In his dream, the ground before him was littered with the bloody remains of hundreds of dead Humans, splayed about in an open field on Klinmon, his ancestral homeworld.
Linuso Summlin raised his hands to his face; they were covered with blood – Human blood. He thought this odd for a Klin, to have killed with his own hands. His race was more subtle, more finessed. They usually employed others to do the killing for them.
Yet instinctively he knew this entire field of Human corpses had fallen by his hands, and as he looked closer at the bodies, he saw all their faces were the same. It was the lifeless, vacant-eyed face of Adam Cain, the Human whose mocking smugness haunted the darkest avenues of his sleep.
Is this a memory or a dream? As the gray fog of unconsciousness began to lift, Linuso couldn’t tell which. It seemed so real – so satisfying in its aftermath – that if this was a dream, then he did not want to wake, forever content to live out the rest of his existence confined to this gruesome dreamscape.
Unfortunately, that was not to be the case….
Linuso became aware of a painful brightness attempting to invade his dream, filtering through his eyelids to wash away the scene of glorious death before him. When he opened his eyes – even a fraction – a spasm of light hit him with the force of an electric shock. He frowned and squinted, fighting to keep the stabbing pain away, but to no avail.
The foggy scene before him began to focus into reality; he was in a bed in a bright and sterile room with several beings hovering around him.
“Pleabaen, it is good to see you have regained consciousness,” said a voice to his right. As more awareness reached him, Linuso could feel he carried bandages and feeding tubes, while a strange, pervasive numbness lingered in his body.
“Where am I?” a weak and raspy voice uttered, one he barely recognized as his own.
“You are in a medical facility near the Estate. You have been severely injured, but you will recover … with time.”
“Injured, how?”
“Perhaps is not the time, Pleabaen. You have only now emerged from a coma.”
Linuso blinked his eyes several times, bringing the room into better focus. He managed to shift his head from side to side and saw the grave expressions on the four other Klin in the room. Injured? I have been injured; but I have no recollection of such an event.
“No, you must tell me now,” he commanded in his foreign voice.
There was a pregnant pause before the speaker began. “It was the Humans, McCarthy and Cain. They destroyed the communication array on the roof of the Estate and crashed it through your chambers nearly killing you. Over one hundred Klin died in the explosion and subsequent fire in the building.”
Linuso’s senses were rapidly returning; his heart raced and the veins in his temples began to pound. “The Humans did this? When … how?”
“Within minutes of being placed in the detention cell they all managed to escape. Apparently McCarthy had planned for this eventuality and placed a key and weapons within the cell—”
“Where are they now?”
“They have escaped the planet, all of them, including McCarthy and Cain.”
“And what of the battle … what of the fleet?”
Again there was a pause before the speaker answered. “The battle went to the Humans, Pleabaen. Do you not remember?” The speaker looked to the Klin wearing the uniform of a medical technician. They shared a concerned expression.
But now it was coming back to him, as memories began to explode in his head. Yes, the battle had gone to the Humans, through a feat of deception that completely destroyed the Juirean fleet and left in its wake a Human force which his own Klin numbers could not match. He had called off the attack, leaving the Human fleet free to roam the region.
“I now recall,” Linuso said. “I withdrew the fleet as we seek an alternative plan to defeat the Juireans – and now apparently the Humans as well.”
Through his groggy awareness, Linuso could see several of the Klin exchange more looks of concern. The speaker – who Linuso now recognized as one of his aides named Jinnil – appeared to be internally debating something more.
“What is it?” Linuso asked him. “Are there other developments?”
“Yes, Linuso,” Jinnil said slowly. “The fleet … the Kracori have assumed control.”
With each new revelation, Linuso was shocked further into consciousness. Painfully,