Rise

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  RISE

  Kim Lakin-Smith

  NewCon Press

  England

  FOR DOREEN ROBERTS, NANA

  (1907 – 1995)

  whose incredible stories of escape

  taught me the importance of freedom.

  First published in November 2019 by NewCon Press,

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  NCP206 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP207 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ‘Rise’ copyright © 2019 by Kim Lakin-Smith

  Cover Art copyright © 2019 by Daniele Serra

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-912950-31-7 (hardback)

  978-1-912950-32-4 (softback)

  Cover by Daniele Serra

  Text edited by Ian Whates

  Book interior layout by Storm Constantine

  Part One

  One

  The sky was on fire when Kali Titian first set foot inside a gunner. One moment the sun beat down, sweat soaking the collar of her uniform and tickling her back, the next she passed through the doorway into a cool, dimly lit corridor smelling of iodine and leather. Chief of Staff, Secretary De Agnes, walked ahead. De Agnes, with his small smug eyes and intent way of peering at her like a doctor conducting a medical, was a bore and overly patriotic even for Kali’s taste.

  “Naturally, I have briefed the guard on board about your presence,” the man was saying over a shoulder.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that.” Kali couldn’t hide her contempt. De Agnes had irritated her ever since he arrived at the academy earlier that morning and insisted on inspecting her shared quarters before they left. “I will request a private room for you,” he had told her, eying her superior officer with derision. Kali had despised his interference and been quick to tell him so. As now, De Agnes had stared blankly at her.

  “It’s protocol,” he said, a snap in his voice. “And it saves on explaining why you have a foot up on your fellow recruits.”

  “You’re trying to make me feel guilty for the privilege.”

  “Not in the least.” De Agnes glanced back as they walked. His small eyes were almost black in the low-lit corridor. “The Youth Guard are your father’s favourite assets, closely followed by National Guard recruits. It isn’t a great surprise that he should choose to reward you for excelling at the academy. It also helps that you are a close relative!”

  “I certainly have my father’s best interests at heart,” said Kali with a small flare of her nostrils. “Specifically, his desire that I extend myself beyond the expectations of the average recruit. That is the true reason I am here today.”

  “I believe that I am the reason you are here.” De Agnes forced a tight smile. “Captain Hanan is my brother-in-law. As a special favour, I asked him to accommodate you.”

  “And I have accommodated him. This is not my first invitation to board an active gunner.”

  Kali liked the way De Agnes fell silent and walked a little faster. She hoped she’d left an overriding impression, preferably one of deep dislike.

  Half an hour later, De Agnes had disembarked, and Kali was belted to a riser stool behind the navigation station and semi-circle of data operatives, finally left to her own devices. The bridge was self-sealed; no windows gave out onto the battlespace. Instead, the screen walls swarmed with spectroimages of the vast battleships belonging to the United Dominions alongside hundreds of thousands of smaller, attendant craft.

  Kali pictured the gunner’s exterior rings in blurring revolution around the central hub, the steel strips of warheads shooting off the craft and punching through the thin atmosphere. Having only recently embarked on mesospheric conditioning training, she struggled with the extreme shifts in momentum. Her brain felt as if it was being pushed to the very back of her skull as the motion of the ship gave off a cloying hum. She had the disconcerting sense of being entirely separate from her body; were she to stand, Kali knew she would topple off balance.

  In contrast, the crew kicked into a balletic flow of motion. Hands worked the banks of gel patches. Eyes swept over screens. Voices called out feed codes and affirmatives. As one syncopated organism, crew and gunner navigated the heaving battlefield of the mesosphere.

  Kali shifted her attention to the captain. The man was young and slick, with numerous pins of valour crowding his lapels. His riser stool was set into a circular track in the middle of the bridge, allowing him to control the vein frame of the gunner’s stem – a central trunk of alloid bio cells powering the ship. Nearby, a pair of dalma plates sat locked into their twin ports, moving and syncing data around the ship like a peripheral nerve interface. Despite her disorientation, Kali felt a tingling sense of awe. She had studied her father’s development of dalma plates and data flow gel technology at the academy, but to see it in action was breath-taking! The plates, which resembled large rectangular stones, sandwiched together, their intricate pattern schemes lighting up as the gel coursed through them. It brought about such an exhilarating mix of emotions and physicality – nausea, wonder, pride, alarm…

  Her breath was snatched away as a tremendous grinding noise reverberated through the bridge and the entire hull bucked. One moment, Captain Hanan was in synergy with the stem, the next it was spasming. Kali clung tightly to the sides of her stool as the bridge lifted on its axis and descended in a series of violent drops. Pitching in her harness, she lost all awareness of which way was up. Flushed with adrenaline, she tried to get a grip on her body as her mind screamed I don’t want to die like this! Not as an observer. Not when I’m a parasite on board! To overcome the instinctual panic, she forced herself to imagine she was back on manoeuvres, just another recruit practicing wargames. Breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. Refocus, she told herself. Make your father proud.

  She forced her eyes wide open and centred them on the activities of the crew. One man was unhooking his harness and running in zigzags as he made his way over to the captain; she recognised the green cell icon of her own unit, the bioengineers, stitched to the man’s sleeve. He was soon elbows deep in the stem, searching for the source of the breach.

  Her focus was distracted by the weapons unit of the guard as they worked to earn the sliced atom badges on their sleeves. The ever-shifting canvas of the walls lit up as enemy craft returned fire or flew out of range. Kali wanted so very badly to dash over and launch every weapon in the gunner’s arsenal – anything to obliterate their attackers and make sure she kept on living. Instead, she stayed bolted to her stool. Back soaked with sweat. Mind struggling to focus.

  The ship gave another great shudder as it apparently took a second impact and the whole hull revolved again a rapid three sixty, crew continuing to work the navigation desk as they strained in their harnesses. Kali struggled to hold onto the contents of her stomach until the great motion rings and the black exoskeleton of the hull stabilised and the bridge stilled.

  “Corporal Titian!”

  It took Kali a moment to realise she was being addressed by the captain.

  “Get over here and act as my Second! My engineer’s out of action.”

  Kali forced her mind to sharpen. The senior bio-engineer was bleeding profusely from a head wound as the medics hauled him onto a riser stretcher; it took her a moment to work out that he must have been wounded during the manic rotations of the ship. She met the captain’s eyes – they had a grit to them – and she remembered her father’s words: ‘Get to know the scale of the ship you one day hope to captain,’ as he stood, blocking out the sun, valour pins shining on his spotless epaulets.

  She undid her harness with clumsy hands and, using the backs of the occupied riser sto
ols as handholds, she made her way over.

  Captain Hanan shook the buckles of a long harness belt that fastened into the same channel as his mobile riser stool. “Hook yourself up, Corporal! I don’t want to lose another engineer if my ship starts bucking again.”

  Kali did as commanded. Once she was buckled in, the tether allowed her to lean back on her heels and examine the stem, floor to ceiling. Functioning as the gunner’s energy capacitor, the stem was fat as a baobab trunk and protected by a slick membrane of gel – that pale green bio-constituent fusing algoid fuel and alloy fibre for conduction. Just visible beneath its gel skin, the vein frame pulsed with an arterial beat.

  Kali swung around to the far side. A section of the stem had lost its slickness and was bulging slightly, coloured purple like a bruise.

  “Stem’s blocked! A faecal thrombosis.”

  The captain rolled around in his riser stool to arrive alongside her.

  “Cause?”

  “Anaphylactic build-up of waste deposits. I need a tool roll…”

  Captain Hanan was already handing her a kit and Kali squatted down to undo the roll. She selected the two-bore scalpel. There wasn’t time to glove up.

  Resting a hand on the bruised stem – firm to the touch, it reminded Kali of her grandmother’s favourite boa snake – she lent in and pressed the tip of the scalpel to the bulge.

  “This will get messy.”

  Captain Hanan’s face was rigid. ‘Kill my ship and I’ll have you shot, no matter who your father is,’ he seemed to say without words.

  It was an empty threat. Kali could strangle the man with her bare hands and not a soul aboard would dare stop her.

  For now, she focused on the bloated stem and made a deep incision. Gel gushed from the wound, a dark green bile instead of the usual soft emerald colour. Kali returned the scalpel to the roll, reached between the veins and flesh folds she had exposed and manoeuvred the inner tendons apart as if threading her hand between harp strings.

  “Pass me the suck syringe – no, not the mini. I need the wide-gate.” She took the instrument from the captain. He had asked her to be his Second, but, in truth, that role now fell to him.

  Slamming the wide-gate syringe into the clot, Kali heard a bilious slap of air as the needle pierced the thickened gel. She yanked the plunger free and forced her hands around the mass. The clot felt dense and resinous – a direct result of the blast to the lower levels shocking the system. A gunner’s metabolism would usually turn off the damaged parts of itself like tourniqueted limbs until it came safely down to land. Rarely, the damage was precise enough to aggravate the bio materials and cause damage at a cellular and mechanical level. Bio-engineering was a modern science and Kali was still in training. She knew enough, though, to ease the clot carefully from between the web of sinews and past the vein frame. It released in a rush of bile and flesh threads. She tossed the mass aside.

  “I need the wound mesh.” She took the adhesive strip from the captain and slid it into place; seconds later, the mesh had imprinted over the gash.

  Kali lent back from the newly coursing stem. At her feet, the slop of surgery soaked her boots.

  “Well done, Corporal.” Behind the captain’s cool gaze, Kali caught a flicker of relief. “Now, unhook and get yourself to the viewing level.” Captain Hanan pointed up. “I’ll give you a moment to get seated before we light up the skies.”

  A minute later and Kali was strapped into a riser stool a level up from the bridge, on the viewing platform. In front of her, a wall of toughened glass-sheet gave out onto the heavens. Above, the black shine of outer space, all around, the wild blue of the mesosphere. Hard ahead lay a battleship of the United Dominions on the defensive. Sentinel craft packed around its sides while the gunner poured down a torrent of firepower.

  Kali pressed her hands to the glass, feeling her breath rise high in her chest as she watched the gargantuan show of strength by her father’s fleet. Moments later, the battleship splintered apart, sprites of fire shooting across its hull. The might of her father’s fleet reflected in her eyes.

  Two

  A Decade Later

  Sometimes, when the wind dropped, and the city was unusually quiet, Mohab would listen to the sounds of battle taking place high above. Seated on the narrow balcony outside his suite of rooms at Nilreb Universium, Mohab would stare up at the night sky with its tracery of stars and he would see flashfire and, occasionally, the ghost of a gunner. Nothing rained down; the sifter satellites atomised the debris. He couldn’t help wondering though; how much damage can a sky take before it falls?

  Tonight, though, it was his mind on fire. “I will keep my head down,” he had told the universium’s dean earlier that day. Professor Michaele was a good man – one of those rare citizens who did not recoil in his presence nowadays. Michaele was Bleek, but he also taught classes on ethnic displacement and assimilation, and wrote, at least theoretically, of a route to peace.

  However, that afternoon the dean’s hands had appeared uncharacteristically nervous and stroked the downy hair at the back of his head as if self-soothing. “The universium cannot sustain this level of interrogation, Mohab,” he had said, somewhat mournfully. “Already, we are forced to redact so much, to censor our symposiums and research. We have pitifully few students as it is! Everyone’s too busy waging war.” Michaela blinked rapidly. “Our Vary students have all been sent away or restricted to their home districts. You, Mohab, are our final fugitive.”

  Mohab had not liked that title. “Hardly a fugitive! The universium has been my home for five years. I have cooked for you, Professor, in my rooms. We laughed over spine pig steak and yams. You showed me the notes for your next paper.” Desperation scraped the inside of his throat. “Remember, you talked about your love for Vary diction? Our south westerly colloquialisms – how my mother used to say ‘bide the riverbed’ whenever she thought we were in danger.”

  “I remember. I still intend to write that tract. But you, Mohab, you have not my privilege of birth. You are the last Vary in residence here and I fear for your safety.”

  “Fear for me more if you throw me out! The Vary slums are riddled with lungrot. All but my father were lost to it. You know this, professor.”

  “And I know your father is the single most important man to your people.”

  “A choice that was his to make and I have no part of!” The injustice gnawed at Mohab. Pain and loss floated up to the surface. He pictured his dying mother’s face, eerily beautiful in its fragility, and he recalled the damp wheezing of his young sisters before the terrible silence.

  Another emotion niggled at him. It had the shape of anger, but the sharp corners of guilt. “I just want to keep my head down and stay,” he said, knowing his time had run out.

  He left the professor’s office with a handshake and a promise of one last month of lodgings. “To give you time to make alternative arrangements”; the dean had given him that much.

  But in the hours since, Mohab had found himself incapable of action. He didn’t want to leave the universium. He didn’t even want to acknowledge he was Vary any more. Instead, he stayed out on his balcony, sipping cherry wine and watching the sky flash as if the moon and Mama Sunstar crossed swords up in the heavens.

  The sudden insistent smack of a fist against the door forced Mohab from his stupor. Agitated, he called out, “I am sleeping. Go away!” and then, when the noise persisted, “Okay, okay. I’m coming! Quiet now. Quiet.”

  Turning up the fire lamps as he went, Mohab crossed the sitting room to the hallway. He paused at the door, listening to muffled voices he didn’t recognise on the far side.

  “Open up!” said a voice out loud. “Open up for the National Guard, Mohab Tredora.”

  Fear jolted Mohab’s every nerve and he was forced to double over, clamp a hand to his mouth and do his best to fight the nausea. Momentarily, he considered escaping over the balcony railings. He could lower himself down to the balcony below and so on for seven floors until he
reached the ground… Only, he also knew with absolute certainty that the guards would hunt him down and execute him on the spot.

  Instead, he did the only thing he could. He reached out with a trembling hand. Thinking of his mother and his father, he thumbed the gel patch to roll the door aside and let the monsters in.

  Three

  “Wrists.”

  Kali reached out her arms as the guard grabbed the next pair of cuffs on the chain running the length of the wagon. He snapped them around her wrists and she shuddered as the internal plungers rested snugly against the pulse points.

  Turning her head to one side, Kali tried not to think about the consequences of those lethal ‘nicks’ being activated. The bio gel which was the life force for so much of her father’s new technology had also been harnessed as a weapon; pulse stimuli could solidify the gel inside each nick into a cutting edge, designed to slice the wearer’s veins. The guards wore master key versions of the wrist cuffs. One brush of a finger could activate a solitary nick or all those within a five-metre radius; Kali knew the hardware inside out.

  Her neighbour showed his big teeth. “What you staring at?”

  “No talking!” The guard put a hand to his belt where a beater stick was holstered.

  Kali tried to ignore the male and all the other prisoners manacled to either side of her and opposite.

  “Name?” The guard stared out from beneath his visor. His eyes were the chalky green of the thermal baths in Geno; ‘well-bred,’ her grandmother would have whispered cynically by her ear. His breath was perfumed with schnapps.

  “Lieutenant Kali Titian of the ninth Geno Battalion,” Kali said without inflection.

  “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant. I presume this is your first time travelling in a livestock bay, but there aren’t enough haulage wagons running to transport you separately from the Vary. The ground is breached by fifty-two new splinter zones between here and Nilreb. You may not know that, given your recent incarceration at the courts.” His gaze skimmed her throat, collarbones, and down. “Out here, we’ve baked bone-dry.” He slipped a finger into the front of her vest and skimmed left to right, his rough fingernail grazing each nipple. “Not enough release for all that hot swollen air. Eventually it busts through.”