FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #22

When we arrived on the Bridge, I walked through the Control Center's now empty hall right to the Commander's chair, my father's place. But I didn't stop to sit in it.

I was going to the Mainframe Kernel Chamber deep down below to wake Quennah up, despite the feeling that she would not be happy about it. 'Babysitting' was the thing she hated the most. Still, this was an emergency and, after discussion between the remaining kennar members, we agreed to do it.

Eyuran's mom went on with the search for the lost spacecraft, though our options were greatly limited by the stealth mode Quennah was in.

Before entering the elevator, which would take me to the Outer Core level, I stopped for a moment and turned to her.

"Aunt, please, Uncle Orewen is worried about you. He even said he will send Eyuran here if you will not comply with his request to consume his homemade food." For a second, Aunt Rifa faintly smiled.

"I got it." Seeing Baro next to me, her smile faded away without a trace. "What is he doing here again?"

"Our relationship is very complicated." Ignoring their confused stares, I continued, "Nevertheless, rest assured he will not hurt you." I glanced at him. "Right, Baro?" The Medan nodded, ill at ease. "Aunt, ask him if you need something."

"I think this man should rather worry about me hurting him, coming here without his weapons," Rifa messaged me through the Node.

"Please, Aunt, postpone your wrath until everything is over. Now is not a good time."

She nodded eventually, with discontentment all over her face.

"Very well."

I knew how she felt. At least I thought I knew.

The person responsible for Mom's condition was locked up now, and I would take that man's life if she died. But it would get worse for both sides if we lost Father and the rest of our kennar.

While they had a chance to rebuild the affiliation with us (and the Danna), the remaining Medans decided to continue peacefully, hoping for our help even though they knew the retribution that would follow. After all, none of them desired a conflict. And only they knew the horrors they had gone through before taking this path. However, they had all got their hands dirty with murder.

Some things cannot be fixed. And even if we had the capacity to forgive, many of us will never do so, and none of us will ever forget the abuse, let alone the death of a loved one.

Dear Ancestor, people's hearts are very intricate and delicate things.

Leaving Baro with Aunt Rifa and instructing him to make sure she took a break and ate when Orewen called, I entered the elevator platform, hit the buttons on the panel and the elevator doors closed, cutting me off from the heavy atmosphere.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I had been down here only a few times with Father.

Clearing the first two access stages, I ended up in front of the huge Kernel Chamber gates. The shining 'blue eye' of the outer lock was studying me.

"Hello, Quennah," I addressed the ship's Mainframe through my Node.

"Bloodline verified. Welcome, Commander Trainee Falaha Kierenen," was the response. The 'blue eye' blinked and the thick, armored triple gates slowly cascaded to open.

I could see the white cloud of my breath in the cold air.

The last access stage to the Chamber was the maze code of the Inner Gates. Unless you could decipher the pattern Quennah set especially for you, she would not let you through the last gate. The patterns were so complex that without soma's processing capability it would be impossible to come up with an unlocking algorithm. She designed and changed the maze codes at random intervals, and none of them were similar to each other. The word eccentric could not even begin to describe her. Apart from sleeping, she had a lot of strange hobbies, some of which she picked up from other ships long ago, like making grass field circles on every habworld flyby.

It took me a while before the giant maze blocks reassembled into the spherical shell, and the Inner Gates hatched, leading into the Mainframe Kernel Chamber. Now fully connected with the Mainframe, the controls appeared in my siSystem.

"Aona, Darna, Tara," I counted the three deeply seated in the floor tanks of biotic liquid. Here goes.

Draining the tanks synchronously, I switched their environment into active state, and the locks released. Soon the metagrid shells opened on all three.

Quennah was rising.

Naked and wet, with long copper hair just like mine sticking to their tall, ash-pale bodies, in front of me stood star seed triplets, more than two millennia old: the First, the Second and the Third Living Kernels. These were the genetic daughters of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. They were also the DIVE-type spacecraft, Quennah.

And the nightmare of kennar Fargann.