Retribution: Part 1
Now Playing: KNAC
Topic: Mercator Arc
Order of the Raven

 

Retribution

 

Smoke hung in the chill, bitter rain mixed with nanophage spores, a fog of war that gnawed the flesh to the bone. The war band watched the advancing cloud from their perches of iron, the exposed black skeletons of their homes. They were naked save for their armor and boots, and helms of machine eyes; a black substance like tar covered every inch of exposed flesh to trap the weaponized spore. Their only weapons were bladed instruments of sick cruelty, war hammers of their prized iron, and their feared name.

Amex was the only one who did not crouch in his place. He stood proud as fire gave its color to the low cloud deck. He did not flinch as distant a-mat mortars flashed hard radiation and crisp blue-white brilliance. He watched the smoke below, filling the channels between husks of buildings and piles of rubble. He sought men, the enemy, his helm eyes attuned to the ambient mass background looking for subtle variations within the gravity frequencies.

The squad came like a promised gift. Soon, furtive, questing lasers stabbed out of the blanket of hungry smoke. Amex did not care. Let the foul enemy see them before they died.

Of the war band, Amex was the only one that wore wings. The black feathered limbs had once been a property of the theater and were fully articulate. He had affixed them to the back of his cuirass, the tips of the broad feathers dripped blood from an earlier kill. He extended the wings halfway as the search lasers swept closer, a signal to his men to prepare to repel. From underneath his helm, locks of his long hair fell to his shoulders. Finger bones, fastened to thin braids like beads, chimed on the wind, heralding the coming storm.

Fat, sparkling and mottled beams of green scanned the ruins of the building below, daring to tip up and wash the waiting men on their perches. Amex called forth his blade, the Ethrudhan; in fluid form it spiraled down the armor of his right arm, pouring itself into its rigid form as it extended from the grip of his hand. The light scattering off the clouds gave the blade the look of iron cooling on the anvil.

The moment came and Amex spread his wings. The criminal war band descended on strands of flexcable, their blades and hammers poised for battle. The troops below were not entirely caught by surprise and their guns roared. “Corvus mortus!” they shouted to one another, taking defensive postures. Strobes of muzzle flashes filled the smoke and dust like lightning popping through a thunderhead; shadows of men lurched within.

Amex’s band was upon the Legionnaires. Molecular thin blades cut the foul enemy down. War hammers crushed and smashed. Bullets bit back. Ethrudhan fell man and machine, scything through all. Blood splattered his armor. The bones in his hair made merry music.

They lost few. The enemy much more; they were not accustomed to close quarters combat preferring the safety of long range attacks. Amex surveyed his victory in the rain savaged smoke. They gathered the bodies of the enemy that remained intact. “Give ‘em wings,” he ordered and his men attended to the backs of the dead and unconscious. New blood joined the earth, made thin by steady rain.

The low clouds churned and glowed a sick sulfur as the bloated sun broke over the horizon. Amex and his men transported their horrors to the break in the rampart, a line of debris from razed buildings once made from spacecraft parts; the eastern river had never been an obstacle. The League will see their handiwork, their blood work, and their fear would deepen. Their terror would still them as they dared take to the heart of the old city of iron. But a new thing happened as Amex’s soldiers laid the bodies out for review.

A brilliance like a chunk of star flared from beyond the tall rim of the crater where the city huddled. Then came a thunderclap that rang the skull and shook the bowels. Amex turned his face to the sky. Ozone stung his nostrils. The enemy had discovered the ancient secrets to unleash the terror weapons in the Homesteader above. Any moment now they could lay waste to the entire Iron City. He hated their cleverness. If only Avis had gotten the Infiltrators up and running first. . . .

But no. Why had the spaceport been hit?

Linked to the wave, his weave reported the skirmishes were stopping. The a-mat shelling ceased. For an hour and a half there was confusion across the wavecast network. The enemy Homesteader had fallen to others. Pavona? No one knew.

The lander descended through the clouds, a gleaming ovoid like an egg sitting atop a spike of raw energy. It came down upon the rampart of spacecraft junk, its exhaust thrust turning metal beneath to white-hot pools of slag. Other debris caught fire. The pilot of the lander cared not for these possible hazards. Landing struts flowed out from the body, impervious to the flame. Yet the flame did not last long as some field from the craft drew off their life.

Soldiers from the League and the Association held their places, commanders uncertain. Who had command of the Homesteader? What would they do with it?

Amex had his men creep closer. The clouds grew cold and dark. Lightning flashed in the west. The rain fell in fat drops, like plump insects.

A part of the lander peeled open and dark men stepped out. Their skin was as black as Amex’s nanophage barrier, but he saw that it was their natural color. He watched in awe from the telescopic vision of his helm eyes. He had never before seen such men.

They were guards, perhaps scouts, for their leader disembarked and he was a giant among them. His skin was just as dark, but his features were not like those of the guards, with their broad noses and thick lips. But his hair was like Amex’s and waved like living things in the gusts. But it was the unfurling banner that froze Amex’s heart in a surge of impossible hope.

A red pennant snapped in the wet wind. On it a black bird symbol sprawled. This strange man wasn’t much different than him! Amex could not contain his joy and exhilaration. He spread his mechanical wings and, shouting the name of his war band, led his men in a charge to the lander. The horde was unopposed. The strangers watched, silent and still. Amex and his Men-at-Sides labored up the treacherous rampart, avoiding getting their feet caught in the tangle.

The stranger was taller even than Amex. They knew neither Pavic or Junc, but had their own tongue that was long and labored the ears. Amex felt in the presence of a god. The exalted stare of those alien eyes seemed to pour into him, mingle with his soul. Amex formed Ethrudhan and kneeled to one knee. He lay the blade horizontally between himself and the stranger.

The dark giant knelt. Two of the man’s questing fingers reached out and traced through the tar on Amex’s jaw, leaving two naked, white streaks. He looked at the goop covering his fingertips, then smeared the tar on a bit of refuse. The stranger took the broad shimmering blade offered to him, admiring it, a ghost of a smirk curling his lips. Amex began to rise when the stranger swung Ethrudhan through his neck.

Mil Kariden slammed awake, a plane through his neck tingling. He thought he heard the jangle of finger bones.

 

* * *

 

A recruit’s marks. That’s what they were. Kariden studied the left side of his jaw in the privy’s mirror-mode optic array, his back aching as he leaned over the sink. Nanotech tattoos. Not like the permanent ones on Dessero’s or Ganton’s face. Not the marks put there by Raum himself. These were low rank marks. Marks that seemed to say “Prove yourself first” and he wondered hadn’t he done that? What further deeds were needed?

The tattoos were like fingerprints smeared down his jaw. One of Ganton’s men did the job, dipping his fingers in the goop and raising them to Kariden’s face. It burned as it seeped into the skin. His weave caught the taste of invasive algorithms: tracking codes. Kariden allowed it lest Ganton become suspicious of his more advanced weave.

It looked artificial, like graphite dust pressed into his flesh, not like the others, the Ravens marked by Raum. Theirs looked natural in an odd sort of way, like a black birthmark, a part of them. Those men never spoke of their induction, but they all shared that same shell-shocked look of men who had gone through Hell and come out the other side. They were men of an exclusive club, sneering down at recruits like Kariden. He hoped that whatever lay beyond his meeting with Raum was worth the effort. He hoped the Rector was right, that he could spread a cure of goodness against the immoral disease afflicting Cratertown.

He was informed the tattoo could not be altered or removed save only by Raum on the day of his formal induction. “When is that?” “When there are enough of you to warrant Raum’s attention,” Ganton had replied. Kariden left the mark alone. He sensed the anti-tamper system was clever enough to become a weapon against him should he try to recode it. Funny how some tech was inferior to his, and some about equal or better, a hodge-podge of machine strands. The machines meshed into his flesh and their code felt old, from some prior golden age of nanotechnology. He had no need to recode the anti-tamper system anyway. He only had to confuse the Raven wavecast of his whereabouts, tricking the system into believing he remained in his apartment in the Parish. Simple.

There were other ways to hide the mark when the mark needed hiding.

He quit pinching and deforming his face and stood straight. Kariden lifted a squeeze tube from the edge of the sink. He squeezed a dollop of the cosmetic smart salve onto his finger tip. He rubbed the pale grayish stuff onto his skin, wiping it across the marks. The cream read his skin tone and soon the two dark streaks across his jaw disappeared. He had stolen the makeup from Syvanda, the girl whose leg first caught his eye on that fateful day he first stepped into the Skulls, the Raven’s private saloon.

If it weren’t for her, he would not be embarking on this personal bit of detective work.

 

 

 

“You fancy a bit to eat before we skump?” Syvanda had asked from the open kitchen of her apartment, pouring two drinks. She had that lilting accent that marked her from Heil Thericon. “A girl can’t be ‘spected to work as well as she’s want, famished and all.”

Kariden waited for her in the sitting room, on the edge a worn chair that smelled of mildew and dust. “No. Not at all.” He knew she wanted to be pampered and fed since the skumping was free by the twin mark on his face. She wanted to be treated like a lady, at least somewhat removed from the lifestyle she found herself in, if only for a little bit. If only for an evening. Kariden could grant her that.

“Absolute aces,” Syvanda said gaily, stepping around the counter into the room. “Otherwise I’m apt to just lie there. And that wouldn’t be much fun a’ tall.” She offered Mil a tall thin glass of pale sparkling wine.

“I suppose not,” he mumbled, standing. He took the drink, admiring her form.

He hated to compare her to Daphia Ulden, but there it was. No one he had seen on this rain drenched rock approximated Daphia’s beauty and her classic lines of ancient Pavonan aristocracy. But Daphia was untouchable. Syvanda quite the opposite. She was by no means ugly, a little tall, making the length of her shapely legs insatiable; her nose was a bit longish, her eyes owned a devious sparkle, and her throaty laugh rang like a bell announcing good times and great fun. She had no love of venom, and kept herself at a limit of mild intoxication when she drank. Kariden suspected something terrible had happened to her to warrant this personal temperance. He saw it in her eyes, some past pain when the bit-girls of Skulls got too drunk and wild.

Syvanda was still dressed for the tavern, wearing a tight yellow shirt with a deep cut neck to draw eyes to her endowedness, and a dark high-hemmed skirt to show off those long legs. When outdoors, she draped herself in an ankle length raincoat and carried an umbrella like a deep scoop, the inner surface coated with an optic array like a one way window. Her coat hung on a peg over the drip grate next to his, close as lovers.

She beamed at him, her calico hair falling around her face and brushing her shoulders. She raised her glass to toast. “To good times all ‘round.”

He met the toast, the glass chiming. “To us.” Kariden said it because she liked to hear it, but it was a lie because he thought of Daphia when he did.

They downed the wine in long gulps, then kissed. Kariden enjoyed the touch of her, but he was wary of the act. He knew Syvanda wanted more. She wanted a way out of whoredom and she saw him as her exit. She could become his woman and no one else’s.

All he wanted from her was to feel human once in a while. Connected.

“Can’t very well go out looking like a tramp just come in out th’ rain,” she said, leaving him her glass and strutting down the hall to her bed chamber. “Won’t do a’ tall.”

Alone in the room, Kariden spied Syvanda’s optophonic array painted over a large rectangle of stiff cardboard leaning against the counter, forgotten behind a chair of the dining table. Having little else to do, he placed the empty glasses on the counter and pulled out the array, set it up on its easel, and activated it with a touch. He cycled through the wavecast channels with his weave. A lot of it was torturous cyberscapes from people who thought themselves artists and entertainers when they certainly were not. Some was live streaming visual-audio captures. Others bloviated their version of the news.

“Chance a bit o’ talk with me, Mil?” she called out from the bedroom.

“Yeah,” he replied, shutting off what looked like a robbery. In progress.

He stopped in the open doorway of her bright-lit room, leaned against the jamb thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets. He found Syvanda standing before a full length mirror propped up between two open wardrobes stuffed with clothes, her back to him, naked save for a pair of plain undergarments and a satiny corset she tugged over her breasts. The mirror must have been a lavish gift from a wealthy client, for it was actual silvered glass in an ornate wooden frame. An optic array was certainly cheaper and more practical, but the mirror seemed to give a life to her reflection, as if it were merely a doorway into another—albeit off-angle–world where her twin blocked the way.

She threw a glance at him over her shoulder then continued to wiggle into the garment. “How ‘bout the Reimel? You eaten there?”

Kariden scratched the back of his neck, studying the floor. “No I haven’t.”

She caught the hesitation in his voice. “Is ‘ere a problem with it?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “No, it’s fine.” Except he assassinated a man in the entranceway. “Whatever you want.”

“They have the best food on the Spaceport Row,” she claimed, making some minor adjustment to the way her breasts fit in the corset. “Been some time since I’ve last eaten out that way.”

He knew what she eluded to. “Why don’t you find another house?” Better clientele. Better class of people.

Syvanda barked an incredulous laugh. She swiveled the point of her chin to her left shoulder. “Come tie me.”

Upon the invitation, he stepped into the room. A fragrance blossomed from her that reminded him of the flowers from Tullis, of spring days playing in the yard when the breeze would carry their scent. He took the ends of the flat strings crisscrossed down her back. “Laces huh? You know they have machines that do this, don’t you?”

She laughed softly. “You have a lot to learn, Mil Kariden.” Then, “Not so tight. I do want to eat. A lot.”

He relaxed the laces and tied them off. “How’s that?”

“Much better,” she said turning around to face him. Syvanda rested her forearms across his shoulders. She looked up at him, pouring her eyes into his. “Did it thrill you?”

He shrugged, “I suppose.” He didn’t know what to do with his hands so he risked placing them on her hips.

“Mm-hmm,” she nodded. “It’ll thrill you more to unlace ‘em.”

He smiled.

“Or would you rather the machines did it?”

“No,” he chuckled, “I think you are quite right.”

Syvanda gave him a peck on the cheek and pulled away to the wardrobe on the right. She found a shimmering pearl-like evening gown and held it out for review. “What do you think? You think it will hold up in the light?”

What the hell did Kariden know about women’s clothes? “Looks great.”

She studied the garment as if contemplating options. “Under this light . . . but I have pure white in here. Don’t know about the Reimel. That’s the problem with this place, the light is shit. The outside light is literally shit. A girl can’t look her best in this drab dismal place.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” he offered. He could care less what effect the light had on the color of her dress. She was lascivious regardless, and that, truthfully, was all he cared about.

“Probably right.” She stepped carefully into the gown, slipped the thin straps over her elegant shoulders. Syvanda stepped past him to her vanity desk, flashing a shy smile. She checked the thin layer of cosmetic salve smeared around her eyes and cheeks, and used her weave to adjust their color parameters for a palette of browns and coal, with a hint of deep blue. She pressed a tube to her lips and the salve livened their natural tint. Next, she pulled a gossamer hairnet from a tin and dropped it onto the shaggy mess of her tresses. The net drew and pulled her hair up, curling the bulk of it all around and over itself toward the center where it twisted around into a kind of knot. He gathered that it looked like a plump sagging overlarge cap, or a pastry. The net itself was invisible.

She drew up from the chair and Kariden watched her sort through the other wardrobe until she came away with stockings and knee high boots. Syvanda plopped down on the edge of her bed, the hem of the dress running tight across her knees, and beckoned him over with a finger. He walked to her, looking down at her with a sloppy grin deviling his youthful face.

“Help me into these.” She held up the rolled stockings.

Mil took them and squatted. The doxy lay an ankle across his thigh. Kariden slipped the dark micromesh hosiery over her toes and along her arcing foot, over the sharp knobs of her ankles. He unrolled the material up her shin and calf, aroused by the touch and form of her leg. Over the knee, to the hem of her gown, and under it along her thigh, cool and smooth under his fingers. Mil tugged the lace stocking top as far as it would go. He let his hand linger on the inside of her thigh, as if committing the feel of her to memory. She straightened her clothed leg out and flexed her toes, delighting him with a lustful giggle.

He brushed his lips across hers in the barest of kisses, lost in the fragrance of spring day afternoons, giving her a promise of what he would do to the rest of her. She moaned and her mouth pulled into a lazy and longing smile. Syvanda dropped her leg and pressed her other foot into his thigh. He ran the other stocking up her leg, trembling in excitement. She moved her head to peck him, but he leaned out of the way, teasing, laughing.

He thought fleetingly of Daphia’s shoe—the scuffed and broke-heeled trophy he claimed for saving her—as he held Syvanda’s boot, a thing of white glossy material, split down the side and hanging open. Its morphing sole could raise her heel several inches, or lower and spring forth cleats like any other rockboot. He eased her foot into it and machines in the seams sealed it together as if it were in reverse action of ripping apart. He helped her into the other. “So unlacing a boot is not as exciting?” He grinned at her.

Syvanda laughed. “Who said anything about taking them off.”

Kariden chuckled with her, pressing his mouth to hers and easing her down to the bed. Daphia flared through his mind and he pushed her away, as if she had bolted from a closet he had locked her in, and he struggled to put her back. They kissed slow and measured, devouring the feel of one another until Syvanda’s belly rumbled and they broke into laughter, nose to nose.

 

The visit to the hotel and restaurant bothered him less than Mil Kariden expected. His soul felt concealed behind a tarry veneer where the bite of guilt or shame lodged ineffective. A battered courier-turned-limousine dropped him and his date off under the protective overhang where he had dropped the man Ganton and Dessero had assigned to him, the kill that pulled him into their ranks. And why should he feel anything for that bastard? Why should his stomach unsettle in fear of the place? The violence, though sickening, came deserved. The man carved women.

The thought made Kariden sigh as he escorted the lovely Syvanda under the large awning, to the sparkling expanse of glass windows and automatic glass doors of the hotel, a place like a Pavonan marvel in a heap of junk. Syvanda threw a quick glance behind them, Kariden catching her eyes lowered, as if she were trying to recognize the place on the graded rock where the contents of the target’s head splattered in a goopy red mess. As if she understood the meaning of his sigh. Slashes of insect-angry rain stung with stray needles as they hurried to the sanctuary behind those doors.

As a Raven and his escort, the maitre d’ ushered them to the opulent backrooms of the Reimel’s restaurant, where the experience of fine dining would come a discount, part of the perks of having the establishment protected by Chief Ulden and his men. Everything on the menu was grown local from expensive indoor plots and artificial meat tanks. Kariden had no idea what many of the food choices were, and, laughingly, left the decision to Syvanda.

The small talk prior to the meal ran a gamut of topics. If there was one passion Syvanda had, it was talking. She had an opinion for everything and no problem sharing it. Kariden let her carry the weight of the conversation, enjoying her lilting, questing accent, and mannerisms. She allowed herself silence only when the plates arrived, composing herself prim and proper as a Baroness. Mil wondered if Daphia ate this way.

Tantalizing, succulent aromas wafted from the sizzling food that looked more like art than anything meant to be eaten. The taste and texture of the meat took him back home to Tullis, where as a boy he had enjoyed the steaks of local herbivores. Flavors exploded against his tongue in a dizzying array. The cut of beef was a far cry from what he had been eating of late, the skewered grilled strips of areela from braziers squeezed between tight alley walls, meat that was rumored to have been meant for hospitals, and not for their cafeterias.

Near the end of the meal, Syvanda flashed him a concerned, curious look. “D’ja know there was a man killed out front, not long ago?”

Kariden stopped chewing, then continued. Swallowed. Reached for a glass of iced tea. “No. Wasn’t aware of it.”

“Really?” She studied him as if looking for a lie. “Was all over the wave.”

He drank a modest sip, and set the glass back. “Oh. Well, I don’t stay on the wave much. Must miss a lot of news.” Except what passed for news out here was opinion, agitations, and propaganda. The real news came from the bulkers and the taxi drivers. If you wanted to keep on top of things, that’s where you went. He knew Syvanda knew this, as smart and together as she was. Any good doxy did.

She shrugged, bit into some shellfish. “Looked like something you boys might have done. Thought you might know something.”

He cut into the thick slab of meat. “Yeah. But we aren’t the only ones serving justice around here.” The Rector was not squeamish about executions. Nor were many of the Guilds.

“Justice,” Syvanda said with a crystal goblet of wine hiding her mouth. The elegant woman drank and held the glass as if another swallow was forthcoming. “Weren’t nothing like that a’ tall.” She pulled another draught of wine and set the glass down, then dabbed her lips with the corner of a napkin she had pulled up from her lap. “Was murder.”

Kariden cracked a nervous grin and hid it by stuffing his mouth with a forkful of sauced lettuce. He chewed and scratched above his nose at the corner of an eyebrow . “Why do you think that?”

“The man was looking for his daughter.”

Kariden saw the man again, through the tunnel of death as he walked, the frieze of the overhang about to hide him from the shot, his palms hot and tight against the grip, the trigger, a cold sliver of metal. No. he wasn’t looking for his daughter. He had come to cut up girls. “And where was she?” This supposed daughter.

“Over in the Vinestickle,” she said as if the young girl could be nowhere else.

Kariden swallow down the knot crawling up his throat. Vinestickle. Or, as some said, Vines-tickle, a row of shacks the proprietors had the nerve to call brothels. This did not sit well in his stomach. He saw the young doxy from the photograph Dessero suggested he forget, her face and body superficially slashed, robbing her of her beauty. She’d come from the Vinestickle.  But Dessero said she was one of theirs . . . from a Raven house. “What happened,” he exhaled, trying to sound normal under a tumult of apprehension. He wiped his hands on the cloth covering his lap.

“It’s always the same story, isn’t it? From what I understand, she was one of Hasco’s imports . . . poor dear. Those girls never get much of a chance, unless they get noticed.”

Kariden nodded impatiently.

“So anyway . . . her family seemed to have had some money, some connections, you know how it is, and her dad tracked her down, through Hasco’s network—which must have took some doing—and followed her here. He was about to look for her when he was murdered before he could even check in.”

“You certain of this?” His words were cold, and the uneaten food lay like poison in his plate. He forced himself to calmly take his glass of tea and drink from it as if a storm had not just exploded in his head.

“It’s on the wave,” she reminded. Then she leaned over the table, the bearer of a secret, “And I have my connections . . .” Syvanda let him dwell on that, sinking her stare into his before pulling back and composing herself prim and proper.

“I’m sure you do,” he answered, a notch above a whisper. “What about the daughter? What happened to her?”

“You know, that’s the saddest part. Father being killed is one thing, but . . . some bastard had cut her up real bad. . . .”

Kariden turned his attention back to the food in his plate, cutting into the thick steak, hoping to hold onto the pretense that the conversation was mere gossip he knew nothing about. “A tragedy,” he muttered before forking the meat into his mouth. It tasted bland.

“Yes,” Syvanda agreed. She stared at Kariden expectantly, a lose strand of gold bobbing beside her cheek. “Terrible.”

The Raven’s mind reeled, this made little sense. What reason would Ganton and Dessero have to get rid of the father . . . if the wealthy man hadn’t been the one doing the cutting?

Syvanda added,  “She wanted to leave, you know? They think she might have gotten a bottle out to her father”—a note slipped past to a bulker captain.

His breath held up in his mouth. He exhaled. “So Hasco had her . . . cut? As punishment?” The bulker captain still kept agents here, even after they tried to kidnap Daphia Ulden, the chief’s daughter.

Syvanda shrugged. “Probably.” She sighed. “So much terrible things go on out here and no one seems to want to do anything about it.”

How did Ganton figure into this? Being the boss of his little gang, he put these jobs together. What did Ganton care about a cut up doxy that didn’t work for the Ravens? Hell, when did he care about whores period? Kariden figured he could slash Thessa’s face and Ganton would laugh. And why did he need her father killed? Just to stop him from taking her? To send a skumping message to Hasco? What kind of message would that be? There were more strands in this tangle.

And which girl was it? Kariden had seen a few in his mission briefing. He bit down on his lip.

He wanted to ask her more, but he didn’t want pique her curiosity as to why he was asking more. There were other ways to get that information from her, without her knowing. Syvanda might not do to learn the truth.

 

She was a good throw around the bed, Kariden had no doubts about that. And Syvanda didn’t mind doing some throwing herself. He concluded that it wasn’t a matter of if, but when her bed would give way and drop her and whoever she was skumping to the floor.

He railed, their bodies pressed together, slick from a sheen of sweet. He cradled her head and face in the deep pillow as she yelled her pleasure near his ear, gasping for breath. He wondered how much of her actions were real and how much were show. It was a passing interest. She didn’t seem to notice the interest his fingers had in her scalp.

His weave had pushed its wirve endings out, penetrated her skin painlessly, and entangled with her own weave. Her sensations ghosted over his. She gasped at the shock of the shared pleasure, feeling what he felt mixed with her own sensations, as did he of hers.

Syvanda giggled from ecstasy. “Never. Done this,” she breathed against his cheek. “Intense.”

He used the overwhelming shared experience to mask his true intention and seeped intrusive code into her network, hiding his presence from her higher functions and awareness. He sipped from her memories, gathering all she had stored in her weave’s fluid cache concerning the man he assassinated and the abused daughter he sought to save.

Now he knew which girl had suffered, and in particular which brothel she had worked in the Vine’.

Syvanda shuddered against him with a long howl, the heels of her boots digging into his lower back.

 

---

Part 2

 

 

Genesis Part 4: Welcome to Mercator
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.

Genesis Part 3: Tripp, his crew, and enemies
Topic: Genesis

Ah, the good captain Tripp . . . yes, as in one of the many names of Stephen King’s superflu in “The Stand”, except my captain doesn’t kill you with a head full of snot.

This is my first trip to Mercator, and I don’t even get out of orbit. In fact I was so involved in learning myself some orbital mechanics, that I put a little too much orbital mechanics in the story. As this story was created in February 2009, I do not know how much of this incomplete mess is going to survive. The original story surrounding this event has changed so much I don’t know what I would keep. Also the characters born in those words have also evolved.

Mil Kariden is presented as a crewmember aboard Tripp’s ship with a mysterious past. Raum is also present, but his character is a bit aloof, and who Raum is now in my mind is not the same person. Daphia was created here first, not as Kariden’s love interest but as Raum’s main woman (by her choice), who may have had some dalliances with Tripp that had gone rather sour. Daphia was also meant to be older and inspired by German rocker Doro Pesch.

This story has not been finished and it is not streamlined.

 

"You gonna vent that?" Captain Obrius Tripp asked the engineer flying his ship.

The other man's eyes and hands dashed from instrument to instrument and control to control as he sat in the pilot's station engaging switches and tapping options on display panels. Droker looked ridiculous wearing his oversized data overlay goggles. He threw a quick glance back at the captain sitting in his oversized chair on a raised platform in the center of an arc of clustered control stations. Tripp pointed with his head to the empty station to Droker's right. All the other five stations were empty as well, their controls dark.

Droker jerked his head around, saw the bright illuminated warning lamp. "Oh shitshitshit," he stammered reaching over and toggling a few switches, fingers barely reaching. He had to get out of his chair and nearly lost his footing scrambling to the other station to activate the purge. "Codus Iman," he swore in a voice strained and high pitched from age, registering the pressure in the cascade fusion vessel. He opened magnetic valves to redirect the plasma surge. "Sorry 'bout dat, cap'n."

Captain Tripp shrugged, his huge shoulders crinkling leather, as the engineer slipped back into the pilot's station. "It's only the flowback relief manifold. We would've only died just a little bit."

Droker shook his head not finding it the least bit funny. "I'm but one man, I can't do all this shit meself."

If it got too overwhelming for Droker, Tripp would lend the man a hand. Droker just happened to be the type that was quite entertaining when he was wound tighter than a clock spring. "You're doing fine," Tripp said looking at the deep screen wrapped around most of the small flight deck.

The display gave him a realtime view of space ahead and to the sides of the lumbering Chariot of Abraxis, a Rothstone class bulker that had just exited it own intersystem sphere-hole. A pre-calculated entrance point set them on a desirable orbit that would place them within rendezvous range of their destination. Ahead, the thin crescent of an ugly little planet loomed, the light of its red giant sun dimmed by the deep screen's processors.

Mercator.

It was never a pleasant visit.

Tripp had been twirling a mindset by one thin arm between finger and thumb. He clamped the end of the arm between his teeth as he adjusted his long, red, unkempt hair before placing the mindset snug against the back of his head. He accessed the communication system with a thought and waited. His channels were open but no one seemed interested in hailing.

The deep screen began overlaying data blocks near the objects that the ship's sensors and library could identify. The flight control system highlighted their predicted trajectory in a long green arc that curved around the limb of the planet. A disc on that arc, like a knot in a string, fast approached from near the planet's curve. Droker, busy with some other pressing detail, didn't notice. The captain asked, "You gonna spin us around before or after we hit the apo?"

"What," Droker groaned looking up. He let out a deep sigh. "Iman please," he muttered, cuing up ship's attitude systems. "Gawdammed automatics! That's whacha auta fix." He coursed power through a set of linear coils running through the center of the Chariot's slender midship. Exotic fields did something otherwise unnatural to gravity and the truncheon-like ship began to pivot, bringing its single, bell mouthed engine to point toward the planet beyond.

"Someone's got to watch the screen." Tripp reminded. "Besides, what are they gonna think if they call and I'm not sitting in the command chair?"

Droker waved a hand to shoo the thought away. "Doan mean nuttin. Doan mean a gawdammed thing, if's ya asx me."

"I've learned not to ask you some time ago. Doesn't seem to do any good."

Droker snorted. Another light on the other station caught his attention. "Bleedin Iman," he said under his breath getting up to avert another possible crisis. "I doan belong up here, settin all dees switches and pushing buttons."

Tripp stifled a laugh.

"Need to git back to da engine room where I know waddahell I'm doin."

"We're working on that," the captain said.

Droker returned to his chair, pulled the goggles off and rubbed the bridge of his beakish nose. "Headin into a clustafug is what we're doin. A gawdammed clustafug! Prolly worse than last time."

"Well, yeah," Captain Tripp agreed. "We do seem to follow a pattern."

Droker huffed, looked out at the enlarging, blood-red crescent. "Fuggin Mercator." He shook his head slowly, "Every fuggin time." He released a deep sigh that sagged his whole body.

Captain Tripp shared the old spacer's sentiments.

 

 

The engine fired when they hit the highest point in their orbit. The Chariot rumbled and both Tripp and Droker kept their eyes affixed to the deep screen's projected orbit trajectory. The wormhole deposited them on a higher orbit than their destination, giving them a greater velocity to catch their target. They were lowering their current orbit to arrive at their destination soon after the next burn. The screen identified other orbital traffic but nothing took an interest in them.

Yet.

The flight deck's rear door opened. Kariden stepped in, heaving the door closed behind him. Tripp threw a quick glance over his left shoulder. The thin and wiry man wore his side arm and had a laser pulse rifle slung across his back. He looked spoiled for a fight, and was probably the only one of the small crew that enjoyed actually visiting Mercator. He still complained on occasion, as if to hide his true feelings.

"Rail guns are ready," he said slinging off the rifle and propping it against the control station where he then sat. He engaged his panels, calling up the weapons system control.

"Just be careful you don't spook anyone," Tripp said. The captain hot miked the intercom. "How 'bout you Logan, see anything the sensors miss?"

Logan, the youngest crewmember at thirteen, sat in the observation cupola that had deployed to a point higher than the firing ring for the sphere-hole inflation system. "Nada, boss," he piped, peering through binocular goggles. "Doesn't look like anybody's sensor masking themselves." Other than using his eyes, he was checking the sensor array's returns for any malicious data streams that could take over their scanner readings.

Above the boy, Mercator hung like a bloated blemish against the perfection of the cosmos. The sun's ugly light tinted the heavy cloud coverage with a smear of yellows and oranges. The clouds released a perpetual rainfall against rocky landmasses nearly devoid of biota. The roaring oceans were a brackish green from oxygen laden minerals. Despite this there were sprawling cities under its nominal pressure and breathable air.

Lawless cities.

Governed by the strongest.

Three circles flashed on the left of the deep screen across the face of the planet. In the center of them were tiny ships, too small to be discerned from their distance. They had swept the Chariot with radar. "Looks like someone taking an interest in us," Tripp mused, pulling at his beard.

"Counter screens are ready if they want to take a pot shot at us," Kariden said never looking up at the main display.

Droker shook his head, "Oh they aint goan wais nuthin. Woan do'm no good. Bank on it."

Captain Tripp said nothing but watched the deep screen. Raum wouldn't let anyone attack them. He would enact a punishment far worse than Tripp could mete out. Raum owned Mercator. "Let's just take this easy," the captain advised as he watched the russet planet grow as their orbit drew them closer. They were headed toward periapsis backwards so Mercator's limb began to take up most the upper side of the deep screen.

Logan's voice came over the intercom. "Someone's trying to sensor decoy us."

"Do what you got to do," Tripp ordered.

"I think they are trying to test us," Logan said. "I've isolated the hostile code. I put our colors on it and sent it back out."

Captain Tripp chuckled. "I'm sure they'll appreciate that."

Kariden threw him a fat, knowing grin. "Giving 'em porn?"

 Tripp knew that if the other ship's techs were any good, they'd stop the malware. "Don't reply with anything destructive," He told Logan. "We don't want to piss off anyone."

"Don't worry, sir. I got it under control." Logan had nothing further to say.

Nearly a half hour of mind numbing waiting passed before the periapsis marker strobed a bright green on the deep screen. "Comin up on peri," Droker called out. The countdown numbers cycled by the marker. Upon intersection, the engine automatically fired. A look down diagram in the right upper section of the deep screen showed their orbital path shrink from the subtle elliptic to something near circular. The engine shut off and Droker had the mighty Rothstone class about face. Mercator's cloudy surface grew across the screen as the ship took it's time pivoting.  It dominated the lower half once they stopped. Droker rolled the bulker so that their zenith would face the planet giving Logan a better view of the orbital space between them.

Raum's orbital station, waited a several kilometers away.  Droker targeted the station as a destination point and the Chariot automatically performed the maneuvers for rendezvous. Tripp tapped his knee with an anxious finger as the space station grew larger and more clearer. He wanted to get this over with, and even as fast as space travel was, there was no rushing it.

The cylindrical station stretched a kilometer long and half that wide, its surface punctuated with antennae and weapon placements. The dark blemish of Raum's sigil became more clearer as they approached. A large, black bird with extended wings, head turned to the left with a red beak, emblazoned across the forward section of the hull. The bird's body was enclosed in a black circle with two short parallel bars intersecting the center of its lower, left quadrant, the wings and tail feathers extending beyond the ring. The art appeared as if stenciled, militaristic and oppressive. The Chariot of Abraxis locked onto the docking signal and began to make maneuvers to place itself before the forward maw of the ominous station.

The open tube of Raum's orbital lair was an depressing expression of cubism. Along the inner curves of the surface an unimaginative cityscape of rectangular prisms devoid of any lighted windows crowded one another as if fighting for space. It always reminded Tripp of an ugly geode that had the potential to be a beautiful work of engineering art had it not been so prosaically utilitarian. The internal structures were buildings of massive scale, designed to house millions of people, but now it was mostly abandoned, the spoil of some long forgotten war. It had become an enclave of criminals. As they moved in orbit, the red light of the sun—a star the locals called "Boiler"—flooded the interior of the station, its orange glow lending the illusion that everything inside had caught fire. Three tall building at the mouth of the station met each other at a central cubic node. The bulker aligned with this node, its shadow small and insignificant against the cityscape.

"Ara'Zarak," Kariden murmured, calling out the station's name in something like awe. He unconsciously rubbed a scar on the left side of his jaw. "Home of Raum and his Death Ravens."

"Clustafug," Droker reminded everyone turning toward the security officer, "Like I dun toll da Cap'n."

"It's worst than that," Kariden said distantly.

"No matter," Captain Tripp called, "we are here to do a trade. We do that, we leave."

The deep screen suddenly drew a red circle around an orbital shuttle that had launched from the station's central complex. A data block annotated the shuttle's orbital elements. It came to meet them. "That must be our hostage," Tripp said. "Extend the port docking jetty for our guest."

"Wonder who he's sending over?" Kariden asked.

"No idea," Tripp murmured. "I hope it someone important." He mentally activated the mindset's communication set. "Bolan."

The man's serious and eager face bloomed into Tripp's visual field. "Yessir," Kariden's lieutenant answered.

"Meet me in the port dock. Hostage coming aboard."

"Aye sir," he gave a curt nod and disappeared.

Captain Obrius Tripp stood, his leather garments creaking, and dark red hair flowing over his shoulders. He glared at the Ara'Zarak. "You got it Kariden," he said turning, sharing a glance with the man, and walking to the flight deck's door. Droker shouted after him, something about Raum's people never seeing him sitting in the command chair. They never even called, for that matter.

The designers of the Rothstone bulker arranged the habitable decks along the inner curving walls, floors pointing towards the center, which posed no problems with the psuedo-gravity fields saturating the decks. The crew typically kept the gravity off in the arcing cross corridors. The halls were tight, almost coffin shaped in cross-section with round ceilings. Tripp made his way around, pulling on hand rails until he reached the two-seventy deck. The captain advanced under gravity toward the docking room at the end of the hall.

He stepped in. Bolan stood ready, armed to the teeth with an assortment of weapons, kinetic side-arms, pulse lasers, and knives. Maybe it was overkill. Maybe it wasn't. The mercenary kept his watchful eyes on the display, monitoring the closing shuttle. Tripp took a place behind the man. They said nothing.

The ship's sensor system identified the shuttle as a Holdfast type, shaped like two truncated cones butted at their bases, its faded yellow hull cratered with the oval pits of attitude thruster channels. A mating tube sank into the front of the four passenger craft. The retros fired bright staccato bursts. The shuttle softly docked.

Moments later the craft's door opened and a figure stepped over the threshold. Tripp shook his head recognizing the person. Bolan opened the door on their side. The woman stepped carefully in.

Her former beauty had been worn haggard by drug use. She had tried to look her best but her blonde hair exploded in chaotic disarray. Her clothing said she had a thing for leather as well, not for protection but for raunchy sexuality. The left side of her jaw had been marred by a tattoo of two short bars pointing to her mouth: the mark of Raum.

"Hello, Daphia," Tripp said crossing his arms. Bolan had a side-arm out, directing it away from her but ready it bring it to bear.

She glowered at the captain, "Why do you always seem to come into my life?"

Tripp shrugged, "I don't plan this shit."

Daphia cast Bolan a dirty look, then returned her scrutiny to Tripp. "Well, this shit still happens anyway doesn’t it?"

Raum had sent his main woman. That boded well. It meant Raum was actually being serious and the trade had not turned into a trap. Unless he and the little woman had a falling out and she had become expendable.

He hoped not.

Tripp asked, "So, how is he?"

Daphia cocked her head back. "Let me see the cargo first."

Captain Tripp sighed, then reached into his jacket's inner pocket and pulled out an ornate mechanical scroll. He pulled the tubes apart revealing a thin flexible sheet of nanoleaf. Pressing a button on the side of the scroll called up the cargo manifest.

The woman gave it a cursory glance. "Don't show me that. I want to see the cargo for myself."

Tripp then noticed the mindset buried in her hair. Of course, Raum was watching through her eyes and listening through her ears. He closed the scroll, shoved it back into his coat. "Let's go."

The three of them made their way to the three-fifteen cargo racks inside the spacious hold via the nearest circumferential corridor. They descended a ladder well, absent gravity, onto an enclosed pier butted against a pressurized cargo container. The container had a side door that was mated to its partner on the pier. Tripp gestured with an open hand toward the door.

Daphia studied it with trepidation as Bolan approached the door and cycled both open. He stepped in with side-arm extended, his face dour. Daphia glanced back at Tripp uncertain if she really wanted to see the cargo. She startled suddenly, then marched toward the door.

Tripp speculated that Raum reprimanded her via the mindset. He watched her step into the door, glance around into the dim interior of the container. She drew a hand to her mouth. Tripp looked away, his anger building.

Daphia stepping back into the pier, with Bolan following her. "Satisfied," Tripp asked.

Her voice had a hard edge, the tone of a person forced into something they despised. "Raum is." She stared into Captain Tripp's stony face. "He's ready to receive you. And the cargo."

Tripp grabbed her upper arm, squeezing it like a iron band. He bent down, eyes burning like hell. "You tell me what I want to know," he growled.

Daphia grimaced, tried to yank away. "He's fine."

He jerked her, squeezing harder. "Alive?"

Her face melted into pain. "Yes," she groaned through clenched teeth. "Raum'll—"

Tripp let go of her. "Kill me if I hurt you?" He glanced around then locked his eyes back on hers. "What more can he do to me," he shouted pointing toward the container beyond the wall. "What more can he fucking do?"

He forced himself calm. "Let's get this over with," he said to Raum through her. He turned to Bolan. "Put her in a holding cell."

 

Tripp took one of the Chariot's maintenance pods over to the Ara'Zarak. He would be Raum's hostage. The mouth of the station looked huge from his ship's flight deck, but it yawned agoraphobically enormous from the view ports of the pod. He passed through the pressure membrane stretched across the opening of the hangar, into the place Daphia's shuttle had launched.

Articulated robotic arms reached out to him, their magnetic end effectors contacting the pod's receptive plates. They spun and backed the bulbous craft into a docking collar. Tripp set the controls to stand-by and unclipped his harnesses. He could use a drink and planned to get excessively drunk when this was over. Hunched, he stepped through the tight confines of the pod through a hold designed to haul equipment and components for outer hull repairs. He opened the aft hatch and stepped into the realm of Raum and his band of Death Ravens.

The room was a dark place, lit by failing wall sconces. Four guards raised pulse laser rifles at him. Four? Was he that dangerous? Behind them, standing in shadow stood a giant nearly seven feet tall, a wall of lean muscle.

"Obrius Tripp," the man said, his voice deep and booming. He stepped into a cone of light. Raum was dark skinned and broad nosed. The apaxan species had deposited his people on a hot world and they had adapted both naturally and by genetic design to cope with the temperatures. He wore his hair dreadlocked, long past his shoulders. His hazel eyes were darkly outlined and under his left eye slashed tattooed short parallel bars. Raum's broad chest was bare except for a leather vest adorned with a red version of his emblem. Leather bracers covered his forearms, the right holding a knife in its spring-sheath. A belted pair of nanofiber pants and heavy combat boots completed his attire.

"Where's Crash?" Tripp asked.

Raum tossed a balled up sheet of nanoleaf to the captain. Tripp snatched it out of the air and pulled it open. He stared down at a realtime feed of a large coffin. Crash couldn't be dead. Strength began to run out of his knees. "She told me he was alive."

"He still is," Raum admitted. "For how long depends on you."

Tripp used an icon on the sheet to stiffen the nanoleaf. The coffin was a medical stasis transport litter. Tripp accessed the boxes health monitors and saw that Crash's brain activity was almost nonexistent. He couldn't determine why. "What have you done to him?"

"Nothing your medicoids can't reverse."

Tripp nodded. He accessed his mindset as he balled up the nanoleaf. Kariden's face overlaid much of Raum, and Tripp turned to keep the man in his peripheral vision. "Send the cargo over." His security chief affirmed the order and disappeared.

Tripp faced Raum and tossed the nanoleaf back.

Raum caught it, squeezing it like a toy. "Was that Mil Kariden?" he asked. Tripp said nothing. "It's a shame, really," Raum portended. "That you would have one of mine. I should have one of yours."

Obrius Tripp didn’t like the sound of that. "He wasn't one of yours when he signed onto my crew."

Raum rolled his head back, keeping his eyes on Tripp. "They are always mine. Always." He began to chuckle at Tripp discomfort. "Don't worry my good Captain. A deal is a deal. They will make a fine addition to my home."

"I'm sure they will," Tripp returned in monotone.

"Let's go wait on them, shall we?"

Tripp shrugged. What else could he do?

He followed Raum into another section of the hangar complex, to the place where the cargo container would be received. He was thankful they waited in silence.

The container finally made it across the expanse of space between the ship and the station. The robotic arms pulled into place and soon a guard had the side doors opened. Two guards rushed inside, shouting fiercely for the occupants to depart. Screaming and sobbing echoed out the open door and Tripp had to look at the floor.

A gun barrel jabbed him in the back. "Keep your eyes up," the guard shouted.

Tripp watched as frightened, young women and girls processed out of the door. He had been forced to acquire these girls. Raum would press them into prostitution.

Just to get Crash back.

He felt sick.

Raum grabbed one out of the line. He studied the distraught woman, groped a breast and slapped her butt as she sobbed and begged not to be hurt. Then pushed her back into the line as they were being filed out into another room. He turned to Tripp. "Well, well. Looks like you've done good."

Anxiety and adrenaline had Tripp jittery. He took a series of calming breaths. He wanted to get Crash, and get a drink. A lot of them. "I think I've fulfilled my part of the deal."

"Yes," Raum agreed coldly. "Better than I expected."

Tripp said nothing. He wouldn't push it. Men like Raum could change their mind in a heartbeat just for sport.

Raum spoke into the room, using his mindset, "Send Crash to Captain Tripp's pod." He looked at the captain and nodded his head to the door. "Let's go."

Tripp followed him back around to where his pod was berthed. When they arrived, the stasis litter sat on the floor like a refrigerator. Even so, he imagined they had to squeeze the bulk of the man into the thing. Tripp stood over it looking down at the monitor that revealed Crash's vital signs in waves of green lines. The computers were saying the man was fine, but Tripp felt no relief. He'd rather his pilot be standing on his own two feet.

Then again, Crash would have attempted to kill everyone in this room.

He recalled when he first met Crash, back home on Derelict Junction. He entered a bar to scout for crew and walked into an all out brawl. A mountain of flesh in the center of a ring of drunken fighters hunkered down and turned slowly, head and eyes darting, massive hands ramming into skulls of foolish advancers. Tables were up-ended, chairs smashed, the floor wet and slippery from blood and drink. The man held his own in the mêlée against him until those foes remaining with the ability to stand fled. Tripp could use the services of a bruiser and extended the offer to join his small crew. Turned out Crash had better skills that using his fists as battering rams. The man could pilot a ship like no one better.

Tripp felt an arm fall across his shoulder. Raum leaned in like an old friend and Tripp wanted to squirm away. "Before you go," Raum said, "I want you know that you are no longer welcome here. Return to Mercator, and you will die." He paused to let the words sink in. "I'll kill you myself." He clapped Tripp hard on the back and stepped away, gesturing for one guard to approach the litter.

Tripp stood at the front of the medical device and bent to grasp the handle. He looked up expecting the guard to do the same on the other end but Raum laughed.

"I'm not giving you the stasis litter. That wasn't part of the deal. Get your man out and get off my station."

"He could die," Tripp yelled. The guard slung his gun over his shoulder and began to lift the lid. Tripp put a hand on it to stop him.

Raum shook his head. "Then you better be fast getting him back to your boat."

Tripped hated it but he didn't have time to argue. He slammed the lid open. Alarms on the litter began to cry. Crash had been shoved in there. His shoulders were rolled forward, big meaty arms flopped on his sides. Tripp reached down to get his hand under the man's armpits. The guard had an better time with his feet. It would have been easier to get him out by tipping the litter on his side and rolling him onto the floor, but Tripp managed to heave his mass out. Raum could have made it less difficult by lowing the gravity, but that was asking for too much.

They got the huge pilot into the maintenance pod. Tripp had no where to put him so he secured him to the cargo floor. The guard lingered. Tripp growled, "You're finished. Get the fuck out of here." The guard snorted and left.

Tripp cycled the door shut and stood behind his seat. He beat on the seat's back and shook the poor thing, wanting to rip it from its mooring and throw it across the cabin. "Motherfuckers," he spat through clenched teeth climbing into the seat and fastening his harness. He stabbed his comm system on, "Kariden, we are going need a medicoid at the MP dock."

The robotic arms pulled his craft away from it berth and released him. The pod automatically followed its back course.

"Those sons of bitches! What did they do to him."

"I don't know. He's a vegetable at the moment. Raum said we should be able to revive him."

"Should be?" Kariden paused. "You want me to hold Daphia?"

"No. Send her home. We're done with this fucking place."

Hopefully for good.

He passed Daphia as she headed to the Ara'Zarak. He shot her an obscene gesture she had no way of seeing. It was a cowardly act but tensing his hand and fingers under the stress of his anger felt good.

He docked. Mil Kariden and the medicoid were waiting. The medical machine with virtual intelligence and a nanofluid surface entered the pod and administered to Crash where he lay. It did a quick scan, broad leaf like sensors sweeping over the man. Prehensile appendages pressed their applicator ends to his flesh and shot medicines and microbots into his blood stream from stores inside its body.

The medicoid spoke in a sexless voice, "He has suffered a drug overdose. The microbots will begin repairing cellular damage. It's imperative that you get him to the medical bay."

'No shit," Tripp muttered.

"I got the gurney sack ready," Kariden stated from out in the hall.

"Good," Tripp said, shutting down the gravity field from the pod to the sick bay with his mindset. He released Crash, and Kariden helped him stuff the oversized man into the gurney sack.

"It must have taken a lot of Venom to do this to him," Kariden observed.

They floated Crash to the medical bay where other medicoids were waiting. They strapped him down to a bed and Tripp reengaged the gravity along their route. There was nothing more he could do for Crash, and no orders to give the medicoids, they knew what to do. He wanted to stay by Crash's side, but they had things to do yet. "Let's get back to the flight deck," he said to Kariden barely above a whisper.

There, Tripp settled into his command chair, the security chief doing the same. Droker fidgeted at his controls as if he were itching and had no means to scratch. He was happy to have the captain return. "Thays got thay's guns trained on us," he said.

Tripp dismissed him. He ordered, "Initiate an orbital plane change, give me ninety degrees to the solar ecliptic. Then I want a high acceleration burn to put us into a long elliptic. And calculate a sphere-hole exit somewhere just outsystem. We'll figure out what to do from there."

"Codus bleedin Iman," Droker cursed, trying to figure out where to start. "Toljer it would be a clustafug."

"If you tell me it’s a clusterfuck one more time and I will strangle you," Captain Tripp warned. He had a better idea and stood up and stepped forward.

Droker turned around, mouth agape expecting to be beaten.

"Get out of here," Tripp barked. "Get down to the engine room. I'll take care of this."

Droker fumbled with his harness and beat a fast retreat off the flight deck. Tripp took the seat, began punching in commands. He contacted Logan. "Retract your roost and get down to the deck. I need you here."

"Right away sir," the boy called.

Tripp turned around to Kariden. "As soon as we stop acceleration, I want the port and starb'rd guns satelled. Just in case."

The other man nodded. "You got it."

Tripp turned away, focused on his piloting and navigation tasks. "I hope you don't have any unfinished business here. I doubt we'll be seeing Mercator again."

Kariden chuckled, "It hasn't been home for a while." He could see that Raum had really gotten to Tripp. There was no need to ask what happened aboard the Ara'Zarak. He supposed that Crash's little misadventure had gotten them banned from the system. Now they'd have to plow around the lesser systems of the Pavona Expanse. You survived in space by picking your battles. And they sure as hell didn’t have the fire power to take on Raum and his Death Ravens.

Not by a long shot.

Tripp would rather make the inclination change at their apoapsis where it would be more fuel efficient to pivot. The deep screen showed that several on orbit craft had a radar interest in them and he didn’t want to perform any maneuver that could be predicted to give anyone the chance to initiate an intercept. That, and the node was many minutes away and he didn’t want to wait.

"Droker," he called over the mindset, "where are you?"

"Aw-mos'd dere," he panted.

"I'm going to need as much power on those coils for a rapid rate of rotation."

"Aye."

"As in disengaging the safeties," Tripp added.

Kariden turned to him, "That'll effect the paranodal shields if we need them."

"I know," the captain spat.

Logan entered the flight deck and immediately jumped into the seat of his control station. He brought his station up fast, trying to clear his mind of the thoughts of doom than ran unbridled. We're not going to die, we're not going to die. Just do your job. He grabbed a mindset from off the control panel, extended a cable from the station, and plugged it in before wrapping it around his head. He entered the ship's sensorium and without a command from the captain began to wage electrodataic warfare.

Tripp heard Droker's voice over the mindset. "Aw-rite, I'm doin wacha's asx'd. Be a moment fer yer ready."

The captain switched over to the intercom to address the rest of the small crew, "Everyone strap in." He had the commands cued and ready to go, gave everyone a few seconds to at least find seats, and executed the ship's attitude change.

A moan rumbled out of the deckplates and bulkheads, the overhead lights flickered and dimmed, went out completely, then sputtered into emergency mode. Warning tones wailed as stress sensors tripped. The deep screen projected a list of minor system failures. The Ara'Zarak appeared to roll away and the blighted face of Mercator heaved sickeningly as the mighty bulker positioned itself for an inclination change burn. The fields reversed to brake their momentum and the Chariot of Abraxis lurched, sending her crew into nauseous vertigo until they settled.

Wasting no time, Tripp advanced the engine's throttle to full thrust. The numbers denoting the inclination angle began to increase. Tripp silently urged the numbers on, though there was nothing else he could do to make them go faster.

Genesis Part 2: Hit and Miss
Topic: Genesis

In late January of 2009, I was seeking a new plot to replace the war conflict of the original idea. “Deeper Self” was exploratory in nature putting down some ideas and seeing what stuck. It was here that I saw the apaxan and their Codus spokesmen more clearly, and to date, nothing of the apaxan or the Codera have changed much.

The story had a lot a good scenes, but they were mostly unnecessary for what was going on. The premise was that Codus Thellamond Cosundi was exceptionally aged, and needed a body transplant, in that a new body had been grown for him and his brain was to be removed and placed in the new and younger body. The problem was that I had he and his assistants sneaking around on Pavona to do the deed, and for some unstated reason they didn’t want anyone to find out, so there was a lot of subterfuge and false purposes whose only goal was to set up intrigue for reader.

Honestly, a transplant could have been done on the apaxan spacecraft (adyta), or on an Allodian (human machine) craft or world. Technically, within the bounds of the fictional universe, there was no reason for venturing to Pavona and risk discovery or capture. So I shit-canned the story.

This is the birth place of Codus Cosundi and Wisty (“The Renegade”). These two characters will be prominent in tales after the “Order of the Raven” series. The world of Mercator is also first mentioned here.

What follows are excerpts from “Deeper Self” that are central to the development and exposition of these characters.

 

 

He dressed in the uniform common to all Codera, a black fullsuit whose invisible nanoseams made the ensemble appear as one garment, including boots.  Over this he wore a tailored, black jacket of which the tall collar wrapped around his neck and throat like a band.  It hid the neuronal pores at the base of his skull.  The wine colored lapels were filigreed with swoops of arcs and acute angles, an iconographic language that identified him to the Gloud conglomerate.

Cosundi strode alone at an unhurried pace down the wide main corridors of the Marklunder class starship toward the transportation complex.  Personnel paused when they saw him, reminded of the strange passengers they carried.  He suspected they wondered why these apaxans didn't have their own starcraft.  None dare ask as they stared with awe and trepidation.  They didn't know whether to be blessed or cursed.

The transportation complex wasn't as busy as he expected.  No one sat waiting on the lounges.  Four people kept themselves busy at two control hubs.  Another man, standing idly by, perked up upon noticing the Codus.  He came dashing over, dressed in a blue-gray fullsuit, hair trimmed short against his skull, his youthful face betraying a wide measure of inexperience of the greater world.

The young man put on a broad smile and nearly genuflected.  "Codus Thellamond.  Your carriage is ready sir."

Cosundi nodded curtly.  Sudden fatigue from the walk washed over him.  The lounges beckoned.

The man continued, "Your biometrics have already been processed, so there will be no wait at all.  If you'll come this way?"

"Very well," the old man said.  He could rest in the carriage.  The young man led him past the control hubs through a large open doorway into a stretching jetty.  The pressure doors rumbled, closing behind them.

"I'm Becknold Timmoriad, your assistant and guide down on Pavona."

Cosundi gave him a quick glance.  He would need no guide, but said nothing.  It was best if Timmoriad knew as little as possible.  The assignment of an aid was to be expected, but Timmoriad was not going to follow him around like a puppy.  "I assume you've been briefed?"

"Yessir.  Things should go smoothly, although—" he bit the sentence off chiding himself for letting his thoughts slip out.

"Although what," The Codus prodded.

Becknold stammered, "Um, well, we are surprised the apaxan are interested in the matter."

The apaxan weren't, Thellamond thought.  Only the Gloud were.  Keeping the other apaxan disinterested had demanded discreteness of terrible complexity.  He wondered who Becknold was talking about that expressed surprise in the Gloud's affairs, but didn't raise the question.  "These apaxan are interested," he said, offering nothing more.

Becknold nodded.  The old man wasn't going to divulge much.

They neared the end of the jetty where a male technician in an orange fullsuit and a mindset wreathed around the back of his head waited.  He had been leaning against the wall, and then stood ready as the Codus and his assistance neared.  The wall behind him puckered in the center forming a hole that bunched at the edge and grew wide, revealing the plush white interior of the carriage.

Timmoriad greeted the technician and helped the old man into the craft.  He pulled a folded mindset out of a breast pocket and placed it around his head before climbing into the vehicle.

"Departure in ten minutes," the technician said stepping back.  Then added, "Mind the wall, sir."

The assistant scooted over without thinking.  The hole in the curved wall of the carriage began to shrink, the rim smoothing and disappearing leaving no visible seam.

Cosundi knew the carriage was pill-shaped.  It was a small conveyance with a single bench seat with plenty of leg room.  There were no windows and a blank flat wall faced him.  A section of the curved ceiling cast a soft glow.  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes to relax.  The carriage began to gently vibrate.

"Have you ever been to Pavona?" Becknold asked.

Thellamond slit his eyes open and looked over at the young man.  "Are you serious?"  He closed his eyes again.  He'd been born on the planet, if his genesis could be called a proper birth.

"I'll take that as a yes."  Timmoriad tapped his leg.  He wasn't sure if all Codera were this antisocial, or just this particular old man, or, having seen so few, old men in general.  "What about Carthage?  The Vendale district?"

Thellamond kept his eyes closed.  "No.  Never been to that part of the planet," he lied.  To ward off any further queries he added, "I'm tired.  I'm not as spry as I once was.  Allow me some peaceful quiet."

It was as if Becknold didn’t hear.  "So you haven't taken advantage of treatments then?"

Cosundi sighed.  "Of course I have.  At some point they aren't effective anymore."

"Yeah, but it's supposed to be a couple of centuries or more before that's theorized to happen."  Becknold studied the Codus finding him to appear in his eighties.  The man slit his eyes again and met his stare, a condescending gaze reptilian in its coldness.  The young man swallowed.  "People don't generally live long enough for that to happen."

The delegate of the Gloud closed his eyes again and shifted his head.  "People aren't generally Codera.  Not another word unless it's your aim to talk me to death."

Taken aback, the young aid rolled his eyes.  "My apologies."  Timmoriad scratched under the right arm of his mindset, readjusted it.  He had nothing to do now but refresh his mind of the itinerary.   The data soaked into his brain, the information like strong memories, absolute knowledge.

A soft, sexless voice called out from some undisclosed location in the cabin, "Standby for sphere-hole injection."

Cosundi felt the acceleration.  The monorail carriage sped a short distance through a vacuum chamber.  The rail extended over a globular pit, through the center point of a ring of complex machinery hugging the curved walls of the cylindrical passage.  The carriage gently buffeted and began to slow, coming to an easy stop.

The carriage wall puckered and opened, revealing a similar jetty to the one they just left.  A technician stood waiting, a gangly young woman in a skin tight light-blue body suit wearing a muscle-like grav-assist exoskeleton.  Becknold climbed out.  He and the technician helped the Codus out of the carriage.  Cosundi gazed at the young woman barely into adulthood.  The exoskeleton stated she was a Mooner, but it was her strange beauty that drew his eye.  A beauty he would like to explore, just for the sake of doing it.  He almost reached out to touch her.

. . .

His aid had left hours ago.  The suite settled in darkness except for the light that streamed through the windows from the buildings outside.  He sat across from the door, dozing.  The Gloud waited, stirring in the deeper parts of his mind.

He heard soft footsteps in the hall.  They stopped at his door, then continued.  Thellamond waited less than a minute before standing and approaching the door.  Opening it, he found what he expected.  He pulled the bag inside and quietly shut the door.  He took the small duffle into the bed chamber, activated a soft lamp by the bed and placed the bag onto the wrinkled linen.  He pulled clothing out the bag, attire a typical old man would wear on the streets of Carthage.  He stripped off the fullsuit and donned the trousers and shirt, the walking boots, jacket, and cap.  He unfolded the collar of the jacket to hide his hideous pores.  He found a walking cane in the bag, extended it to its full length.  He took the flat stick of Pavonian currency and tucked it into a pocket inside the jacket.  Switching off the light, he left the room, then the suite.

Cosundi took an elevator to the ground floor.  He shuffled across the lobby unnoticed and stepped out onto the wide sidewalk.  People milled about.  Taxis were waiting.  He looked for number 482, found it near the back of the queue.  He walked to the car.  Through the glass he could see the driver wore a mindset though the vehicle had manual controls.  The driver discerned him, his face then showing approval.  The passenger door unlocked and popped ajar.  Cosundi pulled it open, slid inside, and secured the door.

The driver pulled out into the street and entered traffic.  Cosundi had a vague idea where they were going.  He recalled a map from the Gloud's memory.  Any deviation from the route and he would feel it as a knot of anxiety.  If that happened the driver would die.

It didn’t.

They drove out of the depths of the city into the squalid perimeter and stopped at a small grocery.  Off duty shift workers bustled about inside.  Cosundi handed the man the debit stick.  His fee was transferred and he took it back and got out of the taxi.  The car left as he entered the grocery.  He ambled around until he saw his contact browsing the meat section.

She was short and had the round flat face of Asian heredity, yet a genetic cocktail of non-Asian influence had sharpened her eyes, nose, and lips.  She wore her shimmering dark hair short, bangs just touching the tops of her unadorned eyes.  Black, vestment-like clothing hid her figure and covered her feet.  He stood next to her, picking up a package of ground meat that had been grown as nothing more than muscle in a genetic food farm.

She noticed the brand he chose as he inspected it.  She didn’t need the code act to recognize the wizened old man.  "I see that God's plan has brought us together," she said in a thick Pavonian accent he understood.

"I doubt God had anything to do with it," he muttered in the same, replacing the meat.

"Ye of little faith."  She flashed a coy smile and turned to leave.

Cosundi waited a few moments before following her.  He met her again outside on the shallow sidewalk just as she pinched the end of a cigarette, igniting it.  Few people walked around, tending to their own business.  She inhaled and blew out her nose, like a beast from prehistoric legend.

She watched the traffic make its slow stop and go way down the street and said, "I'm Wisty."

"Is that short for something?"  He asked as a laughing young couple walked by.

"Wisteria."  She took a long drag and blew it out slowly.  "Do you know what that is?"

"No idea."

"That's makes two of us."

A silence slipped between them.  He watched her smoke, intrigued by the vice and her delicate fingers.  "I believe we have something in common that merits our attention."

"That we do, the good Lord providing," she said looking up at him and squinting as she inhaled another lungful.  "This way, please."  She chucked the exhausted butt down amongst the rest of the trash scattered across the sidewalk.

They walked a block and slipped into a dark alley littered with odorous garbage.  He followed her through a winding narrow passage between buildings.  Fatigue set upon him, yet he soldiered on, the Gloud prompting his body.  They entered another alley and departed onto a deserted street.  He began to wonder if all this meandering was necessary.  After a few more blocks of walking, she led him into a slummy residential area.

Dangerous people prowled and stared out of shadows.  No one challenged them.  Wisty stopped at the address of a short shambled building.  An unlit stair led down into darkness.

"After you," she commanded.

Cosundi shuffled down the half flight of broken concrete.  He heard locks click, bolts throwing back.  The cold knob of the door turned easily and he stepped inside a dank ruin of a long forgotten home.  "Wonderful place."

"I figured the Gloud would appreciate the experience," she said after closing the door behind her, the locks clacking.

"That we do," he breathed taking in the dilapidated scene.  Humans could live anywhere.  The most brutal environments could be endured.   He reached out and touched the wall, feeling the hard edges of flaking paint and the grooved textures of worn sheetwood.  The Gloud were near rapturous in this human experience.  The apaxan mental map of the world differed greatly from human, attuned to other aspects of reality.  The residual Gloud in his mind had become addicted to this variety of the universe experienced by humans.  During unions, the actual Gloud only received a dull taste in comparison.

Wisty walked to a battered ancient wooden table where previously she had left a slim case.  She watched the Codus run his probing hands against many textures, then popped the latches.  Inside, snug in a foam cut-out, lay a mindset.  She lifted it gently, cupping the six hanging tendrils sprouting from the back of it.

Cosundi noticed the motion and turned to face her.  He spied the mindset.  "So it's true."  It came out a flat statement.

"Very much so," she answered, proffering the device.

He folded his collar down, rubbed the pores.  "If you'll help me," he asked taking the mindset. He dropped his cap on the table beside the security case.  Bending his neck, he placed the mindset around his head.  It fit snuggly.  Wisty carefully inserted the special tipped tendrils into each pore.  It was a strangely pleasant feeling, a hardwired reward for participating in union.

His mental command activated the mindset.  Cosundi's eyes fluttered and he sank to his knees.  Wisty caught him and helped him down, cradling his head in her lap.  With a loose fold of her clothes, she wiped drool from the corner of his mouth, whispering a prayer.

Codus Thellamond's body jolted and he went into a fit of coughing.  Wisty rolled him over on his side.  He cracked his eyes open, seeing the surreal shadows and splotches of dim light accentuating the loneliness and abandonment of the rundown apartment.  His taxed brain parsed the information delivered to him in flashes of hot memory.  He tried to tell Wisty he was fine, but the best he could manage was a harsh grumble.  She helped him sit upright.  His coughing subsided.  He shivered and reached a trembling hand up to the mindset.  Wisty helped him remove it, careful not to yank the tendrils from his receptive pores.

He shook his head as if to clear the fog in his mind.

Knowledge blossomed just under the surface of his consciousness as his brain developed new neural pathways.

The Gloud seemed distance within his psyche.  Churning.

Without turning to look at her, he said, "You're a human machine aren't you?"

To answer she stood up and pulled off her garments.  Still sitting on the cold, gritty floor he craned his neck around to see her.  The flesh beneath her neckline had an unnatural silvery sheen, like dull liquid metal with the texture of skin.  Her feet wore no shoes but became them, fading into black neat things below her ankles.  Wisty's small breasts were absent nipples, and her crotch was smooth, devoid of feminine detail.  He saw the color drain from her face as she squatted beside him.

The curiosity of the Gloud rolled like a serpent.

"Yes. I am a Therandian of the umashi race."

"The umashi," he whispered as the Gloud swelled.  "It's dangerous for you to be here."

"I know the risks."

"So why are you helping me?"  He rubbed his temples.  His brain would unlock its new secrets in due time.

He struggled to stand.  She helped him.  She was warm like any flesh and blood being.  He stared at her and cursed his old body for its infirmness.  That would change.

Wisty studied his old, frail body.  "We are the only ones that can, help you.  Discretely."  His eyebrows arched as he nodded.  She picked up her garments, throwing a straight leg out for balance, sure to know the Gloud were tracing its gracious lines with Thellamond's eyes.  She slid into the clothes noting his dour disappointment.  "You're not like other Codera." 

Cosundi saw her face flood with its previous color.  "In what way?"

"The other apaxan groups don't allow theirs to live to great age."   She fetched another cigarette and smoked solemnly.

He was aware of this.  Her interest was not in him per se, but the Gloud.  "The Gloud have their secrets. "  He studied her emotionless face.  "And you would like to plumb their depths."  He noted the almost imperceptible shrug she gave and chuckled.

"We want to understand the apaxan better.  That's all."

He watched her smoke, patiently waiting on his response.  A smoking machine.  So utterly human in this one act.  "Even I don't understand them."

Wisty looked away.  She studied the burning embers of the cigarette.  Thellamond's observation about her ethnicity reduced it to a useless prop.  She dropped it then crushed it under foot.  "Part of them resides within your mind, right?" she spoke, turning her head to face him.

He shuffled near her, lifted one bony knuckled hand to caress her smooth face.  She shifted away, and his hand remained raised.  "What we are is—"

New memory surfaced like bubbles breaking across water, severing his thoughts and speech.  His eyes closed and he let out a deep groan.  The facility was ready.

They were waiting on him.

"Are you processing," she asked with renewed interest.

"Yes."  He leaned his head back in the thralls of pleasure as he recalled things he had never done.  A token added to sweeten the deal.

"Is it anything that I know about?"

"No," came his raspy whisper.  Cosundi clutched the hook of the cane, hand like a claw.  He took a deep breath and let it out.  The episode passed, the details nothing he wanted Wisty to know.  "I must return to the hotel."

"Of course."  She guided him out of the domicile.

 

. . .

 

Within their adyta, the apax had assembled.  Each member coming from their daily routines and meeting in the central chamber.  They piled atop one another in a writhing mass, lateen like upper bodies with three, trice bifurcated tentacles sprouting equidistance from a fat ventral bulge.  Neuronic tendrils at the apexes of their fanlike surface probed and sank into neuronic pores of their neighbors.  Their minds began to connect, one after another until each member's identity weakened, supplanted by the emergent collective conscious known as the Gloud.  The Gloud was a mind that considered itself to be a single entity, merely composed of seventeen parts.  The thoughts of the individual members were too deep to be registered by the Gloud directly.  They merely formed the brain that contained its awareness.

The Gloud thought.  Its perceptions could recognize elements of the universe humans couldn't discern, and so it thought about things that no human could hope to comprehend.  The Gloud was aware of a strange hyperdimensionality quite near it.  The tantalizing elusive thing hovered just beyond the acute senses of its host amalgamate.   It's indescribable motion and behavior lead the Gloud to suspect that it may not be a natural anomaly in the convoluted lattice of spacetime—at least nothing it had ever experienced.  The Gloud concluded that if its senses were to be believed, the hyperdimensional variance may be acting under an intellect.  Without further conclusive evidence, it ignored this presence and directed it's calculating thoughts to the activities of its Codus and the plans upon his return.

Such thinking burned an abundance of energy and many hours later the Gloud grew tired and required sleep.  It had a vague notion that its rest period involved fragmentation into its constituent units.  Like union, the act of disunion was never an event it recalled with any clarity.

The apax abandoned the central chamber, ambling to their individual quarters through rough textured tunnels.  There they ate a puree of nutrients, straining the meal through their ingestive grills under the edge of their upper bodies.  During union they slept.  Fragments of the Gloud's thoughts filtered down into dreamlike interpretations.  For one apax, whose personal identifier, like all others, could not be translated into anything comprehensible, this dreamlike sensation awoke an ancient memory.  The memory had been chemically coded and passed on to it during its gestation.  The memory remained firmly buried, an abstract that refused to crystallize.  However the apax knew it had something to do with the Exodus, the epoch when their race saved humanity from extinction and deposited groups of humans sparse across the galaxy and time.

There were other things to do, so this apax put this fleeting memory away and settled into its daily routine.

. . .

It always felt cold in the adyta.  Like an underground crypt.  Here in the central chamber, Thellamond stared at the mass of apaxan joined in union, a slow writhing pile of alien bodies.  The apaxan filled the air with a chemical aerosol of odors, and sonorous moans and sighs, and wet coughs and slurps as they spoke to one another in their complex language.  Cosundi knew they also had a biological means to produce radio signals, the unnoticed addition to their speech.

His chair had risen from the floor as if it were passing through a membrane, the cell level machines that made up the adyta reconfiguring into a throne.   The Gloud shifted and a chain of three apaxan undulated toward the chair.

Cosundi took his seat which adjusted to his form and began to recline.  He lay his head back, his neuronic pores available through the oval opening at the back of the chair.  Two apaxan reached out with probing tendrils that brushed the skin of his neck like a lover's caress.  The tendrils slid into the pores.  Cosundi's sighed, his face relaxed.  His eyes fluttered.

The Gloud within him came rushing to the forefront of his consciousness like a tidal wave.  Cosundi felt himself slipping away, deeper and deeper, beyond the point of dreams, into the utter black void of oblivion.

When the dreams did come, they were a jumbled puzzle of partial information.  Only the Gloud within could speak to the Gloud proper and their method left his brain in disarray.  The dreams were bits and pieces of the things he had done since the previous union, all out of chronological order like a badly edited video.  Added to the mix were the confusing bits of data uploaded to the apaxan/human hybrid neural nodes that began restructuring neural pathways, the xenopsychogenic cognition percolating.

On the edge of waking, thoughts began to coalesce:  a short woman who appeared as something she was not.  She smoked.  Wisty.  A dark room of ruin.  The mindset, special built for Codera.

The facility.

He opened his eyes looking across his chamber as expected.  A time piece's baroque face announced several hours has passed.  The Gloud within had walked him into his room, as they did after each union.  He got out of bed and dressed, his uniform clean and fresh from its constant autocleaning function.  It was time to address the captain of the Grand Finesse.  The Gloud were finished with his services.

. . .

Codus Sedhal Doud and Wisty sat on separate lounges in a waiting room.  They had engaged in small talk, then Doud turned the conversation back to Thellamond.  He could see that Wisty held concern for the man.

"There's an interesting thing about Codus Thellamond," he started.

Her curiosity brightened.  "Which is?" she prompted.

Doud shifted on the lounge.  "He hasn't undergone fusion yet.  That's rare for a Codus of such longevity as his."

She frowned.  "Fusion?  What do you mean?"

"Oh, you don't know?  When a Codus is new, the interface with the apaxan collective consciousness leaves a portion of that group within the hybrid neural net.  All of us in the Codera Corps have a thin hybrid cortex layered over our own, and hybrid nodes throughout our brain.  This hybrid neural matter translates the apaxan perceptions into something humans can comprehend.  After a few unions, the apaxan persona extends into our brains, giving us a sort of split personality.  They will naturally merge over a course of time, and the fusion is mostly unnoticeable.  One day you realize that you aren't just a human that can communicate to apaxan, you are essentially a human apaxan."

. . .

"How soon can we load the adyta," Codus Doud asked the man sitting across from him at the desk.  Captain Obrius Tripp leaned his bulk back into the chair which creaked in protest.  Or it may have been the man's leather crying out.  He wore it everywhere: his long coat, his pants, his heavy boots, his studded wrist bands.

Tripp swept reddish tangled hair from his scruffy face.  "That depends on how inconspicuous you want it loaded.  There's a cradle here, but even under cover of darkness, someone's going to notice."  Doud opened his mouth to respond, but Tripp cut him off, "And you'll have to pay for it.  Of course."

Sedhal closed his mouth.  A berthing cradle for a ship the size of Captain Tripp's, a Rothstone class bulker, would cost more Pavonian tronums than he was willing to pay.  Doud ran the tip of his finger back and forth across his chin.  "That depends on if you don't want anyone seeing an apaxan craft loaded aboard your ship.  I doubt the Gloud care one way or the other."

Tripp sat forward, leather creaking, and clasped his meaty hands together on the desk.  He peered out from under his eyebrows, "I was under the impression that a modicum of secrecy surrounded this operation."

Doud regarded the big man.  "Not so much secrecy as privacy.  The Gloud would rather people not snoop into their matters.  I was assured that you were a captain renown for safeguarding the privacy of your charters.  Has this not changed?"

Tripp grinned.  "I think we understand each other."  He reached into his long coat's inner pocket and pulled out a thin scroll.  As he pulled the two ornate cylinders apart, a paper-thin sheet unfurled.  Captain Tripp studied the updating readouts of his ship's orbital data.  "Ten hours from now.  We're at Orbit Level Four."  He allowed the scroll to close and held it in his left hand.

Doud cocked his head, reached into his jacket pocket and removed a flat card.  He tapped the edge of it on the table before slapping it down in front of Tripp as if dealing a playing card.  "Five thousand tronums."  Cosundi would have the rest upon boarding.

Tripp buried it under his huge hand, sliding the electronic currency card towards him and tucking it away inside his coat pocket.  The scroll followed.  "If they're aren’t there.  We aren't waiting around."

"Of course," Codus Doud said as the captain stood.  Two umashi escorted him out of the room and to another landing deck to his shuttle.

. . .

They stepped through the door into the hanger where the Gloud adyta crouched.  The Mred ship was moving slowly under its own mysterious power, just off the deck, with a trio of umashi guiding it out an expansive door back into the other hanger.

Codus Doud greeted them, wearing a normal mindset.  They approached and the two Codera bowed their respects.  "You'll find Captain Tripp to be quite something.  He looks the adventurous sort."

"Perhaps," Cosundi said.  "I'm not paying for adventure so I hope he minds his financier."

Doud chuckled, clapping Cosundi on the shoulder.  "That he better."  He walked him to the adyta.

Wisty stayed behind, watching silently and sorting through what she had stolen from the Gloud.  She knew where they were going, but the reasons were still just beyond reach.  She saw the two men exchange farewells and Codus Thellamond stepped into the adyta as if a ghost walking through walls.  Sedhal Doud returned at a casual pace.  He stepped over the threshold of the massive hydraulic lift and she followed him back up into the control room.

The lift began to rise, preparing for the adyta's launch.

Wisty said, "He's going to Mercator."

"Mercator," Doud exclaimed whipping his head around to face her.  He turned around and studied a control monitor.  "Well, Tripp is certainly the man to take him into that—mess."

"Renegade Allodians?" she said frowning as if guessing.  He looked at her, hanging onto to the moment when she might glean something else.  She stared at his expectant face and shrugged.

He returned the shrug and went back to his control monitor.  "Mercator is certainly the place for renegade Allodians.  Your people are certainly stirring up trouble in that sector."

"They aren’t my people," she said fishing out a cigarette from her pants pocket.

 

Thellamond's bed had transformed into an acceleration couch.  He sat there as the rest of the room shrank around it.  The adyta configured itself for orbital insertion, the interior reorganized as the craft stretched into a slender conical missile.  His spacious room was now a closet.  The apax rooms were stacked and arrayed above and below him.  With the gentlest of motions he knew they were underway, climbing on a field of dark energy.  Within ten minutes they broke the atmosphere of Pavona and put themselves on an intercept orbit to meet Captain Tripp's Chariot of Abraxis.

The adyta became a creature of microgravity, reconfiguring into its simple cylinder shape.   Cosundi's room grew around him and the couch let him go, becoming his bed once again.  Lapping fields of gravity seeped from the floor, holding him at nominal force.  He busied himself with making the bed neat, then realized it was the habit of an old man.  He sat on it, then lay back, thoughts of Wisty coursing through his mind.

She had a thing for holding his head, keeping it where he pleasured her most.  He smiled and closed his eyes.  It would be nearly two hours before they berthed in the Chariot's hold.  Two hours.  Even the apaxan technology abided orbital mechanics.

. . .

 

Captain Tripp was just too interesting for me to let sit on the sidelines. In Part 3, I get him into the game.

 

 

Genesis Part 1: In the Beginning. . . .
Topic: Genesis

I find it interesting how ideas evolve, how they move on from original concepts I’m initially excited about to visions I hadn’t contemplated, and how major characters imagined are swept aside and others take center stage. I’d thought I’d share the process. So here is Part 1: In the Beginning. . . .

 

The seed of The Temperance Well spawned in July 22, 2008 with this idea:

. . . a moon, much like ours, with the exception that most of its face is dark leaving a rim of lighter material around the edge. Together with a prominent crater with ejecta rays, these features lend the moon its common and obvious name of "the Wheel". . . .

The story is one of First Contact of a sort. It is a far future story in which the colonization of an earthlike planet experiences technological regression after several hundred years. The setting is a mix of 19th century and much later. The plot centers around rediscovery of the planet by another group of humans seeking information this old colony may have of the Lost Worlds.

 

And later on August 6 of 2008 with this passage:

"Disaster!
Our very near future is shattered by the unexpected opening of a wormhole just beyond the Moon's orbit. Something very much like an asteroid has emerged from it at speeds very much approximating an asteroid's.
It is not an asteroid, but an apparently inoperable space going vessel on a collision course.
Humanity has but less than a few days. . .

Impact!
The large craft begins to burn up and disintegrate as it plows through the atmosphere. Most of it does, smaller pieces remain, raining down. The bulk of the craft explodes violently in an airburst of hundreds of megatons of TNT over the Pacific. A strange and mysterious powerful object survives! The several meters diameter spherical object hits the water blowing out a superheated cone of water/steam. It hits the ocean floor with tremendous force and buries itself deep into the crust.
It is not finished. It wondrous properties attract it to the gravitational center of the planet and it begins to move toward the core on a journey that will take it many hundreds of years to complete.

Apocalypse!
Millions are dead, thousands are dying. Ecological disaster! Economic collapse! All our petty problems are eclipsed by this global catastrophe.


Salvation!
It comes in the form of advanced intelligence, from beyond the reopened wormhole. They tell us the object that survived will kill the planet. It will shut down the core, it will cool the mantle, it will lock the tectonic plates. The planet will cool, become lifeless to humans.
They offer Exodus.

Thousands of years later, humanity has commandeered that alien technology. Someone is looking for the Lost Worlds, for the Earth remnant. For that mysterious powerful object. . . "

 

On the 17th of August, 2008, I expanded the idea of Kha, the hyperdimensional being seeking that mysterious powerful object.

 

Finding the Shards was tedious work. They were undetectable from his realm for the most part. He had traced the last one to a planet populated with nascent sapience. In his perspective that planet traveled a helix around the strand of its sun; it was a cable that stretched from its creation—an intertwining of smaller strands spiraling in wild helixes—to its end—a fraying of strands.

He had been directed to place near the middle of the sun's length. Moving in closer, the planet strand divided into two distinct cables, one a ribbon of moon. If he focused his senses toward the planet, he would detect a multitude of strands wrapping around it. Deeper down, the strand of the planet would resolve into billions of tiny interwoven filaments. His attention wasn't directed there.

From his vantage he moved, interested in the anomaly of strands that began in empty space and merged down to the planet, and sprang out again. Where they appeared and disappeared he knew was the phenomenon of the sphere-hole, which he could not see unless he moved beyondward where they appeared as a mass of tangled stretched tunnels.

One isolated strand grew out of the planet, reaching out just beyond the orbit of the moon. This would be the Jau'Tak craft the Apax where chasing, no doubt a part of their war coming to the unsuspected sapiens below.

The Last Shard was embedded in the Jau'Tak craft. It was not a shard to them. It's lower dimensional cross-section was spherical, its color a deep cobalt. From inside, a band of energy vibrated, twisted, oscillated, giving off a faint glow from its deep center. It danced to unknown rhythms. The Jau'Tak were using it as a power source. They had no idea of its true potential. He guessed the Apax did, but they had not the means to tap it.

To be certain the craft carried the Shard in its core, he dipped a tendril of himself into that lower dimension, onto the liquid surface of the planet near where the craft would impact. Thereupon the energy that comprised his being began to condense into matter. He directed the formation of this new flesh into a simple form, a tubular, dark gray mass, seeming to stand erect on the waves of the deep ocean. He grew a multitude of eyes and other sensors to see all wavelengths of photonic energy. Waves crashed upon him but didn't he feel the water. He only saw the craft.

It fell on its collision course. The Jau'Tak were punishing the Apax for having an interest in the young race that populated the planet. It was a petulant and self-indulgent gesture, but the Jau'Tak where known for such conduct. The craft was the size of small celestial body, a fireball heating to plasma in the atmosphere, parts of it breaking free. He felt exotic forces pulling on him, forces that could only emanate from the Shard. Forces that were directly undetectable in these dimensions.

The fireball grew closer. He felt the song of the Shard, stirring him, coaxing deep instincts.

He began to resonant. It would have been a disturbing and deafening sound to any living creature nearby to hear.

The impact of craft superheated the ocean. A tsunami formed, racing out. It would be many minutes before the shockwave and superheated air reached him. The core of the craft still retained much of its momentum. An incredible explosion ejected water and rock from the depths.

He pulled his tendril from that world, his flesh transforming back into energy in the process. The Shard would bury itself into the planetary core, sucking up its energy, poisoning the planet, leaving it lifeless.

The Apax, wracked with guilt for being culpable in the destruction, offered their exodus. The strands of their craft merged and diverged from the planet cable, terminating cleanly in sphere-holes. The Apax were spreaders, in both space and time. The nascent sapience would be distributed across many epochs in their future.

He would have to lure some of them back, to crack the planet and take the Shard.

And to deliver it to the Temperance Well.

 

After jotting down a few pages of notes on planets and cultures and technology, I envisioned a planet with regressed technology that had the map back to long lost Earth. I saw a war between God-fearing human machines and posthuman demigods seeking the Lost Shard to enable their victory over the other. I saw non-humanoid aliens with bioengineered human spokesmen, with their own designs for the Shard, and Kha, with “his” human agents seeking the same. It was a race, but a race to what?

The creation of the universe? That was kind of the idea . . . I’m glad I’ve abandoned it.

I did write (Nov. 29th, 2008) a little about this war between machine and demigod, but eventually I felt that the war angle was uninspired and unimaginative. War is such an overused concept.

 

They couldn’t hold the picket line in the globular cluster for very long. Twenty-three war-craft spread out like so many beads falling from the string of a broken necklace under the intense radiation bath of blue-white stars. Gansun saw in his mind from the immersion dataflow, each of the ovoid craft, bristling with spires and blades of weapons and sensors, luminous and shimmering from the omnidirectional light. His people knew there would be no hiding here for very long. They had fled here hoping the hostile environment would deter their fearful enemy.

The sensor pulse propagated through the dataflow tactical sensorium in Gansun's mind. He pushed the imagery into his background processing, thinking the enemy would come when they were ready, and turned his head to look at the woman standing beside him. Garna's beautiful face held an expression of deep focus to her duties and tasks as her hands and their long graceful fingers splayed in the soft and viscous liquid metal interface of the control console.

He pinged her and she startled, then turned to look at him. He pulled a hand from the interface and laid it gently atop hers, giving it a squeeze. In one small moment, they shared each other’s desperation and fear, their grief and anger, followed by a ghostly fantasy of intimacy and passion. Then the watchdog broke them of their reverie, commanding them back to their duties.

Gansun pulled away reluctantly, forcing himself to firewall his feelings for Garna. He longed to be with her in their intimate sanctuary of cyberspace, but he knew it was best to only use the open communication network to speak to her. Hand back in the flowing interface, Gansun locked his mentality to the task of monitoring and maintaining his assigned sector shield.

The globular cluster's sea of energy remained just as dangerous as their enemy. The shields protecting the ship strained under the constant electromagnetic assault, and even then what filtered through was enough to damage and disrupt their mechanical bodies and electro-optic minds given enough exposure. The fleet had been here for some time and the damage was becoming noticeable. Some of the crew had already been downloaded to thick walled modules and stored in the ship's core, their bodies recycled to their atomic elements.

From the dataflow, Gansun knew where all three hundred of the crew of 34 Apex were and where they were going. With this information, he permitted the shield to filter through more harmful radiation where the crew were absent. Thus the shield retained its vitality.

It wasn't long after that the event they feared most had come upon them. The Overmind gave its warning ping across the dataflow, bringing forth tactical imagery into Gansun's mind. The enemy ships were unsurprisingly very similar to their own, larger, yet with shorter spires. The enemy arrayed its formation into a dense conical cluster. Their numbers were undeterminable, yet estimated at less than a hundred. They were closing fast, which would make them difficult to hit even with their own terrible weapons.

From the dataflow Gansun was aware of the fleet taking a defensive formation, pulling together in the form of a large hemisphere to surround their attackers.

<Internal Security prepare for boarders!> the Overmind announced over the comm-net.

Gansun saw the horrible continuum distortions curving the local hyperspace and set his shields for maximum interference.

The Overmind called again, <All personnel initiate self backups and download to emergency processors!>

Gansun slowed his subjective time rate, made a backup copy of himself, then succeeded in closing an enemy hyperspacial tunnel. He felt the backup purge through his interface and reopened his shared cyberspace with Garna. He needed her.

-If they board here, at least we won’t remember it,- he said to her.

She nodded almost imperceptivity, -I've never lost this body. It terrifies me to think of doing so.-

-It's not that hard to get readjusted to a new one,- he found himself lying to reassure her.

Garna felt his subconscious overlay. -That's a nice gesture,- she said of his prevarication.

Their conversation terminated as he wrestled with another boarding attempt. It was merely a probe, for he saw their plan immediately. They had sent multiple distortions to a weaker shield section to overwhelm. Gansun looked up across the room to Hoytus, who was assigned that sector. The man grimaced in battle. Gansun tried to overlay his adjacent shield but the distortion gradient was too great.

They got through.

<SPHERE-HOLE IN THE ENGINE CORE! SPHERE-HOLE IN THE ENGINE CORE!> the Overmind alerted.

Garna worked furiously with her own defensive sphere-hole creation, attempting to wrap one around the invader's. The feedback would cause severe damage to both ships. It had become the only tactic available against the enemy.

Over the dataflow they both saw the carnage that took place in the engine core. Men stormed out of the hyperspacial gate: tall muscular men, with square blocky faces, and gleaming heads bald save for a tuft of dark bristly hair standing high at the back. They were dressed in lose red swatches, sashes, and kilts. Golden sandals adorned their feet, and golden shin guards with decorative inlays protected their legs. They had identical appearance in every way, and in each right hand they held firmly to a small shield the size of a dinner plate. In the center of this bronze shield was the embossed face of a cherub, that at some unseen and unheard command would open their mouths into an angry, wide, silent scream towards their hapless victims, who would disintegrate, the bonds holding their nanocells together breaking.

They had come up with no defense against this horrible weapon.

Security personnel inhabiting armored bodies fired volleys of microscopic knots of spacetime that couldn't penetrate whatever barriers protected the invaders. It was all in vain, and more an attempt to distract than anything.

Pained and frustrated, Garna yanked her hands from the interface and slammed fists back into it with enough force to cause it to splash sluggishly. All her attempts just slipped of their barriers. –We can't compete against their technology,- she lamented.

-I know,- he replied. Then, -make another backup.- Both fleets' weapons systems were flinging and causing into existence spacetime knots. 34 Apex's hull had become dented and twisted as the knots penetrated surface levels, the tremendous gravity pulling matter to them before they unraveled and flattened. Internal shielding became weakened by the minutes. The knots would reach deeper. Gansun had just seen the 67 Vertex collapse and crumple from a superknot remotely generated into its core. He didn't honestly think the Apex was going to make it.

-I don't have time to!- she retorted, as she coordinated a simultaneous attack on the sphere-hole by the security teams. She trembled as her mind raced, then finally, the barriers were weakened by the assault. She popped another sphere-hole inside the other. The sphere-holes were perfectly coupled. The sphere-hole in their engine core collapsed, leaving the bisected bodies of invaders falling to the deck. The resultant gravity wave disrupted the finer quantum machinery, leading to system failures across the ship.

Garna and Gansun saw on the dataflow tactical the enemy ship they had been coupled to collapse, then explode. –We managed to get a superknot aboard,- she explained.

-Yeah!- he shouted, then, -I've got trouble here!- Another attacker was pounding on his shield sector. There wasn't enough power to multi-layer the shield and any overlay from another shield sector would leave them completely vulnerable. He tried as many hyperspacial curvature patterns that he could to block the tunnels. He knew it was a matter of time before they got through.

They lost two more ships. The fleet Overmind Commander ordered the evacuation of all personnel of drive disabled ships to the others that could escape.

-I'm backing up,- Garna said.

-No! Wait,- he pleaded as he gave up his fight. He pulled his hands from the interface and quickly stepped near her. He put a hand into her interface and embraced her with his free arm. Garna looked at him with shock as a sphere-hole opened in the center of the control room.

Gansun drew his face close to hers. –I love you,- he said kissing her firmly and desperately. Their backup purges left them as angry cherubs silently screamed their destruction.

 

 

A cluster of twelve ovoid ships of the human machine fleet has escaped the attack at the globular cluster thousands of lightyears behind them. There was not enough room aboard for all the survivors to inhabit new bodies. Gansun and Garna remained in pure thought-form in a virtual environment, living in a perpetual daydream state. In a lush verdant garden of their making, they lounged naked, appearing as human as the oldest memory of the flesh would allow.

Garna recalled the loss of her original body had been a period of depression and grief whose magnitude she had not expected. But Gansun had been there for her, consoling and loving. And while she had no physical body yet, she was growing accustomed to the more flesh-like form she fancied for herself.

She lay against him on a bed of soft moss, tracing a line of muscle on his arm. "What would you think," she said, "If I requested a body much like this one?"

"It would be possible," Gansun mused. "But such bodies are always inferior. Replicated skin poses a barrier to interface, and—"

She interrupted with a bubbling giggle, "I know all the inferiorities. I could have one like this just for fun."

Gansun grinned taking her hint well. "I suppose," he said, "Then I would have to have one too." He became serious, "We would have to have to have two bodies. And that is something the Scriptures forbid."

She looked into his eyes, understanding completely. Garna recited quietly, "One shall not asunder the soul into Two." The Bifurcation Sin remained their most serious offense. The punishment was the destruction of the copies, and exile for any escaped.

"Don’t fret. I found you beautiful beyond compare before, so any body you choose will be just as beautiful, because it will be yours."

His words moved her so that she felt her love for him would burst her heart. Garna lay her head upon his chest. His hand played in her hair as he stroked her head. "How long before we group up with the main fleet," she asked.

"It could be years," he answered thinking about the random jumps they would have to make to throw off their trail from the enemy. "What do you think of the new mission once we regroup?"

"I don't know," she answered with concern. "I doubt it exists. The Shard is from such deep legend. Who can trust the integrity of the Archive in such matters?"

"It had better exist. With the Shard, our enemy would have no chance against us," he replied. He stared off and felt the ersatz nature of this realm he shared with Garna and the other survivors, isolated in their own partitioned fantasies. He felt a sudden hatred for it. It was a lie. An inescapable lie. "It better exist," he repeated, "Otherwise we will be exterminated simply because we are machines."

 

The control interface was a little too Cylon Basestar from Battlestar Galactica. Shame on me

Here are the actual notes from April 8th, 2009:

 

Books of the Temperance Well

 

The first book must deal with the Last Shard and what it means to those seeking it.  This book will start during the Machine-Demigod War, whereby the machines are losing. The machines need a doomsday weapon and out of ancient legend it beckons.  I need another plot devise other than war. So they have to verify the existence of the Shard from a nearly forgotten information/memory nexus, one of many storehouses of knowledge dispersed throughout space by their ancestors.  Information leads them to the fabled Lost Worlds, but not the location.  For that they must approach the Apaxans, and the best they can do is point them to Nurouth.  In the middle of this search are battles and pursuit by demigod agents and their Apaxan sympathizers.

Events on Nurouth are Book II, whereby they discover the location of the Lost Worlds from the derelict of the colonizer ship.  To make things difficult, the colonizer is under fathoms of ocean.

Book III would involve arriving at the Lost Worlds (those star systems 500 lightyears radial from Earth) and finding a Jau'Tak empire.  And the Jau'Tak know exactly where the Shard is, in the core of the transformed Earth.  A planet they populate.

Book IV would deal with the problem of extracting the Shard from the core, which means the destruction of the Earth.  The Jau'Tak won’t be pleased with development.

Once the Shard is free, Kha takes it.  I don't know if this would be included in Book IV or be Book V.  I don't know if Kha allows the machines to use it as a weapon, or if the machines have abandoned that idea.  Nevertheless, Kha takes it to the remote reaches of intergalactic space (with his human and possibly Apaxan (maybe even Jau'Tak)) companions and creates the Temperance Well, where the purpose of the united Shards is resolved and explained.

 

Book of the Allodia-Vruscaenau War

 

This book deals with the introduction of the Last Shard as a relic being sought for its power.  The goal is to locate Nurouth.  The Apaxan are the only ones who know where it is.  The conflict is dealing with the Gloud and Vruscan agents.

 

Outline

1)      Intro Conflict:  Gansun, having performed a scout mission in the 41 Octaces, is being pursued by a Vruscan battlecruiser.

a)      Scout ship is damaged and cannot inflate a wormhole large enough for it to pass.

b)      The battlecruiser is closing, coming within effect range of it probabilistic hypernodal weapons.

c)      Gansun establishes a communication link with his distant fleet, and inflates a wormhole just large enough for a high bandwidth transmission.

d)     Gansun transmits his scout's data and his mind to the fleet moments before the battle cruiser's hypernode string implodes his craft.

2)       Exposition of data: Gansun returns to fleet, his data analyzed.

 

 

 

Old Outline ideas

1)       Gansun and his data is received.  He remains in an unconscious state while his replacement body is constructed.

a)       The data is configured for analysis.  It is a mental copy of a Vruscan officer.

b)       Gansun's body is ready. He is loaded into it, and is debriefed.

i)         Vruscan battle cruiser computer systems not as advanced as themselves and theirs.

ii)       Under stealth, Gansun was able to access their computer and mask his gravimetric distortions.

iii)      This allowed him to approach the cruiser closely and search for a member of the officer caste.

iv)     Upon finding one alone, he captured the man with a wormhole and deposited him aboard the scout.

v)       Nanomachines covered the captured officer, destructively digitizing him into a data matrix.

vi)     The activity with the wormhole was discovered and Gansun fled the area.  A hypernode erupted near his scout and damaged it.

c)       An interesting curiosity is discovered with the officer's mental copy by Garna.

i)         When the copy is stimulated by keywords such as Jau'Tak, Apaxan, or Exodus, network pathways elude to a mysterious relic of great power.

ii)       Garna notifies her superiors but is scoffed because the data isn’t concrete and not of tactical or strategic importance.  Something about this is tugging at her, yet she knows not what it is.

d)       Gansun and Garna meet for the first time.  They speak little beyond greetings, but each yearns for the other.

2)       Garna's dilemma: Garna wants to follow up on the powerful relic.  None of her coworkers show much interest in helping her.

a)       She continues to work with the mental copy trying to uncover more clues.  Nothing seems to work.  She needs to activate the copy, which is forbidden without going through proper channels.  She knows she will be denied.

i)         She needs help and decides to coax Gansun into helping her.

ii)       Cautious about being direct, she uses her job as an analyst to ask him more questions about the scout mission.

iii)      He is suspicious as all his mission data is available for review and there is nothing more to add.

iv)     He thinks he knows what she wants given their chance meeting, and asks her out for date.

v)       She accepts.

b)       After a few more dates, Garna brings up the subject of the officer's memory of the mysterious relic.

i)         She tries to persuade Gansun that it is something worth looking into.

ii)       He is uncertain, and doesn't like the idea of activating the copy so that they could speak directly to it.

iii)      Garna tells him that they could copy the copy and secretly activate that.

iv)     Gansun says their careers aren't worth that to throw away.  Understanding her deep curiosity and feeling it a little himself, he suggest he may be able to get her permission to activate it legally.

3)       Gansun makes the case:  Gansun approaches his superior and relays what has happened with Garna.

a)       He feels that if her curiosity isn't satisfied,  she will go against orders and take matters into her hand.

b)       The superiors council and discuss Garna and wonder why what she has found has snared her so.

i)         Her heritage is traced.

ii)       They discover her ancestors had direct ties to the Atheneul Nexus.

iii)      They wonder if she has deep and latent knowledge of antiquity.

iv)     Curious themselves, they abide her wishes.

4)       Revelations of the Officer:  The copy is activated and debriefed.

a)       The officer begrudgingly and reluctantly  discloses the myth of the Last Shard, the reason why humanity has been spread across the galaxy.

i)         If the Vruscan's relocate the Last Shard, they could reunite humanity once again.

ii)       This is their goal of ultimate conquest.

iii)      It is powerful enough to make a single wormhole for an entire fleet numbering in the thousands.

b)       The council is skeptical about these claims, but it is a lead that must be verified.

c)       Before they do so, they must contend with Vruscan forces.

5)       Battle: Vruscan fleets keep advancing in their pogrom.

a)       Vruscan's are sterilizing Allodian planets by steering gamma ray burst through wormholes at target planets.

b)       Whole populations must be uploaded to matrix ships in their own exodus to flee the scourge.

c)       The Allodian fleet takes refuge in globular cluster where they are able to outlive the pursing fleet.

d)       They depart the cluster and are safe for now.

6)       Search begins: The council creates a special task force to seek the Atheneul Nexus.

a)       As direct descendant, Garna will go.

b)       Gansun will also go.