Saturn turned toward Sestra, eyes wide. Sestra hated Zega, but her argument in his favor was vehement. She didn’t sound like she was pretending, for the greater good or otherwise. That, or she was the best actress Saturn had ever seen.
Sestra continued to berate the elders, “Who before me could lead the twenty-four? You, Elder Vurn? You, Elder Rane? Only one Dinari has the ear of all the people. Only one is willing to stand before the spires’ might. This council must vote to elect Zega as the face of the Dinari of Garuda Colony. Elect Zega as the Consul of the people.”
Saturn’s mouth was agape. She’d only meant to fulfil her obligation, perhaps teaching the elders a lesson in the process. Nothing more. Sestra, it seemed, had her own motives. What had changed? The zealous Dinari standing before her was not as she remembered. Her hatred for Zega can’t have run as deeply as Sestra had let on. Saturn’s heart pumped quickly and she grew hot from her chest to each of her extremities. She felt the sweat bead on her forehead as the Council of Elders chattered amongst themselves.
The elder at the center raised one clawed hand and the room was silenced.
“You’ve overreached your place young one. Still, these matters are worrisome. Leave us. We will send for you when we’re ready to hand down our judgment.”
Sestra crossed her arms defiantly and replied, “Should I come back in a week’s time? Perhaps a month? I’m sure you’ll make the right decision, even if the colony is destroyed by the time you reach it.”
She turned on her heels and stormed down the stairs through a massive stone archway, leaving Saturn to fend off the blank stares of the council. Their shocked faces made Saturn smile inside, despite the implications should their decision favor Zega. She gestured to the elder at the center of the table and jibed, “And you thought I was bad.”
Saturn nearly tripped down the stairs on her way out, descending the stairs too quickly to maintain proper balance. It’d been a long time since she’d felt so humiliated, but at least her part in this was done. Her agreement with Zega wasn’t contingent on the council reaching a specific verdict.
Outside the Great Hall, Saturn walked quickly down a well-lit corridor that narrowed the farther she trekked from the main chamber. The stone hallway finally tapered until the rock was only a meter above her head and on each side of her. The many glowing orbs of light jostled along the top of the hallway from the outside breeze that funneled its way through. She started to feel grains of sand bombard her face and she covered her eyes with the off-white sleeve of her form-fitting upper garment.
The entrance to the cave was just ahead and Sestra stood at the edge looking out over the colony below. Saturn stepped up next to her and saw what had Sestra looking so upset. A massive sandstorm was approaching from the west and moving in fast. The colony would be enveloped in under an hour.
Saturn’s eyes turned to her Dinari cohort. Sestra’s arms were crossed and a scowl spanned her rounded face.
“Care to explain?” Saturn asked her.
Sestra’s voice was harsher than ever, as though water hadn’t touched her lips in days. “The elders need to realize that their power is derived from us. Ultimately, we decide what’s best for the colony. Not them.”
“What if their decision doesn’t come back in Zega’s favor?”
Saturn hoped, in fact, that it wouldn’t. Sestra on the other hand looked distressed at the mention of the possibility.
“The Dinari are strong. They are only now remembering that fact. If the elders can’t see it then they are blind.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
Sestra raised a piece of cloth over her mouth and her blunt nose to repel the swirling sand.
“We best move our vehicle inside. Don’t want to risk a faulty start when the sandstorm has cleared. We might be here a while.”
20
With the approaching squall, Sector Eight’s streets were emptied. Ju-Long watched an older Dinari female shutter her windows and stuff a sheet in the crack beneath her door. Despite her efforts, he could still see light from a glowing orb behind her windows. There were no perfect seals on Garuda. Down the stretch of road, he could see that the rest of the Dinari were in the same frame of mind, preparing to hole up until the storm had passed.
“How long has it been?” he asked Astrid, who was using the nearby wall of a Dinari residence to shield herself from the sand.
“He’s late,” she replied. “Should have been here ten minutes ago.”
Across from the Dinari residence was a large break in the buildings, a trail which led to a circular expanse and a massive spire housed at the center a hundred meters away. From that distance, Ju-Long couldn’t crane his neck far enough to see up to the top, even if it was the clearest of days. With the encroaching sandstorm he couldn’t see more than a few stories of the spire, but for its shadow behind the wall of particles.
Ju-Long was growing impatient. “If he doesn’t get here soon we’ll need to take shelter.”
The growing howl of the wind was beginning to make it difficult to hear. Stray gusts whistled in Ju-Long’s ears and he brought his pale red scarf up higher to cover them.
“Worried?”
“I like my skin the way it is: intact and covering my body.”
Astrid kicked her boot at the packed sand and watched the dust rise and then settle. Against the backdrop of the clay building she might have blended in if she could stay still long enough. Ju-Long couldn’t blame her. He was getting antsy as well.
“Some Ansarans pay for such a treatment to slough off dead scales.”
“For the man who has everything.”
“Rough scales signify hard work. An Ansaran in such a state would not be seen as very desirable.”
Ju-Long looked at her with his head cocked to the side. Astrid had a smirk curling up the side of her mouth. An image of Toras receiving a spa treatment entered his mind, but the thought seemed ridiculous. She must have been messing with him.
“Though,” Astrid continued, “If Ansaran men knew what pleased a woman, maybe there wouldn’t be such a shortage of females among my kind.”
Astrid had a sultry way of speaking that made almost anything she said sound sexual in nature. She had a hungry look come over her as she looked him up and down. Even with much of her face obscured by her cloth disguise, she was sensual, erotic even. Ju-Long felt hot despite the utter lack of sunlight that made its way through the sand. Astrid’s body was mostly covered in her voluminous robes, but her blue and green eyes suggested everything he needed or could ever want to know. If Nix didn’t hurry up, he and Astrid might have to take care of another item on their agenda.
Astrid pushed off from the wall and pointed down the lonely stretch of road behind Ju-Long. A single hover bike rode against the gusting wind, being blown to and fro by the maelstrom. Ju-Long smiled and began pulling weapons from the holsters on his bike. He slid a Dinari energy weapon into the crescent-shaped holster on his thigh and slung the strap of the stolen Ansaran laser rifle around his neck and shoulder.
“Show time,” Ju-Long said.
Astrid took the remaining two Ansaran laser pistols and slipped them inside her cloak to hanging straps on each of her sides.
The hover bike stopped alongside Ju-Long’s and Nix dismounted, cloaked in a traditional Dinari robe with the hood up over his head and a piece of thick cloth drawn up to his nose. He pulled the cloth down as he approached Ju-Long and Astrid so that the beige fabric dangled loosely around his neck.
“You’re late,” Ju-Long jibed.
Nix said loudly to be heard over the wind, “Couldn’t be avoided. Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?” Astrid asked over the howling wind. “Do you actually expect to assault a spire and live?”
“There will never be a better time than now. During the storm, the Ansaran Guard will be occupied with the shutdown of the city. It should be a ghost town.”
“What’s the endgame here?”
Ju-Long could
see that Nix was growing tired of explaining himself. Still, Astrid’s questions weren’t out of line.
“What’s special about this spire?” Ju-Long added, pointing off into the distance.
With the growing wind, they had to huddle closer together to hear one another.
Nix replied, “This colony is protected by a web of energy. You’ve seen it before. The Dinari can’t stand the purple light the spires project at night. It’s the most effective way to keep the Dinari at bay. Though this spire looks like the others, it’s a generator of sorts. The rest only act as repeaters, magnifying the energy.”
Nix pointed to a roughly hewn bag attached to the back of his bike. “We’re going to blow it up.”
“Won’t the city be defenseless?” Ju-Long asked.
“When the fighting begins, the energy web is the first thing the Ansarans will use. While the Dinari are forced indoors, the Ansarans could go door to door rooting out the agitators. Either we destroy this spire or the Dinari uprising will be over before it begins.”
21
Saturn tapped her toe against the dark stone floor, the sound echoing throughout the rocky corridor outside the great hall. It had been nearly thirty minutes and she was beginning to grow impatient. Sestra had paced the same stretch of hallway since they’d moved the hover bike, mumbling to herself in words Saturn’s translation chip couldn’t recognize. Based on her limited knowledge of the intonation of the Dinari language, it sounded like a strange dialect that she’d never come across before. After several minutes, her translator started picking out individual words as it learned the new language. Saturn heard her say ‘running out.’
“What’s running out?” Saturn asked.
Sestra’s eyes enlarged. She stared back at Saturn in shock, her exceptionally bulbous eyes glowing under the light from the many orbs overhead. Deep lines appeared on her face that conveyed the same worry that was in her eyes.
“You speak Vasal?” Sestra asked, returning to the Dinari common language.
Saturn shrugged. “My translator.”
Sestra approached Saturn cautiously and grabbed her chin with a firm hand, forcing her head left and right and examining Saturn’s ears.
“Have you lost it? What’s wrong with you?”
Saturn broke free of Sestra’s grip and felt the small lump at the back of her neck. Every time she felt her translator chip she remembered the shooting pain that ran down to her toes when the Ansarans had forcefully inserted it at the base of her skull. The chip was the size of a grain of rice and fused to one of her nerves. Sestra continued to stare her down with incredulity. She must have known the chip was in her neck, so why was she acting so strangely?
Sestra’s eyelids flicked and she backed away, returning to her restless pacing, her bare feet sending high-pitched clicks and clacks every time her claws scraped against the stone.
“Apologies,” Sestra mumbled almost to herself, “It’s been ages since another has spoken my native tongue.”
“You’re not from Garuda?”
“I was born on Vasalis,” Sestra said as she meandered to the far side of the cavern, dragging a finger along the stone wall and creating a thin white line. “A faraway moon. One of the first to be colonized, millennia before the war.”
“How did you end up here?”
The Dinari’s eyes shifted as she considered the question. It seemed like an easy question to Saturn, but then again, her journey to the Ansara System wasn’t exactly a simple one.
“It is said that Vasalis was once a beautiful place. A moon of the Mother World, it was a sanctuary for diplomats and the wealthy. I never knew that place. When I was born it had already been a wasteland for centuries.”
“What happened to it?”
“Vasalis was the only planetary body in this system that was never terraformed by the three races of Ansara. It was already a perfect cradle for life, only life as we knew it had not yet come to exist there. Its natural resources were bountiful. That is, until The Long War. The War of a Thousand Years required more resources than Ansara and the other colonies could provide. The Ansarans plundered Vasalis for every bit of metal and precious mineral they could get their claws on. The landscape became a series of holes and caverns that burrowed deeper than the eye could see. The entire moon was irreparably scarred.”
“What happened to the people?”
“The Ansarans left the world to die, along with the Dinari inhabitants. Thousands of Dinari fell ill for lack of food and water, but the hardiest found a way to live. A network of caves was created beneath the pockmarked land from countless excavations. Within, life remained. In a sense, at least.”
Sestra’s hand pressed gently against the bone dry wall of the tunnel, her gaze traveling up to the orbs hovering near the ceiling.
“Water rose up from the depths of the moon forming pools. Sometimes it would run down walls such as this one. A rare sight, indeed. There were about fifty Dinari left on Vasalis when I came of age. The Ansarans likely thought us all long dead. Maybe it was fate that brought a Dinari ship from the Mother World. It was a scavenger ship, searching for scrap and resources left over from the war, or anything that could be easily extracted and sold. Instead, they found us.”
“Lucky.”
Sestra’s face contorted into a look of disgust.
“Lucky?” she spat. “They imprisoned us and sold us as slaves to the highest bidder. Their own kind, no less.”
“Slaves?” Saturn asked, stunned.
Sestra’s head ticked to her left toward the Great Hall. Her raspy voice shook with a rage from deep within. “A story for another time, perhaps.”
Saturn followed Sestra’s eyes down the hallway to the approaching Dinari Elder. He carried a glowing orb out in front of him and kept his eyes focused on the ground below. His bare feet shuffled along slowly until he was within ten meters of them. Saturn pushed off from the wall and regarded the aged Dinari expectantly.
“If you’ll follow me,” the Dinari muttered before turning around and starting his long shamble back to the Great Hall.
Saturn and Sestra’s eyes met and they nodded to one another. Her Dinari counterpart’s reasoning for the way she’d acted before was beginning to make more sense to Saturn. Sestra had faced true hardship at the hands of both the Ansarans and the Dinari. It would make sense that Sestra would be so outspoken against oppression in any form, even if that meant giving Zega more power as the lesser of the available evils.
The Dinari Elder waddled onto a small stone platform, which lit up with a flash of purple light. The stone square lifted off the ground and floated silently around the back of the councilmembers’ table. Saturn eyed the many steps and found herself wishing she could avoid another lengthy climb.
“This is one reason I’ve avoided working in the spires,” Sestra said, much calmer than before.
Saturn took the first few steps with purpose.
“At least the spires had the decency to lend visitors a lift. The Council can’t do the same?”
“Careful, the stingy Council would probably consider it for a favor. Your wish might have a hefty price.”
Sestra followed her up the steps, taking each stone stair one at a time, slowly but resolutely. At the top of the stairs, Saturn could see some of the faces of the elders in the distance, watching their struggle with blank looks across their leathery forms. Hundreds of stairs still stood between them and the platform at the top and each step began to feel more asinine than the last. Saturn began to sense a burn in her quads that wasn’t present on her initial ascent.
“In the future let’s agree to pawn this job off on the boys.”
Sestra snickered. “Ju-Long would probably look at this as a warmup. He might even do sets.”
“Ju-Long is also dating an Ansaran. What’s that say about his judgment?”
Saturn caught Sestra smiling to herself. The perpetually serious Dinari was finally starting to crack and show her personality. Despite Sestra’s strange shift in b
ehavior since they’d first met, she was starting to see some of the old Sestra. The one that was loyal and kind despite her rough exterior.
Near the top of the stairs, Saturn’s legs wobbled up the last steps until she was standing before the Council of Elders. Sestra made it up the final couple of steps and stood panting at her side. Saturn’s heart was thumping but she managed to minimize her heaving for the sake of saving face. The last thing she wanted was to appear weak to the council.
The Council’s spokesman stood gingerly and berated them, “For being in such a hurry before, you’ve managed to take your time in returning. Our time is precious too.”
Saturn shot forward. “You pompous piece of—”
Sestra grabbed her arm and forcibly held her back. She whispered, “Don’t waste your time on such filth.”
Before Saturn could protest further, the Council’s spokesman continued, “The Council has reached a unanimous decision. There are hard times ahead and soon we must all do things we aren’t proud of to survive. The Council does not take your warnings lightly.”
Saturn’s heart pumped and she felt blood rushing to her extremities. This was it. They were going to give Zega the keys to the colony.
“Though the return of the phage is worrying, we find that there is no evidence of a Dinari uprising. These scuffles with the Ansaran Guard are merely troubled youths lashing out. We will not give them a voice. This Council will not elect a Supreme Consul. As twenty-four we reign.”
The rest of the council echoed the Spokesman’s statement.
Saturn couldn’t believe it. After Sestra’s vigorous plea the Council still voted against Zega. A part of her couldn’t wait to give him the news, but the rest of her felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. Ultimately, this meant trouble for the Dinari.
Sestra released Saturn’s arm. She seemed calm, collected. The Dinari stepped in front of Saturn and addressed the Council.
The Corsair Uprising Collection, Books 1-3 Page 42
