Legend

III

The scientists had been wrong in one respect. Human life still existed on Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s home planet sixty years after the mothership departed. Not much life, granted, and the existence was miserable, but man still walked the face of the planet. The people left behind had adapted as best they could, tilling the land by hand after the last of the machines had broken down and could not be repaired. They ate plants and animals their ancestors would not have even considered as food. It was the human way to cling to life and the survivors were the hardiest of the race.

Unfortunately, the scientists had been right about something else. The mothership’s warp shift had been picked up by a Swarm scout ship on patrol over twenty light-years away from the star system. While the scout ship had immediately turned in the direction of the shift, it also sent out an alert to the nearest Swarm Battle Core.

It took the Swarm some time to find the planet the mothership had come from and for the Battle Core to arrive, but the Swarm were a patient race, who had little concept of time except as an operational variable. On the planet’s surface, there were few still alive who had witnessed the mothership’s departure. Their descendants cared more about gathering their meager crops than stories of spaceships andaliens. There were fewer than twenty million humans left, down from the peak of over five billion prior to the Revolution. They were crowded into the few places on the planet’s surface where food could be grown and the land didn’t emit radiation that killed all who walked upon it.

According to the Master Guardian, the Swarm was a strange race, one whose origins were unknown even to the Airlia. There were some scientists among the races who encountered them who speculated that the Swarm was an invented species, designed as weapons, as it showed only a capacity to destroy and no inclination to create. Whatever alien race had invented the Swarm, if this was true, had long since disappeared from the universe, perhaps consumed by its own invention, the inherent danger in any form of bioweapon. And most species that encountered the Swarm no longer existed either. Only the Airlia, so far, had been powerful enough to resist the Swarm.

One of the Swarm consisted of a gray orb, four feet in diameter, with numerous eyes spaced evenly around the body. Anywhere from one to a dozen gray tentacles extended from bulbous knobs on the orb, placed next to the eyes. At maturity a tentacle was over six feet long. The orb had a massive four-hemisphere brain. Each of the tentacles had a rudimentary brain stem and could detach from the orb and operate on their own. The tentacles could infiltrate the bodies of other species and take over the cognitive functioning of intelligent creatures, a most effective means of reconnaissance. The tentacle could gather information hidden inside an alien’s body, then exit the body, reattach to the orb, and relay the information learned to the main brain. If a tentacle was lost, the orb could grow a new one from a knob.

It was speculated that the Swarm had some sort of basic telepathic capability among members of its own species when in close proximity to each other. Certainly no otherspecies had ever been able to communicate with it and no Swarm member had ever been taken alive. No prisoner taken by the Swarm had ever been recovered alive, and those who had fought the Swarm learned quickly to kill any of their own that had contact with the Swarm because of the possibility of tentacle infiltration. There was no negotiating with the Swarm — once contact was made, it was war, and a war that could only end in extinction for one side or the other. So far, except for the Airlia, the Swarm had wiped out every race it had encountered.

The Swarm scout landed on the planet and detached tentacles. They learned that this was indeed the place the mothership had departed from. Surprisingly, though, the Swarm also found no trace of the Airlia, its longtime enemy, who it knew had built the mothership. The assumption was made that the Airlia had, for some reason, fled the planet, abandoning these lesser, somewhat intelligent, creatures.

The race that still existed on the planet posed no threat to the Swarm. Indeed, it appeared that none would be left alive in another generation or two. That meant nothing to the Swarm. Over the millennia the Swarm had already wiped out numerous intelligent species in the universe.

Sixty years after the mothership’s departure, Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s son was still alive and a grandparent. He had vague memories of his parents and their departure. For years he tried to tell the generations after him the story of the mothership lifting off, but the story became more myth than real as the years went by, and even he began to wonder at his own memories. If it were not for the ruins of a nearby city, he would not believe his own stories. People who could have built such a magnificent place must have been capable of great things.

Once, his grandson, after hearing the story for the umpteenth time, asked a few questions that kept him from telling it again: Why had his parents abandoned him? What was there out there in the stars more important than family?

By the time the Swarm Battle Core arrived in the planet’s system, the son was now confined to a chair and daily contemplated taking his own life rather than being a burden to his family. He ate little and his body was emaciated.

As the Core appeared in orbit overhead, it was visible to the naked eye, and for several wild moments, the son wondered if the mothership had returned. Then he realized that whatever was in orbit was far larger than even the massive mothership. In fact, though the humans had no way of knowing it, the eclipse caused by the Core cut off sunlight from half the surface of the planet.

As his family huddled around him in fright at the strange apparition, he remembered vague stories of an Ancient Enemy and a sensation of dread replaced the brief feeling of hope he had had.

The Battle Core in orbit was essentially a self-sustaining mechanical planet and starship; the Swarm had no known home world. There were hundreds of these Battle Cores spread out in the Galaxy. Each was over two thousand miles long, by a thousand wide, and two hundred in depth. Its mass was so great that it generated a discernible gravity field that affected the tides of the planet below. During the war with the Airlia several dozen of these Cores had been destroyed, but each at great cost, and their loss was offset by the annihilation of dozens of Airlia-colonized planets along the frontier.

The Swarm scout ship took off from its hide site on the planet and rendezvoused with the Core to render its report. The intelligent species on the planet below was dying out and offered no military threat. There was only one thing of value on the planet’s surface: the people themselves. Report done, the scout was dispatched to the point where the warpdrive had been initiated with orders to try to track the path of the mothership.

Smaller capital warships deployed from the Battle Core, moving to equidistant positions around the planet. Each of these “smaller” ships was still twice as large as an Airlia mothership. They were large orbs with eight protruding arms bristling with weapons and launch portals. The capital warships descended into the planet’s atmosphere above populated areas until they were at an altitude of ten miles and clearly visible to the frightened humans below.

At this point, the arms on the capital ships spewed out smaller versions of themselves. Over two million drop ships descended on the planet’s surface like black rain. They all touched down at the exact same moment. Portals in the craft opened and the Swarm emerged.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s son watched as one of the craft landed in the field in front of his house. When he saw what emerged, the shock stilled his heart and he died relatively peacefully. He was one of the fortunate ones.

The Swarm began their harvest and in less than six hours there was no human life left on the planet.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai, along with the other fourteen teams selected for planet infiltration, had been put into deep sleep shortly after liftoff from their planet. Placed inside the black tubes the Airlia had used for the same purpose, they spent most of the interstellar journey unaware of not only what was happening on their home world but events on board the ship. Members of the crew died, children were born, and new generations grew up in the unique environment of the alien spaceship. The only planets they foundcapable of supporting human life were ones that the Airlia had seeded and were still occupied by their enemy, so each time they swooped in close to the star system — but not close enough to be detected by Airlia surveillance — and dispatched one of the system craft with a crew of two to infiltrate the planet.

For those inside the mothership it seemed as if only eighty years had passed, but the relative physics of warp speed was such that much more time passed in the universe around them. Still, when Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were brought out of the deep sleep, they awoke to mostly strangers.

Brought to the control room, they learned that the mothership was looping near the edge of a nine-planet system at sub — light speed. It had come out of light speed over four years earlier, decelerating ever since. Prior to this, four teams had already been deployed in other systems. After each deployment, the mothership took four years at sub — light speed to move in and four years to move far enough out before triggering the warp drive, accounting for a great chunk of the relative time lost.

As Donnchadh and Gwalcmai stood in the control room and studied the solar system, unspoken between them was the acceptance that their son had long ago turned to dust. They did not know his fate, but hoped he had lived a relatively happy life. They also learned that Enan had died over thirty years ago and there was a new ruler on board the ship. They felt distant from the younger generation around them, a generation that had not gone through the Revolution and did not even know what it was to walk on the surface of a planet. They had only each other and the interior of the mothership.

They were relieved when they were sealed into their spacecraft, inside one of the mothership’s holds, as it approached the edge of the solar system. The interior of the ship, which they had named Fynbar after their son, was crowded with weapons, explosives, and technology, most of it appropriated from the Airlia. There was also a considerable amount of food and water crammed into the craft.

The cargo bay door opened and Gwalcmai took the controls. The spacecraft was saucer-shaped, with a bulge in the forward center rising up and two large pods in the rear providing power. The forward bulge was where the two seats for Gwalcmai and Donnchadh were located. The craft’s surface was gray. As soon as the Fynbar was clear of the mothership, the larger craft turned away from the solar system, heading back toward deep space.

The goal was the third planet, the only one in the system capable of supporting human life. It was a long way from where they had been left off to the planet. The two made most of the journey toward the third planet in silence, each lost in his or her own thoughts. From the Master Guardian they had learned how to cloak their ship from Airlia detection and Gwalcmai turned on the shield as soon as they were inside the orbit of the ninth and outermost planet.

They did not electronically probe the planet as they came in because, while they could passively avoid the Airlia scans, any active scanning on their part would bring them to the attention of the Airlia. They did, however, use passive scanning, which boiled down to using the strongest magnification on their forward imagers to study the planet. They detected seven continents, if one included an icebound mass on the southern pole. As they closed on the planet, they spotted the main Airlia outpost on what appeared to be an artificially constructed series of concentric islands in the middle of one of the oceans. On the very center island, surrounded by six strands of alternating land and water, was a massive golden palace stretching up into the sky — exactly the same as the Airlia command center had been on theirown planet. As they closed on the third planet, they passed the fourth, a mostly red one with no apparent water, noting an Airlia outpost on that planet, including an interstellar transmitter array.

As they got closer to the third planet, Donnchadh got up from her seat and began preparing for their arrival. She took two backpacks and filled them with supplies for an initial foray, including a brace of a dozen black daggers that could kill Airlia, small earpieces that would allow them to communicate with each other at distances if separated, and a half dozen explosive charges that she could detonate with a remote the size of a small ball. She also opened a metal case and took out a golden scepter, a foot long and two inches thick. On one end was the head of a lion with ruby red eyes. She slid it into an outside pocket of one of the packs.

Donnchadh took two chains made of fine silver and looped one over her neck, then one over Gwalcmai’s. Two items hung from hers: a golden medallion emblazoned with an eye inside a triangle; and a ka, a device in the shape of two arms held out in supplication. There was only a ka on Gwalcmai’s chain.

“Do you have time to update your ka before we land?” she asked Gwalcmai. “Or do you want to do it after we land?”

Gwalcmai checked the control console. “Let’s do it now. We have a while before we get into orbit.”

To the rear of the two command chairs, crammed among the supplies, were two black tubes, Airlia in design. They were the same as deep sleep tubes, with console extensions on one end. A body lay inside each — clones of Donnchadh and Gwalcmai. Set into the rear wall was a vat of green fluid in which another clone of either one of them was already gestating.

On each of the bodies in the tubes was a skullcap from which several dozen wires ran to a main line that fed to acommand console between the two tubes. The eyes on each body were open, but betrayed no hint of intelligence or awareness. Donnchadh opened the top of each tube and removed the skullcaps and leads. She took the ka from around her neck and slid it into two small holes on the right side of the console. A light glowed orange, indicating it was in place. She then set one of the skullcaps onto Gwalcmai’s head as he sat in the pilot’s seat, she then tapped out a sequence on the hexagonal display.

Nanoprobes slid out of the skullcap into Gwalcmai’s brain. They were so thin, barely five molecules in width, they caused no pain as they pierced flesh and bone. His memories and experiences were quickly uploaded and transferred to the ka. It took all of ten seconds, then the nanoprobes withdrew. The skullcap was taken off and put back on the body in the tube. Gwalcmai performed the same procedure on Donnchadh. Both kas were now updated to the present.

“Once we land—” Donnchadh began, but halted.

“Yes?” Gwalcmai was unconsciously rubbing his head. Even though he’d felt nothing when the probes went in, there was still a part of him that sensed the violation.

“We will have to keep power settings on the ship at a minimum,” Donnchadh said. “The bodies will be maintained, but to keep the memories viable in the main console will require an unacceptable level of power consumption.” This was an issue she had thought long and hard about during their flight into the star system.

Gwalcmai digested this, then realized what she was getting at. “So our memories, our selves, will only be in the kas?”

“Yes.”

“And if we both are killed?” The machine had a fail-safe system. It could be set to inject the memories and personalities of a person into the clone after a certain amount of time. This was the pinnacle of Airlia technology — not only didthey have a virus in their blood that allowed them almost immortal life spans and could regenerate their flesh, they also had the ability to regenerate their personality via the machinery. But Donnchadh had just told him that they couldn’t afford the power to maintain the fail-safe.

“Then it is over.”

“Then let us not both be killed,” Gwalcmai said as he took the pilot’s seat once more.

Donnchadh took the seat next to him as they closed on the third planet.

“They will have a Grail here,” Donnchadh said after a long silence.

“Most likely,” Gwalcmai agreed.

“We could do what we failed to do on our planet,” she continued. “There will most likely also be a mothership somewhere on the planet.”

“That is not our mandate,” Gwalcmai reminded her. “Our mission is to try to work to subvert the Airlia so that these humans can eventually defeat them without suffering the losses and damage to the planet our world did.”

“Still—” Donnchadh said no more, leaving the issue open.

They came into orbit around the third planet and circled it several times, studying the surface. There was no mistaking the main Airlia base on the planet now — set on an island in the center of an ocean between two continents. The concentric rings of land and water surrounded a magnificent city. On the large hill in the exact center was a golden palace over a mile wide at the base and stretching three thousand feet into the sky. The land in the surrounding rings boasted bountiful crops and many villages. They had seen the exact same type of building on their own planet.

On the other continents there was abundant life — and humans. Their technological level was depressingly low — some places did not even have the wheel. Of major concern to Gwalcmai was the fact that the most sophisticated weaponry was swords, spears, and bows. While, as a highly trained God-killer, he was an expert with the sword, he still preferred the range of projectile weapons.

“It will be a very long time before they have the weapons necessary to fight the Airlia,” Gwalcmai noted as they circled the planet another time.

“We can help accelerate that process as much as possible,” Donnchadh said.

Gwalcmai directed the spacecraft to a large island to the northeast of the Airlia-controlled capital. They flew over the southern shore and inland until they were over a large plain of tall grass. The sky above was gray and rainy. A river ran across the plain, cutting deep into the ground.

Gwalcmai brought the spacecraft down, the skin of the craft glowing red from its entry through the atmosphere. He flew back and forth across the plain, searching for just the right spot. Once he found it, he flew north to a mountainous area, halting above a jumble of boulders on the side of a mountain. He activated a cutting beam, shaping three of the boulders into large rectangular shapes. Then he used a tractor beam to lift them off the ground. He flew back to the plain, the three large stones in tow.

Gwalcmai flew back to the river and laid the stones down on the plain about sixty feet away before moving back to the river. He dropped altitude until the Fynbar was just above the water, the heat emanating from the spacecraft’s skin causing steam to rise from the river. The forward edge of the craft touched the riverbank and the two pod engines whined with exertion as the narrow forward edge of the craft dug into the ground. Ever so slowly, Gwalcmai dug the craft into the dirt and rock, angling down and burying it until only the engine pod and the rear edge of the craft were visible. He rocked it back and forth, widening the cavity it had dug in the earth. As the ship moved, the heat from the spacecraft’s surface fused the limestone, creating a cavern. He then backed the spaceship out of the large hole he had created and landed on the plain above.

For several moments, Gwalcmai and Donnchadh sat still in their command chairs. They wore black jumpsuits, marked only by the insignia of their respective units from the Revolution sewn onto the left chest.

“Shall we?” Gwalcmai asked.

Donnchadh nodded. They unstrapped from their chairs and moved to the ladder leading to the top forward hatch. Gwalcmai led the way, unsealing the hatch. With a hiss of slight pressure equalization, it opened. He was greeted by drops of rain splashing onto his face. He paused, breathing in the fresh, moist air. Sensing Donnchadh’s impatience, he climbed up, his partner following. They stood on top of the ship, faces turned up, letting the water course over their skin, soaking their suits. It was the first time they’d breathed anything but regenerated ship’s air since departing their home world.

For a moment all their sorrow was forgotten. Donnchadh raised her arms and danced, twirling about. Gwalcmai watched her with a rare smile on his face. He spent precious moments soaking up her joy along with the rain, then duty called. He went to a hatch on the hull and opened the door. He pulled out a bundle of red web netting, which he carried to the rear and draped over one of the engine pods. He did the same to the other engine, connecting the two nets. Donnchadh finally joined him and they completely covered the craft with the antidetection netting they had appropriated from the Airlia.

Once done, Donnchadh climbed off the craft onto the plain. She took off her boots, savoring the feel of grass and dirt beneath her feet. Gwalcmai went back inside the craft. He used the Fynbar to lift the stones, positioning them on the plain above the cavern he had gouged out. Two stones went upright, while the third was placed across the top as a lintel piece.

Once the stones were in place, Gwalcmai piloted the Fynbarinto the cavern, setting it at rest inside. He sealed the opening to the cavern with explosives, isolating the ship. He then used more Airlia technology they had brought from their world to partially hollow out the left stone above the ship, cutting a door in the stone that could only be opened with a special medallion and emplacing a small lift to give access from the ship to the stone.

Once this was done, Gwalcmai took his leave of the ship, carrying a large pack on his back and another in his arms. He exited the stone, the door sealing behind him. He gave one of the packs to Donnchadh. They stared at the stones for several moments, then Gwalcmai pointed, and they set off across the plain.

They were on Earth and their mission had begun.