Chroniech! (15 page)

"This is going to be a one-way meeting. I have not slept in over two days and, quite frankly, I am dead tired. I will present the information and the meeting will end. I will answer no questions until after I have had at least eight hours of sleep."

Stricklen glanced around the room to make sure that his last point had been understood. "Before I begin, I wish to inform everyone of a situation which has come to my attention within the last ten minutes. The ships that have been examining the remains of the Chroniech warships have left the area and are returning to Almaranus. A large group of Chroniech ships has been detected approaching the area and the group commander decided not to engage them in combat.”

"The transmission also included a bit of information which is alarming from a logistics point of view. A recording device was retrieved from one of the Chroniech ships and some of the records were still intact. A playback of these recordings suggests the Chroniech may have a method of instantaneous communications across interstellar distances. If this is true, they have a tactical advantage over us which will be very difficult to surmount.”

"At present, the communications device used to accomplish this has not been discovered among any of the recovered wreckage. I will provide additional information as it becomes available.”

"As you have all heard, about an hour ago I concluded a long meeting with the Kyrra. A total of five have been released from stasis and are now our guests. They are; Trel'mara, who is a communications engineer; El'Narra and Nordlatak who are both biologists; Norgoola who is a field dynamics expert and was also the pilot of the cargo ship; and Tee'Chea a construction engineer.”

"Although most of our talk centered around their current situation, we did manage to find quite a bit of time to discuss the history of both our cultures. Theirs is a very interesting history and I would like to share with you what we have learned." Ken then began to tell the story of the Kyrra.

Thousands of years ago, the Kyrra race had achieved a level of technology which allowed them to begin the exploration of space. After discovering faster than light drive, the Kyrra began to explore the surrounding star systems. Eventually, they found a planet which harbored life. They were very lucky that this life was not intelligent because what they found shocked them.

Violence and aggressive behavior was something unknown and totally alien to the Kyrra. The crew was shocked and horrified when they observed the local wildlife fighting each other to the death and the victors consuming their victims as food. After a crew member was killed by one of these animals, the exploration team quickly left the surface. Robotic probes were used to continue the observation.

Over the years, the Kyrra managed to understand this aggressive behavior and, as they explored more and more planets, they learned this was the norm for all other life. The Kyrra reasoned that if this were the case for primitive life, then it might also be the same for more intelligent life. This worried them greatly. It was eventually decided they would not contact any other intelligent species for fear of their possible aggressive behavior.

At first, the Kyrra remained content to stay within the confines of their own star system. It was feared that their risk of discovery by other space-capable cultures would be increased if they established colonies on other worlds. Nearly two hundred years after first achieving starflight, Kyrra technology reached a point where they could build probes that were virtually impossible to detect. They built a large number of automated probes and sent them out to explore the surrounding star systems.

As the technological sophistication and knowledge of the Kyrra grew, the probes became more and more advanced. Over the course of the next hundred years, several intelligent, space-faring races were discovered and observed from a distance. It soon became apparent to the Kyrra that a large number of space-capable cultures existed.

Then, one day, a probe encountered an object which, until then, had somehow avoided detection. The Kyrra were shocked to discover that a small, solitary neutron star was approaching their star system and there was nothing they could do to avoid the destruction that would result by its passing. The Kyrra race had roughly two hundred years to survive.

The resources of the entire Kyrra population were directed towards finding a way of saving their race. They needed to find a new home. The probes which had been previously launched were reprogrammed to begin searching for a suitable planet. This was a mistake which the Kyrra would eventually regret making because this reprogramming caused the probes to purposefully search for areas of space which seemed to be devoid of existing space-capable cultures. This prevented the Kyrra from keeping track of the activities of the existing space-faring races which they had already previously discovered.

Colonizing a habitable planet was out of the question because of the aggressive nature of the life which would most likely already exist on that world. The Kyrra realized their best hope would be to find a suitable uninhabited planet which they could terraform for their own use. They also realized that terraforming a new world would require hundreds of years and a method of sustaining their population while this was taking place was needed.

Years of research finally resulted in the development of the time stasis device. The machine offered a solution as to what to do with the population until a suitable home could be created.

In addition to the thousands of probes that were now exploring all nearby space, it was decided that a group of exploration ships would be sent out as well to look for a possible new homeworld for the Kyrra. These manned ships would follow up on possible targets located by the probes. Until the new world could be made habitable, the vast majority of their people would be held in stasis.

Because of the approaching neutron star, the population could not be placed in stasis anywhere within their own star system. A planetoid orbiting a nearby star in an otherwise featureless system was chosen to become the temporary resting place of the Kyrra people. To prevent detection from other space explorers, the time stasis devices were shielded and placed deep underground. The removal of the population began.

Forty-three years before the neutron star was to pass through their system, an exploration ship from another race discovered the Kyrra homeworld. This was an event which the Kyrra had hoped would never happen. The initial contact with the explorers was peaceful. They claimed to be from a race which, like the Kyrra, desired only knowledge. However, before the ship had left, more arrived in the form of an invasion force. The Kyrra quickly discovered that the supposedly peaceful explorers were in fact a race of slavers.

The slavers invaded the Kyrra homeworld, destroying cities, manufacturing complexes and anything else they considered a threat to their domination. As the invasion began, the Kyrra reacted quickly and warned their exploration ships of the attack. Because of their nonviolent nature, the Kyrra had no weapons and could offer no resistance against the invaders.

The slavers quickly learned that Kyrra technology was vastly superior to their own. For generations the slavers had relied upon their slave labor force to build and maintain their ships and weapons. Conquest was achieved through the sheer number of ships and troops the slavers could bring to bear on a newly discovered world.

If the conquered planet was found to possess any devices that could help further the conquest of new worlds, the enslaved population was forced to to mass produce the device. After several generations of such behavior, the slavers no longer understood the technology behind the tools they used.

The slavers attempted to force the Kyrra to apply their peaceful technology towards the creation of weapons. The Kyrra refused. This infuriated the slavers. They turned to torture and violence in a vain attempt to persuade the Kyrra to change their minds. The Kyrra learned quickly and it didn't take them long before an underground resistance had been formed. Unable to achieve the results they desired, the slavers scaled back the number of troops on the Kyrra homeworld — they were needed elsewhere.

The slaver empire (which had encompassed an enormous volume of space) was quickly coming apart. Subject races had been rebelling against their masters for years and a few of them had managed to actually force the slavers off their worlds. The rebellions were slowly ripping the vast empire apart.

Soon, the number of slavers on the Kyrra homeworld began to fall. The Kyrra were considered a passive race requiring little supervision to keep them in line. The slavers needed manpower and weaponry in other areas of their empire.

As the number of slaver troops declined, the Kyrra found themselves with greater and greater freedom. The occupation had taught the Kyrra something they would never have learned on their own — how to kill. Over the course of many months, several large, very powerful force field generators were secretly built and installed. Hundreds of smaller, semi-portable generators were also built and placed at strategic locations.

Because of the earlier evacuation, the Kyrra population living on their homeworld had steadily declined. In order to continue to produce the stasis chambers and to maintain the normal functioning of their society the Kyrra had automated most of their factories.

Using these advanced robotic assembly lines, the Kyrra constructed thousands of small, personal field generators. Small enough to hide inside their clothing, and designed to look like a personal communications device, these field generators were distributed to every adult Kyrra. After many months of planning and preparation, the Kyrra acted.

On the chosen day, as many Kyrra as possible had gathered within the confines of their remaining cities. At a specified time, every semi-portable force field generator was activated. Within each bubble of force there were Kyrra; sometimes as few as one or two; in others as many as several hundred. Those Kyrra who were not protected ran toward the nearest bubble.

The field generators that had previously been distributed to all Kyrra allowed those who carried it to pass through these force fields. Many hundreds were killed by the surprised slavers as they ran for safety. After a specified period of time, the larger field generators were activated. These generators were far more powerful than the small ones protecting the Kyrra. They produced a force field large enough to cover entire cities. But they were not normal fields of protective energy.

After forming, the city-sized fields began to slowly contract, squeezing everything, including the air, within them. As the pressure rose, the slavers turned their efforts toward escape but there was nothing they could do to penetrate the Kyrra shield or slow its collapse. The slavers eventually succumbed to the pressure and soon were all dead. The city-spanning force fields were then allowed to return to their original diameters.

Although the slavers had been killed, the collapsing fields of energy had caused enormous amounts of damage. The shrinking force fields had dragged everything inside their boundaries inward. Buildings near the edge of the city were destroyed. The ground around and under the city was pulled inward causing massive earthquakes. The entire area inside the force field actually sunk into the ground by several feet.

The entire Kyrra rebellion lasted less than an hour. Those slavers who had managed to escape, found the Kyrra were now behind impenetrable fields of force. Try as they might, no weapon they could apply would penetrate the city-spanning force domes. In their rage against the Kyrra, the slavers lashed out and destroyed everything on the planet which was not protected. For a short time afterwards, the slavers continued to test the strength of the Kyrra defenses.

Eventually, the problems within the empire forced the slavers to abandon their fruitless attacks and leave the Kyrra homeworld altogether. On planet after planet throughout the outer regions of the slaver empire the slavers stripped everything of value they could load into their ships and departed. From orbit, the departing ships bombarded the defenseless worlds, obliterating all life. The slavers were gathering all their resources together to defend the core of what was left of their disintegrating empire.

Behind their protective shields the Kyrra watched, helpless to stop them, as the slavers methodically placed hundreds of fusion bombs around the protected cities. Each city was ringed with at least ten such devices. The rest of the planet was subjected to random bombing from dirty nuclear weapons. Stunned, the Kyrra watched their world die around them as the radioactive fallout from the bombs filled the atmosphere with lethal radiation. As the last ship departed orbit, the bombs surrounding the cities were detonated.

The destructive power produced by the release of a thousand megatons of nuclear weapons is something that cannot be imagined. Fifty eight protected Kyrra cities felt the full force of such destructive power. Seventeen of the cities were destroyed as their force fields collapsed. The rest experienced severe damage as the shock-wave of the explosions produced intense tremors.

When it was over, and the slavers had left, the Kyrra evaluated the extent of the damage. At the time when the Kyrra had first discovered the neutron star their homeworld had a population of over 125 million. Because of their unique evolutionary history, the Kyrra had never developed the need to rampantly procreate. To their horror, the Kyrra discovered that the slavers had dealt them a terrible blow.

Their non-stasis population had been reduced to a little over a quarter of a million, many of whom were injured and would probably die. There were about 11 million Kyrra in stasis deep within a planetoid orbiting a nearby star. The Kyrra homeworld had been rendered incapable of supporting life. Their factories had been destroyed.

After the slavers had left, the remaining Kyrra repaired one of their long-range communication stations and recalled their exploration ships. While waiting for these ships to arrive, they repaired a few of the ships the slavers had left behind. They were very lucky that several such ships had been within the confines of their city-wide force fields because stepping outside the protective energy wall would have meant certain death from radiation.