“We cannot help her,” Torv explained. “She shall die. They all do.”
“What? How does your species survive if all mothers die in childbirth?”
“She carries many crechelings.”
Destra gaped in horror, watching the death throes of the pregnant Gor. Her limbs were thrashing more weakly now, and a glistening pool of translucent fluid had appeared, slowly spreading beneath her. “You can’t just stand here and watch!”
“We honor her with our sight. She is worthy of it. Hers are the only crechelings that we now know of, and she the last Matriarch.”
“The last . . .” Destra looked around, her eyes skipping over the odd two dozen Gors standing in a circle around the thrashing, pregnant female. “You mean she is your last surviving leader?” Destra asked, turning to find Torv now standing behind her and looking over her shoulders for a better view.
“No,” he hissed. “I mean she is the only surviving female.”
Destra’s jaw dropped. “That’s what you meant when you said she’s the future of the Gors.”
“Her crechelings and the female in her belly who is to replace her must form the next generation of Gors. If we are not careful, it shall also be the last.”
“What about your fleet, Torv?” Destra asked. “You must have another female aboard one of those ships.”
“Our fleet is almost gone. The Sythians chase and kill my people. But even should they survive, there are no females aboard those ships. Only the males go to war. My creche mother is the first and only Matriarch to travel beyond Noctune, and she only does this because your people come and take her from her home. She is the one who convinces the Gors to rebel against our masters. They would only listen to a Matriarch. The Sythians are wise that they do not allow any Matriarchs to be in their fleet, but you humans change that and set us free.
“Now my creche mother is dead, and my sister dies to give life to new crechelings. We have just one female left—she who is about to be born. The last Matriarch.”
“Your sister? That’s your sister?” Destra asked, pointing to the dying female.
“Yess,” Torv replied.
Destra wondered why she’d never seen or heard of this pregnant Gor before, especially since she was Torv’s sister. “You said your sister is pregnant with many crechelings. How do you know that only one of them will be female?”
“Because, only one of them ever is. For a Matriarch to give birth to more than one female is rare, just as it is rare for her to survive the birthing. Those who do survive are blessed, chosen by the gods to lead us as high praetors.”
“Your creche mother . . . Tova, she was one of them?”
“Yess, she survives the birthing, but she gives birth only to me and my sister.”
Suddenly Destra understood why the Gors wanted so badly to get to Noctune. They had just one female left. If they found even one more alive on their home world, she would become invaluable to their species.
Destra looked on, watching as the female Gor gradually gave up the fight and stopped her writhing. As soon as she lay still, her bulging belly began to move, her skin stretching and protruding strangely in several different places at once, as though fists were punching her from the inside—or like little heads trying to butt their way out. . . .
Destra’s stomach did a queasy flip, and she looked away, shuddering. Then came a wet tearing sound, followed by loud, high-pitched hissing. The circle of Gors broke and they started toward the dead female and her monstrous babies.
Torv stayed by Destra’s side, watching her carefully. “You look away as if our crechelings offend your sight. Why?” a deadly threat lurked in that question, and Destra forced herself to turn back and watch as the crechelings were pulled one at a time from their dead mother’s ruined belly.
“I mean no offense, Torv. My stomach is weak, and I am not used to seeing something this gruesome.”
“Is birthing not gruesome for humans?”
“Yes, but not deadly.”
They watched as two dozen armored Gors took turns comforting and cradling the crechelings. One of the adults brought a hissing, gasping little creature to Torv and he took it in both of his hands, holding it up before him and the other Gors. He grinned and said, “Behold! Your Matriarch!”
The Gors all roared and hissed, holding up the other crechelings. The female that Torv was holding abruptly stopped hissing, and she opened two wrinkly yellow eyes to look upon her subjects.
Destra studied the Gor baby curiously. It was about the size of a human baby, but its skin was a sickly gray. Its face and body was fuller than that of an adult Gor, but her nose was flat and bony, and her ears were just two small holes in the sides of her head.
“She’s beautiful,” Destra lied.
“Yesss!” Torv said after a moment. He turned back to her and cradled the baby against his massive chest. “They must eat soon,” he said. “They are already starving.”
A sudden, horrible suspicion formed in Destra’s gut. “Eat what? Don’t tell me they’re going to eat . . .” Bile rose in her throat as her eyes flicked to the body of the dead female.
“No, to be eaten by ones creche mates is a great dishonor, and Tava does nothing to deserve this. We feed the crechelings, but we cannot feed them from the food you give us. They must eat fresh meat, and plenty of it.”
“There isn’t any,” Destra said.
Torv hissed with displeasure. “Perhaps you have some humans who do not deserve to live?”
Destra blinked at him, shocked by the suggestion. “No.”
“Then let us hope that we reach Noctune soon.”
* * *
Captain Picara had expected to die a quick death; she had been waiting for the severed bridge of the Emancipator to collide with something else and disintegrate, but that never happened. Instead Sythian cruisers clustered around them, as if herding them to a specific destination. Moments later she realized that was exactly what they were doing. Their destination appeared in the distance—one of the giant, behemoth-class cruisers.
Picara broke the deadly silence on the bridge to speak to her crew.
“They’re going to capture us,” she said. That realization came with as much relief as it did trepidation—they weren’t going to die. At least not yet. Picara wondered whether being captured by Sythians might be worse than death.
The enemy command ship grew until its shiny lavender hull was all they could see.
“What are they going to do with us?” someone asked.
Picara shook her head and reached for her sidearm. “Whatever they’re planning, we don’t want to be a part of it. Ready your weapons! They’re not taking us alive.”
When the distant, gleaming hull of the enemy ship became the gaping maw of a hangar bay waiting to swallow them whole, apprehension shuddered through Picara. The inside of the ship was dark, barely lit to a dim purplish glow. No sooner had they crossed the threshold of the hangar than they felt the sudden tug of gravity. Going from weightless to her full weight in an instant, Picara gasped. Her stomach leapt into her throat and there was a horrible moment of falling. People screamed.
Smack.
She hit the deck. Others landed around her with ringing thuds. Some of them stumbled to their feet, while others merely stirred and groaned. Marla Picara was among the latter group. She sat up and looked around, watching her crew rise as dark silhouettes against the alien glow shining in from the forward viewports. She tried to hold her gun steady, but from the way it flopped uselessly in her hand, provoking sharp grinding stabs of pain, she realized that she’d broken her wrist. Using her left hand to pry the gun from numb fingers, she trained it on the doors at the back of the bridge, waiting for Sythians to come boiling in.
That moment never came. Instead, they spent what felt like forever in darkness and pain, nursing painful bruises and broken bones.
Picara’s XO walked up beside her. “Ma’am,” the other woman said.
“Commander,” Picara replied, n
odding to her.
“What do you think they’re waiting for?”
A sudden clank sounded on the other side of the doors, interrupting them. It was followed by a whirring screech as drills began boring through the doors. “Looks like they’re not waiting anymore. Get ready!” she called out.
But the doors never opened. Instead, a loud hissing noise filled the air, and Marla began to smell something acrid that made her head swim.
“What the . . .” She flopped onto her side, a dreamy haze filling up her head like cotton. She drifted away, down a dark, endless tunnel.
Eternity passed in a heartbeat.
Picara’s eyes flew open with a violent stab of pain. Black, featureless faces milled around her, red eyes glinting in the dark. One of them hissed at her, and to her surprise she found she could understand what it said.
“You are awake. Good.”
Picara’s heart thudded in her chest. Her palms began to sweat, and she felt a terrible pressure inside her head. “Where am I?” she replied, trying to get up, only to find that she was tied down and couldn’t move.
Her hands were free, but her broken wrist had been immobilized. Picara’s mind spun. The fact that they’d set her wrist showed that they were concerned for her welfare. But why?
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.
One of the black faces drew near and she saw a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. Broad, papery black wings spread from its back and refolded themselves. Picara watched in horror.
“You must help us to understand your technology,” the creature replied. “We shall need it to reach Avilon.”
Picara’s eyes widened with sudden realization. Her crew had been busy making quantum tech refits to the Emancipator, but the components had all been ready-made, stolen and smuggled from the upper cities. Her crew wouldn’t know how to recreate any of them. “Good luck,” she said, spitting at them. “We don’t even know how our tech works.”
The creature hissed at her. “Then you will learn with us.”
Picara smiled. “Learn from what? You destroyed the Avilonian fleet.”
The creature bent close to her ear and she felt its warm, rancid breath on her face. “We do not destroy their ships. We capture them.”
Suddenly Picara understood the real intention behind the Sythians’ trap. They hadn’t lured the Avilonians in just to kill them. They’d lured them in to disable their ships and study them. If they managed to reverse engineer quantum jump drives . . .
Visions of endless hordes of Sythians swarming into orbit around Avilon danced through Picara’s head. Defeating Omnius didn’t seem to matter anymore. When compared to the survival of the human race, freedom seemed like a pointless luxury.
* * *
After a rocky night’s sleep and spending the morning seeing the Gors and their newborn crechelings to their transports, Destra stood on the bridge of the Tempest, watching as Admiral Hale readied the ship for its jump to Noctune. She marveled at the idea that they could jump directly from one galaxy to another. Avilonian technology was clearly far more advanced than anyone had ever thought possible.
“Engineering!” the admiral called out. “Are our shields raised?”
“In the blue, sir, 100% charged and ready.”
“Good. We don’t want anything to surprise us on the other end. Helm, do we have our jump back pre-calculated?”
“Yes, sir. As long as we remain at the exit coordinates, we will be able to jump back here without delay.”
“Good. Then we’re ready. Start the countdown!”
An audible countdown started from sixty seconds, and Destra squeezed Atta’s hand.
“We’re about to see the Gor’s home world,” she said.
“I know,” Atta replied. She shivered and said, “It’s going to be cold, though.”
Destra smiled. “Don’t worry, we aren’t going to the surface.”
Admiral Hale came up beside them. “Are the Gors all aboard their transports?”
Destra nodded. “I still think we should send a ground team with them.”
“No means no, Ma’am,” the admiral said, referring to their previous discussion. Last night she’d gone to tell the admiral all about the Gors’ plight. He’d listened patiently to her, and then she had requested permission to join them on Noctune in their search for survivors.
“There’s a difference between helping someone because you feel you owe it to them and helping them out of genuine empathy,” she reminded him. “The Gors are facing extinction. If they don’t find another female, their species probably won’t survive. They could use our technology to help them find any survivors. Let me go with them. At the first sign of danger, you can pull me out.”
“I want to go, too!” Atta put in.
Both Destra and Admiral Hale glanced her way, then back to each other. The admiral shook his head. “We don’t know if you’ll encounter Sythians down there, or for that matter if we’ll run into them in orbit. We may not have time to extract you before we’re forced to jump away. So the answer is still no.”
“No to sending me, or no to sending any ground team at all?”
“No period, Ma’am, and that’s final.”
The countdown reached ten seconds and they all turned to look out the forward viewports.
As soon as the countdown reached zero, the world around them washed away in a blinding sea of brightness. It reappeared just as suddenly, with a new pattern of stars spread out beyond the viewports. These ones were somehow dimmer and farther apart than what they were used to seeing in Dark Space. The Getties Cluster was known for being colder and darker than the Adventa Galaxy—yet another reason why the Sythians might have wanted to expand from their over-crowded galaxy. The grass is always greener somewhere else, Destra thought.
“Report!” the admiral called out.
“Sensors clear!”
“All systems green! Jump successful.”
“Excellent. Launch the transports,” he said. “As soon as we confirm they’ve landed, we’ll jump away.”
“Yes, sir.”
Destra noticed a small, bright orb in the distance. “Is that it?” she asked, pointing to the icy-blue speck.
“That’s it,” the admiral confirmed. “It’s a good thing the Imperium’s star charts had the coordinates, or we never would have been able to take the Gors here. I can’t believe they don’t even know where their own home world is,” he said, shaking his head.
“The Sythians probably thought if they didn’t know the way home, they’d be less likely to try to get back there.”
“Probably,” the admiral agreed, turning and walking over to the captain’s table. Destra and Atta joined him, watching as the Gors’ transports launched, carrying the last of their species home. The admiral panned their view over to Noctune and zoomed in on it. The surface was mottled white and blue with thick glaciers. The skies were clear and frigid, devoid of any clouds.
“There doesn’t appear to be any sign of an orbital assault,” the admiral mused.
Destra nodded. “Maybe the Gors have tunneled so far under the ice that an assault wouldn’t be very effective.”
“So our battle-shy Sythians landed on Noctune and killed all of the Gors themselves?”
“They must have.”
“Even knowing that the Gors would cloak and hide, and stalk them in the dark? How many Sythians do you think they killed like that? Thousands? Millions?”
Destra began to see where the admiral was going with that. “You think the Sythians wouldn’t risk that kind of bloodshed. Not if they were the ones who stood to die.”
“Exactly. That’s not their style. So either they lied about exterminating the Gors, or . . .” He shook his head.
“Or what? You said it yourself. There’s no sign of an orbital bombardment. The ice is pristine. It would have boiled off and precipitated back to the surface.”
“Perhaps it did, and that’s why the ice is so pristine. Sensors! Get me a full vo
lume scan of the planet. Image the result and project it on the main holo display. I want to see just how deep the Gors’ tunnels go.
They both watched the main forward viewport, waiting for it to display the results of their scan. A moment later the planet appeared, and the layers of ice became a translucent blue. The planet’s rocky surface appeared below that in a more solid gray. Trapped in the ice and woven throughout were jagged, oblong chunks of rock. Admiral Hale frowned, studying something Destra couldn’t see, projected on the inside of the glowing contacts he wore.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Sir . . .” someone said, sounding alarmed.
“I see it,” the admiral replied.
“See what?” Atta tugged on her sleeve. “Not now, Atta.”
The admiral continued staring off into the distance, his eyes flicking back and forth behind his contacts.
“Mom . . .” Atta tugged her sleeve again, pointing up to the scan of the planet.
“What? What is it?” Destra replied.
“Is that the Gors’ city?”
“The Gors don’t have a . . .” Destra trailed off, suddenly realizing what she was looking at. Those weren’t chunks of rock trapped in the ice.
They were skyscrapers.
Chapter 33
Bretton eyed the scan of Noctune as it slowly rotated before their eyes. The planet’s thick layers of ice and glaciers had been peeled away by the Tempest’s scanners, revealing not rocky terrain as he had expected, but a vast and ancient empire, the ruins of which lay buried deep beneath the ice.
Beside him, Destra Heston gasped and shook her head. “The Gors are a primitive civilization. Where did those cities come from?”
“I’m just guessing,” Bretton replied, “but I’d say those glaciers are millions of years old, and Noctune used to be a much warmer planet than it is today.”
“So where did the water come from? I can imagine oceans freezing, but kilometers of ice suddenly burying the surface?”
The ship’s chief engineer replied, “The water must have been in the atmosphere, Ma’am. Based on the position of the ruins, the amount of ice, and the current lack of moisture in the air, we have to assume that the Admiral is right. Noctune used to be much warmer, perhaps even a little too warm, and the humidity had to have been near a hundred percent. Squeeze all the water out of that much air, and suddenly you have a world covered in thick sheets of ice.”
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