Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: Ozymandias, Chapter 7 (Patreon)

Working through the edits of this chapter, still aiming to have it up by the end of the week. In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from the history of the Baheil and stay tuned!

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“Initially, the Baheil thought they were dealing with some form of parasite, near-mindless and instinctive in action.” She pointed to something that looked like a brief sentence. ‘We were wrong’.” She grimaced with the echo of those words.

“How were they wrong?”

Adrianna touched a particular segment of text and, as if it was a keypad instead of carved steel, Barry appeared next to the walkway alongside a holographic computer console. Adrianna nodded towards their cartoonish guide. “This was some of the data from Baheila Osz’s scouts, taken from a colony originally believed to be well outside the hot zone.” She moved her hand over the virtual controls, and an audio clip played.

Harper recognized Baheil speech; there were two voices. One composed, but urgent in tones; a ship’s leader, trying to get information from whoever they were talking to.

The other speaker was near hysterics. “‘It’s killing us’,” Adrianna said over the pleading screams of the second voice. “‘We’ve lost control. They’ve gotten into the systems. It’s killing us. Do not let this happen to you. In the name of the Skies....’” she broke off as the message devolved into static. “The scouts were repeatedly attacked by refugee ships as well as elements of their own fleet. Initially, the scouts thought this was due to panic and misidentification, but it was worse than that. This wasn’t something as simple as a pandemic. The disease took control of its victims.”

“Took control?” Harper didn’t like the sound of that.

“Yes. They don’t go into much detail here, but later descriptions don’t leave much room for interpretation.” Adrianna was still a novice with Baheil text, but she was learning. “This wasn’t some microbe or even a lab-bred bug. A plague doesn’t wipe out a star-faring species.”

Not without some help,Harper silently agreed. The Valthus had been one of the Compact’s earliest successes, and one of their greatest tragedies. Saved from annihilation by trans-organic radical elements of their own species, the Valthus had been proud members of the Compact. Until the Wasting, a campaign of terror orchestrated by surviving machine-corrupted sympathizers, a deadly and incurable plague deliberately spread across Valthus colonies and populations. It had taken decades, but the Valthus had eventually died out. It was their fate that had led to the Valthus Lesson, the standing order to immediately destroy any relics or technologies from the trans-organic Valthus or the thing that had corrupted them. “What else does it say?”

“During the scouts’ mission, the situation had worsened considerably. Several core worlds were reporting outbreaks and the government was losing control of the situation. By the time the surviving recon ships returned to Baheila Osz, three of those systems had fallen to the plague and more than twenty percent of the navy had been lost. Infected ships would attack friendly vessels and systems in order to spread the plague. With two weeks of the scouts’ return, the trickle of refugees to Baheila Osz had become a flood.”

“The same thing happening to the other worlds was going to happen to them,” Harper realized. “They sealed the system.”