Talisman of Earth Read online

  As Rhodes and Rax watched the holo of the fateful battle with the Valgons following their miraculous survival, there was one thing that did not exist in a form of data that the Talisman crew could ever know. But Gulliver remembered it.

  It was a sound made by the Hartford’s AI, christened Ulysses by the scientists that grew him. It was Ulysses’ scream upon the death of himself and his crew.

  Gulliver had no tear ducts. He couldn’t cry. But he most decidedly mourned for Ulysses for some time following his demise.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “As much enjoyment as I received from seeing that again, please, tell me what I am really doing here,” Lt. Grekkon Rax politely insisted.

  Rhodes nodded, raised his right, human, hand, and made a small circular motion. The holographic images began moving in reverse. He slowed down his circles as it went. Rewinding done, he swept his fingers forward and now it all progressed once more, albeit at something like one-eighth speed.

  The Valgon battleship was nearly done with its volley. Explosions played over the opalescent, pulsating surface of the Talisman’s electromagnetic shields. At this speed, Rax and Rhodes could actually witness the expanding waves of energy and force as they drove the two ships apart. While the Talisman could take the cataclysmic pounding, the Valgon ship was little more than a paper mache model. Ever so slowly, the Alliance vessel began to ripple. Layers of armor peeled away from it. The already-open gaps in the ship’s decks buckled and ripped further apart, belching out equipment, shuttles, and Valgon crew who were summarily, and in slow motion, imploded by the shockwaves. In the matter of only a few frames, the entire enemy ship, still shredding, bloated across its entire hull like a dead body. This was just before the final moment when it would burst apart into a billion indecipherable bits.

  “Pause,” Rhodes spoke. “Step forward one frame.”

  The holos moved one frame. Not much changed.

  “One more frame.”

  Again, little change.

  “One more frame.”

  And there it was. Rax had never seen it before, but it was suddenly very obvious.

  It was blurred, moving at a high percentage of lightspeed, but it was there: A silvery, button-shaped capsule ejecting from the stern of the Valgon battleship.

  “By the Anvil of Ekton!” Rax exclaimed, truly taken aback. Rhodes even noted that Rax had reacted so far as to tuck his small tail between his legs. He’d never seen a Kenek do that before, and couldn’t help but smirk.

  “What is so funny?” Rax demanded. “This is not a time for amusement.”

  “Nor is it a laughing matter,” Rhodes added.

  “The Valgons launched something, maybe an escape pod, maybe a probe, maybe a Malign AI Core. Ekton knows what...”

  “We always knew they probably sent out an extradimensional message in the time between wormhole exit and their destruction,” said Rhodes. “There’s little doubt news of our survival, at least, initially, reached the rest of the Alliance. But it’s unlikely they had time to transmit anything that definitively proved the Talisman’s condition after that. So what we’re seeing here is probably that proof. Whatever it was, and we may never know, has now had four damned years to go wherever it had to.”

  Rax collapsed his bulk down onto a comfortable media room chair. It immediately screeched and bent a few degrees out of alignment. “The League thinks we’re dead. The Alliance knows we’re alive.”

  Gray Rhodes flopped down into a chair next to the massive security chief. They just sat there, staring at the still-framed holo for a long few minutes.

  “Want to go procure a sample of Dr. Cho’s home brew?” Rhodes finally asked.

  Rax nodded, “Most assuredly. And we will need to tell the Captain and Dr. Weller about this delightful new bit of information.”

  “I was thinking I could delegate that,” said Rhodes with a straight face.

  “I was thinking I would drink your share of brew,” Rax replied stonily.

  Everything that transferred energy in any way throughout the Talisman was privy to Gulliver. Therefore, he saw, heard, and knew nearly everything that occurred aboard ship. There were certain permissions he could confer to various crew members, or that needed to be conferred to him by the likes of the Captain or Deputy Commander. In general, though, Gulliver was almost omniscient.

  And so he knew when Rhodes had called up the holos from four years ago, and brought in Lieutenant Rax to review them. Gulliver experienced them again, just as the two officers did. He was equally as surprised by what Rhodes had discovered, apparently via pure instinct. What humans called a “gut feeling”.

  Another surprise, just as unpleasant, was that Gulliver himself had not seen the ejection from the Valgon ship. Oh, he had “known” about it, objectively speaking. It was all just data, visual and aural, to him. It registered as debris, along with hundreds of other random chunks of the enemy craft that were being blown off in every direction at the time. But Rhodes didn’t see the object for what it actually was, in zeroes and ones. He saw it for what he felt it was, based on his human perceptions. As did Rax, via his Kenek perceptions. As would any of the other crew members, had they exhibited the same sort of obsession as the Commander with all of the circumstances surrounding the Talisman’s dark situation.

  Rhodes, Rax, and the rest of the crew and all of their species were alive and sentient. Gulliver and all of the other modern AI Cores were alive and sentient. Somehow, though, Gulliver and his ilk still lacked something that mattered very much. How was Rhodes able to see what an AI Core, with its astounding and boundless sight, not see?

  Captain Lancer and Doctor Weller were surprised, but not shocked, by the revelation that the Valgon ship they followed through the lek essel had ejected a mysterious capsule just prior to their destruction. It wasn’t any definitive, but it was just enough to raise their stress levels, as if they needed that. Rhodes and Lancer agreed to keep the knowledge of the object secret from the general population of the Talisman. The rest of the senior staff concurred. Fearing more wouldn’t help them do their jobs any better. There was enough to fear already.

  Commander Rhodes and the big saurian sat in Rax’s oversized stateroom, imbibing unhealthy amounts of Dr. Seok Won Cho’s homemade ale. The jovial exobiologist could be annoying sometimes, oftentimes, but he was right that replicated brew wasn’t remotely as tasty as the real thing.

  Grekkon Rax reminisced a bit about his childhood on Kenekkari, a planet of one and a quarter Earth masses in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. One of Rax’s favorite hobbies was anthropology, and he spent a great deal of time as a youth digging around Kenekkari’s lush grasslands and in endless caverns beneath ancient, rolling hills. It was the only world the League knew of that had cultivated two species that both reached the Type One Kardashev stage of civilization, being able to harness at least the energy available on and around their world. The astounding thing regarding that fact was that the two civilizations were separated by nearly one hundred million years of evolution. The ancient Kenekkari people were of a quadrupedal saurian species, with long necks and a four-sectioned set of “lips” that functioned much like four small elephant trunks. They nuked their civilization into oblivion, paving the way for the predecessors of Rax’s species to evolve from a kind of fleet-footed, arboreal creature in the bowels of Kenekkari’s primeval jungles.

  Rax was particularly fond of some of the fossils he unearthed, including a calcified jawbone of one of those archaic sentients.

  Mulling over an alien past provoked Gray Rhodes into a sentimental mood. Few crew members aboard the Talisman ever got their Deputy Commander to open up so much, so Rax kicked up his massive heels and settled back into his seat, all ears and a dribble of ale at the corner of his sizable mouth.

  Rhodes recalled being raised on the frontier world of Giese 667 Cc, twenty-two point seven light years from Earth. He arrived at the age of six with his parents, two brothers and one sister, after a three year journey aboard a wa
rp-driven colony ship. They were part of only the second wave of colonists to the planet that came to be called Freya, after a Norse goddess of fertility, gold, war, and death.

  His father set to work as an electrical engineer and his mother as a mechanic. As most other working adults on a young colony, they also worked part time as teachers. The children tended gardens and did chores to keep the humble household up, and went to class. With any downtime, they explored, roving a wilderness that was blessedly free from any apex predators that posed a threat to humans.

  Over time, his parents produced two more children, another brother and another sister. Rhodes matured into an athletic, intelligent and capable young adult. He met the woman who would one day become his wife, Kina King, when he was seventeen.

  Rax chortled at a vignette about a time when Kina went hiking with Rhodes and they got lost, only to find out they had always been half a kilometer away from their ATV.

  Young Gray had an uncle on his mother’s side, also an XO at that time, named Barrick King. Commander King joined the family while on shore leave one Spring, and ended up taking Rhodes on a shuttle flight to up to his orbiting cruiser. Rhodes still remembered the ship’s name: Albion. It was the first time he had been into space since the voyage to Freya. He rode on the Albion—-probably as an illegal stowaway, though Uncle King assured him that it was perfectly legitimate—- as the cruiser ranged on a full patrol of the 667 system for several days. It was during that time that he fell in love with the stars. It was a stronger pull at that time than even his feelings for Kina, and it wasn’t long after that he was accepted by the UPSN Academy.

  Rhodes left for the Inner Solar System and was gone for three years at the Academy, and another two years on his first patrol.

  By the time he returned to Freya, much was changed. His siblings were all grown, his friends were all working on important projects, and his parents were heavily involved in planning a colony expansion that would take the better part of fifty years to actualize. Even though Kina had been disappointed with his decision to leave, she had continued to send messages back and forth with Rhodes for all those years. They had grown apart, as was expected, but they knew enough about each other that they could come back together.

  Gray took Kina with him when he left again, and they settled on Mars. Valia was born there, and Rhodes advanced in his Star Navy career. All was right in the universe. For a time.

  That was when Rhodes veered toward melancholy, but Rax anticipated it. “Now! What we need is another sizable dose of drink!” He whooped.

  “No,” Rhodes said, head hanging low, “What we need is to kill something.” He looked up, a menacing grin spread from ear to ear.

  Rax clomped his mug onto a side table, sensing the driving urge in Rhodes’ words. “Oh, yes we do,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Another holographic projection, but not just another. Rax chose it because he knew it would get both Rhodes and himself in the proper mood for a fight.

  The 3D image extruded from an entire wall in the workout room: a holo of a landscape on a forsaken, uninhabited planet midway between Alliance space and Kenekkari. It was a world of windswept rock, bent into formations of staggering size. Magnificent scythes and buttresses of silvery, camouflage granite curved from sandy ground strewn with machine wreckage and fallen space debris to heights of over eight hundred feet.

  It looked as uninviting to life as any world could, but beneath its surface was an ocean of freshwater more voluminous than five times all of the oceans on Earth.

  This particular battle pit a battalion of about 1,000 Kenek and Althorian League ground troops against a full regiment of roughly 5,000 Valgon warriors and assorted Malign units. The holo was recorded by several Kenek recorder drones, which hovered around and above the field of battle.

  Rhodes almost gasped when the full scale became apparent. The Alliance’s line stretched from the base of one rocky spire to another, a distance of a hundred yards, while the League forces were arrayed over a small arc on a patch of slightly higher ground. Their fortifications were few: some piles of broken stone and boulders, a few heavy automatic coilguns (what a terran would call a Gauss rifle, Rax explained). Half a dozen armored personnel carriers were scattered in front of the arc, mostly ruined, their armor full of punctures and their treads shredded.

  The Alliance advanced. The League stood by.

  About fifteen or twenty small, dark glider shapes swooped over the battlefield and toward the League battlement. Rhodes saw a quick exchange of fire between the Malign flying drones and the League forces. Several missiles exploded against the APCs and rock piles, and a handful of Althorians were tossed into the air like ragdolls, before all of the drones were downed.

  Presently, the enemy regiment split into three battalions. As soon as the Alliance line broke, the League opened fire. A third of the Alliance forces flanked the bastion to the right, a third to the left, and down the center came the Malign. The intelligent robots stepped, rolled and galloped in a dozen shapes and sizes, churning the ground as they came. Their black metal bodies absorbed unforgiving punishment from the sputtering automatic coilguns, and hundreds of railgun and other armor-penetrating projectiles. They fell in droves, but Malign never truly died unless they were atomized. They had nothing to fear from ground-based weaponry.

  Meanwhile, the Valgon warriors sprinted just as quickly around the side of the fortification. The more devastating, withering fire from the coilguns could not be redirected in time, and the huge exoskeletal Valgons plowed into the lines of League fighters. Althorians, though spritely and well versed in Sik’nath, were at a disadvantage in the crowded entrenchment, and the Valgons made short work of many with their vicious claws and eeskel projectile blades. The larger, more powerful Kenek soldiers held their own against the Valgons in the hand-to-hand combat, but only for a few moments. Once the Malign collided with the barriers, the engagement was all but over.

  The League battalion scattered, Althorians dashing out between barricades, Kenek, and Valgons alike. The slower Kenek strayed and fell behind. Even to Rhodes, it was heartbreaking to watch as the large saurians seemed to only trundle away while their enemies swarmed over them, cutting them to pieces.

  The image exploded and disappeared in a burst of white noise.

  “There was no retreat possible. And with the Alliance, surrender is not an option a sane warrior considers. We fought knowing we were probably going to die,” Rax spoke solemnly.

  “We?” Said Rhodes, eyebrow raised.

  Rax nodded, “Yes. I was there.”

  “How did you live through that? It was a massacre.”

  “Yes, it was. But the evidence of what happened next was lost when the last of our recorder drones was shot down. We had called for an emergency evacuation hours before. It arrived, a single shuttle that made it through a curtain of Alliance cannon fire. Just as the rescue craft arrived, two of our own League destroyers also arrived in orbit and laid down a covering laser barrage,” said Rax. Even as he talked, he thought back to the sight:

  The gleaming, but battered, Althorian rescue shuttle dropped through billowing clouds of acrid and black smoke. Rax, a decade younger, looked over one shoulder, then the other, as dozens of Malign and Valgon warriors coursed through and over the bodies of his comrades. Just as he dropped his weapons, holding his many wounds closed with his bloody hands, and started to close his eyes to welcome his death, he heard the sibilate sound of high energy lasers spearing through the air. Lightning blue beams of continuous wave, multi-petawatt laser light danced out of the heavens, shimmering as they cut surging masses of smoke and lacerated the Valgon and Malign hoard, one by one. Claws and tails, robotic legs and arms all fell to the scorched ground.

  “I didn’t know I’d live another day until that point. I dragged myself over a third of a kilometer of blood-clotted dirt and rock to reach the landing zone,” Rax said.

  “Remind me to tell you about the last battle of the Saturnine rebellio
n sometime. Your story tops it, I’m pretty sure.”

  Rax motioned to some noticeable scarring on his right leg, his lower torso, and both arms and shoulders. “I sustained most of these scars during the Battle of Dardagath. Luckily, nothing so showy as losing an arm.”

  Rhodes flexed his cybernetic left arm and grinned. “Showy, yes. Lucky, not so much.”

  “Well, time to get to it, shall we? You are not going to learn enough about fighting Valgons in a sim. I thought today I would try something new,” said the wide, tall Kenek as he walked out into the passageway.

  Shortly, the two officers arrived in the gym. Rax gingerly placed six different holo tablets in locations around the room while Rhodes stood by patiently, wearing some basic sparring armor that protected his head, torso, and wrists.

  “Okay, so now I’m curious,” the Commander said.

  Rax chortled, “Good! You should enjoy this. Now, do me a favor and close your eyes. I want to see your reaction.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” said Rax, deadly serious.

  Rhodes dared not push back. He scrunched his eyes shut and stood there, hands on his hips.

  “Now, look,” came Rax’s thick voice.

  Rhodes opened his eyelids and took a reflexive pace backward, brought his arms up in a defensive posture, and almost yelled a curse. If his tongue hadn’t been tied, it might have been heard.

  Standing not twelve feet from Rhodes was a Valgon warrior, nearly eight feet tall, clad in a standard Alliance combat vest studded with various edged weapons. His two claws moved menacingly, while his two hands of his fingered-arms rested on the hilts of some daggers. The Valgon’s four legs were bent, ready to spring. The size and ferocious bearing of the warrior was disconcerting, and Gray Rhodes felt distinctly outmatched.

  If he had a tail, he would have it tucked squarely between his legs.