Broken Stars (Universe on Fire Book 1), page 22
EPILOGUE
The small Val’ayash recon ship dropped out of FTL at the edge of a star system ravaged by war. The entire space before them was filled with dense energy clouds which would destroy anything that even attempted to pass through.
“Set shields to the maximum,” Antaris Truthspeaker, Battle Commander of the Third Verse in service to the Val’ayash, Commander of the recently destroyed light cruiser Pious ordered.
“Shields at maximum, Battle Commander,” one of his subordinates reported.
“Take us through,” Antaris said and leaned back in his chair.
As the small recon ship entered the storm, Antaris allow himself a moment of reflection. He had lost his charge, a light cruiser he had commanded. That was something that had not occurred since the time when the old Zhal’Qash still lived. And the fact that galled at him was that it had been accomplished by peoples his kind had never before encountered.
Their technology level had seemed primitive, save for the few pieces of technology that seemed far ahead of anything the Val’ayash knew of. The few pieces his people had recovered had been studied on their trip back, and the only thing they had managed to establish was just how confused they were. They had no idea how the tech even worked.
The battle his destroyed ship waged with the new enemy had been strange as well. They had been tricked, led to close the range, and then the enemy had struck. Still, after months of analyzing data, his people had no answer for him as to what had happened. Explosions had rocked his ship without warning from the inside, crippling most systems. Then they had poured an extreme amount of firepower into his ship until they managed to overcome the shields.
It was only Antaris’s experience gained in countless battles over thousands of years that had told him that his ship was all but lost. They had been lucky to have been able to evacuate before their ship exploded and took them all with it.
And that was not something that Antaris could allow. Word needed to be carried about this new threat, their technology studied and reversed, added to the might of Val’ayash. Their mission demanded it.
The recon ship finally reached the inner edge of the storm, and found itself inside the inner circle of the system. A star shone before them, with two planets orbiting it. All around them the storm raged, protecting them from prying eyes.
Four rings surrounded the star, and Antaris could see them spinning around it as the harvesters pulled stellar matter from the star itself and funneled it to the rings, fueling the forges that worked nonstop. Warships lined the rings as construction crews worked on them. The might of Val’ayash would soon be returned to its former glory. Soon their time would come, and mistakes of the past would not be repeated.
Antaris ordered the ship toward one of the two planets, and had them land on the planet, near the Temple of Truth. His failure required penance.
He found himself walking through the Temple halls soon enough, his gaze toward the ground signaling his failure. He reached the end of the hall, and finally allowed himself to look up.
A tear in space pulsed slowly above him, white then black in sequence. Antaris felt a stirring deep inside him, the connection that only the Val’ayash shared with the creator. Every time that they ushered a soul to the true life they felt an echo of the sensation. But now, standing before the living proof of their faith, the sensation was so much more powerful.
“Forgive me for I have failed,” Antaris said as he bowed his head.
“It is from failure that we learn the most. Raise your head, Battle Commander,” a dual voice said.
“Thank you, Creator, what is your will?”
“The time for the return is at hand. Prepare yourself, Battle Commander. Challenges lie ahead.” A part of the voice seemed almost gleeful, while another conveyed almost no emotion. The duality of the voice often made young priests go mad, but Antaris had long ago trained his mind to hear the will of his creator clearly. The voice was the manifestation of their creator’s dual nature, of Chaos and Order.
“And so I shall meet them head on. In time, all shall reach true life and rejoin your greatness.”
“Yesss, you will accomplish your destiny and deliver their souls to their true purpose.”
***
On a clear summer day, on vast grass plain in the shadow of a large mountain, a tear in space announced the arrival of a cloaked figure. The stranger removed his hood, and took a look around himself. His eyes paused on the dark mountain, and then turned to the clear blue sky. He took a deep breath and allowed himself a moment of peace.
Then a rustle behind him soured his mood.
“What are you doing here?” With his mind, the stranger sent the words to the one who had intruded on his moment.
“I could ask you the same thing,” the intruder said out loud.
The stranger grimaced, glancing back at the intruder and seeing a human-like being standing there watching him. “Have you been following me?” he asked the intruder.
“You are not hard to follow, when you are not bothering to cover your tracks,” the intruder said.
“You still haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here?” the stranger asked, his eyes turning back to the sky.
“We are curious as to what your plans are, this universe is far away from the places you usually visit,” the intruder said casually.
The stranger almost laughed. “Since when am I required to tell you my plans?”
“You can’t keep doing this, it is wrong. They do not deserve you playing with them like they are just pieces on a board,” the intruder said, his voice almost pleading.
“That is funny coming from you. Did you forget how we met?”
“I never forget, but just because it was necessary then and there, does not mean that it is necessary here and now.”
The stranger started walking forward, allowing his senses to be filled with the air and the smell of the grass. “They are just pieces on a board, just like we once were. This here,” he gestured with his hand to their surroundings, “none of it matters, there are an infinite number of permutations, an infinite number of realties. They are just one drop of water in an endless ocean.”
“That does not mean that they do not matter.” The intruder walked beside him.
“That is funny, considering that you are willing to sit still and let Chaos and Order sate their hunger.”
“I understand that as it stands, we are no match for them,” the intruder said. “Risking their anger would do far more damage than just letting them be.”
“That is why we are so different, you do things in order to preserve as much of life as possible. And I’ve never cared about anything other than my own strength. The only reason I oppose them is because they are the next challenge.”
“Yet if you win you will save countless lives,” the intruder said.
The stranger stopped as he noticed something in the grass. He leaned down and picked up a small rock, perfectly round. He bounced it in his palm for a moment, admiring it. It was almost perfectly round. “It is so rare for Earth to survive. In most realities where it exists it either destroys itself before getting to space, or they get destroyed by something out there. In only a few rare instances does it truly thrive.”
“You know, I have never actually stepped foot on an Earth, it does have a beauty to it,” the intruder said as he looked around. “In our home universe it was a wasteland by the time we met.” The intruder then gave him a pointed look and changed the topic. “She thinks that she has found a way.”
The stranger tilted his head at that. “Really?”
“She is still working on it, but if she succeeds… We will have a way of getting more power, perhaps eventually enough to oppose them directly. You should go to her, she could use your insight.”
“She doesn’t want to speak with me.”
“Perhaps if you reached out?” the intruder offered.
The stranger hesitated, but then shook his head. “No, I can’t. Not now.”
“What could be more important?”
“This place.” The stranger opened his arms. “Can you feel it, two different realities, merging together?”
“That is nothing new, it has happened before.”
“Not this controlled. And I feel them here… Chaos and Order, they’ve touched this universe for some reason. Put their tendrils out, infecting a race, but I can’t find them. Something is obscuring my sight. But I know that a part of them is here, and that should make them susceptible to the rules of this reality. If I am right, then they have made themselves vulnerable… The power in this universe, altered by another… I might be able to draw enough power to really hurt them. Catch them off guard.”
“And what will you do when they decide to retaliate? How many more souls will be lost because you can’t accept that they are stronger than us? They were the first, they’ve had countless ages to grow their power. We are nothing to them.”
The stranger didn’t answer, instead he threw his consciousness out of his material body, feeling all around him, searching the planet for the breach. Then he found it, deep in the ground. He saw that he had been right, the breach was stable. He only needed to figure out how that had happened, and then figure out how to access the power.
“How can we not try?” the stranger asked, as he returned back to his body. “How many do you think that they have devoured? All to fuel their hunger. If they are not stopped, eventually they will devour all that there is.”
The intruder shook his head. “I hope that you know what you are doing. But I cannot sit and watch as you do this. I still remember what happened the last time you defied them.” The intruder turned and departed through a tear in space.
“As do I,” the stranger whispered as one of his oldest friends walked away. “As do I, old friend.”
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Rise of the Empire Book 1 – Olympus and Eternal Path Book 1 – Eternal Soul
Rise of the Empire Book 1 – Olympus
Chapter One
February 2081
Michael Jorgenson reached for the panel above his head. He switched the exterior lights on and raised the front covering so that he could see outside of the sub. He liked to do that sometimes, though he didn’t need to. The Olympus searcher submarine Merman, like the military submarines of the last century, navigated mostly by sonar and other sensors that were developed in the past twenty years. But Michael liked to watch the water; its emptiness soothed him. Sometimes he swore that he could see movements out there at the edge of his vision. There were, of course, lifeforms here at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, but they tended to stay away from Olympus subs.
“Oh God! You are doing it again!” Peter Manes said from his post at the sensor station.
“I like looking at the ocean,” Michael replied sullenly.
“Well, normal people like me are terrified. All that nothingness, it’s weird. You are looking but you don’t see anything.”
“Then don’t look.”
“I can’t not look,” Peter said, exasperated.
“Well then shut up and watch the screens.”
They spent the next ten minutes in silence. Michael stared into the dark ocean, but there was nothing to see, of course. They were seven hundred meters above the ocean floor, and there was nothing around them but water; the lights couldn’t illuminate more than a couple meters in front of them. From time to time, he would catch glimpse of something out there moving fast on the outskirts of his vision. He tried to follow it with his eyes, trying to discern what it was and what it looked like. Much of the ocean remained unexplored, its life unknown. Most of the underwater cities were built close to the coast, and the majority of the Concordis cities were in the Mediterranean, with only two cities built in the Atlantic. And both of those were placed at around ninety kilometers from the coast.
The League had only one underwater city, and while Olympus had many mining operations in the Atlantic, none of them were anywhere close to the depth the Merman was currently at. The Merman was slowly mapping the bottom of the West European Basin at the depth of four kilometers. The searcher-class submarines were equipped with state-of-the-art sensors, which made Michael’s and Peter’s job easier.
They were meant to map the ocean floor, discover metal reserves, and discern if it was profitable for a mining operation to be constructed here. If it was, a message would be sent to Olympus headquarters in Nephthys. If not, the deposits would be marked and coordinates sent to their base in Sedna, the second city built in the Atlantic. It was a boring job, with sensors and computers doing most of the work. The only reason for a crew was that the computer couldn’t be programmed for all eventualities, so the crew was more of a failsafe.
“That’s strange,” Peter said, snapping Michael out of his reverie.
“What?”
“I just got a signal, but it’s strange…”
“Strange how?”
“This signal isn’t deteriorated at all,” Peter said, dumbfounded.
“What do you mean? Is it a glitch?”
“No, I’ve verified that the signal is coming from the outside and that it is our signal, but it seems that it was boosted. And it’s not a returned signal. Whatever it is, it’s broadcasting continuously at us.”
“So what? Another sub caught our signal, boosted it, and sent it back to screw with us?” Michael suggested, maybe more harshly than he needed. But this was starting to creep him out, and his nerves caused his words to come out sounding scornful.
Peter didn’t seem to notice his tone; he was completely engrossed with his station. Furiously tapping his screen, bringing up various graphs and running the signal through the computer. “No, barring the fact that there isn’t another sub anywhere near our position, our submarines don’t have the capability to send a signal through water without it deteriorating. That’s why we go to the surface to get in contact with the base.”
“The League or the Americans?” Michael asked in a low voice.
“No, the League is on par with us—our equipment might even be slightly better, and we couldn’t do this—and the Americans are at least a decade behind us technologically. They are still recovering from the war.” Peter raised his head and looked at Michael. “I’ve found the source.”
Michael looked at his friend. He saw the same emotion there that was starting to creep into him: fear. He swallowed and asked, “Where is it?”
“The signal is originating some fifteen hundred meters in front of us, from the ocean floor.”
“Can you tell what it is?”
“There is some kind of interference with the sonar, all I’m getting are rock formations. And it’s absorbing any signal I try to send. It’s like they just disappear. But we know that there is something, since whatever is there is broadcasting.”
“Could it be something natural? A strange fish or something?” Michael asked, grasping for anything to make sense of the situation.
“I don’t know…there are a lot of strange creatures in the world. Some can create electricity or mimic different sounds, but radio signals? It’s true that Earth’s oceans are the least explored part of our planet and that there are strange and different beings living here at the bottom of the oceans more than anywhere else. But I just can’t see a living organism having the capability to catch radio signals and then aim them and broadcast them, not to mention that it would need to have organs specifically designed to do just that…I mean an entirely biological beacon it would—”
“Peter, stop!” Michael said as he recognized his friend’s coping mechanism. Whenever he became nervous or afraid, he had the tendency to ramble on. “What you are trying to say is that it can’t be any kind of lifeform, and must be something manmade, correct? Well, then, if it isn’t another sub, it could be some top secret project of Olympus. You said it had some absorbing qualities, maybe some kind of stealth or something.”
“Well, yes…yes, it could be something like that. Yes, yes, even though I don’t think that we have anything near that kind of capability, nor does anyone else. But if it is a top secret project, we wouldn’t know about it right? Yes, they would keep it a secret and—”
“PETER!” Michael said again. “Focus, Peter. If it is something of ours and is top secret, then they wouldn’t have sent our signal back at us, so the only thing that makes sense is that they had some kind of complications. Maybe the only thing they can send is our own signal, and are trying to get our attention. There might be people trapped there with no way of sending a message out.” Michael tried to convince that what he was about to do was a correct decision. “We need to go and check, see what we find.”
“Michael, this sub isn’t equipped to carry out rescue operations.”
“Maybe so, but we need to check the situation. If there is need for a rescue, we’ll surface and call for help.”
Peter hesitated a beat, and then nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he whispered. Michael knew his friend was scared. He was as well, but he also knew that as long as there was a chance that there was someone in need of help, he couldn’t just turn his back and walk away. He took control of the sub from the computer and set a new course. It took just under four minutes to get to the origin of the signal.
“Where is it?” Michael asked. There was nothing but rock in front of them, and they were just a couple of meters away from the coordinates Peter sent to his screen.
