Karzin Read online

  I knew that Takar and Rokul were from one of the secondary systems in Skotan space. Few of those planets had survived the initial Xathi attack.

  Sylor, with a short nod, turned back to me. “Their attack upon Valorn was devastating. We were already losing, badly. There is a chance that the fight there has already been lost.”

  I had had enough. I was finished with them.

  “Then you have forgotten how strong our people really are. True Valorni do not give up the battle, and I refuse to forget our people, our families, or what our responsibility is. If you have nothing else for me except useless comments about my actions or my behavior, then I suggest you leave, now,” I growled.

  “No. We’re here to fix whatever this is and get the real Karzin back,” Rokul said from his chair. “We need you back, sir.”

  I shook my head, waved them off, and left the common area. “You know how to leave,” I called back behind me. I returned to the command center and finished working on the defective computer core. I needed to get it back into space, back to the satellite it had come from, and back to work on finding a signal.

  While I worked, I watched them leave through one of the outer surveillance cameras. They opened a rift and walked through, the rift closing behind them.

  It was about time they left, they had wasted enough of my time.

  If they couldn’t understand what I was doing, I wanted nothing to do with them. I needed to put my concentration into this.

  “Leader Karzin?” It was Pem,again. I turned to look at him. “Might I ask you a question?”

  “Fine. What is it?”

  He walked closer to me, his left hand on his speech-box. “Your men seem to be…very passionate about your current state of affairs.”

  “What of it?”

  “I was curious as to why you and your men have such a differing set of opinions. Do you not believe in your cause upon this world?”

  “Our cause, as you put it, is over. The Xathi have been destroyed here and the humans are safe. It’s time we return home, to our home. That is my cause now.”

  “And if there is no way to return to your home?” he asked.

  I never answered him.

  Because it simply wasn’t an option.

  I couldn’t let it be.

  Annie

  Thanks to Cassie’s little stunt, I was running late. I didn’t get to shower before work. I barely got to run a comb through my hair and brush my teeth. My nice pants were wrinkled after hanging on the line to dry. My stomach growled in protest to skipping breakfast and my minimalist dinner the night before.

  I jumped on the shuttle seconds before the doors closed. There were no seats, but that was normal. I grabbed on to the first solid, non-living thing I felt just as the shuttle took off. Most of the seats were filled by people just like me, harried and trying to get to work.

  A few of the passengers were of alien species. The first time I saw one riding the shuttle, I couldn’t stop staring. I felt so rude, but I couldn’t help it. I’d never been that close to an alien before. Now, though I was still curious about them, I was more used to the sight.

  There were three separate species of aliens that now lived alongside us. There were the Skotan, red from head to toe with some kind of retractable scales, though I’d never seen them in person. K’ver were gray and appeared to have circuits embedded directly into their skin. Two of them had taken jobs at my lab in the tech innovations department. I smiled to them in passing but I’d yet to have a chance to speak to one. The Valorni were green and built like barns. I saw them the least out of all the species. Their natural strength made them ideal for labor-oriented jobs. It was likely that a Valorni built the house I lived in now.

  Some still treated the aliens with skepticism, but I saw no reason to. If they wanted to do us harm, they wouldn’t have risked so much to save our world from the Xathi. I’d heard they couldn’t leave the planet now. They’d trapped themselves here to save us.

  That earned each one of them respect in my book.

  The shuttle ride was brief, but I still had a distance to walk until I reached my office.

  Nyheim used to be spectacular. In a way, it still was, but it was a beauty of the spirit, not the eye. It had survived so much and still stood strong. Most of its memorable structures were gone now.

  Bare bones of buildings in disrepair lined the streets. It was more like walking through a skeleton of a city than an actual city.

  Halfway between the shuttle station and my office was a tiny eatery made out of a dislodged shipping container. Orlin, the owner, furnished the inside with a small kitchen and cut windows in the sides to take orders.

  “How’s it going, Annie?” he asked when I stepped up to the window. “Cassie make you late again?”

  “You know it,” I sighed. Because of Cassie, I was forced to grab breakfast from Orlin at least once a week. I didn’t mind, though. Orlin was a fantastic cook. He could make even meal rations taste high class.

  “Have you told her I’m hiring?” he asked. “I’m getting too old to be working here every day.”

  “You’re not getting old,” I said with a dismissive wave. Orlin was barely fifty and in great shape for his age. Though I could understand wanting a day off every now and then. I was going on my twelfth day straight. “I almost got her on the shuttle today. If I told her I wanted her to work here, she’d never come. I have to trick her somehow.”

  “Good luck with that,” Orlin chuckled. “Your usual, then?”

  “Please.” I reached into my back to pull out my credit chip, but Orlin waved me off.

  “You’ve got enough to worry about. I’m not going to make you worry about food on top of it all,” he said.

  “Thanks, Orlin,” I grinned. I stood off to the side while Orlin made a fresh pot of coffee and flakey croissant with egg, cheese, butter, and a small piece bacon. If Cassie knew, I bet she’d change her tune about coming to the city with me. We never had enough to afford bacon on top of our regular groceries. Meat had become a rarity since most of the domesticated animals were killed or escaped during the Xathi invasion and many of the wild creatures moved to other areas.

  Orlin handed me my coffee and food. I flashed him another grateful smile before continuing on my way. The croissant was devoured by the time I reached my building.

  The top half of my office building was gone. A tarp was stretched over the gap to make a ceiling, but no one used that floor anyway. My lab was on the third floor, untouched by the Xathi ship during its initial crash landing.

  I was lucky to have this job. My last place of employment closed down not long after the Xathi ship crashed onto our planet. I applied to my current job, expecting nothing, but I was pleasantly surprised. All of the sciences were in demand as everyone scrambled to get back to pre-war levels of industry.

  I’d barely stepped into the room when one of my colleagues ran up to me. Bea was a woman in her mid-thirties who always wore her black hair in a bun so tight I couldn’t imagine how it wasn’t painful for her. She had yet to speak to me at all since I started working here. Honestly, no one here had been very social, so if Bea was running up to me, either something terrible or something fantastic had happened.

  “You’ve got to see this!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What?” I asked. Bea grabbed my arm and tugged me through the lobby of the building.

  “I came into the main labs, yeah? And all I could hear were these piercing beeps and alarms,” she spoke quickly.

  “A malfunction, then?” I asked.

  “That’s what I thought! Especially once I realized they were coming from your station, no offense,” she looked over her shoulder and shot me a look of apology.

  “My station?” I stammered. I could understand her surprise. My station was always silent.

  I’d been assigned a task that initially sounded interesting. My job was to monitor the area around the remains of the half of the Xathi ship that had cra
shed back down to the planet's surface. I traveled out to the wreckage myself and placed all sorts of scanners and monitors on the surface of the earth and beneath it at various intervals.

  The main concern was unknown substances leaking from the Xathi ship and negatively affecting the soil around it. Though, since the Xathi ship’s remains were far out in the desert, where no humans had ever settled, there wasn’t much of a risk factor. It was mainly for scientific curiosity.

  I thought it was going to be such an exciting job. I thought I’d be at the forefront of discoveries, unveiling the mysteries of the giant crystal insects that attacked us. However, it had been nearly two months and nothing had happened yet.

  Until now, apparently.

  “I’m sure it was just a glitch,” I said lamely.

  “I checked!” Bea cried. “I assumed it was a glitch, too. Again, no offense.”

  “None taken,” I muttered.

  “There’s nothing wrong with any of your consoles. All of your monitors are in working order but they’re recording stuff that’s off the charts. Literally!” Bea dragged me into the elevator and pushed the button for our floor at least twenty times before the doors closed.

  “How many caffeine pills have you had today, Bea?” I asked. I once saw a whole bottle of caffeine tablets at her station. It wasn’t uncommon for everyone, other than me, to work late into the night on their various assignments.

  “I’ve been here for nearly twenty-four hours,” Bea said.

  “What? That’s not healthy!” I exclaimed.

  “I have so much to finish up! Didn’t I tell you? I’m transferring at the end of the week,” she replied. I wanted to tell her that since she’d never spoken to me before now that of course she didn’t tell me she was transferring, but I refrained.

  “You’re transferring?” I asked.

  “My husband got a job in Kaster. It pays too well for us to say no,” she explained. If she kept talking as fast as she was, she was going to bite her tongue clean off.

  “Is there much work for a botanist in Kaster?” I asked, praying that she actually was a botanist.

  “There’s lots of work for botanists everywhere nowadays,” she replied.

  I tried not to audibly sigh with relief. “The Xathi did a number on the local plant life. There’s so much to study, I’ll have my hands full for months. Bet you wish you’d studied botany now, don’t you?” She nudged me playfully and cackled a little too loudly.

  “Promise me you won’t take any more of those pills, okay?” I patted her shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve emptied the bottle.”

  “That makes me more worried,” I winced.

  The world’s slowest elevator finally arrived at our floor. Bea dragged me out of the elevator and through the double doors of the main lab. I heard the beeping alarms before we entered the room. I half expected the alarms to be nothing more than a side effect of Bea’s excessive caffeine intake.

  “See? It’s going at it again!” she exclaimed.

  “Please sit down,” I urged. “I’m worried you’re going to have a heart attack.”

  My station was in the farthest corner of the room. All of the monitors I’d placed out in the desert corresponded to a light on my console. All of them were flashing green, a sign of change in the environment.

  “What could this be?” I muttered to myself as I approached the console. The first thing I noticed was that all of the monitors were no longer where I’d placed them. They’d been shifted considerably. Some looked like they were buried far deeper than I’d left them. That could’ve only happened if the earth itself had shifted.

  I pulled up a seismograph that reflected any changes in the amount of energy coursing through the planet’s crust. The graph showed that huge spikes of energy had been bursting from the earth all night.

  “So, what’s happening?” Bea appeared at my side, startling me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “But something out there is causing tremors bigger than anything I’ve ever seen.”

  Karzin

  It didn’t come as a surprise that, not long after the team’s failed attempt to intervene upon my behavior, I received a summons from General Rouhr.

  While I had never imagined that any of our crew would ever forsake our homes, the idea that General Rouhr had abandoned his own home in favor of this human planet surprised me more than anything else.

  The man that had faced down Xathi hordes, fought them to within a breath of death, and vowed to not let the Xathi destroy this world or its inhabitants.

  But he had abandoned his own world because he had found a human woman that changed him.

  I had no desire to go to Nyheim. Even with a rift, it would be a waste of my time. However, it was my duty to go.

  I cleaned myself up, had one of the Urai cut my hair to ensure it was as it should be, and I shaved. While I had come to like the beard I had begun to grow, it was unprofessional. With a clean uniform, I asked Fen to open a rift for me to Nyheim and I passed through.

  I had been through several rifts, yet the shuddering cold never became easier. Fen had set the rift for just outside the city to ensure that no one accidentally passed through it, and I was grateful. The fifteen-minute walk to General Rouhr’s new offices would give me an opportunity to gain control of myself. I did not wish to show my disdain for his actions, and I needed the time to hide it.

  The building that he used for his offices also contained the offices for his human mate, Vidia. She had taken over as some sort of leader for the human population and had convinced Rouhr to join her. While still our commander, he was now a liaison of sorts between our peoples.

  It was a step down from what he should be.

  I entered the building and was greeted by an overly excitable—or peppy, as the humans would say—young human male with a very light voice. “Commander Karzin. It’s such a pleasure to see you. How are you?” His smile made me want to punch him, repeatedly.

  “My well-being is not of your concern. I am here for General Rouhr.”

  With an over-exaggerated wave of his arms, he seemed to just let my comment roll off. “Of course you are. He’s right this way. I’ll take you to him.” His enthusiasm grated on my nerves. I knew where the general’s office was, I didn’t need an escort.

  “I know the way,” I told him.

  As if he hadn’t heard my statement, he continued on with his rambling monologue. “He’s such a wonderful man, the general is. He’s done such wonderful things while working here. And the work he’s done with Ms. Vidia, oh my, I just can’t believe how amazing and wonderful they are for us. Here you go, Commander.”

  He stood at the general’s door, his hand on the knob, waiting for me to come close. He opened it for me and smiled as I walked in.

  Before I could say anything, he called out loudly from behind me, “Commander Karzin for you, General.”

  “Thank you, Tobias. That will be all.” The general was sitting at his desk, and I had to admit that he did look less haggard than he had months ago when we were still fighting the Xathi. He looked years younger and much healthier.

  I stood at attention, giving the general a salute. “I am here as requested, sir.”

  Of course.

  My team sat in the office, watching me.

  “You don’t look happy about it.” I looked at the general, my anger seething inside of me. “As a matter of fact,” he continued, “you look even more pissed than normal.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what you mean,” I responded.

  “My apologies. I’ve begun to pick up on the human vernacular and I seem to be using more and more. You look angry.” He folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward a little. “Are you angry at being called here?”

  I took a deep breath to gather myself before answering. “No, sir. Merely curious. How can I be of service?”

  “So, you’re not upset at seeing your team here the day after their failed attempt at an intervention to g
et you out of the Aurora?” the general asked, a hint of a smile on his face.

  I didn’t answer.

  The fact that even asked the question meant he already knew the answer. My team had come to complain to the general like petulant children.

  “I see,” he nodded. “You think they’ve come crying to father. It’s sad that you think that, because that’s not at all what you’re here for,” the general said as he took to his feet. “I actually have a job for you and your team.”

  “My apologies then, sir. What is the mission?” I knew I should have felt a bit of shame for my attitude, but I didn’t.

  He pointed behind me. “May I introduce Dr. Annie Parker?”

  I turned to see a human woman, someone I had not noticed when I first came in. A shock of warmth ran through me. An appreciation of a form, nothing more, surely.

  I did not wish to lust after human women. But if I did…this would be the woman to do it for.

  She was small enough that, when seated, she’d been hidden behind the brothers. When she stood, I saw a small woman, no more than five feet tall, with painfully straight red hair that stood out brightly against her pale, alabaster skin.

  “Doctor Parker,” the general continued, “will need an escort to the Xathi crash site in order to investigate some interesting readings her machinery has been picking up.”

  I turned back to him. “Why wasn’t team one given this assignment? They interact with the humans more, have experience with them.”

  His look was not happy. He made his way around his desk as he spoke. “Not that I need to explain myself to you, but you would have known this if you hadn’t exiled yourself. Vrehx and Jeneva are expecting. Due to the sensitive nature of this child being the first human-Skotan mix, Vrehx will temporarily be held back until the child is born.”

  “Then send another team, sir. Let Sk’lar and his men be her bodyguard.”

  Rouhr took one large step towards me. I could feel the heat of his breath as he snarled at me. “You are an insolent, disrespectful fool. I chose your team, and you presume to think you can tell me otherwise?”