Leviathan

by Erik Schubach

  She scoffed, “So the little toad has made it his life's work to outdo me in all my endeavors. Which is the only reason he pursued the healing sciences, and then tried to tackle the Equilibrium problem and try to solve it before me.”

  I sighed. Either I had everything I needed now, or I was being fed everything I needed. I had to remember that I was dealing with the Fae. It was a dangerous game, trusting them. I had to figure out how to phrase a question to know definitively. I prompted, “Did you have anything to do with the murders?”

  She sighed and her smile faded. “Now where would the fun be in me just telling you? Besides, it's my turn to ask a question, Knith.”

  Grr.

  She asked, “Come with me to Ha'real? We can get the business of setting up your new posting there, and I can share more of the history between Sindri and our court, and the gaes mother had placed upon the entire Summer Court to never speak of him to those who did not already know.”

  This was like pulling teeth. I wasn't going to get the information on my terms, so on her terms, it would be. I nodded and then hesitated and looked at Graz, who was licking her fingers the entire strawberry gone, wearing the green leafy cap as a hat. The berry had been as big as her, how did she eat it all?

  Then I said to her, not quite knowing how to tell her I was going to have to move out of the Brigade barracks so her family was going to have to find someplace else to live. “Umm... I got a new posting today, in the A-Ring.”

  She buzzed up to me, eyes wide, “That's great! Wait, is that great? I mean you're a null and all and the Fae are all a little nuts if you catch my drift. That's a long commute.”

  I sighed and said, “I'll have to get quarters up-ring, Graz, so what I'm say...”

  She spun in place in the air throwing dust everywhere as she buzzed off in a weaving line. “Wait till I tell the family we're moving to the A-Ring!” And she was gone. Then a moment later she buzzed back up to my face and held my nose between her hands and said, “Sorry, this is just exciting. I said you were some loser Enforcer to the fam, but now you're bringing us to the A-Ring. I'll see you back home, we'll start packing. Wait should we pack now? Is it going to be a while yet? Aurora is so pretty. Why do I have only one shoe?”

  I had to cup her in my hands to calm her down. “Graz, slow down, you're on some sort of sugar high. Wait, are you drunk?” Oh great, the strawberry. I heard something a long time ago about fruit fermenting in Sprite's stomachs. I spoke clearly for her, “Graz, what I'm saying is that 'I' am relocating to the A-Ring, and you...”

  Rory chimed in, reading the situation, “...are most welcome. Sprites are almost unheard of in the upper rings, it would be good to shake things up a bit in Ha'real for a change.”

  What? No. Just space me now. Now I'd never get rid of Graz and her hyperactive family. Did Rory think she was helping or something? The look of joy on her face told me that no, she didn't realize the fresh hell she signed me up for, she truly loved Sprites for some reason. She didn't see the nuisances they could be, like appropriating your furniture to live in without asking.

  I opened my hands and Graz buzzed out of the cafe in a swaying, bobbing line. I looked at Aurora and prompted, “Do you have any idea as to what you just did?”

  She nodded and said primly without remorse, “Yes. You were going to shatter the poor thing's heart, and I stopped you.” Ok, I take it back, she knew exactly what she was doing.

  I let her know, just in case she wasn't aware, “You're pure evil, Aurora.”

  She tittered out, “Please tell mother, she'd be so proud. Now come along, let's get this liaison nonsense sorted while I give you a quick primer on my... what is the human phrase? On my fucked up family. You'll need it when you go after my half brother.”

  I sighed and said as I pressed my thumb on the payment pad, “By all means, let's go on up to the A-Ring.”

  With that, Mother, with her developing sense of humor, started playing an anthropological song called “Stairway To Heaven”. Very apropos.

  Chapter 13 – Another One Bites The Dust

  We were finishing up later than I would have thought, there were so many contracts to look over and check the wording on the five hundred page liaison agreement before I signed it. I would have an office in Ha'real for me in the room outside Rory's lab, which I would share with Nyx. I felt bad they were stuffing me in her overly cavernous and clean space without her having any say.

  My lieutenant, who happened to be a lieutenant, would not be allowed in Ha'real, he would man the official Fae and Brigade Liaison Enforcers office outside the wards by the main gate. I cringed at the acronym already, I mean FABLE? Really? But it had Princess Aurora in a giggle fit so I was completely fine with it if it kept her smiling like that.

  We would have posh living quarters assigned us, at the spoke terminal complex. I guess they didn't like having down-ringers all up in their space. Though Aurora quietly informed me it was much safer for me to live outside the palace because Queen Mab found me... interesting. That could only end badly for me.

  I found all about the gaes that bound all the Winter Court from speaking of Sin. He was an embarrassment for Mab. Showing she couldn't hold on to her husband since he strayed and had a child with the Queen of the rival court. She didn't want rumors spreading about it outside the court. Thus the gaes that she put on even those who did not know of Oberon's infidelity.

  She obviously hadn't thought of how that gaes would impede an investigation like this if the kid went all G'Nar Netzer and went on a killing spree like this.

  I accidentally learned possibly the most interesting fact about the Fae that isn't in any of the history books I read in school. Since I had brought up how powerful a gaes like that was to affect a whole Court, one of her guards, whose names I still didn't know, had said, “It's nothing compared to the one Oberon laid on all greater Fae before he went missing.”

  It took some prying after the death glare Rory shot the guard, but I found that Oberon is the reason no greater Fae can lie. For weeks after finding out of Oberon's infidelity and that a child was born of it, he and Mab argued about it to the extent their magics flaring was bringing down towers in the original Ha'real of old Earth. Mab struck out with anger, casting her gaes.

  Oberon, in retaliation, had said how he was sick and tired of the duplicitous actions of the Winter Court, where everything was lies and misdirection to get the better of those below them at any cost. It was why he had strayed. He thought he could change Mab, but she and her people were too lost. So he had said that if she was going to throw gaeses around, then why not one that was actually useful. He cast the most powerful gaes in the history of the Fae, almost exhausting all his magics and killing himself in the process, and not even the Queens could break it unless they worked together, and that... not gonna happen.

  His last words before he led the Wild Hunt on a final ride and disappeared into the night were, “Let us see how the Fae courts fare against each other when it is only the truth they can speak forevermore.”

  Rory shrugged and said, “That was the last I saw of father. It was my third birthday. And I can barely remember his face, his voice. I pray that he yet lives, whether back on that old, dying world, or has found his way upon the Worldship. I do not believe the rumors that mother killed him while on the Hunt are true. As ill as she speaks of him, Oberon was her one true love, and I know that she loves him still.”

  I sighed, seeing the grief of losing her father. I absently wondered what it was like to have parents, and that to lose one must be heartbreaking. I was going to console her as I reached out to take her hands, but my traitorous mouth instead blurted, “You're older than the Leviathan?”

  She giggled and barked out a laugh. “Yes, they laid the first girder of her hull in space on my eleventh birthday. You are a very random creature, Knith.”

  My eyes widened in excitement and I rushed out, “So it is true? There was Open Air before the world? Exodus? All of
it? Old Earth is real?”

  Her smile was equal parts warm and sad as she started rubbing her thumbs on the sides of my hands, the silver of her Ionga ring warm on my skin. “Yes, it is all real. Yet I was still too young to appreciate what was going on until a few decades later when my mother sat me down to impress upon me that all the nature around us, which seemed would live forever, was going to die soon when the sun in the heavens swallowed the world.”

  She sighed with remorse, and I was distracted by what she was doing with my hands. I didn't ever want her to let me go. There was no denying my attraction to her now. She looked up to meet my eyes and said, hers haunted, “And maybe I was in denial, but it seemed that nothing could erase the world, the power of nature I could feel as a birthright. It wasn't until the final days of the Worldship's construction, a thousand years later, that I knew it was real and we were going to abandon everything I had ever known.”

  She shook her head, and forced a smile as she turned to look out the huge floor to ceiling windows in her lab, which I was positive were not there a moment before. She gazed down upon the thick forests below which curved up into the sky at the horizon of the ring. “Now this is the world. One I have known for longer than the dirt, and sky, and the endless Open Air of the one of my youth. And should I be among the blessed, I may yet again know a world of Open Air and open skies where nature runs rampant.”

  Wistful was the only word I could apply to the look on her face, her eyes so far away as if in a memory. I lifted her hand and kissed the back of it, the ice of my lips leaving a frost imprint. I assured her, “You are Fae. You will outlive the stars, so you will see the new world. But this world is the only one us Humans have, as we will be gone in one of your blinks. So this is the world I know and love. I envy you the knowledge you will have of three homes in your life.”

  She looked at her hand and smiled at the frost, but made no move to pull away. What was I thinking, kissing it? Then she reached up to cup my cheek with her impossibly soft, impossibly strong hand, the heat sinking into me as she said, “Ah but my dear Knith, you do not listen. You, of all humans, have a chance of seeing Landing. Your aging slowed as you achieved adulthood... like the Fae. I believe you may have a form of immortality yourself if your recklessness doesn't get you killed first.”

  She crinkled her nose and it was possibly the cutest thing I have witnessed in my life. “I designed your genes to have no degradation of telomeres. As you may know, in lesser races like Humans, when cells divide, the telomeres in the chromosomes shorten. This is the aging process. And when those telomeres are too short to divide, then the organism... Humans, in this case, die. Like a kill switch in computer code, Humans are programmed to die.”

  I opened my mouth and she held a finger to my icy lips as she continued, “Don't be foolish enough to think that this makes you anything more than what you are. You can still be hurt, get sick, and be killed like any other mortal. It is just that your aging will not progress much farther than it has.”

  I snorted as I tried to take into the enormity of what she was telling me. “Just great, so I'll be discounted in the Brigade forever because I look young?”

  She pulled back a moment to study me, her brows furrowed. “Most Humans would be overjoyed to hear they would live longer than a mayfly in the storm of life. You complain that you look young?”

  I shrugged. “What good is immortality if it has its drawbacks? And to actually take advantage of it I'd have to live in a glass bubble and stop living to make sure my life wasn't taken too soon. It is what my ancestors refer to as a silk prison. Pretty to look at, but still a prison if you cannot move beyond the walls holding you in.”

  She shook her head, eyes wide. She said to the universe, her gaze upon me and a smile on her lips, “Knith Shade, you are a woman of contradictions and surprising depth.” Then she smirked. “I suppose this means you aren't done risking your life every day for the people on the world?”

  I shrugged and said without apology, “I am what I am, and a couple of extra years won't change that.” I smirked back and said, “You should know that Rory, you made me.” I lived for her laugh.

  That was pretty much it, then the call came in, making me realize the day had gone by in a blur, and the Day Lights would be transitioning to night soon. It was Central. A man in a cloak with the hood obscuring his face had left Underhill and was traveling the Bulkhead J corridor instead of heading outside.

  I held up a halting finger to Rory who was about to speak and asked, “Mother, do we have a feed of this?”

  She answered inside my head since Aurora was there, “There are only a few frames available before the cameras and sensors went dead. I am tracking the outages, and it seems he is heading along Bulkhead J toward the Jump Pods.”

  That would explain why we couldn't catch him on any of the outside cameras, he was using the back corridors.

  When Mother displayed the half-second of footage I said, “Freeze and play one frame at a time.” She did and then I said after a few frames, “There! Save that frame to the case file.” A pale white hand with an Ionga ring and biometrics showed him as the same height and weight as Sin.

  I muttered, “Gotcha!”

  Then I said as I ran out of the lab, swinging the doors open, “He's on the move, and I have enough now to arrest him. And I think I know where to find the material evidence to make this an iron-clad case.”

  She called out to me with what sounded like real worry, “Be careful, Knith Shade. My brother is more dangerous than he appears.”

  So was I.

  I waved at Nyx, who had stood with a pad and pen in anticipation when I ran out the doors, before sighing and sitting back down. I liked the lady, and just knew she would be true to her word if Rory ever called her in to take a message, I knew she'd message the hells out of it.

  As I ran, the Fae parted in the halls to let the crazy Human woman past as I shouted, “Make a hole people! Brigade business!”

  Then to the air, “Mother?”

  I was so relieved that she sounded like herself when she spoke aloud and assured me, “A transport is on its way. ETA thirty seconds.”

  My smile was huge as I said, “Welcome back. I missed you.” Then added, “I love how you can anticipate my next moves.”

  She made a noise that sounded pleased. That... wasn't programming.

  I yanked the palace doors open, which startled the guards there, and I slapped away their pikes that they had instinctively swung my way. “Brigade business!” Then I dove into the transport that slid up to the doors and called out, “Spoke Terminal... hells, just get me to the C-Ring.”

  If Sin was heading to the Jump Pods, he was heading up-ring from D. I'd pick him up on C, and I'd have the unit trailing him as backup.

  Mother started up my playlist and blasted a song called, “Another One Bites the Dust” into my head. I'm sure my slowly spreading smile looked like a predator revealing its fangs as I punched in my Enforcer override and then was pushed back into my seat as the speed limiters were disengaged from the vehicle.

  I was screaming, “Yeehaaaaaw,” as we corkscrewed into a dive directly into the spoke core and the reserved emergency airspace at speeds that had the mag drives of the transport whining, the reactive paint on it flashing in the blue and amber light of Enforcer pursuit. Adrenaline and the thrill of the hunt singing in my veins. Gods did I love my job!

  The nav and avoidance computer was working overtime as we spun out of the spoke into the C-Ring airspace just above street level which was reserved for emergency vehicles. Eyes turned up as the people below were hit with the force of the air the transport was pushing aside, creating a minor wake of turbulence behind us.

  Mother was calling out our progress to Central, and another unit was dispatched for backup. They were two minutes out as I landed at the Jump terminal. The Enforcer following Sin radioed in that he thought he had been made. That Lord Sindri looked to be ready to keep jumping up-ring but
had stopped to look around before going down into the bulkhead structure instead.

  The signal was cut off just after, and we assumed the Enforcer got too close again and the sanctum spell or whatever Sin was using to block electronic surveillance had cut the feed. I cursed, “Fuck me sideways!” Then looked down into Irontown for the backup unit. I couldn't wait, he was getting away.

  Mother warned, “Knith, don't. Backup is a minute out.”

  I exhaled loudly and shook my head, “Inform them we're in pursuit. We've got this guy. If he gets away, more people could die.”

  “I don't like this.”

  “That's why I chase criminals and you run the ship, and everything else, so we don't all... well, die.”

  I was flying down the stairs into the bulkhead corridors, taking them four at a time. He'd stay in J, I knew his M.O. now. He liked to stay next to the Skin so he could get to the Jump terminals or any Remnant ships that may be scabbed to an airlock, his escape routes, where he can stay unseen by the bulk of the Leviathan's cameras and scanners. The ones in the corridor he handled with his spells.

  The question was, which of the ten levels of the Bulkhead J superstructure was he in, or was he heading down to loop under the outside in the horizontal J corridors? I heard running steps on the stairs a couple of levels down and said, “Alley-oop!” as I leapt over the railing to drop two levels, praying this new Mark-6 armor could take the beating my Mark-4 could.

  Mother was almost growling in my head, “You take too many chances.”

  I smiled then grunted as I hit the gridded platform, my legs, and the roll I went into, absorbing the excess kinetic energy my armor couldn't. I made a mental note to let the development team know that nano-panels didn't do as good a job at impact mitigation as servo struts of the old armor. I suppose it was a trade-off for it fitting so well and molding to my body as I moved.