The blue pulses of weapons fire drew Malaran forward. Her eldest brother, Aadi, now King Aadi, and his entourage were taking heavy fire.
Malaran and her troops, clad in silver and black camouflage, crept quickly through the dense forest of "trees." The thick silver branches and the heavy foliage of blue and gray seed pods provided many shadows to mask their movement. The musty smell of the grassland had been replaced with a slightly metallic odor, at times so strong that it could almost be tasted, like blood in the mouth. The trees were actually hyphae of a giant fungus-like structure, almost a mile wide buried a few feet beneath the ground. The Engineering Directorate had once experimented on this structure, manipulating the DNA and introducing various metallic compounds in hopes of creating a natural looking landmark that would hide the occupants from Umpala sensors. An alternative to the more predictable underground facilities.
In the air she felt something different. A tingle maybe. Something like the feel of static electricity, or perhaps a subtle vibration-like effect in the air. In the Void. A disruptor field. The secretive Engineering Directorate must have pulled a disruptor field generator out of storage. There would be no armored cars to contend with today, just infantry with pulse rifles
She had been delayed coming to this secret rendezvous with Aadi, and it appeared to have saved her from the ambush.
Aadi had urgently requested they meet before Malaran made any contact with this so-called Emperor. Before she committed herself. He claimed to have important information to consider and didn't want to discuss it over comm channels, not with the enemy's seeming command of technology.
As Malaran neared the rear flank of the enemy, blue pulses occasionally shifted the shadows, and the muffled whine of energy discharges shook the leaves. And then she came upon the enemy, facing away and firing at her brother's position.
Malaran raised her staff as she opened the pinprick into the Void, energizing her weapons. She looked around at the detachment, making sure everybody was ready. Their weapons raised as well; each member briefly met her eyes. All were ready.
Malaran focused her mind, trying to invoke Fore-Sight and True-Sight, hoping to use her training to her advantage, and then she fired. The midnight-blue pulse hit an enemy soldier in the middle of the back and scorched a deep, smoldering depression that maybe went all the way through. Before he could scream, the rest of Malaran's detachment opened fire, striking down several more.
Advancing rapidly, her heart pounding away in her ears, Malaran directed the onslaught forward. A storm of blue pulses swept the area before her as she pressed into the enemy's position.
Her long years of training came back to her, and as she advanced and fired, she found herself following the ancient battles forms, the kata, of the Agema, shield and staff performing in unison a dance of death, losing track of how many she struck down, brief bursts of True-Sight and Fore-Sight increasing her deadliness.
She pressed forward, faster and faster, trying to save her brother.
As she burst into a small clearing devoid of trunks or branches, she came face to face with an enemy. She looked at her reflection in his mirrored combat visor, but then for the first time, she noticed how the enemy was clad. Black and silver battle uniforms, not the forest camo-suites like Malaran and her detachment wore, but actual black and silver uniforms, the stripes and bands and patches all replicated perfectly, even the bulges from the embedded plastic armor plates, the standard combat attire of the Agema that had not been seen in five hundred years. They even bore shield and staff.
She was shocked for a brief moment. The Agema were revered among the Order of Calista. The Agema were defenders of Calista. Yet now they attempted to destroy her family.
As adrenaline surged through, all her training urging her into another battle form, she wondered how she could stand against the mighty Agema. The man was a head taller than her and much broader, and the shock faded quickly from his face as he stepped forward to perform a staff strike.
Her instincts took over as Malaran surged into an ancient battle form, the Scorpion Strike, spinning behind her shield thrust and bringing her staff up behind to backhand jab the enemy, connecting with his throat.
As the staff end dug into spongy flesh, Malaran fired the energy pulse. The enemy soldier's head popped off and spun as it fell to the ground, spraying a light coating of blood though most of the wound had been cauterized.
The wound at the base of the throat did not cauterize as well, and big spurts of blood gushed forth as the body collapsed.
She was shocked. One basic attack form and the mighty Agema lay dead before her. The moment seemed to catch up with Malaran, and she had to pause for a very brief second. Today she had killed for the first time, but not until this moment had she stood face to face and watched someone die from a few feet away. She felt the gravity of it, let it briefly take hold, but then came something else. Anger.
The bastard wore the uniform and weapons of the mighty Agema, the great heroes that stood with Calista at Athene, but the damn imposter knew nothing of their combat forms. He just wasn’t that good at close combat. He surely was no elite warrior.
Then she saw the cable running from his staff to his back. To a power cell. The Agema, the true Agema, spent at least a decade or more learning to tap the Void and energize their battle staff without the need of a thirty-pound power cell clamped to their back. The Void technology, human Void technology anyway, just didn't work that well with males for some reason, and only a small portion of the male population could learn to energize a battle staff with the training starting in childhood and continuing for years and years. The Agema were almost always recruited from this select group. The dead man wearing the uniform of the Agema carried a staff, but he was an imposter like the false emperor that he served.
If they all were this bad at using staff and shield in close combat, she would smash them all down herself. She stormed forward right into the middle of them, all her years of close combat training, all her knowledge of Calistite and Agema fighting forms, staff and shield reaping death and destruction from but a few paces away.
After first contact with the Umpala, the Agema combat forms had evolved to deal with the bigger, stronger gorilla-like adversaries, and such forms served Malaran well as she smashed through the bigger, taller men posing as warriors.
Fore-Sight and True-Sight images blossomed in her mind, revealing the flow of the battle, the invaders now caught between two forces as her guard detail pushed forward to support her and Aadi’s troops taking advantage of the enemy’s dilemma and pushing forward as well. The invaders faltered as they faced enemies from all sides, and Malaran pressed forward to exploit their weakness, reveling in the personal combat. Her enemy, as inept as children with staff and shield in close combat, fell quickly to her graceful slaughter as True-Sight and Fore-Sight guided her hand. These were the people who had murdered her father and mother, the monsters who nuked fellow humans. She would make them all pay.
And then there were no more. Suddenly, she was standing in silence among the fallen bodies, no more monsters to slay. Leela came to stand next to her, speaking, but the words did not quite register. In fact, no sound registered at all. Malaran looked Leela in her concerned eyes, and then her mind abruptly thrust her into the moment. Leela's voice and all the post-battle sounds erupted in her ears, jolting her briefly.
"Are you okay?" Leela asked.
Her troopers stood in a general protective pattern around them, glancing back with concern, or something else, in their eyes. The bodies of the enemy littered the ground.
Malaran assumed Leela had been repeating the question for the last several moments.
"Yes," said Malaran, forcing a small smile to ease Leela's worry. "I'm fine."
Malaran quickly counted her contingent, and everybody seemed accounted for, though a few of the men wore bandages and one wore a sling. Some of Aadi's elite royal guard hovered around as well, while others inspected the fallen enemy. Malaran noticed a few Nagas
in the mix of Aadi’s forces, House Ashoka’s elite commandos in their distinct black scale armor and the green headdress in serpent-head motif.
Leela nodded, the tension easing out of her shoulders, but then she frowned. "You should've held formation. We could've mopped them up without resorting to close combat."
Malaran couldn't help but smile as she recalled the revelry she had experienced. "I simply saw an advantage and exploited it."
"You kind of freaked out the men," whispered Leela with slight amusement in her voice and glancing over momentarily at Basav, the lieutenant, before looking back at Malaran. "None of them had ever seen you practice all that Calistite martial arts stuff."
Leela put her hand on her back and leaned in a little. "Hell, I watched you practice for five years and still wasn't sure all those dancing steps and fancy moves would amount to much in a real fight."
Just then Aadi and his entourage of personal guards came forward. The guardsmen's hard eyes darted glances around the perimeter. Ragged looking from patches and bandages, Malaran could tell they had come close to failing, a desperate last stand fighting hand-to-hand. Another king almost fell, another family member almost fell.
Aadi himself showed little emotion. He had been groomed to be king for over forty years. Dressed in a standard officer's uniform in the House Ashoka's colors of green and black, his only royal insignia were the bejeweled emblems of serpent and sword attached to his collar. But like Father, he had the bearing of a king, only the softer eyes he got from Mother distinguished him from a younger version of Father.
"May we have a moment?" he asked, and his guardsmen spread out into a protective perimeter. Leela patted Malaran on the back and then stepped away to join the other troopers.
"Air transport is inbound," said Aadi, foregoing any brotherly affection. "We will relocate immediately." He stepped closer to Malaran and whispered, "I may have a spy on my staff. The electromagnetic effects of this forest should have thwarted any superior technology the enemy might have. Should have prevented them from discovering our rendezvous."
"Maybe the starship's pilot is better adept at Far-Sight than we thought," Malaran said.
"Maybe," said Aadi, but Malaran knew he didn’t care to think about such mystical things, likening much of it to mumbo-jumbo.
"The point being," he continued, "that my demise may be imminent. I must inform you about certain matters before this happens."
"What kind of matters?" Malaran asked. He acted like this information was pretty important.
"You must not under any circumstance marry this imposter."
It kind of surprised her. She thought he would have grasped at this solution for preventing more nuclear strikes. "The monster must be appeased, or he'll keeping firing nukes," said Malaran.
"You cannot," Aadi said. "We believe that he knows the family secret."
"What secret might that be?" She didn't even know there was a family secret.
"It involves the Anax-Hema.”
“The what?”
“The Emperor of Man, with the consent of the High Council, declared a specific genetic marker unique to his immediate family to be a requirement to rule the Empire. It formally established House Xander as the Imperial House. The Mega Oikogeneia, the Great Houses, had tired of the House Wars, especially with new alien threats looming."
Her mind raced but still couldn't figure out what something from the history books had to do with anything. "What are you talking about?"
“The Anax-Hema was a symbol of the Emperor’s power. A symbol necessary to validate anybody who tried to claim the Empire. But more than that, it was a key to power. A key to open certain databases and technologies. A key to many secrets.”
Malaran vaguely remembered reading about the Anax-Hema, but at the time it all just seemed to be a bunch of pomp and circumstance mixed with touches of divine right. “But what does something from the history books have to do with anything going on right now?”
Aadi, glanced around, as though making sure nobody else listened in. "The Emperor developed a contingency plan to preserve his dynasty, to preserve the Anax-Hema." Leaning in close, he whispered, "The Emperor had preserved a collection of zygotes, fertilized eggs, so that surrogates could bear him more children at a later date. So he could make a glorious last stand at Athene and still be assured that his dynasty remained. The Emperor gave these to Lord Dakshu Ashoka, who brought them to Nuevo during the exodus.”
That was interesting, but Malaran frowned. “So are they still in storage after all these years? Are they still viable?”
“Nobody knew how long they would remain viable, so the decision was made soon after the arrival on Nuevo to birth a female child that would eventually marry the heir to House Ashoka. The hope was to blend our bloodlines and to preserve the Anax-Hema for future contingencies.”
Malaran pondered that for a moment. One of her ancestors was sister to Calista. That was somewhat exciting to know that some of the same blood that ran through Calista ran through her, but it had been so long. “Wouldn’t the genetic markers for the Anax-Hema get diluted and distorted over the centuries?”
“That was a distinct possibility, but there turned out to be an even bigger issue. The Ashoka bloodline tended to disrupt the genetic markers even in the first generation. It was rare that even a single child would receive the genetic marker intact enough to be identified as the Anax-Hema. Crossing these particular bloodlines just seemed to scramble the genetic markers too much, and it did not bode well for preserving the Anax-Hema. Not with Ashoka blood anyway.”
“Then why does it matter?” said Malaran, trying to figure out where Aadi was going with all this. Ashoka and Xander bloodlines might have merged, but did it really matter five hundred years later that House Ashoka were the “true” heirs to the Empire, especially since the Anax-Hema no longer existed and the Empire itself no longer existed.
“There were multiple zygotes,” said Aadi. “And as long as they proved viable, every couple of generations or so, a new child was birthed. A girl that would marry the Ashoka heir and become queen, or a boy that would eventually father a girl to marry the heir. There was hope that this fresh influx of Xander blood and frequently intermarrying would strengthen the Anax-Hema in the joint Ashoka and Xander bloodline."
Malaran’s mind kind of stuck on the point about the heir’s sisters being married off to Emperor’s sons. She was Aadi’s only sister. Her mind raced trying to figure out what this all had to do with the monster on the starship claiming to be a long-lost relative of House Xander and wanting to marry her. “How long did the zygotes last?” she asked finally.
Aadi sighed as he bent in close to whisper. “Mother was the last. The last child of the Emperor of Man.”
Malaran was shocked. She didn’t know what to think. It didn’t seem possible after all these centuries. Even more startling, it meant that Mother technically had been the Emperor of Man. House Xander did not follow the archaic traditions that favored male children over female. The eldest child of whatever sex became Emperor. Mother technically became Emperor when she reached eighteen years old. And when she died…Malaran looked at Aadi. “Then that makes you the true heir to the Empire of Man.”
“Perhaps,” said Aadi. “But I do not bear the Anax-Hema.”
The pit of Malaran’s stomach felt heavy as her thoughts coalesced. She looked at Aadi. “I bear the Anax-Hema?”
Aadi locked eyes with her and whispered, “Yes.”
Malaran had to process that for a moment. Not only was the last reigning Emperor of Man her grandfather, not only was Calista her aunt, not only was her Mother and now her brother technically Emperor, but she also bore some special genetic marker that might be valuable to the invaders in the starship.
Then a stray thought struck her. “But Mother’s eyes were green.” Athenian nobles and House Xander tended to have blue eyes, the result of various genetic tinkerings to set the nobles apart from the common people. Niyatian nobles tended to ha
ve green or grey eyes, and even the hildagos, the nobles among the colonistas who arrived on Nuevo decades before the exodus, had dark blue eyes to set them further apart from the peasants they ruled over.
Aadi just waved it off. “We have lost a lot of scientific and technical knowledge, but changing eye color isn’t too difficult.”
Malaran nodded as she continued to process all this information about heritage. "So the monster that claims to be long lost relative to House Xander needs me to help validate his position as Emperor?"
"Yes, the bearer of the Anax-Hema, and a princess of House Ashoka and House Xander," he said.
Malaran frowned. “It just seems like a stretch to me. He has a battlecruiser. Some genetic marker thing from the history books doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, especially since the Empire of Man is dust and anybody can rebuild whatever empire they want.” Then the thought struck her. “Why didn’t he just make a deal with Father if it is such a big deal to him?” Marrying daughters off for political purposes is what the Kings of Nuevo have done for ages. “Surely in all their secret negotiations a deal could have been reached that avoided nuclear catastrophe.”
"Father did try. But it was complicated. Father suspected that the imposter somehow knew the secret, but it was difficult to determine what his true intents were. The imposter spoke of rebuilding the Empire and great alliances and that sort of thing, but the Empire cannot be rebuilt with a single battlecruiser. Father used the negotiations to try and figure out what the imposter was really up to, and either he got too close to the truth or the imposter is just insane and tired of the negotiations.”
Malaran sighed. "The situation has not changed, though. Except that we know for sure that he is insane, willing to nuke other humans. Why should I not just marry him and avoid any more nuclear destruction?"
“There’s just more at stake,” said Aadi.
Malaran couldn't believe what she was hearing. A tinge of anger colored her voice. "He will sit safely in orbit and wipe out the entire planet with nuclear weapons. What more could be at stake than the destruction of all of Nuevo?"
"The destruction of all of humanity," answered Aadi with a tinge of anger in his own voice. Then he sighed and changed to a more conciliatory tone. "I don't have time to explain it all to you." He leaned in close and whispered, "But you must understand that there were other contingencies. The Emperor and the Great Houses did not intend for humanity to go quietly into the night, condemned forever to low-tech refuge worlds. This imposter could interfere with these other plans and destroy all hope of humanity ever regaining its former glory. He could bring another Larsengard to all the worlds.”
Everybody on Nuevo knew the legend of Larsengard. House Ashoka would not let them forget. Larsengard had been a Refuge World, but shortly after settling there, House Saud was overthrown by Democratists. The population began skyrocketing, and the Democratists set up independent nation states, who promptly got into an arms and technology race. Their technology advanced so much, so quickly, that it drew the attention of the Umpala. And all was obliterated.
Larsengard was why technology was tightly controlled on Nuevo. Why even the steam engine was forbidden. Why the rule of House Ashoka tended to be harsh at times and why the Crown did not deal lightly with the Colonistas, or the Cosaks, or the Boltamen, or even the Lake People.
She looked him in his eyes. She had thought them soft eyes before, Mother’s eyes, but she had thought Mother a kindly, soft woman, not someone of the same blood as Calista and of Emperor Theramenes Xander. The same bloodline that bent the other Great Houses to their will and made their house the Imperial House.
Malaran thought Aadi meant well, but it was just difficult for her to put much weight to all this talk of nebulous plans and contingencies. It had been five hundred years, and apparently, nothing to show for any of it. A battlecruiser armed with nukes, sitting on your doorstep, seemed the bigger concern to her.
It seemed clear to her, but she didn’t want to agitate Aadi any further. She looked away. “I don’t know,” she said softly.
“The Anax-Hema is a key, a key to power. Don’t give him the key.”
Malaran gave her brother a weak smile. “I have some contingencies of my own.” This false Emperor would get more than he bargained for.