The Legend of Corinair (21 page)

Jalea picked up her mug of ale and took a sip. She had never truly acquired a taste for such intoxicants, but had learned to tolerate it as operations often called for their use. She was sure that the bartender had gone to confer with others who were probably watching her through a hidden video monitoring device at this very moment.

A few minutes later, the bartender returned, placing her change on the counter. He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “Down the hall, third door, downstairs. Now, slap me like I just propositioned you.”

Without hesitation, Jalea leaned back and slapped him hard with her open hand, followed by tossing the remainder of her ale in his face. “Pig!” she yelled as she rose from her barstool and stormed off down the hallway.

The bartender laughed in the face of the onlookers. “Worth it,” he chuckled.

Jalea strode indignantly into the hallway, going right past both the men’s and then the women’s restrooms, instead entering the third door just as instructed. The room was dark, lit only by a bit of light coming through a crack in the curtain that covered the small, high window. She found a light control by the door and activated the overhead light panel. The room was small with many storage shelves on one wall and a large wash basin on the other. She felt around the storage shelves until she found what she was looking for. On the side of the shelving unit was a small catch. She grabbed it and pulled, causing the shelving unit to swing forward slightly. She pulled harder and swung the unit open to reveal a staircase that led down to a lower level.

Jalea carefully stepped into the dim staircase, pulling the shelving unit back behind her until she felt it lock back into place. She descended the staircase slowly, her footsteps echoing down the long corridor at the bottom of the stairs.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, she followed the long hallway. She was sure it was going under the pedestrian walkway outside, possibly even over to another building on the opposite side. At the end of the hall, she reached a door, which she opened.

The next room was only a few meters square and was decorated with tapestries depicting the Legend of Origin. She had seen such artworks many times as a child, her father having served as a priest of the Order. His service to the Order had been the inadvertent cause of her mother’s death when she was still young, and it had been the direct cause of his own death much later. But despite these tragic memories, she had made herself remember all the trappings and rituals involved in the Order, knowing that the knowledge would someday come in handy.

To her left, there was a table full of candles and artifacts. In front of the table was a kneeling pillow. She stepped up to the pillow and knelt down. She picked up one of the unlit candles and held the tip to the flame of the main candle in the middle of the table. Once lit, she placed her burning candle on the table at the end of the row of already burning candles that had been placed by previous visitors that day. She crossed her hands in front of her chest, bowed her head down, and began to mumble an almost inaudible prayer. When she was finished, she drew a cross over her chest and rose. To her right were two small doors, each decorated in much the same fashion, although the symbols on the doors were obviously different. There was another door in the wall behind her directly adjacent to the table full of candles, but she already knew that the purpose of that door held no interest for her.

She entered one of the two doors and stepped into a small confessional booth. After closing the door, she turned, sat down, and waited for someone to come. After waiting for several minutes, a bright blue beam of light washed across her, traveling from her head to her toes in less than a minute. She knew instantly that she had been scanned. It was not an uncommon precaution, considering how deep into the Ta’Akar controlled Pentaurus cluster the Darvano system was located. The Legend of Origins was still a forbidden practice under the order of Caius, and all caught in its practice were summarily executed.

Once the scan completed, she heard the sound of the third door in the room as it opened and closed, followed by the sounds of footsteps as someone—a man by the weight of his footfalls—made his way across the small outer room, opened the door to the adjacent booth, and closed it behind him.

A moment later, the opaque screen on the wall between them began to glow, the silhouette of the occupant in the next booth showing on its surface.

“Why do you seek counsel?” a benevolent male voice came from the adjacent booth. The screen was nothing more than a piece of cloth casting a shadow of the occupant; hence the man’s voice came through quite clearly.

“I’ve had a dream,” she began.

“We all have dreams, child.”

“Perhaps dream is not the right word.”

“What word might better describe what you experienced?”

Jalea paused for a moment, feigning hesitation for an unknown emotional reason. “I’m not sure,” she lied.

“Are you unsure, or unwilling to admit the truth?” the man prompted.

“A bit of both, I suppose.”

“Do not worry, for you are not judged, at least not by me.”

“It was not a dream, really. I want to call it… a vision, but I’ve never had such and have no way to tell if that description might be any more accurate.”

“What makes you think it was not a dream?”

“I was not asleep at the time,” she admitted softly.

“I see,” the man said. “Perhaps, if you tell me of this experience, I might be better able to help you identify it, to understand its meaning.”

“It was a voice,” she told him, “a man’s voice. An old man, I believe. I’m not sure.”

“And what did this voice say to you?”

“He told me to look to the sky on this night. To the level of the first moon, but a quarter rotation to the north. At twenty-eight thirty,
on this night
,” she told him. Jalea was pouring all her emotion into her performance, playing the tortured and confused soul for all she could muster.

“What is it that you are supposed to see?” the man asked.

Jalea could tell that the priest’s curiosity was peaked. “He said a sign would be given. And that on the next day, a gift would be bestowed upon us all, a gift that would save us all from evil,” she told him, almost in tears. “Oh, father, do you think me insane?”

“Of course not, child.”

“But father. I think the voice… I think it was God, father.” There was no response from the man after that, and for a moment, Jalea feared she had overplayed her hand.

“I’m curious,” the man asked. Jalea could hear the doubt in his voice. She was probably not the first person to tell him that God had spoken to them. “Why do you tell this to me?”

“I do not wish this burden,” Jalea told him as she sniffed. “I am not a strong woman. I am a nobody. I fear persecution. Someone else must deliver the message.”

“Deliver it to whom?”

Jalea pretended to think for a moment, as if she had not considered that possible question until now. “I’m not sure,” she told him, making it sound like an admission. “Other believers, maybe? People who believe in the Legend of Origin?”

“And to what end?” he challenged.

“If something bad is about to happen, or something good for that matter, shouldn’t the people know?”

“Perhaps,” he agreed.

After another moment of silence, interrupted only by her occasional sniffle, Jalea spoke up once more. “Father? Do you think me insane?”

The man felt pity for the woman. If she was telling the truth, she was obviously upset by this revelation. Perhaps it challenged her beliefs, or perhaps it confirmed them, even after she had long suppressed them out of fear of reprisals by the Ta’Akar. If she was lying, then he simply pitied her for her foolishness.

“Who is to say that God does not speak to people such as you and me?” he told her.

“Thank you,” she sniffled one last time before she quickly exited the booth and ran out of the room.

The man sat in his booth for several minutes after she had left. He had counseled many during his service to the order, and many had claimed to have visions, to have received messages from their Savior. They were almost always simply the tortured souls of ordinary people that were seeking some sort of forgiveness, some sort of redemption, at least in their own minds. He had never begrudged any of them that which they sought. But none of those that had made such claims before had spoken of impending signs, and never of signs that were to occur at such an exact time and in such a precise location. It gave him cause for thought.

CHAPTER 7

Nathan lay stretched out on the couch in his quarters as he continued to skim through the video recording collected by the signals intelligence team. But unlike his previous sessions, he wasn’t really looking for anything in particular; he was just looking.

The door buzzer sounded. Nathan paused the video feed, rose, and went to the hatch to open it.

“Hi,” Cameron said. “Got a minute?”

“Sure, come on in,” he invited, returning to the couch.

“You still watching that stuff?”

“Yeah. You know, it’s kind of amazing, really.”

“How so?”

“Well, their society. They’ve got music, sports, movies, and news. They’ve got families, schools, hospitals, celebrities. Hell, they’ve even got politics. It’s just like on Earth. I mean, it’s not; it’s very different. But then again, it isn’t. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yes, actually, it does. I noticed the same thing back on Earth. I grew up on the European continent. We had all these little countries, and each one of them was very different: different languages, different foods, different music. But they were still basically all the same. Why should it be any different out here?”

“Come on, Cam. Not only are we a thousand light years away, but a thousand years have passed since these people left Earth.”

“They’re still human beings, Nathan, just like us.”

Nathan sat quietly in the dark room, the light of the flickering video monitor dancing across the room.

“Listen, I hate to ruin your viewing pleasure, but I thought you should see this,” she said, handing him a new data module. “Vlad and Allet got the base’s comm-array linked into our systems. This is one of the first signals we collected.”

Nathan took the module, got up, walked over to the control unit, and swapped it with the current module. It immediately began playing. The camera work was shaky and it was difficult to watch. It was obviously made up of clips from many different sources. Some of it was obviously done by amateurs and other bits were from news cameras on the scene, but both showed the same death and destruction. It was destruction on a massive scale. There was footage of huge streaks of red-orange balls of energy raining down from the sky and flattening buildings. There were bodies everywhere. Some of them had been torn apart by shock waves and debris, while others were burned beyond recognition. There were even some mounds of red, maroon, and black goo that Nathan later realized were people that had literally melted from the sudden intense heat of the energy blasts. Then, suddenly, the view cut to the weapons cameras of what Nathan assumed were either Ta’Akar fighters or rebel ships. They showed intermittent shots of the battle in orbit above the world that was being decimated. And it showed the Ta’Akar ship—the same one that he had rammed only minutes after accidentally arriving in the middle of the raging battle. It showed that very same ship raining the deadly balls of energy onto the helpless planet below.

Suddenly, Nathan felt great satisfaction that they had somehow managed to destroy that ship. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked quietly.

“Yes. This is footage from the attack on the last rebel base, the attack we jumped into the middle of. It was broadcast on the news networks on Corinair less than an hour ago.”

Nathan looked at Cameron. She had never seen such incredible guilt in anyone’s eyes. “Did we—” He had to stop for a moment to get control of himself. “Did I cause this?”

“No, Nathan. We didn’t cause this. These images are from before we arrived. If anything, we stopped it.”

“But why? Why would they glass the planet? Surely they knew they were slaughtering far more innocents than rebels.”

“They don’t care. As best I can tell, it’s their way of making sure that no one dares oppose them again.”

“How are the people on Corinair reacting? Surely something like this has to enrage them.”

“Surprisingly, they’re not reacting much at all. The few comments we’ve seen are supporting the action.”

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“Personally, I think they’re too scared to speak out. I mean, come on. After seeing that, wouldn’t you be afraid as well?”

Nathan continued to watch the recording, which by now was showing the aftermath of the devastating attacks. After a few minutes he had to ask. “So what happened to these people? Did anyone send them any aid?”

“No,” she answered flatly. “The entire world has been quarantined. If they’re going to recover, they’re going to have to do so on their own.”

No more words were exchanged between them over the next few minutes as they both sat watching in fascination and disgust.

“Anyway, I just thought you should know,” she told him as she rose to exit.

“Why? To scare me into running away or to make me want to stay and help them seek retribution?”

“I wasn’t
trying
to make you do anything, Nathan. I was just giving you the facts. You do what you think is right with them. That’s your job as Captain of this ship.”

Nathan stared at her for a moment, not knowing whether to thank her for trying to help, or curse her for forever searing the ghastly images into his mind. He finally decided she was just doing her job.

“Thanks, Cam.”

Cameron looked at him. His expression was as dour as she had ever seen it. “Goodnight, Nathan,” she said softly, after which she departed.

* * *

The priest of the Order of Origin was still troubled hours after his last counseling session. In fact, he had been so disturbed by that session that he had closed that day and gone home to spend time with his family. Later that evening, after dinner when he saw the news broadcast about the Ta’Akar attack against the last remaining Karuzari base, his concern grew deeper. He had always avoided choosing sides. He knew that the Doctrine of Origins was a complete falsehood. He knew it in his very soul. He risked his life every day in his role serving the Order, but it was a calling like no other. He was preserving a belief that had lasted for thousands of years across the galaxy, and no one man could dissuade him or his fellow worshipers of their belief.