Starblade (30 page)

The Morningstar girl giggled. “Sexual
creatures indeed!”

“I should go and let you and your friends
enjoy yourselves.”

“Don’t leave.” Frederika stopped her, took
her by the arm. “Come sit und eat with us, unless you want to get
back to Kulcarin.”

An embarrassed, girlish smile came over
Sitara's falcon-like face. “If you really want me, then I shall
stay.”

“Your Rakja won’t miss you I hope?” the
blonde asked. “I wouldn’t want to keep the newlyweds away from
their honeymoon nest.”

“Kul barely noticed I left our apartments,”
she said. “Kulcarin's getting to know your Blackeagle Knights. I
think he enjoys the new command. He says he has plans to
incorporate them into his Skatha battalion.”

The notion of the Blackeagle Knights under
the command of Kulcarin Aranskrai disturbed Frederika. She couldn't
quite place why and shoved it off to ponder later.

[Tahru Temple: Rashalon Vault]

It was fitting she should be dressed in a
simple white sari on the dawn of her Rashalon. White, in Asian
cultures symbolized purity, death and mourning. Frederika wore
nothing more than this white garment which she had been ritually
dressed in after bathing in a temple pool. Her honey colored curls
flowed freely unadorned down her back and her feet were bare. In
effect she had been stripped of all that she had been before this
moment. The warm water had refreshed her and she could feel her
heart pound as the Rashalon neared.

Sitara, Mia, Sabina, and ISG Shuriken Kra
stood beside Frederika in an antechamber within the Tahru temple.
Each gave Frederika looks of encouragement, yet they remained
silent and waited for the start of the ceremony. The ritualistic
nature of the event demanded this, but more so it was done out of
respect for the fact that not everyday one stepped into the
Rashalon Engine to be reborn.

The morning had brought with it a bright
welcoming sun which beamed through the slanted windows of the
temple. A fiery-orange glow filled the vast chambers, an illusion
of a Phoenix fire.

A gong rang three times.

“Are you ready?” Shuriken asked Frederika
and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

She nodded at the general. Shuriken Kra had
been very supportive of her since they met. Frederika exhaled and
proceeded ahead to the vault containing the Rashalon Engine. Her
friends followed. It was a tiered array of platforms and at the
center of the temple, a statue of Falcania stood guard. In her
hands she held aloft The Phoenix Heart which glowed and thrummed
with life.

Queen T'Kara and the Shotar waited beside a
bank of controls of the great machine. Each held a key that would
unlock the reformatting engine.

Frederika noticed Oberon and 'her'
Blackeagle Knights standing in a corner of the vault. The Drakorian
Kulcarin Aranskrai waited with them looking very
self-satisfied.

“Today we bring new blood into the brood,”
the Queen stated. “Frederika Gisela von Gotha, come forth into the
Rashalon Engine. Become reborn.”

Frederika walked toward the platform. Small
tremors coursed through her. She gave the Queen an uncertain
glance, but Nadia returned a reassuring smile that relaxed her.

“You’re key, my Lord,” Nadia said.

Sharr Khan produced a triangular modeled key
from his belt and inserted it into the proper slot. As he did so,
his mate inserted her own key, together the Shotar and his Lady
activated the Rashalon Engine which now hummed with vitality and
filled the vault with a low roar. Nadia then pressed a number of
crystal buttons on the bank of controls to ready the transformation
program.

The platform which Frederika stood on began
to fill with a green gaseous mixture impregnated with
nanotechnology. All around her, she felt the air become heavy,
thick with gas. She could see the aerosol forming into a liquid and
change to a soft-shell substance around her. The microscopic
nanites began to spin the neutral gas into a protective and
transforming shell, an egg from which she would emerge as a new
being.

Her vision went black, the outside world
gone. Frederika wondered if she had drowned, suffocating in the
green gas? She felt out of her body, as though she had become a
disembodied consciousness which floated about on a rapid stream.
Other voices and awareness's joined with her like little sparks.
Time became a meaningless concept upon her entrance into the
void.

“
Welcome to Char, child of
Turhan.”

A beautiful, dark-haired woman greeted
Frederika in the void where her consciousness lingered while her
body under went a transformation on the microscopic level. Even now
the nanites reshaped Frederika’s flesh and bone. They entered her
vital systems, reworking her nerves and muscles, pushing around her
molecular construct. Some of these nanites would take up residence
in organs built to house them and from there they would rebuild
bone and muscle or destroy viruses and diseases for the entirety of
her life. Falcanians were as much machine as they were organic.

“
Who are you?” Asked Frederika.

“
I am Falcania. Who are you? Now that is
the question,” the AI stated. “I have come to guide you and watch
over you as you undergo Rashalon.”

Frederika indicated that she understood, at
least she thought that she did. The embodiment of Falcanian culture
had come here to teach her about what she now became.

“
Look,” Falcania said. “The souls of our
kind dwell here.”

The AI pointed to blue-white orbs,
compressed DataStreams, sparks of each Falcanian mind that moved in
Char’s cybernetic latticework even while awake in the material
world a Falcanian mingled here.

A shadow hovered among the radiant orbs.
“What is that?”

“
Our darkness,” Falcania told her. “It
threatens us, yet we do not know where it is for the Shadow knows
we seek it out. Perhaps you’re our hope?”

The cybernetic world changed. All around
both women, data rushed in a flood of exotic symbols. Bits and
bytes opened a pathway into Frederika’s neural network, a flashcopy
was being mapped of her personality.

“
Come, see the beginning.” Falcania
pointed at a spark, larger then the others, like some kind of
juncture point for all the rest. “We stand now in the memory core.
Watch Sharr Khan set alight the Phoenix Fire.”

Memories that were not Frederika's own
overpowered her. The zeitgeist of a species poured into her being,
filled her very fiber. Not only did she physically transform but
she had begun to understand what it was to be a Falcanian on a
primal level. This natural understanding of who and what they were
bonded Falcanians in a way most humans could only envy.

Frederika watched as two boys stood on an
old broken down stonewall in some tiny New England town. She
recognized them as Sharr Khan and Shuriken Kra. Kra wore big
awkward glasses instead of
his signature goggles, Even then,
he had the sense of a playful trickster about him. Sharr carried
himself with a serious air. They were respectively about ten and
eight years old.

“
You know all that Falcanian stuff?”
Sharr asked his younger companion.

“
Yeah.”

“
Its real, at least I want it to be.
There's no reason it should just be fiction.”

He'd been pondering the idea of telling his
best friend about his idea for the Falcanians for a while now.
Shuriken looked at him curiously. Kra enjoyed writing about it.
Writing about the Falcanians was fun and cool and had the chance to
show some awesome action.

“
Really? You think so?” he asked.

“
We can do this,” Sharr spoke with
conviction. “Make ourselves stronger and better. Humans must change
and evolve. Genetic engineering is the future. We can augment
ourselves give ourselves wings, longer life-spans... Anything we
can dream of!”

It was interesting to Frederika to note that
in the original plan Falcanians had bird-like wings, not the
mammalian stylized aileron they would come to be designed to
have.

“
Our society is corrupt and someday it
will die,” Sharr declared with an unintentional prescience. “Where
will we be when that happens? A civilization built on honor and
family is important let's build our own. Will you help me
Oswald?”

Oswald?

Shuriken Kra's given name had been Oswald!
Frederika beamed. She must tell him how cute she thought that
was.

It struck Frederika that most children did
not have such deep thoughts about the nature of life and of
science. What Sharr was talking about would not enter the public
conscious until decades later when genetic engineering would rise
as a topic of debate, but this was the early eighties. Years before
genetics became part of the public discourse.

“
Just tell me how to breathe in space and
I'll be there,” Shuriken said with his usual wit.

Frederika smiled. The Phoenix Project was
born from the idealism of a handful of children wanting a better
world and a better human. These were deep thoughts for such young
people thoughts way beyond their years.

Shuriken Kra began his recruitment of the
first generation of Phoenix Project members not long after having
spoken with Sharr. A silent network spread within the local school
systems. Whisperings of the Phoenix Project and Falcanians began to
be sought out by other youngsters disenchanted with the society
they were in.

Like so many dreams, the Phoenix Project
needed a little work before all the bugs in the system got ironed
out. There were of course many false starts and new beginnings.
After all, the idea of the Phoenix Project had been conceived by
children. One shouldn't have expected success at the start. The
idea itself was revolutionary.

The memory moved ahead to cover the rise and
fall of the Phoenix Project. Frederika beheld Sharr undergo his own
personal transformation. How he had lost faith in his chosen
mission turned it aside to pledge his troth to old gods, though the
Aesir and Vanir ignored his righteous devotion.

The fire rekindled in Sharr's heart in a
moment of personal revelation – September 11th. The rise of the
Falcanian Khanate followed slowly after as old members returned to
the fold in time to watch the world collapse.

Personal memories became abstractions.
Language and scripts streamed into her mind. The Skora filled her
awareness. Like an internal Rosetta stone, her language center
converted German, English and the myriad other languages that she
spoke over into the Falcanian verbiage. Both the Trikash and
Kaliburn scripts surrounded her and she understood them and saw the
lines as if she had always known what they had meant.

Philosophical precepts took shape in
metaphor via the Telchar Shanral. The concepts of tairlok and
karlok entered her mind as well as a number of attendant
philosophies. She came to understand the
primal, the animal
drives and their relation to the higher being coalesced in the
understanding that the 'Transhuman' was rooted as much in the basic
drives of the lesser creature as it was the god-like and the
Falcanian was a reconciliation of these two poles. The animal and
Transhuman were poles of the same concept both called for
expression in the human animal and this was embodied in the
Falcanian.

In a heart beat Frederika not only witnessed
the events of the Telchar Shanral, but she experienced them and in
doing so they changed her very nature.

Three days had passed since Frederika
entered the Rashalon Engine. Frederika slept in a great green egg
as her body and soul underwent the Rashalon. Valküri and Tahru
looked on and tended to the being which reformatted inside the
shell.

Only a few hours ago, Sharr Khan learned he
would be a father yet again. His Queen was pregnant with the son he
had asked her to produce. Still, Nadia did not speak to him and
only remained by his side during the bulk of the ritual. She
mastered the ability to present a united front. He knew Nadia would
not tolerate rumors of trouble in their marriage.

Aria was left in the care of Atar Kran. She
hadn't been pleased to be left behind at the palace, but Kran was
the only person Sharr knew he could trust with Aria's safety,
besides himself. The Shotar understood Kvaltar and Shuriken's
thoughts about her and neither cared for Aria. She also was
pregnant with his human child and that changed everything. Better
to keep her out of the reach of his court for the time being until
things became more tranquil.

Attendants had already begun to prepare the
chamber for Frederika's emergence out of her shell. Tables of food
and drink would be brought forth. Frederika would be hungry. In
fact she'd ravenously crave food once she hatched. Just as a baby
chick needed nourishment when it broke forth into the world, so did
the new Falcanian.

Crack!

The shell began to fall apart. Fissures in
its outer layer spread out like a spiderweb. Nearby a Valküri
waited, she signaled to the gathered Falcanians that their new
brethren was about to hatch into this world.

Queen T’Kara stepped closer, a look of
anticipation on her exotic face. She felt very proud of handiwork,
curious to see how The Phoenix Heart and the AI Falcania
reformatted Frederika. At a certain level, the heart was no more
than a randomness generator which brought out interesting genetic
traits in a Falcanian, such as displayed in a Falcanian's unique
Garuda and wing color.

More pieces of the green shell broke away. A
female form crouched low within the shadows of the eggshell.
Slowly, she crept naked from the fragments of her kryla and into
the center of the room. For a brief moment the bright light blinded
her, yet nictitating lenses flashed green over her eyes and allowed
her to see in the brightness. The lenses enhanced and protected her
eyesight as well as kept a Falcanian’s eyes moist in-flight.