Galactic Standard Date: 152,323 AE
Command Carrier: 'Light Emerging'
Border between Zulu and Tango sector
Colonel Raphael Israfa
Raphael
The Light Emerging was smaller and sleeker than other command carriers in the Angelic Air Force, built for stealth and deep-space intelligence gathering. Colonel Raphael Israfa was her commander, and also the de facto leader of the 42nd Intelligence Division even though, technically, that job should have gone to a general. It was his job to figure out what the old dragon was up to in Zulu Sector, or that's the excuse their Supreme Commander-General had given when she'd given him this command and then banished him into the uncharted territories. With nothing better to occupy his time, Raphael had spent the past nine months tracking a pattern of suspicious shipping activity.
“Where did Mikhail's distress call originate from? Raphael asked his second-in-command, a Mantoid by the name of Major Glicki.
“All we received was a truncated data burst, Sir,” Glicki touched her voice modulation box which helped her enunciate the non-insectoid sounds. “I didn't receive enough data to triangulate the signal."
“Narrow down the search parameters,” Raphael frowned. "This is my best friend who's just gone missing!"
With golden hair, cobalt eyes, and buff-gold feathers the color of a phoenix, what set Raphael apart was not just his golden plumage which, in a species prone to inbreeding, even the slightest variation from white was a cause for celebration, but the rare dimple which marred his otherwise perfectly engineered Angelic features. That dimple flashed now, but it was not because he smiled, but grimaced. When Mikhail had gone to the ground two weeks ago, he'd been running his scout-ship black-ops. He could be anywhere in the galaxy right now. Anywhere!
“According to Mikhail's last report, he tracked a Sata'anic merchant vessel somewhere up into the Orion-Cygnus spur." Glicki's green, heart-shaped head tilted to regard him with her compound eyes. “Other than that, we have no way to narrow down his location. The signal was extremely degraded."
Raphael rose and paced over to the vast, spinning hologram of the galaxy which blinked at them in varied, multi-colored lights. Each light represented a red giant, brown dwarf, yellow sun or other stellar body; all teeming with planets, all teeming with moons and asteroids where a ship could go down and never be heard from again. The Orion-Cygnus spur was the remnant of a dead galaxy swallowed up by the Milky Way so far in the past that even Emperor Shay'tan was fuzzy about when it had happened. While tiny compared to the major spiral arms, the area it encompassed was still vast in mortal terms.
“Damantia!” Raphael ruffled his reddish under-feathers. “Even if we launch an armada, it will take a hundred years to search that spiral arm. Orion-Cygnus is almost completely uncharted!"
“Two hundred twenty-seven years, Sir,” Glicki tapped her command module as she calculated the odds. “Based upon the number of known stars multiplied by the likely percentage we don't know about in an area this size. That’s how long I estimate it would take to search all habitable planets, not including asteroids and moons." Glicki paused her tapping and met his gaze. "Unless Mikhail rigs a homing beacon, Sir, we shall never find him.”
Raphael's golden eyebrows came together in worry. “Play me the distress call again?"
Glicki slid her prayer-like tibia slid across the console which served as the Light Emerging's nerve center with its dozens of communication feeds, her gossamer under-wings humming with concern. With the click of an armored fingertip, she boosted the audio signal, ran it through a series of data sequencers to enhance the audio quality, and then replayed it loudly enough for the entire bridge to hear.
---“Raphael … I’ve been hit! Shay’tan has found the godsdamned Holy Grail!!! This planet is crawling with enough Sata’an to…”---
“I'm afraid that’s all we received, Sir,” Glicki said. “I boosted the signal and traced the source as best as I can.”
Raphael's wings drooped. “Do you think Mikhail survived?”
Glicki enlarged the hologram to focus only on the likely search area, silently running calculations to narrow it down to where a scout ship could travel in the amount of time since Mikhail had last given them his position. Large swaths of the known scans of that sector bore black, spotty static. Glicki tilted her heart-shaped green head with worry as the Light Emerging's long-range sensors pulled up the most obvious stellar bodies, but the tags which marked those stars were only labeled 'unexplored.'
“Mikhail is tough as hell, Sir,” Glicki finally said. “Shay’tan's too cheap to terraform an entire planet. If it's crawling with Sata'an, we can assume the world is probably marginally habitable." Glicki flared her hard outer wings and fluttered her softer, gossamer under-wings to make a light ‘whirring’ noise, the Mantoid equivalent of a nervous sigh. Colonel Mannuki’ili was her friend as well.
“What do you think he meant by Holy Grail?" Raphael pondered the message. “I can hear the surprise in his voice, and Mikhail doesn't surprise easily. If Shay’tan stationed a substantial military presence around it, it must be valuable.”
“It could mean almost anything, Sir,” Glicki said. “All we can do is keep doing what we were sent here to do. Monitor shipping traffic, communications signals and energy signatures and hope we can get another scout ship in to track whatever Shay’tan is up to.”
“Nobody is as good at stalking prey as Mikhail,” Raphael said. “He can stalk a Leonid stalking a cat stalking a mouse. That’s why Jophiel sent him in to investigate in the first place.”
“He was trained by the Cherubim themselves," Glicki said. "If he could survive … you know…." Glicki didn't finish what she hinted at because the information was classified and there were other ears about, but Raphael knew what she referred to.
“Anybody who could survive that could survive anything," Raphael agreed.
He thought back to their journey together through Basic Training. Mikhail had always been a man possessed by tightly leashed internal demons, and as they had honed their fighting skills, Mikhail fought ferociously like a demon made of ice. He had fought, and won, as if he possessed no emotion at all.
It was an illusion Raphael knew to be false…
It wasn’t until he'd made the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel that he'd been granted access to view his friend's pre-academy history. Mikhail was the sole survivor of the 51-Pegasi-4 genocide. The then nine-year-old boy had been found clinging to the bodies of his parents in the ruins of their home, buried alive for days before a rescue crew had found him. The report claimed he'd survived by pulling a Sata’an sword from his dying mother's body and killing the three pirates who'd murdered his entire family.
Mikhail kept that sword at his side. Always. A silent, chilling reminder of a past he refused to discuss.
“We'll keep looking for him, Sir,” Glicki said. “Shall I put out an informational bulletin to other ships that we are looking for suspicious shipping activity into this sector? If Shay'tan has a base, at some point he'll need to resupply.”
“Please do that,” Raphael said. “And put in a request to Major Klik'rr that we are interested in any intelligence reports that may come in related to the shipment of any goods that might be used to roll out Sata’anic Rule. Supreme Commander-General Jophiel needs to know about this.”
Chapter 13