Reformation (7 page)

Goron received word
that Alaric had died in southern Italy just a few short weeks after conquering the city of Rome.  The news was unfortunate, but of little lasting consequence.  He fully expected the Novi captain to have Alaric assassinated, but the efficient speed with which it was carried out was admirable.  Goron had hoped Alaric and his band of Visigoths would cause trouble up and down the Italian peninsula for at least a year or two in order to cement the state of chaos throughout the once proud empire.

In the end, Goron paid the news no mind.  He had moved on to another scheme that showed significantly more promise. 

By his estimation, Captain Hastelloy and his men had been quite active in the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the continent in recent years.  Goron’s initial instinct was to work against those efforts, but in the end saw no need.  Why fight them if he could join them, or at least corrupt and take over what they labored so hard to create.

To
that end, Goron’s relic was hidden away among the white stones and stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.  There, front and center above the half-moon shaped altar alcove his life force rested, encased in red glass and revered as the perpetual flame of the cathedral.  The position of prominence gave him an unobstructed view of the entire sanctuary and any worshipers who came to visit.

Initially only the local parish members
entered his sanctuary, but now the flood of visitors for him to influence was nearly endless.  Humans traveled long and far to see the charred piece of fabric housed in a protective case and proudly displayed near the altar.  They referred to it as the Shroud of Turin.  They prayed to it because the tapestry sized piece of linen displayed the charred image of a man who suffered wounds consistent with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

In reality
, it was a piece of fabric laid over a woodcarving that was burned from the inside out to produce the lightly charred image.  The work was exquisitely done by one of Goron’s followers and served his purpose well as a draw for additional worshipers. 

Goron was amazed how well the artifact worked.  There was not even a need to convince people the shroud was legitimate.  They wanted to believe.  They were so desperate to feel the physical presence of their god that they would readily believe and do almost anything.  They
willingly gave away their wealth, left their families, and even waged wars and committed murder to be closer to the presence of their god. 

Even
in the late evening hour during the middle of the week, Goron felt the presence of several hundred worshipers filling the sanctuary pews, asking for divine guidance.  If Goron still had lips, they would have smiled broad and bright.  These people were in the right place.

“Do you come to worship my
burial shroud or to worship me?” Goron asked in a soft, caring voice that seemed to emanate from the very stones making up the cathedral walls. 

The barely audible murmur of individual
s praying abruptly ended in dead silence as the visitors looked around the cavernous sanctuary.  Eventually they turned to each other to try and confirm they were not hearing things.

“Are you prepared to carry out my wishes?” Goron asked a little louder
this time.

Most remained reverently silent
.  Some allowed gasps filled with both fear and delight to escape their lungs, while a cowardly few ran from the place of worship in utter terror.

Goron addressed those who remained with a booming voice.  “You are my chosen few. 
Will you accept my guidance without question?”

“Yes, anything you ask of me
, Lord,” came a bold reply from one man with all the others quickly joining the pledge.

“
Then salvation in heaven and an eternity spent at my side shall be yours,” Goron boomed.  If he had eyes he would have rolled them at this point.  These simpleminded creatures made it so easy.

Tepin walked up
to a large clay vase that stood nearly as high as his seven foot tall frame.  From the top he pulled out a long slender dipstick and observed the fluid level was running low.  He immediately opened a two inch circular access hatch beside the dipstick, and attached a funnel.  He then bent down and picked up, with the utmost care, an iron pitcher holding about five gallons of Carborane.  He made sure not to spill even a single drop of the extremely potent acid as he poured it down the funnel.

With the fluid level topped off
, he checked to make sure that the iron and copper electrodes were properly secure.  He also made sure the power leads attached to the stone altar were connected and free of kinks.  Tepin repeated the procedure on the backup battery located on the opposite side of the life force altar.  He then stepped back and admired the device he dedicated his life to maintaining.

Mother Nature was such a wondrous and perfectly conceived deity.  Not only did she provide sustenance in life, she yielded a perfectly natural process to maintain life even after death.  The naturally occurring chemical reaction that produced electricity between the acid and electr
odes was sufficient to power an iron-boron electromagnet that could pull a life force escaping its physical form to a focal point to preserve it for all eternity if desired.

Unlike the Novi who used a blasphemous machine to prolong their lives, the Alpha accomplished it through a completely natural method that consumed absolutely none of Mother
Nature’s precious resources.

“It’s happening,” one of
Tepin’s fellow monks said from the corner.  Tepin turned his head to see the man sitting next to a bed where the oldest member of the red planet colony lay. 

The elder
had contracted the parvovirus a week earlier and his immune system was no longer able to cope with the particularly aggressive virus.  He was in the final stages of respiratory failure and did not have long in this world. 

Tepin
slowly turned his attention back to the flat stone altar flanked by two seven foot clay vases.  He closed his eyes for a minute to say a silent prayer; when he opened them again he saw the radiant glow of a divine spirit floating an inch above the altar’s stone surface.  The robust red and gold flame flowed like liquid metal from side to side with a divine fire burning from within. 

He watched the life f
orce intently for a few minutes because he had high hopes for this one.  The man had lived a long, productive life and had much to offer the collective.  All his life force needed to do was hold it together long enough for the others to accept him.

Tepin
saw the vibrant glow flicker a bit, and then watched in sorrow as the glow slowly drained from the flame until the light was extinguished from existence.  What a pity.  Tepin only hoped that when his day came his life force would somehow measure up and be deemed worthy.

**********

Kuanti felt the new presence the instant it arrived in the collective consciousness of the Alpha relics.  There was a strange and unexpected harmony in the collective considering there were over a half million life forces present.  These disciplined minds were able to shelter their inner thoughts from the others to the extent only relevant information was shared.  The instant that harmony was disrupted by a newcomer it was open season.

In life the Alpha determined leadership and worth by one’s ability to physically dominate others.  Existing as a formless stream of consciousness did away with that
tool.  Alternatively, they made sport of mental domination instead.

Kuanti remembered how thoroughly violated he felt the moment his thoughts entered the collective, which only included a few dozen others at the time.  His deepest fears, his most profound insecurities that he kept secured away in the back of his mind were dragged out into the open for everyone to feed upon.  The humiliation was almost too
much to bear; he contemplated letting his life force expire.  The others sensed the impulse of course and egged him on to go through with the decision.

In the end
, Kuanti found just enough hope and strength of will to hold on until his mind was able to keep his thoughts private from the collective.  Since that day, existing among the others who were strong enough of will not to end their existence either had been a true pleasure. 

Kuanti knew immediately this newcomer did not have what it took to survive; very few did anymore given the numbers they faced.  Cora was the first to grab onto the man’s humiliation of cheating on exams in school. 
Another sensed his paralyzing fear of reptiles and projected into his thoughts an image of the newcomer being devoured by an enormous serpent.  Cheating on his mate, fear of the dark, inadequacies in athletics all crashed in on the new arrival at once; it was too much. 

T
he life force left the collective almost as soon as it arrived.  The mental discipline it took to exist as a formless stream of consciousness took time.  Time the weak-minded did not have. 

Most newcomers chose to immediately extinguish their
lives for all eternity to spare themselves the unrelenting scrutiny of stronger wills.  This effectively served as a winnowing fork to separate valuables from the worthless chaff.  Only the strong survived, even in the afterlife.

Kuanti had no difficulty
dealing with the other relics now.  He was the revered Founding Leader.  His greatness was undisputed, and his mind had no trouble maintaining its mental walls to keep others away from his inner thoughts.  The only time Kuanti felt any anxiety whatsoever was the couple of months every other year that the orbits of the third and fourth planets came close enough for Goron’s life force to join the collective.

It amazed Kuanti how Goron was able to dominate the thoughts of everybody else without the benefit of constant contact with the collective.  Life forces introduced for the first
time spent years adapting to the rigors experienced inside the shared mental environment, if they survived at all.  Their thoughts were transparent as a piece of glass, yet Goron’s mind was about as easy to read as a book in a pitch black room.  The captain was an absolute master of his thoughts and emotions, and had the uncanny ability to drill into those of others.

Kuanti re
sented the periodic interruption in his leadership from Goron’s presence, but deep down he knew the captain was his better.

“Report?”
came a question aimed directly at Kuanti’s consciousness from the collective.  He focused his thoughts and reached out to feel the new presence.  It was not hard to find; Goron’s life force shined through the din like a supernova.  Kuanti had bad news to break to his captain.  To hopefully ease the backlash he began the discussion by reminding Goron of his own failure.

“I still
miss Elohim and his rather primitive psyche,” Kuanti mused. They lost Elohim’s life force several hundred years earlier, but Kuanti still liked to bring up the subject from time to time since it was the one and only example of Goron failing in his duties as Leader.  “Don’t you?”

“Yes, yes
, Kuanti.  The Novi succeeded in extinguishing his life force under my watch here on this planet,” Goron replied in a very bored tone.  “I am now operating alone on this world against the five Novi crash survivors.  There, did I say my lines right?  Did I adequately perform my part in your pathetic little play to dredge up that topic one more time?”

“
I find it odd that the death of my engineer and the reduction in my influence on this planet seems to please you,” Goron went on.  “Explain yourself.”

The
captain was good, Kuanti admitted to himself, or at least he hoped was only himself.  “We have endured a setback of our own.  I simply brought up the topic in order to have a more understanding mind on which to convey the details.”

Kuanti felt a flash of anger escape Goron’s me
ntal blockade.  “Well, let’s see.  I am alone as a formless relic on a planet dominated by a very much living Novi threat that keeps coming back no matter how many times I manage to kill them.”

“You are the only occupants of a planet with over ten thousand loyal Alpha warriors eager to do your bidding.  Your only mission is to construct a Flashtrans communicator to reach
our home world to get us the hell home.  Yes, they are such similar circumstances, Kuanti.  Your continued failure is completely excusable now that I give it some thought.”

“The Flashtrans communications array
is operational.  It has power and is transmitting,” Kuanti reported.

“How uncharacteristically competent of you,” Goron commended.
  “Why is an Alpha fleet not already in orbit to finish off the Novi and take us home, or does your little setback ruin that happy ending for me?”

If Kuanti still had hands he would have punched something.  He had done the impossible and yet Goron made him feel an inch tall.  “The fault does not
lie with us, Captain.  The signal is being jammed by a device on your planet.  The Novi are putting out a scrambling signal that will not allow any transmission to leave this system.”

From across the forty million miles of barren space between the two planets Kuanti was impacted by a devastating wave of anger from Goron
’s mind.  Yet through the anger he got a glimpse of another emotion – admiration.  Deep down the Captain admired his Novi counterpart and his resourcefulness.  As soon as he detected the errant emotion it was sealed away once more behind Goron’s formidable mental barriers.

“Too clever by half,” Goron managed. “Damn that
Novan!”

Goron brought his attention back to Kuanti.  “Let me guess.  Since discovering this interference you have
just sat in a corner brooding.”

Kuanti’s
mood perked up at the accusation of inaction.  He was afraid the initiative he took would not be well received by Goron, but he now saw inaction would have been a far greater failure.  “Not exactly.  I felt the best course of action was to construct a craft that could transport an assault team to your planet to terminate the interference so that the signal can be sent.”

“Excellent,” Goron said in a rare display of commendation.  “What sort of timeframe are you facing?”

“At least ten generations,” Kuanti divulged and counted his blessings Goron did not have the physical ability to harm him, but his mental assaults could still be devastating. 

Kuanti decided to explain himself before Goron had the chance to rip him apart in front of the collective.  “We need to develop new materials to construct a spacecraft.  We must invent and build a new fusion reactor to power that ship.  We need to . . .”

Goron erupted with rage.  “Have. You. Lost. Your. Mind?  Why spend hundreds of years reinventing the wheel when you have a perfectly functional fusion reactor right now?  Why can’t you use the original reactor housed inside the engineering section of my ship that you crash landed aboard over two thousand years ago?” Goron insisted.

“If you had not allowed an unarmed collector class ship to get the drop on you in the first place perhaps we wouldn’t be in this situation at all,” Kuanti challenged.  He knew it was imprudent, but it needed to be said.

“Your captain is waiting for an answer to his question, Ensign,” Goron demanded.

Kuanti
could feel the half million life forces mentally circling the two in the hopes of seeing a leadership challenge to entertain them.  Goron was still the better man, even from forty million miles away, so Kuanti acquiesced to the order.

“That reactor powers the colony
and our entire industrial complex. Most important of all, it powers the environmental barriers that allow us to maintain a habitable environment within these caves.  We cannot survive without it, therefore another must be reengineered and built.  Unfortunately that process will take a considerable amount of time.”

On the fly, Kuanti thought of a
way to save face.  “A quicker solution would be for you to locate the signal and use the locals on your planet to attack and destroy it.”

“Yes
, it would,” Goron conceded, “I am working tirelessly to do exactly that as well as disrupting the Novi’s progress and influence on this planet in any way possible.  In the unlikely event that I am unsuccessful, your efforts will be the backup plan.  Now, with that settled, let’s put our collective minds together and document everything we can recall about refining materials for a ship’s hull and building a fusion reactor from the ground up.”