The Sub-BASEment, 11:58pm
<<Designation: Banshee as I predicted, it is back; same location as before, sub-basement Sector SK, the Combat Simulator room. Query: why does Designation: Akira respond with the comment ‘same bat-time, same bat-channel’ when my predictions about time and location prove to be accurate? I have looked up the reference but do not understand the allusion.>>
Mary smirked at Frankie’s confusion, she was pretty sure Akira hadn’t seen that much television growing up so it had to be something he’d learnt or heard since leaving Skomer Vale… “Time is of the essence Frankie; focus, we have what, less than 3 minutes before it vanishes again?”
<<Yes, the alien canine-like creature has already materialised.>>
“Good I’ll be in position in under 30 seconds…”
<<At your current speed Designation: Banshee you will be in position … in a further 33.56 seconds.>>
Just over half a minute later Mary rushed round the corner and sure enough, there was the small, russet-coloured corgi-like creature wiggling its feelers 1 and barking wildly at the wall that separated the chamber and the gym but there was nothing there. Or at least that’s all she could see until she stepped inside the gym, put on the infra-red glasses that she’d brought with her and sure enough a distinctly female shaped cold spot materialised over by the Western wall. The ‘cold spot’ appeared to be kneeling and shaking back and forth as though in agony. 2
Annie had once hypothesised that what Mary was currently seeing was some sort of psychic recording as the ghost (presumably, that was what she was seeing in front of her) always appeared in the same spot, repeating the same actions again and again, before it would vanish.
<<Its appearances would appear to be following a lunar cycle, Designation: Banshee. It will be another 28 days before it and the pseudo-canine will reappear again.>>
The ‘dog’s’ antennae was twitching eagerly as it barked. Mary took off the glasses, opened her inner eye and found herself looking at a young woman in old styled clothes with what looked like acid burns on her face.
She went to step in closer as Akira and Mace rushed down the corridor to join her. In the split second between steps, she found herself enveloped in a blinding light then everything felt as though she was being torn apart as the direction of gravity swung round randomly, nauseatingly, as though she was caught in a maelstrom.
A second later, the light cleared and she found herself standing above ground in some sort of large makeshift warehouse, surrounded by dozens of women in baggy one-piece boiler suits, their hair covered in scarves, with large rubber gloves and wearing either wooden clogs or rubber boots. They appeared to be handling what looked like ammunition boxes and very large cannon shells. The other surprising thing was that so many of the women had a bright yellow tinge to their faces. The ‘Corgi’, like Banshee’s teammates, was missing but with all that noise from the heavy machines and the workers shouting at each other as they moved heavy shells and equipment around, it was both deafening and all very confusing.
She was looking around trying to make sense of where she was when she saw a young girl at the opposite end of the shed, uninjured but otherwise the exact image of the ghost she’d ‘seen’ in her mystical vision though unscarred, heading down a set of stairs into a basement. A heavy metal blast door slammed shut behind her.
She tried to follow the girl, though not exactly sure why, when an elderly man with a walrus moustache and overlarge overalls grabbed at her arm and shouted, “Hoy, you shouldn’t be here dressed like that. What if you cause a spark?” He seemed determined to harass her more but was caught short when something large fell through the roof and the world around them exploded… Blazes erupted all around her as everything caught fire. She immediately changed into Banshee and turned insubstantial just in time; an explosive pressure wave tore her harasser into shreds as explosions erupted all around.
Through the gap in the roof, he saw what looked like a zeppelin overhead and on a collision course with it was another cigar shaped ship, but this one lacked a cabin below it and looked more like an alien spaceship. What the..?
This second ship appeared to be double the size of the airship and seemed to fade in and out of view as though it wasn’t really there. She couldn’t focus on that though as around her burning ammunition boxes exploded in all directions; accompanied by the staccato rattle of bursting rounds of ammunition.
In the centre of what was left of the building, was a heap, metres high of blazing explosives. Red hot metal spurted from this, looking peculiarly like a continuous stream of tracer bullets, while shattered cartridge cases with dangerously jagged edges dropped all round her.
To her surprise, she could still hear Frankie. The voice was faint and seemed to be emanating through a hovering portal of shattered solid light, the shards revolving round themselves unaffected by the explosions and scores of fires. She reached out and encountered a solid barrier despite her own insubstantial state. Her commdot was still working (though it shouldn’t whilst she was insubstantial) but apparently it was only when she stood close to the revolving lights.
<<Designation: Banshee what has happened, can you hear me? Your GPS is not registering. Designations: Akira and Mace, I believe the small, organic creature has temporally displaced Designation: Banshee.>>
“Frankie? I’m here, wherever here is.” The exploding ammunition and the general noise from the fires made spoken conversation impossible. Thankfully, her commdot didn’t rely on hearing alone, The bone conduction microphone converted sound waves from her ear-bone into a clear audio transmission enabling two-way communication, for the moment. She tried to walk through the fires towards the basement door and the transmission faded. If her suspicions were correct, there were no satellites or communication towers around to relay the signal.
As though in confirmation of her thoughts, she stepped back towards the light and ‘heard’ Frankie say <<I am only receiving a Bluetooth signal but without an actual transmission source registering. Can you describe where you are?>>
Banshee rapidly reported all that she had seen so far.
A second later Frankie responded, <<I hypothesise that you haven’t moved very much spatially, only temporally and some sort of portal must remain open allowing this communication, for the moment. I suspect that you are on the surface above the BASEment but in the year 1915. That was the night when a zeppelin attack destroyed the munitions factory on the surface and burnt it down. I am losing your signal so I have sent what information I can confirm to you as a data burst… good luck. Now move, a second bomb is due to fall.>>
Banshee heard a loud surge of static and ran though the fiery slaughterhouse towards the stairwell. As she did so, the signal started to fade. She was obviously going out of communications range. Her final parting shot was, “Remind me what the penalty is for meddling with history?” She shouted the words for even at this distance, the clamour of the million explosive bullets drowned out the sound of her own voice. It was also impossible to breathe as the flames consumed the oxygen.
<<I understand from my conversations with Designation: Psipher, Danni that any interference with the past will cause…>>
Whatever else she was going to say was lost as Banshee remaining insubstantial, turned invisible and phased down through the floor, even as more shells and explosives combusted and another large cylindrical object fell through the roof. She looked up and realised that the building was completely wrecked. One wall had been blown to fragments; the iron girders of the roof had been twisted into peculiar shapes and hurled hundreds of metres away. Red-hot missiles could be seen shooting up through what remained of the roof, which was perforated with numberless holes of all sizes and shapes.
Then the impossible happened, twice.
The falling bomb hit the floor of the warehouse but didn’t explode, instead it passed undamaged through the solid floor. Then a second later in the sky above, the spaceship collided with the zeppelin and vanished. The zeppelin continued on its majestic way across the sky, its payload now unleashed and its gondola having been seriously damaged it was apparently heading home though whether that damage was from the collision with the other ship or from the anti-aircraft arsenals on the ground, it was impossible to say.
Banshee finished phasing through the floor into the basement and found herself in a large armament storage area under the warehouse. Above her, the roof vibrated and threatened to collapse in as continuous explosions and millions of rounds exploded, peppering what remained of the warehouse above. There was a muffled roar, somewhat resembling the discharge of a heavy gun, followed by two explosions of a sharper character, and then a huge tongue of flame leapt through the air from nearby as an explosion blasted through the floor above. Smaller tongues of flame followed the force of the detonations along the ground, and then a voluminous cloud of acrid smoke drifted through the tunnels. She looked around and realised that an unexploded large phosphorus-filled firebomb now lay on the corridor floor in front of her nested in amongst hundreds of smashed cases of explosives, shells and ammunition. It was only a matter of time before this part of the warehouse became an inferno as well.
She didn’t stop though at least she could breathe down here. The ghost had been in the sub-basement and that was where she was intending to start her search for survivors. She phased down again, then switched her commdot channel to read Frankie’s Data burst as she ran through the sub-basement in search of any survivors. This part of the premises was obviously used as a canteen and changing rooms for the workers as well as workshops for building the crates used to transport the ammunition and other items to the war.
The first part of Frankie’s data was some basic information about munitions factories during World War 1. Munitions workers faced serious risk of explosion due to the nature of the materials they handled. Most of the workers in the factories were female. Strict regulations were put in place to reduce the chances of accidents happening. The workers wore wooden clogs or rubber boots so as to avoid the sparks that could be caused by shoes with any metal in them. Other metal items were prohibited, including jewellery and hairpins. No wonder that guy had been so angry at her for wearing street clothes and carrying her harp.
The yellow faces she’d seen on some of the female workers was also explained in the ‘footnotes’. Munitions workers whose job was filling shells were prone to suffer from TNT poisoning. TNT stood for Trinitrotoluene – an explosive, which turned the skin yellow of those who regularly came into contact with it. The munitions workers who were affected by this had been commonly known as ‘canaries’ due to their bright yellow appearance.
Then she found the details of the Wessex bombing. During a zeppelin attack overnight on the 8/9 of September 1915 It was reported that there were two zeppelins spotted hovering above Wessex involved in the bombing though that did not marry up with German war records which claimed that the attack was carried out by a single ship. The second Zeppelin was reportedly shot down but again no evidence was found to confirm that. It was documented that two massive firebombs were dropped on the factory that night, one exploded on the surface, the other ended up in the basement storage area below only to subsequently explode a short time later through the concrete infrastructure contained that explosion. The munitions factory bombing resulted in 35 workers being killed.
That second bomb was due to set of several tons of stored Thermalloy, which would give off a heat in excess of 3,000 degrees centigrade as it exploded, rendering the basement into a fiery hell and melting the meat off their bones of anyone caught in the blast.
Of the victims identified afterwards (several bodies were so badly damaged that they remained unidentified), Frankie had specifically marked one file for Mary’s immediate attention.
Claiming to be 17, Nora Doyle was, had been in fact only 15 according to the records when she died that night but not from the explosion. The coroner’s report was slim; too many people had died that night for a full and comprehensive medical investigation to be carried out on all of the victims. The medical examiner had noted that a cracked skull had been responsible for her death despite the fact that she’d received numerous phosphorus burns from the second bomb exploding. The examiner had also commented that the bruises and rib injuries looked ‘as though she had been trampled by a horse…’
In the distance, standing under a naked lightbulb, she could make out a young girl shaking with fear, petrified by the sounds of the explosions emanating from above her.
Mary had planned to try and get behind her, grab her and insubstantialise again, then fly her up out and away though the factory walls to some safe place above ground out in the open air. There she could materialise again (while still standing behind the girl) and in her maternal, motherly old form fuss over the girl and make sure she’s ok, muttering something about it being a miracle and how she must have been blown clear of that nightmare without a scratch. The best laid plans…
A huge stock of ammunition must have ignited on the floor above and a fusillade equal to a machine-gun barrage peppered the room through the ceiling. “It’s like a thousand machine guns gone mad,” she heard a young female voice shout in abject terror between the explosions and shots. Then she saw the girl. She went to move in when a nightmare appeared out of the wall in front of her. The apparition was of what looked like a two-metre plus, tall angry centaur, its face though was more equine that she would have expected and it appeared to be wearing remnants of a decorative fur cloak that matched its dark, unkempt mane, running down from its neck to the middle of its back.
Its face was angry as it raised a hoof-like hand above the girls head as it screamed what sounded like, “o leekk’kungri kuk’krna kroor! G’naak!!!” and charged at the girl.
Banshee had no idea what was going on but was relying on making it up “on the hoof” so to speak. There was something about the way the alien’s body seemed to sparkle in the light from the single naked bulb that made Banshee think that it was uncontrollably phasing in and out of reality. That and the fact that the creatures’ charging hoofs only sounded on the concrete occasionally as it charged at the terrified girl made Mary think that the centaur could be substantial or insubstantial as it liked, but of course it would need to be substantial in order to trample the girl.
No time to try to work out if it was in full control of its phasing, Banshee immediately became visible in her nightmare form, while remaining insubstantial and unleashed her terrorising scream. She immediately followed it up by howling “Thall anseo a bhiast ghránna!” which in the Gaelic was the equivalent of shouting, “Over here, ye ugly beastie!”
The scream worked. The Creature turned mid-step, glowered and started to scream something that sounded like “K’krurna G’naak! K’kree” as it charged her. It was clearly terrified but this was one creature that apparently responded to such emotions by charging, not retreating. Bloody militant vegetarians!
Still, she had succeeded in distracting the centaur from attacking the girl and she could hardly be more scared than she already was. True to form, she hadn’t tried to run as her legs were too shaky to allow her to stand. Instead, she’d forced herself into a corner and tried to roll herself into as small a size as she could manage.
Ok, now for the next part of her ‘cunning plan’, she headed towards the girl as fast as she could – most unbecoming in a lady of her age and faster than most an eighth her age could have achieved. As she flew closer she tried to match her own phasing in and out of insubstantiality in what she hoped was the exact opposite to the centaur’s. It almost worked, its mutually opposable tube-like ‘fingers’ retracted as the two boney forearm ‘hoofs’ of the hexapodal creature struck out. The first ‘fist’ went through her; solid to her ghostly form but the second strike a second later must have been as it turned insubstantial again and knocked her hard to the floor as both of them came into phase with each other. The alien’s front two legs reared, ready to stamp down on her as Banshee immediately turned physical and the hoofs passed through her. For a split second, she wondered if it would solidify itself while the hoofs were inside her but thankfully it didn’t, either because it didn’t think about it in time or it lacked control over its shifting.
She wasn’t going to wait around, Banshee got to her feet and ran. She grabbed at the girl, and pulling her in, turned insubstantial and tried to fly away. She wanted to try matching opposite phases with the centaur as she fled but the still terrified girl had to be dragged, kicking and screaming and Banshee couldn’t risk looking over her shoulder all the time as the creature tried to turn around and chase after her.
Regardless of what was written in Animal Farm, she was aware that ‘two legs (were) bad, (while) four legs (were) better’ at least it was when you were being pursued by an alien centaur… She dived into a side corridor and slammed the metal blast door shut but realised there was no way to lock it. Now what? She realised that she was in the corridor that led to the gym where she’d seen Nora’s ghost and the corridor itself was a dead end. She could head up the stairs but that led them to what in her time was the team’s research library, which was too damn close to the second bomb. That could explode at any time, though the walls up there were extremely thick and had obviously survived the explosion. Wonder if horses (or equine aliens) can climb stairs?
She’d originally thought to try and find some sort of shelter or bunker within the sub-basement in which to place the girl in relative safety from explosions and bullets but instead she had allowed the changed scenery of the place to fool her into forgetting the building layout she knew from her own time.
She heard banging on the other side of the blast door as the creature squealed and tried to use its long, spindly retractable ‘fingers’ to open the door. Then from above, she heard the sound of heavy stomping and a loud voice shout out, “ka tarrgnu’korgnarr x’ghuk!!” followed a second later by several voices replying in unison, “kra x’ghuk G’naak!!!”
The last couple of words spoken, ‘x’ghuk G’naak’ was apparently known to the Vilani language translator installed in her commdot. Functional once more, the commdot’s database translated them as “exterminate” and “meat eater, carnivore, cannibal…”
The odd use of the word for “cannibal” snagged at Banshee’s consciousness, but this was no time to meditate on definitions.
Banshee’s main priority was keeping Nora safe and alive – both from explosions and from the centaurs, so going up the stairs (even insubstantially) to face both threats seemed like the least desirable choice at the moment. Instead, she briefly transformed back to Mary (in her young, unscary glamour) and allowed the girl to cower at the bottom of the stairwell while she pulled her harp free from its carrying case and tried to play a medley of both the healing and then the sleep tunes in the hope of rendering her unconscious. The mash-up failed to cause her to fall asleep but did render her docile and had the effect that the lone pursuer stopped trying to open the door for a few seconds.
It had no effect though on the six creatures of the same species that had appeared on the top landing and were standing in the doorway pointing what looked like weapons at them both. There were different from their other pursuer in that they wore helmets, body armour and each carried a very large rifle-like object, which were being focused on them both. “Kt’rr, !!traaka kr!!muur gn!xtang?” the lead creature screamed at them. Mary reslung her harp and slowly raised her hands as she slowly inched closer to the thankfully glassy-eyed girl. Then the fates intervened. The second bomb exploded, whether due to a timer delay or something setting off the fuse, it didn’t matter now. The explosion ignited the explosives and the whole of the basement level was subjected to intense heat as it melted the paint off the walls and threatened to melt the metal of the doors.
Above them the six aliens were hit by the full force of the blast as the Thermalloy ignited and turned the six of them into a melted puddle of barbecued meat and burnt their shadows into the landing wall. They were evaporated in seconds, even their bones cracked and shattered under the heat scattering their fragments across the landing and stairs.
The heat advanced down towards Mary and Nora and threatened to ignite the air itself. Mary rushed over to Nora, picked her up, and immediately turned insubstantial and invisible again. The blast door on the landing above slammed shut, saving them both from the worst of the searing heat. Dragging the girl, they rushed through the blast door that lead to what in Banshee’s time was the changing rooms only to be followed a second later by the lone equine alien who’d finally managed to get the door to the corridor open and now was fleeing the blistering heatwave from the floor above that threatened to consume them all. It sniffed the air as though getting their scent but instead of advancing on them it rushed through to the showers at the far side of the room and started to turn on the tap so the cold water cascaded down on top of it. Bypassed, but with an unholy firestorm on the floor above, Banshee rushed over and bolted the blast door, hoping it might withstand or at least delay any explosions she dragged the girl into one of the other municipal showers but didn’t turn the tap on just yet.
Hopefully this last explosion would have extinguished all of the other explosions and fires but she had to be careful though, if she accidentally exposed anything not yet combusted to an excess of oxygen it would reignite.
Just how long could she hold her breath though? Long enough to drag herself and her insubstantualised passenger through a smoke-filled, oxygen-depleted environment to the corridor opposite?
Noticing explosions were no longer buffeting the door, the invisible Banshee and her docile passenger rushed out of the shower cubicle and risked opening the landing door. Other than the stench of grilled alien, the stairwell looked empty. Risking a misdirection, she began thumping the door to what would one day be the gym to attract the aliens’ attention and then fled with the girl, quietly closing the door to the stairwell behind her.
On the other side of the corridor door she could hear the alien decide to leave the shower and head into the inner room, then she heard a screech – surprisingly enough of excitement and surprise from the creature as the inner door slammed shut. Had it gone inside? She wasn’t going to wait around to find out.
No time to waste, Banshee flew up and over the huddled mass of evaporated flesh that had been their alien pursuers while trying to shield Nora from the sight and smell, then flew through the door into a room seared clean by a thermal explosion. Unable to breath, the rest of the journey was an endurance race as she warned the girl to hold her breath as she flew across the room now stripped bare. Banshee phased through the far door into the corridor that would lead to what had been the Hangar and risked taking a gulp of air, half expecting to sear her throat. Instead, while excessively hot and acrid, the air was breathable despite causing both of them to start coughing. Of the surviving centaur, there was no sign. It had not attempted to follow them. They headed towards what one day would be Mace’s workshop, then up the internal stairs and into the future hangar bay. There – as as she had previously planned – Banshee quickly converted the goods lift into a mid-floor bunker for the girl. She turned back into Mary and this time strummed the full sleep tune before bundling the girl into the freight lift and allowing it to go up the shaft midway before stalling it. Trapped between floors, surrounded by bombproof concrete walls and with blast doors above and below, she was as safe as Mary could make it.
Leaving Nora hopefully safe and in a deep sleep she once more became invisible and insubstantial and headed back via the corridors to see what the surviving alien was up to.
The alien was still in what would become their gym. It was demolishing a bricked up cupboard on the far wall that in her day had still been bricked up – another change to the timeline. The creature stopped what it was doing and sniffed the air, before snorting and muttering “kroor! G’naak, kiik’rnerk’pighix kirrlu’ treenggr’kruugr’t?” it turned, curled its lips over its teeth then turned its back on her and again hammered at the bricked up wall. As the bricks fell away, it revealed an alien looking object that looked like a large metallic stingray embedded half in the wall of the storage area which its rescuer identified with a screech of joy as ‘treenggr’kruugr’t!’ before it pulled it free and hugged it to its chest.
Whatever this object was, it had value to the creature. It turned and holding the seemingly precious object close it scampered passed Banshee while muttering “kroor! G’naak! kroor!” and tried to cover its nostrils with its free arm. Mary got the distinct impression that despite beig insubstantial and invisible that it was telling her that her breath stank!
The final explosion had extinguished all of the major fires above. Banshee let the alien leave with its prize though it elected to go through the sub-Basement and not attempt to navigate the unholy and unidentifiable mess that was its own species melded into the stonework of the landing above. For a brief second or three Banshee considered following, though if her suspicions about it being able to smell her were correct then her attempts to remain concealed were doomed to failure.
Instead, she again flew through the cooling room and corridor until she got to the hangar. She phased through the blast door and arrived at the service lift platform with its sleeping but otherwise uninjured cargo. She picked up the girl, turned insubstantial and invisible again before she headed up the shaft to the surface.
She was in time to see the alien leave on a large disk-like platform, gravity-powered she assumed, heading towards a shimmering shadow in the sky, a shadow large and cigar-shaped. She had no time to ponder what had just occurred, she just hoped that it would now leave. He carried her unseen burden away from the remnants of the warehouse into the shadows then gladly put her passenger down and called for help.
As an old lady screaming for help and claiming to have found a survivor of the decimation, she was immediately surrounded as the miracle that was little Nora was quickly rushed to hospital despite being unharmed and miraculously having survived the holocaust that had taken the lives of everyone else. As soon as she was sure Nora was safe, Mary sneaked away and joined the teams of people attempting to look through the rubble and surface fires for other survivors. There was none. The glittering portal had survived, though this time she was unable to re-establish communication. She did get some funny looks from some of the others who overheard her apparently talking to herself but Mary just added a few “Thank you God” to the end of her mutterings and they assumed she had been praying out loud.
It seemed that only she could see the temporal breach in the here and now, everyone else just ignored it. Ok, it was still the only thing connecting her to her own time and so she stayed close by and a few hours later, was rewarded when Akira with the ‘dog’ appeared next to the glimmering portal.
The combination of ‘dog’, Akira and a certain bejewelled necklace working in combination had allowed them to time travel and track her down, though Akira reluctantly admitted that there had been a few false locations en-route, which perhaps explained the large avian bone the ‘dog’ was carrying when it had first arrived and was now busy demolishing for its marrow.
It took a few minutes of conversation to reveal that she had apparently altered the timeline though hopefully only a little. Akira and the ‘dog’ (apparently the rest of the team had named him Calamity at some point), had come seeking Banshee after she vanished whilst down in the sub-BASEment. Akira had to persuade Calamity to try to search for her.
Ghost? What ghost? Was Mary claiming the BASEment was haunted? How fun… Mary gave up and the three of them headed home back to their own era.
Back in the present, Banshee immediately did a bit of checking. The others still didn’t know why the ‘dog’ and Banshee had gone down to the gym in the first place, only that Frankie had detected a temporal rift appear even as Banshee had vanished… Ghost, again what ghost? As for the tired little dog curled up at Akira’s feet, Calamity had been staying with them on and off since Sam and Akira had feed him some bacon and he had become a permanent resident after they’d returned from their dognapped trip to the future. 4
A search of historical records revealed several changes in history. 40 people had now died that night apparently, though several of the bodies were never identified. The cremated remains found in the BASEment were identified as having been intermixed and merged with the remnants of about half a dozen horses though what they were doing down there was a complete mystery. There were several conspiracy sites about that little particular mystery, none of them came even close to the truth though.
There had only been one survivor who was apparently been blown clear of the explosion – 15 year old Nora Doyle. Nora was completely unable to explain how she’d survived but claimed that an angel in the shape of an old lady had been present and had flown her to safety. Nora as the sole survivor had been a local ‘celebrity’ for a few weeks. She went on to work as a nursing auxiliary for the remainder of the war and subsequently married a local man and had half a dozen children. In later years she was primarily known locally as a psychic whose spirit guide was apparently the sentient ghost of a centaur from Greek mythology. She died in 1993 surrounded by several generations of her family.
There was no record of any ‘aliens’ being present that night, though history did record the reported presence of a second zeppelin over Wessex.
At Mary’s insistence, Frankie hacked into the Ziru Sirka Embassy’s Argushiigi Admegulasha Bilanidin or Vilani ‘Repository of All Knowledge’ and found that Mary’s description of the creatures matched records of a Major Race known to as the K’kree.
The K’kree were a species of hexapodal grazing herbivores that ruled over a neighbouring hegemony composed of Two Thousand Worlds located on the far side of the Vilani Imperium. The K’kree had developed intelligence to thwart carnivorous predators. The K’kree quickly achieved planetary dominance and, convinced of the righteousness of their ways, headed to the stars where they committed genocide against a number of meat-eating carnivorous species, called “G’naak” in the K’kree language and undertaken a holy crusade to exterminate all carnivores across known space. For centuries, they had been contained within a sphere of two thousand star systems on the opposite side of the Imperium, thousands of light years away. How had a lone starship full of K’kree ended up on Earth in 1915 then?
It seemed the Stellar Empire’s ‘Repository of All Knowledge’ was silent about how that could have occurred.
Deep in Driftspace
The ‘t’K!nghkeeu gri’ or ‘Distant Pasture’ was a Driftship developed by the kakungx’r herd. It was an experimental interstellar ship and as such was small by K’kree standards, carrying just over 50 adults and a few foals that had been born mid-passage.
Chewing on some of his last remaining Xrak seaweed, Prime Engineer Kt’rr finished fitting the final connections to the reality anchor he’d recovered and allowed it to go online. It was just in time. Uncontrollably he phased out and again found himself temporarily insubstantial. His two apprentice engineers shuddered in fear at the sight, worried that they too might catch the drift virus and become pariahs amongst the herd like kt’rr, who was shunned and ostracised as a result by his Steppe Lord and the eligible mares, despite being the ship’s engineer. The two youngsters only remained in his presence because if the reality anchor ever again went out of phase and he was stuck in an insubstantial form, it would be their duty to risk being infected to try to save the ship even if that meant they became infected with the drift sickness themselves.
It was kt’rr’s fate now to be alone forever, never to find a mare or raise his own brood of K’kree and never to enter into communal grazing with the rest of his clan. The very thought threatened to drive him insane again and he forced himself to focus on his work.
This was only the K’kree’s second Driftship and the first sentient-staffed vessel to enter Ghost Space and try to leave the civilisation that was their races’ Two Thousand worlds behind, hemmed in on all sides by the Vilani, Vargr and the Guaraan puppetmasters.
He knew that others in the crew wanted to blame him for the death of the six security crew sent down to rescue him after he elected to abandon the ship and follow the phased reality anchor planetside but he found it hard to sympathise. It had been their job to put themselves between danger and those members of the crew deemed too important to risk losing and anyway they were bullies and nearly imbecilic, refused the right to breed. Admittedly so was he, but that was because he was infected with the drift sickness due to his proximity to the anchor, not because he lacked intelligence or status in the herd.
All of the major races used parallel dimensions called Jumpspace to travel through space faster than light. It allowed a ship to jump a parsec of normal space (a parsec was equal to 3.142 light-years) in about a ‘week’ of normal time though travel time inside that dimension took only ‘about 24 hours’ at most.
In fact, it is hinted that it’s possible to jump two parsecs or even more in the same length of time by entering higher levels of Jumpspace. Ghost Space was different and only the K’kree of the kakungx’r knew how to enter it. In Ghost Space time and distance acted very differently, something they only discovered after entering it. Travel time in the real universe was instantaneous but the time inside that dimension could take years, however it allowed a ship to travel hundreds of parsecs in a single journey. If only they were able to fully navigate it. It seemed that ships in Ghost Space were affected by unseen dimensional ebbs and currents, which were nearly impossible to navigate.
When the ‘t’K!nghkeeu gri’ entered Ghost Space it found itself at the mercy of these dimensional currents or at least they were until he’d managed to invent the reality anchor. That allowed them to sail where they wanted by phasing the ship through obstacles, spatial distortions or temporal paradoxes. Unfortunately, they had drifted too far before he’d worked out a solution and he didn’t know how to get the ship back home. They were already lost. He’d managed to navigate them towards a habitable planet but a collision as it phased in to orbit had caused the reality anchor to come loose and phase out of the ship with him as its unwilling passenger, causing them both to crash land on that hellish planet.
Initially he had considered claiming the planet for his Steppe Lord and exterminating the Vilani variant that inhabited it, nasty little G’naaks that they were. But this race had proved much worse than any Vilani they had ever encountered before; this was a race at constant war, finding new and horrible ways to slaughter each other. Although he had not been able to confirm it, he was sure that they were cannibals like the first species of G’naak had been – these Vilani-like killed their own kind in their millions in monstrous and unK’kree ways and they even enslaved and ate creatures with frighteningly similar physiology to themselves – ‘cows’ and ‘horses’ they called them.
The discovery of other sophonts in the universe had caused a massive xenophobic reaction in K’kree society. The realization that intelligent carnivores might exist somewhere in space sparked the K’kree obsession to convert the universe to herbivorism but this had been one hell planet where the inhabitants seemed determined to sterilise the whole planet themselves and he was glad to leave them to eat themselves into oblivion and extinction.
He was just grateful he managed to get away alive.
The thought of creatures who seemed to be carnivores inflicted with Drift sickness which they appeared to be able to control was horrifying, what if they had elected to make the K’kree their prey? No, despite his desire to claim another world for his Steppe Lord, he was glad to leave that world behind, even if it took several more years of travel to find a suitable replacement planet to conquer. Just as long as the loneliness did not drive him insane in the meantime…
1 First appearance of the ‘corgi’
2 The ghost discovered
3 Explanation of temporal paradox
4 Time Travelling
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 