Chapter 7
When Ned awoke, he wondered if this would be his last morning on Earth. It was a slightly morbid thought, he realized, but he was having a hard time picturing himself re-integrating into Earth society a second time. But there was plenty of time to figure that out. Mirana was probably going crazy with impatience, and he didn’t know how much more farewell time he or his parents could take. But it had been late last night, and it had felt wrong to just leave. He got up and went downstairs. His parents were already eating breakfast.
“I called Jared this morning,” Ned’s father said. “I told him you’d be calling.” Jared was away at school, and by the time they had finished talking the previous night, it had been too late to call. So Ned called up Jared and explained things to him. Jared was surprised, but he didn’t have nearly as much to say. Ned realized that he could go and visit his brother before leaving, but somehow it didn’t seem like that would make anything easier on either of them. So they left it with the phone call.
“I have to go,” Ned announced when he was done.
“Can I pack you something?” his mother asked.
“No, I’m ready. Thank you, for everything. I’m going to miss you.”
There was an awkward round of parting sentiments and last-minute hugs, and then they were all standing by the front door. But Ned couldn’t just walk out the door and vanish. Somehow, he wanted his parents to see what he was really headed for. He reached through the Plasmic ether into his battle suit’s activator pin and engaged the armor. His parents’ eyes went wide as the blue metal materialized around him in a wash of light. The helmet came on too, but he disengaged it so he could look his parents in the eye. “I love you,” he said finally. Then he brought the Plasma to bear, gathering in his hand and spreading across him until he was surrounded by the surging blue light. He smiled at his parents, then teleported himself away.
“It’s about time,” Mirana announced with obvious irritation. Ned was actually standing in his backyard again; there hadn’t been any other place in range that he could safely teleport to.
“Should I find a better spot?” he asked.
“No, we’re right above you.”
Ned looked up and saw a black spot in the sky, were Nemesis’s shuttle bay was poking through the Shadow field. Another quick teleport, and Ned was inside it. The doors closed as the ship lifted higher into the sky.
“At least it wasn’t a total waste of time,” Mirana said through the com link. “I found your ship. Pretty effective, putting it down in a glacier. What did you do, trigger an avalanche and then hike back to civilization?”
“Pretty much.” Smardwurst Varlon had suggested “parking” his starfighter under an ice floe or in an underwater cave to avoid satellite detection, but the idea of walking home from the North Pole or across the ocean floor had been a little unnerving. So Ned had taken a slightly riskier course and landed his fighter under an outcropping of rock and then made sure to cover it with a healthy measure of snow. He had still had to travel several miles to the nearest town, alternating walking and teleporting. But the fighter had kept responding to his occasional homing signal, so apparently it had gone unnoticed.
“We’re coming up on it now. Opening the bay doors.”
The shuttle door opened, and Ned found himself looking down on a field of snow and rock. His suit pinpointed the spot where his fighter was waiting for him. He teleported the distance to the ground, then took a look around. There really was a lot of snow in his way.
“Think the fighter can punch its way out on autopilot?”
“Wow, you really are out of practice. I’m going to leave you to this one on your own. See you in orbit.” Mirana cut the transmission.
Ned took a deep breath. She was right, of course – there were probably a dozen ways for him to free his ship from the accumulation of ice. He closed his eyes and began drawing in power. It came to him in waves, building in strength and demanding release. Finally he opened his eyes and surveyed the scene again. He send tendrils of Plasma through the ether, positioning them to come into normal space around his fighter angling outward into the mountain air. When he released the power, ice exploded toward him in a shower of blue fire and white powder. More ice collapsed, but again Ned blasted it away. Eventually he decided that enough of it was cleared away, and he signaled his fighter to launch. The was a loud crunching sound as the engines pushed it clear of the ice and into the air. Ned’s Plasmic powers were already feeling exhausted after all that teleportation and ice removal, so he signaled the fighter to land and lower the command chair. He climbed in, raised the chair back into the cockpit, and angled the fighter toward the morning sky. He held the controls almost lovingly, excited to find that the lessons he had been given in what seemed like another life were coming back to him. Thoughts of leaving his friends and family tugged at his attention a bit, but he was flying now, and such concerns were just going to have to wait. He accelerated quickly, not glancing back, and soon the blue morning sky faded to the starlit black of space. He was taking no precautions to avoid being detected from Earth satellites, but then again he was about to disappear, so he figured it did not really matter.
Ned flipped his fighter over and took in the blue and green expanse of the Earth visible “above” him. It really was a breathtaking sight. He thought about all the people down there, struggling against billions of challenges but unaware of the threats that might come against them from outside. Ned promised himself that he would keep it that way.
“Are you ready for this?” Mirana’s voice came over his com link.
“Yeah,” he said deliberately. “I think I am.”
“You know, you really are one of us now. An Anacronian.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like the original people who left Earth. Your knowledge of the galaxy has caused you to lose your place in your world’s history. You’re leaving to use that power somewhere else.”
Ned supposed it was true, but the idea of “losing his place” on Earth didn’t exactly sound appealing. “Are you trying to encourage me?”
“I’m just making sure you don’t have second thoughts. I want to make sure you want this. Oh, and one other thing. Don’t let me hear you telling anyone you’re coming to ‘help me’ do anything. If you’re coming, it has to be your initiative, your mission.”
“I understand. But, where are you?”
A signal showed up on his fighter’s scanner readout, and Ned headed toward the spot. The familiar landing bay of Nemesis appeared floating in space, surrounded by nothing, and Ned guided his fighter down onto its deck. The bay doors closed behind him, shutting out the image of his homeworld. Maybe Mirana had been right; as Ned climbed out of the cockpit and walked toward the airlock, the harsh metal surroundings and impossibly complex instrument panels of the landing bay drove home her point. He was starting to feel like an alien already.
“Meet me in the pricom,” Mirana’s voice instructed as the airlock pressurized. He deactivated his armor and walked the short distance to the ship’s primary command center – the only command center in the case of Nemesis. The first time Ned had met Mirana aboard this ship, she had nearly kicked him in the face to demonstrate the need to stay on his guard. It had seemed a bit out of place on an ally’s vessel, but he found himself checking around corners before he turned them. Nothing happened along his way, and soon he was in front of the pricom doors. The instant he stepped through, a young man he did not recognize shot him in the chest with a laser pistol.
His first instinct was to retaliate with a Plasma bolt, but Mirana held up her hand to stop him. She was smiling. “Bortis has been pleading with me to let him try that,” she explained.
“Just to make sure it really worked,” Bortis said, clearly amused.
Ned was surprised to find three other unfamiliar people in the room as well. “You hired a crew?”
“Piloting Nemesis by myself was fine for a few missions, but I didn’t want to le
ave it abandoned when I was away, and eventually the maintenance work piles up. I figured it made sense to leave the details to the experts. This is Ablithra Erdjflonger, the first officer” Ablithra stepped forward and shook Ned’s hand respectfully. “Bortis Mart and Jenzo Plith are in charge of ship operations, and Kalru Elgis is the engineer.”
Bortis was still watching Ned with fascination. He was a few years older than Ned, but he had a youthful look that was accentuated by his dark red hair, which looked like it had just survived a hurricane. Jenzo was a little older and seemed to view the meeting as merely a brief interruption in his daily routine. He nodded to Ned as he was introduced, but otherwise he stood at attention with his eyes on Ablithra, as if awaiting orders. Kalru, a woman with a sharp nose and a very long braid, remained seated at a control station and looked up only briefly. Ned was a little thrown off by the group. He was used to being surrounded by ship officers who ignored him, but the unexpected presence of just a few people on such a small ship made him feel a little self-conscious, as if he should be interacting with them somehow but wasn’t sure in what way.
He wanted to ask Mirana what was coming up next, but she had already warned him about insinuating that she was in charge of planning everything. He chose his words carefully. “So, should we go after that lead, or do we need to check in with Marnax first?” Ned thought he saw Jenzo shake his head a little.
“Marnax doesn’t need to know what we’re doing until we have something concrete,” Mirana said. “So far, we’ve managed to keep our investigations pretty hidden.”
“Makes sense. I guess I’m ready then.”
“Actually, there are a few things I’d like to try out before we head back to Anacronian space. Are we behind the sun?”
“Yes,” Jenzo said. “We’re clear of the planet’s line of sight.”
“Bring us around and drop the Shadow field. Ned, come with me.”
Ned noted that, while he was supposed to take responsibility for the mission, Mirana had no problem giving him orders. He followed her without a word, though.
“I suspect that we both have questions for each other about the Plasma that we should probably sort out before we go and try to use it together.” Mirana led the way down the short corridor and opened the door to the engine room.
“Sounds good.” Ned had to admit that there were more than a few things that he wanted to know about Mirana and her rather disturbingly-powerful abilities.
They stepped inside, and Ned glanced around. The room was fairly large, but it was impossible to see very much of it because of the network of metal tubes that intersected it, forming pillars and arches and lining the walls and ceiling. Ned knew that as many major systems as possible connected to this room so the crew could inspect and regulate them without having to traverse the maze of crawlspaces that would provide access to specific components when necessary. He looked at the glowing strips and dots of light and the sealed panels that covered the tubes’ surfaces and wondered how long it had taken the crew to learn what all of them were for. Off to one side was a viewscreen that showed what Ned assumed was Earth’s sun.
Mirana walked into the room and stopped at a console set into a bulbous structure about shoulder height. Ned followed her. “This station controls the ship’s warp field emitters,” Mirana explained. “Do you notice anything about it?”
“Not really,” Ned admitted. He was looking at the console readout, trying to get an idea of what the various controls might do. “It says the warp field is off at the moment.”
“Don’t look at the screen, look at the device. Look inside.”
Ned looked at her in confusion, then closed his eyes. He reached out with the Plasma to probe the structure behind the screen. “Oh my goodness.”
“You see it?”
There was definitely something interesting inside the metal casing. It reacted to his Plasma somehow, reflecting it maybe. It was like how he could sense the location of the Shield Crystal and his suit’s activator pin. “Is that the Shadow drive?”
“Yes and no. Remember, Dark Viper didn’t know anything about Shadow Plasma when he designed this ship.”
“Yeah, I had wondered about that. How did you know Nemesis could disappear?”
“A lot of what Dark Viper did with his power involved the use of auxiliary devices,” she said. “You know, like the weapons on Devastator. They were things that exhibited unusual properties even when he wasn’t close, but no one was ever able to replicate them. I figured that either he was able to imbue things with his power, or else he was finding these devices somewhere and using them in his ships.”
“Wow. So there might be more ships like Nemesis?”
“It seems that whatever it was he was doing with these devices, his resources were limited, or at least his understanding was. Otherwise I imagine he would have built this ship sooner.”
“Makes sense. So you found out he was installing one here?”
“I found out he was building a top-secret warship with something new attached to the warp field emitters. I actually boarded Nemesis once before stealing it, but the device hadn’t been installed yet. I couldn’t really just wait there, because I also had to know what was going on with Marnax. But when I learned that its construction was almost done, I hoped that it would be something I might be able to hijack with my own power.”
By referring to her actions before Venom, Mirana was skirting a very sensitive topic. Mirana had been fighting both sides of the war at the time, and people had died as a result. But Ned had realized long ago that he was going to have to set that matter aside if he were to make any progress with Mirana. And besides, it was probably true that she had saved more lives than she had cost. He forced his thoughts back to the device Dark Viper had sent to be built into Nemesis’s engine room. “So what did he plan to do with it?”
“I think – that is, I assumed based on the correspondence I intercepted – that this device was designed to channel and amplify the abilities of a Plasma Master.”
“Wait, so… if Kayleen Rax had gotten to this ship before you…”
“The warp field would have become an unstoppable weapon. And if Markan Dren were using it, I imagine its warp capacity would have been augmented even beyond what is has now.”
“That’s incredible. So why didn’t they just wait until it was done and use it? Couldn’t they have killed me with something like this?”
“Maybe. Or maybe Viper didn’t want them to get the chance. Maybe he didn’t trust them with that much power, and he was going to use it himself.”
“But he wasn’t there when it was launched.”
“Maybe he was on his way. Remember, I stole it before the launch date. Or maybe…” She eyed Ned meaningfully.
“Maybe he was afraid I would take it from him.”
“Imagine,” Mirana said. “A starship with a force field powered by the Shield Crystal.”
“Invincible…” Ned’s voice was almost a whisper. “Do you think it could work?”
She smiled. “Try it.”
Ned stepped around the console and placed his hands on the metal bulge of the device. He sent the Plasma into it, willing it to react to him. “How do I know if it’s working?”
“You need the warp field up first,” Mirana explained. She pressed a button to open a com link to the pricom. “Activate a static warp shell,” she instructed.
Ned gasped in surprise as the device flared to life. He could feel a rush of power from his hands, flowing into the device and off to the sides, where the warp engines were generating a hyperspace distortion field around the ship. The field was not changing the ship’s warp phase at the moment, but Ned could feel it flowing outward and enveloping the hull in a tight bubble.
“Ready to try it out?”
Ned almost didn’t hear her – the rush of power was a little distracting. “What do you have in mind?”
“Ablithra? Please launch a torpedo and have it strike the ship’s hull. Leave the shields down.
”
“Firing.”
The forward viewscreen showed the glowing projectile launch, then turn sharply and head back for the ship. Ned felt a tremor as Plasmic energy absorbed the force of the explosion.
“Effect?” Mirana asked.
“No damage.”
Ned turned to Mirana. “I take it you told them you were planning to do this?”
Mirana smiled. “Nope. They’ll catch on pretty quick though. Ready for a real challenge?”
“Sure.”
“Ablithra, we’d like to see just how strong the Plasma shield is.”
“Standard prominence run?”
“Sounds good. Take us in.”
Ned noted Mirana’s choice of vocabulary – “Plasma shield” definitely sounded better than “Shield field,” which was what they’d have to call the modified Shadow field if they just replaced the descriptor. “What’s a prominence run?” he asked.
“It’s how ship designers show off when they feel like they’ve built a really strong shield system. The heat around a star will drain shields pretty fast, but if you have a really good shield, you can fly in and under a prominence arc and make it out again before your shields fail.”
“What happens if the shield doesn’t hold?”
“Well, I’m sure we can get the regular shields up before the hull melts. Watch the viewscreen; this will look pretty interesting.”
The screen showed the bright glow of the sun grow larger as Nemesis approached, and filters on the screen dimmed the light enough that Ned could see the jets of Solar plasma ejecting into the corona. Almost immediately he felt the warp field flare up as the Shield Plasma began protecting the ship from the scorching heat of the intense radiation and stellar wind. The sun quickly filled the left half of the screen until its curvature looked perfectly flat – it was like a huge sea of fire leading out to a vertical, black skyline on the right. A large, fiery arc appeared on the horizon.
“It’s working,” Ned said in amazement. “I can feel it, but it’s not really drawing the power from me. It’s more like it’s channeling it from the sun itself, through me.”
“Miss Kelar, we have a problem with visibility.” Ned saw what Ablithra meant: The viewscreen was becoming obstructed by a wall of blue fire. “I’m filtering out the blue coloring, but it’s getting thicker as we get closer.”
Mirana tapped her chin in thought. “Extra shielding isn’t so great if you can’t see. Can you dim down the flames a little?”
Ned focused the Plasma shield on the sun-facing side of the ship, leaving a much thinner covering over the forward section. The view cleared. “Better,” Ablithra said. Mirana looked pleased.
The prominence grew larger as they approached, and the power flow strengthened. Ned clenched his teeth. The shield was not exactly draining him, but he could feel it flow around him. He felt like he was being buffeted by tornado winds while anchored to a cliff. The sensation grew more intense as they approached.
Mirana saw the look. “Everything okay?”
Ned nodded. “Take us through – wait!”
“Raise shields!”
The Plasma shuddered around Ned, and he felt gaps form in the shield. Waves of regular Solar plasma slammed into first the ship, then the shields as they came up, just as Nemesis began its pass under the prominence. Ned focused his energy into the warp field device and brought the Shield Plasma back together, shutting out the sun’s corona as Ablithra angled the ship sharply upward and accelerated away. Ned let the power fade and let out a heavy breath.
“Are we clear?” Mirana asked. Her voice was urgent but not afraid.
“Yes,” came the report. “We got slammed around a little, but the hull held. The shields took a beating for a second too, but then it stopped.”
“Good. Set a course for the vortex and then wait.” Mirana cut the transmission and then smiled at Ned. “I think that went pretty well!”
Mirana’s excitement made him smile. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that would be helpful in a battle…” Again a question formed, and again he realized it would be a bad idea to ask it. But this time his curiosity won out. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
She rolled her eyes a little. “Less than an hour in and you’re already being judgmental. No, it’s okay, I was expecting it. Shields alone wouldn’t have been enough. Even this one test didn’t completely protect the ship. If I had revealed myself to Marnax, he never would have let you come with me or given me the armada’s support. So I had to choose between invisibility and stronger shields. I chose the power I knew I could use. And once Venom was destroyed, you were on your way out, so there was no need to further complicate things by explaining.”
“Makes sense, I guess.” He was not completely convinced, but he understood her reasoning enough to admit that some good had probably come from her choice.
“We’re going to have to set some ground rules, Ned.”
“Like what?”
“First, you have to agree to trust me. I know you don’t agree with all the choices I made, but you convinced Marnax to pardon me, so if we’re going to work together, you’re going to have to make the choice to let all of that go. We just don’t have time to go over it every time something I do calls into question a past decision.”
“Fair enough,” Ned said. “Second, from this point out, we share everything we know about the Plasma. And about the missions we decide on. We can’t help each other if we don’t understand each other’s abilities.”
“Agreed. Actually I was hoping we could sort of compare notes on the way, and maybe test our powers. We might have to land somewhere in order to really do that – I don’t want to accidentally blow up our ship. But I’m guessing you don’t want to do that on our end of space.”
“It would probably be better to get out of here before we start anything that Earthlings might eventually notice,” he agreed.
“Okay. Before I reengage the Shadow drive, I figured it would be interesting to see whether this ‘Plasmic transducer’ thing can combine powers. Want to power up the shield again?”
Ned sent the blue light into the device, and again he felt it spread out around the ship.
“Here goes,” Mirana said, and placed her hands on the metal shell. Immediately Ned’s connection to the warp field vanished, sliced away by the first touch of Mirana’s power.
“That’s kind of eerie,” he said as he stepped away, disappointed but not surprised. “I’m sure glad you’re on my side.”
Mirana contacted the pricom again. “We’re in Shadow drive. Take us to the vortex.”