Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
AIRIK
Airik’s routine didn’t change. For the past three mornings, he’d woken from a half sleep granted only because he sipped sedative serum throughout the nights.
He’d then performed his physical regimen, showered, and eaten nutrition gel—unflavored because he disliked any of the flavors formulated to appease biological needs.
Without a Watcher system scrutinizing his actions, he could experiment without worrying about an oath-branding for deviating from protocols.
He learned the exact dosage of sedative serum to send him into a dull, dreamless sleep.
But even without the terrors, Airik would shoot up, hands shaking, heart pounding, the scar under his eye burning like it still bled, whenever he woke.
By the time he ate, the tremble in his hands would calm, letting him perform the additional maintenance required to keep the aging striker from failing mid-orbit—adjusting the power core’s temperature shields so that it didn’t overheat and melt.
An imprecise action that Airik made while holding his breath.
Every day, he had verified that the ship’s heartbeat signal reached the outer Veynari network. In the unlikely event it went off, he wanted to ensure that its silence would be heard by outposts checking all Veynari craft in the vicinity, to send an extraction team if needed.
As Torren had pointed out in Zarmur, it was strange that Airik sat, staring at the communications panel, waiting for authorization to decommission Ed’un.
He’d already read the mission objectives.
He knew that because of the presence of morphed kudra, this planet had a plasma shield to keep reapers out.
If an unauthorized craft passed the shield, it’d be shredded into thousands of pieces.
Not even reapers would gamble on the chance that Veynari tech would ever fail.
But Airik didn’t complain or even check with an outpost directly for news. Morazir were almost never assigned to non-combat positions, a waste of skill and strength. So even if it was a blurred sort of existence, he tried to enjoy the silence.
The striker orbited just outside Ed’un’s gravitational pull. Above Airik, the plasma shield pulsed, sometimes spiking and sputtering forth bits of hyper-pressurized gas in response to the still-flaring solar storms.
It didn’t bother him. As long as the tunneling portal still worked, a black void in the center of the plasma shield just ahead of where the striker was stationed, he’d have a way back to Vorakon and out of immediate danger.
Below him, Ed’un’s purple-and-gray mass turned, the swirls of its storms visible through the cloud of atmospheric processors that pumped appropriate concentrations of gas to make the atmosphere breathable for true sapient species.
Once, Ed’un had been a testament to Veynari control over nature.
Its landscape and air had been transformed from toxic to hospitable.
Wildlife and fauna had been seeded. It had thrived, so a research colony and city, Buriji, had been built to house researchers and the Veynari star fleet.
Its location at the boundary of the Axa Galaxy made it well suited for outer expansion.
But then the kudra, which powered the city, had morphed into brittle, toxic crystals that, if inhaled, would be lethal.
The event killed half of Buriji’s population within hours.
In a bid to save precious resources, after a morazir-led evacuation had saved those who had survived exposure, the Veynari had irradiated the planet hundreds of times, hoping to stop the morph.
It hadn’t worked. Even after neutralization, the morph persisted. The wildlife that lived had been forever changed, bent toward venom and poison adaptations, all within such a short span of time that Ed’un had been abandoned, a loss and a lesson.
And now, once authorized, Airik would shift the gravity of the planet’s core. Molecular disruptors would trigger tectonic quakes, crushing Ed’un’s mass until nothing would be left but tiny rocks contained within the plasma shield.
The decommissioning of a mistake. A chance for him to rest. Alone. Starbound. And for now, safe.
Knowing he couldn’t be watched, he pulled out a glass screen from his bag, about the size of a book. The last language module Airik’s progenitor had built. It used a neural algorithm to approximate his progenitor’s voice, forming Urrthen words from the books and recordings loaded into its system.
Airik tapped the glass screen to wake it up.
Why are you doing this again?
The device hummed softly, piecing together vocabulary from the last time he’d used it, before the Lemides.
“Caterpillar,” a man’s voice said. This word, the only one of its kind in the module’s system, had been recorded directly—not an approximation.
A woman’s voice, fighting laughter, recited the word next. “It sounds silly,” the recording said.
Airik’s chest felt as though it’d collapse under the weight of a connection he couldn’t seem to sever. Filling him with…something.
Why does this still hurt?
“Caterpillar,” he heard his mother’s voice say again. The recording continued to repeat, as programmed, until the user attempted to say the word.
Caterpillar…caterpillar…caterpillar.
A foolish hope held Airik still, listening as the words repeated over and over and over again. Maybe once, she’d say something different. She’d say something to him—the man Airik had become.
After the pain within became too great and he wanted the words to stop, he mashed an icon on the screen, pulling up the Ingelesh word’s definition, in the generated voice and in the Veynari common language.
“The larva of a butterfly or moth, having a segmented body with three pairs of true legs and several pairs of leglike appendages. A wormlike insect whose entire purpose is to transform. Eating and growing so it can one day enclose itself in a protective shell, a cocoon, emerging later as an entirely different being with wings, a new purpose, and freedom from the ground.”
An animation of a tiny green creature crawled up and down a twig as Airik read the pronunciation guide.
Maybe it was the sudden loneliness that compelled him. Or more likely, a madness that made him try to attempt the word for the first time.
“Caw-tor-peel-urr.”
“Try that again.” The program meter beeped, blinking red. It even chided him like his progenitor.
“Caw-tur-peel-arr.”
“Not quite! Try again.”
“Cah-tur-pill-arr.” The syllables twisted on his tongue and lips as he imagined the creature would, though he’d never seen one and never would.
“Nice try, but you can do better!”
He groaned in frustration, uncorking the sleep-aid bottle. Overfilling his dosing cup, he considered trying the strange word again.
Just as he brought the cup to his lips, the return portal in the plasma shield above him shimmered, breaking his focus. “Clear the display,” he commanded the ship’s neural engine, his arms still frozen midair with the cup and bottle.
All measurements and data vanished from the viewport, giving him an unobstructed view of the plasma shield and the return portal above him.
A high-pitched squeal screamed through the ship. Something broke through the plasma shield.
Hastily setting down the cup and bottle, Airik rubbed his eyes, looked back at the cup to ensure it was full and that he hadn’t drugged himself into delirium, then looked back at the viewport.
The return portal and the plasma shield around it flickered.
What had been a void, so dark light couldn’t escape, burst with brilliant white light, like sunlight on a lake.
A metallic hull, red hot and battered, breached the light. Out of the fathoms of infinity, oozing from the white resonance, a ship emerged.
It came out slowly, Airik’s head swiveling to follow it, so close that if the viewport had been removed, he could throw a stone, breaking the tiny red light that blinked at the top of the unknown craft.
For some reason, he felt his left arm drop to his boot, his hand reaching for the knife’s handle, his body relaxing a little as he felt the cool metal blade.
Before Airik could send a warning signal, a small thruster on the craft spat out sparks, propelling it into Ed’un’s gravity. It made no effort to dodge any of the atmospheric processors, leaving a trail of explosions in its wake.
Airik switched the striker’s system from suspension to flight and gave chase.