by Barry Kirwan
Hohash were data-plexers – omnipaths – capable of receiving all sorts of signals and processing them, and interfacing with other Hohash, of which there were not many left – a few on Esperia, maybe a few others scattered across the galaxy, and one with Hellera. And Kalaran. That’s where she had been when Louise captured her, in Esperia’s caves, together with the Hohash, looking for anything left behind by the only other Kalarash, who had left the planet just before Quarantine. Micah had sent her to the caves to look, and Louise had somehow gotten past the barrier.
Kat realized her hands were clenched into fists, her lips squeezed tight, and released them. She’d had so much anger, had spent so much time working on a way to kill Louise. But Louise – Arctura – whatever, was bloody tough, and might look human on the outside, but inside she’d been re-engineered by the Q’Roth more than any other Alician.
She sat back. At least she had something to do. She had been accessing all sorts of war reports from both sides – the Hohash translated everything for her – but nothing yet, not even a mention of Hellera or a Kalarash. She thought of Antonia, of Micah, and her former captain, Blake. What would you want me to do?
For Antonia, it would be simple – come home; not so easy. For Blake, kill Louise; ditto. But Micah. He could be devious. Then it came to her. It was as blindingly obvious as it was dangerous: play both sides.
She accessed the Hohash again, interfacing with it via the node in her brain, and began surfing the information streams again, but this time she was looking for something different.
She missed breakfast. She skipped lunch. Aramisk came to check up on her and forced her to break off for ten minutes to drink some water and take a shower. By early evening, Kat found something. Although the Q’Roth had culled humanity, and so were her sworn enemies, they now worked for the Tla beth, and were actually on the ‘good side’, fighting against Qorall, as were the Alicians, though they seemed to have their own agenda.
She accessed encrypted Q’Roth battle reports – Hohash could decrypt anything, it seemed – and found several obscure references to a human. The Q’Roth were losing most if not all battles against Qorall’s forces. She couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for them, even if it meant that Qorall was getting closer to Esperia. But this reference to Jorann kept cropping up. Apparently, now a low-ranking general commanding a battleship, this Jorann was once human. After cross-referencing many reports and notes, her mouth dropped open as she realized who Jorann really was, who he used to be.
Kat leapt off the bed and paced in her room. Here was a potential ally, someone who could help Esperia from the outside. But apparently, although he knew he used to be human, Jorann had no recollection of who he used to be, of his real name, and had been re-engineered into a full Q’Roth warrior. Her heart beat fast, nonetheless. Jorann could be the best hope to protect Esperia when Quarantine came down, though apparently he was about to engage one of Qorall’s main fleets. But what could she do with the information? She bit into her knuckles.
Louise appeared at Kat’s doorway.
“Not now!” Kat shouted, then added, “Sorry, Arctura, but I may have something, a possible lead on Hellera, but I need time to think.” And come up with a good lie. Louise glared, but left without another word, sealing the door behind her.
Kat went back to the Hohash, grabbing its rim. “Pierre. You have to tell Pierre.” No, that won’t work, Pierre can’t access a Hohash. “Ukrull – the Ranger; show him.” Kat closed her eyes and opened her mind, focusing on the Jorann information, his last known location, and a single word – his original name.
She collapsed back on her bed, exhausted. At first there was a sense of elation – she’d done something, and maybe it could make a difference. But her loneliness – something she kept at bay every day – fuelled by fatigue, surfaced and threatened to overwhelm her. She lay thinking of her wife Antonia, longing for her soft touch and tender kisses. For once, she let the emotions out. She pulled the cover up over her shoulders. While the Hohash showed her images of rain falling on the sea, Kat fell asleep on a wet pillow.
Chapter Three
Sides
If Jorann had still been human he’d have shaken himself. The Q’Roth had been his sworn enemy, that much he remembered; he’d nuked a quarter of a million of the warriors in the last days of the fall of Earth. Then he’d been captured and offered a stark choice – join forces or die. He’d spat at Sister Esma, told her where to go, and she’d obliged him by venting him into space. But she’d downloaded his memories beforehand and taken enough DNA to produce a hybrid clone. She told him later that the Q’Roth leaders usually got what they wanted – in this case his intuitive battle strategies. Initially they’d tested the clone without his memories, but its performance had been rudimentary. So they’d uploaded his personality, and he’d woken, surprised to be alive, and then disgusted at what they’d turned him into – a six-legged, black-carapaced three metre tall Q’Roth warrior.
His trapezoidal head had a lipless gash of a mouth that rarely opened, communication achieved instead by stone-like throat muscles that clicked and grated in Q’Roth language whose sound reminded him of rustling leaves and grinding rocks. Instead of eyes he had six vermillion slits, like razor cuts, arranged in two opposing sets sloping diagonally downwards toward the centre of his forehead. Although the slits occasionally oozed blood-like sweat, Q’Roth warriors could not cry. That suited Jorann just fine.
He only wished he could remember his human name.
“Bring the Hunters forward, they go in hot,” he signaled the other battleships. There was no reply, no confirmation – Q’Roth war tactics were largely silent, they would only speak if they disagreed. But he knew they also disliked talking to him, let alone taking commands from a hybrid once-human. Yet this was his battle strategy, his call. Pride and prejudice were irrelevant today; if he had miscalculated, they would all be dead very soon.
For seven years he’d refused to cooperate with his Q’Roth captors. But they kept taking him on missions. He witnessed the inexorable slaughter as the invader Qorall slashed and burned his way across the galaxy, and Jorann knew where the remnants of humanity lay – right in Qorall’s path. They wouldn’t last a second. Four ships full of human cargo had fled the Q’Roth’s culling of Earth eighteen years earlier, and without doubt still saw the Q’Roth and their Alician cohorts as their principal enemy. But Jorann had seen many species far more malevolent; he knew how brutal the galaxy could be, and Qorall put even those alien races to shame.
So, here he was, fighting alongside the species who had almost erased mankind. He even had command of a four hundred crew, kilometer-long battleship, sculpted from obsidian Scintarelli tree-metal and shaped like Thor’s hammer, dripping with weapons turrets. If he’d wanted to, he could cause it to self-destruct or fire on the other Q’Roth ships and take out as many as possible. He had enough command overrides on the Bridge, and was alone – his lieutenants worked a deck below in Tactical. But futile bravado had never been his style. He’d learned that to survive in this galaxy you had to play the long game.
“Your guest is en route.” A voice message from Granch, the senior commander, interrupted his thoughts. The fact that Granch had announced it fleet-wide was significant. Perhaps he finally trusted Jorann, or more likely he wanted all his troops to be focused and follow commands. In any case, it was good that the ‘guest’ was en route; Jorann’s whole strategy depended on it.
Jorann knew the nine other senior commanders never fully trusted him, despite his strong performance in the last dozen battles. He’d saved most of the fleet from near disaster in the Ossyrian sector less than a week ago, seconds after Qorall fired an anti-matter cluster into its sun, triggering a superflare, engulfing four defending fleets and two of Jorann’s destroyer squadrons unable to jump fast enough. Still, to his colleagues, Jorann was an aberration. One of them had even fired on Jorann’s flagship a month earlier during a firefight. Qorall had surprised them all by launching plan
ets through a wormhole at the third largest Q’Roth shipyard, after destabilising their cores to turn them into world-sized grenades. None of them, even the oldest Q’Roth warriors from the Antechratian Campaign five centuries earlier, had ever seen anything like this level of carnage or firepower. The errant commander who’d fired – luckily Jorann had just raised his shields – confessed his misdemeanour and took the honourable way out, piloting a Hunter vessel stacked with atomics deep into enemy space, taking out one of Qorall’s supply convoys.
He checked his displays, densely packed with Q’Roth three-dimensional script no normal human could ever hope to fathom. Sixty seconds till they emerged and met the leading edge of Qorall’s forces.
Jorann understood the Q’Roth sense of frustration – they were warriors, foot-soldiers of the highest calibre, space dog-fighters extraordinaire. But such skills were useless against Qorall’s Inferno Class weaponry. Moreover, Qorall’s strategy eluded the galaxy’s indigenous species – he did not seem interested in the spoils of war, whether worlds, technologies, or resources, except for swelling the ranks of his armies and navies. Instead, he spread inexorably across the galaxy like a cancer. What perplexed Jorann in particular was that the arrowhead of Qorall’s general front had from the start charted a course towards the new homeworld of humanity, Esperia. It didn’t make sense: mankind – what was left of it – was as much a threat to Qorall as an ant was to a Q’Roth warrior. And yet through eighteen years, despite brief deviations, Qorall’s forces held this course. Perhaps that was one reason the Q’Roth High Guard wanted to keep Jorann alive.
His ex-humanity lowered his standing amongst the commanders’ ranks. He had no Q’Roth ‘friends’, and certainly never any female companionship – which would have been a step too far in any case. Despite being in the largest army in the galaxy, and having four hundred crewmembers on his ship under his command, he often felt completely alone. He’d learned to live with it, channeling his energies into battle tactics and strategies. That was all that kept him going; quite Q’Roth, he realized. But he sensed he had had a vibrant social life before, when human; a wife, friends, camaraderie. But there were so many holes in his memory, locked away somehow, the key being his original name. If only he could remember it. He didn’t want to go to his grave as Jorann; he wanted his human name, whatever it was. Surely he deserved that much? But after eighteen years as a Q’Roth, and perhaps even as a military commander back on Earth, he knew that ‘deserved’ had nothing to do with it. And so he’d prefer his grave, if there ever was one, to be unmarked.
As with all front-line commanders, his nights were numbered. Yet the Q’Roth High Guard grew increasingly desperate – they had lost thirty-three battles in a row, more than eight thousand ships; they couldn’t keep taking those kinds of losses. This mission was different. Jorann had outlined a new strategy, enlisting the aid of the mysterious Tla Beth, the very top layer of the Grid hierarchy, who were apparently pure energy creatures whose Homeworld remained a closely-guarded secret. One of them was venturing out from their hyper-dimensional safe haven where they strategized, moving ships and inter-stellar counter-measures on trans-dimensional maps that no species below Level Fifteen understood. The Q’Roth all but worshipped the Tla Beth, and if anything happened to this one… But that was why they’d recruited Jorann into their ranks in the first place, to think outside the sphere. He prayed his gambit would work.
The normally green display in front of him flashed blood red, and the Q’Roth equivalent of adrenaline surged through his arteries. Jorann deplored war and its inevitable carnage, but he nevertheless felt the thrill of battle he’d known so many times before. He’d always been a career soldier, and was never more alive than when his life was on the line, knowing he could be killed at any second. His upper claw hovered above the ‘fire’ button during the extended jump into Qorall-controlled space.
His fleet re-materialised as planned, the enemy’s flotilla dead ahead, and he and nine other commanders unleashed the planet-breakers. Waves of energy whipped like fluorescent barbed wire at the darkly translucent, bubble-shaped shield protecting the enemy’s ships. Secondary artillery fired automatically, spewing volleys of energy pulses and strange-matter-tipped missiles, which crashed into the energy barrier like psychedelic hail on glass. He hated using strange-matter weapons. Aside from their precarious nature – they sometimes ‘went off’ before being fired – they tended to rip the space-time fabric, leaving jagged potholes for any traffic transiting through the affected sector. But as the Q’Roth were in permanent retreat, that hardly mattered, and conventional atomics and anti-matter artillery seemed to have no effect on these shields. In any case, as had happened the last three times he’d encountered this enemy formation, the shield remained intact. The enemy’s strategy was simple – they would wait until the Q’Roth forces had expended considerable firepower, then lower the shield and attack. Jorann’s gash of a mouth opened a crack and a hiss issued forth.
As planned, five Q’Roth Hunter Class crab-shaped ships broke formation and hurtled toward the sphere. Ten other Q’Roth destroyers vectored particle weapons around the tightly-packed quintet, creating a halo of white plasma fire around them, as they converged toward a single point on the barrier’s surface, inflicting the heat of a hundred suns. In eighteen years of warfare, no one had successfully breached one of these shields, and Qorall’s army had remained unstoppable, conquering more than half the known galaxy, laying waste to any sector refusing to surrender.
Jorann’s claw squeezed hard as the glare of the beams blotted out all the stars. Now would be good… On cue, his ‘guest’ appeared. A small Tla Beth single-occupant ship, iridescent blue and shaped like a gyroscope, popped into existence behind the five Q’Roth Hunters, sucked along in their wake. Steady… He’d not been able to ‘talk’ with the Tla Beth directly, having instead to explain his strategy through several layers of intermediaries. He accepted this state of affairs – after all, he was a mere Q’Roth, Level Six intelligence standard, and the Tla Beth were Level Seventeen. He’d never even seen one up close. He hoped the upward briefings had been effective.
Intel on the holo dashboard contained nothing but bad news: the barrier was holding. Their drenching of the shield with enough energy to rend apart a star was looking increasingly like a suicide dash. If any more Q’Roth ships joined in with their weapons, the radiation backlash would fry their compatriots. Still, he’d seen too many futile deaths.
He signalled, “Break off?” to Granch, but already guessed the answer, which remained unspoken. His suggestion was broadcast to all commanders simultaneously using the mind-plexing system the Tla Beth had granted them, enabling them to communicate and react as one. Humans could never use such augments, it would sound like a deafening cacophony and paralyse them; one of the advantages of being Level Six. He imagined his own standing amongst his commanders had dropped a notch for even suggesting aborting the charge.
Space appeared to ignite as the Hunters pummelled into the shield, vaporizing on impact, cremating their crews. Fifty. He always counted the dead; he’d never know their names, but the least he felt he could do was to recognize the sacrifice of those under his command. The explosion would have burned out his retinas if he’d still been human, but instead the six slits on his trapezoidal head oozed a little more vermillion than usual, rending the scene blood red. He missed human vision, but then his Q’Roth senses allowed him to see what no human eye could have. Amidst the explosive swirl of plasma boiling off into space, the Tla Beth craft launched a missile of unknown origin directly at the glowing area of the barrier wall, which sprouted electric blue fractures, then shattered as the toy-like Tla Beth ship rammed it. Jorann’s mouth-gash widened into something approaching a grin. Fire and ice – smart bastards.
Jorann wasted no time. His flagship and four other battleships supported by ten destroyers jumped according to a pre-ordered pattern, and punched their way through the fissure. Finally! A message from Granch appeared fleet-wide,
a staccato Q’Roth phrase translating as “Kill them all, no prisoners, leave nothing alive.”
But as soon as Jorann was inside he knew something was wrong. His battleship stuttered, its engines faltered, losing speed. Black ships shaped like sea urchins approached, but the beam weapons he fired on them dispersed like a lamp in fog; letting loose the planet-breaker would simply backfire on his own ships. It took him a second to recognise what was happening: they weren’t in normal space anymore – it looked like so-called ‘empty’ space, but it had a much higher density.
He ignored the storm of comms from other commanders; instinctively he knew what it was – he’d been a nuclear submarine commander back on Earth a lifetime ago, and knew how a craft handled in space, and in water. They were in a very low density, transparent fluid. Some of the Grid scientists had conjectured this possibility, how some form of unknown ‘liquid space’, presumably from Qorall’s galaxy, could make the shield more resilient, offering internal pressure, and dampening any energy-based attack on it.
“Torpedoes!” he barked in Largyl 6, the formal Q’Roth command language. His battleship spattered the nearest enemy ship, and he relaxed as he saw hundreds of other Q’Roth-launched intelligent missiles to port and starboard, snaking their way through the invisible medium, homing onto their targets. He recognised the enemy ship design: Mannekhi, Level Five. So, they’d joined ranks with Qorall. Not surprising, they’d been treated like dirt by Grid Society for eons. But such defections bled away effort that should have been targeted at the real foe.
The Mannekhi ships returned fire, purple pulses spitting from their spines, unaffected by the fluidic space. He ignored the battering as the energy bursts slammed into his battleship, keeping one sensory slit focused on the damage indicator, dropping slowly from ninety-three per cent. At fifteen per cent his ship would implode. He leaned forward, two of his six slits trying to see what was behind the ranks of Mannekhi vessels. His battle instincts kicked in; he had a bad feeling…