Topic: Genesis
As I was writing the Capt. Tripp story, I hit a few snags. I wanted to learn more about the characters, so I decided to write some short stories in first person to explore the crew of the Chariot of Abraxis. Mil Kariden was my first choice, and because he was meant to be a former (Death) Raven, I wanted to go down to the surface of Mercator and see what it was all about and what it was like to be one of these killers.
After writing the story, I liked Kariden so much I thought about doing more first person stories about him, telling his tale of why he became a member of Tripp’s crew. I never did write about any of the other crew with the exception of a grown Logan . . . and that’s another part.
This story wrote fast, I’m talking a several hour marathon burning the midnight oil, as I’m prone to do. This is the very first iteration. In the second, I replaced the fire scene with a new kill-the-people-who-captured-me scene, and changed the name to “Proximity”. In the third version, I removed the campiness and altered the drug sale to a one man military attack. In all there are eight more starts to this story exploring alternate ideas as I decided to get completely away from “The Drug Trade” being the central theme. The drug trade? Really? Sadly, yes. Why the hell do a sci-fi story about drugs and dealers when you can do that subject as contemporary fiction? I know, right.
Welcome to Mercator
Ears ringing, I watched the circlets of steady raindrop splashes merge into something like mail on the dark undulating surface beneath me. Shit. My nose. My booted feet hit and I was suddenly submerged in freezing cold water. The shock of it ran through me like a jolt of electric current. The water burned like acid sprayed up my nostrils. My momentum carried me deep and the weight of my boots and oilskin greatcoat sank me farther than I would have liked. I tried not to panic and my lungs burned, ready to burst. I waved my arms to surface as I heard splashes of bits of wood and metal falling in after me. I hated to lose the damn coat—it was my favorite—but I had to get above water so I struggled out of it. I expected it to drift down into the depths like a graceful creature of the sea, but it collected around a pocket and sank like a stone as I swam up.
Shit. I forgot the Mekmore.
Just fucking great. What was I going to do without a gun?
I broke the surface and sucked in a huge lungful of air in long rasps. Warm blood covered my upper lip. I could hear the fire raging above me. I swam toward the nearest pylons of the piers and stilted buildings. I had to get out of here. I wished I have kept my coat.
Where am I, you ask?
Cratertown, Mercator.
As the biggest population center in the southern continent, and maybe the planet, it earned the dubious title of Capital. I didn't know what it was supposed to be the capital of since there was no formal government. A brutal hierarchy of warlords and crime bosses ruled the planet. And if you wanted to survive, you had better sworn an allegiance to one of them.
I was a Death Raven. I'd thrown my lot in with Raum. He was the only chief powerful enough to have his own orbital command station, a kilometer long Homesteader habitat abandoned after the Overthrow War. I'd never been to the Ne'Tzak, never even seen it from the surface of this ill planet. The constant overcast sky wouldn't allow it.
No, I was a Cratertown goon.
The city, if you haven't guessed already, had been built along the edge of a predominate crater. The perpetual rainfall had filled it up to the level where the water began to flow out of crevices forming rivers racing away into the plains below.
Buildings—ramshackle huts thrown together from off world materials and spacecraft hulls—stepped down from the rim's edge to the brackish, green hued water. Fingers of stilted buildings stretched toward the center. There was a lucrative fishing trade for sponge-eels and sea-rags. They were nothing we could eat—Mercator's indigenous biota was inedible, something about the chemistry being incompatible—but sponge-eel venom was a powerful narcotic, and sea-rag skins made excellent water-proof clothing.
Which was good because it never stopped raining on Mercator.
Anyway, I made it to the pylons and hugged the slippery bulk of one as people began to respond to the explosion, their feet clapping across the boards of the pier several meters above my head. Voices of alarm called out, directing action, seeking survivors. I'm sure you've guessed that I had something to do with the explosion. I'd be a bad liar to say that I didn't, but honestly, it didn't turn out the way I expected.
Never does, does it?
Welcome to Mercator.
I'll get to it, but right now hypothermia has me a bit concerned. I swam as quietly as I could toward the shore that must have been a good hundred meters away. Now I'm thinking that it would have been nicer if Avis ran his business a little closer to the beach. The people above were shouting about searching the water and I knew they would draw the only conclusion left to them. Not that I drowned, but that I was under the pier.
This was just not my day.
Finally I got to a point where I could stand up, probably more than half the way to the shore. My fingers started to ache and I couldn't stop shivering. At least my thick socks were wool. I sloshed through the last thirty meters of gray-green water and by the time I reached the shore I could care less if someone discovered me. I fell onto hard edged, dark gravel under the pier into a shivering ball. The sepia light struggling through the cloud layer gave everything a sickly sulfuric look. I longed for heat and white light.
I struggled to my knees. I heard someone shout, "He's down here."
I made it to my feet, exhausted, and a little nauseous. Hell, I actually was starting to feel a little warmer. I smiled, then frowned realizing that feeling warmer was a bad thing. My core temperature was falling.
A couple of people had dropped over the side of the pier, two of medium build. Maybe the one with the long hair was a woman, I couldn't tell. The next guy to land was a lot larger. They were all draped in sea-rag ponchos and the smaller of the three kept their distance, uncertainty on their faces.
The big guy I remembered as being a guard at the foot of the pier. He scowled at me and lunged. I had no doubts that he had saw my tattoo, the two black parallel bars stenciled across the left side of my jaw, pointing toward my mouth. "Fawkin Dahth Ray-Veen," he growled in a thick patois. His left hand grabbed me, held me upright. I saw his right arm cock back, a fist the size of a paint can sprang forward.
"Mil Kariden," the Enforcer said my name as a way of greeting as we gripped forearms. "Have a seat." He gestured to the chair in front of his desk. The man was Loddo Ulden by given name, a name never to be uttered. He was better known as The Sinker, for the obvious reasons of Cratertown's physical characteristics. He had the honor and prestige of having Death Raven tattoos on both sides of his jaw, an indication of rank.
Obediently I sat down, pulling the lapels of my greatcoat tighter around me as I felt a draft.
Loddo The Sinker filled the space behind his desk. He stared at me with wary eyes as if I was something he was about to eat that he knew would make him sick. "You are one of Ganton's boys aren't you."
Of course he knew that already. "Yessir. Three years now."
"That so," he said, his massive head bobbing, just enough motion to be noticed. "Heard good things about you." He shifted in chair, seeking a more relaxed posture.
"Thank you, sir. I do what's asked and expected of me."
He tapped his ringed index finger on the table about three times then opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of nanoleaf. He laid it down on the smooth surface of his desk and shot it toward me with a flick of his fingers.
I caught it and looked at the information presented thereon. It was a map of a section of Cratertown on the other side, across the lake. Pier 139, Building 227. The man was Jorn Avis.
"Get rid of this asswipe. Send a message." Loddo watched me with fatal seriousness.
"It will get done," I answered pressing the recognize icon on the nanoleaf. It registered my bioelectric field and would reproduce its data to no one but me. Its surface was such that I had to look directly at it to see anything. The information would be hidden from curious persons if I so happened to view it in public. I folded it into quarters and shoved it in my inner coat pocket.
My dismissal was The Sinker glancing at the door, then taking an interest in some other business on his desk.
There were certain things you didn't do on Mercator. Especially Cratertown. You didn't decide to set up your own narcotics ring and leave Raum out of the deal. That was a serious no-no. If you did that, you had the unexpected pleasure of making my acquaintance, a relationship that rarely spanned an hour. Just because you could squeeze the venom out of a sponge-eel didn't mean you had a right to. Jorn Avis, need I say, apparently didn’t care about this sniggling little detail. If he had simply not been aware of it, I would not be planning to visit him. Obviously, the requests that he cease and desist were ignored.
Bad move.
So my job was to remove him and his Venom lab.
If it were only that easy.
Avis had taken a nice chunk of territory in the Ironwork District. Hell, we Ravens couldn't be everywhere and things like this happened from time to time. They had it pretty secure which meant they knew the trouble they were asking for. I couldn't just walk in. I had to be allowed in. I had to be expected.
I had to be a buyer.
And not for personal consumption, but for bulk resale.
Three days after my assignment from The Sinker, I applied a dab of special make-up that automatically matched my skin tone over my identifying tattoo, packed a healthy dose of explosives in the false bottom of a briefcase full of Mercator paper currency, and later found myself walking down Pier 139.
What can I say, it was raining, thankfully a light drizzle. Icteric sunlight cast everything as if in a haze of smog. Typical day actually. I wore my oilskin greatcoat and wide brimmed hat. The rain pattered a constant staccato and beaded on the dun surface of my outer clothing.
Building 227 was typical of the area. Most of the buildings on this pier had something to do with processing sea-rag into clothing. Two-twenty seven had been abandoned for some time. It had a floor hatch like its neighbors, where sponge-eel was brought up, and processed Venom lowered into boats.
Both the guard at the foot of the pier and the one at the door searched me thoroughly. They didn’t open the briefcase but they did sweep it over with a scanner. The briefcases at Raum's disposal were impervious to such scrutiny, hi-jacking the return signals with deceptive data so that the scanner thought it was just a case with money. This was one of the perks of commanding a Homesteader replete with its nanoscopic machine assembly vats.
They lead me to Avis's office deep in the back of building, which shows you just how amateur this outfit was. I shouldn't be meeting with him directly, but if that was the way they wanted to do business, so be it. They also left me and Avis alone. I chalked it up to more inexperience. I should have been paying more attention.
Avis stood in his office to greet me, a short, pale, emaciated man, probably from violating the first rule of the narcotics trade, don't use. Venom did ugly things to people's bodies. At some point—early on—they stop caring. I never touched it. It would affect my job performance.
The grease that kept his hair pulled back and plastered to his skull gave it an unnatural gloss. The irises in his large eyes were as black as his pupils. Avis was just as creepy in real life as he was in the image on the nanoleaf. He regarded me, and again I felt like a morsel, except this time, something delicious.
He opened a hand to a chair and nodded for me to sit. I did so as he took his chair and leaned over the desk, spanning his hands fingertip to fingertip and tapping his lower lip with the tips of the index fingers. He looked at me deep in thought. I averted my gaze from his disturbing eyes to the brassy, nude metalwork statue standing sexily on his desk.
Avis collapsed his hands atop one another. "Five hundred vials." He said nothing else and waited for me.
All I wanted to do was drop off the case and leave. I would detonate the charge by a signal from a neural implant at a safe distance.
"That sounds right," I answered. "Fifty thousand notes."
He nodded. "What do you do to raise that kind of money in a place like this?"
I kill people. But it's not my money, it's Raum's. I looked at him blankly with no answer because I didn't foresee this line of questioning. "What does it matter," was the best I could offer.
"So," he drew the word out, "You think I'm stupid?"
Well, yes. I thought he was stupid for trying to cut in on one of Raum's enterprises. But I knew this was not what he meant. "I—does it matter?"
He leaned back and opened a drawer and I knew it wasn't going to be good. An iron ball settled into my stomach. To be honest with you, I preferred to shoot at people from a distance. Placing bombs against buildings was also preferable.
He removed a Mekmore, a compact high energy laser handgun, and set it on the desk, pointing at me. In his other hand he brought up what could only be an implant disruptor. He clicked a button on its shiny surface and placed it gingerly on the desk across from the gun, giving it a loving little pat. A tiny diode began flashing blue.
There went the idea of using the implant to set off the explosives. I felt heat behind by ears as my implants received disassemble and disband instructions.
"If you'll be so kind as to withdraw the money and stack it on my desk, I shall be grateful and promise not to torture you before I have you shot."
I tried to salvage it. "There must be some mistake. I'm here to buy Venom."
He smiled at me as if I were a child too stupid to realize what I was doing was not a good idea.
He picked up the gun and waved it at me. "The briefcase, Mr. Kariden." He used the gun to point to an uncluttered spot at the corner.
I lifted the briefcase and opened it. Mercator currency was nothing to look at if you were into art. There were no portraits of famous people because there had been none. Mercator notes were very utilitarian, just denomination numbers and anti-counterfeit codes. Many had gang signs scribbled on them.
I began stacking the bills, uncovering the false bottom.
"What's the yield on the explosive?" Avis asked as if we were talking about mud boarding.
I stopped. Maybe the anti-scanner system wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Or maybe I was set up. There was always that chance, but I couldn't think of why.
Well, maybe Loddo's daughter, but that's another story.
At least I hope it was another story. She was quite a looker.
"Enough," I said about the bomb's power. Hell, the game was up.
Avis nodded and I could tell he was cooking up his own plans for the bomb. That's when I noticed that his eyes weren't real. They were artificial orbs, craftily done right down to the imitation blood vessels. The irises had a metallic luster under the right lighting conditions. I just happened to catch it at that opportune moment. I didn't know what bandwidth he could see with it, but I was pretty damned sure he could see both the explosive and my implants.
Crafty little bastard.
It would have been a nice bit of intel to have. The Raven Eyes were pretty good at spying, but they missed this.
He probably thought he could diffuse me with this mental power play of ersatz omniscience.
Well, if I were anyone else but me, maybe so. I laid another stack of bills on the desk, planting my feet for traction. Then I shoved the desk toward him, hard. The edge of it slipped over the armrests of his chair, striking his arms. Oddly, he didn't cry out. His gun fell and skittered across the floor. I rubbed my jaw against my left shoulder, wiping away the make-up. Maybe it was a bad move, but I wanted him to see the tattoo. He recognized it with understanding terror. I heaved again, sending bills fluttering and the briefcase crashing to the floor, and pinned him inside his chair against the wall. I grabbed his nude statue and swung it down with all my force toward his head. He ducked and managed to free his arms, throwing them up in a tangle, but I managed to get three whacks to make contact until he limped unconscious. Miraculously I was uninterrupted. I panted holding the blood stained sexy statue ready to pounce again. A gash on Avis's head flowed freely, rivulets coursing down his flaccid face. I glanced at the door knowing I had to work fast. I laid the figurine back on the desk. A plan fell into place.
I checked the explosive. The sturdy thing lay undisturbed. A single window looked out over the water. I saw the Mekmore and pocketed it. Then I went back to the desk and grabbed the blood stained statue and lifted the case. I placed the bomb near the door, checking over the device.
Avis made an abrupt rattling noise in his throat that froze me. He managed a wet laugh, then said as I looked over my shoulder at him, "You honestly think you can kill me?" His mouth twitched as if he had trouble forming a smile.
"Look's like it," I said, turning my attention back to the explosive. I began setting the delay, locking the time.
"You have no idea what you are getting into," Avis said as if he had gravel in his throat.
I hesitated, finger held over the arming button. The jumbled thuds of heavy footfalls approached the door from down the hall. "I'm just doing a job," I muttered and stabbed the arming button.
I stood, spun around, and threw the statue at the window as hard as I could then sprinted toward the shattering glass opening. Jorn Avis's creepy eyes followed me.
The rest you know.
When consciousness returned, I didn’t have to worry about hypothermia anymore. I was quite warm actually. A little too warm. Sweaty and roasting to be precise. A persistent roar surrounded me. The sound was accompanied by crackles and pops.
I was none too surprised or pleased to discover that the guard and his crew had shoved me into a small abandoned shanty and set it afire. Oh, and they stripped me first. So I'm naked and surrounded by growing tongues of flame.
Yep. Welcome to Mercator.
I coughed and kept my head low. All four walls of the room were torched, probably by an incendiary gel. That's what I would have used.
I scrambled around on my elbows and knees, trying to protect my genitals from the floor, searching for any means of escape. I cut my right forearm on the head of an extended nail. Now bleeding, I looked to the source of my superficial wound. A floorboard was loose.
That was good.
I worked the floorboard up as the flames encroached. I tried to use what I removed to break up the other boards, but it wasn't strong enough. I began to work on them, wiggling and prying, until they gave up their greedy hold. The flames were very close now and the smoke was overcoming me. I almost forgot what I was doing, finding a primal beauty in the screaming flames marching toward me.
I wondered why they didn’t slather the gel on me as well. I guess they wanted me to suffer the knowledge of my death.
Not today.
In a terrified rage I pounded on the floorboards until enough pieces of them broke free under my splintered bloody hands. I had enough space to slip down between the joists. Flames licked at me as I fell into the dankness under the shanty. Parts of the floor above me had burned through, hot charcoal and embers dusting the craggy ground below. If I could get to a wall, I could probably knock or pull a portion down and escape. I noticed the only clear path to the wall involved the sewage sluice pipe.
I don't have to describe the smell do I?
The shanty, like a lot of them, didn’t have plumbing or running water (there was plenty falling from the sky in abundance) so it's designers used a half-pipe to route the human waste from the relief room to the covered sewer ditches outside. The rain worked in our favor on that deal, believe me. You hardly noticed the smell.
So anyway, I followed the sluice pipe to its exit, earning plenty of cuts and abrasions from the rocky ground and blisters from falling embers. The pipe ran through a sheet of corrugated metal. It had been nailed to a wooden frame. Wood doesn't last long in this environment. I pulled the metal sheet from the soft wood without too much trouble and tumbled out into the rain.
I was at the side of the shanty not too far from other slap-together homes. Bystanders were out watching but not doing anything. I shivered under the onslaught of cold rain and tucked myself into a crouch. It was nothing like the chill from the lake. For that I was thankful.
Looking around I determined that I was no longer in the Ironwork District. Avis's men had meant me to be a message too. Some of the bystanders pointed at me, but none were brave or curious enough to approach or offer aid.
Some people would bend over backward to help a Raven, for the selfish reward. And I don’t blame them. Some would bend over backward to kill a Raven. I don't blame them that either. I really didn’t have a lot of options but to ask for help.
Do you have any idea how much that realization hurt me?
But just then, as if the glorious Codus Iman had ordained it Himself, the rain fell in a torrential downpour, obscuring everything in sheets of water. I almost actually thanked him. I began to make my way out of the area when I heard the loud horn announce the arrival of a ground vehicle. I could just make out its large mud wheels, and Raum's sigil on the door, the blood beaked raven, wings spread, its body enclosed in a circle with two, short parallel bars intersecting the lower, right quadrant.
Armed men climbed out, shouting and pointing at the burning shanty. I saw a woman under a large umbrella.
Daphia Ulden.
She saw me.
A few days later, Loddo "The Sinker" Ulden had me up at his estate, high on the rim, looking down at the districts controlled by the Death Ravens. Daphia was there as well, dressed from head to toe in polished dark leather. Hair, so blonde it was almost white, fell over her shoulders in lanky bands. The three of us sat in the great room sharing a bottle of imported wine. The Sinker informed me that Raven forces had captured, killed, and dispersed Avis's gang. My deeds had even reached the ears of Raum, high in orbit.
I had hopes that perhaps me and Daphia's fling could be expanded into something more permanent, but she had become Raum's woman. It wouldn’t be wise for me to say anything out of line towards her, let alone touch her. But women weren't going to be hard to come by anyway, so that was that. I had the perks of a Death Raven hitman.
"Raum wants you to come up for a little recuperation and recreation," The Sinker said, looking quite comfortable on his couch.
"To the Ne'Tzak?" I asked? That was an unexpected surprise.
"The very one," Loddo said. "Raum would like to meet you. Daphia will escort you."
She regarded me coolly.
"Well, that's certainly reason to celebrate," I downed my wine. I could have had another bottle all to myself.
Daphia took a sip and placed her glass on the low table before the couch. "When you come back, you'll have the pick of your targets. All of them."
A promotion.
That's Mercator for you.
