It felt to her like the detour to her tribunal was just a formality. Like someone in the Union had plans to ship her out to the penal colony, no matter what and shipped her to Talsyk, parked the prisoner ship in orbit, sent her to the surface, waited, then picked her up. Because by the time she was unloaded off the transport onto the prison ferry, it promptly left orbit, heading straight for the penal colony at the edge of the system.
And if that seemed unbelievable enough, there was conveniently a lot of inmates aboard that was also fated to be deposited there before the ship delivered the rest of the prisoners to mining camps, prisons, execution prisons or to exile them from the Union. She really hoped she wasn’t mistaken for execution after all that.
As for the accused that left for Talsyk for their tribunals the same time she did? They all got off or weren’t sentenced to a penal colony. It wasn’t a coincidence, it was planned. And it pissed her off as she was led back into the block she thought she escaped from.
It was mealtime by the time the ship broke orbit, venturing to the distant penal colony. She didn’t want to eat but knew if she didn’t now, she’d have to wait until the morning for another meal. Reluctantly, she entered the mess, stood in line for a tube of protein paste and water, and hoped Byikanea and her gang wasn’t around. Her nerves relaxed a bit when no signs of the bat-shit crazy redheaded Linl woman were seen.
The line shrunk enough for her to get the tube of paste and water. Looking from left to right, Saressea saw nothing but rugged inmates squeezing the brown goo inside the tubes into their mouths, talking, laughing, sharing stories of what they did that got them arrested. Then there was the special group in the corner, huddled around their own tables and chairs claimed for them, the group of SOM members or supporters. If Saressea hadn’t stopped to stare at them, she might have been able to avoid making eye contact with Byikanea. She groaned having realized this was the second time she did that.
Mind-altering flashbacks of Byikanea quivering with orgasmic lust, while Saressea lay back a paralyzed victim of rape, wouldn’t stop. She tried looking away, but thoughts of being violated prevented that. Byikanea’s gaze into her eyes was soul piercing.
Two large inmates dragged Saressea to the table Byikanea sat at with their cronies, like she was the queen of all prisoners aboard. The two murmured something to Saressea as they forced her to sit before Byikanea. The words were nothing more than fading sounds in the background. Saressea couldn’t shake the psychological trauma of what Byikanea put her through during the multi-month voyage.
“We meet again,” Byikanea said for a second time, or was it a fourth? She didn’t know, it wasn’t until Byikanea snapped her fingers that Saressea came back to the world of the present.
“Guess we both got pissed on by the Gods,” Saressea said.
“Gods . . .” Byikanea scowled at her words. “What was your name again?”
“You fucked me every other day and you don’t remember?—”
Byikanea laughed, it was the same evil laughter like the first time they met. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was with Jainuzei and you know that.”
Byikanea gave her a quick wink and a smile.
“Well, sorry that the Gods screwed with your shitty memory,” Saressea said. “They must have been busy pissing all over me when they did that.”
“Gods . . .” she scowled again at the word.
Discharged protein or vegetable tubes littered the surface of the table. Saressea had a feeling she should eat hers before the guards took it away when it was lights out time. She went to leave and was firmly pushed back down to sit on the chair by the two large inmates behind. She squirmed, trying to shake them off with the jerking of her shoulders. It didn’t work.
“Sit with us, Saressea,” Byikanea said. “I have a very important question to ask you.”
Saressea remained still, ending all attempts at resistance. Her tail lowered during the process. “Okay, shoot.”
Byikanea leaned forward across the table and discarded tubes. “You mentioned Gods twice.”
Saressea lifted an eyebrow; it made her right feline ear stiffen during the process. “Yeah . . . and?”
A devious smile spread across Byikanea’s face. “Are you a believer, Saressea?”
“Well, yea—”
“Choose your words carefully.”
Her tongue pushed against the side of her mouth, anxiety prevented her from answering too quickly. Saressea had a feeling the wrong reply might see her not arrive at the penal colony. Byikanea would probably see to that, and if not her, then the dozens of inmates grouped around her watching Saressea’s ears sag from the stress.
“We are believers,” Byikanea said. “Are you?”
“She hasn’t answered your question,” one of Byikanea’s cronies, an Aryile woman, said.
“Saressea, do you want to be here?” Byikanea asked her.
“Stuck on this rust bucket ship with you wackos?” Saressea said. “I can think of about ten other things I’d rather be doing right now, so no.”
“You want to be set free, then?”
“Sure? Legally preferably, but yeah, that’d be nice.”
“Then you are a believer?”
“Uh . . . sure,” she lied, scratching the back of her head. She had nothing else to lose at that point. People living in penal colonies weren’t known for their truthfulness. “Yeah, sure I’m a believer. That’s right.”
Byikanea stood up, gesturing to the people around her. They gave her their attention, and she gave them a speech. “The three Gods have abandoned us all,” Byikanea said as if she was a preacher. “It’s not because of what we did or didn’t do. It’s because they left us, left this galaxy, left the universe. We pray to a force that can’t hear or see us.”
What the fuck did I agree to? Saressea thought as an uneasy feeling rippled throughout her body and across her tail. As Byikanea continued, Saressea repeatedly told the Gods sorry, over and over in her head, in hopes of the slim chance they were mind readers.
“ . . . Marduk, the king of all Gods never left us,” Byikanea continued. “He just never got the chance to show himself to the people of Radiance. He was exiled in the Sirius system by Tiamat’s minions, killed by Captain Foster and her crew. As long as we keep his devotion in our thoughts, we can bring him back, we can bring the Radiance Union into his protective arms and save our people from the vile dragons of Tiamat’s creation.”
Byikanea’s speech was drawing all eyes in the mess at her. Even a number of the guards standing watch nodded their heads in agreement. Saressea quickly figured out who had been slipping Byikanea special privileges. Saressea also knew the beginning of a mutiny when she saw one. And she saw one. She needed to get out, and fast.
“Hey, guys quick question,” Saressea said to her.
Byikanea looked down at her with the same lustful stare she couldn’t erase from her thoughts. “Speak, Saressea.”
Saressea bit her lip and then said. “I gotta pee, is it okay if I step out for a sec?”
“You’re going to miss the fun if you do.”
“I could imagine, but I really, really got to go—”
Three sets of clicks removed the electronic bindings that kept her hands and legs restricted. Her slave collar loosed afterward, so did everyone else’s at the table. Behind, Saressea saw a number of inmates experience the same unexpected freedom, and the guards standing watch? They stood watching as if it were a form of entertainment.
Byikanea climbed up onto the table, raised her hands in the air, drawing the attention of everyone including the prisoners that did not have their collars and bindings removed. With a loud brimming voice, she shouted. “Believers of Marduk will be set free tonight!”
With the slave collar powered off and removed from Saressea’s neck, her HNI booted up again. She never realized how much she missed the implant in her head until that moment. She imagined everyone else’s HNI was rebooting as well, including the inmates that suddenly c
onverted to the faith of Marduk when they saw the deal they could get.
A text-only message flashed over her eyesight, it was sent minutes after her slave collar had deactivated.
Get to an escape pod, now!
- Michei
It didn’t surprise her that Michei, a member of the Whisper, got the heads-up of what happened. What did surprise her was the surge of violence that erupted when Byikanea unleashed her psionic might, now that the damping effects of the collar was gone, upon the guards that didn’t stand with her.
Three sets of alarms blared, two of them she recognized. One of them was to let guards know that the prisoners were rioting. The other alarm she had no idea what it meant, and the last one? It was a battle stations alarm; the ship was under attack by another.
Multiple psionic blasts followed, rupturing the walls, vaporizing those that got close, flinging guards that didn’t stand with the rioting inmates from wall to wall with brutal telekinetic force or pulling magnetic rifles out from the hands of others. Byikanea wasn’t the only inmate with psionic powers, but she was the only one that conjured the devastating psionic bombs that blew apart the walls and ceilings.
Saressea kept to the floor crawling on it as weapons fire between guards loyal to Byikanea exchanged bullets with guards loyal to the Union. She wasn’t looking forward to crawling across the floor that flowed with blood, brains, and fragments of arms and fingers when she approached it. Crawling over the two dead Javnis bodies and halved Vorcambreum was hard enough.
A hole in the wall gave her access to a hallway full of guards and inmates busy shooting and bludgeoning each other to death. Blood sprayed across the side of her face when she tried to slip past an inmate stabbing a guard in the neck seventeen times in the same spot. Three times could have done the trick, seventeen was just fucking hatred.
Her instincts told her to keep moving. The opening of a maelstrom in the middle of space seen via a window made her stop and look. Out from the maelstrom came a Hashmedai command ship. Leading the command ship was an Earth vessel with a rotating habitat ring. She had her HNI verify what she saw was real. Last time she checked, only Draconians could exit the maelstrom.
Her HNI sent a visual confirmation back after it scanned the imagery from the window. The ship leading the charge was an IESA ship from the twenty-first century; the massive sphere behind it was an Imperial command ship, and the fleet of ships exiting it? Half were Imperial warships, the other was of a class of Radiance ships she had never seen before. And they were all opening fire on the Radiance cruisers escorting the prison ferry—
An inmate’s head exploded when a high-velocity round hit it. The insides of their head drenched the window she was looking at, blocking the view of the incoming fleet. The chunks of pink mixed with a splash of crimson that used to be their brains slid down the glass. It was a grim reminder she had something important to do.
Right, the escape pod.
Saressea continued her search for it amidst the chaos.
55 Foster
XSV Johannes Kepler
Unknown Planet Orbit, Unknown System
July 23, 2119, 13:17 SST (Sol Standard Time)
The crew and guests that found themselves aboard the Kepler sat around a circular table with the logo of IESA painted on it. Above the table was the large projection of the nebula, showing the Kepler’s approximate location inside the barrier and the estimated location of Kur. The colors the nebula depicted on the hologram cast a light pink hue on all those in attendance as the lights dimmed, and Williams gave everyone a recap.
Eicelea and Vynei squirmed in their seats when the projection changed to Alisha’s IESA portrait. They recognized her too. Eicelea pointed at it with her tiny finger.
Foster’s eyebrow rose. “Don’t tell me you y’all know her as well?”
“We do,” Eicelea said. “We were roommates for an extremely short time on Rasi, in the Barnard’s Star system.”
“That proves this is the Alisha I know,” Odelea said. “She transferred to a research outpost on Rasi when I last saw her.”
“Barnard’s Star,” Foster said, putting things together. “Didn’t Karklosea say Jainuzei was there?”
“She insists he was, yes,” Odelea said, nodding.
“And now hijacked our ship, ran off to the Gerard Kuiper with our vortex key, Nereid, and Lisette.”
“Jainuzei and Alisha must have met,” Williams said. “Then, when she returned to Earth, he came with her in secret.”
“Then went to Sirius, something happened, they created the SOM, then the Gerard Kuiper left with Alisha faking its death,” Pierce finished for him. “It ended up in the nebula, and—”
“Jainuzei knew about it,” Penelope said, reclining on her chair. “Been browsing through your logs, Jainuzei spent quite a bit of time reading news reports via QEC about the ruins found on the Javnis homeworld. He also sent encrypted messages via QEC back to someone in the Luminous system, probably speaking to his allies.”
“The SOM on the refinery made a big deal about the discovery of those ruins too, didn’t they?” Williams said. “They knew it was a backdoor into a planet in the nebula.”
“And the origin of Marduk and the Javnis Muodiry creation,” Foster said.
Williams stroked his beard, keeping his eyes on the projection. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “The vortex key, I get, they got it working and used it to leave, which is what the SOM was trying to achieve. So, on one hand, it looks like Jainuzei is pushing their plans forward. But if that’s the case, why was he killing their members? And why bring Nereid into all this?”
“We can debate all we want,” Foster said. “But our questions will only be answered once we capture the Gerard Kuiper.”
“Agreed,” LeBoeuf muttered. “We need to go after them.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Foster said, nodding in agreement. “They opened a fresh vortex, I can sense it. We’s just need to get the Kepler in it and I should be able to navigate us to wherever they went. Of course, that’d be the easy part.”
“And the hard part?” Penelope asked.
“Gettin’ the Kepler there,” she replied. “We’s need to get the vortex key working. Those fissures ain’t gonna cut it since they link with other fissures. We need to follow the path the Gerard Kuiper’s makin’.”
“But he took it . . .” Chang said drily.
Foster smiled at him. “There’s a backup one, remember? The first vortex key we got that blew out.”
Originally, there were two vortex keys, one that was in the possession of Amicitia Station 14, the other in control of the Empire. The first key came from Amicitia Station 14 and broke down after testing, the second, and working key, on Gerard Kuiper, came from the Empire. The burnt-out key was left aboard.
“That’s right,” Pierce said. “He left that one since it wasn’t working.”
“During her downtime Saressea tinkered with both keys and learned a helluva lot more than we did at the time,” Foster said. “Her files should still be on that data crystal we found. Let’s put ‘em to use, get that busted key back online and runnin’, and we got this.”
The remainder of the day was spent studying Saressea’s recovered HNI files about the inner workings of the vortex key, using the encrypted data from the data crystal taken from the SOM hut by Karklosea. EVE worked for hours on it, making repairs that Saressea didn’t know how to make at the time of it breaking down.
By the time everyone finished dinner in the mess, EVE reported she got it working again. And the best part? The tentacle creature inside the key was long dead, most likely killed when it got fried the first time. If the theory was right, and it was a psionic tracking device, it shouldn’t be able to do it now.
It put a smile on Foster’s face. Gerard Kuiper was using the vortex key that telepathically transmitted to the Draconians its location. They were the ones that were going to have to scratch their heads wondering why they kept getting attacked.
He
r smile faded when the faces of Rivera, Nereid, and Lisette came into her thoughts. They were still aboard the Gerard Kuiper. They needed to be pulled out before the dragons pulled the ship apart.
“Everyone ready?” Foster asked as she gave the bridge crew a quick look.
Chang nodded double-checking his helm’s controls. “Ready and waiting, Captain.”
“Y’all know the drill then.” Foster went for the exit to make her way to engineering. “Dom, you got the bridge, Tolukei rub the hull down with that creepy goo.”
She marched to engineering, looking at the tattoos on her hands, knowing that the strange wires under them that fused with her body was able to once again give her the power to commune with the alien device.
Similar to their last attempts at venturing through the maelstrom, Tolukei used his telekinetic powers to control and spread the goo the Kepler had in storage along the hull, preventing it from vanishing. The technique wasn’t reliable, as Tolukei struggled to keep it adhered correctly, all while it proved to be a taxing task to his mind. How the Gerard Kuiper managed to pull it off was a mystery to all. Foster hoped their pursuit of the Gerard Kuiper wasn’t going to end with them finding the partially faded away hulk of the ship adrift in the maelstrom because Jainuzei and his company didn’t know any better.
Foster reached up and touched the restored vortex key in engineering when she arrived, and the crew gave their all clear. In a flash, she felt her mind lift away from her body, like a form of astral projection, sensing the presence of a shut vortex, and ripping it open. With Williams in command, he ordered the goo-covered ship through and Foster allowed her powers to close the vortex behind. She returned to the bridge when the task was finished.
The Kepler was once again flying through the red and magenta clouds. After an hour, the first test was completed, no dragons swarmed them. Now came test number two, keeping the ship together while Tolukei used all his psionic might to force the goo to remain on the hull. The Kepler followed the direction the Gerard Kuiper went, with Foster’s guidance.
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