by Barry Kirwan
“Esperia. If it’s still in one piece.”
Aramisk nodded, and the Raptor veered towards the planet.
Kat bit down on her lower lip, staring at the orange dot dead ahead, willing it to survive, trying not to think of it glowing nova-white, incinerating everyone she cared about.
Not quite everyone. If you’re out there, Pierre, now would be a bloody good time to intervene.
But as the craft powered toward Esperia, Kat noticed that her companion was frighteningly still, as if she might crack. Mannekhi hid their emotions well, but she knew they weren’t made of stone. Kat draped her arm around her rigid shoulders. “Aramisk, tell me about Tarish, and about the Eleventh Tribe. I’ve never been good with relatives, but it’s never too late to learn.”
Aramisk turned to face Kat, face blanched behind strands of unruly hair, lips trembling as if struggling to let the words out. Then the façade she’d built up all her life split wide open. Kat held her, and while she rocked Aramisk gently, uttering soothing nonsense, all her own anger, fears and pain breached the surface too.
Chapter Twenty-One
Tightening Noose
Jen’s exhilaration at flying the Kalarash ship had long since evaporated. She’d handed over control to Dimitri, Rashid operating tactical, sweeping aside dark worm debris as Kalaran ploughed through the latest, thickening wave. Just how many were there? Qorall had evidently been breeding them somewhere, or genetically manufacturing them, but that would require bio-farms on an almost unimaginable scale.
She tugged at her hair, let her forehead dip down and bump the console in front of her. “This is taking too long!” The other two didn’t hear her, they were both immersed, their minds hooked into the ship’s functions. Jen was supposed to be resting, not having slept in two days. Instead she accessed the Memento’s long-range scanners, but didn’t like what she found.
Jen had asked Kalaran if he could see what was happening back home, and without another word he’d let her look. Four Hohash were in the area: two on Esperia, two on the pyramid ship. These omnipaths relayed information to the Memento as it battled to enter the galaxy through the portal blockaded by Qorall’s forces. Due to the gravity weapons Kalaran was using, there were temporal effects in the datastream. Images arrived in pulses, flashes of vision. It reminded her of old-style radar, where every sweep would give an update of what had just happened, and then fade. The gap between the updates was around ten minutes, though back home they were being transmitted every second. She’d asked Kalaran once if he could go back in time. He’d said no, but that it was possible to slow time, or give that appearance. In any case, ten minutes was up.
With a mental flick, the image arose in her head again through the neural interface. She filtered out the deepening lattice of Shrell filaments– a quarter of the males were already dead – and focused on Esperia’s predicament. The Hunter vessel was a burial mound of twisted metal, and sixty captives had been taken – she didn’t know why. The pyramid was listing badly and looked good for only another fifteen minutes or so. That was where she kept staring, because Gabriel was onboard. Images of him stole her breath away – God, he looked like his father! Micah seemed to be badly injured, but at least the Ossyrians were patching him up.
The Crucible had lacerated the moon, and in about one local hour an avalanche of rock would start its fall towards Esperia, burying it under a hundred metres of meteoric rubble and dust. The Hohash had uncovered who was running the ship via a decoded transmission between the Crucible and the Marauder. Jen wasn’t surprised. How could humanity have such awful luck, with Sister Esma hellbent on its eradication and Louise riding shotgun? The only active deterrent was Kilaney onboard the Mannekhi spiker; she’d never met him, but his reputation preceded him. The info-pulse faded, normal vision flooding back.
Jen stood up and paced, tugging at her hair again. She kicked the side of a console. “Kalaran,” she shouted, “let me do something! I can’t just stand by and watch them all die.” There was no answer. He was busy. They all were: Dimitri’s shut-eyed expression was deadly serious, his large hands twitching feverishly over the multronic navcon keypad. Rashid’s body was perfectly still except for his fingers dancing inside a football-sized holosphere, each tiny movement whipping out hellfire beams from the Duality to fend off or slice through enemy flesh. Beads of sweat clung to his temples. Hold it together, Rashid!
Jen turned on her interface again and switched back to short range, seeing an augmented forward view from the Memento. There were three more enemy waves inbound, combinatons of ships and worms, enemy vessels attacking as soon as they emerged from the ruptured portal. Where the hell were they coming from? Jen didn’t want to distract Kalaran, so left him to try and scorch a way through. But the tactic was obvious – Qorall wanted to delay Kalaran’s return, to ensure that Esperia fell. Not that he gave a damn about the humans. The spiders; Qorall now knew they were a threat, despite not knowing why or how. Join the club; Kalaran wouldn’t tell her either. Jen resorted to her favourite way of killing time, a karate kata where she could flex her muscles and utter a heartfelt ‘kiai’ at its end.
Ten minutes up, she switched on and stretched the scanner scale out again, in time to witness Louise’s Marauder detonate in a shower of white shards, two Raptors surviving, one headed to the Crucible, one to Esperia. She was unsure who had made it off alive. But just before it exploded the last occupant had broadcast a message that Louise had Nova bombs and was going to fire them at Esperia. If any got through, the spiders and all of mankind would vanish, boiling to death on an imploding world. If that happened, she wondered if Kalaran would cease the fighting and turn back around.
“No.” Kalaran used an avatar of her father this time – she’d asked him not to use her brother anymore, not with the real Gabriel – his son, anyway – out there fighting for his life.
Jen was relieved to hear it. “But without them you can’t win, can you?”
As was more often the case, Kalaran answered a different question. “Hellera is still there. Qorall has found her hiding place.”
“Kalaran to the rescue, eh?”
Her father’s face turned to her, a flash of displeasure – she hated the way Kalaran could mimic people from her memories so damned well. “Sorry,” she said. As if to try to change the subject, not wishing to lose his attention and end up pacing alone again, she asked the question in the back of her mind. “Why did they take the hostages. I mean the Alicians, why did they take sixty people?”
Kalaran’s borrowed face smiled, the way her real father used to when he was humouring her. “I’m Level Nineteen, Jen; I always know what you mean.”
She shrugged, folded her arms. “I’m not distracting you am I? You know, from more important things?”
Kalaran’s smile broadened. “Ninety-nine and a half per cent of me is locked in battle, but the rest of me needed a small break, a diversion.”
“I’m flattered,” she said, failing to sound sarcastic, because whenever she got his attention, particularly using her dead father’s image, she never wanted it to end.
He opened his hand, and moved it as if tossing something into the air. A series of small linked balls appeared. A molecule. She’d studied chemistry, and every night Kalaran had been sleep-teaching all three of them advanced sciences, but she didn’t recognise it at first, except that the way it twisted, it could only be a DNA strand.
It rotated in mid air while Kalaran spoke in her father’s grainy Irish voice. “It is tempting to imagine that one can easily move up a Level.” He said no more.
This was how it worked between them, the way he taught her. Intelligence is never about facts, he’d once said to all three of them; it is about the way you think, the questions you frame. Jen knew she had to make the leap to the next point, see the link. “The Q’Roth… they upgraded the Alicians in a matter of centuries…” Her eyes widened. “You mean they got it wrong?”
“They missed something. I had one of the Hohash run a de
ep bioscan of the Alicians who raided your new world.” The atomic-level model shrank into nothingness. “They will die out without this molecule in its natural state. A reproductive imbalance.”
Jen snorted in disbelief. “So, if none of us had escaped…” She shook her head. “Life can be a sardonic bitch, eh?”
Kalaran grew serious. “That has been an especially hot Level Nineteen discussion topic for eons, Jen. One of our koans, you might say.”
Kalaran didn’t usually talk more than a few sentences. She capitalised on his mood with one of her long-harboured questions. “So what do the different Levels really represent?”
“Species think that they can advance by learning a trick or altering DNA, but it takes thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years, and for higher Levels, millions. They think it is like a simple musical scale; you just need to go up a notch.”
“It’s more like harmonics, isn’t it?”
Kalaran stared at her a moment. But he suddenly seemed distracted, as if seeing something elsewhere, and was gone.
“See you around Kal. Nice chatting. I know, you’re busy.” But he’d given her an idea. The Hohash… Jen walked to one of the glass spheres the three of them used to move around the vast ship. “Take me to the Hohash.” There was a pause during which the sphere remained stationary.
Kalaran spoke to her without appearing. “Why do you want to see the Hohash?”
“I have an idea. Best if I don’t tell you, though.”
The sphere dropped through the floor into a vast, lilac-tinted empty space, makng her grab onto a waist-high rail despite the gravity stabiliser, as she free-fell past the smooth, asteroid-sized globes whose function remained a mystery. Dimitri had described them as God’s marbles, as usual seeing wonder in everything. The mercury lake was five kilometres below, and she plummeted towards it. This area had been out of bounds for the past year. As it rose up towards her she realised how vast it was, its surface rippling, swirling currents underneath. She held her breath and grabbed the rail again. Are you going to stop? It was getting really close – she could see the reflection of the sphere, getting bigger. Kalaran, please!
It stopped a foot from the surface; she felt no deceleration, and stumbled out onto the squidgy surface, her heart thumping in her chest. Thanks, I think.
Jen had never stood on it before, and didn’t know if it was actually mercury or not, but decided it was best not to slip.
The Hohash she had seen only once before – Kalaran was a bit protective about it – was waiting for her. Instead of a golden rim like others she’d seen, this one’s rim was a deep red. But it was the mirror itself that was mesmerising. Most Hohash had flat mirror surfaces, and she’d found one in the caves where she’d first encountered Kalaran that had its surface divided up into eight segments, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. But this one had five concentric ovals, making her feel drawn in, as if, like Alice, she could step right through it.
Jen had one thing, and only one thing in common with Kat. Jen had a node, however her success in accessing any Hohash had been pitiful compared to Kat. Kalaran had told her it had nothing to do with her node, rather that she had ‘issues’, a darkness inside her the Hohash didn’t appreciate. She’d sulked for a few days after that little gem, not missing the irony. But she needed to try something. Closing her eyes a moment, she reached out, trying to open her mind to it. With a shock she was ‘in’ – this had usually taken ten minutes, or much longer, and occasionally forever.
Opening her eyes, she placed the ‘call’ as she thought of it, letting the Hohash know whom she wanted to communicate with – Hellera – knowing it was a ridiculous idea. Why would Hellera even acknowledge, in her eyes, such a lowly being? But with trepidation that had her biting her lip and gripping the Hohash’s rim, Jen knew that the link from this Hohash to Hellera’s was ‘open’. Jen saw nothing, but spoke anyway. She had a pathetic urge to start with “Your Majesty…”
“Hellera, my name –”
“Is Kalaran there?” The voice was synthetic, cold.
“Yes, he…” The connection broke, leaving a stinging sensation in her head. Great. Not for the first time Jen wondered what on Earth Kalaran had done to Hellera. Dimitri had offered a few bawdy suggestions, but Jen seriously hoped that by Level Nineteen beings would have risen above such behaviour. Try a different approach, she told herself.
Hellera.
The sting was more intense this time, making Jen’s eyes water.
“I can have the Hohash in front of you eviscerate your brain. Be concise and then do not contact me again.”
Jen thought quickly, then spoke three words.
Jen escorted the Hohash back to the cockpit control area Kalaran had created for his three human guests. She counted down, then accessed the scanner again. Three of Louise’s Nova bombs had detonated as they snagged Shrell filaments. Nothing else had changed appreciably. She flicked to short-range, the view ahead of the Memento. A crimson glow mushroomed behind the enemy worms and fleets. Abruptly, ships exploded as a ruby cloud engulfed everything in its path, scattering worms and flinging space vessel debris in all directions. As the cloud faded to pink, and then the blackness of space washed back in, a single ship emerged, its deep red arrowhead facing the Memento.
Dimitri and Rashid both disengaged from their immersers, and glanced at Jen.
“The cavalry,” she said. “I thought it was about time.”
Kalaran’s voice entered the room. “You called her. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Kalaran needs you’.”
Kalaran didn’t do pauses, but Jen was sure there might have been a tiny delay, probably in the nanosecond range.
“How did she arrive so quickly?”
Jen shook her head. “Maybe I should look over your intellect rating system. Your entire template seems to neglect emotional intelligence.”
Kalaran laughed. “As you would say, Jen, I get it. She was already on her way.”
The three Kalarash ships slipped through the portal amongst fleeing dark worms, entering the Silverback galaxy unobstructed, shoving away the debris of mashed warships. For Jen and the others it had been a year, though eighteen had sped past on Esperia. She’d heard no more from Kalaran, other than an image relayed on a central viewer showing the nebula where Hellera had been hiding until very recently, or rather, what was left of it. Dimitri reckoned it was a white hole. Jen didn’t know what that was exactly, except it was blinding white and everything in that sector had shredded and was breaking down at the sub-atomic level. The radiation was off the scale, exotic particles spilling outwards at sub-light and lightspeed. Dimitri had a hard time conceiving its power; undoubtedly one of Qorall’s secret weapons, probably not his last. Hellera had gotten out just in time.
The scanner saccades were coming more regularly now they were inside the galaxy, as they slowly segued towards ‘normal’ time. Jen’s expression grew dark, events unfolded rapidly on the pyramid ship. She called for Kalaran. “We need to get there faster, or slow time more, so we arrive before it’s too late, preferably both.”
There was no answer, so Dimitri filled in the gap. “We cannot do both, my love, you know that.”
She whirled around to her lover, her chest heaving. “But I don’t want to watch him die, all alone, when we’re so damned close!”
Dimitri deflated, offering her his hand.
Hellera’s ice-cold voice spoke, sending a shiver down Jen’s spine, making Dimitri and Rashid jump. “There is a way. Tell her, Kalaran. Or else I will.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nova Stormers
Micah staggered like a drunken spider, ricocheting from one side of the corridor to the other. Petra folded her arms tight, as if hugging herself, biting her lower lip.
“Stop clowning around, Uncle.”
“Not funny,” he managed, smiling through pain-clenched teeth. He knew that when Petra resorted to humour like that, she was really concerned. Chahat-Me, on the other hand, watche
d dispassionately, along with two other space-suited surgeons who’d just implanted the bio-mimetic spinal shunt. He still couldn’t feel his legs; that would require more intensive surgery. For now, Micah just wanted to be on his feet when he faced the inevitable.
One of the two Hohash craft had returned to Esperia carrying three youngbloods and several wounded Ossyrians. Chahat-Me suggested he go with them, but the look he’d given her needed no translation, and ended any further discussion.
He stumbled again, trying to convince himself he was less wobbly on his feet. This field op was only possible because they had hotwired his resident to the shunt’s neuro-cluster. But every time he thought he’d got the hang of it, he veered off in near-collapse, groping for support.
After a further minute of embarrassing himself, smoother muscle control returned. Standing straight, he turned, and walked towards Chahat-Me. Relief flooded through him at simply being able to walk with normal steps, though a deep throbbing pain lurked in his lower back. “Thank you Chahat-Me.” He gazed into her quicksilver eyes. “And I’m sorry for… earlier. All of us owe you so much. These past years you’ve looked after us, I’m not sure we earned that.”
Petra joined him, hooked her arm inside his, and leant her head against his shoulder. “It’s nice when you’re not being a pain in the ass, Uncle.”
He squeezed her hand, wishing there was somewhere safe he could send her. But there wasn’t; the whole Esperian system had become a battlefield. Blake had once told him this was why loved ones should stay at home, away from the killing zone – otherwise soldiers couldn’t concentrate, and could easily be undone. Micah knew Petra was his weak spot.
Chahat-Me touched Micah’s right temple, and his vision switched to black. A flood of images poured forth through his resident, making his legs tremble. Petra supported him. He saw ancient Egypt, the construction of the pyramids, Ossyrians walking in palaces, teaching basic medicine before they departed. Then he was shown flashes of humanity’s medical development throughout history, from leaches, blood-letting and trepanning the skull to ‘let the bad vapours out’, to Pasteur and penicillin, the cure of malaria and the defeat of the nano-plague in 2038; human doctors working tirelessly. Micah guessed the Ossyrians respected this aspect of mankind’s progress.