Cargo (The Ascendants Book 1)

by V. M. Law

  “You look troubled, Kasey.”

  She wheeled around, reaching for the pistol in her waistband and brought it up to eye level as she completed her rotation. She found the Commoner staring back at her, with his hands clasped behind his back and a wild look about his hair and beard, which stuck up in every direction possible and seemed glued together in rough patches.

  “Who are you?” she asked, knowing the answer before even considering the question.

  “I think you know who I am, but I also suspect that you would be surprised to find out,” the old man said, leaning forward and allowing a smile to grow on his wrinkled, rigid face.

  “I asked you a question,” she repeated, hoping to sound menacing. The others, from their circle of laughter, could not see Kasey in the corn, and she wondered briefly if this man might not be the Commoner. She didn’t know who else he could be, but she felt the tremors of fear in her unsteady hand as she gripped her gun.

  “Well, I am the Commoner, of course!” He threw his arms wide. “Welcome. Welcome to my home. I would have tidied but I had more work to do preparing the ray. I couldn’t let you guys die out there, could I?”

  “How do you know my name?” she asked, keeping her pistol drawn, though lowering the barrel.

  The look of mirth evaporated from the Commoner’s face, and in the absence of his sideways smile, he looked like a homeless man, clad in tatters and disheveled from years of abuse to his physical body. She remembered how old he must be, and how much Vitrol he must have taken to be standing before her, and reconsidered her appraisal of his appearance.

  “They didn’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Ajax must have seen the two in the corn patch. He walked silently up to Kasey and rested his hand on her shoulder, consolatory. The Commoner spoke.

  “My name, you have heard before, and I yours. In other times, I went by Brysen Lee, and in my heart I still consider myself such. Kasey, I am your great-grandfather.”

  The world around her, the smell of grass and the weight of Ajax’s hand on her shoulder and the peculiar look of familiarity that hung about the man she knew only as the Commoner, the impending deaths that awaited them all, everything fell away in the aftermath of the words entering her ears, rocketing through her mind and her heart, and exploding back out of her mouth in a stammered, inquisitive repetition of his words.

  “Brysen? My great-grandfather?”

  He nodded only once in affirmation, and she noticed the tears brimming in his eyelashes.

  “But how? You died. You died in space and never came back to Earth.”

  “We should have told you, Kasey,” Ajax said from behind her, and through the shock of revelation, his words sounded far off, as if they echoed down the corridors of the Neptune station from the Age of Discovery, two miles away in the hangar. “We meant to, but we didn’t think you’d believe it. We figured this was better.”

  She ignored him, and ran to embrace her kin. When she threw her arms around his torso, she ignored the feeling of his protruding ribs, the curve of his sternum that pressed against her cheekbone.

  “I think a meal is in order,” he said, and everyone laughed. As he remained locked in Kasey’s embrace, he avoided the concentrated stare of Ajax, who knew the man much better than Kasey did, and had the unmistakable intuition that everything happened too slow for the Commoner, too slow for his plans and his schemes. He continued to stare at the Commoner, who continued to avoid his gaze as he beckoned them to his kitchen.

  ***

  From the bridge of the Ides warship, Nigel processed millions of pieces of information that poured into his mainframes from every mechanical device on the vessel. He simultaneously read short range and long range detection systems, temperature and salinity controls, air quality information, engine power, and everything else that powered an interstellar traveling hive full of insects.

  Computer banks loomed over his corporeal hardware, towering edifices that he controlled remotely, that kept him shrouded in shadows penetrated only by the green and red and blue glowing lights of the various units before him. The only one that he truly cared about, waited on, was the electromagnetic scanner that plumbed the depths of space searching for anything that emitted an electrical signal.

  Its lights wavered and flashed and blinked, blanketing Nigel in their ominous pallor.

  I am coming, my love.

  I am coming.

  Chapter 25

  Kasey sat with her rediscovered great grandfather at the wooden table that he dragged from his abode to rest beneath the branches of the maple tree. She enjoyed a sugary, delectable treat that she had never seen before, never heard of. A rounded, flat baked confection, it seemed to her, though Brysen assured her that it required no baking, dripping and saturated with a sticky brown liquid, sweeter than the cake and stronger in flavor. The smell of it was irresistible, setting her stomach aflame despite her nerves and the shock of meeting a lost family member.

  A waffle, he called it, and the syrup came from this tree. A breakfast staple of the old people, lost when the wheat fields died. He had been making them with cornmeal and water since before the war began. Different, but close enough for people who could not remember ever seeing a real one.

  Through mouthfuls of waffles and syrup that poured onto his chin and coagulated in his beard, Gustav talked frantically of the past few years, the journey to Earth and back, the changing of identities and the black-bag transit trips. The thefts and the intrigue and the discovery of Kasey that led them to the Age of Discovery.

  He sat dazed through it all, looking not at his kin, but at the gigantic ceiling fans that circulated air, the light that replaced the earthen sun, which hung impotently in the Neptunian sky, weaker than any of its moons.

  “Boss, you need to realize. This station is compromised. The Age is barely running and MarsForm knows we’re here. We need the Morrow.”

  “The Morrow?” Mantiss said, also dribbling chunks of fried cornmeal into his facial hair. “I thought it blew up.”

  “It would have, if we let it get through the wormhole,” Ajax said.

  “So you guys stole the Morrow and the Age? No wonder we’re getting boarded by an army of commandos.”

  Gustav interjected to tell Mantiss not to impose his brevity upon serious matters. The mechanic stumbled through a stiff response, and the Commoner continued to stare at the artificial sun, telling them that the ray that penetrated the atmosphere of the planet without experiencing diffraction, the ray that pierced the vessel that had boarded them, was of his design. It was constructed when he was on MarsForm’s good side and never tested until he detected the approach of the Leviathan on the base’s security systems.

  The conversation ceased, and the company turned to stare at the Commoner, except for Kasey, who hadn’t ceased staring at him since the waffles were placed before her.

  “Well, good thing it worked, because we’re going to need it again, and soon.” Ajax leaned forward to give his words more emphasis, still staring at his boss who stared at nothing.

  The only response he got came from Gustav, who told him that a ray that powerful would take hours to charge. “We are so close to accomplishing our mission. Why are we still eating pancakes?”

  “Waffles,” Mantiss corrected.

  “Whatever. If you knew we were coming, sir, you must have begun prepping the Morrow?”

  “Pardon me?” he broke his gaze away from the tree’s canopy, telling the crowd that he thought he saw his butterfly, whom he hadn’t seen for a while, and for whom he was beginning to grow concerned.

  Gustav stared at him, and for the first time since they encountered one another in the corn rows, Kasey saw the Commoner as an old man addled by years of drug abuse, and wondered how serious the puncture scars on his veins must be.

  “The Morrow? You’ve begun the launch sequences, correct?”

  “Ah. The launch sequences. I have done no such thing.” He did not meet their collective gaze as he
uttered the words, the proclamation of their doom and the failure of their designs.

  “What?” Gustav screamed, pushing his seat back from the table with such force that it toppled over in the grass. “We’re fried! We need to leave, right now.”

  “But that will do no use at this stage,” the Commoner said, his voice laden with sorrow. “I thought it would be more proper for us to enjoy each other’s company, and waffles, and the reunion of friends and family.”

  His eyes definitely shone with tears of joy, Kasey thought as she sat in his shadow. Gustav paid no heed to the old man’s eulogizing, and quickly began gathering his rifle, his ammo and his satchel. Ajax stood at the table and stared at Brysen Lee, able to attribute the change in the man’s demeanor, his loss of vitality and cunning, to the rapid ingestion of Vitrol. “Boss, we have Charybdis. It is functional; we only need to move it to the Morrow.”

  “But don’t you want to see my greenhouse? I have perfected the soil composition, finally, and if it weren’t for our deaths—” He chuckled. “If it weren’t for our deaths, I promise you we could all be enjoying the finest corn you’ve ever tasted in a week’s time.”

  “Fuck your corn!” Ajax screamed, and from the entrance of the pavilion, Gustav screamed that they needed to leave. Even Llewellyn joined, leaving only Kasey still sitting at the table, dumbfounded by the sudden change in their fortunes. “We need an operational ship with a strong enough engine to carry the weapon. Your weapon. The weapon you spent your entire damn life building. If you can’t help us, then we will have to leave you.”

  “But friends, you haven’t finished your waffles! I know they didn’t come from your childhood, but I think I made them perfectly enjoyable. It’s a sin to waste the syrup.”

  “Kasey, let’s go,” Llewellyn said, softly, as if to console her for a terrible loss.

  She turned her face to his and in the instant they made eye contact, he knew that something broke within her from the pain of abandoning a family member, however ephemeral that connection had been. “How?” she asked, the only word she could muster in the confusion.

  “Kasey,” he screamed, already turning to follow the footsteps of Ajax and Gustav. When the two of them were alone, and she turned to face her great grandfather, he said to her that she should run, if that was what her friends were doing, and to tell Corbin that he would be returning to Earth at any moment. In this final conversation, it was not his words that broke her, but the starry look in his eyes that she recognized as the same look Corbin would direct at her when she bounced on his knee, hearing stories about how things were before they fell apart.

  Underneath the branches of the first and last maple tree Kasey would ever see in her life, she held her great grandfather in a strong, familial embrace, a bear hug that one would throw around a long lost friend, who, arriving unexpectedly, knocked on the door in the middle of the night bearing gifts and good news.

  She fled, leaving the shade of syrupy branches and corn rows that obscured her stress, the dream world that existed beneath its outstretched arms, and plunged herself back into the world of laser rifles, aliens, and wayward shipping company captains. Their screams echoed in the halls ahead of her, guiding her deeper into the center of the station.

  ***

  Farrow knew when the summons arrived from the claustrophobic bridge of the Ides’ unnameable warship that the base on Neptune had been found, that the final moves of a long and tiresome game were about to commence.

  “I need your help, Farrow,” Nigel said, remotely. He had been programmed to emulate human emotions and conversational dictums with far too much precision for her to ever want to stay in the same room as it for longer than a moment. And even through the SatCom, Farrow knew that he lied. That he only wanted to see her squirm in her seat again as he released the Ides into the base that was her father’s pride when it ran properly.

  She couldn’t escape thoughts of the base on the entire journey, as she sat in her own bridge in the docking station of the Ides’ ship.

  Now, she sat before him once more, listening to his military style interrogation techniques as he demanded from her the access codes, the floor plans, the security system layouts—everything that would be needed to seize the base effectively. She wondered, looking at the swarm of gigantic alien insects that trampled their young under hooked and sharpened claws, if they needed the information—if they would use it, or if they would simply run through everything they detected in their path, maiming and destroying and throwing the blood of their victims in every direction until it ran in rivers in the hallways.

  She wondered how many people were down there, on Neptune, waiting for them with guns cocked and mines set to detonate. With a wavering voice, and a turning stomach, Morgyn Farrow gave Nigel the information he desired. She told him about the shield, the generator for which was virtually indestructible, the automated turrets, the tacking systems that followed moving objects and alerted other to their paths.

  As she spoke, she found herself imagining the weaponry that she spoke of cutting through the advancing Ides and found the images appealing, and the venom hidden in her voice rose steadily to the surface until it became clear to the computer that she relished the images flashing through her head.

  “We are about to land. I shan’t expect your shields will do much for them, nor their turrets. I require only the knowledge of the floor plan, so I can attend to business of my own as the Ides attend to theirs.”

  Silence was her response.

  “Morgyn,” he warned her, sounding like a mother scolding a petulant child. “We have discussed this. You would do well to keep your feet warm and remember the fate of your Earthbound cousins. There is no resistance.”

  She grinned a sidelong grin, one that would terrify any of her underlings, but that was completely lost to the computer. Again, she gave him the information he asked for.

  When Nigel dismissed her, and she walked through the grimy halls of the Ides’ warship for the final time, she thought about what his business could possibly be, and how he would react when he faced her in the endless halls of the base.

  Chapter 26

  As Kasey caught up to Ajax, Gustav and Llewellyn, she heard them talking of a space elevator, a deeper recess, a sanctuary that might withstand the onslaught of the Ides that would begin momentarily. Her heart thrummed with the incessant pounding of exertion; she doubled over when she caught up with them, and had to resist the urge to vomit on the sleek, reflective floor, constructed from a substance she did not recognize, that had probably also been developed by her great grandfather, when he was on the good side of his firm.

  An alarm sounded as the four congregated in the hallway that led from Brysen’s home, his garden paradise that would soon be so much kindling. Kasey held in another wave of vomit that crippled her, made her light headed, bade her sit down on the cool surface below to catch her breath.

  She also knew, and the alarm was a constant reminder, that to give into the voice in the back of her head would be to commit suicide, to be overrun by the Ides in much the same way Brysen would be.

  The last thing she heard when she turned to flee: music, classical music that played through the alarm and echoed down the halls so loudly that as she ran, Kasey grew unsure of whether she ran from her great grandfather or the undulating, ominous architecture of the sounds crashing in her mind and in the hallway. She thought about that music again as the three argued about how to access the Age, how to retrieve the Charybdis and what to do about the Morrow, which would not be primed in time to take off before the Ides arrived.

  The alarm continued its baying, drilling into Kasey’s mind the immediacy of her death, a moment which until that instant had always seemed avoidable—at least for a while—but now hung in the near future, and promised to be grim and painful.

  Gustav spoke with the most fervor. “I know the base acutely. I’ll get the Charybdis; Ajax, you must take them to the Catacombs.”

  “And wait to die there? I think
I’ll die fighting.”

  “We aren’t dead yet, and the human race shouldn’t go extinct because you struggle with being too prideful.”

  Llewellyn, for once, sat silently, waiting to receive an order or be given any indication that his presence would be needed.

  “Why are you the only one who gets to die on the front lines?” Ajax, despite the grim situation manifested by alarms and the shock of returning home to an addled friend unable to cope with the world, smiled, attempted brevity, did everything he could to stop Llewellyn and Kasey from losing their nerve and running headlong into fear and certain death.

  “I’m going back,” Kasey said quietly, and at first no one heard her speaking at all. She raised her voice, and repeated the same words. “I’m going back.”

  They all stared at her in disbelief until she began back pedaling, a few short steps at a time, which increased in length until she spun around and turned to run, to sprint, to pump her knees until they hit her chest and ached. They screamed after her: “No!” and “Don’t do it!” and “You’re going to die, for sure, if you do!” and things like that. She did not hear. She ran at full speed, unmindful of the pain that still smarted in her leg when she slammed her foot down, tracing the scuffs of her shoes on the floors, eventually losing herself in the conflicting echoes of classical music and the frantic screaming of Llewellyn, who knew with certainty that he was witnessing his best friend die.

  “I’m going after her,” he screamed, and through the alarm and the music and the sounds of screaming, she heard his words clearly and knew that her friend did not get sucked into the gravitational pull of the two men they originally sought to arrest, and then unwillingly found themselves partied with. It did bring her relief to hear him stand by her, to express a wish to die by her side and the side of Brysen. It brought her a sense of relief that was equal to that which she felt when she heard Gustav object to the compounding of stupidity and tackled Llewellyn to the floor. But by that time, she had already rounded the corner and could smell maple syrup and cornmeal waffles.