Spacer Clans Adventure 3: Naero's Fury (42 page)

“
First they would use the knowledge they gained to go on the hunt for the other Driathan sentinels, taking over more host bodies to use in their vile plots and exploiting our tek. Eventually, they would locate Ur-Jahal, and all of our people, locked in their healing sleep. Millions of perfect, immortal, self-healing hosts, ripe for the conquest.”

Baeven rose up and clenched his fists.
“We will not allow that.”

“
We must find a way to reach Govae, then. I sense his pain and distress. I dare not alert him, for fear that they might detect our efforts and locate Zoa also. Jia shuddered. “My poor brother stands alone against the full might of our dark foes!”

“
Govae is your brother?” Naero asked, suddenly thinking of her siblings.

Jia smiled sadly.
“So we were all created. All Driathans are brothers and sisters,” she said.

“
Do Driathans marry? Can they reproduce?”

“
Not normally.” Jia looked at Baeven briefly. “Yet love makes all things possible. Until I met Bae, there were many things that I thought were impossible. He has opened my eyes to so many things in this universe–love and pleasure not the least of them. Who knows then, what can be?”

Jia touched his face. Baeven leaned into her caress and kissed her open palm.

That was it. It was painfully obvious how these two felt about each other.

Naero had to
give them them some privacy.

“
We’ll keep expanding work on the leap drive,” she said. “That’s going to take some time. Why don’t the two of you take a break and get re-acquainted, while we keep things going here on our end?”

40

Naero
spoke with their crews while Baeven and Jia took their private time together on board
The Shadow Fox
in their quarters
.

Naero arrived in the planning room first, prepared to update everyone on
every status of their various projects and missions. With so many people stuffed into it from their ships, the room was a hodge-podge of scents to Naero’s sensitive nose.

She could pick out e
ach person’s scent, their various colognes or perfumes, the wiring and plas smell of tek. She noted various forms of lix or food they had on them, or that they had recently snacked on.

After the briefing
, they all returned to their posts and duties. Ty and his teks re-doubled their efforts on the leap drive, scheduling a battery of progressive tests throughout the next few days.

They would
continue to use Naero and Baeven as their Cosmic batteries to accomplish these feats–to continually power the latest variations of the new device. Jia could help a little with her control of nearby Zoa, feeding them pure flows of Cosmic energy.

But it all remained exhausting.

They had no choice.

Get the damn tek working and reach Govae, or
allow him and all of his vast secrets to fall to their enemies.

Naero had to rest and refuel continually
, if she was going to keep up the schedule they required.

Batteries needed to re-charge.

She reached out briefly into the Astral Plane during one of her rest sessions, attempting to reach Womi.

To her surprise,
Khai was waiting for her to appear there and pounced on her almost immediately, swooping in to attack her. He got out a few garbled words before Naero broke off her connection.

The Mystic Enforcer stalked them relentlessly
because of her–coming closer every second–just as she suspected.

And
when he found them, they had no way to stop him.

Especially
once he reached Zoa-4.

There weren’t any enemy forces
there to throw in his way. Even she and Baeven would be hard pressed to fight him and that damn Cosmic sword of his. Especially while they were both constantly being drained and kept so weak.

But t
hey couldn’t let anything stop them, either. They were the only ones who knew anything about these dire enemy threats, or who had a ghost of a chance of doing anything about them.

And
even they remained ignorant–still in the dark about so much, constantly playing catch-up with their foes.

After
more fitful rest, Naero went to check on the non-stop leap drive experiments.

Ty and his teks
looked tired, bleary-eyed, and discouraged.

“
Any luck with the probes?” she asked.

They shook their heads.

“Let’s face it, N–we’re making scant progress,” Ty said, half-heartedly.

“
Yeah…by constantly failing,” Zhen noted. “By learning what not to do. Good thing you’re here, N. We’re out of juice. Time to feed the kitty again.”

“
Ugh…” She rolled her eyes. The device continued to suck her and Baeven dry of their Cosmic energies to power itself. And with Baeven still recovering from his injuries, and catching up with Jia, Naero was the only game in town at the moment.

“
Okay. Just don’t make me pass out this time, Z.”

Dr. Zhenti
sa smirked. “No promises.”

“
Just lie down on the medbed, N.”

“
Genius. Where’s my head?”

More of the same jolly time.

After they were done, and she had some lix and food, Naero finally felt like she could stand up and walk.

Good news. We sent out another leap probe and fina
lly brought one back…without it imploding.

“
Great, Om. Imploding. Bad.”

Alala
cut in from her scanning and comstation.

“
We’ve got something coming in, Captain. Cloaked and approaching fast.”

“
What is it?” Ty asked. “Khai? The enemy?”

“
The Enforcer doesn’t cloak,” Naero said. “He just charges in and kicks ass.”

“
Right.”

“
Even with the new sensor arrays Baeven gave us, we’re still having a problem pin-pointing or defining it. But whatever it is, it’s coming straight at us like it knows exactly where we are. Arrival…within just a few hours.”

“
Track it as best you can and keep us posted.”

They were running out of time.

With Khai also closing in. Naero could feel it on the back of her neck.

Now t
his unknown phantom coming straight for them.

Jia and Baeven
finally joined them in the tek lab, both looking radiant and particularly pleased.

O
ver the next two hours, they ran one experiment after another.

“
We’ve done it,” Jia said at last. “We sent out a probe, even further than it would take to reach Dotar-2, and retrieved it safely. All we need to do now, is refit the device to our ships, program our destination, and get going.”

“
Refitting now,” Tyber said. “All fixers working toward that goal. I’ll use teknomancing to speed up the reconfiguration. Just let me focus.”

Naero shook her head in frustration.
She and Om went over the data and had bad news for them all.

“
Haisha. I’m sorry, my friends, but it’s still not going to work. Even with all we’ve done, were still days away from hitting the go button on this device. Khai, and this other thing are closing in on us too fast. They’ll be all over us long before then.”

“
I have a radical suggestion,” Alala announced to both ships. “Om and I have finished decoding more fragments of the KDM referring both to to leap tek–and its similarities to the enemy wormhole generators. The Kexx knew all about them. With simple modifications, we can also use a variant of this tek to open a temporary wormhole to Dotar-2. It’s a one shot deal with an unstable wormhole, and it will only last a few minutes, but it’s our only chance of getting us there quickly. We can still continue to perfect our primary goals with the Leap Drive for future use.”

“
But the question remains,” Jia asked. “How fast can we make it all work?”

“
Estimates with the fixers are between one and two hours,” Alala said.

“
That’s more like it. Let’s throck on that,” Naero said. “Give the fixers the specs and I’ll absorb the data from Om.”

“
Let’s move, people,” Baeven said. “We’ll dock the ships again, and go through this one-shot wormhole together.”

“
One problem I’m seeing,” Naero said, absorbing the tek data flowing through the fixers.

“
I see it too,” Jia said. She turned to Baeven. “The Cosmic energy requirements. They’re off the charts. Powering the wormhole will not only burn out the device completely–there’s a chance that it could kill you both.”

Baeven smiled. He did
n’t even glance back at Naero. “What’s a little risk among friends and family?”

Less than two hours later they ignited
an unstable worm hole, aimed toward Dotar-2.

Naero could
n’t even lift her head off her medbed.

She kept drifting in and out.

Baeven had fallen into a coma. Jia lay wrapped around him–only her advanced Driathan healing abilities keeping him alive, as his body struggled to regenerate.

“
Proceed through the wormhole,” Om advised. “We have eighty-seven standard seconds.”

Warning alarms went off.

“What is it?” Naero asked. She forced herself to sit up.

“
It’s Khai,” Tyber said. “Coming in hot. He’s trying ram right into us. We can’t go through a wormhole cloaked. All shields up. Max acceleration.”

“
He’ll try to damage and disable us,” Naero said. “Or he’ll phaze right through our hull and immediately go on the attack to subdue the ship and crew. He’ll stun everyone with his sword, and neither Baeven or I can fight him right now.”

“
Another ship uncloaking,” Alala said. “Naero, it’s
The Flying Dagger
. It’s firing all batteries on the Enforcer. No effect; they’re just batting him around.”

“
At least they’re delaying him,” Naero yelled. “Get us through that wormhole!”

“
Entering now,” Ty said. “Both of our new friends are attempting to pursue.”

“
Don’t let them!” Naero screamed. “Shut the wormhole down. Negate it and leave them behind us!”

“
We can’t. It’s already unstable and collapsing at its own rate of decay. We can’t disrupt it without killing everyone.”

All of them sped through the wormhole’s tunnel and radiant light show. The effects seems to mesmerize all who stared
out at them.

With nobody paying
direct attention, Naero rolled off her medbed and crawled on her hands and knees over to an open scanning station.

In seconds the wormhole spit them out
the other side.

The emerged i
nto a far distant arc of the Cygnus arm in the Gamma Quadrant.

Now they were on their enemy’s turf
, in unexplored space.

Then everything went dark
on board.

All of their ships lost power, dead and drifting through space at hypervelocity.

They struggled even to maintain life support.

T
hey experienced a total energy drain and power loss. Even their advanced fixers clattered lifeless to the floor, like useless balls of scrap metal.

This was s
omething they certainly didn’t expect from generating and utilizing an unstable Cosmic wormhole.

Minutes turned into desperate hours.

Without power they were all forced to get into EV suits and use emergency lights and battery packs.

In less than two days
, they would all suffocate, freeze, and die.

Naero finally got some of their hundreds of burned out fixers working. She sent a few out into space to try to
locate either
The Flying Dagger
or Khai, if they were close by.

Only Jia seemed unaffected. Her miraculous android body
did not require life support.

More and more,
Naero could see why the G’lothc would hunger for such indestructible, immortal, self-repairing synthetic bodies to use as their hosts.

At least
Naero and her friends were still generally speeding in the direction of Dotar-2.

Too bad most of them would be dead
, frozen popsicles by the time they shot past it.

Getting a weak telepathic message from Baeven.

Focus on it, Om.

Naero. Dotar
’s star. Tap its Cosmic energy. Use its flows and your teknomancy to restart our drives. Have our pilots sling us around the star and juice us up. I can’t move yet. You must do this.

Baeven
, like you, I can’t walk yet, after powering our wormhole. I can’t even stand up.

At least you’re conscious, still.
Find a way, or all of us and our crews are all dead. Don’t let that happen.

Okay. I wo
n’t. I’ll find a way. Where’d you get such a crazy idea?

Baeven laughed weakly.
Khai just told me–telepathically. He’s out there, somewhere, trying to do the same thing. Even that sword of his has temporarily lost all its power. He said that you alone would understand the concepts involved.

She did. So, going through that
strange wormhole disrupted almost everything it seemed–even Yii.

The stars. Of course
. The stars were the answer. Always.

Energy. Raw C
osmic energy.

S
he had less that two standard days to figure out a way to startap and convert that power into a form they could use directly, before they were all dead.

Th
ey maintained contact with both
The Darkstar
and
The Flying Dagger
through the reviving fixers.

Tyber
’s crew relayed that they were limping along, still docked with them.

Om was somehow protected by being inside of Naero. But both Jia and especially
Alala were also badly damaged from being part of their vessels. The crews struggled to put up old-style solar collectors and restart their failed drives.