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33: The Fledgling
Sasha awoke feeling much like she had for the past few years. She rubbed her sleep-filled eyes and dragged herself out of bed yet again for another day of work somewhere in the palace.
As she left her apartment area she passed Bahn. The Jeshurunian didn't say anything as she passed. Perhaps he'd gone into one of his hibernation cycles.
All the Jeshurunians were uncharacteristically quiet these days. They weren't sick; the sisters had done tests on them to make sure of that.
The silence didn't seem despairing, but more... contemplative, as though the entities were trying to figure out some massive puzzle.
Sasha had tried to interrupt Bahn's thinking many times, but all he would say was "Patience."
"Oh well," she thought, "at least they're doing something, I suppose."
Sasha left her quarters to report to Astra for a work assignment for the day.
On the way down the hall she looked around, noting once again how empty the place was now that the rest of the population was gone.
There were more echoes now, and more silence, but curiously, less dust as there were fewer people around.
The sun didn't care that Iscandar was almost uninhabited though. It still rose and set just as it always had; the two moons also kept their courses unaltered, not caring who did or didn't see them anymore.
Sasha sighed and rubbed her eyes again as her vision suddenly blurred a bit – something that had been happening on and off for a bit now. She'd gotten so used to it now that she barely noticed it anymore.
Finally she came to Astra's door. She asked permission to enter and was quickly granted it as the door spiraled open for her to come in.
"Late night?" Astra asked as her sister came in. "You're not as early as you usually are."
"Oh," Sasha yawned, "I'm just still tired from yesterday I suppose. Nothing to worry about." she smiled
"Alright then," Astra brushed off her sister's lethargy, "Why don't you take one of the ships in the harbor today and get some of the Mahtehkhetim* to help you clear out everything that needs to be cleared away and clean it out so that we can use it if we need to."
"Which one did you want cleared out?"
"It's up to you." Astra gestured out the window at the row of unoccupied vessels bobbing in the harbor. "There's no lack of choices."
"Alright." Sasha yawned again, "I suppose I'll decide when I get down there then." she turned to leave, but as soon as she reached the door she collapsed.
The machine powered up. For the first time in over a hundred years the Rophi Shamayim hummed to life; its lights and power indicators sent colorful flashes bouncing off of the vault walls.
All of the remaining living Iscandarians had been gathered here in the palace vault for this one last-ditch effort to save the remnants of their people.
Starsha sat in the operator's chair, her eyes fixed on the readout being projected in front of her. The system was starting up, preparing to attempt another purge, but this time, instead of reforming a dying planet, the machine would be reforming the very bodies of the Iscandari people and purging them of the virus that was quickly killing them all.
The eyes of every single person were fixed on their young queen, watching everything she did. Every one of them it seemed was holding his – or her – breath, waiting for the machine to begin its work.
"Oh, Yahweh, please, please heal my people." Starsha prayed as she saw the final piece of the start-up code appear before her eyes.
Astra stood by, watching intently as her sister worked the machine. Sasha stood next to her, leaning a bit on her sister and looking at both the people and Starsha alternately, seeing the anxious hope that flickered in many faces.
Finally, the Rophi Shamayim was ready.
The user interface appeared. A holographic, step-by-step guide was projected for Starsha to follow, lighting up the appropriate command icons for her to press in the right order.
She pushed everything correctly, following the guide with unerring precision.
Once the last command was put in, Starsha sat back in the chair and waited, now holding her breath too and waiting – just... waiting.
After what seemed an eternity, the Rophi Shamayim began to thrum louder and louder as the machine scanned the new Iscandarium core that Starsha herself had placed there along with a sample of her own cells to serve as a reference point for the machine in restoring the people to their former state.
A minute passed, and then all of the indicators suddenly dimmed and the machine went dark – all except for the glowing core.
As none of the Iscandarians had ever seen the Rophi Shamayim at work, a murmur began to spread through the group, whispers of despair. But just as soon as the whispers began, they were silenced when the machine suddenly burst into a display of brilliance, sending its many lights blazing about in a kaleidoscope of colors.
This sent a collective expression of awe rippling through the gathered adolescents and children.
Suddenly, the light vanished once more as the Rophi Shamayim shut down, it's core and the genetic sample vaporized.
Immediately, Starsha, Astra and Sasha all began to take updated cell samplings from a cross-section of the Iscandarians so that they could be tested again.
Starsha told the people they could disband, wait upstairs in the entryway, or the library, but they all stayed, waiting in the glass room while the princesses left to begin the testing..
Starsha remembered that moment well. Five years ago on this very day – one year after her coronation – they had tried the only option left to them.
She walked into the palace vault again today, looking around, remembering that day they'd used the Rophi Shamayim, which now sat dormant once again, never more to see usefulness.
It was one of the most difficult memories of her twenty-two year life. The Rophi Shamayim – though powerful enough to restore a planet – was not capable of revitalizing living tissue and restoring it to its pre-infected state. The only good it had done was that it had cleansed the air of the foreign substance. There were no more airborne particles that could infect others who might step foot on-planet, though by now it was irrelevant as most of the Iscandarians who had been off-world at the time of the catastrophe had already found homes and settled on other planets, never to return to their homeworld.
Telling her people what had happened – or rather, what had failed to happen – had been the hardest thing she had ever had to do – telling her own people that they were going to die, and that there was nothing she, they, or anyone else besides Yahweh, could do about it now.
Some had wondered why she and her sisters never appeared to be suffering the ill effects of the virus. If explaining their impending doom to her people was hard, explaining her own vitality was nearly impossible. She did her best to explain that she'd been born with a natural immunity, and sometimes the questioner was appeased, resigning themselves to the inevitable, but much more often, they were angry. They wondered why their queen and her sisters had been given such a gift and they had not, doomed to suffer in obscurity and die young.
Starsha did her best to console them all, assuring them that she was still trying to find a cure for the virus, but with her limited resources and knowledge, she had, of course, failed to deliver an antidote. Then they'd all died... one by one... sooner or later. Some of them had taken longer than others, resisting the virus until the end, but they had gone into eternity nonetheless.
All that remained now were the three sisters, Astra, Starsha, and Sasha.
Their world had been a lonely place for them these past years, but at least they'd had work to do, keeping up the palace on their own and making sure that everything they needed didn't fall into disrepair.
Starsha had learned many things over the years: basic vehicle and starship maintenance, sanitary engineering, advanced biology and botany, robotics, architecture, carpentry, even the arts of swordplay and marksmanship, though when or if she would ever have the occasion to use those skills, she had no idea, but having more time than she knew what to do with, she practiced many of them often.
Time was a bit irrelevant now that there was no one else to depend on them for anything.
The days and years had slipped by unnoticed by Starsha and her sisters and before she knew it, Starsha had begun to forget about those two calls to the strange young man whose face she had never seen except for those brief glimpses she'd caught on that first night. She'd even begun to forget what she'd found through the Interface that day years ago.
What did it matter now that Deun had a relative who could take the throne from him? There was nothing she could do to facilitate that coup, and there was no longer a reason for her to get involved. What happened on Gamilon was their business. That was how she was beginning to feel about it. Her world had both collapsed and expanded in the same instant. She now had an entire planet and yet, that was all she had. The universe beyond the atmosphere seemed inconsequential now.
Occasionally, she'd pick up her Interface, even begin to put it on, but then something else would come to mind that always seemed just a bit more pressing than looking for the strange young man, so she'd put it back down and go off to accomplish whatever it was that had come to her mind.
Now, in the silence of the palace vault, Starsha sat on the bench in front of the Rophi Shamayim, once more dark, left to its eternal sleep.
She stared at the machine, wondering why it hadn't worked and once again felt the pain she'd experienced when she'd discovered that the Rophi Shamayim hadn't done as she and everyone else had hoped.
She sat quietly, as she had done so often through the years, letting the silence surround her, sometimes breaking it with a heavy sigh or a shuffling of her blue-boot covered feet. The hem of her long blue dress brushed the floor as she leaned forward, her face in her hands.
She'd sat there quietly for a long time, thinking of nothing and everything all at once, letting her mind jump from one thing to another as it wished when all of a sudden, she heard footsteps coming quickly through the vault door and approaching her.
"Starsha!" An out-of-breath Astra placed a hand on her twin's shoulder, "It's – it's what I feared!"
"What?!" Starsha looked up at Astra and her heart froze when she saw the look on her twin's face.
"It's Sasha." Astra replied, tears beginning to form in her eyes. "She – she's – " Astra bit her lip before continuing, "She has the virus."
"What...?" Starsha said in a harsh whisper, not believing what she'd just heard, "But how...?"
"I don't know..." Astra replied, "She shouldn't have contracted it – not with the eradication of the virus from Iscandar. Only those infected at the time of the purge..." here Astra stopped and looked at her sister.
"But she was infected..." Starsha replied, horrified as she remembered Sasha's odd behavior, leaning on Astra for support at times and rubbing her joints as though she suffered from some form of inflammation. That, coupled with her occasional disappearances to rest and bouts with something that caused her vision to cloud and blur more and more often confirmed it. Then Starsha remembered one of the key qualifications for the genetic alteration she, Astra, and Sasha shared, "And I know why she contracted it..."
"How? She is of the same generation we are. How could she get it? Her system should have fended it off." Astra said, voice beginning to shake.
"She was... too young..." Starsha said haltingly. "Frincha said 'adolescent.' Sasha was only eleven... Too young to enable the gene to activate, and by the time it did, it was too late to do anything but slow the virus's progress..."
Astra met her sister's gaze, holding back her tears in silence.
"How did she keep it hidden for so long?" Starsha asked, her own tears starting to brim in her eyes.
"She's our sister," Astra said as she finally broke down and began to cry, "She can do whatever she puts her mind to."
Starsha nodded, "Maybe you should go and see if there's anything she needs."
Astra nodded, swiping at her tears as she left almost as quickly as she'd come.
Starsha watched Astra leave, feeling the shock of the discovery wash over her as she realized that her little sister was going to die.
Then something came to her and she got up and left the vault, heading up to her quarters as fast as she could.
Once there, she sifted through several things that she'd lain on an empty shelf – things she'd not used in years. Not finding what she sought, she began digging through an old chest she'd put some things into - mostly old clothes.
She found it!
A box, sealed for months now. She put in the key sequence to open it and the glass melted away to reveal her old Interface. She grabbed the thing and pulled in onto her hand, hoping that perhaps this one last thing could bring help to her sister.
Deun sighed impatiently and drummed his fingers on the armrest, alternately staring at Yeshin and another of his subordinates, Goer Volgar.
"Volgar, I sent you to Balan to ensure the smooth transport of equipment through the territory between here and there. Have I chosen something too complicated for your tiny brain?" Deun said it so condescendingly that even Volgar understood the Leader's unhappiness.
"No, Sire." Goer bowed to Deun, "It – we – our ship had some... unexplained difficulties."
"Difficulties caused by 'the rebels' I assume?" Deun raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Volgar, you know our perimeter guard is impregnable. There is no possible way that they could have gotten through, sabotaged your ship, and then left unnoticed. I do not tolerate excuses. Leave Gamilon now and get your sad excuse for a carcase to Balan or you will never see the light of Gamilon's sun again. Am I clear?"
"Yes... Sire..." Volgar muttered, not too pleased with the Leader's quick dismissal of the rebel threat, but powerless to make the young man listen.
Goer left the throne room dejected, his second in command in tow.
As soon as the doors closed behind Volgar, Deun slammed his fist into the armrest. "They're all incompetent! Every single one of them! Did my brother take all the intelligent one with him when he left?"
Yeshin wanted to agree, but in the interest of keeping his head, he refrained.
Deun groaned, then sighed and looked at Yeshin, "So, aside from the group Volgar was supposed to be supervising, have the rest of the shipments arrived at their destinations between here and Balan?"
"Yes, Sire." Yeshin nodded, thankful he could give the Leader a positive answer for once.
"Good." Deun said, his eyes narrowing in thought for the hundredth time in the past several weeks. "It seems everything – or rather, most things – are working out as they should. Soon everything will be made right again."
Yeshin nodded in silent agreement, a solemn look on his face as he thought about the catastrophe that had befallen Gamilon. "Such a pity she is dying, Sire..."
"Indeed, servant." Deun sighed, seeming not the least bit concerned about the planet itself, "But, there is a solution, as always, and pursuing it has proven much less troublesome than I had ever hoped. With the help of the zealots, we'll be able to commence the second phase of the operation on schedule. Once Volgar finally arrives at Balan that is." Deun sneered at the now-closed door, "The idiot thinks I should have taken another course of action. Well, he doesn't understand the politics of the situation, servant. He has no idea how important it is to save face. If that means squashing a few inconsequential pawns in the mean time, then so be it."
"Yes, Sire." Yeshin nodded and let the conversation end.
"We've heard from our source inside Volgar's entourage." Naomi told Eliora and Raymond triumphantly, before letting her face fall into a more sober expression, "And it isn't good."
Raymond and Eliora listened carefully as Naomi recounted to them the news she'd received from their inside man, "Volgar's managed to get the repair crews working around the clock and the flagship is almost ready to launch again. There's no time to get back in and 'inconvenience' them once more before they leave. We've run out of time."
"We'll send a ship out after them then." Eliora said stubbornly, "We can't let them reach Balan with that equipment."
"We have no ship to send." Raymond sighed, "The only one we have left isn't space-worthy and there's no time to make it so."
"Then what are we to do? Sit back and let Deun commit mass murder to make himself look like a hero?" Eliora protested.
"Of course not." Naomi replied, "This plan of Deun's... it's pure evil. He has to be stopped somehow."
"But our power will not be what stops him." Raymond said calmly, looking at both women, "Adonai will have His way. We've done our part for now. There is nothing else to be done except to beseech Adonai on behalf of our world, and the victims of Deun's plans. Who knows how many thousands – or even millions of lives have already been snuffed out because of Deun? We cannot control him, but 'the king's heart is in the hand of Adonai,' and He will turn it where He wishes. The only One who can convince Deun to stop this madness now is Adonai, and it is to Him we must bring our troubles. No one else can help us now."
* Mahtehkhetim – literally "metals"; used here to refer to Iscandar's "metal" robotic servants that the three princesses began to use more frequently after the death of the rest of the population