String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [0]
She should have insisted that her personal cabin contain a window. It would have been simple enough to add to the design of the ship, and her children would have enthusiastically seized any opportunity to provide their rih-hara-tan with the most extravagant comfort, let alone a small portal to the stars.
Instead, her last living glimpse of the constellations of the Monorhan system, intricate designs she had been taught to name almost as soon as she could speak, was stolen as she had been all but carried by her shi-harart, Naviim, and three terrified harans through the dank, lifeless corridors of a forsaken alien space city into the docking bay where her ship was berthed. The sadness of this realization didn’t hit with full force until she found herself locked securely in her cabin aboard the vessel she had christened Betasis twelve… could it have been only twelve?… short rotations ago, when this catastrophic journey had begun.
“Oweninum’s Belt,” she whispered to the darkness. On the homeworld, this cluster of seven stars had shown brightest in the final days of the harvest. Weeks later, the first crystals of wantain would blanket the fields in luminescent temporary death, until they were melted away by the timeless dance of Monorha’s two suns, Protin and her partner, the Blue Eye, at the dawn of the planting season.
She activated her silent cabin’s internal lights with a thought and turned her attention to the hand-painted star chart that covered the wall behind her personal command console. So well attuned was the Betasis’s organic circuitry to her mind and body that the dimness she now traversed as she crossed from the entrance alcove to the magnificent rendering of a thousand stars seemed to eerily echo her despair. Or perhaps her ship simply knew, as she did, that the task she was now determined to complete was best accomplished in the faintest hint of light.
“Is this, truly, the price of heresy?” she asked, gently caressing each of the seven stars of Oweninum’s Belt that had been lovingly recreated by her ati-harat. It would be her final question of the Blessed All-Knowing Light, though she was uncertain if she still had the right to speak His name, let alone address Him in prayer.
The library of scrolls sat along the far wall, swathed in rich and ornately woven casings. Technically the property of the entire tribe, they were traditionally entrusted to the care of the rih-hara-tan for her private study. The original twenty-seven letters of Dagan that had been the hope of her people for countless generations, and the inspiration behind this final doomed voyage into the unknown, rested in a place of honor among them.
Steeling herself against the wave of nauseating rage that threatened to overwhelm her with thoughts of Dagan and his cursed visions, thoughts that would easily transform her into a frantic-braying kuntafed if given leash, she forced herself to draw a ragged complete breath and reached for the scroll of Jocephar. There she would find the invocation to meditation required to begin the ritual. She was certain that what she was about to attempt hadn’t been contemplated in Jocephar’s time. But if anything of her or her people was to survive the next few hours, she had to try. She had miserably failed them once. She would not permit herself to do it again.
This ritual of transference was meant to be the final gift from one rih-hara-tan to the next. It gave the tribe a seamless continuity as the wisdom and experience, the very essence of its leader, were bestowed upon the next in the line of succession when it was clear that the rih-haratan was near death.
But her last potential successor, Lynarra, a mere child of eight cycles, was dead already; dead, along with ten thousand others, almost the entire population of Monorha’s Fourteenth Tribe.
“And for what?” she asked herself.
For the ravings of madman was the only answer that came.
Even as this blasphemous thought knifed through the surface of her mind, she saw the face of Klyrrhea before her. Time had carved gentle lines around the deep green