Hallowed Nebula

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “No, being afraid of the ground was,” Jainuzei said as they continued to climb. “We were often preyed upon by predators, and so built our cities above ground to avoid them. Living this way just became a part of our culture as time went on. Now, these cities are only inhabited by scientists studying the climate change of our world . . . and these vermin that tried to assassinate my son.”

  “Predators on the ground,” Chang said drily. “That would have been nice to know beforehand, pal.”

  “They are quite large too,” Jainuzei said. “With the jungles burning, I doubt we’ll encounter many of them.”

  “Large . . .” Foster muttered. “Just about every animal I saw here had scales, those predators do as well?”

  “That is correct.”

  “So, these predators we’re talking about,” Foster said. “They’s basically dinosaurs, then?”

  “I do not know what that is,” Jainuzei replied and continued upward.

  “Going on what we’ve seen,” LeBoeuf said. “I’m going to assume dinosaurs, Cap.”

  “Cool,” Chang said. “We’re on an alien world, in an alien jungle, a burning one at that, full of alien dinosaurs.”

  Foster snorted. “Just remember, if y’all stand still, T-Rex can’t see you.”

  By the time the four made it to the top platform of the tree city, they saw two Aryile men walk on what looked like a patrol. They were armed with magnetic rifles and wore robes and cloaks that looked like the ones Tolukei wore. Hand gestures became the only means of communication as they slithered across, trying their hardest to not make the wooden floor below crack.

  The patrolling Aryile made a sudden turn and backtracked across the rope bridge that connected to the rest of the tree city. The four were left with no choice but to hide inside one of the huts, hoping the darkness that shrouded them would do the rest. Though, with the quickly spreading wildfires in the distance that darkness wasn’t going to be around much longer.

  “Can you do something about that?” Jainuzei asked Foster.

  Her eyebrow rose. “About what?”

  Jainuzei pointed at her hands. Looking down, she saw the blue hue of the tattoos on her hands. She was still holding onto the tachyon rifle, triggering its effect, bathing the darkened hut with it.

  Foster exhaled. “Well, shit.”

  “Do it now!”

  “Yeah, yeah hold ya horses!” Foster said as she hastily tried to remove the tachyon rifle’s strap from her and place it on the floor.

  “Don’t bother now!” Jainuzei stood up slightly from his cover, his rifle’s barrel aimed forward.

  Foster was a second away from disarming herself. “What’s the big fuss?—”

  Bullets flew back and forth. Foster ducked and rearmed herself. At that point, everyone scattered to their own cover. The two patrolling men noticed Foster’s tattoos’ glow. She was impressed they made it back to the hut as quickly as they did.

  LeBoeuf’s holographic bracelets twirled around her wrists turning purple, and she created a shimmering lavender-colored barricade for the four to cover behind. It came just in time for the second spray of bullets from the two Aryile men. Bullets accelerated by magnetic fields put red glowing holes through wood in a fraction of a second. Bullets against psionic barricades? They dinged to the floor once they hit, making the barricade flicker purple colors.

  The first attacker went for cover behind the hut’s wall after Foster shattered his shields. Tachyon rifles were great for that. She ducked from a bullet that was aimed at her face. It soared over her head instead. She paused for a second when she came back up for another shot. The Aryile was dead. Chang’s rifle tore eight bloody holes through his chest.

  There was one Aryile attacker left. A number that was sure to increase now that the four went loud with their guns. LeBoeuf didn’t do much shooting. She was too busy trying to remain focused, keeping the psionic barricade active. It was up to Chang, Foster, and Jainuzei to lay down the heat.

  During the weapons exchange, the Aryile’s rifle was shot out from his hands. Chang wasn’t that bad of a shot. The Aryile went for a long dagger, and almost instinctively, Jainuzei put his rifle away replacing it with one of many Hashmedai plasma blades he had on him, a one-handed plasma sword. Jainuzei leaped up and over the psionic barricade, ignoring Foster’s requests for him to get back into cover.

  Jainuzei ran out of the hut, swinging the plasma sword that now glowed bright emerald colors. By the time Jainuzei was done, the Aryile lay in four pieces on the wooden floor. Technically five, but Foster couldn’t see where his head had rolled to. Probably down to the jungles below.

  “If you tryin’ to impress us, it ain’t working,” Foster said, kicking his rifle, sliding it across the aged wooden floor to him outside the hut. “Don’t be reckless!”

  “I’m not reckless,” Jainuzei said, rearming himself. “I am honorable. I will not slay an adversary with a ranged weapon when they are wielding a melee one.”

  As Foster feared, more attackers were on the way by the time the four left the bullet-ridden hut. How many was a number none of them stuck around to count. They needed to finish the job, and that was neutralizing the threat without getting their heads shot off or getting burned by the spreading forest fires. Some of the huts at the far edge of the tree city had already begun to lift smoke into the orange glowing night skies.

  “Shit, we need to hurry!” Foster roared, looking at the growing flames. “Jainuzei, exactly what do we need to do here?”

  He didn’t answer. Turning around she saw why. He left the three, charging toward a large central hut within the hanging tree city.

  “What a fucking dick, did he seriously just ditch us?” Chang said, having taken notice their guide ditched them.

  The three ran after Jainuzei, returning blind fire at the unseen targets behind, above, and next to them. Foster was glad they brought the personal shields. She saw hers flash blue at least three times during the run. Her wrist terminal reported it had fallen to 43 percent. She needed to take cover and fast before that number hit 0.

  The fires were quick to spread throughout the city. Embers fell from the leaves above. The smell of burning wood came next, and soon afterward, would come the haze from the smoke. The sad thing was, their fighting probably contributed to the fires.

  LeBoeuf was forced to use her psionic rifle, using either incendiary blasts or psionically charged lightning bolts. The cryonic rounds weren’t cutting it. Eventually, she just started flinging bodies off with telekinetic pushes. Foster heard at least three bodies scream as they fell then go splat on the ground below.

  Chang’s rifle shot bullets so fast, missed shots that hit the wood and created enough heat to start small fires. And Foster? She had a tachyon rifle, and its missed shots vaporized holes through the wood, burning anything else nearby.

  The rate at which Foster’s shields were falling slowed. Whoever had been chasing them in the darkness had met their end from the combined firepower of the three, as with the half the city now turned into a raging inferno of flames, adding to the forest fire’s destruction.

  All that remained of the tree city was the large hut Jainuzei charged into, and therefore any survivors from the renegade group. Foster heard a struggle with yelling and screaming in the Radiance language coming from the hut. The three humans approached the front entrance to the hut with their weapons ready for action, while the orange glow from the flames around them shined on the wooden structure.

  “What do you think that’s all about, Cap?” Chang asked her.

  “Jainuzei must be roughin’ up their leaders,” Foster said, then looked back at Chang and LeBoeuf. “You two ready?”

  LeBoeuf nodded. “Ready and waiting!”

  “Let’s do this,” she said. “Try and take ‘em alive, I’m sure the council will want to talk with ‘em.”

  LeBoeuf flicked her wrist, and the thin wooden door exploded with psionic might, scattering wooden fragments in every direction. Foster, LeBoe
uf, and Chang bolted in with their rifles searching for hostiles to put down. There were none, the only people armed were the three humans, Jainuzei, and an armored Linl woman holding a glowing sword infused with psionic energy to a bearded Aryile man on his knees.

  The woman had blonde hair tied into a long thick braid and a glowing blue disk-shaped psionic shield on her left wrist. She was a knight in shining cybernetic armor. A psionic space knight, the same one that dragged Saressea away.

  The space knight woman faced Jainuzei, and a heated string of Radiance words left each other’s lips.

  “Behind us!” Chang yelled, turning his rifle to aim out the door they barged in from.

  Foster and LeBoeuf joined Chang outside. Three Aryile and a Javnis repelled down from the burning trees above, forcing the three to seek cover behind another psionic barricade LeBoeuf conjured, and engage in a deadly standoff.

  During the gunfight, Foster heard six shots from a magnetic pistol discharge from the large hut behind, followed by the thud of a body dropping.

  18 Rivera

  Summit Ruins

  Mount Hermon, Earth, Sol System

  November 1, 2118, 15:30 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Jasmine Rivera was surprised her request was approved so quickly to visit the newly unearthed ruins in the mountains. Well, it wasn’t her request to be exact, but rather that of Sarpanit. The transport that she rode in on lowered into the blackened hole in the mountains, the aftermath of the ion cannon strike last summer when the dragons made their presence known.

  Flakes of snow began to fall, dusting the transport’s windshields in the process. It was a comforting thing to watch, it helped keep Rivera’s mind at ease. Emmanuel, her team, her sense of normalcy in life, it was all gone. Foster and the Kepler too, if the AI Goddess, Sarpanit, who had taken full control of her HNI by the time she stepped out of the transport, had anything to say about that.

  Rivera’s boots crunched the snow and frost beneath her feet when she moved away from the transport. Ahead of her were various archaeologists from Earth and elsewhere in the UNE, studying the newly discovered ruins that had been buried inside the mountains for eons, well what remained of it. The ion cannon strike was used in a military operation, not excavation. The discovery of the ancient ruins was flat-out luck.

  She moved deeper into the dig site, which was nothing more than a giant crater, with scattered pieces of what was on the inside of the mountains. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, that was Sarpanit’s job. All Rivera did was blend in with the teams of researchers and archaeologists, then pretended to cross-check the damaged stone-made artifacts with the data Sarpanit, in secret, gave Rivera.

  “Your weapons are much more powerful than I thought,” Sarpanit’s voice spoke to her.

  “They are not my weapons.”

  “You’re human, are you not?”

  “Not all of us believe in the use of violence.”

  “Violence is necessary to achieve unreachable goals,” Sarpanit said. “Or to ensure nobody would dare use it against you.”

  “I disagree.”

  “All humans resort to it, I was human once myself. Don’t forget that.”

  Rivera shook her head then kneeled to scan a stone carved tablet. “Have you ever hurt someone that you regretted hurting later?”

  “Everyone I inflicted pain on deserved it.”

  “One day, when you hurt someone with violence . . . someone that didn’t deserve it, you will understand why I became the enlightened person I am today.”

  Rivera made her way to the center of the crater, mystified of her surroundings. She wondered if this was what it was like to stand in the glass craters that scarred parts of Earth, thanks to the Imperial invasion’s plasma bombardment. She’d never know, she never did visit them and most had been cleaned up at this point and had their cities rebuilt.

  A tall Rabuabin man caught Rivera’s attention. Her staring at him caught his as well, she wasn’t aware Radiance had people on Earth studying this. He approached her, taking in the same sights of the blackened hole they all stood in.

  “Crazy isn’t it?” the Rabuabin said to her, and then looked on at the ruins. “To think these were all found after the orbital strikes hit.”

  Remains of an underground bunker in the distance caught her eyes. She pointed at it. “What is this?”

  The Rabuabin man’s gaze followed her index finger. “People here were hoping you could tell us with the data you pulled from the Carl Sagan,” he said. “The Earth’s military is tight-lipped about what happened on the mountains prior to the orbital strikes.”

  “I found glyphs that matched the ones here, meaning that the tomb of Tiamat we found in Sirius is directly related to this,” Rivera said. Though she never found it, that data was simply given to her by a crazy AI. “I’m more curious about what you said earlier. What did prompt the UNE to blast these mountains of all places?”

  “You don’t point ion cannons at mountains, mountains on Earth at that, and pull the trigger,” the Rabuabin man said. “We heard that the Draconians were in the region before the ion cannon strikes. The Draconians must have known this structure was buried inside and came to dig it up. Maybe they already did, but the humans obliterated the evidence.”

  “What do we know about the inside of it?”

  He used his HNI and conjured a detailed holographic map of the area and pictures made by the first teams to venture into the interior of the fallen structure.

  “Not much,” he continued. “Humans sent recon drones inside to take a few pictures, then some teams to poke around. Because of the ion cannon strike, most of the clues had been damaged beyond recognition, except for a broken dragon statue and glyphs like the ones you discovered. Well, according to my boss at least. I’m not an archeologist.”

  Rivera viewed the projection and the orbiting holo photos closely. Her face lurched closer to the projection. The all too familiar crumbled walls, ceilings, and floors of the underground bunker below them matched what she briefly observed in the data Foster and her team brought back from Sirius.

  The Rabuabin man grimaced. “Something caught your eye?”

  “These walls,” Rivera said, pointing at them and the crude drawings of rows of dragon statues. “There was a structure at Sirius that looked similar to this.”

  “Lyonria . . . on Earth,” he said, stroking his clean-shaven face as his tail swayed slower. “My boss says they experimented with humans during ancient times. But there’s never been any signs they built bases on Earth.”

  “That’s because nobody cracked open a mountain to see what was on the inside.” Rivera snickered. “And I doubt these are Lyonria. I was in one of their structures at Sirius, they didn’t look like this. There was a distinct difference from that, Tiamat’s tomb, and this place.”

  “I’ve heard about that,” he said. “But my boss insists that there were two different generations of Lyonria that were in the galaxy—”

  “That’s because there are!” an agitated voice yelled at the two from behind.

  The two spun on their heels. Rivera looked ahead and saw no one, the Rabuabin man looked down, and she followed his eyes and saw a Vorcambreum woman. Her dwarflike body was four feet, her head, full of silver hair covering her large ears, looked up at the two, both her hands holding onto her hips.

  “Rivera, let me introduce you to my boss, Eicelea,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Rivera said, lowering her hand for a shake. “I’m Jasmine Rivera, an IESA engineer.”

  “IESA engineer?” Eicelea retorted. “Why would they send someone like you here?”

  Rivera placed her hands on her hips to match Eicelea’s stance. “Why would the UNE ask Radiance to come here?”

  “You don’t know who I am?” Eicelea gasped, her yellow eyes opened wide. “I am the great Eicelea, galactic-renowned archaeologist from Radiance.”

  “Impressive, I can see why they asked you then.” She lied, she really didn’t know. Rivera�
��s head tilted left to right, looking at the ruins, the teams of researchers scanning and studying. “Something tells me these weren’t built by human hands, even though this is Earth.”

  “Quite literally, in some way,” said Sarpanit.

  “So! Now that we’ve established why it’s vital that I must be here,” Eicelea said. “Why is it that you must be here?”

  “She’s one of the sleep-ins from the Carl Sagan, boss,” the Rabuabin said.

  Eicelea looked up at him. “Oh, and I suppose she told you that, Vynei?”

  Vynei, the Rabuabin man nodded. He pushed an HNI conjured holo screen at Eicelea, Rivera noticed it had her name on it. “I did some research when I saw her arrive. We were chatting earlier about the discoveries too.”

  “Carl Sagan . . .” Eicelea’s yellow eyes narrowed as she stroked the grey flesh on her chin. “That would be the ship Captain Foster was in command of. And that Doctor Pierce . . . ugh, you know of them, Jasmine?”

  “Of course—”

  “Oh, why do the Gods do this to me?!” Eicelea threw her hands up frantically, moving away from the two. “Why am I the only archaeologist in the galaxy that has threats pushed at me? Can the Gods not allow me to visit a dig site, study the ruins, and leave with my adrenaline levels at normal rates?!”

  Eicelea stormed off stomping, vanishing behind several personnel and extracted stone objects from the ground.

  “Was it something I said?” Rivera asked Vynei.

  “We’ve had a lot of bad luck; our most recent one was the ruins found on Jacobus.”

  “Vynei!” Eicelea shouted to him from wherever she waddled to. “Watch my back; I don’t trust that human or the hexes she brings from the Carl Sagan!”

  “I should go,” Vynei said. “Nice talking to you, Jasmine.”

  “Personal bodyguard?” she asked as he moved to catch up with Eicelea.

  Vynei faced her briefly to say. “Like I said, we always run into bad luck when we explore ancient ruins.”

  When Vynei moved out of sight, Sarpanit began to vocalize words again into Rivera’s mind. “I was starting to wonder when they would shut up.”