along with the beast. There would be nothing left to find. Our genetic secrets are safe, for now.”

  “What about, Sef?” Telarrek had been the last one to see him alive.

  “He’s gone...” Esabelle looked almost sad.

  Kalian could empathise in a way; she had cared for them and kept each of them alive for millennia when she piloted the ship. It wouldn’t be so unusual for her to still feel some connection to them, even if she did hate Elandar and her father especially.

  He eyed the touch pad next to the circular door. They had keyed the lock so it could only be accessed with either Esabelle or himself present. It didn’t offer much comfort. He connected to the room one last time, ensuring their captivity, before racing Esabelle to the bridge.

  The command bridge was a buzz of activity with over a dozen UDC personnel overseeing the numerous diagnostics. Some sat at their station while others were forced to stand and move from one place to another as data was transferred between holographic charts. The Gommarian was fairly self-sufficient, requiring little input from the makeshift crew.

  The room was lit by a rainbow of colours from the various hard light holograms and touch consoles. Perhaps the most impressive feature was the panoramic viewport that encompassed the forward section of the bridge, as well as half of the ceiling. Li’ara wasn’t fooled by the image however; she was well aware of the bridge’s location within the mammoth ship, and knew the image was generated from external cameras. In the belly of the Gommarian they were surrounded by miles of internal walls and an incredibly thick hull.

  Li’ara took stock of the crew before her and appreciated their diligence. They had each lost something or someone from Earth and Century, and were dealing with that loss in their own way. The fact that they continued to perform their duty admirably was testament to their strong character. The UDC will do that to you, she thought.

  Discounting the s
cientists onboard, she knew there were only one thousand four hundred and seventy-six UDC soldiers and crew personnel. It wasn’t much but they were getting by, for now. There had been talks surrounding the future of their race among the higher ranking scientists, as well as Captain Fey’s ranking officers. So far the only thing they could all agree on was that the Gommarian was not the right place to start again, as it were.

  Trying to stay positive, Li’ara focused on the new arrival. She came to stand behind Lieutenant Rodriguez who was monitoring the escorted human vessel. The Conclave continued to send out their beacon of hope into the Orion Arm, awaiting any response from survivors that were out-system when Savrick attacked. In the last five and half months, three ships had made the trip to Conclave space and transferred to the Gommarian. Unfortunately, High Charge Uthor had personally informed them of a ship found floating in between the two galactic arms. The ship had insufficient life-support systems to bridge the galactic gap. All crew were dead.

  Li’ara stooped over the Lieutenant’s shoulder to examine the specs on the new arrival. It was apparently a deep space explorer in search of more precious Solarcite, or Intrinium as the Conclave called it. With a crew of only sixteen, it was relatively small in terms of adding to the population, but every human being was a win.

  “This is the Gommarian to the Columbus, do you copy?” Lieutenant Rodriguez checked the shield strength on the hangar entrance as she waited for their reply. After an affirmative she sent a command alerting the hangar crew before replying, “You are free to pass through the hangar shield Columbus. Your landing platform is being highlighted for you now.” After another affirmative she opened the comm to the escorting Novaarian craft, “You guys know the drill.”

  Li’ara smiled at the familiarity that had grown between the Novaarians and the humans. Telarrek was a familiar face with his frequent visits to help install everyone’s translators. He explained that Ilyseal had been reassigned but he wasn’t allowed to divulge any more than that, though privately he had admitted that he was unaware of her new role. Captain Fey had extended an invitation to the Novaarian Highclave councillor, Elondrasa, though she was yet to accept. It seemed Conclave politics was even more complicated than Central Parliament’s had been.