Chapter Ten

Jimmy still felt a weakness in his knees as he stood near the helm where Hima was seated. Julz was right behind him, her watchful eyes careful not to miss any sign that Jimmy might falter.

Mul-Rok sat in the Captain's chair, leaning forward with his elbows planted squarely on his knees.

"Du-Voz is coming. He's coming fast."

Hima's massive fingers played skillfully across the flatscreen keyboard in front of him. "There's nothing on the scanners, kid. Not a blasted thing."

Jimmy turned to Mul-Rok. "He's following, staying just far enough behind us to remain undetected. If the Council give him the authority he needs to make his move. We'll be too late to react. There will be no escape."

Mul-Rok glanced quickly at his daughter. He could sense the bond she'd created with Jimmy. He'd deal with that later. If Jimmy was right...

"Hima, how quickly can you get us to Earth?"

Hima stared at Mul-Rok for only a second before responding. "I've got the coordinates already set in the Nav-Com. All I need is your override code for the jump to the system."

Mul-Rok turned his gaze to Jimmy. "Our lives are in your hands, young one." He took another look at Julz, then rose from his chair and went to stand next to Hima. "Here's your code, Hima. H4TY890S1Z. Get us to Earth, now."

...

Pausha stood rigid, trying desperately to process what he'd just heard and how he would deliver the news to Du-Voz. There wouldn't be any easy way to tell him Mul-Rok's ship had made it's jump without warning.

"Maintain your present course. I'll be with the Captain."

Chapter Nine

Terraling Master Du-Voz sat in his black, throne-like command chair, his long white fingers draped over the dark fabric of the chair’s arms. Pausha was at his side, dressed in the battle armor of his people and strapped with pulse blasters on each hip.

“Sir, Master Mul-Rok’s cruiser will be in range in four minutes.” The navigator was also a Graumaling, and just as fierce looking as Pausha only female.

Du-Voz rose from his chair as he spoke, “Close the gap to two minutes, Leenak, then hold your position.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pausha, you have the Bridge. I will be in my chamber. Do not disturb me with anything less than a catastrophe.”

“Of course, Master Du-Voz.”

Du-Voz left the Bridge of his battle cruiser and entered his private chambers without any further instructions to his crew. The Com Screen in front of his desk was already buzzing with life, the whole of the Brethren sitting before Du-Voz in the Counsel Chambers back on Terra. Du-Voz took his seat, leaning heavily on the smooth black top of his desk.

“My apologies, Brethren, for having to bring you together in such haste and at such a late hour, but the incident at hand required your immediate attention for I believe one of our own means to defect to the human world of Earth.”

“Defect? Master Du-Voz, surely you cannot believe Master Mul-Rok, one of the founding fathers of the Millennium Program, capable of such a betrayal.”

Du-Voz turned his attention to the counsel member who had spoken. He was an ancient looking Terraling, with a thin, wispy beard that hung long from the sides of his face and his chin. Du-Voz recognized him at once and inclined his head ever so slightly toward the man.

“Grand Talent Lu-Ang, of course I would not trouble the Brethren with any thing I was not prepared to support, including but not limited to the defection of a man you have treated as your own son.” The insinuation was delivered with respect, but the point was made. The Grand Talent was a biased judge on the issue, despite his seniority within the Brethren. Du-Voz smoothed his right hand across the desktop and brought the touch screen to life. While his fingers tapped the necessary links, Du-Voz continued, “The link and file now available to you is the security investigation and the footage from Hangar 42D4 earlier this evening. I know that after viewing the files, you will see an intervention is in order. I ask for nothing more than your authority to perform the intervention before Master Mul-Rok can do any real damage to our people, our mission, our way of life itself.”

Grand Talent Lu-Ang was the only member of the counsel not engrossed in the investigation file. His eyes were on Du-Voz.

“The files and your suggested course of action will be taken under review.”

A younger, senior member of the counsel now addressed Du-Voz. He knew this man as well. “That is all I ask, Master Tu-Lok. I would only add that I have Master Mul-Rok’s cruiser under surveillance and could move to intercept within two minutes, if the Brethren decide on such action.”

“Thank you, Master Du-Voz.” Tu-Lok inclined his head respectively, but Du-Voz’s eyes were locked on the Grand Talent. Lu-Ang might be a bigger problem than he anticipated.

“I await your decision, Brethren.” The Com Screen went black. Du-Voz rocked slowly back in his chair, fingers pressed together in front of his face. “Adrena.”

A female hologram rose from the black surface of the desk. “Master.”

“I need to see my son, immediately.”

“He’s already on his way, Master.”

Du-Voz smiled. “It’s unfortunate not all those who serve me, serve as faithfully and as efficient as you, Adrena.”

“You’re too kind, Master Du-Voz.” The hologram disappeared back into the desk’s dark surface.

Chapter Eight

The darkness lifted a little and in the haze Jimmy could hear a soft, soothing voice calling to him. His eyes wouldn’t open and his right arm lay limp at his side, cold as a chunk of ice. The cold spread up his arm like liquid fingers, inching toward his shoulder.

“Julz.” He heard himself say the name, but knew his lips hadn’t moved.

“I’m here.” She was close, her voice, strong and calm, brought light to the darkness fogging his mind.

“Where?”

A sudden warmth burned through his veins, starting at his right hand and chasing the cold still spreading up his arm. Her fingers slipped perfectly between his. Her skin was cool, soft, not at all what he expected. Suddenly Jimmy’s mind was racing with images of the time he’d spent on Terra, as a Select in the Millennium Program…

For the first few years, Jimmy lived in the compound with Hima and their eight bunkmates. The coursework was rigorous, the instructors were worse. Failing wasn’t an option unless you enjoyed punishment, and the punishments were harsh. Ground into them by their instructors, the Order became their life. At night, when Jimmy lay sleepless in bed, the Order disappeared, replaced by visions of home, his family, and his friends. He missed home.

Space, that final frontier he’d always dreamed about exploring was nothing like he imagined. But, and despite the reality he lived every day, his dream still lived. Perhaps even more so now that so many of his questions about space were being answered. Were there other planets, other solar systems and galaxies like his? Was there life on those planets? Was there a better, faster way to travel through the vastness of the Big Unknown?

Yes. Yes. And, oh my, yes! The answer to those questions stunned Jimmy, initially, and when the shock wore off, that same, stomach tightening excitement, that mind-consuming need to explore was still there, eagerly awaiting its opportunity for fulfillment.

And then there was Julz. Julz-Rok…

Jimmy was in his second year of the program and just starting a rigorous course of defensive tactics when he met Julz. She played an enemy in the role-play tactics tests. Julz was brutal, on everyone, powerful, cunning, and fast. Then they’d met. It was a fight talked about by everyone in the program.

“Hey, you in there, bonecrusher?”

He heard her voice again, and it ripped him from the whirlwind of memories her touch had sent him into.

“I’m here.” There was something unnatural about the way this kind of communication felt.

“Well, good, but I need you here. Can you manage that?” Concern, genuine concern flecked her usually casual tone. Something was wrong.

The cold crept slowly back into his arm, the leaden weight feeling even worse than before. “What’s wrong?”

Silence was the answer to his question. He concentrated, reached out with his mind, trying to get to Julz, to see what she was seeing, but he couldn’t find her, and then suddenly he was out of his body. A fleshless soul standing at the side of the med-unit his body was plugged into. Julz was at the control panel for the unit, punching keys as fast as her fingers could move. The life support systems seemed to be failing. Jimmy looked at his body. He looked at peace, restful, uninjured.

Suddenly Julz was screaming into the com-link. “I don’t know what’s wrong!! His vitals are all over the place!!”

“Julz.” Jimmy tried calling out to her. She paused, turning slowly around and staring at the spot where his soul stood watching her. He smiled. Even agitated as she was, rocked with fear and worry, she was beautiful.

“James?”

“I’m right here.” And suddenly he was back in his body, eyes fluttering open, and turning his head slowly to look for Julz. “Hey, everything alright?”

Julz turned, first to him, eyes wide, then to the control panel. Ya, everything was great. “I just had the strangest…” Jimmy smiled as his eyes slipped closed once again. “James? James.”

Jimmy sat up, pulling the warmer blanket around him as he did it. “We need to get to the control center, bad guys are coming.”

Chapter Seven

Med-units scurried across the hangar floor, treating the nano-tech troopers pummeled by Hima, Mul-Rok, and Julz, and then mentally disarmed and immobilized by Jimmy. Amidst the first-aid chaos stood a man draped in heavy red robes, hemmed in gold and that sapphire blue like the blood inking every Terraling’s veins. The man’s face hid in shadow under the heavy hood drawn up over his head.

"Your orders, Master?”

Terraling Master Du-Voz turned to look at the Graumaling Select standing off to his right, the Select careful not to obstruct his Master's view of the empty hangar. The Graumaling was a fierce looking sinewy humanoid with agate colored skin. Thick tufts of quill-like black hair sprouted from his shoulders like patches of grass and ran down the center of his back and the backs of his arms.

“We’re going to Earth, Pausha. Get my cruiser ready while I address The Brethren about my concerns.”

A grin broke across Pausha’s face. “As you wish, Master.”

Chapter Six

“STOP!”

The word sprang from Jimmy’s lips with such force, his vision blurred and his head swam. The ringing in his head brought his hands instinctively to his ears, covering them and pressing in as if his head might explode. The last thing Jimmy remembered was the cool stone of the hangar floor on the skin of his face and Julz calling his name.

What Jimmy never saw was the effect his single word had had on the situation. The blaster rifles carried by the nano-tech troopers burst into a dozen pieces, the energy chambers exploding in perfectly contained balls of red flame. The troopers themselves found themselves suddenly pinned to the hangar walls, unable to move, unable to continue the fight as their armor fell to the floor in pieces underneath them.

Julz and Hima retreated to where Jimmy had collapsed to the floor. Mul-Rok was not far behind them. Hima scooped Jimmy up off the floor, casting a wary eye toward the pinned down troopers.

“He’ll hold them there until we’re safely away. Get him on-board, Hima, into the med-unit, now.” Julz started to follow Hima onto the ship, but Mul-Rok stopped her. “Help me finish. It will do none of us any good to leave unprepared.” Julz hesitated, her desire to tend to Jimmy painfully obvious on her face. “There is nothing you can do for him, Julz.”

She turned to her father, “I can be the first thing he sees when his eyes open again.”

“If we don’t leave this place now, he will never open his eyes again.”

Julz knew her father, knew his love for their world, their way of life. Something had changed him. Something awful forced him to forsake all he had ever known. She could see the anguish in his eyes, but knew the resolve she heard in his voice. Mul-Rok believed this was the only chance any of them had at survival. She couldn’t see deep enough into his thoughts to understand the danger he sensed or see what it was they needed to survive, but her father’s heart and mind were true. She had no choice but to follow his lead.

Without another lost second, fuel cells slammed home while crates and provisions found their way into cargo holds along the underside of the vessel. Julz worked quick, finishing the work the four of them had been doing before the troopers arrived in minutes, and without ever moving from where Jimmy had fallen to the floor. When she’d finished, Julz followed her father onto the ship, the hatch lifting from the hangar floor and sealing itself seamlessly into the ship’s exterior.

Mul-Rok tapped the com-link on his wrist as he strode through the ship’s corridors toward the command center. “Hima.”

“Ay, captain, still getting our boy strapped into your wee incubators, sir. Gonna need a few more minutes here.” Came the Nevarian’s reply in the best impression of Star Trek’s Scotty he could muster.

“Julz is on her way. I need you in the command center before I get there.”

“On my way, Captain.” The alien had a gift for Earth-based dialects. It was uncanny. Hima spent hours in the Terraling’s vast multi-media library of information learning everything he could about American Pop Culture, especially when it came to science fiction. Hima found Earth’s idea of alien life amusing.

Hima sat patiently at the helm when Mul-Rok entered the command center, his massive hands dancing across the control panel in front of him with practiced confidence.

“How come we’re still on this planet, Hima?”

“Thought ya might like to sit down first, Captain, this ain’t gonna be no pleasure cruise.”

Mul-Rok found his chair and sat. “Hima, you’re the last of the Nevarrian Royal Family. Earth slang does not become you.”

“You liked the Scotty impression better, I get it.” Hima stroked the throttle keys and the cruiser shot into the moisture rich, night sky of the planet Terra. Within seconds the cruiser cleared the planet’s atmosphere and raced into space.

Chapter Five

Earth. Home. Jimmy was going home.

The thought pinged around in his head like a Pong ball. Although being one of Earth’s Select Few meant someday he would have to return to Earth, he never really thought it would happen. No one had left the Millennium Program that he knew of. No one. And that begged the questions… Why him? Why now?

Jimmy glanced quickly at the three working quietly to get the deep space cruiser ready for launch, oblivious to, it seemed, the reason why they were there.

Trained, practiced, Jimmy had no doubt they could do whatever it was Mul-Rok had them preparing for, but Mul-Rok shared none of the reasons for their quiet, hurried activity. Mul-Rok lived by rules, survived through strict diligence and adherence to the Order. Nothing in the Order explained what Mul-Rok had them doing. Jimmy knew the verses of the Order better than the Pledge of Allegiance. Mul-Rok, for the first time in ten years, showed a kind of humanness Jimmy didn’t think possible for his Master.

A warm tingling spread across the back of his hand. He’d almost forgotten about the pain from earlier. The hangar, protected from the cooled catacomb air, provided Jimmy with an opportunity to examine his hand a little more closely, so he pulled the glove from his hand to try and determine the reason for the irritation.

As Jimmy’s hand came free of the glove, he focused on the veins beneath his pale skin. The veins moved like liquid blue ink, spreading slowly up his arm. He flexed his fingers, staring at the markings he’d only ever seen on a Terraling. When he looked up, Julz was watching him and he heard her voice in his head.

“What do you think?” The question was playful, flirty. She’d never been flirty before. And then the oddest thing happened. Jimmy could feel himself inside her mind, feel her thoughts, her fears and desires. “Say something.”

“What should I say?” He blurted the words out, startling himself and the other three in the room. He was no longer in Julz’s mind, that was certain, but why hadn’t he been able to communicate the way she did?

“You talking to yourself again, Jimbo?” Hima’s sarcastic growl brought a crooked smile to Jimmy’s face until he saw Mul-Rok watching him intently. Julz was also watching him, intently.

“Ya. Call me crazy.” Jimmy pulled the glove back on, covering the blue spreading up his arm.

Hima laughed until the hangarbay door swung open and a squad of nanotech Terra-elite soldiers filled the open doorway.

The Squad Leader stepped forward, blaster rifle held at a low ready, the red power cells fluxing like a heart and the trigger finger of his left hand indexing the weapon.

“Master Mul-Rok. You and your team are to stand down.”

“Stand down?” Hima turned to face the soldiers, every muscle in his body beginning to swell. Hima could smell a fight coming before any one else.

“Stand down and have your students return to their dwellings.”

Mul-Rok turned toward the squad, “I’m afraid, Trooper, I won’t be doing any such thing.”

“We have orders, sir.”

“Do you, now?”

Hima threw himself at the arrest squad as the energy bolts flew from their rifles. He grabbed two of the soldiers by their heads and rammed them together, taking them quickly out of the fight. The remaining soldiers scattered to other vantage points around the hangar, filling the air with the red bolts of energy that destroyed everything they touched, everything but Hima.

Bolt after bolt of the liquid energy rammed into the blue-fleshed Nevarrian. And each time a blast struck him, his body absorbed the energy, causing him to swell to three times his normal size.

Mul-Rok attacked with his bare hands, disabling soldiers one by one while his daughter shielded him from energy bolts with her psi-abilities.

More soldiers button-hooked through the doorway, laying down suppressing fire and moving tactically into the firefight. As good as his friends were, the end of this fight was not far off. Jimmy watched from under the cruiser where he’d been loading fuel cells. He didn’t have the super-skills Hima and Julz had, and hadn’t mastered the fighting arts of his instructor.

“Help us.” The plea entered Jimmy’s mind with quiet confidence. They needed his help. “You can end this now. End this.” The back of his hand burned a little. He knew what to do, knew how to do it. They trained him.

“Jimmy.”

Chapter Four

The cold air rushing through the catacombs at this hour stole the breath from Jimmy’s lungs. Hima stepped in front of Jimmy, blocking the icy blast and giving him enough time to pull the suit’s sock-like hood over his head. The blood-freezing temperature in the catacombs existed to deter any nocturnal activities. For most, it worked well. But for some, like Hima and Julz, cold was a way of life, a rite of passage.

Even with the hood over his head, protecting him from the freezing wind, Jimmy collapsed to his knees, his lungs and throat burning. Hima caught him as he fell forward.

“Julz.” Julz turned immediately, saw Jimmy on his knees, and raced to his side. “Forgot to cover up that pretty little Earthling head of his.”

“Jimmy?” He didn’t respond. “I can’t see his eyes in this hood, Hima. We need to get him to a sickbay.”

“Negatory, beautiful. Give the suit a sec to warm our little Earthling back up and he’ll be ripe as a Nevarian winter peach. Little frostbite in the lungs never hurt anybody I knew.”

“He’s not from Nevar, Hima.”

“Could’a fooled me. He’s like the little brother I never had, only with over-sensitive skin.” Jimmy coughed, then gasped for air as he grabbed hold of Hima’s massive arms. “There, there crazy Earthling. What were you thinking going out in the cold without your hat on? What would your mother say?”

“Very funny.” Jimmy’s hoarse reply was reassuring for both Hima and Julz.

Julz placed her head to his and Jimmy felt a fiery blast of warmth surge through him like an electrical current. Then he heard her voice, “Don’t do that to me again, James. I cannot lose you.” Then the warmth and voice were gone. He stared at Julz. She gave him a quick smile and went back to business. Hima helped him back to his feet.

“What was that all about?”

“Tell ya later.” No one had ever called him James. But when Julz said it, he kind of liked the way it sounded.

“Right. Then let’s get moving tough guy.” Hima wouldn’t let this moment go without some further explaining, but to his credit, he knew this wasn’t the time or place for prying questions. Jimmy had no secrets from Hima. Hima knew that and respected him all the more for it.

The trio of curfew breakers found Mul-Rok waiting for them in the lower catacombs near the hangar bay. His eyes flickered in the incandescent light coming up from the floor lamps. Jimmy hadn’t been this deep in the catacombs. Passage into the lower catacombs by any of the Select was forbidden, although Jimmy found there weren’t many security measures preventing them from moving freely through the catacombs. Perhaps the Terralings believed a little too much in their cold air security system.

Mul-Rok walked forward and embraced his daughter. Although most of his body was covered with a taught, black flightsuit, Jimmy watched the blue veins in his neck pulse with light as the two embraced.

The back of Jimmy’s hand burned white hot suddenly and he clinched his fingers into a fist to fight off the pain.

Mul-Rok’s eyes flashed to Jimmy as he released his daughter, and although Jimmy’s breath caught in his throat, he was glad his eyes and face were hidden from his Master. Hima’s unique suit proved its worth yet again.

“It’s time for us to go.” Mul-Rok turned and started down the catacomb toward a nearby launchbay door.

“Where exactly are we going?” Hima, never afraid to ask a question of anyone, stopped short when Mul-Rok turned and glared at him. Then Mul-Rok’s hard look fell on Jimmy, and lastly turned on his daughter.

“Earth.”