Trojian Horse

Hethios felt unsure. That was unusual for him. He always knew what to do. They all depended on him to know what to do. He felt he had failed in his primary directive which was to protect Arien until he was ready. It was never quite clear what Arien had to be ready for, only that he needed to be prepared for something important and the fate of the Vulpeculae was tied to Arien’s. Even now he couldn’t quite remember why he had agreed to Arien’s guardian back then although the awe of the occasion probably had a lot to do with it. The one requesting didn’t really seem like one to say no to.

Of course, he had to raise and educate Arien but most importantly he had to protect him. In time though the objective became blurry. Their relationship became more personal than he had anticipated. By his very nature young Arien depended on his caregivers for everything short of breathing. It was unlike the Vulpeculae young that were capable of locomotion within hours of their birth and only sort guidance from their parent until they were old enough to care for themselves; which often happened within a year or two of their birth. So many things about Arien were different and that is what made him even more special. The entire Vulpeculae community welcomed him although in time they found Arien an oddity because he didn’t talk, think or look like them. Time only made this division worse but for the most part Arien didn’t notice it until much later in his life.

Hethios paced around the laboratory unable to remain seated for more than a few seconds. If Arien was dead, then all was lost but, and this was a very sceptical but, if he was alive then it was a question of how long he would remain that way. Time would not be their ally. He had to be found fast. A few weeks had gone by and they had heard nothing more about Arien. Nothing at all. There was no sure way of telling if Arien was alive or dead, but whatever was happening he felt sure Arien was at the centre of it somehow. That kind of thinking went against his empirical way of thinking as it depended on variables he could not measure. It forced him to accept more of the way of the world than he could realistically measure. More than anything he found he wanted Arien to be alive and find his way back home somehow, and he was sure that. He just couldn’t be dead. There was still too much Arien had to do. Too much he had to tell Arien.

He thought back to how he and Arien had been brought together. He could remember the warmth of the sun, the dust blowing in the gentle breeze as he stood on the balcony of his laboratory back on Mer-oonit. There were reports that there would be a sandstorm later that day and he wanted to enjoy the warmth and the view before they had to shutter their rooms. Mer-oonit was a red desert for the most part but the canyons whose bellies flowed with water and the yellow moss that covered the ground was a wonderful sight and the moss was a delightful feat of Mer-oonit evolution. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. Even the deserts were far from empty, much like a lot of the worlds in the cosmos; there was more to them than meets the eye. It was a strangely unique planet. One in which they had begun to find themselves comfortable. The Vulpeculae pined for their home but the war made that desire impossible to satisfy.

The dracien were relentless in their pursuit of galactic domination, their most formidable weapon being their numbers. Though they lacked much in the way of physical attributes they more than made up for it with the ability to multiply at an extraordinary rate. Their leader, Reeger, or Lord Reeger as he liked to call himself was a different beast entirely. While he shared similarities with his race over time he became like none of them. Hethios suspected that Reeger had modified himself genetically, or mechanically, to enhance his natural abilities, making him faster, stronger, and smarter than any of his own. Despite Reeger’s impressive physical prowess they had managed to keep the dracien tide at bay for almost a millennium now. Reeger had been defeated before but somehow, he, and the dracien, had come back stronger and more vicious than before.

Nobody knew where the Dracien came from. One day it was if they never existed and the next they were the next super power in the galaxy. From less than nothing they had transformed themselves into a cancerous growth that threatened to enslave the entire galaxy. They, the resistance, had taken the threat of Reeger seriously and dealt with him swiftly but each blow they dealt Reeger only seemed to make him stronger. Hethios had always felt that Reeger’s rise to power was orchestrated by some hidden powers that chose to remain anonymous though to what end he did not know. It was only a theory which lacked the most crucial ingredient. Evidence.

Eventually Reeger became too powerful for them and their home planet Halglar was destroyed. Reeger had amassed weapons with world destroying capabilities very quickly. Too quickly. He had many near brushes with Reeger and he was never convinced that Reeger could develop such weapons on his own. Reeger simply lacked the kind of intellect required no matter how he genetically altered himself. Their need drove them to find Mer-oonit. Even when they terraformed the planet they knew they would not be able to live long on it, not only because they did not complete the process of terraforming it but they knew that their presence would attract Reeger their way. The presence of sentient beings on Ser-oos, who were very primitive at the time, would place them in danger from Reeger.

It was clear they had to find a new home and the engineers of Georas, their closest allies in the war, estimated that they had another one hundred and forty years on the planet before it became uninhabitable. The neighbouring planet was habitable but it was also occupied. Many of the Vulpeculae felt that occupying the planet and teaching these beings about living in harmony with their environment and with each other was the right call to make. Occupation, though forceful at first, would be seen by the Ser-ooits as necessary and they would even eventually grow to believe it to be a salvation. Hethios flatly opposed this idea and that was the end of the argument. He reasoned that their idea of occupation was no different than that proposed by the dracien. Where would it stop? If the Ser-ooits could invite them then that would have been a different case entirely but virtually none of them, save a few, knew of the existence of anything beyond their horizon on Ser-oos. He had had the privilege of visiting Ser-oos on several occasions and considered it a very beautiful planet, a lush green in most parts with such a variety of creatures and plants living in perfect symbiosis. He wished the beings would keep it this way but it seemed unlikely. Many of them were careless with their environment but it was their planet to destroy if they chose to. They would have to learn the hard way and he only hoped that they would learn sooner how to save their planet than the Vulpeculae had.

Even before Reeger had threatened their existence, the cost of blind invention had almost cost them their atmosphere. The seas on Halglar had begun to dry up leaving behind a barren seabed of orange silt on. Their quest for comfort and efficiency had taken them further than they had meant to go. Looking out to the horizon it was hard to believe that many golden ages had enjoyed domination over that solar system calling Mer-oonit home. So many stories had been told about Mer-oonit before industrialisation and faster interstellar travel turned Mer-oonit into a degrading deserted planet. Soon the beings on Ser-oos would look up into the sky to see a lonely red planet in the sky and know nothing of how it came to be a red wasteland devoid of intelligent life over the eons.

In his search for a new home, Hethios had found a dozen other planets not so distant from their own that could be explored as possible homes. The queen had laughed at his suggestion that these other planets were not so distant. It would take them years to get to one then more time to get to the next then the next if any before were found unsuitable. Their ships could manage about half of light speed and while their lifespans were long enough to accommodate such a journey, it was the resources they would need to carry on such a journey that would be hard enough. It had been hard enough for them to make it to Mer-oonit. It was impossible she had said. They would just have to accept their fate and die of on Mer-oonit. With as much dignity as they could muster. Luckily for the Vulpeculae Hethios dealt almost exclusively in the impossible. He had been working with the engineers of Georas to design a new engine for space travel. This engine would enable them to travel the vast expanses of space that would normally take years within hours. Days would become seconds, weeks into minutes, years in hours, centuries into days. He was reinventing interstellar travel. The Queen was convinced. They would leave when the new ships were ready.

He set to work perfecting the engine while conducting further observations on the targeted planets. It was calculated guesswork but the only way to know for sure if they could live on any of those planets would be to visit them. He had spent many years working on the engine and soon he felt certain that it was ready to be tested. It was fitted into a ship run by a seventh-generation quantum computer, the first of its kind. They named the quantum computer Iris. The ship itself was made of thoritrium, a material that was hard but malleable when ultra-cooled, could resist the massive forces that would be exerted by such high speeds and warping during what Hethios decided to call the jump-gate and was equipped with the most powerful engine they could make at the time, many generations ahead of its time – the locus drive. Roue volunteered to pilot the ship.

The other ships were built as transport ships which meant they sacrificed more in function what they made up for in aesthetics. Most of these ships were built in orbit as lifting them against the Mer-oonit gravity would require too much energy, energy they couldn’t spare right then. They were desperately homeless and at war. That is when Arien came to them.

He was once again on the balcony of his Mer-oonit laboratory looking out at the beauty of the planet. As was wont to happen at that time he began going over his work in his head trying to make the best sense of some readings that had been relayed from the mothership orbiting Mer-oonit earlier that morning. The readings had been collected on one of the prospective planets they hoped to call home one day. The levels of some of the gases seemed higher than he had initially thought and he wondered what sort of impact that would have on their trip. The Vulpeculae were very hardy beings, able to survive in what most beings considered hostile environments but even they had limits so he had to estimate within a reasonable level of certainty which planets would be worth their time. He stood there for several hours when the sandstorm warning was sounded and they had to shutter their residences. He sealed the windows of the room and decided to go back to his work. Standing in the middle of his laboratory was a figure in a brown cloak with a hood carrying a bundle in its arms. The stranger spoke gently to him, greeted him in Ng-uni, the language of the ancients, which Hethios coincidentally knew. There were very few beings, much less races that still spoke and studied that language now. The stranger held out a child of the Ser-ooits for Hethios to take. The child was wrapped in brown cloths, which looked and felt like some type of furs. The stranger, who never attempted to identify himself and whose face Hethios never saw, warned him that retribution would follow this youngling and he had to protect him until the time was right. He remembered he had asked the figure what all this meant. This baby was central to the war, he was told, a bigger war than they presently found themselves in, a war that they would not know existed until this baby uncovered it. He told him that there was a prophecy concerning this youngling, and they would hear it in time. When the time was right. They would have to take the baby and flee as soon as they could, he was told. Reeger was not to know of the baby’s presence, of this Hethios was instructed to make sure of. Perhaps it had been the curiosity, maybe it had been the wonder how a child of Ser-oos could breathe in the Mer-oonit atmosphere as this child seemed to do, whatever the reason he had taken the baby in his arms and the stranger had vanished before his eyes. As a parting gift, the stranger had told him about a planet called Trojian where they would find a suitable home.

Not long after Reeger and his hordes came for them. They torched their homes and they used hologram ships as a decoy for Reeger’s attack. It was a momentary distraction but a moment was all they needed. They managed to load most of the ships with resources and it didn’t take long to load the Vulpeculae and disappear into the cosmos. Reeger’s armada was incapable of dealing with the speed of the new Vulpeculae ships nor was he capable of following them. Hethios was sure that somewhere out there in the universe Reeger was was plotting his revenge. Hethios knew they had to be ready for another attack, whenever it came. He still felt conflicted about leaving the resistance in the darkness about their mission and their whereabouts but he knew it was necessary.

His mission to protect the Vulpeculae was made more important by his current inability to protect Arien. He felt something about the strange happenings on Trojian was reminiscent of what had transpired on Halglar. Somehow, the appearance of Reeger and his dracien horde had accelerated the rate of decay of their planet. Now it seemed this planet was beginning to show unexpected signs of decay and he could not help but wonder if again the two were related.