Falco Invictus: On the Forge of War (8 page)

“Good.” He nodded at them and left the women
to their meal.

“'Radiant Falcon',” Mia remarked after
Ch'Kran had gone. “He offers you a great compliment.
Ch'Rahli-Valka
is a term of endearment that Falcanian
noblemen only ever apply to a favorite wife, prized concubine, or
their first born daughters. It is not given lightly to an
outsider.”

[Unknown Space: Ten minutes to twelve,
Falcanian Standard Time]

“What was that?” Trajan demanded.

The sensor officer checked his scanners and
discovered a blip which had just begun to fade away out of sensor
range. No doubt because of quick thinking on the part of the
Falcanian crew which had pulled their vessel further out of scope
of the advanced
DSV Excalibur
.

“It's gone.”

“Widen the scan!” Trajan ordered. “Captain
Braden, I believe we have a shadow.”

The Captain nodded and ordered his weapons
officer to ready the armaments.

“Locking on,” the sensor officer said. Each
scanner had been calibrated to find the faintest reading in the dim
reaches of space. “A silhouette is coming up.”

Trajan stood over the monitor, intently
watched as the computer checked its records for a match to the
silhouette which the sensors now targeted. At last, an oval shaped
ship with wings came up on the screen. Its outline was familiar to
the Centurion for he had seen such vessels streak across the red
skies of Mars. “A Falcanian FS-9 Raptor!” Trajan shouted. He moved
across the bridge to Braden in his command chair. “Close in!
Destroy them!”

Braden pressed a button on his chair to give
an order for his gunners to close in on the FS-9 Raptor.

Thrust control rockets flipped the vessel
over and rotated the FS-9 Raptor so it could face off against the
DSV Excalibur
that had just charged her defense grid for
battle and began to move forward onto the
Tair’Aliran
’s
position.

“Gunports open!” shouted Kulcarin. “Lock and
load all railguns.”

“Weapons hot, sir.”

Kulcarin ordered his men to alert. The
bridge lights changed to a green hue. He felt the distance between
his ship and that of the Imperium’s shrink. Each vessel moved at
its maximum velocity. The expanse between them reduced in distance,
yet it appeared as if the vessels gracefully glided at a slow pace
to meet each other in combat.

The FS-9 Raptor was faster and more
maneuverable. Sitara had designed a magnificent vessel. This became
very apparent when the
DSV Excalibur
rotated itself toward
the
Tair'Aliran
. The Imperium ship fired its maneuvering
rockets. Closer and closer the ships moved as they reached weapons
range. Kulcarin looked at his tactical display, and waited for the
two spheres that showed the expanse of both ships weaponry to join
and give his order to open fire.

The Falcanian noticed a small silver-white
point on the holoviewer as he looked at the
Excalibur
move
in toward them. It seemed to flash and then blink in and out of
sight. Thinking it was a far off pulsar, Kulcarin turned his
attention fully back on the enemy ships which plunged toward
them.

“We are getting strange readings, Bashir,”
Shierak said.

“The
Excalibur
?” Kulcarin asked.

“No. Off our starboard bow.” The Falcanian
commander heard the apprehension in Shierak’s voice. “A building
energy spike.”

“H’kilos!” cursed Aranskrai. His instincts
aflame, Kulcarin jumped out of his command throne to shout his next
orders. “Evasive! Break course, bring us about at full burn.”

On board the
DSV Excalibur
Captain
Braden and his Imperial minder assumed that they had chosen to flee
rather than fight a superior warship.

Space rendered itself and became a chaotic
whirlpool filled with lightning, a chaotic discharge of energy. A
vortex that emitted all the colors of the rainbow and some that no
human eye could see exploded into fullness. The surge of the
wormhole blinded the sensors on both the
DSV Excalibur
and
Tair'Aliran
.

“All systems back online and functioning
normally,” Gee LaSalle said just as the lights came back up. “No
damage to report.”

“The FS-9, do you see it?” Cole asked.

“No, sir. We should send out a scout.”

“Either they were swallowed by that thing or
destroyed in the event horizon.” Trajan scowled. “We have more
important things to attend to then stellar phenomena.”

LaSalle glared at Trajan. “I would think you
wouldn’t want them to follow us any further, Centurion.”

“No debris or even a trace of an explosion,”
the sensor officer added.

“We do not have the time to investigate,”
Trajan snapped.

Braden's better judgment would have been to
do a sweep, and see if they could find any trace of the FS-9
Raptor. But he knew the
DSV Excalibur
could not afford to be
late for their rendezvous with the Iksar'rang.

Braden sighed. “Very well. Set course and
begin the countdown to spacefold.”

[The Indian Ocean: 1:00 AM Falcanian
Standard time]

Winged shadowed figures vaulted into the
skies silhouetted by a palace caught in a blaze. She could feel the
gusts of air become whirlwinds all around her. Flames turned night
into day. A hot breeze warmed her body brought up by the heat of
burning buildings and the beating of many wings.

She knew that in its fully constructed form,
the palace had been a pyramid shaped building with immense towers
capped with bronze domes atop each spire. Great oval styled doors
once stood sentinel at the palace gates. They were etched with
double helices. Before the bombing the walled garden had been a
place of recreation for the dwellers of the fantastic fortress. The
gardens had sheltered strange blossoms and unusual trees.

Above the burning palace a mountain range
rose and she knew them to be the mighty and aged Himalayas. The
Bharata people considered the range holy so also the winged-ones
who had made a home at the Himalayan base honored it. Cries filled
the air calling in an unfamiliar language: “Kroi, Kroi, Kroi!”
words filled with anger and despair. Frederika felt the sadness for
she experienced it herself. Pain, sorrow, anger and hatred burned
inside her. In her deepest core she was responsible for the fleeing
figures as though they were her kin. She needed to protect
them.

Purple lightning struck from the sky. Some
kind of weapons rained down upon the city and turned it to ash. She
knew without a doubt that hope had been lost. Those winged beings
were not taking to the air to do battle, but rather to escape the
carnage that befell their once glorious city.

In the darkened cabin.

Frederika sat up, her eyes quickly adjusting
to the night. The dream throbbed in her brain. Something happened.
Her instincts told her this vision, had been brought about by a
change of course in the scheme of the universe. Déjà vu pressed
down on the Morningstar and overwhelmed her. A cold feeling chilled
her bones. Frederika felt as if doom itself had entered her life
and she could do nothing to escape it. A thought nagged at her that
she had some how been at fault for the conflagration of the city in
her dreams. This greatly bothered her. How could the destruction be
her doing?

Around the room she glanced and Frederika
noticed that Mia had become uncovered on her futon. She went over
and fixed the girl's covers. In the last few days, Frederika had
grown very fond of the girl. Mia became the sister she never
had.

[Unknown Space: 1:30 AM Falcanian Standard
Time]

There is a Tarik aphorism which says the
universe leans toward irony. What had hidden the
Bloodwing
from the
Excalibur
's sensors had been in truth the immense
black mass of a funeral barge launched by a civilization a thousand
years now gone. The barge propelled itself from the depths of
hyperspace back into normal space because of a tremor in space-time
which created a wormhole. Its appearance proved most fortuitous for
the Falcanian crew. Indeed it could be nothing but destiny itself
that these things had converged here and now.

Fashioned from a dark, sensor absorbing
crystal, the barge was able to block the ship's sensors. Had Braden
followed his gut and sent out a scout, the black sloping barge
would have appeared to the naked eye, but hid the
Tair'Aliran
from sensors.

Kulcarin and his crew were right beneath the
massive thing, its mass blocking the faint starlight from view.
Kulcarin should have ordered his ship back to Earth. Instead, he
chose to investigate the object that failed to register on his
ship’s sensors, but could clearly be seen outside the portholes of
his
Bloodwing
.

Had he returned home, Kulcarin would have
saved himself a great deal of pain and trouble.

There came no responses to the
Tair'Aliran
's hails. The ship seemed lifeless. The strange
vessel drank in the beams of the
Tair'Aliran
's forward
illumination as the attack craft hovered before the ship in search
for a means to dock. No seams or obvious cobbling together of
plating could be found in the whole of the barge. The Falcanian
corvette moved slowly up and under the black ship's hull, searching
for some means to board her and learn about the technology that
constructed a craft completely invisible to modern scanners.

Lord Aranskrai stroked his goatee and looked
out at the wedge of a ship. He had come out here to stop the
DSV
Excalibur
from completing her mission. In that he failed. He
thought to compensate for his non-achievement by learning more
about this sleek black ship and its construction. Who had built
her? Where had it come from? How did its stardrive work? Answers to
any of these questions would benefit the Falcanian Khanate.
Kulcarin's sense of honor demanded that he act.

After three hours, Kulcarin and his crew at
last discovered on the exterior of the black ship what appeared to
be a hanger bay. The bay seemed large enough to hold the whole of
the Raptor as well as a dozen more like it.

Kulcarin moved closer to the holo. “Can we
breach that door?”

“It’s a crack in the shell,” Shierak
affirmed.

Triumph flared in Kulcarin's eyes. “Prepare
to grapple and breach. We're going in.”

The
Tair'Aliran
's ventral hatches
clutched onto the alien ship’s hanger bay door and permitted for
her crew to pierce through with a diamond headed maul. A probe
concluded the atmosphere aboard the barge was breathable and within
Terran ranges. Kulcarin and a half dozen of his men entered the
alien vessel.

Whoever built this had been large. The size
of an SUV turned on its nose to approximate by the dimensions of
the doorways. When they entered the hanger bay, the Falcanians
found it was empty of any craft, though it seemed the ships
internal systems worked as subdued reddish light came on once the
ship's internal sensors noticed the Falcanians.

Kulcarin walked with his men through the
unadorned ship. They soon split into two teams to cover more
ground. Mostly empty rooms were found. Slate black walls did
register on scans and were not apparently made from whatever the
outer hull had been formed from. Kulcarin wandered about the empty
chambers, while he looked at his scanner. He had strayed from his
men, fascinated by the idea of where he was and gone off into some
other chambers more toward the center of the ship. Aranskrai's
communicator chirped. “This is Grath, my team found what we think
is the bridge.” There was a short pause before the voice spoke
again. “The command chair – these beings were huge!”

Kulcarin smiled. He never heard his engineer
filled with such awe before. “Anything that can tell us what, or
who made her?”

“I think I found a data crystal... It's
gigantic.”

“Bring it. My mother will find it of use,”
Kulcarin commanded.

Colonel Aranskrai came to a large square
door and pressed the oversized button on the nearby wall. The doors
slid open, creaking as if in need of lubrication. Kulcarin stepped
forward as he felt his third eye tingle. His Tahru tutor always
told him to pay attention to that tingle. It usually meant
something important lay ahead.

A box... no, rather a sarcophagus sat in the
center of the room. Obsidian in color like the rest of the ship. It
was simple, no markings to indicate if it were barren or occupied
with remains. Across from the sarcophagus on the black wall were
the first adornments Kulcarin had seen on this strange vessel. A
mural glowed on the crystalline black bulkhead. Below it a
block-like alien script told the tale, but Aranskrai could not read
it.

Had Kulcarin been able to understand the
hieroglyphs, three words would have been of interest to him:
Gwareen, Kri-Skar, and Kranix T’Raul, were players in the mural’s
epic. Two planets with armies between them clashed in the picture.
One with large continents that seemed to have been carved by ice,
great green oceans made it appear to be a jewel, a grand emerald.
The other world red, perhaps hilly and its gray seas seemed to be
filled with constant storm.

Aranskrai eyed harder the image. His
thoughts interrupted by the tomb's door as it slammed shut.
Kulcarin did not move, too enthralled with the pictures on the wall
to bother with the mechanism. Instead he stepped closer to get a
better look at the two armies between the red and green worlds.

They were large and covered with fur, ivory
colored wool to be exact. Ram horns adorned their heads as they
charged toward their much shorter opponents. Very little doubt to
conclude by proportions these horned goat-men had built this black
mausoleum ship. The other army bore a resemblance to brawny,
six-feet tall… jackrabbits. Not typical cuddly bunnies by any
means. They had extended fangs, spiky pelts and wore elaborate
braids. Their soft fur ranged in shades of black, white or other
beneath sparse armor. Probably not herbivores judged Kulcarin,
given the predatory arrangement of their large eyes. These furry
warriors were clearly hunters. The jackrabbit creatures wielded
curved swords and carried almost old fashion projectile rifles. A
dragon of fire led these feral rabbits. It was not evident though
to Aranskrai which side in this onslaught between rams and hares
could be labeled the aggressor.