Infinity (3 page)

   
The crew and their families
were residents of Infinity. Each crewmember had a mandatory period of time of
military service to fulfill. Infinity also carried travelers and colonists who
wished to move to another planet or galaxy within the kingdom. Non-military
citizens were not legally allowed to travel outside of the kingdom perimeter
without documents.
 
      
 
 

   
Infinity led the way as the
prince of the kingdom and commander of the forces addressed the crews of all
vessels as to what their mission would be. They were not told before they came for
the sake of security. If word got out to the enemies of the kingdom through
spies, it would put the whole mission in jeopardy. One hundred vessels from a
hundred different planets, all of them with a part human population that
dominated half of the planets, but were ruled by either a mixed couple or
couples originating from that world.

    
The crewmembers manning
the vessels were partly human, but most of them were either half human or full-blooded
natives of their worlds.

   
Fifty years had passed since
Cruise said farewell to his brother Arthos as he ventured away in search of the
lost relic with only one vessel accompanying him. The technology and knowledge
usually doubled every five years and the scientists on Cassiopeia, the best in
the kingdom, had been working to develop faster and more powerful drives for
the vessels.

Of the vessels
that Cruise took, five of them were equipped with all the latest technology and
driven by Vareilum crystal ore. The Varelium gave the vessels that had it the
speed to reach one hundred times the speed of light. The scientists warned,
though, that exceeding that speed could tear the engines and vessel apart,
ending in a massive one thousand terra-ton explosion that could devastate any
nearby planets.

“Take us out,
Infinity.” Four words from Cruise was all it took for Infinity to rev up her
engines and take them out far beyond their own solar system in less than two
earth seconds. In several Earth hours they had crossed a quadrant of the
kingdom and were leaving it far behind.

   
Dvora leaves her husband’s presence and flies across the megacity of
Shovaya in her hovercar to the location of her villa high on Oukrecan Pinnacle
in the Rocky Verutian Mountains. She was to meet her daughters there to plan a
surprise party for Daxu Korth. Before she enters the villa she notices
something very strange out on the lawn.

   
“A glowing rock has fallen from the sky,” she says to herself. “It’s
such a beautiful blue stone. I’ll make a pendant out of it and wear it around
my neck.” She picks up the small rock, about the size of a fig. Fig trees were
plenteous on Cassiopeia. Figs had been brought there from planets that had been
colonized by Earthlings ages before. She walks towards the villa and a funny
feeling comes over her. She gets dizzy and faints. She was unconscious for a
short instant and then she comes to. She sees that she had dropped the stone
and bends down to pick it up, but now the stone isn’t glowing anymore. It has
lost its glow and also its color. Now it just looks like an ordinary stone.

   
“Well, what kind of precious stone is that?” she flings it into the
garden pond. She enters the villa and proceeds to a transporter that looks like
an elevator, verbally commanding it to open.

   
The camera-like lens scans
her whole body and utters words in perfect Quewythian.
“Qfymmamt...STU...rojtojh...libxz.” “Scanning...DNA...searching...match.” “Stu
xudromiat.” “DNA...confirmed.” The elevator door opens and Dvora steps in. The
door shuts and Dvora is transported a mile down in just a few cycles. She steps
out of the transporter into a well-lit office with connecting laboratories,
hallways and rooms.

The doors on the
rooms all have numbers; Quewthian numbers. She walks over to the door that has
the number seven on it.

   
The character used for the
number seven looks like a palm tree with seven branches protruding from the
trunk. Dvora enters the room to an oval shaped table made of wood from the best
Quewythian trees on her home planet Laskaris. It was harder and more beautiful
than Mahogany retaining a natural redwood lustre.

“Mother,” says a
young woman named
Kyn, the eldest daughter of Dvora, speaking in the
traditional Quewythian language. “I and my sisters are pleased you could join
us.”

“I am also pleased you
received my messages and came speedily from the planets you are ruling.”

“Please sit, Mother,” says
Kathara, third eldest, gesturing her hand towards the head of the table; the
place reserved only for a Queen. Dvora takes her seat proudly and then greets
her other daughters in sequence of their age, raising her left hand in the
traditional greeting and bowing her head as she says each one’s name. Kyn, Vaneza,
Kathara Sarita, Emedria, Ophelia and my baby daughter, Yeralai I am pleased to
see you all.”

“We are pleased to see our
mother as always,” replies Kathara, as the eldest daughter must do. “Everything
is in place we trust.”

“It is, my daughters,”
replies Dvora, as she looks around the table at each one. “By the time of our
next dawn, when the morning Magenta sky turns to Cyan and the twin suns are
high, it will be finished.
Koupiton Hoxenyth will be
dead from the most powerful wuocuj in the Twelve Galaxies Cluster; the
poisonous Quewythian Klinaberry.”

“But Mother,”
responds Ophelia, “What are you talking about? We thought we were to plan a
party for him and now you talk about killing him. What’s gotten into you?”

   
Valenza, the oldest speaks. “Have
you lost your mind, mother? Father cannot be killed with any poison, even the
most powerful of all wuocuj, Klinaberry.”

   
The queen responds in anger.
“Yes, I am aware of that, Ophelia. But he shall be dead to us and the universe.
If the antidote is not administered, he will be catatonic.

   
This
will give us the opportunity to take over the Twelve Galaxies Cluster and
declare the usurpers and half-brothers Cruise and Arthos traitors. We will all
testify that they jointly planned and commanded the poisoning of their father,
and unlimited powers shall be granted to me...and my birth daughters.”

   
Her daughters were not able
to resist their mother’s demands. They seemed to have had no will of their own.
She seemed to be controlling them somehow. Just as Dvora had explained to her
daughters, the next morning after the Daxu Korth, ruler of the Twelve Galaxies
Cluster had his morning meal, he became sick.

“I’ve been poisoned.” He knew right away.
The doctors confirmed his suspicions and at once administered an antidote.
“Bring Dvora to me at once.” The antidote worked only partly as that particular
poison was very powerful.

“We have to have a stronger antidote made
in the laboratory,” says Physician
Ochacia,
the head doctor and surgeon commander of the planet. He called his assistants
by cyber phone at the laboratory and gave them instructions on how to make the
antidote.
 
“You must rest. I will
keep giving you doses of the antidote I have, but if the stronger antidote does
not get here soon, within two phases you will fall into a catatonic state.”

“But I can’t go
to sleep for two nights,” replies Daxu Korth, slightly delirious, using the
earth English language term for two phases.

“Where is Dvora?
I sent for her,” the king muttered. Daxu Korth lived in the Citadel from which
he ruled the Twelve Galaxies. It was a virtual city in itself in the mountains
outside of Cassiopeia’s capital city of Shovaya, but considerably smaller
covering an area equal to five thousand acres on earth.

   
The Citadel guards stood
their ground. Twelve of them surrounded the inside of the room and twenty-four
more were standing outside in the hallway. Fifty more guards surrounded the
house.

“What has
happened, my veki?” Dvora enters the room running up to the king, who looks at
her with suspicion.

“As if you
didn’t know,” he mutters, now gaining a little strength from knowing the woman
who wanted him dead was there, and he would have justice.

“What are you
talking about?” Dvora giggles as if she had no idea whatsoever.

The king then
asks for his prosecuting director, who had Dvora’s mountain villa bugged and
hidden surveillance cameras installed. The bugs that recorded all conversations
were so tiny they could go unnoticed even if they were in plain eyesight. The
cameras had been placed in every corner of the ceilings and were transparent,
the size of a pinhole. The king asked the prosecutor to turn on the device just
above the king’s mantle; on top of his fireplace.

“Dvora,” mumbles
the king, “I’ve been having your villa monitored for the past twenty cycles.
Yes, believe it or not, our planet has circled the twin suns twenty times
already. Time comes and is gone, and soon too.” That’s when my agents
discovered it in the Rocky Verutian Mountains.” Dvora’s face dropped in
astonishment and shame. Her eyes widened in fear as she heard her husband
reveal the truth; that he had been spying on her for the past twenty years.
“Let’s see if you conducted any secret meetings there recently.”

   
A screen that covered the
entire wall above the fireplace mantle was activated by the prosecutor’s voice.
He then fast forwarded the audial visual and set it to stop whenever there was
a conversation. When he played it back, the king saw the faces of Dvora and all
of his stepdaughters and also heard their devious plans.

He was weakening
even more now, but managed to sit up, being helped to his chair by two maidens;
house servants. Dvora just stood there, her eyes darting around the room as if
searching for a way to escape. The king turned to the guards. “I want six of
you to go and fetch my stepdaughters, all seven of them. Find them wherever
they are.”

“No,” cried
Dvora, “You mustn’t bring them here. It was all a misunderstanding, my veki.”

“My ears did not
misunderstand what I heard with my eyes and saw with my ears,” seethed the
king. “You know our law. The eyes and ears of two or more together are enough
of a witness to condemn you. Guards, seize her.”

   
Dvora hoped and prayed to
the Goddess of Darkness Velrshenah that the king would keel over and slip into
unconsciousness before the stronger antidote arrived. That would eradicate the
charges brought against her by her husband. She as the reigning monarch had
legal immunity. She could not be charged with any crimes as long as she reigned
and neither could her birth offspring.

The king also
knew this of course, and so did the doctor. Physician Ochacia rushed the order
to make the stronger antidote and ordered it transported by Quantum Action. It
arrived instantaneously. Quantum Action did not work on living things as of
yet, but the king had brought all of the best scientists in the Twelve Galaxies
Cluster to the royal Citadel laboratories two thousand years before to improve
it. Quantum Action had come into use for emergency situations only. The king
made it a law confirmed by the Royal Council of the Twelve Galaxies Cluster. It
was a highly guarded secret and was still under testing for distances. The
doctor administered the stronger antidote in time, with only minutes left.

“The symptoms are
subsiding,” announced the doctor in his native Quewythian, “due to the superior
DNA and super metabolism of the king.”

The guards still
had Dvora, holding her by her arms. The chief prosecutor was waiting to see if
the antidote was on time or not and sees that it had been successful. He
immediately orders Dvora to be bound with wrist cuffs made of the second strongest
metal in the Twelve Galaxies Cluster, Kraoleum.

Kraoleum was
what was used in the building of spacecrafts until Platainium was discovered.
Platainium had not only strength, but was also light and seemed to have a
living property about it.

   
The Kraoleum wrist cuffs
were augmented with a tracking device and electromagnetic locks impossible to
break out of. The king had the strength of fifty men and even he could not
break them. An electric current flowed through the cuffs, which paralyzed the
hands, wrist and forearm. It was virtually painless, unless the wearer was to
struggle trying to break free or should attempt an escape. Then the electric
current automatic increased until someone shut it down. The greater or longer
the struggle, the stronger the current became. It was not strong enough to kill,
unless the prisoner kept struggling for more than an hour.

The door opened
and the head guard announced that they had apprehended Dvora’s daughters. They
had also wrist-cuffed them, but the king did not want to see them. He knew they
were only his stepdaughters and that they had no right to an inheritance of
power or riches, not being his own offspring.

Now that the
king had recovered from his ordeal with Klinaberry, and realized that it had
been added to his morning meal in his juice cup, he remembered the audial
visual and Dvora’s words about the sorceress. “I want the sorceress Caratrah
Shadowfire
arrested and brought to the Hall of Justice right now.”

   
The king then ordered his
trusted house worker to playback the audial visual of the making of the morning
meal and every step that took place in the process. It came to the part where
the poison was added to the juice. The doctor, prosecutor, and the king saw
whom it was that Dvora used to poison him.

 
“Bring me the Chief Meal Preparer,”
shouted the king. A few cycles later he appeared with a guard at each side. The
meal preparer, Wutsam Tsupy, was trembling for fear.

“Why...W...what an honor to be brought
before the king,” he stammered. “What glorious event was it that prompted the
king to summon his number one food preparer? A birth moon or solar
anniversary?”

The king glowered at Wutsam while at the
same time gazing around the room. “I don’t need to be patronized. Just view
this audial visual of the preparation of my morning meal.”

Nothing more needed to be said. The two or
three witnesses confirmed the truth and Wutsam Tsupy was also wrist cuffed and
taken away to stand trial for attempted murder. The fact that the poison could
not kill the king, just leave him as a vegetable until he wore away after ten
more thousand years, was not enough to prevent the charge of high murder to be
submitted by the prosecutor.

Giving commands, Daxu Korth ordered Dvora
and her daughters also to be brought to the Hall of Justice. The trial took
place immediately, according to the law. Once accused criminals had been
arrested and charges brought against them, their trial would be held at once, no
matter what time of day or night.

The king would not preside as magistrate
according to the law, but the Supreme Magistrate Advocate would. Being a crime
against the king, the Commodore and his advisors, the king’s advisors, the
governor and mayor would be there as well as the chief Galactic Marshal. His
deputies swiftly found the sorceress and arrested her, bringing her to the Hall
of Justice.