Ivan Kal - Inheritance

“Adrian,” Tomas said as he walked around the table and shook his hand.

“Hello, Tomas,” Adrian said.

“Come, sit.” Tomas guided him to the two couches to the side of the room. “How have you been?” Tomas asked once they were comfortable.

“I could be better, but well enough,” Adrian responded.

“Good. It will lessen over time, the pain, become easier to live with. You will never truly forget, but I think that you wouldn’t want to,” Tomas said.

“No,” Adrian agreed.

“So, tell me, why have you come?” Tomas asked.

Adrian took a breath and released it slowly. “I wanted speak to you about the Sentinels.” Tomas quirked his eyebrow, and Adrian continued, “I want to accelerate our plans a bit.”

“In what way?” Tomas asked.

“I know that originally we planned on making the Warpath system the base for Sentinels, but lately I was thinking of moving it to someplace else. We would still train people in Warpath, choose Sentinels from there. But the actual base would be somewhere else. I want to keep Warpath out of it, make it a place where people can train to be warriors, not turn it into a Sentinel choosing ground. We will make an offer, and if someone wants to take it, we transfer them to the program,” Adrian responded.

“I think that we are still a few years away from that, Adrian,” Tomas said.

Adrian made the Nel gesture for agreeing. “We are. But I want to build the base now, to get everything up and running. And there is one more thing. I want to give Sentinels psionics.”

Tomas scratched his head for a few moments, thinking. “Why do you think that they will need them?”

“Besides making them much more formidable, it is the telepathy that will make their work much easier,” Adrian said.

“We don’t know how to use the psionics yet. And our bodies aren’t yet up to par,” Tomas commented.

Adrian looked uncomfortable for a moment before sighing. “I have talked with Seo-yun, and will be going through the treatment she devised in a couple of days. And after I recover, I plan on going to the Sowir homeworld to learn how to use my telepathy.”

“You would go to them to teach you?” Tomas asked, taken aback. He didn’t know if he could have done the same thing.

“They are my only chance of mastering it. The other psionics I will need to discover and master on my own,” Adrian said. “And I didn’t mean that we give psionics to every current Sentinel, and not for a long time. The current Sentinels aren’t ready, they need to learn more. They don’t even know our plans. I will need to see which ones want to take it on. And our people haven’t figured out how to trigger the change in grownups yet. But in five, maybe ten years, we will, and I think that we should give it to them. By then I will have learned enough to train others, and then they can come back and train more.”

Tomas nodded thoughtfully, agreeing. “Yes. And by then we could start triggering the change in infants, in the progeny centers. By the time their psionics manifest, there will be people who could teach them.” Tomas looked at Adrian, impressed. “That is a good plan. And which system do you plan to turn into Sentinel home system?”

Adrian made a Nel gesture that Tomas didn’t recognize and then spoke, “Sol.” He smiled and added, “More precisely, Mars.”

Several days later, Tomas sat in his office with his top advisers and friends: Laura, Jack, Nadia, Seo-yun, and Sumia, who was visiting from Nuva.

“The Sowir have apparently kept their word. We haven’t had any incident since Adrian talked with them,” Laura said. “The effort of securing the system is going well, and soon we will be able to let them have a limited control over their system back.”

“What about their tools?” Jack asked.

“They put those in their home system in stasis, and we will transport them out of the system soon,” Seo-yun said. “Those they had left on their other worlds have already turned feral and killed each other or starved. We can’t do anything about those.”

“How is the situation on Guxaxac?” Tomas asked.

“The fighting is still intense. The Sowir are refusing to communicate, even when we broadcast the recordings from their brethren or bring a Sowir from their homeworld to speak with them. It is just as Lurker of the Depths warned us. They will keep fighting. And in truth, I doubt that the Guxcacul would have appreciated or allowed the Sowir to surrender. There is a lot of hate towards the Sowir there,” Jack said.

“At least the Sowir that surrendered don’t appear too broken up about their fellows dying,” Tomas added.

“They are a very strange race. They knew that it was impossible to get their people off Guxaxac, so to them, they are already dead,” Laura added.

“I still can’t believe that the Sowir are defeated,” Sumia said. “It has been so long… before your people came, we were counting days until the Sowir turned and finished us off.”

The others didn’t respond, and the room lapsed into silence, until Nadia broke it.

“The Nelus government is moving. They are going to start angling to get their former worlds back,” she said, “and I’m sure that the Guxcacul will do so too once they get their own world under control.”

“Well, tough luck,” Tomas said. “We took them back; they are ours.”

“Once they see that you won’t budge, they will want to join the Empire,” Sumia added.

“And when they ask, we will speak about it. Until then, I am keeping what we conquered,” Tomas added firmly. He would not allow anything to compromise the strength of his Empire. If the Guxcacul and Nelus wanted to join the Empire, they would have to work for it.

Sowir homeworld

Lurker in the Depths swam aimlessly in the ocean that had birthed him. For the first time since he’d ben born, since he had become aware of himself, he was feeling unsure of himself, of his path and that of his people. He had always believed that to feel the Spirit of the Universe was to never know doubt for your actions. What his people had always believed to be the truth was nothing more than an incorrect assumption. They’d been wrong.

One moment had changed everything. And now his entire people knew guilt, a thing that they had never felt before. They knew that they had done a horrible thing, and they didn’t know how to handle that.

Already some of his fellows had sunken into madness. The ones on Guxaxac had all gone insane. Lurker of the Depths had lied when he’d told their jailors that they wouldn’t respond to the messages, that they wouldn’t believe them. When they had sent people from the homeworld, let them get close enough to send messages through the Spirit, they had listened. And they had gone mad. They would continue to fight not because they didn’t believe, but because they could not handle the truth. It was they who had almost wiped out an entire species.

Most of those on the homeworld had not been in such positions, where they commanded their tools from the ground to slaughter and kill.

Lurker of the Depths himself was close to madness. He might not have commanded troops on the ground, but he had commanded fleets. He had killed. And he knew that they would never be able to redeem themselves for what they had done.

And yet, there was a part of him that refused to give in to the madness. It would be an insult to all he had killed, all the lives his people had taken. And he would not allow that. The Sowir race would change. It would take time, but Lurker of the Depths would make sure that the Sowir were not remembered as mass murderers.

Sanctuary

Adrian, Sora, and Akash stood at the edge of the plateau on which Olympus City was built. Behind them was the city, and below them spread the endless sea of trees, illuminated by the two moons and the nebula. The vista was amazing, with mountains in the distance piercing the teal-tinted sky.