Family Matters

by S E Zbasnik

  "I see," the dwarf settled back and closed the case. "Now Ma'am...would you mind opening up the rest of the case?"

  "I..." Variel glanced around, the first sign of something wrong creeping into her voice, "I don't know what you mean."

  "Ma'am, I was not hewn yesterday. Please open up the hidden compartment of this case."

  "Oh..." Variel nodded, a flush coming upon her wan face, "Of course officer. I'm sorry, I just..." she babbled as she passed her hand under the hidden DNA sampler. The back of the case vanished revealing a treasure trove for the customs official to poke through.

  He reached in greedily and removed a cylinder, a good twelve inches long as easily another two inches across. The dwarf shook it up and down, watching the rubber end wobble a bit. As he looked up at her with confusion, the entire thing began to vibrate back and forth.

  "I'm sorry," the blush was in full bloom across Variel's cheeks, "you seem to have activated it. Oh gods."

  The officer cried out in surprise and terror scattering it from his hands. As soon as the vibrating cylinder hit the desk it started to wiggle up and down, twisting to reach all those hidden nooks and crannies. The officer watched the black worm rotating across his workspace in confusion, then realization began to dawn. He glanced back to the woman who was covering her face in her hands in shame, then back to the...object climbing further along his desk. "Shattered pickaxe," he work cursed. "Take it, take the damn thing." He started to pick it up, but froze and motioned for her to do it.

  Variel worked her magic, silencing the dancing mechanism and plopped it into the hidden compartment of her briefcase. "I...I'm not in trouble, am I?" she asked, looking in terror at the two trolls who had no idea what was going on but were enjoying the show.

  "No!" the dwarf screamed, "No, you can just...you're dirty. I mean clean, you're clean to go!" Rattled, he covered his face with one hand to hide his own blush and waved her on with the other, "Get out of here."

  Variel curtsied and muttered a few thank yous as she joined her party on the safe side of security. While locking up the brief case again, Marek stared at her face. The blush remained but her eyes were pure steel. Gobsmacked, he stuttered out, "What in the hell was all that?"

  Orn smiled wide, nudging his captain in the ribs and almost tearing into her hidden package, "That's a good one, Cap. Round of applause for the performance. It'd put any bard to shame."

  "What was? What's going on."

  Orn looked to the human and sized him up, "Thank the gods you never did sleep with him," he muttered to Cap. "Can't you spot someone smuggling a vibrator through security?"

  "It's a...you did what?!"

  A series of lilting notes sounded, their shuttle had arrived, "It distracted the guard enough he completely forgot about checking the sub-dermal scan. Come on, let's get going before one of the trolls asks to borrow it."

  CHAPTER TEN

  Flakes tumbled off the edifice masking the shuttle depot's original building, the crumbs of industry decorating Orn's head. He glared at the human who almost crushed his false hand in the midst of terror throes under atmo madness. Okay, maybe Orn spun some tall tales about how if you don't keep your head between your legs during an atmo break the universal translator in your ear canal will pop like a can of beans in the microwave. And then there was a bit about the tendency of giant air snakes to flit about in the wind's of the stratosphere, hungry for the meat inside the shuttles. All harmless stories to delight the kiddies through the doldrums of passing the rocky atmosphere barrier who did the same move 10 times a day, 253 days a year.

  Marek's left eye still twitched as he tried to shake his leg into something approaching useable. His wife didn't say anything, letting Orn have his fun or perhaps she was saving her strength for what was to come. Virginand was not bad by 'desolate hell hole abandoned by any sane thinking species to the dregs' standards. Thick plumes of smog wandered the air like a teenagers looking for trouble, blotting out the flashes of green and orange sky with its encompassing grey arms. It was less roads that criss crossed the ground and more heavily padded dirt, smashed down by vehicles far taller than anything necessary. Specks of gravel dug up from their shallow graves under tire wells, but most were scattered ages ago and never replaced.

  Still, a few tables leftover from the scraps of older tables dotted the café section of the city. A pair of Brownies sat at the only occupied one, sharing a slice of pie. The canopy snapped in the winds, mercifully low grade for the season. A scent, not unlike someone burning garbage and throwing sage on it to hide the smell, drifted on the high winds. Marek scrunched up his face to try and block the blast.

  But there was one plus to the planet, she noted as the others adjusted with each incredibly bouncy step, the lower gravity kept things light hearted at least. "Right, okay, we landed," Variel said as she jumped a few inches into the air, trying to pace around her companions and coming to a reverberating stop. "Where to next?"

  "Was I in charge of that?" Marek asked.

  She wanted to say something cutting, but Variel turned at the pair of uniforms baring down upon them from behind the shuttle depot. The officers were identical, aside from one being five feet shorter and huffing to keep up with the gargantuan stride of her partner. But otherwise they had the same smug sense of superiority that marked all corps across the galaxy. "We have a problem," she muttered under her breath.

  "Good afternoon," the dwarf said stretching her exhausted legs.

  "Hello, Officer," Variel said nodding to first the ogre then the dwarf. "Is there something we can help with?"

  "Seems we got a report that there's a Mr. Lidoffad with you, first name of Orn."

  "Who wants to know?" Orn shouted, waving his functioning fist around. The false hand ground as the servos thought better of working in the gritty air and flailed the fingers out. "Stupid piece of coprolite," he muttered, shaking his hand up and down.

  "I am afraid so," Variel answered. "Why?"

  The ogre dropped down to his knee and tried to death glare the dwarf too wrapped up in his hand to notice, "We have a few questions to put to Mr. Lidoffad."

  Orn finally got his hand to clench just as he looked up and wanted his fingers free, "Wha? What questions, what about? I'm not on trial here!"

  "Sir," the dwarf took over, her hands stuffed inside the wool pockets of the corps pants pulled underneath her breasts. The police system of the galaxy wasn't known for its fashion sense, "Where were you on the night of Nocture 25?"

  Orn blinked slowly and said, "You're going to have be a lot more specific and a lot less local."

  "I see," the dwarf said. Turning to her partner, she nodded once. The ogre slapped one fist around Orn's arm and easily lifted the enraged pilot off the ground.

  "Hey! What are you doing?! What gives you the right, okay, that shiny bit of metal across your chest does, but other than that what gives you the right to yank people up off the sidewalk?"

  The dwarf officer sighed, her voice blank as she mumbled, "You have the right to shut your mouth. If you fail to abide by that right, someone will correct it for you. You have the right to not flail as my partner tries to carry you or you risk a dislocated shoulder. You have the right..."

  The trio vanished back into the shuttle depot towards the corps office hidden behind, Orn dangling limply from the bored ogre's fingers. Marek looked at his nonchalant wife and then back towards the swinging door they'd exited only a moment earlier.

  "Aren't you going to go after them?" he asked nonplussed at the calm demeanor of his ex-military/still terrifying wife.

  "Why?" she shrugged. "We have a job to do out here, not locked in some corps waiting room filling out paperwork. Besides, Orn can handle himself. If he couldn't lie his way through a shuttle corps franchise he wouldn't be pilot material."

  "Is that your Crest loyalty at work here? We leave men behind?"

  A sneer graced her lips but she didn't yank him up by the collar and throw his lighter body into the wall. She needed to reserve h
er strength for what was to come, and there were too many witnesses. "Save your moralizing for the talk circuit and dig through your archives to find the drop off destination."

  Marek sensed that he just jumped onto a lake of thin ice and didn't fall through. Bouncing up and a down a few more times to test it would be inadvisable. He prodded at his hand before finding an address that was a whole bunch of numbers.

  "Longitude and latitude, saves on downloading updated planetary maps," Variel said inserting the numbers into her own hand and waiting for the local computer to synch up. She'd banished WEST from her PALM until they either got the computer's brain back in working order or she could find a more permanent solution than hitting "dismiss" when his robotic mug muscled its way in every two minutes.

  "Hm..." she said, "we're in luck. The place is close, a few blocks to the west."

  "So, what's the bad news?" Marek asked, already getting a sense of how this adventuring stuff worked.

  "It's in the Church of the Astros."

  The city life of whatever scrap they landed on seemed to be mostly sleeping in, or off threatening to shake down the other half for nap protection money. A handful of denizens, none of them human, scattered across their walk. Marek seemed to shrink inside his collar when a quad of gnomes crossed their path minding their own business.

  If she had cared to train her husband up proper in being a sword spouse she would have knocked the xenophobe into immersion therapy. Or, conversely, gone the opposite way. There was no denying that for every soldier who found a familiar humanity in something with a few extra legs or a few less eyes there were three that would rather blow it up than exchange words. They were not explorers by trade. That first contact shit was better left to the diplomats and well endorsed "Meet & Greet" teams.

  Variel turned the last corner and looked up, then up more. The Temple of Astros loomed across the entire block and then a bit into the next when one of the orbiting planets needed some growing room. The onyx pristine pillars were coated in a shimmering dust to mimic the stars. Twelve orbs rotated in creaking arcs around the hollow dome shielded from the harsh sun. Cherubs wouldn't have looked out of place, but it was bass reliefs of comets and asteroids that dotted the church's walls instead of saints or angels.

  A pair of mothers stood beside the doors, smiles that never reached their eyes firmly affixed. Variel clucked her tongue and said, "Well, we're here. Let's head inside and wait."

  Marek looked like he'd gotten a whiff of the midden after Orn used it, "This is a church?"

  "Yes, now get inside," she said, shoving her husband past the kindly mothers who smiled and bobbed their planetary headwear, but didn't say a word.

  The foyer floor was a gorgeous black marble, each stone cracked and blended with varying colors to recreate the heavens. White ceilings glittered with gold and silver specs above them. As the shadows fell across the white, the whole ceiling transformed to black, somehow amplifying the silver stars. Mosaics of orbs in reds, greens, and blues were inlaid into the walls, each next to a relief of the deity they represented. It was breathtaking.

  "Tacky," Marek muttered under his breath. "So tacky."

  A woman approached from the side, her shoes squeaking a haunting tune as she moved. Her robes were all black, same as the two standing outside. They represented the space in between the gods, the area necessary to make everything possible. She smiled and bowed her head, her heavy cloak flared out creating a perfect circle around her legs. "Have you come for the service?"

  "Gods no," Marek muttered as Variel elbowed him in his spangly guts.

  "Yes, we have."

  The mother smiled wide, a warmth exploding through her thick troll hide. "Then please, have a scope and take a seat," she said as she passed a thin scroll to Variel.

  She accepted it and motioned Marek into the sanctuary. He stumbled in first, his eyes scanning the sides for the altar to the god, the terra cotta ceiling, the eternal pyre, even the treasure room. "They don't even have a sacrificial stone," he muttered, his lips curling in anger. "What kind of place calls itself a church without a sacrificial stone?"

  If the foyer was breathtaking, the sanctuary held you down and pulverized you until all the oxygen wooshed out of your flattened lungs. Pews in the same black marble lined the space in four rows, centered out as if it were an arena. When a mother or sister passed near the pew it lit up in a rush of glittery stars, casting the love of the sky upon her. There was no altar at the center as would be typical on Arda, but twelve machines resided in a circle in the middle facing out into the congregation. They were formed of silver and gold gears with hefty levers beside each one with only varying banners covering up the inner workings. But the real eye opener, the part that could cause even a devote atheist to pause, was the dome.

  Despite it being a high midday sun, the dome glittered the blacks of the night sky, purple swirls mashing into indigo as stars burst into life and petered back out. Comets danced around the edges, playing in a nebula while in the darkest depths a blackhole consumed it all. Something told Variel this wasn't a projection. One of the mothers cranked a lever attached to a machine and it trembled as the gears wound, the silver blending with the gold until a planet sparked to life in a projection above them. The mother didn't look up, her eyes on a tube of oil that she pumped into the rusty lever, but Variel couldn't break from the shifting clouds and abject beauty as a rock of ice transformed before her into a planet.

  "Hey," Marek grumbled, breaking her train of thought, "let's find a seat near the back."

  He needn't have worried, the church was mostly empty. Apparently now wasn't the typical time for people to find salvation before they went back to sinning. She inclined her head towards a bench a row in from the back and inched inside. Her husband drug his feet despite the lower gravity and followed suit, still bitching about how this was all barbarian mumbo jumbo.

  "Do you think you can stop being a racist asshole for two seconds?" Variel hissed.

  "Me? I'm the racist asshole because a few heathens throw up a fancy light show and call it a church. If anything, you're the one who's racist."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, thinking this has anything to do with race. I'd call a human worshiping at the lacking-altar of Astros a pagan too."

  "You're such a fucking idiot."

  "At least I don't swear in a church," he said, smugger than normal as he inched away from the pew's back that kept coating his body in the glittering glow.

  Variel glared but didn't continue the thoughts of just how many curse words she could test out in here on him. Her husband covered his forehead like a good little Ardan and ducked down. She shook her head and continued to watch the sister preparing the machines for the service.

  Marek was profound in his faith as long as it meant he didn't have to change and could look down on anyone who didn't do what he thought was right while he sinned all he wanted and asked for forgiveness later. In theory, Variel had a patron deity as much as he did. Any Ardan born came prepackaged with the god already above their heads, but most chose a new one when they came of age.

  Nearly every Crest in the Bears took up Orville; the god of dramatic retellings, black out drinking, and empathy. He was famous for transforming himself into a bear to trick the goddess of animal cruelty prevention from cutting off his testicles after she caught him sleeping with her husband. That was always a popular feast day. The man with the thickest beard portrayed Petra, and the smallest women they could find was Orville. How that made it all funnier and holier, Variel was never certain.

  Marek was born a Wolf but converted at his marriage, happy to leave behind the god of apologies and slurping your soup. She'd never known him to attend services a day in his life aside from faking Soulday for the few times her mother or his parents visited while she was on leave. Gods, she hated the holidays; everyone happy to see their loved ones, extolling the fun they were going to have together, while she gritted her teeth to survive it. It was the best way to prepare for a tor
ture training session, spending 24 hours trapped in a house with three or four people who despised her, while making small talk over Uncle Gorge's new tie that played jousting fight songs. She always left behind her cyanide pill in her locker before every holiday break in case she got desperate.

  Variel nodded at the mother walking past carrying a basket full of flour. Her mother threw an epic fit when her only daughter was not removed by the surgical approved timeframe to put her under the Bear's left paw, but came on her own. She insisted her daughter be washed in the rivers of Orville before Terrwyn's umbilical cord even fell off, but her Mum forbade it. Let the girl find her own path. Variel snorted at those old arguments, as if she ever stood a chance.

  Her mother got her way in the end, and Terrwyn followed the paths of Orville, she tithed to the bear, kept a staff of hickory wood in the bathroom, and a bowl of berries by the door. But secretly, while her in-laws were gathered around the hearth talking about how wasteful and useless the Crest program was, Variel would walk through the crackling snows to the temple of her birth. Dropping down to one knee beside the overflowing bowl, she left a single coin for Vulpes, the goddess of cunning and deceit. As soon as she rose it was back to the lies, the false religion, the fake career, the unloved husband. She existed for thirty years but only lived for the past five. Variel paused in her thoughts, blinking hard. Gods, she needed to get out of here soon. She sounded sappier than a dryad on prom night.

  An ancient dwarf shuffled down the aisle, her soles treading heavily upon the glistening floor covered in small mirrors to reflect the ceiling above them. Weary lines reflected from beneath the grey cowl wound about her head. She could have been a thousand years old from the weight strung across her shoulders.

  The mothers shifted out of her way, a regular, and allowed her to genuflect before the machine of her birth. Variel turned to her husband and asked the time. He was too busy watching the travesty that was a mockery of all things holy as the aging dwarf held out her hands to receive her prophecy.