Star Gods: Book Four of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Read online

Whatever purpose he had in mind for her when she arrived, she didn’t yet know, but she felt that Hinev needed her more than anyone else did. It was so wonderful to know that she was needed, that she belonged, even if Hinev’s work left little time for him to pay her much attention at all.

  She was such a serious child. Though it would have been good for her to have friends her own age, she really didn’t want any.

  Hinev was seldom able to spend time with her, but when Hinev was around, she sensed that he had grown fond of her. Nothing could explain his avuncular affection for her. She sensed that some part of him that needed to be understood, that needed the kind of loyalty and love only a beloved child could give, had rendered her a special place in his affections. She had become like a daughter to him. In Alessia, he found that kind of unquestioning, unconditional love and complete faith in him–she knew it and so did he, though they never spoke of it openly.

  Hinev had no other living family.

  * * * * *

  “Alessia!” Hinev shouted from the other room, waking her completely. She flung back her covering and ran to the door of his laboratory, which yawned before her like a dark abyss.

  Inside, Hinev was waiting.

  Look at it, Alessia! She heard a voice in her mind, for the first time.

  She looked above them, where Hinev pointed.

  A crystal sphere hung suspended in mid-air, bobbing along as though floating on an artificial breeze.

  Alessia’s eyes returned to Hinev.

  A faint blue light flickered about him and in the depths of his dark violet eyes.

  Then suddenly, the ball crashed to the floor.

  Hinev collapsed, suddenly writhing like a serpent, in pain.

  “Hinev!” Alessia screamed, coming to his side. Now he lay motionless, but for rasping breaths that caught deep in his throat.

  Fynals Hinev slept unmoving for the next twelve days.

  * * * * *

  “I still don’t see why I can’t go with you,” Alessia said, tapping a silica rod against the lab table. Her eye found the big, smooth, hairless scar on her right hand from a chemical burn in the lab more than a year ago; she looked up at him with her best imploring expression.

  Hinev sighed affectionately, dropping the last of his personal belongings into a heavy, two-handled bag. “I need someone here I can trust to keep an eye on my experiments.” Hinev said, studying her with his steady gaze. “You’re the only person I do trust. Remember, don’t let anyone in the lab while I’m gone. No one will break in, I hope! And if any Elders come for an inspection, make sure they don’t find anything interesting. I am taking all my important electronic data and notes with me. I have never linked my experiment’s notes and data into the main computers—thus far, they have remained unmonitored with all my efforts to remain secret, and I intend them to stay that way.”

  Alessia sighed, surrendering to the futility of asking again. Of course it was flattering to know that Hinev trusted her more than any one, but after three years, she would have thought he might let her go with him on one of his expeditions! She had done her work, learned everything he and his fellow explorers could practically teach her. He had been a demanding teacher, nearly impossible to please; she had spent nearly every waking moment since she became his assistant trying to earn his approval. Hinev had even seen to it that she was becoming as qualified in spacecraft engineering as his friend Niflan, so why not let her come?

  “I will miss you,” she said.

  Hinev was leaving to oversee the project at Lake Firien. How she envied him! Ever since Hinev had told her that the Council had been preparing a lengthy project to rebuild a new flagship out of the ruins of an ancient starship that were located near her childhood home, she couldn’t get the project out of her mind. That was probably why he didn’t want to let her come with him; he knew she would want to go just to return to Firien. Dared he let her return to that beloved place? His eyes seemed to say. Yet she knew he would have trusted her, if the decision were up to him. He was only trying to soften the blow of her being left out of the project on the Council’s request list, even though she was Hinev’s assistant. Why couldn’t he just take her anyway? she wondered.

  Hinev knew she would be a burden to him out at Firien, where he had things to do, so he was leaving her behind.

  “I will miss you as well,” returned Hinev.

  As she watched Hinev clipping his bag shut, she remembered the fire. The fire in the lab that afternoon when she had lost some of the feeling in her right hand and breathed in a few of the noxious vapors. She had been taken away for medical care while Hinev remained behind to take care of the lab. As though he hadn’t been burned. As though no power, not even poison nor burning fire, could touch him.

  She often wondered that he had no scars from that accident. And in the last three long years, Hinev looked the same as he always had. Alessia was now a young woman herself, almost past her last growing stage, at last only a head shorter than him.

  Hinev smiled, as though he found something secretly amusing which he didn’t care to explain.

  “Kudenka will be coming by some time this tenday to check up on you,” Hinev said, turning to her. “Until then, you’re on your own.”

  “As usual,” she muttered.

  Hinev laughed. “Alessia, you’ll be fine. I know you hate to be left out of the excitement, but really this is for the best.”

  “Of course.” She said woodenly. A silence fell between them for several moments; Hinev brightened.

  "The name of the new flagship should be of particular interest to you," he laughed, "since you deciphered it.”

  “Me??” Alessia echoed, surprised.

  “Yes, you,” he nodded, clucking her under the chin. “Close your mouth.”

  She closed it.

  “Selesta–the name written on the outside of the wreckage. You deciphered it.”

  “That fragment came from those ruins? Ahh.”

  Hinev nodded. “One of our top spacecraft engineers, lieutenant Fielikor Kiel of the Martial Scientific Force, is working on the designs, but he sent a request for an assembly of explorer scientists to help with the engine. No one has solved the problem of how to circumvent the effects of time dilation. The faster our ships get, the more time will pass on Seynorynael for every year they’re gone.”

  “Kudenka never stops talking about that.” Alessia agreed, secretly wondering what she could do to help. “I get the impression it’s horrible to come home and find one's family and way of life utterly gone, erased by eons of time.”

  “Yes, it truly is."

  Hinev grew silent, and then wished her good-bye.

 

  * * * * *

  In the long Seynorynaelian year of Hinev’s absence, Alessia dedicated every waking hour to studying and trying to grasp the many problems the research team designing Selesta’s engines had crossed. Selesta’s engine schematics in their many incarnations were now highly publicized in the spacecraft engineering research wing of the Federation Science Building, and she had no trouble securing all of the engine schematics she needed to satisfy her curiosity about The Firien Project.

  Alessia was no stranger to strange schematics and blueprints. She had been trained for two long years in spacecraft engineering by some of Kudenka’s explorers, mostly friends of Hinev’s who allowed her to spend time in their various departments when Hinev was away on short forays. And she had studied the engine schematics of Sesylendae, Kudenka’s old spaceship, for so long that she could picture them in minute detail even with her eyes shut.

  Now that Hinev was going to be gone for a year, she found she had nothing to do. So, once she had access to the current blueprint of Selesta’s engines, she pored over it with equal tenacity, until she had the schematics entirely memorized. And she spent tendays going over the computer simulations, making temporary alt
erations in the design and seeing what would hypothetically happen to Selesta’s operating systems as a result.

  For almost a year, it seemed she would never make any more process than any of the engineers: Kiel, Giorlian, Kellar, and Manafries. Then one night, after working so hard on a particular set of alterations for several tendays and thinking she had succeeded in correcting the design until the test simulation failed, inspiration struck her in a dream, as it had only twice before in her life when it really mattered. She woke up agitated, all the while pessimistically certain that the alterations her subconscious mind had conjured for her wouldn't work in reality. She documented the changes, anyway.

  When she finished the work at last and ran a test on the computer simulation program, her heart nearly stopped beating.

  How, how could it work?!

  She ran the program again.

  The enormity of her triumph never quite hit her; it still seemed impossible. How could she succeed in solving Selesta’s engine flaws, when the Federation’s top spacecraft engineers were still stumped on how to make the design work?

  Still in a state of denial, Alessia hesitated to show the completed schematic she had altered to anyone. How could her design work? Engine plans that didn’t appear functional until she ran them through the simulation computers. Besides all this, she knew no one had asked her to interfere in the project!

  She decided not to show her schematic revisions to anyone. They were bound to eventually resolve the schematic’s problems on their own. It had to be easy to correct Selesta’s schematics after all; the current difficulties had to stem from a simple design flaw that someone was bound to catch sooner or later. Alessia had herself thoroughly convinced of this, never realizing how wrong she actually was. So, before Hinev returned, she hid the data documenting her design change among her personal effects.

  However, the memory of her work, her successful alterations, remained fresh in her mind. And it was there that the now fully telepathic Hinev found them.

  * * * * *

  For a long time after he returned, Hinev continued to send messages back to Firien and the head of the engineering team, Fielikor Kiel. Alessia sometimes heard Hinev over at the communications monitor, discussing the progress being made on the Firien project, she supposed from what she managed to overhear.

  Yet when he had finished with whatever they had been working on, she realized that there were changes in the air. Hinev no longer seemed the same man he had been when he left. He moved and spoke like a man possessed of some crippling fever of emotion, though he was more lucid and efficient than he had ever been. He was more intelligent than he had ever been. And because of this, his experiments increased and became infinitely more complicated.

  But, could he be on the verge of a breakdown? she wondered. Hinev spent so much time ensconced in his private laboratory that she often feared something had happened to him on the inside.

  Only two tendays after his return, she was invited in for the first time since that day long ago, when he had collapsed of some unknown illness none of the doctors could treat. Back then, he had been in a coma-like state for two tendays, while she feared the worst. Yet he had recovered, and never complained of any ailment or physical taxation since, not even when he worked them both to the point of collapse.

  “Alessia!” Hinev called, his voice strong but like a chord of music.

  “Yes?” She asked, heading towards the door, which swished open before her like a shutter.

  “It is now time for you to fulfill your purpose here,” he called to her from the other room. She stepped into the room, where Hinev stood across from a long lab table adorned with alien emulsions percolating through flasks and beakers of every shape and size.

  His face was unreadable. Several odd apparatuses had been set up all over the room, along with all of the strange solutions she had seen littering his laboratory over the years; by the nearest apparatus lay a vial of purple fluid and a network of intravenous tubing.

  “Have a seat, dear child,” He said softly, his gaze unwavering, though there was a tremulous quality to his voice. “Our android nurse there will help you.”

  She didn’t know then that the tubing had been meant for her.

  That Hinev needed another person upon which to test his serum.

  * * * * *

  After the injection of Hinev’s serum into her veins, which was an experimental blood, brain, and body altering serum he had been working on for years, Alessia drifted in and out of consciousness.

  What was her last memory? Lying there in the chair, feeling nothingness and ice filter through her system, cutting off all conscious thought–

  And then the screams! By God, the screams! She felt her body lashing about as though it belonged to another being she could not control. Her mind had already retreated far within her, as though in a futile attempt to avoid the all-pervading agony. She heard herself scream time and again, but as if from far away. Her screams were a blood-curdling sound that echoed through her horrified mind, which retreated further into the void.

  She found the images there. There, she beheld again the face of her father, only this time in a beautiful city she had never seen. Could she stay there? Her thoughts begged, trying to come closer, reaching out for her father–

  When her consciousness was suddenly ripped away.

  Now her screams echoed a different kind of pain. Why, why couldn’t she reach that place! Why wouldn’t her father help her to get there, to be with him again?

  * * * * *

  She gasped awake.

  “Hinev??” She called instinctively, afraid but not alone.

  Something was different, she thought, blinking. Very different.

  “Alessia–you’re awake??” Hinev asked, drawing over her, shock clear in his gaze, relief clear in his voice.

  She was lying down in bed.

  “What happened?” She said, sitting up.

  The pain was gone. All pain was gone.

  “I–you–”

  “How long have I been like this?” She asked.

  “Just under two months.” He said, clasping her by the shoulders. “Alessia, I never expected your immune system would hold out so long. I never dreamed you’d fight the serum so long, or I would never have tried it on you–”

  “What are you talking about?” Alessia said. Then she remembered the purple emulsion filtering through a clear tube dangling high above her eyes. “Hinev??”

  “Yes?”

  “What did you do to me?”

  Hinev swallowed. “You’re all right now. The metamorphosis is over.”

  “Metamorphosis,” she repeated, pausing a moment as she got her bearings. “Hinev, why is that table moving towards us?”

  Hinev half-turned to the table in the far corner of his lab, on which he had placed a holo-still; in the image Kudenka and Niflan embraced a woman unknown to Alessia.

  “You wanted to look at that, didn’t you?” Hinev asked, though it was more of a statement.

  She nodded.

  “Well, we’re going to have to teach you how to control your telekinesis first then,” he said, turning back to her with a bittersweet smile.

  * * * * *

  No! Don’t talk to the wall, talk to me!! Hinev said in her mind.

  She frowned.

  What are you trying to say?? Hinev asked.

  “I wanted to know–”

  Tell me like this, he instructed. No talking out loud, Alessia. Come on, now, you’ve only been trying for two hours. It took me almost a year to learn to direct my thoughts correctly.

  She’s getting it, I think... taking less time than... maybe the others... can be taught... if I can get...

  Alessia shook her head to clear it of the random thoughts in the air. She seemed to be picking up everything, like an antenna, without being able to focu
s on a clear string of thoughts. Hinev could direct thoughts to her, but she couldn’t seem to direct anything to him.

  I’m going to wipe that smirk off your face, Hinev! Alessia thought, with growing irritation.

  Good, Alessia! I heard that one!

  Alessia laughed out loud. “I’ll master it yet, you see?”

  “I never had any doubts.” Hinev told her.

  After the preliminary blood tests, Hinev had left for almost a month. However, when he returned, he found Alessia’s control over her abilities growing, so he had spent the past few tendays teaching her to use her new powers. She had tried to concentrate on adapting to her new identity, as she had always done before, yet she couldn’t help but be alarmed by the fact that she no longer ever felt tired, or hungry, or thirsty, or hot, or cold, or so many other sensations that reminded her that she was a human being. She had ceased menstruating as well, permanently. When was she going to go back to normal? Somehow it just wouldn’t sink in it that she would never be “normal” again.

  She didn’t know it yet, but Hinev’s miraculous serum had rendered her immortal.

  In time, her new power of telepathy came as naturally as breathing; it functioned involuntarily, but at the same time she could control it at will. The trick was not to fight it, not to let it overwhelm her, as she had in the initial days after waking from the metamorphosis. Mastering telepathy, though, was rather like mastering the power of control communicative energy, which was a power very closely related to telekinesis, only much more difficult than telekinesis to control, despite its name.

  Control communicative energy was an energy force which used telepathy to communicate with objects; it flooded the molecules in between her and her chosen object with temporary, cooperative semi-sentient waves, making the objects move and do as she wished. Moving the objects around without bringing them directly to her, trying to guide and manipulate them was far more difficult that simple telekinesis, which just used her energy to pull things in a direct line towards her. Though often mistakenly grouped as a purely telekinetic power, control communicative energy always required a supreme effort of concentration, like controlled telepathy.