Malaran, Leela, and Disnu, all clad in camouflaged grasslands hunting attire of purple and black geometric patterns, lay perfectly still in the tall purple grass watching through binoculars as the lander set down.
It had been a strange time in the weeks since the starship arrived. Apparently, some negotiations were ongoing, and no open hostilities had broken out, but all the royal military forces were on high alert. Father and Mother had relocated to Citadel Donatello out on here the Vastedad Morada away from the population center of Bandarpor that surrounded Citadel Brunelleschi on the east coast. Nobody was telling Malaran what was going on, though. All her brothers were sent to secret locations, and Father had assigned her a detachment of troops and told her to go lose herself out in the wilderness for a while until things settled down. She didn't like being out of the loop, but she thought being "out on patrol" was better than being cooped up in her citadel waiting to see what happened next.
And somehow, out here on the desolate purple plain, she had stumbled upon a secret landing.
On both sides of the sleek dark vessel, the nacelles glowed a brilliant blue and rumbled with an otherworldly staccato vibration as the engines increased intensity to ensure a smooth touchdown. The moment the ship stopped moving, the large rear hatch slid open, and an all-terrain type ground-car shot out, heavily armored and three big treaded rubber tires on each side.
As Malaran held her breath and tried to absorb what was happening, wondering if maybe they should fire on the car, the landing ship took off, engines flaring and rumbling anew, lifting straight up for a couple of dozen yards before streaking off skyward at a steep angle.
"Probably recon or saboteurs," whispered Leela through the dark face flap that revealed only her brown eyes. Malaran's personal guardswoman since Malaran was fifteen years of age typed in a quick message on the databand around her wrist, alerting the rest of the troops assigned to Malaran. No direct confrontation had occurred in the couple of weeks since the starship arrived, but rumors had persisted of secret landings.
Out here on the Vastedad Morada, there was often nothing but purple grassland and buzzing insects as far as the eye could see in all directions. Along with ten of the thirteen ancient citadels, the vast purple interior of Nuevo's only inhabitable continent was actually dotted with a smattering of communities, a few agricultural areas, a few forests and hills here and there, a few oddities like a massive rock, and according to folklore even a few ghost ships that sailed the purple sea, but they were but blips on the desolate expanse that stretched almost six thousand miles east-to-west and almost three thousand miles north-to-south. Most people on Nuevo lived on the outer edges, closer to the oceans of water and away from the purple sea of grass, various towns and cities thrown together with a hodge-podge of building techniques from various eras of technology. Bandarpor on the east coast was the royal capital, while Puerto Juarez was the economic center of the west coast, an amalgam of not only building techniques but cultures. Nobles from Niyati, the original Ashoka home-world, openly intermingled with the hildagos of the colonistas, the very same hildagos who every generation or so decided to wage a rebellion against House Ashoka. There had originally been hope that the colonistas would welcome the refugees, share the conviction for a low-tech society that would avoid the Umpala’s attention, but the hidalgos, the nobles and masters of the peasants, saw the Niyatians and other refugees as unwanted guests at best and as invaders at worst.
The tensions were primarily near the coasts, though. The Vastedad Morada was so huge that one could easily avoid another.
Apparently, just blind luck enabled Malaran and her party to spot a secret landing for themselves, though Malaran had been trying to peer in on the operations of the enemy using her powers of the Void. She had often trained to use Far-Sight outside the Oculus chamber, but her skill remained pretty sporadic. It wasn't the same as having all the technology of the Oculus chamber behind her, and here of late she frequently wondered what it was going to be like to never use the chamber again. At times her emotions would alternate between revelry and dismay at her separation from the Order. She even missed Kalima. Kalima could be a little harsh, but Malaran preferred that over the false flattery and false friendliness that royals often encountered. She had too many false friends when she was younger and kind of gave up making friends once she entered the priory. Her guardswoman, Leela, ended up becoming her best friend.
After watching the lander fly off, Malaran turned her attention back to the ground car and grabbed the amulet around her neck, one of the artifacts of ancient technology from before the Fall of Man, once a toy to make pets do tricks. Now she used it to summon the vispas. The mind control devices worked on a few of Nuevo's creatures, primarily exploited with the giant flying vispas and the great torthugans.
"We're going after that car," Malaran said, excited at a chance to finally get close to the enemy.
She thought she saw Leela's shoulders droop ever so slightly. Malaran knew Leela didn't particularly care for watching Malaran put herself in harm's way, especially considering her role as Malaran's personal bodyguard and surrogate big sister. It was tough for a princess to have genuine friends, but Leela had become her best friend.
The large winged insects, yellow and purple with huge compound eyes, flew up and settled down into their mounting position. Malaran sprung up and slid into the saddle affixed near the back of the thorax and slipped on the helmet and visor that hung there. She looked over at Leela and Disnu to make sure they were ready, and then the vispa shot skyward. An exhilarating rush shot through Malaran as the ground receded. She altered her course slightly and headed almost due east in pursuit of the ground car as the purple grass swept by below.
"Have everybody move into a surveillance pattern around the ground-car," said Malaran through the comm system mounted on the helmet. She hadn't decided what she was going to do, but she wanted to be ready for any possibility.
"Roger," came back the reply back from Leela. Again Malaran noted a certain lack of enthusiasm on Leela's part.
Father had told Malaran to lay low and incognito for a while. To stay away from the citadels. Apparently, he never considered the idea that Malaran would go hunting the enemy, so he didn't specifically authorize anybody in the detachment to override any of Malaran’s orders. Like all of the king’s children, Malaran was given rank as a military officer, but with her duties to the Order of Calista she had only had time to undergo very minimal officer training, just a week or two of training each year, unlike her brothers who all graduated from the Royal Military Academy. Leela and Basav, the detachment’s commanding officer, were unsure of Malaran’s official military status and unsure of their authority to countermand a member of the royal family, and Malaran soon found that if she acted like she was in command then everybody seemed to go along with it, though sometimes the enthusiasm was clearly lacking. Especially Leela, who used body language and whatever else at her disposal to let Malaran know she wasn’t too thrilled with Malaran’s decisions.
As they sped across the landscape, Malaran caught sight of the ground-car after several minutes, and then slowed down to maintain some distance and to rest the vispas. The vispas could fly all day at a cruising speed of around twenty miles per hour, but they could go as fast as eighty miles per hour for short bursts. The faster they went, though, the quicker they would fatigue and become useless.
The car still maintained its original heading, speeding through the tall purple grass on a fairly level plain. She figured maybe eight to ten men would fit inside, though the design did not seem that familiar. With the advent of disruptor fields long ago, mechanized ground forces had been generally abandoned from military doctrine long before the Umpala War. With the way the disruptor fields scrambled electronics and power systems, ground combat in ancient times had been reduced to infantry battles with pulse rifles, a specially designed energy discharge weapon that could work in the presence of disruptors. Disruptor fields could even cause a "spark" that would ignite chemi
cal explosives. It didn't happen all the time, but often enough that nobody trusted chemical powered vehicles and weapons. Anti-disruptors had been invented at some point, but these fields were strongest in the air while disruptor fields were strongest near the ground. Aircraft benefited from this, but not ground forces.
Because of the low technology here on Nuevo, disruptor fields never really came into play. The main opposition forces to House Ashoka tended to be the colonistas, who rode on the backs of caballos, genetically modified horses, and fired gunpowder firearms. The colonistas had settled on the planet before it had become a Refuge World, seeking a low-tech, pastoral life to begin with. House Ashoka, hoping to avoid notice from the Umpala, went a step further after they arrived and tightly controlled and even suppressed most of the technology, but they kept and utilized enough high-tech to maintain their dominance. The military utilized what mechanized ground vehicles were still available, but these tended to be civilian vehicles that had been modified for military use.
Pulling up a map on her helmet's Heads-Up Display, Malaran pondered why the car seemed to be headed directly towards Citadel Donatello – Father’s current command center. She had herself traveled several hundred miles over the last week to keep relatively close to that citadel since Father and Mother and relocated there, Kalima’s words about Calista not being able to save her family still fresh in her mind. She found it troubling that the car seemed to be headed directly towards her parents’ current location.
"What do you think?" Malaran asked Leela. The car didn't seem to have any weaponry that would threaten a citadel. A citadel deployed a special kind of protective field that was even more advanced than a disruptor field.
A regular disruptor field, in addition to frying electronics and computers, would also dampen and distort the trajectories of fast moving projectiles. An artillery shell might skip across the surface of the disruptor field rather than be penetrating, or if it did penetrate, then it wouldn't fly straight and might explode early. And when it did explode, any shrapnel blasted out would also be damped down by the field. A disruptor field could significantly hamper artillery and kinetic weapons, but could not completely render them useless.
A suppressor field, however, could render them useless. Invented by House Medici back when they constructed the citadels, a suppressor was supposedly a sort of protective energy dome that repelled energy blasts and completely drained the kinetic energy from incoming projectiles. A suppressor field could even turn around redirect the stolen energy back at the projectile and destroy it.
A suppressor field did have the same weakness to energy pulse weapons like disruptor fields did, but it had another distinct advantage over disruptor fields in that that a suppressor field did not fry electronics and computers or ignite flammable chemicals inside the field.
It was a stroke of genius that enabled Baroness Valina Medici of House Medici to invent the suppressor field, a feat that no one was ever able to duplicate, but it seemed to be a stroke madness that caused the Baroness only ever to deploy such formidable technology in the thirteen citadels scattered across a worthless planet. Nobody ever determined exactly why the Baroness never deployed the technology anywhere else. There was speculation that there was something unique about the internal energy fields of this planet that were somehow being tapped.
Whatever the reason, the citadels represented some of the most powerful defensive technology ever invented by the ancients, and it sure didn’t seem like a single armored car would pose much of a threat.
"Maybe face-to-face negotiation,” said Leela. “Or maybe a scientific probe to analyze the defenses of a citadel," Leela answered. "Should I notify Watch Command?"
"Not yet," Malaran said, not wanting to bring attention to her presence so close to a potential hot zone. Father might issue new, explicit commands to Malaran's troops, turning them more into jailers. Besides, the car couldn't be that much of a threat to a citadel. The suppressor field didn't reach all the way to the ground, but the outer walls of the citadel were covered in very thick, energized battle-armor plating. Whatever madness convinced House Medici to build the citadels on Nuevo so long ago also convinced them to ensure that their great works of art would not be easily damaged.
"Has anybody else reached position yet?" Malaran asked. Maybe they could just take the car out themselves if necessary, though as far as she knew nobody on either side had fired on one another yet.
"One patrol has a good angle on them, and should be on the other flank of the car in another fifteen minutes or so," said Leela. "The rest of our detachment is behind us, forming up as they come. Maybe another forty minutes to catch up, as long as the car maintains its current speed and direction."
Forty minutes might be too late. The car might reach Father's defense perimeter by then. Malaran tried to think of a plan.
The rest of her company carried standard pulse rifles while she wielded a battle staff and shield in the tradition of the Calistites, weapons modeled after those of the revered Agema, the praetorian guard that fell at Athene standing with Calista. The small elliptical shield was strapped to her left arm, leaving her hand free to hold the staff in a two-handed grip if necessary. When powered by the energy of the Void, the shield could deflect or weaken energy pulses fired from small arms, while her battle staff could be wielded as an energy pulse weapon. It had a distinct advantage over regular pulse rifles in that she didn't have to carry a thirty-pound power cell strapped to her back, and she didn't ever have to worry about running out of juice when firing pulses. The staff worked just as well as pulse rifles in the presence of disruptor fields and could potentially generate more powerful energy bursts.
She just didn't know enough about the car and what kind of protections it bore. But she didn't want the opportunity to slip away.
"We should alert Watch Command and let them handle it,” said Leela. “They could divert an aircraft to monitor the car.” The Crown had kept a few dozen flying craft of various sorts operational all these centuries.
"We can handle it,” said Malaran. "Get ready to coordinate an attack with the other patrol as soon as they're in range. Just in case." Malaran still remembered what Far-Sight revealed that day in the Oculus chamber – the wargames, the preparations, the tall man eager for war and conquest.
Malaran thought she heard Leela sigh, and she couldn't help but smile. It did feel good to have someone so devoted to her, yet not willing to smother her.
"What if this had been all arranged ahead of time?" said Leela. "What if this is some kind of peace envoy?"
That thought had been nagging Malaran a little, but it just didn’t feel right. They had been out of the loop since they left the citadel, but that day in the Oculus chamber, she had seen the truth. She had seen their leader's eyes, seen his wargames. The starship came here for something more than making peace. And Kalima would not have spoken those ominous words about not being able to save her family if the starship had come to make peace.
"It's not a peace envoy," said Malaran. "It's the enemy." She had prepared for this moment her whole life, to follow in the footsteps of Calista and battle the enemies of man. It wasn’t the Umpala, but it was somebody wanting to wage war on her family and her home.
Malaran directed the vispas to speed up and descend to just several feet or so above the purple landscape that streaked by below them. Leela didn't say another word for several minutes, and Malaran would glance over occasionally as the wind blasted past, attempting to read her demeanor.
The other patrol reached position out on the opposite flank and maintained their distance as everybody raced east. Streaking over the grassland towards Father's citadel, Malaran knew she would have to decide upon an action soon unless the car changed direction.
"Patrol car! Patrol car" shouted one of the troopers from the other patrol over the comm system.
It must be one of Father's outer defense patrols out here beyond the main perimeter of the citadel - a solar powered car with pulse cannon
rigged on. "Are they engaging?" Malaran shouted back.
"Negative!" came back the reply. "I don’t think they see it yet.”
Malaran sighed. It has just been a few weeks of waiting, and apparently the patrols were already getting lax.
Before she could decide what to do, a small turret rose up from the top of the enemy car, and blue lights streaked out towards the east.
"Patrol car taking fire!" said the other trooper. A small explosion sounded, and smoke began to rise from where the patrol car had been.
Malaran adjusted her comm frequency to include everybody in both patrols. "Spread out and prepare to engage! We'll hit them from all directions!" It had attacked the defense patrol with no provocation. It was definitely the enemy.
"Roger!" came the reply from Leela and the other troopers.
Malaran readied her energy staff and shield, concentrating on opening a small pinprick into the Void, tapping its energy to power up her staff and shield. She had trained most of life to fight like a Calistite, and she saw no point trying to change that now.
"How’s the Patrol car?" Malaran said.
"On fire."
Then it was up to her. Malaran took a deep breath as her vispa assumed a vector heading straight behind the car. Leela drifted off a little to the right, but stayed close, still in bodyguard mode.
Taking aim at one of the back tires, Malaran said, "Fire!"
A midnight-blue pulse of energy shot from her energy staff. Like the Agema weapons of old that it had been modeled after, her staff drew upon the energy of the Void. Bright blue pulses streaked in as well, from Leela's and the others’ pulse rifles. Even with the wind as they rushed forward, she could still hear the muffled whine of energy discharge from Leela's rifle.
After several shots, Malaran noticed that some energy field seemed to be protecting the car. The battle cruiser in orbit appeared to be the same design from five hundred years ago, but these energy shields on the ground-car did not. The pulse rifle had become the standard small arm so long ago because disruptor fields could not interfere with its operation and because its energy blast could penetrate any type of energy shield that had been invented at the time. But now, only her dark energy blasts from her staff seemed to be penetrating the shields, and so far, only causing minor damage. She needed to get closer.
Blue lights streaked out from the car towards the other patrol.
"Ahhh!" shouted one of the troopers over the comm channel, followed by crashing noises.
"Janah is down!" shouted one of the troopers as the turret began turning again. "Moving to --" began the trooper, but was cut off as the turret fired again.
"Go lower!" Malaran shouted as the turret began turning again. The turret was proving too accurate, cutting her troops apart. It must have some kind of computerized target assist. The higher technology was proving dominant.
The turret fired another blue pulse, and from its target, another blue pulse shot skyward. Malaran thought it looked like a ricochet but then realized what had happened. The turret had hit another trooper just as he fired. Three shots and three troopers down, while none of their shots seemed to be doing much. This was suicide.
"To the ground!" Malaran shouted. "Land and roll!"
As her vispa braked hard to land, she heard Disnu scream in the comm system. Just she and Leela remained.
"Bail! Bail!" she shouted flinging herself from the still moving vispa. She hit hard and felt her breath leave her, but she still forced herself to roll. In one turn of her roll, she saw Leela's vispa puff open in a cloud of yellow and purple chitin as a blue pulse streaked through its thorax. The next moment a blue pulse caught the side of her own vispa's head, causing the wounded creature to writhe about on the ground and beat its wings, becoming airborne for brief instants.
"Leela!" Malaran shouted as she hugged the ground, her pounding heart seeming to shake the entire world.
"I'm okay," Leela shouted back.
Relief flooded over Malaran briefly, but it could not compete with the dismay at losing four of her men in less than twenty seconds. Another second and she would have lost Leela too.
She quickly peeked up through the grass, ready to hug the ground again, but there was no point. The car hadn't turned to come back and finish them. It continued to speed off in the same direction it had been going. Swatted the gnats and kept going.
"Anybody else?" she shouted over the comm. "Check, check!"
Nobody else answered.
Malaran stood up and pulled out her binoculars, trying to get a fix on the men who went down. Some might just be wounded.
Leela sprung up next to her, and Malaran noticed that she seemed to be favoring one of her legs.
As Malaran surveyed the terrain looking for her downed men, she realized that in the excitement of the pursuit she had come closer to Father's citadel than she had originally anticipated. She caught sight of the citadel's golden towers standing above the purple plain.
"Warn them. Warn Watch Command," said Malaran to Leela. The car was dangerous, but she still couldn’t see it being much of a threat to a citadel.
She decided to take a better look at the car and try and figure out what it was doing. She closed her eyes and tried to peer into the Void, letting the energies surge through her body. She focused her mind, her optic nerves synchronizing with the quantum lattice and the various harmonics of the Void.
From high and behind, the vision centers on the car speeding and occasionally bounding along directly towards the citadel. Zooming in close, and then focusing through the roof and into the interior of the car, ancient tech is everywhere. A large metal drum-like structure demands attention. The image zooms in the on ancient emblems scribed on its surface, familiar because the same kind of weapons had been used against the Umpala. A nuke.
Malaran opened her eyes and shouted, "To the ground!" as she tackled Leela. "Nuke!"
The enemy had sent the car, and the nuke, in beneath the suppressor field. With a battlecruiser in orbit, everybody was watching the skies. The use of a nuclear weapon against fellow humans was unthinkable. It had been taboo for over a thousand years, long before the Second Dispersion and perhaps even before the First Dispersion.
Kalima’s words about Calista not being able to save her family rang through Malaran’s head as dismay flooded over her.
As they laid there in the grass looking in the direction the car went, Leela yelled into her comm, arguing with a skeptical officer at Watch Command about a nuclear warhead speeding towards the king's citadel in a deadly ground-car protected with some kind of energy field. It all probably sounded crazy -- "My friend used her special powers to look through the armored plating of a speeding car and spotted a weapon that had been taboo for millennia." Malaran wished that she still her royal comm unit so that she could just contact Father directly, but his security people had worried about how advanced the technology might be on the starship. The invaders might have been able to intercept and even trace communications, so they had taken away her royal comm unit.
As Malaran’s panic and frustration surged, the energies of the Void seemed to surge too. As she tried to invoke Far-Sight again, suddenly a blast of Fore-Sight thrust forward in her mind, ghostly phantom images revealing the more likely futures. All the phantom images included mushroom clouds.
Mother and Father. There was nothing she could now do to stop the car before it got there.
Leela’s warning to Watch Command might have a chance, but Fore-Sight seemed to indicate a low probability. They just wouldn’t believe the car carried a nuke and wouldn’t see it as much of a threat. They will fire upon the car, but not overwhelmingly. It will take time to realize how effective the energy shield is and how much firepower is needed to punch through, and by then it will be too late.
There was just nothing Malaran could do to save them.
If she had alerted Watch Command earlier, then there would have been time for them to realize they needed some serious firepower to take out the ca
r’s shields.
If she had just not been so eager to handle the car herself. If she had just not been so stupid. So dumb.
“Damnit!” yelled Leela into her comm. “The car has a nuke. Hit it with everything you got!”
Malaran looked over at Leela, her only real friend the last few years since she came to Citadel Buonarroti and joined the priory, and realized that they were probably too close too. If not the fireball, the shockwave would kill her and Leela.
Not only would she be unable to save her Mother and Father, but she would also be unable to save her only friend as well. Kalima’s words rang through her head again -- even Calista couldn’t save her family in the end.
But at least Calista inflicted some serious damage on the Umpala in return. She ripped open a fissure in the Void that swallowed much of the Umpala fleet, ripping them out of normal space-time. Malaran would be able to do nothing but sit here and watch everybody die.
And in Malaran’s panic and despair, a crazy thought came to her.
As surges of both Fore-Sight and Far-Sight blossomed in her head, colliding visions of the nuke currently streaking towards Father and the phantom images of the future brilliant blast erupting, the current reality coalescing into the future possibility, she opened another small, virtual pinhole into the Void, the way she had been trained to tap the energy of the Void.
The energy still surged forward into her from the syphon she had opened before, and now she used it to control the second pinhole she had opened. Instead of siphoning the power of the Void through this one, she forced the pinhole into a small bubble as the virtual clock counted down as the visions in her head coalesced together towards one moment, Far-Sight showing what was happening, Fore-Sight revealing what was likely about to come.
Several blue pulses of energy and several artillery shells streak from the citadel. Explosions erupts around the car as the artillery shells miss the target or are deflected by its protective field. The energy beams are severely weakened by the car's energy shield and only cause minor damage. A small missile streaks out from the citadel but explodes in mid-air as a blue beam from the car's turret slices into it.
She didn't warn Father in time. It was all her fault. A tear ran down her cheek as summoned up all that she had, all that she could be, to will the damn bubble of Void to surround and protect her and Leela, to separate them from the space-time of the nuclear bomb. They all couldn’t die. She needed to save Leela.
As the Fore-Sight and Far-Sight visions harmonized into one, she watched the blast, the brilliance of a thousand suns, the great conflagration, and the awesome shock wave that shot out in all directions. She watched it sweep over her and Leela’s position, sweeping away the bodies of dead vispas and fallen troopers and the burning wreck of the patrol car. But she and Leela remained, rooted in time and space, protected from the holocaust.
But not totally immune, the visions stills nauseating her. The blast knocks in the walls as radiation rips through Father's flesh, through his cells and the RNA within, and then the conflagration bursts through the broken walls and incinerates the remains of his body.
She screamed, and in that instant, her vision, her senses, returned to the purple grass tickling her face, the musty smell of wild turf, and the sounds of Leela gasping for breath. Ash whipped by in the wind. The protective bubble was gone.
Malaran looked up at the mushroom cloud that towered up before her, filling her vision with a panorama of doom and despair. It was like reliving the Fall of Man, and she could only stand there and watch, so helpless and small.
More than a thousand years had passed since man had nuked man, the great taboo that had endured through the ages. Whoever did this was truly an enemy of mankind. And her despair turned to anger.
She would make them pay.