by S E Zbasnik
Dwarf and captain shared a look before Orn turned to the kid and asked, "What's that mean? You were an accounting intern?"
Segundo shook his head. How could these otherworldly types not know about the prophet school? It'd literally been his entire life up until a half a year ago. To think anyone outside its beige and padded walls had no idea of its existence paralyzed his entire existence. "It's a school, a siphon, set up to educate and nurture the chosen one."
"Which chosen one?" Orn's grasp of religion ranked somewhere above his knowledge on interstellar banking and unreal estate law.
"Any chosen one. Many religions contract with them to save on time and resources in their hunt for the new prophet," Segundo sounded like he was reading off the brochure.
"So, you were raised by these prophet middle men instead of on top of some unrepentant monastery high in the mountains on a planet that rains glass?" Variel asked, curious enough to draw some weep from the technician's wound.
"There were fifty of us, taken from our parents because we were all born under a certain star across the universe. The eldest was almost ten and hated every moment of it. I wasn't much past six or seven months and can't remember my biological donors."
"Parents would give up their children like that? No questions asked?" Variel was surprised, especially if there was no compensation.
"The 'leaders' spoke of a great light touching the one who would lead the People of Salvation, granting him the ability to heal with a word and balm the soul of suffering. What parent wouldn't wish that for their child?" Segundo had a lot of time to try and forgive his parents, which was much easier than the others when he couldn't remember them. It was a bit like praying to a black stain on the wall.
"We were trained, not in the religious doctrine of the Salvagers, that would have made choosing the chosen one too easy," Segundo's bitter words caught in his throat. Perhaps he wasn't as over it as his superiors hoped. "But in sitting still, being quiet, listening to the words not spoken, contemplating the pain of trees being felled with no one around, and sweeping. Lots and lots of sweeping."
"Sounds like prepping a kid for a life of accounting without ever letting him crack a math book," Orn butted in.
"And if you didn't eat all your meager rations and happily go to sleep on the floor were you beaten and kicked out?" Variel asked, knowing where this was going.
"Oh no, of course not. We were all treated with the same level of dignity and grace afforded a person of import because they had no idea who was the actual chosen one. To be on the safe side they assumed it could be anyone, even the boy that tried to flood the boarding house by clogging the drains with copies of the rule tapestries.
"After eighteen years in the commune, they gathered us all together and announced it was time. Some old man, foreign to all of us, waved a stick dotted in crystals over each of our heads. With it, he determined the worm eater was the One. There was lots of celebrating from our Fathers, crowing about how from now on he'd be the Chosen One destined to save the universe. Most of us kept blinking up at the kid on the podium asking 'him?'"
"No miracles or feats of anything associated with this kid, I take it," Variel said.
Segundo tried to think. There'd been an obvious hierarchy as was bound to happen when trapping fifty boys together, but The One ran to the middle of the pack. Not strong enough to be a leader, not weak enough to be a follower. Certainly not weird enough to be an outsider. Just was. "He did eat almost twenty worms in a sitting once, hence the name."
They'd been stripped of their previous identities the moment they crossed the boarding house's threshold. Names could place undo significance on a child and throw off the results, so everyone was simply called Brother Salvage. Of course this lasted all of two, three weeks at the most as each brother tried to carve his own sense of autonomy -- hence the names of skill. For most of his life, Segundo was known as "Triple Jump" after he took three giant leaps back to avoid a spider. It could have been much worse; poor "wet pants."
"And they all named you Second because you weren't the first?" Variel continued after the kid lapsed into silence.
Segundo nodded, "They lined us up, gave us a number, the surname of Second, and told us where we'd be reporting for an apprentice or internship."
"Okay, wait," Orn interrupted, "So, you're the Fifth of the seconds. Does that mean in the event the first four fail to perform their duties, get caught taking naked pictures of saints or what have you, you get the title and crown?" His dwarf eyes lit up, "Oh please tell me there was a Chosen One runner-up crown! With lots of those stick on jewels on colored cardboard paper. And a scepter!"
"I'm glad you find my life so amusing," Segundo showed his first sign of teeth as the dwarf gleefully crafted a crown in his mind. But Orn was too far gone and failed to miss the glares of the barely into adulthood technician who never really came up against adversity in his life, much less from a dwarf who didn't care if he hurt anyone's feelings.
"Well," Variel said diplomatically, "Life sucks for everyone, unless you used to eat worms." She rose from her seat and added, "Don't forget to sterilize your plate when you're finished. No free rides on this ship." Panic claimed the face of the more than likely penniless kid and she amended, "Figure of speech."
The intercom buzzed to life and the surprisingly dulcet tones of WEST carried across, "Message for you, Owner 23."
"Send it to my PALM," she said, wondering why the computer was bothering her with it.
Orn broke from his little chosen one pageant reprieve and noticed WEST's less confrontational nature, "Fer must have drugged it again."
"You misunderstand, Owner 23," WEST continued. "The message is coming from a ship floating to the starboard bow."
"What? Orn, you swore space was empty!" She cursed at the dwarf as he tumbled out of his chair.
"It was, last I checked," he tried to defend himself as he chased after the captain, "A few hours ago, anyway."
"If we get blasted out of space, I'm holding you personally responsible," she admonished Orn as she dashed through the bridge doors, partially open from a lazy pilot.
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, "What else is new?"
Orn's backside slipped into his chair as he hit the rise button and swung about trying to find the comm line. The captain tinkered with something on the side, near one of the non-functioning panels the old cruise-line put in to let passengers live out their "space pirate" dreams. Sure, you totally decimated that Dragon ship by pressing a few buttons that are connected to a child's busy box. Congrats. Now, why not head back to the buffet line while we handle the important stuff?
"It's not a Crest ship," Variel said, relieved.
"Why in the rockslide would it be? Patching through to the hailing ship's comm," Orn said, as he pushed down on the wrong switch.
A screen rose from the depths of the control panel and fitted itself into the viewing windows. Orn gulped and glanced to the captain. He waved his right hand in consolation and said, "Sorry, clumsy fingers."
Variel ran her fingers through her "pool table" hair and tugged down on her fresh change of shirt, the tunic even more billowy than the last to allow for air movement across the still healing wounds. Orn was never ever supposed to call up the viewscreen. It was like telling your enemy where you stuck your battleships and then letting him go first.
At first the screen remained white, a small bit of fuzz warping the edges, then the white pulled back and a gigantic pink monster with two deep black crevices for eyes came into view. Captain and dwarf recoiled, both searching for a weapon, but the view continued to pull back until the monster focused into a nose linked to a face and then a man. He was thin, his cheeks passing from gaunt into skeletal, as limp salt and pepper hair dangled from below a white hood. But his eyes sparkled, like the joy of someone who'd found either inner peace or total madness. Possibly both.
"Can we help you?" Variel asked slowly, hoping the answer was no.
The man smiled wide. Madness, definitely ma
dness, no one can smile that big without pulling something in his brain. As he beatificated first over the woman in brown, then down to the dwarf in red, the smile actually rose higher, "It is I who have come to help you."
"Beg pardon?" She would have made the "kill the line" gesture but the skinny grinning man was staring through her, as if she left her face on the back of her skull.
"Is your life languid and limp? Do your limbs dangle from your nearly lifeless body?"
"Nope," Variel leaned over Orn's shoulder, moving to shut off the line, "We're all limpless here."
"Well, that's not strictly true now is it Cap," Orn grinned wickedly.
She bit back a few choice curses and, shifting to her right foot, kicked Orn's chair hard. "What do you want, Mister...?"
"Me?" their caller touched his robes in feigned simplicity, "Oh, I am a humble servant of The Way."
"Thank you, but we really don't need any-" Variel moved to click off the line, but Orn wouldn't shut up.
"The Way?"
"You have not experienced The Way?!" He sounded like Segundo now, so certain a pair of space debris would know all about an obscure sect on a planet far flung in the nebulous fields. "But of course, it is obvious from your lackluster hair and the dark circles rimming your eyes."
Variel leaned back, trying to not feel insulted. She just donated a pint or two of blood to the med-bay floor, which wasn't about to become a favorite beauty treatment. But it was hard to shake off the barb to her pride. Healthy was about the best she could hope for anymore.
"Do not fret, young...ish one," the stranger continued, "for I bring salvation from your curse. All you need do is renounce the devil in all its beguiling liquid forms, then the light shall shine within. Water!" He tried to spit, but was so desiccated from his devotion only a mote of dust escaped, "It is home to disease, destruction, and will make you bloat with fluid."
Oh gods, Variel massaged her aching temples, just what she needed, a dietst. She thought about asking him just how long he intended to survive without any water in his body, how water could possibly be a devil, or if he'd actually passed any of the sanity tests required to purchase a space vessel. Instead, she focused on getting this problem out of her hair as quickly as possible.
"Yes, thanks, I'm afraid we're all full up on religion, gods, deities, and any other floating disembodied sky being that will destroy us all for failing to accomplish his nebulous goals, but we'll take your instructions under advisement."
She leaned over to sever the line but not before their new friend could pout and ask, "Okay. Can I leave some literature on your--"
And the screen blissfully fell dead as she turned the thing off, letting it retreat back into the console from which it should never escape again. Maybe if she put tape over the damn thing, or got a pilot with a working hand.
Orn shrugged and smiled up at his beleaguered captain. Could anything take down that dwarf's spirits? "He seemed a bit thirsty."
"Ha," she barked a solitary laugh and returned to the starboard sensors, watching the water dietest pull out of their orbit and off to harass someone else.
"I've always wondered though," Orn mused aloud, "what does God need with a starship?"
"Are you going to make that stupid quip every time we pass a missionary ship?"
"Until they learn a new position," Orn grinned wide, but the captain only waved her hands in defeat.
"I'm too exhausted to continue this..." her hands circled for eloquence as her exhausted brain hunted through her internal thesaurus, "thing. I'm heading to bed. If anything catches on fire have Gene take care of it." She slid towards the exit of the bridge to the small recessed ladder on the left. Orn's humming accompanied her slow climb.
The door to the Captain's Quarters whooshed open at her life signature, and she stumbled into her room. Most proper captains kept their quarters as far from the bridge as possible. They already spent most of their life hovering around it, no reason to sleep there as well. But this ship hailed from an archaic romantic period; the stoic bachelor going down with the ship, chasing white dwarf stars, avoiding love except for the ship and all that. It was also one of the few rooms she could lock the dwarf out of. As the lights rose to greet her, a shadow jumped from the darkness.
Variel recoiled, still on high alert from the near miss with authorities. Her hand clawed for something heavy on the desk. Being a spaceship, the heaviest thing allowed to roam free was a small book of ancient postcards. She still wielded it like a pro, but it was all for naught.
As the lights above her narrow bed rose, the familiar face of her resident killer lifted to meet hers. The postcards slipped back to her desk, a joke gift of Orn's that she never got, and she shook out the burst of adrenaline. Her body couldn't take much more.
Yelling at the elf wouldn't accomplish much, they either clam up worse than usual or...no that was pretty much the elven response to any attack. They were the only race to stop a war with a librarian. Instead, she pulled out her desk chair bolted safely to the ground. It swiveled to take her exhausted form. "I assume you have a good reason for being up here."
"I needed to speak with you," Taliesin said, as if it were perfectly normal to break into someone's room and squat on their bed until they wandered in to talk.
Variel nodded slowly, "And you couldn't do it anywhere else on the ship..."
The assassin folded his hands and dropped his eyes, "I did not think you wished this to be common knowledge."
"Oh?" her face almost fell. He could not have been listening closely to Dacre; he was dangling upside down, swinging about like a high-wire circus clown. But those elves, and their ears, and their brains. A long life tended to make a species very curious or very bored.
Variel shifted in her seat, trying to not imagine it opening up beneath her, "So, you're here. What'd you want to say?"
The elf raised his head, his hair loose and dangling around his head. It was almost always knotted up and twisted back. Those haunting eyes were shrouded. "My intended is dead but not by my hand. It would be incorrect of me to retain the fee," and he held out his naked hand holding a pair of maroon chips.
"You carry hard dwarven currency on you?" she said, shocked at what he offered her, "on this ship? With Orn just down the hall?"
"It would be either a very skilled or very unwise man to steal from an assassin," he mumbled, as if this entire conversation jumped off a burning building away from him.
Variel nodded, made some sense, still...no one carried hard currency anymore. It was like hanging a giant "please murder me" sign around your neck. But assassins something worked "off the books," gods knew she'd done it a few times, and all but hyperventilated until those red chips turned into a "centaur slipping on the ice" vid.
She raised her hand but held it up, "You keep it, you'll need it soon enough for rent."
The sides of Taliesin's eyes fell. Elves may say little with their mouths, but entire novels were written by the slight twitching of their saucer eyes. "But it is rightfully yours."
"I know your guild exists to clean up the universe. Take out those that managed to slip away from another species' jurisdiction. Lauded as heroes by some that need better role models, but I won't. I don't assassinate people."
The assassin's eyebrows curled in together, "Dacre is dead."
"Yeah, murdered, by me. Not a high panel of elven judicature who got it in their heads to police the unpoliceable by cobbling together some employees and calling it an assassins' guild. Assassins plays cooler in vids."
He blinked his eyes slowly, trying to parse the words of the quick ones. It was not always easy. They spent so many saying so little. "Assassinate or murder, I can see no difference."
"Exactly," she said, closing her hands and slotting them near her chest then gasping as one must have grazed her wound.
A shudder passed across her form but she shook it off, never wanting to let on to being less than unshakeable; a difficult pedestal to remain upon. Taliesin rose to his feet, for
the first time feeling awkward about invading her personal space. There were few belongings, only a metal footlocker, a few pieces of clothing tossed to the bottom of the small closet, and a flower sealed in a clear plastic sitting upon her desk. The sparseness of it, the lack of personalization somehow made it feel that much more invasive, as if he strolled inside her psyche.
"I apologize for the intrusion," he bowed deeply, unused to human customs.
"It's all right," she said trying to push it all away as she waved her hand exposing the bandaged area. He gasped at the blood weeping through. Instinctively, he dropped down to a knee and began to reach over to inspect the wound, a deep pang of pain calling up from his own uninjured hide as he did so.
But Variel looked down at him, a strange mix of concern and bemusement on her face, "What are you doing?"
"You are bleeding still, I intended too..." the thought ran over as his mind registered where the wound was and how exactly he'd have to minister to it.
"It's fine. It's not blood. Monde's little antiseptic bugs are just leaking as they shut down," she smiled at his misjudgment, a rare warm one.
"Ah, you must injure yourself often," he said, trying to cover his blunder as he rose to his feet.
"Every chance I get," she admitted with a snort. "Now, unless there is some other major business I need to attend, I should probably get some sleep and let the bugs finish their business."
"Oh, yes, of course," his eyes glanced towards the official door, not the way he'd entered, and he shuffled towards it. Taliesin paused for a moment over the exit and said, "Any words uttered from the mouth of Dacre died with him."
She could have pretended she had no idea what he was talking about. Feigning ignorance was one of her highly sought after resume skills. Instead she nodded lightly and whispered, "Good."
The elf saw himself out.
As Taliesin's slightly orange palms worked swiftly down the ladder, he felt a familiar presence hovering just out of the line of the "under the sea" mood lighting no one bothered to exchange for proper simulated night lights. His boots hit the deck whisper quiet, one of the rare carpetless sections, and he turned slowly to face his sister.
