by Dan Schiro
“A magician never reveals his secrets,” Orion chuckled.
“Stop that,” she said, slapping his bare chest. “People are saying you called thunder to smash the Great Painted Dome down on the terrorists, and that you used some kind of alchemy to turn an atomic to pure lead.”
“That last part,” Orion said with a click of his tongue, “is kind of true.” He pulled his right arm from the crumpled sheets and showed her the silver A-within-O glyph on the top of his wrist. “Have you ever heard of a spellblade?”
Her pink eyes flitted to his arm and her brow furrowed. “Are you telling me you have a magic tattoo?”
“Magic’s just a word we use for something we don’t understand.” Orion scooted back to lean against the padded headboard. “And it’s a lot more than a tattoo.” He flexed his mental muscles, and the spiked chrome gauntlet boiled forth, covering his arm to the elbow.
“God’s eggs,” Britta gasped as she leaped out of bed, her white wings tense behind her.
“I’m sorry to startle you.” Orion cringed. “It’s just best to get past that right away.”
She took a deep breath and put a hand over her right breast, atop her fast-paced freyan heart. “Okay, so you do have a magic tattoo.”
“It’s not magic, not really,” Orion said, shaking his head. He thought for a moment to put his explanation in order. “You’ve heard of the Engineers, right?”
“Well, of course. Everyone has.” Gracefully, she snatched a corner of the silky sheet and pulled it up to cover her flushed, naked body. “They built the Maker Rings. They carved the ether routes. Pretty much every civilized race in the galaxy uses their design for the manacite drive.”
“Right.” Orion pointed an armored finger at her. “And after all of these years — literally, millennia — we still don’t really understand how Engineer technology works.”
“I guess.” Her brow furrowed as if she had never wondered what made the Maker Rings spin. “And you’re saying that when the Engineers disappeared, they left behind… that… thing?”
“Spellblade,” Orion said with a nod. “A rare piece of E-tech. There are still a few hundred of them out there, bouncing around the galaxy. Just like the Maker Rings and the ether routes and the manacite drive, we don’t exactly understand how it works.” He raised a blond eyebrow and smirked at her. “But that doesn’t make it magic.”
“Oh.” She seemed to think for a moment, still clutching the sheet. “So, what can it do?”
“Form objects.” Orion concentrated, and a gleaming silver short sword appeared in his hand. “Weapons mostly, in my line of work. Swords, hammers, axes, other stuff that can’t be stopped by a lightshield.” He looked up to see her gazing at the sword fearfully. “But it can make other things too, tools.” He smiled at her, and the blade returned to the gauntlet in a swirl of liquid metal. “Lockpicks, wedges, levers… anything really. A rolling pin if I decide to make pizza.”
Britta’s face brightened. “I’ve had your Earth pizza. I love it.”
“Yeah, everybody does,” Orion sighed. “Our great contribution to galactic culture.”
Britta’s gaze slipped back to the silver gauntlet. “You’re telling me it can’t actually do…” She scoffed out a curse in her native language. “I’m trying not to say ‘magic,’ here.”
“Ah.” Orion nodded. “What I did to the bomb is typically called a spell, but only because we don’t have better language to describe it.” Orion gazed at his own shifting reflection as he flexed his armored hand. “The best I can explain it is this — the Engineers figured out how to use pure manacite to bend the laws of chemistry, of physics, of reality itself. Then — somehow — they animated it, turned into this symbiote. It only looks like magic because no one in the galaxy has forged a new spellblade in hundreds of thousands of years.”
Britta nodded, looking frightened and fascinated. “So… what kind of magic can it do?”
“Every spellblade is different,” Orion said with shrug, trying to anticipate all of the usual questions. “Some can call fire, some can move the earth. Some can suck the heat out of a room, or a building. Some can heal, some can control minds. On and on. The more blood it has to fuel it, the greater the spell.” He smirked. “Also, most spellblades have corny names.”
“Blood?” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Did you say blood?”
Orion cringed and nodded. “Blood. Life force. Hopefully, you know, blood from someone bad. Just the way it works, I’m afraid.”
“Oh,” she said softly, clutching the sheet a little closer to her throat. “And what can yours do?”
“Mine?” Through force of will, Orion elongated a claw at the end of his index finger. “Mine is called the Blade of the Word. And it can cast any spell I speak… but only once.”
Amusement flitted across Britta’s face. “Only… once?”
“When the word is spent, it’s gone.” His tongue perched between his lips, Orion pricked his opposite palm with the gauntlet’s long claw. As the blood bubble rose, Orion wondered what such a small amount would cost him. A day? A week? A month? Orion rationalized that, somehow, showing off was worth a trifle of his lifespan.
Britta watched with rapt attention as faint red veins lit the silver gauntlet. “So… you could make an Earth pizza appear if you wanted to?”
“Well, technically I could.” Orion’s colorful eyes narrowed as a grin spread across his face. “But what if I’m stranded on some forgotten planet and I need a pizza? Then I won’t be able to cast that spell, will I?”
Laughing, Britta shook her head. “I really can’t tell if you’re playing with me right now.”
“Let’s find out.” Orion’s smirking face fell still, and he searched for the right words. “Pepperoni and sausage, Neo-Chi pan-style pizza.” He hoped it wasn’t too much to ask for with such a thin drop of blood.
White fire flashed, and a frozen pizza in a plastic wrapper dropped onto the sprawling bed. Britta let the sheet fall away and jumped back with a sharp gasp. Then she threw back her head and laughed, clapping her hands. “That was amazing!”
Orion sighed as he reached for the hard, flat disk. “This is not what I ordered.” The colorful paper trapped between plastic and pizza proclaimed “pseudoronni” and “soysage” as if those ingredients were something to be proud of. He looked up at Britta and shook his head. “See? Didn’t come off right. Not enough blood to fuel it.”
“Who! Cares!” she cried. “You just made something out of, of nothing.” She bubbled with laughter. “God’s eggs, I bet my stuck-up sisters have never seen anything like that.”
They cooked the frozen pizza in the suite’s flash oven, and despite Orion’s misgivings about its quality, even bad Earth pizza was good Earth pizza. Then they made love again, slower and more passionately this time. Soon after Britta drifted into the deep sleep of exhaustion, and Orion slipped soundlessly out of the room. He pulled on his sweatpants and shirt in the hallway and walked down the art-bedecked corridors to the space yacht’s polished central elevator. A slow and steady ride took him up, and the mirrored doors opened to reveal the wide observation deck.
Orion strolled out with his sturdy chin high and his mismatched eyes wide. The Royal Whimsy’s entire top deck had been designed expressly for interstellar sight-seeing, and Orion gazed up through a diamond-glass dome to see the gentle incandescent walls of the ether route streaming by as they cut through the fabric of space-time. Orion watched the indigo waves, rosy flares and green wrinkles brighten and disappear, brighten and disappear, as a vice of guilt gripped his heart.
What had compelled him to seduce Britta, he wondered? He understood what his therapist called “the promise one body makes to another of something more” and the emotional consequences that came with that. He knew that Britta would expect him to chat over the datasphere, meet in private VR rooms, or worse, she would actually tr
y to come to see him when she had leave. All he would do was dodge her and disappoint her, and he knew that. So why did he do it? Why was he incapable of investing in any kind of lasting connection?
When he found that his neck had grown sore from staring, Orion shook his head and packed the feelings away in a crowded corner of his mind. He and his crew would return to the Maker Rings in a few hours, and AlphaOmega Security would need to find another job soon to keep the lights on.
Chapter 5
The next morning, Orion and his friends watched from the observation deck as the Royal Whimsy killed its manacite drive and dropped out of the ether route a few hundred thousand miles from their destination. The cascading pastels of the tunnel through space faded, and they saw the magnificent Maker Rings. The four ancient bands of E-tech rotated slowly around an artificial white dwarf star, the rings at crossing angles like an elaborate gyroscope.
Orion was never less than awed when he saw the orbit-long bands of the mysterious superstructure from space. No one knew how the Engineers had managed to create the thousand-mile-wide rings and their automated cities, diverse ecosystems and breathable atmospheres. Likewise, no one knew how the Engineers had ignited and tamed the tiny artificial star that powered the rings’ ageless movement. Despite the broad lack of understanding, people of today had no problem enjoying the Engineers’ work. Home to some 27 billion from scores of races, the Maker Rings had been the center of galactic government, commerce and culture since the Great Ape Empire had discovered them millennia ago. Orion felt a tingle in his right arm as the pure manacite of his spellblade resonated with the trillion-ton manacite cores that ran through the foundations of the ancient rings.
The Royal Whimsy cruised in slowly, a small blip among the swarm of other ships constantly coming and going. The space yacht flew along the outside of one of the rings until an automated system directed them to a spaceport nestled between the huge glyphs etched into the bands. When the hangar bay doors had sealed safely behind the ship, the Whimsy’s observation dome peeled back. The recycled, flower-perfumed air of the luxury ship was displaced by a gust of spaceport atmosphere that rippled the edges of Orion’s blue-gray smartcloak. The port smelled of a heady mix of machine oil, metal and alien bodies.
“Let’s go.” Orion prodded Aurelia and Kangor toward the ramp down to the steel panels of the spaceport. “I want to get back to the office and check in, first thing.” What he really wanted was to be gone before Britta and the rest of the crew could leave their stations to see them off. It was just better that way.
They stopped briefly in a secure vestibule where precautionary blue rays scanned them for any harmful bio-agents. Then they breezed into a busy terminal churning with dozens of different life forms. He counted many winged freyan, reddish duroks, reptilian mystskyns, catlike temba nubu, four-armed poxgane and tall, pale s’zone, accounting for the galaxy’s largest races. Among them, great apes lumbered slow and hairy, and lockhovven crept by with their many tentacles kept moist in membrane sheaths. Tiny briophytes walked shoulder to shoulder with other races in whirring mechasuits, insect-humanoid hivers skittered across the terminal in packs, and gaseous fazzianos tromped through in heavy containment suits. More than a handful of fellow humans hurried from port to ship, and Orion even saw a few chrome-bodied defectors from the Robot Republic.
He also saw the ever-present tripods, of course. Not really sentient or synthetic, the plodding, silent servants of the lost Engineers were always nearby on the Maker Rings, fixing and cleaning and taking care of tasks that no one really understood. Orion, Aurelia and Kangor paused amid the flowing diversity and conferred, a huddled eye in the middle of a hurricane of sentient creatures.
“So, my skysled is parked on the fifth floor,” Orion said with a nod to a switchback ramp in the far corner of the busy terminal. “I’ll just meet you guys back at the office?”
Kangor shook his head. “Not I.” Hot breath whistled down at Orion from Kangor’s large nostrils. “I’ll be needing a hunt.”
Aurelia yawned. “Didn’t you get enough action on Phantak Ro?”
“It was a good fight.” Hunger gleamed in his fiery orange-red eyes. “But it lacked the poetry of a true hunt. I’ll rent my usual space in the Kapata Wilds, the game is good there.” He gave them a brisk nod and turned, shouldering his way through the crowd. He loomed almost a head taller than the other sentient creatures and was furrier than most.
“Okay,” Orion called after him, “but leave your datacube on so I can reach you. Things might move fast, now that our name is out there.”
Kangor waved a huge hand back at him. “We can hope, little friend.”
Orion ran his fingers through his spiky blond hair and looked at Aurelia Deon. “And you? Can I count on your help as we get ready for new business?”
“I won’t be returning to the office today either, I’m afraid.” A gust from an incoming tube train rippled Aurelia’s sheer silk robes. “I’ll be needing some time to, let’s say, unwind.”
“Oh, unwind!” Orion shook his head. He knew Aurelia well enough to know this meant a multi-day bacchanalia that would put most organic life forms in the hospital. “A quiet walk in the park? Maybe a night in with a good book?”
“Perhaps,” Aurelia said, feigning thoughtfulness. “Though I might need to mix in some music, lights, drugs and pretty young bodies.” She smiled, beaming with the unique ethereal sexiness of the Green. “You should join me, if you think you have the stamina.”
Orion raised his hands in surrender. “I most certainly don’t, but you have fun.” At almost 3,500 years old, Aurelia Deon had earned the right to do as she pleased. “Just do me two favors? Make sure I can get ahold of you. And don’t blow your whole cut from this job on one night.”
Aurelia turned to go, her short head tentacles swaying with her sharp pivot. “You can’t be serious, Orion,” she said over her shoulder as she sashayed toward a waiting hyperloop train. “Me? Pay? Please.”
With that, Orion stood alone in the ever-changing flow of alien life. He turned and started for the ramp, his smartcloak sweeping along behind him, and he only got a few dirty looks along the way. Humans were part of the galactic community now, but some of the other major races resented how fast the people of Earth had spread. A function of humanity’s ability to adapt, Orion supposed, but it frightened the Union to see humans go from discovering the manacite drive to eco-forming distant planets in little more than 200 years. Even the hivers think we’re locusts, Orion thought with a grim chuckle, and maybe they’re right. The business empire that had his family’s name on it had more than a little to do with that perception of humanity, be it ugly stereotype or fact.
After a long hike up the switchback ramp, Orion reached the parking garage and his skysled. The SkyStreak 300 LE waited right where he had left it, four yards of contoured chrome atop a custom-edition ion engine. The datacube in Orion’s cloak automatically deactivated the skysled’s electro-stun security system as he approached, and he leaped into the saddle, eager to fly. Gripping the levered handlebars, Orion tapped at the pedals in the stirrups to bring the humming ion engine to life. With a twist of the handle, the maneuvering jets on the flat underside of the craft roared and the skysled rose a few feet in the air. Orion thumbed the handlebar controls to maneuver through rows of parked vehicles until he saw the open sky of the exit ahead, and then he kicked with his right foot to accelerate. As the wind feathered his hair, Orion witnessed the majesty of the Maker Rings again, this time from the inside out.
The sky captured a bluish hue, but paler than Earth’s in the light of the artificial star. Orion cruised toward the center of the Hub, the single largest super-city on the rings, and miles of alien arcology stretched out in front of him. Dense, swooping buildings gleamed in the steady white light, many of them gilded with solar panels and crowned with windmills. Green spaces thick with trees sprouted between the concentric rings of the buildings
, interlaced with waterways and ponds. Thousands of other vehicles moved smoothly above the city in air traffic lanes, their ion engines receiving free wireless power from the slowly spinning Maker Rings. Just as the Engineers had presumably intended, everything here intertwined in a seamlessly functioning harmony.
As Orion soared above the metropolis, he looked even farther up the band of the Maker Rings. Hundreds of miles up the curve, Orion could see all the markings of a living planet, from seas to forests to deserts to more cities that spread out in urban fractals. In the sky, Orion could see the faint forms of the outer Maker Rings cutting their paths around the star. Two of the bands showed more swaths of green, ink blots of blue and glimmering silver cities. The outermost ring appeared as nothing more than a dark shadow. Though perhaps hundreds of reclamation projects had been proposed and initialized over the last several thousand years, no one had ever been able to restart the fourth ring, or even diagnose why it had failed while the others had persevered.
Orion kicked his ion engine down a few gears and decelerated to join a flow of aircars, small cruisers and other skysleds headed for the city center. His destination was clearly in sight, for Echohax Tower dwarfed everything else on the Hub’s skyline. The inverted Y-shape measured some 15,000 feet tall, counting the towering spire that scratched at the passing clouds. It gleamed with tens of thousands of windows set in seamless gray alloy, unblemished by millennia of wind and weather and artificial sunlight. Inside, the building was like a city within the city. Its 200 floors included something to fill every need and suit every taste, plus vast spaces devoted to self-contained waterworks, power grid infrastructure and dropship hangar bays. In total, some 30,000 creatures worked and lived in Echohax Tower, and hundreds of thousands more passed through its doors each day.
Orion rocketed in and banked around the superstructure, swooping into a private hangar on the lower side of the building’s west face. He parked his skysled in a maintenance stall, happy to see that Mechanix Inc. had repaired the company dropship and left it waiting under a vast white drop cloth. After pulling away the billowing sheet to take a quick peek at his gunmetal gray spacecraft, Orion strode to the executive tube, a convenience afforded to him as a business owner in Echohax Tower. He hopped into a spherical gravity lift for a quick ride up, sideways, and up again to reach the 50th floor, or as it was better known, the Palladium Eatery. A tourist destination known galaxy-wide, the Palladium Eatery was an entire vast floor of Echohax Tower subdivided into more than a thousand one-room restaurants. It offered a variety of galactic cuisines from scores of races and hundreds of cultures, but Orion quickly found the path to his favorite bistro. Stepping through a beaded curtain, he arrived in a dim restaurant called Fin & Tail.
