There was light everywhere. It was so bright that he had to close his eyes. And when he did he could still see. He saw patterns of color that he knew, somehow, were people. There were fifteen in all. Five were far away, one dominated them all, alone standing. Three lay on the ground, and the fifth was somehow both suppressed and radiant. It was awesome. He looked closely and saw a another being. Right in front of him. And then the light and dark faded and reality reemerged.
Jim snapped awake, disoriented, confused. His eyes acted as though he just stared into bright light… As he regained his vision, he found himself in some kind of cave. Memory slowly returned, or it seemed slow, at least. He had reported back to Greglthf after learning of the cult on… Somu’e… Yes, that is where he was. Somu’e.
He had left Felt and arrived on the Confederate world by Thursday morning… he had tracked the woman…
Her name was Maurin Ueiva, a Ki’lail debutante who had a notorious history of vicious anti-Senarian rhetoric. She was purportedly about 40, but she looked much younger. And she had a feeling of one who had weathered the ages… In the way she spoke and carried herself. Jim couldn’t explain it, but she had a confidence that Jim had only seen before on the oldest of Senarians.
Jim had arrived just before her, it seemed, on her cult’s home base of Somu’e, and had spent most of Thursday afternoon tracking her down. He had followed her into a complex, mostly carved out of rock. … Where he was now. He had almost given up and turned back at an end that was apparently dead, when a convenient rock had fallen loose and revealed that the back wall was a hologram. He had gone through. He was on some sort of high-up balcony in a large auditorium, where the old Ki’lail had just been fried. And then he had blacked out…
He looked out over the assembly that had zapped the old man. He could barely conceal a gasp when he realized that the old man standing on the middle of the platform was no longer old. The Ki’lail looked no older than his early thirties now, and in the pit, his aids lay on the ground. He could tell even from the height of the upper level that that at least two of them were dead. The sapphire-haired three-eye man stood as if experiencing utter bliss, his eyes closed, smiling as if he’d just beaten the final boss of Triple-Super-Bot II Turbo. He opened his eyes and his smile faded. Ueiva had joined him in the room, but Jim didn’t realize until just then it because of a black obstruction…
A very black obstruction. It seemed to be hanging in mid-air, and it was a shape Jim found all-too-familiar. A Senarian battle visor silhouette, double the size of his own visor, could only mean one thing. There was someone here, also infiltrating, someone very much larger than Jim. Someone very much less human.
The Ki’lail man spoke now, looking dangerously in the direction of Jim and the invisible Senarian agent. “Hello, Jim Raynor and Najenkur Kehkz,” he said.
That shook Najenkur to her core. Somehow, he had been so empowered by the energy surging through his body, he saw Najenkur through her cloak field and anti-Psionic visor. But who was this Jim? She glanced back over her left shoulder and stared strait into the invisible face of the human infiltrator behind her, hinted at only by a visor barely three zivits long and one wide. She silently whispered a prayer of protection and launched to her feet. She no longer had any doubt she would have to kill to get out of here alive.
Tulva spoke again. “Yes. I know you are there. Both of you. I can assure you, even if you escape with your lives, you will never prevent us from destroying that which we hate. We have already won this fight.” He reached for the comlink that the magenta-haired woman had offered him. He raised it to his mouth and spoke. “Put the base on full alert, and deploy the EMP.”
Alarms began to blare and shortly after that, a surge ran through her cloaking device, shorting it out.. She turned and saw a human male, tall for one of his species. He drew his guns and cocked his head at an angle. “Well,” he said. “It looks like we are in for a fight.”
Jim and his unexpected ally, this Kehkz woman, bolted down the corridor they had used to enter the complex. The hologram was now not working since all the electronics in the base had just been fried. But that didn’t matter to either side. Jim had some very old-fashioned guns, and the Senarian’s gender identified her as a sword-wielding type. Male Senarians preferred energy blades, so Jim was thankful that she was a she.
Just as the pair had rounded the corner and stepped into a large circular room, the had to stop and dodge a pair of psi-lasers beaming from third eyes of the guards so easy to slip past before. Jim hit the floor, dodging left, and brought his guns up firing. He missed, and another laser streaked over his head. He rolled out from behind the rock to his right and squeazed off two rounds into the Smuell’s bulbous cranium. He fell, limp. Several other guards had joined the fight by now, however.
The Senarian woman leapt into the air and landed behind a new guard, her sword cutting him clean in half before her feet touched down. She turned to her right and defended against the laser from an old GW II-era blaster pistol.
Her sword glowed from the impact.
Being a kinetic sword, Jim knew it would cut better when it got hotter, brighter, or more electrically charged—and a laser blast would have all three of those effects.
Jim fired again at two newcomers with his sub-machine gun, tearing holes in their armor, or at least knocking them back a few steps. Jim launched himself behind another rock at the far end of the room, landing in a puddle of water. He fired across the cave at an attacker in the Senarian’s blind-side, and had the grim satisfaction of watching his lifeless body flip-over backwards. Why can’t the bad guys just run like cowards for a change?
Najenkur was now exchanging sword blows with a Ki’lail swordsman, the last of this group of attackers and about two-thirds as tall as the Senarian. The fact that he was holding his own told Jim he was good. Very good. Too good.
So, Jim shot him.
“What are you doing?!” Najenkur said. Screamed, really.
“Helping out,” Jim replied.
“Helping? You just shot a man who was engaged in a sword fight. That is on page one of the book of dishonorable warfare!”
Jim decided she was insane, but he could tell she was livid, so he apologized. “Sorry. I didn’t know it meant that much to you.” He surveyed the carnage that they had just wreaked on the guards. “We need to keep moving. They just might nuke the place,” he said at length. She stared daggers at Jim, but said nothing, so they started down the corridor together.
Najenkur had had to use her psi to open the doors on the way out, but there wasn’t much more fighting. Two guards waited at the exit, and she had split the first one down the middle herself with her two antiquated kalatani blades. She allowed the human to shoot the other. She couldn’t help but cringe at having to kill to survive, but she also knew that this was bigger than herself. What ever Tulva was doing, people were going to die if he succeeded.
“Well,” said the human. “What do we do now?”
What now indeed? She looked at the human, intently, and began to read his mind. By the end of the minute, she had determined that he was legitimate.
“First, we should tell each other who we are, and why we were in there. I am Lt. Colonel Najenkur Kehkz, North Confederation military. I was ordered to investigate this cult on the grounds that they may have developed or discovered a weapon capable of killing many in a terrorist act.”
“Then our missions are the same,” the human confirmed. “Lieutenant Jim Raynor, Imperial Army,” he saluted. He looked around. “We need to go somewhere safe if we’re going to talk. They might come back—maybe just to kill us.”
Within the hour, they were at a Confederate Military headquarters on Somu’e. Najenkur suggested that they should pool their knowledge about the Eyes of Vengeance and see what they could come up with together. After a while, their efforts, which included mining the exhaustive databanks of the Confederate Galaxy Network, turned up mostly nothing.
“Is there anything else you didn’t tell me? Anything that might give us a clue as to where to go next?” Even as Naj said the words, she just then noticed the exhaustion in her own voice.
The human lieutenant thought for a moment and said, “Well. She did say something about an ‘ancient weapon’ that was stolen by the Senarians. Something about the ‘Starless.’”
And that stopped Najenkur in her mental tracks. “A starless planet?” she asked.
“Maybe.” Jim replied. “The translator just said ‘the starless,’ whatever that means.”
Najenkur knew all to well what it could mean. She keyed in a search for “Et nama-kan” After a while, security clearance was required. Very high security. That meant she was making progress. She typed in her authorization, which was just barely adequate for the file. It was very old, dating back more than 1000 years; it was so old that much of the text was in Old Senarian, the Shakespeare version of the Senarian Language, if one wills. “Come over here,” she said to human.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I don’t suppose you can read Senarian. This is an ancient document about an incident that mentions ‘the Starless’ and ‘the dead system.’ About 1200 years ago, during the Senarian war with the Xel Empire, the Xel purportedly had a weapon of immense power. According to this, my—A Senarian general captured the weapon and used it to ‘put-out’ the star in that system. The shockwave tore the inhabited world apart, killing millions.”
“How come we imperials have never heard that there is a weapon in Confederate space that can collapse stars?” Jim asked.
“I’ve never heard of this myself, Lt. Raynor. This isn’t common knowledge at all. I’ve heard legends all my life a starless planet that acts as an all-powerful weapon, but it is never given second thought. It is believed to be only a legend. And the stories have never mentioned genocide.
“Furthermore, it doesn’t say it collapsed the star. The way it’s worded, you get the sense that the star didn’t leave a black hole or anything; it is just gone. I don’t know what that means, but it is clear that if this is true, then this thing Tulva and Ueiva are after could destroy the Confederation.”
Jim considered this for a moment and then pointed to the four Senarian characters on the screen that she had been hoping to avoid explaining. He said, “Hey, that says ‘Kehkz,’ just like your last name. Relative of yours?”
“So you can read Senarian,” she dodged. “Yes, Pelenthou Kehkz is my ancestor. He—“
“He was the general who defeated the Xel,” Jim finished for her. “I know my military history, and Senarian Language is a required course at the academy. So basically, you’re saying that your ancestor committed genocide. No wonder Tulva feels so much hate for you.”
“You noticed? I don’t think I’ve ever felt that pure a hatred.” Najenkur thought about the bright light, and the transfiguration of Tulva, and how she could feel his unadulterated hate for her coursing through him, after learning her name during the brief seconds their minds bonded. She shuddered. Even this non-psionic human could feel it.
Jim took a closer look at the screen. “So what are the coordinates of the planet?” He inquired.
Naj sighed heavily. “They aren’t given, and I understand why. But I don’t know how it could remain hidden for so long. Even if there is no star, the light it has given off must just now be reaching the edge of the galaxy; it would be thousands of years before it is all gone. And if there is starlight, someone will undoubtedly jump there, if for no better reason than to hide from police.”
“Maybe it is obstructed, or something.”
“If it was near the edge or core of the galaxy possibly, but we can’t just jump towards ever pinpoint of light we see.”
Najenkur looked up to see Jim tinkering with a small electronic device at the table across the room. “What is that she asked?”
He turned the device on and smiled. “It is a tracking device,” he said. “Tuned to the frequency of the homing beacon that I put on Tulva’s ship before I entered the base.”
“Well,” Naj said with a wry smile, “It is as good of a next-step as I can think of.”