by George Tome
“Hide the destroyer on Antyra, and contact the aliens with the two shuttles,” continued Deko. “If you fall into a trap, make sure you don’t get caught alive!”
“We’ll have their fleets on our heels,” Kirk’an said with a sigh, pointing at the grays.
“I reckon you’re the most capable of us to fool them,” Deko smiled.
Kirk’an is too pessimistic. They’re going to need a whole fleet to stop us, thought the god of the bracelet. With a bit of luck, the grays will only send a couple of ships to scan Antyra, and we’ll blast them into smithereens before the arrival of the Rigulians. It may actually be harder to explain to the aliens why we have to run like crazy just after meeting them, he grinned at the prospect—Kirk’an’s not exactly famous for diplomacy.
“Sigia will fall before the contact,” said Deko, making efforts to hide his voice tremor. “You’ll be everything that’s left of our world.”
He stopped speaking for a few moments, crushed by the enormity of his words. For Sigians, the apocalypse had come.
“You’ll be the ambassadors of a dead world. Tell them how we fought to the last Sigian; tell them how we didn’t bow our heads and laughed in the face of death. Convince them we deserve to be helped.”
Deko stopped for a moment, looking into his eyes. His eyes. Gill felt the burning gaze piercing his skull like a hot platinum rod. Suddenly, it crossed his kyi that Deko wasn’t talking to the Sigians anymore. The Sigians were dead—all of them. After 1,250 years, they were surely dead, even the seed bearers, because somehow, they managed to meet their doom on Antyra II—maybe betrayed, maybe careless, maybe out of luck. No. Deko was speaking to him across the gulfs of time and space, to tell the tragic and unbelievably heroic tale of his species. The alien was seeking his help! And then he started to feel something growing inside him, something he never felt before: it was the implacable determination to keep this story from being buried back into nothingness… to become the new Sigian ambassador.
“Your purpose is to rebirth Sigia. With their help, you can bring back our world,” continued Deko. “Share our greatest achievements, and in return, ask for a world only for us.”
A loud sigh came out of Kirk’an’s chest. He began to feel the enormity of the task on his shoulders.
“You’ll have the plans for the bracelets, and they will work on aliens too, except for our enemies. If any of the grays get their hands on one, it’ll blow up in a rather spectacular fashion. Don’t forget about the wormhole prototype and, of course, our newest ship, the destroyer you command. You have multipoint forges. Print some incubators and everything else you need. Raise us from the ashes. And above all, don’t forget about—”
“Revenge!” exclaimed Kirk’an, grinding his teeth.
“Look at these cities,” said Deko, pointing at the huge flames stretching all the way to the orbit. “We’re all waiting for our death to get a purpose.”
As they talked, most of the enemy fleet had gone to the other side of the planet to hunt down the last sky towns and rogue ships.
“If Sigia falls before two months—which is all but certain to happen—the Six Stars will lose contact with us. They may get spooked and turn back,” Kirk’an said, worried.
“We already told them that our tachyon generators need maintenance, so we might go silent for a while—a small lie to buy us some time.”
They approached the battlefield, still undetected, their enemies being too absorbed by their sinister occupation to bother looking around. The ship steered toward the hydrocarbon planet, where the Sigian base was dug inside the southern flank of the Torres volcano.
“Be ready to take the package,” said Deko. “It leaves now!”
A large ship burst from a hidden ice gallery. The grays immediately detected it. Their fleet—most of which still gathered on the other side of the planet—rushed in pursuit. But since they were so far away, none of their ships had a chance to catch it before it reached Gill’s destroyer.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same with the asteroid wreckers. They finally figured out the ruse and swiftly turned on a trajectory to bring them between the two Sigian vessels.
At first scattered, the enemies quickly coalesced into a distortion front. As if attracted by a magnetar, the gray ships slipped closer and closer, until they touched at the widest section. Automatic handlers linked them together, and their speed began to increase. They turned into a giant monster, rushing to devour them.
The fleet was moving incredibly fast—much faster than the older models—and it became clear they’d cross the path of the Sigians before the contact. The god of the bracelet started to shiver. How were they going to get rid of them?
No gray ship could ever dream of outrunning a Sigian one—especially the destroyer—but a fleet was a different beast all together.27 When the giant monster approached the Torres vessel, the crew reduced its speed and began evasive maneuvers. The enemies immediately broke the distortion front and launched their deadly dance like a swarm of licants around a light bulb.
Gill’s destroyer approached the hive while keeping the contact with the other ship’s bridge. No one there showed the slightest concern, even though they knew all too well they were going to be blasted into pieces. When the distance became small enough, the vessel made a final jump toward them and stopped pulling the space. The enemies focused their lenses on its engines, with two of them exploding almost instantly. Meanwhile, the ship crossed the bulk of the blockade, turned its back to the destroyer, and jettisoned a red conical cargo toward them. Then it accelerated again with all the speed it could squeeze from the dying engines, flying toward the bulk of the ships approaching from behind.
As the cargo reached the destroyer and the crew pulled it into the cargo bay, an explosion more powerful than anything Gill could have imagined ripped through the enemy fleet. Some of the ships closest to the blast began losing air and liquids into space, spinning out of control. Antimatter! realized the stunned god of the bracelet. A deliberate blow to give them an advance!
The red cargo was under wraps in the destroyer’s belly when the first wave of enemies arrived nearby and opened fire. Most of the fleet followed closely, except for about twenty, too damaged to take part.
Soon, it became obvious that their ship didn’t care much about hits that would have torn apart other vessels. Their outer hull was covered in a layer of golden crystal stripes designed to deflect energy attacks. When the lasers hit the hull, the surrounding area became shiny and scattered the beam in all directions.
Seeing the uselessness of their efforts, the attackers stopped firing and began pounding them with nuclear charges. On the ship’s bridge, the Sigians were prepared for this. The walls, floor, ceiling, and even the battle cockpits where the fighters nested became transparent. Their defensive rays lit up the skies, hunting down wave after wave of bombs. Each of the soldiers defended a patch of space using a strange rod, which they pointed at the charges directly through the invisible walls.
With more and more grays reaching them, the space turned into a mad whirlpool. When the cargo was finally anchored in the ship’s bay, the commander gave an order. A tall Sigian pushed his arms inside a translucent sphere through the openings on its sides. The slug woke up and clung hungrily on his elbows. Thousands of lights started to shine within it, animated by a life of their own, while the ball slowly pulsed under the Sigian’s will. The soldier twisted the jelly, and the stars, the enemy ships, and pretty much everything else became a storm of lines and colors. The Sigians didn’t seem bothered by the distortion madness, still hitting their targets with ease, always at the slightly thickened head of the stripe. Everyone knew all too well what would have happened if they missed one. But with every passing moment, more and more charges were launched at them.
At Kirk’an’s orders, the Sigian made a series of jumps in one direction, till the enemies slid to their right. With the destroyer out of the range of their nukes, they stopped jumping and sped up.
&
nbsp; And then came the ugly surprise: they were unable to outrun the grays after they assembled in a distortion front!
Once the destroyer was again in their range, the jelly handler twisted the space while the metal monster broke formation and attacked them from all sides. After they detached, the grays lost the advantage of their speed. Once again, the Sigians slipped from their grip and sped away, just like the first time.
Their enemies tried the same attack a couple more times until they finally got the idea. They had to contend with chasing them at close range.
“What shall we do now?” the god-Gill asked Kirk’an.
“We run like this until we meet a planetoid.”
“They’ll blow us to pieces in one hit,” he said, nodding.
The god of the bracelet had spoken for the first time, and from their common lips, the weird words came out with ease. It felt strange to hear himself uttering such unnatural sounds so naturally.
Deko popped up again on the wall screen, more worried than before. The wrinkles on his face now looked like the canyons of the Red Scarp.
“We’re in trouble, Deko!”
“So I’ve seen! From now on, you’ll talk with the fleet command. I can’t help you anymore,” he whispered.
“What are you going to do?” asked Kirk’an, knowing all too well the answer.
“My time has come,” he murmured, resigned to his fate. “We don’t have defense on the base; we moved it to the asteroids to slow them down. Good luck, Kirk’an!”
“Good-bye, Deko. I promise you won’t be forgotten,” said Kirk’an, saluting him by pressing his fist to his mouth and blowing, producing a guttural noise that sounded like choeee. Then he touched his chest.
With all the cities crashed down in flames, the gray fleet finally approached the volcano. They couldn’t possibly miss the largest cave. The bracelet bearer clenched his fists in despair. He would have done anything for a chance to fight the enemies, to rip their ships into pieces and watch the debris drifting aimlessly.
Following a brief search, the grays stopped around the southern wall of the volcano. They had found the tachyon detector and most likely were trying to understand what it was supposed to be.
After they reached a conclusion, they opened fire on the ice ceiling, collapsing it into the hole underneath. The hit revealed an artificial cave sheltering the huge tachyon device. It was a sphere suspended in a gravity field and bathed in bluish light, sending out sparkling, playful irisations in the depths of the glacier. From place to place, orange detectors pulled their heads out of the ice walls.
At the same time, hundreds of hologuided nukes plunged into the volcano. Some fell in the canyons while others steered along the ice caverns.
Deko was still with them on the wall screen.
“Remember, you’re the last h—”
The transmission ended abruptly when the bombs exploded all at once. Huge fire mushrooms rose everywhere, the ice melted by the blasts turning into boiling rivers, which quickly flooded the canyons. Water, steam, and burning hydrocarbons gushed out of cracks. When the oxygen released into the atmosphere reached the volcano, huge pillars of fire climbed through the hydrocarbon eruption to join the orbital fire streaks of the burning cities. Inside the ship, everyone was speechless. Ariga’s hydrocarbon harvesters and fleet printers became history… for the bracelet’s bearer and for the whole Sigian civilization.
CHAPTER 6.
Tarjis, the children of Zhan. “The righteous ones,” in the sacred language. When the temples asked for all children to be handed to them, they ignited a civil war that robbed them of their power. But not all opposed them. Plenty of Antyrans, afraid of Zhan’s wrath, gave up their sons and daughters. These children educated by the temples came back in the world as tarjis, Antyrans following the Inrumiral book’s commands above all earthly laws.
Most tarjis became farmers. Growing acajaa kept them closer to Zhan and protected them from the corruptible technologies lurking in the cities. They were not greedy and never worked large parcels that would have taken too much of their precious time. They fed on Baila’s promises and never chased more than the bare necessities of life. That was why, in time, the farmers became the power base of the temples.
Of course, not all tarjis were farmers. The most cunning were trained to conceal their education and infiltrate the Shindam’s bureaucracy, to become Baila’s eyes inside the worldly leadership.
And then there were the coria dwellers, from where the prophet recruited his assassins.
The majority of the believers lived on Antyra II.28 And it was precisely this reason why Baila XXI was cursing his wretched misfortune; he had a whole planet packed with tarjis at his disposal, and it had to be the Sigarion’s jure—a servant of the Shindam—to stumble upon the artifacts, instead of one of his pilgrims!
At least now he’d finally put the tarjis to good use, to help him get his hands on the artifacts, wipe out the Shindam’s corruption, and take back the reins of power.
The prophet scratched a note on his sleeve-fabric display: remember to dump a seeker on his tracks. The tracks of Colenam, the discoverer of the skeletons. He was sure the Shindam hid him somewhere, but he wanted him. He wanted him not to extract details—he already received them—but to set an example. He decided that all those involved in the story should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
The sleeve screen woke up with a beep, and a red triangle appeared in the upper-right corner. He knew the meaning: a new holoreport was ready to be rendered. His agents were out gathering information and untangling the threads of the complicated story for him. Let’s hope I finally get some good news. He felt his time had finally arrived.
Lounging in the pink fluff of a double nest, Alala changed the spectrum of the windows to an intense green. The mountains, the sky, and all the wild landscape around the dome took on the hues of a surreal world suffocated in a poisonous atmosphere.
She liked this color more than any other. The rays enveloped her body, giving the impression she was lying in the tall grasses of the Alixxoran plains. When she was a child she liked to hide in the grass and let her brothers seek her; it was one of their favorite games.
They lived a carefree life on a forage farm near Alixxor, playing “chase the smell” all day long in the fields. Then, one day, their mother got sick. She never agreed to send them to the temples, as their father wished. Her brothers… it seemed an eternity since she last saw them.
But it wasn’t a good moment to get overwhelmed by memories and become vulnerable again. Taking a deep breath, she banished the treacherous thoughts back into the little corner from where they had escaped for a moment.
Dusk was falling, and Gill still lay hidden in his nest, strangely uninterested in what was happening in Alixxor—even though the madness had “something to do” with his tail. His behavior puzzled Alala greatly. He definitely knew more than he revealed in the Tower. He had lied to her, and she sensed that. After all, she was a female. Well, she knew a couple of tricks to make him loosen up his tail, and soon she would use them without remorse. But for all her curiosity, she decided to allow him a few more breaths before going on the offensive.
She chased away the insidious feeling of drowsiness dripping in her bones. She rose to her feet and walked into the food quarter to prepare something to eat—namely, a handful of dubious leftovers forgotten on her last trip. If only she had learned how to cook.
After opening two cans and pouring water on the orange powder, she stirred the content to warm it with the help of a chemical reaction. She sniffed the result and happily decided that the job was done. She moved back into the main room, which was furnished with a large holotheater for the lazy evenings after a day of adventures in the frozen mountains.
She turned on the holoflux from the softness of the double nest, anxious to find out what was happening in the capital.
Everywhere, she saw the same images of turmoil and destruction. The tarjis were marching through the city to take
over the Shindam’s Towers; long lines of refugees clogged the exit roadways. The chaos and fires spread like a deadly plague about to consume Alixxor in its poisonous claws. If Antyra’s star had risen above a prosperous, joyful capital in the middle of the largest holiday of the year, the sunset cast its shadows over a besieged city on the brink of a civil war.
All this time, Gill’s kyi had remained trapped in the terrible nightmare of the Sigian soldier. He knew he risked being discovered if Alala rushed into his room and found him unconscious with the bracelet on his arm. He could order the bracelet to disconnect, but the temptation to live the end of the story was too great.
Although the Sigians had left Ariga’s star system, the status quo didn’t change.
The owner of the bracelet anxiously gazed at the enemy vessels chasing them at close range, trying to guess how long they had to live. They had plenty of energy onboard, so everything hinged on their enemies’ desire to throw a planetoid in their path. And if the grays had already found out their mission, as he strongly suspected, they wouldn’t release them from their clutches until they were thoroughly dead.
With a whole fleet on their trail, it made no sense to fly on to Antyra. They would condemn the Rigulian ambassadors to certain death, that is, of course, if Kirk’an could find a way to stay alive for another two months—a pretty outlandish proposition. They had to open a tachyonic synchronization with Sigia and ask for help, even though their homeworld didn’t fare much better, either.
Fortunately—or rather, unfortunately—they could call them at will. The problem with transmissions was that the position of a ship talking to a base could be easily triangulated by the enemy probes in orbit around the Sigian worlds. But in their unenviable situation, followed by a whole enemy fleet, that was the least of their worries.
“Kirk’an, the new orders are to change course for Sigia,” said the young cadet as soon as he appeared on the screen.