4.

The boy removed his helmet. His military haircut and white hair made him look bald, with a slightly sloped forehead that belied his intelligence. One corner of his mind was focused on the data that he had pulled from the Toormonda, looking it over and searching for patterns. He pushed that corner of his mind into the background, out of focus for now as he debated what to do now.

He remained confused. The last thing he remembered was going to sleep in his bunk with the other trainees. Suddenly awakening aboard the strange ship; being surrounded by Topoka, with no idea how he had gotten from one place to the next, it was all so very confusing.

He had smelled the fear of the Topoka, and watched them flee before him, and he had been forced to laugh.

Once he had been frightened of them. No longer. He was not frightened of anything any longer. Only that he would disgrace himself, and be unable to join with his ancestors in the afterlife.

Then the man had appeared. The boy had at first thought that the man was a superior officer, but several factors had thrown suspicion on the encounter.

First of all, he spoke the language of the Yonohoah flawlessly. Among the stars, only the boy’s class of trainees spoke that language; their instructors spoke High Command.

Second, he was too friendly and eager, too interested in the boy. That interest had set off the boy’s distrust of the man, and he had seen how the man had attempted to interrogate him for information which could be used against the training corps.

It was either a test, or the boy had been captured and was in enemy hands. Either way, his response was the same. Resistance.

He had started with passive resistance. Cooperation while issuing disinformation. He had given only his name, age, and rank.

He was Eodar of the Yonohoan people. He had lived for twelve years. He was a Scout Troop Trainee rank 2.

Everything else had been lies.

Then the man had attempted to scan his brain, and that was something that Eodar could not have permitted. So he had lashed out, and he had been surprised at the effectiveness. His scout armor was not in training mode, and the munitions were fully unlocked and set to live fire.

He had killed the man who had been interrogating him by tearing off his arm and ripped through the ships computers to find his information. Except that his own suit’s computers kept throwing up errors which Eodar did not know how to interpret. He was forced to proceed without all of the information that he required.

He did not know how much time had passed, or what his location was. He did not have orders or mission directives. His weapons were of a type that were both familiar and different from the models upon which he had been trained.

But he had been trained to adapt to the situation and act according to his best judgment.

So he had searched the ship. To his surprise, the cowardly Topoka had resisted his attempts, going so far as to defend one room in particular. Only when Eodar had entered, he had seen nothing but an unknown man in stasis. Eodar hadn’t been able to disable the stasis field in order to interrogate the man, and so he had been forced to leave without doing so; he’d been unable to deactivate the anti-entropic field generator.

He would not kill a man who was vulnerable in that state. It was possible, perhaps likely, that the man had been a prisoner like Eodar.

His primary motivation had been to escape. Afterward he would identify his location and rejoin his forces. He would report his action and face the consequences for his capture, whatever they would be.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

He was Eodar of the Yonohoah. He had family upon the planet Totola, and brothers among the stars.

He was unafraid of death. Only dishonor frightened him.

Stealing the shuttle from the flagship had been easy, his armor’s software easily overriding the small one-person craft’s security protocols. He had scanned for nearby vessels and found one in the hyperatomic plane which had responded to his command codes; a civilian vessel. A Toormonda.

A link to the training corps. Much of what he had learned about the way the universe worked had been from the time with the other trainees aboard a Toormonda.

He had boarded the nearby craft expecting to find a bunch of terrified children. Instead they were adults. A confusing turn of events; he had expected one, maybe two adults to supervise and direct the children’s education.

More, the query of the registry had stated that the Toormonda was from Totola, which meant that Eodar was near his home, yet the occupants were all from Earth, a world he had never heard of.

That they were engaging in diplomacy with Totola was so silly that Eodar had nearly laughed. He could just see these people trying to talk with the elders of his tribe. The foolish old matrons who truly believed that they knew the ways that the world worked because they were old.

He knew more about the universe than they ever would. He understood the underpinnings, the way that things worked to create what was real and what was not, on a fundamental, material level. The elders believed that the Topoka created their world for them out of kindness. It was a laughable comparison between Eodar’s education and what his tribe believed.

Eodar wondered what he should do. His armor suddenly flashed, and he jerked in surprise as a command hologram lit up.

The face of his instructor from the training facility appeared before him.

“Congratulations, Trainee Eodar. You have passed your final examination,” the hologram stated. “You have been assigned your first official mission. Infiltrate Earth. Identify any threats to humanity. Report your findings via Rocktala. Follow your training and prove your loyalty to your fellow man.”

Eodar signaled his receipt of the message and sat back in the cockpit of the one-manned fighter. He focused on the data from the Toormonda, puzzling it together as he searched for a pattern. There was a pattern there, he was certain of it. Perhaps once he went to sleep, his dreams would give him the answer.

~~~~~~

It arrived without warning in the Lagrange point of the blue marble of a planet. There was no warning, there were no signs that the civilization on the third planet from Sol could detect. Not with their technology.

It immediately began broadcasting. Radiowaves, microwaves, thousands upon thousands of frequencies were used to convey its information. It’s warning.

Some of the datapackets were encrypted, or at least of a format which did not run on the computers which attempted to execute them.

The radio signals, however, were easy to understand.

Voices, speaking the same message over and over again. Some of the voices were growls and murmurs. Others were of a strange, lyrical language which was untranslatable. Others were in English, although the words made no sense to those who heard them.

“We are the watchers at the edge of time and darkness. A weapon of our making seeks enemies and allies. It has the capacity for creation and destruction, but it is beyond control. Someone seeks to control that which cannot be controlled. The results may be catastrophic to the guardians of the universe. We are not the Topoka, the guardians of the guardians. We are the watchers who hold the knowledge which holds back oblivion. This weapon has been set loose upon the universe once more. A weapon from the future may destroy the past and a weapon from the past may destroy the future. Seek allies among the yonohoah, for they are your brothers and sisters. All of mankind depends upon the life or death of the weapon which has returned from the veils of oblivion. Do not destroy this message, this message contains salvation and the destruction of innocence.”

The message repeated endlessly.

Across the planet Earth, people looked up at the night sky and wondered what the enigmatic words meant.

Some believed it was a prank; an old space telescope that had been hacked. Others saw proof that they were not alone in the universe in the words.

As always, nobody could agree upon anything until a missile from the surface destroyed the device that was causing radios and transmission devices to fail all across the globe.

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