Chapter 25

By the time that Gazza arrived at the caves, Stix was trying to stop a war.

It wasn’t really her fault it was her mother’s. Well, to be more precise it was the line of Queens that she came from. You see the Soldier Ants that guarded the Taran Queen had a secret. Actually, they had lots of secrets but this one was a biggy. You see the race that had been known as Giant Ants was not extinct.

While the planet Tara hadn’t been recorded in Asha’s records as having been explored, it had been terraformed by Keltrians. A group that Garett and Gina had belonged to were responsible. They had planned to move a lot of Shifters from Planet Que, which was considered the Pix homeward. Like the other homeworlds, they had most of the other races living on that planet too.

Since the Shifters were one of the last races that the Pix scientist had created, there were a reasonable number of them still on Planet Que. They had, at one stage in the histories of the Keltrians, been a rather troublesome group until most of them were moved to the fifth planet with the Granteli, since it was lightly inhabited at the time, being a relatively new world.

Because the Shifters could change form, as well as their identities, without using a glamour that other magicians could detect, many people were wary of them. It often only takes one bad apple to condemn the whole barrel. The last known activists to be banished from Planet Que had been a group of Shifters and Genteli people from that community.

They had a problem with the Queen of their Islands. She had been one of the Empresses youngest daughters and she hated Shifters. Assigning her to the Islands had been a poor decision by the aged Empress. Her daughter wasn’t well liked by the Islanders in general and many were amazed the magical items had even stayed with her.

She wasn’t a really bad person, just someone who was intolerant of other people’s ideas and differences. She was more inclined to view the child races of the Pix as experiments gone wrong rather than true people. She had also picked wizards and mages to rule the islands that were like-minded and only of the Pix race. This was where the trouble really started the downfall of the Keltrians.

One thing that had worried the Empress of the planet was that after being confined to a stasis chamber for a twenty-five year period, not all of the rebels had died and the survivors were still sane. This was unheard of; stasis was one of their greatest punishments. Malcontents were normally confined for either half a year or a whole year and then released, after testing to ensure they were sane and rehabilitated.

Being confined in the stasis chamber for even five years was rare. People wearing magical items, in particular, didn’t fare well. Even the worst of the non-magical people had died or corrected their ways if confined for fifteen years. The normal succession of confinements was a half year, then stretches of one year, two, five, ten, or fifteen years.

The Empress had reluctantly enacted the twenty-five-year sentence. This meant the group that was banished spent a total of sixty years in and out of stasis. By then they were old news and all of their families had been moved from the islands to Planet For or they had moved elsewhere of their own volition.

The harshest thing about stasis was the occupant was aware during their time of confinement and only their body was in stasis. This was why many people only required a year, or two years at the most, to rehabilitate or they went mad and died.

One thing the Empress who had ordered their confinement didn’t know at the time, was that a scientist, who was an undeclared Shifter because of her Pix features, a High Mage and a sympathiser, had altered the stasis chambers. She had included a dimensional space of equal size to the chamber. For the condemned, it felt like they were put to sleep and woke up some hours later.

She did discover that those who wore magical items at the time did indeed die during or not long after the twenty-first year of confinement. However, those people who had magical ability but were not wearing items survived along with the non-magical people, none-the-worse for the ordeal. She passed this information onto the survivors’ families, her team and even the scientific community.

However, the Empress who had condemned the rebels didn’t hear of her research until much later. At the time, the Empress had little choice and had to order the banishment of the rebels, the final punishment. So, the surviving twenty members of the alleged group of rebels were put back in their chambers, placed in a shuttle and sent into deep space towards one of the other solar systems that had a habitable planet.

Five thousand years later, some of their descendants repaid the favour of being banished by sending the hydrazine bomb to blow up the blue sun. However, they didn’t realise that the bomb would take a couple of thousand years to destabilise the super dense sun. This gave the Keltrians more than enough time to build spaceships and get some of their population off the doomed planets.

The doctor’s research also had a far-reaching effect. It was her research that meant that the stasis chambers on the wheelships and shuttles could be altered to preserve the life of the occupant for longer. People wearing magical items did have to leave the chamber at least every twenty years and for at least a week or two before they could they could go back in.

Ageing a month or so for every hundred years of travel was a cheap price as far as the explorers and settlers were concerned. The fact their servants and kids didn’t age at all while in stasis was even better. It also meant they could take it in turns to check on the ship. Thus, finding crews for the wheelships hadn’t been as hard as the Queens and Empresses had thought it would be, particularly, from the child races.

The group that had terraformed Tara had indeed sent out the messages that the planet would be ready by the time the homeworld got the message and sent the settlement ships to it. Unfortunately, for them, they had an accident before they could leave. They hadn’t determined how unpredictable the weather on the planet was at the time.

When Garett recognised the system from his hidden computer files in the shuttle, he was able to direct Asha Nine towards the planet without her knowing it. He had a spell on her and the tenth level, so she was not always aware that he was in her section. He’d been doing experiments in his other hidden lab in the shuttle at the time of the accident.

His assessment of her condition wasn’t as hopeful as hers had been and he decided to abandon ship. However, the shuttle bay doors had been damaged and he was trapped. His only hope was the stasis chamber when he realised how long it was going to take her to get to the planet in her current condition.

Her damaged systems also meant he couldn’t get a lock on any of the transporter portals on the planet so he couldn’t leave that way either. He did let the droids into the section to have several goes at fixing the damaged engine that was slowing them down and the doors. He liked contingency plans.

It wasn’t until he realised that Asha had a hydrazine leak, because of the damage, that he confined himself totally to his shuttle. He reluctantly locked out the lower levels to try and reduce the contamination.

If the hydrazine killed Asha, he was really in trouble. Slow was still better than no go at all. He did keep six of Asha’s droids working on the doors. They were to wake him as soon as they had them fixed. Unbeknown to him, the droids had to abandon the repairs because the leak was affecting them. He wasn’t aware that controllers used some of their own spores to build the brains of their repair droids.

The androids did manage to complete the repairs on the launch tubes for the satellites, which was why they had been sent to level ten before Garett had redirected them. Once he was in the shuttle with his shields up and he was in stasis, his influence had waned and they went back to their first priority. The minds of the droids were very hard to influence and control even by a High Wizard.

Garett was very confused when he next woke. When he checked, not only was the shuttle still confined in the bay, the bay was some seventy meters below the surface of a planet. When he tapped into Asha’s systems from his shuttle, he was able to read her log as to what happened. He was relieved that the hydrazine leak wasn’t a problem anymore.

Initially, he couldn’t understand how or why he had been able to survive what he learnt was three and a half thousand years of sleep and still be sane. It was only then that he realised that the magical items he had been wearing were no longer on his body. He felt naked without them but not ready to go insane. He could only surmise that the rest of his sextet was also dead by this time, as they had not come to find him.

He was still able to use some basic spells and using a cloaking spell, he made his way to his laboratory on level nine. Asha was asleep at the time and moving around cloaked didn’t trigger any of her system alerts. He even used the stairs to get around. He then discovered that the main access to his lab wouldn’t let him enter because he was no longer wearing a wizard’s items.

He was relieved that he was able to use his emergency back door to get into his lab. His lab was a mess from the crash. The droids hadn’t been able to enter to clean it up.

As he was cleaning up, he picked up a box and was delighted when the entity enquired if he was interested in claiming it.

The box was only a High Mage’s box and while Lore had been his best skill, he was happy to settle for Nature, as it was also one of his primary skills in the past. Having a wizard’s knowledge also meant that he could get the best out the skills the items could enhance. He hoped this step was only transitional. It did, however, feel great to be wearing magical items again.

He soon learnt that he was not able to find let alone enter the treasure rooms so he couldn’t claim one of the High Wizards boxes that he knew was in it. He spent several months mucking around in the lab. He became frustrated when he was not able to get the new high wizard’s box so that he could accept its entity. He tried several combinations but no box he made that was more powerful than his would be claimed by an entity.

Without his High Wizards box, he was barred from many of the places he wanted to go within Asha. Even though he had put the spells on the rooms, he couldn’t undo them without wearing the items. Despite his contingency plans, he hadn’t expected to be demoted to a High Mage. He did feel fortunate that the crystals that held the control spells over Asha still responded to his commands, so she and her androids stayed asleep. He didn’t want her in his business.

When he went through Asher’s logs, he was pleased to learn that settlement ships had arrived two thousand four hundred years before. So he packed up the other twenty minor boxes he had and decided it was a time to find out if he could find someone who was possibly good enough to be a wizard.

He hoped that if he found a strong partner, between them, they could get the entities to activate the boxes he had made. He missed Gina terribly but he also knew that she was far in his past. When he had gone back to the shuttle and checked out the recordings of his capsule, he determined that he had died when the bling left him after the crash onto Tara.

The emergency system had been able to revive him and he had dropped into the same type of sleep that people not wearing items entered. He remembered vague dreams and crying. He even had a sense that time had passed. He didn’t know why he was kept alive.

For a Shifter, he was still a young man; if you excluded the years, he had slept in stasis. As a wizard, he had been but a babe. He wondered if this all had to do with why he felt he could cope with Gina and the others being gone. They hadn’t been together long in the scheme of his life expectancy even as a High Mage.

Being a pragmatist and having a scientific bent, he shrugged it all off and packed to go exploring.

When he made it to Fire Mountain, Garett was appalled that the settlers had lost so much technology.

The settlers had managed to keep some of it but the general living standards were not what he was used to. Mt Fire was for all intent a mining town and a bit rough and ready at the best of times. During the twenty years that Garett hung around in Mt Fire, he posed as a doctor while he gathered information, wealth and explored the region. He made sure to invest in several lucrative mining ventures.

Garett learnt that many of the settlers that now formed the largest populations on the island’s western coasts had moved away from this area because of the fighting with the ants. Because the Tarans mined and the largest concentrations of Faerie Clans were living around the mountain, the ants no longer bothered the people here so much.

Apparently, the ants and the faeries didn’t have a problem even if many of the refugees and the ants did. Many of the local ants were even tame to an extent. One of the local Lords had befriended a Black Ant Queen, and she let him use her workers as pack animals and workers in his mines in exchange for the rich foods he could provide them. They would also help with removing overburden and building projects. The Ants fascinated Garret for a time.

Garett also learnt the settlement ship the Tarans had arrived in had long since been stripped. Also, not many magical items had come with the ship. One of his objectives at Mt Fire was to collect as many different minerals to top up Asha’s recycler and to find gems for his projects. He also found the ants were handy to build him an access tunnel into the ship and they were good at keeping his secrets.