Immortals (24 page)

He stuck the soul-drive’s wires into the scalp of the dead girl and pressed on a tiny button on the side of his device. The device glowed and hummed in his palm and after a couple of seconds went dark and silent. He placed it back in his tunic, looking expectantly at the girl’s face, his mouth agape, waiting for the miracle to happen.

And then it happened.

The girl stirred and then started choking and coughing, vomiting out the water that she had swallowed. There was a collective gasp amongst those gathered around the girl. Then, the girl gasped for breath and her bosom heaved violently with the effort. The old man noticed that she had a pendant around her neck, which spelt her name:

‘KYRA’

The old man shook her and gathered her in his arms.

‘Are you alright?’

Her eyelids fluttered and opened, and she looked into the old man’s eyes. Then her lips moved and she said something inaudible. The old man brought his ears closer to her lips and asked:

‘What did you say, Kyra?’

The girl made the effort and whispered a name.

‘Jai?’

Then, tired with the exertion, she closed her eyes and lapsed into an exhausted unconsciousness. The old man checked her vital signs and once assured that she was alright, left her to the care of the soldiers who moved her to under the trees, away from the rain.

The man looked around and found the rescued warriors still propped up against the tree by the riverbank.

Jai was definitely a name and one most likely from remote Earth. He walked up to them and knelt before them.

‘Which one of you is Jai?’

Jai raised his hand and answered feebly:

‘That would be me.’

‘Thought so.’

‘Why do you ask?’

The old man looked at the girl and then thought better of it.

‘Let her pull through all of this and then if she is alive and safe, I shall tell him,’ he decided.

Jai was expecting an answer but before the man could say anything, the clouds thundered and out of the dark skies, a Humae’it destroyer broke through and hovered directly over them. It had searchlights that were directed downwards. The soldiers ran for cover and Jai and Ludvig were led inside the tree cover. The old man started towards the girl, but it was too late. The craft hovered directly over her, a couple of metres from the ground.

There was a whirring and the old man realised that the craft was getting ready to fire. He held on to a branch, not knowing what he could do to save the girl, whom he had brought to life moments earlier. The guns of the craft were trained down on the girl and the destroyer readied itself to fire.

At that moment, the sky above the destroyer lit up with two mighty streaks of fire, lighting up the entire surroundings. These streaks were accompanied by a terrifying rumble like a thousand bolts of lightning going off at once. The brilliant flashes curved and arced their way towards where they were standing and exploded right on the craft, hitting it with stunning violence, blowing it to smithereens.

The dust settled and the old man, recovering from his horror, ran towards the girl. The destroyer was smashed to pieces. The air around them reeked of burning flesh and there were the tattered remains of the ship’s Humae’it crew strewn everywhere, burnt beyond recognition. The girl was in one piece. He bent over her and held his hand below her nose. She was still breathing; bruised by the debris strewn all around her, but still alive. Some of the soldiers ran towards them and one of them asked:

‘What was that? That was not Quesenium.’

The old man shook his head, muttering in disbelief, having recognised the fiery trail in the sky.

‘No, that wasn’t Quesenium. I know what it was. That was a meteorite. A meteorite that has probably blasted its way through a tremendous amount of space and time to come here at this precise moment to save the life of this girl.’

He looked down towards the girl and muttered, half to himself:

‘Who are you? What have I brought down into our world?’

The girl opened her eyes, looked back into his eyes, and said,

‘Henna. I am Henna. How’s Jai? Did he make it?’

He smiled at her and nodded.

Before The Invasion – An Epilogue

The following events transpired six years after Jai, Ludvig, and Henna walked their last steps on the Earth . These events would eventually lead to two big wars, the Last War on Earth and the Great War being fought on the Domus-Nova planet in the Mouse-tail galaxy, many millennia later; the war in the middle of which, Jai, Ludvig, and Henna have landed now.

Mount Meirut

(Dae’ityon Spaceship)

Caegallen Galaxy

Earth Year 2018 AD

A gong on the table awoke him. It was the reminder that he had set for the meeting.

He pressed a knob on the table.

‘Yes, Sire?’ came the reply almost instantly.

The voice belonged to Dupraiiti, his
chargé d’affaires
, who was in an office two levels below.

‘Let me know when the Lords are seated. I shall make a slightly delayed appearance at the meeting.’

‘Yes, Sire. I shall inform you as soon as the Lords are seated.’

The Lords had requested the Roudaiitya to convene an emergency meeting of the ship’s Navigation Council.

A great many had died. And the rest were not doing much better.

There was an air of restlessness everywhere. There were reports of the dead rotting in the open in the lower slave decks. There were also reports of disease and pestilence in the slave quarters.

The Navigation Council meeting was held rarely and only when necessary.

That this was a rare and necessary circumstance was beyond question, but Dumyaiite, the Roudaiitya, was reluctant and this reluctance stemmed from the fact that he had nothing new to put on the table.

The Lords would sit together to decide on the course that their ship
Mount Meirut
would take. The ship had scoured almost the entire galactic cluster with only meagre success.

The COPS (Carbon Organic Planet Seekers) had not had any major luck either.

The populace’s patience was wearing thin. Food had been rationed and the less favoured were dying of hunger. There had been reports of food riots and ration looting. There were also a few reports of desperate Dae’ityons feasting on their Plurient slaves. That did not worry him much but something had to be done before mounting desperation made the Dae’ityons turn on each other.

Moreover, there were not enough Plurients to dine on. In addition, they would not exactly be a culinary delicacy.

Plurients were a physically strong and yet very docile species, that had been enslaved five centuries ago when
Mount Meirut
had visited their planet. They were aptly suited for doing menial jobs on the ship. Each Dae’ityon family on the ship had at least one Plurient slave and the affluent ones had many.

The Roudaiitya Dumyaiite had never eaten a Plurient and he had very little desire to taste one soon.

This kind of situation had never risen before. They had never gone so long without sourcing a ‘COP’. On an average, a galaxy yielded about a hundred Carbon Organic Planets but the Caegallen had been disappointing. There had been only twenty-three until now and they had been hunting for the twenty-fourth for 1770 years now, without success.

The Roudaiitya had changed about twenty ‘skins’ in the interim and would soon have to get a new one as his present ‘skin’ was nearing seventy years already. Only a couple of them on the ship had the luxury of changing ‘skins’- the Roudaiitya was one of them. The other was the ship’s cartographer, a wily old-timer called Brignaiita.

Changing skins involved extracting the consciousness of one’s decaying body and then worming the consciousness into a freshly acquired body. Worming resources were very limited and were generally reserved for the ship’s transport needs. However, to ensure that there was some continuity in the intellect for guidance and steering of the ship, the two guiding leaders of the ship, the Roudaiitya and the map-master, had been given the ‘burden of immortality’ to guide the children of the Great Dae’ityon in their journey through the Universe.

Dumyaiite missed the vigour of youth and yearned to get into a new youthful body. As per the rule, he had to choose from the death row inmates of the penitentiary for a new body for his consciousness. However, the Council may thwart his attempt at ‘juvenation’ if they decided to blame him for the failure to source a ‘COP’ and therefore impeached him.

It was one of the very few ways a Chief Lord could lose his Lordship – if his ability to steer the ship was put into question, and another Lord challenged him and succeeded in providing answers when the Chief Lord could not.

Generally, it was assumed that the Chief Lord would groom his successor from his Deputy Lords, relegate leadership to him at an opportune moment, and thus allow his long-used, tired consciousness a final rest. There had been some despots who had lingered on, with the allure of power and immortality.

Dumyaiite was aware at some level that, in the eyes of the Dae’ityon historians, he may be joining the ranks of those despots soon.

However, as all megalomaniac dictatorial despots go, the Roudaiitya too had illusions of his indispensability to the mission of the Dae’ityon. He thought that none amongst the Cosmos-faring Dae’ityons was worthy enough to take over from him.

It was imperative that he succeed in sourcing a ‘COP’ soon and he should somehow manage to placate the Council till then, and stave off any such challenge to his authority.

There were rumours of the Lords openly questioning his navigational decisions in their provincial sectors. The trust of the ship’s captains in him was dwindling, too. His sources had informed him of a possible challenge to his leadership from amongst his Lords in this meeting of the Navigation Council.

A case would be made against him for the critical error of judgment on his part for having decided on the Caegallen galactic cluster.

He could not understand it himself. The probe into Caegallen had been textbook. There should have been at least seventy to eighty ‘COPs’ in that particular space-time sector of the Caegallen, not the paltry twenty-three that they had managed till then.

It seemed very odd to him. It went against the axiomatic ‘RULE’ of their forefathers.

RULE
–
R
oot
U
niversal
L
if
E
.

As per the axiom, life is the rule and not an exception and therefore, there would always be food for them, ‘every somewhere’ in the Universe.

Carbon life had been very uniformly showered on the entire universe and every galaxy yielded roughly the same number of carbon worlds. At least that is the way it had always been until they stumbled on to the Caegallen. There were pockets of density in the randomness, and they generally aimed to navigate for the denser space-time sectors in a galaxy, and after having had their fill, moved on. However, Caegallen’s densest areas had been sparser than the sparsest of regions in other galaxies. It was as if the Caegallen had in some way resisted and repulsed the ‘carbon shower’. It did not harbour too many non-carbon worlds either. They had just come across a couple of silica- and sulphur-based life worlds in the last 1500 years, although there were abundant, but useless to them, metal-halide life forms on roughly one out of ten stars in the cluster.

They had no way of consuming these other life forms and hence these were of no interest to him as conquests.

Piolaiit, his lovely wife, entering his chamber, interrupted his train of thought. His mood lightened up each time he saw her.

An immortal life got lonely on a personal level. He had no permanent family to speak of. He had long since cut all ties with his massive brood. Piolaiit was his thirty-ninth wife. He had never taken more than one wife at any one time and had loved each one to the best of his ability.

The table speaker buzzed and the Roudaiitya pressed the button. The voice at the other end said:

‘Sire, the Lords have arrived along with the Map-Master and two of his Navigators.’

‘Thanks, Dupraiiti.’

Piolaiit knew about the meeting.

‘My Lord, the meeting will be on soon. The Lords have been seated. You shouldn’t make them wait too long.’

She sashayed down the hall to stand before him, a coy smile on her lips. His pulse quickened as he admired the nubile Dae’ityon lass standing in front of him, ready to submit to his desire if he so demanded. He loved her sinuous tentacles and she certainly knew how to use them to please him. Her slender frame made her look very vulnerable and very desirable. She was in the prime of her youth and fertility and would soon be bearing his children. She loved him almost to a fault and understood her role as a pillar of strength and comfort in her husband’s arduous life.

He got up, gathered her in his arms and planted a ‘cyss’ on her lips.

‘There’s always time for you, dear,’ Dumyaiite muttered under his breath, gathering her tighter in his muscular tentacles.

Her slender tentacles curled up in excitement as the ‘cyss’ lingered on her sinewy lips. His big and burly frame almost drew her within him and his tentacles locked on to hers, inching across the prominent ridges on her body in lustful abandon.

Dae’ityon mating was a riot of colours and soon the beautiful hump on her back that spewed the tentacles turned a fiery pink, the colour ascending the veins in her tentacles as they grasped his burly frame tighter and tighter. The receptacle on her underbelly slowly engorged, spewing out an intoxicating mix of pheromones that rose up and enveloped both of them in a faint pink cloud. Dumyaiite felt the pheromones kick in and his body shuddered, as her body writhed in pleasure and waited in anticipation.

The Roudaiitya knew he could not afford to make the Lords wait for too long. Getting to the meeting at the three-thousandth level would take a couple of hours at least. He recoiled from Piolaiit’s embrace and wrenched her out of their lock-mate.

‘Enough, you siren! I don’t want to be late for the meeting,’ Dumyaiite said playfully.

She fell to the ground near his feet, feigning humiliation at his rejection. It was rude to reject a Dae’ityon female after having oneself initiated congress. However, she knew about the meeting and swallowed her humiliation with a smile.

The pink fluid in her tentacles slowly dripped out of the tiny pores at the end of the veins on the tentacles, sizzling and evaporating mid-air, the mist settling on the floor around her.

Dumyaiite groaned and cursed. He sensed the hurt around Piolaiit and would have to do something special to make amends to his wife later.

But right now, he had to get to the meeting.

He gathered his thoughts and made his way to the Map Room. Brignaiita, the Chief Navigator and Map Master, and two of his Commodore Navigators, had also been called to the meeting.

The only Dae’ityon allowed juvenation other than the Roudaiitya was Brignaiita. Brignaiita’s recorded age was 3100 years, although there were rumours that he had been around for very much longer than that.

The story behind this sinister rumour was that Brignaiita was not actually Brignaiita. It was widely rumored that it was Brignaiita’s father in Brignaiita’s body.

Brignaiita’s father, as per this particular conspiracy theory, had committed a murder most foul in the distant past. Those were troubled times for him, after he had been impeached from the post of Chief Navigator by one who was of his own blood – his son.

He had murdered his son, surreptitiously ‘juvenated’ himself into his son’s body and had assumed the position of the new Chief Navigator.

He had taken on his son’s life after that.

Legend had it that he had even assumed the role of husband to the wives of his son after the murder. Many had known of what had happened but none had dared to defy the Map Master then.

Even now, very few dared to whisper the myth and it remained just a very scary shipworld legend.

If the myth were true, it would add another 2000 years to his real age at the very least, making him older than 5000 years.

The Roudaiitya moveed into the elevator and pressed a button. The doors slid down and then the elevator spiralled towards the map room that lay 3000 floors below him. It would take him a good couple of hours to reach there. He detested taking these elevator rides. It had been almost a year since he had visited the lower dens of the ship.

The lower levels took almost six hours to reach, and six hours seemed an awful waste of time for him.

The Lords would have travelled an average of three hours each to get to the meeting. The Lords were the representatives of approximately 1.3 billion Dae’ityon citizens on the
Mount Meirut
, spread across the length and the breadth of its 63,000-and-odd horizontal levels and divided into approximately 23,000 vertical sectors.

The elevator came to a cantankerous stop after two long hours and the doors slid up. Dumyaiite stepped out into the cool corridor that led to the Map Room. Two security attaches immediately flanked him as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. They marched alongside him to the Map Room at the end of the corridor. The door slid up and the guards stayed put, assuming their positions on both sides of the door.