Chaos Quarter

by Welch, David

  “Then we’re changing course. I traded with a world on my way out here, place called Byzantium. They were fairly advanced and had significant hospitals. We go, find a neurosurgeon, and then make for Boundary at best speed.”

  “Your own people may reprimand you for this,” Lucius spoke, gesturing at the room around him. “Your computer records everything. If your intelligence people are as machiavellian as you fear, they may punish you.”

  “Small price to pay,” Rex said. “Chaki, you want to take her up to full speed?”

  She smiled proudly and moved down to the pilot’s station, handing Quintus to his father.

  “Gladly,” she declared.

  * * *

  Lucius remained on the bridge after Rex left, staring into the viewscreen, into the void as it spilled by. Tirana was another dead system, focused around two stars, a small red one and a larger orange one. They spun around a center point, the space between them filled with a swirling vortex of gasses. The few planets they had, all gas giants, traced quirky orbits as they followed the dueling gravities of the stars.

  Somehow Chakrika doubted the distant stars were on his mind. His face had hardened since Rex left, his mind clearly stewing over what had just happened.

  “Say something, Lucius,” she spoke, as he unconsciously hugged Quintus closer to his chest. “You’ll give yourself an ulcer worrying like that.”

  “Cannot get an ulcer, the nanobots will repair it,” he replied sarcastically.

  She sighed dramatically and turned back to the viewscreen, joining him in his silent gaze.

  “It’s not because I do not want her to be free of this,” Lucius spoke, keeping his gaze fixed on the screen. “I understand, I do. What they did to her is what I used to do to my serfs.”

  Chakrika turned to face him.

  “That isn’t true. Whatever bad things you did—”

  “It is true,” Lucius asserted. “Different degrees of the same thing. My people, myself, we treat our serfs like rubbish to make them less than us. We dehumanize them and tell ourselves that God wills it. This ‘Perfected Hegemony’ merely did with genetics what we failed to do with words, laws, and coercion.”

  She let him turn his thoughts over for a few moments.

  “It isn’t because I think I’m superior to Second or to whoever she will be when this is done, it’s Quintus,” Lucius went on.

  “What about him? He’ll be with us, he’ll be safe,” Chakrika assured him.

  “Rex thinks that because we’ve lost the Hegemony ship, we’ll have time to travel to this Byzantium and find a surgeon who can operate on her. But he doesn’t have a child to concern him. I don’t care how many years he has lived, he cannot know what it means. When he told us he would sponsor us for citizenship when we reached the Commonwealth, my soul leapt. Not for myself, but for Quintus. I’m resigned to being hated by his people, even if I get a certificate saying I’m one of them. But my son would have a chance to grow up in a real nation, a safe nation where pirates don’t come from the skies to blow up your home.”

  He slumped back in his chair, stretching his neck, trying to push his fears from his body with the motion. She could tell it wasn’t working. The lines remained around his eyes, on a face too young to have such lines.

  “We’ll reach the Commonwealth,” Chakrika said, not knowing herself whether she believed it or not. “We will. You’ll take Quintus some place safe. Find some farm in the middle of nowhere where you won’t run into many people and just live out your life.”

  “Farm…” muttered Lucius with a dark laugh. “My mother would die from shock if she thought I was working the land with my own hands.”

  “Then someplace else! A ranch! It doesn’t matter!” Chakrika spoke. The excitement in her voice passed to Quintus, even several feet away in his father’s arms. He flung his arms out in front of him dramatically, his mouth forming the first hints of a smile.

  “And what will you do?” Lucius asked, turning his head to face her. His gaze held her eyes for a long moment.

  “I-well, I’ll come visit you!” she said. “On your farm!”

  “But not to stay?” he asked.

  She withdrew, tearing away from his gaze. Quintus, oblivious, playfully slapped her forearms.

  “I was presumptuous earlier…when we…”

  “When you nearly kissed me?” Chakrika asked.

  “Yes. It was not my intention to cause you any unease,” he spoke.

  She swallowed, her nerves firing a hundred times their normal rate.

  “No, I-uh-it’s just that I never…never have been with a man like that…” she stumbled.

  Lucius raised a confused eyebrow.

  “Yes, I’ve been with a man,” she stressed. “But I’ve never, uh, been with a man that I cared for.”

  Her words hung in the air, drawing a shocked expression from Lucius.

  “You mean—”

  “First I was a slave and then I was a whore,” she replied darkly.

  “Basilisk,” Lucius countered.

  “Words,” Chakrika said, brushing away a tear. “Stupid words that hide the truth. ‘Different degrees of the same thing.’”

  Lucius nodded, a smile breaking out across his stern visage.

  “You were afraid to kiss me because you like me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know how to do this, Lucius,” she said, fear evident in her voice. “I remember movies from my childhood when I was young, seeing men and women together and smiling. But I don’t…I don’t know…I spent the last ten years being hurt by men or…or selling myself to them.”

  “I can understand your fears,” Lucius replied. “Young noblemen who could snap a finger and have a woman in their bed do not spend much time learning the ways of the heart.”

  “What about the governor’s wife?” Chakrika asked.

  “Kambinachi,” Lucius spoke with a sad chuckle. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Tell me,” Chakrika spoke.

  “Well, Kambi was thirty-four years old. Her husband, having a household of young, nubile serving girls, didn’t pay her all that much attention. At one of the feasts, she approached me about such matters…I was hesitant to sleep with my new employer’s wife, but I was also intoxicated, and she kept going on about how she had never slept with a pale-skinned man.”

  Chakrika laughed at that.

  “I regret that she died,” Lucius spoke, his voice and features softening. “And that she barely got to see her son. But the truth of the matter is that, as much as I cared for her, we were not in love. We had an affair, meeting when we could. When she fell pregnant, I honestly did not know if it was mine or her husband’s. I stood outside the delivery room, hiding in a closet. When the child came, I heard the commotion, the shock. The mid-wives knew that Odemegwu was not the child’s father. So I rushed in, grabbed both of them, and ran for Long Haul.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chakrika said.

  “So am I. And if she had survived, perhaps something more would have come. But I am not sorry that I met you, Chakrika,” he spoke, “And you can stay at my ‘farm’ however long you wish.”

  She smiled and got up.

  “Keep it on course, computer,” she declared and walked to Lucius. She slid behind his chair, sitting on the ledge of the bridge’s upper tier. Her hands found his shoulders and began working into the muscle.

  “By God’s grace,” said Lucius, “You are good at that.”

  She smiled and continued massaging.

  * * *

  Rex was dimly aware of somebody entering the common room. He chewed on one of the five thousand pieces of beef jerky Lucius had picked up on Helvetia. The toughness of the dried meat offered him a primitive sense of accomplishment. Your dried animal flesh is no match for my human pre-molars, he thought, then wondered where the hell a thought like that came from. And why did it feel so satisfying?

  “Rex,” he heard Chakrika’s voice say. “What is that?”

  She referre
d to the holographic projection floating above the table. The image of a planet, four feet in diameter, hovered in the air. Small structures, the detail invisible unless you squinted, seemed to swarm around it.

  “Earth,” he replied.

  Chakrika moved to the couch, sitting in the seat beside him. There was a reverence in her eyes as she stared at the projection.

  “That’s Earth?” she asked, awestruck. “That’s the homeworld?”

  “That’s it,” Rex replied. “Doesn’t look much different from the rest of them, does it?”

  “All other worlds are made in its image,” Chakrika said in a reverent whisper.

  “Most of them,” Rex said, motioning to his left. Second stood at the rear of the room, next to the kitchen. Her eyes watched with their usual blank stare. God knew what Hegemon worlds looked like.

  “Can I see it? Does your computer have images of it?” Chakrika asked.

  “Sure. Updated the maps before I left,” he replied.

  A confused look met his words. He smiled patiently.

  “Zoom in on my old house,” he spoke.

  The computer soared down to the surface, passing space stations and defensive satellites. It broke into the blue of Earth’s sky, through fluffy and not-so-fluffy clouds, down to a suburb of Annapolis, Maryland.

  “Used to live here,” he said. “When I was an instructor for the fleet.”

  A three-story home, done up in cedar-plank siding, sat on an acre of lawn. Woodland ran from the back of the property, thickening to hardwood forest. A swimming pool and Jacuzzi dominated the back yard. Rex frowned. Whoever had bought the property after his transfer to Pershing Station had taken down his hammock.

  “Your home is huge,” Chakrika replied. ”It’s almost a mansion!”

  “Fairly standard where I come from,” Rex replied. “Dreamt about it the other day. Shift to Paphlygon, Mecong Isle.”

  Earth dissolved, getting a cry of protest from Chaki. Paphlygon took its place. He paused the projection for a moment, letting Chakrika see his homeworld.

  From space Paphlygonia looked overwhelmingly blue, with only broken lines of green drawn across it. Three archipelagos dominated his world, each over two thousand miles long. Two began at the same point near the North Pole and then stretched in different directions toward the equator. Another in the southern hemisphere tried to wrap the planet’s circumference just inside the sub-tropical zone, but died off far short of its goal.

  Not one island on the planet was bigger than one hundred miles by eighty, but there were so damn many of them that they still made up 13 percent of the world’s surface. Tens of thousands of smaller islands, similar in size to Earth’s Hawaiian chain, clustered around the larger islands. Millions of even smaller islands, many without fresh water sources, dotted the lengths of the archipelagos.

  He ordered the projection to continue on and focused upon Mecong, his childhood home. It was a mid-sized island nearly thirty miles across, almost entirely covered in forest. Vast redwoods and sequoias stretched hundreds of feet into the air. Entire villages existed beneath them, obscured from sight. He could see the peninsula where his family had their home, perched above three-hundred-foot-high sea cliffs, the house protruding from the hill dramatically. His father, the architect, didn’t do subtle. Nearby, the small town where he’d gone to school and loitered with his friends sat in a break in the forest. Fields, some for farming and others for sports, clustered around the village. Across the islands another small town clung to the coast, home to his high school’s implacably evil football rivals.

  “Your home?” Chakrika ventured.

  “Yes,” Rex replied. “Mecong Island, northern district of the Ross Archipelago, planet of Paphlygonia.”

  “It looks beautiful,” she spoke. “Why would you leave it to come out here?”

  “I left it because I didn’t want to be a fisherman and didn’t have the grades to get into a college worth paying for,” Rex replied. “The fleet offered decent pay and a chance to get out, see Explored Space for myself.”

  “Do you regret it? Your fleet tossed you out here,” she asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I don’t regret it. At first I did. Basic training was hell, took six months to learn combat drills only infantry uses before they’d let me test for Annapolis. Felt like quitting every day. Then I had five years of school before they even put me on a training ship.”

  “Why’d you do it? Wouldn’t fishing have been easier?”

  “Much easier,” he replied. “But the longer I stayed in, the more I found myself believing all the things they said. About country and service. It all used to seem like slogans you hear on TV, but it began to make sense. I learned how much effort it takes to stay free and protect a nation. Even felt a little angry at my old friends for taking what they had for granted.

  “Then when I got sent to the fleet, I’d see Europan refugees, fleeing across the void in any space-worthy piece of junk they could steal. Peasants…the serfs Lucius once had. I’d hear horror stories of how they were treated. All second-hand of course, or translations, since the serfs are only allowed to learn French. But all that talk about freedom, all the stuff they’d made us read, started to make sense. I felt compelled to protect it. I felt responsible for it. All I’ve seen out here, all these tyrants and pirates and crazies…just makes me miss it all the more.”

  “Even though your superiors turned on you?” she asked.

  “I hate Commodore Gutierrez, but I don’t hate what I do. Yeah, I’d like an easier assignment. But I have orders and so I’m here. I could’ve quit—”

  “Wait, you could have quit and you chose to go into the Quarter?!”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve done all this out of patriotism?”

  “I wanted to serve,” he said. “These were my orders. As much as it sucks, I can’t just turn my back on it. Especially now. What Second told us…we’ve never faced an enemy with living ships. I mean, for all I know, they can heal themselves!”

  “The organic components of the War-beasts are self-healing,” Second said from her spot.

  “See? We’ve never fought an enemy that isn’t human, even if they call themselves homo betterthanus or whatever,” Rex spoke.

  “Homo superioris,” Second corrected.

  “So as crazy as it sounds, I am here because despite all the shit they’ve put me through, I still want to serve.”

  “You’re still a soldier,” Chakrika surmised.

  “I don’t think you ever stop being a soldier,” Rex said. “Even if you want to. Just look at Lucius. Didn’t even hesitate the first time he jumped into my gunner’s seat. Did what was necessary.”

  Rex sighed, realizing that he had half come out of his seat. He leaned back against the couch.

  “Want to see more?” he asked.

  “How many worlds does your Commonwealth have?” she asked innocently.

  “One hundred twenty-two terraformed worlds plus Earth. Four hundred sixty-four systems, about two-thirds of which have been colonized. We’ve still got some empty space we’re exploring.”

  Her mouth gaped at the numbers.

  “One hundred and twenty-three worlds? My people barely controlled one!”

  “Well, then you have a lot of learning to do,” he smiled, then cleared his throat. “Computer, let’s start her on Venus, Hartell Resort.”

  Arrogance, you say? Foolish primitive, it isn’t arrogance if you’re right!

  -Master Aaron of New Timor, to a particularly defiant primitive shortly before a hunt

  Helvetia Refinery, Akiris System

  Standard Date 12/10/2506

  “The Sifters say this is the one,” Flynn spoke.

  They were not in the command pods. Instead, they sat in a large cavity colored with bioluminescent cells. With a command they could flash a wide spectrum of colors, creating any image desired.

  Blair tilted back, a tongue-like muscle twice his height cushioning him. He looked out on an image
of space, projected from the War-beast’s memory. A red path had been projected by the sifters to show their quarry’s escape route.

  “And you are sure this is the ship we are looking for?” Blair asked.

  “Dispersal patterns are consistent with the time period they were here. The asteroid infestation’s recording devices showed a mechanical vessel matching the description following this path,” Flynn explained.

  Blair groaned. Relying on primitives and their machine technology, he thought with the normal amount of contempt. His Warriors had managed to capture the spaceport of this odd infestation, bored out of the rock of an asteroid. The Warriors had gotten no further, though. He had but four dozen warriors on this beast, and the primitives had rallied in large numbers, with the mechanical ‘guns’ that they seemed to carry everywhere they went. The subcutaneous bones, plates, and thick hair of the warriors were designed to resist such weapons, but even they could only take so many hits. Sure, they could kill the first five primitives that started shooting at them, but by the time they got to the sixth, enough metal bullets would break their protective skeleton and rip through their organs. Had he a Haul-beast carrying a few hundred Warriors and some Runners, they would have overrun the infested asteroid and feasted on the flesh of their defeated foes. Instead, he’d been forced to call them back once they had transmitted the data from the asteroid to the War-beast.

  “But we cannot be completely certain,” Blair questioned.

  “No. This primitive is probably one of the smarter ones. He managed to kill one of our kind and obscure his trail,” Flynn answered.

  “Do not ascribe intelligence to them where there is none. That city was on fire when we arrived. We don’t know if this primitive is responsible for the ambassador or if it was done in the attack. And we have no way of knowing how much damage was actually done,” Blair asserted. “And changing your fuel supply does not require excessive intelligence.”

  “Well, whoever he is, it is likely this path is his. This is our best chance of recovering the ambassador,” Flynn said.

  Blair sighed heavily. The tongue-muscle undulated beneath him, villi on its surface massaging his body’s tensing muscles.