Ereshkigal’s War (Edge of the Splintered Galaxy Book 5), page 24
After two hours of fighting, there wasn’t a trace of the Bladeback fleet left in orbit of Mesooria.
After six hours of orbital bombardment, there wasn’t anything left alive on Mesooria.
“Have we done enough?” Jainuzei said.
Ereshkigal studied Mesooria closely. What was once a wet, swampy world was now glowing red with plumes of dust blackening its skies. “Yes, let us depart.”
Kur and its accompanying fleet drifted back through the tube, fading from sight. After several days of traveling through the transit tube, Kur returned to Apolnar. It looked no different from when Tetsuya had last seen it. The debris field created during the battle with the Johannes Kepler was still there. He wouldn’t be surprised if the Johannes Kepler wasn’t too far away.
“Destination?” Jainuzei asked.
“Take us back to Mesooria using a new tube,” she said. “It would seem that capturing Nergal’s army was not enough to convince the Bladebacks to join us. We will try another plan.”
“Mesooria’s towers, as I had suggested?” Jainuzei said.
Ereshkigal motioned her head. “We could try that, yes.”
After the tube evaporated, Kur laid down a new one, then passed into its square-shaped portal. The rest of the fleet followed behind. Days later, Kur arrived at the swamp world of Mesooria again. Only there was no debris in front of the world. Its surface was free from the scars of an orbital bombardment, and its cities were untouched by Ereshkigal’s wrath.
Jainuzei smiled and put his hands behind his back. “And just like that, the massacre of the Bladebacks never occurred. Yet we have visual proof it did happen in another timeline.”
Ereshkigal created a holographic projection before her. The images showed the destruction of Mesooria, the desecration of its fleets, and the futile attempts the Bladebacks made trying to strike Ereshkigal down with her psionic force field active. It was a horrific sight.
“Another timeline?” Tetsuya asked.
“We used the tubes to not only go back to our previous location, but to the same day we had used it,” Ereshkigal explained.
“This is why I check to see how long it will take for the gateway to evaporate,” Jainuzei said. “It’s possible for one to slip through and alter time. Or wait to ambush us should we decide to return.”
“Those new ships that joined the fleet . . .” Tetsuya said, grimacing. “They were from the future then? Because if I understand this correctly, you’re also entering the future every time you pass through a new tube.”
“In a way, yes,” Ereshkigal said. “We constructed the shipyards in the future, then later on jumped further into the future to gain the completed ships and bring them to our present time.”
“So as of now, the shipyards that created the new ships outside don’t exist yet,” Tetsuya said.
Ereshkigal nodded. “Yes.”
“Aren’t you worried your enemies in the future will just bomb the shipyards and change history?” he asked.
“Impossible,” Jainuzei said. “Do you not remember where we found the sixteen new ships?”
Kur had traveled deep inside Omega Centauri, so deep nobody could reach Ereshkigal’s secret shipyards with sublight or FTL tech. Except for one group.
“The Johannes Kepler,” Tetsuya said. “It’s a fast ship, from what you told me.”
“Foster and her ship are one of two risks we face,” Ereshkigal said.
Tetsuya motioned to her. “What is the other?”
He wanted to know more. The sudden revelation was intriguing. Tetsuya was building a list of Ereshkigal’s weaknesses to exploit and free him from his dark destiny.
“The Draconians have their maelstrom,” Jainuzei said.
“But the Draconians do not know about us or where our shipyards will be constructed,” Ereshkigal said. “And soon will never have the power to know.”
“Why?” Tetsuya asked her.
“The Draconians are one of three species that dominate this region.”
“Right, the Bladebacks, the Amphibians, and . . .”
“Worshipers of Tiamat, from what we have gathered,” Ereshkigal finished for Tetsuya. “The Draconians will have no choice but to surrender when two of their allies devote their lives to me. Now, let us educate the Bladebacks, properly this time, as to what will happen to them if they refuse my generous offer.”
Now Tetsuya understood why Apolnar fell so quickly. Kur must have attacked it multiple times in different timelines that no longer exist, repeatedly failing until they found the one strategy that worked the best. If the situation didn’t work out for Ereshkigal, she just sent her forces back through the tube before it evaporated, then laid down a new one and used it as a reset button.
There was no way in hell Foster could win. She needed an insider like Tetsuya to sabotage Kur.
And he needed to do that without getting spaced.
28 FOSTER
XSV Johannes Kepler
Omega Centauri Interstellar Space
September 25, 2121, 11:09 SST (Sol Standard Time)
Nobody had seen Odelea for the past two days. And she wasn’t answering her pages either. That usually meant that Odelea was about to discover something new and there’d be headaches for Foster to deal with. To Foster’s surprise, Odelea wasn’t in the ship’s lab. Pierce had that all to himself. According to Chef Bailey, Odelea hadn’t been in the mess hall either. He knew this because he had prepared baked Honeycrisp apples just for her.
It turned out that Odelea was in her quarters, and she’d been there for a while. Foster entered Odelea’s room and shook her head at the empty stim packages lying all over the place. Odelea paced about with dozens of holo screens following her like loyal, floating pets. She interacted with them, stopped at one, and smiled ahead when she noticed Foster standing before the door.
Odelea pushed the screen to the right. “Oh, sorry, Captain, I forgot I let you in!”
Foster crossed her arms. “You forgot you buzzed me in already?”
“As you can see, I have a lot on my mind right now,” Odelea said, pacing back to her desk in the corner. “I’ve been translating the Amphibian’s recent conversation, the one we picked up and is recovering in sickbay.” She pointed at the holo screens. “These are my notes of our conversation and the language he speaks. It’s a rather beautiful dialect too. Captain, did you know that—”
“You could have told us what you were doing,” Foster cut in, and she was so glad she had done that. Odelea would have gone on rambling.
Odelea turned back to Foster, one eyebrow raised. “I thought I mentioned something about that?”
“You didn’t. You also haven’t shown up to any of your shifts. Lucky for you, we’ve just been cruising at FTL with no direction.”
“My apologies, Foster. I must have lost track of time.” Odelea clasped her hands before her waist and bowed. “There was a lot to go over, and I made several exciting discoveries that led from one thing to another.”
“Like?”
Odelea strode to her desk, grabbed the largest holo screen floating above it, and brought it before Foster and herself. “I have gathered information about the governments that control this region of space. There is an alliance of three races who rule the stars, known as the Silyeos Alliance.”
“Right, which we gathered after we put down Nergal,” Foster said. “Well, not the name of that alliance.”
“The Amphibians are one of them,” Odelea explained. “The second race is called the Bladebacks, and the last race is a reclusive species simply referred to as the ‘Worshipers of Tiamat.’ Draconians, most likely. They are rarely seen beyond their homeworld.” Odelea tapped the screen, and it unfolded into a three-dimensional holographic map of the stars. A blue dot had the words “XSV Johannes Kepler” written in the Radiance language below it. “Using our maps of Omega Centauri, I got the Amphibian to point out important systems, including the homeworlds of the Bladebacks and Amphibians.”
“But not the Draconians?”
“No, very few people know where it is though. The Amphibians’ and Bladebacks’ leadership knows the region of space they come from but not the exact location. Again, these followers of Tiamat, as they put them, rarely leave their world.”
“The devastation the Draconians brought to the Milky Way says otherwise,” Foster snorted.
“Well, the Draconians use the maelstrom to travel. Their ships only travel through regular space when in a system. When moving long distances, they’re in the maelstrom where nobody sees them until they appear. If you don’t understand the concept of maelstrom travel, then from the perspective of everyone around, it will look like they never leave their system.”
“Fair point. All right, excellent work, Odelea, though next time let us know if you’re going to duck out on your duties to do this . . .”
Foster twisted for the exit—
“Oh, one last thing!” Odelea blurted. Foster spun back as Odelea waved her hand in the opened space. In an instant, the three-dimensional map, along with several other holo screens, vanished. Foster could now see her clearly. “The Amphibian in sickbay wants us to take him home.”
“Would the Johannes Kepler be welcomed there, Odelea? We got off to the wrong start with his people.”
“The Amphibians we fought with were part of Nergal’s cult and living on the fringes of this region. The Amphibians part of the Silyeos Alliance are different and would welcome us. Also, our Amphibian guest was a member the agriculture fleet, earning him a high standing in their society. He plans to vouch for us if there is any angst and warn his people about Ereshkigal. With the support from the Silyeos Alliance, we could turn the tide and push Ereshkigal’s forces off Apolnar.”
“And then get the actual coordinates to the Draconian homeworld. And maybe even the Silyeos Alliance sending a message to the Draconians and putting in a good word about us as well.” Foster liked the idea. “Send the data to Pierce, and I’ll have the bridge lay in a new destination.”
It was the best they had to work with. The Kepler was moving in a direction that put them as far from Ereshkigal’s fleet and Apolnar as possible. Nobody could catch them while traveling two light-years per month. Now, the Kepler had a destination that would aid their mission. Foster hoped Kur wouldn’t be waiting for them when they dropped out of FTL.
Using the newly discovered data Odelea had obtained, Pierce updated the Kepler’s regional star maps of Omega Centauri. He then checked it with the data the team had gained previously. Both screens appeared and rotated above his console as Pierce studied the holographic stars and planets.
“Confirmed, Captain,” Pierce said. “The planet Odelea learned about from our wounded friend in sickbay is a habitable world. It is also a system with high space travel activity.”
And one of many worlds Foster’s previous command supposedly swung by in the past. She had to remind herself that this wasn’t their first time in Omega Centauri. The Carl Sagan was there; Foster and her old crew didn’t remember it. She had a feeling they were getting close to the Draconians though. A Draconian fleet captured the Carl Sagan then sent it back with her and the senior crew in stasis. Her best guess was that the Carl Sagan passed through this region of space controlled by the Silyeos Alliance, found the world of the reclusive third species, the Tiamat worshipers, and then . . . something happened.
Something that involved a memory wipe and the Draconians launching their attack on Earth, Paryo, and Veromacon in a bid to resurrect Tiamat.
XSV Johannes Kepler
Qurialla Orbit, Nudross System
February 25, 2122, 08:24 SST (Sol Standard Time)
It took five months for the Johannes Kepler to reach its destination. It’d probably take another five months for Foster to forget the crew’s wild new year’s celebration, even though it was over a month ago. Somewhere on Chang’s wrist terminal was a video of Foster singing after drinking. Williams and Rivera got wasted so bad that Foster was 90% sure those two retreated to Rivera’s quarters for a night of drunken sex, though those two didn’t remember what they did that night to this day.
Foster scrubbed those thoughts for now. The Kepler arrived at a planet where water covered ninety-one percent of its surface. Twenty percent more than Earth. She thought they had just magically returned to Earth for a split second. Wishful thinking on her brain’s part. In reality, they had flashed into the orbit of the planet Qurialla, the homeworld of the Oepanians, AKA the Amphibians.
What separated Qurialla from Earth, apart from the fact that there were more stars in space and that you could see almost the whole shape of the Milky Way behind, was that the world had much less land. An ocean covering ninety-one percent of a planet would do that. Qurialla’s continents, most of them no bigger than Australia, bore the typical colors one would expect from an Earth-like planet, greenery here, yellow deserts there, white covering lands experiencing winter, and a lot of white in the north and south poles. Above that? Streams of fluffy clouds, where a small moon orbiting the watery world created tides similar to those on Earth.
Foster felt obligated to defend Qurialla from all hostile forces, even though that duty should lie in the hands of the dozens of starships circling the Earth-like planet. According to EVE’s scans, the Amphibians’ military armed the ships near the world with enough weapons to send the Kepler running should they all concentrate their fire strategically. A few other vessels had what looked like Hashmedai plasma cannons fused onto them. Nergal’s faction must have traded those ships to the Qurialla Amphibians.
Almost all the ships bore the scars of recent combat and drifted in geosynchronous orbit with Qurialla.
She hoped the Kepler didn’t fly into an ambush waiting for them.
“Incoming transmission, Captain,” EVE reported.
“We got their attention already, huh?” Foster said, sitting back in her chair.
“Yes, it is coming from the surface of Qurialla,” EVE said. “One of the larger cities near the equator.”
“Let’s hear it and hope their communication tech is compatible with ours,” Foster said.
“It is, Captain.”
A projection appeared before Foster and the Johannes Kepler’s bridge crew, depicting the flickering image of Amphibians tending to workstations in what looked like an operation center. They spoke in a language Foster didn’t understand.
“Odelea?”
“Ah, yes, one moment, Foster,” Odelea said. She listened carefully to the extraterrestrial language, then stepped away from the communication workstation. Odelea replied to the Amphibian on the holographic projection in its language. The Amphibian seemed surprised that an Aryile, an alien to them, spoke their words so clearly.
“The Amphibian High Minister would like to meet in person,” Odelea said, spinning around to face Foster.
Williams nodded. “That’s promising.”
Odelea addressed the Amphibian on the hologram again and spoke back and forth in its language.
“They are transmitting landing coordinates,” Odelea said. She trotted to her workstation, activated a small holo screen, and eyed it closely. “Ah, here it is. Sending them to you now, Chang.”
“Got ‘em,” Chang said, his fingers inputting a new destination for the Kepler. “So just mosey on over? Nobody’s gonna start blasting us?”
“No, we are cleared for landing,” Odelea said.
The projection of the Amphibians faded. Afterward, the Johannes Kepler descended through Qurialla’s clouds and approached a city baking in daytime sunlight, heated by the planet’s equatorial temperatures. A dome shield covering the city irised and allowed the Kepler to pass through. It served as the city’s only means of protection from asteroids and meteorites. The system was littered with tumbling rocks. The barrier also protected the habitable areas of the planet from Omega Centauri’s intense radiation that not even the planet’s magnetosphere could effectively repel.
The Johannes Kepler drifted to the capital city on the horizon, a metropolis with tall buildings poking out of the ocean. Below were Amphibians swimming toward underwater structures, and above were concrete walkways bridging the skyscrapers that rose out from the sea. Waterfalls gushed off the sides of most buildings. Most of the tall structures that the Kepler flew in between looked like giant water fountains. The architectural marvel of the Amphibians was something to look at. Foster made sure that EVE was recording everything. The eggheads back home were going to have a field day with this when Foster filed her report to IESA.
A landing pad awaited the Johannes Kepler during its descent into the city called Deltris, according to Odelea’s translations. The pad looked like a hanging flower garden on the side of one of the trapezoid-shaped buildings where the Amphibians’ military and leadership operated. The Johannes Kepler approached the pad and extended its landing gear, its flaring landing thrusters slowing their descent. Seconds after touching down, the ship’s cargo bay door opened and lowered the entry ramp.
Foster, Odelea, and the Amphibian they rescued walked down the ramp first. Foster’s security team consisting of Miles, Chevallier, Maxwell, and LeBoeuf strode in behind. Just a precaution in case they were walking into a trap. It had been months since they last saw Kur. Ereshkigal’s fleet could have been anywhere by now. Karklosea insisted on staying behind to defend the Johannes Kepler should trouble start knocking on its doorway.
Foster heard everyone around her sigh in relief as they stepped off the entry ramp. It was the first time they left the confines of the Johannes Kepler in ages. First time she wasn’t trapped within the familiar walls and three decks of the Johannes Kepler. First time in months she could breathe fresh air not sourced from air recyclers. First time in ages she could look up and see a blue sky, clouds, and a sun shining. The planet’s 0.8gs of gravity was the icing on the cake. Foster lost twenty-four pounds just by stepping onto the planet and away from the Kepler’s artificial gravity set at 1g. Then came a comforting ocean breeze that hit her face. Foster kept her eyes shut and stood there. She had missed all the senses she was now experiencing. Near the landing platform’s sides were decorative tropical plants with leaves rustling in the winds. The team had just found their new vacation spot when all this was over.
