On translating from the Pruchlais direct to the Family's main base of operations on planet Trua, Sam suddenly felt the chill of the stone walls of the citadel surrounding him.
A slender male whose jet-black skin appeared in stark contrast to his simple white robes appeared next to them. "Welcome back Tye, Sam," he said. "The council waits," he added pointing down a narrow corridor leading from the translation station.
"Thanks, Luc," Tye said heading off at a trot down the corridor.
"We know where the chambers are," Sam scoffed while rubbing his arms and hurrying to follow Tye, "but I like the new haircut."
Luc was an advanced AI unit. The first teacher and nurturer that Sam had known as a young boy. Then, Luc was Luca and female.
In the ninth century, an attack on the Pruchlais corrupted her program and then just over a hundred years later, a Family conflict led to her erasure. On both occasions, the council sanctioned the AI's recovery despite the program growing more unstable with each reboot generating sporadic gender choices.
Sam and Tye strode through the colossal, stone citadel, passing many brothers and sisters processing similarity data on their way to the council's chambers. Sam sighed, thankful of his new duties.
Luc was waiting for them again as they reached the council's chamber and opened its door, an additional temporal barrier, for them before disappearing.
Sam drew a deep breath as he entered the space, the timelessness of the chamber filled with only a worn, round limestone table surrounded by ancient oak chairs unnerved him.
Their queen sat opposite to the door and waved them toward empty chairs while studying a pad in front of her but otherwise ignored them.
Mick's partner, Clare, sat next to the queen and it was no surprise to Sam that she appeared anxious.
"The rest of the council," the queen said weakly, "is unfortunately indisposed, upline war matters."
"Any breakthroughs?" Sam asked knowing their mysterious enemy's front line was closing in on the Reference Plane. Thankfully, their enemy appeared only to have linear TD tech that severely constrained any potential tactical translations. They could only translate downline into the relative past and towards the RP, jumping linearly from fractime to fractime. This made it difficult for their enemy to sustain a supply chain sufficient to equip great numbers of troops in multiple universes; therefore, their enemy fought the war largely one fractime at a time.
Moreover, although Confederation troops were waging an exhaustive campaign on the enemy's rear flank, the chase downline seemed stymied with little relative progress in the last few centuries. The Family was their only forward asset, which explained why the TC tended to ignored minor Family breaches of the Time Accords. However, those same accords prevented the TC from intervening between the RP and the nearest fractime currently under siege or even father downline.
The Family detested this doctrine and Sam figured the council had plans of its own regarding a RP invasion in less than a century, Breeze time. He also knew the enemy had patience and had infiltrated many fractimes ahead of the front to sabotage and weaken any possible counterattack. They all suspected there were many enemy scouts already in the RP despite only limited confirmed infiltrations.
The queen subtlety shook her head at his question.
"You've seen the imagery?" Tye asked her referring to the video of O'Shanley's implosion relayed from the pad that she had left behind in the bar.
"Of course," Clare injected matter-of-factly.
The queen tried to sit up a bit straighter while giving Sam a look that made him shudder. "The two men with you at the time?" she asked.
"Regulars," he said.
"Interesting face," the queen said.
Sam assumed she must have been referring to Miri's facial ink rather than Lars' subtle first-nations' appearance. "He's Maori," he said, knowing the queen had extensive knowledge of all indigenous peoples of Earth so he did not elaborate further.
"His appearance," the queen said seemingly lost in her own thoughts, "and to a lesser point, both their disappearances are troubling."
She then looked to Tye. "Have your new elder sister review the imagery and trace subjects plus and minus ten fractimes," she added.
"Of course," Tye said. "Current RP historical accounts indicate that O'Shanley's was thought destroyed by a faulty gas main late night the 14th of June 1984," she said uneasily.
"Fascinating," the queen said shaking her head. "A long time ago, a naughty, young girl visited an O'Shanley's bar decades in the future."
"Just another shift in reality outside Trua's protection," Clare said sadly to no one in particular and seemed intent on studying the tiny alien fossils within the limestone table. "At least it should make for an interesting back-change report for once," she added with a sigh.
Sam was well aware of the council's debate for decades about the instability of the Higgs field resulting from translations. Such field changes were incredibly small but added up with each translation.
Clare wanted to conserve the field as much as possible and with the RP's field already near instability, Sam knew her concerns were valid.
The Higgs field aside, Sam knew Clare agreed with the rest of the council that the affects from extra-universal meddling were mostly beyond their control. Active intelligence gathering as well as the strict
Family canon not to intentionally influence your or another Family member's individual timelines was their best defense.
Sam looked to his queen.
"This unfortunate event will not be spoken of again," she announced.
"Future cam, indeed. I want to know yesterday who destroyed O'Shanley's and the reason behind why our eldest brother is missing."
"Probably one in the same," Clare added.
"It could have been an enemy infiltration," Tye suggested.
"The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places," the queen quoted in a whisper.
Sam recognized the author as a favorite of hers and wondered if she was still paying surreptitious visits to nineteenth and twentieth-century writers in RP+1 despite her poor health.
"Sorry about the future cam," he said as the queen fought a cough. "I acquired it as well as a memory coin from my latest case. I was going to show them to Mick. Thought he might want them for his collection. I've never seen either before," he explained truthfully, saddened her rare illness appeared worsening.
"A coin?" the queen asked hoarsely looking to her twin.
"Magic tricks that are highly illegal," Clare replied. "They contain entangled quanta that actives a future brain-scan and then translates the captured short-term memory into the past to the activator. Complex and expensive, but poor range and intra-universal only. Obviously, their use would break family canon by meddling with one's own timeline."
"Yet further indiscretions concerning the Time Accords and Family canon," the queen said sternly looking into Sam's eyes and then softened,
"may be of benefit."
She reached out and grasped his hand only to release her frail touch a moment later.
"The nearly simultaneous destruction of a stable Reference Plane monitoring post and Mick's disappearance begs too many questions," she said.
Clare failed to suppress a shiver. "It's catastrophic if the enemy has discovered us," she said, "and my Mick."
Sam pulled Mick's note from his shorts pocket and handed it to her.
After quickly reading it, Clare just shook her head as she handed the cryptic note to the queen. "Just like him," she added angrily.
"Any ideas?" Tye asked.
"I usually do not ponder mythical religious locales, Middle Sister,"
Clare replied bluntly.
"But there is one who may have insight into this," the queen said studying the note.
"The ambassador?" Clare asked.
"The historian," the queen clarified.
Sam knew they were one in the same: Draconous.
Sam had often used Drac's extensive knowledge of humanity's history in the galaxy before while shifting through masses of similarity data to pull out subtle evidence of meddling regarding antiquity theft. In addition, as Family representative to the other planets in the Confederation, Drac had invaluable connections to galactic-wide power and influence that were indispensible to his mission.
However, Drac had the affliction like many other members of the Family resulting in an unpredictable transformation into a demonic manifestation. Fortunately, unlike the majority, his shift was not long lasting and he somehow kept his gentle, if not audacious personality during what Family specialists referred to as simply the change.
He was also the queen's main communication conduit to that part of the Family they called Laiths that shared his affliction. Most thought an error in their genetic code caused the change but intensive research had
not found a cure. The Laiths believed prejudice that surrounded the condition plaguing the Family for centuries contributed to the failure.
"Really?" Tye said with disbelief at the mention of the historian.
Sam knew she had issues with Drac's stability surrounding his rare changes in the past. "It's okay," he said reassuring her.
The queen struggled to clear her throat. "The upline war approaches and we are no closer to understanding our enemy. We need to know if this was a direct enemy attack on the Family. We need a full council, especially Mick, as certain war initiatives are close to launch."
"Agreed," Clare said with a curt glance at Sam.
"Then I assume our alliance of sorts with the US government has been successful," Sam said.
"At this point," Clare said, "let’s just say things are progressing well."
"We must find Mick and soon," the queen injected.
Sam looked to Clare who cast her eyes back to the note still in the queen's hand and wondered why she had been so vague.
"With the council shorthanded," the queen continued, "Clare is needed on other urgent matters."
"Looks like it is just us," Tye said to Sam.
"It’s just Sam," the queen told her. "You are also required elsewhere.
New Elder Sister, Luinan, has the details."
"And you," she added looking to Sam, "are reassigned to Mick's search and rescue immediately and will report directly to me."
"Understood," Sam replied, relieved to have a break from pulling pints and antiquities retrieval if only for a short time. "Do we know where Drac is?" he asked and sensing Tye's excitement regarding her new mission.
As the queen touched the table over a smooth, calcified shell, Luc appeared.
"How may I assist you?" the AI asked.
"The current location of Draconous?" the queen asked the program.
"The ambassador is here on Trua and is currently in the citadel's deep archives," Luc replied.
"You're in luck, again," the queen said looking at Sam and handing him back Mick's note as the council chamber's door swung open. The meeting was over.
The depths of the citadel contain three main areas. The deep archive, the auxiliary archive laboratory and a containment sphere, which the Family use to restrain Laiths considered too insane for release into the multiverse.
Sam's trek through the citadel to the deep archives was a familiar path but still he felt awe as he past the various statuary and art works that adorned the walls flanking him.
He stopped to study a gargoyle mounted on a podium that grimly guarded the archives entrance. It was a favorite of Ces's. For some reason she liked the sad eyes staring out from their sunken orbs.
Sam sighed as he stood before the ancient oak door of the archives.
He and Sara more than understood the need to protect Ces and her growing special abilities, but he still had felt anguish being on the sideline from the real war efforts. Besides, his suspicions the queen hoped that Ces someday would be an effective weapon as well as play an important part in the war effort worried him.
He pushed the door inward to reveal an air lock allowing access to the archives beyond. Activating the familiar controls on the lock, the door behind him closed and as the decontamination began, he considered the Family's historian.
He knew Drac had taken on the plight of a minority of Laiths with a demonic change above most else and now devoted most of his time to funding a cure. Being the Family's ambassador-at-large gave him the
resources to follow his quest throughout the galaxy, so it was unusual to find him on Trua.
As the air lock's door opened before him, the vastness of the deep archive hall caused him to try to repress a shiver. He failed as usual.
The deep archives contained mostly historic information and artifacts rather than the similarity data on which the Family now focused most of their resources to detect the enemy's advance.
Drac could be anywhere in the large complex so Sam depressed another control on the nearby wall.
"How may I assist you," Luc said appearing beside him in elegant dark green robes befitting his presence in the archives.
"The historian's location, please," Sam asked glancing down at his old tee shirt and faded shorts.
"Ambassador Draconous is in the fifth section, tenth element. Shall I accompany you?"
"No thanks, Luc. I'll walk."
Luc nodded politely and then disappeared.
Sam had been to the section before. It held the early historical accounts of the Family's arrival on Earth during the Iron Age as well as the ancestral documents for all second generation. He had combed many of the archives in the fifth section researching his biological parents who both died in a Laith uprising during the Earth's tenth century.
"Draconous?" Sam asked, arriving at the section and seeing a portly human form at a small table sorting through a pile of scrolls illuminated only by a dim, flickering candle.
The small man jumped slightly then pulled a pocket watch from his yellow waistcoat, flicked it open and then looked to Sam.
"Event's are progressing at an alarming rate," Drac said shrilly. "And you're late, my good boy," he added as he began to tidy the pile of documents.
Sam smiled at his old friend's informality as well as at Drac's typical colorful attire. "What events? And, I arrived at the Citadel just under an hour ago."
"My boy," he said standing up to stretch and adjust his purple suspenders, "Luc advised me of Mick's disappearance and your impending arrival. You have the document?"
"Sure," Sam said digging the wrinkled paper out of his jeans pocket and handing it to Drac.
The historian gazed at the post-it note then held it up to the flickering candle.
"Interesting," he muttered.
"Something?" Sam asked hopefully.
"There's nothing but the visible indelible ink," Drac replied. "I was expecting something hidden and more definitive. Very curious indeed.
Hell- that is different given the Mick's strict rules against meddling into Earth's religious activities."
Mick's ban had caused Sam to abandon recovery of some significant artifacts. Sam believed considerable Laith meddling contributed to Mick's ban on influencing Earth's religions but the council staunchly withheld specific details from the second generation. He shuddered as his suspicions rose again on just how colossal the impact of Laith meddling could be in RP and surrounding fractimes.
Drac stroked his short green goatee. "There are a few cryptic scrolls surrounding that place name during the Alpha times around here somewhere."
Drac stopped and scanned corridors leading to other elements of section five. "Yes, I remember," he added then scurried off down a long corridor flanked by high shelves filled with multitudes of dusty books and crates.
Sam knew there were parts of the deep archive in sore need of restoration, but these areas never got organized or even cataloged. In these areas, Drac's knowledge was invaluable.
"Alpha times?" Sam asked to Drac's back. He had believed Luc's first program corruption following the deaths of most of the first generation during the Laith revolt had resulted in the loss of most details of the Family's origins.
"Believing everything you're told, Sammy?"
"Shouldn’t I?"
Drac chuckled. "Hell may be closer to us all than you think. You don’t accept the Family creation stories?"
"Which one," Sam said with a sigh. He had not given much credence to any of several versions of the Family's arrival on Earth. However, his own triple-helix DNA proved he was not Solarian but Auriane; a people history said rogue cyborgs had nearly wiped out when they destroyed the Family's home planet. Many of the survivor's progeny, initially scattered across the galaxy, now found sanctuary on Trua.
"They all may have some truth. Perhaps this scroll may shed some light on the matter," Drac said excitedly. "I have felt for some time that both our own alpha times and origin of the change is somehow also linked to the common galactic concept of a hell," he added.
Sam just watched Drac's footfalls in front of him as they continued to weave through dusty shelving. Sam had many rather lengthy discussions surrounding similar family dogma with Drac. He had learned to take most of Drac's conjectures with silence.
Drac stopped abruptly, climbed a nearby ladder to a top shelf at the end of a rack of shelving, and then carefully handed down to Sam a small, dusty wooden box. "There are some truths that remain only as clues to test us," he said sliding down the ladder's rails like an adolescent.
Sam placed the box on a table positioned at the end of the shelving.
"If this contains information on the Alpha times," Sam said, "why has it not been revealed before now? It would be critical Family history."
"Good question," Drac said breaking a wax seal over the boxes latch.
Sam noted there had been at least one other seal in the past from remnants of a different color wax surrounding the latch.
As Drac pushed the lid back, its two small hinges protested and Sam caught that odd but familiar smell of old.
The crate contained just three small scrolls. Two partially unrolled scrolls had broken wax seals. One remained wound tight.
"Ah, just as I remembered," Drac said gently lifting the sealed scroll out of the crate.
"What about the other two?" Sam asked.
"A collection of puzzling parables and astronomical data, mostly meaningless or untranslatable and scribed much later than this one. You can tell by the security fibers and wax," Drac said while running an index finger over the circumference of the scroll's unbroken green seal. "And I've recorded them both centuries ago," he added.
"What makes you think that one has bearing on Mick's disappearance?" Sam asked.
"Let's see," Drac said thoughtfully. "It was mid-thirteenth century, Earth when I first showed Mick this crate. After inspecting the other two scrolls, he insisted on preserving the seal on the third. I found it very curious but I felt it better not press the issue with him at the time."
Mick, although declining to serve in various political circles within the Confederation, was a natural, respected leader that insisted on openness above most else. The fact he had secrets was surprising to Sam.
"Luc, we're going to my quarters, please power up the archival laboratory. Sam and I are on our way," he added.
"Of course," Luc's disembodied voice said from somewhere above.
"You've moved into the auxiliary lab?" Sam asked wondering why anyone would want to live in the dank depths of the Citadel.
Drac nodded with a wide smile as they stepped on a nearby inter-citadel transporter platform.
The environment with bright white surfaces and stainless equipment in which they appeared was a stark contrast to the musty, deep archives.
Sam gazed at the extraordinary large rocks and minerals scattered around on the floor as well as smaller specimens behind glass doors of oak cabinets lining the interior of the lab.
"Like what you've done to the place," Sam mused looking around.
Drac lifted a meter-long, multifaceted quartz crystal off the main worktable and on to the floor with a grunt to make room for the scroll. He then brushed a sonic opener over the scroll's wax seal, which slid off the roll in one piece.
"So far so good," he said. "Several data scrolls of the same apparent age and security fiber have disintegrated upon the seal being broken.
Even so, we may have just one chance to obtain the information contained on this scroll."
"To unroll it would be too dangerous," Drac added as he carefully picked up the loose roll and placed it gently in a nearby scanner. "We will have to try to retrieve the digital information as it is," he added closing the scanner's door and touching a control.
After the scanner beeped completion, Drac slowly opened the scanner then sighed. "As I feared," he said as wisps of dust exited the scanner and floated around them.
Sam peered into the unit to see the crumbled remains of the scroll.
"How?"
"Old security tech," Drac replied. "But our modern scanners are pretty good. We should have something," he added, as a two-dimensional display appeared floating over the worktable.
After Drac brushed several controls on the display, Sam saw it fill with countless vertical, parallel and subparallel lines intersected by a few short, subparallel, horizontal lines.
"Probably an ancient Celtic text," Drac said studying the script.
"Translate, twentieth-century English," he ordered the display. "My Ogham is a bit rusty," he added sheepishly as the display filled with a stream of unrecognizable characters.
"Fascinating," Drac said.
"Yeah?" Sam said peering over his shoulder.
"Mostly gibberish," Drac said. "Translate into Gaelic," he told the display as he adjusted a control on the workstation.
Drac sighed and Sam remembered enough Irish gleamed from his parents to know the translation had failed again.
"Maybe it's not Ogham after all," Drac said. "Search the open Galactic encyclopedia for similar alphabets and translate," he told the display.
His request returned a single result.
"Interesting," he said while tweaking a control on the workstation.
"The characters are an early Calma language I'm not familiar with. It appears to be a citation containing numeric, galactic coordinates just outside the uninhabitable zone of the Lár. The non-numeric characters are still untranslatable."
"How early?" Sam asked recalling that inner galactic species like the enigmatic Calma had called the supper-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way the Lár for eons.
"It seems such characters have been observed in the past near the Lár," Drac said studying the display.
"How early?" Sam asked again getting a chuckle from Drac.
"The citation does not have that information, but it's probably referring to the famous Library ship and the ensuing salvage war over its contents."
"That is ancient," Sam muttered, remembering the mysterious myth about a colossal battle near the center of the galaxy over the contents of a research vessel over a billion years ago. "Could this be from that ship?"
he asked.
The historian shrugged his shoulders. "This will take time. I'll need to review older research and perhaps even access to the Calma archives themselves," he said. "And a visit is long overdue," he added thoughtfully.
"When do we leave?" Sam asked.
Drac straightened and then bent backwards in a stretch as he chuckled while subtly shaking his head. "I'll find you when I have results."