Chris Randolph - Stars Rain Down

Juliette’s brow furrowed and her jaw tightened as she considered Marcus’ plea. She finally waved the crewmen away and they stood down. “Fine. But I don’t like it.”

“Of course not. You’re a good doctor. I need you to keep an eye on this thing, alright? Check for signs of rejection. An adverse reaction could kill me.” He could feel that the ship liked Juliette, and he smirked. “So do I,” he accidentally said aloud.

Faulkland leaned over the circular railing with an unusually large smile on his face. He was loving every minute of this. “So, we should all get used to you being double extra crazy?”

“God, I hope not.” As if on cue, the device’s tendrils moved inside his skull again and he jerked. “Just need a little time to acclimate. How long was I out, anyway?”

Juliette had her medical probe drawn and was scanning the side of his head. “About thirty seconds from when it struck to when you started talking. You were in REM sleep.”

Marcus said, “Felt like days.”

The ship informed him that the battle he experienced took several days to complete. “I guess that makes sense,” he replied, then shook his head as he realized he was speaking aloud again. It was going to take some getting used to.

Juliette finished her examination with a sigh, and finally stepped back. “Everything seems alright. There’s a little bit of inflammation around the wounds, but nothing serious. Less than I’d expect, in fact. Let me know immediately if it starts to itch or burn.”

“Will do,” Marcus said with a sigh, glad to have a little space to breathe again. It was bad enough having someone new in his head, let alone being poked and prodded like a lab rat.

His gaze swept the rest of the room, and the place was now familiar, all except for the thirty-some-odd Eireki milling around in pressure suits. That was a little out of the ordinary. He called up memories of the room, and the ship responded with the different configurations it could assume. The variety was staggering. He selected one with an abundance of the molded seats, and the room shifted to accommodate. “Care to have a seat?”

The crew responded with understandable caution. The ship informed him that many were terrified and vividly imagined arms pinning them down and jamming bugs into their heads. He made a mental note about establishing some sort of privacy policy.

“At ease, folks. She’s not gonna bite. She won’t do anything to you against your will, and she’s frankly having enough trouble dealing with one of these things right now,” he said while tapping the device on his temple. “I called up the chairs because it’s awkward being the only person in a room sitting.”

No one sat down. Marcus stood instead and allowed the chairs to melt back into the floor.

Rao was staring at him, and looked to be a thousand leagues deep in thought. If he weren’t wearing a helmet, he’d undoubtedly be stroking his week-old beard.

“Question, Jay?”

“Too many to count. How about this… what the hell happened when you touched the generator?”

“She was asleep and had been for a very long time. When I touched the hollow-drive, it jumped to max output and woke her up. She flew into a panic, like waking up from a nightmare with your heart pounding.”

“If she was asleep,” Juliette asked, “how did the doors and tubes work?”

“Reflex. It’s by design. If she’s incapacitated, her crew would still be able to navigate the ship and escape if necessary.”

“Alright,” Rao said, “and she brought us here to latch that thing to your head?”

“That’s part of it. She wanted a good look at the invaders, to determine if we were hostile. Once she realized who we are, she made contact through the device.”

“Who we are? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Marcus took a moment to collect his scattered thoughts, and put them in order. Bits and pieces of history were streaming into him, but whole massive swaths were mysteriously missing. The ship was forgetful, and he hoped it was just that she was still waking up, but she offered no explanation.

“Right. There’s a really long answer to that question, but the short version is… uhhh… we’re aliens?”

Confused faces all around said he’d need to come up with a slightly longer answer.

“Alright, let’s try the story book version. Once upon a time, there was a civilization that had stretched itself across the entire galaxy. They called themselves Eireki, and they were peaceful, enlightened creatures, who communicated with each other through telepathy. They were also masters of technology, able to manufacture intelligent living machines like this ship.”

There was a step in the sequence which Marcus couldn’t piece together, and every attempt to get hold of it left him empty handed.

He went on. “For the longest time, they believed they were alone in the universe. They found other planets with strange and wonderful life, but none of it was intelligent. Not yet at least, so the Eireki became stewards, fostering life wherever they found it in hopes of one day meeting creatures like themselves. That was until the Nefrem arrived… the enemy.”

There was something wrong or missing there, too. He couldn’t pin-point what it was, but it just didn’t feel right.

“The Nefrem came from outside the galaxy in a living planet that was both their ship and breeding ground. They were twisted demons who devoured life. They absorbed new gene-sequences, keeping whatever was valuable and discarding the rest, while recycling the flesh itself into their own perverted idea of order.

“As you might’ve guessed, war erupted between the Eireki and Nefrem. It was savage and bloody, and stretched on for millennia. Both sides grew stronger, angrier and more effective through the conflict, and by its end, they were shattering whole planets in their efforts to exterminate one another.

“The war finally came to a head with a single cataclysmic battle which involved the entirety of both races and their trillions of warships. The fighting was fierce and laid waste to the system where it was fought. When the smoke cleared, the only survivors were this ship and the Nefrem’s living planet. Nemesis.

“The remaining Eireki knew that approaching the living planet meant death, since it produced a… like, a psychic signal that destroyed Eireki minds. They had no choice, though, so they charged the living planet and pushed it backward into a gas giant. Then the ship fired until the gas giant erupted into an artificial star.”

“And the demons were destroyed?” Faulkland asked.

“No. I know this sounds impossible, but it was only a prison. The Nefrem technology was capable of channeling and redirecting the star’s energy into a protective shell. I don’t really understand it, but she’s confident they survived, trapped and dormant all this time, and will survive the star’s eventual collapse, as well.

“Which leads to the ‘us being aliens’ part. The Eireki knew the Nefrem would eventually break free and begin their conquest all over again, so as their dying command, they sent the ship on a final mission. They’d found a planet uncannily like their own homeworld, which they kept secret from the Nefrem. They called it the Garden.

“It had abundant life of its own, and the Eireki thought it a strong candidate to eventually produce its own intelligent life, but they couldn’t take any chances with the future. They sent the ship to break their most sacred law and seed the planet with their own genetic material.”

“And you’re telling us that this Garden is Earth,” Juliette said.

“Yep. And we’re the Eireki reborn.”

“Then why aren’t we telepathic?”

“So we could fight the living planet,” Marcus said. “Telepathy was an amazing boon to the Eireki people, but it also became their greatest weakness. They couldn’t even approach the enemy because of it. The ship claims there have been unexpected side effects, though. They never had culture anything like ours, for instance.”