Baranak_Storming the Gates Page 3

  His eyes, now crimson points of light, darted from me back to my father. The golden emblem of the Church, swinging out from his chest on its chain as he moved, flashed brightly, as if it held some sort of scarcely contained energies. His voice took on a plaintive, almost apologetic tone.

  “I don’t want to, I don’t—”

  His words dissolved into a keening wail—a sound itself instantly subsumed by an eerie, mechanical whine that seemed to be coming from his insignia.

  I had had enough of this. Gritting my teeth at the unholy noise, I moved forward to grab him, to pull him away—

  —and the flames burst forth, seemingly pouring from every part of his body, engulfing him instantly. His robe became a torch, but his body within burned even brighter.

  My father! Still he was held in the unnaturally strong grasp, and the flames had already spread onto his clothes, his flesh. Gasping, he stumbled backward, and the corindar fell upon him.

  Panicking, I attempted to move forward again, but the intensity of the flames only grew greater, the heat doubling and doubling again in the space of a second.

  Their end of the tent was on fire now. The flames surged up the walls and engulfed the furniture, the papers, everything. The two bodies that had fallen to the floor were indistinguishable now, within the inferno. Rancid smoke filled the remainder of the tent, and I choked, trying to move forward, unable to do so.

  Guards entered the tent behind me, bringing themselves up short as they ran headlong into the heat. They looked at me, but all I could shout was, “Out! Out!”

  They listened, and we all shoved through the now-burning entryway and fell to the grass. It was burning now, too, and we had to scramble further away to keep from being engulfed ourselves.

  Two of the soldiers grabbed jackets, blankets, whatever was available, and tried to beat at the flames, to no avail. The others called for help. Only a few seconds had passed, yet I knew, in that dull space before shock sets in, that my father was beyond saving. Anger and confusion welled deeply within me.

  The tent collapsed into a formless mass, already mostly devoured. More soldiers ran up with extinguishers and turned them on the blaze, surrounding it and attacking it from all sides. The unnatural fire resisted, though, and it was more than a minute before the expansion of the circle of flame could be halted. Then began the job of fighting it back toward the center, which took more long, agonizing minutes.

  None of us could approach the remains of the tent until the bulk of the fire had been extinguished. It was simply too hot, too deadly. Finally I rushed in, the ashy remains of the grass and the tent crunching and crumbling under my boots. The heat still was unbearable. Gritting my teeth, breathing shallowly, I searched for and found the spot where I believed my father and the priest had fallen. I leaned over, grimacing at the heat that still radiated upward, searching the ashes for any signs. At first I found nothing, but then I spotted a flash of red, partially obscured by ash, and dug it out. It was a jewel, a gemstone of some sort. I pocketed it and continued to search.

  Then I found it.

  A tiny piece of metal, half-melted and disfigured. It burned my fingers as I grasped it and lifted it closer

  One of the rank insignia from my father’s uniform.

  There could be no doubt. He was gone.

  Dazed, light-headed from the smoke and the heat and the shock, I looked around, seeing the looks of disbelief and confusion on the faces of our troops, seeing the ships still lifting off in every direction. The ships headed for the first battle of our great campaign. My father’s great campaign.

  And now he was gone. And his murderer, if appearances could be believed, was a member of the very Church that had endorsed our operation, indeed had paved the way for it. The same Church that had pushed him onto this path to begin with. That had provided our military forces with all of the intelligence we had on the others of the Seven Worlds.

  Cold panic gripped my heart. If we could not trust Corindar Jeras himself, given his long, personal friendship with my father, then how could we trust anything the Church had told us?

  Just what were we getting ourselves into—exposing ourselves to—with this war?

  A moment later, I had my answer.

  An alarm sounded from the command bunker nearby, and several soldiers around me pointed up, shouting.

  The sky above, already sparkling with the tiny points of light that were our ships, had grown suddenly far more crowded.

  Another fleet had arrived, as if from nowhere.

  No, not from nowhere. From the Gate. I knew it then, without question. The Gate was operational. It was open now, and another force was emerging from it, in massive numbers. An attack fleet.

  Our own ships had been caught flat-footed, prepared for an offensive campaign—a surprise attack of their own—not a defensive stand.

  Explosions blossomed in the darkness overhead.

  “Verghas,” one of the techs shouted from the command bunker. “It’s the Verghasites!”

  We had been betrayed. Not just my father, all of us.

  Cursing, I ran for the shuttle.

  TWO

  Hands shaking, still covered in soot, I fumbled at the straps and managed by the hardest to secure myself into my seat.

  “Go. Go!”

  The rumbling of liftoff shook the cabin. I closed my eyes and struggled to push my emotions down, to contain them, at least for now.

  I was no renowned military commander, no master strategist like my father or some of my uncles. Dad knew—had known—my strengths, and had asked me to perform a service that he believed I could accomplish, and one that needed doing, now more than ever. My uncles and aunts could battle the obvious enemies of the moment, and could do so far better than I could. It fell to me to discover the identity of the deeper enemy, the real enemy, no matter where the answer lay. No matter how potentially blasphemous the answer.

  I couldn’t bring Dad back, but I had the mission he’d given me. For now all grief was set aside. It was time to act.

  My shuttle roared into the sky above the moon Victoria. I lay back in the cushioned seat, trying to relax my body, but my mind worked feverishly, examining possibilities and probabilities. Very quickly, something occurred to me that had escaped my thoughts during all of the chaos of the preceding events. I leaned forward in my seat and clapped the pilot, Selvin, on the shoulder. My voice was ragged from the smoke, but I managed to make myself understood.

  “Can you locate the corindar’s ship?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, and quickly he brought up a tactical display of the vessels still parked at our camp. Most had already taken to orbit, but several dozen of different sizes and configurations yet remained on the ground. One of them flashed red.

  “There it is, sir. Looks like they’re just now lifting off.”

  “Indeed.” I frowned. That certainly made them look guilty, or at least complicit in Jeras’s betrayal.

  It was a medium-sized transport ship, its hull a deep red and gold to match the Church’s colors. Apparently in quite a hurry, its engines strained against the pull of the artificial gravity boosters active on the surface of Victoria—those devices that approximated normal Majondran gravity on the moon.

  Jeras’s ship was obvious now that I knew where to look. Activating the communications array, I hailed it.

  If he heard my transmission, the pilot ignored us. The ship lifted out of the thick atmosphere of the Tagas Valley, where our base was located, and angled away from us.

  I watched it, a frown developing on my face. The ship was moving closer to our fleet, closer to the invading Verghasites, closer to the massive firefight going on above Victoria. Even from this distance, I could identify dozens—hundreds—of spacecraft, from corvettes up to big battleships and carriers, on the Majondran side alone, along with what looked to be a roughly equal number of attackers. A long and bloody conflict appeared unavoidable.

  I watched, frowning. Why would the Church ship possibly want t
o get closer to such a battle? The only thing I could think of was that perhaps they sought to lose us amid the confusion. I began to think that perhaps I should have waited and observed them a bit longer before hailing them. Now they knew someone was watching and wanting to catch up to them.

  I leaned toward my pilot again. “Do we have any way of stopping them?”

  “No, sir. We’re just a shuttle—not equipped for combat at all.”

  I considered my options. The Church ship had stretched the distance between us, and would soon enter the sphere of the battle. If the other pilot thought he could lose us there, he might well be right. I had no desire to follow him into that mess.

  Then it occurred to me: Why should I have to go into it at all?

  I scanned the tactical readout for a few seconds, then made my selection and flipped the communicator back on. Keying in my personal security codes and overrides, I waited.

  It did not take long.

  “This is Captain Jon Salas of the Marata, Lord Baranak. How may I be of service?”

  I nodded to the holo display and greeted the captain. “I hate to drag you away from the battle, even for a few moments, Captain,” I said. “But this may be just as important. Do you see the Church-registered shuttle at…” I consulted the tactical display and read him a series of numbers.

  He glanced to one side, where the edge of a wide, three-dimensional holo display floated in midair. Then he looked back and nodded. “Hard to miss, sir.”

  “I need you to lock that ship down, Captain.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Lock it down?”

  “Minimize the damage, keep them alive if you can—but don’t let them leave the area.”

  “Ah. Yes—certainly, sir.” He blinked and hesitated a moment. “A Church ship, sir?”

  I had expected that question, that doubt. Devotion within the very conservative ranks of the Majondran military ran at least as deep, probably deeper, than the population of my homeworld as a whole.

  “That Church ship, yes.”

  He must have quickly set any reservations aside, which I appreciated, because he nodded and said, “At once, sir.”

  The captain turned away again and spoke to one of the techs seated nearby on the bridge.

  I waited, anxious. The Church ship had gained velocity and would soon be deep within the swarm of battling spacecraft.

  “We should have them for you in a moment, sir,” Captain Salas reported.

  I allowed myself to relax a bit, glad to hear that the discipline of our military forces could trump even Church indoctrination. Then again, he scarcely could have objected. All I had asked was that he detain the ship, not destroy it.

  A bright flare of light at that moment drew my attention away from the holo and to the viewport. Ahead of us, a crimson beam of energy speared out from the Marata, just barely missing the Church ship. A warning shot, clearly. Only a tiny difference in firing angles and the smaller vessel would’ve been vaporized into an incandescent cloud.

  A second later, that’s precisely what happened: the ship exploded.

  My jaw dropped.

  I leaned closer to the tactical display, making sure I had seen what I thought I had seen. It was painfully apparent. Our quarry was no more.

  Leaning back and looking at the holo, I could see that Captain Salas was just getting the word of what I had witnessed firsthand. He didn’t appear any happier than I felt.

  Shouting, nearly screaming at the display, I got his attention. My already-rough voice nearly cracked as I choked out the question.

  “Who ordered that ship destroyed?”

  The captain blanched visibly in the display.

  “Sir, I…I do not know! I gave no order to the gunners. My orders were directed to Lieutenant Genz, to lock them up in tractor beams.”

  I glared at him. Part of my brain hovered on the brink of fury. Another part, trained and conditioned over most of my life, stepped back, observing our exchange dispassionately. That part carefully studied the man’s expressions and reactions, seeking any additional information that might be gleaned.

  “So am I to understand, Captain, that your gunners are free to fire their weapons at any time they please? Free to blast ships out of space whenever they feel like it?”

  The captain looked horrified.

  “No—no, sir! Not at all.”

  “Then how did that just happen?”

  The captain started to reply, apparently thought better of it, and managed an, “Excuse me a moment, sir,” before whirling around and barking at his subordinates.

  I waited, the anger welling up again despite my efforts to control it.

  After several seconds, the communications officer approached the captain. She spoke a few words to him that I could not overhear. Then he turned back to me.

  “No order was given to fire, sir. In fact, gunnery reports they only fired the one warning shot, and it safely missed.” He shook his head. “It must’ve been a stray shot from the battle.”

  I cursed, angrily and vehemently. My only lead was gone. I turned away from the holo display and brought my right hand up to my short, blond goatee, stroking it absently, thinking. Several moments passed during which no one came up with any additional information sufficient to be worth disturbing me. Then my reverie was broken as Captain Salas spoke up.

  “My lord,” he said, “perhaps the ship wasn’t actually destroyed.”

  “What?” I turned back to face him, where he floated there in miniature in the cloud, and crossed my arms. “We saw the ship explode, Captain.”

  “Perhaps that was what we were meant to think we saw,” Salas replied. “I’m running a high-intensity scan now...”

  I waited impatiently, curious what he was getting at and desperate enough for any hope that I was willing to entertain even the most far-fetched of ideas.

  “There,” he cried, standing in the display and pointing to a readout screen that was not part of the image I was seeing. “It was a ploy. They didn’t explode.”

  “What are you talking about, Salas?” I demanded.

  The captain manipulated the controls aboard his ship and suddenly I was seeing a tactical display of our immediate area of space above Victoria. He pointed to a faint trail of dots.

  “They slipped away while we were focused on the explosion. There’s the ion trail their engine is leaving behind. It must’ve been slightly damaged.”

  I was confused. “But—the explosion—!”

  Salas shook his head. “An old trick. Likely they released a big cloud of fuel just behind them—between us and them, to be precise— and ignited it. Then they slipped away in the confusion.”

  Nodding now, I pressed Salas. “Can we follow them?”

  “A simple thing,” Salas said. He manipulated controls and grinned. “There. They went around the bulk of the fighting and...” His grin vanished. “...and passed through the Gate.”

  “The Gate?”

  “Yes, my lord. Definitely. The trail leads directly to it and vanishes.”

  Groaning, I leaned back in my seat and stared up at the section of sky where I knew the gate hid, invisible but now so powerful and important. The canopy of stars and constellations surrounded us, the moon Victoria still a massive mottled shape at our backs and the blue-white swirled orb of Majondra, only homeworld any of us aboard had ever known, a large and insistent presence above and to port. A shimmering nebula of many colors swirled along, snakelike, in the background. Most disturbing of all, in the vast gulf of space between Victoria and Majondra, wave upon wave of dull-gray and olive drab warships from Verghas poured through that invisible gateway, colliding with wave upon wave of defending ships rising from our bases. Streaks of hard light and glowing tracers of harder projectiles crisscrossed the shrinking distance between them, and an ever-increasing proportion of that sector became filled with explosions, streamers of smoke and debris, wreckage, and above all the dead.

  Why was this happening? How had the Verghasites known the
Gates were about to open? How had they had time to construct so vast a fleet, poised to strike at a moment’s notice, even more quickly that my father’s ships could react? And why had Corindar Jeras killed him—right on the cusp of the war?

  And how would the fighting come out? What good would it do to solve the mystery, only to see my world overrun by the enemy and the answers rendered meaningless?

  I shook my head. The war was not my concern at the moment. I would pass on word of what had happened to my uncle, Justinian, and his brothers and sisters. They would pick up the fallen baton from Dad and lead us to victory.

  I had a different task before me. For the moment, only I knew that something more sinister than a simple attack on our command structure was afoot. The only thing I could do was to chase down my only remaining clue—the Church ship. No matter where it ventured. And so I made up my mind and issued the order: “Marata—pick us up. I’m taking command.”

  “You’re commandeering our ship, my lord?”

  “That is correct, Captain Salas. We have a new mission. We are going through the Gate.”

  + + +

  We docked our much smaller ship with the Marata and I ordered us through the Gate before my crew and I had even had time to climb out. By the time I reached the bridge and strode in, taking a spot to stand alongside Captain Salas in his center seat, the Marata was plunging forward, the starless circle of the Gate expanding to swallow us up.

  No one aboard knew first-hand what to expect. We had all seen historical recordings and descriptions from some six centuries previous, but to actually live through the experience of almost instantaneously stepping across a vast portion of the galaxy; it was a singular moment that could never be closely approximated by a holo recording or a poet’s hand.

  We tumbled through a nightmare tunnel of light and dark, color and void. The seemingly stable fabric of reality twisted and spiraled and shredded around us and the spot in the galaxy we had occupied moments before became a spot many, many light-years away, while the spot we now filled formed into reality before us.

  The Marata shot back out into reality as the stars reemerged, though in all-new configurations. Before us hung the brown-green limb of Sarmata, fourth world out from old Earth in the chain of newly-awakened Gates.