Genellan: Book Five Draft
Enemy Forever
To Elizabeth O’Connor, a sweet soul…now an angel.
Copyright 2025 by Scott G. Gier
Prologue
Star Shadows
Their first time was in a sleeping bag, by a dying fire. Casting shadows on the snow, their breath mingled in the brittle Genellan night. Buccari loved St. Pierre. He worshipped her. But their union was more than emotion; it was an animal want, a life force—the most powerful, the most timeless imperative in the universe.
Afterward they stared at the uncaring stars.
Section One – Genellan
Thunder Bay
The small moon, called Dim One by cliff dwellers, neared its zenith in the morning sky. Bright One, the large moon, lowered in the west, hanging above the ridge they were about to top. Behind them, high in the east, gleamed another light—a faint orange spark—not a star, a planet: Kon, the system’s primary world, a celestial beacon defying the light of day.
Nestor Godonov stopped climbing to catch his breath. And to consider a much nearer object, a reconnaissance drone circling overhead, faintly whirring.
Its mild hum was obliterated by hunters screeching across the ridge.
“Crap!” Tatum shouted. Eyes wide, the big redhead slid downward, goggles atop his field cap. Godonov failed to halt the man’s momentum. They stumbled back against scrub bush and boulders.
“What, Sandy?”
A rumbling growl drowned out Tatum’s reply. Godonov required no additional information. Both men retreated downhill, jumping, sliding, rocks clattering. Another roar, louder, and then a crunching presence—the footfall of a heavy creature. Godonov, neck crawling, glanced back. A crimson maw lined with yellowed daggers lifted into view.
A hunter screamed.
Tatum turned and unslung his rifle. “Down!” he shouted.
A canister clattered across the rocks. Godonov dove as a concussion shattered the air. Dazed, he lifted his head. A fist grabbed his pack straps and yanked him to his feet.
“You getting any data?” Tatum demanded, all the while maintaining aim with his new appendage. Regeneration had given the ex-Marine a new arm, a fine limb and strong, appropriate to the proportions of a large man; and yet, in contrast to his massively compensated natural arm, the left looked a mere twig.
“On it!” Godonov gasped. He snapped down his visor and blinked up full spectrum capture; his reticules stabilized, autofocusing on the agitated dragon. A quadruped, the creature, a coil of muscle, twice man-sized, crouched above them. Rugose and mottled gray, except for a vermillion blush about its throat, the monster blended against its stony background. It emitted a chuffing sound and held its triangular snout in the air, mouth open, tasting the flash-bang’s dissipating essence.
Satisfied his systems were collecting, Godonov grabbed a rock and whipped it sidearm, shouting, “Git, doggy!” The missile missed low, bouncing across the scrabble. The dragon’s snout snapped down at the clatter, pewter eyes raised like turrets above a broad skull. Tatum’s belly-laugh punctured the tension. The monster’s gaze shifted. A guttural rumbling rolled out, atavistic, terrible.
“What’s so damn funny?” Godonov gasped. The beast slid a clawed foot downward, its glare returning to the science officer. Godonov’s neck ran cold. He eased out his pistol, trying to remember if he had chambered a round. He did not want to shoot the beast, but neither did he want to die. The dragon’s glare registered his movements.
“Doggy fancies you,” Tatum muttered, flashing hand-sign.
“Not funny,” Godonov mumbled, taking aim at the creature’s silver eye.
“Down!” Tatum barked. Two more canisters clattered to the ground, detonating one after the other at the dragon’s feet. Screaming, the beast bounded backward and upward, disappearing over the ridge with blurring quickness.
The hunters shrieked; they took immense pleasure in casting the grenades.
“No infrared!” Godonov shouted, getting to his feet. Ears ringing, he holstered his pistol and blinked up the data scan. He played back the encounter, syncing drone data with his own feed. “That’s why the drone didn’t pick it up. We found a cold-blooded dragon!”
“Found, hell! I as good as stepped on it. It was asleep in the sun,” Tatum said, flashing more hand signals and resuming the climb, traversing left. “Let’s move. We’re almost there.”
“Wait one,” Godonov replied, replaying telemetry. All Genellan dragons discovered by humans in the Corlian north, over a dozen species, were warm-blooded. Konish exploration records documented cold-blooded variants, but then the kones had pretty much exterminated the equatorial populations.
“Isn’t this great?” Godonov blurted.
“Yeah. Great,” Tatum grunted.
Nestor Godonov was euphoric. Each new day was a miracle. The slaughter and destruction of the Ulaggi attack could never be forgotten, but enough time had passed for memory at least to be dulled. And Godonov had so many other things to think about—an entire planet—and far too many responsibilities. An expanding corps of scientists and explorers under his command were making discoveries every day, but they had barely scratched the surface. Satellites had imaged and scrutinized every inch of topography, including subsurface resource analysis; but even after a decade on the ground, much of the planet, especially its high latitudes and oceans, remained physically unexplored—a wealth of unknowns, exquisitely beckoning.
Of a more immediate nature, and somewhat dampening his euphoria, Sharl Buccari had ordered a new city built. Cassy Quinn had assigned the best engineers and construction experts to the project, but, before she left, Buccari had put Citizen Godonov in charge.
He was responsible.
For building a city.
Today was his first morning on site. Godonov and Tatum were scouting the coastal hills of Genellan’s second largest continent, called Olanto by the kones, on the shores of what the kones knew as Goma’toock—Thunder Bay. True to its name, towering cumulonimbus boiled over the ocean, black bottoms signaling rain. It was one of few equatorial regions that the kones had not exploited—they had no need for petroleum; the kones had come to Genellan for precious metals—and fur.
A hunter screeched, indicating caution. Tatum hand signed and slanted north. Godonov followed. They had almost topped the long spine breaking south from the coastal mountains. This granite spur of low mountains and ridges extended into the ocean, shielding the headland behind them and separating it from sprawling tidal estuaries to the northeast. The science officer looked back at the great bay defined by the promontory, its waters smooth and dark blue—a natural, deep-water harbor protected offshore by an archipelago of forested islands. In the middle distance below, a Legion transport squatted in its own landing scar, miniscule on an expanse of wind-rippled grass. The heavy-lifter was disgorging equipment and workers tasked with building a rollout runway and a shipping wharf. Within a year there would be a burgeoning city embracing the harbor and climbing these hills. They had already given it a name—Petrolia.
“Lead, Petrolia Base. Commander, are you okay?” queried a voice through his multiplexor.
In the near distance, at the foot of their climb, next to a meander of riparian foliage, sprawled their base camp. Lines of crushed grass, the tracks of all-terrain vehicles transporting personnel and equipment, connected the camp with the landing area’s exhaust-blackened crust.
“Affirmative, Base,” Godonov replied. “Tell Morgan to check telemetry. Just found a new dragon species. It’s beautiful. And cold-blooded. I’m going to name it after her.”
“Commander Morgan is watching your feed. I won’t repeat what she said.”
“Didn’t appreciate the cold-blooded part, did she?”
“Said you throw like a girl.”
“Rog’,” he replied. “Godonov out.”
Commander Nestor Godonov, Senior Science Officer, Tellurian Legion Space Force, citizen of Genellan, was a happy man. He had married a beautiful woman, a wonderfully intelligent scientist—making allowances, of course, that she was an exobiologist. But the recent marriage was sweet icing on a grand cake. Godonov was a planetary geologist. He loved his job—he had been blessed with the task of exploring a bountiful, virgin world. Godonov was one of very few humans who had walked on all four of Genellan’s continental land masses and on too many to count of her primary and secondary islands, discovering geological wonders in abundance—and untold flora and fauna. It was a cold planet, with immense polar caps and glacial realms, and yet with vast equatorial oceans and low latitude temperate regions teeming with life: carnivores, mammalian and reptilian, large and fierce, both on land and in the oceans; herbivores and omnivores; insects and vermin; vertebrates and invertebrates; all following the fundamental rules of biology and chemistry known to humans since the beginning of time. Where Godonov had not walked, he had studied in detail, poring over satellite imagery and scanning resource data. Genellan was glorious in both its mysteries and in its seemingly endless bounty.
“It stinks!” Tatum said, at last topping the ridge.
Orbital coverage was effective for analysis, and efficient, but nothing beat striding the ground, letting one’s senses add physical dimension to the imaged terrain. Godonov followed, breasting the ridge. He inhaled deeply. And gagged.
“Oh, man!” the science officer choked out, pointing. “Would you look at that!”
A persistent sea breeze had flushed their side of the ridge, but turbulence at the top allowed the mixing swamp odors to seep across. Godonov blinked away tears and stared in awe. Satellite images had done feeble justice; the vast wetland spreading before him was an obscene vista of stinking blackness punctuated by myriad low islands of dun. Most islets were barren, but the larger ones, especially those of higher elevation, exhibited vegetation, stands of trees. Many just skeletal snags, but here and there were taller islands thickly forested with emerald-leafed trees supporting clusters of scarlet blossoms. Flowing around the islands were swirls of iridescence, orange and metallic green—bacterial blooms—that gave gaudy highlight to the stark palette.
From space the ebony morass and its surrounds were glorious to behold. Satellite images revealed two large rivers, one from the west draining a continental watershed, the other from the north crashing down from more proximate snow-capped mountains, both silver ribbons glistening through dark-green rainforest. The faster-moving northern river, glacial-blue and turbulent, boldly penetrated the vast oily blackness, holding its integrity and vibrant hue for dozens of kilometers. The second river, brown with silt, arrived with more serenity but greater volume. Emerging from the forests, the muddy torrent submerged smoothly beneath the immense swamp of black. But then, in a marvel of hydrodynamics, the brown current resurfaced and again submerged, three times with sine-wave regularity. Each time it emerged it widened, radiating eddying coils of rusty chocolate. Both irrepressible currents swept through the petroleum swamps, slowing and colliding in the muck. Their energies not to be denied, their consolidated flow continued, draining eastward toward the ocean, spreading in an estuary of spidery filaments black and silver against the dunes, and finally into the sea, mixing stubbornly with tidal currents of emerald and aquamarine.
Glorious from space, standing on the ground it was black and dun and malodorous.
“That’s a whole bunch of ugly!” Tatum said.
“It’s beautiful,” he replied.
“You can’t smell that?”
“You’re smelling energy, Sandy. Power. Stinking power, just sitting there.” Godonov understood. Taming these swamps would provide their new civilization with energy. But discovering energy resources and exploiting them were decidedly different challenges. Thunder Bay was a long way from New Edmonton; and Genellan was covered with oceans, more so than planet Earth. Tankers and freighters were being constructed at New Edmonton’s nascent ship-building facilities, co-located with an ever-expanding network of oil refineries and cracking plants. Connecting the continents, to move resources between them, would require ships—a fleet.
The supply line to New Edmonton was long and vulnerable, but Petrolia would, in time, become Genellan’s primary city, a city dedicated to energy exploitation—civilization’s first priority. It was Godonov’s job to build that city. Legion engineers conservatively estimated petroleum welling up in this location alone would support an industrial civilization of a billion souls for ten millennia; and that did not consider new technologies, or the even more plentiful reserves of natural gas found under all the continents of the planet, not to mention the pocket nukes already on the ground or larger nuclear facilities in planning.
Nothing seemed rare on Genellan. Resource satellites indicated deep and plentiful anthracite veins. The vast northern steppes on both continental Olanto and Corlia, contained rich deposits of copper, uranium, and an abundance of lanthanides—the ‘rare Earths.’ Godonov laughed at the irony. There were diamonds, and gold, and silver, too, riches beyond comprehension.
Nothing seemed rare on Genellan—except danger.
A cold shadow passed over him. Flinching, he jerked his scan skyward. A hunter hovering on an updraft had eclipsed the sun. Godonov exhaled, relieved that it had not been an abat. Varieties of the eagle soared over all Genellan continents. The giant raptors feared nothing.
Godonov double-checked his sidearm. The dangers of exploring a new planet were real and plentiful, yet in the grand scheme those dangers were trivial. The real shadow hanging over everything, an existential threat to all humanity, was the threat of another alien invasion. The Ulaggi would return. There was nothing Godonov could do to prevent it. There was nothing anyone could do. Time was their only hope, their only prayer. They would try to prepare, but time was precious.
And yet Nestor Godonov considered himself to be among the luckiest men in all of history—certainly the luckiest scientist. He had a virgin world—a perfect planet—to explore, and he had a brilliant, beautiful new wife. He was a very happy man.
The threat of his species’ annihilation would have to wait.
