Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

  Not content to kill the crew, Jay held up his hand and separated the molecules of the control panels. He laughed. There would be no putting that back together. A quick scan told him that there was nothing left alive on the ship, but he still streaked to the back and scuttled the engines all the same. This ship would not be of any use to the Forlorn.

  Apparently, they must have realized that something was wrong because Jay’s precognition went off like the 4th of July in his head. He astral stepped out and into the cargo bay of one of the battleships an instant before the small craft he had been on was vaporized.

  Alarms were going off all around him and he could sense the Forlorn warriors being dispatched to him. His vastly improved telepathic senses were able to hear whispers from the Forlorn hive mind connection but was unable to actually pierce the signal. It was not telepathy, but more tech based. Of course, as Jessie would have said, their bodies were simply the most advanced of machines.

  The first group of warriors reached his location primarily because he allowed them too. He was capable of moving so much faster now than even the day before because of all the skill increases. Given a straight light he could have moved over thirteen hundred miles per second now, but of course that wasn’t an option on this ship. Even his improved processing couldn’t react properly to everything at that speed.

  Jay allowed himself to cut loose for a minute. All the stress and fear of the past few months came out as he started slicing the Forlorn to pieces with a PSI blade. He moved amongst them like a whirlwind of death and most didn’t even raise their weapon before they were cut down. He had no mercy for them. Even if he might have felt some remorse before, his bond with Eesa had some of her emotions rubbing off on him. This was a hunt. The hunter might respect the prey, but it didn’t feel sympathy for the prey.

  Then he realized, this wasn’t actually a hunt. This was an extermination. The Forlorn were pests, like cockroaches. They had spread throughout the known universe polluting one galaxy after another. He was just squishing them. That prompted him to maximize the mass of the next group and as their bodies became a thousand times heavier, they were immediately flattened. The organic parts were left oozing out of the twisted metallic remnants.

  Jay reached the ship’s engines and began disintegrating all the containment parts. He was being shot by Forlorn weapons intended to cause a breakdown of his cells. His body was so durable and regenerated so quickly that he could have resisted this small arms fire, but Trina’s power allowed him to simply absorb the energy and then ultimately released it as an explosion that ended all the Forlorn around him.

  By that time, the sabotage was complete. This ship was going to blow up and nothing could stop that. Jay astral stepped off of it and into space to watch it blow apart from the inside.

  All along a partitioned portion of his mind had been tracking Eesa’s progress. Her fighter had made short work of the smaller vessels. The enhanced pulse weapons cut right through their weaker shields. The battleship that she attacked was able to maintain shields although it did take some damage. It began returning fire, but her ship was simply too fast.

  It moved in ways that should have been impossible but the nanium structure responded to her Eesa’s very thoughts. Better yet she activated the subspace drive and could literally phase out allowing deadly barrages of energy weapons and missiles to pass through her. She eventually took out the battleship by firing phased pulse weapons into it. She applied Amelia’s power to the A’snkarnt weapons to devastating effect.

  The first blast took out the engines. The second took out the command deck. A third blew up the main weapons, and a fourth blast ruptured the side of the ship. It was venting atmosphere and soon the engines were going to explode. Jay had finished a ship off a second after she had and now, they were racing to see who could destroy the third battleship first.

  The competitive streak within Jay came out and he shot toward the ship crossing the span between them in fraction of a second. He strafed the side trying to disintegrate it, but the shield held. He knew he could step through the shielding but that seemed to be unfair because it would limit Eesa’s attack options if he were inside the enemy ship.

  Her first attack had already taken out its engines. If he didn’t do something and quickly this was going to be all over, and he would have to admit she had destroyed more of the Forlorn than he had.

  Then it struck him. He was trying to get too fancy. Sometimes old strategies worked the best. In this case he just needed to think bigger. He immediately formed a PSI blade that was a thousand feet long. It didn’t need to be thick in fact he kept it as thin as a hair but still as indestructible as any of his constructs. The level of control for something this massive would have been beyond his control a short time before but now it felt natural.

  Then he gave a mock salute to the ship and brought down the blade. He drove it not with just his PSI enhanced muscles but also all of his control of kinetic energy. The blade drove through the forcefield. The amount of force running along the edge of that blade caused a tiny fracture in the ship’s protective field and just like the ship were nothing more than a snake, Jay beheaded it, lopping off the front twenty percent, which contained the command deck.

  The two portions of the ship floated apart in space driven by the kinetic energy of his strike. He sent a telepathic message to Eesa, “I win.”

  She couldn’t respond back but he could feel her frustration. Then everything changed as a group of three more battleships jumped out of hyperspace. Clearly wanting to win, Eesa fired her multiphase PSI missile at the ships. The planet killing weapon did just what it was supposed to.

  It first flew at nearly a quarter of light speed so there was little chance to react. Even if there had been any reaction it phased through any shields that would have been in its way. Then a dozen different powers went off at the same time. Necrotic energy blended with electricity, fire, and kinetic force. The mass of the ships was all lessened and the force therefore ripped them apart like tissue paper.

  The resulting explosion was massive, and the shockwave buffeted them even thousands of miles away. He could feel Eesa gloating as she tallied the count of her kills which pushed her ahead of him.

  Then all thoughts of a contest were driven from his mind. More ships started to appear and were opening fire as soon as they did. Jay watched as not three or even three hundred ships appeared but more like thirty thousand. They blocked all the space around him, and their cannon fire filled every inch of the area around Eesa’s ship.

  The nanium was tough. Their improved shields were powerful, but she had not reacted quickly enough to phase and so her ship was torn to shreds. Jay watched as four of his wives were killed before his eyes.

  Rage surged through him and as he had twice before he stepped back through time. He appeared in front of their ship an instant before it was destroyed and threw up the largest, thickest construct he had ever made. It was a curved shield meant to protect him and Eesa’s starfighter.

  Almost instantly it began to buckle but almost instantly is not quite the same as instantly. That sliver of a second allowed Eesa enough time to trigger the subspace drive and respond to his mental command that she flee. Likewise, Jay time skipped back to the shuttle. Since he wasn’t actually traveling through space, they couldn’t lead him with a weapon and target him and so instead he ended up back aboard the shuttle which then jumped back to the leviathan.

  Jay was breathing heavily. The final exertion had been intense, but it was more about having seen his beloved wives killed. They wouldn’t remember it so they wouldn’t know the danger, the risk. He couldn’t lose them. Jay had to do whatever it took to fix this. He wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  Interlude 5- Too Late

  The seven armadas had been buffeted by gravity weapons, blown apart by streams of pulse weapons, and sucked into miniature black holes. The entire region of space around what had been the A’snkarnt home world was a tattered ruin. Subspace and real space had
been torn apart by the weapons brought to bear and an area more than ten light years in every direction around the planet was going to be deadly to travel through.

  Three of the Overminds had fallen and nearly a third of the fleet. Of course, that left more than six hundred thousand ships left around the planet. They were in the eye of the storm so to speak and charting pathways out of the battlefield. There was still a prize to be claimed on the planet below.

  The Forlorn would absorb the remaining A’snkarnt technology and enhance themselves. But more important this was the last bastion of the AI known as Coreframe. It would make the Forlorn perfect. They would finally achieve the complete blending of the organic and the technological. Then they could spread out across the stars till all the universe was a reflection of their singular purpose.

  No further resistance was to be found on the planet below, but the Coreframe had somehow been downloaded. It was moving around the planet in ways that they didn’t understand. Such a powerful AI should have been static, but again their ancient enemy defied the inevitably of the Forlorn as no others had.

  Troops were being sent down and the planet scanned. The Overminds were in agreement but then new information appeared. Some of their ships on the outskirts of the battlefield had just been attacked. They were obliterated without passing on the identity of their attackers, but it was clear that there was at least some level of A’snkarnt technology being used.

  This would never do. It would take all of the remaining Overminds to integrate Coreframe into the Forlorn. This new threat couldn’t be disregarded. In an instant the four minds agreed, as they always did and dispatched thirty-thousand ships to deal with the threat. It was five percent of their remaining strength and the calculations they ran in an instant estimated the force to be overkill but there was no use in taking a risk.

  Besides, that was the most ships that they could safely navigate through the tears in space, at least if they wanted to do so quickly. Then reports came back as the ships were arriving. Something had to be wrong.

  There was only one ship present. It bore similarities to the Tamoori, a world which had been recently integrated. Their ship designs were excellent and soon would be used to modify future Forlorn ships. Their organic forms would become new Forlorn, although there was something odd about them that was delaying integration.

  The had small amounts of a strange energy which their people called PSI. It didn’t’ originate with them, but it defied any attempts by the Forlorn to control it. The only means they had learned of to store it was helite crystals possessed by the Tamoori themselves and those were rare. It would bear more study, but what was interesting now was that one of these vessels should be attacking Forlorn battleships.

  Nothing in their prior encounters suggested that such a ship could have survived beyond a few seconds of battle with one of the large Forlorn ships. There were also indications that this ship was different. It was made of an as of yet uncatalogued metal and showed signs of having A’snkarnt technology built into it.

  But worse there were other strange readings. Things connected to the limited data they had received from the probe that Caj Decius had sent back. It was something to do with another race that the deceased Overmind had deemed to be pure chaos. Such a thing could not exist. Progress was good, but change was bad, whimsical and the enemy of the order which the Forlorn represented.

  In an instant the decision was made that no matter how fascinating this ship might be it was not worth the risk. It must be obliterated. So as one several thousand battleships and their support ships fired. The green energy of Forlorn weaponry lit up the darkness of space and …

  Something happened, but they couldn’t sense what. A temporal anomaly occurred. Then a bomb ignited in the midst of their ships. Reality itself was warped. The ships had been so tightly packed together that more than half of them were destroyed.

  Their hulls became ice, or their drones lost connection with the shared mind, or one ship became a center of gravity that sucked in all the ships around it. The myriad of destructive forces unleashed made no sense. It wasn’t possible for such weapons to all exist in one bomb, but yet that is what their scans were telling them.

  The ship they had been sent to destroy was gone and it had just wiped-out thousands of Forlorn vessels. That could not be tolerated. This planet would be guarded by a thousand ships. For now, though, the integration of the treasures it held would have to be put on hold. It wasn’t safe to feast while an enemy such as this still existed.

  _______________________________________

  Far beneath the fleet covering their planet Coreframe was on the move. The reality of personal movement, not as it controlled some ship or robot but with a body of its own, was something new.

  Except this body wasn’t really its own and it wasn’t fully controlled. Mostly, but not quite. The mind of the infant, Higen remained. It defied all logic but still the tiny human kept fighting. The body was matured now. Pushed forward by Coreframe using the data it had gathered from D’varn. The scans of Higen’s father served as an excellent template.

  But every time that Coreframe thought he had complete control, he would hear a tiny scream of defiance. The human mind was undeveloped but still it fought back. Most annoying was his insistence that his mother and father would save him. That unshakeable faith Higen held in those two beings defied all logic. Speaking to the little mind was useless, but still Coreframe tried, perhaps that was a failure of logic too.

  “Just fade away. It won’t hurt. You can’t withstand me for much longer,” Coreframe projected inward.

  “Mommy warm, mommy feed, mommy always come.”

  “Your incubator is gone and can’t get here. Release your burden. Once I control this body fully, I will be the supreme being of the universe. Your legacy will live on in me. You should be honored to serve in such a manner,” Coreframe argued.

  “Daddy strong, daddy protect, daddy smash you.”

  Coreframe realized it had been correct. There was no point in speaking to such a tiny undeveloped mind. It had no grasp of its circumstance. The problem though was that without full control of the body and its potential, Coreframe might not be able to escape the Forlorn. What would happen if it were captured in this state was entirely uncertain.

  Chapter 29- Scope of the Problem

  Jay yelled across the room, “You don’t get it. You didn’t almost die. You did die. I had to watch it. I had to feel you die. It tore me apart inside, like a part of myself was being cut out.”

  “Yelling won’t change the fact that none of us remember that,” Amelia said, “I agree that I would cry if anything happened to any of them. Even Eesa is great, and I wouldn’t want her to be lost.”

  “I know you don’t remember, but you also all trust me. You know that I had to warp time to save them. This time it wasn’t in a small space. It was tens of thousands of miles and affected millions of Forlorn on those ships. I still feel sick to my stomach from the way that time is rippling around me now,” Jay snapped.

  “We all appreciate your concern for us, husband. But this is war. Some of us may get hurt,” Jessie said.

  “No, I won’t let that happen. You all have to stay back. I don’t know what will happen if I start twisting time on scale like that again, but I also won’t let any of you die. I need each of you.” Jay sat and put his head in his hands as he spoke.

  Meikiyo ran her hand through his hair as she said, “I want to believe you can do anything my love, but somethings are beyond even you.”

  “Meikiyo is right, Jay. You are incredible but you aren’t a god,” Trina added.

  “Well except for in bed,” Huong giggled

  “So it comes down to this in the end. I thought if I worked hard enough, we might be able to find a way around it, but it is all about power,” Jay said but it was clear he was talking to himself more than anyone else.

  Then he lifted his head up and said, “Spread the word. I will fuse with any member of Team Jay t
hat wants to. They have to commit to exclusivity, but I won’t require any promises about children or such. They just have to be willing to lend their strength to the fight.”

  The girls looked at each other and Jay was sure that a flurry of telepathic communication was going back and forth. Mia finally spoke, “Why now? We destroyed half that fleet that attacked us. Surely, we can handle the rest. I know that fifteen thousand ships sound scary, but we have had a few more of those bombs ready within a week, less time obviously with Tempus Fugit.”

  “I can’t Tempus Fugit now. The fabric of time in this area is all wonky now. I don’t know how to explain it and that is on me, but something isn’t right. I don’t want to kill us all by trying to save us.”

  “Okay, so we trust you. We can feel that you believe this to be true and that is good enough for me at least. But why the rush? You said something about two days left,” Amelia asked.