by Jeff Wheeler
I take the lens from my pocket. It pulses. The interior expands forever. The fulfillment of all my desires is within. I am in control of that power. I am in control, but I am not strong enough to wield it or let it go. I am like every other human.
Fear fills Helen’s eyes. Despair settles on Tovenaar. The sound of feet running up the stairs echoes in the room. The other wizards arrive. They crowd into the room.
A mirror? I step back. Where had that come from? An image appears. Another challenger? Is he behind me? Lust inhabits his eyes. Greed distorts his mouth. My enemy. I spin to face him, but no one is there. Another glance at the mirror. I almost do not recognize who it is. The image is my reflection.
Quickly, I drop the lens to the floor. Before the others can react, I raise my sword overhead, and with all the strength I can muster, I smash the glowing sphere. The explosion propels me across the room, and I smash into the stone wall.
* * *
When I wake, Helen hovers over me. She dabs my face with a damp cloth. Bandages cover both my hands. A complex root pattern of red welts covers my forearms and expands to my shoulders. The pattern reminds me of lightning flashes.
Sunlight streams through the open window. Where has the night gone?
“You stopped breathing when you broke the lens,” Tovenaar says. The daylight emphasizes the deep wrinkles in his forehead. “We were worried that you would not recover. Helen breathed life into your lips. That worked better than magic.”
“The lens.” I sit up. “What happened to the lens?”
“Gone.” Tovenaar grimaces and points across the room. “Ash. Finer than sand. No one will ever assemble it again. My brother and cousins expressed their satisfaction, but that may only be an illusion they weave to console themselves at its loss.”
“Master Tovenaar, I am sorry. You were right. I should have followed your instructions—”
“Things worked out. I am satisfied with what you did. Esme must also be, for she waits for you in the courtyard.”
I cannot look at Helen. “I also owe you an apology, Princess Helen.”
“I am always Helen to you, Little Brother.”
“Little Brother?”
“Yes. My younger brother will grow taller than me and one day be king, but you will always be the right size to be my little brother.”
“What now, Eric?” Tovenaar touches my shoulder. “Much of this is my fault. My brother says I should never have taught you any magic, not when I planned for you to destroy the lens. The wizard aroused in you was too vulnerable to the attraction of the lens.”
“I still want to become a wizard. Will you continue as my master and teach me? I have much to learn.”
“I haven’t many years left, but if these last months are an example, sharing my experiences with you will be an adventure, one that I relish.”
“Adventure?”
“Yes. I did not expect you to be an adept, but suddenly you are filled with potential and mystery.” Tovenaar lays my sword alongside my bed. “This is yours.”
“The blade glows.”
“Aye, I’ve never seen anything like it. A week ago, I was certain that magic is incompatible with iron, now I’m not sure of the relation. Also, those patterns on your arms suggest magic washed over you when you smashed the lens.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but isn’t that what makes an adventure? Recognizing that you are ignorant is the first step to enlightenment. Ready for your next lesson? I will hold back no longer. We cannot afford to loose you untrained onto the world.”
“Yes, Master.” My sword arm protests at the movement, but I sit up in recognition of his pedagogical tone.
“Every day, iron becomes more commonly used. What does that tell you about the future of wizardry?”
“Future? Won’t magic be difficult to practice with more iron around?”
“Excellent analysis, but perhaps you are the wildcard in that prediction. I am pleased.”
Did Tovenaar deliberately age a few minutes to make his eyes actually twinkle?
Ronald D Ferguson
After teaching college mathematics for too many years, Ronald D Ferguson decided that writing fiction was more fun than writing textbooks. He now writes science fiction and fantasy full time and lives with his wife and a rescue dog named Cash near the shadow of the Alamo.
April 2017
Science Fiction
Between Earth and Exile
By Laurie Tom | 9,100 words
We had captured the Alcaltan frigate a week ago. It should have been an easy job. We chose that moment for a reason. The ship was being towed for decommission and only had a skeleton crew for defense. But that hadn’t mattered. They still killed Kellen.
Sometimes no amount of planning or preparation is enough. Most of us, had we lived anywhere else on Earth, would not have had the opportunity to escape on the Bloodborne. We understood how some things came down to a matter of luck.
But luck still had to be dealt with. And Kellen was gone.
I knocked on the door to my Captain’s quarters, telling myself that my plan was sound, even logical, and not that I was homesick after all this time. I was twenty-one and had served under the Captain for six years. Age did not matter in the face of survival.
“Come in.”
Even while we were docked at Pyre Rock, the Captain preferred his quarters aboard the Bloodborne. It was quieter than the base most days, given all the construction and the wailing from Emma and Daiki’s new baby.
I pushed open the door and it squeaked in protest. The Bloodborne ran on limited power while docked. The only reason we still had normal Earth gravity was because we were at Pyre Rock, where we could take advantage of the stolen generators we’d installed in our base. The Alcaltans’ command of gravity had been one of the deciding factors in the war. It was nice to make it work for us.
“Alexa,” he said, with a glance in my direction, “isn’t your team lining the walls of the new wing?”
He sat behind a rough desk of our own construction, dark hands rotating a display of Pyre Rock on the holo. It was a draft of the construction. We hadn’t burrowed into that much of the asteroid yet.
“Finished, sir. If I might have a moment of your time?”
The Captain gestured for me to take a seat at a small table a meter from his desk. He did not get up to join me, nor did I expect him to. The Captain had never been much for coddling his crew, or himself. His quarters were spartan, save for the rack of shelves on which he kept keepsakes of our victories. They were a reminder that against all odds, we still survived.
“Captain,” I said. “Right now, the crew has its hands full. We’re trying to expand our base and man the Bloodborne at the same time. And I hate to say it, sir, but Kellen’s death has hit us hard.”
He nodded, silent. I don’t think he wanted us to know how much he missed Kellen. If the Captain was the head and the heart of the Bloodborne, Kellen had been the limbs to make everything happen. We’d lost crew before, but the second-in-command of the Bloodborne had been a sharp, intuitive man. Replacing him would not be easy. Not that we could really replace anyone, but even pulling from what we had, no one was Kellen.
“We need more people,” I said. “I know there’s a chance they’re not even alive, but if we’re building a colony here, I would like to rescue my family. My mom was a structural engineer before the war—she could help build Pyre Rock—and now my brother is old enough to crew.”
The gaze that met mine betrayed neither surprise nor anger, but it was unflinching, hard. The Alcaltans had tried to break us many times, but even with Kellen’s death, I knew they would never break him.
“We have been exiled,” he said evenly. “You know you can’t go back for them.”
That was the agreement, the only reason the Bloodborne had been allowed to leave.
“I don’t need to go back to Earth itself. Just the solar system would be enough. We need more people, before there aren
’t enough of us left . . .”
It was selfish to want to rescue my family. I wasn’t supposed to care about things I could not change, people I could no longer see, but no matter how I wanted to be like the rock that was my Captain, I could not be that strong. He had gone into exile with his head held high and a willing crew at his back. I had gone in tears.
My Captain studied me, and I tried to still the twinge in my gut. “And how do you propose to get your family off planet?” he asked.
“I have an idea,” I said, and I felt very small sitting in the office across from the man to whom I owed everything. “I think I can get them smuggled out on a carrier. It won’t be easy, or cheap, but I believe I can manage.”
The Alcaltans were not a hive mind any more than humans. Though in exile, and officially hunted by Alcalta, there were a few rogue outposts where we, the crew of the Bloodborne, were tolerated despite what we were. We had connections, and if I pressed them hard enough, paid them well enough, I was reasonably certain I could arrange something even on occupied Earth.
“I’ll handle all the arrangements,” I said. “I just need your permission to borrow a shuttle.”
I prepared myself for his refusal, because with a crew of a hundred, two on leave caring for a child, and no way for us to gain new recruits, he could scarcely afford to lose anyone to a whim, to a purpose that arguably served the individual more than the crew.
“If I offer this opportunity to you, I must offer it to everyone,” said the Captain finally. “Find out who is interested and how many people that means you will have to rescue. If you think you can manage, you have my permission. However, I think you will find that a shuttle will not be enough.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
* * *
My life had changed the day the Captain’s ship landed on the outskirts of Concord Grove, bringing the last human colonists home in defiance of Alcalta. It had stayed grounded for only a few hours.
The police, the human police, had surrounded the ship, as though they could hold a dreadnought and its crew at bay with tiny tanks and a handful of rockets until a representative of our government could arrive—the same government that had surrendered to Alcalta once they realized that the aliens only had an interest in keeping humanity contained and not in obliterating us.
Captain Jonathan Mercer had been an officer in the Earth-based fleet, but he didn’t roll over when the war ended. He and his crew stole an Alcaltan dreadnought to rescue the survivors of a colony that would have died without help, survivors who would probably die anyway on a depleted and overpopulated Earth. Our government called it a pointless venture, but for that, the Captain and his crew were branded a threat to the peace.
If not for the fear that murdering the Captain would have turned him into a martyr, I had no doubt they would have executed him on the spot.
Instead the sentence was exile. He and his crew were to take that blasted ship and leave Earth, forever.
I remember seeing the Captain, standing so tall and proud that I doubted they could have forced him into exile if he had not agreed. He didn’t belong there on Earth. To the rest of us, to those who crowded around his ship despite our fear, he issued a warning, that the Alcaltans would not hesitate to eliminate us the moment we became too great an inconvenience, that we might discover ourselves unhappy with the sacrifices demanded in a life of appeasement.
So he extended an offer, to any who were willing, to join his crew. At first only a handful dared to walk past the police, and when they weren’t shot, a handful more. No one knew what kind of future a life in exile promised, but the Captain seemed so assured, so strong, that we knew he would not limp into the stars and fade away. I had no future on Earth, where every day revolved around finding enough to eat. With the new refugees, there would be even less.
My mom refused to go. She did not believe we could survive on a ship without a port, in the face of aliens that had made it plain they would only tolerate our existence if we remained on our home planet. I was afraid too, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I stayed.
I still remember her fingers in my hair, how her body shook as I hugged her good-bye and told her I had to go. She said she understood, though I don’t know that I believed her. Without me, there would be one less mouth to feed, and she could care for my younger brother without worrying about what could happen to a teenage girl in a broken city. We’d fought so much—over school, over food, over curfew—that I could barely believe she let me go.
For a moment, I reconsidered, but fear was stronger than tears. When I darted past the police line, I did not look back. I fell in behind the new crew members preparing to board, the last to join.
In retrospect, we should have found it strange that we had been allowed to leave Earth on a stolen dreadnought, that the Captain had been allowed to take dissenters with him. The Alcaltans did not let us go so easily. Our first battle as a unified crew was shortly after we cleared Earth’s orbit, once we were far enough away that we were out of sight of those on the ground below.
The Alcaltans planned to kill us where there would be no chance of martyrdom or inspiration to those who remained behind.
We were terrified, outnumbered, running a ship many of us had never served on before, some of us not even familiar with ships at all. I considered it a testament to our Captain that we escaped. We then understood what measures we needed to take simply to survive.
Our crew was alone in a universe where we were the only humans outside of Earth. We named our ship the Bloodborne and took to raiding for food and supplies. It wasn’t out of rebellion, or a patriotic desire to show the Alcaltans that humanity was not done. We were pirates, and we could only rely on each other.
But as I relayed our Captain’s offer to rescue our families back on Earth, I soon discovered that, though I trusted my fellow crew, I hadn’t really known them.
Peter had a sister, three years younger than him, who’d lost an eye in a crossfire. Valerie had left behind her husband of only two months, not realizing that helping Captain Mercer in the colony rescue would result in her exile. Manuel wanted to know if his parents were all right. And Justin had asked me to find his son. I hadn’t known he was a father.
Hitomi and I had even gone to the same school, though being in different years, we had never met. Richard’s mom owned the store where I used to buy slushies before the sky fell, and if I thought hard, I could remember seeing him there on Friday afternoons.
When they learned the Captain had approved smuggling their families off planet, their lives came tumbling out, and by the time I finished speaking with everyone, I had a list of just under two hundred names. Not all the crew had family they could speak of, some had lost everyone in the war, but there were still more people than we could fit in a single shuttle.
I knew that the chances of all of them being alive would be negligible though. Perhaps a quarter would be, and we could work with that.
The amount of money needed to bribe our contacts to get information on two hundred people was astronomical. The crew chipped in whatever they could, even those without loved ones to rescue. We used the Alcaltan lumil when dealing with the outside world, each member of the crew getting a share of the spoils after a successful raid, but we didn’t use it with each other. There was no such thing as paying for room and board. You served on the ship, you got a room and three meals in the mess. Any lumil we kept was just gravy, and yet I couldn’t account for more than half of what we needed.
People started talking about pawning their belongings the next time we visited an outpost. Human goods were nearly worthless to Alcaltans in their intended forms, but a diamond from a ring could be repurposed for manufacturing, the metal from old electronics could be salvaged.
“I can arrange the necessary information gathering,” I told the Captain, when next I met him in his quarters. “The only problem is the money. Not everyone can afford it, but it doesn’t seem right that we should restrict rescuing family to only a
portion of our crew. And how would we choose? It’s easy to say those who can afford it should get priority, but what about the rest? Would we hold a lottery?”
A part of me regretted conceiving this plan at all. If no one was rescued, we’d be no worse off than before, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see someone else’s family come home while mine was left behind.
Once again I sat at the small table while the Captain remained behind his desk. The distance may as well have been the entire ship. I was just a part of the crew. I wasn’t Kellen. I couldn’t expect sympathy. After all, I was the one who’d dug myself into this mess.
My Captain spoke. “Would you consider it right to leave a few people behind, when by the luck of the draw they could have been the ones you save? You can’t give hope only to take it away.”
“It wouldn’t be right, but it would be fair. I just didn’t think this would happen—that we wouldn’t have the money to even find out if the people we want to rescue are still alive. I thought the crew would have saved up a little more. It’s not as though we’ve needed a personal stash of lumil to survive.”
Indeed, we ate better on the Bloodborne than we had during our final year on Earth.
“And what did you save for?”
“I . . . I wanted to buy my own ship,” I replied, feeling silly to admit it. “When I was in school, I had this idea I would buy my own ship, see the galaxy, go to Alcor, Yukikawa, and all those planets we don’t have anymore. Of course, now I know I wouldn’t be able to afford much more than an oversized shuttle, but it would have been less recognizable than the Bloodborne, so we could have used it . . .”
The Captain stood and walked over to the shelves suspended along the wall. “For years we’ve stolen everything we needed to survive, and used the ship’s communal funds to procure what we could not. There are no longer such things as homes, vacations, or retirements to save for. It’s unsurprising that the crew should spend the majority of their earnings on the rare outpost entertainment.”
