The Story Thus Far
Construction on Pelegna Centrova Station had ground to a halt, and a worrying number of people likely knew.
Administrator Praath had done his best to prevent word from getting out, but at this point a flyby would be all that was needed to see just how far behind schedule he was: modules 12 through 18 were unfinished, their innards exposed to vacuum, and spire four, rather than connecting to a comms tower, terminated in a mishmash of reflective elements that had been hastily grafted to it to prevent collisions with docking supply craft and fab drones.
No, anyone that looked would be able to tell, and far-field sensors had picked out a statistically-above-background number of warp bubbles dissolving and forming, the cosmic equivalent of rubbernecking. With each passing day Praath grew more and more self-conscious. It wasn’t his fault the Golganaut had never arrived, and he had reported its disappearance in a timely fashion to the proper authorities, but the replacement he had ordered was now also being delayed by mineral conflict in New Byzantia, and he had no recourse to appeal to the GC for assistance since this whole damn project was being executed outside their auspices. Oh, it was legal, but it was also the latest bit of human expansion outside their own solar system without explicit Decider approval. The price of autonomy was, well, autonomy.
It was with great trepidation, then, that Praath welcomed Clade Ruffeline, a ‘fact finder’ (clearly a spook) for the Deciders, onboard his unfinished deep space waystation.
“Impressive work, for humans,” he commented, as Praath took him on a begrudging tour of Centrova’s pressurized wings. Clade’s second skin made him present as a bipedal humanoid, but Praath knew that a gangly mass of cilia writhed within that opaque suit, something utterly alien masquerading as an upright primate so as not to upset the delicate sensibilities of a callow junior partner species. The flat display that sat atop the skin’s shoulders like a human head wore an expression of grudging respect but Praath knew it was another lie.
“Yes, well, it’s a work in progress. I do hope you will visit again once it’s complete, but for the time being I fail to see how I could assist you.”
“Oh, but you’ve already done so much for my investigation. Truly.”
This comment did little to assuage Praath’s discomfort. If anything, it increased it. Was the real investigation into the station itself, and the disappearance of the Golganaut merely a convenient excuse?
“I’m so glad to hear that,” he lied through clenched teeth, “this concludes the tour, unless you need to see the exposed wings, in which case I can arrange for a technician to accompany you, assuming your skin can support you in vacuum?”
“Of course it can,” the screen grinned, “but that won’t be necessary. I would, however, like to conduct some staff interviews, if you could…?”
Kylex was dying. He’d already lost feeling in two of his forelimbs, and there was a strained feeling in all four of his hind limbs that he knew from experience preceded their loss. His hearts were sluggish and his ichor pooled, denying his extremities vital nutrients. Sleeping was always a tricky proposition of a Eupanoma, with most healthy individuals standing for the duration, but for the past three days, Kylex had rested in a gel-chamber to take his weight, drifting in and out of consciousness. He dreamed of independence from his physical form, of returning to pure will and once more embodying all of creation, but he knew that time would not come for centuries, or even millennia: the galaxy had to be conquered first.
Gradually, like waking from a dream, he became aware that someone was communing with him—there was a jangling in his skull, a signal from the biomechanical interface he used in the gel-chamber to maintain direct control over his planetary empire. Its salient, large-scale properties—population, economy, industry—became like extra senses in his perception, and he could steer them at will to maintain balance. Cooling an overheated economy was as easy as moving a few paces back from a warming fire.
“Speak,” he commanded.
“Lord Disidera, you who are the manifestation of the world itself, I would grant you knowledge.”
“Grant.”
“Your flagship is complete. It was subjected to a barrage of tests, including live-fire drills, and the effected portions have been replaced. It is as durable and lethal a craft as Eupanoma is capable of manifesting at this juncture.”
“Begin raising all offensive craft to orbit. We strike Frond III at dawn.”
“A display of our power, lord?”
“I feel the quickening. My new body must be anointed in blood.”
If Kylex focused, he could shift his awareness into the nascent body growing inside him. While he was reality incarnated, these two nested bodies and their associated biomechanics were the only sensory perspectives he had access to. He flicked a clawed finger within himself, feeling the faintest thrill of pain where it grazed his innards, and grinned savagely within the gel matrix. Then, with less effort than it would take to lift a finger, he summoned a team of slaves to bear the vessel containing him to his new flagship.
“Funniest thing,” Clade said, placing a suitably sheepish grin on his facial display, “we seem to have ‘misplaced’ the record of where the Golganaut was setting out from. We know it took off from somewhere is New Byzantia, which isn’t huge, but with 6400 lightyears between them and you, that still leaves a 500 cubic lightyear cone of volume to search. The GC is powerful, but that’s a tall order, even for us. We’re just looking for any clues that could help us narrow the scope of our efforts.”
Ampere Bechard swallowed nervously, dearly wishing he had followed his instincts and hopped in a warp pod the second he found out there was a GC agent aboard Centrova station. The GC wasn’t known for being particularly cruel to those that interfered with the highest levels of their political and military activity, but on the other hand, this was the same organization that would literally vaporize an entire planet if they thought a single species on it might be a threat.
“I, uh, don’t know myself. We used to get lots of shipments from that region. Crews here like to say Pelegna Centrova is a little piece of New Byzantia all the way out in Perseus.”
“Oh, that’s cute,” Clade replied, flashing a patronizing smile, “What can you tell me, then? Anything? Any little detail could help.”
“Well,” Ampere began, wondering if he was still selling Praath out just a bit. Better him than the entire species. “The administrator and I guessed that maybe they got picked up by the ‘pedes.”
“Beg pardon?” Clade leaned in, feeling his cilia still and stiffen as he focused his skin’s sensors on this strange bald ape and its communication orifice.
“Eu-somethings. ‘pedes. The Golganaut was, uh, maybe gonna be near their home world during transit.”
“Eupanoma, eh?” Clade felt a knot of anger in his cytoplasm. Those fucking cultists again. If they were behind this, that would be a much more interesting assignment than this time-wasting boondoggle. If the humans wanted to plant a flag outside their arm of the galaxy, so be it—they wouldn’t have enough influence to cause real trouble for at least another century. He got up and walked away from the ape without another word, heading towards the bay where his ship was docked. The sooner this information got to his superiors, the sooner he could get off this assignment. And perhaps there would be a more interesting one on offer in the near future.
The view of space on the command deck of the Castigator was triply distorted; first, by the gel matrix, then the ship’s artificial atmosphere, then the thick composite glass of the observation blister. Outside the chamber, Kylex was alone, save his honor-guard. Before his eyes, the glistening planet far below seemed to dim, but he knew it was just his vision failing. It was time.
Shifting his mind to his inner body, he embraced it fully for the first time and felt the exultation once more, that of a fit young adult, after decades trapped in an aging and increasingly decrepit form. He surged with youth and virility: all he needed to do was free himself. Flexing his claws, he began to tear at the flesh that surrounded him, shuddering at the intensity of the pain as he cut his way out of his own body. He had done this hundreds of times: enough to have grown to savor the agony of it. It was his trial, the price to keep this splendid form, and he paid it gladly. Gel and light began to flood into the dark cavity that held him, displacing ichor and viscera, and he pulled himself forward, seizing the sides of the opening he had created and wrenching outward.
With that splitting of bone and carapace his old body died, ending the supply of gasses that traveled from pump to tube to orifice to trachea to him. He needed to surface or he would suffocate. Dragging himself forward, the pain of his old body faded only to be replaced with the agony of asphyxiation. Desperately, he spread the chest open wider and, with a series of furious kicks that broke bone and tore ligament, dragged himself free of his molting. His head broke the surface of the gel-matrix and he gasped, taking his first deep breath of air. The honor-guardsmen held firm, making neither sound nor expression as their god, de-aged by more than a hundred years, naked, dripping with globs of gel, leapt from the lip of the tank into their midst and then made his way to the master controls.
“Kill,” he rasped into the master comms unit, and the space outside his ship lit up with fire as his fleet began their bombardment of Frond III. An attendant appeared with a towel and he cleaned himself, polishing his claws until they shone. They would drop off in a few days—they were only to facilitate his reincarnation—but while he had them he intended to enjoy them.
“So that’s the only lead. If the humans knew more than they were telling me, which is always the case, I didn’t have clearance to go digging in their grey matter. If you want to escalate this, however, I’d be happy to head right back there and…”
“That won’t be necessary,” clicked the reply from Clade’s Decider contact. They weren’t meeting in person: Clade had dropped out of warp a few light seconds from the GC intelligence outpost orbiting the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole and set up a quantum channel. “We have numerous pressure points in this investigation, and your skills will be better-employed elsewhere.”
Clade let a sigh of relief out through his spiracles and watched the bubbles drift away through the fluid that filled his small, zero-g warpcraft. It was very fast, but he had little desire to repeat the 30,000 lightyear trek. As the gas bubbles approached the walls of the chamber, they sped up, sucked into the craft’s filtration system by nested impellors, to be recycled into breathable, nitrogen-rich water. He decided to push his luck.
“Permission to request information.” He waited , cilia on end, for the reply. It came after exactly six seconds: two out, two back, and two during which the speaker must have deliberated.
“Granted.”
“What is the status of the Erileytha system?”
“They are being monitored by a private contractor within the Belichore Provincialists. Last memo received 5.3872 galactic seconds ago: Summary: Planet five building out warp capacity, likely aware of GC. Planet three pre-warp, early-stage global-orbital civ, peaceful, junior partner candidate.”
“Five seconds is a long time,” Clade said slowly, weighing his words, “That’s an entire Eupanoma generation, if I recall.”
“Correct.”
“Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted.”
“I may be on the verge of uncovering a conspiracy. I don’t yet know the full scope, but I’ve heard too many anecdotes about the current Eupanoma regime to trust ‘all is well’ memos from the team monitoring them. Those things are aggressive, possibly a planetary death cult, and if they’ve been hijacking freighters for the last fifty standard years, their military capabilities may far exceed even our worst-case projections.”
“Very well. We will send an emissary ahead of you to Belichore to arrange a meeting with the team monitoring the Erileytha system. We take your concerns very seriously, and grant you level three discretion in this undertaking.”
Clade Ruffeline spun joyfully in his little ship as he punched the Belichore system into his nav computer and bubbled back up. Level three discretion was head-knocking business. Level three discretion was rough-them-up-and-threaten-their-family type shit. His decades of loyal service to the GC Deciders were finally paying off, and if his suspicions were correct, this conspiracy—he was certain that’s what it was—could lead to even more exciting work in the weeks to come.