by S M Briscoe
Jarred looked to the hand that had apparently done the impossible and found it clenching the sword he had forgotten he was still holding. It had sliced straight through the thick stone pillar, as if had been nothing, and somehow it had felt as if he himself had been the one cutting through it. Casting the strange thought aside, Jarred rose to his feet. There was no time to contemplate the meaning of anything he was experiencing. The cavern was coming down around him, though that concerned him less than the current state of the spherical vessel, which was now completely visible and free of the rock wall that had held it, hovering above the ground. Its surface was so covered in the bright glowing fissures, it appeared almost as a floating ball of light.
Terrified, but unable to turn away, Jarred quickly back away, working his way down the crumbling steps to the rising pool of water at their base. The tremors and collapsing rock had increased the flow of water seeping from the numerous gaps and cracks in the cave wall. Slabs of rock continued to crash down upon the crumbling monument and into the water all around him, but he continued to watch the now spinning sphere of light. It had become almost unbearably bright, whirling in the air like a ball of fire. Pieces of rock that fell from the ceiling into its path were instantly crushed into dust particles.
As the sphere continued to spin at an increasingly furious rate, massive sections of rock were ripped from the cave wall and ceiling, appearing to be pulled into the path of the floating vessel, disappearing within its burning vortex. Water from the pool ran impossibly up the steps toward the object, jumping off the floor and turning to vapor on contact with it. Jarred began to feel himself being pulled back to the rock shoreline, fighting without success against it, swimming against the reverse flow and reaching for anything to keep himself in place. He continued to struggle against the gravitic pull of the vessel as the water drew him up to a point directly under beneath it. He felt the water around him and eventually himself rising into the air, but could not not pull his gaze from the shimmering ball of light he had no doubt would devour him as it had everything else.
Time seemed to slow down as he hovered in the air, surrounded by droplets of floating water and feeling the warmth of the shimmering vessel that spun just above him. The cavern became quiet and still for what felt like an eternity. And then the air cracked, a sound like ripping thunder that almost deafened him, and a wave of energy cast him and everything else across the open chamber. He was plunged back into the pool of water, rising to the surface in time to see the sphere become completely still for an instant before caving in on itself and vanishing into nothingness.
For a moment the cave seemed still again and Jarred floated in the pool, awestruck by what he had just witnessed. The moment passed quickly and all at once what was left of the cavern began to collapse. Jarred dove deep into the water to avoid the slabs of falling debris, swimming down to the floor of the pool. Looking in all directions for any route of escape, he felt the sudden and familiar call of the presence that had led him to this place. He spared a glance at the sword in his hand and turned in the direction he felt himself being drawn. It was impossibly dark, but Jarred thought he could make out what appeared to be a black haze against the rest of the dark watery background. Wasting no time he swam towards it. As he drew closer, the black haze became a small hole in the rock wall. With little other choice, he pulled himself through the opening and into the narrow tunnel beyond.
Half swimming and pulling himself along the length of the tunnel, he moved as quickly as he could, knowing he could not hold his breath indefinitely and hoping that he would find another large opening or an air pocket before drowning. His heart sank when he ran straight into a dead end in the tunnel. Feeling around the wall of the tunnel, his hand reached an open air pocket above his head and he pushed himself up into it. The water was rising steadily from the flooding in the main chamber, but it gave him a few moments to collect his thoughts.
He couldn’t return the way he had come. That chamber was a death sentence. The water must have found a way to continue moving forward, otherwise the air pocket wouldn’t exist. He felt around the dead end of the tunnel and felt the small hole. His arm sank into it and he could just wrap his fingers around the other side of the blockage. Pulling his arm out he brought the sword in his opposite hand up and pointed it towards the rock wall. It had cut through that pillar in the chamber with ease. Thrusting hard, he pushed the blade into the rock close to the preexisting hole. It cut through easily and Jarred grinned to himself. Repeating the stabbing motion he began to dig out a larger hole in the blockage. The water in the tunnel had risen to the point where he had to press his face into the ceiling to get any air and he stabbed out frantically, knowing he had only a few moments before the air pocket would be gone.
Punching his arm through the widening hole again he felt a heavy section of rock collapse on his hand, pinching it for a moment and knocking the sword free of his grip. He cursed and reached out blindly for it, finding only the caved in rock. As the water finally rose to the tunnel ceiling, he pushed himself down and hammered on the blockage with all of his strength and desperation. To have come all this way for it to end here, like this. He refused to go out this way. With a cry of anger, he struck the rocky blockage with all of his might, feeling a surge of energy explode outward from himself.
The rock wall in front of him seemed to detonate violently, falling in on itself, and he was sucked through the opening, being pulled along by the strong current of flowing water through the tunnel. Oxygen deprived and shrouded in complete darkness, Jarred felt himself fading. His lungs were burning for air and felt as if they would explode. He was losing consciousness and yet somehow in the blackness he saw it. A sliver of light in front of him. He reached out for it weakly, feeling his hand grip the familiar hilt of the sword.
And then he was out of the tunnel into a large body of water, shimmering light above showing him the way to the surface. Jarred pushed off for it, using the last of his waning strength to rise up towards the light. Breaching the surface, he cried out with his first breath of precious air. It hurt his lungs as it filled them, but he breathed it in deeply, letting the air saturate and rejuvenate him. Exhausted, he moved towards the rocky shoreline until he could again touch ground. Crawling towards the dry rock floor, he collapsed with his body only a part of the way out, lying down in the shallow water.
After a long moment’s rest, he raised his head to take in his surroundings. He was in a large open cavern, much like the one he had just escaped, but many times the size. It more closely resembled the first open cavern he had been led to by the Toguai. It felt as if days had passed since he had taken his first lone steps into that tunnel, being drawn towards something he did not know or understand.
Continuing to look around, Jarred was beginning to realize that this large open chamber looked very much like that first one. The rock formations. The numerous tunnel openings. The centralized pool he was currently lying in. It didn’t just resemble that chamber. This was that chamber. Panning across the room, his gaze finally fell on the curious looking face of the creature that had brought him here forever ago. The stalky grey skinned Toguai was still sitting where he had been when Jarred had set off without him. He would have laughed had he the strength to do so.
“Are you just going to sit there?” Jarred spoke, between labored breaths. “Or are you going help me out of here?”
He wasn’t sure if the creature understood him, but after a moment it stood up and made its way toward him. It reached out a hand and Jarred took it, pulling himself out of the water.
The Toguai dropped his hand suddenly and Jarred fell flat on the ground again. He was about to let loose a string of curses at the creature, but stopped when he saw the way it was looking at him.
Not at him. At what he held.
It was looking at the sword with an expression Jarred couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t fear in the Toguai’s eyes, though it had backed away upon seeing the weapon. Was it reverence? Its people had
supposedly protected this secret for generations, as Orna had said. It had become their purpose. Now it was suddenly before the Toguai and it seemed almost stunned.
Jarred watched the creature curiously for a moment before slowly and painfully getting himself to his feet. It was time they got back to the surface. He had some more questions that needed answering.
Chapter 24
RYZA
Slavers were something Ethan had grown up fearing, such was the life of a refugee. A slave had his life and freedom taken from him, to live out the rest of his days toiling for someone else. He had always imagined it as a torturous existence, with chains and shock whips and other dark, unbearable conditions, where the unfortunate souls unlucky enough to find themselves sold into slavery would be ground down by their owners and then thrown away like trash when they were no longer useful. Living that slave life for himself now, he was again faced with a reality which did not quite equal that of his imaginings, though the experience was no less terrible for it.
Disgusting as it was, the work he was forced to do wasn’t that difficult. Definitely not the grueling hard labor he had envisioned, though he was still exhausted by the end of the twelve hour work shifts. While the labor was fairly simplistic and repetitive, it also happened to be mind numbingly monotonous, which caused the time to crawl by at a painfully slow rate, an altogether different, though no less agonizing sort of torture in and of itself. His primary function so far had been to trudge through the steaming pools of bio waste that collected in a sort of large spill basin, one of many in the disposal zone, shoveling the muck into holes in the floor that opened into a drainage pipe system. Those pipes led to an incinerator below which disposed of the sludge, which was also the source of heat that made the festering waste swamp bubble and churn like a giant pot of some gruesome soup. He spent the hours unclogging one pipe opening after another with the blunt tool the workers were provided for the task. Thankfully they had all been supplied with face breathers as well, as he could only imagine the noxious fumes the waste pool gave off.
He could almost taste the vile stench that had been absorbed into his waterproof coveralls when he stripped them and the rest of his clothes off at the end of the day for the relief of a well needed shower in the community wash station. He had quickly gotten over both his embarrassment and modesty in having to utilize the mixed sex sanitation area. The hard, but still soothing shower sprays were the only relief to be had in this place and he found himself looking forward to it as each day progressed.
The jobs they all performed could have easily been completed by half the number of mech workers. But mechs were expensive. The slaves were all divided into two separate half day work rotations to keep the zones fully operational at all times. Mechs did not require rest and could run constantly, but that came at a cost as well. They needed regular upkeep, repairs, programming upgrades. Ethan could envision the line of thought Syntax Corporation had taken to come to the conclusion that slave workers would be less costly than mechanical ones and that it was good business to use them like any other tool for this kind of menial work. It was simple, repulsive mathematics and it made him sick. He wished that he could stop thinking about it, but with little else to occupy his thoughts down here, his focus always came back to the anger and disgust he felt.
The desperation he saw all around him didn’t really help matters. It was hard to stay positive when hopelessness was spread uniformly over every face he came across. Just that morning, he had awoken to find a man, Dorishian he thought, dead in one of the bunks in his cell, his usual blue skin drained to a lifeless grey. Ethan wasn’t exactly sure how, but the murmurs of the rest of his cellmates was that he had taken his own life, not that he was at all interested in those details. He supposed the man just could not bare the thought of living out his days in this place. Ethan could understand that.
In the frenzy that had followed the discovery, mechs arriving to cart the body away, Ethan had observed something of interest though. Before the Dorishian had been taken from the cell, one of the mechs had removed his security bracelet, using some kind of device on its arm to apparently deactivate it. The bracelet had sounded a quick set of beeps before clicking open. The event was Ethan’s first since arriving that actually boosted his spirits, though he made sure not let that feeling show outwardly. He couldn’t be sure of who was watching. He simply stored the information away, hopefully for later use, and returned to the usual mundane routine as though nothing had occurred. It wasn’t very difficult. The slight uplift in spirit he had felt was quickly smothered by another day of tireless work in the sludge pits.
At least having Mac around was a bit of a distraction. The man told frequent jokes and had a seemingly limitless number of stories to tell, often relating them to whatever it was they happened to be doing. Considering the amount of time they spent in knee deep pools of bio waste, Ethan found himself fascinated by how often Mac seemed to have found himself trudging through one disgusted liquid or another. His current tale had him carting some kind of rare breed of animal across the system for a wealthy client. As he had told the story, the creature was amphibious and required constant submersion in its natural bog-like environment.
“Because of the size of this thing,” Mac continued, recounting the story with enthusiasm, “it couldn’t just be transferred into a holding tank for transport. That would have been too easy. Instead, I had to convert my entire cargo hold into one big swamp for it to swim around in. A disease ridden pool of muck, with all the little dietary critter fixings to go with it. You think this place smells bad? My ship reeked of the worst backwater sludge pit you could imagine for months. The disgusting little swamp bugs and lizards are still creeping around in every nook and cranny. I can’t get rid of them.”
They both laughed through their face masks.
“I still miss her, though,” Mac went on, after a long moment, sounding a bit nostalgic.
“The stinky lizard?” Ethan asked, jokingly.
“No,” Mac laughed. “The ship. It was my home. I spent more time aboard her than anywhere else.”
“I hear lots of pilots say that. That their ships are like a home to them. I could tell that Jarred was sad to have to leave his on Isyss after it crashed, and it was a piece of junk.”
“Pilots develop a bond with their ships,” Mac explained. “They put countless hours of work and care into them, hoping that when the chips are down, they’ll pull through for them. They spend so much time in them they become like a familiar companion. One that gets you out of as much trouble as you get into.” Mac gestured up towards the ceiling. “When you’re out there, it’s just the two of you surrounded by a whole lot of space. Out there, your ship is your best friend.”
Ethan nodded with understanding, though he didn’t completely. He had never had a ship, or a home to call his own for that matter, so the feelings Mac was describing were unfamiliar to him. Even so, it was the one thing he had always wanted, more than anything else. To have a ship that was his, and to be able to call it home. Looking around himself, he thought about how quickly things changed. Right now he would settle to just be anywhere but here.
A horribly familiar stench brought him out of his thoughts as it began to seep in through his mask’s air filter and he felt the sudden urge to vomit. “This stupid mask is leaking again,” he almost gagged, smacking the oxygen intake valve.
“Mine too, kid,” Mac replied. “Just try breathing shallow.
Ethan looked up at the man, who looked nauseous himself. “Does that work?”
Mac shook his head, negatively. “No, not really.”
A loud buzzer sounded, signaling an end to their work shift and Ethan sighed in relief. He and Mac climbed out of the waste tank as their bracelet warning sequences began to tone, right on schedule, and made their way to a set of stairs that connected to an elevated walkway ten meters above the tank area. They continued chatting as they traversed the narrow catwalk, which was slow going with the dozens of other workers tha
t were also trying to make their way back from the numerous tank holding areas that filled this expansive wing of the waste treatment plant.
The walkway itself stretched from one end of the facility to the other, suspended above the holding tanks by support rods and cables that connected it to the ceiling at various points along its length. It led to the facility’s only access point, or the only one they were permitted to enter and exit through, which was sealed shut while they worked and only opened to allow passage at the beginning and end of their work shifts.
Mac continued on with another tale concerning the transport of six Ferusian exotic dancers to a renowned club owner and a mid trip power failure that left them drifting in space for a week without comm capabilities. Only half paying attention to the story, Ethan’s attention fixed on the open doorway ahead of them and the hot shower and tasteless meal that waited just beyond it, he simply nodded to show his interest.
Mac noticed his half hearted attempt, looking a bit disappointed. “You’ll come to appreciate those stories when you get a little older, kid. They help to remind us that when something bad happens, sometimes there’s a little good that comes with it.”
Ethan thought about that for a moment and tried to make the link between the story and where they were now. He wished he could find the upside to this place, but he guessed it was most likely one of those times when a bad situation was just a bad situation.
“What did you do for the week you were stranded?” Ethan asked.
Mac grinned. “Considering I knew we might all die out there, I got to know my passengers . . . very well.”
