When Zayd woke, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t still unconscious and dreaming. The last thing he remembered, he’d tumbled feet overhead in his Rock Breaker before crashing into the volcanic surface of the Rotten Egg. A combat mech could survive that kind of event without much difficulty and a skilled pilot would get up and keep fighting. A mining mech like the BQ2110 Rockbreaker had no business surviving such an event and neither did its pilot.
The place where he woke up didn’t help with the feeling that he was either still dreaming or dead. The soft futon he was lying on had been set out in what looked like a grassy clearing in a forest. Trees swayed in a gentle breeze but none of them felt like they were quite right. The leaves were darker green than they should be, almost bluish in hue, and unless his eyes were playing tricks on him, the undersides of the leaves glowed with their own blue-green luminescence. Overhead, a deep cerulean sky played host to fluffy clouds, the likes of which Zayd had only ever seen in artificial parks and videos from garden and agriculture planets.
“Finally awake?”
The gentle feminine voice startled Zayd fully awake as he sat up and turned to look behind him. What he saw stilled his body and his thoughts even as his heart raced and blood began to surge in places it shouldn’t. Sitting on a tree stump was a vision of feminine perfection the likes of which he’d never seen. Large amethyst eyes blinked at him with cat-like pupils that seemed to track his every motion, as though she could see through to the center of his being. The woman’s long garnet hair had been swept back tightly into a coil at the back of her head that fully exposed her long tapered ears and the several silver chains dangling from them. Her thin lips quirked in genuine amusement as she watched him react to her but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t restrain himself from taking in every centimeter of her lithe figure. The fitted dress of soft emerald fabric the woman wore did little to conceal her gentle curves from his gaze as his eyes traveled down from her pert bust to her trim waist and slender sculpted legs. Perfection didn’t begin to describe the alien beauty before him but Zayd had no better words to use.
“Have you had a sufficient look?” the woman said after giving Zayd a few moments to take everything in. Strangely, when she spoke, the movement of her lips didn’t align with the words he heard and there was a slight delay, like he was watching a foreign film that had been dubbed over.
“No,” Zayd said, continuing to stare at the beautiful woman. “But I can talk while I look,” he added. “Where am I?”
“Is disrespecting women normal on your planet?” the strange woman asked. “Perhaps I should have left you naked and strapped to the examination slab to have this conversation. I will grant you thirty ticks to correct your manners,” she said with an intensely piercing stare.
“No ma’am, I’m sorry,” Zayd said rapidly, his mind snapping fully out of the fog he’d woken in as he realized that he really wasn’t dead or dreaming and his present circumstances might be far more hazardous than he realized. The casual setting had made it feel like he was on a picnic with this woman but maybe for these aliens, this setting was just as formal as a briefing room or an interrogation room for that matter. Maybe the chains hanging from her long slender ears designated some kind of rank he didn’t know how to read. Maybe a lot of things. One thing she’d made abundantly clear, wherever he was, it wasn’t far from being strapped to a slab to be ‘examined’, maybe prior to being dissected. “My name is Zayd,” he offered. “How should I address you?”
“That’s better Zayd,” the enchanting woman said with a smile. “My name is Eirian, you can address me as Priestess Eirian or just Priestess if you prefer. Since you’re awake now, you can get out of bed and join me for a conversation. This isn’t an interrogation,” she explained, waving at an empty space of grass that sprouted a tree stump of similar size to the one she sat on. “Sit, I’m going to explain some things to you and then I’m going to ask you a question. I’ll answer you as honestly as I’m able,” she said in a tone that sounded both genuine and helpful, at least, if you could ignore the way that her words still didn’t quite line up with the movements of her lips.
When Zayd got up from the futon he’d been sitting on, it folded itself away and pulled across the grass until it vanished under a nearby hedge. Now that he was up, he realized that he’d been dressed in a fitted tunic and loose pants in a style and fabric similar to what the priestess wore, though his sleeves stopped at his elbows while hers flared from her elbow into a long spill of lighter green lace. The material felt cool and comfortable against his skin and stretched easily as he moved without any of the restrictive feelings he was accustomed to from outfits that were as fitted as this one was. Taking a seat on the stump, he wondered what it was really made of. The top of it had been polished smooth and even adjusted itself to better suit his frame when he sat on it. “Priestess, is this place in your ship?” he asked as he took his seat.
“Yes, properly, this is an officer’s suite onboard the Spear of Destiny. Depending on how our conversation goes, this could be your new home and these could be your new quarters,” she explained, her emerald eyes watching him closely for every slight reaction he made to her statement.
“You’re recruiting me? What for?” Zayd asked, confused at why such technologically advanced aliens could want to do with him.
“There’s too much to explain for you to really understand,” the priestess said with a slight shake of her head. “Let me put this in the simplest terms possible. The Spear of Destiny is the personal corvette of Lady Nimue Gael, third daughter of the House of Gael of the Stellar Imperium. I imagine that none of that means anything to you,” she said expectantly and continued speaking once she saw his bewildered gaze. “What you need to know is that Lady Nimue is what your people might crudely call a treasure hunter. She is a student of ancient cultures, dead languages, stellar cartography, and a dozen other disciplines. She has made it her personal mission to search for resources at the edges of the Imperium that can propel the evolution of the House of Gael forward. You can understand this much, yes?” Priestess Eirian asked.
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“So, this Lady Nimue Gael is the owner of this ship and she’s looking for treasure that will help her family,” Zayd summarized. “Sounds straightforward enough.”
“There is nothing straightforward about progressing evolution,” the priestess cautioned. “But those matters can wait for later. How much of the history of your own species do you know? Are you familiar with the Solarian Empire?”
“I know a bit,” Zayd replied. “Studying the tactics and doctrine of the Solarians was mandatory in school. Supposedly it was a golden age for mankind when the people from our original homeworld rose up to unify thousands of scattered and independent colonies and states into an empire that could resist invasion from stronger aliens. The size of human-occupied space grew by an order of magnitude before the empire collapsed to internal struggle. No aliens could defeat it, it could only die from within,” he said, reciting almost directly from a textbook he’d read as a child.
“True enough from the perspective of people within the Solarian Empire I suppose,” Priestess Eirian acknowledged. “Not every state and colony submitted to the Solarians however. The Stellar Imperium was founded by the Apex Emperor and the Temple of Evolutionary Ascension when they fled the Solarian Empire. What is relevant to you right now though,” she continued, “is a different breakaway portion of Original Humanity. The Kingdom of Ruin,” she said, waving a hand and conjuring a holographic projection of a mighty industrial city in the midst of a military parade with thousands of mechs and tens of thousands of soldiers marching through the streets.
“Cygnus Lowe was called the King of Ruin,” she explained like a teacher speaking to a primary school student. “He led his legions in brutal battles that left nothing but broken starships and shattered mechs in his wake. If he’d had any mind to conquer the galaxy, he might have built an empire that rivaled the Solarian Empire, but his ambition extended only to preserving the independence of his local stellar cluster. Still, the price for invading the Kingdom of Ruin was so high that the Solarian Empire gave up and declared the entire area off-limits. What they couldn’t conquer with military might they would defeat with economic warfare. For the duration of the first King of Ruin’s reign, however, that didn’t really matter.”
“What happened to him? Did someone finally manage to defeat him? Your Imperium maybe?” Zayd asked.
“Old age, the most inglorious death for a storied warrior,” the priestess said sadly. “Before he died, however, he created an artifact for his descendants that contained all of his accumulated martial ability. At least, that’s the official story. Privately, Lady Nimue doesn’t believe he was capable of creating the relic, rather, she thinks the relic is what gave him the power to become an unstoppable warrior, to begin with,” she explained, waving a hand and changing the holographic projection to reveal a seven-pointed star-shaped emblem made of a metallic crystal that shimmered in dark red hues. “This relic passed from Cygnus to his grandson Tomin, then to Tomin’s son Erak who declared that power must be fought for and not inherited. After that, bloody contests were held to determine which warrior would ascend to the throne. It was utterly foolish. Personal power is important but without instilling the skills to rule a kingdom along with the strength to conquer one, a nation can never endure. Now, there’s nothing left of the Kingdom of Ruin but actual ruins. And, of course, the relic that started it all,” she said with a smile.
“Lady Nimue retrieved the relic,” Zayd said, nodding in understanding. “If it can make a warrior strong enough to stop the mightiest empire humanity ever built, I’m sure bringing it home to the House of Gael will earn a number of rewards for Lady Nimue.”
“It would, but only if she can manifest the strength to keep it. Lady Nimue is unable to use the relic herself, it requires a different sort of host to fuse with it and draw out its power,” the priestess explained. “Unfortunately, while she brought several candidates to become her Champion, most of them died in battles we fought on our way home. We made it here on our last jump but we’ll have to make repairs before we can return to civilized space where the most injured among our crew can receive sufficient medical treatment to restore them to combat-worthy status. Until then, Lady Nimue has no Champion and no soldiers capable of piloting mechs to defend us. At least, she doesn’t yet.”
“You want me to become her champion,” Zayd said, quickly putting the pieces together. “Why me? Why not Sergeant Dane Quan, he has actual combat experience. I was kicked out of the academy at thirteen because I can’t use a cyberlink,” Zayd explained, not wanting there to be any misunderstandings about his capabilities. It seemed like the aliens were rolling out the red carpet for him but it didn’t make any sense why they would choose him when there were better options available.
Suddenly, Zayd’s heart shook as an idea occurred to him. If there were better options available but they offered it to him, had they already extended the offer to Sergeant Quan and been refused? Was he merely next in line as they worked their way down the list of captives? Or did they feel that he would be more grateful given his circumstances and more likely to respond to an offer to change those circumstances? If so, the cordial treatment and luxurious environment were little different from the ‘sample’ offered by dealers of illicit drugs to tempt their customers into an addiction they couldn’t survive. Offers that were too good to be true usually were.
“The cyberlinks your people are using to pilot their mechs are crude at best, barbaric at worst,” Eirian said disdainfully, interrupting his train of thought. “Meanwhile, you possess the right genetic mutation to use a significantly more refined system to pilot mechs, and more importantly, the relic reacted to you. If we were within the Imperium, an opportunity like this would never be offered to someone like you. No matter how much potential you have, in the Imperium, there are tens of thousands of people with more. However, we aren’t in the Imperium right now, so you have a very narrow window of opportunity to make a decision. Swear yourself to my lady Nimue Gael. Serve as her Champion and not only will I help you merge with the relic, I will help guide your evolution into one of the greatest warlords the Imperium has ever seen,” she promised intensely.
“The choice is yours Zayd. We cannot force you. Without your cooperation, it’s impossible to fuse with the relic,” she explained. “However, time is limited. We need the power from the relic if we’re going to make it off this planet and return to the Stellar Imperium. You hold the key. I will not lie to you, a Champion will be subjected to harsh training and deadly combat,” she continued. “But isn’t that exactly what you were made for? Doesn’t your very existence cry out that this is the moment you were born for? You have the greatest opportunity a warrior could ever ask for. Do you dare to accept it?”