Her eyes shifted to him. “So Area 67 really is an alien research center?”
“Uhm, I actually don’t know. That’s not where I got my information,” he told her, but he was wondering if that wasn’t also true.
“Where did you--”
The Cetix slammed its head against the glass and they both jumped several feet into the air. A starburst-like mark appeared on the glass. One more slam and it would shatter the glass completely. Bitter adrenaline flooded his mouth and Jace got up on his toes.
“Damn… maybe we should retreat?” Jace suggested with a wild laugh.
Sami gritted her teeth and shook her head. “It’ll just follow.”
“Yes,” Jace stated and tightened his hand on the weapon. “You’re right. We make a stand here.”
“Right.”
The Cetix drew its head back, preparing to slam into the glass again. Jace braced for it. Sami did the same. Suddenly, red laser beams--LASER BEAMS!--streaked through the air. They hit the Cetix’s carapace and left baseball sized holes through it. The thing let out a terrible scream and charged at whoever was shooting.
Soldiers appeared. They had weapons that he recognized from his dreams though no synthskin uniforms. He couldn’t remember the name for the guns. It would come to him. But he knew that they were laser guns. Every sci fi story told him that.
The Omull were suddenly in the fight. Red beams grew thicker in the air. But the Omull kept coming even as their limbs were blown off or disintegrated. One soldier let them get too close and a huge clawed arm sent him flying through the plate glass window of the Con-Ve. He landed at Jace’s feet. The soldier’s throat was opened down to the bone. Blood pooled around his head.
“No!” Sami cried as she took in the horror of it.
But Jace was focused only on the weapon the soldier carried, but no longer needed. It called to him. He dropped the axe and reached for it.
“Jace, what are you doing?” Sami cried.
His fingers closed around the weapon and the staticky buzzing sound quieted. His mind completely quieted. And in that silence a voice rose up, warm and inviting.
Jace? Gehenna asked.
Jace smiled. Gehenna?
Yes, he could hear her smiling though she was an AI. Finally, I’ve found you.
Return
Khoth’s hands lightly rested on the controls of his personal Paladin-class starship, the Exarch, as he piloted it towards the massive Gate the Altaeth had built above Haseon. The Gate glittered as the metal--or calcanth as it was called, which the Altaeth built all their structures out of regardless of whether they were on the ground or in darkness of space--was hit by rays of Haseon’s sun.
Strangely, no one in the Illumen Alliance had ever found calcanth on any known Altaeth world, or any world at all, actually. Some thought that it was not a natural material whatsoever, but had been grown somehow. Yet calcanth’s constituent parts were just as mysterious as the whole. It was but another mystery of the countless mysteries surrounding the Altaeth.
The Gate itself was an enigma, too. It was seemingly simple, consisting of only two curved wedges of calcanth--miles wide and tall--that rotated around one another in a graceful circle. Never touching. They only stopped spinning once a destination Gate was selected on a nearby ship. Then the wedges locked in place and the space between them would glow a fiery red, before a silvery tunnel appeared. Entering the tunnel, a ship could be taken across the known galaxy in a matter of hours. The location of new Gates was a full-time occupation for the Icith, a gentle, gigantic species of spacefaring beings who could not fight to save their lives, but they located Gates with an alacrity that no other species in the Alliance could match.
How the Gates worked--potentially opening wormholes through spacetime--was unknown. They’d been studied for millennia, but no one dared dismantle one for fear of not being able to put it back together and losing that destination forever. But scans had shown little to nothing about the interior of these wedges. Scientists warned that if they did not discover how the Gates worked they might not be able to repair damaged ones later and might lose access to whole swaths of the Alliance. But that had not happened so far. The Gates were remarkably maintenance and error-free. They were not attacked by the Khul either, for their enemy needed the Gates as much as the Alliance did to breach the great distances between star systems.
There had been three ships ahead of Khoth to use the Gate, but now he was next. He lifted his right hand to change his view to a split-screen. The Gate ahead of him and Haseon, his beloved homeworld, behind him. His hand trembled and he quickly lowered it, curling his fingers against his palm as he rested it on top of his thigh.
This might be the last time I see Haseon. I should wish it farewell.
But he did not change the view, yet neither did he ask for clearance to leave for Earth. In fact, he was silent for so long that the Gate Control contacted him.
“E-Exarch, is there some difficulty?” the crisp voice of Control asked.
The Thaf’ell Control officer stumbled over his ship’s name. It was not a word that was of any language that was known. It was a made up word as far as he could tell. Daesah had been the one to name it.
“The Exarch. That is your ship’s name,” she’d told him.
He’d frowned at her at the time. “What kind of name is that?”
