| abstract
| - Soon after Leone and Aristark had informed Ketar about their planned space trip in search of Kalid, Ketar began to prepare for their eventual arrival on Azur. If Leone and Aristark did manage to talk Kalid into cooperating then Ketar wanted to have a plan ready that would allow him to get every bit of useful information out of Kalid and the Haldus Order. When Ketar learned from Aristark and Leone that their destination was the h.1263522 star system, he quickly found information about the planet Flammis in the archives of the Spaceship Guild. As head of the Galactic Antiquist Party, Ketar had nearly complete access to even the most ancient and secret records of the Spaceship Guild. The Antiquist Party was the political wing of the Spaceship Guild and the Spaceship Guild had originally created planetary branches of the Antiquist Party as a way of exercising influence over the political processes on various worlds so as to assure that the economic interests of the Spaceship Guild were protected. After the last galactic war, a larger organization, the Galactic Antiquist Party, was created as a centralized political machine that could represent all of the local planetary Antiquist Parties. Now, a hundred years later, the Galactic Antiquist Party had grown powerful enough to dominate over the Spaceship Guild. In fact, Ketar now controlled most of the wealth of the Spaceship Guild and he directed that wealth towards his goal of returning Azur to the level of power and influence it had exercised before the galactic wars. By exploring the archives of the Spaceship Guild, Ketar had learned that starting about 250 years previously there had been a feud between the Spaceship Guild and some renegade members of the Haldus Order. An early feature of that conflict was destruction of the Haldus Order Temple at Shackleton Base on Earth's Moon. That struggle had stretched over 67 years during which it had grown increasingly violent. Finally the Spaceship Guild had penetrated some of the mystery of the Haldus Order. In particular, the Spaceship Guild first found and then destroyed the Haldus Order colony on Flammis and warned that if the feud did not end then the entire Haldus Order would be exterminated. That strategy and warning had worked, and the Haldus Order finally restrained its own renegade faction. Ketar now had a spy who had infiltrated one of the cover organizations of the Hadus Order. It was the information from that spy that had led Ketar to realize that Set had come into armed conflict with the Haldus Order. Ketar had suspected that Sybil was a member of the Haldus Order and so he had ordered Leone to press her for information...and Kalid's name had spilled out effortlessly, as did his idenity as a leader of the Haldus Order. Ketar decided that it all made sense. Sybil, as a member of the Haldus order, was trying to protect the secrets of the Order. She had tried to hide the location of the Haldus Order base on Flammis from Leone. Ketar concluded that Flammis must still be very important to the Haldus Order. Sybil had tried to keep Flammis secret and had not used the name "Flammis", but her effort in subterfuge was wasted. The Haldus Order was barely mentioned in Spaceship Guild records from the past century. However, Ketar knew from personal experience that even large and important organizations could exist and operate effectively and yet escape the attention of the Spaceship Guild's intelligence agents....his own family's operations on Azur proved that! Thus, it was easy for Ketar to imagine that after the Spaceship Guild had turned Flammis into a Green planet, Haldus Order forces had eventually returned to Flammis and they probably now had a secret base on that world...a base where Kalid might have been hiding from Set. Yes, Ketar felt sure that Leone and Aristark would find Kalid on Flammis and so he made preparations to give them a warm welcome upon their arrival at Azur. Ketar's major remaining question was if there was any truth to the rumors about both Haldus Order members and Set having telepathic powers. Yes, there were many questions Ketar wanted to ask of Kalid. Ketar had estimated how long it would take for Leone to go from Sakkara to Flammis and then on to Azure. Now Ketar was worried because news from Leone was overdue. Ketar's calculations suggested that Leone should have reported on events at Flammis no later than the previous day. Ketar tried to imagine that maybe Leone and Aristark were very busy at Flammis and had no time to communicate. Maybe Kalid did not trust Leone and Aristark. Maybe it would have been best if Sybil had gone along to Flammis in order to talk things over with Kalid and help smooth the way towards his cooperation. Of course, there might have been some other kind of unexpected trouble. Communications over interstellar distances was not a trivial matter. Hyperspatial communications equipment was notoriously fragile, and it was possible that Leone had not been able to communicate with Azur after meeting with Kalid because his Thot spaceship's hyperspatial signal encoding systems had been damaged by the atmosphere of Flammis. However, Ketar respected Aristark's competency and expected that Aristark should have been able to protect Leone's spaceship from being damaged by the nanite cloud of Flammis. The difficulty of communication with and between spaceships was one of Ketar's greatest frustrations. Ketar was trying to build up a fleet of spaceships which could be used to return Azur to its former glory, but coordinating and keeping secret such a fleet was not easy. Hyperspatial communication depended on large stationary receiver arrays that collected and decoded arriving messages. Every inhabited star system had such an array, but that did nothing to solve the problem of getting signals successfully transmitted to isolated spaceships that were moving freely through interstellar space. Ketar had not been able to determine if there was a functioning communications station in space near Flammis. Records in the archives of the Spaceship Guild indicated that after Flammis was turned into a Green planet an effort had been made to monitor spaceship traffic in the h.1263522 star system, but none was ever reported and the monitoring and communications equipment in that system was probably forgotten about and not maintained during the galactic wars. According to the public astrogation records the h.1263522 star system was not inhabited and there was not even any mention there of the fact that the second planet of that system had once been colonized. It was likely that the communications array near Flammis was no longer functioning correctly, so Ketar did not even think about trying to send a message to Leone's ship. Ketar assured himself, "Soon they will be here." Ketar made an effort to stop worrying about unseen events at Flammis and he tried to stay focused on what he could control. For Ketar, sitting on the Throne of Azur as Planetary Governor meant the privilege of operating at the center of the vast and sophisticated planetary data web. He was able to coordinate all plans and preparations for Kalid's welcome through his computerized command center and his special shell access to every node of the global data network. From the command center, Ketar sent orders to his servants and watched, using all available means, including 3D remote cameras, and made sure that everything was proceeding according to his desires. Ketar commanded a personal army of nanite-powered robots that could quickly install microcameras anywhere on Azur that was of interest to him. More than anything else, it was Ketar's absolute monopoly on the use of surveillance nanobots on Azur that assured him continuing control of the planet. Of course, none of his servants knew they were being watched, so it was an interesting way to supervise operations. On several occasions the monitoring system had proved useful and had allowed Ketar to stop growing rebellions before they had a chance to build strength. Traitors had been quickly identified and executed and they never even knew who the "rat" was. Usually there was none; it was just that Ketar had exposed their plans by monitoring the huge network of interconnected data nodes and cameras. Ketar personally watched people from his inner circle very closely, but most of the outer levels of the government had to be monitored with the aid of automation and scans for key words that might signal disloyalty. The other segment of the population that received extra monitoring was the major "opposition party", the Rugo. Most political trouble makers naturally collected within the ranks of the Rugo, so it was often possible to identify and crush new political movements simply by occasionally checking on the activities of the leaders of the Rugo. Spying on the entire planet was a big job. Unfortunately, Ketar could not risk telling anyone about his use of this surveillance technology. If people knew about his spying system they would try to abolish it as an illegal anti-privacy system. The people of Azur, a world famous for "freedom", would only tolerate a limited amount of government control over their lives...that was a powerful social reality of Azur that even Ketar had not been able to change. Of course, in the many decades since Ketar's family had taken control of Azur, freedom was nothing more than a motto; in reality, privacy and freedom had not been respected by any of the Planetary Governors from Ketar's family. The secret to being able to keep on using the spy network technology was being discrete, not over-using it and hiding it from public attention...a formula that had worked for centuries, going back to the times before the galactic wars. However, his family's power had been greatly reduced during those wars, so Ketar's concern was finding ways to return the influence of his family and Azur to the grand levels that had existed before the devastating galactic wars. Now the task at hand was for Ketar to get as much as possible for Azur out of the secretive Haldus Order. Ketar's trick of feeding false intelligence to Sakkara had efficiently revealed the identity of a leader of the Haldus Order. By making it appear that Set was more dangerous than he actually was, Sybil had gone looking for help and protection from the Sakkaran government...and out had popped Kalid's name! Now it was just a matter of revealing Kalid's secrets. Ketar suspected that this could be accomplished by flattering an old fool: Kalid. Ketar's spy within the Haldus Order had reported that Kalid had ruled the Haldus Order for more than 60 years. Ketar's plan was that Kalid would be made a friend and at the same time it should be possible to keep playing Set and Kalid off against each other. Yes, his strategy would be flattery of the "Wise One". Ketar chuckled; it seemed a safe bet that any leader who let his followers call him the "Wise One" could be tricked by false praise and flattery. Ketar did not personally have much to do in order to prepare for the arrival of the "Wise One". Ketar possessed hundreds of servants who would efficiently handle most of this job for him. As Planetary Governor, Ketar had an entire well-staffed department that was devoted to the logistics and organization of staged celebratory events, usually for the glorification of the Governor, but that apparatus could easily be used to turn the visit of Kalid to Azur into a great show of friendship and hero worship. Still, Ketar enjoyed planning the details of such events, like ordering food, renting dancers, hiring orchestras, among others. Ketar really liked that kind of thing, and now he even dreamed that he would live to see the grandest of celebrations on Azur: the day when Ketar himself would be celebrated as the Governor of Azur who finally returned Azur to the level of influence it had attained in the old days before the wars. For a moment, Ketar imagined himself in the future, making a triumphal march... Nevertheless, now was not a good time to enter the daydream realm, he should plan the next step, a necessary step on the road to ultimate glory. Ketar had been born to reign. He came from an important family whose members had long been involved in Azur politics. However, nobody outside the family knew this. Ketar's family had long practiced polygyny. The family patriarchs had many wives kept in secret and most of their children had different last names so that nobody outside of the family would know their real identity. For a moment Ketar reflected on his own wives and he brought up their images on his display screen. From the time of the earliest settlements on Azur it was forbidden for more than one member of a family to enter politics, a rule that extended up to the forth grade of consanguinity. This law had been created in order to prevent familial oligarchies and the possible establishment of hereditary monarchies. But Ketar's family had been responsible for that law and for Ketar and others who secretly shared his blood line, that law was something to be ignored since its purpose was really just to keep other families from gaining political power. In this way, Ketar's family had controlled Azur's government for over two hundred years and nobody outside the family knew that a dynasty secretly reigned. Of course, during the chaos of the galactic wars the situation had gotten slightly more complex, but after a couple of assassinations control of Azur had been successfully returned to Ketar's family. However, during those wars Azur had suffered the loss of millions of residents and had never recovered its former power on the galactic stage. For the past hundred years Ketar's family had planned and organized and built towards a future day when it would be possible once more for Azur to be recognized as one of the most important worlds in the galaxy...if not the most important! Azur had recovered its population, but the rest of the galaxy had also moved ahead. But now, Ketar knew it was time to take another step towards that long-sought goal; that was why he needed Kalid. Yes, everything was falling into place! Ketar had spent most of his life thinking that another generation would have to pass before Azur could finally rise again to glory, but all had changed in just the past year. Seemingly from nowhere the Futurist Party of Sakkara had risen in power and become a security concern. Suddenly, to counter Set's Futurist Party forces, modern war ships were needed to replace the old hulks that remained as the out-of-date remnants of the fleets that had fought in the old galactic wars. Who better to supply those ships than Ketar? Now elements of Ketar's fleet could operate openly under guise of countering the threat posed by Set, but Ketar had additional plans for his fleet. And then, there was the utter surprise of telepathy! At first, Ketar had dismissed the rumors and reports from his spies...really, it was absurd...telepathic powers? But the rumors did not go away. Finally, as crazy as it seemed, telepathic ability became the only way to account for Set's sudden rise in power. At first Ketar had imagined that Set was some kind of mutant, a one-of-a-kind freak with telepathic powers. But it had not been that simple. Ketar had feared that Set would use his mental powers to trace back to the root cause of the destruction of the space elevators on Sakkara. If Set actually had telepathic ability, what could possibly stop him from learning the truth? However, at that point, Set's forces had gone crazy: they went off in strange directions rather than go directly after those who were responsible for the space elevators disaster. At first Ketar had been baffled by Set, but eventually Ketar's extended spy network had resolved the mystery. Ketar tried to remember how he had become conscious of the Haldus Order. He had long known of its existence, but its supposed knowledge of god-like powers that had first been mastered long ago in ancient Egypt and then secretly passed down to modern times seemed like just another folk tale, something like the "crystal powers" of Atlantis. Still, the question had to be asked: why was Set suddenly at war with the Haldus Order? And the specific claim reported by Ketar's spies was that Set was killing telepaths of the Haldus Order. At first Ketar had been surprised to learn that his intelligence service included a spy who had penetrated the Haldus Order. It was a stroke of luck for Ketar. His spy within the Haldus Order had only gradually become aware of the Haldus Order. Ketar now knew that members of the Haldus Order hid their true affiliation behind "front organizations" and cover stories. Only after years of membership in one such front organization had Ketar's spy even heard the name "Haldus". Ketar's intelligence service had grown tired of reports from that spy about rumored telepathic powers...such stories were ignored for many years...until Set stormed onto the scene. So, finally, Ketar had been forced to contemplate the idea that there was a war of telepaths being fought between forces of the Futurist Party and the Haldus Order. Ketar's first impulse had been to support that war and hope that the two parties would destroy each other while also providing a useful distraction for other worlds of the galaxy...a destraction that could "justify" the construction of a new fleet of combat spaceships by Azur. Ketar had imagined that the Haldus Order was just a group of mystics that nurtured and trained telepaths, probably telepaths who were of not of much more importance than readers of tea leaves an goat entrails. Seriously, if they had truly useful telepathic powers why would they remain quietly hidden away rather than seize power? But then the landscape had shifted one more time! The more Ketar learned about the Haldus Order the more it became clear that they also had some kind of secret technology. At that point, Ketar knew he could no longer afford to assume that the members of the Haldus Order were just some superstitious practitioners of a mystical Order...no, it would be an error to just hope that Set would exterminate them. Eventually Ketar had realized that it was imperative to learn what kinds of technology the Haldus Order had. The idea of telepathy-amplifying technology still seemed fantastic, but Ketar could not afford to ignore those rumors. What better way was there to learn these secrets than to befriend the leader of the Order, Kalid? Of course, Ketar had a few qualms about dealing personally with Kalid. What if Kalid had fantastic powers and could read Ketar's mind or even take control of his mind? But, no, that could not be. If the Haldus Order had that kind of power they would not meekly hide in odd corners of the galaxy. Ketar felt quite confident that telepathy was just an alternative mode of communication....potentially a very useful mode, one that Ketar would be happy to use for the benefit of Azur! Ketar told himself: taking advantage of such unexpected opportunities was what made great men. Ketar's plan was to form an alliance with Kalid and establish a working collaboration against Set. Through that collaborative relationship Ketar would have access to Neurocom technology: that was a term Ketar had invented to refer to communication by neuronal means, telepathically. What if Kalid did not want to cooperate? Well, there were other options...the Haldus Order had been frightened into revealing the location of their secret base on the planet Flammis. It would be interesting to learn exactly what importance that world had for the Haldus Order. If the Haldus Order really did have secret technology then somewhere there had to be research and development centers for advancing the science of telepathy. On Flammis, on Sakkara? Yes, if Kalid would not cooperate, Ketar had the power to take what he needed from the Haldus Order, by force. Now that Ketar knew of the existence of secret Haldus Order technology nothing could keep him from possessing it, one way or the other. Still, things would go quicker and easier if Kalid could be made to cooperate. A major challenge facing Ketar was that the science of telepathy seemed to be obscured by a camouflage, a dressing of esoteric characteristics that had been built up over time within the secretive Haldus Order. Ketar, as leader of another centuries old secret organization, had a good idea of how misdirection could be used to protect important secrets. Ketar's spy in the Haldus Order had reported that within the Haldus Order it was rumored that Kalid had been born with natural gifts for telepathic communication. One possibility was that secret Haldus Order Neurocom technology was only an amplifier for innate abilities, a way for artificially extending an existing capacity of individuals for telepathic communication. If so, it became an important question: did everyone have telepathic ability or just a special few? Obviously, the answer to this question was a secret, but it seemed like the members of the Haldus Order believed that only a select few had telepathic abilities. Was that belief based on fact or was it misdirection? Working from outside the Order, Ketar's spy tentacles had probed this important question. Ketar's intelligence cells had found some evidence to suggest that there were natural variations in telepathic ability, some people naturally had more "mental power", but it seemed to be the case that a basic level of telepathic ability existed in the brains of animals and all humans. The important conclusion was: the Haldus Order tools for amplifying telepathy could be used by anyone, even Ketar! Although this was not completely sure, Ketar had already bet 100 to 1 that it was. It had to be! It was the only hope for him to complete, in his life time, his plans for building Azur back up to its previous level of power in the galaxy....yes, he would proceed upon that assumption. So, it was no longer enough for Ketar that the Haldus Order use its secret technology in order to defeat Set. Set was of minor importance on the grand scale, the scale of events beyond Sakkara. Ketar needed Kalid for a nobler purpose, returning Azur to its position of dominance among the worlds of the galaxy. Ketar wanted to make a favorable impression on Kalid's mind and trick him into sharing Haldus Order secrets. Kalid and the entire Haldus Order existed with a web of mysticism, therefore, Ketar had invited the best esoteric masters, wizards, occult science priests and mystics of Azur to welcome Kalid. Ketar's goal was to make Kalid feel comfortable, then after that first meeting, just Kalid and Ketar would have a private interview in which Ketar would outline plans for cooperation against Set. Defeating Set would appear to be the heart of his plans, but that was not really Ketar's true goal. If everything was done correctly, Kalid would not guess his real thinking. Ketar's plan for defeating Set would succeed thanks to a "surprise effect": the unexpected combination of Ketar's fleet of spaceships guided against Set's forces by Kalid and other telepaths of the Haldus Order. At that moment, as Ketar saw it, his plan to deal with Set could not fail. And most importantly, while Set was being defeated, Ketar would learn the secrets of the Haldus Order...that was his real interest in collaboration with Kalid. Once Set was eliminated, the usefulness of the Haldus Order would come to an end and Ketar alone would remain standing, ready to turn the force of telepathy to his goal of returning Azur to grandeur.
- Azur The focus of this chapter is Ketar and his activities, his plans to liberate Azur from the Empire. This chapter could include a flashback that describes Ketar's involvement in the attack on the Elevators as part of his efforts to extract money from Spaceship Guild operations and use that money to fight against the Empire. It should also be explained how Ketar learns about Kalid and why Ketar tells Aristark and Leone to find Kalid. Also, how does Ketar know Sybil and why does Ketar tell Leone to go to Sybil for advice on how to find Kalid? Set, making use of his telepathic powers, detects members of the Osiris Order on Sakkara. In particular, Set learns that Kalid and Sybil are members of the Osiris Order. Set learns that Kalid is on Flammis and sends forces to take Flammis and capture Kalid (but Kalid escapes and goes to Earth). Ketar is spying on the Futurist Party and so Ketar's spys learn about Kalid, Sybil and the idea that the Osiris Order has hidden technologies, possibly something such as a technology related to telepathy.
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