“Can you have my crew off the Avenger without raising suspicions by the time the fragment gets here?” Kiyan was a little sad as he looked forward to possibly the greatest battle of his life without his friends at his side.
“Sapphire has been assigned to redesign the environmental systems on another battle ship. I convinced them that her improvements to our systems were quite substantial.”
“But they were! No offence but the air in the ship feels more like a planet instead of a spacecraft.” Kiyan understood that as an organic he would appreciate the improvement more than an AI.
“I must admit that her success was helpful in perpetrating the subterfuge. Jeremy, Fred and Addy will be sent to the draconic ship for additional elemental training. Corban has been chosen to represent the protectorate in a meeting with the thorans. Savos as the thoran representative will also be at the meeting. That only leaves Terra, Ray, Kronos and a couple others that I can transport to another ship at the last moment.”
“I don’t know what awaits us but I see no other choice.” Kiyan resigned himself to whatever fate was in his chosen path.
“The well laid plans of mice and men. One only hopes that we trod not a path that leads to failure.” Alec mused aloud.
Chapter Twenty-three: Convergence
“Theo, something is wrong, I can feel it. Time is shifting and I can’t tell how.” There was worry evident in Kendra’s thoughts.
“I would not have chosen the word wrong. Different is a more applicable description.” Theo‘s response did little to alleviate Kendra’s agitation.
“There will be a shift and I don’t know what will cause it. I have never seen this time period in the visions.” The vague feeling that Kendra was feeling annoyed her with its persistence.
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“Greetings Kendra.” Baric addressed Kendra when she appeared on the com channel.
“Greetings Baric. To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” Kendra had not expected the commander responsible for the vault to be so close to the front.
“I wish to see if I can be of any more help to the plan you have been developing.” Baric looked slightly surprised by the question Kendra had posed.
“Plan? Please enlighten me. I seem to have forgotten about my involvement.” Baric was even more surprised by Kendra’s ignorance.
“You requested that Kiyan acquire the temporal fragment for you. I have just delivered it to the Avenger but seeing that your ship is also present in the blockade I begin to wonder why you did not have me transfer it directly to the Athena. Aboard the Avenger it is useless but aboard your ship you can use it.” Baric began reviewing his communications with Kiyan as he saw the astonished expression flicker across Kendra’s face. Suspicions that not all was as it had seemed to be began to surface.
“How is it useless with Kiyan?” Kendra asked the question that she was thinking out loud almost unintentionally.
“He is unascended unlike you. Am I to take it that you had no knowledge of this transaction?” Baric regretted how easily Kendra’s son had fooled him.
“He is ascended and is fully capable of using the fragment.” Kendra snapped her attention back to the conversation. “Thank you for informing me of this old friend. There are things I must investigate further.”
“I only hope I have not caused too much damage by my carelessness.” Baric remained expressionless. “I see that the apple has not fallen far from the tree. Be sure to give the insolent lad a sound thrashing for me.” There was a click and the channel was closed.
“Theo! Kiyan is up to something.” Kendra didn’t have time to wait for the com channel to open and reached out to touch Theo’s mind with her message.
“I’m not terribly surprised. He just cloaked and left his position in the blockade. It seems Terra and a couple of his crew members have just been transported to my ship. Have you any idea what he is up to?” Theo must have been on the bridge to be able to open the channel so fast.
“I’m not positive but he has the temporal fragment and he was very interested in the dark one this morning. You might draw several disturbing conclusions from that.” Kendra clearly already had.
“How did he get the temporal fragment? It is supposed to be on the vault!” Theo glanced down at the panels in front of him.
“He tricked Baric into thinking he was acting under my orders. Besides, you of all people should know that he has access to your ancestor’s collective memories.” Kendra was about to say something else when Theo interrupted her.
“The portal is stabilizing. A ship’s shields should be able to protect an organic crew from the effects of the radiation.” Theo tapped a few buttons before continuing. “Whoever is doing it is doing from our side and Atlas tells me that the effect it only temporary at best.”
“I think we both know who is doing it. Theo, we need to get to Kiyan before it is too late.” With that the both of them melted into energy and slipped into space. Being in space unprotected from the discordant energy being emitted by the portal was difficult. It took both of Kendra’s and Theo’s combined strength to resist the repulsive energy patterns. It only took them a moment to transverse the distance that separated them and move towards the Avenger’s expected location.
They soon felt the shape of the ship moving against the fabric of space. Unfortunately the shields were up. A normal shield would have offered little in the way of impedance. The phase shifts would have given ample opportunity to slide between. The Assurian shields were different. They utilized temporal buffers to blend the phase shifts together and multiple emitters to use several phases at the same time. It was like throwing a rock between moving railroad boxcars only with a dozen moving at different speeds and directions at the same time that the rock needed to pass between.
The opportunity came when the Avenger drew close enough to the portal to have a detrimental effect on the shields and a surprised drakken ship navigated into the invisible battleship. Taking advantage of the split second fissure in the shields, Kendra and Theo took their forms on the ship. Just as they had fully became corporeal again a jolt nearly knocked them off their feet.
“We are too late. The ship is through.” Theo verbalized the obvious. “We are in the drakken universe.”
“We can go back through.” Kendra strode purposefully towards the bridge door in front of them. The door slid open revealing Kiyan in full sync with the ship. Attempts to communicate with her were futile. His mind was closed to any telepathic intrusions. The temporal fragment was still glowing above Kiyan.
“Alec! Let us talk to him.” Theo directed his words at a nearby control panel even though he knew that the AI was fully aware of what he said no matter where he was on the ship. Instead of the expected interface channel two sync stations formed at a couple of the control units.
“It isn’t what I had in mind but I suppose it will do.” Theo made the first move and was synced with the mainframe a moment before Kendra.
“Kiyan, we need to go back now before the drakken here detect us.” Kendra addressed Kiyan’s virtual form. He was standing inside a semi opaque sphere that had all the ship’s sensor information overlaid around him. The visual representations of Alec and Luke could be seen beside him.
“Look.” A giant image appeared in front of Theo and Kendra. In it they could see the enlarged portal tearing at space. The other universe could be seen through it framed by the burning fringes. Outside of the window an intense whirlpool of energy twisted at space. The highlighted drakken ships in orderly formations were lined up prepared to pass the portal. Detecting the sudden shift in stability several of the formations broke off and raced towards the portal. Just before they got to the window it suddenly clouded and shrunk. Most of the ships were atomized by the edges and only a fraction managed to pass through before the portal was only big enough for a few ships at a time to pass through. The image changed and the watchers could see thousands of ships littering the space before the portal in orderly rows.
 
; “We can’t go back without taking thousands of drakken with us.” Kendra knew what Kiyan meant by showing them the images. She wondered at how many ships had been destroyed as a side effect of Kiyan’s crossing. The information was instantly presented by the mainframe. A couple hundred ships had been destroyed but they were only a drop in the ocean compared to how many were waiting. Already the ocean of ships were reorganizing themselves to take advantage of any future stabilizations of the portal. It was eerie watching ten thousand ships move in unison like a school of fish. Kiyan had moved the Avenger off to one side and thus avoided the charge and repositioning of the fleet.
“I had no idea there were so many mechanical drakken prepared to cross over.” Theo gazed at the landscape before him with an astonished expression.
“There isn’t a single organic in the entire fleet!” Kendra had the passive sensor data overlaid on her own sphere.
“It is worse even than that. I doubt that we would find any organic beings with our longest range decloaked scans. I didn’t see anything but these machines with my shadow walk. I had hoped only to risk myself but you are now here.” Kiyan was silent for a moment before continuing.” Phase two commences.” Kiyan had hardly finished speaking before dozens of the ships broke off from the main fleet and began moving in what looked like a search pattern. “The great chase begins.”
“We are cloaked now but they are bound to find us.” Theo’s words were unneeded as the Avenger was already moving at top speed. The search pattern was soon abandoned with a faster more thorough method. The ships that made up the outside of the fleet began carpet bombing space sector by sector in expanding rings.
“If we go into warp with them so close they can follow us. How did you plan for that eventuality?” Kendra directed her query at Kiyan.
“The great chase.” Kiyan’s response reminded Kendra of Theo a couple hundred years younger and caused her to roll her eyes.
“He is definitely your son Theo.” This time it was Theo rolling his eyes at Kendra’s response.
“You make it sound like it was my fault we are here somehow. They are almost here with the attack wall.” Kendra didn't have a chance to respond to Theo’s comment when the Avenger decloaked and opened a warp frame. The tumultuous energies of subspace surrounded them an instant later. The pocket of space jolted with the shocks of the drakken ships entering warp so close.
“At this range they can force their way into our warp frame. Surely you have a plan for that?” Kendra’s question went unanswered as a spike in the energy readings validated her concern. Already a drakken vessel was merging warp frames. Alec managed to delay the inevitable by randomizing the warp drive power output and frequencies. Knowing that a malevolent ship in the same warp frame could cause deadly fluctuations in the subspace stability, the Avenger dropped into normal space. A moment later several dozen drakken warp frames opened around the ship.
“You can’t hope to last in a fight all by yourself against numbers like those only a jump away.” Theo was irritated by what he considered a major oversight by his son.
“I don’t have to. All I have to do is make them think the impossible.” Kiyan’s enigmatic response did little to make Theo relax. Instead he put himself to work doing what Kiyan termed “distracting”. It involved firing at every ship within range with every ordinance that the Avenger carried. In a minute about half a dozen warp frames opened up and the Avenger was pulled into one of them. The familiar jolts followed as the drakken reentered warp.
“What did that avail us?” Kendra could sense a larger plan in the peripheral of her mind.
“The great chase.” Kiyan was too busy to elaborate.
“I understand the appeal but it is unsound logic.” Theo sounded frustrated. He would have tried some different subspace evasion methods like broadcasting subspace white noise in an attempt to disguise his trail or trying to generate warp shadows. A grid representing normal space appeared in front of them. Overtop of this grid was seen a blue dot that represented the Avenger’s relative to normal space. Several red dots could be seen that presumably represented drakken warp frames.
“What the...? How did you manage that?” What had caught Theo’s attention were the five smaller blue dots that were traveling in different directions from the Avenger. Each of the smaller blue dots had a following of red dots. Three of the smaller dots disappeared. Two of them reappeared a moment later and split into two more dots each. The third dot never reappeared. Kiyan dropped the Avenger out of warp and was immediately surrounded by what appeared to still be a goodly amount of drakken ships. Again they repeated the distraction routine and returned to warp surrounded by several new dots.
“How did you manage to make them think a fighter was the same as a battleship? They should have been able tell that the warp frame was different without wasting any ships following it.” Theo watched the elaborate branching patterns left on the grid by the dots every time they divided. The red dots divided their numbers every time a new blue dot appeared on the grid. Soon a swarm of dots and branching lines filled the grid. The Avenger dropped out of warp a few more times adding to the number of blue dots on the screen.
“I added artificial mass generators to my warp capable fighter compliment. It wasn’t difficult to update my existing fighter wings. All I had to do was to adjust the warp generator parameters to simulate a larger warp frame critical mass target.” Kiyan interrupted his explanation to drop out of warp. Seeing that no drakken immediately dropped out with him, Kiyan released a final wave of fighters and cloaked. The drakken caught up just in time to follow the fighters back into warp.
“The pattern is perfectly symmetrical in dispersion. I released the largest wave of fighters first and then progressed with increasingly smaller numbers. The pattern will continue to disperse over several more light year sectors without the Avenger. If the drakken manage to predict the pattern they will only find fighters with battleship mass signatures. After reaching the full disbursement pattern the fighters will remain in warp until either their energy reserves give out or the drakken manage to track them down and destabilize their warp frames. Either way will require massive amounts resources scattered over a wide area.” Kiyan remained under cloak but was relieved to note that there were no drakken remaining within sensor range.
“Genius. The drakken will lose every ship they use to destabilize the warp frames resulting untold ships wasted.” There was admiration in Theo’s voice.
“Also Alec is convinced that this ruse will make the AI think that there was never a battleship in their universe in the first place.” Kiyan began to dread what he knew was coming next but did not have much time to wait for it.
“From what you have told us, this universe is entirely made up of mechanical drakken. Don’t get me wrong but your attacks will not amount to much against numbers like that. Why exactly did you come here if getting stranded in a hostile universe was not your plan?” Kendra cut directly to the heart of the matter.
“I find it hard to believe that your crew willingly allowed themselves to be transferred off your ship in preparation of a fiasco like this.” Theo spoke up before Kiyan had a chance to answer Kendra.
“I believe that the dark lords are still organic and oversee the mechanical drakken in production. Due to the dark energy around them I have never been able to detect their life signs very well. I want to close the portal from the dark universe before the dark one had a chance to start a war. As for my crew, they didn’t know what I had planned.” Kiyan sensed Alec’s annoyance over something.
“About that. There is a small black lizard hiding in a plant in the atmospheric processing facility.” Alec brought the image up in front of them. It was as Alec had said. A small black winged lizard only a couple centimeters long was curled up inside the hollow stem of a guerrero stalk.
“Ray!” Kiyan scowled. “I thought you sent him to Theo’s ship with Terra. Alec, Why is he here?”
“How should I know? He was in the simulator when I t
ransported him and..... Oh. He transported to the simulator from the atmospheric deck. He must have been running a program with himself designed into and faked the transport. I do not understand how you organics are so adept at deceiving others.” Alec was positively fuming over having been tricked.
“I suspect he inferred your plan somehow through his connection with you.” Theo was trying to withhold his laughter at Alec’s behavior.
“Ray’s specialty is martial arts and security not programming. Someone else had to have helped him pull off something like that.” Kiyan was still scowling.
Alec made himself busy running analyses based off of Kiyan’s observation. “It had to be Luke. With his connection with you, he would have to at least be equally as deceptive as you are.”
“Ha, you are forgetting that my deceptions have been falling apart rather quickly of late. First my parent figured it out and now we have Ray.” Kiyan responded to Alec’s accusation. It is possible but if he was willing to do it for Ray...
“I haven’t forgotten anything since the time my data was transferred to this mainframe. I am already running a high level scan for any life signs across the entire ship for others.” Alec was showing the results.
“Now in all fairness, you have just managed to deceive an entire drakken armada and it was only because of Baric that we figured it out in time. You also managed to get the rest of the crew off the ship.” Kendra cast a rueful eye at Theo who apparently thought the entire situation to be rather comical.
“There are no life signs other than ourselves and Ray on the entire ship.” Alec displayed the data before the trio.