Bloodlines

by Richard Fox

  Knight clapped his hands together. “Great. So you want to be good cop and I’ll be bad?”

  Marie glared at Knight. “You’ll do nothing unless I give the okay.”

  Knight shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  The Ultari snarled at them as Marie and Knight entered the room a few minutes later, lips curling back, revealing jagged, discolored teeth. Marie sat in the chair opposite and Knight floated up to the side of the table. The alien glared at his two captors but didn’t speak.

  Marie removed a small speaker from her pocket and set it on the table between her and the alien. A green light blinked on and off and she heard a crackling in the air.

  “Before we get off on the wrong foot here,” Marie said, the speaker translating her words into Ultari, broadcasting them in a cone towards the alien. “Do you need anything, any water or food or anything?”

  The alien turned his gaze to her but remained silent.

  “My name’s Marie Hale. This is Mr. Knight. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

  Nothing.

  “You’re Ultari,” Marie asked. “The other aliens you were fighting, above Negev, they’re from the Sacred Intelligence? We’d like to talk to you about that.”

  “Zeis filth,” the alien said through gritted teeth, then spat on the floor. Marie heard the words faintly from his mouth, but the speaker cancelled most of his volume out and replaced it with the English translation. “Ultari Empire crush your worlds. Praise the Ancestor’s Spirit.”

  Marie and Knight exchanged glanced. “Zeis?” Marie asked.

  The alien growled, clenching his fists, his chains clinking against the table.

  “I think you might be mistaking us for someone else,” Knight said, leaning forward. “We’re human, not Zeis.”

  The prisoner glared at Knight for several seconds, seeming to study the man’s features. “No Zeis.”

  “That’s right,” Marie said, wanting to keep the Ultari focused on her. “We’re human. We’re what you might call the new kids on the block.”

  The alien didn’t respond.

  “These Zeis that you mentioned, are you at war with them too? You’re fighting the Zeis and the Sacred Intelligence?”

  The Ultari spat on the floor. “Don’t speak their name. They claim they are rightly guided. We spit on them, slander them with the name Regulos. You humans would serve them? Make the Ultari your slaves too?”

  “Oh, like your people did to ours on Negev, right?” Knight said before Marie could respond.

  Marie glared at him. A look Marie thought was confusion spread across the alien’s face, but without knowing more about it, she couldn’t be sure. It considered Knight for several moments, then turned back to Marie.

  “Gragar know nothing of what this man speaks,” the Ultari growled.

  “The Sacred Intelligence,” Marie prodded and worked to control her emotions as the Ultari spit again. “The Regulos, you said they would make you slaves?”

  The alien lifted his arms, pulling his chains tight. “Slaves.”

  “No, absolutely not. Our people don’t believe in slavery. You attacked our people; those are for our safety and yours.”

  He relaxed, setting his forearms against the edge of the table. “Gragar hungry.”

  “Well,” Knight said, leaning forward. “Tell us what we want to know—”

  Marie cut him off. “We’ll look into getting you something to eat. But first, if you could tell us anything about the Regulos or the Triumvirate, that would be extremely helpful. Gragar, is that your name?”

  After a moment, the Ultari said, “Gragar. The old gods are legend.”

  “How so?”

  “Triumvirate. Rulers of Old Empire, before the Regulos and their abomination betrayed the empire. The Triumvirate vanished after they lost the final battle of the war. With the Emperor gone, the true Ultari clans fought for the throne and crown. The clans were weak, couldn’t beat the Regulos, and fled to the conquered worlds. Clans shed their blood for too long, had too many emperors. Stopped caring about the first. The Triumvirate became fodder for children’s night tales.”

  “Bedtime stories?” Knight asked.

  Gragar glared at Knight but ignored him. “The Triumvirate bent the Abomination to their will, used it to expand the empire beyond the home world and across the stars. They led us to greatness. Then the Abomination found traitors, weaklings, and used them to defeat the Emperor.” The alien seemed genuinely sad as it related the story.

  “Why did this…Abomination turn on the emperor?” Marie asked.

  “You ask a rock why the wind blows. The Regulos abandoned the expanded empire and retreated to the home worlds. Left the true Ultari with the planets we’d burnt clean of lesser races. Now the Regulos are too strong to fight. They sit in their palaces and deny any who come to take a piece of their riches.” Gragar spat.

  “The Regulos shut off all their worlds?” Marie asked. That the Valiant and her children were on the way to one of these planets filled her with dread.

  “The first worlds are theirs and theirs alone,” the Ultari said. “Outer systems are there for trade, to buffer against the rest of the galaxy while the Abomination seeks perfection.”

  Gragar shook his head. “Because they hate what isn’t perfect. There is a forbidden zone around the first empire. This world is in that zone, too close to Regulos territory for us to care. But there was a hyperspace signature...the clan lord thought it was another faction poaching our territory.”

  “Forbidden zone?” Marie asked.

  “If you were Zeis you’d know,” Gragar worked his jaw from side to side. “How you not-Zeis get here?”

  “This world is habitable,” Knight said. “Why isn’t it settled? Why is it forbidden?”

  “Artifact world,” the Ultari said. “The first empire killed off some primitive species during the expansion. The Abomination kept it off limits to everyone. It is far too close to Regulos space for a mining raid. Nothing else for us to take.”

  “What do you know about the Milky Way?” Knight asked. “The big galaxy you can see in the sky.”

  “Too far for hyper drives,” the Ultari said. “Legend says some great darkness is there. We’re safe in our stars. But only children’s night tales.” He sat back. “No true. Like Triumvirate.”

  “Ever heard of the Qa’resh?” Marie asked.

  Gragar’s face snapped to one side like he had a tick.

  “Gragar do not know Qa’resh,” the Ultari said, taking care to pronounce the name.

  “The Triumvirate is real,” Knight said. “We got to know the Emperor, Arch-Duke, and Prince very well.”

  “Lies!” Gragar shouted, lunging toward Knight, pulling against his restraints.

  Knight tottered back and pointed his cane at the alien.

  “No more talk. When the true Ultari return, Gragar will be rewarded. Will destroy humans. The old gods are dead.”

  “Explain this, then,” Knight said, sliding a data pad with an image of the Triumvirate’s prison on Negev, the three screaming faces carved into the mountainside. Then he swiped the image to show the robotic bodies of the three rulers.

  Gragar roared, lunging again, shaking the chair’s arms and back as he struggled against his restraints. Marie jumped from her chair, backing away, moving closer to the two-way mirror behind her. Knight’s remained oddly calm.

  “LIES!” Gragar bellowed. “You speak heresy! Holy Ones Spirits gone! Ancestors gone!”

  Marie held out her hands. “Okay, let’s bring it back down. Relax, we won’t—”

  The Ultari struggled against his chains, baring his ugly, jagged teeth, growling.

  “Alright, we’re done,” Marie said, motioning for Knight to leave.

  A soldier opened the door from the outside and Marie followed Knight from the room. Gragar’s shouts were muted as the door shut behind them.

  “You let him have too much control,” Knight said.

  “Y
ou pushed him and there was no reason for it. He was talking.”

  Knight laughed. “And he told us a great deal, but not enough.”

  “We were in the same room. What did I miss?”

  “The Triumvirate told us they were the rulers of a benevolent empire and were overthrown by traitors and the last governor bought it. That one in there’s telling us the Emperor and the others were taken out in a coup and vanished, then their empire split. Whoever of the Ultari wasn’t loyal to the Regulos and that Abomination became little better than pirate bands. But what should scare the hell out of us is that we planted our flag on Terra Nova, which both the Ultari and these Regulos won’t stand for. We’re squatting in two back yards.”

  “Then let’s hope Carson can convince these Regulos to cut us a break,” Marie said, stepping around him.

  Knight rapped his cane against the floor. “He knows more. A lot more about the strength of the Ultari and the Regulos. Let me start working on him. Hours long interrogations, asking him the same questions over and over again to see if his story ever changes. I’ll need some white noise generators and we need to remove the bed from his cell. He clams up, then a couple guards in power armor with shock prods will—”

  “No.” Marie spun on him, pointing. “Out of the question.” She looked up at the solider still standing guard outside the door. “No one gets in, unless expressly permitted by me or Governor Hale, is that understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And under no circumstances will Mr. Knight be allowed access without me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the soldier repeated, giving Knight a stern glare.

  Knight threw his hands up. “Oh, come on, you want answers or not?”

  “I’m very serious, Mr. Knight. And let’s get one thing straight here; you’re a guest, nothing more. I’m well aware of your history and that of Ms. Shannon’s. Push me, and you’ll find yourself in a cell right next to our friend.” She nodded to Gragar’s room.

  ****

  Marie returned thirty minutes later with a tray of food. The guard nodded at her and opened the door without a word.

  Gragar looked up as Marie entered and snarled.

  Marie held out the tray. “I’m not here to ask you any questions. I brought you some food.”

  She set the tray down in front of the Ultari, silverware clinking. Without knowing more, she’d thrown several different entrees together: steak, chicken, salad, broccoli, even a slice of pizza. She motioned to the guard and he released one of the Ultari’s hands from the restraints.

  “Hopefully something here will be acceptable,” she said, stepping back.

  The Ultari examined the plate. He leaned forward and sniffed a few of the portions, then picked up the slice of pizza. He ate half the slice in one bite, and a moment later, his eyes went wide, flicking up to Marie.

  “Is good,” he said. “Is very good.”

  Marie nodded. “Pepperoni is my favorite too.”

  Gragar finished the rest of the pizza in one bite, then moved on to the rest without slowing to swallow. He ripped off a bite of steak, then switched to the chicken, growling as he chewed.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” Marie said. “I’ll come back and check on you later.”

  Chapter 14

  Carson and West stood behind the pilot’s couches, looking out into the black nothingness that was FTL space. After almost a week cooped up on the Valiant, Carson was ready to step foot on solid ground again. Not to mention returning to real space, where there wasn’t a threat of becoming some infinite cluster of matter stretched through the universe in some kind of weird human/quantum rift.

  Greer tapped a command into her terminal, then grabbed the controls with both hands. “Okay, dropping out of FTL in five, four, three…”

  The all-encompassing blackness vanished in a flash of light, and the Valiant re-entered normal space. Carson had never been so happy to see the stars.

  “Stealth systems active,” Lincoln said. “All systems nominal, FTL drives are winding down.”

  “Where are we?” Carson asked.

  Greer checked her console. “Data is still coming in, but it looks like we’re in the L2 Lagrange point, above the third planet in the system. Right where we wanted to be.”

  “Look at that,” West said, pointing.

  Ahead of them, a massive space station hung in the void above an alien world, hanging against the backdrop of stars. The spherical structure dwarfed anything Carson had ever seen. Several segmented layers seemed to float over the surface of the behemoth, rotating slowly around its circumference. Long pylons connected these segments to several large docking rings orbiting the station, some at distances of up to a kilometer.

  It was night on the planet below. Clusters of lights spread across the dark surface of the world, covering what looked like the entire globe. Strings of lights, hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships, stretched between the station and planet and to a moon orbiting the planet.

  “That thing’s almost as big as the Crucible,” Lincoln said, reading the data on this console.

  “That’s got to be hell on traffic control,” Carson said, shaking her head at the incredible sight.

  As they watched, several ships dropped out of warp in flashes of light above the station. The new arrivals moved away from each other, some heading for the planet, others to the station. Ships warped away at random intervals, their hulls stretching away briefly before vanishing into the void.

  “Not just warships that have FTL, then,” West said.

  “It also begs even more questions,” Carson said, watching rectangular-shaped hauler stretch off into warp.

  “Which is?” West prodded.

  “Where are they all going? How many worlds like this are there? This galaxy was supposed to be empty, well, it’s most definitely not. I mean, there are probably billions and billions of people down there, I find it hard to believe the Qa’resh’s probe missed all this. I mean, a civilization like this didn’t just pop up overnight.”

  “You think the Qa’resh lied to us? Or Ibarra lied when he put together the first colony mission? Who didn’t want to get away from the war back then?”

  Carson shrugged. “The Qa’resh are gone. Ibarra’s a long way from here.”

  “I’m picking up some system chatter,” Greer said. “But most of it is scrambled or alien. The translator nodes are scrubbing the data, but who knows how long it will take to…”

  A flash of light cut across space, meters from the Valiant’s bow. Alarms sounded and tactical warning panels flashed on both pilot’s consoles.

  Greer jumped. “What the hell?”

  Lincoln tapped furiously. “I don’t know.”

  Two ships, decidedly smaller than Valiant herself, zipped past the bow at an angle, showing off clusters of ordinance attached to their underbellies. They flipped over, reversing course to interest them again.

  “Fighters,” Greer said.

  A holo-image of one of the ships appeared over the console, markers’ indication hard points, engine placements and a cockpit mounted along the dorsal spine, at the front of the aft section.

  “Were they just shooting at us?” West asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Greer told him. She shot Lincoln a quick glance. “Status?”

  He shook his head. “Active sensor dampening is active and functioning to specs. Drives are at standby. They shouldn’t have been able to spot us. Our stealth is at a hundred percent.”

  Something, about the size of a trashcan, smacked against Valiant’s hull, a few meters in front of the cockpit’s viewport and stuck there. Almost immediately, panels along its sides and top began unfolding, exposing clusters of antennas, conical commination dishes, and manipulator arms that folded down and clamped onto the Valiant’s hull.

  “The hell?” Lincoln said. “Something’s tapping into our computers. Valiant’s systems are being accessed.”

  “Shut it down!” Greer shouted.

  �
�I can’t. It’s locked me out of the system. Whatever it is, it’s moving extremely fast.”

  Carson tapped her wrist computer. “Birch, Nunez, suit up ASAP. We’ve got—”

  “Wait,” Lincoln said. “Wait, I don’t think it’s malicious.”

  “Explain,” Carson said, leaning forward to look at the screen.

  “Whatever it is, it’s accessing all of our communication protocols and reading the core data. It’s not copying, deleting, or transferring anyth… there, it’s done.”

  A light flashed on Greer’s console, and before she had time to react, a holographic collage of fractals appeared above the main console between the two pilots, filling Valiant’s cockpit with flickering orange light.

  The image pulsed as a deep, masculine voice said, “You are in violation of Diasore System Traffic Regulations 3.206f, 12.02, 17.41a, 18.7b1 and 49. DIN Adjudication has assessed a fine of 7,000 astruals against this vessel. Any further violations will result in fines and/or detainment. You are—”

  Carson raised a hand. “Hello, can you hear me—”

  “An additional fine of 100 astruals has been assessed to your account. Any further violations will result in fines and/or detainment.”

  Carson turned to West, confused. He shook his head and mouthed, “Wait.”

  The voice continued, “Your vessel is hereby slaved and will proceed to Diasore Station, Dock 56, Pad 109 for processing. Do not attempt to deviate from your assigned approach vector, as any violation of your instructions will result in additional fines and/or detainment.”

  The image vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, leaving the four humans in stunned silence. The two fighters ahead of them turned, thrusters flaring, putting them on course for the station.

  “What the hell was that?” Greer asked.

  “I think we just got grounded,” West said.

  “Yeah,” Carson said. “But grounded by who?”

  “We’re getting flightpath information,” Greer said. “Looks like they’re sending us to the planet’s surface. Northern hemisphere, looks like a continent on the far side…and the engines are firing without any input from my controls. They really did slave this ship. Want me to find a workaround?”