Introduction

REPUBLIC OF HAVEN - 4923 AD

  Ty was doing homework on the family computer. He hated the old machine, but he’d been caught playing a game earlier on his tablet when he should have been working. His mom had grounded him from the tablet and forced him to work on this machine. He was in the middle of solving a fourth-grade math problem when the alert of an incoming net-call started flashing. The look of consternation on his freckled face brightened to a smile when he recognized the caller’s identity.
  “Mom!” he shouted out. “A net-call from Dad is coming in.” He brought the call program to the front and accepted the call. The image of his dad’s face appeared on the screen.
  “Hi squirt,” said his dad.
  Ty smiled. “Hi Dad,” he answered. He looked up and shouted, “Mom, Dad’s on the call.”
  “Hey, Squirt, have her bring Trellissia too.”
  Ty rolled his eyes at the request and shouted again, “Dad wants you to bring Ellie too.”
  Ty heard his mom’s footsteps reverse as she went back to the bedroom to get his little sister.
  “I just got her down,” she said to no one in particular as she went into the room.
  “Hey, Dad.”
  “Yes.”
  “Ellie’s been fussy today, mom’s gone to get her. So where are you today?”
   His dad’s smile froze for an instant and there was a pause before he answered. “Hey Squirt, you know I can’t tell you that. I’m on the ship though.”
  “I know Dad, the background is masked out. All I can see is your face.”
  Ty could hear his mom approaching. He glanced at her and saw her holding his little sister in her arms. Ellie was asleep. A curl of her blond hair was pasted to her forehead by sweat. There were pink splotches on her face where she had been resting on a pillow.
  “Move over Ty,” she said. Ty stood up and his mom dropped into the chair. She smiled briefly at his dad. The smile froze for an instant then faded to a look of concern. “Hi, honey, what’s up?” she asked.
  Ty watched his dad’s face do the freeze thing again. He looked at his mom.
  “Hi Cutie, you look great! I don’t have much time.”
  “OK,” she answered. Ty wondered what his dad saw. She was just mom, long blond hair pulled up in a pony tail. Her grey eyes always had a sparkle in them. As she worked around the house, she was always humming a song. Tonight, she wore a gray tee-shirt and black sweat pants. She hadn’t been feeling well most of the day and was getting ready for bed herself when the call came in.
  His dad spoke, “Remember that trip dear, the one we’d planned about taking?”
  His mom shook her head no as he continued.
  “The one to Zanzibar, remember?”
  His mom blinked. Her face blanched. “What?” she asked in little more than a whisper. “Zanzibar?” she repeated.
  His dad’s smile quivered for a moment. “Yeah, Zanzibar,” he answered, his voice strengthening as he continued. “You need to make plans to go as soon as you can. Don’t wait for me to join you. I’ll meet you when I can. You need to leave as soon as you can, OK?”
  The urgency in his voice alarmed Ty. He looked at his mom for her answer. Tears began streaming down her face.
  She nodded, “I’ll make the trip. I love you!”
  “Me too babe. Thanks for letting me see the kids. Gotta go now. It’s getting intense here.”
  And with that the screen went blank. Ty’s mom reached out with her free hand and touched the screen where his dad’s image had been, caressing the spot on the screen. “You come back to me, Eric,” she said in a soft whisper.
  “Mom, what’s going on?” Ty asked.
  His mom stared at the screen for a moment. She didn’t bother to wipe the tears away. He could see she was deep in thought. She stared at the screen for several moments before she took a deep breath, wiped her tears with the back of her free hand, and turned to Ty.
  “Son, we’re going on a trip. We need to leave right now. You must...,” her voice shook with emotion at the words. “...you must not dilly dally as you have in the past.”
  The intensity of her voice scared him. He nodded silently, then brightened, “Does that mean I don’t have to finish my homework?”
  She nodded, half smiling, “No, no homework for now. Get your nice thermal coat, your fast-pack, and travel bag from the hallway closet. I need you to be a big brother and carry Ellie’s fast-pack too.   I’ve got to get myself and Ellie dressed.”
  “Mom, what about Whiskers?”
  His mom stood up and walked down the hall to her bedroom. She said over her shoulder, “Whiskers is a cat, let her outside and dump a bunch of cat food on the porch. She’ll figure things out.”
  With that she went into her room. Ty went to the hall closet and got his coat on. It was his favorite coat, not only was it water proof, it had a built in heating and cooling system and it could change colors. He never got to wear it except when the family practiced fire drills and home evacuations. He wondered where they were going and why his mom was so upset.
  He put on the coat and grabbed both fast-packs. Outwardly, they looked like the pack he and all his classmates used to carry lunches and school supplies to school. He’d helped his dad put the packs together for a family project earlier in the year when he was home on leave. They contained food bars, first aid kits and really compact camping gear. His dad’s pack even had a pulse gun in it. This was not the typical trip he thought as he lugged the two packs into the front room. He wondered who was going to carry his dad’s pack.
  His mom was late in coming so he carried his parents’ packs, one at a time, into the family room.  Then he picked up Whiskers, who was sleeping in her bed box by the fire place and carried her to the back door. He tossed her gently onto the back porch. “There you go, Whiskers,” he said. The cat landed on her feet and trotted off into the darkness. Ty watched her cross the yard until she vanished in the dark.
  In that instant, the darkness of late twilight was interrupted by a momentary flash of light in the sky. Ty looked up to see what it was. A small sphere of white light high overhead had appeared. As he watched, it faded to orange and then black in just a few seconds. There were tiny sparkles of light flashing in the sky around where the flash had occurred. He watched it as the display travelled east across the sky. Ignoring Whiskers, Ty stepped back into the house and ran to his mom.
  “Mom, mom! There’s a space battle going on right now overhead!”
  She had dressed by now and was wearing her thermal coat over a travel suit used for interplanetary trips. Ellie was in a baby carrier strapped to her chest. He noticed tear streaks on her face as she looked up at the room’s ceiling then down at him before answering, “OK. Ty, get the fast-packs in the car. We have to leave right away.”
  As Ty carried the fast-packs to the car, his mom’s comm-card chimed with an incoming call. “Hi, Amy.”
  There was a pause while she listened to the caller.
  “No, I haven’t had the news on…Really?” She stopped in mid stride and listened. Her eyes widened. Then she began hurrying through the house getting the last of the things she needed to leave. “Amy, we’re bugging out. Come with us. I know Kent’s in space right now. Eric is too and I could use the help…Yes, I think it’s that bad. Eric netted a call through a few minutes ago and warned us to leave. So, will you come?…Great! Meet us at the Weather-Top Trail head in Gamer’s Park in half an hour. You can ride Eric’s ATV…Yes, now. Bye.”
  The next few minutes were a blur for Ty as he helped his mom get their ATV trailer hooked up to the car. He drove the small three-wheeled vehicles onto the trailer while she finished hooking it up.
She started driving before he’d finished setting the restraint controls. She drove in silence through the small town they lived in. Ty noticed that not many other vehicles were out on the roads. He could tell from the whine of the drive motor that his mom was pushing the vehicle as hard as she could. As they pulled into the parking area of the park, the car stopped dead in its tracks as a sunlight bright flash of light appeared in the sky. It was gone in an instant. As it faded, the world faded to pitch black too. All city lights went out with the light.
  “Come on Ty, we’ve got to go. Out of the car now!”
  “Yes, mom.” Nothing on the car worked. Not even the door latches. His mom hit the emergency release button. All of the restraints opened with that. She twisted herself so she was sitting sideways in the seat and kicked out the window on the passenger side of the car. The window exploded in a shower of grain sized particles. She clambered out through the opening. She turned and looked back at Ty.
  “Hand me Ellie,” she said. She reached her arms through the broken window and grabbed Ellie as Ty handed her to him. “Now, get the fast-packs.” Ty handed them out to his mom’s waiting hands. He struggled with the bigger ones for his parents, but once they were out, he clambered out of the window to join her. The night was eerily silent. It had gotten colder too. It was much darker without the lights. After a few minutes Ty’s eyes adjusted to the dark. “Ty, take Ellie’s and Dad’s fast-pack. I’ll carry Ellie and the rest. Hurry honey. We need to go as fast as we can.”
  “What about the ATV’s mom, can’t we ride those?” asked Ty as he walk-ran along side her to keep up with her.
  “That was a bomb high in the sky that made our car quit. The ATV’s won’t work either. Your Dad said after that will come bombs that hit the ground to destroy cities and kill people.”
  “Us, Mom?”
  She didn’t answer, but the speed that she ran, gave him the answer he feared the most. They got to the trail head. Ty’s mom took out her comm-card to check the time, but it was dead too. She threw it away into the dark. They stopped a few minutes to catch their breath and listen for Amy. As they stopped to listen, Ty heard a new sound, a different sound: a low moaning rumble, more felt than heard. “Run, Ty. Leave the packs, run.”
  “Where, mom?”
  “Towards, the grotto in the center of the park, about a hundred meters up the path. Run there, find a place as far inside the grotto as you can get and wait for me. Run Ty, run as fast as you can.”
He sprinted into the forest in the darkness. A light appeared over the horizon. It was too small to be the sun, but it cast shadows through the tops of the trees. The shadows like spokes of a wheel, moved as the point of light traversed through the sky. It was headed towards them from the eastern horizon. Ty got to the grotto. He slid to a stop at the edge of the grotto. As he did, in an instant, the sky brightened to brighter than noon-day with an actinic, piercing white light. He turned back to look behind him. His mom running towards him, she was carrying Ellie across her chest, the cloak of her travel suit fluttering in the breeze behind her as she ran. The ground began to rumble and shake. He jumped down into the grotto. He slipped on a rock as he landed and fell, hitting his head on another outcropping in the grotto. His world went dark. The night passed in a series of vivid snatches of images for him. First, he felt searing heat enveloping him, then he heard his mother screaming. Then he heard her crying softly. Then there was silence as the warmth that enveloped him like a blanket gradually faded away.
  He woke up hours later with a crushing weight on top of him. The mass on top of him wasn’t sharp like rocks, but it was hard just the same. Yet something soft was brushing against his face. He opened his eyes and saw Ellie’s face up against his. She lay, eyes closed, motionless as if sleeping. Ty turned his head to see what was on top of him. It was his mom’s shoulder. She had laid on him and Ellie during the night.
  She didn’t respond to his movement though. He’d never seen her lay this still before. “Mom, would you get up now? You’re heavy,” he said.
  She didn’t answer. Panicked, he pushed himself up past her. She rolled off to one side. Her travel cloak shattered into black powder as she did. He sat up on his knees. Ellie lay still, unmoved from where he first saw her. An unnamed fear began to grow within him. “Mom. Ellie!”
  There was no response. He reached for his mom to shake her. As he did, a small silver stone, shaped like an egg fell out of her right hand onto the ground. He recognized it as a gift his dad had brought home several years ago. He was never allowed to touch it. It got put away in her fast-pack. Now, he looked at it for a moment then picked it up and put it in his pants pocket.
  He tried shaking her again, but no matter how hard he shook her, she didn’t respond. “Mom!! Wake up!!!” he cried.
  Through all of this, Ellie lay still. Ty scrambled up to the top of the grotto. He sat there crying out them both for hours until hunger compelled him to go find something to eat.
For as far as he could see the trees had been sheared off. All that remained were charred stumps and piles of ash. The ground cover vegetation had been burned to a layer of charred ash. When he got to the parking lot, the asphalt was sticky. He found what was left of his family’s car a half a mile into what had been the forest, upside down. The paint was burned down to the metal. All that remained was the metallic husk of the car.
  Something moving in an outcropping of rocks caught his eye. He walked over to it. It was his dad’s fast-pack, wedged into a small crevasse in the outcropping. When he reached to pull it out, it crumbled to fragments in his hand. Several of the foil food pouches were inside. Discolored by heat, they were otherwise intact. He grabbed them all and stuffed them into pockets in his travel suit, then he opened one and ravenously ate all of it.
  He looked back towards where the city had been. Nothing remained above ground level. Wisps of smoke rose into the air from many areas of the city. He could see nothing moving in all of it though. Without the hunger pangs gnawing at him, he walked back to where his mother and Ellie were. They lay where he left them, as he’d left them. He sat there for another few hours, till late in the day, crying and calling down to his mom.
  As the sun settled low into the sky. He got up and walked back towards the town, but the smell of the smoke and smoldering fires in the town drove him away from it and towards the surrounding hills. A high haze obscured the stars when night came. He got to the top of the closer hills by twilight. On the far side of the hills from the town, shielded from the blast, were trees.
  Ty found a tall one and climbed into its lower branches. He spent a sleepless night, sobbing and peering into the darkness around him. He listened too, for a rumbling roar and a piercing point of light falling from the sky, but another one never came. By the gray light of early morning, he scrambled down from the tree and headed towards one of the many streams that were scattered around the area. He ripped open another pouch and ate its contents while he searched for some water.
  The only water he’d found was brackish and choked with ash.  By mid-morning, he gave up and headed back over the hill to see if there was water in town.  He remembered the swimming pool in the down town area. Several hours later as he walked into the outskirts of the town he saw a silver sphere descending from the sky directly towards the town.
He looked around to see if there was some place to hide, but nothing presented itself. He stood still in the middle of a road and watched it drop closer. The sphere, which was about twice the size of his home, came to rest floating just a few feet in the air, down the street from him. A door irised open near the bottom of the sphere. A silver clad figure, a man, stepped out onto the road.
  He was as tall as his dad. Unlike him, he had a beard, a well trimmed goatee. The man was of a slight build, with blue eyes. He walked up to Ty.
  “Who are you?” Ty called out. “Are you an Alliance soldier?”
  The man stopped and smiled before answering. “Did you call for help? I’m someone who is willing to help you. And no, I am not of the Alliance.”
  “My mom and my sister are hurt. They’re back over there.” He pointed towards where they were. “Can you help them?”
  The man grabbed a small black box attached to a belt and began to walk closer to Ty. As he did, he brought the box up to his eyes and looked through it in the direction Ty had pointed. Shortly he spoke. “Your mom called for us. You have the monitor on your person, but both your mother and your sister are beyond my help.” He put the box thing back on his belt.
  “But they’re hurt, they won’t wake up. Do you think they’re dead?”
  The man smiled a warm, sad smile. “Their bodies are dead, but they live on, elsewhere.”
  “You’re not the Alliance?” Ty asked again. The man shook his head.
  “I’m not.”
  “I’m thirsty.”
  In response, the man reached into a pocket over his chest. Ty noticed the suit had a myriad of pockets. They bulged from hidden contents. Other implements he could not identify hung off of a belt. The man pulled out a small silver flask. He opened the top and extended it to Ty. Ty reached for it and took a sip. The fluid was cool. Not sweet, nor tart, but somewhere in between. Its effect on him was immediate. He could feel energy and vitality flowing into him from just the sip. He took another swallow then handed the flask back to the man.
  “Thanks,” said Ty.
  “What’s your name?”
  “I’m Ty, son of Eric, son of Terril of the House of Weiss of the Free Republic of Haven.”
  The man gave a small smile as Ty recited his name. “That’s quite the name,” he said. “How old are you, Ty of Weiss?”
  “I’m ten. Who are you? What’s your name?”
  Again a somber, friendly smile. “I am T’thron, son of A’mell, Son of Z’chrell, of the Order of Mercy of the Free Roamers.”
  “You’re an angel?” Ty asked, awe in his voice. “My dad told stories of your people. Hardly anyone who hasn’t been in space believed him, but he said everyone on his ship did.”
  The man shook his head slowly. “No, Ty of Weiss, I am not an ‘angel’. But members of my order do travel among the stars doing what good the whisperings of the great God’s spirit move us to do. I was called here by your mom. I’m sorry I could not get here sooner.”
  “I want to see my mom again.”
  “I understand. Shall we go see them now?” he asked.
  Ty nodded yes. They walked together to where his mom and sister lay. They walked in silence. Ty noticed, the world was silent. No birds were in the air. Nothing could be heard except for the wind. Even it was muted.
  When they got to the grotto, Ty pointed down into it. “They’re down there.” Ty looked down at them. They lay as he left them the day before. “They’re dead aren’t they,” he said.
  T’thron shook his head no, “No, Ty of Weiss, all that made them who they are lives on, just not there in those bodies anymore.”
  Ty looked up at him. “Where have they gone then? Can I go there too? Will I see them again?”
  T’thron squatted down so he could look Ty in the eye. “You will see them again, Ty of Weiss.”
  “Can I see them now?” The man shook his head no. Tears came again to Ty’s eyes. “But I want to!” he cried.
  T’thron took him in his arms and held him consolingly. For a moment Ty resisted, then he flung his arms around the man’s neck and hugged him as he cried. The man stroked the back of Ty’s head speaking in a language Ty didn’t know. The tone of the words were soothing. When the flow of tears slowed. T’thron pulled back from Ty so they could see eye to eye again.
  T’thron spoke, “It’s not mine to give, Ty of Weiss, it’s up to you. They are happy where they are.”
  “Really?”
  T’thron nodded. “Your sister in the innocence of her young age is safely with God.”
  “What about my mom? She’s old.”
  T’thron smiled a soft quick smile before answering, “She gave everything she had protecting you. She loved you so much she placed your life above her own safety. God respects that and will honor and reward her for it.”
  “Will I have to do the same thing to see them?”
  “You will see them again. But how you live every day will determine if it is a happy reunion.”
  “What do I have to do?”
  “Each of us has a voice within us telling us what is right. Follow that voice. Be kind. More… I cannot say.”
  Ty looked into his eyes for a moment, then nodded, “Ok, can you take me to my Dad now. He’ll want to know.”
“Where’s your father?”
  “He’s a Space Marine assigned to the Coventry, an assault cruiser.”
  T’thron closed his eyes and nodded. He was silent for a minute. “Your father is with your mother then.”
Ty’s shoulders sagged. Tears began flowing again. “Where do I go?”
T’thron’s eyes teared up at the plaintive cry. “I will see that you are safe Ty of Weiss, if you come with me.”
  “Ok, do we have to leave my mom and sister as they are?”
  “No, I can fix that. Come with me.”
  T’thron stood and took Ty’s hand. They walked a hundred feet away from the grotto. T’thron took a small device from his belt and held it in his hand. He bowed his head in concentration. In a moment the silver sphere he’d arrived in came floating over them several hundred feet in the sky. I beam of white light lanced out of it and fell upon a large flat boulder near the grotto. The boulder rose into the air and floated a few feet above the ground towards the opening of the top of the grotto. Once over the grotto, the boulder began to glow red then white. It liquified and began to flow out into a large disk thirty feet in diameter and several feet thick. It was large enough to cover the entire top of the grotto.
  It lowered over the top of the grotto. The bottom surface of it flowed down into the irregularities of the opening, sealing it shut. Then it cooled quickly and turned a slate gray.
  “Can I go see now?”
  “Yes” said the man.
  Ty ran to the grotto. It was sealed completely. Ty reached out to the stone surface. It was now cool to the touch and very smooth, like glass.
  “Cool,” is all he said. He reached into a pocket of his travel cloak and pulled out the silver egg shaped stone his mom had held in her hand. He placed the stone on the surface.
  “Keep the monitor, Ty of Weiss,” T’thron said from behind him.
  Ty stood and turned to face him. “In the past, when we visited grave sites, we left flowers. There are no flowers. I want to leave something.”
  “Let your life Ty, be your mother and father’s monument. Keep the monitor. Let it remind you of them.”
  “OK…, one more thing.” Ty turned to face the flat stone. He waved with his upraised right hand and said, “Bye Mom, Bye Ellie. Please wait for me, I’ll see you again. I promise to make it a happy meeting. I love you.” He lowered his hand and turned to T’Thron. “I’m ready to go.”

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