A Clash of Aliens (The Human Chronicles Book 13) (22 page)

“I’m with you, Stevie. We’ll do what we can to get back home, but if it comes down to saving ourselves or the Milky Way…well, we’re soldiers. We’ll do our duty.”

There was a chorus of cheers and yessirs throughout the bridge.

“Now, let’s find Riyad’s ship. Anything, Tom?”

“Just gravity bips, like what we trail. That has to be them. We can’t let them get too far away or else the traces evaporate.”

“Bring us to the proper heading, Mr. Morgan. Full power when plotted. Let’s go save our galaxy.”

Chapter
20

The journey to the semi-dead world took three days from the entry point. Somehow Panur had been able to program his shipboard transit portal to place them close to Kor. Riyad didn’t ask how; he wouldn’t understand even if told.

Now they entered the spacescape of the single-star planetary system. The last time Riyad was here, the commando team was trying to avoid a persistent Sol-Kor beamship while riding in one themselves. This time he was at the controls of a Human ship—and one badass craft at that.

From orbit he was able to locate the long river canyon where they had lured the beamship into slamming into a cliff wall. There were several ancient cities in the area, but Riyad was able to recognize the one where they’d held up for a day, and where he and Adam had been taken prisoner—briefly—by what remained of the unfortunate natives.

He set the
Najmah Fayd
down in the same dilapidated sports stadium as before. The natives would be aware of their arrival, yet this time they wouldn’t identify his ship as being Sol-Kor.

********

 “What’s wrong with you, Panur” Sherri asked. “You’ve had a sour look on your face since we landed.” Lila stepped over to the mutant, seeking to hear the answer as well.

When Riyad, Arieel, and Benefis also gathered around, Panur felt compelled to reply.

“As you know—most of you know—I am the product of the Eternal Queen and a foreign species. My current mood is a result of the fact that it was from
this
world that the other half of my equation was acquired.”

“Is that a fancy way of saying your father came from here?”

“The creature who provided the DNA material for the experiment came from here.”

Sherri laughed. “So this is a homecoming of sorts? I know you gave us that bullshit story about how you were a mutant and the Queen discovered you at the time your people—” she put
people
in finger quotes— “were harvested. In reality, you’ve never been here before, have you?”

“I have not, yet I did take the opportunity several thousand years ago to study my ancestry.”

“What did you find out?” Arieel asked.

Panur hesitated, giving Sherri the impression he was hiding something. “C’mon, buddy, you’re among friends.”

Panur looked at her and frowned. “That I very much doubt.” But then he sighed. “I found out that this side of my family tree was quite impressive. Although just discovering space travel at the time of the Sol-Kor contact, they were an advanced, peaceful, and curious race. Their cities—such as the one we are in—were glorious examples of design and conservation. They respected their world and treated it with reverence. They lived their lives with purpose and responsibility.”

“In other words, they didn’t deserve to be eaten by the Sol-Kor.”

“They could have achieved much if not for the unfortunate circumstance of being located within six light-years of the homeworld of the Sol-Kor. This was the second world harvested. Once space travel was developed on Kor, the natives stopped eating each other and sought food sources beyond their planet. At that time there were several competing colonies, each with their own queen. She who would become known as the Eternal Queen had just assumed her position within the colony where she resided. With rudimentary space travel, her colony prospered, and she eventually consolidated all the others under her rule. She could provide the most food, coming as it did from off-planet. And the food they acquired was of superior quality, if not taste.”

“Meaning more advanced species than their own, creatures with bigger brains,” Sherri pointed out.

“But no star travel, making them susceptible to attack from space.”

“So when did you come on the scene?”

“Members of various species were brought to Kor for experimentation, to see if a new food crop could be developed. The Sol-Kor have always preferred the taste of their own flesh, yet that was counterproductive and caused conflicts between the colonies. So a hybrid race, one with Sol-Kor essence yet also the nutritional value of the advanced species, was the goal. Unfortunately, the experiments were carried out by unqualified scientists, Sol-Kor scientists. They had developed primitive space travel—that which required decades of travel to reach the nearest star—and having done so thought themselves qualified to manipulate genetics as well. Many failures preceded me.”

Panur stopped speaking and returned to his station.

“No way, buddy, you have to finish your story,” Sherri said. To her surprise, she found this fascinating. She was also acquiring a newfound understanding of Panur the person.

The mutant looked at the faces around him, and found them all engrossed in his story. He continued:

“As has happened with Lila, I also developed quite rapidly, fast enough in fact that some of my latent abilities were identified before I could be recycled.”

“You could be
recycled
at that time?” Arieel asked. From the look on Lila’s face, she had heard all this before.

“At that time I didn’t know what my body was capable of doing. I had my suspicions, since I never required food or rest. But along with that, knowledge and correlations just flowed to me.”

“Correlations?” Benefis asked.

“Yes. Correlations between various technologies, between chemicals, between cause and effect. I was able to see how things would work together simply by thinking about it, so I began to invent.”

“You showed the Sol-Kor how to kill more efficiently,” the Juirean said flatly, contempt in his voice.

“Not initially. I did it more for survival, as a way to gain favor. I was one of a kind, and therefore I sought approval and acceptance like any other living creature would, perhaps even more so. I began benignly. I saw a better way to travel between stars, with the gravity drive being one of my first creations. Of course, the Eternal Queen soon took notice of me after that. She was wise and realized my potential. I was given status and respect. In return, all I had to do was invent. And invent is what I do—it is what I must do. Lila can relate. With minds as fertile as ours, we seek ways to relieve the pressure of all this accumulated knowledge. The release comes through invention, from creating.”

“When did you start helping them to harvest entire planets of their indigenous life?” asked the Juirean.

“Please understand, at that time I
was
a Sol-Kor. I knew nothing else. I was a product of the Eternal Queen and some anonymous race. That attitude would change over time as I began to accept, and indeed celebrate, my uniqueness. But at that time I felt a responsibility to help my race, not only to survive but to thrive. Yes, I invented the gravity drive and suppressor beam, and then later trans-dimensional travel. Yet when one has lived as long as I have, you have a tendency to discount other life. They are mortal, you are not. They will soon die off, while you continue. So I began to focus more on myself and less on my adopted race. I sought out my roots, and that was when I discovered the Hal’ic, the natives of this world. I felt regret for what had happened to them.”

Panur smiled as he surveyed the faces. “I know that many of you do not realize this, but I do have feelings, emotions. There is a misconception that the more advanced and intelligent the creature, the less given to emotions they become. That is wrong. Emotions are the most stimulating events a creature like me can experience. They are what give meaning to all I achieve. Without emotions, there would be no drive to do…anything.”

“So Panur has a heart?” Sherri said.

“I do not need it to survive, yet I do need it to live.”

“Damn, that’s heavy.”

“Do I need to go on? Yes, I have feelings, and landing on the ancestral homeworld of my paternal heritage has caused them to resurface. I will recover…I always have. Now, may we move on to another subject?”

Sherri placed a hand on Panur’s shoulder. “Thanks for telling us that. Now, as a favor to us, how about using those feelings now and then…by being less of an asshole?”

“If I must.” A smile slowly stretched across the mutant’s face.

Lila pulled a seat over next to Panur. She placed her hand into his and a strange melding of the flesh occurred. Sherri cringed, before looking to Arieel in a panic.

The Formilian wore a contented look on her face. She, too, had seen another side of Panur. Whether that meant a life without Lila for her or not, only time would tell. But something profound had just happened.

Sherri stood up suddenly, catching everyone off guard.

“All right!” she called out. “Enough of all this touchy-feely crap. Let’s go out and find some of Panur’s ancestors. We have a hero to rescue.”

Chapter
21

J’nae studied the surveillance footage once again, not on a screen but in her mind. She’d already viewed the recording once, and that was all it took for her embed the images in her memory.

The Human had definitely been assisted by a Sol-Kor, which didn’t make sense. Why would a lowly Durlead help him? What could he hope to gain?

The obvious answer was there: this was no ordinary Sol-Kor drone…if even a Sol-Kor at all. Could he have been a Human spy, surgically altered to appear to be Sol-Kor? That seemed highly unlikely, given the logistics of it all. Yet if this was an altered member of some other race, one originating from within the Sol-Kor universe, that could portend even graver concerns.

Any race advanced enough to have placed such a spy within the very capital of the Colony would have long since been harvested. There should have been none left to carry out such a feat. And those races which the Sol-Kor had allowed to survive were too primitive to have carried out such and act.

Like the Salifen. They were too simple-minded to have done this.

So who was it? The simple fact that Adam Cain had been rescued, and by such means, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was something out there J’nae was unaware of. This set off in her mind a cascade of chemicals and hormones which sparked her thinking to new levels. This was why she existed, to solve problems. The more complex or difficult the problem, the more alive she felt.

J’nae began to think, to categorize, to postulate. The question created a whole new category of threat for J’nae and her Colony, yet by its very impossibility an answer could be found. It had to be. Eliminate all other impossibilities, and what remained would be the truth.

There was hidden race, with advanced capabilities, existing where none had been suspected before.

Bypassing a traditional computer analysis of past harvests within the main Sol-Kor galaxy, J’nae chose to scan the data herself—once—and then complete the study within her mind. Something had survived, and was now in a position to harm the Colony, especially with their new affiliation with the Human Adam Cain.

It was an unfortunate consequence of planet-wide harvests that not all members of a species could be collected. In fact, rarely did a harvest run over sixty percent of the natives. That left millions of survivors, but by the time the effects of the suppressor beam wore off, most of those were in such poor health that they succumbed rapidly to the elements or starvation. Follow-up expeditions had found that within two years after a harvest, rarely did five percent of an original population survive, and never at the level of advancement they had been at the time of the Sol-Kor arrival.

Yet even five percent survival rate was enough to repopulate a planet, if given enough time. Periodic surveys were done of planets that had been harvested several thousand years ago to see if the population had grown significantly to warrant a second harvest. J’nae found that of all the planets harvested over two thousand years before, fifteen percent of them had undergone a re-harvesting.

As a result, this line in her research reached a dead-end. Any ancient race who could have resurrected an advanced civilization would have been subsequently re-harvested long before they could become a threat to the Colony.

Unless…

Unless it was a pre-suppressor beam race. And even before that, before gravity drive technology.

Before these technological innovations, planetary harvests were much more primitive, more time-consuming and less thorough. They involved wholesale invasions and outright battles. The bodies of dead natives were quickly collected to be processed before they went bad. Campaigns such as these could last decades, during which time nests of native survivors could have hidden from the Sol-Kor. They wouldn’t have suffered the effects of prolonged beam suppression or exposure to the elements. And when the Sol-Kor left, what was left of their civilization would continue, damaged yet still intact.

Within her mind, J’nae began to look far back into Sol-Kor history, back to the very first harvests, to the point where she happened upon a name. When she saw it, she was shaken to the core.

J’nae!

The name of the planet screamed in her brain. It was what Panur had named
her
, and a quick scan of the knowledge within her mind revealed why. There were ancient files available referring to the creation of
her
creator. He had been created in essentially the same process as she. So was this sentiment on Panur’s part, a way to keep some strange bond alive between him and his ancestors? That was a surprise, even if J’nae had to admit to having a full cache of emotions present in her as well.

Panur’s genetic material—at least half of it—came from this planet, which had been the second harvested by the newly spacefaring Sol-Kor. Being only the second, it would be expected that a vast number of the natives—Hal’ic they were called—would have survived. And yet that is not what the surveys showed.

In the five thousand years since the harvest, the race had never resurrected, a second harvest had never been ordered. This was unusual.

J’nae leaned back in her chair and smiled. It was all too obvious. The odds of the Hal’ic never advancing from beyond the point of the first harvest, after so many centuries, was not to believed.

The Hal’ic were there—Panur’s ancestors—and they had effectively hid from the Sol-Kor all this time. And only six light-years from Kor.

“That is where Adam Cain was taken,” J’nae announced to the empty room. “And that is where I will find this new threat to the Colony.”