Aeolus Investigations Episode 16

Available from Amazon.com.

In Apollo (episode 15), Elista, the newly recruited member of Aeolus Investigations was instrumental in winning the day against the Karg marauder that had destroyed her world.

Now the new mission is to locate and evaluate the Karg homeworld.

The Accord had managed to avoid an all-out interstellar war with the Unity pirates. Will the same be true of the Karg? A race that had been burning populated planets to cinders the first time they were encountered.

Elista – Chapter 3, Waince

The momentum of that single, short step sent Elista stumbling over uneven, broken ground. She dropped to one knee with somewhat less than her normal grace, both of her hands landing on the scorching ground, her head bowed, gagging and coughing from both the swirling dust and the horrible stench. She closed her mouth and stopped breathing. Her nano-cells would keep her blood oxygenated for a while — practically forever, in fact. This version she had been given drew energy directly from the universe. She realized that was a poetic way of thinking about it, but it wasn’t incorrect. She found herself surprised at how readily her body accepted that she didn’t really need to breathe for extended periods of time.

Still crouching, she raised her head. Immediately in front of her was a melted building, with drips of molten stone and steel from higher levels congealed along what was left of its lowest levels. It was barely recognizable as having been a building.

She had seen it before.

As she pushed up onto her feet, the scene around her changed dramatically. She found herself rising from her crouch, not in the desolation of an instant ago, but now inside a small, undamaged room where a young, pretty woman was in the final stages of labor.

Elista felt dizzy. She assumed she was probably hallucinating due to the fumes she had briefly inhaled before realizing she didn’t need to breathe. Although, possibly the ear pendant — Jermine’s ear pendant — that she had taken from Kacen had kicked off the hallucination that had returned her to a scorched Waince. She had no reason to believe that was real, either. Unless, of course, she had first phased to Waince from Apollo and then into this room from the outside without conscious thought. She hoped not — either of those would have been incredibility dangerous. Having a hallucination was much safer. That led to the thought that her life, especially the part revolving around Aeolus Investigations, could be a hallucination.

Her safest, most rational approach was to treat all of this as real. Being here was impossible. Even if it wasn’t real, her subconscious mind could be trying to tell her something. After all, the team’s hulk-meds had increased all of her other abilities.

OK, then. The mother-to-be was naked. The small room she was in was comfortably warm and well lit by the ceiling lights. It had no windows. A single female attendant, dressed in a pale pink gown, stood at the foot of the bed, ready to help with the delivery of the forthcoming child. She spoke soothingly to the woman through her labor pains — in Elista’s native language — coaching the woman to take deep breaths and to try to relax through the contractions.

As far as Elista could tell, it seemed as though neither woman saw her standing off to the side. She walked toward the two of them, looking into the face of the one in labor. It was a face she had only ever seen once before, in a single picture, dressed up formally, wearing that ear pendant. Still, it was a face she would never forget. It was the face of her mother. “Jermine?”

The woman looked at her for the first time. “Elista? No, honey, you can’t be here. It’s too soon. Find me again, daughter. When it’s time. Save me. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” She reached out and grabbed Elista’s wrist. Jermine was strong enough that despite Elista’s own physical enhancements, that grip hurt.

Jermine looked up, directly into Elista’s eyes. For the briefest moment, Elista felt a gentle breeze, scented of jermines, blowing through her mind. Jermine’s features relaxed, as though the pain of labor had been forgotten for a moment. “You’re not the backup, Elista. You need to understand that. That was never the plan. Two of my daughters are going to be needed to seal the Rift. Everything dies if those monsters get out. I’m getting so tired of fighting them. I don’t think that I can contain them much longer.” The woman released her grip and lay back in the throes of another contraction. “Don’t let them escape,” she gasped as the contraction eased. “Erase the Rift. Seal them in. I’m sorry that I can’t stay with you, that I have to leave you so soon.”

This can’t be real. Still, hallucination or not, she reached out and took hold of Jermine’s hand as the woman winced. The woman’s hand — no, her mother’s hand — clasped hers back. She stood like that for a few minutes, silently holding hands with her mother — a woman she had never, until now, met. “I have so much to ask you, mother.”

Jermine again looked into her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Elista, but there is no time.”

At that moment, a man stalked into the room — her father, although he looked decades younger than her most recent memories painted him. He was clearly angry. Furious even. Standing over Jermine, his bond-mate, he yelled, “Traitor!” Great timing, father. Let her have her baby in peace. Let me be born in peace.

His dagger flashed through the air. Elista moved with hulk-med enhanced speed, grabbing for his wrist. She would have shattered it, both to prevent her mother’s murder and in partial repayment for all the pain he had caused her throughout her entire life. That is, up to the point where he had unknowingly given her the best gift of all and sealed her inside of a stasis chamber, his true motives now forever unknown.

Her hand went right through his arm as though he was no more than the illusion she would have assumed this all to be were it not for her physical contact with the woman who was soon to be her mother. She could only watch helplessly as her father plunged his dagger through Jermine’s throat. The force of his strike was so great that he nearly severed her head. Jermine died with a smile on her face despite her blood spurting all over her breasts, Elista, the attendant, and the man who had just murdered her. She squeezed Elista’s hand a final time and smiled up at her before life left her body.

Furious, Elista vaulted the table, intending to destroy the murderer. None of her punishing — no, none of her lethal — blows struck flesh. She wasn’t really thinking about what she was doing. Was she changing the past? Or at least trying to? Changing the past isn’t allowed. That was the rule that I swore to adhere to. Except this isn’t real. It can’t be. I can’t really change anything that is happening here.

She heard the man say, his voice angry, “Cut out my child.” He stalked out of the room, still seething. At that point, Elista blacked out, the past unchanged, with her mother already dead on the delivery bed, about to give birth to her daughter — to Elista.

Elista is available from Amazon.com.