by Ian Woodhead
“That girl will live through this purge, and so will a few others. Whether it is enough to ensure the continuation of your species rests upon your resolve to finish your journey, Walish Din. Embrace your life, you stupid shepherd. Make your mark, shout out your status, show this stupid flock of two-legged sheep that you are here!”
“I don’t understand!” An old man had now got in his way, and no matter how hard he pushed, just like everyone else his age, the ancient Diannin would not listen to a word from anyone younger than him.
“The Gizanti approach, shepherd. In another few moments, the Diannin on the edge of the crowd will see that death is near.”
Walish Din tilted his head back and screamed out. The old man jumped, but he still did not move. The young shepherd then did something that no young Diannin had ever done. He curled his fingers into a fist. The old Diannin’s eyes widened. He must have realised Walish Din’s intention and tried to move out of the way, but he was too slow to avoid the shepherd’s punch.
He hit the old Diannin between the eyes. The blow knocked him back, tripping up over somebody’s feet. The people around the old Diannin all moved apart in tandem as his body fell onto the cobbled stones. A shocked silence hovered over the crowd. Walish Din felt their eyes drill into his body. He had just committed the ultimate crime.
“Well, that’s one way to shout your status, I guess.” The human stepped over the groaning Diannin. “Hurry up, you’ve bought yourself another minute. Don’t let it go to waste!”
The crowd parted as he walked towards them. He had never felt so much hatred directed at him. This was almost as bad as the misery Walish Din felt when he reached into that girl’s head. He was now truly alone. No other Diannin would ever talk to him again.
“Stop it with the self-pity. If you don’t get out of here, there won’t be another Diannin left in the galaxy. Move your legs, it’s not far now.”
He moved past the remaining members of his species, seriously wondering if he would ever see any of his kind again. Walish Din heard their screams and began to sob. He would not turn around again though, not this time. As he knew that if he did that again, this shepherd would not be able to continue. He would die here.
“You’re nearly there, there isn’t that far to go now. Keep moving, you’re doing great, far better than I thought you would. I…”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” he screamed. “You are making it sound like I have just participated in some stupid competition. My own kind are dying around me.”
“Don’t you think I don’t bloody know that, you silly little shepherd? If it wasn’t for my intervention, you would be able to stand there and have your little temper tantrum. I am the voice of reason, Walish Din. I can see that they’re all dying. I have eyes you know.” She stood directly in front of him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “The galaxy is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care about you or your species. I care about you, and I also care about the ultimate survival of your species.”
“By letting those orange dragons murder them all? Get out of my way. You talk in riddles and contradictions.” The girl refused to move. “Leave me alone. I no longer wish to look at your annoying hairless pink face anymore.” If the orange dragons were coming up here to destroy the spaceport, then all he had to do was find another way down this hill. Perhaps he could look for the pretty young Diannin he saw in the market. Walish Din saw more sense in trying to help her get over her grief than to continue on this silly notion perpetrated by some imaginary companion.
The human girl had not moved. “No,” she growled. “You ain’t chickening out, not now, not after the trouble I’ve gone to get you here.” Her fingers dug into muscles. “Your destiny is far greater than you could even imagine, you silly little shepherd. It isn’t just your ridiculous species whose danger of extinction hangs in the balance. You need to forget about the girl in the market.”
Walish Din felt water drip from his eyes. “What is this?”
“They are tears, shepherd.”
“How? We do not leak water. I thought only humans did that.”
The girl nodded. “You’re crying, you idiot, because I’m crying. There are over twelve million displaced humans on your planet, Walish Din. They are all going to die a horrible death.”
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured.
The girl cast her gaze towards the village before turning her attention back to him. “I know you are, and that’s why you have to continue.” She shushed him before he could object. “Listen, listen to me. Those humans are living incubators. Growing inside their bodies are billions of spores, encased in several hard shells. Once the shells are ready, what’s left of the human bodies will dissolve. Can you guess what will happen then?”
Walish Din shook his head.
“Those hard shells will appear over every planet, infested by humans, in the galactic expanse. They’ll crack open and release their spores. Within a few days, there won’t be a single human being left alive.” The girl paused. “The human species will no longer exist, meaning that their continued oppression will be at an end.”
Walish Din wasn’t sure how to take this news. Everybody knew that the Terran Empire was at heart evil, but that didn’t mean that the entire species should die. He could hear those orange dragons in the distance. Still, once those incubators were off his world, then surely the orange dragons would go as well, leaving them alone.
“Can you guess what will happen then?”
He was sure that she was about to tell him no matter how he replied.
“The Empire will find out where those human incubators originated. Before you could say glikglik, Imperial warships will fill your sky, and it will be the last sight you avert see before they open fire and burn this world.”
Walish Din spun around and walked away from her, feeling sick.
“There’s a chance you can save your planet and all the others,” she shouted after him. “Stay here and you’ll surely die.”
He continued walking away, heading towards the largest building in the town. Walish Din heard the sounds of human and alien shouts coming from that building. He felt the tension mounting the closer he got to the spaceport. There was a chance that he could still end up dead before he even figured out how to get off his home-world.
This wasn’t the first time he had been to this alien-looking building. When he was younger, his spawn donors brought him and the other yearlings to the market in order to enrich their teaching. Before returning, they brought them all up here, up to the spaceport, built by the humans. The sight of all those silver metal birds lifting off into the sky made some of the other yearlings cry out in terror. Walish Din saw the look of superiority on some of the human faces. They obviously thought it funny that their superior technology scared these primitive creatures.
The humans didn’t look quite so superior now. Walish Din stopped a few metres from the grand archway. Several humans as well as a smattering of aliens bustled around the spaceport entrance. Right now, they all wore the same expression as his yearling friends. Walish Din gained no comfort from this.
He passed through the archway, aware that his imaginary human female had caught up with him. “Now what do I do?”
His voice of reason stayed silent.
“Come on, answer me.” Walish Din dare not take another step towards that crowd of large, angry looking people. In fact, the urge to flee gripped him by the throat when he heard gunfire.
“Don’t run!” she hissed. “Don’t you dare leave here.”
He had to jump out of the way when two more humans rushed past him and joined the rest of the humans. As they pushed their way closer towards the building, Walish Din saw the reason for the crowd’s lack of movement.
There were three men blocking the small archway which led inside, each one dressed in black armour with accompanying black weapons held in their hands.
The panic-stricken men were not alone. Beside them, stood another, older man. He too was dressed
in a similar uniform, but unlike the others, the armour hung off him. It looked as though a child was wearing it. This didn’t seem to bother the older man one bit. Unlike the jittery security personnel, he carried on doing his job like he had all the time in the world, much to the annoyance of the waiting crowd who, by the looks of it, were becoming more uneasy by the second. He took a ticket out of a crying man’s hand, fed it through a grey, rectangular device in his hand, then studied the readout for what seemed like an age before nodding three times. Two of the security then grabbed the crying man and literally launched him into the building.
More humans pushed past Walish.
“Look at the old bastard’s face; he’s loving this,” cried the girl. “I bet it’s the first time in his life when he’s actually felt like someone important.”
Some of the humans were now throwing credit chips at the guards and pleading to let them pass. This was going to get ugly real soon. He felt the tension in the air. It made the urge to run even more intense.
Two shots fired from inside that crowd, followed by a dozen more shots. They came from beyond the spaceport. Walish groaned loudly when he saw gouts of flame shoot into the air, further down the hill. The orange dragons had entered the settlement!
“Stay with me, Walish Din. Don’t you dare run now!”
The security guards now fired into the crowd. Three humans fell to the floor. Thick blood pooled out from under their stomachs. Half the crowd turned and ran while the remaining humans dropped to the floor. Screams of mercy and crying battered his ears, yet above the noise, Walish Din still heard his voice of reason telling him to run. To run towards the three guards.
Every cell in his body howled in protest as he turned to face the human security guard. Walish swallowed hard then ran straight at them, expecting to be cut down at any second.
“Believe in The Touch, it will protect you. It will always protect you.”
Her calming voice did help to smooth away some of the terror, but it didn’t stop him from jumping out of his skin and biting his lip when one of the guards reached forward and slapped his large hand on the Diannin’s shoulder.
“Come on, sir, let’s get you on the shuttle.”
The man pulled him inside and physically propelled him over to the waiting doors. The shrieks of the humans he’d left behind filled his ears, along with the sickening sound of weapon’s fire coming from the humans and from the orange dragons.
The girl had been right. They were heading towards this spaceport. He reached the door just as the orange dragons slaughtered the last of the humans by the entrance and pushed their huge bodies through the narrow gap.
Walish Din’s last view of the spaceport before the hatch softly closed was of one of the orange dragons stamping on that ticket inspector while blindly firing its energy staff into the air.
Somebody gently picked his shivering body off the soft carpet. He turned his head to find an older human with a shock of grey hair trying to escape out of a black-peaked cap looking down at him. His large green eyes were full of concern.
“This is the captain, Walish Din. Tell him to alter his course. Tell him that he has to take you to Altus Gamma.”
Walish Din blinked, before relaying the message.
“But, sir, this is a passenger liner. We can’t fly into another war zone. I’m not even sure that we’ll escape from this one.”
“Ask him again.”
Walish did as his voice of reason commanded. The captain of the liner released a tiny sob before finally nodding. “Yes, right away, sir.”
The girl kneeled beside the young Diannin. “You need to prepare yourself. What you’ve just undergone is nothing compared to the challenges which you’re about to face.
Chapter Nine
He opened both eyes, vaguely aware that the most important thought in his life was slipping through his barely coherent mind. Danny Cole blinked rapidly, trying to hold onto the last few fragments of whatever had been running through his dreaming mind.
The last fragments of whatever he’d been thinking about abruptly vanished when the IV line attached to his arm pumped his body with a cocktail of drugs designed to bring both his mind and body out of sleep suspension. Danny sighed heavily before looking around the room. He expected to see the others in the same situation as himself. All groaning, trying to move with each one wearing a vacant expression.
Danny frowned. He was the only one awake. The others were still inside their suspension pods. The recuperation procedure hadn’t started on any of them. He slowly sat up, wondering if something had gone wrong.
“Sleep well?”
Danny sat up. His box fell onto the floor and the dried moss rolled out and vanished down a small hole next to another sleep-pod. “What the hell?” He groaned at the sight of his so-called voice of reason sitting at the edge of his sleep pod. So much for being alone.
“Oh, don’t worry about that anymore, Danny. I think you’ve come far enough to dispense with the totem.”
“What?”
“The box, Danny Cole. It’s just a simulacrum, a focal point to enable your waking mind to deal with your special status.”
He shook his head, hoping the apparition would leave him alone.
“You didn’t check in the corner of your bed.”
Danny glared at Mr. Smith. “Why are you here?”
“That’s the important thought, Danny.” The apparition grinned. “You were thinking about the time when those bastards had incarcerated you, remember? Well, during your mad stage, when you were trying to make an image of me by collecting moss. There, now that that’s out of the way, let us get you back to a more important subject. Namely why you’re awake while the others are still sleeping.”
“Go away!” he spat. “Go on, get out of here, and don’t come back.”
“Oh, don’t be like that. I mean, where am I going to go? There’s no air out there, remember? Come on, Danny. Be reasonable here.”
Even with all the energy-rich drugs now coursing through his body, Danny still wanted to lie back down, close his eyes, and drift off to sleep. Right now, he even considered pretending to go to sleep just to get rid of his other self.
“I am not going to vanish this time, Trooper Cole. Not now. Soon you will remember each and every vision. Not just yet though, I still think it’s too early. You’re getting close, so take comfort in that.”
“Fine, I’m almost ready. Great. Now why don’t you piss off and go bother somebody else.”
Mr. Smith shook his head. “No, not yet. Not until I have told you this.” His other self licked his lips. “You are, of course, aware that the Gizanti and that duplicitous Chaplain are only puppets. Their masters hope to achieve their hidden agenda that will affect every intelligent life-form within the galactic expanse.”
“Leave me alone.”
“The Empire have no idea what you or the other two signify. If that happens, then you might as well end your life right now for because you can guarantee that even with this alien invasion, the God-Emperor will stop at nothing to kill you.” His other self stood up and walked over to the sleep-pod containing one of the soldiers. “Right now, the God-Emperor sees you as a curiosity, perhaps even a potential ally. This might change depending on how his next vision transpires.” He stared at Danny. “As for the Gizanti… Who knows what their species want with you.”
“What are you talking about? There’s hardly any of them left. You heard what Cladinus said. The invading aliens have possessed their bodies. They’re all as good as dead now. Cladinus doesn’t want anything but to help us. He’s grieving for his race; he has nobody left.”
“You don’t really believe that!” he spat. “You poor naïve fool. You really think that he took the ship to their home planet? It was just some colony world. He and the rest of his dead Gizanti pals are just leaves on a vast tree. Leaves fall off. Just watch yourself, Danny, because what you’ve been through so far is nothing compared to what’s on the horizon. There is a huge amoun
t going on behind the scenes. You remember that.”
Danny jumped when the Gizanti walked through the door.
“You worry the Battle Sister when you have conversations with yourself,” said Cladinus. He methodically checked the other sleep-pods before facing Danny. “This mission does not concern your fellow human comrades. Only myself and you will be leaving the Battle Sister. Please follow me.” Without waiting for a reply, the Gizanti left.
He took one last look at the sleep-pods before racing after the huge alien. His racing mind went over every word that tumbled out of Mr. Smith’s mouth while he followed Cladinus through the organic corridors of the quiet ship. The more he thought about the conversation, the more confused he became. Why couldn’t he go back to how it was before the fucking visions? Danny was happy back then. Life didn’t confuse him. He had his rifle, his squad mates, and his orders.
The alien entered the control room and stopped beside a jumble of ribbed pipes. It wasn’t until he followed him into the room when he realised that all those pipes were connected to the Chaplain.
“What is this? What the hell have you done to him?”
“Do not by alarmed, Danny Cole. He is unharmed.”
He approached the man, lying on the deck. It looked like two large pipes had literally swallowed his feet and ankles. Another smaller pipe covered his mouth and nose and another one entered his left ear. “Are you sure that he’s okay?”
Cladinus nodded. “Yes, he is sleeping, much like you were doing a few moments ago. Only he is not talking to himself.” The Gizanti’s large orange arms waved in front of the corridor. “Watch.”
A monitor beside Cole hummed to life, and he saw the Chaplain and a group of human fighters running down an ornate corridor full of paintings while avoiding blaster fire from unknown pursuers. It took him a moment for him to recognise the surroundings. “That’s the Imperial Palace! Is this another vision? I mean, is what is happening on there going to happen?”