Chapter 28 - Questions
Jordan and Vila had gone in search of their guardian to report, but Kellex had not taken it well. Now they stood in his official chamber and listened, stony faced to his ranting. He was not just angry as their guardian, but in his role as one of the six most powerful Aeronites on Tymorea.
“You failed me! A simple but important mission – to take a mere infant and you couldn’t even do that! You had that verminous red headed girl whelp in your control and you let her go! A child, younger than you – and she out-smarted you. Where is the Tymorean King? What incompetent underling did you put in charge of him? Or did you let him talk himself free too?”
“We left him with Geller, but he is dead,” Jordan announced tersely.
“No more than he deserved,” Kellex snarled. “You have made me a laughing stock with the other Warlords. You disappoint me.”
“Sir,” Jordan tried to make his Commander listen to the rest of his report. So far, he had only let them answer his specific questions.
“I do not want to hear your excuses,” Kellex thundered.
“But, Sir!” Vila tried to add her voice to the plea.
Kellex backhanded her, making his anger clear. “I knew training a female was a mistake. Nothing either of you freakish changelings can say will change my opinion of you. We …are…winning! We are taking over their cities and their pitiful troops run from us. Their aircraft are not opposing ours.”
“Lord, the Ciriot are here,” Jordan blurted desperately, and then he too felt the sting of Kellex’s anger, and had to keep a tight control on his own. He persisted in speaking. “We have seen them! They were in the city when we returned with the girl, and they had taken the king. They were waiting for us at our ships.”
“You cannot expect me to believe such a fantastic pile of drivel. If they had come here, our scanners would have spotted them.”
“Lord, it is true,” Vila insisted.
“Enough!” Kellex roared. “Report to senior commander Villeni and when he has taught you a lesson in truthful reporting, you will go and complete the mission I gave you. Do not return until you have the brats or have killed them. GO!”
Ashen faced, his two junior Commanders saluted, and walked stiffly from his presence. Kellex growled angrily, thinking of all the time he had wasted training those two. Perhaps he should have simply killed them, like he had the older two. He considered his other ward, Pyr.
“Too young to be useful,” Kellex muttered. “But at least he is more obedient. He is already showing initiative and is keen to fight.”
New reports began to come in; distracting Kellex from wondering where his youngest ward was if his elder sibs had returned. The child was not important. His last fleeting thought on the subject of his wards was that it was fortunate that he had the foresight to authorise creating a clone of Jordan. A whelp he could mould from birth.
Disobeying Kellex’s orders was not an option and both Jordan and Vila had to control their anger and resentment. As long as they could remember, they had obeyed their guardian, and done their very best to make him pleased with them. Now, he had told them their best was nothing. With out needing to speak, Jordan and Vila each knew that the other felt the same. It was an ability they had tried to ignore, but now, it was all that stoped them from outright mutiny.
Kellex had never ordered official punishment for them before. The mere thought made them feel humiliated. Yet they knew, instinctively that if they let their resentment show, Villeni’s punishment would be much worse.
Later, after Villeni had finished with them, both Commanders walked slowly back to their quarters, rebellious and resentful, and their thoughts were simmering with anger. Only the sure realisation that Kellex could read them like a book when he chose, forced them to control themselves.
Neither spoke, or thought at each other. Their sense of personal humiliation was too great. Each only wanted to be alone, take a dose of pain relief. If they were to go out and try to prove themselves, they had to be fully fit and ready to fight.
Vila decided on a short period of meditation. She wanted to think over their abortive mission, and work out what they could have done differently. Kellex had already vented his opinion, but he had refused to listen to the whole report.
Her first thought was to ask herself why she had let the girl go. At the time, it had seemed so logical, so correct. Had that little chit bewitched her?
No. Young though that girl was, she had immediately seen the implications of the Ciriot presence. She must have known, somehow, what the Ciriot were. When they were near the ships, and the creatures had appeared…she had done something to protect all of them. It wasn’t some kind of force shield, because she, Vila, had made sure that she was unarmed, unprotected, and had no means to escape.
Then…she had commanded them…in the same way that Kellex could.
For the first time in her life, Vila realised that Kellex was not always right. The girl had implied that he wouldn’t listen, and he hadn’t. In fact, he seemed to have no real concern for them when they had not done exactly what he wanted of them.
He had said it would be a simple task, and he had planned the whole scenario, but, he hadn’t allowed for the Ciriot. He dismissed the mention as lies, but he had known who they referred to.
Then that girl had said that the Ciriot must have learnt of their plans – implying a traitor close to Kellex, or within the Aeronite forces. Had Kellex known and wanted them to fail? She didn’t want to consider that idea.
The chime of her door distracted Vila. She had the sense of her brother.
“Come in.” The door responded to her voice command and Jordan entered, and went to perch on her bed, and he looked down at where she sat on the floor.
“Kellex is wrong. He should have listened to us,” Vila said resentfully.
“Of course he should have,” Jordan agreed forcefully. “And he will learn that soon enough. Personally, I don’t want to be around when he does. He will probably blame us for his close-mindedness.”
“He certainly won’t admit he was wrong,” Vila concurred.
Jordan swung his left leg for a while before continuing. “I feel that we have been blind too.”
“Blind? How do you mean?”
Jordan shook his head. The fleeting idea he had was still nebulous. “Kellex called us freakish changelings…”
“He was being despicable,” Vila said waspishly.
“Probably, but why that term? You didn’t want to think this before, but the Tymorean King called us his lost children. I didn’t like the idea then either, but it makes horrible sense – like why it is only the two of us that can use those Tymorean devices.”
Vila began to feel slightly ill. “That girl…called me sister. And she looks exactly like me.”
“And the other one is very like me,” Jordan suddenly realised.
The enormity of that realisation stunned them both. “We always knew we weren’t Aeronite, because our eyes are different. Kellex always said we were cast out and he rescued us. I never questioned that until now.”
“He must have stolen us and mind-washed us,” Vila gulped. “I don’t want to be Tymorean; they are so…so…despicable.”
“Or that is what Kellex always told us,” Jordan said with a look at his sister. He stopped short of saying that Kellex had lied to them ever since they could remember, and they couldn’t remember being with anyone else.
“Jordan? I think that girl did something to me. I didn’t want to believe it when she called me sister. That was before now. I thought I knew my place and who I was – now I don’t know any more.”
“I don’t think I have changed much,” Jordan was thoughtful. “I still think it wrong that the Tymoreans won’t help us. I can’t not try to make them see sense. Just thinking of all the Aeronites who will die if we can’t make a place for them here – it makes me feel sick.”
“Jordan…why do we have to take what the people here have? There is a lot of empty land…”
“Because they…” Jordan stopped suddenly. He was going to say that ‘they’ had kicked the original Aeronites off the planet. But no one living here now was one of those ‘they’. If there was an issue to be had, it was with the current rulers who refused to help. They had no right to blame the downtrodden common folk, who according to Kellex were kept in ignorance by the despotic Governors. There was no reason to punish those commoners.
“I wonder if anything we have been taught about the Tymoreans is really true,” Jordan mused. “The people don’t look to be suffering deprivation, even if they are not using technology. The city was shielded until our people sabotaged the protections. A despot wouldn’t care.”
“And I think today has shown that Kellex never really trusted us. He seemed like he hated us as much as he hates the king and the other Governors. We always did our best to please him, and when he gave us our Commands, I thought he was proud of us,” Vila felt the sting of rejection.
“Proud of himself,” Jordan murmured. Talking ill of his guardian still felt like treason.
“Oh, no!” Vila suddenly exclaimed.
“What?”
“Pyr. He is our brother…Kellex stole him too.”
“I remember him as a baby,” Jordan told her.
“We can’t leave him here with Kellex.”
“He doesn’t know any other life,” Jordan objected. “Should we throw him to those he thinks of as enemies?”
“We should let him choose,” Vila told her brother.
Jordan stared at his sister and saw the same realisation dawning on her face. “Are we going to change sides?”
Vila paled at the enormity of that treasonous idea. Kellex would have them killed.
“Even if we are Tymorean, the Tymoreans won’t accept us now,” Vila said quietly. “And however you look at it, the Aeronites still need help. I still want to make the Tymoreans see that. And until now, Kellex didn’t treat us too badly. We were better off than a lot of the children I saw when we visited Aerdna. We always had everything we needed.”
“Let’s find Pyr and talk to him,” Jordan decided. “Whatever we decide to do will affect him too. If Kellex decides we are traitors, though he stopped short of saying that earlier, who knows what he will do to Pyr.”
“He has been acting oddly,” Vila recalled. “Ever since Kellex moved the ship here.”
“Ummm, that might have been my fault,” Jordan admitted. He watched Vila get to her feet and put her weapon belt back on. “He told me that he was glad Kellex’s prisoners got away. That girl, her brother and the two peasants. I gave him a warning.”
Vila realised that Jordan had punished him. In hindsight, his action had been correct. Kellex would have done worse if Pyr had said that to him.
“He should be at his lessons with Cormini,” Vila said after checking the chronometer.
“Let’s hope Kellex is too busy to be lounging in his personal area,” Jordan said. “I don’t want him to see us still here.”
The teaching area was in Kellex’s suite. Pyr still had his cabin there, though both Jordan and Vila had been granted their own space, away from their guardian.
Both places were empty. Cormini was not in the teaching area either. Pyr’s normally neat room was empty but showed signs that he had left in a hurry. His normal day clothes were in an untidy pile, half on and half off a chair, and his one permitted weapon, a low power stunner was not on its rack. Several sealed ration bars had dropped to the floor near the door.
Alarmed, they went in search of Cormini, the man who taught Pyr, and had once taught them.
His cabin was not far from Kellex’s, but it had a privacy glyph on the lock, and he didn’t answer their request for entry. Jordan decided to make use of one of the privileges of his confirmed rank, and overrode the privacy code and entered.
“Cormini, where is Pyr?” Vila demanded.
The old teacher had been huddled over a table, drinking from a flask. He pushed his chair over backwards when he shoved it back to get on his feet. He was trembling when he saw who had entered.
“He has gone …. He left this message.” Cormini walked unsteadily across to a message recorder and played the message. It was brief.
“Mini, I have gone with my brother to fight. I want to be a warrior like him.”
“Does our Guardian know?” Jordan demanded and the man nodded.
“He was delighted with his initiative.” Cormini admitted, trying to stand straight.
“He wasn’t with me, Cormini,” Jordan paled. “He’s only a child, almost the age I was when I got really sick.”
“If he does not survive he is of no use to us!” Cormini repeated in a voice that was pitched higher than his normal voice. It was what Warlord Kellex had told him.
“You are wrong, Cormini.” Vila went and stood in front of him. “We have seen the Ciriot on this world. If he came with us, unknown by us, then the Ciriot have him. They were waiting at our ships, and killing our warriors! They would kill him with out a qualm; he’d be of no use to them!”
“The Ciriot have betrayed us!” Jordan stated flatly. “They have become our enemies.”
“Treason!” Cormini screeched.
“I fought with Princess Kryslie,” Vila told her former teacher. “I could not defeat her by myself. She matched everything I tried and still seemed to have more in reserve. In spite of that, she saved us from the Ciriot. Kellex wants us to kill her, though I feel it will be a mistake. She told me that she had not been born to fight us, only to destroy our warped power. Instead of doing that, she told us to use our power to preserve our people if we could. It is the Ciriot we should be fighting. The Tymoreans have never attacked us, merely defended.”
“You are speaking treason!” Cormini repeated, his voice still high pitched.
“No, Cormini,” Jordan spoke firmly. “Our first duty is to our people. We must fight the Ciriot. They have decided we are no further use to them.”
Cormini had turned pale as he began to understand the implication of Jordan’s words.
“Go!”
Jordan and Vila retreated, tense with worry, and went to Jordan’s cabin.
“I need to know the truth,” Jordan said, going to access his computer terminal. “Kellex doesn’t care what happens to Pyr. He probably took him to spite the Tymorean king. He probably cares as little about us and simply likes the idea of us destroying our kin.”
“Do you truly believe that we are kin to that girl and to the king?” Vila asked.
Jordan nodded.
“Then maybe we could go to them and demand their help,” Vila suggested. “Maybe Kellex lied when he said they refused help, perhaps no one asked them.”
“It’s possible,” Jordan agreed. He had sat himself in front of his computer and was manipulating the device using the touch pad. He was busy accessing secured sections of the ship’s files. “Let us be thankful that he never had us demoted. With our rank confirmed, accessing restricted files is easier.”
“Easier, but you are talking of getting into our guardians private files,” Vila realised.
“Uh huh,” Jordan admitted. “And if he changed his security protocol, and the firewall detects me, we had better not come back. Do you want me to keep on going?”
Vila bit her lower lip; she knew this was the moment of decision. “Yes. I want to know our true origin. Do you know his passwords?”
Jordan glanced up and gave her a shrug. “I learnt them about a year ago, when he had me doing some confidential stuff for him.”
“Try it,” Vila urged.
“Go lock the door,” Jordan directed.
It took Jordan five minutes of manipulating the pressure sensitive pads to pass the security protocols. At the end of that time, Jordan muttered, “He is an over confident, damn idiot. Or he was sure we were too stupid to try this. I’m in his private journal file.”
Vila was looking over his shoulder as he did a search through the entries.
“Found it,” Jordan announced quietly.
In his private journal, Kellex didn’t hide his smug satisfaction of his own cleverness. He wrote in detail of how he had made use of one of the ugly ones – a mutant who was able to change his form to mimic anyone. He had convinced the man to mimic two children holding hands. He admitted his pleasure at having so useful a reason to kill such a freakish abomination. His intense satisfaction in tricking the Tymorean King was plain.
“Holy Jyx,” Vila swore.
Jordan was searching for later entries, and found details of how he had mind-wiped their memories, and of the training regimen he wanted for them.
Vila wanted to be sick, and Jordan wiped sweat from his ashen face.
“Our father, our real father. Kellex made us lure him to that city, and now he is probably dead,” Jordan said, feeling ill.
“Or tortured,” Vila added. “The Tymoreans will never forgive us.”
Jordan did a search for other mentions of the Tymorean king and scrolled down the entries. “There’s more. He has written here of some prophecy claimed by an old, senile warlord. I don’t think he heard it all, but he has here something about three of the king’s children were going to save the Tymoreans. Kellex says here that he had thought it crazy.”
“He must have been afraid that it was true,” Vila suggested. “And that is why he took us.”
Still scrolling through entries, Jordan was glancing quickly at each. He stopped at one and read it more slowly. “Here! He says he had two of the king’s children killed. Made it seem like an accident. He ensured that a trader ship crashed. We once had two older brothers.”
“See what you can find about Pyr,” Vila urged.
Jordan found the reference. “That time he switched children. He took Pyr and replaced him with a mutant’s child, but he had already given that child a slow acting poison. He found out that the Royal consort was pregnant, even though she was with the king on tour. He found a way to make her go into labour early.”
“Get out of there,” Vila said urgently. “Find a site that might be useful to us to find the girl and her brother.”
Jordan reacted to her urgency and went into a different restricted site, and had a minute to think up a plausible plan, before Villeni strode in with as little warning as they had earlier given Cormini.
“Why are you still here?” Villeni demanded.
“Sir, we are checking where the best place is to try for the king’s elder brats,” Jordan said, looking up and giving Villeni a respectful nod. “We cannot redeem ourselves by trying again without a plan.”
“Warlord Kellex has orders for you,” Villeni told them. “You are to find a way to get into that Temple of theirs.”
“Yes, Sir!” Jordan agreed instantly, putting a determined look on his face. “That is some kind of sacred place to them. Has he instructions for us once we find a way in?”
“Report when you succeed and he will instruct you,” Villeni directed. “And I wouldn’t want to have to discipline you both again if I find you still here in ten minutes.”
They waited until the senior commander was gone, and the door relocked before speaking.
“It is as good a place as any to go,” Jordan said. “But we need to find Pyr first. Then we can plead the case of Aerdna. If they will listen to us, and not try to kill us on sight. This war is wrong. We shouldn’t be wasting men and resources trying to conquer this world. We should be using them to save our own planet, or find unoccupied worlds. Kellex might think we are winning, but he is blind. It is what he wants to think. The rulers of this planet have outguessed the Warlords at every step.”
“Yes. You are right. I will take my command to try to find a way into the Temple, and if I see any Ciriot, I will fight them. If Jyx is kind, I will find a way to beg the help of the scientists of this world, to help Aerdna.”
“Let’s find Pyr,” Jordan said. “He must have stowed away in one of our ships and got out at Amik.”
“I hope it was before the Ciriot found the ships,” Vila said, mentally praying.