Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 1 - Their End Begins

Episode 1

Linuka Omga had killed her father. She loved the serious, brooding man. The galactic hero, or genocidal villain, depending on who one asked. She still killed him. Worse than the memory was the fact she could remember it at all.

Had the plan failed?

No screaming klaxons, but the red lights showed the base was on full alert. Linuka had seen her fair share of violence since the coup, but the level of carnage before her eyes was shocking. The base’s vehicle storage didn’t look like a battlefield—more like the bottom pit of an enormous industrial shredder. It had distributed Võmémééř, Traaz, and humans in parts all over the hall. It was hard to tell where destroyed vehicles ended and mangled bodies began, but the dead humans outnumbered the dead aliens by at least 100 to 1. This fight had not gone well.

It should not have happened at all. Her father had survived all this, only to die for her plan. It should have prevented this, but it seemed her scheme had had no effect!

“You!” Linuka yelled at a woman trying to pass by her, carrying a bundle close to her chest. A child? Her last possessions?

Running left her sweaty, her long hair clinging to the sides of her dirty face. The woman looked haunted, but responsive. Good, they hadn’t used a causality bomb on the surface.

“Are the Dark Ones in orbit? Is the base still under attack?”

The woman shook her head, then turned and kept stumbling toward… wherever she was going, avoiding the streams of bodily fluids from two galaxies oozing down the vehicle ramps. Did the gesture signal no—or uncertainty? Maybe Linuka’s Old Galactic was not good enough.

Linuka needed to reach the command room, find someone in charge. She tried to recall the base map. The vehicle bay was located deep in the lower levels of the base, as was the central command. It couldn’t be far. The glow strips overhead were steady and bright, not dim or flickering like emergency lights. The base still had power and transport pods should be working. Linuka spotted one and jogged toward it, circling around the husk of a dead Traaz. Cleaved open in its center, she saw a clear liquid puddle beneath the giant warrior.

Everything that made him who he was—his Uurmi, his essence—had spilled out, ending a life older than humanity’s presence in the spiral arm.

None of this should have happened. Not anymore. She had fixed it.

She shook her head. Her father had fixed it, paying the ultimate price.

The pod controls were simplistic, and important locations appeared on a text menu display. Old Galactic again, and the font was difficult to read, but Linuka was certain hoonya dusnaa meant command center. Not a term describing any of the religious murals, but the mystics forced her to memorize endless vocabulary streams. She could imagine them nod, stoic, serious, and with a hint of condescension.

See, child, we told you it would become useful.

A short pod ride later, Linuka stepped into the command room, intact and bustling with allies—much to her relief. However far the enemy’s incursion went, it had not extended here. Base Commander Ksheep dominated the operations center, his Traaz silhouette hard to miss. He turned around before she reached him, his Uurmi sensing hers.

“Linuka. I am content to see you alive.”

The base of his silicate body turned, his wet photo-receptor scanning the room.

“Where is your parent?”

The holo-projectors behind the commander showed several ships in orbit. Linuka felt a tear running down her cheek. She had lost both parents to the Võmémééř now. She was alone. Thousands of humans and aliens had fled to the base, but she remained alone. This wasn’t her time, not her reality. It was supposed to change.

“He didn’t make it,” she said.

No matter how hard it was to explain, regardless of how tangled the path that brought them, her father always told the base commander the truth. Linuka kept it simple with a lie.

“We set the trap for the enemy’s leaders and the bulk of their army, and my father stayed behind…” She wiped off the tear. “…to trigger it.”

Not only was he dead, his death had been for nothing. The enemy was still there. Ksheep did not know her well, but his Uurmi sensed her frustration.

“Yes, they are in orbit, but haven’t moved since their arrival. They have landed ground forces, as you know, rampaging through the base. We have to thank you and your parent for luring them into that trap.”

“It won’t keep you safe for long,” said Linuka, pointing at the tactical map. “The base won’t last against these ships.”

Linuka had seen worlds torn by the Võmémééř. Maybe the woman had seen it, too. Linuka couldn’t forget her haunted eyes. Even if the extra-galactics would not cut them down one by one, there was nothing to withstand their beam weapons.

“They have not fired a single shot,” said Commander Ksheep, likely having followed her mental monologue.

“They believe their leaders are still down here—alive,” Linuka said. “The ships won’t act until they return. We can…”

She bit her tongue. The ship symbols on the map began to move. She should have kept her mouth shut. The Võmémééř were masters of crushing everything, including hope.

It was much harder to follow the frantic shout-outs by the tactical analysts in Old Galactic than reading a few transporter buttons. Linuka believed to overhear surprise about the ships’ movements. Not about the fact they moved, but the direction.

“What’s going on, Commander?”

Ironically, talking to the Traaz came easier than dealing with humans from this era.

“The enemy is leaving orbit. It seems like an unorganized scatter. They are heading back into… the nano mine field.”

“They know the mines are still there. Mines had cost them half their fleet. Why would they do this?”

Linuka tried to suppress her urge to speculate, without success. Are they leaving?

An older analyst approached the Traaz and gestured a sequence of geometric symbols using both hands. Linuka had seen this sign language before, the only way most Galacticide-era humans could talk to the silicate aliens.

Gesture faster, thought Linuka.

Two of the ship symbols vanished from the display. Did they hit mines? She had to know what was happening.

When the man stopped waving his arms, Ksheep’s surprise was palpable.

“Enemy ships are overcompensating their orbit stabilization burns. Some almost collided, several head back into the mine field, others seem to fire up their equivalent of a warp drive.”

“Outside the darkstring?”

“Yes. It almost seems like they have forgotten how to operate their ships.”

Linuka stepped closer to the display. None of these maneuvers made any sense. They have forgotten how to operate their ships.

Linuka smiled. She remembered the reports about the worlds subjected to the causality bombs. Nobody died, at least not immediately. But entire planetary populations suffered from an all-encompassing amnesia. Causal disconnect. When cause and effect were no longer linked, nothing made sense. Knowledge, even basics like someone’s name, evaporated.

The trap had worked! It was as she had predicted—the loss of their leaders would leave the enemy confused to their core. The plan had succeeded.

Cheers and jubilation surrounded a dazed Linuka, wrestling with her own confusion, while their mortal enemy began destroying their own fleet out there in the Prral system.

If the trap had closed on the Võmémééř leaders, removing them from existence, why would she remember it? Why would she remember leaving her father behind in anger? Their last words exchanged an argument?

Some connection must still exist, a causal thread sustaining the memory.

The reason could be terrifying—or beautiful.

Either there were more Võmémééř leaders out there, keeping their flame of existence burning for now. Or—her father was alive.

Confusion left her mind, replaced by sharp clarity, and a plan: Linuka would find who survived the trap. And then hug them—or kill them.

Goddess of the Galacticide continues on this website with new episodes each Tuesday.

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