Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1)

by Michael Valdez

Chapter 27

  On The Ocean

  Husband had given Dastou a pretty incredible vessel. A slick-looking 24-meter cruiser that would have been the single most expensive item on Horebaxi if anyone knew about it. Apparently those spies could do well for their supplies without pieces of Yodralki’s Voice.

  Ostensibly designed by Husband with help from unmentioned sources, removable painted planks on the outside of the boat made it look like a tan, bulky, ugly, workman-like small fishing boat when at the modest Hyugesten pier. After disembarking and getting a few kilometers from shore, Dastou, Crawford, and Trenna worked together to remove those planks one-by-one with specialized tools and place them onto hooks lining the inner retaining wall on the deck, where they could be replaced some other time. That took most of a hard, sweaty day, but afterwards the thing looked like a dream, its black with white trim paint job making it sleek and gorgeous.

  A highly modified, torque-heavy siopane-hybrid engine that ran extremely quiet under normal load and hummed politely at full power would get them to Davranis North in five days rather than the nine Dastou predicted. Thanks to that vessel, newly renamed Jaspertine, the voyage was nowhere near as stressful as it could have been. Hopefully the other group had as good of a time reaching their destination of Nebasht, but the way things had gone this past week – other than this soothing sea expedition – each of them probably had a broken limb by now.

  Dastou was below deck, sitting at a small desk with a map taking up almost all of the flat workspace. He was itching to be distracted, and thinking about the others reminded him that Jaspertine isn’t the only siopane-hybrid engine out there. It is, however, the only one outside of isolationist hands. The other engines were all gifted to the Ko Monasi a few years ago, a bribe to quell the tensions between the Academy and Saan’s tribe after she accepted his recruitment offer. They robbed her of her last name, de Kensing, for future use, but they shut up about the “insult” of taking away a promising young tribeswoman once they had the fastest speedboats in the world. Those vessels helped sustain the tribe as a whole since they could use them to ferry items along the Hodenaxi river.

  Dastou had planned on that situation, meaning the tribe’s anger, and had engineers designing and building the boats for months before he went to ask Saan-Hu to join his entourage. The Ko Monasi were already keeping a secret for him – more for his dead mentor, to be honest. Coming to take away a tribe member seemed like asking more than was necessary and would, as Lonoj Ornadais would say, “unbalance the scales.” He needed Saan to be able to return, and he offered a deal: she was not fully exiled as would normally be the case, and they’d get some badass speedboats for their leniency. It worked out perfectly. An added benefit was that Nebasht now had the ability to patrol the nearby mineral-rich islands of the Bluewell Archipelago in case of infrastructure expansion in that direction.

  And Junehara Tain would tell Dastou everything. Husband was the spy on the Thousand Kilo Shore, Tain the informant on the Bluewell Archipelago. Dastou didn’t need Junehara to do that, and didn’t ask – the man was already working with the Saints after his brother Sigrid joined an entourage fully twenty years before Saan’s recruitment. Dastou chuckled at how Saan-Hu’s family was so intimately tied to the DSF at high levels: she was his primary administrator, her uncle Sigrid Tain was one of the original entourage members that became Academy instructors, and her other uncle Junehara Tain was a spy and scout. Dastou wondered if he should recruit Saan’s aunt and mother just to keep the bonds of blood going, then immediately thought better of asking about Mama de Kensing. By all accounts the woman was a bitch.

  Now trying to stop distracting himself, the Saint quit slouching in his chair and looked at the map of the Baritr Ocean in front of him. He had scribbled a few notes and circles, mostly to point out seasonal weather patterns that might affect their trip. To find those patterns he had to meditate, enter the Null Bank. Each Saint was taught to think of the Null Bank as a library despite its name, with organized shelves leading down long, winding, complex routes. Another standard technique was to create a guide within the bank, a subconscious guide of sorts that would lead a self-entranced Saint deep into his or her own mind encyclopedic data hidden within all of their kind’s brains. The mental storehouse was massive, after all, and not knowing where to go would lead to a coma or death due to being too deeply entranced for too long. Dastou’s guide was a talking apple pie that wore pants and a belt.

  “Pie Pants” would float around at chest-level, its casual trousers fluttering under it because, of course, it had no legs. Pies don’t have legs, just pants sometimes. When asked a question, it would answer in an ethereal, echoing voice, indicate the direction Dastou needed to go, help uncover the information wanted, and then show the way out when done.

  Dastou’s branch of the gray-matter library was one he built up for several years after he started his training in earnest at about eleven years old and had changed little in that time. It was a high-tech structure with diode-backlit displays in every aisle to help mark his path, embedded lights in the floor that lit a path after Pie Pants pointed it out, and holographic displays that he could touch and shift to build devices he discovered in his head before testing them in reality. The reason why the Null Bank was difficult to navigate was because, like any human mind, information shifted to and fro. If he had already studied a subject or researched some piece of equipment, where the information was found originally would had moved, hence the need for an ethereal librarian.

  Studying without a guide was tantamount to suicide, but it was also addictive. In fact, it was the only addiction that Saints could involuntarily suffer from, their brains protected against such a chemical imbalance. Knowing more and more about the physical world, learning secrets the Cypher kept for itself, the feeling of becoming unstoppable the more you learn and exploit – it was a rush, the knowledge gained and used a slow drug that you always wanted more of. Not only could you lose your sense of reality, you could cause serious brain damage that led to seizures or comas. The original reasons Saints traveled with small recruited entourages was, first, to alleviate the loneliness of travel, exploration, and experimentation. Second, it was to make sure people around you didn’t let you dig too long or deep in the Null Bank over and over. That reasoning became less important as time went on and mentors taught their charges about subconscious totems and patience as a survival tool.

  In any case, Pie Pants was nowhere to be found. As for the weather patterns he needed for this voyage, he only found them thanks to previous trips into the bank and the displays in his own library, his internal self following recently established routes and then staggering out. Instead of getting what he wanted quickly and leaving, it took him nearly an hour just to find some basic information about oceanic weather patterns, the process was nightmarishly difficult without his probably-delicious guide.

  A secondary problem was that he couldn’t go back in for almost a full day at a time. Having a Kaialus seizure only days ago thanks to Vaiss’ vocal Stitch, his brain was injured in a way he didn’t understand and was protecting itself from further damage, meaning he couldn’t meditate at his usual level. It was infuriating. Dastou had made only three very short visits into the Null Bank since leaving Hyugesten, and found himself unable to enter at all anymore.

  It didn’t matter at this point, though, as this was the mid-afternoon of the fourth day of their journey, and they had only about eight hours before they would see Davranis North’s shoreline in the distance. Slowing down when they got that close and going the long way to DavNo’s deprecated pier, it would be another half-a-day of careful, sneaky boating before they reached land. So, instead of trying to go into the Null Bank one more time, Dastou sat, thinking. At the very least he was doing an excellent job of figuring out how bad his odds were of ever stepping onto Blackbrick soil again if they really had four-hundred-and-eighty troops preparing to defend or lockdown the continent’s biggest city.

  It was also to be noted that
he made a calculated assumption that there were at least double that many armed men and women under Tryst’s, and therefore Citizen Vaiss’, command, which put the number at around a thousand. They wouldn’t all be fully hypnotized, either, as the logistics of that were too much to handle, meaning many were simply patriotic folks convinced to do the “right thing,” to protect their home against the menace that was Saint Cosamian Dastou and his Davranis Security Forces. At best, the patriots were given a less-complex tattoo that removed them from the Cypher, which Dastou would have thought impossible last week, and now he let the concept roll over him like dirty pool water.

  Dastou laughed at himself. He’d been so busy dealing with the small things, with just trying to survive, to help his friends, to deal with an ever-increasing number of oddities, that he let himself be taken for a dangerous ride again and again. Let alone the fact that he let so much slip by him over the years – how long had that army been preparing itself, after all? The Saint sat back in his chair, a frustrated self-flagellating smile on his face. If there was one other Saint alive, just one, some of this may have been figured out sooner. What had he done in these last few years, other than ignore a growing conspiracy across the ocean? It sometimes seemed like he got more in-depth thinking done when he was a drunk.

  No, that was a lie. It was truly terrifying for him to remember how he used to make himself nearly black out every other night with alcohol, how his immunity to hangovers or addiction made it easy to pick a full bottle of something or other and get to work on draining it. There was also the pointless sex with women that were practically strangers and a few early recruits. Lonoj Ornadais helped him finish the Academy, helped him sober up. He got very little done on his own while binging and wallowing in misery.

  Alright, alright, that’s enough self-pity. He had a tendency to go into that nice little depression if left alone long enough, and he was tired of it, sick of his inability to stop the all-encompassing dejection sometimes. A few minutes of that mood sucked away at hours of his energy, and Dastou decided to keep himself busy be checking their supplies. If he couldn’t find the weather patterns he needed in the Null Bank, he’d have to make sure they could properly ration what they had if they had to take a yet longer way around a storm to get to DavNo. He might still become mildly depressed while counting protein bars and dried meats, but it was better than doing the same while sitting still.

  The Saint stood up, stretched, and got a look at himself in a small mirror near the corner of the cabin. His brown skin, which always made his silvery-gray eyes brighter, had changed little in the sun and salty sea air – not unexpected – and he had re-shaved his head the day before, along with what little scruff had tried to become a beard. He replaced his torn clothing with the exact same styles in Hyugesten: a waist length dark yellow leather jacket that was close to his tailored versions as was available, a white buttoned shirt, heavy-duty black jeans, and boots. His small trunk in the corner for clothing, next to ones for Trenna Geil and Crawford Zedhani provided by Husband and Wife after they called in some debts from a local clothing maker, held more of the same. He definitely looked and felt better than the bruised mess he was when he got to Hyugesten. The Saint took a deep breath, scratched at his post-shave itching jaw, scratched at his more-or-less completely healed suture near his waist, and turned to walk out.

  “What the hell!?” cursed Crawford, his surprise evident not only in his voice but in using very taboo profanity.

  “Oh, no...” Trenna had gasped at the same time.

  Their voices came down from the deck and, with the engine of this speedy cruiser being nearly whisper-silent, Dastou heard them clearly over lightly lapping ocean water. He jogged up the narrow handful of steps to the stern, felt his eyes sting at the still-bright sun and reflected glittering on the water’s surface, and made a sharp turn forward. He walked quickly to the bow where the second radio was placed. The first radio, in the cabin, was non-functional – it was the only thing wrong with this vessel so the Saint had no place to complain. Near the on-deck radio is where he found the others, Crawford squinting at the device as if to ask for an explanation, and Trenna with her hands covering her mouth in shock.

  Crawford heard Dastou coming and spoke without looking. “Take a listen, boss.” He turned up the radio. “This is entirely ridiculous.”

  A familiar, haughty voice came from the radio, trained and clear: Councilor Jandal Tryst. He was stern, focused, methodically timed, and slightly indignant.

  “...Murders of our citizens have forced our hand. Blackbrick will declare itself free from the manipulations of Saint Cosamian Dastou and his armed forces, and we do so with our own military might. We are currently capable of keeping them out of our borders and any other land of Horebaxi we are asked to defend. Regrettably, our first duty must also be to place the aforementioned escapees under arrest. Cosamian Dastou, Nesembraci Jaydef, Saan-Hu, the traitor civilian Trenna Geil, and at least five other unnamed Davranis Security Forces agents are to present themselves in Blackbrick and provide evidence of their innocence, if any exists.”

  The last was said a little sarcastically and with a pause before continuing.

  “With their actions of late, we are certain that they will do no such thing. Therefore, we must seek out these criminals on our own terms, using our own resources, and with immediacy. Blackbrick is officially declaring our intent of defensive aggression against the Davranis Security Forces, its training school the Ornadais Academy, any of its soldiers that try to prevent the arrest of the aforementioned criminals, and any other parties that attempt to keep us from these duties. We will make ourselves and our commitment seen and known soon after this message is heard.”

  That was it, the end of the message. There was a pregnant pause as everyone waited by the radio, looking at it, expecting something more. When Tryst’s voice came back on after the long moment of waiting, Crawford groaned in disgust.

  “This is Councilor Jandal Tryst, a chosen representative and citizen of Blackbrick, the capitol city-state of the Stoneground. I must lamentably use this message to...”

  Crawford turned the radio off. “It’s the same thing he already said. He talks about the attack against his city, the death and destruction, all that.”

  “Making sure it plays again and again,” said Dastou. “Making sure it’s heard everywhere until they make themselves ‘seen and known,’ I guess.”

  “I don’t completely understand the message,” Trenna said. “What does ‘defensive aggression’ mean?”

  “It’s a made-up stack of words,” Dastou explained, “to make something very dark seem noble. Take away the pointlessly extravagant talk and it’s easy to see what it really means.”

  “War,” Crawford stated. “They are declaring war on the DSF in the most outright fanciful way possible.”

  “Exactly, using words like ‘lawful,’ ‘traitor,’ ‘authority.’” Dastou exaggerated each of the quoted words in an impersonation of the councilor’s high-and-mighty tone. “Tryst is making Blackbrick out to be a peace-keeping power trying to find and capture criminal scum, and they will fight back if necessary.”

  “How do they declare war on a school?” asked Trenna. “Controlled cities can’t really fight each other, can they?”

  “Technically speaking, they can’t,” Crawford said. “But since at night anything goes, sometimes there are skirmishes between people seeking some kind of expansion of influence, usually criminals.”

  “That’s not rare in the Davranis Palm,” Dastou added. “With four city-states connected to each other in those places, lots of illegal trafficking happens, and the people doing it are both greedy and protective. There’s a small fight somewhere at least four times a year. The Stoneground and its five city-states are the same – a skirmish here and there, a black market with a few factions, the usual. The problem is that all that almost all of that activity happens at night, during free hours. However, if Blackbrick has that army I told you guys about when we boarded
, in which Vaiss likely made people naturals in order to have them be soldiers and put all of it under Tryst’s command…” He let the pause linger.

  “They’ll be like my people,” Trenna said. “They can go anywhere, at any time, day or night.”

  “Yeah. Declaring a cross-oceanic fight against a non-systemic school is new, but not impossible. Put a bunch of artificial naturals, as strange of a phrase as that is, in Blackbrick uniforms in my stolen Caravan, and you’re halfway to that war. The other half is getting into the Academy.”

  “From what you’ve said, though,” Crawford piped in, not realizing that Dastou had only paused rather than stopped talking entirely, “Vaiss can also hypnotize you and any of us gray-eyes. I imagine he could just walk on in, using a Stitch here and there to get past anyone guarding the place.”

  “Machines aren’t susceptible to hypnotism,” Dastou said after a barely-there sigh at the interruption. “I can design facial-recognition software and have any cameras that see him shut themselves off to avoid a visual Stitch, and accompany that with a lockdown protocol to close off the school. Vaiss can’t get in on his own.”

  “So Tryst keeps acting like he’s hunting criminals,” figured Trenna, “and that his soldiers or guards should be allowed to go in to try and find you. Well, us.”

  Dastou nodded. “I can’t design software to recognize people I’ve never seen, and Vaiss is probably too smart to be anywhere near in case of armed combat. Shit…”

  The Saint’s stomach fell; going to DavNo may have been a terrible idea. His original hypothesis involved Citizen Vaiss heading there if Captain Hays really did obliterate the navigational data in the Caravan, which wasn’t in doubt. Dastou planned to contact allies and spies, figure out where Vaiss had arrived, and do his best to make a confrontation favorable. But the Citizen wasn’t going to be there at all, probably just a platoon or two of Blackbrick’s own, which was all that could fit in the mobile headquarters barracks. If this war announcement had been made a day sooner – and maybe it was due to the bafflingly sporadic nature of radio communications – he could have reached Davranis Central by now, gotten back to his school, his students. His entourage.

  “Shit,” Dastou repeated in a mutter, “we’ll have find whoever Vaiss or Tryst sends instead. Get them to talk, get some information so we won’t be making bad guesses anymore.” So he won’t be making bad guesses, he corrected internally.

  “Oh what in black hell!?” Crawford called out.

  Again, the highly taboo curse grated Dastou’s ears, but he didn’t have time to denounce that or the interruption before the young agent rushed to a table bolted to the forward bow, opened a satchel strapped on the underside of the furniture, and took out a pair of binoculars. He put them on, faced northeast, almost directly where the cruiser was aimed, and cursed slightly less offensively under his breath.

  “Sir,” said Crawford before a pause, a tone that could only be described as silent fear entering his voice. That was alarming, as Crawford had little open fear for almost anything. “They’re not sending a few soldiers to get you, and we certainly won’t have to look too hard for them.”

  The redhead held out the binoculars and Dastou took them. Trenna retrieved the sniper’s wavelength monocular she’d been playing around with the last few days. Tools in hand, they looked out to the ocean where Crawford pointed, the sun producing a haze on the ocean that couldn’t block the immensity of what the redhead wanted the others to see.

  “Ugh,” the Saint said in a grumble.

  A few kilometers away, objects that could be best described as angular, sideways, floating metal buildings cut the waters. They were similar to cargo container vessels but sleeker, more pointed, more dangerous-looking. Each was huge and well-armed, with cannons, one to port and one to starboard at least five times as large as the tiny figures on the decks. Smaller, higher-repetition cannons inside the ship weren’t visible, but four big slots on either side of the hull were meant for them, keeping the weapons concealed or protected until they were in use. The fore and aft decks were meant for people to be able to walk on, but the center third of the vessel was connected with the hull, creating a sheer metal wall that dub into the ocean like the side of a cliff. Thick antennae poked at the air from the center section’s curved roof. A flash in Dastou’s mind reminded him of something he saw once in the Null Bank, machines he could not explore in detail due to their complexity and, therefore, the risks involved with getting all the details necessary for study with or without a guide. That partially-ignored discovery gave him a name for this weapon-on-water he was staring at.

  “Warships,” Dastou said. “Those are warships.”

  “War-what?” asked Crawford.

  “They are what the name implies. There are different classes, but I only see one here, in the destroyer category, five of them. These look heavily stripped down, though, missing a lot of radio antennae and stationary small-arms artillery. The crews must be stripped down, too. I’d say... fifty at the absolute minimum. One-hundred-and-twenty at the most.”

  “Five ships,” echoed Trenna with awe. “That’s at least two-hundred-and-fifty soldiers from their army.”

  “Sailors from their navy,” Dastou corrected. “Yeah... that’s a lot.

  “At any rate we know how serious Jandal Tryst is about coming to arrest us,” Crawford said.

  “Bringing five brand new warships,” said Dastou, “and that many sailors isn’t something you do to arrest someone. This is a threat, a warning, maybe an attack.”

  Wow, when Dastou’s wrong he is wrong. How long would these ships have been in construction, how long was this invasion planned? The Saint was forced to let go of his ideas of what he had to do, what he needed to take care of. He was going to have to improvise his way through this, and felt suddenly at peace with himself. Dastou got the tingle of a great new challenge ahead of him, and despite the fact that the toned-down destroyers ahead could cause the deaths of thousands entirely unopposed, he smiled.

  “Attack?” Crawford squealed, the uncharacteristic fear still lingering. “Attack who, DavNo?”

  “Probably,” answered Dastou. “That’s the direction they’re heading in. And we’re the only ones who know about it, so guess what we have to go do?” The smile faded only slightly as he took the binoculars from his eyes, and the Saint could only guess that he looked a touch on the crazy side for being at all cheery at this development.

  “I’d rather not guess at or do what you’re planning,” Crawford lamented.

  “That’s okay,” said the Saint in a pleasant tone, “I’ll tell you anyway.” He leaned close to the redhead, and spoke only loud enough for the three of them to hear, as if they were being spied on by the ocean. “We get to tour a warship. How exciting.”

  Dastou handed Crawford the binoculars and the redhead looked like he was going to be sick. Trenna put down her monocular, a worried crease on her brow.

  “How incredible and exciting,” Dastou said as he walked away from the others, headed down to get a good look at his maps. This was how things should be. The Saint had gotten better at planning ahead lately, but his kind was always best at surviving their way through their own dangerous ideas. It was time to embrace who he was and do something very, very stupid.

  ~~~~