Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 5
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
No one was sure in their hearts whether to hope for him to pass quickly or to linger longer. What was best for him? How was it best? Who could say? Acshah began to truly feel the impending loss, the helpless dread of waiting for this to all be over. She didn’t want Father to die, but she knew that when he finally did and the family confronted their grief and moved on, that life would continue; things would return to normal...as normal as life without Father in it could ever be.
Sitting there listening to the murmurs of conversation the occasional warble of suppressed laughter, sighs and tears, Acshah felt alone and lost; she longed for home, to head north and north again across the Boreal Ocean and the Sea of Taiga and home to New Bangalore. She felt every bit of the distance between her and her own bed, her room, her flatmates, her friends, lovers and Kalden...especially Kalden.
Mother came back down for the Evening Meal. In honour of everyone being home, a full banquet was prepared. It seemed to Acshah to be an obscene time to eat so much food, but it was exactly the sort of custom practiced in Landing; exactly the sort of tradition that everyone else found comforting that Acshah had always found disturbing and bizarre. Here the death rituals were already beginning: Supper was a five-course affair spread out over two hours. If Father had been feeling better he’d have been sitting to Mother’s right; the children and families were seated around the grand table counter-clockwise from oldest to youngest.
Between each course a short prayer was said. After the third course Mother stood up. It fell to her both as Family Matriarch and as High Priestess of the Rose Shrine to deliver a sermon of comfort to the family. It fell to her to petition the Shekhina Mehdi, the Queen of Light and Sorrow, to Remember Father, to Dream the Dream of him while She slept. It was all such hollow ceremony to Acshah; prayers to a dead woman of legend. There was no proof that McQuire Allison had even ever lived, other than a name on the Old Ship’s passenger manifest and always-unreliable eyewitness accounts from more than twelve hundred years before. If there was proof that McQuire had existed, Acshah didn’t know or believe there was definitive proof that she was anything more than another passenger aboard the Old Ship, and possibly one of the original settlers. But still Acshah’s family not only adhered to the Articles of the Mysteries, they believed in them. Despite her misgivings Acshah listened attentively when Mother spoke:
“The prayers that have been said tonight,” Mother said, “And those left to be said are all petitions that I have made many times over the long, long years of my service to Temple through the Shrine of the Rose. Many times I have presided over a Vigil Feast for families of the sick...for families of the dying or dead. Now we are one such family. We are going to lose Father; our Patriarch, our High Priest, our teacher. You are going to lose the man who raised you. I...am going to lose my friend, my lover, my companion for the last three hundred years. But never has my faith in the Way been stronger. Never before, during any of the times I have kept this vigil in service to the Temple and to the Shrine of the Rose, have I felt surer of the Shekhina Mehdi’s presence, of Her strength. I know that he will be remembered by Her. I know that he will be forever enjoined to the Queen of Light and Sorrow. I know that my loss will be temporary, for eventually, inevitably, I too will die. And when I am enjoined with Her, when I am remembered by Her Dreams, I will be united once more and as never before with my husband. He and I will be one and one with the Queen and all who have been Kept and Remembered in Her Dreams; at the end of all time and the beginning of the New Machine, we will all be one with Her, as we will be, as we once were, as we have always been. For we are Life; Life serves the Machine. The Machine serves the Purpose and the Purpose is Life. Let us pray,”
Yeung hesitated before raising her hands, palms upwards and tilting her head back, along with the rest of her family. She didn’t close her eyes or recite the prayer, instead waited and listened for it to be over. She was alone in not praying; alone in not believing the words Mother had spoken, alone in not feeling comforted by the hope that Father would join with the Queen of Light and Sorrow when he died. Despite all her disagreements with the rest of her family, despite how much animosity there was between them, Acshah actually envied them. She wished she had their faith, even if it was nothing more than a sad delusion. At least they had some solace.
♦♦♦
Later that night alone again in her old room Acshah could no longer ignore her cartouche, or the message light flashing intermittently on her lenses. She replied to Kalden, expecting to leave him a message. Instead, he answered, bleary from recently-disturbed sleep. Sensors built into the walls of his room back in New Bangalore scanned him and rendered a perfect three dimensional image of him into Acshah’s eyes. Back home, his lenses would be rendering one of her. The buds in their ears provided them perfect sound from each other’s locations.
“Acshah,” he implored.
She wanted to be with him now. She wanted to be able to reach out and hold him, smell his scent and be away from this place and this time.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Nima asked. He was genuinely wounded and concerned for her.
“My family’s traditions,” she said, “Their religion; their...bigotry.”
“Then why go home?”
She stared, looking and not finding malice in the statement, hating herself for thinking that Nima Kalden would even be capable of such a thing.
“Because he’s my father,”
Kalden bowed his head and nodded. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” he said, “I wish I could be there for you.”
“I miss you,” she sobbed.
“Hurry home.”
♦♦♦
She woke up in the middle of the night. Acshah had left the windows open and the balcony doors cracked. There was a breeze gusting in from outside. She realized that she hadn’t seen the night-time sky from over Landing in six years. She pulled on her robe and stepped outside. Night on Midian occurred when their orbit brought them around to Heruba’s far side. The gas giant eclipsed the star Heket. At night, Tear faced Heruba’s dark and stormy equator, with only a crescent of dark, star-scattered sky dancing through the heavens. But Landing saw more sky. It was strange to see Heruba as nothing more than a mountainous, glowing crescent. Stranger still to see the light from so many distant stars shine visibly in the rest of the very black night.
It never really got dark in Tear at night; the sky was aglow from Heruba’s turbulent radiance as it presided in the sky over New Bangalore. Light from the supermassive storm cells in the atmosphere of the gas giant shone so brightly it never got dark enough to see more than Anuket, their sister-star in the sky overhead. Yeung closed her eyes and smelled the air. Here in Landing there was no tang of salt, no smell of the sea. The air was cooler, drier; it smelled of the earth and the river. And the stars in the sky...oh, the stars.
Tonight there were hundreds of stars visible to the naked eye. She looked up, her eye tracing out the patterns of familiar constellations. Anuket stood guard over the Heruba crescent, dancing with her as Midian tumbled on its axis. Yeung looked up at the stars longingly, simultaneously enjoying this sky and aching for the one over New Bangalore. It had been on a windy Wet Spring night like this that Acshah had lost her virginity to her childhood friend, Eli. Eli was of Family Devlyn of the Santino House; unlike the Cole House the Santinos weren’t dedicated to the Temple Priesthood. They were scholars and merchants. Father had never approved of their friendship; the very idea that a daughter of such important members of the Way should associate with tradesmen offended him. Devlyn Eli had gone on to set up a transport service between the Southlands fishing villages and Landing. He lived in Echo Point now; a town far up the coast, where the Blue Mountains fell into the sea. Yeung had learned he was married. It was another warm memory of life in Landing. She remembered looking up at these same stars, picking out the constellations, watching Thalia go one way across the sky and Melete another, always dancing, never meeting. She remembered learning The Story of Thalia and Melete in school, thinking it was soppy poetry then. But she did love this sky. Looking up at it made her feel so much better, until she saw stars that didn’t belong in any sky she had ever known.
At first she thought they might be planes lining up for the skyport. Except that the flight paths all ran from north to south and Plains Watch as well to the east of the skyport’s airspace. There was nothing east of them but desert and ocean. She remembered the song A Horse With No Name and how it was said to have been written over a thousand years ago about Kodo Marco, an explorer who went east a few years after Landing, never to return. These weren’t planes, then. They were bright and still in the sky, lined up in neat, precise rows. Were they satellites? Acshah hadn’t heard of any launches and the mythology and paranoia about space travel Midianites shared meant there were strict prohibitions against spaceflight, manned or otherwise. Acshah wondered if there was a process by which stars could suddenly become visible and knew there wasn’t; certainly not this many. And something like a star’s birth nearby would be an event that would have been predicted by what few astronomers were allowed on Midian, years in advance.
Whatever these lights were, Acshah knew they weren’t stars or planes or satellites. Whatever they were, she knew they didn’t belong. But she only truly began to feel afraid when the strange lights changed formation. She watched as they shifted, some drawing forward, some moving to one side or another. More lights appeared in the gaps left between and Acshah swore they started to become brighter. Terror filled her, for whatever she was witnessing was nothing natural, nothing that should be in the sky…nothing that should exist.
Two
Lost Heroes
The Ouroboros broke from Q-field, its sensors sweeping the broad expanse of dark void. The Ouroboros was a deep-range Carrier-Destroyer, part of the Phenex El-Ahur Starfleet. It was a knotted, pitted ovoid; its outer hull the rough texture of unfinished wood. The skin of the Ouroboros was a dark orange-red; old rust. Running lights shone across its surface and it was bisected along its vertical axis by a thin line of blue luminescence, guarded by twin ridges that narrowed to razor-sharp points. Like many ships of the Phenex El-Ahur Starfleet the Ouroboros was an alien vessel, salvaged and adapted for its Human crew. Nearly five kilometres high and more than twice as long, she was one of the largest ships in the Starfleet.
On the Command Deck Commodore Baxter Vincent stepped onto the bridge platform and was joined by his command officers. The walls of the Command Deck rippled and vanished as the bridge rose into the air and out over the main crew pit. An enhanced tactical image of the sector around them appeared across the deck’s walls. A single object was being tracked as the Ouroboros made a slow approach.
“Object matches target size and description,” his tactician reported.
Baxter nodded, “Contact Anuket Command and inform them we are plotting intercept.”
♦♦♦
More than a thousand years before, they had gathered on the plateau of Mount Umbra. On the day the Queen had sealed herself in the Keep she summoned them all together in the courtyard of Her Keep, built into the living stone of the mountain on the ridge of the last slope below its summit. The Shekhina Mehdi anointed each and every one of them with a kiss on the forehead, bestowing to each of them a small portion of her nearly limitless power. She commanded them to protect Her people while She slept. She banished them from their mountain home, admonishing them only to return when the Aeons War came to Midian. The Phenex El-Ahur were charged with the task of preparing a space fleet. Their ranks left Midian aboard the surviving support vehicles from the Old Ship. They went into space and sought out the galactic cluster from which the Ancient League had fled. The Phenex El-Ahur visited thousands of worlds. From the library world of Hiddek Uhl to the capital planets of the Ancient League, the El-Ahur explored and studied, gaining knowledge and power from primeval sources. They adapted the technologies of countless lost, dead and forgotten civilizations and the El-Ahur prospered and strengthened themselves for the dark times of the Aeons War ahead. Baxter Vincent was one of the first of the Queen’s Phenex El-Ahur, and he remembered the exile and their first trips into space. The crafts used then had been considerably smaller than the ‘Boros. They’d been much closer to their target in size. In fact, their target was perhaps one of the oldest vessels to have ever left Midian.
♦♦♦
The Ouroboros was closer to the object now. Their weapon system cycled and the Q-field drive was charged and readied in case a quick escape was necessary. Target was scanned; its size, mass, composition and Q-field displacement confirmed.
Captain Heihachi Daniel, Baxter’s first officer, relayed the information to the Commodore: “Object confirmed to be command and emergency modules of the Esperanza,”
The bridge rotated to face retrieval systems. “Bring the debris aboard and brace it for salvage and rescue.” Baxter commanded.
As they turned to their stations around him Baxter studied his officers. They all wore the traditional black and gold vestments of the Phenex El-Ahur. They worked with calm efficiency; discipline, training and skill evident, their focus perfect.
“Anuket Command orders us to stand by once the debris is aboard and await instruction on how to proceed with extraction.” Heihachi said.
Baxter nodded. A piece of history was about to be brought aboard and promise and prophecy fulfilled. The Esperanza had been lost during the first few, desperate years on Midian. Its fate had long been hinted at, but only now was the truth about to be revealed. History was about to tell itself. And, Baxter knew, so was destiny. This was all happening exactly as it had been foretold. The foretelling had been the recollection of The Grandmaster; the One Who Died. He who had come from the future to begin the war had told them how, when and where to find He who would come from the past to end it.
“Recovery has completed salvage,” Roshenko Aqualina, the Ouroboros’s Systems Chief soon reported, “Their scans confirm stasis pods are aboard though they only have readings on one.”
“He’s aboard,” Baxter said, simply.
“Sir, there’s no way of knowing that for sure.” Heihachi replied.
Baxter leaned against his station and stared at the datastream that was projected into his eyes.
“I know it, Heihachi; we’ve found him, exactly as he said we would.”
Heihachi stared at Baxter, his pale, placid face, the cold, blue eyes determined and confident. Baxter Vincent was one of the true Firstborn, over a thousand years old. One of the first El-Ahur, he had witnessed much. Heihachi’s commander was a man of unyielding faith. Despite all that Heihachi had seen since the war began, he was not like his commander. Heihachi was not a believer in prophecy. He’d never been in the Queen’s presence. He’d been born off Midian long after the Keep was sealed. But he had studied under Baxter and now he proudly served as his first officer. Heihachi may not have believed in the religion, but he believed in his commander. “As you say,”
“Reply to Anuket Command: We await our orders. Extraction and rescue are standing by.”
♦♦♦
The Esperanza had left Midian over thirteen hundred years before. Some regarded the ship as the first vessel of the Phenex El-Ahur. After all, she had been the first ship to search the other side of the Great Void. The Esperanza had been built during the first ten years that the first Humans had been on Midian. Landing had occurred during the first weeks of Wet Spring and for most of the first decade of habitation the people lived in the temporary shelters and rescue and escape vehicles that had come with them from the Old Ship. But on the outskirts of the old colony a shipyard was constructed. There, cobbled together from the gutted ruins of a dozen other vehicles from the Old Ship, reverse engineered and then re-engineered, the Esperanza was built.
After ten long years the Esperanza’s hull was sealed. Separately in another part of the vast compound, the engines underwent their final testing. They too were ready and preparations began to move the engines to the main assembly hangar, where they would be fitted into the Esperanza’s hull. Her name meant “Hope” and as Mission Commander Jack Benedict oversaw her construction, he vowed that the Esperanza would live up to her name. Captain Alina Tanaka had been in charge of systems assembly and she would take her place in the engine room when their mission commenced. The reactor systems were in place and the drive components were being slowly winched into position. Long bundles of heavy cable connected the two components and orange-jumpsuited workers in safety gear and harnesses coiled bundles of cabling up inside the body of the Esperanza.
Tanaka emerged from the cluster of workers, similarly dressed in an orange jumpsuit and hard-hat. She hoisted her goggles over the rim of the hat, wiping sweat and oily dirt from her face. Grease, grime and various other substances were likewise smudged across the fabric of her work-clothes.
