Twilight Serenade, page 2
part #6 of Earth Song Series
Most recently, the Rangers were tricked into a mission on a world defended by the Mok-Tok. When the Mok-Tok were defeated, they released a virus designed to kill humanity. The Nocturne virus failed to kill everyone, but it did damage the brains of thousands of young children so severely that even the codex couldn’t help heal them. They were housed all over the planet in coma care wards, forever dreaming, unable to wake.
Now humans were well known in the Concordia and hated by many of the powerful higher-order species. The location of Bellatrix was still a secret, and the early warning system was part of Lilith’s plan to keep it so for as long as possible. They’d believed the Concordia didn’t use starships any more, but that had turned out to be a big lie. All the higher order species used starships, some more than others. Since humanity had only one ship, it was supremely vulnerable.
With Bellatrix only a few million kilometers away, Lilith dropped her ship below light speed, no longer generating a tachyon shockwave ahead of it. The shockwave allowed the Remus detection grid to register her entrance into the star system. She approached slowly around Romulus to give Var’at and Kal’at time to calibrate the array. She entered a perfect polar orbit over Bellatrix at exactly the time she’d planned. And just as planned, her mother checked in.
“Are you home?” Minu’s voice came over the local communications network. She didn’t need the quantum communicator this close in.
“As planned, Mom.”
“I’ll be up in a couple of hours. I’m just finishing some work at Fort Stuart in Jerusalem.”
“No need, I’m coming down.”
There was a slight pause before a surprised Minu asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s been a while since I’ve been down, and I want to meet the new First Among the Chosen in person.”
The distant chuckle from her mother was honest. “I’m no different than when we parted company a few months ago. Maybe a little fatter…”
“How is my baby brother or sister?”
“Still cooking.”
“I’m sorry?”
Minu laughed again. “He or she is fine. I just saw the doc a last week. He said I’m a kilo lighter than I should be.”
“Then we should have dinner at your cabin.”
“That’s a great idea. Why don’t you meet me there in three hours?”
“Perfect. That will give me time to drop off Kal’at.”
“That is appreciated,” the Rasa scientist said over the radio.
“See you soon.”
Lilith wrote a series of command subroutines and stored them in the Kaatan’s semi-autonomous controls. She could command the ship from almost anywhere in the galaxy, instantaneously, through the quantum communicator, if necessary, but she preferred to be onboard if anything serious happened. She was confident that between her ship’s sensors and the new array on Remus, she’d have the better part of an hour’s warning should a ship decelerate into the system. That gave her plenty of time to return. No starship would risk passing through a star system at superluminal speed. Even a powerful ship of the line like the Kaatan would be hard pressed to survive an impact at more than the speed of light.
Once she’d tended to the housekeeping details, she informed Kal’at she was ready. She floated out of the CIC and down the corridors using gentle hand and arm motions that the computer converted into slight nudges from the ship’s force fields. At only 175 meters from needle bow through bulbous central section to cylindrical stern, the Kaatan was not a large ship, but it packed massive firepower and had adequate space for a large crew, if necessary. There were four needle-shaped shuttles in the ship’s boat hangar.
Her ground-side transport waited just outside the hangar. It was a huge spider-shaped bot with a null-gravity bubble projected on its back. Using the bot, she could spend extended time on a planet with relatively high gravity.
Though she’d worked to strengthen her body, being born and raised in zero gravity had left her without the physique Bellatrix-raised humans took for granted. Her bone density was only 40 percent of that of normal humans her age, and an accidental fall could easily cause her to break limbs.
“Ready to go?” Kal’at hissed. A pair of crab bots passed them, weighted down with baggage, samples, instruments, and a variety of other equipment. Scientists of all species were the same; they never traveled light.
“I am. Are you looking forward to returning to Romulus?”
“It is not the planet of my birth, but it is now home. I look forward to seeing how the maturation of our young proceeds!”
Lilith nodded and gestured, following her reptilian friend into the bay where one of the shuttles was already on the deck. They’d spent months together as the only occupants of the Kaatan. Lilith was somewhat surprised to realize she would miss the Rasa.
A score of the Kaatan’s blue crystalline bots scuttled around the shuttle, detaching power and consumable cables and verifying the craft’s readiness. The ship was automated to such a degree that she only needed to order it made ready, and the ship did the rest.
The Rasa crab bots worked side by side with the Kaatan’s to finish loading the shuttle. Lilith gestured, and her transporter trundled gracefully on eight insectoid legs to the shuttle. It found an empty space in the rear cabin, folded in upon itself, and went into standby mode as Lilith and Kal’at continued to the cockpit.
Before she left the hold, Lilith had triggered the flight sequences. The cargo door irised closed, the gravitic drives spun up, and the craft lifted off the deck. The exterior door of the Kaatan slid open and the shuttle passed out into space.
“Why do you bother using the cockpit?” Kal’at asked as he wedged his tail into a seat which was not designed for him. “You could pilot the craft from anywhere on board...”
“Truth be told, I could fly it from anywhere in the galaxy.” Kal’at turned an eye turret toward her. In many other beings that would have been a boast. But he knew a lot more about her capabilities, after months together. There was no false bravado in her statement.
“Then the question is even more relevant.”
Lilith shrugged and smiled slightly. “My father made me promise. Should something happen to the automated systems, the manual controls are located here.”
“Is that a possibility?”
“Not even a remote one.”
“Then why give your word?”
They’d cleared the Kaatan and were angling away. The big, green, cloud-covered face of Romulus swung into view and grew larger before she answered. “Minu says it is human custom to obey your parents’ wishes.” Kal’at seemed unconvinced but did not pursue the topic.
With the powerful gravitic drive of the shuttle, they burned down into the atmosphere of Romulus in minutes. The ship cancelled out all sensation of motion as they rode out the upper atmosphere turbulence and dropped below the perpetual cloud deck. Endless deep green seas stretched out below them.
“Your people have begun construction of a third platform?” Lilith asked as the shuttle dropped to just above the waves.
“That is correct. New food contracts have been very lucrative. The platforms are constructed largely from scrap we buy from your Chosen that contractors transport up here in Phoenix shuttles.”
Lilith was aware of the arrangements, and she paid attention with a small part of her brain while allowing the rest to revel in the simple joy of flying a perfectly designed craft in the atmosphere. The Lost had been gone for untold eons, but their engineering feats were gloriously eternal.
Since they were traveling at five times the speed of sound, the prime habitat platform went from being a dot on the distant horizon to looming in seconds. Lilith applied gravitic control to break, bank, and climb with the kind of flawless precision only a pilot with a brain partly controlled by computers could manage. They dropped below supersonic speed barely a hundred meters before rocketing past the platform. She got a spectacular view of the facility with its hundreds of humans, Rasa, and Traaga, all busily working. Many looked up in shock at the sudden appearance of the shuttle, and some waved when they recognized the sleek needle shape.
The shuttle banked into a fantastic skew turn at more than two hundred gravities, tail slipping in to precisely line up with one of the platform’s many landing pads. Lilith backed the shuttle in and down, setting it onto the platform as lightly as a feather.
“You are as wonderful a pilot as your father,” Kal’at pronounced with a nod from the copilot seat. To his credit his claws hadn’t tightened on the hand rests during the hair-raising approach; he had complete faith in her abilities.
“He still is,” she said and floated aft.
“Of course.”
Lilith wasn’t being illogical. Now that she was home, she had every intention of meeting with her mother, then finding her father or those who had killed him. Her mouth curled into a little smile. That was something she was looking forward to. If there was no satisfaction, there was at least revenge.
* * *
Minu had just taken the fish from the small, infrared oven when she heard the distant, multiple cracks of a vessel tearing through Bellatrix’s atmosphere at hypersonic velocity. She smiled as she carried the hot dish to the table, then checked on the mushroom casserole. She occasionally enjoyed making a meal completely from local foods. It didn’t always work out, but this time it did. In the fall, the mushrooms were plentiful on her island, and the fish were biting.
She’d removed a bottle of wine from the cooler and was reading the label when she felt a little shiver run up her spine and the cabin vibrate ever so slightly. She could just hear the whine of the shuttle’s gravitic impellers as Lilith set it down on the ceramic concrete pad between the cabin and the old observatory that had belonged to her ancestor, Mindy Harper. A few moments later, the door opened and in came her daughter.
Minu put the bottle down and went to her. The transporter bot stopped just inside the door and lowered to the ground. Lilith lithely floated to the floor and carefully released the gravimetric field. A sound somewhere between a sigh and groan escaped her lips as the pull of the planet’s core took hold of her. Minu cocked her head, and she nodded, then the two women embraced.
“It’s so good to see you,” Minu whispered in her ear and kissed her cheek.
Lilith hesitated a half second before returning the kiss. Physical displays of affection were something she still struggled with, even as a 24-year-old woman. “I’m sorry your dad is not here to welcome you home.”
Lilith nodded and felt emotions creeping into her consciousness. She intercepted those feelings and directed them to something more useful. “We must discuss finding him.”
“That might not be practical.”
Lilith started to disagree and explain that there was nowhere in the galaxy their enemies could hide when she really noticed her mother, or more importantly, her belly. “You have gotten fat!”
Minu gagged and covered her mouth, stifling her laughter. Her daughter was always a shining example of propriety.
“No, daughter, that is your little brother or sister.”
Minu had so seldom seen her daughter at a loss for words, she dearly wished she’d had a camera on hand. Lilith’s jaw dropped, and she gaped, reaching a hand out to Minu’s swelling stomach. But she hastily pulled it back as if she was afraid the pregnancy was catching. “It’s okay,” Minu said and smiled. Lilith gently laid a hand on her mother’s growing stomach. As if on cue, the baby kicked right under her hand.
“Oh!” Lilith squeaked and pulled her hand back.
“Little one knows his or her sister is there.”
“Really?” Lilith asked quietly. “That is normal behavior for a fetus?”
“Sometimes, yes.” Lilith put her hand back and felt another kick. Her eyes sparkled with more joy and amazement than Minu had never seen in her.
“How much longer?”
“A few months.”
She looked at her mother again and shook her head. “I believe you will explode before you give birth.”
Minu chuckled and moved to the table. “I feel that way some mornings. Are you hungry? I could eat a kloth!”
Minu felt she’d outdone herself on dinner, but Lilith only ate with partial attention. After giving her debriefing on the flight back and the functionality of the sensor arrays on Remus, she bombarded her mother with questions about how Aaron was lost, until Minu finally interrupted her.
“Look, I know you want to go all Lone Ranger and kick some alien ass to find your father—”
“I do not know who this Lone Ranger is, but if he is one of your Rangers, he is welcome to come along.”
Minu stopped for a second, considered how long it would take to explain the Lone Ranger, then aborted the attempt. “Anyway, we have more important things to do right now.”
“There are thousands of children who were brain damaged by the Nocturne virus,” Minu continued. “Ted’s been working with Dr. Bane, the planet’s foremost cybernetics expert, and Dr. Tasker, who’s in charge of the Codex Trust. They have an idea, but they need your help.”
“Okay, what can I do?”
“We need to access the Kaatan’s medical intelligence for help designing a cybernetic implant capable of bringing those kids back.”
“I don’t know if that is possible,” Lilith cautioned.
Minu gestured at her daughter with a fork full of fish. “You’re living proof it’s possible; the real question is if it’s practical. There are so many children. We have to try something. Legal has been working for weeks on a contract to offer the parents. It’s scant hope, but better than nothing.”
“You shouldn’t have released the Mok-Tok,” Lilith grumbled. “Maybe pulling a few of his limbs off would have influenced him to help us.”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Threatening to expose him to it was enough to get his help to neutralize the virus and produce a vaccine. They muffed it. The bug was intended to kill all of us. As it was, only a handful died, but thousands were maimed.” Lilith made a face. “Don’t worry, mother keeps a list of all the bad people.” She speared another hunk of the rich, native, lake fish, an easy-to-catch species that resembled Earth’s sharks but weren’t carnivorous. “For now let’s concentrate on helping those kids.”
“As you wish, Mother.”
“Now, let’s talk about your ship’s low supply of consumables, and how we can go about replenishing them…” Lilith leaned closer to listen.
* * *
Night birds and terrestrial insects singing outside coupled with the occasional barking of howlers created a cacophony unique to Bellatrix. Five centuries earlier, humans had brought their own flora and fauna to the world, and non-native insects and birds had increasingly become the dominant species. Native howlers and scrubbers were becoming more and more rare.
Inside, Lilith slept quietly in one of the cabin’s two guest rooms. Her ground-side transporter was folded up tightly under the bed, creating an area of about one quarter gravity, enough to keep her firmly under the sheets but light enough for her to breathe easily and sleep comfortably. Minu worried about her. Lilith would never be able to handle full gravity for more than brief periods.
Minu unconsciously placed her hand on her growing stomach, and she felt tears running down her cheeks. There were few moments when she indulged her emotions these days, but this was one of them.
“I’m running low on friends,” she cried into the night. Pip was flawed and a huge pain in the ass most of the time, but he was a faithful friend who gave his life to save her. Then there was Aaron. She didn’t want to admit he was dead, but how could she do otherwise? The Tanam were all about advantage, and his corpse was of no use to them. Now, she was going to send her only surviving family into harm’s way.
* * *
In the early morning hours, Lilith carefully climbed out of bed. Her bot silently moved to her, and the anti-gravity projectors lifted her into the air. She sighed quietly as the crushing gravity disappeared.
The blue crystalline bot walked her into the living room. The bot’s sensors located Minu asleep in the other bedroom. Then she returned to her task. She went to the desk that once belonged to the Minu family matriarch, Mindy Harper. On it were two computers, base units of the much-smaller tablets humans favored. One was a special access unit for the Chosen network. The other was linked to the planetary network.
Checking to be certain her mother was still in deep REM sleep, Lilith slid open the desk and reached for the planetary access computer. A thin tendril of blue crystal, thinner than a hair, rose up her leg, along her torso, down her arm, and extended from her finger until it contacted the computer.
It grew over the computer and into it. The machine beeped as her hard-wired hack penetrated its primitive brain and opened to Lilith’s much more powerful, cybernetically-modified mind.
Lilith didn’t bother with fineness, she took it all. Using Minu’s high-level access, she began copying all the available data. In moments, terabytes moved though the Concordian-built data network, stored in a small offline computer in Lilith’s room. As an afterthought, she took her mother’s personal files as well.
She was back in her room less than ten minutes after getting out of bed. She’d restored the computer she’d broken into to normal operation, and all signs of her hacking were wiped clean. Lilith was confident no one on the planet could detect the cause of the attack.
She took a moment to upload the data to her ship. Once she confirmed the data was stored in a special file, she returned to bed and went back to sleep. At the other end of the house, her mother slumbered, unaware that anything unusual had happened.
* * * * *
