by Barry Kirwan
The enemy sea urchin in front of him ignited, a third of its spines flaring before melting. Something nagged at him; a seed of doubt growing fast, but he and the other commanders drove on. This was the first time they were actually progressing; for eighteen years it had been a cycle of defeat, retreat, re-group, attack, defeat. He checked that the other ships outside the sphere had installed a stent to ensure the hole didn’t close; he didn’t want to be trapped inside a galactic pitcher plant.
His battleship forged through three ranks of Mannekhi ships, decimating dozens. Fifty-three per cent integrity left. That meant casualties. Connection broke with three destroyers whose hulls were less protected. Jorann and his fellow Q’Roth commanders were winning, but the attrition rate was punishing. He sent a coded message up the chain to the Tla Beth:
Amidst the flashes and blossoming flares of space battle – his lieutenants and the automatic systems handling the Mannekhi ships – his old rage unexpectedly surfaced. He recalled watching as the Q’Roth purged a dying Earth of its atmosphere and all its water, all its life. When he’d first emerged as a Q’Roth clone, he’d promised himself one day that he would exact revenge, seizing an opportunity to eradicate a large number of Q’Roth. And here it was. If he turned and opened fire on the other battleships, the Mannekhi would not stop to question, and together they would annihilate the Seventh Fleet. He’d promised himself that he’d never empathize with his blood enemy, the Q’Roth, no matter what. Seven billion people wiped out, he reminded himself.
Five years ago he would have done it without hesitation. But he didn’t know himself anymore. What he did know was that against all odds, Blake and Micah and thousands of other humans had survived, safely quarantined on Esperia, the so-called spider planet, protected by a Level Twelve shield and Ossyrian guardians. But the quarantine – always intended as a temporary measure – would come down soon, and Jorann wanted to hold back Qorall as long as possible. If they had any sense, as soon as quarantine ended, mankind’s refugees would run like hell to the far end of the galaxy.
And if Jorann somehow met them one day – Micah, Blake and the others – he wouldn’t expect them to understand. He’d be quite happy if they dealt out rough justice, court-martialed him for treason as a Q’Roth sympathizer and executed him. That would be more than okay.
A shudder, as a crumbling enemy ship rammed his own ineffectually, jolted him back into the present. The Tla Beth ship was still there, buzzing about like a mosquito, occasionally visible, then moving too fast for even Q’Roth vision to keep up. What was it doing? Why hadn’t it left? But he knew why: curiosity. Like him, it was trying to determine what was lurking in the background. The Mannekhi ships had given up firing at the Tla Beth ship, their sprays of purple pulses failing to touch it.
Jorann’s ship nudged through more wrecked sea urchins and dispatched Hunter Class vessels from his bays to clean up the mess – just as well, he’d run out of torpedoes. He ignored the charred corpses drifting around cracked hulls – the Mannekhi were humanoid in shape, the only species he’d seen that resembled humanity. More than once he’d wondered if they were distant cousins. Too bad, they’d chosen the wrong side.
The last row of sea-urchin ships was white instead of black, burning bright, masking whatever was behind. Seven Q’Roth ships remained active inside the shield-bubble; five others including two battleships were now debris. Two destroyers limped back to the stent. Jorann knew that their commanders and crew would have preferred to fight to the death, but the Q’Roth ship-yards were finding it hard to keep up with daily losses, so any ship not obliterated was towed back for re-conditioning.
The tiny Tla Beth ship spun into view ahead of Jorann, and fired a metastaser – a weapon he’d only heard rumours of until now. Orange light bathed one of the sea urchins then leapt across to adjacent ships, spreading outwards to the entire array, latching onto any material with a Mannekhi signature, ignoring Q’Roth ships. The sea urchins shimmered then exploded one by one, opening up a gap in the final defence perimeter.
That was when he saw it. His claws flexed defensively of their own accord. It was darker than anything around it, a slug-shaped hole in space. Except that it writhed. One of the fabled dark worms. As he tried to take it in, to see any features, a priority message plexed into his mind: the stent was collapsing. His gun turrets trained on the worm, fifty times the size of his battleship, but he didn’t fire – he’d read the reports. One of his fellow commanders lit it up with focused particle beams, but as Jorann had heard before, no sooner had the beams touched the worm’s vacuum-hardened flesh, than black tendrils traced their way back to the firing ship – as if they could latch onto light – and yanked the ship towards the worm with alarming speed, enveloping it inside its dark folds.
He now knew why the Mannekhi and the liquid space had been present: to exhaust the Q’Roth’s supply of torpedoes. Even so, he wasn’t sure they could really have inflicted much damage. These creatures usually inhabited the null-space between galaxies, surviving on dark energy and any vessel foolish enough to attempt such a voyage. Qorall had used the worms in the first battle to breach the galactic barrier, but they’d hardly been seen since, and most in the Alliance had hoped they had returned home. Jorann sent a priority message to those outside the stent, to dispatch one ship immediately back to the High Guard with news of this development.
The worm slithered towards the Tla Beth ship. Why wasn’t the Tla Beth running? The other commanders were eerily silent. Breaking protocol, he tried contacting the Tla Beth ship directly on the emergency channel, but there was not even a transponder response.
He skimmed through sensor readings and then his mind snagged on one: the worm had emitted a dark energy spike that had been off the scale, directed at the Tla Beth ship. No one knew much about Tla Beth tech or physiology, but Qorall must have somehow gained intel on their weak spots. But then another thought struck him: how had Qorall known a Tla Beth would be present? The idea of a corrupt Q’Roth was impossible. Never mind, he told himself, that would have to wait.
Qorall’s tactic was suddenly clear to him: all this slaughter had been a ploy with a single objective: to destroy – or more likely capture – a Tla Beth, the highest level of intelligence in the galaxy. Qorall wanted one, presumably alive, to study. The Tla Beth were the only species of any real threat to him, and Qorall didn’t know enough about them, coming from a different galaxy. Jorann understood the importance of military intelligence: if Qorall captured a Tla Beth…
He mindplexed the other commanders, not bothering to apologise for involving the Tla Beth in the first place; that was in the past now, and regret wasn’t in the Q’Roth psychological lexicon.
Immediately the two remaining battleships lurched forward to place themselves between the worm and the Tla Beth ship. Jorann received a message
Instead he spun his ship into action, plotting a loop-and-catch manoeuvre that would push more ‘G’s than human physiology could have handled. Using a gravity web he snatched up the inert Tla Beth craft into the main hold. As he raced back toward the collapsing stent, the liquid space increased its density, slowing his ship down. That made him realise something about the sphere – it had intelligence. He wondered if it was alive in some rudimentary way; so much of Qorall’s arsenal was organic, compared to this galaxy’s focus on tec
hware. Instinct could react faster than intellect. Jorann wanted to think this through but he had other priorities: his ship’s integrity was at twenty-five per cent and falling. Two destroyers paved a way before him, attracting mines which hadn’t been there on their way in. The two battleships behind him went silent. He gunned all engines and thrusters, ordering his faster Hunter craft to make a dash for the stent. Instead, they turned and charged the worm, trying to slow it down.
Jorann wasn’t going to make it. The stent had already buckled. One of the outside commanders informed him the whole sphere was shimmering; it was about to jump, presumably away from the War’s front, back deep inside Qorall space. The destroyer to port exploded, and two seconds later the one to starboard peeled off, its drives heavily damaged, drifting backwards to detonate in the worm’s pathway. Jorann watched the gargantuan creature ease through the debris field, nudging the exploding destroyer aside like driftwood. Jorann and his surviving crew were alone.
His sensors told him the worm was increasing its speed, gaining on him. He calculated he had twenty seconds before it would make contact and leach the energy from his battleship, including all Q’Roth life, and capture its Tla Beth prize.
Jorann set the self-destruct timer for ten seconds and broadcast a message to Granch and the other commanders outside. “They won’t get the Tla Beth. Take the intel we’ve gained back to the Ch’Hrach staging point. Prepare better next time.” He didn’t add what he thought: that it had been an honour serving with them, that they were the most impressive, fearless soldiers he’d ever seen. He counted down. At three seconds everything around him turned quicksilver.
A second later he found himself in a cramped metallic compartment gazing through a porthole at a distant luminous sphere. A spark flared briefly inside it, then the bubble itself flashed and was gone, leaving a motley flotilla of healthy and injured Q’Roth ships, which soon jumped out of this space as well, onto their long trip back home.
Jorann tried to turn around, but the area confining him was like a cylindrical coffin. He heard a voice behind him. It took him a moment to realize it was human, though it spoke perfectly accented Q’Roth.
“Sorry for the discomfort, this is really a two-person craft, but we needed to talk.”
Jorann thrashed his legs, manoeuvring his body until he could rotate enough to see who the voice belonged to. As he finally managed to turn around, he saw a compact cockpit with two occupants: the first was humanoid, but made entirely of platinum flow-metal. Next to him was one of the mud-coloured reptilian Rangers he’d seen once or twice, two and a half metres from snout to tail, with serious teeth. Some said they served the Tla Beth; others that they had unknown allegiances. The Q’Roth considered them to be anachronistic mavericks the Tla Beth should have weeded out long ago.
Jorann tried to speak human, but of course it came out Q’Roth.
“Who are you? Why did you save me? And for that matter, how did you save me?”
The platinum man stared a while, then smiled. “We know who you really are, General – well, who you used to be. We were here on reconnaissance back-up for the Tla Beth, when we, er, received a message, and discovered you.”
Jorann could not see how any of this was possible. “Is the Tla Beth safe?”
The reptilian Ranger answered in Largyl 6, though it sounded as if he had bricks in his throat. “Tla Beth in hold. Unconscious. Stasis. Second Tla Beth ship on intercept. Will take home.”
Jorann gathered that was as much information as he was going to get. “Then we need to return to the Q’Roth High Guard, and –’
The platinum man held up a hand. “The other commanders have all the intel they need. Besides, we have another mission for you, one involving humanity.”
Jorann’s gash pressed closed. He couldn’t accept this was happening. In the first five years after awakening as a Q’Roth he’d plotted, and dreamt of somehow being rescued by humans. But the Q’Roth warriors he’d lived with until now were infinitely more pragmatic, and didn’t indulge in wanton optimism. It had been so long. Despite having yearned for human contact all these years, now he found he couldn’t face it. “Any humans would kill me on sight if they could.”
The platinum man’s face rippled for a moment, as if he had momentarily been elsewhere. “Fair point. But maybe I can help you out. Would you like to look human again?”
Jorann stared with all six slits at the humanoid creature, wondering if he was some kind of agent for Qorall, if this was some kind of trick. Maybe the sphere had jumped with him and his crew inside it, and Qorall was using some form of mental simulation to get his guard down. It seemed infinitely more likely than being rescued by a humanesque figure promising to deliver his most heartfelt, and most discarded, desire. Jorann steeled himself. The Q’Roth had trained him for such interrogation. All he had to do to break this charade was ask for a piece of information which the enemy couldn’t know, that even he himself didn’t know.
“If you know who I am, then tell me my name.” There, that would stump him for sure. Only Sister Esma knew, and she’d withheld it even from the Q’Roth. Once they failed to answer this question he would attack, or die trying. He readied muscles in all six of his legs; his claws curled, ready. He would show Qorall what a Q’Roth warrior could do at close quarters.
The man’s silver brow creased in a frown, which then morphed into a measured stare. Again, he did something very human – he folded his arms. “You’re General Bill Kilaney.” His tone grew softer. “She hid that from you all this time, didn’t she?”
Jorann heard the name echo inside his memory, at first like a small tinkle, but then it reverberated, resonated, a massive church bell getting louder. His muscles eased off. Of course. General William “Bill” Kilaney. Hearing his name was like a cadence, as if a thousand memories, a thousand voices, suddenly snapped into coherence. Instead of an irritating background cacophony, it was an orchestrated choir. How clever Sister Esma had been to extricate that one memory from all the rest, keeping his humanity off-balance, off-key, all these years.
He couldn’t speak. He kept intoning his name over and over, terrified he might forget it. Q’Roth physiology wasn’t strong on emotions, but his upper claws shook. He clenched them, and closed all six slits for a moment. Thank you, he intoned, not sure exactly who or what he was thanking, and in the same moment he paid his last respects to all the Q’Roth who’d perished inside the sphere. 26,012. From this day on, he would count them no more.
The platinum man waited patiently, seeming to understand. “Will you join us, General? We mean to stop Qorall, and to preserve humanity. Blake and Micah are still alive, and they’re going to need your help when the quarantine comes down in a week’s time. We believe that some of the people there are set to engage in a war with the Alicians and the Q’Roth, which is the last thing any of us needs. Until finding you, I wasn’t sure how to prevent this from happening, but as you can imagine, your presence, and your unique perspective, would be invaluable.”
Jorann – Kilaney – found he could utter no words. He’d been Blake’s mentor for two decades. All the smaller memories flooded back to him – the ones that ultimately mattered most, the ones that defined him – unlocked by the simple keystone, his name. Everything he’d done, everyone he’d known, who he really was. Amidst the tumble of images, his wife’s face emerged, so clear in front of him, lost to cancer four years before the fall of Earth. She seemed to smile, as if happy to see him again. He raised his two shaking, upper claws in front of him, stared at them, saw them as alien, so alien, despite they were his. The shakes passed. He stretched open the claws like fingers, and meshed them into a crude steeple, like he used to do back on Earth.
Purpose crystallised inside him: defeat Qorall, hell yes; but also – despite what his rescuer had said – Sister Esma would pay for her crimes.
“General, will you join us in helping humanity?”
Kilaney gazed at the platinum man. He no longer felt like uttering a further word
of Q’Roth – he would put that behind him. Instead, he manoeuvred muscles in his armoured thorax, shoulder carapace and neck to approximate a movement he’d not practiced in eighteen years.
He nodded.
Chapter Four
Arson
Micah and Petra sped through the night along the rarely used dust-track towards Shimsha, Spider Central as Petra called it. But Micah wasn’t in search of spiders. One way or another, war was coming either soon after Quarantine came down as Gabriel predicted, or whenever Qorall’s forces reached Esperia. Mankind needed the best tactical commander left alive on the planet. But Blake had become a recluse since his wife had passed, staying hidden in Shimsha. Micah hoped to persuade him to come back, rejoin the effort, and fight once again if necessary. Blake was respected by Genners and Steaders alike, and could perhaps heal some divisions.
Petra shouted above the wind as they roared closer to Shimsha. “Do you reckon he’ll even talk to us? He’s so wrapped up with the spiders. Who knows if he even cares about us anymore?”
Micah knew he should have called on Blake more often. “His wife died, Petra. He needed some peace, and some space. Anyway, I sent a message, so he knows we’re coming.”
“I wasn’t criticizing his motives.”
“He’s not going to let us down, that’s not who he is.” Micah prayed he was right about that.
There was a short pause. “I know he was a great commander,” began Petra, “by the old standards.”
“Look, intellectually he’s not at your or Gabriel’s level, Petra, he can’t be, I know that. But he has a damn sight more experience of fighting a war. We need him.”