Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (36 page)

              The War in Heaven had begun here, that much every Dendratha knew.  They had seen the great skyships duelling above them, seen them burst and die and fall to earth, cowered when the K’Soth invaders had struck their most holy city, killing thousands and then rampaged through its blessed streets, looting and killing and feeding, only to be massacred in turn by the humans.

              The slaughter had brought forth demons from the earth, horrific beings of metal that had swarmed from the netherworld to slay the sinners.  Only Maran had saved them.  The worldgod of the Dendratha had brought forth His angels to do battle and had eventually defeated the diabolical hordes with a wave of His divine hand.  The Dendratha had given thanks for their deliverance, and had then set out burying their dead and rebuilding their devastated city.

              Things had been very quiet ever since.  The humans, wracked with guilt it seemed, had contributed to the rebuilding effort.  The Dendratha had politely accepted their help, although most wished that the curious bipedal creatures would just leave them alone.  A few ships still came and went from the lone spaceport in Erais on the coast of the northern polar sea.  But most brought academics or researchers – people the locals could safely ignore.  Knowledge of what was Out There in the heavens was unsettling for many Dendratha.  It was all too large, too unknowable and, judging by their race’s recent experiences at the hands of offworlders, utterly terrifying.

              Now it seemed that the skyships had returned en masse.  As the points of light grew larger in the sky, the primitive telescopes at the Marantis Monastic University were angled towards them revealing graceful winged shapes that glinted in the light from the twin suns Irrin and Irrinil.  It was the Angels of Maran!  A great cry went up in the city for the faithful to come to the cathedral and pray and as the multitude gathered at that hallowed place they lifted their heads in devotion and fear.  For if Maran had unleashed his angels, those terrible beings of divine wrath, then a truly terrible time must once more be looming.

              Beklide reclined in the shuttle that bore her and her six strong body guard from the
Sword of Reckoning
towards the surface of the planet Maranos that now curved away below them.  From here she could see the various colours of the desert sands, the gradual changes in texture wrought by the elements and the ravages of time.  It had a savage beauty that was all too rare on the carefully cultivated worlds of the Arkari sphere, worlds of which a great number had now been reduced to ash.

              She could see another shuttle in the flight just ahead of them and slightly to starboard, skipping across the upper atmosphere like an impossibly quick silver bird, its nanotech wings constantly shifting as it flew.  Its carefree appearance was an illusion.  The reason for their visit to this world was deadly serious.  This was a world whose name had been stricken from Arkari history at least once and which had narrowly avoided destruction by the very ship she had just left.  Maranos lay at the very fulcrum of galactic history.  The great wormhole at its core had been used by the Progenitors to flee the galaxy and once to damn a full half of the Arkari race into the darkness of the far future.  Now, Beklide hoped, it would be the instrument of their revenge against the Shapers.

              A crowd had already gathered at the great cathedral at the heart of Marantis.  In a religious fervour born of devotion and fear, the people of the holy city had flocked to its hallowed grounds to pay homage to their god.  Cramming the cathedral grounds to their considerable capacity, they thronged outside, abasing themselves before the towering structure in prayer.  Bright shapes broke through the cloud floating high above the desert to the west.  There were three of them, flying in tight formation.  The Angels of Maran had come.

              Beklide saw the city growing ever larger below them.  It was a warren of jumbled buildings pierced by broad, radial thoroughfares and the gleaming line of the Commonwealth constructed railway snaking in from the deep desert.  In the south of the city, a huge area of reconstruction marked where the worst of the fighting during the war between the Commonwealth and the K’Soth Empire had levelled part of the city, whilst at the city’s heart, the cathedral reached skywards like a vast claw.  It was a towering structure, many times the height of the other buildings that surrounded it.  The broad circular grounds within which it sat were alive with thousands of tiny figures.  As they drew closer and began to circle the cathedral she could see that thousands of expectant faces were turned up towards her.

              The shuttles came lower still and killed their speed until they were hovering above the crowd like hawks.  The crowd parted, leaving a clear space large enough for the three sleek, silver craft to land, which they then did, settling gently onto the dusty earth and folding their wings.  Outside there was silence, as the crowd watched and waited for the servants of their god to show themselves in person.

              Within a few moments they were rewarded with the sight of a patch of the skin of each shuttles flowing open.  Beklide stepped slowly from her craft, flanked by her bodyguards clad in form fitting armour and gripping compact weapons.  Technicians, scientists and more soldiers emerged from the remaining two shuttles.  There was a gasp of collective awe from the mass of Dendratha who, as one, threw themselves face down in the dust and began praying loudly.  Beklide’s translator pendant picked up snatches of the prayers being directed towards her and her party.  There was no doubt that these poor, backward people considered the Arkari to be divine, but they were also afraid of them.  Beklide had little time for the backward superstitions of less advanced cultures, but in the case of the Dendratha’s fear of the Arkari, their fear was completely rational.  The coming of the Arkari to this world had heralded nothing but bad news for these people across the ages, whether they had come as their saviours or their potential destroyers.  Their very appearance had become embedded in Dendratha culture as the Angels of Maran, the harbingers of divine retribution.  Beklide stood for a moment, the desert winds whipping her long robes, and looked out across the sea of people.  She could smell their fear.

              One figure had not abased itself before the Arkari.  A robed Dendratha, clutching an ornamental staff, emerged from the ancient doors of the cathedral and picked its way through the prostrate crowd, coming to a halt before Beklide where it stuck its staff firmly in the ground and stared at her defiantly with small black eyes set into a long, olive green face.

              ‘I am High Priest Allaniko,’ said the Dendratha in English.  Beklide’s translator pendant picked up the human language and translated it into Arkari, though she understood it well enough unaided.  ‘Just what do you think you are doing by coming here?’  Allaniko added.  ‘Don’t worry.  The others can’t understand a word I’m saying.  You’d better come inside before this gets out of hand.’

              The spacious, vaulted interior of the cathedral was cool, dark and quiet, contrasting sharply with the scene outside.  Allaniko led the way, his S shaped body undulating across the tiled floor towards a group of other robed Dendratha clustered around the central dais.  Having reached the others of his kind, he turned to face the Arkari once more, fixing them with an angry glare.

              ‘Now, explain yourselves!’ he barked.

              Beklide was a little taken aback.  She was surprised that the priest did not seem to be taken in by the religious fervour evident outside.

              ‘What?  You’re surprised by my lack of respect?’ said Allaniko, as if reading her thoughts.  ‘I may be a leader of our faith, but I’m not blind to the truth about much of our religion.  I know what you are.  You’re not servants of God, that’s for certain.  We’re not all as ignorant as you offworlders like to think.  I was a priest in Erais and Bridgetown before I took up my duties here, so I have had many dealings with humans and other species over the years, hence I have learnt some of the their languages and I like to think I know something of what goes on out there beyond our little world.  None of it sounded good.  Why can’t you just leave us in peace?’

              Beklide sighed.  This wasn’t going to be easy.

              ‘High Priest Allaniko, my name is Fleet Meritarch Lorali Beklide.  We mean no harm to you or your people.  We have come here because we wish to investigate the machines that lie at the heart of this world.  Many billions of lives out there in the wider galaxy may depend upon our success.’

              ‘I see.  That last time anyone descended into the catacombs beneath this cathedral and tampered with the devices at the heart of our planet the result was that fire and death were rained down upon our people.  First, the K’Soth: they came here and they burned everything!  Thousands of our people lay dead in the streets and then those monsters came to this cathedral and slaughtered everyone!  You can still see the marks on the ancient doors of this holy building where those fiends nailed my predecessor to them, you can still see the bloody stains on the floor where the others were tortured and devoured by those animals!  Then afterwards, the meddling of the humans caused the gates within our world to finally open and unspeakable horrors were unleashed from the depths of hell.  Your solution, I understand, was to attempt to destroy everything in this system by detonating the very suns that give us life!  If Maran had not saved us, you and I would not be having this conversation for I would be a charred cinder in the dust of a murdered world!’

              ‘I realise that what happened to your people was an unspeakable crime,’ said Beklide.  ‘One in which I personally played a part.  The beings that came out of the portal were once Arkari, banished by our race many thousands of years ago.  It was I who gave the order to destroy this system.  I knew what they were capable of, that if allowed to escape they would have wreaked untold havoc across hundreds of systems.  I am sorry.  It was a calculated move.  Sacrifice one world to save many.  I am very glad that my ships did not need to carry out those orders.’

              ‘And yet you have the temerity to come here?’

              ‘Yes.  The events that happened here were engineered by another, more ancient and more powerful race.  They are known as the Shapers and they seek to dominate all sentient life in this galaxy.  A war is raging at this very moment between the free civilisations out there among the stars and this source of ancient evil.  Trillions of lives, thousands, if not millions of worlds are at stake in this part of the galaxy alone, but the secrets held below us in the bowels of this planet may be the salvation of all.’

              Allaniko considered her words for a moment, his brow furrowed in concentration and he appeared to sag against the support of his staff.

              ‘Ekrino,’ he said finally.  ‘They never let us take his body for burial.  There were rumours that one of you killed him, but others said differently.  There were rumours that he had become little more than a walking corpse, a puppet of strange and unknowable things...’

              Beklide remembered the name. She remembered Mentith’s account of how he had shot the old priest through the head and found that the interior of his shattered skull was alive with the wriggling horror that was a Shaper agent.

              ‘Yes,’ said Beklide.  ‘It’s all true.  The Shapers used him.  They knew that if the secrets of this world were uncovered it would be the trigger for war between the humans and the K’Soth and that the portal would unleash our banished kin if activated.  It was they who brought death and destruction here, just as they are bringing it now to thousands of other planets.  They will come here again, Allaniko.  They will come here again and if they do, no-one will be able to stop them. You must grant us access to the portal.’

              ‘And if I refuse to allow your trespassing on our world?’

              ‘Then you will not stand in our way.  But I would prefer to do this amicably, with your permission.  I promise you, that we come to look and to study only.  We do not seek to reactivate the machines, nor do we seek to damage or remove them.’

              ‘What choice do I have?’ said Allaniko bitterly, his headgills wilting in submission.  ‘I am powerless to resist.  We are but simple people.  We do not have your great warships, your glittering technology and your power over the fate of the very stars themselves.  All we want is to live out our lives in peace.  Do what you must,  I will try and explain this to my flock as best I can, but after you are finished, please leave and do not return.’

              ‘You have my word,’ said Beklide.  ‘Thank you.’

              Defeated, Allaniko made his way outside to face the crowd of worshippers.  Standing on the cathedral steps he told them that they should not be afraid, that they should return to their homes in peace and that the Angels of Maran would depart soon to continue their duties for their Lord in the heavens.  He thanked them for their prayers and for their faith. 

              As the crowd began to slowly disperse, Allaniko looked upwards towards the distant shapes high above the atmosphere of his world and saw movement.  He considered the morality of having just lied to his flock, of having preserved the lie that the Arkari were divine beings sent by their god when he knew that, long lived and technologically advanced though they were, the Arkari were just as mortal and imperfect as the Dendratha.

              There were streaks of fire in the upper atmosphere now.  The Arkari were arriving in greater numbers, here to probe and pry and trample over his people’s most holy site.  He had given them access, he had been powerless to do otherwise, but he would make sure that they would respect its ancient relics.  Angrily he turned and made his way back inside the cathedral to find the one who had called herself Beklide.