Echo of the Elders

Chapter One

GLIMPSING NOESIS

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. The horrific truth is the mind will provide all the audio necessary to augment the atrocities witnessed by unhearing eyes and, just as nightmarishly, the scream in the eyes of those meeting their fate. That scream was the only thing my panicked brain could hear, despite the alarms of my environmental suit and the frantic cries screeching through my commlink as she was snatched from my existence. When silence and darkness swallowed her grappling form, framed in the debris of our lander tumbling against the canvas of open space, my entire being was riddled by the harrowing realization that it was I who had been stolen from that chaos.

A cold dread enveloped me like the black, viscus suspension in which I was ensnared. The only sounds where the harsh labor of my frantic breathing, the rush of blood in my ears, and the pummeling of my heart against my ribs. The anxious symphony was a terrible testament that my suit’s systems were offline. Compounding my terror was the coagulating blackness subduing the fight in my straining limbs. Yet, there was no anchor or escape. I was quickly encased in that smothering tomb like an insect in amber. My death would be slow and my lost remains mummified within the spacesuit I once saw as a vehicle of liberation.

Unable to move, I surrendered my struggle and closed my eyes against the few remaining sensor lights in my helmet’s visor and tried to meter and slow my breathing for the benefit of my own impotent sense of control rather than delaying my mortality. My heart acquiesced to the impossibility of escaping my chest, slowing my pulse and easing me into the stillness of my aphotic grave.

My thoughts carried me to the supposed sense of clarity one attains upon their death bed, but my imagination was imprinted with the scream in the eyes of my CO as if seared into my vision. Frustration stung my capitulation to oblivion. She would blame herself for not recognizing the ambush despite the reconnaissance telemetry showing the all-clear.

“What is your name?”

The scenarios of investigations, hearings, and court martials playing out in my imagination were soon accompanied by a droning hum that slithered into the imagery so subtly that I didn’t notice until it began to grow louder. I could feel the hypoxic hum spreading into my arms and then my legs. Grief, profound and replete, broke my ego with the knowledge that I would be meeting my end in mere moments. Tears burned my eyes as convulsive sobs choked my throat. My mourning, however, was usurped abruptly by confusion and futile hope with the sudden rattling of my visor in its track with the increasing. The droning crescendoed with a roar that stripped away the encasing blackness, my environmental suit, and my clothing in a flash of light.

I found myself suspended in a translucent liquid instinctually panning above and around me for the surface to no avail. It was as if I had suddenly been encased in the center of a great oceanic sphere with no hope of reaching the perimeter before my lungs gave out. The reflex to hold my breath amid the translation was the only thing that kept me from drowning, but my body was already wrestling reason for a breath. An irrational anger set fire to my veins. I could no longer stave off death and decided that if I were to die it would be an act of will instead of an act of fate. Throwing wide my arms, I filled my lungs with the alien water. My brain reeled with primordial alarms unleashing a chemical soup in a bid for survival that sent my limbs thrashing and eyes peeled for signs of rescue.

Rescue came, although not on a lifeline or special forces infantry nor even resuscitation. Confusion confounded my mania as I exhaled the heavy liquid and drew it into my lungs again. As my brain adjusted to the sensation of the embryonic fluid passing in and out of my body, I recalled the oxygenated fluorocarbon solution used by surveyors on exoplanets with dense atmospheric conditions. I savored the strange sensation and warm environment awash in relief until realizing that my captors wanted me alive and if they wanted me alive, they wanted something from me.

Despite the certainty that I was already being monitored, I struck out in search of the perimeter desperate to find a means of escape or evasion. My mind struggled against the other-worldly beauty and tranquility of the softly illuminated fluid and the sense of liberation in swimming unencumbered by a respirator. The source of the illumination was undefined and shone from no particular point in my surroundings, thwarting my sense of direction or distance. The effect reminded me that this was a cage and left me frustrated and straining to discern any variations in the depths encompassing me.

My determination was stifled abruptly with the sudden appearance of a consuming gloom in the depths ahead. I recoiled on a jolt of adrenaline and turned to flee only to be met with another colossal shadow infiltrating the sphere then another and another. Everywhere I turned the nebulous shadows encompassed me as if the alien fishbowl in which I was trapped were now surrounded by enormous spires. As I drifted aloft the medium was penetrated by a dulcet soundwave that I could feel in my chest and testicles. The translucence of the waters intensified with the notes, brightening to the deepest and most beautiful blue I had ever encountered. I could feel the vibrancy as if it had seeped into my very consciousness. I was spellbound in the harmony of sound and color when the panorama unfolded before me.

Earth. Not only the beautifully marbled planet but the biology, ecology, geology, meteorology, and the collective intentions and energies of the whole in balance and fidelity. Gaia. I felt as if I were glimpsing an attainable, hopeful future through the harmonic suspension.

The resonance changed to a din abruptly and with it the beautiful blue to withering sepia. Chaos, strife, and contention replaced the harmony of the world and stretched out as far as human reach into space. A great anger and grief at the futility of it all overwhelmed me.

That discordant tenor changed again to a horrific scream mirroring that in the eyes of my CO in the ambush, washing the sphere in a blood red miasma. Fire, destruction, death, violence, hatred, and bigotry littered mankind’s corner of the galaxy. Remorseless attacks and counterattacks between humanity and our alien enemy spread like a contagion infecting worlds known and unknown. Underlying my harrowed repugnance and dismay as I witnessed atrocity after atrocity was a deep and burning shame that amplified my grief.

To the relief of my beleaguered soul the resonance changed again and my brain stammered trying to reconcile the fact that I could perceive each of those three colors with their respective narratives simultaneously. Yet, before my dazzled mind could grasp the phenomenon, each melted into the other to create an inky cloud that lingered before me.

The sphere fell silent.

Before I could react, the murky stain was upon me! Swirling around me. Worming its way into my pores and filling my veins to storm my brain with all that I had perceived and more. My consciousness exploded with understanding. Not merely understanding of knowledge and context but the very nature of things. All things. The universe and all its expansive glory to the secrets of particle and quantum physics permeated every essence of my being imbuing me with a bliss beyond joy or rapture.

The state of transcendence consumed me, and all fell dark.

“What is your name?”