Bellogorn
Torment and Control - 2005
THE CAST:
Premier Gor/Carffekk, Salvia Kiy/Birjjikk, The Misfit
Premier Gor switched off his virtual screen and looked up at the portrait hanging over the grand stone surround fireplace in his circular state office. The scene depicting the old port of Santraneed far to the west with the Sea of Needles in the background didn’t inspire evil deeds, not that he needed inspiration in that respect. But the previous painting of the poor soul whose epidermis he now occupied always encouraged him to grand heights of wickedness. Unfortunately, that portrait had been damaged a year earlier. He did miss it.
Gor rose from his chair and left his office. There was something he needed to deal with – a little discipline to impose.
He took the right-hand, less used corridor leading away from his office which was, by Trun standards, reasonably opulent. The smooth granite walls were lined with paintings in grandly appointed frames. Small chandeliers hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. The floor was an elaborate mosaic of stones reflecting the colours of the seasons. At the end of the corridor was an unremarkable wooden door. Two bored soldiers flanking the doors straightened. Their instructions were clear – let nobody in or anything out.
The ornate key attached to Gor’s belt slipped effortlessly into the keyhole and eased the deadbolt across. Once through, he locked the door again, leaving the key. He descended a spiral stone staircase to what once had been a suite of dungeons – only one cell occupied now.
The door to this cell was boron steel, and entry was via a sub-atomic optical scanner – technology too advanced for this world. Gor grabbed a facemask hanging next to the door and presented his eye. It slid open. He stepped inside and waited for the door to close behind him.
Under the mask, a cruel smile crept across Gor’s face. The larger of the two creatures chained to the rear wall of the cell let out a deep and doleful howl when it finally picked out Gor. The younger sibling echoed him with a higher pitched wail. The poor wretches knew what was coming.
The previous year, Premier Gor had reported to Salvia Kiy that they weren’t hitting the required targets for the subjugation of Preenasette by the Game end date. Her reaction was what he expected.
‘Why, Why, WHY!’ she screamed. ‘Everything has been meticulously enacted exactly to your plan, master planner. And you tell me this now?’ She was picking up anything resembling a projectile from his desk, throwing them at the wall of his office. Gor knew to ride the storm and waited for his Cadre leader to calm down. Finally she stopped, breathless, teeth bared and eyes smouldering. ‘Why, master planner, why has this happened?’
‘It’s an unanticipated side effect of the Trun psychic.’ She was directly over him now, uncomfortably close to his face. He ignored it and held her gaze, knowing she would deem any lesser action a weakness. ‘Where we would expect blind faith from our Bondservants, we are only getting blinkered faith. They keep questioning their situation.’
Kiy’s rage eased. She wanted to know the details. ‘You mean, we murder their families, take away all their reasons to live, make them think it was the Vercetians and instil the idea that revenge is the only justice. And you say they are questioning this?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘They have empathy that we could never have anticipated.’
‘Have you a course of action to rectify the situation?’
‘Yes,’ replied Gor, a little more at ease now. ‘We have fourteen hundred Trun Bondservants in prominent positions, causing havoc, propagating the war. The psychic suggestion of savage revenge we have planted is not holding. The three of us cannot keep reapplying it. We need a Bellogorn.’
‘The Game rules won’t allow us one from the slave pens without marking us down considerably. That I will not accept.’ Kiy contemplated him. ‘But you know that already. What are you scheming, master planner?’
Gor grinned. ‘Bellog is only a single wormhole from here – an eight-week round trip.’ His host’s jaw was salivating, extending the evil smile on his face. ‘We go and get one. The Assessor and the Game leaders will never know! When we’ve finished with it, we incinerate it – remove all the evidence.’
Salvia Kiy’s grin was identical. ‘Your deviousness continues amazes me, Premier Gor. And this will get us back on target?’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘Good,’ she replied. ‘I’ll go and get one myself. I need a break from this form.’
‘Get one with a young sibling,’ he said. ‘They are always so much easier to control.’
Kiy nodded and turned to go, with a sweeping look at the mess she had made. Will she apologise? he wondered. She carried on out of his office. There’s a first time for everything, he smiled to himself, but it’s not today.
Now I do need to take that hideous painting down.
Birjjikk was in Gor’s office, having removed her host’s epidermis and phase-shifted her head and shoulder horns into existence. In his full-length mirror she admired herself. The skeletal slimness of her scaled aquamarine cheeks highlighted by thin shadow lines and elongated ears, her eyes with their bright orange hue, and her sharp pointed teeth. She looked closer at her teeth. They were losing the brilliant whiteness of youth – at two hundred plus years, she was nearly a third of the way into her life expectancy of six to seven hundred years. She could extend that to eight hundred with estivation – a form of hibernation taken in the heat of their underground world – but she thought it a waste of her precious time. At least her sweeping scalp horns still curved down to her waist. That length was rare amongst the Zerot and her proudest feature. She reached into the drawer where she stuffed the discarded epidermis and pulled out a Kirkir – her favourite piece of clothing. The fluidic cloth wrapped around her torso, circumnavigating her horns and fusing to her scaly skin. The skirt draped over the small of her back and down past her backside. She felt for the hidden knife and flicked it open.
‘You still have that?’ asked Premier Gor, thinking back to their academy days. He laughed. ‘The whole class knew about it, but not our tutor.’
‘I never told you this, but Master Nama-Krikk told me just before the Final Test, he knew I carried this knife from my first day at the academy.’
‘And he never took it off you?’ said Gor incredulously.
‘Strange, I know, but no. I think the Master had a soft spot for me,’ she said, attempting to smile.
Birjjikk stepped onto a waiting receptor plate. ‘Keep an iron grip on this planet while I’m away.’
‘Yes, madame,’ he answered formally.
An opaque globe coalesced over the plate and she was gone.
Birjjikk materialised in a small spaceship in high orbit around Preenasette. She went straight to the cockpit, sat down and began the pre-flight routine. When she finished, she deactivated the cloaking device, revealing a small, silver, tear-shaped vessel with a perfectly smooth polished finish. This four-person ship was the pinnacle of pre-ascendancy design, though the small storage bay would be a squeeze for two Bellogorn. Stolen from the Rammor, it was a faster vessel than any the Zerot had ever come across in all of their travels. Birjjikk eased the ship forward; the Cammerine Coils, embedded in the outer hull began oscillating between her current dimension and a parallel about a hundred times a second. During its moment in the parallel universe, energy created inside a heavy atom by the dimensional transfer powered tiny drive motors to each coil. The oscillation to this dimension caused the ship to jump. This cycle increased from a hundred times a second to a thousand, then a million and finally to billions of oscillations per second; the teardrop-shaped vessel’s long point accelerated through the vacuum of space at an unbelievable speed.
A week at this speed got Birjjikk to her targeted wormhole, where she slowed to maximum entry velocity. No matter how advanced her spacecraft was, compressed space rules applied first and foremost; entering the wormhole at maximum speed would result in disaster. Another relatively short flight and she entered orbit around the planet Bellog.
Bellog was one of the few planets never conquered by the Zerot.
A scout for Cadre 67 had been first to discover the Bellogorn. He found they possessed no ability to resist attack and the act of killing them was abhorrent, even to the Zerot – their uncontrollable panic and senseless squirming and histrionics was distasteful. This pathetic behaviour tainted the prospect of planetary invasion, some fighting spirit seasoned the slaughter. He noticed, however, that they appeared to be fantastic communicators, so he logged a request for a team to return and take some to Zerot for evaluation.
What they found was living breathing long-range communication devices. Of little use to the Zerot, or so they initially thought, but experiments revealed the Bellogorn were able to passively direct others – with a bit of “stimulus” from the Zerot. The Bellogorn could not control but could suppress and push. A classic tactic of the Zerot was to inseminate hatred within those they were seeking to manage; hatred for whomever the Zerot deemed advantageous to their standing in the Game. This mind control would wear off eventually, at a rate commensurate with the strength of character of the being in question. A Bellogorn could prevent the return of free will, able to inhibit the mental fortitude of many beings simultaneously. The Zerot had found the perfect way to manage their slave compounds.
Birjjikk landed near a sizeable Bellogorn conurbation. It wasn’t a town or a city, more a gathering of dwellings, scattered amid heavy brown masses of indigenous foliage, all fighting toward the canopy to catch the weak sun. Domed habitations, linked by power conduits. The Bellogorn only needed listening rooms and to be in communion with each other, sharing everything each individual was experiencing. Their metabolism was tiny, so feeding was just an incidental activity. Most of their energy expenditure was in electrical charges between brain neurons. Nine hundred billion of them notwithstanding, it was still not a significant energy expenditure. Most of the nutrients they required were consumed from the acrid atmosphere they breathed in. They would often go months without moving. In appearance, they resembled nothing so much as a nightmare: bodies of eight roughly triangular planes, four legs – it had an odd gait, supporting itself on three appendages while the fourth pulled it along, leaving a slimy trail behind it. Near the top, a single eye on a stalk and a small stunted mouth through which it breathed only, vocal communication nearly forgotten. From either side, tentacles with tiny, sensitive suckers, dextrous and nimble. Inside, they were almost entirely cerebrum – associated with higher functions of thought and communication.
A Bellogorn would struggle to get its tentacles onto a Pindora crystal, but once there, it would navigate the galaxy with incredible accuracy, able to pinpoint inhabited planets, listening to countless species and sharing them with their brotherhood.
Votron glass-optic creeper vines wrapped themselves around the power cables that linked the Bellogorn dwellings, feeding off the generated magnetic field, searching for the Pindora crystals in each housing and facilitating a gigantic data conduit that allowed the listeners to communicate with each other instantly. They monitored all life in their quadrant of the galaxy with crystals and a creeping super-plant evolved over millions of years, all in the pursuit of gossip.
The Bellogorn had been present since the infancy of the universe and were a threat to no one. Bellog boasted no precious metals and possessed an atmosphere that would cripple most races. Only one species understood the true nature of this eccentrically mysterious race of listeners, and they had only scratched the surface. The Zerot.
An opaque globe appeared in the middle of the conurbation, depositing Birjjikk with breathing mask and equipment. She enjoyed the tension in the air as ten thousand poor souls wilted in her presence. She unclipped her scanner, not wanting to spend any more time on this chore than was necessary. The stolen scanner technology displayed only the life forms in each dwelling, the power cables, and the crystals that probed the galaxy. She perused the single-sex Bellogorn, finding solitary beings and Bellogorn with younger brothers. She soon found the perfect pair.
Birjjikk entered the home to a wailing duet of Bellogorn brothers. She studied this pair, assessing their suitability – one full grown and the other old enough to have started experimenting with a Pindora crystal, but not so old that the sibling bond was weakening. She marched to the younger one, snatching its eyestalk and closing her hand tight. The poor creature’s high-pitched wail became a frantic scream, the pain receptors in its brain working for the first time in its life. The older one began shaking, its eyestalk now spinning about aimlessly. Perfect, thought Birjjikk.
She opened her case and produced two transporter straps, quickly wrapping one around each. She checked the setting for the cramped cargo bay, took a sample of the atmosphere, grabbed the two Pindora crystals and stepped onto her plate. Opaque globes bloomed, then slowly dissipated in a now empty room. Back in her ship, she could hear the two Bellogorn choking in the oxygen. With no urgency, she took the atmospheric sample and slotted it into the cargo bay life support. Eventually the choking ceased. Birjjikk sat down at the control console and began activating the Cammerine Coils for her return journey.
She leaned back in her seat and smiled; an expression that in most races would be a sneer. The teardrop-shaped vessel accelerated and she couldn’t help but think that the death of Preenasette was now assured, fulfilling her destiny as one of the greatest Cadre leaders in Zerot history.
Of the seven thousand two hundred and fifty dwellings scattered on the planet Bellog, blind panic ensued in seven thousand two hundred and forty-nine of them. They each experienced the visit from the Zerot and the taking of two of their brethren Bellogorn. All felt the terror. None of them could go back to listening to the galaxy until the terror eased, and that could be days or even weeks.
But in one dwelling there was no terror, no panic. In the home of the “Misfit,” there was only outrage and anger.
Outrage at the alien that had brazenly abducted two of his people. And anger that his fellow Bellogorn were incapable of doing anything to stop it.
The young Bellogorn left his abode in a rage. He started off in the direction of the raided conurbation, fifty miles away – he could get there in a couple of hours. But of course, the alien was already gone. He stopped and vented his frustration by thumping his powerful upper tentacles on the ground, causing the bushes around him to quiver, then returned to his home.
Things were getting worse. He knew the underlying reason for his angst and he needed to do something about it.
In this world of males, he needed a mate. He wanted a female.