Adrift (The Sirilians Book 1)

by Nicole Krizek

  No, surely not. Not his only friend and companion… he wouldn’t.

  “We have arrived,” one of the Grays declared, surprising Karo and breaking his daze.

  “Already?”

  “Yes. This shuttle is normally designated for Ambassadorial duties, and is therefore equipped with the latest in probabilistic technology.”

  Karo was still grasping the idea as he scrambled to catch up with the duo, who had risen from their seats and were headed towards the hatch. One of them placed his palm against the wall, which illuminated under his fingertips. The hatch opened, and Karo remembered to bend low as he descended.

  He stopped in his tracks as he got his first look at the space station.

  From where he stood on an outstretched docking platform, the station towered above in a gentle vertical slope until it ended in a point. The widest portion was ringed with platforms whereupon ships of all sizes were sitting idle, each with similar disc-like shapes.

  Karo brought his attention back to his companions, but saw that they were already across the platform greeting someone. He walked quickly to catch up. One of them gestured towards Karo and made the introductions. Karo assumed—hoped—that he was Ambassador Lear.

  “May I present Karincin Abishek, formerly of Siril. Karincin, this is Anand, Leading Ancient Historian for the Department of History.”

  Karo bowed to the newcomer in greeting. “Thank you for inviting me to visit your space station.”

  “It is truly an honor to meet you Karincin,” Anand replied enthusiastically. “It’s like a part of our history has come to life!”

  At least Anand sounds different than the other two, Karo thought as he returned the smile. “Thank you. I’m hoping to spend some time in your department and learn what happened to my people. I have a lot of questions.”

  “Of course.”

  Chairman Rowe interjected in the sternest voice he’d heard from a Gray thus far. “You must realize that we are your people.”

  Like hell you are! Karo turned his attention to Rowe; his expression and tone of voice emanated displeasure.

  “You need to realize that I just learned that the Sirilians are gone. From my perspective, I departed from home only five years ago, maybe twenty if you count the time I thought I had been in stasis. I came here to learn what happened, and how we evolved into you. It’s going to take me some time to accept that, if it’s alright with you.”

  He hadn’t meant to be disrespectful, but Karo needed to make it clear that this was not going to be an easy process for him. He needed time. Access to their archives would be helpful too.

  Rowe inclined his head. “Of course. My apologies.”

  Ambassador Lear interjected. “Perhaps you’d like to spend some time in the Department of Ancient History?”

  Karo nodded and Anand gestured for him to follow him across the dock. Once it was just the two of them, he looked over at Anand with amazement. The Gray was only tall enough for his head to reach Karo’s stomach. It was like walking next to a small child.

  They didn’t go far before Anand stepped onto a rectangle-shaped platform and waited. Karo joined him, and was soon bending his knees and holding his arms out to catch his balance as the platform began to hover before zooming through the space station. It traversed a hallway before entering a large vertical shaft and rising. They past several other individuals, each on their own hovering platforms.

  “This is amazing,” Karo said absently.

  “Yes, we’ve been using this method to travel throughout our stations and ships for many years now. It is far more efficient than walking.”

  “It sure is.” Karo was listening, but he was more captivated by what he was seeing. The vertical shaft was open at each level which made it possible to see down each corridor as they continued to rise, and for anyone close by to see him and stare.

  Everyone they passed seemed to divert their attention to him. Karo felt like he was on parade. Thankfully the platform slowed its ascent and began moving down another hallway. They moved through an archway and into the room beyond. It was round, like so many others he’d seen, with a large central object that Karo hoped was a console.

  “Welcome to the Department of History,” Anand announced.

  The hover platform slowed and came to a stop in the center of the room. Karo eagerly stepped off and watched it set gently onto the ground. His gaze wandered throughout the space, but it looked similar to the rooms he’d seen throughout the entire station and on the shuttle. Here the walls, ceiling, and floor pulsed with familiar blue illumination. It seemed that the station was also comprised of biological material.

  Anand headed towards the central object, and Karo followed. It was made from the creature, the same as everything else, but was cylindrical in shape, and extended all the way up to the domed ceiling of the room.

  Anand placed his hand against the cylinder and the surface changed to show the image of a planet. It was predominantly blue with a massive ocean. As the image rotated, Karo saw a large diamond-shaped continent.

  “This is Siril as it exists today,” Anand told him. “I’m sure it’s different than what you remember.”

  “Yes it is,” Karo replied as he examined the image. It was the same one Lukas had showed him.

  “May I ask how it’s different?”

  The question struck him as odd but Karo didn’t have a problem answering. “The continent didn’t look like this when I lived there. Somehow its shape was changed into a diamond. Our central city was right there.” Karo pointed to the center of the continent where a large lake now existed.

  “Is that where you lived?”

  “Yes,” he answered sadly. “How long ago did it… disappear?”

  “Over seven millennia. There was a massive earthquake that caused the bedrock to become sunken. The heart of the city was leveled; seawater rushed in and formed the lake. Instead of trying to flush it out and rebuild, the people instead lived on its perimeter. Thus began the time of planetary redesign.”

  “Redesign?”

  “Yes. The people decided to alter the planet’s landscape to provide an optimal chance for survival. They reshaped the mountains to better collect rainwater, altered the sea bed to optimize currents and create a milder climate, the list of changes is lengthy.”

  Karo tried to imagine the technology that would have been required to alter an entire planet’s surface, never mind the resources.

  “Why would they do that? Why go through the trouble to change an entire planet’s geographical features?”

  “Regrettably, the historical records from that time have mostly been lost, but we believe that they did it to stabilize resources so they could concentrate on building ships, and the first space station.”

  Anand changed the view on the console to a rendering of a basic space station. “This is what we believe Space One looked like.”

  It was much larger than Karo had expected, with docking ports for multiple ships, solar sails, and a huge hydroponics bay. He’d seen designs similar to this during his time at the Department of Space. There had been an entire team dedicated to figuring out how a colony of people could live in space long-term. They hadn’t yet designed anything like the image of Space One, but a few of the design elements were similar. It must have been a massive undertaking, and would have drained their resources pretty quickly.

  “My people built this?”

  “Yes. Its construction was completed roughly three hundred years after you departed. Do you have an idea as to why half of the population would leave the planet? It doesn’t say in our records.”

  Karo took a moment to think. It was difficult to put himself in their place—a lot could happen to a society in three-hundred years—but he had a solid idea.

  “The Sirilians were obsessed with eliminating risk, and we had done all we could to make our planet a safe place to live. The month before Scouts were sent into space, we were faced with potential annihilation by a massive solar flare.

&nb
sp; “We were forced to watch, while we waited to either be destroyed in its path, or be spared.” Karo shook his head. “There was nothing we could do, and we all felt useless. I’m sure an earthquake had the same effect.”

  “So they went into space in the attempt to reduce risk to their population?”

  “That’s my guess.” Karo chuckled. “Although life in space is riskier in its own way, you can move a space station out of harm’s way much more easily than a planet.”

  Anand looked thoughtful, and Karo took the opportunity to ask a question of his own. “Why has the historical record from that time been lost? What happened?”

  “Sadly, Space One was destroyed, along with most of their records. A few hundred people escaped on ships. They later came together and formed what would be the beginning of the Grays.”

  “How was it destroyed?”

  “A race called the Voro Anim attacked, took the station apart, and either killed or enslaved most of the people onboard.”

  Karo’s eyes went wide in shock. “They attacked my ship as well.”

  Anand nodded sadly. “They have not changed. Back then they had just escaped Siril, and were in possession of more advanced weaponry than what had been developed on Space One. They were able to take the station with a single ship.”

  Karo’s mind spun. Sometimes these people said things matter-of-factly, assuming that Karo knew what they were talking about. Usually they left him more confused than before.

  “Wait, what do you mean they escaped Siril? Were they prisoners?”

  “No.” Anand was silent a moment before continuing, “I’m told that Chairman Rowe explained how the Sirilians splintered into two groups; the one that was more intellectually-inclined left the planet to eventually become the Grays.”

  Karo had a vague memory of him mentioning it, but he nodded anyway.

  “The Voro Anim is the group that decided to stay behind on the planet.”

  “So they’re my people’s descendants too?” he clarified.

  “Yes. We believe that there was a discord on Siril leading up to the completion of Space One. Part of the population believed that their best chance for survival was to leave the planet, but the other refused. The two groups decided to cleanly break apart.

  “In space, the one group focused on technological and genetic advancement, while the other spiraled into a tribal-like mentality. They created powerful weapons, and eventually were able to build a ship and attack.”

  Karo felt like he needed to sit down. He knew that learning his race’s history was going to be a lot for him to take in, but he never could have expected this news.

  Learning that the Sirilians had evolved into the Grays was hard enough to believe, but that they were also the Voro Anim? That was even harder.

  “Ok, fast forward through time. So the survivors of Space One come together, form another station, then evolve into your people?”

  “Correct.”

  “Do you mind me asking how? I mean, we don’t exactly look alike.”

  “We are more alike than you think.” Anand brought up an image of Karo’s genome next to what he assumed was one of the Grays.

  “We adapted our bodily structure for life in space: less muscle mass, shorter limbs and torso, and our skin color is a byproduct of the lighting our bodies are exposed to. Our heads were enlarged to accommodate a larger brain capacity, and we removed all sexual organs and sexual assignment of male and female.”

  Where do I start? Karo wondered as he tried to not look at the naked alien in front of him. He’d never wanted to glance at someone’s crotch so badly in his life.

  “No sexual organs?” He hoped the question was generic enough.

  “No. We have no need for them. Our bodies are grown in a lab and our consciousness is implanted only when necessary. For instance, this body I occupy has been the host to five different minds.”

  Wait, what?! “You trade your consciousness in and out of bodies?”

  “In a manner. We’re only corporeal when it’s necessary, for instance when we’re meeting with another race. The rest of our existence is spent in our Central Ether. There we can exchange information and ideas more efficiently. It is what has allowed us to advance so rapidly.”

  “What happens to your body once you leave it?”

  “It will either be inhabited by another individual, put into temporary stasis until it’s needed, or recycled to provide material for the next generation of bodies.”

  I guess that’s why they all look the same, Karo thought.

  “I don’t mean any offense, but how do you tell each other apart?”

  “We are telepathically linked even when in this form, and, in a way of speaking, we do not interpret your world as you do.”

  Like most other news, Anand said it with such normalcy; but it actually made sense. That was how Rowe and Lear had moved in unison, and hadn’t needed to discuss anything. If they could link telepathically to their ship, why not each other?

  Karo didn’t know if he could take anymore revelations—he was almost numb to them at this point—but he couldn’t help but ask one last thing.

  “Who lives on Siril now?”

  Anand brought up the image of the planet, and this time enlarged the western shore of the continent. Karo saw figures milling about the sand, and huge darkened spots in the water right off of the shore. “A colony of four-hundred and twenty Earthers live there now.”

  Lukas’s people? “How… why are there Earthers there?”

  “We created a wormhole over their planet a few millennia ago, to study them. Their technology has advanced to the point that occasionally a vessel will get ensnared by the gravitational funnel. When that happens, we do our best to save the occupants, and deposit them on Aeonas. Over time they’ve formed their own colony. There are even some Arathians living there now.”

  Karo was surprised by that news. “Arathians live on my homeworld?”

  “Only a few of them, and we believe that there are plans to soon relocate the planet’s inhabitants to Arath.”

  “The Earthers can’t be returned to their homeworld?”

  “No, to do so would be against our laws. Earth is not yet aware of other alien races.”

  Karo could extrapolate from that statement: the Earthers couldn’t be returned for fear that they’d illuminate the others on what they’d seen and experienced. That could alter the planet’s entire future.

  He felt a stab of pain in his temple as a vague image entered his mind. He’d talked about this subject with another person. Not in regards to Earthers—at least he didn’t think so—but he had definitely talked to a woman about other planets, and their limits of interference. Karo tried to hold onto the memory but it receded.

  “Karincin?” Anand repeated, pulling Karo back to the present. “Are you alright?”

  “Yes of course. I was just thinking that I’m glad Siril is being used for something worth-wile.”

  The corners of Anand’s mouth turned into a small smile. “I am relieved to hear you say that. I was not sure if you’d be pleased to hear that there are unfamiliar aliens inhabiting your home.”

  Karo shrugged. It wasn’t like he’d be able to begin a new life there. Better someone make it their home than have it sit abandoned. He didn’t feel like it was his anyway. Planets didn’t belong to individuals, and if they did, they shouldn’t.

  CHAPTER 20

  Karo was exhausted. After his conversation with Anand, he’d needed a break to allow his mind to digest all that he’d learned. Hopefully he’d begin to make sense of it… maybe.

  The Grays had given him a private room, but Karo got the feeling that they didn’t have guests often. It was bare of anything except for a single chair and a bed. At least they’re my size, he thought, as his eyes wandered around the empty room and lingered on the pulsing blue walls. Walls, ceiling, floor, chair, bed, they were all parts of the bioship… parts of a creature that the Grays had created.

  His surroundings mad
e Karo cringe. Guess I won’t be getting a lot of sleep tonight.

  Tired, but too edgy to rest, he instead paced the floor while his mind ran wild.

  He wasn’t sure which revelation to dwell on first: the fact that his people had abandoned their planet to live in giant space stations, that the Grays and Voro Anim were his people’s descendants, or that his people were truly gone.

  He knew—technically—that the Grays were his closest relations, but really, he had much more in common with the Arathians.

  Genetics be damned.

  Thinking about the Arathians made him wonder how the repairs on his ship were going. Were they making progress?

  Thinking of his ship caused a pang in his chest. He tried to ignore it—even tried to convince himself that it was good for him to be spending time outside of its walls—but he couldn’t lie that convincingly to himself. He felt a need to return that was bordering on obsessive.

  He sat, but his eyes darted around the room. It was all wrong: the blue interior, the silence, the smell of the air, even the artificial gravity felt wrong. Anxiety hit him hard, and Karo tried to control his breathing. His fingers dug into the arm of the chair, palms sweaty.

  A spear of pain went through his temples and he squeezed his eyes shut tightly. Images flitted through his mind, but they were too fast to clearly make anything out.

  He saw glimpses of buildings—some he recognized from Siril, others he’d swear he’d never been to. He saw images of a bedroom—the walls and furniture all draped in vibrant colors; but it was the emotional response Karo experienced that unnerved him the most. He felt drawn to the room, as if being there would ease his distress.

  Karo held onto the vision. Real or not this place was peaceful, inviting, and where contentment blossomed. He drank in the feeling, let it consume him.

  Soon his hands unclenched, his breathing and heart-rate slowed, and the anxiety began to abate. If his mind was going to hallucinate, at least it’d given him a pleasant image this time.