Twilight Serenade, page 33
part #6 of Earth Song Series
The most interesting guest was a representative of the Capdep. The huge six-eyed spiders were seldom seen outside their world.
“We believe it was important to meet you,” it chittered and clicked, then bowed. Minu thanked it and tried not to throw up when she bowed back. She wasn’t overly thrilled about spiders. Thankfully, there were only a handful of arachnids on Bellatrix. As the Capdep walked away on its eight legs, she was suddenly reminded of the Weavers. She felt a cold trickle down her spine.
She remembered meeting a Targ. They looked like evolved Kloth, down to the six limbs and two sets of eyes! Ted arrived from their quarters, having watched with the others on video, and spent the rest of the night in fevered discussion with Bjorn, theorizing that the Kloth were aboriginal Targ, left behind when they were removed from their home world.
Aaron brought Mindy, who wouldn’t let Minu put her down for a second. She wasn’t exactly scared of the aliens, but she wasn’t exactly thrilled by the strange sounds and smells. She was at the age when sudden changes in her environment often frightened her. The exception was the Capdep. She couldn’t take her eyes off the arachnid and watched its every move. Minu thought she was frightened, but she soon realized Mindy was interested, not frightened.
Once the reception was over and the last of the guests left, a single Tog remained. Minu had no recollection of hser coming in, and it took her a moment to recognize hser. “Z’kal?”
“Correct, Imperator,” hse said and bowed. “I have always been impressed with your and your parent’s ability to tell us apart. So few humans have that skill.”
Minu bowed. “P’ing-so declined to attend, and I certainly did not expect you, considering we have…history.” She could have sworn the Tog smiled.
“I hold no animosity toward you in particular,” Z’kal said. “All clients try the bonds that hold them. Now, if Pip had survived, I might have issues with that one…”
Minu grinned, and Z’kal took out a chip from hser equipment belt.
“This is the last thing we will give you, Imperator. With this transfer, our duty is complete.”
“What is it?”
“The funds you were promised,” hse said, “and the encryption key that unlocks full access to all public areas of the Concordian database. You will need to purchase a full node to add to your planetary database administration system. The one we provided will expire in three days.”
Minu took the chip and looked at it. A fortune, and all the knowledge in the universe, in one little chip. “I thank you.”
Hse nodded and turned to go. Then hse seemed to remember something and turned back. “P’ing-so had one final thing to say.” Minu asked hser to go ahead. “Try to not hate us.”
The space they’d been given for their reception seemed quite large with all the guests gone, yet everyone heard what the Tog said. No one said anything as the door closed behind hser.
“Is that what I think it is?” Ted asked. Minu’s entourage gathered around her and looked at the chip.
“Yes,” she said and took a tablet from her belt. She plugged the chip in.
“Encryption Key Present,” the computer told her and displayed a little icon. Minu linked her tablet with the Concordian data network. “Limited Client Access,” it told her. Minu took the encrypted key and dropped it into the access point. “Full Access Granted,” the computer said. “Extend All Access to species?”
Minu was a little surprised by that. She hadn’t expected to be able to limit who had access to the information on the Concordian database.
“What do I do?” she wondered.
“A little knowledge is dangerous,” Ted said.
“All knowledge is liberating,” Bjorn said.
“I’d say that is your decision,” Dram told her. “But I think you already know what you’re going to do, don’t you?”
“I do,” she said, and pressed “Yes.”
With unlimited access, the party devolved into a late-night, computer network binge party. Those not inclined to do hard research trolled the various Concordian boards. Much of the data was previously available, but since they were on Nexus access, the data transfer rates were phenomenal.
It was well past the planetary equivalent of midnight when Minu finally found the Awakening protocols, the rules for master species toward their clients and other unAwakened species.
She read in silence, following several links before suddenly stopping under files labeled “Rescue Protocols.” She clicked on icons and read, her breath coming faster, her face turning red, and the veins on her neck starting to stand out.
“Aaron!” Cherise yelled. He looked up from where he’d been talking with Sergeant Selain and, seeing the look on her face, turned toward his wife.
“Minu?” he asked, moving instantly to her side. “What’s wrong?”
“Those motherfuckers,” she said, standing up, tears forming completely against her will. “Those rotten fuckers.”
“What?” Aaron asked, both worried and scared.
Minu sent the file she’d been reading to Aaron’s tablet. He accessed it and gasped as Minu moved to the center of the room. “Lying, good for nothing, motherfuckers.”
“Tell us?” Cherise begged. Everyone watched her with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
“They didn’t rescue us from Earth,” Minu said. The bionics in her right hand whined as they overloaded, and the tablet exploded in her hand. “They killed our planet to make us their slaves.”
* * * * *
Epilogue
“Why don’t you go in there?” Cherise asked.
Aaron took a deep breath and looked down. “You’ve known her as long as I have,” he said. “You, me, Gregg, and Pip were the team. We joined the Chosen together. I’m her husband, you’re her sister. Would you go in there right now?”
There were no more sounds of destruction, just looming silence. Some of the Legates stood or floated on one side of the door, Minu’s honor guard stood on the other. Ted, Bjorn, and Faye sat in chairs near the door. Faye looked afraid, and Bjorn and Ted were asleep.
“I’ve never seen her like this,” Cherise said, turning and looking at him. Aaron glanced at her face. Mindy was in her sling, sound asleep. Cherise’s chiseled features reflected concern and fear. She had worry lines on her face. Why was it the first time he’d noticed that?
“We’ve all seen the various stages of Minu,” Gregg said. “This is a new one. She is murderous. I love her. I’ve never in my life been afraid of her.”
“She doesn’t trust me as much as she used to,” Cherise admitted quietly.
“What happened between you two?” Aaron asked.
“I… let her down at a critical moment.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gregg cut her off. “You are still closer to her than anyone. At least as close as dipshit, here,” he said and hooked a thumb at Aaron.
“Thanks,” Aaron said. Gregg winked. “The point remains. Someone needs to go in there.”
“I’m willing,” Lilith said.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron said, “but we may need an emotional appeal.”
“I agree,” Lilith said. “That aspect of familial relationships sometimes escapes me.”
“Maybe seeing the baby will help?” Cherise asked.
Aaron shook his head. “I…don’t want to take Mindy in there just now. You saw the look on Minu’s face. She snapped.”
“I’ll go.” Everyone turned to look at Bjorn. They were surprised to see him awake. Ted was still asleep. “She’ll listen to me.”
They all looked at each other and exchanged shrugs. Bjorn was the least excitable of them all. Minu held him in the highest respect, as he was her first commander in the Chosen.
Bjorn didn’t wait for their approval. He just nodded and headed down the hall.
“Be careful,” Cherise warned him.
“I will,” Bjorn said.
The room their reception had been held in was at the end of the hall in a section at the rear of the dome. The hall led to a series of offices deep behind the dome, cut from solid rock. Bjorn stopped at the door and took a deep breath. He’d appeared calm to the rest, but he was anything but. He’d known Minu for many years, and it was not like her to lose it. Her temper ran hot, but behind rage, there was always calculation and control.
Not this time. They’d all fled in terror an hour earlier, as their newly promoted leader went on a rampage. He touched the control and the door slid open, then stopped halfway. A fist shaped dent in the dualloy stopped it. There was just enough room for him to slip through.
Lights flickered in the room, casting intermittent rectangular illuminations into the hall. It was hard to see details. He struggled to focus on the interior.
An hour earlier, the room had been full of tables covered in snacks and drinks. The walls had been lined with abstract sculptures and tables cut from wood of 100 star systems. The seating had been a mixture of human and alien designs, comfortable and expensive.
The room was in ruins. The bioluminescent light fixtures were shattered, most casting dim light or flickering on and off, creating the stark pattern he’d seen in the hall. In the middle of the room, sitting cross-legged on the remains of what had once been a four-meter-long conference table made of some exotic hardwood was Minu Groves. He started to clear his throat.
“What do you want, Bjorn?”
He stammered for a second. “W-we were worried about you.”
“It isn’t you that needs to worry about me.” She turned her head slightly, revealing half her face. It was covered in sweat and dust from her extensive deconstruction of the room. Her waist length hair, usually bound in a meticulously braided ponytail, was mostly loose around her head, wild and uncontrolled.
“I know this was a dark revelation,” Bjorn said, “but what does it really change?”
“You’ve had some time to research while I worked through things in here,” Minu said. “What else have you found out?”
This is working through it? Bjorn wondered. “That we’re far from unique,” he said. She chuckled emotionlessly.
“Destroying most of a species is not only acceptable, but preferred in many cases,” he recited from memory. “The law makes note that it creates a more compliant client species, instilling a sense of desperate willingness to comply and do whatever is necessary in order to ensure survival.”
“Do they talk about how it’s better to keep it all a secret?”
“It’s in the laws of Awakening,” Bjorn said.
“Yes,” Minu said.
“It says that it is their highest law,” Bjorn continued. “To break this rule, to wake a sleeper, as they call it, will bring the worst of all possible punishments.”
Minu nodded. “Annihilation.”
They were quiet for a time. Minu picked up a statue she’d been holding. It was of some alien being, carved an unknown time ago for unknown reasons. It wasn’t familiar to Bjorn.
“Did you ever study ancient Earth literature?” she asked.
“I went to the Keeper’s Academy, same as you.”
She considered the statue for a moment. “The imminent death of 20,000 men, that for a fantasy and trick of fame go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot whereon the numbers cannot try the cause.”
“Minu…” Bjorn said.
She held up a hand. “Which is not tomb enough and continent. To hide the slain? Oh, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”
“You’re scaring your friends,” Bjorn repeated.
“You aren’t the ones that need to be scared,” she said again.
“What now, Minu?”
“Now?” She stood and looked down at the statue. With a whine of high-powered servos, it cracked and exploded into a thousand shards, raining through her fingers to the floor. “Now, we go home.”
* * *
The entire time her mother went through her emotional event, Lilith worked on her special project. She used their newly-won Concordian access to network with the planetary computers on Nexus.
In a few hours, she’d managed to process more data from her mystery files than she’d been able to analyze in all the months she’d worked so far.
With full access, she went into the Bureau of Planetary Control where leases were kept and checked on a certain mysterious planet. It was indeed logged. Last explored during the People’s era, it had been categorized as unsuitable for colonization due to insufficient land mass and hostile native flora. “No Indigenous Sapients” were noted in the survey, completed by robotic ships.
She tried to compare that survey data against her own data and ran into a wall. There was no commonality with which to compare dates.
Frustrated, she turned to methods she used in space. Ships that traveled faster than light needed ways to find out what the date was. It was one of the conundrums of superluminal travel that the faster you went, the less time distortion there was. The humans’ famous scientists had gotten that one wrong. They believed that faster than light travel was impossible, and the closer you got to light speed, the slower time passed for the traveler. That much was true, up to a point. But that was why faster was better.
Even at very high speeds, there were still distortions. So, when a ship arrived, for it to communicate and work with other ships, common time indices were necessary. The simplest way to facilitate this was via star positions.
The galaxy was constantly in motion, and those motions were predictable. Take sightings of known stellar phenomenon, powerful stars or unusual ones, and compare them against records. Adjust as necessary, and you could figure out what time it was.
“Got it,” Lilith thought. Inside the personal files she’d pilfered from her mother were the astronomical files that had once belonged to Mindy Harper, who had been an astronomer before she became the mother of a tribe. The files included the observations Lilith needed, taken by Mindy after arriving on Bellatrix.
But when she compared the data to observations taken before the humans’ arrival on Bellatrix…there was an error. Well, not an error, exactly; an inconsistency.
Minu and Bjorn came down the hall. Everyone in the room became instantly alert. Even Mindy woke up and looked around curiously.
Minu looked like she’d been cut from stone. Her face was sharp angles, and there were deep circles under her eyes. At first, Lilith thought her mother looked defeated, but she quickly revised that. She looked resigned. Resigned to a task that would be the hardest thing she ever did.
While everyone was trying to figure out what happened next, Lilith quickly reviewed the files for details on her ancestor. Mindy Harper was a well-respected astronomer, up until the day she’d reported receiving a signal she claimed was of extraterrestrial origin. Unable to substantiate the claim, her career and reputation had been destroyed.
Lilith wondered if Mindy Harper’s lack of skills had led her to make such a mistake. Then she reviewed the details of how Mindy Harper had located Bellatrix. She had looked through the portal, studied the foreign world’s stars, and compared the view she saw to the one she had memorized. Mindy Harper didn’t lack skills. She’d had the incredible ability to do that by herself with the primitive computer capabilities available to her.
“We’re going home,” Minu announced, “without delay.”
Lilith nodded in understanding as everyone began falling in behind Minu. How was she going to tell her mother what she had learned? P’ing had said that when hse arrived on Bellatrix more than 100 years earlier, hse had never seen a human before. When Lilith compared the stellar observations, that made sense.
One hundred years earlier on Bellatrix, Lilith thought and recalled the world she’d flown so close to. Its blue seas and swirling white clouds. Its teeming cities that lit up the night side sky like 100,000 stars.
How could she tell her mother that the world of her species’ birth was not only still alive and well, but it had yet to face its fate and wouldn’t for many more years.
# # # # #
About the Author
Located in rural Tennessee, Mark Wandrey has been creating new worlds since he was old enough to write. After penning countless short stories, he realized novels were his real calling and hasn’t looked back since. A lifetime of diverse jobs, extensive travels, and living in most areas of the country have uniquely equipped him with experiences to color his stories in ways many find engaging and thought provoking. Now a bestselling author, he has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.
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Caution – Worlds Under Construction
* * * * *
Titles by Mark Wandrey
Cartwright’s Cavaliers
Winged Hussars
A Fistful of Credits
For a Few Credits More
The Good, the Bad, and the Merc
Alpha Contracts
A Fiery Sunset
A Time to Die
A Time to Run
Earth Song: Overture
Earth Song: Sonata in Orionis
Earth Song: The Lost Aria
Earth Song: Etude to War
Earth Song: Anthem
* * * * *
The following is an
Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy:
Salvage Title
___________________
Kevin Steverson
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