by Chris Turner
The image swayed and leveled its otherworldly gaze at Nrog. “Greetings, creatures from a far future age. I see Miko has introduced you to me.”
All gathered shuffled back in surprise.
“What are you?” Jring crowed. He shook his locust head, recovering his composure. “State your purpose.” Though his truculent demand fell short as only superficial pretense.
“As you wish,” came the AI voice, with something of an imperial timbre. Its horrid grin lit an improbable face. The being’s words translated into three languages via the devices attached to the presiding creatures’ antennae, tentacles and ear buds.
“I am the simulacrum of the ageless Masters,” it intoned. “A proxy, hidden on Kraetoria for an age. Our race is gone. Yet our essence lives on in the form of electronics and synthetics like what you see, though it be beyond your grasp.”
“We’ll be the judge of that!” Nrog snapped.
“Perhaps, but the truth must be spoken. You will discover that I only speak in truths.”
“We shall see,” Jring said. “Start with an explanation of your presence on Kraetoria.”
“That is a discourse too lengthy to deliver. Suffice it to say that our presence has been not without advancement. Furthermore, it is a joy and privilege to behold such marvelous creatures of the Masters’ design.”
“What do you mean? Do you suggest we are a product of your Masters’ whim?”
“In a word, yes.”
“Where is your proof?” Nrog sputtered.
Miko felt a cold shudder run up his spine. He could not help but recall the disturbing revelation conveyed by this luminous creature in the bunker on Kraetoria—that humans were created from the same source. Grown in vats, bred as experiments down in some hidden lab on Kraetoria. Could humans and godless Zikri and Mentera have been created from the same essence? The prospect chilled Miko’s to the bone.
“You mean even us, humans?” Star wailed.
The proxy grinned back at her. “My database recalls your distress in our last meeting, human. You seem to have trouble grasping that everyone has a creator, even myself.”
“Answer the question!” Jring persisted.
“My circuits advise me to ask you this instead, Princeps. Do you think your allied war is merited enough that its fruits will outweigh the cost?”
Jring scoffed. “Of course. Why else go through all this ordeal and ally ourselves with such violent creatures as the Zikri?”
Nrog glared, as if such words stung. His black, beady eyes glowered with a tinge of malice.
The proxy continued with curious amazement, “Do you not think these humans will rise up and retaliate against you? The same whom you persecute, kill and enslave for food?”
“They are weak and insignificant,” declared Nrog. “Tadpoles to be scooped up in nets.”
“Like these humans who have single-handedly slipped through your net and defy you?”
Nrog gave a rumble of scorn. “They are nothing but a pack of lowly fugitives, nobodies. A broken-down NOA spy, some human female from a backward planet with no military skills, a rebel locust missing a claw. It’s laughable.”
Jring spoke up, “And yet, here they are, Nrog, infiltrating our fleets, killing your soldiers with the help of the rogue Zikri skulking about our own shared planet on Kraetoria. They steal our ships and kill our pilots.”
“That’s not entirely true. We are both stooges here, Jring. How many of your own locust guards have been killed by these ragtag rebels?”
“The numbers have not been ascertained.”
The simulacrum slapped its ape-like hands on its thighs in a gesture of satisfaction. “It delights me to see you at loggerheads.”
“Shut up,” chittered Nrog. He glided before Miko who glowered up at him. “I will ask you again, human, who are you and who sent you?”
Miko licked his lips, seeing Nrog’s minions arching tentacles toward him, ready to throw him in a tank. “I am a NAVO officer. Lieutenant Miko Almstran. Usk and Star are my friends. I picked them up along the way.”
“NAVO doesn’t exist!” roared Nrog.
“They did, at one time,” refuted Miko. “They are NOA now. I came through a time tunnel with that rebel Zikri you search for on Kraetoria. We got caught in a gravity whorl while taking off in time-drive while under attack. We crashlanded on a far world, Rogos, passing from amalgamator to amalgamator, finally to land on a Mentera station and long story short, were shot down over Kraetoria.”
There was a stunned silence. Nrog shrilled, “You lie!” He advanced on Miko, lashed out a motilator, slapping him across the room.
Star surged up and hobbled to Miko’s side where he lay on his belly, gasping in anguish. “Brute! Leave him alone!” One of the Zikri guards caught her up in its slime-pocked motilators. She squirmed, pounded fists uselessly in its iron grip, and battered it with her heels. Her legs dangled a foot off the ground.
Miko rolled over, wheezing out a curse.
“Let me go!” Star shrieked. “Why don’t you die, all of your foul race!”
On a flick of motilator, Nrog urged Basilursk forward to snatch at Star, dragging her kicking and screaming toward the first of the empty tanks.
“No!” rasped Miko.
Too late. The Zikri dipped a tentacle round her mouth to stop her outcries. He carted her before the glowing glass. Glistening tentacles lifted her up and over the brim.
With its powerful front motilators it held her under the pale green brine while she thrashed and kicked, her ashen hair askew. A wild look of terror was branded on her face. She struggled. No use.
Miko crabbed to his feet, striking out and yelling—but slimy tentacles held him back. In teary-eyed horror, he watched as Star convulsed in back-arching agony as she drowned. Floating, suspended in green fluid, she stared out from behind the glass, her lips parted in a small O. Bubbles trickled from her mouth to the surface. He gave a wretched howl as Mentera blasters arced his way.
Chapter 23
Usk spat out white fluid and backed away as Mentera lumo blasters leveled on him.
Nrog’s shadow fell on Miko. “I trust this is a warning for you to show proper deference. All will go the easier for your locust friend and the female.”
“I’ll kill you,” rasped Miko. He started forward, but Nrog’s motilators kept him back. He stared helplessly at Star, every cell in his body wanting to lunge forth and strangle Nrog with his bare hands.
“I hardly think so. You and your rebellious friend are in no position to do that.”
Jring called, “Enough of this charade, Nrog.” He signaled to his aide to apprehend Usk.
The simulacrum, bearing silent witness to all until now, glanced in idle interest toward the tank with Star and the other creatures bobbing placidly in the pale water. “Intriguing, intriguing. Treating your guests so disrespectfully. Bravo, Admiral! By plunging your naysayers in tanks, you hope to gain their fear and respect. You have not won against them by going the way of the brute. You’ll only make them angrier, and angrier. Perhaps this is what you wish, but it won’t save you.”
“Says who? We’ve choreographed this invasion to crush the humans completely, confirm our supremacy.”
The simulacrum shrugged. “Perhaps. Logic dictates it will work, but too many variables cloud the issue. Despite your energetic leadership, I daresay, foresight is lacking, since you have not considered all the variables. You’ve set yourself up for failure.”
“Failure? What failure? Have you foreseen any aftermath of this war?”
“Perhaps. But you doubt my very existence so...”
“Admiral,” interrupted Jring, “do we have time to waste conversing with this memory module?”
“Quiet, Jring. I want to hear this imposter.”
“Very well,” said the simulacrum, “look what the powers to be have orchestrated. We have rolled the dice and played god, as The Masters. Created monsters like yourselves, and now the cubs have come to play with sticks and stone
s and fire and steel to beat in the heads of their brothers.”
“A flowery allusion,” derided Jring, “but a vast oversimplification. Masters,” he scoffed. “Why beget such a disparate pantheon of species? It’s as impossible as it is improbable.”
The simulacrum grinned its ape-like grimace, if such were possible. “Is it so outlandish as not to be obvious? Like all dutiful parents, to see the children play, then fight and wage war with one another, at last to triumph over all the others. The cycle repeats itself while the other tribe rises up and conquers its rival. The ultimate cycle of the ages. War, peace… Peace, war. Rulers rising, rulers falling, then to rise from the ashes yet once again. On and on forever and ever. Just as it happened to us. I find the irony amusing.”
“I find no irony in any of it,” chittered Nrog.
“Then you have no sense of humor, Admiral, and have much to learn.” Nrog bridled, but the simulacrum rippled its shoulders in what might have been an indifferent shrug. “The journey is long, Admiral. Yes, very long. Yet time is infinite…and much of it is an illusion.”
“Enough riddles,” snapped Jring. He piked up a gold-pincered claw. “I opt we pull the plug on this bombastic automaton and dispose of the prisoners.”
Nrog lifted a motilator. “Not just yet, Jring. There are pieces of this puzzle which still remain unanswered. Like, for example, where do the humans fit into all this?”
The simulacrum clipped out an ape-like grunt. “That’s a question I am forbidden to answer.”
“Answer the question, proxy, or risk annihilation,” threatened Jring. “We will plumb your innards, and short-circuit your cerebus.”
“As I mentioned before, you will wait a long time, Princeps. The information you seek is buried so deep in the lattice of my memory crystal that it would take a million supercomputers a million years to find such information.”
Jring clacked his claws. “Impossible. You speak on the edges of hyperbole.”
Miko did not like the sinister glow on Nrog’s face—or Jring’s. How to exploit these two leaders’ mutual rivalry and hatred? So much different than Audra, this commander Zikri. Weaker, smaller in girth, but as ruthless, if not more deadly.
He kept glancing with hollow heart over to Star who floated in pathetic passivity in the hated locust tank. Her hazel eyes glazed, blank orbs staring forward, unblinking as a speared fish. Her arms floated elbows out, as if she were comatose.
He must get her out of that tank! But how? She was sealed in, paralyzed by the water. He was weak, defenseless, with no weapons or means at his disposal. Where were his wretched powers of invisibility when he needed them? How fickle the universe was!
As he brooded, one of Jring’s guards caught up the cable hookup from Star’s tank and plugged the end into a circular indentation at his navel. The other end remained affixed to the plug and circuit box at the tank’s top. A sallow light glowed from the circuitry and the Mentera began to feed off Star’s essence.
Miko stared in sheer horror. The locust’s back straightened, his head lifted high, lips parted in a satisfied sigh as Star’s eyes took a murky dip and her whole body collapsed inward in the fluid’s suspension.
Miko could not bear the sight and he sagged, defeated, numbed by despair. His heart thickened in misery, his drive zapped, and he roared out in anguish, “Noooooo…”
Nrog flicked motilators in triumph on seeing his pain. He looked over at Jring with satisfaction.
The simulacrum continued with a sigh. “This allied invasion of yours. Nothing but games on a star-lit stage, albeit ones spanning light years. The Masters are watching. They’ve been watching for an eternity—though have long passed into ephemeral husks. It comes as no surprise to us, this war of yours and the anticipated outcome.”
Nrog clipped out an outraged chitter, clearly despising the simulacrum’s arrogant claims. “So, you have mapped out its outcome?”
“Of course. What do you think?”
Miko glared at Nrog, nursing a silent, seething wish that the luminous creature of the Masters would launch a firebolt and fry him.
“So, what is this outcome then?” Nrog sneered, his motilators flexing with suggestive menace.
The proxy smiled, a grim, disturbing rictus of a simian smile. “Such knowledge is beyond your limited intellect. Any disclosure would affect your part in the overall drama to come—it would set in motion a variation of the observer effect, altering the predicted outcome.”
Nrog’s aide rustled at his commander’s side. He spoke to him in a whispered guttural. “Sir, permission to dismantle this device and forcibly extract its secrets.”
“Granted, Basilursk. But not until I question this creature more.”
“As you wish.”
“It will do you no good, Admiral,” warned the simulacrum. “My circuits cannot be decrypted, or reverse-engineered, or even backtraced. Part of our advanced design was to install a pleuron node.”
“What is that?”
“A backtier whose very nature defies description. Consider your most advanced neural networks, those are but puerile snakes and ladders pathways to what the pleuron offers.”
“We Zikri are masters of decryption,” Nrog sputtered. “We revel in taking things apart.”
“Not as masterful as you think. How successful were you in decrypting these humans’ transmissions in real time?”
Nrog choked, as if wondering how the thing knew that.
“These humans, in fact, are just harbingers of your own doom. Even while you plunk them in tanks, others gather forces. Never underestimate the weakest link in your chain, or the smallest resistance to your supposed, invincible forces.”
Nrog’s face grew blue with rage. “I don’t care for your sanctimonious lectures.”
“No lecture, Admiral, simple facts.”
“Basilursk, shut this box down this minute. And kill these humans and the bug, if they are to be our ‘demise’.”
The simulacrum smiled. “Even if you kill these specimens, it makes no difference. The die is cast. There are others who have picked up the torch.”
Nrog laughed at the creature’s assertion. “At the moment ten thousand Zikri and Mentera ships are poised to storm the free colonies and subjugate every human man, woman and child. Tomorrow it will be a 100k.”
“What do I care who wins this fools’ war? The Masters are beyond death. You, as creatures of flesh and blood, cannot see that everything works according to clockwork formula. Before the Masters shed their mortal bodies, they learned how to transcend the laws of cause and effect.”
“That is impossible,” jeered Jring. “This genesis prophecy of yours is likewise preposterous. Who are you to tell us how it is to end and what has passed? What we’re capable of grasping? You’re a synthetic droid, nothing more, some voice programmed from the past.”
The entity responded in a toneless monotone. “I am everything—I am the future, the past, and the present. You cannot grasp the totality of what I am, what I have become, and what I will continue to be.”
“Gibberish,” grumbled Jring. “The Mentera will endure and outstrip all the races of the galaxy. As of this moment, engineers of ours are constructing a planet-size Ark—The Ark of the Future—a vast blimp full of Mentera, our youngest and most gifted progeny. To be outfitted with unlimited food in the form of humans and untold resources and technology. They will reach out to the farthest ends of the galaxy and spread the Mentera seed!”
Nrog’s polyp of a mouth gobbled. His motilators worked, somewhat paler now, as if his warrior sense only now perceived the sinister intentions of his allied partner’s race.
Miko knew in an instant that Jring had been goaded into revealing his master plan.
“So, it has all come to treachery!” Nrog roared, lifting fore-motilators in menace. “This ape-like thing from the past is an instigator, these human rebels are saboteurs, even you, Jring, and your skulking brood are fickle and ready to gobble up everything in the galaxy.” With exasperat
ed venom, Nrog glided over and grasped the blue simulacrum’s box with his six motilators and flung it far across the room.
The device rolled and smacked but remained undamaged. The projection continued to glow, but its beam shot out a lopsided ray, canted the simulacrum some thirty degrees to the floor. Its smiling face looked much unfazed by the aggression of Nrog, and Princeps Jring watched on in silent amusement as his counterpart seethed and glided over ready to strangle Miko and Usk with his uplifted motilators.
Miko braced himself, his fists balled, as he cast Nrog a venomous glare, awaiting death.
But fire thudded against the hull.
Nrog shrank back on his motilators. Crouching in a protective stance, he motioned to his attendants. His four aides sprang to attention. The locust that had been feeding, unhooked himself from his intravenous cable and jumped over to Jring who withdrew his gold-plated lumo weapon, hunching on his hind legs.
“Sir! NOA,” chirruped Basilursk. “They’ve come in on light drive. They assemble their fleet before our ships.”
“How many?”
“Reports indicate over eight hundred.”
Nrog gave a sinister chitter. “Child’s play, Basilursk. Engage them. Full strike. Jring, get your forces down to Xares! We’ll take over the planet and our Orbs will incinerate these NOA upstarts.”
Jring hastened to comply, nattering on about the loss of their initiative. “I told you so, Nrog. We’ve lost the element of surprise.”
“Viewport up!” Nrog motioned. A vivid curved holo screen of some unknown technology shot up around them in a wide arc.
Miko’s eyes gaped. This was a circle 360 technology, some amalgamation of holo gas, light and color. The dizzying view made him feel as if he and all gathered were projected into space right in the middle of the battle.”
Nrog gave further orders to his minions. They lurched forward to obey.