Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 45 - Between Fire and Ice

Episode 45

“You hate funerals,” said Baaii Fij.

“Right,” said Cha Dzeeny, without taking his eyes off the scanner screen. “Still, this one I’d like to have attended.”

“Why?”

“I served with the man. He was a good leader, and a surprisingly good shot, for an Assembly Member.”

Cha could almost sense Baaii’s eyes drilling into the side of his head. He met her stare.

“He gave us hope in dark times and never gave up. I saw him save an entire civilization; enemies at his mercy. He didn’t have to. Did it anyway.”

“Kel Chaada, the savior. Spare me, Dzeeny. You’re getting soft just because our ward happens to be his biological daughter. She is Sya Omga’s child—her successor. That’s what counts.”

Baaii made a waving gesture around the panoramic cockpit dome of the EsChii long-range transport the local authorities provided them for reaching the state funeral site.

“Look around you. This is what Kel Chaada did. He killed our people. My family had friends on the Okkek.”

“So did mine.”

Cha focused on the scanner again, recalibrating the instrument to ignore the metallic clutter haunting the planetary disc of the Prral system. These were the shards of a Grandslaught carrier and her task force, utterly destroyed in the Battle of Prral 33 orbits ago. Fighting the much smaller force of EsChii’s appointed leader—Kel Chaada.

“He did what he had to,” said Cha. “Defended his nation. I can respect that.”

“Nation.” Baaii scoffed. “Rebel miners in the Wel Edge. You know who I respect? Shaajis Sya being on the line with us, staring down Dark One warlord Diin Ṛũl to the end.”

Cha nodded. “A heroic defense, no doubt.”

He wanted to add that despite all the bravery displayed during the Battle of Dziilaa Sok, the defenders were routed by the alien invaders. Few ships survived. Entire systems got destroyed. It was Kel Chaada’s crazy infiltration of the Dark One’s home galaxy that brought victory in the end. An underhanded blow, destroying defenseless infrastructure through ingenious sabotage. Sometimes you have to fight dirty. The blood Kel Chaada spilled clung to Cha’s hands too. But he never felt ashamed when he washed it off.

Were these the different realities Linuka Omga talked about? One in which Kel Chaada was the villain, and Sya Omga the selfless hero? Another which saw the roles reversed?

He glanced over to Baaii. She seemed to have given up on the conversation as well, and stoically toggled data filters to make sense of the debris field.

Had Cha’s closeness to the Shaajis made him switch realities once too often? Left him at fundamental odds with the woman he once had strong feelings for? Strong feelings, my kyong, thought Cha. I loved that woman. Probably still do.

“How do we know the bombs are still here?” Baaii broke the ice after an uncomfortable silence echoing with the unsaid. “Scavengers could have picked the debris clean.”

“They probably did. But this here is still the wreckage of the Okkek task force. Tswa sni sni explained what we’re after is a thinned-out ring, orbiting beyond the planetary disc. The debris from the Galacticide-era battles in this system had 1200 orbits to distribute. Scavengers would not have noticed its existence.”

“This is why the AI core insisted we filter almost every signal, look for phase jitter and thermal mismatch? Because we’re looking for something weird.”

“Yes, fractional-dimensional stuff. ‘Weird’ doesn’t do it justice.”

***

Shifts had passed, and mini-warps had propelled the transport along the faint torus of ship fragments of a bygone era.

“We’re back in broadcast range of Prral,” said Cha. “Do you mind if we watch the funeral?”

“I thought it was private, no streaming coverage.”

“I know Tswa sni sni records it. The Isonomih have a high opinion of… ”

“Save it. We watch it. Put in on the central projector.”

The central console turned into an alien landscape, recorded from a high vantage point. A small congregation of Traaz, Isonomih cores, but mostly humans, had assembled around a hole dug into the ground near a flat, dried-out riverbed. Nobody wore environmental suits, but most humans donned breathing masks. Prral’s atmosphere was either low-oxygen or thin in general. The spectacular view of white glacial fields and the reddish glow from magma seas stretching from the arid highland to both edges of the horizon was haze-free.

The projection focused on Linuka Omga. She climbed down into the small excavation, and one mourner handed her a tactical belt.

A religious dignitary of some kind recited lines that sounded like New Galactic but weren’t.

“What is he saying?” asked Baaii.

“Don’t know,” said Cha. “Maybe some Wel Edge dialect.”

“It is strange to see the Shaajis officiate a heathen ceremony. Do these people believe in an afterlife?”

“Don’t care. It’s a girl burying her father.”

The projection flickered, and then the image stabilized just when the speech began.

“This belt,” Linuka Omga said, facing the small gathering over the edge of the hole, “was worn by Kel Chaada as part of his uniform during the Battle of Omech Chaa. It was made for his armor set by the Traaz and carried a portable scanner designed by Those Staying Behind on the day our galaxy was united for the first time. It was the last time Kel Chaada took up arms against a citizen of this galaxy.”

“What’s with the belt?”

“It’s symbolic. No body to bury, they pick a piece of clothing or gear.”

“That’s…”

“… nice,” said Cha. “You can admit it.”

“It’s practical.”

Sya Omga held up her hand.

“I know what you want to say. What about the Rogue Fleet? Well, as I am living proof standing here today, he did not bring down Sya Omga with weapons.”

Cha looked at Baaii.

“Disrespectful,” she said. “But funny.” The smile looked warm on her face, smoothing the lines orbits of conflict had carved.

“After that day,” said Linuka, “he became the galaxy’s staunchest defender, its champion to the end. You have looked around, on this strange world, and I hope you agree with me that here, where I put this belt into the ground, halfway between fire and ice, is the place Kel Chaada can rest, having pushed back chaos and glacial complacency all his life. It comforts me to know that in so many realities out there, Kel Chaada is still fighting for us. But here, in this one, his fight is over. And he has won.”

She reached for the miner’s hand to pull her back up, then walked over to Vriishany Omga, standing next to Traaz Raar and Me-Ruu. The projection stuttered again and turned silent.

“We lost audio,” said Cha.

“It’s over, anyway. I feared it would be much longer.”

“So, you hate funerals, too?”

“Who likes them? No, I thought it would be less… personal. The Shaajis seemed to have genuinely adored her father. I never saw her as someone with two parents, just as revered Sya’s daughter.”

“She had only one parent,” said Cha. “Kel Chaada raised her. And I hope he did a good job.”

Baaii’s forehead wrinkled.

Cha pointed at his scanner screen. “The second scanning buoy we dropped just confirmed a signature match. We got ourselves a causality bomb.”

Linuka Omga better turned out to be Kel Chaada’s daughter. If Cha had the choice to hand over the infernal devices of the Dark Ones to anyone, it would be him.

He wasn’t sure if Baaii recognized the silent significance of the moment, or if he had truly gone soft. But Kel Chaada’s funeral marked the end of an era. Finding the first causality bomb was the beginning of a new one. A chapter in which a Linuka Omga now controlled reality to be created—or destroyed.

Leading scientists did not fully understand the device’s power. He wondered if retrieving it for the same person who just recently urged them not to do anything stupid she asked for was a good idea.

His fingers glided over the controls, locking in a course for retrieval. Cha’s body, trained to run on orders, was as much on auto-pilot as the transport.

Maybe he had to learn to switch to manual.

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

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