by Matt Snee
To Brave the Crumbling Sky
Book Two:
The Oldest War
Matthew Snee and Gregg Chirlin
Copyright (C) 2017 Matthew Snee and Gregg Chirlin
Layout design and Copyright (C) 2016 by Creativia
Published 2016 by Creativia
Cover art by
http://www.thecovercollection.com/
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. Approach
2. The Welcome
3. On Strange Ground
4. Dinner
5. Jon Jason
6. A Girl Named Jenn
7. Racetrack / Delphiniums
8. Rescues
9.
10. Queen Eleanor
11. Spirit Train
12. Io
13. The Death Dream
14. Jupiter Intervenes
15. The Terrors
16. The Birth
17. The Island of the Shard
18. Failure
19. That Which Can Be Taken
About the Authors
For our fathers.
Prologue
“Junk!” exclaimed Plerrxx happily, pointing out the windows of the space-hopper. “All sorts of junk!” The Mrrowwrian cat-man spoke telepathically, as his own language was difficult for a human's ears and tongue.
The three of them—Captain, Jennifer, and Plerrxx—floated weightlessly in the main cabin of the ship as it plunged through space. Jennifer frowned. She peered out of the window to see the bilge of space junk that they had stumbled into. “We don't have time.”
“It will only take a couple hours to salvage it.”
“Worlds depend on us,” Jennifer argued.
“It's my ship,” replied Plerrxx.
“Okay,” said Captain, hoping to avoid further confrontation, but curious at the same time. “We'll stop. But only for two hours, Plerrxx.”
The cat-man smiled, purring through his beard of black fur. He propelled himself backwards toward the cockpit.
Jennifer scowled at Captain. “We don't have time for this.”
“It will be okay,” said Captain, not knowing if it would be at all.
She shrugged, lighting a cigarette and going back to the TV.
Captain glided up to the cockpit to find Plerrxx punching away rapidly at an array of blinking consoles. “This is exciting, truly exciting,” Plerrxx told Captain. “There's no telling what's out there!”
Captain started to feel the Mmrowwr's enthusiasm. “Like what?”
“Who knows! Old Martian robots. Mysterious jewels. Ancient weapons, technology, art, machines, architecture, organics… Anything!”
Captain looked out the window and wondered—space junk? The concept was both astounding and obvious all at once. He tried to perceive what treasures might be lurking beyond the hull of the hopper. “What are we going to do?”
“We are going to go out there, of course!”
“Out there? Into space?”
“Yes!”
“We?”
“That's correct, my human friend. I need your help if we're going to do this in two hours.”
“Okay,” said Captain, nervous but excited. “What do I have to do?”
“Watch my back,” the Mmrowwr said.
Plerrxx floated back to the main cabin where Jennifer brooded. Captain followed. The cat-man reached into a compartment and brought out two hooded jumpsuits - protection from the cold. He handed one to Captain. “Wear this.”
The suit fit Captain well, but there was a hole in the back where he supposed a Mmrowwr's twin tails were supposed to go. He got into it and started to sweat from the heat.
“Come on,” Plerrxx said, when they were ready.
They went to the airlock. Plerrxx hesitated, checking Captain's suit. Captain did his best to check Plerrxx's. They wore only the jumpsuits—no helmets or oxygen tanks—for it was, as Captain had recently been shocked to discover, only an illusion that one couldn't breathe in space. Satisfied with their inspections, they stepped into the airlock and took deep breaths of purified air before the outer door flung open and the ruined breath of the cosmos rolled in. Confronted by the vastness surrounding him, Captain was overcome with a rush of nausea as things turned upside down before righting themselves again. The universe spun in a constant, fiery motion.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes!” Captain gasped.
The cat-man pulled an umbilical cord out of a compartment on the ship's exterior and buckled it from Captain's belt to his own. He pushed away from the ship into the junk. It was thick around them like huge floating snowflakes made of metal pastes, rigid plastics, petrified organics, strange bone, and manufactured rocks. The rubbish twirled through space like dreaming atoms.
“How are we going to find anything out here?” Captain asked, bracing himself against the cold that leaked into his suit. His naked eyes were already burning in the freezing temperature.
“We will find it by smell, of course.”
Captain sniffed. There was a panorama of pungent scents. “How can you differentiate any of that?”
“Because my nose is better than yours,” the Mmrowwr bragged.
“Do you smell anything now?”
“I smell—something… I don't know what it is.”
Captain nodded. The space-hopper was far below them now, as they meandered through the junk. He started to worry, but smiled.
“Where does this stuff come from, Plerrxx?”
“Oh—lots of places. Mars, Mercury, even Earth; some of the organics might be ancient Venusian stuff. With any luck, there may be remnants of rare Owl-men tech from long lost dimensions!”
Plerrxx propelled them forwards. A little jet bracelet that he wore on his left wrist shot out highly compressed gas into the air with quick, hissing bursts. The umbilical cord stretched, but there was still plenty of length left.
“Something…” Plerrxx mused, sniffing around. He wiped debris out of the way. Captain eyed each item as thoughtfully as he could. He didn't recognize anything. Some of it looked mechanical, some of it Martian, some even biological, but all of it incomprehensible.
There was a silence that Captain noticed, extending for thousands of miles around them. A peacefulness, a timelessness that was almost as cold as the air. Captain—so recently a refugee from Earth, from Venus, from Mars—thought of his mother at moments like these; thinking of what he was unable to share with her. She never had any interest in astronomy or the planets, but he believed that even she would have been thrilled seeing such vistas. A person would have to be crazy not to be astounded by the wonders of the heavens.
“Yes…” the Mmrowwr continued. “I think… something close.”
Captain could now smell it - something juicy, rich with odor, perplexing.
“What is it?”
“It's…” The Mmrowwr peeled away a thick slab of junk to reveal something that looked vaguely fish-like. “Here!”
What was it? It was a dark blue, made out of some kind of tempered rock, with fins and had… teeth?
The teeth opened, and a metallic growl ripped through the ai
r. It was alive.
“Quick!” Plerrxx mind-shouted, pulling at the umbilical cord and shooting off his jet bracelet. “We must get back to the ship!”
Captain understood. He pulled at the cord and watched as the space shark shivered into full consciousness. The construct shot out its own jets, which sprouted from its fins. It was headed for them.
“Hurry!” Plerrxx cried.
Captain didn't know how he could hurry any faster. He waved his arms, trying to push himself through space. Luckily, the creature seemed blind, and diffident to its physical coordination. Still, its teeth were sharp, and dripping with strange oils and goo.
The space-hopper drifted nearer as the shark picked up speed. Captain and Plerrxx pulled frantically at the umbilical cord, willing the airlock closer. They heard a second growl behind them. Captain turned catching sight of more sharks awakening around them in the junk, disguised to look like the flotsam they inhabited.
Somehow, they made it to the airlock. Plerrxx commanded it to open and they escaped inside, chests heaving with fear. There was a loud “CRACK!” on the hull, followed by what sounded like a mess of chainsaws.
“They're eating the hopper!” Plerrxx realized. The cat-man opened the inner airlock and threw himself into the main cabin.
Jennifer hovered, smoking a cigarette and flipping channels on the TV.
“Find anything?” she complained sarcastically. Plerrxx stormed past her into the cockpit. Captain, in shock, met Jennifer's eyes and she saw the scare in his face. “What happened?”
“Teeth…” was the only thing Captain seemed able to say. He pushed through the cabin up to Plerrxx; Jennifer clicked the TV off and followed.
Inside the cockpit, Plerrxx frantically jabbed simultaneously at several of the consoles' buttons. “They'll chew the hopper apart!” he blurted when they'd caught up to him.
“What are they?” Captain asked.
“Self-replicating robots. Martian, I think. Machine scavengers. But we woke them. I should have known!”
More and more sharks were appearing out of nowhere. They fastened themselves to the hull and began to chow down.
“What are you going to do?” demanded Jennifer, sternly.
“Fry them!” Plerrxx replied triumphantly, pushing a button as a rumble emerged from the bowels of the hopper. A flame enveloped the ship as the sharks attached to it. “See?” Plerrxx said. “No problem.”
The smoke cleared and the sound of the sharks feasting on the hopper began again. They had not been harmed.
“I think we should get out of here,” Captain suggested, panic in his voice.
“Yeah!” added Jennifer, starting to lose her cool as well.
“I'm trying!” Plerrxx mind-yelled. He smashed at his control board, the space-hopper roared to life. A second later, the engine choked. Something was clogging it. “They've got to the engines!”
The space-hopper sputtered, spinning in place as the space sharks continued their attack.
“Do something!” pleaded Jennifer, overtly afraid.
“Wait!” said Captain, pointing into the distance. “What's that?”
There was movement out in the junk. The organics that had appeared petrified moved, shuddering to life, swooping with surprising speed toward the hopper. “Look!” said Plerrxx.
The new creatures assailed the sharks in a frenzy, strangling them with their elongated tentacles and spraying what looked like acid out of pulsing orifices. The sharks let go of the hopper and fought back as best they could. The organics—machinivores evidently—seemed more advanced… hungrier.
Freed, the hopper's engines groaned to life. “Go!” cried Captain.
The space-hopper jumped as the galaxy kaleidoscopes around them. The engines spat hot gas and the ship rocketed away from the junk. They watched as they put the danger behind them. They all were breathing heavily. “See?” Plerrxx said.
“See what?” Jennifer was furious.
“No problem,” Plerrxx commended himself.
* * *
Later—after being reassured that the hopper's repair protocols were well under way— Jennifer tied herself to the cabin wall and tried her best to sleep. This was home now; an alien vessel with weird angles and constant beeps. She had nothing but what she carried on her back. Sometimes she would cry herself to sleep; but now, she just let the emotions spill off her. I have to be strong, she thought to herself, over and over.
The sadness she felt leaving the Devasthanam—her home for most of her life—to its fate of destruction was mostly subsumed by a solid responsibility. She wondered why? Why would no one else dare to act? Was there anyone else out there, set on the same mission… on a different path? Or was it only she and Captain (and now Plerrxx) who pursued salvation as everyone lived out their last days and months unknowing, uncaring… or just unbelieving.
Regardless, she had been entrusted with a gargantuan task: to stop the No-Shape—a catastrophic unexplained phenomenon—before it destroyed Earth and the rest of the Solar System. It had already laid to waste Mercury and Venus, and was now—as she herself had helped orchestrate to buy them time—headed for the Devasthanam. The only way to prevent further ravages depended on the retrieval of four shards of a key; a key to an ancient fortress at the end of the Solar System—the Triborg–which housed the power to stop the No-Shape. The shards were hidden in the four Death Dreams: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. They needed to collect each, one by one, if they were ever going to have a chance. This dazzled her imagination. These shards, of which Jennifer knew more than she was telling, were barely considered by Captain, who was fixated instead on the planets themselves and their marvels. Jennifer had been flushed with the myths at a young age. They weren't only stories to her, but true history. Her father's words, both printed and remembered, hung like chains from her shoulders. He had been a strange dad, but had always told her la Vérité.
This Truth of the cultured Solar System, of teeming civilizations and races beyond most Earthlings' conceptions, was sacred to Jennifer in a different way than it was to Captain. Sometimes she would look in the mirror and see ghastly things in her eyes, an awareness of reality shared by few; all the secrets were there to prick at her alone.
She reached up and clutched her necklace. Plerrxx had mysteriously returned it to her shortly after they had departed the Devasthanam, saying he could not bear to keep such a treasure. The wish jewel it contained, the ranaadamtrix, had been a gift from her mother.
When sleep finally came to her, the pastures of the nether-world were blank with fog. She wandered through the plain landscape made eerie by dampness and quiet. Am I dreaming? The Bhagavad Gita, ancient tome of Hindu wisdom—which she had memorized—answered:
I remain detached in all my actions—as if I stood apart from them.
Nature, with me as her inner eye, bears animate and inanimate beings;
and by reason of this, the universe continues to turn.
There was no such thing as chaos—all was pattern, but soaked with creativity, and expanding in infinite forms. What most called chaos, Jennifer called God—the utter continuity of his/her body, filling everything, pulsing, a flowing net of star oceans that had no end and may not even have had a beginning.
What part would she play?
Still dreaming, she thought of Captain, regretting that she dragged him into this. He had just been some guy, trying to live a normal life. She had taken all that away.
No, she thought. The No-Shape took it all away.
The Tiamatites—the ancient alien race that raised her—told her that if she wanted to stop the No-Shape she would need a man named Lewis—nicknamed “Captain”—an Earthling, or in Solar System jargon, a “scap”: a person who had no understanding of the Truth, who was firmly rooted in the conspiracy perpetrated by the Shadows, the clandestine rulers of Earth. Why? She had asked the Tiamatites. Who is this man?
He will have the idea, they told her.
So she departed. Now she wasn't so mu
ch overwhelmed as she was anxious.
The dream ended and she woke up to the darkness of the cabin. She saw Captain over by the television, staring into its holographic representations. Plerrxx was in the cockpit piloting the hopper.
She bent her neck back and forth, stretching her muscles, which ached in the weightlessness. “Should I go back to sleep?” The thought was fluid in her mind. She thought of her options, and then of the business ahead. It would certainly be difficult, if not impossible to sleep as peacefully as this again.
She closed her eyes.
* * *
Captain was happy to see Jennifer resting. He worried when she couldn't sleep. For him, sleeping came easily. For Jennifer, sleep was a foe, something that had to be bested at every turn.
He was happy to see the news reports from Earth. The No-Shape had departed in the direction of the asteroid belt. The plan was working. Action and reaction worked around them.
What was next?
Jupiter!
What would that be like? What awaited them there? He reminisced about his former life; of sitting and writing in his room all day, having lunch with his mother, taking a ride on his bike, having dinner, and an hour of video games before bed. He lamented the innocence of that routine, even though he knew it had been killing him. Life had slowed to a trickle, there was less real adventure every day.
Yes, he had been a broken, half-dead man. Until one day, Jennifer arrived.
Now he zipped across the innards of the Solar System, headed for places his mind had once strained to imagine. Nothing out of his past had prepared him for the scares and delights he had already experienced on this quest; which he knew were only just beginning.
His heart beat loudly in his chest. Where will I go next? He thought.
To wherever I have to. To wherever I have to.
1. Approach
The asteroid field marks the frontier between the terrestrial planets and the Death Dreams. These latter's unfortunate name may lead the untrained mind to envision hallucinatory phenomena or the absence of life, but that would be in error. The erudite scholar will recognize that these vulgar terms are merely euphemisms for mystery and power.
