Chapter 45: The End of the Line
The passageway led them through the bowels of the palace, turning and descending at times and ascending at others in that claustrophobic murk. After what felt like an hour they finally filed from the dim hall into a large antechamber connected to what seemed to be a sort of workshop area. It had the look of being hastily abandoned at some time earlier. Scattered containers of unknown contents, boxes left open on stacks of similar containers and the scattered remains of what could have been meals all about the room.
Paulie looked around, the small alien in his arms shifting as he gripped Paulie’s coat tighter. Their almond shaped eyes seemed to take in the whole room, the pitch black of them hard to read. They grumbled low, their insectoid mandibles clicking as they spoke galactic common. He could not understand the boy, but he got the idea they were talking to themselves anyway.
Jakiikii was holding the other two star children, the mendagoonian soldiers surrounding them like they were guarding the queen herself. And in a sense they were, the future queen anyway.
Paulie had been talking with the captain as they walked, apparently the monarch having two female children was incredibly rare. Their species had a much higher male to female gender ratio, it was not uncommon for clutches to be entirely male. It was said that Holy Nastrica must have the blessings of the great beyonders for her good fortune. Paulie didn’t know about all that, he had found that for being a high tech civilization the GGI were quite a superstitious lot.
He chuckled quietly as he waited for their next instructions. After another moment of the captain consulting his maps they began to move again. This time in a new direction.
“If we can get to the throne room we will be safe behind anti-orbital grade walls. But the enemy is many and we were ill prepared for such a sudden assault. It pains me to admit, but no one here actually expected such a tragedy.” The alien said, their injured arm tied up and close to their chest now.
Another of the guards spoke, their own translator warbling for Paulie’s benefit. “You train for these kinds of events. But they are never supposed to happen.” The grumbling was echoed by several of the other royal guards. Captain Elldite seemed to hiss something and the grumbling fell silent.
Jakiikii nodded her angular head, her six eyes scanning their surroundings independently of each other like a six-eyed chameleon. “Yeah. Tell us about it, Paulie and I were outside the city limits chasing a lead when the first explosions happened. We got completely cut off from the main adjudicators complex.” She paused, head cocked and then asked the royal guardsman, “Hey, why didn’t the palace shield deploy? It should have turned on and prevented such an attack from getting through in the first place. Just like the main adjudicator’s precinct.
One of the other guards chittered angrily and Captain Elldite nodded, a hand waving to the other alien to be calm. “Yes, Ishion is correct. We were betrayed. Sabotaged. I do not yet know how, I would have to speak to the commander of the guard to get to the bottom of it. But I suspect that elements of the local defense force may not have been as they at first appeared. I can think of no other way elements of the great dark might have infiltrated our most secure areas. Nor how they communicated without the knowledge of the Intercession and the Adjudicator Major General.”
The man’s face was covered, so Paulie could not see the movements of their faceplates as they spoke. But from the way they stepped with their six spindly insectoid legs and the clenching of their gloved fingers he could tell the alien was angry. And Paulie was too. It was likely that many hundreds or even thousands of innocent people had been killed tonight. Aliens they might be, but in his time amongst them he had come to appreciate them as more than they would have first appeared to a human unfamiliar with the culture. Not just some collection of strange creatures, that menagerie of crazed xenobiotic lifeforms in all shapes and sizes.
A collection of wild science fiction wonders.
He shook his head. No, these were people. Like him.. like anyone he had known on Earth. He shuddered and was rewarded with a hand patting his shoulder and the gentle chittering of a child's sympathy. The young grubling he carried looking up at his face with their impassive insectoid features. But somehow they still came off as sympathetic, something about the position of their antenna or the lowering of the longer hairs around their face. The way they looked at him with those dark eyes, like pure voids that drank in the light of the room and returned nothing.
He gave the alien a comforting pat on the back and stepped quicker to get closer to Captain Elldite as the grubling grumbled and settled back down in his arms.
“Hey, uh.. I was wondering actually. What is the relationship between the adjudicators and your own.. people?” He gestured to himself and the other officers. Jakiikii, Flaxiga and Officer Kreenin glancing his way as he did so.
Captain Elldite made another alien gesture, their voice soon replaced by that mechanical drone as the unrecognisable speech was given a form Paulie could understand. “Well, normally there is none. The sovereignty of the monarch and our own forces acts like a separate entity entirely. Local authority is presided by the adjudicator major general and local system defense forces commander. In a lower population system like Trellan, there may be but a single major garrison. Ours is based in Korscam, nearer to the space port. Their forces have been alerted and are in the process of deployment, but it takes time to get them moving. Time we are rapidly running out of.” The man gestured to a nearby turn, the hallway once again opening up into that more grandiose vaulted form with the red stone pillars from earlier.
Paulie shrugged. “Okay, so if there is no direct oversight then why call for reinforcements in the first place? Surely it would have been more prudent to lock down the palace and hunker down?”
The captain shook an arm, the gesture seemingly one of disagreement. “Yes and that is where the problem arises. The lock down protocols were disrupted as the main control center was sabotaged, possibly destroyed. There was an explosion in the primary and secondary disaster coordination chambers when we were attacked. The only reason we were able to alert anyone of our plight in the first place was a fragment of Rozz surviving the initial blast. I assume they must have alerted you specifically for that reason?”
Paulie nodded slowly. It made a strange sort of sense he supposed. When the city was attacked Rozz contacted them very soon after. And by the time they had arrived at the precinct Rozz had already formulated a response, telling them to get to the palace with all haste.
“Yeah, now that you mention it we were kind of given the mission to come and assist. Not the other way around. I guess it is useful to be an all seeing quantum hive-mind after all.” he joked, but didn’t laugh. The moment was far too serious to warrant it. Instead he made a gesture toward the other children. “If we are going to get to the throne room are you sure they will be any safer there? What if the throne room was compromised?”
“Impossible. The only way to get to the controls there is to be there physically, and only our people would have been given access to the monarch’s bunker. Most don’t even know of its existence. Much less how to penetrate the security screens in place.” He said it so confidently, but his body language was troubled.
Not for the first time Paulie wondered why they were not communicating with jargon worms. Instead of pointing it out he asked instead, “Well, if they were able to infiltrate so deep into the inner security then how did the queen get away?”
Jakiikii looked between them, the group passing through another four way intersection as Captain Elldite answered slowly, almost reluctantly. “We were only alerted by chance. It seems that the plot was uncovered only minutes before the first attack, Rozz was alerted and passed the information on to the commander of the guard. There was enough time to move Holy Nastrica, but not to secure the children.”
Paulie glanced at Jakiikii meaningfully but remained silent, no reason to believe that they had anything to do with it. He knew the truth though, due to his and Jakiikii’s investigative efforts they may have averted a global catastrophe. A bolt of cold dread went through him at the thought, what other deadly lines had they come so close to crossing?
‘Yeah right.’ He said internally as he tried to push the fear aside. He was successful, but only partially.
“I have movement up ahead.” One of the guardsmen said, their chittering speech echoing through the quiet of the empty hall.
Paulie and Jakiikii immediately clung to their charges tighter, eliciting a small protestation from one of the females. The grubling squirming in Jakiikii’s three-armed grasp till she grumbled at it to be still.
Paulie glanced down at the youngster in his arms and then towards the hall. He could not fight this, he needed to get to cover and protect his charge. Stepping into the solid cover of one of the pillars, he leaded his head around the corner while trying to ignore the muffled noises coming from the immature mendagoonian.
Captain Elldite and the other royal guards took up similarly defensive positions, the captain signaling to the others to maintain position. The hand gestures were easy to understand, a wide open swing meant move in the signed direction. A closed single fist up meant stop and two meant take cover. Paulie saw the man give the two fisted signal at that moment followed by another that he took to mean prepare to fight or something similar given the response of the other guards.
Officer Flaxiga and Kreenin had also taken cover near to them, both adjudicators holding their weapons at the ready. Officer Kreenin seemed to have calmed down a little, the generally nervous nerivith man’s tail was still lashing the air behind him. But his face was once again calm and his eyes were focused on the opening ahead. That four way intersection from which the noises of possible enemy forces were approaching. He saw the pink skinned alien and Officer Flaxiga share a meaningful look but he had not the time to dwell on its implication.
Instead he just muttered quietly, more in an attempt to calm his charge than himself. At least that was the lie he used to justify the words that fell waveringly through lips pursed in a little more fear than he might like to admit. “Maybe they won’t see us. They will just pass right on by and we will be fine and there wont be anymore shooting and killing. They won’t even notice us at all.”
Well of course he had spoken the antithesis of that outcome into existence, for not a moment after the first black clad terrorist walked around the corner then they spotted his group and shouted in alarm. The first were dropped nearly a heartbeat later when a bright blue bolt of ionised air connected one of the officer’s MDF pistols to their head. The hypervelocity beam cutting a neat hole through the alien and sending their steaming brains across their allies behind them causing a chorus of shouted alien words.
Paulie wanted to do something to help, but seeing as his cargo was the entire point behind their tenuous operation he was more inclined in that moment to stick to the plan and remain in the cover of the red stone pillars. He heard the snap of incoming fire, bright lashes of plasma fire whipping by to impact the floor. Leaving small semi-molten craters where they did so.
The grubling in his arms chirped in apparent fear and buried their head into his chest. The alien child trying to dig through the outer layer of his coat with soft, fleshy hands. In response he hugged the alien tyke closer and did his best to shield them from the noise and the violence that whipped the air around them into a tempest.
It worked for the most part, the fight was swift and in mere minutes it was all over. But Paulie saw the bodies, these were not the same uncoordinated rabble that they had met outside on their way to the precinct. The bodies of the fallen wore tactical gear, their weapons well kept and their movements seemingly practiced. No, this was not some unplanned attack by mobs of crazed malcontents as he had originally suspected. These had the look of trained soldiers on a mission.
He pointed out as much, asking Captain Elldite about the symbols etched across the bodies of the dead. A sort of black web with a bright yellow starburst at its core.
Captain Elldite seemed to be repulsed by it, making a small chanting noise and cursing. “Great zalcing maker beyond.. that is the symbol of The Infinite and Divine. A death cult that purports to worship the old gods, what they call the true masters of creation.”
Jakiikii grunted at the name and Paulie gave her a sideways look. “Is that what Rozz was talking about? The followers of the great dark or whatever? What are the old gods..”
She nodded and waved for him to be quiet, nodding a head towards the children meaningfully. “Yes, among others. They are seriously bad news, showing up like this. In force. The last time anyone saw this many of them they were busy ransacking moons over in the Nalrui system.” She shook her head, the children in her arms looking at him with antennae tucked tightly against their heads. “But why would they come here? What does it mean?” She trailed off, her normally husky tone becoming a whisper that ebbed from deep in her chest.
Paulie didn’t know the answers, hell.. he didn’t even know what questions to ask. But he had the feeling that there was more going on than was at first apparent. He had been feeling a deepening sense of dread for weeks now, and the parasite living in his head was not the sole reason though it certainly wasn’t helping his harrowed mental state.
As if in response to thinking about it, the pressure of the parasite’s foreign mind pushed up against Paulie’s skull and he gritted his teeth as he fought for a moment in his own head. Like the sea it rose and then ebbed, undulating through his psyche like the body of some titanic creature stirring in the midst of slumber. It hardly seemed to react to him now, the thing that was at once a boon and a curse caused a sense of worry to be sure. But this dread he was feeling came from somewhere else entirely.
He thought back to his meeting with the adjudicator major general. Something about the alien had struck him as off too, the deadness in the man’s eyes. Like the marble eyes of a taxidermied corpse. He shook his head as they continued to move. No, something was very wrong here. And he was afraid that whatever it was might end up consuming them all before they even had the chance to uncover the actual truth of what was happening in the wider galaxy.