Impact

  Impact

  Volume Three of the Galactic Citadel Series

  THORBY RUDBEK

  Copyright © 2013 Thorby Rudbek

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9780987767424

  DEDICATION

  My thanks go to my readers.

  For what could be more important to an author,

  than to have an audience?

  In ‘Impact’, my promise to my readers is that you will find something to lift you, to make you smile, and not something that is like a sorry echo of the weary world, which so often wraps around us and pulls us down, like heavy clothes after falling overboard.

  Richard and Kirrina come back to Earth in this tale, and their Citadel becomes a symbol of hope, instead of fear.

  Paranak comes too…

  Prologue

  Kirrina crouched down low behind the crumbling wall, staring intently into the gloom of the pale, star-lit night. Perspiration plastered her bright hair to her scalp and ran down her forehead, threatening to break through the defensive line of her faint eyebrows and into her oh-so-grey eyes. It was hot on this planet, hotter than anywhere she had been before, and even the legendary qualities of the Arshonnan fabric that comprised her outfit could not entirely alleviate the heat stress that she was experiencing.

  Ahead, beyond the remains of the wall – possibly proof of an earlier Arshonnan settlement – was an open stretch of ground that she knew she needed to cross to reach the safety of her Ship. Fortunately, the disinterest zone would have prevented the enemy from discovering it, but, if they caught her before she reached the safety of its SPF[1], she would not live to regret it. Around the perimeter of this inconveniently-placed open space – perhaps it had been a roadway, in some distant past – but stretching too far away to her left and her right for her to be able to detour through them, stood the jumbled ruins of bombed-out structures and weird geological formations. Doubtless these ruins were where countless Narlavs could easily be in hiding, just waiting for her to make a dash for the automated safety of her craft.

  Her eyes faded back to blue as she admitted to herself at last that the effort to locate the enemy by mental power was threatening to entirely exhaust her. She reached down to her own, customised holster and pulled out the small, dull black laser pistol that she had kept with her since she had found it beside the body of a nameless but brave woman. Kirrina’s visit to Arshonna had been nothing like she had expected and anticipated. She had gone through a mental firestorm of emotions on her first – and final – visit to the planet where her ancestors had lived for (seemingly) countless generations. That cold body had lain for centuries in the dark of the half-vaporised, half-melted remains of the world where her parents, as well as unnumbered other relatives, now dead, had been born. The notable exception was her uncle, Batamon, one of the few survivors.

  At least I still have him.

  Kirrina had been there when that last known fragment had ceased to exist. She had watched from the outer reaches of the Arshonnan system as that remnant had fallen into its own star. In a manner of speaking, she had caused it to happen. Her home planet was lost forever.

  I finished the destruction of Arshonna… now not even that tomb-like monument remains.

  Forcing herself to concentrate once more, knowing that her daydreaming could cost her dearly one day, or even sooner, she pulled at the neckline of her jumpsuit, adjusting it to hang a little lower and allow the hot breeze to carry away some of the moisture that had been trapped there. She sensed the fabric adjust to provide a firmer support lower down, now that some of her curves were exposed, and psyched herself into the next move, breathing deeply and slowly to maximise the oxygen in her lungs and muscles. Stepping around the end of the wall, Kirrina stayed doubled over and moved with surprising speed in a back-straining crouch across the open space, all the while watching the perimeter for signs of movement.

  Suddenly she dropped to the left, her knee banging painfully on the loose rubble as she felt the singeing burn of the enemy’s laser rifle across the ribs below her right shoulder blade. The jumpsuit started to lose its strength throughout the upper torso as a hand’s breadth of the fibres were split, and, more significantly, the skin over her ribs was split too. Ignoring the pain of the hit, and struggling to hold her breath to prevent the dust from filling her lungs, she bounced back to her feet and lunged forward, dropping behind another section of ruined wall as the Narlav’s second shot panned closer to her, starting to cut a groove in the ancient cement-work. Made it! Though not entirely unscathed… She knew she had been lucky, and that it was a mistake to rely on such fickle turns of fortune.

  Kirrina had gauged the angle of the beam before the enemy had ceased firing, and she managed somehow to roll across the rough surface and down into the depression she had spotted before attempting the escape, despite the seemingly endless succession of jabs she received from the fragmented remains of the surface. The jumpsuit’s secondary sensors tightened the section around the decidedly non-medical laser surgery, but the power of the beam had cauterised the wound, and there was not any risk of bleeding, at least as long as the burnt flesh remained fused to the bone beneath it.

  Falling into a fissure that opened unexpectedly along the cracked ground, she twisted her wrist and dropped the miniature but lethal laser. There followed a nightmarish moment when she feared the firearm was gone forever, but as the thought burst into her mind she touched the smooth surface of her warm weapon once more, and a slight smile flitted across her dust-dishevelled face.

  Crawling quickly, she put a good thirty feet between herself and the point where she gauged the enemy must have lost track of her, and she vaulted over the wall and ran forwards once more. A flash from behind hit a jagged rocky prominence a little to the left and in front of her, so she dropped again, this time somersaulting diagonally to the right. The fabric behind and below her right shoulder blade tore again and, more significantly, the skin separated from the bone during this manoeuvre, and Kirrina could feel the warmth of her blood as it streamed freely. She knew she could not afford to pause, so she dropped into a pipe, or perhaps it was an old lava tube, and scuttled down it for a minute or so, until the pain of a laser strike in her left heel told her to exit. The little laser blasted a ring of lava tube barely big enough for her to fit through, but she smashed the disk-like portion out of the way, bounced up through the opening revealed, and tumbled to the rocky ground outside less than a second later. The scenery looked familiar – by some inner sense she had put herself back on track for her ship, her refuge.

  She doubled back, determined now to put an end to the pursuer. Who becomes the pursued…

  A shape detached itself from the jagged skyline a little to her right, and Kirrina fired, gauging the height with extraordinary precision, but as she did so a blinding flash caught her in the eyes and she tripped and fell, knocking out several teeth as her face ploughed into the rubble-strewn ground.

  Kirrina groaned.

  “Computer, restore!” Paranak’s familiar, deep voice drowned out her comparatively quiet complaints, and simultaneously his tough and vice-like grip brought her to her feet, adding further pain to her injuries – until the Medic commenced the performance of its wonders.

  Kirrina reached up to find her teeth where they were supposed to be once more, and seconds later, her eyesight returned, giving her the strangely welcome first sight of her un-blooded blood-brother and favourite enemy, standing before her in the gloom, covered in dust and holding his deadly-looking laser rifle at a Narlav arm’s length, (quite a distance for a human).

  “Didn’t I hit you at all?” Kirrina exclaimed in disappointment. “I was sure that last charge was going to work.”

  Paranak chuckled, the sound coming from somewhere deep inside his bar
rel-shaped chest. “If I had been as tall as your other blood-brother, Richard, I would have received the same temporary blindness as you did.” He dropped both arms in unconscious emphasis. “But I am not. Perhaps you should restrict yourself to human foes; you will never lose, then!”

  Kirrina raised one arm wearily – this was mainly a psychological weariness, she knew, as the Medic always brought all the body organs, parts and components back to optimum condition – and hit him half-heartedly across his super-solid skull.

  “A warrior must always seek to better himself, no?” She sighed, pleased that she had convinced him of the reality of his victory. Again!

  “Yes. Or herself,” he added with humorous emphasis.

  Kirrina grinned despite her mental fatigue and started brushing ineffectually at the cement-like dust that almost entirely coated her black jumpsuit. The split in the back had spread further, and the part that had covered her right shoulder was halfway down her arm. Amazingly the material at the front of the torso still adhered to her chest, though on the right side it was lower than anything she had ever worn, and was threatening to slip even further as she brushed in that area. She stopped, grinning at the foolishness of the attempt when her beloved Pool Room was just a few paces away, and deciding that the potential circumstance of being bare-chested in front of a Narlav was a situation more exposed than any in which she could relax. She leaned on Paranak’s shoulder, draping her left arm across his broad back, and eased the tired jumpsuit fabric upwards with her right hand, managing to maintain her modesty, just before both it and the clothing entirely departed.

  “Let’s go and clean up; Richard will want to hear the score!”

  “He should know by now what to expect,” Paranak boomed contentedly. “I have bested you nine times since you last surprised me.”

  “Maybe I’ll surprise you again some day.”

  They paused by common consent, the physical contact was enough to give that message to the Narlav, and looked each other over critically. Paranak had some bruises from his part in the adventure, but to Kirrina they were barely noticeable, causing the vaguely greenish tint of the Narlav’s tough hide to discolour – a deeper shade of green – not really visible under the coat of dust in the uneven lighting until they stopped moving.

  He in turn studied her, reaching with his left hand in a move impossible to a human, and checked out the hole in the back of her outfit, figuring out the damage that it indicated he had inflicted, and pausing to wonder again at the fragility of her ‘hide’.

  “And next time I’ll forget about doing a mind search, and maybe then I’ll even be able to keep up with you.”

  Paranak mimed a blow to the side of her head. “I was wondering when you would figure that one out!”

  She stepped away, and, just as she reached the boundary of the Moss Room, whispered the ‘R’ word, so that her wonderful Narlav comrade would be returned to his fearsome peak condition, too.

  Chapter One

  Narlav eyes, being wide-spaced, produce a superior stereo vision – FP9 datafile

  “Nortok, take us in without micro-jumping,” Daklan, the Commander of the first Warrnam from Rhaal and consequently the Prime Leader of their Planetary Council, ordered. “I want to savour our success.”

  The pilot took his Commander’s whack on the side of his head with gratitude and pride. Yes, there was no doubt that the distant planet was habitable – he could see the indications on the long-range scanner next to his navigational displays, but their current position was almost to the limit from which such readings could be taken, as the star system they had entered was huge. The outermost of the twelve planets was a gas giant almost large enough to be a star in its own right – consequently, their ‘entry point’ from Grey Space into the standard dimensions of reality had been far beyond the orbit of that gas planet, to minimise any possibility of entering space within such a planet, or other, smaller but also deadly hazards, such as asteroids or comets. Once the star system had been properly charted, such precautions would not be necessary, of course, but a system never before entered obviously has not been so charted.

  Nortok took the Drive levers in his hands and gave their Space Hammer one quarter of the maximum acceleration the old ship was capable of.

  It will take more than half a yata[2] to get to this planet conventionally. It will be a tedious journey.

  He then moved his body from side to side in a manner than indicated a sudden amusing thought.

  Perhaps there will be animal life there…

  The Narlav pilot’s improved spirits were not due to the possibility of finding a creature suitable for companionship – what humans would refer to as a pet, neither were they because of the chance of finding a larger animal – one good for eating, but rather due to anticipation, an optimistic yearning for a creature such as the Hadrhund[3] – that he could hunt, like his grandfather had described in his terse battle journal.

  Daklan moved across the Control Room deck to stand near his navigator, Fludrad’s incliner and checked the display again for himself. The instruments showed a world approximately the same dimensions as Rhaal, with temperature equivalent to about thirty-centigrade, and an atmosphere as dense as Rhaal’s, with oxygen concentrations of twenty-seven percent, and carbon dioxide levels around point seven percent. The rest of the atmosphere was a mixture of noble gases, mostly argon and some nitrogen. Prior explorations over the centuries of Narlav space-faring indicated that such a planet invariably harboured life of some kind, and thus could theoretically provide a home for the Narlavs of Rhaal. The clincher, though, would be the results from the short-range scanner – then he would know what kind of lifeforms inhabited this jewel of a planet. For this information, he was happy to have to wait a short while, to savour –

  “When I suggested a conventional approach, I did not infer that I wanted to crawl to the planet!” His deep voice boomed as he caught sight of the Drive lever positions.

  Nortok slid his controls hastily into a more aggressive position.

  This will take our Warrnam up to maximum acceleration in a few yo[4], then I’ll ease off the acceleration – hopefully before any serious equipment failure – maybe even coast for a while, and then reverse the acceleration to bring us to the planet, ready to go into orbit.

  He reached over to the panel that always vibrated at high acceleration rates, and braced it with the heavy duty rag he kept there for that purpose, so as to stop the noise before it began. He could do nothing, however, about the humming coming through the framework of the eight hundred metre long vessel. This was due to the dissonance of the eighteen, thirty and a half metre diameter, nearly six hundred year old Star Drives, mounted in spheres along the side of the Hybralloy-skinned exterior, and the after-effects of the many battles this craft had been rumoured to have participated in. Despite the near-constant attention of the ‘Shaatak pack’ – pitiful lower lifeforms (the human slaves on board that were compelled to maintain and service these ancient, hundred foot diameter power sources) – the Drives continued to slip out of synchronisation and add further stress to the structure of the mighty transport and battle wagon.

  Nortok privately thought it would be better if Gradhan, the ship’s engineer, took more of a personal interest in the status of these key components, instead of alternately beating each of the four humans in his Shaatak Drive team whenever something went wrong. He failed to see how these pathetic creatures could be expected to perform the delicate adjustments necessary, when they were swathed in makeshift bandages, their eyes bloodshot and bleary with pain and lack of sleep. As the sounds settled into their routine frequencies, he noted, with a feeling of relief, that Daklan had left the Control Room.

  He’s probably going to invest in a brief sleep session, so that he’ll be rested by the time the planet is near enough to be scrutinized by the more revealing short-range scanner.

  Considering the mundane nature of travel in normal space, the automatic monitors and the automatic Shell Field activ
ation system, he knew that there would be little of interest for him in the next few hours, either, so he put his own body into a semi-conscious state – as close as he dared to actual slumber – so that he, too, would be rested when the ship was close enough for the details of their prize to be revealed.

  ***

  Fludrad, the Navigator, studied the displays before him with concern. They were starting to provide confusing data. He considered calling Daklan, but he hesitated to disturb his Commander’s nap. According to the long-range scanner, now working well within its range, and thus considered to be highly reliable, the planet temperature had risen to nearly a hundred-centigrade. It doesn’t make any sense! There are no known mechanisms for such a wide range of planetary temperatures on such a world and surely nothing living could survive in such heat. The short-range scanner showed intermittent indications of complex organic molecules, confirming the likelihood of this world being habitable, but was still struggling with the distance to provide accurate, reliable results.

  Fludrad was a bit of an anomaly in the flight team – he enjoyed studying, and learning, and, somewhat like Paranak, considered that his colleagues were unbalanced in their focus solely on battle skills. Unlike his very distant relative, however, he had managed to hide his interest in the sciences quite well, and had come across as an exceptionally energetic warrior, instead of an irritatingly intellectual scientist. Such a label would have been very hard to live with, and might have resulted in his outright rejection by the war-hungry Daklan, leaving his future uncertain, and him waiting in the highly polluted air of their doomed home planet until the other Warrnam Commanders completed their command team choices – perhaps including him. Instead, he had worked extra-hard at his warrior training skills, and kept his real preferences hidden.