Chapter Six

Avery listened as Maxim gave him all of the details that he had needed to hear and delved deeper than he had wanted to admit that this went. Though he knew that the situation had to be extremely serious to justify the intensity of the response from the multiple species now scattered across three planets who all seemed fully devoted to this cause, he hadn’t expected anything like what he was hearing. His mind hadn’t totally processed what it meant when the woman who they introduced as Rain told him that she had been a part of the Nyx 23 team. It was as if she had said the words, he had attempted to understand and believe them, and then his mind had simply rejected it, putting it into the corner recesses so that there was just enough awareness of the reality that he was willing to be a part of what they were doing, but not enough that he had to feel the full impact of it. Now, though, he didn’t have that. The protection that he had built up around himself had been shattered and now he was forced to hear everything that they had gone through and everything that had been happening around him, without him, or anyone else, knowing it.

When he was just a child, Avery had been in awe of the ship pilots who traveled far into space to bring passengers to the far planets that he only dreamed of ever seeing. He wanted to be like them, to do something more than just filling another office. The first longing of his heart had been to be a part of the military as his grandfather had, but health problems had prevented him from being able to fulfill the position that he envisioned as his own. Then he found this role. It had seemed like the perfect compromise. Though his primary function would be to bring wealthy leisure travelers on long cruises through space, he would also have the occasional opportunity to participate in exploration, immigration, or military maneuvers when more ships were needed. This meant that he would have the chance to serve the way that he intended to, if only briefly.

Now with everything that Maxim was telling him flooding his mind, Avery couldn’t help but struggle against the feeling that what he had been so dedicated to his entire life wasn’t what he thought that it was. He thought that he knew what was happening in the Universe and the detrimental events that had caused such a surge in his desire to be a part of the military or at the very least, the academic ventures that would further research distant planets, species, and situations to help prevent more tragedies like Nyx 23. He felt empowered and informed when he learned about the changes in the technology that was used for the ships, technology that was supposedly inspired by what happened to the Nyx 23 crew. He felt as though his missions that he had taken had brought important information and that he was honoring those who had been lost by helping to prevent the same thing from happening again.

Now all he felt was lied to. He had committed himself because of what he thought that he knew, but now it was obvious that virtually none of what he thought he knew was actually true. Listening to Maxim was only confirming things that he had begun to question and he was starting to feel sick to his stomach. He thought back to when he and Maxim had talked about the technology in the ship and the panic room that were supposedly designed partly in response to the disappearance of the Nyx 23 crew. Knowing that that technology had been put in place as a protective measure had always made him feel safer and almost as though they were refusing to allow those who were responsible for the disappearance to continue to win so many years later. It was almost a feeling of vindication. It had never occurred to him that those changes couldn’t have actually be made as a response to Nyx 23. Though additions such as the panic room were valuable additions after the recent hijackings of ships, it wasn’t logical to think that they would have anything to do with Nyx 23. The official word was that no one knew what had happened to the ship and the crew that it carried after they left the planet that would later be named Penthos. That meant that they would have no idea what would have happened to the ship itself and if that had anything to do with why they went missing. It had never occurred to him that this official word could have been a lie or a misdirection.

Avery felt like he was drowning by the time that Maxim finished what he had to tell him. There was so much that he should have known, so much that he should have been able to change but had never had the opportunity to. He felt guilty in a deep way that he never had before. It was as if he thought that by merit of his desire to protect Earth and the Universe on its own should have somehow given him greater insight into everything and he should have been able to detect something as horrific as had been happening. In his heart, though, he knew that he would have had no way of knowing. He wasn’t a part of the University and had no real connections to the military outside of his occasional appointment as pilot. He, like everyone else, had been completely blind.

Maxim stopped talking and looked at Avery expectantly. The pilot opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. He shrugged and shook his head, letting out an exasperated sigh.

“I don’t even know what to say,” he finally managed to get out in a soft, almost apologetic voice. “I had no idea that it was that serious.”

“No one did,” Maxim said. “That’s the problem. This has been going on for more than a century without anyone having any idea that it was happening, so no one was able to stop it.”

“What I don’t understand is why it took that long.”

Avery looked over Maxim at the Denynso warrior propped against the wall.

“What do you mean?” Maxim asked.

Zyyr groaned slightly as he pushed himself up to sit straighter and Lila ran her hand comfortingly along his forehead.

“Why did it take so long?” the warrior repeated. “Like you said, this has been going on for more than a century. More than 100 years and no one knew that it was going on? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” Lila asked.

“The children,” Lynx said, his voice sounding as though the thought had suddenly occurred to him. “There should have been children.”

“Right,” Avery said. “The Valdicians and the humans from Earth came together more than 115 years ago and decided that they were going to start this breeding program so that they could create a master race of weaponized hybrids. I can accept that they might not have started the actual breeding element immediately. They might have taken some time to find the perfect place to have their facilities and to build what they might need. They might have done some planning to decide exactly how they were going to handle the breeding itself. This could have taken a while. I could even imagine that it might have taken a couple of years, but even that means that the first children born into the program would have been born more than one hundred years ago.”

“So why hasn’t there been an intergalactic war with these super soldiers?” Maxim asked.

Avery nodded, knowing that the Mikana man was starting to follow his though process.

“The first generation wouldn’t have been the super soldiers like you describe them,” Lila pointed out. “Remember,” she glanced at Zyyr, Lynx, and Maxim. “Idella? My great-grandmother? She was one of the first born into the program.”

“Your great-grandmother?” Avery asked, startled by the revelation.

The delicate-looking woman nodded.

“Yes. She was born into the breeding program during one of the first waves of children. They didn’t just breed all of the women at one time. Instead, they staggered it so that there would be new babies born every few months over the course of several years.”

“That would ensure that they weren’t overwhelmed by a sudden influx of babies,” Avery said.

“Exactly. The point, though, is that Idella was only a blend of two species, the Mikana and the Eteri.”

“Eteri?” Avery asked.

“The winged men and woman who went to Earth with Jonah,” Maxim explained.

Lila nodded again.

“She was only those two. That would hardly be considered a master race.”

“What happened to her?” Avery asked.

“She escaped,” Lila said. “She fell in love and they escaped the facility together and returned to Uoria.”

“If she had remained, she would likely have been bred with another species.”

“Exactly. They would have blended in another species with her so that the child had the three species in it. There were probably other children born in the same waves who were made up of other combinations so that they would then be able to breed those together to make a truly powerful hybrid. That’s at least two generations, and then those would need to become adults before they would be able to be soldiers.”

“Even then,” Avery said. “They would have become active by now. It’s been 115 years. The first children would have been born within five years. That would mean that by now there should have been a full-blown army that would have emerged, but there hasn’t been. Where did they all go?”

“And why is Ryan talking about the hybrids like they are his creation and he is still training them up?” Maxim asked.

Avery shook his head, thoughts racing through his mind now.

“Something stopped the program,” he said. “They might have had a decade or two of babies born and a few combinations, but then it stopped. They never got the army that they wanted. That’s why Ryan is as rabid about this as he is. His family started something and then never finished it. The children that were born into the program never reached the point of actually being the weapons that they intended.”

“So, what happened to them?” Maxim asked.

“I don’t know.”

Just as he said it, Avery noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He reached forward and pushed aside a few of the papers on the top of the stack. Two sheets of what looked like extremely aged paper stood out against the others. While none of the papers were new and all seemed to have been there for many years, these were obviously considerably older even than those. He picked them up cautiously and brought them closer so that he could look at the words on them. It was in a language that he didn’t recognize and he turned it to show it to Maxim.

“Look at this,” he said.

Maxim looked at the page and Avery could see his eyes scanning the words the way that his had. He shook his head and glanced at Avery.

“I don’t understand that language,” he said. “Do you?”

“No,” Avery said. “I don’t recognize it.”

“It looks like a list of some kind. Like a recipe.”

“Or a spell,” Lila said.

“A spell?” Maxim said.

“Idella taught me that there are a lot of things in this Universe that we don’t understand. The way that things work now weren’t always this way and some of the ancient ways have disappeared. There were books in her house that were filled with what she said were spells from long-gone people.”

Maxim held the paper out to her.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked. “The language or the symbols or anything?”

Lila evaluated the paper for a few moments and then handed it back to Maxim.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t look familiar.”

Avery kept staring at the paper and the strange symbols scrawled across it in ink that seemed to be gradually fading away with years. It looked familiar in a vague, distant way, but he didn’t know why. He was reaching for the page again when Elise walked back into the room.

“They’re on their way.”