An Epic Space Opera by Mark Laporta
In this episode of Infinity Afterglow, a wily symbiote confronts a greedy shape-shifter at the crossroads of destiny. Will he align with the only winning military strategy, or settle for commanding a fleet of clay? Read infinity Afterglow from the beginning.
Nevruleth, nominal admiral of a huge fleet, sulked in his command chair, the victim of his own indecision. Here he’d acquired what he’d assumed would be the biggest prize in the universe, yet he had no way to use it. When he was younger, he might’ve been tempted to lash out preemptively against the Terran Protectorate. And it was easy to see why. The humans were the one species that had ever come close to the military dominance enjoyed by the Skryntali thousands of years earlier.
Though primitive, in his mind, by comparison to his ancestors, the Protectorate was too formidable to be attacked cavalierly. Besides, at that moment, his fleet consisted solely of himself — one lone operative for two thousand ships flying in tandem. With no knowledge of basic tactical maneuvers or long-range strategy, he’d be outflanked in seconds. His one shot would be a full-throttle, sneak-attack. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how foolish that would be.
Owing to the Flight Shape security protocols that governed the piloting of his fleet, he’d temporarily taken the form of an avian from the Thallusian rain forest. His bright yellow beak clacked in a petulant rhythm.
Lose my edge in the first battle, he realized.
Realistically, the threat of a massive Skryntali assault was a more daunting prospect than any bungled attack, no matter how much damage he inflicted. To do better, he’d need dedicated personnel that he could galvanize into action, a true fighting force. Yet as one of the few Skryntali with any nostalgia for the glory days of his species, he knew that recruitment alone could take months.
Nothing in it for them, he thought.
Fact was, the high point of Skryntali civilization was too far in the past. In the centuries since his magnificent battle cruisers had been mothballed, generations of Skryntali had grown up in a scavenger culture. They’d realized how much more profitable it was to hold power in the shadows of civilized society — minus the slogans, mass rallies and bloodshed. Besides, given minimal skill in influence peddling and blackmail, the political elite were the cheapest commodity on the market. By now, one-in-three members of the Interstellar Council were wholly owned subsidiaries of the Skryntali Guild of Traders.
Nevruleth himself was in a perfect position to understand his contemporaries. Hadn’t he himself built a sizable trading empire, corralled a loyal following within the Interstellar Council and amassed a staggering fortune in exactly the same way? What possible reason was there, one part of his mind kept arguing, to throw that over?
“The Quishiks is what!” he shouted into his lonely command center. What good was being a great contraband trader if your entire customer base were dead? And yet the few associates with whom he’d broached the subject had shown not a shred of interest.
For their part, Nevruleth’s fellow traders believed that, in a pinch, they could rely on their standard shape-shift failsafe. If the Quishiks surged, the Skryntali would hide in plain sight as their evolutionary ancestors had. By assuming the shape of local fauna, rock formations or tunneling mammals, they’d become nearly invisible to the mutants. Even Nevruleth’s own cousin, a business partner in some of his most lucrative deals, refused to accept his vision of a resurgent Skryntali civilization.
”All I see is the mark-up we can get on the essentials,” she’d said. “Once the Quishiks are finished, we’ll have orders in the millions, at very attractive prices.”
As if, Nevruleth had tried to tell her, there’d be anything like a normal economy, or a functioning credit system, once the Quishiks had finished their rampage. In time, he gave up trying to convince her, once he realized that he’d failed to grasp a simple truth. Any sentient being of merely average intelligence rejects the concept of “impending doom.” To live up to its name, a threat must be immediate.
Yet, Nevruleth was convinced, whatever the outcome of the inevitable Quishik assault, the discovery of the powerful Skryntali fleet was as foreordained as the fall of a precariously perched teacup.
“It must have happened for a reason,” he insisted.
By taking that stance, he ignored millennia of evidence that the universe openly defies any imposition of local causation on its chaotic soul. All the same, despite a cosmic-level bias towards entropy, a certain type of causal link could still occur between two events, as long as it promoted the disruption of the status quo. As a consequence, any student of Probability might’ve easily predicted the “unexpected” arrival of a mid-sized probe ship bearing the insignia of the Kaldhex Assembly.
“Nice fleet,” said Warvhex, once she was within sensor range. “It would be a shame if nothing happened to it.”
Nevruleth’s voice growled through the symbiote’s com system.
“You arrogant slug,” he said. “What the moldy muon is that supposed to mean?”
“Slug?” said Warvhex. “Not very original, coming from a brilliant fleet admiral. Maybe I should call you ‘blob,’ or ‘spineless,’ or ‘spineless blob.’ But I have better things to do with my time than make a fool out of you, — especially when you’ve already done the job for me.”
“How do you figure me for a fool?” asked Nevruleth. “Be careful how you answer. I have weapons charged.”
“Which you won’t use, as we both know,” said Warvhex. “One blast from that oversized soup tureen and you’ll create an interstellar incident big enough to make a crater out of your shapeless head.”
“Yes,” said Nevruleth, “I’d heard the symbies had gone soft and signed up with the crusties and the monkey men. Who’s the fool you were talking about?”
“You’re making my point,” said Warvhex. “Name-calling is your only talent. Think you can stop the Quishiks by calling them ‘bloody mutants’?”
Nevruleth’s blue-and-red-striped wings flapped rapidly before settling down again.
“Stop them?” he said. “I plan to use them. Any fool can see they’re the most powerful weapon ever created. I need only make them submit. You idiots don’t realize how easy it would be to cure the Quishiks and make them obedient again.”
In answer to Warvhex’s sarcastic question, Nevruleth explained that the Skryntali had manufactured the virus that distorted the Quishik genome — and knew precisely how to counteract it.
“But my people are such cowards, they’ve never had the sense to deliver the cure,” he said. “Now that I have our fleet, there’s nothing to stop us from moving in close and….”
“And what?” asked Warvhex. “Vaccinate them? You’re forgetting two things. Your fleet is five thousand cycles out of date. The Quishiks are way too maneuverable for you. Besides, they’re not the same as they used to be. Their genome has been altered by a Terran Protectorate biomechanoid with a guilt-complex.”
“Idiots,” said Nevruleth. “That changes everything.”
“That’s why I’m here,” said Warvhex. “You want to make the Skryntali great again? Here’s your chance. Put your fleet under our command. We can use it to distract the Quishiks while we mount a real assault.”
“Team up with the … the filth of the universe?” asked the shape-shifter. “I thought you were smarter than that.”
“So can I assume you’ve convinced a single Skryntali to join you?” said Warvhex. “Obviously not. Otherwise you wouldn’t be moping around in deep space, polishing your beak.”
Warvhex gasped, as Nevruleth’s outlines blurred and he transitioned from a brightly colored avian to a long-necked Jelnestri lizard with dark gray, scaly skin.
“You’ve made your point,” he said. “What you fail to grasp is that I have other interests to protect. If I can’t get the Quishiks, I’ll be sure to get control of what’s left — after you fools finish mucking about with them.”
“Muck is all you’ll get,” said Warvhex. “You turn your back on us now, we’ll hunt you down as soon as the Quishiks are gone. And that, my dreary little bore of a scavenger, will happen sooner than you think. Good luck, Admiral. Enjoy your fancy title while you can.”
Warvhex’s ship spun around and headed back the way she came, toward Seldra. For his part, Nevruleth consulted his nav-AI and locked onto the energy signature of a small Olfdranyi trading vessel that contained his wayward paid assistant, Eldrinaj Kaklyadar. He patched his comlink into his long-range scanner and made a growling demand.
“Stay put, you miserable wretch,” he said. “We have a deal to make.”
“What makes you think….” said Eldrinaj.
“I don’t need to think,” said Nevruleth. “Your desire to keep on living tells me everything I need to know.”
^^^
This concludes Episode 34: Fleet of Clay. A new episode of Infinity Afterglow appears every Saturday. Read Episode 35 now.
Read Ungent Draaf’s earlier adventures in Mark Laporta’s novels Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. Mark Laporta is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.
His new novel, from which this episode is excerpted, will be published by Chickadee Prince Books. To pre-order, contact Orders@ChickadeePrince.com.
Image by Kalyee Srithnam.