by Ian Cannon
“Here?” the embed said.
He just nodded through a stoic, hurt face and whispered, “What god in his right mind would throw two so perfectly different people together in a place like this … and yet what god wouldn’t?”
“Hmm,” the embed responded thoughtfully. “This is where you first laid eyes on the woman who would become your wife.”
Ben sank into bitterness. All these memories, all the life they held, were about to become pointless. He sneered, “I won’t do this.”
The embed placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “I am very sorry, Benjar.”
Up in the sky, time restarted. The explosion spread out and began to dissipate as Benjar’s scream fluttered down from faraway. Ben looked up and watched himself fall out of the sky. He slammed down on the declining slope of the crater bowl and tumbled forward head over heals crashing, banging, summersaulting down the hill, faster, faster, perfectly out of control until—“Umph!”—he jarred to a stop. And Ben watched it all from atop the canyon.
Next, the wreckage of the ejection pod came down ontop of Benjar making him scurry like mad deeper into the canyon, bowling the dead out of his way before—BOOM—it blew up and hurled him through the sky. As he landed …
The duplicative space zoomed into the point of action fast, faster, fast! Until Ben found himself laying face down in mud and blood in the crater amongst the dead looking through the other Ben’s eyes. He’d been here before. He couldn’t move. He remembered that vividly. There were sentry cannons placed around the bowl designed to pick out motion—any motion at all, no matter how miniscule—and kill any survivors. One motion, one sneeze, one tiny fart, and he was dead.
He was back in that place again. Not just in memory. Not as some observer tucked safely away in some duplicative space. No—this was real. He was here … again!
Must not move. Not a twitch!
He opened his eyes … and they stared back at him—those other eyes—not twenty-four inches away. A dead Cabal soldier. One of the faceless many. They just stared right into him like knives. They cut him, sliced him down to his bones. But he knew the truth. They saw nothing. They were blank dead eyes now, a face smeared with stench-riddled moon mud and toil, the residue of combat and dying. And then …
They blinked.
At first, it was shock. They were alive. This person wasn’t dead. They were alive! He wasn’t alone. This person was there with him, trapped in the crater of the dead as they lay face-to-face. And she was a woman.
They both needed a plan, so they communicated with their eyes unraveling a way to get out of the crater bowl. They figured it out. He would make a mad dash for the crater’s edge drawing the sentrys’ fire. She would collect her sniper cannon and begin picking them off. She’d have to get every one of them or he would be dead, and she’d be trapped. It would be a desperate race against time. Seconds would count. Life would hang on every breath. He would run on the count of three.
It was their first tiny step toward a lifelong partnership.
He blinked once. She girded herself for action.
He blinked a second time and held his breath.
He blinked a third time and leapt into flight, screaming, “Now!”
She was up in a flash, grabbed her gun, initiated her micro-optic targeting reticle, painted the targets in the night, started blasting away … and the rest was history.
They made it out alive tumbling head over heals into a ditch, both heaving like marathoners. This was where they’d shared their first words … and they weren’t necessarily friendly. He was Imperium after all, she was Underworld Cabal. Sure, they’d assisted each other in escaping the unescapable, but that didn’t change things. And it certainly didn’t nullify ideologies.
Duplicative Ben watched the events play out, mesmerized. He’d forgotten so many details, or rather, they’d been shuffled to the back of his mind. Now, watching them unfold with such incredible clarity he found it fascinating that his own memories were charging his recall—an ironic twist.
“A harrowing escape,” the embed said.
Ben felt bitter at the sound of his voice. He muttered, “Stick around. It gets better.”
Time went on. Memories went by. They parted ways right there in the ditch, she refusing to trust the enemy, he determined not to push his luck. She was a strong, quick adversary who, as it turned out, wasn’t afraid to flash her Underworld survival blade and hold it up to certain throats. Namely his.
But, as Ben’s memory string showed, fate brought them back together. Trapped and surrounded first by a Cabal hunter/killer group, next by Imperium troopers. Lives were taken on both sides, binding them together as reluctant partners. As he observed her in her introverted, angry ways, he sensed a woman on the run. She was a woman in trouble. There was more to her situation than she’d been willing to reveal.
They spent that first night together having to share space in an abandoned recon hut overlooking a mountain pass. It had forced conversation in which she accused him of being a traitor. Yes, she’d been right, but he wasn’t going to admit that. Duplicative Ben watched the conversation take place just as he remembered it.
He’d said, “Let’s get one thing straight, you and me. I don’t want to be here. It’s not my moon, and it’s not my war. My choices are mine alone.”
She laughed bitterly at him, “You don’t lie to me, Imperium. You only lie to yourself. It’s in all you do. It’s in your war. It’s in your god. It’s in you. Lies. Filthy lies! That’s why the Imperium could never win. Your whole existence is a lie built on a lie.”
Ben snickered pathetically at the memory as he watched it play. He remembered quipping something stupid like—
“You should have gone into politics, joined the Omicron high council—for all its wisdom. You enjoy this too much,” the other Ben argued back at her.
Yeah, that’s what he’d said. How stupid? It made him roll his eyes in self-loathing. Retrospect was a beautiful thing given the way time changes context. He and the woman he would come to love deeply had bickered over what they’d both come to believe was pointless. They’d been enemies for nothing. He looked down falling grim. Perhaps now, they’d become lovers for nothing, too. It made Ben feel sick just thinking about it.
The embed said, “You quarreled that first night.”
“Just friendly banter between mortal enemies,” he said irritably.
“Let’s move on, shall we?”
The following day Benjar and his new Cabal accompaniment made their way to a field of abandoned bay crawlers. They were big mechanical quadrupedal machines that literally walked prisoner holding cells across the land on powerful, multi-jointed legs that herked-and-jerked in a strangely syncopated rhythm, iron synovial joints and pistons driving them over mountain regions, through deep moon crags and across starkly rolling plains, crushing and stomping anything in their way. And there the bay crawlers were, standing right in front of him as they once had. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Another memory splayed out before him in perfect, comprehensive detail.
Duplicative Ben smiled with warm reflection and walked over to one running his fingers across its underbelly as he moved. “I remember,” he murmured. “They were all junked out. We had to rebuild one of their drive systems. But it worked.”
“You two made a good team,” the embed observed. “Even back then.”
“I guess this was our first real connection,” Ben said, still marveling over the bay crawler standing before him as real as it had ever been.
“And it carried the two of you across the moon,” the embed guessed.
“It got us where we needed to go.”
The duplicative space hurried the memories along, and Ben watched, bleary-eyed and falling deeper into nostalgia. He and Tawny had worked together tirelessly assembling and disassembling before getting the thing to work, then tested it out, loaded up and off they went gamboling across the northern flats headed toward their destination—Benjar’s command center where t
he RX-111 awaited them.
They had also discovered a much-needed shower unit installed inside the big, iron beast. Tawny showered first. This memory was special—very special. It was the first time he’d ever seen her in her true Raylon glow. A single wash was enough to clear away several days of moon soot and residue. Sure, there were battle stains that would remain for months, but nevertheless, she was fresh and new. Her face was a deep amber color as if sunned on a Raylon ocean beach. Her arms were a well sculpted image of feminine power. The new, white camisole she’d found in the crew’s storage bin laid stark against her body betraying healthy, pert breasts that heretofore had been hidden under grimy battle armor. But her hair was unmistakably Raylon—surprisingly full and intensely red. It was shocking, breath-taking. Something this unspeakably gorgeous didn’t belong on Malum. And yet, it seemed she was perfect for this place. A warrior’s warrior. A survivor’s survivor.
Benjar looked her over. She said, “What?”
He replied, “What’d you do with that other lady?”
She flicked her wrist at him hiding her flattery.
Benjar showered next feeling the very war slough away from his skin. It was dizzingly refreshing. Afterwards, they spoke again, two people trained to kill each other becoming less like known enemies and more like unknown strangers, something to explore. Maybe even discover.
She still would not call him by name. She referred to him as Imperium—“You’re all Imperium to me,” she had said.
To which he replied, “My name is Benjar. Benjar Dash.” But it didn’t matter to her. She was stuck in her ways, trapped in her ideology.
Duplicative Ben watched their conversation move forward through memory, recalling their words with an unbridled sense of wonderment. This was the moment where he’d begun to strip away her hard, cold layers, to undress her programming and dive into the more provocative pieces of who she was, where she’d come from, why she was here. He shook his head just watching, while the residue of tears filled his eyes.
What a fascinating enemy…
And then, what would later prove to be her moment of catharsis, happened. He—Benjar of the past—fished his key to freedom out of his pocket and showed it to her, entrusting her with his secret. He told her about his plans to leave the war, to be done with it. Tawny’s face had visibly shined with a new, powerful thought process. In that moment she had decided what she was going to do. She knew, even if she wasn’t fully aware herself, she was going to leave with him.
Afterwards, Benjar moved into the bay crawler’s control deck while Tawny laid down and somehow found sleep. Duplicative Ben sat across from her watching her sleep, marveling over her.
The embed said, “You started to have feelings for her in that moment.”
“Started?” he said. “No. I think I already knew.”
“Knew what?”
Ben shot a look to the embed suddenly angry. He hissed, “Why would I tell you?”
The embed angled his words carefully. “I’m only an entity, Benjar. A figment. I mean nothing to the empirical world. Here, it’s really only you.”
“You’re a tool for them!” he said indicating the empirical world, Specter and Incarcerum.
“No,” the embed said. “I am a tool for you. I do admit some curiosity concerning living emotions, but whether or not you divulge is irrelevant. I’m merely asking.”
Ben drew a big breath and switched his gaze back over to the sleeping image of Tawny. Was her sleep dreamless. Or was she living a whole new life inside that head? With a sad grin, he murmured, “I think I already knew … I loved her. She was so strong, yet … there was something missing. I needed her. And yet, I felt she ...” His words trailed away.
“Needed you, perhaps?” the embed prodded.
“I wanted …”
“You wanted her to need you?” the embed asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But it’s more than that.” His eyes never left her curled on the floor, sleeping away.
The embed said with great curiosity, “What?”
He sighed, “I wanted to make her feel okay. I wanted to take her away from all this.”
“You wanted the two of you to be together, even then,” the embed assumed.
“Yes.”
As if satisfied with the conversation, the embed said, “Interesting. To need a thing because it needs you in return. How … odd. What happened next?”
They approached the Battle of Malum. Needing to get to the other side of the combat ground, they guided the bay walker through the greatest land battle either of them had ever seen. The entire world was at war, columns charging forward, armor groups lighting the starlit skies with streamer fire, battle fronts engaging en mass, battle vehicles—Vespers—grumbling forward laying salvo after salvo into the storming enemy, sky-streaking Falcon V’s zooming overhead and laying large swaths of napalm into soldier, tank and armament alike. The horizon was ablaze with flame and fire.
And then …
The noumena visual media feature playing out in the duplicative space made Ben gasp with a sudden jolt. Something very large approached from the sky. He remembered as soon as he saw it. A sub-atmosphere combat cruiser roared overhead shaking the lunar surface with its thunder, releasing rockets and bombs all over the place. An ensuing eruption capsized their entire bay crawler into an impact crater forcing them to have to correct their machine and crawl painstakingly back to the surface.
The battle was too thick. There was no end in sight. They decided to turn back, but they’d do so together. From there, they would have to go the long way. No choice. It was off to the west, toward the Neutralious rail system. They figured that would be safer.
They were wrong.
“Neutralious rail system?” the embed observed. After two days of traversing the moon in the perpetual bay crawler, the world had gone from an endless flatland to a dramatically broken mountain pass that created Malum’s largest scar. It was eternal square miles of pure dimension. The bay crawler pulled to a stop at the canyon’s edge.
“It was an automated rail service,” Ben explained as if recalling the plan from the mists of memory himself. “It serviced the war on Malum. The plan was to catch the train and ride it all the way back to headquarters. From there, we’d snatch the RX-111 and get off the moon. Seemed simple, but—heh.”
As Ben’s vivid memory experience reflected, he and Tawny stood above the bay crawler overlooking the mountain expanse before them spying the railway attached to a mountainside in the distance. The train would be speeding by at any moment, splitting the wind and peeling around mountain bodies like a bullet. And here it came.
“This plan seemed problematic,” the embed observed.
“Tell me about it,” Ben said.
“How did the two of you board?”
Ben presented the scene with his hand and muttered, “Dangerously.”
Tawny and Ben standing above the bay crawler, fired a magnetic cable tow from a hand gun with a Boom! It zipped across the canyon trailing its cable behind, attached itself to the train, and they jumped in an exercise of pure suicide. Even the embed flinched. Once they reached terminal velocity in their freefall and the cable’s slack drew out, they began their majestic swing through the mountain valleys at full-throttle speed being drawn up and up the cable.
“Ah, yes I see,” the embed said as if impressed.
The duplicative space reset with a reality-warping shuffle and they found themselves in the next memory, like the sudden segueing from one scene to the next. They were aboard the train watching Tawny and Benjar as they conversed lightly over some well-deserved rations. They talked. It was an amicable conversation. They spoke about his plans to leave the war and become a freight hauler, maybe join the Guild—for which they both agreed was a den full of pirates and scum. But Benjar hadn’t seemed to care. He only wanted his freedom. But Tawny …
She was still hesitant toward him, not even addressing him by his name, only Imperium. Her past had been full of
betrayal, loneliness, a lack of hope. She had grown up on the mean streets as an orphan, abused, often hunted. She’d never known partnership. She’d hardly ever even known friendship. Yet something had told Ben she was desperate for it, yearning to touch something beyond herself, become greater than the sum of her parts.
And then, more trouble.
“What’s that?” the embed asked.
Ben sighed grinning with recollection, “An RDT. Rapid Detonation Team. Cabal explosives party.” He passed a weary look to the embed and said, “Apparently, we’d boarded a train that was targeted for destruction. They were going to blow it up. And, as memory serves …” he looked out to see the Cabal lander skiff zoom over the train preparing to board, “here they come.”
Memories of that moment drew out seamlessly. Tawny and Ben were trapped on the train about to be destroyed. They faced certain death. There was no escaping the situation. There was only one way out, and Tawny orchestrated it. Ben and the embed watched.
Tawny spun on Benjar locking him down with her stare. It was a tense moment, softened by the new, thrilling affinity that coursed back and forth between them. She said, “It’s over.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “I’m sorry,” and lurched at him. They kissed. It was the first time. It was shocking and full. Benjar put his arms around her. They lingered there swimming inside the other’s touch. And then she pulled away, smoothly drawing both his B-7 blasters from his holsters and pointing them at him.
She got the draw on him.
“What’re you …”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and spoke into her communicator. “RDT Lead … don’t blow the train. I’m on it … I need extraction … and I have a prisoner.”
The embed flashed Ben a look of dismay. “She betrayed you.”
Ben grinned and said, “She’s very resourceful.”
