Chapter One
A thought can be immortal, even if its creator is not.
—Noah Watanabe
They floated in orbital space, torn fragments of thick, lifeless flesh, drifting apart slowly in bright sunlight. Nearby, the powerful sensor-guns of a pod station waited for the emergence of another podship, in a flash of green light. But it did not happen. Now, following three explosions in a matter of hours … obliterating as many podships and all of their passengers … an eerie silence prevailed.
Looking through the porthole of a shuttle as it made its way through the carnage, Noah Watanabe felt the deepest sadness in his entire life. To his knowledge, nothing like this had ever before happened in history. He had been responsible for it and felt considerable guilt, but reminded himself that the violence had been necessary to prevent further Mutati attacks, and that podships and their passengers had been dying anyway, each time the shapeshifters used their super-weapon against a merchant prince planet. Entire worlds had been annihilated!
For millions of years the gentle Aopoddae had traversed the galaxy to its farthest reaches and back, making their way through perilous meteor storms, asteroid belts, exploding stars, black holes, and a myriad of other space hazards. The sentient spacecraft had survived all of those dangers, and might have continued to do so for the rest of eternity.
If not for the unfortunate intervention of galactic warfare.
O O O
They’re shooting podships out of space!
In the millennium that he had been the Eye of the Swarm, the leader of the Parvii race, Woldn had never faced a crisis of this dimension. Now he had to make a quick decision and knew it would be the defining moment of his life, the event that would be remembered for eternity.
He flew from star system to star system and then back again in a matter of moments, accompanied by an entourage of only a few million Parviis, moving with him almost as if they were part of his body. Usually he had many more of his kind with him, linked telepathically, but now he needed solitude and room to think. This small group constituted his royal guard, and now he was performing the Parvii equivalent of pacing, flying back and forth across great distances.
His worries caused him to fly faster. He reached such a speed that he very nearly left the others behind. Just before flying into the heart of a red giant sun, he spun around and returned, speeding past his entourage again, in the other direction.
He knew what had led up to the podship crisis, the Mutati torpedoes that destroyed four merchant prince planets, attacks that stemmed from the long-standing enmity between the Humans and their shapeshifting enemies.
When his guards had finally caught up with him, Woldn had made his difficult, monumental decision. The slender Parvii had slowed in the spiral arm of the galaxy, and come to a dead stop in space. His defenders gathered around.
From there, where no outsider could see him, the powerful Eye of the Swarm communicated his decision to his Parvii minions, sending mental signals so powerful that they reached completely across the galaxy, to every sector.
Effective immediately, without regard to who was at fault for the destruction of the three podships at Canopa, the Parviis would cut off all podship travel to and from Human and Mutati worlds. No notices would be sent; podships would simply no longer go to those places. Throughout the rest of the galaxy, service would continue. Furthermore, all podships presently operating in Human and Mutati sectors were to jettison their passengers and cargoes, and report to a remote region of the galaxy.
He transmitted the telepathic commands, ranging far and wide. In those targeted sectors, the bellies of hundreds of podships opened in-flight and everything tumbled out, sending the unfortunate, unwitting passengers to their instantaneous deaths.
O O O
In a matter of hours, Woldn received a troubling report that his messages had not reached every Parvii pilot. He had feared this might happen, since the number of telepathic dead zones in the galaxy had been increasing at an alarming rate, running parallel with the disintegration of Timeweb.
Boarding a podship, the Eye of the Swarm prepared to broadcast from a sectoid chamber directly to pilots in other sectoid chambers, a method that boosted his signal strength. In Woldn’s lifetime this had never been necessary, but it was one of the methods his predecessors had employed successfully in times of need. On the downside, it might injure the podship he transmitted from, due to the painful amplification of signal strength. But that was a risk he had to take.
Too much was at stake.
***