Page 12 of Into The Rift

As I made my way to the bridge, I considered that I was more anxious than I let on to get a look at this Tygerian warship. The second I came near the command console, I saw it looming on the screens. I had to admit, it didn’t disappoint.

Solid black in color, and approximately twice the size of my own ship, its long, cylindrical shape bristled with antenna, communication devices and heat shields, along with various thrusters, propulsion systems and armament. It even had docking ports visible on the exterior. It was fully lit inside and out but emitted little exterior light for all of that. It reminded me of a huge bird of prey, like the enoks in the high mountains on my home planet that could carry off a fully grown man.

I sat down in the chair that the first officer vacated when he saw me enter. “Open a channel to the ship,” I told the communications officer as I took a seat. “But just audio for now.”

I waited impatiently as the comm officer hailed the ship, though it took only seconds before an answering voice came back. It sounded deep and powerful.

“This is Colonel Tariq of the Axis Imperial Forces. Who is this?”

“This is Lord Dominiko, of the Confederacy of the Pton. Back off my ship at once, or I’ll begin executing the prisoners.”

“Touch them,” came the immediate sharp and growling answer, “and we’ll destroy your ship and everyone on board.” He sounded furious and like he could barely contain himself, but there was a hint of a frantic note in his voice. I had long ago learned that it was never a good idea to let your enemies know how much you cared. He’d made a serious mistake in showing me.

“That seems a bit counterproductive on your part. I thought you were here to try and save your princes.”

“I don’t negotiate with terrorists!” he shouted. “Release the prisoners at once, and I’ll give you and your men a quick death.”

“A tempting offer, but no, I don’t believe I will.”

“Then we’ll board your ship and take them ourselves.”

“And when you do, you’ll find me busily engaged in executing them. Starting with your mate.”

He began his threats then. How he would kill me slowly and torturously, kill us all, destroy the ship, and on and on. When he finally ran out of threats, he started a loud and furious growling and snarling, and I decided none of this was getting us anywhere. I closed the channel abruptly and stood up.

“Let me know if anything else of significance happens. Ignore any further requests for an open channel. Begin taking evasive actions but stay well away from the rift. I don’t want the Tygerians following us in, and they’re stupid enough to do that, according to what I’ve just heard. A battle inside could destabilize the rift, and I don’t want to take that chance.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

I’d been hoping to reach the rift before we were intercepted, but I was beginning to realize evasive action alone wasn’t the answer. We’d run out of fuel long before Colonel Tariq ran out of his threats and obstinate determination.

I went back into the comm room to think things over. Maybe it was time to consider alternatives after all.

I hadn’t thought much of this plan to gain hostages from the first time Lord Jerica, the head of the High Council, had brought it up. He had been reading the reports of our agents on Loros, and when he’d discovered the youngest son of the high king Davos would soon be traveling back to Tygeria, he got the idea for kidnapping him and holding him hostage, theorizing that it would give us leverage over the Axis and prevent them from carrying through on their plans to finish building and staffing an outpost in this northernmost planetary system in their galaxy. Kidnapping and holding hostages was a longstanding tradition with the Pton people.

The planets in far reaches of this spiral galaxy were sparsely inhabited, which cut down on our options in this galaxy significantly though. Loros was the largest planet in the area, and it was too well-guarded to be a possibility for a direct strike. We had to content ourselves with whoever was coming and going from the area around Loros, but so far, we’d been unsuccessful. When Lord Jerica found out from our spies that another one of the Axis king’s grandchildren was going to be on board the ship going back to his home planet, he couldn’t wait to urge the council to attack and secure both hostages. The other prince was a real bonus.

I served on the High Council, and it was a complicated, difficult job that I didn’t enjoy. But then, I’d been given little choice in the matter. It was almost a job requirement of mine to instill fear in my subordinates, and I had learned how to do that at an early age and from the best teacher. Much of what I had learned about survival of the fittest and intimidation of underlings was from Itaka, my grandmother, and to this day, I’d hate to be an enemy who met her in a dark palace corridor. Despite her tiny size, the only one coming back out of that corridor would not have been the enemy.

My family was closely related to the imperial family—the old emperor, who was named Kitannos, was my grandfather, which made the current one, Linnius, my uncle or dashall. The old emperor had fifty some consorts, and my father had been one of his many, many sons. But though his birth order was fairly high, my father, Pratullus, stood no real chance of ever ascending the throne. He was the only son of Itaka, my grandfather’s favorite wife, however, and that had made a huge difference in all our lives. It had afforded us enormous privilege.

Only Linnius, the son of his first and principal wife, and the first in line for the throne was held in more esteem than my father, and once the old man finally shuffled off to the afterlife to live among the gods, Linnius slid neatly into his spot. Probably even before the old man’s body got cold. I thought that Linnius had maybe even helped his lingering demise along, though no one dared to hint at it.

Linnius turned out to be a cruel, savage leader. It was Linnius who had first had the idea to invade this galaxy closest to ours, known to us as C390, despite stories of a powerful king of the principal planet in the galaxy. He had already decimated the planets of our nearest neighbors in our star system. Our own galaxy was a spiral star cluster, much like C390, but many, many light-years away. We called our galaxy L485, and we called our planetary home Pton.

My planet Pton was vast and endless green, mazed with clouds. It had three small moons around it, two of them encircled by their own rings of cosmic dust. It was beautiful but could be a challenging place to live, with devastating storms that often swept the surface.

In between the galaxies was intergalactic space, and Pton was on the verge of this space. Intergalactic spacewas the physical area between the galaxies. Mostly it was dark and empty, except for the presence of intergalactic stars, and the intergalactic medium, which consisted mostly of hot hydrogen gas. Our people called it the rift.

Little was known about us by outsiders, except for the fact that those from Pton had a reputation for being barbarous and cruel. That stemmed from two things—first was that Linnius followed a “scorched earth” policy on the planets we’d vanquished, leaving no or very few survivors when the fight was over.

Secondly, our people were sometimes thought of as demons.

It wasn’t because of our savagery or cruelty, though that was probably a factor. It wasn’t even the fact that we had descended from creatures with horns and scales covering their bodies. The scales appeared now only in bright patches when we hit puberty. We were rather proud of the horns, and only the noble class had them. Lower classes had to have theirs cut down to nubs at an early age.

At any rate, the reason we were thought of as demons was because of one other attribute that was in our ancestry. We drank the blood of our enemies.

It was another throwback to our ancestors, I suppose. It was in our nature to greatly enjoy the taste of blood from both our enemies and our lovers—anyone that had aroused our passions. We didn’t drain our lovers, of course. That would have depleted our population considerably and unnecessarily. Our bites released toxins that in very small doses caused euphoria and pleasure in our sexual partners, though, and we enjoyed sucking their blood both as foreplay and as a way of bonding with them. Mated couples regularly practiced blood exchange.

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