Page 37 - The Chronicles Ser2 (6-10)

record of an encounter with the Lemur the Anasazi ancestors of the Achenazi had left. He would
have to broach the subject with tact. He was distracted by the couple’s arrival…
“I’d forgotten how filling those pancakes were. You seemed to like the savoury ones; I don’t think
I’ve seen anyone devour them so quickly!” Fenton joked. Meorr punched him playfully in his ribs and
he feigned hurt. Jason was waiting for them at the door of his chamber.
“Ah; welcome you two. Please come in and make yourselves comfortable. I have some good news
and some … more disconcerting news…” He let them get seated and told them about the Ulahri
records and Fenton immediately agreed to pass them on to Lestrange. He hesitated then spoke to
Meorr…
“Meorr; when our first ancestors, the Anasazi, came to settle this region of space they made many
discoveries. One of which concerns your people the Lemur. It was about two millennia after the
battle with the Gantrax. Were you or any of your people aware of an outpost on a moon in a nearby
system that was occupied by a Lemur garrison at that time?”
“We had a couple of survey vessels go missing in the region around that time but most of their crews
turned up later surviving on a remote ice world. They had been attacked by some vessels they didn’t
recognise. But as far as I know we had no military presence here. We were in our phase of making
trading relationships at that time. That’s when our people first encountered the Osir and the Unat”
she replied adding “If it was a military outpost it was here in secret and probably without consent of
the Governing Council. Back then a lot of that kind of stuff went on”
“From what I’ve been able to piece together from the fragmentary records of that era, a lot of the
files got corrupted during a gamma burst when a nearby star went nova, it would appear this
Garrison ship came across an abandoned, but intact, Gantrax facility. It would also appear to have
been some sort of biological research centre. Some of the crew became infected with an agent and
turned on their superiors. When the Anasazi found the place the remaining garrison personnel had
set up a quarantine zone. The poor Lemur who had been infected but not contracted the disease
had become carriers and as a last resort, driven quite mad by their predicament, they entombed the
complex in a radiation barrier. The Anasazi for their part agreed to place a minefield around the
world and to place a beacon to warn others not to approach” he continued to describe the
symptoms of the disease in all the horrific detail directly from the archive account.
“We had always wondered where the disease came from; we call it Veyrak’s dementia. It would
appear from your ancestral record that an early version of the viral agent was released amongst our
people as a test. If this disease could be made species specific you have a means of wiping out whole
races leaving their worlds open for colonisation. I can’t begin to describe how sickened I am by the
thought. May I pass this information on to my High Council?”
“Yes; by all means. I don’t have records of what happened later, but I would imagine the world is
empty of life by now. From what the Anasazi doctors were able to glean, the virus dies out after
hosts die. So it is only infectious while the hosts are alive. The place may be safe to approach by
now.” He finished.
“I’d get your people to take all precautions, if your military is anything like ours then the Complex
will have been booby-trapped!” Fenton added sternly.
Jason made arrangements for Meorr to contact her people using one of the new pan-galactic
subspace arrays the Hive-net was now linked into. A cumbersome system, but it afforded a better
compatibility with the Lemur systems.

The Unbroken Chain

The Alurak High council contacted Lunaris about a month after the Sphere landed back on
the Moon’s surface. K’ru brought them up to speed with the events that she knew and they
reciprocated the information. There had been recent disconcerting news about the Ulahri that were
still living in a region near the Unity territories. A strange illness was taking hold that, if some means
of blocking the spread could not be found, looked like it could wipe out the entire species in a few