Characters | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Epilogue
Chapter 2: Seren and friends get a call for help
The Children of the Stars had been travelling the universe for ten thousand years. Annie could swear that’s how long they’d been assigned to the Mother of all Star’s planet. She was sick of sitting still and wanted to be moving again. It had only been five years in reality, but it had been a very uneventful five years.
“Can’t you sit still for two seconds?” Seren asked. She was sitting on the couch with her tablet translating the ancient language of the Mother.
In the five years since they’d discovered this place, their entire civilization had gone from hoarding technology and enslaving micro-suns to sharing their knowledge and working with the suns as equals.
When the Children of the Stars were still just crawling out into the universe, they’d discovered a planet that had been hollowed out to make room for a micro-sun. The sun had been created to power a massive computer that housed the consciousness of the original inhabitants of the planet. Something had happened and the minds merged with the sapience of the sun. They melded into a wonderful and powerful mind.
Instead of marvelling at what they’d discovered, they stole the technology and then pushed the planet into a void between galaxies. They monopolized the technology and travelled the universe.
Since Annie and Seren had re-discovered the Mother, they’d made a lot of fascinating discoveries. The largest being the ability to speak with suns. Every sun is sapient but until recently, they’d only been able to talk to the Mother and her children.
“The suns say anything interesting?” Annie asked.
Seren pointed at what she was working on and said, “This is just a novel I’m translating. It relaxes me.”
Laughing, Annie walked over to her wife and kissed her head, saying, “Okay. That’s weird. Cute, but weird.”
A message beeped on both their watches. It was their friend and boss, Jan, or as they were supposed to call them, Captain Ng. Emergency meeting, my office. Now!
The captain’s office was sparsely decorated and Annie would normally tease them about it, but when she and Seren entered, they saw that the room was filled with high level military.
Annie saluted and said, “Generals!”
Seren only nodded politely since she wasn’t military.
“Good. Thank you for coming,” said the soft voice of the Mother coming from a speaker in the walls. “I have been speaking with the suns and they are concerned about what is happening in the Milky Way Galaxy.” She brought up a starmap.
“That’s one of the old galaxies,” Seren said, looking almost hungry. “Our home galaxy, Abell 1689, is roughly five hundred million years old. Most of the galaxies we’ve travelled to are between that and five billion. The Milky Way and the old quadrant are between ten and fifteen billion years old. Who knows what we could find.” An archeologist’s dream.
“Yes, exactly,” said the large man who was head of the military in this section of the galaxy. “And something is happening there?”
Annie appreciated the general trying to get Seren and Mother back on topic.
“Yes,” said Mother and when no one said anything she continued, “Suns have fantastic powers. When a star explodes, everything it’s made of gets scattered, but eventually enough of it comes back and starts a new star. That means that the stars in the Milky Way have died and been reborn so often that their powers are closer to a god.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Jan. “There’s no such thing as a god.” The Children of the Stars didn’t believe there was a deity, but they did believe in being reborn.
The Mother sighed, something that sounded strange from a digitised voice, and said, “Powers like a god not an actual god. Either way, one of them is screaming for help.”
Everyone stood in silence until Annie asked, “Why is a sun that has god-like powers asking for help from us?”
“He says that the other suns have banded together to destroy him and his people. He says there are two trillion people that will die.” The Mother sounded sad and disgusted at the same time.
“How can we help?” asked Seren.
“I propose we send every ship at our disposal to help them out,” the Mother replied.
The general huffed and said, “That’s not up to you alone. We need to assemble the council for something this big. An emergency meeting can happen by tonight.” He marched off muttering about logistics.
When he was gone, Seren got a huge smile on her face and asked, “What’s the real plan?”
Annie and Jan looked at her confused but Mother replied, “The council will probably refuse. I have been working on a new ship design that is smaller but could hold a few hundred fighters and a small crew. I believe I could change it into a warship and repository of knowledge. We could help upgrade their technology, which is quite primitive from the datastream the sun sent.”
“How big is this datastream?” Seren asked excitedly.
“It’s a complete history of his people, only half a million years of data. I’ll send you the compressed files.”
The answer and offer was enough to make Seren sit down. She made the face that Annie jokingly called, “acheologasm” and started to scroll through the data.
Annie rolled her eyes and said, “If the council says no then who’s going on the ship?” She knew the answer but had to ask. The Children of the Stars had been ruled for ten thousand years by the Technomages who had been generous but brutal. When they’d found the Mother of All Stars, they’d briefly treated her as a new ruler. Mother had found the idea horrifying and they’d worked on a form of democracy. There was a ruling council but any major decisions could be voted on instantly through the star-communication network.
Jan sighed, “Whoever volunteers.”
The three friends looked at each other and nodded in agreement. They’d volunteer.Well, I wanted something exciting, thought Annie.
Read Chapter 3
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