Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1) (32 page)

I
stood up, silently and slowly. My cheek was hot as a tear slid down my face. With
one more look, I turned, left, and closed the door behind me.

“Eli!” A
high-pitched voice was calling.

My cheek
stung, it was the soft warmth of my tear. It came again, no, it wasn’t the
tear, it was far more acute and painful. My cheek stung, something hit me. I
shook my head as the memories I had seen began to fade away.

“Eli!”
The voice said again. “You’re having some kind of fit.”

With
effort, I opened my eyes. Piter was crouched over me her brow furrowed.

“What
happened?” I was laying on the floor.

“You
alright?” Piter asked. “Sorry about the slaps, but you were in some kind of
trance, babbling about war, slaves, ships, and justice.”

“I saw
memories,” I fumbled. As I recovered my mind I was relieved to know that I had
not absorbed all of Filian’s mind as it had been with Lor’ten. Only the brief
flashes of her memory remained in my mind.

“You
saw
them?” Piter asked. I saw a spark of realization in her eyes.

I sat up
and looked around. The object that Piter had handed me lie a few feet away,
rolling on the ground. It was still intact. I knew then what it was. These were
Charons that my teacher had spoken of. These were the Charons that the elders
kept. In my memories I had imagined that all Charons had to be held within a
living mind. But now, I realized, that that wasn’t true. I looked back at the
center stone. I saw six, eight, thirteen, sixteen, more. There were dozens.
This was a time capsule, a collection of memories somehow imprinted into the
objects and stored here.

“You also
said ships, weapons, and technology.” Growd’s back was to one of the lights,
and his face was cast in shadows, but I could see a glint in his eyes. “You
said ‘lets take their technology.’ What did you see? And how did you see it?”

As I
fumbled for a reply, Growd stepped over and tentatively picked up the Charon.
He closed his eyes and stood quietly for several seconds, and then opened them
back up and shook it.

“How?” he
demanded.

With
Piter’s help, I got to my feet, my legs were still shaky.

“I-I
don’t know, I just grabbed it, you saw,” I answered. “You know as much as I
do.”

“Piter,
scan it,” he said, as he handed her the Charon.

She took
it, sat it down on the floor in front of her, and pulled her hand-held scanner
from her pack. She swiped a few commands on the touch screen, pointed the
scanner at the Charon and slowly moved it up and down as it processed.

Growd
stood over her shoulder, watching hungrily, while the two guards stood back at
a distance, their weapons were holstered as they watched with interest. With
the memory still fresh I could still feel the strength of Filian’s legs as she
leapt onto the wall. They were close enough, I could be on the first before he
would have time to draw his weapon. I caught myself and reigned in my thoughts.
I was not Filian, I did not have the body of a Thar’esh. I was human.

“The
scanner can’t get a consistent reading,” Piter responded. “I’m getting
intermittent biological signs in there, but it’s not because it’s biomatter.
The material is reading as non-organic.”

“But
you’re getting positive readings?” Growd pressed.

“Positive
for life signs, yes,” Piter answered. “But it’s not consistent. One second it
detects a life sign, the next it doesn’t. I’m getting some residual energy
fluctuations too. When I get this back to a fully equipped lab I can make more
sense of it.”

“We don’t
have time for that,” Growd snapped. “Wait, how can residual energy flux?
Residual energy should show decay. You’re saying its residual energy is
increasing
?
I’m no physicist but I understand enough to know that that shouldn’t happen.”

“Yes,
well, yes and no,” she answered. “That’s what the scanner is telling me, but I
think it’s just not equipped to make sense of the signals. As I said, when I
get this back to a fully equipped lab I can make sense of it. In-depth analysis
of alien artifacts is as much guesswork as it is science when you’re out in the
field. I need instruments, a control group, experimentation.”

“Experimentation,”
Growd interrupted. “Good idea. Eli, go grab another.”

“What?” I
asked.

“You heard
me, go grab another one and tell me what you see.”

“You
can’t be serious,” Piter said. “You saw him last time, he fell and his eyes
went all glazed and he fell and started convulsing.”

“He
didn’t fall,” Dex interjected. “I saw it, he was standing just fine until you
came up and pulled it out of his hand.”

Piter
shot him a scathing look.

“Well,”
Dex continued. “It happened pretty quick, but he was just standing there
dreamy-eyed and jabbering, then you took it out of his hand and his body went
all rigid, like you unplugged him.”

“Unplugged
him?” Piter echoed. “We’re talking about a person here. This isn’t science, we
don’t know why he’s seeing whatever it is he’s seeing. Who knows if he will
even see anything if he picks up another. All of this needs to be done in a
controlled environment, right Eli?”

I heard
her gasp as she turned to find that I was standing back at the center stone. I
looked from one to another, deciding which Charon to hold. I knew that Growd
wanted me to access the Charon’s for his own greed, but I had my own reasons.
The burning question of who I was and where I came from had been consuming me.
I needed to know more.

“You
can’t be serious!” Piter gasped.

“Have at
it boy,” Growd said softly.

I took a
breath reached for the Charon on my left.

The
blue-green haze of the Charon closed over my eyes again. But this time I was
ready.

As I
held it, I realized that each Charon was an imprint of a living thing, complete
with our primal instincts: fear, happiness, anger, and love. Filian’s Charon
had thrust her most powerful and potent memories upon me in response to my
resistance. It met my fear with fear. Instead of fighting to maintain control,
I submitted my will to the Charon, and I was rewarded.

The
memories knew the mind that bore them. This Charon belonged to a man named
Taro. His self-image swirled around my mind. His presence was nervous and cold.
He held a mantle of power and responsibility, but he did not have the depth of
strength that I had felt when I was within Filian’s memories. Taro’s mind was
clouded in fear. The fear all sprung from one place in his memory, I reached
for that moment:

I
stood on the bridge of a ship to the left hand of the captain’s seat. The ship
was similar to the one I had seen in Filian’s memories, but things were
changed. The technology was improved, vastly so. Each display and console was
so different from the last that my only conclusion was that the ship had become
a collage of alien technology. New wiring was run along the bulkheads. There
were new terminals and high resolution holographic displays throughout the
command deck that were not there before. A dozen Thar’esh sat at their
terminals.

I
looked up, my eyes scanning the displays. There were ships approaching, several
dozen. They were Celestrial. The captain gave on order, clear and calm, and I
stood and watched as fire streaked out from above and one by one, the
Celestrial ships dissolved into dust. The Captain gave a satisfied grunt, and
directed the ship toward the nearest world. As the ship turned, I saw a blue
star blazing in the distance.

The
memory shifted, time had passed. I was still on the command deck, though the
air was changed. Two of the consoles were unmanned, blood was on the floor, and
a section of the viewport was blackened from fire. In the distance I could see
spinning hulks of red-hot debris floating out in the black. One Celestrial ship
remained, alone and distant.

The
Captain keyed a command and a holographic face appeared in front of us. It was
a Celestrial, female. She was young, but her eyes looked hard.

“I am
Navali, commander of the Celestrial defense forces,” I saw her arm was in a
sling, her shoulder bleeding. “I want to negotiate.”

“We do
not seek your surrender,” my Captain said icily.

“I do
not intend to,” she snapped back. “I demand yours.”

My
chest rumbled with laughter, and several of our crew clicked their tongues in
response.

“Surrender?
Our surrender?” the Commander replied, his eyes widened fractionally. “You
fleet is lost. You are beaten. Take your end with dignity.”

“So be
it. I will,” her response was barely more than a whisper, the display blinked
black.

“She
is firing,” a voice said.

“Evasive
action and return fire, finish them,” the Captain barked.

“They
aren’t firing at us, sir,” the voice replied. “She fired at the star.”

“Idiot
children,” the Captain muttered. “Close in, destroy her.”

As we
closed in on her ship, I watched her missile as it hurled through space. It was
closing in on the system’s star. Just as we came into range of her vessel, the
missile disappeared into the sun.

The
memory dissolved into blinding light and debilitating pain. When, at last, it
cleared, I was lying on the cold steel of the floor. I opened my eyes to see
the Captain lying in front of me, his eyes open but lifeless, blood dripping
from his mouth.

Alarms
were sounding as I rose to my feet. Systems were offline, most of the ship’s
armor was dissolved. Entire decks of the ship had been swept away. I looked out
the viewport and saw darkness and a cloud of smoldering ash. All of it was
gone, the Celestrial ship, the star, the worlds, all of it. Gone.

With my
hand shaking, I put the Charon back in its place.

“Well?”
Growd’s voice sounded distant.

Growd,
the Collegiate, all of them were wrong. It hadn’t been the Thar’esh. The Celestrials
themselves had destroyed Vasudeva. The thought of that kind of power in the
hands of the Collegiate gave me a chill up my spine, but then, if they had the
technology, surely the Collegiate would know about it? How could they not know?
Navali and her people must have developed it. When they destroyed the system,
the secret died with them. Perhaps Navali decided to destroy her entire star
system than risk the Thar’esh gaining control of such a weapon, and in doing
so, she killed billions of her own people and all but destroyed the Thar’esh.

“Boy!”
Growd called again. “What did you see?”

I
struggled to sort out the new memories, there was still something missing,
something that didn’t fit. The Draugari. Why were they here? Why was their
fleet far above, fighting the Celestrials and defending this world? Taro would
have known. He survived that day. He must have taken the ship and slipped
through the flux point before it collapsed with what was left of the Thar’esh.

I reached
back for the Charon, but Dex caught me and pulled me back, pinning my arms
painfully behind me.

“No, no
more,” Growd’s face was inches from my own, his eyes narrow, his breath smelled
like stale coffee. “Now you talk.”

“Dammit!”
I yelled, struggling against Dex’s grip. “I need to know what happened!”

“You need
to know?” Growd howled back as he swung back his hand and hit me with a
backhand across the mouth. “What you
need
, is to tell me everything you
saw, now.”

The
inside of my cheek was bleeding where it had cut against my teeth.

“It
wasn’t the Thar’esh who destroyed Vasudeva,” I stopped to spit blood on his
shoes. “It was the Celestrials.”

“Bullshit.”

“I saw a
Celestrial, I heard her say her name was Navali. Her ship launched the weapon
into the star to hide their secrets and destroy the Thar’esh, but they
survived, a few survived.”

“Navali?”
Piter broke in. “Navali Can’tar? She was one of the most celebrated and revered
scientists in their history.”

“You’ve
heard of her?” Growd paused.

“Of
course,” Piter sounded annoyed. “She’s well known. Famous even if you know
anything about the history of fusion systems.”

Growd
scoffed.

“She was
the Emperor’s granddaughter and a genius,” Piter ignored him. “Her research on
power systems was what helped the Celestrial to redesign and optimize their
fusion drives. When the Earthborn came in contact with the Celestrials their
fusion technology was centuries ahead of our own because of it. Of course, that
was over 500 years ago.”

“A genius
with power systems?” Growd turned back to me. “So I’m supposed to believe that
you just had some out-of-body experience where you saw a dead Celestrial
scientist blow up her own star and kill billions of her own people? Do you have
any idea how absurd that is?”