Dreams of Jupiter

Part 4 - Ancient Purpose

As Kael's mind reeled in shock from the blunt announcement, the image of the fetal child and its dark, cold eyes faded and he found himself looking into a cave where three early human males, dressed in ragged furs, were standing and sitting close to a small fire.

Abruptly they turned from the fire to snatch up crude spears made with chipped flint heads lashed to lengths of wood.  Weapons in hand, they then turned point them towards something they were seeing coming in from the cave's entrance, shouting defiantly and gesturing wildly towards whatever they had seen.

A moment later they appeared, a pair of slender, large-headed aliens dressed in heavy environment suits.  At first glance Kael thought they were Kadareen, a species known more commonly on Earth as the Grays, the Confed's diplomatic and First Contact specialists.  It had been the Kadareen that, over the space of a couple centuries, eased Earth into the Confed after long standing miscommunications, misconceptions, and paranoia were resolved.

But, as these two aliens stepped forward, Kael could see that they were more robust than the fragile-appearing Grays, taller and with a deeper chest.  Almost contemptuously they slapped away the spears before the flint heads could touch their metallic suits.  Then they were brutally killing two of the cavemen by firing blasts of energized plasma through their heads from shoulder-mounted weapons.  The third they took hold of and threw him roughly to the ground.

At that point, one of the two took a device from a utility belt and pressed it against the back of the surviving caveman's neck.  The dirty creature, now further soiled with the remains of his companion's brains and struggling against an impossibly strong hold, jerked as a light on the device flared.  Then he was going limp after one of the aliens thumped him on the back of his head with a clenched fist.  The pair then turned and walked back out of the cave without a backward glance, leaving the unconscious caveman in the company of his two slain comrades.

- I see from your own racial memories that our suspicions about your world were true. - Sen's voice returned to say.  - The Star Masters visited your world long ago and planted a seed into one of your early ancestors. -

'Seed?  What kind of seed?' Kael wondered wildly.  Then mentally kicked himself when he realized the silent communication with Sen was two-way.

- The Star Masters were rulers of galaxies. -  Sen explained offhandedly, as if answering a young child's question. - In their arrogance, they developed a technology that could both lay waste to entire star systems and provide limitless energy to power their civilization.  A rebellion from within tried to steal the technology's plans before they could build it.  So instead of building it in secret and using it to crush their enemies, the fools broke the plan into fragments or seeds, and scattered it over a hundred star systems to keep it out of rebel hands, thinking to defeat their enemies and retrieve it later.  Those seeds they buried in the genome of the dominant life forms in those systems, to make it more difficult to discover. -

There was a slight pause before:

- Of course the Masters did not defeat their enemies and their empire was destroyed, leaving the plans scattered across space.  We discovered both their existence and the existence of the plans when we conquered a system in the Qurashi Galaxy.  We desire that technology and now hunt down those plans to acquire it, system by system, seed by seed. -

Kael felt Sen's attention swing back squarely onto him.

- Before you think to deny us the seed by holding yourselves for ransom to save your world, we can take it from your dead body as easily as from your living.  We can and we will. -

The words sent a cold flare of fear washing through Kael as he considered Sen's words.  The Senkosh meant to not only defeat the Confed forces on Earth, they planned on killing everybody on the planet as well.  Tass, his sister, his parents, the people from work, everybody!  Just so they can take something jammed into his genetic structure thanks to some long dead ancestor being attacked by marauding aliens?!  It was insane!  But it was also reality.

Before Kael could consider it further, he felt himself being dragged from the comforting darkness by pain and motion.

" ... you okay?" a voice shouted from somewhere nearby.  Kael groaned as yet again he was shaken by a hard hand on his shoulder.

"Buddy, can you hear me?" the voice said again, this time from much closer.

Kael's eyes fluttered open and he found himself looking into the concerned face of a human soldier in battle armor, the visor on his helmet flipped open.  A glance to the side found a first aide cross on the man's shoulder, marking him a medic.

"There you are."  A relieved smile appeared on the man's face.  "You survived quite the fall there, bud.  Nearly two hundred metres.  Nobody else on that platform did that."  He shook his head, plainly confused.

"I still can't believe that you weren't buried ... urgh!" The medic abruptly fell to the side, missing most of his chest.

Adrenaline pushing aside the pain of his battered body, Kael unsteadily rolled to his feet and threw a quick look in the direction the shot came from.  He instantly regretted that he had.

 Now at ground level, he found himself looking down a street littered with massive dark metal wedges.  Battered and scarred, holes left behind in the buildings around them spoke of the wedges' direct paths to the ground, blasting through anything in their way like giant artillery shells.  Oddly enough, for artillery shells, they were surrounded by pools of some kind of viscous fluid as if they were bleeding.  A heart beat later he saw why: fissures opened along the sides and front of the nearest wedge, spilling the fluid out and onto the ground in thick gushes of liquid motion.

The fluid geysered for a moment before the flow abruptly ebbed.  Then armored forms were jumping through the openings to land on the street, each throwing up sticky coronas of fluid as they landed.  The newcomers took a second to orient themselves then they were charging down the street towards a stunned Kael.