NationStates Jolt Archive

Thanks to recent discoveries during IPE's work out in the Uranus sector, we're pleased to annouce that a new sytem has been discovered on the far side of the galaxy! Already an extra-powerful hyperspace transmitter is in place, an exploration team has been dispatched, and will be arriving there within a few weeks. Due to serurity concerns, the coordinates cannot be released at this time, but after the Inter-Planetary Explorations crew has finished, that assessment will be reviewed. For more information, please contact IPE at...

Kestrel flipped the screen off. Being stuck in a Maria-class deep space explorer was bad enough, but being stuck in one and being forced to watch the damn IPE channel's repeats over and over again was quite another. It was still going to be another week and a half before they reached this unexplored new world. Dr. Stanka was contstantly saying what a huge discovery it would be, though he didn't mention what it would do for his grant status at the University back home. Dr. Lewis, on the other hand, whiled away her time complaining about the entire trip, and complaining the loudest about how she couldn't trust her replacement to grade the upcoming term papers properly. Arvan, the pilot, usually managed to avoid the lot of them by pretending to have things to do in the cockpit, and when Kestrel couldn't stand the two doctors anymore, she'd usually find refuge there. Luckily for them, the digging crew all were stowed away in suspended animation, as the Maria XI couldn't really support more then four people at once. Naturally, being the least important, that ment that the ten-strong squad had to be frozen. Kestrel envied them.

The planet itself looked rather inviting, from orbit at least. Initial scans showed it had all the characteristics of an earth-type planet, all except some form of populace. Cities of great magnitude registered, but all apparenently were deserted and had been swallowed up by the planet's verdant jungles. These too were curiously devoid of life. And the ship they'd tracked back here was no where to be found.

The three moons orbiting the planet were more or less the same. All showed signs of civilization, but all also appeared to have been deserted. The moons looked as though they'd been nuked and bombed extensivly, though no adverse amounts of radiation were detected.

As the expedition's leader, Dr. Stanka gave Arvan the order to land in what appeared to have once been the capital, or at least the largest city on the planet. It didn't quite appear to be completely grown over with moss, though it did appear to be slowly sinking into the sea it sat on, as the former harbourside was now almost completely flooded.

They quickly located what looked to have once been a spaceport, and landed their craft there. There was no indication that anything had landed here for a terribly long count of years. The two-inch thick dust was clear evidence of that.

Of course, looks are always decieving.

It took about an hour for the exploration team to defrost, and luckily for them, nothing went wrong. The seven-strong work team started unloading equipment, while Kestrel and the two security agents decided to check out the rest of the port complex. They decided that even with the air apparently quite breathable, they wern't going to take any chances with the dust, so everyone who went outside wore a rebreather mask with a face shield. The first thing they unpacked was the small crate full of PPG, or Pulsed Particle Gun, pistols.

The spaceport appeared to be empty of pretty much everything, save for dust. A few computer terminals were found, but there was no obvious way of working them, and no apparent source of power. A blank screen on a five foot pedestal didn't offer much.

An hour of wanders determined that the entire complex was indeed empty. Nothing that could even be the least bit helpful was to be found either. It gave Kestrel and the rest of the team the creeps, but Kestrel even more so, as she found that her senses seemed to be... dulled by the planet. As if something in the background was hiding just out of sight, and was blocking her from detecting them. That feeling alone made her skin crawl, and the utter desertion of what looked like a perfectly good planet didn't help the feeling.

Doctor's Stanka and Lewis, on the other hand, delighted in the fact that the planet appeared deserted. It ment they didn't have to explain to anyone why they were poking around at everything, and possibly breaking functional things just to see how they worked. Ah, the life of a scientist. After the security detail, lead by Kestrel, reported in, the teams set off to find these computer terminals, with the intent on taking them apart.

They watched, and they waited... as they had done for more then a millennia. They felt the telepath among the new arrivals, and sensed promise. When the time was right, they moved about to execute their plan. It wouldn't be long now...

However, their arrival had not truly gone unnoticed, and a communion of sorts was being held across the overgrown, fallen world.

‘There is much to be done…’

‘Yes…’

‘The Others are active’.

‘I can feel them in the new arrivals.’

‘As can I.’

‘They should be destroyed immediately.’

This thought came from the one known as Ulkesh, a leader of the more military of the two main factions. Immediately it was drowned out by a chorus of complaints from the other, more benevolent group.

‘Very well,’ he conceded in thought, ‘we shall let them live, but they shall not leave.’

‘And what of the telepath, I have been blocking her since she arrived?’ asked Alkesh, one of the more moderate ones, closest to the abandoned port.

‘I suggest that you deal with her’ sent Vorsh, another moderate, ‘she could be useful to us’

Meanwhile, away from the prying eyes of the expedition, Ulkesh’s ship, a small ‘light cruiser’ type vessel, rose smoothly into the air, heading out of the system to carry out another task. On the ground however, hovering over the ground by a few inches, not disturbing the thick layer of dust, an object swathed in robes moved, pausing just beyond the area the intruders had opened up, Alkesh watched, his single lens-eye glowing a lime green in the darkened room he waited in. He would watch, and see how they reacted to his encounter suit and its trace power readings.

Stanka, Lewis, and two of the workers were still working on finding so much as a seam in the terminal when he appeared. Kestrel, sitting on a desk to their left, spotted him first and almost seemed to freeze as he approached. After he can to a halt several meters behind them, Kestrel leaned over, wide eyed, and tried to get the attention of the two doctors.

"Doctor... Doctor!" she hissed low.

"Yes Kestrel, what is it?" replied Stanka without so much as turning his head.

"Theres... something here..."

"Nonsese! This planet is deserted. And if you're trying to scare me, it's not going to work."

"Uh, doc..." mumbled one of the assistants who'd turned around.

"What Johnson? Argh, fine," he stood up and look over towards Kestrel, and saw him. "What do... you..." he trailed off.

Lewis had slightly less tact. She ignored the lot of them, and only finally stood to look when the entire team had stopped work.

"Well, come on, what are you gawking a... oh shit!"

There were, of course, watching. They were always watching. For a thousand years, they had waited, for the disease to rise again.

A thousand years, and yet, still...

They had noticed it, the Indiastani vessel, arriving...

Of all the people in the universe... They... Well, it could be a threat. Yet, it could also be... Useful.

And a ship moved, not to fight... But to watch. To watch what would happen, to watch how they would decide...

For the time had come, again.

Glorious Tag of Doom

Alkesh looked at them, gawping at him like lobotomised chickens. Still, this was unsurprising. He moved around to look at them, his head moving, green eye surveying each of them in turn, somehow seeming to peer into their very souls. With a sound like heavy, wet stones sliding across each other, like massive blocks of a great monument.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice heavy and artificial. His gaze rested on Kestrel, “all of you…”

They stood, and they stared. Sol itself was filled with various speiceses, all techicly alien to one another, but this thing didn't come from Sol... it was real alien. They were spellbound.

Well, most of them were. Dr. Lewis got over the inital shock rather quickly. "My name is Doctor Sylvia Lewis, contractor for IPE, and we're an expidition from Earth. Just who they hell are you?"

Kestrel, however, was more mesmorized then the others. The thing whispered in her mind, promising her things that made her mind both cry for joy and mercy. She spoke to him, silently, though even her mind seemed to stumble, "I... don't know."

He moved his head a little, to fix his baleful glare at Lewis and paused, after a moment another, solitary word came from his synthesiser, “Pain!”

She collapsed after a moment, with an agonised scream, suddenly feeling as though assorted hot needles were slicing into her skin, cauterising as they went. She twitched in the layer of dust for a few moments, before finally he stopped.

Next he looked at Kestrel. That was a better answer, and a true one. Another solitary word came from him. “Learn,” he commanded. She was struck by a vision, blotting out her vision.

1,000 years ago, around the 1,200s, CE.

The serene space above the Indian subcontinent was enhanced by the presence of the ships, eerily beautiful, as strange blue lights, like rivers running across some of the surfaces of the organic ships. It was the year of war, of destruction, of loss.

However, the Vorlons – that was their name, she grasped that after a moment of confusion – were already planting the seeds of their future victory. The vision moved inside one of the ships, to reveal angelic looking beings of light, glowing brightly, winged seraphim, moving about a large number of sedated human women. One of them moved to one of the women, her dress slightly higher status than the others, and held his hand over her abdomen for a moment, in a subtle glowing, she was altered, and all her progeny would carry certain genes that would one-day blossom into certain abilities. There was a strong suggestion that this woman was a distant ancestor of hers.

After another moment, the vorlon withdrew his mind from hers, with one residual whisper, “You are our servant, it is your place.”

Kestrel stood, dumbfounded by the vision gratned her. She knew she would be safe here. She understood.

That didn't mean the rest of the team did.

"Christ!" one of them yelled. In a blind panic, the three guards started shooting as Dr. Stanka stumbled back towards the ships, his eyes fixed on the scene that was unfolding. One by one, they keeled over in agony. He saw their shots do nothing; they even failed to leave marks. After the last of them dropped, screaming, he turned blindly and ran. As he rounded the courner into the dock and out of the concourse, he looked back one last time. The mewling heaps of the three security guards and Dr. Lewis lay about the terminal, while Kestrel simply stood there, as if she hadn't even noticed what happened, and the three technicians were huddling against the wall in terror. He ran on to the ship.

"Arvan! Get the ship online! We've gotta get out of here, NOW!"

"What the hell Germain... where are the others?"

"They're gone. We haev to leave before it gets here!"

"It? What the fuck have you assholes been up to... gods, I knew this was a bad idea..."

"Shut up! Get the engines going!"

They both ran up the back access ramp, Stanka pausing to hit the controls to close it. Arvan was already up in the cockpit, the ship's computer already prepping for takeoff. Stanka's eyes were still wide in panic, while he was sweating something fierce. In a few moments, the engines roared to life, and the Maria XI was off and running.

Alkesh’s ship, a ‘transport/light cruiser’ was waiting. It surged up from nearby to meet the Maria, with a loud screech it passed through the atmosphere. He didn’t acknowledge it, even as it fired a bright yellow blast that lit up the sky, cleanly slicing the engines from the IPE vessel. He knew it would do its duty, it was part of him.

After a moment, as the rain of debris began to fall, the vorlon turned his attention to Kestrel again, spitting out another command, “follow,” he turned, and headed back the way he had come.

Kestrel was lead deep into the heart of the vorlon city. He took her onto a train of sorts, cylindrical, organic. It hovered above the ground, a path of disturbed dust showed a line of cuneiform script delineating the pathway as surely as rails. She could see the eerily deserted spaceport through a shimmering translucent part of the wall

The architecture of the vorlons was vast, smooth and curved, domes and towers rose. Alkesh moved to the front of the carriage, his orange and yellow robes billowing about him. He moved, and paused for a moment, glaring at the controls – not that there were any actual controls, merely strange, organic looking plinths growths from the front of the carriage – the vehicles sprang into life, and the outside moved. There was no sensation of movement, even as the outside blurred, forests whipping past the window, a carpet of green.

About a minute later, the forests blurred back, as the ‘train’ decelerated, ending its journey outside a largish tower, emerging from the forest canopy. The tower was Alkesh’s, not that they had individual possessions, but the vorlons tended to be bound to what they used most often. With a telepathic order, an irresistible impulse, her commanded his latest acquisition to follow him into a waiting lift of sorts.

The lift stopped, and the vorlon glided out into a room beyond. There were more of the aliens in it, if anything, they were in some sort of council, with dozens of them, in varying colours, mostly variations of Alkesh’s yellow and orange, or a purple colour, but also with smatterings of blue, and green. There was even a solitary one in a radiant white. As one they turned to look at her.

With the same synthesised voice, though with different inflection, the white one, slowly gliding towards her, repeated the previous one’s question, “Who are you?”

Standing before them, she felt more naked and alone then she thought she ever could. Their minds seemed to fill the room; the palpable sense of sheer power that surrounded each of them making her feel tiny.

The question was asked again. Feeling no less stunned this time, she managed to stammer her answer, again.

"I don't know," her mind whispered.

They gave her, over the next few hours, an answer to that question. It was perhaps the wrong answer, but it was a necessary evil. The simple summery was "I am your servant."

After that, Alkesh and another, Harakash led her away. They descended into the depths – although it was still above ground level, a deliberate architectural difference from the others – of the tower.

She was stripped and examined, then laid out on a large, warm and slightly soft slab of some yellowish material. Harakesh’s suit opened, the head sliding back to reveal his ‘true’ form as he emerged. It was almost too bright to look at, radiant white, robed and winged. Looking into his face had a rather strange effect, best described as ‘faith building.’

Alkesh moved behind her head, even as the other vorlon began to examine her naked form, clinically noting assorted scars, not to mention her unnaturally white skin and ashen black hair, tongue, lips and even eyes. With various symbiotic creatures and other tools, he set about returning her body to the way it should have been, even down to restoring her capacity to breed.

As this was happening, Alkesh touched her mind. She half closed her eyes and sighed in pleasure, wriggling ever so slightly on the slab as he did so.

He was slightly surprised to find that certain memories were in fact blocked {clumsily, in his opinion} into her mind, not suppressed, but lodged there to prevent her forgetting them – though she had made commendable progress on them herself. He accessed one, making sure that she was far too pleasured to notice, eliciting little cries from her as he observed.

Hold the rifle up to your shoulder. Look down the barrel. Lead the target if it is moving. Relax. Squeeze the trigger. Snap-CRACK! The two-stage shot rips through the air. The particle laser, unseen while traveling at the speed of light, slices into the soft flesh of the child running between houses carrying an old AK and a few belts of ammunition. Less then a second later, the gun jumps as the caseless rocket of a shell is expelled down the secondary barrel, the mini-missile boring in on the spot already cut open by the laser. Upon hitting the now-exposed flesh of the target, in this case the running child's back, the shell explodes messily, leaving very little left of the target's chest.

He didn’t really approve, but far more importantly, this, and similar things lodged into her mind would be irritating. With casual ease, that of a knife through butter, or perhaps cheese, he removed these impediments to a sound mind. He didn’t just do this for his own purposes though. Though she was a tool, there was no reason not to be generous, affectionate even to such tools, though the more militarily minded of his race would doubtless have disagreed.

Soon he would begin to change her mind once more, to suit his purposes, but for now, he would leave her to enjoy her newfound mental and physical freedom.

Slumping on to something that more or less resembled a fine sofa, Kestrel did the one thing she hadn't been able to do properly in years. Sleep. The entire process had been rather demanding, and once she hit the couch, she fell asleep almost instantly. It felt like an age before they woke her, but it had really only been a few hours. She didn't remember ever feeling more rested, however.

When he spoke, she no longer felt afriad. His voice, even the synthisized version emitted by his suit, sounded heavenly. His voice almost made her smile as the assoiciated memories jumped to the fore, only making her like him all the more. It felt like the love she was supposed to have had for another, but she'd never really known her father. But he was a good substitute.

"It is time."

Alkesh led Kestrel to another part of the planet, and began the long and arduous process of enhancing her. Something that involved half a dozen of them, doing assorted strange things to her, sometimes just involving telepathic contact, sometimes involving changing, rewiring and rewriting her brain, though mercifully she didn’t feel that. Overall the mindgangbang was fairly pleasant, orgasmic even.

After hours of that, the others left, and Alkesh looked at her, “now to begin,” he said, and the head of his encounter suit slid back, and bright shafts of light shot out of his ‘neck’ and into her eyes and mouth, pulses of strange light flowing into her, embedding a part of him within her.

He was actually quite pleasant to carry, somewhat soothing… “Relax once more, soon we will leave,” he said, his ‘head’ sliding back into position.

Ulkesh's ship returned shortly afterward, gliding smoothly into orbit, and paying no attention to the characteristic neutrino emissions of the shadow vessel lurking at the edge of the system, perhaps thinking, in its arrogance, {ah, the error of pride} that the Vorlons, like many of the younger races, were unable to tell that it was there.

‘Let them watch,’ he/they thought, ‘It will not help them.’

As it descended, the ship’s master contemplated the remaining… humans… lurking around their landing site. Some would probably require killing, while he could use the others to further the aims of the ‘Empire’ as thralls of some kind. Doubtless the enemy had many such beings in its service, and it would not hurt to have some of their own.

Gliding into the starport with a trail of disturbed dust behind him, the purple-and-black being turned its attentions upon the unfortunate Dr Lewis first, its solitary eye shooting some strange yellow bolt thing from it, hitting Sylvia’s torso like a giant hand, it batted her from her feet in an eyeblink. It looked around for the others, and said, “Service,” it looked one way, and then turned in another direction “or death.”

The seven remaining members of the expidition had been biding their time after Alkesh left, wondering what to do. They heard Dr. Stanka and the ship take off, followed shortly by the explosion caused by it's firely remains slamming back to earth. When this new alien arrived, they tried to recoil as best they could. They had been perfectly willing to do as it instructed, even more so after the thing shocked Dr. Lewis again. No one, not even the aliens, seemed to like her. When offered a chocie between service and death, they made what seemed to be the sensible choice. They chose service. Even Dr. Lewis swallowed her pride and submitted. Once again, the natural human inclination towards self-preservation shone through, and they did what they believed they'd have to in order to live. They had no idea what was in store for them, but they submitted anyway.

He guided them along, much like Kestrel, and found some abandoned rooms to put his new charges into. He made sure to remove all the furniture in advance, and, upon the first hint of dissent, shot Doctor Lewis yet again.

In order to clear their minds, he made a point of not providing any materials they didn't need, which meant, that he provided nothing but food - some form of nutrient bar - and water. He left them alone to... contemplate their existance.

Several hours passed, and eventually, Alkesh came back again. Kestrel in tow. He’d managed to avoid Ulkesh showing up too, which was helpful. Ulkesh didn’t much care for the younger races, and as far as Alkesh was concerned, he was, perhaps, dangerous. He singled out the ever suffering Dr Lewis, and, with the characteristic pause before he spoke, ordered her to “Come.”