Chapter 17: Reunited

(Looked over for glaring errors by Glenn)

The Saran woman entered the hotel room she and the Saresii had occupied since they arrived in Montreal. They both were working for the Kermac Ministry of Information and thus for the enemy. She had been a member of the Black Cat society and like all Black Cats very opposed to the Gray Cat society, a rivalry as old as time. The Gray Cats had become the dominant group and influenced everything in Saresii life, while all the other societies, like the Red Cats or the White Cats, withered away to unimportant fringe groups.

The Black Cats still managed to maintain a place in society, but they too were slowly but surely being pushed to the fringes and fading away like the others.

The Saran was, so it became apparent to the Saresii, a disguised Kermac. She watched as the disguised Kermac lay down right away, her head propped up by several pillows, while her eyes were closed.

While the disguised Kermac represented a Saran on the outside, no surgery or artificial disguise was used to mask the Kermac arrogance and personality. The Saresii woman was technically a senior level field agent but she was treated like a barely tolerated necessity. The Kermac agent had not told her where she went this morning or what she had found out while she was gone. The Saresii knew, of course, the Kermac was not sleeping but using her telepathic talent to contact her handlers or someone similar hiding behind a business façade right here on Earth. The Kermac agent was most likely a very powerful telepath, but of course not what the White Skins called an LRT, a Long-Range Telepath, able to send and receive messages, even images from virtually any distance.

Despite or because of the telepathic abilities of the Kermac, the Saresii felt constantly worried. There were hardly any laws more diligently observed within all the Union than the famous PSI laws. These laws were perhaps the real reason the Leedei and certainly, the Saresii had joined the Union. There was nothing quite like it to be found in any known society. Those with psionic abilities were no longer feared, vilified, or hunted, and those without them had no reason to fear a psi talent. While the PSI laws certainly filled several volumes of Union Law tomes by now, the basics were very simple. Everyone living as a lawful resident or citizen had to be tested and the so-called HPI or the Heidelberg Psi Index became part of the CITI, the identification implant every resident and citizen had within their body. The HPI also determined if a talented person needed schooling in using the talent and in developing methods of how to use it without hurting themself or others. The PSI laws made active telepathic probing highly illegal. She hoped her companion continued to restrain herself. Like the Kermac she was a telepath and as a genuine Union Citizen, she was tested and received her training on Sares. While Saresii were very thankful for the PSI laws, Psionics were such a substantial part of their society and culture it was considered as natural as hearing or seeing; this however was Earth. Even after all the time since formation of the Union, on Earth, psionics were still considered somewhat novel, and Earthers like no other species considered telepathic intrusion the worst violation of privacy. The now-famous PSI laws were in no small part originated by Earthers after all.

The Saresii woman leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Once again, her mind wandered back and wondered how she managed to get herself into this. Being a willing spy for the cause on Sares was risky enough but taking treason off-planet and travelling in the company of a disguised Kermac during times of war was an entirely different thing. Yet once involved there was no escape. The Kermac and the Galactic Council had seen their influence and relevance wane ever since these pesky Terrans burst onto the Galactic Stage. The Kermac star diminished further as the United Stars was founded and as much as everyone called them blind to the facts, the reality was that for all their self-serving arrogance, Kermac were very aware of the state of things. There was no path to victory in open conflict with the Union juggernaut. That opportunity, if it ever existed had passed after the last Y’All invasion. If the Galactic Council and the Kermac could not beat and conquer the Union back then, what chance did they have now? While the Kermac were seen, especially by Unions, as bumbling fools obsessed with their whiteness and their false beards, they were an old society, able to establish a substantial empire by the ruthless but unquestionably efficient ways of controlling other societies. Aided by their psionics, groomed, and developed over thousands of years as a tool to exert control over others, the Kermac created impressive methods and technology for the sole purpose of control. While Unions often smiled with contempt at inferior Kermac technology, they overlooked the fact that the Kermac reached Tech Level seven long before the collective Union did.

The ancient rivalry between the Kermac and the Saresii had created a conflict that lasted for over half a million years and created the conditions of the conflict that culminated in this latest war.

The disguised Kermac still seemed to rest, and perhaps was. Sending and receiving telepathic messages, perhaps half way across a planet full of thinking beings, while trying to keep a low psionic profile was very exhausting indeed. To pass the time the Saresii skimmed over the news and entertainment offerings available on GalNet. The sheer magnitude of choices made the Saresii brush over the deactivation sensor, then reconsidered and activated the system again to select Saresii mediation music from one of the audio-only channels and closed her eyes as well.

She was a genuine Saresii indeed, and a genetic female at that, not a feminine Saresii man, born to one of the lesser families and in one of the many underground cities of Sares Seven. The Ulegam, the name of her family was not found on the old scrolls and thus not considered ‘of the important’. She was born in a traditional Saresii Arti Womb Clinic, along with 5633 others that day, and thanks to the randomized gender assigner, she was born genetic female. Her parents had ordered her the old Saresii way in a parental commitment ceremony within a circle of family and close friends. It was the male genetic material donor, her father who gave her the name Lulea. According to him, the Spirit of the Cat whispered this name to him in a dream and Lulea was one of the seven Saresii words for dream. After the eight-month of virtu-weaning, Lulea Ulegam was welcomed in the Ulegam household. Her father, the more beautiful and more feminine of her parents worked as a Commune-Infant-Keeper while her mother was a genuine Space-Bus Captain for Gray Lines, a career she cherished and a job that kept her away from home for a considerable portion of Lulea’s childhood. Being a CIK, her father operated the communal infant care center and thus she shared him with 312 other infants. Because he was the CIK, she was the oldest child, perhaps ever to leave Infant care. She had turned four when her mother finally convinced her husband to introduce Lulea to the regular family environment. Of course, Lulea understood, Saresii despised anything messy and infants coming of the Weaning line were, despite all Saresii advances, still messy. They pooped, peed, burped, and drooled; all things of extreme disgust to Saresii. This was the reason for CIKs; infants, until they were potty trained and able to hold a spoon themselves were kept in bubbly soft, cheerful and colorful environments, only to be visited by their parents perhaps once a week, after being properly cleaned, fed and dressed by an army of soft and cuddly androids and under the direction of a CIK.

At first, she hated it intensely and she felt as though she had been evicted from a safe and soft world, where everything was provided and no need was ignored, but with growing age, her mind was ready for more. However, her mother was away thirty-five days out of the fifty of each of the ten Annual Divisions in a Union Standard Year. And with her father being very committed to his CIK career, she basically was left on her own for most of the day, except of course for Bilo, a Household minder who was nothing more than a friendly but dull android. Her aunts, uncles, and grandparents occasionally showed up in the form of Avatar projections and rarely in person. Young Lulea, as early as five or six perhaps, roamed the seemingly endless corridors of the subsurface building that was part of an immense sub-surface city. Not one of the many million Saresii that lived here were ‘of the important’ and thus did not have surface apartments on one of the Nine Worlds, and no one she ever met until she was an adult was of ‘the most important’. Those, of course, owned sprawling residences on Sares Two or even Sares One.

While she roamed those corridors, she met other kids of course and this is where she met Kilun Samani. Kilun was a genetic male and a devout member of the Black Cats. No one, unless of ‘the most important’ and the most gifted ever managed to be considered to enter the hallowed ranks of the Gray Cats. The Black Cat society was one of the few cat societies that survived the purge that occurred during the time of the great collapse, a million years ago. The time of the Long Darkness fell over the Saresii after the Old Council was killed by the Vengeful Females.

There were perhaps a handful of scholars left that knew more than the common lore of this long-gone time, but according to Kilun, the Old Council was made up of the wisest members of the Nine Cat societies, and back then all colors were equally represented. The Black, the White, the Red, the Yellow, even the now completely forgotten green, brown, and blue Cat societies. This age was still called the First Age of Knowledge, a time when Saresii ruled much of the galaxy and eventually met the Seenians.

Together they fought and lost a great war against a common foe of great evil. That was the time when Sares lost or perhaps abandoned all its colonies, the Vengeful Females killed the council and the darkness of a hateful dictatorship changed Saresii culture and society forever. It was also a time when the elusive Gray Cats began their rise to become the great power and central influence they were today.

The Black Cats had never regained their former influence and now were relegated to the sidelines of society and culture. Its members came to be regarded as irrelevant fools, a common view sadly reinforced by the truly foolish acting Back Cat priests, whose numbers dwindled just as the membership did of that society.

But at the core of the Black Cats was still strength and the burning wish to regain importance, a fact sadly also known to the Kermac and their intelligence recruiters.

The seemingly sleeping Kermac agent stirred and snarled at her. “I am in a conference with great minds, how can anyone concentrate with you sitting there and making these sighing noises?”

“I did not know I made any noise.”

“You did! What caused you to sigh so deeply?”

“I was thinking back to my childhood, to Kilun, and to the time I, unfortunately, accepted help from the Ministry of Information.”

“It is good that you remember why you are here and why I oversee things. Kermac and Saresii have always been on opposite sides and it is only fitting that you must obey a Kermac for we are of course the superior species.”

“Can you not exist for a single day without spewing this tiresome propaganda that not even you believe? I am doomed either way and pushing me like this might lead to a reaction you might not like.”

“Be silent and listen. Our target is moving, my contact just verified that Sam Brown rented an All-weather flyer. It seems he knows where Martha and thus the experiment is.”

They had fought in deep space and from deck to deck in an enemy battleship, they had lost friends and got the first taste of war and yet Dirmon could not shut up about seeing the Immortal Admiral, even if it was only an Avatar. To others, he was an imposing and perhaps frightening Petharian. To Roy and the other’s, he was a dear friend and as close as a real brother.

They all had returned to the USS John Basilone, after the truly memorable debriefing with appearances of the Commandant and the Immortal himself, but only to gather their personal belongings and gear. The USS John Basilone was in space dock; not to be repaired but to be decommissioned and most likely to be scrapped or sold after all mil tech had been removed. Scuttlebutt had it that the captain of the ship faced serious charges and most likely a court-martial, but that was Navy and not marines and remained scuttlebutt. What was left of the Battalion had then been moved to Camp Diamond on that 2nd planet where they were supposed to do their first drop. The remaining recruits were summarily declared marines and all who participated in the result received the Silver Star. The hardest thing Roy ever had to do was to participate in the ceremony to honor the fallen, as they carried the flag-draped coffins into the cargo hold of a military freighter.

Some of the elongated black Durinium boxes beneath the flag covers were empty, as some had been hit by direct Line Cannon fire. Weapons meant to crack Union shields and engage capital ships left nothing but nuclear vapor of a marine, even in a Destroyer suit. One of those boxes held whatever they found of Staff Sergeant Leven. Roy did not remember what happened to Leven, there was so much going on, but he remembered the icon of Leven blinking out, right about the time when they cracked the Larkami’s shields.

Roy knew next to nothing about the Botnaar DI, and never spoke a single word in private to the drill instructor, but he felt his loss.

All this happened a few days ago. They retrieved their gear, transferred to Camp Diamond with the others, but he and 21 others did not resume boot camp training as the rest, but after a day of uneventful waiting they were ordered to board a courier ship with destination Earth.

The ship was small and there wasn’t much room so the 22 remained in the Cargo hold where a mobile Serve Matic provided basic fare and they access to the ship’s equally small hygiene facilities. But the flight was short, taking them from Champlain system to the Ugam system. According to the commandant of the small ship with a crew of five, it was just straight up Galactic North. Ugam, so he told them was a bigger system and was tied into the Space Train Network. From Ugam Station they were to travel to Earth, where the group was to enter OCS.

After spending two days in the cramped conditions of the courier ship, Roy and the others were now waiting in the main passenger lobby of ST-Line Green.

A Marine Lieutenant had waited for them at the landing zone and herded them to this lobby. The lieutenant was a chrome skinned Sentmac from Factory and the first X101 Roy had met so far. There were subtle but significant differences to the Stellaris Roy knew, because of Alejandro from Belle Station. The moment he saw the flex metal covered sentient android being, he was reminded of those five beings he had met on Belle Station. He promised himself to call Sobyr as soon as he could. He felt ashamed as he must admit, he had forgotten about them, even though he hoped his Leedei friends would have informed Nccsi at least.

According to the officer who came to them from the local Field Office, Space Train Green Line was not a major line, and Ugam Station was served every 20 hours, and after checking the schedule, Roy knew they had to wait for sixteen. The lobby was typical Union and void of any other passengers right now. It was fairly big and inside a tubular extension mounted just above the greenish glowing gravo anchor of a Mega-Mon station floating in an apex position above Ugam star and the seven planets of the system.

According to GalNet, the Ugam system was a major Ult colony and had been colonized and utilized thousands of years before there even was a Union. The main planet, Ugam-U where that Ult colony had been established so long ago, was perfect in terms of Ult needs. In other words, a very wet and warm world with lots of swamps, sweltering jungles, and extensive bogs. Ken was standing next to Roy as he looked over the main planet info displayed on the large GalNet info board floating in the passenger lobby. “Reading this makes me wonder why anyone would even want to set foot on that muddy dirtball.”

Roy shrugged. “Actually, sounds very nice to me.” He sighed as reading this made him a bit homesick to the jungles of Green Hell.

Ken rested his sizeable right arm on Roy’s shoulder while he looked at the display. “You shittin’ me, right?”

Roy elbowed Ken into the side. “Goofball, you know I am from Green Hell. This place has been colonized for over 12,000 years and I bet it has more cities and tech and all that than it has jungles left. Besides the only thing even worth considering a challenge is a flying tentacle polyp, which, from what I read here, are not common anymore and easily swatted by an alert Ult.

“Well, it also reads that Ult like to eat them, I am not a big fan of flying tentacles especially raw and maybe still alive. I prefer my food on a plate, preferably breaded and deep-fried.”

Mike, the massive Tyrannous now also joined them and said. “There is a local eatery just outside the lobby, we could try some Flying octopus; maybe they even offer it fried.”

Ken complained. “Mike, you eat anything that could even remotely be called food. I’ve seen you eat RICE bars and love them. Who in the entire galaxy loves these Ration Individual Combat Emergency bars?”