Ragnak: The Ghosts of Drokhar

There were Universes in the Multiverse-Z where civilisation had learned to pray to the stars.

There were others where civilisation had learned to conquer them.

Kryndor belonged to the second kind.

Suspended within its own CryptaSphere, Kryndor was a vast Universe of ancient suns, metallic worlds, immense asteroid kingdoms and civilizations that had spent millions of years transforming matter into increasingly sophisticated forms of possibility.

Its peoples had looked into the darkness between stars and refused to accept that distance should remain an obstacle.

They built.

They calculated.

They crossed.

They transformed.

And among all the species that had risen beneath the stars of Kryndor, few embodied that philosophy more completely than the Minas.

The Minas

The Minas were not tall.

They had never needed to be.

Other species sometimes made the mistake of measuring physical stature before measuring what stood behind it.

A Minas might barely reach the chest of a larger warrior and still carry enough technology on his armour to bring down something ten times his size.

Their bodies were compact, powerful and dense, evolved beneath the greater gravity of Drokhar, their ancestral planet. Their bones were unusually resistant. Their musculature was naturally strong. Their hands were broad and precise, equally capable of swinging an industrial hammer or assembling mechanisms whose internal components were almost microscopic.

But the defining characteristic of the Minas had never been their bodies.

It was their minds.

They were builders.

Engineers.

Metallurgists.

Soldiers.

Architects.

Explorers.

Weapon-smiths.

Mathematicians.

They did not consider technology something separate from civilisation.

Technology was the accumulated memory of civilisation.

Every machine represented generations of failures that no longer needed to be repeated.

Every weapon carried the knowledge of warriors who had died discovering how not to fight.

Every spacecraft represented the refusal of an ancestor to accept that the sky marked the end of the road.

That philosophy had pushed Drokhar towards Futura.

But not every civilisation followed the same path.

Across the Cosmos, societies tended to move between two great tendencies.

Skuda looked towards ancestry, spiritual understanding, sacred traditions, ritual, arcane power and the knowledge preserved by those who had come before.

Futura looked towards invention, science, technological evolution, artificial intelligence, engineering and the possibility that tomorrow could surpass yesterday.

Neither was inherently superior.

Neither represented intelligence or ignorance.

There were Skuda civilisations whose understanding of reality surpassed the greatest laboratories in existence.

There were Futura empires whose machines had become indistinguishable from miracles.

Some civilisations rejected one path.

Others merged both.

And running perpendicular to that distinction was another ancient tension:

Ordo and Chaos.

Ordo valued structure.

Discipline.

Continuity.

Purpose.

Control.

Chaos valued freedom.

Instinct.

Rupture.

Mutation.

Transformation through conflict.

Again, neither meant good or evil.

A tyrant could build an empire of perfect Ordo.

A liberator could rise from Chaos.

And a civilisation could contain elements of both.

The Minas of Drokhar had chosen their position with unusual clarity.

Their cities were engineered.

Their armies were organised.

Their technologies were regulated.

Their discoveries were catalogued.

Their warriors fought within doctrines refined over thousands of years.

And even their rebellions usually began with somebody filing a detailed report explaining why the existing system was inefficient.

It was said—usually by outsiders—that a Minas would not begin a revolution until somebody had calculated its projected maintenance costs.

The Minas considered this perfectly reasonable.

Drokhar

Drokhar looked as though someone had forged a planet.

Mountain ranges of black stone rose from immense copper-coloured plains. Rivers cut through mineral valleys rich enough to feed industries for millennia. Gigantic forests of dark ironwood survived in protected equatorial regions, their roots capable of piercing stone and drawing trace metals from beneath the ground.

Above them rose the cities.

Not cities built upon the landscape.

Cities integrated into it.

Towering industrial citadels descended kilometres beneath the mountains.

Transit lines crossed valleys inside magnetic corridors.

Orbital elevators climbed beyond the atmosphere.

Shipyards floated above the planet like artificial moons.

And surrounding the major settlements were defensive arrays designed to identify threats long before those threats knew they had been detected.

The capital, Khordrax Prime, could be seen from orbit.

At night its geometric patterns stretched across the surface like circuitry etched into the planet itself.

Drokhar had survived asteroid impacts.

Civil wars.

Alien invasions.

Ecological catastrophes.

Economic collapses.

Weaponised artificial intelligences.

And one particularly embarrassing period involving autonomous mining machines that had collectively decided mineral extraction was inefficient and attempted to reorganise an entire continent.

The Minas had survived all of it.

Every catastrophe had become information.

Every defeat became doctrine.

Every vulnerability became engineering.

Which was why the thing that came to Drokhar terrified them.

Because for the first time in their recorded history...

they knew the enemy was there.

And they had absolutely no idea how to fight it.

Ragnak

Commander Ragnak Vorn had always preferred enemies that exploded.

They were easier to understand.

Armour could be penetrated.

Fortifications could be breached.

Ships had reactors.

Soldiers had organs.

Machines had processors.

Everything had a weakness somewhere.

Finding it was simply a matter of applying sufficient intelligence, sufficient firepower, or—when the first two proved inconvenient—sufficient quantities of both.

Ragnak was a Fighter.

Not a wizard.

Not a priest.

Not a mystic.

He had devoted his life to the art of combat.

But he was a Fighter born from Futura.

His armour was a weapon system in itself.

A segmented exoskeletal frame reinforced his already powerful Minas body. Targeting systems followed the movement of his pupils. Predictive combat algorithms analysed trajectories around him. Micro-thrusters mounted along the spine and legs allowed sudden bursts of acceleration despite the tremendous weight of his armour.

On his back rested a heavy electromagnetic rifle capable of launching hyper-dense projectiles at velocities sufficient to penetrate most conventional battlefield armour.

At his thigh rested a compact plasma sidearm.

Across his left forearm ran a defensive energy projector.

And tucked against the lower section of his armour was a simple metal hammer.

No energy field.

No electronics.

No intelligence.

His grandfather's.

Ragnak claimed he carried it because sometimes sophisticated machinery required hitting.

Nobody believed him.

Everyone knew why it was there.

Futura had never required forgetting where you came from.

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Ragnak stood inside one of the most secure laboratories on Drokhar watching a dead man breathe.

Technically, the Minas wasn't dead.

That was the problem.

“Again,” Ragnak said.

A technician touched the interface.

The medical scan restarted.

The Minas lying inside the diagnostic chamber was called Dren Korvik, thirty-nine years old, engineering specialist, married, two children, no relevant medical history.

Alive.

Heart functioning.

Brain active.

Organs normal.

Blood chemistry almost perfect.

Yet Dren Korvik had not spoken in three days.

He barely moved.

He stared towards the ceiling.

When food was placed near him, he swallowed if instructed.

When his wife entered the room and begged him to recognise her, he had looked directly at her...

and nothing had happened.

Ragnak folded his arms.

“Neurological damage?”

“None.”

“Chemical contamination?”

“None.”

“Nanological infection?”

“Nothing detected.”

“Pathogen?”

“Nothing.”

“Radiation?”

“Normal.”

“Psi-active interference?”

The technician hesitated.

That hesitation caught Ragnak's attention.

“What?”

“We have a reading.”

“Then why did you hesitate?”

“Because we don't know what it means.”

Ragnak disliked sentences like that.

The technician expanded a holographic diagnostic.

A representation of Korvik's body appeared.

Physical systems glowed normally.

Then another silhouette emerged around it.

Dim.

Almost transparent.

Ragnak narrowed his eyes.

“What am I looking at?”

“Spiritual resonance.”

Ragnak looked at him.

The technician immediately became defensive.

“That's the official classification.”

“I know what it's called.”

The Minas had stopped dismissing spiritual phenomena centuries ago. Futura civilisation had encountered enough Skuda cultures to learn that ridicule was merely ignorance wearing confidence.

Drokhar possessed instruments capable of detecting phenomena traditionally described as souls, spirits, astral residues and post-biological consciousness patterns.

They did not necessarily understand all of them.

But they could measure some.

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Ragnak pointed at Korvik's reading.

“What's wrong?”

The technician displayed a comparison with a healthy Minas.

The difference was immediate.

The healthy subject possessed a dense spiritual signature centred throughout the body.

Korvik's was...

thin.

Ragnak stared.

“How thin?”

“Sixty-eight percent below baseline.”

“That's impossible.”

“We thought the machine was malfunctioning.”

“And?”

“We used seven different systems.”

The technician swallowed.

“They all say the same thing.”

Ragnak looked through the glass.

Korvik continued breathing.

“What removes spiritual energy from a living Minas?”

“We don't know.”

They found another seventeen cases before sunrise.

By the following evening there were sixty-three.

After three days:

four hundred and twelve.

The condition spread across Drokhar without following any biological model.

There was no contact pattern.

No shared food supply.

No geographical cluster.

No common workplace.

No detectable infection.

The victims simply began becoming tired.

Then weak.

Then emotionally distant.

Then empty.

Not dead.

Not unconscious.

Drained.

The Minas media called it the Hollowing.

The government hated the term.

The public adopted it immediately.

Hospitals filled.

Families panicked.

Factories began mandatory spiritual-resonance screening.

Transportation networks scanned passengers.

Military installations elevated planetary alert levels.

Nothing stopped it.

The most disturbing discovery came eleven days later.

One of the orbital surveillance arrays detected something standing inside a restricted military facility.

Something that possessed no mass.

No thermal signature.

No electromagnetic presence.

No measurable physical body.

Only a faint distortion in the spiritual spectrum.

The recording lasted 2.7 seconds.

Then the entity disappeared.

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Ragnak watched it twelve times.

It looked almost humanoid.

Almost.

A thin distortion where nothing should have existed.

Watching.

“That was inside one of our weapons laboratories?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“No entry detected.”

“Teleportation?”

“No energy event.”

“Phase technology?”

“Nothing.”

“Optical camouflage?”

“It isn't invisible.”

Ragnak turned.

“What?”

The scientist enlarged the reading.

“We originally assumed concealment. We were wrong.”

He pointed towards the anomaly.

“Commander... we don't think it has a physical body to conceal.”

That changed everything.

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Drokhar began searching for ghosts.

The Minas deployed the most sophisticated spiritual detection network they had ever constructed.

Sensors normally reserved for scientific study were incorporated into military satellites.

Temple artefacts acquired through centuries of inter-universal diplomacy were connected to Futura processors.

Researchers who had spent careers being ignored suddenly found themselves escorted into government facilities.

The entire planet became one enormous listening device.

And they discovered something terrifying.

There were not one or two entities.

There were thousands.

Possibly more.

They existed beside them.

Inside cities.

Inside factories.

Inside military installations.

Inside research centres.

Watching.

Learning.

Feeding.

Ragnak entered a manufacturing complex after midnight accompanied by twelve heavily armed Fighters.

The spiritual sensors indicated three entities inside.

His helmet displayed their approximate positions as flickering distortions.

“Contact thirty metres,” someone whispered.

Ragnak raised his rifle.

Nothing stood ahead of them.

Only machinery.

“Twenty.”

They advanced.

“Fifteen.”

Ragnak could hear his own breathing.

“Ten.”

Still nothing.

“Five.”

The sensor suddenly screamed.

Ragnak fired.

The electromagnetic rifle thundered.

A projectile crossed the empty corridor and punched through three machinery housings before burying itself inside reinforced concrete.

Nothing happened.

“Second target left!”

Plasma fire illuminated the factory.

Rounds tore through empty space.

Walls burned.

Machines exploded.

The entities remained.

Watching.

Then one moved through Ragnak.

He felt it.

Cold.

Not temperature.

Something deeper.

For perhaps half a second, his armour disappeared from awareness.

The factory disappeared.

His body disappeared.

There was only an impossible sensation of something passing through the place where he existed.

Ragnak dropped to one knee.

“Commander!”

He raised one hand.

“I'm fine.”

He wasn't.

His heartbeat had doubled.

He looked at his spiritual-resonance indicator.

It had dropped nine percent.

In seconds.

Ragnak stared at the number.

Then looked towards the invisible thing somewhere ahead.

“They're feeding on us.”

Nobody answered.

“They're not attacking the planet.”

He stood slowly.

“They're farming it.”

The conclusion sounded insane.

The evidence did not.

The entities attached themselves to living beings and gradually absorbed spiritual energy.

They preferred Minas engaged in cognitively or emotionally intense activity.

Scientists.

Engineers.

Fighters.

Artists.

Children dreaming.

Workers concentrating.

Families grieving.

The stronger the internal activity, the richer the energy appeared to become.

They weren't merely draining individuals.

They were cultivating them.

Allowing them to continue functioning.

Taking enough to feed.

Waiting.

Returning.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until the victim contained almost nothing.

Drokhar had become a farm.

And the Minas were the livestock.

Then they discovered the theft.

A research team examined classified systems accessed during several entity appearances.

Nothing had been removed physically.

No files copied.

No network intrusion.

Yet weeks later, unidentified technological structures began appearing in regions where the entities gathered.

Primitive at first.

Imperfect recreations.

Then increasingly sophisticated.

The entities were not downloading Minas technology.

They were learning it by observing.

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Absorbing principles.

Studying machines.

Watching engineers.

Understanding.

And somehow carrying that knowledge somewhere beyond Drokhar.

Ragnak stared at a reconstructed energy regulator floating inside a containment field.

It was Minas engineering.

Almost.

The proportions were wrong.

The architecture distorted.

Like someone had remembered a machine after seeing it only once.

“They're stealing from us,” he said.

The lead scientist shook her head.

“Worse.”

Ragnak looked at her.

“They're practising.”

For the first time in generations, fear began spreading through Drokhar.

Not panic.

The Minas were too disciplined for that.

Something colder.

A civilisation built upon the belief that every problem could eventually be understood had encountered an enemy that ignored almost every rule through which the Minas understood conflict.

You couldn't shoot it.

You couldn't imprison it.

You couldn't intercept its ships because there were no ships.

You couldn't fortify against it because walls meant nothing.

You couldn't track its biology because it apparently possessed none.

You couldn't even determine where it went when it disappeared.

And meanwhile...

the Hollowing continued.

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Ragnak visited Dren Korvik again.

The engineer was weaker now.

His spiritual signature measured eleven percent of baseline.

His wife sat beside him holding his hand.

Ragnak remained near the doorway.

Korvik's little daughter sat on the opposite side of the bed.

She had placed a mechanical toy on her father's chest.

A tiny drilling machine.

One of the children's models produced by the engineering guilds.

She pressed the activation stud.

The toy began walking awkwardly across his blanket.

“Papa.”

No response.

She moved it closer.

“Look.”

Korvik's eyes remained open.

“Papa, it's the one you made me.”

Nothing.

His wife covered her mouth.

Ragnak looked away.

For the first time since the crisis began, the problem stopped being strategic.

Not a planetary security breach.

Not unidentified spiritual entities.

Not stolen technology.

Not military vulnerability.

Someone had stolen part of that little girl's father while leaving enough of him behind for her to keep hoping he would come back.

Something inside Ragnak hardened.

He stepped closer to the bed.

The child looked at him.

“Are you going to stop them?”

Ragnak had commanded soldiers against armies.

He had stood beneath bombardments.

He had made decisions that killed enemies and saved cities.

He had never found a question harder to answer.

“Yes,” he said.

He hoped it wasn't a lie.

That night Ragnak climbed alone to the upper defence platform of Khordrax Prime.

Drokhar stretched beneath him.

Millions of lights.

Millions of lives.

Above the atmosphere, orbital cities moved silently among the stars.

Beautiful.

Engineered.

Protected.

Or so they had believed.

His helmet detected something.

SPIRITUAL ANOMALY.

Distance:

twenty-one metres.

Ragnak slowly turned.

Nothing.

The sensor changed.

Eighteen metres.

Fifteen.

Twelve.

Whatever it was, it was approaching.

Ragnak did not raise his weapon.

He had learned that much.

“Can you understand me?”

Nothing.

Ten metres.

“You have been watching us.”

Eight.

“Studying us.”

Six.

“Feeding on us.”

Five.

Ragnak stared into empty air.

For several seconds there was only wind.

Then something appeared.

Not physically.

His helmet translated the spiritual distortion into a crude visual approximation.

A tall figure.

Thin limbs.

A body that seemed unfinished.

No recognisable face.

It stood only metres away.

Watching him.

Ragnak felt the cold beginning inside his chest.

His spiritual indicator dropped.

99%.

98%.

97%.

He clenched his jaw.

The thing continued feeding.

“You think because I can't hit you...”

96%.

“...that I can't fight you.”

The figure tilted its head.

That movement frightened Ragnak more than anything else.

It had understood.

95%.

Then Ragnak smiled.

A Fighter's smile.

Not because he knew how to win.

Because now he knew something else.

The enemy could learn.

Which meant it could make mistakes.

The entity vanished.

Ragnak remained alone beneath the stars.

His systems immediately began analysing every fragment of data collected during the encounter.

Movement.

Energy absorption.

Response latency.

Spiritual frequency.

Everything.

Because that was what the Minas did.

They learned too.

Far beyond Drokhar, beyond Kryndor and beyond every route known to Minas civilisation, something carried what it had taken into darkness.

Energy.

Knowledge.

Memories.

Technology.

Tiny fragments stolen from thousands of living beings.

The entities were still weak.

They could observe physical existence.

Touch its spiritual foundations.

Drain those who inhabited it.

But they could not yet truly enter it.

They could not build permanent bodies.

Could not walk openly beneath alien suns.

Could not hold weapons with physical hands.

Not yet.

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They needed energy.

An extraordinary amount of it.

And Drokhar had given them more than they had possessed before.

Somewhere within a Universe whose existence the peoples of Kryndor did not even know...

something awakened.

Something ancient.

Hungry.

Learning.

The Minas had no name for it.

Ragnak had no idea what had begun.

He did not know that other worlds, separated by impossible distances and enclosed within entirely different CryptaSpheres, would soon detect similar anomalies.

He did not know that other species would begin losing people in ways that made no sense.

He did not know that the spiritual predators studying Drokhar were merely among the first scouts of something much larger.

And he certainly did not know the word that would one day become synonymous with terror across the Cosmos.

Sumaya.

For now, Ragnak knew only three things.

Something was feeding on his people.

Something was stealing everything the Minas had built.

And every weapon he possessed was useless against it.

For a Fighter, there could be no greater humiliation.

For Ragnak...

there could be no greater invitation to war.

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