The Shadows Cycle

Chapter 2

IMAGE

            Back at the station, Kara walked back to her cube.  A steady drone could be heard in the silence.  When she returned to her cube, she noticed a strange white light near the object.  Kara did not know what it was, but her question was answered a minute later.

            The entire station started to shake violently. The entire outer layer of glass exploded.  An exceedingly high-pitched whistle blasted through the windows and the station felt like it was thrown back.  Kara assumed that it was a star explosion somewhere in the distance, having heard of this kind of thing happening before.

            An hour after the explosion, the over-speaker announced that a chair Captain meeting would take place at six o’clock that evening in the radar observatory.

            As six o’clock approached, Kara left her cube.  She walked down the hallway and stepped into a Cettion that was located around the first turn in her hallway.   

            “Five-minutes until meeting begins.  Please report to radar observatory,” announced the speaker as Kara entered the room.

            Captain Beckley and several other officers were already in the radar observatory.  The officers were quietly conversing among themselves, but the Captain had a stern expression on his face, silently waiting for the last of the officers to arrive.  When everyone had arrived, the Captain started to talk.

            “Now you all probably know why we are holding this meeting.  It is because of something that happened just a few hours ago.  We do not know exactly what it was, but I have a pretty good idea.”

            “Isn’t it obvious sir?  It was probably the Narlan trying to attack us while we had our backs turned.  They saw it as the perfect chance to attack us while we weren’t suspecting a thing.  We should have had our guards posted as the last of us came back to the station,” said someone that Kara did not recognize.  Then Kara spoke up.

            “That is not exact, although it is a good speculation.  Captain, before we came back in, I noticed an odd object hovering out a few miles away.  When I went back to my cube, I also noticed an odd white light close to the object.” The Captain frowned at this, “I believe that a large ship was firing at a star intending to distract us.  But what puzzles me is that what I saw on my screen was larger, in fact much larger, than any of our pods or the Narlan ships.”

            “Both of these theories are sensible enough, though I must say that I am edging toward Kara’s more.  All of you may know of something that happened twenty-five-years ago.  What happened caused the separation of the alliance between humans and the Narlan, but all of those details will be discussed in later meetings.”

            They continued to talk about several points of what had happened for the next hour.  Once the meeting was finished, Kara returned to her cube.

            Back in her cube Kara started to wonder if there was more to the story than she knew.  Of course everyone in that room knew about the attack that had happened twenty-five-years ago, but was there more detail behind the story?  Staring out her window, Kara saw the white light in the distance.  The object on her radar had disappeared.

            Three days passed, filled only with meetings.  Reports on where the Narlan were located occasionally came in, though nothing exciting happened. 

            Arrangements on a deployment to attack the Narlan were cancelled due to a missing leader, Kara wondered whom.  At about three o’ clock p.m., another meeting was about to take place.  Kara went back to the meeting room and sat down, waiting for the other officers and generals to arrive.  In front of her, a table hovering about twenty-feet in the air held the Commander.  Sitting around him were the members of Commander Heffer’s Charger Squad.  As soon as everyone that was supposed to be there arrived, he began his meeting.

            “If you would all please seat yourselves around me we have a meeting to start.  Many of you know why the Narlan are our enemies.  If you do not, you will now see precisely what happened on the night that they turned against us.  Please turn your attention to the IMAGE and we can begin.”

            A huge screen had risen out of the floor behind them.  It was flashing shades of purple, yellow, red, and blue.  A sort of mist appeared in front of the screen and sank back into it.  A moving picture appeared on the screen, and the sound of the picture was coming from somewhere inside the room. 

A Narlan ship was docked on a station of the humans.  A strange object hovered a few miles away from the station.  A bright white light was near it.  Towards the center of the station was a huge dome.

The picture zoomed through a wall of the station and showed the inside.  There were groups of Narlan and humans walking around different control centers.  The Narlan were bluish-red creatures with four gangly arms.  Coming out of each of their knuckles were four-inch long spikes. 

The picture circuited around the room once and then continued on through a quarter-mile long tunnel.  At the end was a small room with a huge pane of thick glass in the front.  Kara concluded that this was an observatory, for what was on the other side of the glass was astonishing.

An enormous room with a single pane of glass encircling it was discernible.  In the center of the room was a glowing green spherical structure that was about fifteen feet in diameter.  Below it, three claws were attaching odd metal figures to the ball.  Gyrating around the room were small platform laboratories, which held both human and Narlan engineers.  Each laboratory was about thirty feet away from the next.

  Intermediate-sized containers that held liquid metals sat on zero gravity disks.  They sat in front of a human who was adding a solution to the metal.  The disks would then drift over to a Narlan, who would pour the metal into a mold and set it on a conveyer belt.  At the end of the belt, one of the three claws would grab the mold and separate it from the metal.  It would then attach the pieces to the ball.

Suddenly, a violent shake disrupted the process.  The windows shattered, and an ear-piercing whistle was heard.  The hovering ball started to glow a deep red, then turned black. 

Everything turned into panic when this occurred.  The Narlan were particularly going crazy.  Suddenly, golden slivers shot out of the ball and destroyed the equipment.  Silver beams shot out and killed only the Narlan. 

The image showed the outside again.  There was a bright white light hovering miles in the distance, but the object was gone.

Kara knew what had happened:  This was the devastating event that broke the alliance between the Narlan and the humans.

The screen started flashing colors again.  A few murmurs were heard in the silence.  The Commander let everyone stop talking before he began to talk. 

“What you have just seen is the separation of the humans and Narlan.  The project that they were working on was probably the most dangerous, yet, important weapon in history.  That ball was the most powerful object in the universe.  It could totally destroy any race, fleet, city, or even planet.  Two of them could possibly cause utter chaos in the galaxy.  It was called the Intimidator.

“At the time that you saw, it was only half finished.  Forty years before then, it was only being blueprinted.  Every piece and substance was being programmed or modified ten years after the blueprints were done.  The chemicals that were added to the metals would make every piece twenty times stronger than just the device itself.  But after the chaos, the Intimidator was nowhere to be found.  We know one thing: It was not destroyed, for if it were, none of us would be here now.  Only one possible answer remained at the time: It was stolen.”

He paused, expecting for somebody to speak.  When nobody did, he continued on.

“What happened last Tuesday was no mistake or star explosion.  Kara here gave us a picture of the clue to who was our attacker.  A bright white light and at first a strange object near it.  Now let me tell you something else:  This is the third time in known history that this event has happened.

“One hundred years ago, another artifact of extreme value was stolen, but it was a weapon that the Narlan had created.  This week, this shadow of an enemy has stolen the Amplifier.  But in order to take it, they also had to kidnap one of our crew, Tony Griffen.”

At first, Kara was shocked, but then she realized that he had not been to any of the meetings in the last few days.  She had only thought that he had gone to find out what had happened, not that he had gone missing.

“A war has begun, but it may have started twenty-five-years ago.  This is the time where we will need allies; we must begin searching.  It may take a hundred million soldiers, pilots and spies, but we must act fast.  The Narlan are strong and they are known to grow in number alarmingly fast, and given enough time they will have unbearable numbers.

“We have held them at bay by attacking them, keeping their population at a steady level, but they have slipped around us.  It is even possible that the Narlan had always wanted to begin a war with us and were basically attacking themselves to get weapons of mass destruction.  And if it was the Narlan, then we must do something to rid ourselves of them.

“Now we must decide, destroy the Narlan, or search for Tony with the chance of being attacked ourselves.”

At the end of the meeting, it was decided that they would fight the Narlan in the hope that they would find Tony.  They would set out in a few days to recruit soldiers to attack the Narlan.

As Kara was walking back to her cube, she noticed a bright light in one of the cubes up ahead.  She ran up to it and saw two shadowy forms inside.  Judging by how big they were, she supposed that they were two Narlan.  She fired twice with her blaster, and heard a heavy thump on the floor.  After that she heard the sound of breaking glass and knew that the other had tried to escape through the window.

  A sudden heavy sucking started to pull everything near the window into space.  Struggling against the enormous vacuum-force pull, Kara reached the panel next to the door to close and lock it.  She heard footsteps and knew that others had come to see the commotion.