Chapter 41 - The Ciriot in Control
Vila came back to awareness and the bitter realisation of utter defeat. At first she did not know where she was – it was completely dark. Then her memories returned – and the pain. Her whole body still throbbed from the beating, and stung like she had been bitten by hundreds of honey wasps. The slightest movement, even breathing, took her back to the threshold of unconsciousness.
When she thought back to Villeni’s punishment, which at the time had felt extreme, she realised it was little more than a face slap to what the Ciriot had done to her. This was true humiliation, and she wished they had beaten her to death, but that would have been kindness, and these creatures held none of that.
To think that she had been afraid of Kellex’s wrath after having to admit to him that her ‘freakish power’ had not been enough for her to get into the Tymoreans Temple and bring him out. She had found it easy to imagine him purple faced, and almost frothing at the mouth with rage. His words to her had been cutting. She had heard more than enough when she had pretended that her comm. signal had broken up. She didn’t want to hear him order her back to Villeni again. Then, she had been glad he was stuck in the Temple indefinitely.
He was asking the impossible of her, for she had already reported her earlier failure to enter that damned Temple. She hadn’t admitted the mind freezing dread that had suffused her when she had gone right to the entrance. The second time, she hadn’t been able to get that close. Something had changed for whilst she had been able to fly her ship closer, through the outermost shield, she had been stopped by this new inner one.
Vila had wanted to stay near the Temple - protected from the Ciriot attackers by that outer shield. But doing so was folly. If Kellex looked out and saw her ship…. Anyway, she had no food supplies and little water.
Then Villeni’s message had come through. She couldn’t pretend not to hear that. The powerful baseship transmitter was capable of punching a message all the way to Aerdna, not like the primitive device Kellex had been using.
Kellex’s second in command, like his superior, still believed that the attackers belonged to one of the other Warlords, and they were also trying to bring the shields down so the trapped Warlords could leave the Temple. He told her that he had ordered the rest of her flight of fighter pilots to rendezvous with her there, and they were to dig under the inner shield like Jordan had done to enter the city.
Her pilots had come close to outright mutiny. They may well have refused to become dirt scrabbling labourers, except that Villeni had put the fear of the god, Jyx into them. It hadn’t stopped them muttering under their breath, in her hearing. The protocol of command meant that she dared not openly agree with them. She had to keep them working hard. It wasn’t that they were cowards, for they would have had to fly through the attacks of the Ciriot, travelling just above ground level, to get in under the shields. Just as she had done.
For a week, they had dug like moles, trying to dig deep enough to be below the effect of the shield. Six feel down, and the shovels still hit what felt like a solid wall. Vila had taken a turn with her subordinates, forcing herself to do more and lead by example. The men began to gain respect for her.
When she dropped from sheer exhaustion, she sometimes couldn’t sleep. Instead, she felt the forces that warred in her. The hard labour of digging quelled it but as she rested, the power returned. She knew what it was now – the fabled power of the Tymorean Royals. Kellex had abducted her to spite the Tymorean Governor and maybe he had wanted a means to control her power. Did he hope it would destroy her? She hadn’t been trained to use it, thought she had learnt to ignore it, or did Kellex think using it was all instinct?
It wasn’t. Ever since she had fought Kryslie, the one who had called her sister – she had been aware of the difference. That younger sister had used her power as a conductor controlled the music of an orchestra. That controlled power should have been her inheritance too.
When they had finally excavated an open tunnel under the shield, Vila had reported to Villeni. He had in turn received orders from Kellex; Vila and her second were to go and get Kellex, and bring him out. He would use her command ship, and she would return with her second.
Moments later, the Ciriot had attacked. Six of their air fighters had flown in under the shield and blasted all the grounded Aeronite ships. More of the creatures had crept up on them by foot, hidden by stealth suits until the last instant.
The men in her command had fought fiercely, she had fought like a berserker, but it wasn’t enough. Ciriot came in overwhelming numbers and they were strongly protected. Anger drew power into her; the first two Ciriot to grab her had been blasted apart by a concussion of power. The next two had received jolts strong enough to stun them. After that, though she kicked and struggled, they handled her easily and were not gentle. She had watched helplessly as the Ciriot slaughtered her men. Then a cloaked figure had walked up to her. Unlike the others, it revealed its face. She recognised the eyes that blazed with hate. Zorrec’s warrior, Kek, had never liked her. In that instant before Kek stunned her unconscious, she sensed that he thought that if he could not have Kryslie, she was the next best thing.
The slightest of sounds, no more than the swishing of metallic thread woven cloaks, sent her body into a spasm of terror.
The first time she had regained consciousness, before the questions began, she had realised she was completely naked. That had been the start of the horror. Then the Ciriot had beaten her for not answering their questions.
Next time, they added refinements of pain, humiliation and terror – elicited none of the information they wanted either. She simply had no knowledge of what they wanted.
Surely they knew that by now?
Vila felt the metal covered hands as if they were burning brands, and as they lifted her, the pain in her body peaked again and she blacked out.
When she woke again, she wondered if she had died, for she could not feel her body. Had she been rescued?
The hope was short lived. Kek’s ugly face leered down at her, and a Ciriot brandished a wickedly sharp knife, and placed it at her throat. Hope of another kind surged in her. Were they going to kill her? Had they frozen her body so she wouldn’t fight them?
No, it was worse, the knife went in below her neck and slit her open down to the breastbone. Kek placed a mirror where her eyes could only see what they were doing to her. She watched as they opened up that bleeding slit, and placed something glowing and green into her. Then they brought something glowing red hot to touch the sides of the slit, before roughly sewing it up. Somewhere during that, she blacked out again.
Vila could not guess how much time had passed since then, but now the darkness was not absolute. She could make out the shaped of things around her. Remembering the agony of the last wakening, she tried to move carefully. The agony did not return as she sat up, though her body was stiff, and she barely had any strength. Slowly, she felt around herself. She had been lying on a metal floor, probably the same cell where she had been before. Recalling the last awakening, and the obscene operation, she inched her hand up to feel her chest. In doing so, she discovered that someone had re-dressed her. Her fingers tried to open the front flap, but did not have the strength to pull the fabric open. It took long minutes of fumbling attempts before it was open enough to push one finger in.
Where they had cut her, there was a thick raised ridge, but she did not feel any dampness to indicate the wound was still healing. How long had she been unconscious this time, and why had they let her heal. Now she was conscious again, she could try to escape…
“I don’t think so, my puppet,” the mechanical translation of the Ciriot speech startled her. “Get up. You have things to learn.”
Her mind told her, “I can’t I am too weak.” Her body began to move by itself, rolling over, pushing up to its knees, standing unsteadily. All the while, her mind was frozen in shock.
Even that wasn’t the worst. This was torture taken to a new level. This creature controlled her body, made her do things that her own mind rebelled against.
Without her will, her hands stripped her of the uniform, making her stand fully naked again - they hadn’t given her back underclothes. She walked to the leering Kek and stood while he touched her in obscene ways, and used her for his own pleasure. She tried to withdraw her mind, pretend she was not there, but the Ciriot mind held her in the present moment, enjoying her humiliation.
A very small part of her essence escaped and hid deep in her mind. The rest was forced to listen to the mind of her new master as he indoctrinated her to obey him,
Finally, he tested her obedience, telling her to dress, to eat and drink, to relieve herself, and then sit and wait for him to return.
In between those returns, she sat in darkness, seeing nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing. She reanimated only when her master came and played with her mind again. Time lost all meaning.
When Kryslie told the Warlords they could leave, Kellex wasted no time before heading back to his ship. As he strode down the stone staircase at the front of the Temple, he was aware of the flickering of energies that impacted on the shield above. His mind still assumed that the attackers were Aeronites trying to break the shields. The faint shimmer of the wall shields, just beyond his ship, prevented him from seeing the landscape beyond. He hadn’t worried about ruining the part of the garden where he landed, and the rest of the uselessly decorative Temple gardens, was of even less interest.
His mind was full of things he wanted to do, and a felling of vindication. The Tymoreans were finished. The cowards had sent a mere girl to insult their conquerors. Of course she wasn’t able to stop them leaving, or she wouldn’t have tried those pitiful mind tricks to seem more powerful than she was. She was probably there so the Governors could save face, and blame her for them all escaping.
His mind simmered as another thought occurred to him. If that jumped up little female whelp had been able to get in, Vila should have been able to. The wretched female he had raised, obviously hadn’t tried hard enough. He’d have Villeni teach her to be thorough.
The first thing Kellex did on entering his ship, was to power up the communicator and send a message to the Aeronite attack force. He didn’t want to fly from under the Temple shields and into an energy bomb. That he received no answer was irritating, but the noise of the bombardment was tremendous, and the energy discharges might be interfering with the signal. Instead of trying again, he punched a nanoburst signal to his base ship.
Villeni sounded relieved when he returned the contact, but his voice was neutral when he told his superior, “Sir, the aircraft are not ours.”
Kellex had snarled, “Nonsense, the Tymoreans would not be bombing their own Temple. Find out which of the other Warlords sent them and tell them we are coming out.”
“Sir, the aircraft are Ciriot,” Villeni insisted. “I did not believe at first, but many of the foot troops have reported seeing those creatures.”
“The Tymoreans have mind washed them. The Ciriot cannot be here. We would have seen their ships coming.”
“I had the mind healers test the warriors that returned here. They found no sign of mind manipulation or delusions.”
“I will discuss this when I return,” Kellex snapped, cutting the contact.
Cursing, Kellex started his engine, turned on his instruments and the cloaking field, and blasted off, just ahead of all the other Warlords.
The force wall around the Temple did not stop him. It flashed briefly as he blasted through it, flying at ground level as before, and then turning to fly upwards when his instruments showed a gap in the attacking formation.
At first he had kept his eyes on his instruments and the radar screen, but once he was high above the ships that were attacking the Temple, he began to circle and look down. The winds were strong and gusting from unpredictable directions and the turbulence was fierce. He felt the first stirrings of alarm as he saw the mile after mile of blackened and charred landscape. The destruction was interrupted by areas of glowing mauve, the protected cities and forests. He recalled the Royal whelp mentioning the terrain reformer, and considered what he knew of how it was to work. Before the Aeronite ecology could begin, the old ecology had to be destroyed. That was probably what he was seeing below, surely.
But his mind insisted on recalling that the initial scouring phase was quickly followed by the rapid new growth phase. He should start seeing that soon, but instead he was seeing areas that were glowing orange, and when he overflew those places, the radiation sensors went off the scale.
All the subtle hints, the claims of his inferiors, clashed together and Kellex’s anger grew hotter. He was forced to admit to himself that the Ciriot, supposedly allies, were here and were meddling with the Aeronite triumph. He would not admit to himself that the girl whelp’s warning had been accurate.
Before trying to reach Villeni again, he checked for messages that were auto recorded in his absence. The reports of warriors straggling back to the ship were irritations. He would teach every one of them the price for deserting their posts. Other matters he ignored, until he heard Villeni reporting that the baseship was launching and returning to the holding orbit it had achieved when it had first arrived in Tymorean airspace.
His anger went out of control when he heard the rest of the report “…following your orders as relayed by Commander Jordan.”
“He’s dead!” Kellex swore savagely as he increased the speed of his ship on the heading to where his ship had been. “Next time I see him, I’ll tear him apart. I will have him whipped into diced meat.”
After realising that his current heading was pointless, Kellex abruptly turned the nose of his ship upwards and blasted for space. Only then, did the Ciriot craft uncloak and reveal themselves.
Kellex saw an imminent collision and took evasive action. Other craft came into view and he fired his weapons. The aircraft were of a completely unfamiliar design. He wanted to believe they were Tymorean, since the twelve englobing ships were not firing at him, merely forcing him to fly somewhere.
“Weaklings,” he swore, misinterpreting the reason. This must have been why the girl whelp had let them go - so these pilots could make him go somewhere. “Very well – I will go with you and I will kill you all.”
When the Warlords left the Temple, their personal command ships were the only non-Ciriot aircraft flying. Even though the Warlords believed they were cloaked, that technology had come from the Ciriot and it was flawed.
A dozen Ciriot fighter craft converged on each Aeronite craft – remained invisible and undetected – as they observed the actions of the Warlords who were in turn observing the utter destruction that Kryslie had mentioned.
Kellex flew over mile after untold mile of utter destruction, interspersed with areas of glowing mauve that were the protected cities and forests – Kellex became savagely determined. The Tymoreans were defeated! The Ciriot had betrayed their allies, but the Aeronites would defeat them too. They had to. He could not return to Aerdna if they failed. Wazim and Xezir would have to re-program the terrain reformer. That would fix all the problems.
The message Kellex sent to his baseship went unanswered. An analytical part of his mind realised that the atmospheric disturbances were probably causing it.
The only warlord to escape the Ciriot ambush was Xezir. When Kryslie, in a Tymorean fighter craft borrowed from the hangar cavern, took him and Xan back to the Temple to reclaim his ship, the Ciriot presence over the Temple was gone. He had in his pocket, a palm sized device that Xan had told him was a cloaking device a thousand times better that the Aeronite devices. He had tested the device on the flight back to the Temple.
“The Ciriot may have left here for now,” Kryslie warned him. “But they will come back. They are following the other Warlords, probably looking for your baseships. I will follow you until you reach the upper atmosphere.”
She didn’t leave her borrowed ship, and kept it ready to lift as soon as Xezir did. He had the coordinates for where the shield would open, and would head straight there.
However, to get to the coordinates of the shield, he knew he would still have to avoid hundreds of marauding Ciriot craft. Even before he took off, he had Xan activate the extra protective device that Kryslie had given him.
Kryslie knew the secrets of the Tymorean cloaking device. Her ship was able to keep track of his by tuning her sensors to look for one very rare chemical element. Once he was past the top of the atmosphere, she put her ship into a looping spiral, taking the opportunity to observe the conditions outside of the shielded places. That it also gave her more hands on experience flying a real aircraft, instead of a simulator, was a minor benefit. Thanks to the memories shared with her by the Governors, she had known how to fly it.
Xezir spared a moment to regret the destruction of the peaceful gardens that had existed when he had arrived at the Tymorean Temple, but he had a catastrophe of vastly greater proportions to prevent. He flew his craft low until he was out from under the weakened shields about the Temple, and stayed low until well away from the Temple, and in relatively clear airspace. Then he turned his ship upwards to blast out of the atmosphere. He could have shot at the Ciriot as he climbed, but that would have betrayed his presence. He simply adjusted his course to avoid them and increased his speed.
Once he was in the stratosphere, far above the Ciriot fliers, he headed for the coordinates that Kryslie had given him, and established a geosynchronous orbit in that position. He waited there, and hoped his fellow Warlords would join him. Time passed, and they didn’t.
He could contact his baseship from that orbit, and the more he observed of the planet below, the more grateful he was that he had ordered his people back into space. He did not know about the other baseships, but he hoped they would survive. His smile was genuine when his crew reported that all of the baseships were now in space, beyond the new planetary shield.
To distract himself from the probable fate of his peers, Xezir asked Xan about his reasons for surrendering to the Tymoreans, and how he had managed to convince them to help. The answers Xan gave were unexpected, and made him thoughtful. He had agreed to serve the Tymorean Prince and Princess because they had helped him, healed him, when Kellex had wanted him dead. Then when Xan began detailed explanations of the plans made by the Tymoreans to help the Aeronites survive on Aerdna, the sheer scope of the project awed him.
It was flawlessly brilliant, covering every conceivable need…and must have taken decades to prepare. It definitely had not been cobbled together in the short time since the war had begun in earnest.
He hoped the Tymoreans had a way to deal with the devastation the Ciriot had dealt to them.
Jordan watched, feeling alienated and inexplicably nauseous. He wanted to search for Vila, for if what Xezir had said was true, and the Ciriot had her, he had to try to save her. She was his sister, and the closest friend he had, didn’t that mean anything to these other siblings of his? They knew what the Ciriot could do to people.
He sighed and wished he had something to do. He didn’t think it wise to play with the computers here, as he had during the weeks he had been alone here, waiting for Kellex to give him new orders. They would probably disapprove of his attempts to force his way into the system. He had managed to access quite a lot of data, and he knew things now that Kellex surely didn’t know. He doubted that any of it was truly classified stuff, but he had learnt so much.
He was edgy, as if filled with nervous energy. He had offered to scout the estate with the two commoners, but he had been politely rebuffed. They did not have a spare personal force screen, or stealth armour, Kryslie had said, and that may well be true. Or it might have been that they still didn’t trust him. It made him a little jealous that they trusted Pyr, who was still such a little child. Price Llaimos listened to him as if he were an adult. So did Princess Kryslie. And they had treated Xan as a friend, when he was born an enemy, not just made into one through no fault of his own. They had forgiven Xan though, so perhaps there was hope for him.
His belly rumbled fiercely, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since his long ago breakfast. Well, that was something he could do something about and it was more useful than watching the Ciriot desecrating the lesser buildings of the Estate. He would get food for everyone, since he had long since found the storerooms. He had eaten well of foods that would otherwise go to waste. He was thankful that all the food had not been taken to wherever the Royals had gone. He had also created a comfortable bed in the control room.
As he began to take the food from the carry basket and place it on a table, his ears caught part of a conversation between Llaimos and Kryslie. The younger Tymorean Prince was explaining to Kryslie about a program he and Pyr had created. Something he called a ‘virus program’ that he was going to transmit to the Ciriot ships
Not all of the ships would be within range of the signal, but as soon as the nearer ones encountered the more distant ships, the program would be re-transmitted to them. The program would spread.
Jordan had missed hearing the logic behind this move, but he liked the thought that these Tymoreans would be able to deploy the Ciriot ships to whatever location they chose. He thought of one use – and that was to clear a corridor of airspace for when they went to the second continent to confront the Ciriot.
Jordan felt a shiver down his spine. What could seven people do against the might of the Ciriot? Or even eight – if they could find Vila and she was able to fight. Feeling like a coward, he admitted to himself that he was glad he was not in charge.
Llaimos called him over. “Jordan, we would welcome any expertise you have. Pyr and I have been studying all we have learnt of the Ciriot…looking for weaknesses. Perhaps you could go through this information too?”
“They are overbearingly arrogant. Worse than Kellex even,” Jordan admitted freely. “And they are convinced of their superiority and invincibility.”
Llaimos smiled faintly. “A fallacy we can exploit,” he said as he gestured Jordan to the seat he had just vacated.
“Thanks,” Jordan acknowledged the courtesy. He mentally contrasted Llaimos’s behaviour with that of every other powerful person he had met. He instinctively glanced at Kryslie, but she seemed to have her mind somewhere far away. He returned his attention to Pyr who was showing him how to access the Tymorean computers. Suddenly his mind was dragged from its musings.
“I told Llaimos that you were really clever – smarter than Kellex let you believe,” Pyr whispered when Jordan quickly mastered the use of the highly advanced computers.
Pyr was showing him things that he hadn’t yet discovered for himself. He assumed that Llaimos must have taught him to access the computer, but what his brother was telling him now, astounded him.
He had always known that Pyr was smart…for a child…but listening to him now – he realised with shock that his little brother was brilliant. He had blossomed since he had chosen to serve Llaimos. For the first time in his own life, or what he could recall of it, Jordan felt free to use his own intellect.
Jordan returned Pyr’s grin, but still couldn’t force himself to admit the glee he felt at realising that the Tymoreans had hidden so much from Kellex and the other Warlords.
Pyr must have sensed the thought for he whispered, “Yeah!” in agreement.
Once he set his mind to studying the Ciriot, Jordan gave no more thought to how the Tymoreans could cleanse their planet and make it fit for life once again. Neither Kryslie nor Llaimos had seemed daunted by the prospect. So if they had a way – they were not mentioning it. Still…one step at a time. He was helping with the next major problem … getting rid of the Ciriot and looking for ways to find and save Vila.