The journey home, p.1
The Journey Home, page 1
The Journey Home
A K Lambert
Contents
Prologue
I. Escape from Earth
1. Chapter 1 - Gemini 7
2. Chapter 2 - Bellogorn
3. Chapter 3 - Kiy’s Day Out
4. Chapter 4 - Thorrid
5. Chapter 5 - Sol
6. Chapter 6 - Earth (and above)
7. Chapter 7 - The Hidden City
8. Chapter 8 - The Chance Meeting
9. Chapter 9 - Princess Domeriette
10. Chapter 10 - The Records of All
II. Stops along the Way
11. Chapter 11 - The Battlecruiser
12. Chapter 12 - Gorgonea Tertia System
13. Chapter 13 - The Humb
14. Chapter 14 - The Test
15. Chapter 15 - The Pleasure Moon of Doth
16. Chapter 16 - The Return of the Princess
17. Chapter 17 - Stanza De-Lay-Brandon
18. Chapter 18 - The Discovery
19. Chapter 19 - The Battle
20. Chapter 20 - Droop the Sleuth
21. Chapter 21 - The Science Vessel
III. The Arrival
22. Chapter 22 - Gobbler
23. Chapter 23 - Sonia
24. Chapter 24 - Escape from Allacrom
25. Chapter 25 - Residuum
26. Chapter 26 - The Rammor
27. Chapter 27 - The Resistance
28. Chapter 28 - The Arrival Home
29. Chapter 29 - The Game Plan
30. Chapter 30 - The Welcome
Postscript
Characters & Maps
Also By A K Lambert
Prologue
The worldwide spread of the Giant Hornet appears unstoppable. Native to forested parts of Asia, the Asian hornet, Vespa Mandarinia, is a significant threat to Western honey bees, which have no natural defence. In late summer and autumn, hornet colonies attack beehives, destroying entire bee colonies to feed their brood and produce new queens.
Young Bess
A young Bess and her best friend Joly screamed in equal measures of delight and terror as they and their classmates were chased around the training suite by their fighting arts instructors, at this end-of-week ritual. A wonderfully choreographed fighting demonstration – practically a comedy routine – performed by the three Vaux brothers. They would bump into one another, trip over and cause mayhem, all the time taking out the class one by one and dumping them unceremoniously onto the mat. Bess used her highly advanced telepathic abilities to hijack the three brothers’ sophisticated mental interaction guiding these showpieces, learning to anticipate their moves and, increasingly, ending up one of the last standing – an honour all the children wanted to achieve. Today was special though; the brothers produced Kayson lace from beneath their tunics.
Bess guided her friend to a far corner. She would try to help Joly be the last one standing today, though it would be more difficult with the disconcerting lace. She hijacked the mental communication between the brothers.
As usual, they spent the first few minutes toying with the children, letting them escape in fits of laughter. Soon the comedy routines became less random; Theodrone, the eldest brother, started calling the moves.
‘Festig, through my legs. Greetindale, roll over my back. I’ll flip behind. Lace and centre two young ones each.’
The two younger brothers performed the acrobatics flawlessly, landing face to face with wide-eyed students unable to decide which way to run. The laces wound around unlucky students before they could escape, shrinking and drawing them together in an unceremonious fall to the mat.
‘Now, Operation Eavesdropper!’ Theo ordered Greet and Festig, but to Bess, this sounded like gibberish.
A moment later, she and Joly were the targets, laced together – their exit from the game in no doubt.
Bess heard Theo in her mind. ‘Your little game has been rumbled, Bessendra. Ha ha ha!’
Part I
Escape from Earth
Chapter 1 - Gemini 7
Gemini 7 - (Pulcherrim System)
The Sacrifice - 1992
* * *
(Book 1, Chapter 30, The Killing Games)
“The population of Gemini 7 had saved themselves and their planet. A very rare occurrence when visited by a Zerot planetary violation squad. They were a lucky species. Or, perhaps, an ingenious and an incredibly brave one. Either way, Cadre 176’s days were over, and the Zerot suffered two major setbacks in quick succession.”
* * *
THE CAST:
Oncouch Zamball
* * *
Seven hundred million dead. One-third of the population of Gemini 7 slaughtered by the Zerot.
But they still had a planet, and as a species, survived. Oncouch Zamball, head of the Council of Leaders that represented the seven countries of Gemini 7, didn’t second guess their decision to roll over and let the Zerot slaughter them, it was the only way to save their race. They collectively decided after the evil Hammaraffi had made his intentions clear to make the Game play out in such a manner as to ruin it for the Zerot.
Within a week of arriving on their planet, Hammaraffi and his Cadre confronted the previous Council of Leaders and made clear what was going to happen. The manipulation of their people over the next twenty years before a planetary violation squad exterminated every living being on their planet. He enjoyed outlining the details of the Game and Gemini 7’s role, ending in genocide. He didn’t mind telling them because he intended to kill four of them and take their identities, then turn the others into Super Bondservants. Hammaraffi couldn’t resist showing off to his Cadre of three.
He was unaware he was telling everyone on the planet!
The Geminians, a race of psychics with a form of ESP, remained undetected by the Zerot. This extrasensory perception, a pseudoscience unique to them, created a collective conscience. Two on the planet could engage with everyone. One was the leader of 7.3 who passed on the rantings of the Zerot before being killed.
The other, Zamball, was left to rebuild the Council and coordinate the strategy of the Geminians during the reign of the Zerot. Twenty years to come up with the plan that would sacrifice so many. To outsiders, it may have looked a pacifist response, complete inaction against the marauding violation squad, but that was far from the truth.
They didn’t denounce their decision to roll over and let the Zerot slaughter them, because they had calculated the death toll to be no more than ten million. The hive mind concurred.
Seven hundred million was inconceivable, but they had no other plan, so had to see it through.
But now the collective mind agreed on something different.
Revenge.
Hammaraffi adopted the same strategy used on Earth. He chose the largest country 7-2 and took on the role of Fuhrer. His Cadre assumed leadership roles in the Nazi-style hierarchy and formed a secret police force, with Bondservants the spine of the movement. They needed a faction to subjugate and experiment on, but in a species without religion, they were forced to consider other factions for their genocidal experiments. The chosen practised a form of Trance music, satisfying two vital pieces of criteria: there were many millions of them, and were spread across the seven nations. Overnight, this techno electronic music was branded as evil, that needed purging from existence.
Here on Gemini 7, Zamball orchestrated his own game against the Zerot, manipulating Hammaraffi’s Cadre through coded communications and the overwriting of implanted suggestions.
Zamball soon realised that the Zerot were untouchable. The Geminians were able to communicate together and override suppressive implanted thoughts, but anything more would have alerted the enemy who, he suspected, would have quelled and subjugated them. The Bondservants and Super Bondservants all played their parts, the Gestapo appearing to terrorise everything around them, and the advances of the 7-2 armies into the other six nations appearing to be bloody affairs. But the reports to the Zerot were fabricated. The Gestapo didn’t terrorise, and the incursions into other countries were pure fantasy. The only real casualties were the poor souls seconded for the Cadre’s entertainment.
So, for twenty years an elaborate game played out between Gemini 7 and Hammaraffi’s Cadre. The Geminians, and Zamball in particular, were content with the minimal losses over this period, but what they hadn’t allowed for was the sheer ferocity of the violation squad and the efficient manner used to round up the inhabitants of the planet and slaughter them.
The Geminians managed to track the Zerot armada’s retreat and would eventually find their planet.
The single mind, and the singlemindedness, of the Geminians, had completely renounced the pacifist tactics they had employed for so many years. They were focused to a male, female and juvenile on the destruction of the Zerot, and would twist, use and, if necessary, eliminate anyone in the way of their crusade.
They had the makings of a plan.
Vengeance gnawed in the collective mind of one and a half billion souls.
Chapter 2 - Bellogorn
Bellogorn
Torment and Control - 2005
* * *
THE CAST:
Premier Gor/Carffekk, Salvia Kiy/Birjjikk, The Misfit
* * *
Premier Gor switched off his virtual screen and looked up at the portrait hanging over the grand stone surround fireplace in his circular state office. The scene depicting the old port of Santraneed far to the west with the Sea of Needles in the background didn’t inspire evil deeds, not that he needed inspir
Gor rose from his chair and left his office. There was something he needed to deal with – a little discipline to impose.
He took the right-hand, less used corridor leading away from his office which was, by Trun standards, reasonably opulent. The smooth granite walls were lined with paintings in grandly appointed frames. Small chandeliers hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. The floor was an elaborate mosaic of stones reflecting the colours of the seasons. At the end of the corridor was an unremarkable wooden door. Two bored soldiers flanking the doors straightened. Their instructions were clear – let nobody in or anything out.
The ornate key attached to Gor’s belt slipped effortlessly into the keyhole and eased the deadbolt across. Once through, he locked the door again, leaving the key. He descended a spiral stone staircase to what once had been a suite of dungeons – only one cell occupied now.
The door to this cell was boron steel, and entry was via a sub-atomic optical scanner – technology too advanced for this world. Gor grabbed a facemask hanging next to the door and presented his eye. It slid open. He stepped inside and waited for the door to close behind him.
Under the mask, a cruel smile crept across Gor’s face. The larger of the two creatures chained to the rear wall of the cell let out a deep and doleful howl when it finally picked out Gor. The younger sibling echoed him with a higher pitched wail. The poor wretches knew what was coming.
The previous year, Premier Gor had reported to Salvia Kiy that they weren’t hitting the required targets for the subjugation of Preenasette by the Game end date. Her reaction was what he expected.
‘Why, Why, WHY!’ she screamed. ‘Everything has been meticulously enacted exactly to your plan, master planner. And you tell me this now?’ She was picking up anything resembling a projectile from his desk, throwing them at the wall of his office. Gor knew to ride the storm and waited for his Cadre leader to calm down. Finally she stopped, breathless, teeth bared and eyes smouldering. ‘Why, master planner, why has this happened?’
‘It’s an unanticipated side effect of the Trun psychic.’ She was directly over him now, uncomfortably close to his face. He ignored it and held her gaze, knowing she would deem any lesser action a weakness. ‘Where we would expect blind faith from our Bondservants, we are only getting blinkered faith. They keep questioning their situation.’
Kiy’s rage eased. She wanted to know the details. ‘You mean, we murder their families, take away all their reasons to live, make them think it was the Vercetians and instil the idea that revenge is the only justice. And you say they are questioning this?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘They have empathy that we could never have anticipated.’
‘Have you a course of action to rectify the situation?’
‘Yes,’ replied Gor, a little more at ease now. ‘We have fourteen hundred Trun Bondservants in prominent positions, causing havoc, propagating the war. The psychic suggestion of savage revenge we have planted is not holding. The three of us cannot keep reapplying it. We need a Bellogorn.’
‘The Game rules won’t allow us one from the slave pens without marking us down considerably. That I will not accept.’ Kiy contemplated him. ‘But you know that already. What are you scheming, master planner?’
Gor grinned. ‘Bellog is only a single wormhole from here – an eight-week round trip.’ His host’s jaw was salivating, extending the evil smile on his face. ‘We go and get one. The Assessor and the Game leaders will never know! When we’ve finished with it, we incinerate it – remove all the evidence.’
Salvia Kiy’s grin was identical. ‘Your deviousness continues amazes me, Premier Gor. And this will get us back on target?’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘Good,’ she replied. ‘I’ll go and get one myself. I need a break from this form.’
‘Get one with a young sibling,’ he said. ‘They are always so much easier to control.’
Kiy nodded and turned to go, with a sweeping look at the mess she had made. Will she apologise? he wondered. She carried on out of his office. There’s a first time for everything, he smiled to himself, but it’s not today.
Now I do need to take that hideous painting down.
Birjjikk was in Gor’s office, having removed her host’s epidermis and phase-shifted her head and shoulder horns into existence. In his full-length mirror she admired herself. The skeletal slimness of her scaled aquamarine cheeks highlighted by thin shadow lines and elongated ears, her eyes with their bright orange hue, and her sharp pointed teeth. She looked closer at her teeth. They were losing the brilliant whiteness of youth – at two hundred plus years, she was nearly a third of the way into her life expectancy of six to seven hundred years. She could extend that to eight hundred with estivation – a form of hibernation taken in the heat of their underground world – but she thought it a waste of her precious time. At least her sweeping scalp horns still curved down to her waist. That length was rare amongst the Zerot and her proudest feature. She reached into the drawer where she stuffed the discarded epidermis and pulled out a Kirkir – her favourite piece of clothing. The fluidic cloth wrapped around her torso, circumnavigating her horns and fusing to her scaly skin. The skirt draped over the small of her back and down past her backside. She felt for the hidden knife and flicked it open.
‘You still have that?’ asked Premier Gor, thinking back to their academy days. He laughed. ‘The whole class knew about it, but not our tutor.’
‘I never told you this, but Master Nama-Krikk told me just before the Final Test, he knew I carried this knife from my first day at the academy.’
‘And he never took it off you?’ said Gor incredulously.
‘Strange, I know, but no. I think the Master had a soft spot for me,’ she said, attempting to smile.
Birjjikk stepped onto a waiting receptor plate. ‘Keep an iron grip on this planet while I’m away.’
‘Yes, madame,’ he answered formally.
An opaque globe coalesced over the plate and she was gone.
Birjjikk materialised in a small spaceship in high orbit around Preenasette. She went straight to the cockpit, sat down and began the pre-flight routine. When she finished, she deactivated the cloaking device, revealing a small, silver, tear-shaped vessel with a perfectly smooth polished finish. This four-person ship was the pinnacle of pre-ascendancy design, though the small storage bay would be a squeeze for two Bellogorn. Stolen from the Rammor, it was a faster vessel than any the Zerot had ever come across in all of their travels. Birjjikk eased the ship forward; the Cammerine Coils, embedded in the outer hull began oscillating between her current dimension and a parallel about a hundred times a second. During its moment in the parallel universe, energy created inside a heavy atom by the dimensional transfer powered tiny drive motors to each coil. The oscillation to this dimension caused the ship to jump. This cycle increased from a hundred times a second to a thousand, then a million and finally to billions of oscillations per second; the teardrop-shaped vessel’s long point accelerated through the vacuum of space at an unbelievable speed.
