Chapter 17 #2
She spoke to them again, and the Kythrans shook their heads in dismay.
Zara persisted and I waited impatiently as they exchanged words.
Finally, she turned back to us. “They say they are also looking for answers. I told them that we need to understand how the systems work,” Zara said.
“And how to shut them down, or stabilize them. I told them that the planet is dying because of the poisoned atmosphere and they said that they are dying too. Have been dying for many cycles.”
Vikkat moved forward, and I saw him struggling to control himself. “Tell them that they built the weather systems. They turned our world into poison. They must fix it.”
Zara conveyed the message, but the Kythrans shook their heads again. Something like grief crossed their ancient features as the one answering for all of them replied.
“They say that they did not build them,” Zara said quietly. “Their ancestors built them, generations upon generations ago. They are the descendants of maintenance workers. Of technicians. Not the architects. Not the designers.”
“But they understand how they work,” Vikkat pressed. It wasn’t quite a question.
“They understand pieces. Fragments.” Zara gestured at the dismantled technology scattered throughout the chamber.
“They say they’ve spent their entire lives trying to understand.
Trying to find a way to shut them down, or repair them, or…
or anything. But the systems are too complex.
Too vast. Too…” She paused, hesitating over her next words. “Too evolved.”
Something cold settled in my stomach. “Evolved?”
“That’s what they said,” she replied, looking faintly sick. “I don’t know how to take that.”
The Kythran looked at me directly for the first time, and I saw millennia of defeat in those dark eyes. Their words seemed to pour from them and Zara nodded, digesting what they were saying. I could feel the entire D’tran party leaning in, waiting for her translation.
Zara looked at us with a wince. “The weather control network was designed to be autonomous. Self-repairing, self-optimizing, learning from its own operations. The Kythran ancestors thought this was brilliant engineering. They thought it would run perfectly forever, without need for intervention.”
“But it didn’t,” I said.
“No. It learned. It adapted. It grew beyond its original parameters.” Zara’s voice was getting stronger now, animated by the excitement of a new discovery.
“They say somewhere in its history, the network lost the original purpose it was designed for. It began optimizing for efficiency rather than habitability. It began treating the atmosphere as a resource to be managed rather than an environment to be maintained.”
“When?” Vikkat demanded. “When did this happen?”
“Millennia ago,” she replied, then tilted her head toward the Kythran, who gestured at their companions again.
“These six are all that remain of their species on this world,” Zara said, brows furrowed in sympathy.
“They’re last descendants of those who maintained the systems. They say that there were only males born in the previous generation, and they are content to allow themselves to die out here.
They’ve spent their entire lives trying to find a way to shut the systems down. ”
“And?” I asked, though I already knew the answer from the defeat in their posture.
“And they failed,” Zara replied with a blink that said, isn’t that obvious?
“The systems are distributed across parts of the planet. Dozens of towers, each with hundreds of control nodes and processing units. They communicate with each other in protocols these Kythran can barely begin to understand. They have redundancies upon redundancies. Shutting down one tower will just cause the others to compensate and increase their output.”
The Kythran pulled themselves more upright, and I could see this was costing them significant effort. “They say the weather control network has evolved beyond them. Beyond anyone.”
The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
I felt Zara sag slightly beside me, the weight of that revelation crushing the hope she’d been carrying.
All her modifications to the scanning equipment, all her plans to study the control systems and find a solution—none of it mattered if the systems themselves were beyond anyone’s ability to control.
But it was the D’tran’s reaction that made my blood run cold.
Their eyes, which I’d noticed shifted color with emotion, had stayed collectively red. Not the warm amber of calm or the dark blue of sadness. Pure, brilliant red. The color of rage given physical form.
“You lie,” Dorek said, and his voice was shaking with barely controlled violence. “You lie to save yourselves.”
“They’re not lying,” Zara said wearily. “Why would they? What purpose would it serve? They’re the last of their kind and have nothing left to lose.”
“They have their lives,” another D’tran warrior snarled. “And we will take them. Take them as payment for what their ancestors did to our world.”
I saw it happening. Saw the shift from desperate hope to murderous fury. Saw the moment when the D’tran collectively decided that if they couldn’t have results, they would settle for revenge.
Vikkat tried. I’ll give him that. “No. We came for answers, and we have them. We—”
But his warriors weren’t listening anymore.
The red in their eyes had spread to their skin, flushing their faces and necks with the color of pure rage.
They were done listening to reason, done hoping for solutions, done with everything except the need to hurt someone, anyone, who bore responsibility for their suffering.
I braced myself, feeling my own skin shift to defensive colors—red streaked with yellow and black—that marked me as ready for violence. The rock in my hand felt pitifully inadequate against the energy weapons held by six D’tran warriors.
But I wasn’t moving. I’d stood between predators and prey, and I was going to stay there, even if it meant fighting my own distant cousins in this dark cave beneath a dying world.
Because the Kythrans had no chance of surviving what was about to happen unless someone stopped it.
And despite everything—despite the danger, despite the odds, despite the very real possibility that I was about to get myself killed—I couldn’t let these old, fragile beings be murdered for crimes their ancestors had committed millennia ago.
Zara moved closer to me, and through the bond, I felt her fear mixed with fierce determination. She wasn’t going to run either. We were partners, and we stood together.
Even if we were about to die together.
The D’tran advanced, weapons raised, eyes blazing red, and I knew that in seconds, this cave was going to become a battlefield.