Supreme Leader of Anstractor: A Sci-Fantasy Space Adventure (The New Phase Book 3) (6 page)

“Perhaps they didn’t like him,” Maes said dryly. “Does this face look like someone you could call a friend?”

“It looks like someone I would call a meal,” Lasae joked and then laughed with so much gusto that Maes had to stop to admire her.

“You’re not as hard as you come off, Lasae; I admire that. It leads me to think that you’re competent, a good fighter. Am I right?”

“I’ve seen sixty-five tours, and I have all of my teeth, lord. This would make me Anstractor’s luckiest Geralos, or, as you say, I am quite competent.”

Maes Van Senthyn smiled. “The Phasers are good. You are not seeing them here because they have Geralos in their city, killing and eating their babies!”

They laughed cheerfully as they opened the door to the tank room, but when they stepped through, Maes—who had moved ahead of Lasae—stepped right in front of Marika Tsuno.

Her movement was so fast that even a trained professional like Maes Van Senthyn was frozen in shock as it happened. Marika Tsuno—trained-assassin-turned-Phaser—had removed the head of the Geralos female and was staring at the man she thought to be Laern Cobo, as if he had agreed to explain himself.

The hot, sticky blood of Maes’s savior was all over the walls and his face, and as he reached up to wipe it from off of his smooth human face, he feigned terror and backed himself into a wall. The woman was a Casanian, which surprised him. Typically Casanians were not the type to be living in metal structures—like the humans—let alone using las-swords…

A loud noise took him out of his shock as Val Tracker came into the room and saw the carnage. “Laern, you’re alive!” he exclaimed, and as he made to reach for Maes, Marika placed her hand in the center of his chest and stopped him.

“What are you?” she asked Maes. Her eyes were large, black pools of mistrust, and the Geralos spy knew that if he made a mistake, she would snatch the life from out of his body.

“Rika, what’s going on?” Val asked as Maes tried to calculate what he would say to calm the Casanian’s nerves.

“This one was coming up from the cell area, giggling and carrying on with the headless lizard you see next to him. He’s either an abomination, or we have a Phaser that likes to stick it in lizard
chiern
.”

“While that physically makes no sense, I don’t want to hear about it if that’s what he’s been up to. Come on, Laern, you’re not even defending yourself? She’s saying that you like Geralos
chiern
, bro. Speak up for yourself, dammit.” He began to laugh and it annoyed Marika.

“HEY, meathead! What part of this stand-off are you not getting? This is a breach,
erm
, I mean this could be a breach. The lizards take over the minds of the weak. I saw him talking to one; get a grip!”

Maes saw his chance to escape when Marika turned on Val. He bolted back down the hall towards the cells, hoping within his heart that there was another way out. The Casanian was on to his ruse but the rest would be ignorant. If he could get to Rafian, or one of the other major Phasers before he died, he could bring honor to his family’s name.

He heard the sound of Marika descending the sloped floor behind him, and as he got to the cells he realized that he was not going to be able to outrun her. Spinning around to face her with his fists at the ready, he couldn’t see her appear behind him and deliver a kick that rendered him unconscious.

A
RI GROATRATH climbed from his sleek, black, specialist skiff to stand in the yellow dirt of a Virulian valley. The ruins of the temple was spread out in front of him, but what he focused on was the sheer loneliness of the place and the spirits that he felt haunting the land. He was never a religious man, but he felt something both alien and frightening. He quickly wished that he had brought along his wife or his troops, and he assumed that what he was feeling were the fingers of death.

Walking forward he scanned the mountains. They were tall giants that broke the dusty atmosphere, keeping the valley in an eternal shadow that blocked out the low-hanging suns. He walked up the slope of the hill that held the temple, and he scanned the pieces of stone that lay strewn about the valley. Whatever had blown it up had been a bomb of remarkable strength, and from what he had seen upon entry, it had been fired from space down towards the surface.

His mask gave him readouts on what was hopeless rubble versus what could be studied, and he found himself kneeling to look over artifacts or to collect them before rising to walk several more yards again. It was a grueling exercise and again he regretted coming alone, but what he came here for was his own secret and he didn’t want any other Geralos involved.

After a while he grew tired, so he sat on an old column to rest. Taking in the sheer size of the temple’s footprint, he reasoned that the place had been big enough to house over 1,000 people. It made him wonder at the size of the Phaser army. They had managed to destroy a whole troop of Crak-Ti, but the survivors had reported that their number was in the twenties.

He pulled out the crystal and held it up to his mask. One of the suns, Celith, shone a light that made it glow with a magical radiance. He lowered it to examine it clearly and he thought that he felt it throb, so he got up and held it out in front of him. The clear features of the crystal grew dark within his palm. It looked as if someone had injected black ink into its translucent center.

It throbbed and tugged at Ari, and he followed its prompts through the rubble. Celith dipped behind the mountains and the smaller suns, Windry and Laithe, began to climb into the sky.
A planet of constant daylight
, he thought, and then glanced down at the crystal. When he removed it from the light it began to react.
They kept the crystals here in order to keep their power dormant
, he surmised.
That means the temple housed the crystals
;
it was there that they could learn how to manipulate their powers
.

The crystal led him to the outline of a room which was well preserved despite the destruction. Inside of the broken down walls was what appeared to be the ruins of a stone chair. In front of the chair was a podium outlined with a number of glyphs, and on top of the podium was a cup-shaped orifice that looked to have held something of considerable size.

Walking up to the chair, Ari sat down on it and the crystal stopped its pulsing. He sat for a long time expecting something to happen, but when nothing did he stared down at it again. His neuro-messenger flared to life and he recognized Siern’s signal. “What?” he barked into his wrist comm, and several voices began to apologize. “What is it that you all want?” he asked. “It’s obviously an emergency!”

“Minister, they … our fleet was wiped out,” Siern said, his voice trembling in fear.

“What fleet? The Crak-Ti? That is old news, Siern. It is the main reason we put Maes on the mission to find out about these annoying Phaser fighters.”

“No, Minister, see, that’s why we had to disturb you. The fleet that flew in to investigate their base on Vestalia. It got wiped out by a Phaser weapon of some sort.”

“All of our fighters wiped out, you say?”

“All of them, Minister. We checked their life signs on the central database and only three of them remain.”

Ari cursed under his breath, and wondered how his luck had gone so bad in just a few days. Over a hundred Geralos were sent to take the Phaser base, and now he was being told that ninety-seven of them had been killed in action. Worse still was that he had sent his personal apprentice, Lasae Almont. He had invested years into her training and now—

“Lasae Almont, is she one of the three, Siern? Tell me now.”

“I am sorry, Minister, her life went dark just a few minutes ago.”

There was a long silence and then Ari screamed. It was a scream borne of both rage and frustration, and it went on for so long that he felt it sap his energy and weaken his limbs. “Get back to your duties. We will handle this when I return to Geral,” Ari said slowly before touching his wrist to cut off their communication.

Lasae Almont was more than an apprentice to him. He had spent many nights with women inside of his Crak-Ti corps during his younger years but slowed down when he made the life bond with his wife, Saya. But his sleeping around had produced numerous children, and to avoid the scandal he had personally paid the women with his children to retire and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

Still, one of the more brazen women did not like the fact that she had to leave. To get back at him she had trained her daughter to fight, and when she enlisted she had come with a message that was only for the Minister to read. The poor girl had stood in his office fidgeting as he opened the note, which was an overt threat of exposure if Ari didn’t personally look after his daughter.

He took the threat seriously and took Lasae under his wing, personally training her in the covert arts of the Crak-Ti. When she became a woman, he named her as his second-in-command, and this was accepted by the Crak-Ti Corps. Lasae loved Ari, even though she didn’t know that he was her father, and Ari in turn loved her as a daughter. One night he had slipped out and cut her mother’s throat. He had never loved the woman and couldn’t live with the fact that she’d gotten one over on him.

Lasae was told that a human Phaser had killed her mother, and Ari took the opportunity to build up her hate for the Vestalian race. So when the mission came up to raid the base on Vestalia, Lasae was the first to volunteer, despite the objections from her father for her safety. Now, as he stood there, he thought of their long years together. She had his eyes, his teeth, and his milky green skin color. His large eyes throbbed and ejected mist, which made it hard for him to see. He leaned over crying, his body convulsing, and he hated himself for allowing her to go on that mission.

He had plenty of illegitimate children and none by Saya, so Lasae was his one and only heir. He was going to tell her the truth about her lineage, but that was something he was saving for his own retirement. A fury rose up in him beyond anything that he had felt before, and he focused his rage on the Phaser leader, Rafian VCA. He had looked into the man and knew enough about him to know that he had a similar power to the Geralos to invade minds, and had come into his position by traveling to his home planet of Geral and slaughtering a village of innocents.

Rafian VCA was the cruelest of humans, and he had come into a large army of religious zealots that could do amazing, magical things. He looked down at the crystal in his palm, and then threw it in the bowl of the podium with a curse of disgust. A column of light exploded from the podium and he found himself suddenly overtaken by a feeling of weightlessness. His mind couldn’t focus and he seemed to be leaving his body. Fear took over as he remembered his own mortality, and he focused on Geral and how their power was slipping.

He thought of Lasae, and how he wished that he could take her home to see his gardens, made up of thousands of exotic, off-world plants and maintained around the clock by a team of Cel-tocs. He could see her smiling face and hoped that she would be waiting in the afterworld. Then the light consumed him and he was standing in his garden with Saya and the Cel-tocs staring at him in surprise.

“Husband?” Saya asked as she looked him over, and he removed his helmet to see if it was real. “How did you appear there like that? I thought that you were offworld … I am so confused as to—”

She scrambled from the garden to gain the stairs, and she screamed out, “PHASER!” as she fled. Ari didn’t bother to stop her as he checked his surroundings and then checked his limbs to be sure that he was truly there. When he realized what had happened he began to laugh, a deep, impressive laugh that made him shake all over. Saya came out again with a large gun pointed at him but he continued to laugh until his eyes began to mist.

“Saya, my dear, I’ve just come from Virulia.” He held his stomach, as if that could slow his laughing, then held up a hand to motion for her to stop. “I came home using the magic that the Phasers use against us! It was with the crystal, the same one I showed you. Come, I will need the one you wear around your neck. I will replace it, but with it we can turn the tides and retake Vestalia from them.”

Saya stopped and reached up to touch her necklace. He had given it to her as an anniversary gift a  few months back and she had grown to cherish it above all else. “This thing allows you to teleport?” she asked him with disbelief, and his smile and misty face was all she needed to realize that it was true.

* * *

“You lost your way, son of Anstractor,” a voice hummed inside of Rafian’s head. He understood the words but decided that it wasn’t a voice. It felt as if his thoughts were being controlled by someone else, and he could do nothing but witness whatever it was that the being was trying to show him.

The world was dark and he could see nothing, so he lifted a hand to touch his face and found that he could feel his nose, eyes, and mouth. Everything was in place, but when he spoke no voice came out, and when he made to take a step, he realized there was nothing to step on.

“You have forgotten what they have taken from you, young Rafian!” the thought echoed into his head, producing a migraine that forced his hands up to touch his temples. It was the Makers, he surmised, the Neeraki Sentients that had visited him when he first took over the jumpers.

They had come into his life to give him a charge: he was to protect the crystals, and he was to destroy the Geralos, which they called a “genetic mistake.” He had done this, protecting the crystal’s secrets and amassing an army of specialists to destroy the Geralos. But now they were saying that he’d lost his way and it confused him immensely. He moved his lips to speak and found that whatever had stopped him before was gone.

“How have I lost my way, masters?” he asked. “Have I not started a war that will eventually wipe out all life on Geral? Have I not liberated cities on Vestalia and moved in military powers that will eventually retake the planet for humanity? Have I not kept the crystals to be a secret known to Phasers and Phasers alone? How have I lost my way? I am the same man that entered your ship and took on the honor of becoming your voice and hand here in Anstractor.”

There was silence, and his headache subsided. Then the darkness passed and he was floating in space. He flailed a bit in panic, wondering why he wasn’t dead, but when he saw the shimmering light that enveloped his body he knew they had wrapped him in a substance that would let him survive deep space.

“Look around you, tiny insect. Look at the beautiful planets of Anstractor. This is the charge you were given, to protect this system, and eliminate the rogue planet,” the thoughts barked, seeming to be frustrated with him.

“I just don’t understand. What have I done wrong? Everything that has led up to this day has been in line with what you’ve asked of me,” Rafian said.

“Has it really? Do you really plan to eradicate the entire race of Geralos? Or is this a lie you tell us, when in truth you plan to eliminate only the ones you deem hostile and allow the rest to live?”

Rafian was dumbstruck but he knew that the accusation was not far from the truth. One of the risks that he had taken with the powers that the crystals gave him was to meet his mind with that of a Geralos commander. Through the eyes of his enemy he had learned that the lizards weren’t all bad, and were quite sentient, and this had softened his heart for them. He had seen baby Geralos, filled with ambition and good intentions; mothers and fathers; students of literature, arts, and science. It was hard for him to admit that he felt something for them but he had begun to understand the Geralos, and this had made him alter his plan for their genocide.

“You lost your way, Rafian, but we will remind you,” the voice echoed, moving into a sinister laugh as Rafian’s eyes went blind and the world as he knew it changed.

Before him he saw his hero of old, Helga “Hellgate” ATE. She was kissing Cilas MEC good luck before hopping into a nighthawk aircraft, and then she was lifting off from a base of some sort. He saw her leading her fleet, tearing apart the buildings on the moon of Meruda. Then he saw her ship engulfed in flames, and the beautiful white hair that was on her head catching fire as it burned up to her scalp and melted the skin from her bones.

The grizzly scene froze as his eyes followed the laser fire that had hit her, and he saw that it had come from one of her own soldiers. The Geralos were masters of mind control, and one of the youngest girls inside of Hellgate’s squad had become compromised.

The scene switched and he saw the Geralos that controlled the girl sitting in a row with several others inside of their temple. All fifty Geralos was playing puppeteer to someone in the Alliance, and all fifty looked ridiculous with their fingers jammed inside their mouths, which was what they did to start the invasion of a mind.