Topic: Mercator Arc
Updated June 11, 2011. The sermon bothered me so I fixed it.
His eye blinked, twitched against the scope’s eyepiece, tired of seeing the world through a tunnel of death. The target would eventually come into view, and he would have to decide. There was no alternative.
Kariden remembered how he got here, to this place behind the gun, and wondered if instead of stopping at the Rectory, he should have kept walking in the drizzle and damp air down to the shore of the rain-filled crater, to the piers and the fishing boats with their nets full of sea-rag and sponge-eel.
He had no particular care for boating and the stench of sea life, saw abject boredom in guarding nets and baskets, so he stopped across the street from the Rectory, looking up at the huge iron stick-figure holding aloft a wire mesh globe. Mil Kariden stepped casually through the gate as if his business here was expected, and followed the flagstone path around the joined legs of the monument and on toward the façade of the church.
The structure stood solid and as foreboding as an administration building, the stone block steps slick with rain. It was the only building in the area that didn’t look thrown together from scavenged spacecraft hull plating. At the top of the stairs between two of the three sets of doors, a couple of hard looking men stopped him and asked to see the bag slung over his shoulder. Kariden handed it over, feeling their weaves query his as he watched them sort through his worldly belongings from the dripping hood of his grey-green sea-rag poncho.
Satisfied there were no weapons, the guards let him proceed. The doors set under the overhang were huge, made of iron, bordered and inlayed with ornate wood like swirling chocolate and caramel. They seemed to suggest age, humble beginnings, with just a hint of wealth, no flaunting, but a suggestion of what could be attained. He chose the middle set. The dry handle was cold in his hand, a bar of iron.
Inside he found a small room with a grated floor and a vaulted ceiling where the sounds of the shutting door echoed. A warm, white light filled the room from the glowing frieze depicting a bas-relief of the Exodus to the stars. Another triple set of closed doors muted the sermon beyond. A whine of servos startled Kariden. He jerked his head toward the noise to his left at the tall window in the wall. His heart leapt and he froze for a moment before realizing the humanoid robot was of the dumb kind and posed no threat.
The robot’s torso was like a ribcage, flared at the bottom with bands hiding from view the core of its power, the assemblage secured to the flex-shaft of its spine. The two arms were spindly, disturbing things. It’s face was a mask of featureless chrome given to neglect, marred by dark spots and lacelike discoloration.
“Your rainwear, sir,” it said, its voice crackling and buzzing as if from a torn speaker—the low tech kind with a magnet and a conical membrane.
Kariden gaped at it, having no fondness for humanlike robots, and wondered why anyone would design one to look so much like a desiccated corpse. He let his bag drop to the grate, noticed the thin film of water in the darkness under his boots, and pulled off his poncho. He shook it out over the grate, folded it across his arm, and slung his bag back over his shoulder.
The milk-white hand that reached out to receive the poncho was disturbing in its human motion and appearance, replete with nails and wrinkles, and veins like rivers under the skin, all the same shade of white. “Thank you, sir,” it said as it held the poncho. “Your biometrics have been tagged. Enjoy your stay. The service has already started.” It nodded cordially and disappeared into the darkness to store Kariden’s rainwear with the others.
Kariden shuddered as if to jolt himself back into the now, and went to the middle inner doors, cheap things of pressed wood pulp and resin, painted a nice gloss white and scarred with countless boot marks along their skirts. The sermon on the other side seemed to resonate from the doors, muted sounds like sly secrets. He had reason for being here, one of them the growing emptiness of his stomach.
He pulled a door open and slipped inside.
“ ‘. . . Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. . . .’ This God tells Jeremiah. What held for His Prophet, holds for His children, for each man, each woman, each child, has a purpose. Let it not be thought otherwise,” the Rector boomed in a large and gentle voice.
Kariden was surprised by the number of people crammed in the room. The pews were full. People stood along the walls between thick columns whose caps were surrounded by deep planters overflowing with vegetation. The congregation crowded the doorway as he stepped in, an old man looked back at him and made room. A woman on his right with a disarray of kinky black hair threaded with intrusive gray strands turned to look at him. Her weather-worn face creased as she smiled. A shawl, gray as dust, draped over her slouched shoulders. Three children huddled around her feet, peering up at him with blank faces of caution.
The Rector continued speaking, standing in a large circular elevated area under a dome painted with a mural like something out of a planetarium—stars and constellations from some forgotten sky with the traces of beasts, figures, and objects. Behind the dark clothed man, loomed a milky stature, its head thrown back and its arms raised to either hold or present the cosmos. Or both. “Iman stood on the New Dawn and reaffirmed God’s Plan for each and every one of us. God—who loves us so—wants each of us to fulfill our lives with the joy and purpose with which He has blessed us. He has provided us a Path to tread. It is not an easy Path to walk . . . for from what ease has any value?" A hesitation, to let the words soak in. "There is a bitterness to the Fruit of Knowledge, that we can stray from our Path. That we can be blinded and stagger off our course.” The tall man with the gray-white prickly hair pacing the dais seemed to look at each and every person gathered before him. His tone had set a tension in the air. “There are many here that have tasted that bitterness . . .” The room filled with muted and somewhat shameful “amens” and affirmations. “All is forgiven,” he continued with a somberness. “ ‘Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.’ For you shall know the sweetness to come . . .” And on and on the oration went. Kariden tuned it out.
The Rector preached, and soon the room swelled in a clamor of confirmation and praise, their voices ringing back down from the vaulted ceiling. “Yes Children,” he shouted over the noise of the congregation. “You have all stumbled down the miserable streets of this world, to the welcome Glory and Promise of the Father . . . and His Son, the Redeemer . . .”
Kariden did not believe the sermon, did not believe there was a rigid course through life that people had to fall into to find enjoyment or purpose. He stood there listening to it until it was over, then endured the singing of hymns. When the congregation filed out, he moved slowly against the flow, working his way toward the Rector, hidden by those standing around him in private conversation.
Later he followed the Rector to his office. Kariden had expected something more lavish, but the room was small and cozy. There was a small hearth for when the temperature dropped and a cistern for the water cooler. A large naked window opened the wall behind the desk and Kariden first thought it was stained but soon realized it was special made to emit a blue cast into the room, offsetting the ochre smudged ruddiness of the light outside.
Rector Doud relaxed in his chair behind his desk, hands in his lap. "So . . . who recommended me?"
Kariden occupied a straight back chair on the other side of the desk. "A taxi driver. Said you could use someone good with their hands."
"You remember the driver's name?"
Kariden had the name stored in his weave's fluid cache. "Uslev."
Doud nodded his long face. "What? You got mechanical skills? Carpentry?"
Kariden wondered if there had been a miscommunication. Perhaps he was being tested. He pursed his lips and gave a half shrug. "More like fighting."
"Fighting." The Rector's face said he understood exactly. He leaned forward and laid his forearms across the desk. "Why would you want to do that?" Then he added as an afterthought, "For me?"
Kariden looked away from the Rector's hard penetrating eyes and gave another half shrug. "I don't know. I mean I've been here a couple of months and I see how people live. . . ." And Cratertown wasn't as bad as Tullis, in the internment camps where you had to fight to get anything, and fight to keep what you acquired, all under the cold, watchful optic arrays of machines that did not care about justice or human plight, but about exacting their brand of punitive revenge. Kariden looked to the Rector's frowning face. "Uslev said the parish was the closest thing to law and order around here. I'd like to help if I can."
And help he did, with brutal relish against the venom pushers and vice traders. Wasn’t long before Rector Doud recognized his skill and made Kariden his personal bodyguard of sorts when the religious man had dealings in other parts of Cratertown. With no formal government and no stabilizing system of laws, each section of the town had its means of doing business and its own security. Many of these were guilds: the merchants, the miners, the fisheries, the importers and exporters, the bankers and loaners, and the gangs of vice sellers of venom and sex. Over them all was the warlord Raum who allowed the lawless situation to exists as it did, and his Ravens who kept a semblance of peace when they profited from it. And through them all ran the taxi services, that shuttled not only people and packages, but also information.
Certain drivers were loyal to certain guilds or certain people, and the Rector had his drivers. He spoke to them in a casual familiar way, his conversations laced with code words and phrases that Kariden never understood. It would be nothing to set his augmentative network, or weave, as they called them here, against the Rector’s and compromise the man’s code keys. He had learned early on the weaves of his people were orders of magnitude more advanced that those of the Greater Pavonan Expanse, and it was a secret he cared not to share. He saw the Rector was politically manipulative, and the man could use Kariden’s fists as instruments of persuasion, but not his weave.
That, no one but he would own.
Kariden peered down the scope, four blocks away, from a window in a room on the second floor of a cheap hotel, his line-of-sight a chord on the arc of the street. He waited. A tracking reticule with range data wavered over people walking across the entrance lot and drive-through facing the Reimel, the most expensive hotel on Spaceport Row. Limousines and taxies—repurposed war surplus—stopped under the building’s overhang disgorging guests who were likely to be corporate liaisons checking on colonial mining investments. Like his target.
Hours earlier he had met Dessero at a bar in the heart of downtown Cratertown. The Raven drove him south to the crater rim, through the blasted crevice where the road lead to the sprawling spaceport.
“What’s what,” Kariden asked, leaning back in the seat and against the door, his knuckles pressed to the cool glass.
Dessero shot a glance to the space between them on the bench seat and tapped the folder there. “Put a capture block on your weave.”
“Had it on since I got in the car,” Kariden mumbled as he picked up the folder wondering why they were going through the trouble of hard copies instead of weave-to-weave data flashes.
“Good.” Dessero watched the traffic.
Kariden opened the folder, pulled away the cover sheets of some obscure data that had nothing to do with the job until he revealed the image of an unnamed slightly overweight corporate type that had been siphoned from someone’s visual center. “What’d this guy do?”
“He’s been abusing our girls.”
“Has he now.” Kariden studied the man. The optic capture had been from someone walking toward the businessman as he kept his head dry under a broad dark umbrella. His face was ruddy, jowled, nose bulbous, the eyes under bushy brows focused on a myriad of thoughts, hair cut to the scalp, fading toward fleshy flaps of ears.
“Top right corner when you have him committed,” Dessero said.
Kariden had the man burned into his natural memory and squeezed the top corner of the sheet. The image dissolved like liquid, colors swirling. New images began to coalesce. Kariden grimaced. Looked away. “You could have warned me.”
“You. Squeamish?”
“No.” Kariden frowned at the images of a cut up girl. “But he’s a real bastard.”
“Glad you understand.” Dessero sniffed and rubbed his nose. “Done with it, crumble it up. Toss it on the floor.”
Kariden had seen enough and did as the Raven bade. The sheet began to crumble to powder before he could loose it from his hand. He closed the folder and laid it back between them. “So what’s the story?”
Dessero turned the car at an intersection and had to slow down for a pack trikes that clogged the street. “He’s some skump from Valhammradorne, runs an operation out of Derelict Junction. Comes here for business. Pleasure. He’s got unusual tastes so he thinks he can come out here and do as he pleases.”
Kariden nodded as he watched the busy street bleached by ugly sepia light through the windshield wipers. He imagined the man at his obscene work. A scowl had frozen on Kariden’s face.
“He’s made enemies elsewhere, a few other uncivils and a few houses here. Smart enough not to do anything stupid in the Expanse. He’s got a top shelf security outfit protecting him at his port calls. Well trained skumpers we would rather not openly assault. It would bring some off-world heat.”
Kariden shifted in the seat. “I imagine security that good fields a large area. How am I going to get close?”
“Of late, his security detail is lax.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Oh, he’s been here several times and we haven’t made a move against him. We’ve kept the houses and dens he likes from acting as well. It’s made him complacent.”
Kariden frowned. “What about the girls?”
Dessero threw him a sour look. “What about ‘em?”
Kariden turned his head to the side window, watched the rain course down the glass.
Dessero looked at Kariden, looked back to the street. “We don’t want anything that can be traced back to our involvement in the hit. Hence all this low tech bullshit we got to go through.”
That explained the old strike-rifle he couldn’t visually link with and wink-fire from the comfort of a lounge chair. The Raven’s had a penchant for certain types of weapons, and this old Arimaki 320 wasn’t one of them. It was hoped that if the target’s security team searched for the hitman, they would be hard-pressed to pin the murder on the Ravens. Kariden suspected the rifle had been stolen from a rival prostitution house.
Kariden had pulled a couple of high-back chairs to the window, resting the barrel against the corner of the top rail and stile, the gun pointing out the partially open window. Rain blew in, soaking his face. He leaned forward, right leg bent, shin across the armrest of the other chair. After fifteen minutes, his back ached. The unnamed target was due to arrive before the hour expired.
Dessero had taken him out a few strike-rifle assassinations since the message they laid at the lamp post. They hit Raven enemies, men from other Mercator settlements that were causing trouble. Men who did not belong to their society. The men weren’t even people really. Just flat man-shapes in monochrome greens, faces indistinct and recognizable only by the gun. This manner of killing was impersonal. Distant. Easy. He had developed in a short span of time a casual disconnect.
A loss of affect.
He soothed it with women.
After one such successful assassination, Dessero took Kariden to a bar. It was an unusual act as they never drunk together before, and he would not say why. They made their way through the city, taking north and east streets toward the shore of the sea and Pier Road that arced along the gritty beach with its massive piers stretching across green-gray water. Dessero parked in a cleared lot on the north side of the road and the two of them stepped to the boardwalk. The rain had calmed to a mild drizzle and mist. To his left, Kariden could make out the hazy ruins of the old heart of the city blocks away, the Ironwork District, like an old sore that would never heal.
There were few people on the wide boardwalk in the late morning. Most were sleeping through the off-cycle, their bodies still requiring eight hours of rest on a world where that much time was most of the day. Old men sat here and there on benches made of refuse, commenting with reedy voices on the days gone by, war stories, and the weather.
The bar had no sign board. There were no unbashful girls nearly naked in diminished clothing on the boardwalk to coax and pull customers through the doors. This was a secret place. A Raven place.
Inside, the saloon crouched in gloom, its ceiling low, threatening. Square wooden posts held the lintels up. Fresh paint-light the color of candle flame had been sprayed around their tops, flickering, giving the idea the posts were burning. The floor was crammed with empty drinking and gaming tables, spaced close enough so that fights between bumping patrons were a certainty every night. Private nooks swallowed in shadow spanned the walls to either side. A woman’s leg stretched out of one into the wan light. Her laughter fell out, elicited by the dark man-shape beside her.
Kariden stared longingly at that leg, at what the couple must be doing. To run his hand up that leg and to hear that laughter at his ear heated his blood. He looked away.
A straight bar stretched across the back of the room, opened on either side for the two doors set into the back wall. That wall was completely covered in skulls, the dark sockets forming a haphazard diamond pattern. Low shelves jutted out of the bone, cluttered with liquor bottles glinting in the soft light. Slouched on a stool behind the counter sat one hell of a son of a bitch, cigar clamped in his teeth. A double breasted coat hung from his portly frame. It had an old military look about it.
He lifted his chin in a single nod of recognition to Dessero and gave Kariden a disapproving squint. Dessero peeled his rain slick topcoat off and hung it on a peg on the nearest post. Kariden did the same, feeling somewhat out of place. He followed the Raven’s lead again and sat rigid on bar stool.
“Two bocks to get us started.” Dessero fished a money roll from his pants pocket and peeled away a few slips. The barkeep slid off his stool, turned around and bent over a coldbox. He pulled two bottles out and set them on the counter. His large meaty hand scooped up the slips and stuffed them inside his coat.
“Meetin’ Ganton,” he asked with a voice so gruff he might have had barbs on his vocal cords.
Dessero nodded. The barkeep drew the corners of his mouth back and left by the door to the right. Soon after a young girl in her late adolescence came through that door, dressed in buff leather pants and an oversized sleeved blouse. The hilt of a sheathed dagger jutted off her belted hip. She hopped up on the stool. Her face peered out from tangled curtains of hair. She regarded the two men as if she would just as soon slit their throats as serve them drinks.
The bock had a sweet toasted flavor, went down smoothly. They drank in silence until curiosity got the better of Kariden. “So what’s this place.” He spoke quietly as if he didn’t want to draw the young girl’s attention.
Dessero opened a hand to the wall. “Skulls.”
Kariden nodded as if he should have guessed. “Whose?”
“The war dead. Soldiers. Citizens.”
Kariden noticed then the glass tank next to the coldbox. It looked like a simple aquarium, except it was filled with . . . something. A mass like thick liquid metal convoluted like brain in thin ropes and braids, traced with veins that fanned and forked like river deltas. He pointed. “What’s the hell’s that?”
“Their cyberphrenal weaves,” Dessero said.
The girl cast her eyes to Kariden like a net. She grinned slyly. “You wanna link it?”
Kariden rolled the bottle in his hand. “It’s alive?”
The girl’s grin turned impish. “Oh yes.”
Dessero took a swallow of bock. “It’s a game, Mil. Skumpers get drunk and link with it to see how long they can last.”
Kariden shuddered. “What about . . .”
“The pseudo personalities? It’s a melting pot. A thing until itself.” Dessero let a pause hang in the air as he drank. “It’s insane.”
Kariden guessed so. It shouldn’t exist. He finished his bock, pulled some slips out and laid them on the table. The girl slid her butt off the stool and fetched him another out the coldbox, inappropriately bending over when she could have bent at the knee. She exchanged the bottles, palming the slips and tucking them into her pants pocket, her eyes locked on Kariden.
“Your friend is cute,” she told Dessero, not dropping her eyes from her prey. Kariden shifted uncomfortably on his stool. Poured bock down his throat. Thought of the leg sticking out of the nook.
Dessero chuckled a low threatening growl. “Be careful. He’s a killer.”
She cocked her head, taking in his measure. “I bet he is.” A hint weighed her tone.
Kariden shook his head. “Enough of this,” he groaned.
Dessero and the young girl laughed. Hers was a little girl’s laugh, bright and high, of a child being tickled.
Kariden was caught in his own nervous chuckles.
The girl took her stool and for a moment looked like the woman she would become: the curve of her elfin face straightened by the shadows of her hair, her posture confident, her breasts fuller in the lay of shadow and light, and her eyes both playful and hateful.
The barkeeper returned from the other door. “Everything’s set up,” he told Dessero. To the girl, “Scoot.” He motioned his hands as if pushing.
She hopped off the stool and brushed hair from her face. As she passed Kariden she ran a finger along the edge of the bar. “Don’t be shy,” she teased, twisting her head over her shoulder locking a stare with him before pausing at the door and disappearing behind it.
Dessero chuckled as if he had seen it all before.
It was past midnight the next day when Kariden woke with a terrible hangover. His mouth felt like he had sucked on desiccant. His stomach was an angry void, yet the thought of food made that hateful pit turn inside-out. A spike flared and twisted in his head. He had no idea where he was.
His thoughts were slipping down a wall, frantic for purchase for any small ledge they could get their fingers on. Ganton had made an offer.
He pushed and pulled himself into a sitting position, swinging his legs over the bed, cold seeping from the floor into his feet. He dropped his face into his hands, his knees hurt where his elbows rested. The bed was soaked with the musk of sex. He was alone.
His hand fumbled with the dark lamp-shape, clicking the toggle before knocking the thing over. A warm glow filled the room. His clothes were on the floor, mixed with a crumbled white blouse and a discarded pair of buff leather pants. A naked dagger lay under the lamp.
He groaned. Fell back onto the bed, dropped an arm over his eyes, felt empty. Thessa.
The more he drank the more his resistance against her crumbled. She had been the party’s server for dinner in the back room of Skulls, taking opportunities to brush against him when she brought plates of food or refilled his glass. At first Kariden tolerated her touch. Then welcomed it. Then wanted it.
When the party moved back into the front room and he had tossed a number of mind-crippling shots of dascoe down his throat, Thessa had pulled him from boisterous conversations to one of those dark private nooks. She extracted from a pants pocket a thin glass vial filled with blue liquid. Grinning Hell, she added a few drops to their drinks. The venom released the desperate primal part of his mind, a part that threw the question of her maturity down a black hole. Her soft pliant lips knew what they were doing as they left patient kisses and suckles brushing across his face and throat. She was a fire burning against him, encouraging him to take his pleasure with quick dirty talk.
His fingers fumbled with the laces of her leather pants. Ran through a soft thatch of down. Cupped her mound. Thessa moaned, exciting him. She felt his excitement, and pressed her palm against him. He snaked his free hand under her blouse, held the hot flesh of her right breast and ran his thumb over her hardening nipple. She put her mouth on his throat, drew his head down with suckles, and kissed him, pushing her tongue against his.
“Let’s do it,” he breathed. “Get on me.”
“Not here,” she breathed into his ear, trembling, breath hot and alive. Her small hand clutched the front of his shirt pulling it taut across his chest, her hair tickling his cheek.
“Two hundred slips,” she added.
That amounted to a week’s fortune for a miner. Kariden was falling. He had felt it and he didn’t care. He had the money. A lot more than that. Ganton had given it to him.
The Raven captain had entered Skulls with four other men who moved like a squad of two elements, alert and purposeful. Kariden had heard of Ganton, heard he was in the war, a man of some high rank. Some said he served both sides for his own gain . . . and the gain of his ‘boys’. His iron gray hair shone like lead under the overhead lights above the table in the back room. The eyes in his creased face held a youthful luster, burning with intention. The marks on his jaw looked like smudges of oil. Kariden was the only man around the table that lacked them.
From the head of the table, Ganton gestured to his man on his immediate left. The man with the perpetual scowl reached into his jacket and retrieved a thick packet. He tossed it to Kariden. “For services rendered,” Ganton explained.
Kariden carefully opened the packet finding bills of slips neatly stacked inside. He swallowed a lump that formed in his throat. He shook his head. “No sir . . .” the honorific elicited laughter around the table. “. . . I can’t accept this. I work for the people.”
More laughter, amused and knowing, except for Dessero who watched him calmly. “You get paid because you work for me,” Ganton stressed.
Kariden was a killer. An executioner. A soldier. He performed his duty within the bounds of strict principles, both personal and, he’d like to think, professional. But these men around him, sizing him up under the cold eyes of hunters . . . these men were murderers. Make no mistake about it. They would have no qualms about ending him over any offense.
Ganton squinted in thought. “How long have your feet been wet?”
Kariden shrugged. “About two years, I guess.”
Ganton chuckled. “That Mercator years?” Laughter from his men. “Hell, the war hadn’t even started two Merc years ago.” He smiled. A predator.
Thessa came out, serving bottles of bock around the table, catching Mil’s stare and not smiling.
Ganton sipped his drink. “What used to be home out there,” he asked. “I can’t place your accent. You speak Junc pretty well, but I don’t recognize a dialect. Not a Pavic one by any count.”
Kariden shifted uncomfortable. He wasn’t from the Expanse. His people had fled their home. Found another. Kariden sucked his teeth. “It’s another uncivil world. Not much of a place really.”
Ganton nodded as if he appreciated an understandable lie when he heard one. “So what brings you out to our little paradise?”
Kariden shrugged, rolled the bottle in his hand. He felt hot. “Didn’t want to stay home.”
Ganton weighted his response for a pause then barked laughter. “Hell son, you can do better than that. Everyone on this rock is running from something. Running from the law. The gov’ment.” He grinned. “Spouses.” That got hearty laughs around the table. “So,” the Raven said when his boys quieted down, “what’s got you running from home?”
Kariden’s blood chilled. He thought of the renegade Allodians. They had no problem with total war or extermination. He pulled a long swallow of bock. “Just bored I guess.”
It was his tone that killed them in hard laughter, a tone of utter carelessness and apathy, as if Mil Kariden had struck out from home with the only desire of getting his blood up, and spilling a little blood if it came to it. It went against his nervous look. But it was exactly what he had done since coming to this world.
It was that moment when Ganton realized who Kariden was, and he liked the little piss-ass, which would make ordering his death a little hard. Boys like Kariden grew to men who made formidable opponents. “Just bored huh?” He pulled a swig of his drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Guess when you warm up to us, you’ll regale us with your stories.”
Thessa came out of the kitchen with an armload of ceramic plates and bundled silverware. Ganton noted the hungry look in Kariden’s face when the young man looked at the Skull’s serving wench. He watched as she placed Kariden’s plate in front of him, brushing her arm against his.
Mil watched Thessa give Dessero his plate and utensils, then the man to his left, and start to head for the kitchen. Ganton swept his arm out to scoop her up. “C’mer darling.”
She stepped into his arm. Ganton drew her close, his hand holding the curve of her pelvic bone like a handle. Kariden felt a pang of jealousy he had no right to have.
“You like this little prim?”
Kariden gave a half-hearted shrug. “She’s kinda young.”
Ganton grinned. “I didn’t ask how old she was.”
Kariden repositioned himself in his chair. “She’s . . . pretty” He did not want to look into her eyes. He drank bock. He’s testing me. “A bit young. . . .”
Ganton’s hand lifted from Thessa’s hip, cupped her right breast. “A bit young for what?”
Kariden glanced around the table before daring himself to look Ganton in the eye. “For what you are doing,” he almost whispered. It was unmistakable in the deadly quiet.
Ganton’s hand kneaded her breast. The old bastard could be her grandfather and Kariden felt a need to protect her. No, that wasn’t quite it. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that he felt a need to own her, that he was angry that it wasn’t his hand on her breast. She had signaled her desire for him and this man had no business touching her.
“Too young for what I’m doing?” Ganton asked in mock surprise. “According to who? Pavona? Your Rector?” He gave an evil grin. “There’s one law here. What Raum doesn’t ban . . . Raum permits. And he don’t ban much.” As if to punctuate the remark, the Raven captain dropped his hand from her breast and slapped her butt, glared into her face. “Ain’t that right, darling?”
Thessa bit the corner of her mouth and nodded, then threw a furtive glance at Kariden that didn’t sit well with him and left the room.
Dinner was served: thick slabs of open flame grilled areela, a grown muscle that had never been part of a living animal, and a smattering of homegrown hydroponic vegetables. Talk covered a number of topics, from war stories to local politics, to the Raven’s enemies abroad, to the weather, to women, to good times and bad. Kariden spoke only when spoken too. Eventually talk came around to him and the associate work he had been doing for the Ravens.
“Dessero says you’re damn good with a striker,” Ganton said, his meal complete and his hand around a goblet of wine. “We’ve shared his playback. Impressive. Uncanny timing. A sharp eye.”
Mil shrugged with modesty. “It’s . . . fairly easy.” If they knew anything about his weave, they would probably attempt to kill him on the spot. He chuckled nervously. A few of the others joined him, as if understanding the trivialities of killing.
“He’s good with his hands too,” Dessero added. “He can really pour it on.”
Ganton drank wine. “A bruiser and striker . . .”
“He doesn’t look like much. Soft,” the scowling man across from Kariden said, leaning over the table on his elbows.
“Yes,” Ganton replied, drawing the word out into a hiss. “That’s good, though. Doesn’t draw attention. Just what we need.”
They all stared at him, taking the measure of him, probably all weave-linked and debating. “Let me ask you something,” Ganton said. His following question left a chill in Kariden’s blood.
He didn’t know what to do, so he got drunk. Fell into Thessa’s charms. Even if it damned him, he didn’t care. She seemed a beacon of light in this pit of darkness, even if that light was stained with its own sickness.
They rode a jouncing, blatting taxi trike to her crib, Thessa laughing, bright and high. The sound echoed down the well of his soul.
Kariden swayed in the thrall of venom spiked dascoe. He hated it, but the absolute freedom if offered was exhilarating. Her small hand lead him through her door and he knew what he was going to do to her. Why not? She lead him on. She knew what she was doing.
He plopped down on her bed. Thessa lifted the hem of her blouse over her head. She approached him, stood between his knees. Her small hands found his face, stroked it. Thessa bent down to his ear and the nearness of her was almost too much for him. “You owe me two hundred slips,” she breathed into his ear before nibbling it, sending a shock of pleasure tingling down his spine.
Kariden was caught between desire and revulsion. Reason and libido clashed. His hunger for acceptance had the edge. He craved. Needed. She chose him.
He pulled her against himself, delighting in the feel of her form. She wasn’t that much younger than he. “I’ll owe you more,” he sighed against her, his hands dropping to her butt. His head spun with Ganton’s offer echoing down the chambers of his mind. His kissed her belly but all he saw was Ganton sitting at the head of table, relaxed and deadly, crushing hand around a chalice, his offer coring into Kariden’s soul. He wanted this little whore and he wanted Ganton out of his mind. He released those words against the unblemished smooth skin of her stomach. “The Ravens . . . they want me to join them.”
Thessa pulled back, considered it. “You should do it.” She slid the dagger from its sheath. She ran her tongue up the tip of the blade and pressed it against the left side of his jaw. “You get your mark,” she drew the blade down, running a scratch and drawing small ruby beads, “and all this is free.” She pushed him down onto the bed.
Sprawled across her bed in his hangover, he heard her footsteps and pulled his arm from his eyes, turned his head toward the door. She stood in the doorframe wearing a simple tunic, the hem just covering her butt. He pushed himself upright, shame surging over him. He pulled a sheet over his lap.
He stared at the floor, his knees, the edge of the bed. Kariden thrust a heel onto his underpants and slid them over. He pulled them on. He gathered his pants and stepped into them. Found his shirt. His footwear. His rain coat on a peg over a metal grill on the cold floor. Thessa said nothing as he dressed. They glanced at each other but there was nothing to say.
He pulled the packet out of his coat pocket and thumbed off five hundred slips. He gave the money to her, their fingers touching briefly. Thessa looked detached, dispassionate. He hated what had happened. He hated venom. He hated knowing her name.
“It’s wrong what they make you do.”
She stood resolute, her fingers folded over the paper money, working in a crease, over and over. Kariden turned away and strode through the tiny foyer of her crib, rockboots clacking against the flooring. He gave a glance back to her before departing, but she had turned away, stepping into her room.
Hiding tears.
The Rector met Kariden without a word about his whereabouts or his doings. He sat in office in the rectory, behind a desk made mostly of a computational array, absorbed in the business of running the growing parish, weave-linked so that data scrolled across his visual field. “Have a seat,” he gestured. His grey eyes found the scratch on the young man’s jaw.
Kariden sat before the Rector, noticing his stare and rubbed the cut absently. “They’ve asked me to join them.”
The Rector nodded knowingly. “Is this what you want?”
Kariden shrugged. He thought of Thessa. He thought of the other bargirls at Skulls. He thought of the one whose leg angled out of the nook, catching the amber glow of paint-light. “I think I should stop. Stop helping them. I should stop this enforcement business.” His eyes lingered over the knick-knacks on the Rector’s desk.
The Rector remained silent for a moment. “Is that what you think I want to hear?”
Kariden glanced at him, then glanced away. He leaned back in the chair, got comfortable. “I want . . .” He scrambled upright then leaned over on his knees. “I want to do what is right.”
“We all do,” the Rector said distantly. “But wasting your talents by not using them helps no one.”
Kariden blinked. “But the Ravens!” The Rector’s eyes were impassive. “The Death Ravens? I’m not like them!”
“Which is precisely why you should take them up on their offer.”
“What?”
The Rector’s chair squeaked as he leaned back. He drew a hand to his chin and his eyes squinted, not unlike Ganton’s. “Before the Caliseines, the Pavona settlement had endured a dark period. They lost all of their high technology. The people became archaic, and like similar societies of deep antiquity, it was common for alliances between untrusting neighbors to be forged through marriage. Marrying the Parish to the Ravens would suit our needs. You have good qualities Mil. Good values. You could set the standard for moral behavior within that lot.”
Kariden wanted to laugh in light of what he had done with Thessa. “So I should become a Raven to spread . . . goodness?”
“Those that like you will imitate you.”
“Those that don’t?”
“You can’t change everyone.”
Kariden leaned back in the chair and crossed an ankle over a knee. “I don’t know if I should do it.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” the Rector agreed, clasping his hands in his lap. “You must find the path that God has laid for you.”
Kariden shook his head. “You make it sound so easy.”
“It is,” the Rector said, “once you submit to God.”
A moment of hesitation. “If you want me to, I’ll do it.”
“It’s not about what I want you to do,” the Rector admonished. “It’s about finding your own destiny. Doing what is right for you.” A pause. “You’re not going to do wrong by me either way.”
Kariden nodded. He hadn’t known that was what he wanted to hear, but once heard, the truth unlocked. He did not want to wrong the Rector. He may have dabbled in more sin in the last few days than he cared to acknowledge, and he thought to confess his immorality, but holding onto that secret gave him a feeling of power he was wont to lose. “Alright,” he breathed.
The Rector heard his doubt. “The wicked deserve punishment, Mil, but they also deserve redemption. Can you offer forgiveness?”
Kariden squeezed his fingers. Thessa.
And something else. He had flashes of the war that took place here long before he arrived. Feelings he shouldn’t have had at all. Battles in the Ironwork District. Buildings razed to form ramparts. A confusion of scenes from the perspective of death. War crimes. Ganton. His face young. Landed spacecraft sucked up in decaying quantum strings. A giant of a man, dark against iron gray clouds. A black bird on his red ensign.
Kariden had linked that chimerical weave in the tank under the wall of skulls. Linked it in the throes of drunkenness. He recalled Dessero’s shouted chanting. “Do it! Do it! Do it!” His weave has parsed the experiences.
Now he owned ghosts.
The whole town was wicked. “Yeah, I suppose.”
The Rector nodded. “Then go where your path takes you.” His eyes glazed, focused internally to data begging attention in his visual field.
Kariden stood, the legs of the chair screeching across the silence. The Rector watched him as he stepped to the door.
He opened it, looked back at Rector Doud. Could he help girls like Thessa, and men like Dessero? He believed maybe he could with the Rector’s teachings and the blessings of God and His Sons. He smiled. “So I’m to wade into them shielded by Iman and some such? Is that it?”
“ ‘Above all, taking the shield of faith, whereupon you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.’ So yeah, something like that,” the Rector said.
He would wade into them in the wake of a bullet.
If he pulled the trigger.
An imported off-world limo of a sleek kind that could only make rounds about the spaceport’s smooth paved roads stopped under the Reimel’s expansive awning. Bodyguards assisted the target out of the car.
Kariden saw the women the man had tortured. Their poor bodies broken. Bled. Not all had mercifully died. One face haunted him. The girl was about his age, just into the dawn of her adulthood. He could see the beauty behind the damage and it broke his heart that one so youthful and lovely should have to suffer such brutality. Cuts slashed across welts in her face, her breast sliced as well. That which made men’s hearts stop and heads turn was taken away from her. He thought of Thessa and the other girls of Skulls, and of other bars, and the doxies he had taken whose names he never remembered and never wanted to recall from his weave’s cache.
He felt black hate. Kariden thanked Dessero for this opportunity to exact justice.
The reticule danced on the man’s head to Kariden’s relaxed heartbeat. Target data scrolled. The bullet was fed lead information into its smart matter head.
He thought of Dessero’s Mekmore pressed against his temple and his first kill.
The reticule stabilized. His weave humored the gun its computations. A bodyguard blocked the target, was in motion. All three men were walking and soon the frieze of the overhang would block the targeting system’s line of sight.
He thought of the bit-girl’s leg hanging casually out of the dark nook, its shape the very form of desire. When you get your mark, all of this is free.
The weave calculated, and the time to act was now. I can do some good, Kariden thought and let half his breath out. He was aware of the solidity of the trigger, aware of the pressure it took to pull it on the downbeat of his heart. The rifle hiccoughed through its sound suppressor.
Straight edged pits and bumps formed on the bullet, causing sufficient drag that guided the projectile to its target. It punctured the head cleanly, dragging in its wake blood, brain, and bone. Once it exited, the tiny machines that made up the bullet let go of one another, their chains and knots disintegrating into powder. Into nothing.
Kariden stood and propped the rifle against the wall. He had been instructed to leave the gun and the room as is. Someone else would be along to take care of the place and do something with the striker.
Dessero waited, parked across the street along the splash-guards of the covered boardwalk. Kariden opened the door to the back seat behind the driver and ducked in. He shut the door, made himself comfortable. “We’re good.”
Dessero put the car in drive and pulled out into the street. “That’s cause for celebration.” There was no joy in his voice. Almost sarcasm.
He chuckled, feeling an enormous sense of doing justice. Of doing good. He ignored the faint possibility that he could have been lied too. Or where his path could possibly lead him.
This wraps up the vignettes/short stories conserning the events that propelled Mil Kariden into the ranks of the Death Ravens. Mil Kariden is the primary protagonist of the Temperance Well series, a fictional universe that takes it name not from the first story, but from the last that is planned. There are other stories centered around other characters, but the next time we meet Mil Kariden, he will be investigating a mystery.
"Presage" will introduce Kariden's chief antagonist, Raum, in all his infernal glory.
Comments are encouraged.
originally posted Feb. 15, 2011
