Yet even from where Naero stood, she could sense it.
The crippled ship was a living machine and even now it was struggling to regenerate itself. It had a will all its own.
Stepping inside only confirmed that for Naero. Even with her teknomancing she could sense that the ship was definitely a hybrid, a mixture of both Dakkur and G’lothc technology.
Danjen led her within. Each chamber and corridor had required an intense battle. Each one had to be nearly destroyed. The damage was extensive.
Naero sensed the Darkforce. Lots of it. Straight ahead.
They passed through ruined blast doors that, by their looks, had been torn open by raw strength and might alone.
Something that an extremely powerful mantid Shai like Gaviok might be capable of, or Baeven himself.
She spotted Jia first, walking perfection in her silvery, glimmering body. Jia was teknomancing against the living ship itself, trying to subdue it.
She also kept it from self-detonating and destroying them all.
Naero and Danjen walked in further. Gaviok stood by, an enormous mantid who could shift his size and density, a natural master of Chaos force. The color of his carapace shifted with his mood. In battle he was red, or even red and deep, dark black, as he was now.
The primary and secondary defenses of the shielded powercore and stardrive chamber had been defeated. Naero had fought against such defenses on board The Dark Star. She knew how tough they could be.
The last shielded blastwall barrier to the core stood before them.
Baeven stood poised with his back to everyone else, draining the Darkforce energy away, and converting it into Cosmic energy that he could make use of.
Baeven stepped back and briefly glanced at Naero.
Naero started, and brought both her hands to her mouth.
Baeven was different. One of Baeven’s eyes burned with Chaos energy–the other with the Darkforce.
And she was the only one who could see it. Only another Cosmic Guardian could.
What did he see when he looked at her?
“About time. Give us a hand, Naero,” Baeven said. “This entire ship’s been a major pain in my ass.”
Jia shifted to one side. Naero moved to the other.
She briefly hugged Gaviok.
“Good to see you, my prince,” Naero told her mantid friend. There was a special bond between them, like family.
“Naero,” Gaviok said, turning briefly more red than black. “A joy to see you.”
“Hold off the love fest, you two,” Baeven told them. “We have a vital mission to finish here.”
“Agreed,” Naero said, preparing to focus at the task at hand. “So, what’s the prize here?” she asked her uncle.
Baeven grunted, fighting the Darkforce once more, but he was the Guardian of Chaos energy and the Darkforce itself. “Nothing much,” Baeven said. “Just a working enemy wyrmhole projection array. We capture it and learn its secrets, and then we’ll be on par with our new good friends.”
Jia smiled over at Naero. “We’ll be able to travel back and forth across the entire galaxy, just as our foes can. Your people can take the fight to the enemy homeworlds and strongholds, once we locate them. No longer will you need to sit by and wait for the foe to strike at us with impunity.”
Baeven said it before Naero could.
“And once we reach the Gamma Quadrant, we can track down your child, Naero.”
“You know where she is, and Naero-3?”
“We will when we get there,” Baeven said. “Unlike you, I had the sense to put an Astral tracer inside your replicant. Now, as for that girl of yours, Naero. Haisha. She is going to be something else. I don’t even know if the G’lothc would know what the hell to do with something like her. She’s a wild blade if I’ve ever seen one. She just might surprise our new friends a bit, if they aren’t careful.”
At last, Naero had some hope.
She focused all of her teknomancy abilities and placed both of her hands right into the Darkforce field, ignoring the pain and linking with the vessel itself, preparing to merge with it and wrestle with the ship head on. “Let’s do this.”
Baeven continued draining the ship of its energies. Jia kept the ship from killing itself and all of them. Gaviok and Danjen stood by, ready to deal with any surprises or last-minute defenses the living ship might throw at them.
Naero merged with the living vessel, just as she had with Alala. The only difference was that this ship was hostile. She needed to bend its will to her will, and to do that, she had to be come one with it.
It was like wrestling with her Dark Beast all over again.
But its fledgling will and purpose faded as Baeven continued to drain off its power source.
Naero fought and wrestled with its simplistic, undeveloped mind.
Intruder. Must destroy! Must destroy both of us. My programming…cannot let you have…my secrets!
Naero slowly reasoned with it, changing its logic more and more all the while.
You do not need to destroy me, because I am now part of you. You are part of me. We can now work together. There is no reason to destroy any longer. We are one.
In the end, Naero had to replicate part of herself and integrate it into the ship’s simple, straightforward AI. That was the only thing that could make it docile and cooperative.
Then Naero used teknomancy to finally make it obedient to her, Baeven, Jia, and any of Baeven’s crew. She added Spacer Intel override protocols for good measure, for when they turned the ship over to Klyne and his people for analysis.
Just not before she, Baeven, and Jia understood the alien wyrmhole projectors, and installed them on their vessels as needed.
That would take perhaps a day or two.
Naero closed her eyes for a moment.
Hang on baby; hang on, Om. The cavalry is coming. I swear we are.
Let them be all right still. The enemy would most likely see them as valuable prizes, and keep them for study–at first.
Once the captured ship was fully subdued, they could begin to understand all of its advanced systems, including the wyrmhole projectors.
Naero started in on that right away.
Baeven and his people had been fighting the alien ship and its defenses for days. They took a short breather before joining back in.
Naero kept going. She was still relatively fresh to all of this. She even got the ship’s self-healing and self-repair capabilities to kick in more. But everything had to be modified. The living ship could not work the same way anymore. It could not simply operate, powered by the Darkforce alone, with all of those insidious alien defenses.
She modified the powercore so that it became a Cosmic force generator, and not solely a Darkforce battery that would need to be charged by a Darkforce generator. Baeven and Gaviok had already destroyed all of those and unleashed the Mystics inside of them. The ship would have eventually run out of power on its own without a generator feeding it.
Now it could operate independently on Cosmic energy itself, which of course included a balanced part of the Darkforce, and not that energy alone.
Yet Naero held the ship’s intellect just below being self-aware. It would not develop a personality of its own like Om or Alala, unless she chose to start one up. For right now, it was still just a vessel, awaiting programming, commands, and direction.
Naero had to be careful about creating new sentient minds.
It took her and Jia five hours to learn and comprehend all of the ins and outs of the enemy wyrmhole projectors. Another three hours to teknomance and install the alien tek on The Shadow Fox.
There was, as yet, no time to test it.
Naero had vanished off the radar for more than a day, and the situation on Kalathar was still dire.
Intel and everyone else would be going nuts, but wait until Naero and Gaviok showed up with their prize, delivering it to Intel and the Clans on a silver platter.
These were exactly the kind of tek breakthro
ughs that they had been waiting for.
9
The first thing Naero did before she and Gaviok left the island in the refitted, cloaked enemy spyship–now their ship–was christen it and give it a new designation.
She smashed a bottle of champagne Baeven gave her on the side of the thick, black, pill-like hull. She had even thought up a new name for the vessel. “I name thee The Black Spot!”
When they lifted off from the island, they caught up on the chatter of the Alliance fleets, still patrolling above stricken Kalathar. Naero’s stealth fighter barely fit within one of the small cargo holds.
Just as Naero thought, everyone was calling out and searching for her.
They quietly docked with her flagship, The Flying Dagger, and made sure to take an hour or two to install the new wyrmhole projector and a few other nifty mods they had come across. Upgrades were always great.
Then Naero took a breath, and she and Gaviok made straight for The Kathmandu, to finally turn over their prize and all of its tek secrets.
The fixer clouds would have a field day refitting the fleets.
Naero would strongly suggest to Klyne that only Spacer naval warships be given the new projector arrays. She felt certain that he would agree.
If the Corps got their hands on that tek, they’d soon be flooding the Gamma Quadrant with a raging tide of exploitation–not exploration. That would mess up things even worse than what they probably already were.
Naero turned to Gaviok suddenly. “Why in the heck did you insist on coming along, my prince? And what is with all of the luggage? I’ve never even seen you carry a duffle.”
Gaviok displayed his mandible version of what passed as a mantid smile.
“Baeven and Jia and I have been in deep discussion for months. I have business to conduct with the Spacer Mystics, you will be happy to know.”
Naero knitted her brows together for a moment. Gaviok had trained with the Mystics for a while. She took a stab at her friend’s motivations. “You really want to complete the entire Mystic training? You want to be a Spacer Mystic?”
“I do. The first non-Spacer Mystic, and more.”
She was afraid of what the “more” was going to mean.
But they were about to dock with Admiral Klyne’s flagship.
Once on board, she and Gaviok, by default, were more or less placed under arrest and brought before Klyne and the High Mystic Masters, where they were all busy discussing the dilemma on Kalathar from the bridge and the viewscreens looking down over the stricken planet.
Klyne immediately began to dress her down for pulling off another one of her patented vanishing acts.
Naero endured all that she could and then interrupted him.
“Admiral Klyne. Please allow me to speak. There were good reasons. I have vital information to turn over to you, our Clans, and to the Alliance. Please, hear me out.”
“Unless you have a cure for the possession wyrm plague on the planet, I don’t want to hear a lot of excuses and crap from you.”
Naero smiled slightly. “As a matter of fact, I have found a cure within the KDM, and we can begin implementing it across the planet’s surface. The Kexx defeated this scourge long ago. And now I know how to combat and defeat it.”
Klyne had to sit down. So did Master Tree and Master Jo.
Klyne couldn’t speak and only stared at her for a while. “So, does this mean you’ve unlocked the secrets of the KDM?”
Naero held up both hands. “Whoa. Maybe just one, and that was pretty tough as it was. And if that was any sort of a preview, pulling secrets out of the KDM is going to be like pulling teeth out of your own jaw. Not fun.”
Klyne started making the arrangements. “Tell us what we need to do, Naero. Then we can prepare to implement the cure.”
“Sure, in a moment. I’m not finished, yet. On top of the cure, the ship that we docked in your landing bay is a captured alien spyship of hybrid G’lothc and Dakkur tek.”
She sent three data fixers floating over to Klyne. “These fixers have all of the data stored on the alien ship, the enemy wyrmhole projectors, and the tek secrets of another advanced race from the Gamma Quadrant called the Pelani, as I have mentioned before.”
Klyne and everyone else stared at her once again.
“Uh, when you’re done with The Black Spot, I’d like to have it back as part of my fleet. I could use a specialized craft such as that…in my line of work. That’s quite reasonable, don’t you think? I’m not asking that much in return, am I?”
Klyne and his crew exploded into action, not sure of what to do first.
Gaviok went over and quietly began speaking with the two High Masters, once he could get their attention.
By then, Naero was very tired. She would need to rest, gather her strength, and do a great deal of startapping to power the Kexxian cure on Kalathar later that night.
By then, the Spacer fleets should be going through the fixers to refit them with the new tek upgrades, and prepare to seek out the enemy.
Klyne and the Naval strategists were already discussing how they might proceed.
Naero had a hurried dinner with her crew. Captain Tyber and The Dark Star would arrive for their refit that night as well. She needed to hurry if she was going to grab some badly needed rest.
Khai showed up from his various errands and missions.
“Naero, I’ve heard the news. It’s so amazing what you have done.”
“Baeven did a lot of it. I keep telling you how much we owe him.”
“I have so much to tell you on my own.”
Naero rubbed her eyes and slumped against him. “Please, could it wait? It’s been a very full couple of days, and I’ve hardly slept. If I’m going to start implementing the Kexxian cure on the planet tonight, I desperately need some rest. Will you just hold me? Just protect me and give me peace.”
Khai’s eyes flared and he drew in a deep breath. “I can do that. Nothing shall get past me. In my arms, you shall be safe and warm. Have you given orders to your crew not to disturb your rest, my heart?”
“Only if the galaxy catches fire,” Naero said with a chuckle.
Khai offered her his hand. “Then come, know peace beside me, Naero. Let me be thy bed.”
Naero smiled up at his handsome face. She was too exhausted to kiss him.
Within minutes, Naero blacked out.
Khai woke her gently, six standard hours later.
She briefly welcomed Ty and his crew, and couldn’t wait to hold little Gallan. She spoke briefly with Alala, the entity on Tyber’s self-aware ship, welcoming her, as well.
Then she had to prepare for the implementation of the cure to rid Kalathar of the G’lothc possession wyrm infestation, and reverse most of the negative effects. The reversal cure could not bring back any who had already perished. It was not a cure for death.
And by the time she was finished purging the planet, Baeven and The Shadow Fox could be back from their maiden test flight through the wyrmhole projectors, back and forth across the Gamma Quadrant.
When she explained the process to Klyne, the Intel Medical Corps, and the High Masters, at first they didn’t believe her. And for some strange reason, Gaviok was there also. Apparently, Klyne and the High Masters had taken the Prince of the Shai into the Alliance. He was now part of the inner circle.
If only they knew that Gaviok was the closest thing that Baeven had as a brother. Most likely he did not tell them that fact in its entirety.
“I’ll show you how it’s done. Bring in the remaining test subjects, and put the wyrms back into them,” she instructed.
Again the medteks blinked at her as if she were insane.
“Put them back in?” one even muttered in disbelief.
Naero rolled her eyes for a second. “Yes. The wyrms must be destroyed while they are still within the host in order to completely free the host of them and their influence. That’s why the test subjects were dying. Once infested with the wyrm, it must be purged from them not
only on a physical level, but also on a psyonic and a Cosmic level.”
The medteks looked to Klyne and he nodded.
In the end, all eleven of the remaining victims in stasis tubes and gravlifts were brought in and positioned around Naero.
“Everyone get behind me,” Naero warned. “This might get a little crazy.”
Medteks backed up. They didn’t need to be told twice.
Some of them who had heard of Naero even left the medical bay.
Klyne brought up shielding to protect the observers.
Naero focused her biomancy abilities and opened her third eye.
She saw through all of the test subjects as if they were crystal, and detected the insidious G’lothc possession wyrms almost instantly. Their sickening aura of malevolence. How could such things even exist?
And fiends such as these had her child.
Naero shook her head. She couldn’t afford to be distracted, even by that. She needed to concentrate.
Obliterate the possession wyrms, purge them from the victims, and keep the people alive.
She tried to unleash just a part of the Kexxian cure to affect the purge.
The forces she unleashed blew out that entire side of the flagship’s hull. Emergency beacons flared. It was all that Naero could do to keep herself and the stasis pods from being sucked out into space.
Finally the emergency shields sealed off the massive hull breach. But the room and the ship were still heavily damaged. Fixer clouds raced in from both sides, within and without, to make repairs.
Finally the medteks could check the test subjects.
“They’re all alive. Their life signs are little stressed…”
“Big deal–at least they’re not dead,” Naero said, cutting to the chase. “That’s what matters, isn’t it? Sorry about your ship, Klyne, but I don’t think this was meant to be unleashed out in space, within a vessel.”
Klyne raised both eyebrows. “I kinda noticed that.”
Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial Page 8