Triorion Omnibus

by L. J. Hachmeister

  “I know I have no right to ask, but are your parents okay?” he asked. “I—I watched your biography on the post-war broadcasts. They’re on Fiorah, aren’t they?”

  There was no reason to trust him, but then again, there hadn’t been a good reason to set him free other than that it was the right thing to do. Jaeia sighed. “I haven’t seen them since I was recruited by the Dominion. I don’t know how or where they are. I was... hopeful... when I got this transmission of the two of them, but I’m glad you told me the truth. I would have done just about anything to see them again. Maybe even something foolish.”

  “Now you see why my kind is dangerous,” he said quietly, lowering his eyes.

  Jaeia lifted a brow. “You realize who you’re saying this to, right?”

  A smile ticked at the corner of his mouth. Aesis allowed himself a hesitant chuckle. “Okay, fair enough.”

  “Look,” he added. “I will find your parents. Your real parents. I will go to Fiorah myself. I can blend in.”

  Jaeia shook her head. “The Alliance contracted a few Spinners for that kind of mission long ago. On Fiorah it’s not that easy. You can’t just wear someone else’s skin—you have to know who to talk to, how to travel, what not to eat—”

  “I will find them. I’m resourceful—you have to trust me.”

  Jaeia paused, letting the words she intended to say go unspoken. For a moment, everything stopped. The entire universe suddenly fit inside her quarters, in the slender space between them. He held the same look, the same expression in his eyes, that had first captivated her attention.

  “Why?” she said, her words hushed.

  Aesis fumbled with his hands. “I want to repay you.”

  Wait...what is that? For the first time she could remember, Jaeia sensed the inner workings of a Spinner mind. One lifetime, a thousand different faces. The confinement of a single body, of one station, fell away as endless possibilities unfolded before her. He’s opening himself up to me.

  (He’s... attracted to me.)

  “You didn’t have to save us, but you did,” he finished, blushing. “I don’t have to help you find your parents, but I will.”

  She found herself reaching for his hand. Warm and soft, his skin felt as smooth as a newborn’s. “Can I be honest with you?”

  “You know I’m being honest with you,” he said with a faint smile on his lips.

  It was now Jaeia’s turn to blush. “My first intention was to see if you can help me save my brother. He’s in a kind of coma. He needs a new body or he’ll die.”

  He withdrew his hand. “Oh.”

  “But there’s no pure source of his DNA. It’s hopeless,” she said, dropping her arms by her side.

  Aesis didn’t respond right away. “There is a legend among my people, that if you can spin someone a new body right as they die, their spirit will possess the new body.”

  “I know,” she said, smiling wanly. “I studied your people’s culture and history extensively on our databases. That’s why I sought you out. It was selfish.”

  “Not selfish.” Aesis took her hand back. “But it’s never been done before. It’s only a legend.”

  “I know. I’m just trying to find a way not to lose him again.”

  Aesis fell quiet for a long time. Jaeia didn’t understand the conflict of emotion brewing inside of him. Discomfited, she went back to her desk and faced away from him, pretending to study a report on a datapad.

  “I could find something of Jahx’s and bring it back, too.”

  Jaeia stopped what she was doing. “Everything that was ours was destroyed in the apartment fire.”

  Silence, then the feel of him behind her. Only centimeters away, the heat of their bodies mingled in the space between.

  “Then they weren’t looking in the right places.”

  Standing so close, Jaeia detected a hint of his natural scent. Her body reacted before she could stop herself, inhaling sharply and breathing him in.

  Turning around, she found his violet eyes looking down on her, intent but unobtrusive. “My senses are far better than any scanner or machine. I can find traces of DNA in the most unlikely places. I will find your parents, and I will find your brother’s DNA.”

  Jaeia considered telling him to find hers and Jetta’s too, given their declining conditions, but decided against it. How can I be so trusting? I’ve gone too far already.

  A message alert beeped on her desk.

  “I have to get back to work,” Jaeia said, seeing it was Wren’s response to Victor’s latest maneuver.

  Aesis cast his eyes downward. “Please, give me a chance. I will prove to you that I can do this.”

  He left before she could say anything. As the doors to her quarters closed behind him, she cursed herself for believing any of it. Where’s Jetta to set me straight on all of this nonsense?

  “Jahx,” she whispered, closing her eyes and resting her head against the wall. “I’m trying. I’m really trying. But everyone keeps leaving me. It’s all so impossible. Please, give me a sign that you’re still out there... that I’m doing the right thing.”

  A message alert chirped insistently on her desk, breaking her thought. Unnerved, Jaeia scraped her knuckles along the edge of the keyboard interface until it hurt.

  Jahx—where are you?

  She felt nothing, nor did her senses pick up any aberrations in the psionic fields around her.

  (I don’t want to be alone.)

  Finally, she signed in to accept the transmission.

  “Please,” she whispered as Wren’s message played across her screen. She no longer knew who she was asking. Certainly not the haggard stranger in the reflection. “Please, tell me I’m doing the right thing.”

  “JUST TELL ME WHERE to find them, and this can all be over,” Shandin whispered into his ear.

  Reht fell to his knees, pain spiking through his kneecaps. Blood dripped from his father’s fingers onto the wooden floor. His mother’s eyes, sightless and fixed, stayed open and unblinking as her body grew rigid.

  A cold-blooded murder. Heartless. Cowardly. Killed eating breakfast, unarmed and unprepared for attack. Not that his missionary parents would have expected the natives to attack. And it was the natives, after all. Who else would bury their razored featherhawks in his parents’ backs?

  “I will tell you everything,” Reht whispered back.

  Flash forward. Shaking with pain, he removed his hands from the acid vats. Tears streamed from his eyes as he carved the words into his hands with his father’s wood-cutter.

  Can’t forget. Can’t forget what I am. I am—

  The words bled down the backs of his hands. Mukrunger

  (Traitor.)

  (Weakling.)

  Reht screamed himself awake. No longer in his father’s workshop, he found himself in his den, Femi curled up beside him. Somehow, she was still fast asleep, undisturbed by his terror.

  Reht looked at his hands. The bandages were frayed and wet from gnawing on them in his sleep, but otherwise intact.

  “Mukrunger...”

  He bit his forearm as hard as he could stand, holding back the tears with rage.

  Not like this. He would not allow himself to be undone now. Not when it was still possible to get revenge against the man who destroyed his world.

  Slowly, so as not to disturb his companion, Reht untangled himself from the bedsheets. Femi snorted and mumbled in her sleep as he tip-toed through the sea of garbage, pulling bottles of Redfly and vodka off his shelf before stepping out of his den.

  The empty corridor welcomed him with cold tiles and the droning sound of the ship’s engines. Except for Mom who rarely slept and took most of the night shifts on the bridge, the rest of the crew was asleep—not that he would have cared if anyone saw him naked.

  But he did want to be alone.

  A couple shots’ll take care of it, he thought, plodding his way into the galley. He rummaged around disorganized cupboards until he found a smudged glass and topped it o
ff with Redfly. As he grabbed his drink and tilted back his head, he spotted movement within in the shadows.

  Reht slammed down his drink in a single gulp, welcoming the fire that lit his stomach. “How did it come to this, Sebbs?”

  Seated on the remains of a couch that Ro and Cray had dragged onto their ship from some rave a few years ago, the Joliak regarded him in silence.

  “Do you know where that thing has been?” Reht said, nodding his head toward the couch. Aside from the ugly stains and half-chewed cushions, the damn thing had a rancid smell that he hoped was just cumulative body odors. But he had once bedded a Felciccan princess on it, so it had stay.

  The old Sebbs would have made some self-pitying remark by now or been comically uncomfortable with his nudity, but this Sebbs—the one that claimed to have been altered by the Alliance—said nothing. And he should have been smoking, drinking, or taking hits. This one only stared back at him with quiet indignation.

  “I liked the old you better, ya know,” Reht said, taking another drink. He didn’t recognize the cold look in Sebbs’ eyes.

  “Nobody liked the old me.”

  Something about the way Sebbs said it put Reht’s guard up. He felt himself wishing he had at least worn his holster. “What are you doing up this late?”

  “Can’t sleep. Haven’t slept in a long time.”

  “Bad dreams?” Reht chuckled, refilling his glass.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Sebbs replied quietly, his face still hidden in the shadows.

  Reht rolled the drink back and forth between his hands, not looking at the man in the shadows. “What’s your nightmare?”

  Shifting on the couch, Sebbs finally turned away. “How long until we reach Old Earth?”

  Reht looked out the window. The ship was mid-jump, cycling near a blue-gray planet with three orbiting moons.

  “We’re halfway there.”

  Sebbs got up and faced the window. Reht had always perceived him as a smaller man with unremarkable features. Now the light played sharply against the bony ridges of his cheekbones, and cast the rest of his body in strange, alien shadows.

  “You’re lucky, Jagger. Pancar is a man of his word,” Sebbs said.

  Reht wasn’t so sure of that, but his instincts told him Sebbs was right. The Nagoorian was a good man, and had agreed to asylum and privileges for him and his crew in exchange for the information Minister Razar was seeking on his former crewmember, Diawn Arkiam. It was a good deal, and a fair one.

  “Pancar will find a way to deprogram the Alliance out of your head. Me, I’m not so lucky.”

  “What are you talking about? He’s going to help you, too, assino.”

  In a creepy silence, Sebbs watched as Reht took a pull directly from the bottle of Redfly.

  “He can’t help me. No one can. What I am now is soulless. But what I was before was pathetic.”

  Reht traced the rim of his glass with his fingers. “You were always a bugger, Sebbs, but you weren’t—”

  Sebbs turned and faced him, his eyes flat, opaque. In that moment Reht saw something he had never cared to recognize. Sebbs had never been more than a shoal of Sentient detritus to him, a means to an end, but whatever had driven the Joliak before, whatever infinitesimal spark of life had sputtered beneath the haze of chemicals, was lost in the dead eyes of the man that now wore his skin.

  Growls came from the galley entrance. Reht didn’t realize how tense he had become until he saw his first mate and finally let his grip on the bottle of Redfly relax. “Hey, Mom. Things are cool. Right, Sebbs?”

  Sebbs’ mouth pinched at the corners. “Yes. I was just going.”

  Mom continued to growl at Sebbs until he left the galley, letting the claws on his forearms protrude through his skin as a reminder.

  “Don’t be too mad at him,” Reht said, offering Mom a drink, but the Talian shook his head. “He’s just afraid. Can’t blame him.”

  Reht took a long pull from the bottle of vodka this time. “I’m not who I was, but I remember enough of what I was, what I hated about myself...”

  Carefully, Mom pried the bottles away from him as tears formed in his eyes. His first mate had only seen him cry once, many years ago, when he vowed to avenge the death of his parents. But he was just a kid then, not a veteran dog-soldier captain.

  “You know more about me than anyone, Mom,” Reht said, unwrapping his hands. Mom tried to stop him, but Reht pulled away and continued to unravel the bandages until the raw, angry flesh of his hands was unveiled. The plum-red scarred letters stared him in the face, angrier than he had remembered them. “And yet you’ve always been my best mate. You’ve always stood by me.”

  A low rumble rose in Mom’s throat as he tilted his head to the side. His first mate wasn’t sure where any of this was going, and neither was he. The booze was making his head buzz, and the room float by in his peripherals.

  “I can’t be weak. I can’t,” Reht said, balling his hands into fists, making his scars blanch. Mom grabbed his left hand and pried it open. Shocked by his first mate’s sudden action, Reht allowed him to re-bandage his hands.

  “Promise me you’ll help me kill that jingoga Shandin,” Reht said after Mom had finished. “Promise me!” he said, grabbing his forearms.

  Mom gently removed his captain’s hands from his forearms.

  The booze hit him hard now. He tried to stand up, but his legs felt like wet noodles. Giant arms wrapped around him and hoisted him onto broad shoulders.

  “Promise me, Mom,” he whispered drunkenly. “Don’t let me go back to what I was...”

  NO LONGER IN THE LAUNCH site, Triel found herself lying atop soft grass and flowers in full bloom. Towering stone sculptures framed her inside the heart of the garden.

  The old Seer’s face appeared above her, shrouded by celestial light. “She is not ready for what she must do. She will try and stop you...”

  Jetta—

  “She will not let you fulfill your destiny,” Arpethea whispered. “Do not hesitate to end her life to save your own.”

  She could hear Jetta calling to her, voice distant and frantic. “Give me your arm!”

  There were other voices, recognizable but indistinguishable, and the remote sense of someone yanking on her legs.

  Is this real?

  She felt a distinctive warmth press against her, and when she rolled over, Jetta lay beneath her, naked, fair skin shining with a light of its own. Green eyes wet with tears, she reached up and cupped the Healer’s face. “Take me.”

  Arpethea’s voice boomed like thunder. “Kill the Apparax!”

  Triel screamed. Against her will, the Healer’s arms rooted themselves inside of Jetta’s stomach through the self-inflicted gash she had made in the Temple of Exxuthus. Jetta resisted, crying out her name and trying to get away while blood spilled from her abdomen and spoiled the surrounding vegetation. Flowers wilted and stone sculptures crumbled as Triel burrowed deeper and deeper inside her—

  “Triel!”

  The Healer came to, helmet off and suit halfway unzipped under the beam of a flashlight. Jetta was on top of her, helmet discarded, worried eyes searching the Healer’s face. “You’re okay—you’re okay.”

  Triel wasn’t sure who she was trying to reassure. A terrible headache throbbed in the back of her skull, making it hard to put the pieces back together. “What happened?”

  Agracia and Bossy dipped their heads into the light. The two Scabbers looked at her with dangerous uncertainty. “You started glowin’,” Bossy said, twirling her lollipop in her mouth with her tongue, keeping her hands on the last of her 20-20s.

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?” Agracia said.

  Jetta shot the other two an angry glare.

  “It’s okay,” Triel said, putting her hand on the commander’s.

  Returning her attention back to the Healer, Jetta helped her zip up her suit. “What happened?”

  Triel sat up slowly, regaining her senses as the headache receded. It felt
bitterly cold, and she could see her breath in the frigid air. “I... helped you. That’s all I remember. The Necros were going to kill you. I went back.”

  “You chakking pushed Gracie out of the vent!” Bossy said.

  By the aggravated look on Jetta’s face, Triel could tell they had already been through the argument.

  “Agracia blacked out,” she said, putting herself between the Healer and the pint-sized dark horse. “Back off—now.”

  Agracia spat on the floor. “Give it up, kid. We’re all here now, right?”

  “Right,” Bossy said sarcastically. “Bunch of chakking psychos!”

  Bossy went off, cursing and knocking things off shelves as her partner tried to calm her down.

  “Where are we?” Triel said, accepting Jetta’s hand. “Why is it so cold in here?”

  Jetta lead her to a railing. “We’re in a cryobank.” Sweeping the area with her flashlight, the commander illuminated a vault filled with thousands of cylindrical cryotubes covered in blue ice crystals. “Agracia and Bossy are already planning their retirement.”

  “How is this possible?” Triel asked. “How are they still alive?”

  Jetta pointed her light at the energy source. Triel didn’t recognize the writing on the pipeline, but she inferred the meaning of the orange warning signal. “It’s a type of nuclear energy they discovered before the Last Great War,” Jetta said. “It can last a few thousand years if run on its lowest levels. The Scabbers use a modified version of it to power their cities.”

  Triel gripped the railing. “Jetta—what happened to me? Did I Fall?”

  “No,” Jetta said, shaking her head. Her forehead pinched as she tried to describe the experience. “It was the opposite. It was beautiful. Whatever happened to you—I felt...”

  Jetta didn’t finish the sentence right away, instead making a circular motion over her heart. “I’ve never felt so at peace.”

  Triel thought back. I remember hearing Jetta call out to Agracia for help, and Agracia’s mind locking... Retracing her steps in her mind, she saw herself going back and shoving Agracia out of the ventilation shaft. I found Jetta swarmed by Necros. I had to save her—