And All The Stars A Grave.

by Greg Curtis

  “Ohh yes. You could say that.” And the smile on her face was that of a panther devouring her prey.

  “I meant are you sure that damned nurse isn’t outside watching?”

  “I really don’t care, and neither do you.” It was an order and Daryl knew better than to disobey. In fact obedience was the only thing he understood after that. That and the joy of service.

  Chapter Sixteen.

  Daryl’s second time on Unity was far different from his first. For a start he wasn’t actually there, at least officially. He was dead. Despite that he was still able to walk freely among the locals. With his newly acquired green eyes, blond hair and reshaped cheekbones, he looked very different to the man he had been a month before, at least to alien eyes – those that actually had eyes. Throw on a Force uniform, and he was just another Edenite as far as anyone else was concerned. Only the crew and compliment of the Targ knew he lived, and they would say nothing, under pain of arrest.

  Meanwhile the Targ according to all the official reports, was still limping its way home, with at least another month of travel ahead of it. That despite the fact they they’d already spent a month blasting their way back to said home as the captain had damn near overloaded the Targ’s power plants getting them there, and been in port for another one and a half.

  No one it seemed had noticed the great ship come home one day and quickly take cover in an abandoned space dock. Though truthfully it was no more abandoned than the Targ was crippled or he was dead. It just looked that way.

  Inside it, five other battleships of equal size were being prepared for war, and Daryl knew this was only one of hundreds of facilities doing the same. The new ships were being modified according to the mountains of information that had come from QA 40, and the technicians were apparently having a nova of a time doing it. The information had not just been new variants on their old themes; it had included entirely new knowledge, and some of the weapons and shields they’d built from it were unlike anything that had ever been seen before. But they were effective. Especially the cloaks.

  For the first time in history, the Interstellar Community was able to make their ships invisible, at least to instruments, and the Force was absolutely crowing at the thought. The advantage in a battle would be huge as the enemy wouldn’t be able to find let alone target them. Unless they knew how to get around it as they surely would have learned in ten thousand years. But Daryl didn’t repeat his pessimistic views too loudly or too often. It just got him abused.

  Besides, he had better things to talk about with his time. Better people to say it to.

  For the first time in his life he was in love, and he knew it. He told Karen often enough and she returned the favour. And it was a big thing for both of them. Neither could call themselves very experienced, both having given up a social life for their work. But then he wondered, had they really given up that much? Could it have been this good with anyone else? Somehow he doubted it.

  From the first morning after they’d woken up in each other’s arms, he’d known that she was the one. Even with his blurry eyesight he could see she was more beautiful than anyone he’d ever seen, and he had known that she was more loving and funnier. And definitely sexier. No matter how sore he’d been after heaven alone knew how many times they’d made love the night before, he’d still found incredible hunger. They both had. They’d made love that morning in her soft bed, in the shower even as they knew they should have been getting ready for work, and then underneath the breakfast table as they tried desperately to eat something before heading off to their assignments. He remembered watching her limping off to work as sore as he was, feeling just a little pride in his work, before he too had limped off to his own work.

  Since then it had only gotten better, and even more intense. A look, a touch, even a chance encounter in the hallway and they were instantly heading for the bedroom. Or a locked office, or anywhere else they could find. At least the pain had passed and they could walk properly. Most of the time.

  Waking up in the morning next to Karen was shear wonder, each and every day. A pleasure that just seemed to multiply every time he saw her. And the nights were heaven as desire simply took over and they made love again and again until they collapsed. Even then they often woke up in the middle of the night just to make love some more. It was a miracle that they got any sleep at all. The passion was just too addictive. Then, once their flesh was exhausted beyond any hope of more loving, they still wouldn’t separate. They just stayed close and talked, finding out how similar they were in so many things, and yet how their differences too seemed to compliment one another’s.

  The number of times they’d made love until they simply couldn’t any longer, then simply babbled on like teenagers until the early morning hours, then made love a few more times until they absolutely had to go to work, and then somehow tried to carry on with their day as though they’d actually slept, was unbelievable. As were the number of times they’d nodded off during the day, or called in sick. It was embarrassing actually, especially when their friends and colleagues knew exactly what was going on and gave them a hard time about it. But despite that, neither could stop it. Not that they wanted to.

  Together they were under a spell, one that was so powerful it owned them. Pain, tiredness, even fear were irrelevant when they were together. And when they were apart all they could think about was when they would be together again. They were deep in the throws of love and they knew it.

  Daryl was both happier and more exhausted than he’d ever been in his life. But he was also terrified.

  He knew in his heart that they were in deadly trouble. Whatever technology they might have gained from the Calderonians, it hadn’t been enough ten thousand years ago to save them. So how useful would it be now? Especially when he’d learnt anew how the enemy operated. And now, he had not just his own life to lose, but also Karen’s, his world, and family. Even Earth itself. And it wasn’t as if they would survive if they lost. The stakes were far higher than that. The coming war would be one of extinction. Never in his life had so much that he loved been on the line. All of it could be taken from him in a heartbeat and there was nothing he could do.

  His engineering knowledge was hopelessly out dated. He had no linguistic skills at all, so couldn’t help with the translation, and quite frankly he wasn’t even a decent soldier. He was redundant. He’d never felt so useless in his entire life.

  Immediately they’d arrived, he’d handed over all control of the scientific staff to the base. He’d had to. The work was so far beyond his competence it was shameful. He spent his first days working with the other scientists, trying to make sense of the data they’d found. Not translating it, for that was beyond him. Nor even converting the blueprints into working machines as that was something for the Force engineers to enjoy. No, he was just trying to understand it.

  Some of it was easy enough. The schematics could be given almost directly to the engineers without trouble, and they welcomed the challenge. The next destination in the Calderonians journey had also been easily found; a little white star nearly three hundred light years from them, which they’d designated ZF 203. But a lot of it made no sense at all. Given the additional data they’d found, the linguists had finally managed a start on the translations, but a lot of what they came up with was simply meaningless. Even when they translated every word. It was almost as if it was some form of poetry written by a drunk.

  More often though, what they got were half records; incredible stories and fascinating facts with tantalising gaps all the way through. A statistical bikini. What it revealed was wonderful, but what it concealed was vital. He, like everyone else, was frustrated by it.

  Then again some of the stuff that they did find, he almost wished they hadn’t. The details of the war. It was something for the strategists to read in detail, but no one else. Because what it showed them was that the Kaiwhare were monsters, in every sense of the word. Their true evil was recorded faithfully in the computer records.


  The Kaiwhare had first come across the Calderonians in space and realised that the Calderonians had a large technological advantage. To attack would have been suicide. So instead they’d pretended friendship, and knifed them in the back. Over the years they’d slowly infiltrated and then stolen not just all the Calderonian’s technology, but also learned their most secret codes. And from time to time they’d arranged a few accidents, as they tested their muscle. A plague here, a falling moon there. It seemed their more recent attacks were simply old plans reused.

  Then one day, when nobody was expecting it, they attacked. At the start the Calderonians didn’t even realise that they were under attack. All they saw were their ships exploding, one by one, for no obvious reason. Their people dying of new and horrible diseases they’d never seen before, and their cities failing. Billions upon billions had died in those first few days, as the Calderonians hunted desperately for a cause, while the enemy was right under their nose.

  Then, when they were softened up enough, and their fleet was in tatters, the Kaiwhare had finally shown their hand to the shocked Calderonians, as they attacked with their own fleet. A massive navy that they’d accumulated in secret and kept hidden.

  The Calderonians had of course fallen back before their enemy, shocked by both their identity and ferocity. But later it was their brutality that really staggered them. That anyone could do such terrible things was beyond them. They hadn’t fought a war in a thousand years, and then only with small aggressive races without their technology. How could they have understood the nature of this one? They retreated, their fleets falling back time and again, expecting their worlds, their people to be captured, and that was bad enough. But when they retreated the Kaiwhare launched attack after attack against undefended populations. Whole worlds were wiped out, long after their defenders had retreated and they had surrendered.

  Understandably the Calderonians were shocked. They couldn’t imagine that anyone, least of all their former friends could do such a thing. But then, when they did understand, it left them in a new mess. They couldn’t abandon their planets. Not when they knew the cost. But they couldn’t defend them either. As a result their lines grew even thinner as the fleet itself was being lost trying to defend those without hope.

  And so it went on for years. The Kaiwhare attacked and attacked, always having more knowledge and more secrets than the Calderonians had ever realised. And the Calderonians in turn kept falling further and further back. Then finally the Calderonians discovered a new weapon. Something that gave them a decisive advantage, and the war had stopped and even turned in their favour for a while. They began to hope. But even then they had reckoned without the Kaiwhare’s evil.

  The moment they had seen even the chance of defeat, the Kaiwhare had launched their most evil weapons as they attempted to wipe out the rest of the Calderonians in one move. Weapons even they had held back because of the danger to themselves. Genetic plagues, terrible evils that destroyed not just people as they rewrote their DNA, but also whole planets. Such things had been considered illegal for far longer than the Interstellar Community had been in existence, and even the researchers found it hard to believe that anybody could have used such perversions. Or that the Kaiwhare themselves could have survived their own insanity. The weapons tended to spread from one world to another, making them as dangerous to the user as they were to the enemy.

  The Calderonians had quickly developed some partial antidotes. Things to slow down the agents, and to give them time. But they had also known that there was no such thing as a cure. Not for them anyway. They were doomed. Their entire race. But the Kaiwhare had finally gone too far, though they didn’t understand that at first. They had pushed their victims into doing things that they would have once considered unimaginable. They had woken the sleeping tiger.

  In desperation, having been broken back almost to the point of extinction, and surely also hatred, the Calderonians brought out their own secret weapons. Nightmares that they’d cooked up in the labs of their fleeing space ships. Everything except the genetic plagues. And they went to war as they’d never have imagined they would. Perhaps the Kaiwhare’s greatest evil was in that they had managed to turn their victims into monsters as well.

  The Calderonians had developed planet-busting missiles, things the Kaiwhare had never imagined possible. It was to their own cost as the Kaiwhare lost a dozen of their most populated worlds in a single day. Worlds that were now asteroid belts that graced so many systems. Fifty billion lives gone in two days, while the Kaiwhare screamed with impotent rage. Naturally the Kaiwhare called for a truce, for peace, while they regrouped and found new ways to destroy the Calderonians. But they had played that card once too often.

  The Calderonians hadn’t honoured the truce. But then why would they? They knew their enemy wouldn’t. Instead, even as the Kaiwhare were preparing for the negotiations, probably seriously for the first time, forty more of their worlds had become burnt out cinders in space, while their negotiation team was massacred. From there the Calderonians had attacked them as mercilessly as they themselves had been attacked. Revenge was a powerful force. And slowly the Kaiwhare themselves had been forced back, screaming futilely and finally begging for the chance to surrender. It wasn’t given.

  The Caledonians were in no mood for peace. Their rage by then must have been uncontrollable. With surely eighty percent of their people already dead, the rest dying by painful degrees and their enemy repeatedly stabbing them in the back, there was no way the Calderonians would stop. It had become a mission of extermination for them as well.

  Just when the Kaiwhare had thought victory was at hand, they had been taught a painful lesson in defeat, and then another in revenge as entire fleets of Calderonian ships armed with their new super weapons stopped honouring the mores of war. Retreating ships were hunted down and destroyed. Civilians were targeted. Any and all weapons were considered fair. The Calderonians had destroyed all of the Kaiwhare’s remaining fleets, while the bodies of the Calderonians afflicted with the Kaiwhare plagues were dropped on more and more of their worlds, eventually destroying them all as well. Another hundred worlds were turned into primal soups for evolution to begin anew.

  If the Calderonians had spent years retreating it became the Kaiwhare’s turn. And their enemy was technologically an over achiever. For three more years the Calderonians had done nothing but hunt their enemy to the point of extinction, while the Kaiwhare fled from all known space. And unlike the Calderonians they had taken nothing with them. They had no surviving worlds left. No great colony ships. Merely hundreds of rag tag warships that were hopelessly outclassed and badly damaged.

  In time the war had been finished. Not won or lost, just finished.

  Neither side could claim victory, as both had been utterly destroyed by it, and they retired to their respective quarters to lick their wounds. Many hundreds of worlds had been destroyed. Untold trillions had been killed on both sides. And no one had the stomach to fight any longer. Only to try to survive. The Kaiwhare had retreated from all known space and gone into hiding with what ships and people they had left. They didn’t have a single world left to their name. In fact they probably only had a few tens of thousands of survivors in total, and no resources.

  Meanwhile the Calderonians returned to their strongholds to heal as best they could. But the ongoing damage to the Calderonian genetic makeup would not stop. Cure after cure was tried. All failed. Their race was dying and they knew it. They had known it for a long time.

  In desperation they’d fallen back on every possible idea they could find, and in the end, only the Ancients had seemed like a possibility. They were the only race that had ever had a higher level of technology than they then did. More importantly, they had extensive genetic knowledge. As much as they liked manipulating worlds to suit themselves, they also had the technology to alter themselves and all the creatures on it to suit even the most inhospitable worlds. Much as he would have loved to read about the Ancients, and
what the Calderonians had understood of them - which was far more than the Community - Daryl forced himself not to read it. If he had made the other scientists ignore it, choosing instead to concentrate on their enemy, he had no choice but to do so himself. But one day he promised himself, he would come back to it.

  From then the exodus had been planned, but knowing that the Kaiwhare were still out there somewhere, still licking their wounds and no doubt planning evil, they’d left a final defence force. One that first raided all the remaining known Kaiwhare bases, including the ones that had already fallen, and carefully levelled them until they were nothing more than grass and mud. The Kaiwhare would have nothing to return to if they ever did. They then established large automatic defences for every city they left behind intact, cities that those of their people that couldn't or wouldn't leave could survive in until the end. And they destroyed the rest. The Kaiwhare would plunder no more of their secrets.

  It was for those who couldn't go with them that the messages had been left. Those who had gone before them hoped that one day the rest would be able to follow and join them.

  As wars went, Daryl found it disgusting, both in terms of its unimaginable size, and in the way it had been fought. He had terrible sympathy for the Calderonians, even though he knew that in the end they had fought as dirtily as their enemy. It was a war to extinction, and they had determined not to go into that dark night by any means possible. It was a terrible thing to admit but in their shoes he would probably have done the same.