Memoirs of a Timelord (12 page)

       I'd been watching a pulsar off the starboard when I realized someone else was standing there.  The Boss had a way of sneaking up on you.  

       "Discovered the Voh, did you?" it was more of a statement than a question.  

       "They're an interesting people." I shrugged while gesturing to the ship around us.

       "You do realize that this ship is hurtling towards its own destiny?  They will not return from this endeavor." He seemed to be watching me for my response.

       "Destiny?" I didn't like the sound of that.

       "All for the greater good of the galaxy." He gave a gesture to the world outside.  "It will be the stuff of legends, quite literally.  For a millennia the citizens of the Klor-Klath empire will tell the story of the day that the Seven Sovereign Worlds of Tanir united in a coalition to end the Voh invasion of the Blevis system.  For a few centuries it's even a holiday, with three days of feasting in honor of those that bravely stood up to the loathsome Humans."

       I was horrified to find out that my friends were pawns on a galactic chess board, even if they got their own holiday.  

       "Like hell you're gonna kill my people!" I was outraged.  "And what is all that bullshit about the Voh invading.  This is a science ship, the Mata is on a peaceful mission of exploration and diplomacy."

       DorLek gave a frown as he carefully chose his words.  "The crew of this ship are not a true representation of the Voh.  You must remember that these people you know are scientists, academics, diplomats...eggheads you would have called them back on Earth."

       "Mebbe my Daddy called 'em that..." I muttered at the ancient reference.

       "Among their people, these are the enlightened ones.  The elite thinkers...the liberals.  They represent what the Voh could be, but they should never be confused with the real thing." With that he touched me lightly on the arm.  In a flash we were whisked across the quadrant.  I had enough experience with lateral insertions to be able to tell that we had not moved temporally.   When you moved through time there was a different feel to it, like being in an elevator when the cable snaps.  This was just a slide to the left, a simple relocation.

       We were standing on the top of a tower that had to be at least three miles high.  Below us were a few other buildings that protruded through the layer of clouds below us.  It was a beautiful scene, those gleaming sky-islands poking thru here and there as far as the eye could see.

       But when I looked at the scene again, modulating my eyes through the spectrums, what I could see in those bandwidths was another story altogether.  They weren't clouds, but a thick layer of industrial smog that blanketed the planet below.  The toxin levels were like pure auto exhaust.  Worse yet, I could see life forms down there.  Lots of them, millions, scurrying about in their daily life.

       "The Voh Oligarchy live there," DorLek pointed to the skyscrapers that jutted high above the clouds, "and the Ma'Ani live down there." This time he gestured to the ants that scurried below.

       Even from there, high atop the tower, it looked like shit soup down there.  The conditions had to be insufferable.  The longer I looked, the more filth I saw.  Not just in the air, but in piles and on the streets and in every corner of their world.  Even the dust in the wind was laden with pollution.  It was amazing the amount of industrial waste that essentially made up the landscape.  As I scanned the surface with my enhanced eyes it became clear from the dispersal patterns that the source of the pollution was the towers.  

       "This is Gaanti, homeworld of the Ma'Ani." The Boss had been standing by patiently as I took it all in.  He knew that I was still struggling to process all the data my enhanced eyes could feed me.  "This is what happens to those who welcome the Voh into their space."

       It was fantastic the sheer volume of information that my DuNai optics could render at a glance.  Just to keep from overwhelming myself with data, I had learned to look at a thing in layers.  I was just working my way down to a subcutaneous scan of the planet when I made a revelation.

       "They're ships." I said almost inaudibly.  My technology training had taught me enough to be able to discern the flight and control mechanisms in the structures.  Beyond that I could also make out the mining complex that encompassed the lowest levels of the towers.  Plugged into the mantle, the Voh were sucking the planet dry of her precious resources.  They were like great vampires upon the landscape.   

       I remember reading somewhere that after a mosquito sucks their fill of your blood, they defecate on you so they will be light enough to get airborne.  That was a lot like what I was seeing here.  The Voh would bleed this world, shit on it, and then depart for their next victim.  

       "You understand that this galaxy is a training environment and that in time you will supervise the Voh and guide them in their evolution as part of your studies.  However, your time has not yet come." Looking down, the Boss had a roundabout way of delivering really bad news.  "Your friends out there in deep space may have impeccable ideals, but they do not represent the real Voh civilization extant.  Their endeavor was essentially financed by the Oligarchy with the intent to find new worlds to infest.  From the Tanir perspective, your friends are nothing more than the advanced scouts for a larger invasion force.  But their defeat will mark the beginning of true unity in the Klor-Klath Empire that will lead to a great period of prosperity and social advancement.  It is a small price to pay for such a great yield."

       Like anyone from Earth, I had seen my share of movies where evil aliens invaded the planet for its resources.  So when I find out that it's my own people that are the pirates from space, sucking planets dry, I'm a little unsettled.  But the more I looked at the Voh operation, the more they looked like a scourge upon the landscape.  By the time they were finished with this planet it would glow in the dark.

       "You may continue your activities with the KuluMata until they reach Genesis Pass.  After that they face their fate on their own." The Boss reassured me with a nod.

       "You say that like that they're just ordering pizza or something.  Dying sucks in case you didn't get the memo." I had a hard time not blowing my top.  Blame it on my Latin temperament.

       "Everything we experience in life, including death itself, is an experience that we take with us into the Guf.  All living things are created and subsequently die.  How else would you enter the afterlife? The DuNai believe it is wrong to rob a being of this experience.   Death is a very personal event in our lives, and it shapes your soul in profound ways."  Stroking his scraggly beard, he did his best to assuage my anger.   

       I knew there was no arguing with the Boss.  Within a few minutes he was gone, off to manipulate a galaxy or move a star or whatever he had on his calendar for the day.  I sulked about this for a few months, and the closer the Mata got to Genesis Pass, the worse I felt.  These people were friends of mine.  They had families and children and wives and husbands.  I just didn't know if I could stand by while they were wiped out.  But then again, what could I do?  I couldn't hold a candle to the Boss's powers.  Anything I tried would be useless against his all-seeing eye.

             
    

       I awoke with a start.  I'd been drinking a little...okay, a lot, and had fallen asleep on a couch under Skylab when I woke up to find DorLek sitting on the end table.  It had been odd, I'd heard him tell me to wake up in my dream.  It had never occurred to me that he could talk to me through the Guf.  

       "Are you ready?" He asked with one of those crazy little secretive smiles he got sometimes.

       "For what?" My mind was scrambling as I wondered if I had forgotten to complete an assignment.  

       "To save your friends." He said simply.

       "But I thought you said they had to experience their death, and all that DuNai bullshit." I was unsure exactly what he had in mind.

       "But I also taught you that Timelords have domain over the dead."  He held up a device that looked like a stick of gum, still wrapped in foil.  I knew what it was right away; a matter buffer.

       "I can harvest them?" I was truly amazed.  Harvesting people from their deathbeds was bread 'n butter work for Timelords.  An Editor's domain could employ thousands of minions on a single planet so there is a great need for fresh recruits.  Having been harvested myself, I had been fascinated with the subject and studied the process extensively.  In devices training I had even tried to take Didra outside of the house in a buffer, but once she lost link with the central computer, she turned into nothing more than a blob of unformed morphic matter.  But that's another story.

       I knew from my studies that a fully trained Lord did not need the handheld buffer that he handed to me.  The Boss had the ability to grab multiple beings, compress them, and store them within himself in stasis.  You could literally call it a thumbdrive.  Bara said the old man could hold hundreds, but that was pretty exceptional, even among the other old timers.  Most Lords could hold fifty or sixty beings before they had to start pushing the overflow into subspace.  

       But since I was green there were some serious security issues that required me to use the handheld buffer.  See, when you have the most powerful weapon in the universe installed in your body, namely the Onkx, you have to always safeguard any potential access to the device.  Although extremely rare, it was possible for the captor to be overpowered by their own detainees if their mind is not strong enough, organized enough, or properly firewalled.  I was none of these things yet.  At this point in my training I could barely do lateral insertions, so I used the handheld unit.

       With a touch, we were hanging in space over the KuluMata.  My skin had a cold stiffness to it so I knew the Boss had adjusted me so I could survive out here without a suit.  Below us I could see the bright flashes of energy weapons impacting on the hull of the science vessel.  It was a magnificent battle really; the Mata fought well for a buncha geeks with nothing more than defensive weaponry.  But these were warships that attacked now.  Not pirates or raiders.  The Klorr that moved decisively against my friends were learned in the art of war.  The KuluMata never had a chance.

       Then just like that, the Boss has us in the galley.  I guess that's where the killing started.  No sooner had I pulled Cookie into the buffer, and left an exact copy in his place, than the whole area turned into a supernova.  After that we hopped into space again where Yesenski and Hughes were blasted out of the ship through a horrific gash in the side of hydroponics.  Another hop and I was grabbing the Captain as he was felled by hyperkinetic pellets that gouged their way through the bridge shielding.

       The hops turned into a dizzying array of death and horror, each worse than the last.  It hurt me so much to see these people I had grown close to, being subjected to the indignities of death.  Jump after jump I collected each of the 1106 members of the crew in order of their death.  In the midst of this hustle, I remember being awestruck by how precise the old man was.  These were some very complicated moves we were making, jumping about not only in location, but temporally as he zipped us back and forth like the world was his own personal media player.  All this while holding us both partially phased and shielded against the explosions.  He was good, he was really, really, good.

       Roxy was one of the last we found.  She and her security team had mostly survived until the boarding parties took over.  In the hand-to-hand combat that followed, she fought valiantly against the mass of troops.  Still, there was no stopping the horde that overwhelmed her in the end.  It was like a dagger in my heart to see my sister there on the ground, broken and bloody as I pulled her into the buffer.  Try as I might, the image haunted me enough that I gave up sleeping not long after that.

       When we had the last of the crew, the Boss took us back to our original position high above the battle.  I could see the gaping holes in the outer shielding where the breaching equipment had penetrated the hull violently.  There were flash fires everywhere, and it only got worse when I used the Onkx to self-destruct all of the upgrades Aldoo had installed.  The only technology they were going to plunder would be Voh.  

       "This is the way of the DuNai." I felt his words in my head; he was speaking to me thru the Guf.

       "It takes a little getting used to." I agreed reluctantly, happy that I had my friends safely tucked away in my pocket, yet sad at what they had been through.   Essentially they'd just been murdered.   At least that's how it seemed to me at the time anyhow.  I had a pocketful of body bags, in a manner of speaking.  The whole time I kept seeing Roxie, there on the floor of the engine room, not twenty feet from her husband's body.