فاصله بین دو فصل

Interlude

The Nihil.

Ab Dalis. Never a lovely world, always shrouded in swirling, browntinted clouds as if the swamps on the surface were trying to escape the planet’s gravity. Now, though, it looked even worse than usual. The orbital impact had forced an enormous cloud of vaporized water and mud into the air, and much of that had ionized, causing gigantic lightning storms to flicker across the planet’s atmosphere.

It looked like some form of hell.

A convoy of six freighters made its way through the system, away from the ravaged planet. They held the entire workforce, along with their families, of Garello Technologies, a midlevel materials research and manufacturing concern based in the Keftia district. Beyond the people, the freighters’ holds also contained much of the company’s most important research, databases, machinery, and financial resources. All of it had been loaded aboard the six starships to bring it offworld for safety while the disaster unfolded on Ab Dalis, a massive effort that consumed all of the day and night that had passed since the impact.

The company’s chief executive, Larence Garello, had made the company’s other starships available to the Ab Dalisian government for relief efforts, but he had chosen to take care of his people and his business first. Many people relied on Garello Technologies, and he wanted to ensure that when the crisis abated, every person who put his trust in him would be safe and sound, and would still be working for a company that could continue producing the ideas and products that supported so many.

Many Ab Dalisian business owners at Larence’s level scoffed at him for going to such great expense to temporarily pack up his operation and move it offplanet, but he didn’t care. The oligarchs and trillionaires cared more for a single durasteel beam in their factories than the people who worked in them. Larence was wealthy, yes, but that was because good people in his employ gave him their all. He was damn well going to take care of every last one.

The convoy was headed to the system’s outer edge, where it would stop to wait to see how the situation developed.

But before the ships could reach their destination, they encountered something strange.

It looked like a storm, or a storm cloud, perhaps. A massive, bluegray swirl of vapor out in space, dense and threatening, and directly in the convoy’s path. Faint lights flickered from deep within it, like sparkflies at dusk above the Ab Dalisian swamps.

The lead ship in the convoy was the Arbitrage, captained by a darkfurred Shistavanen named Odabba, a good, steady hand who had worked for Garello Technologies for over a decade. He scanned the cloud, but the sensors could not provide any information. He gave the order for all ships to divert course, to go around the thing, whatever it was. Better safe than sorry.

But there was no safety—not anymore.

The storm cloud lit up. A massive, jagged spike of energy shot out from the middle of the cloud, lashing out past the Arbitrage to impact one of the other ships in the convoy, the Maree’s Diligence, named after Larence Garello’s mother.

The other ship glowed brightly for a moment, surrounded by phosphorescent fire, then went dark, its running lights deactivating along the length of its hull and engines fading out. The Maree’s Diligence began to drift away from the rest of the convoy, all its systems clearly offline.

Captain Odabba ordered the convoy to raise shields and prepare for battle—but all six ships were freighters, not warships, and in the rush to evacuate the planet, no guard fighters had been arranged. The cargo vessels were all but unarmed, with only a few light laser cannons each.

Another flash from the cloud, then another, and now it was impossible to think of them as anything but lightning strikes—huge blasts of energy at a scale difficult to process. Each of these two last strikes found a target in Garello’s convoy, but by now the shields were up, and while they didn’t cripple the vessels the way the first against the Maree’s Diligence had, both ships’ defenses took a significant hit.

But each flash of light had illuminated the cloud from the inside, and for just a moment, the beings aboard the convoy had seen what was waiting for them. Ships. Many ships.

As if the third and final strike was a signal, the vessels hiding in the strange cloud shot out, a buzzing, whipping swarm. They were ugly, blocky things, with spikes protruding from them in no discernable pattern. They looked like tools designed for beating someone to death.

Most were sized for one or two pilots, but some were larger, and in the center of the cloud a much bigger vessel waited. It was at least equal in size to one of the convoy’s freighters, but this was no cargo ship. This was a cruel thing, built for war, for destruction.

All of the ships had two things in common, no matter their size or design—three bright slashes down their sides, like war paint, and a strange attachment to their engines, a metal lattice like a half-moon filled with rippling green fire, of unknown purpose.

Laser bolts began to lance out from the convoy’s freighters, anemic and thin in comparison with the threat they faced. There were…so many.

Word began to spread among the people of Garello Technologies and the convoy’s crews. Hope died, replaced with panic and terror.

They had seen the lightning strikes, and the insignia on the ships. They believed they knew who was attacking them.

The Nihil.

Captain Odabba gave the order to run, to turn and race back to Ab Dalis. He knew it was futile, but less so than fighting, and perhaps some of the ships might somehow reach safety.

The Nihil. A year ago, neither Larence Garello nor anyone in his employ had even heard the name. But in the past months, the word had taken on an almost talismanic quality across the Outer Rim, like a plague, or a hunting beast that could not be escaped or fought.

The Nihil were raiders, thieves, murderers, kidnappers. They could be anywhere, at any time, appearing from nothing. They worked in space, on planets, in cities, in the wilderness. They moved like spirits and killed like devils. Whether they were actually monsters or just acted with monstrous savagery was unclear. What was known about them was dwarfed by what was not.

The most important things known about the Nihil were these: They took what they wanted and destroyed what they didn’t, and while occasionally you heard a story about someone surviving an encounter with the Nihil, you never heard a story about someone fighting them off.

A large segment of the enemy ships surrounded the disabled

Maree’s Diligence, swirling around it in a manner chaotic but somehow aware, like winged insects swarming a corpse but never colliding with one another.

Projectiles fired from each of the Nihil attack ships. Not laser blasts or missiles. These were something like harpoons, and each dug deep into the hull of the unshielded, defenseless freighter.

As one, the Nihil vessels rotated 180 degrees, so their engines faced the Maree’s Diligence, and then those engines fired. Long tendrils of flame shot out from each ship, and the Nihil vessels strained at the cables attaching them to the freighter.

From the bridge of the Arbitrage, Larence Garello watched in horror, thinking of the people on that ship, the thousands of people on that ship.

Their families. He had told them to bring their families, that he would keep them safe.

The Maree’s Diligence ripped apart.

It did not explode, other than a few flickers of flame here and there.

Presumably this was due to the fact that the ship’s systems were largely inert after the Nihil’s first strike. Whatever the cause, it shattered and tore, its inner passageways and compartments venting to space. Smaller objects and bits of debris came spiraling out into the void, and Larence Garello, chief executive of Garello Technologies, knew that some of those objects were his people.

“Keep firing!” Captain Odabba shouted to his bridge crew. “I’ve called for assistance from Ab Dalis, and they’ll send what they can. We just need to hold on.”

Larence was not a military man, but even he knew these words rang hollow. Ab Dalis was consumed with a planetwide catastrophe. Their government was corrupt and ineffective after generations of catering to all those oligarchs and trillionaires, and might not send anyone to help even if they could.

Another blast fired from the lightninglike weapon, emanating from the largest vessel in the Nihil force, the warship at its center. It hit one of the other freighters, which went cold and dead, as had the Maree’s Diligence. Everyone left in the convoy assumed that this ship, too, would shortly be ripped apart and plundered by the Nihil corpse-flies.

Indeed, enemy ships surrounded the disabled freighter, and the cables shot out again…but this time something different happened.

Perhaps the freighter’s reactor was not completely inert, or some other error was made, but the cargo ship exploded. A ball of white light enveloped the Garello Technologies vessel as well as many of the swarm of Nihil surrounding it, and while Larence Garello’s heart ached at more of his people lost, he felt a beat of savage triumph at the thought that at least they had taken some of the bastards with them.

“We’re being boarded,” Captain Odabba said, his voice grim, staring at the alerts and threat indicators rippling across his screens.

“I’ll open the weapons locker. We don’t have enough blasters for everyone. Anyone with military experience gets priority. Everyone else…find something to fight with.”

He moved away from the command console toward the bridge annex, where the freighter’s limited complement of weaponry was stored.

But before he could take two steps, the bridge hatch smashed open, as if kicked inward by a giant. It skidded across the deck, smashing into and presumably killing a member of Captain Odabba’s crew. The Klatooinian woman died without making a sound.

Three white canisters shot into the room from the exterior corridor.

Before they hit the deck, they exploded, and the bridge was filled with thick, dense, blue-gray gas. It was instantaneous. One moment the air was breathable, the next it was like being lost in a fog…or a storm cloud, perhaps.

Larence Garello tried to hold his breath, but the shock of the events had left his heart racing, and he was not as young as he once was. He took in a gasp of air—but it was not air, and his system reacted near instantaneously to the poison.

He looked up to the hatchway, where the Nihil were entering the bridge. He saw them through swimming, fading vision, saw the masks they wore, and knew that whatever they were beneath, they wanted the galaxy to see them as monsters.

Larence Garello sucked in one final, burning breath, and knew he would not be one of those rare few to survive an encounter with the Nihil.