The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

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  Sometimes Kesney missed his home in Ochnar.

  Not last night, when he’d come home from a night out in the teeming city of Inen with several of his friends and their girlfriends, and with Ekasi Sherra Linfaln. They got on well, but there just wasn’t a spark there. Though one thing in her favor was that she came from Inen and so knew all of the night spots, such as there were.

  But this morning, as he lay in his barracks with a pulse-pounding headache, swearing he’d never again touch the foul devil spirits, he did miss home. Perhaps not the boredom that descended upon him out in the pastured fields, or the heat of the equatorial sun, but he deeply missed his little brother and mother who still lived in the small city of Ochnar, half a world away.

  His father, Miran Ekar Kesney, had died eleven years ago in a terrorist raid when his ship Falinden had tried to defend their home. Kesney had gone to be trained soon after at the Academy in Inen, but he had only been home twice since his first year. His brother had to be about twelve now. Kesney had last seen him when he was seven.

  They hadn’t even come to the graduation ceremonies last year. Ochnar was a thousand nariars away, and civilian shuttles were expensive, class-exclusive vessels run by privately owned commercial companies. Kesney remembered only a little of what his mother had once taught him in his early life; her voice had been drowned out by years of discipline and education.

  Now her words, her subtle skepticism about everything but the certainty of the next sunrise, were coming back. She had been careful not to show any disloyalty about the government, of course. But was she a secretly a dissenter, too? Kesney found himself wondering.

  Vaikyur had set the wheels turning in his mind, had raised the protective film that had covered his eyes.

  What was a dissenter anyway? The word had never meant much to him in the past, but now it seemed to take on a whole new and colossal significance. He’d started to pay a lot more attention to the world around him, taken an interest in reviewing what the official reports claimed, and tried to remember what they said when another came along.

  For the first time, he saw that things didn’t always add up, that consistency, efficiency, and simplicity weren’t the first considerations in compiling the official government news reports.

  At the same time, Vaikyur’s predictions, whenever the Senkaya-Sukura confided them in his communications officer, nearly always, uncannily, came true. Kesney sometimes still argued with Vaikyur when given permission to speak freely because he enjoyed their debates, but even Vaikyur had to have noticed by now that Kesney had begun to argue without the empowering force of conviction.

  Perhaps because Kesney now knew that his government was truly capable of deceit.

  Kesney had made the discovery only recently. Despite his long-held reservations about Eiron’s political views, Kesney had never found it within himself to denounce Vaikyur-Erlenkov; he hadn’t even made mention of Eiron’s dissentionist talk in a single report. However, just a short time ago, word had circulated around Command Central that one of the charges used against Vaikyur-Erlenkov in the Miran’s interrogation had supposedly been filed by Ekasi Kesney of the Kirey Divison.

  When Kesney heard the audio recordings of the accusations, digitally spliced together using his own words, though words he had never actively strung together, he knew that his accusation had been pieced together and doctored by someone for the sole purpose of destroying Vaikyur-Erlenkov’s reputation. And he knew that, no matter how justified the government might have been in suspecting Eiron of subversive behavior against them, they had crossed over the line of proper and ethical conduct in their effort to punish him.

  Because, if there was one thing that belonged to him, Kesney thought, it was his ability to decide his own views for himself, and that included the right to voice them and face the consequences, as well as the privilege to voice only what he believed or wished to have others believe of him, without being quoted out of context, no matter what purpose his words might or might not be used for. The government had no right to take the right of speech away from anyone, especially when the power of speech could determine the course of a man’s fate or those involved with him.

  Later, when Eiron had asked Kesney about the report after his interrogation, Kesney discovered that despite the recordings, Eiron didn’t believe Kesney had denounced him; nevertheless, Kesney could hardly believe him that his trust remained firm, and so Kesney continued to try to convince Eiron that truly he hadn’t denounced him. Eiron laughed and that put an end to Kesney’s unease; Kesney, in turn, felt a spark of pride that Eiron had never lost faith in him, despite what he had heard Kesney say on the recordings with his own ears—as though Eiron wasn’t at all surprised that someone in the government had arranged it all.

  That was when Kesney decided to intervene on Eiron’s behalf and went in to the Headquarters Building to formerly retract his accusations from the report against Vaikyur-Erlenkov before several prominent witnesses. Kesney wouldn’t denounce Eiron for dissenter activities, he decided, not unless coerced to, and anyone who tried to pressure him to do so would have found the effort useless because Kesney was incapable of making a convincing deception of any kind to anyone.

  After all, though Kesney and Eiron hadn’t exactly become friends since his return to Inen from aico-seven, they had been heading in that direction; Kesney had even invited Eiron along on several of his off-duty excursions to Inen with his Academy friends. Eiron had gone with them once or twice, though he was technically a superior Ekasi; Kesney’s other friends had a hard time refraining from calling Eiron “sir” even off-duty, but of course, they didn’t know him very well.

  However, as an ahkso, Kesney and his fellow Academy cadets had briefly trained under Ekasi Vaikyur-Erlenkov’s guidance the year before Kesney’s graduation, a fact which had made Eiron’s disappearance and presumed death particularly difficult for Kesney. All of the cadets had admired Vaikyur-Erlenkov’s flying back in the old days. Kesney remembered trying in all ways to become like Vaikyur-Erlenkov, who hadn’t, of course, expressed any political views back then.

  Despite Vaikyur’s private talks with him, Kesney had still not been prepared to hear similar political views from Vaikyur’s grandson, his hero. Eiron was almost an idealized older brother; and against Kesney’s better sense, Vaikyur was growing into the father figure Kesney had never known.

  Now, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Eiron had begun to sow seeds of dissension through Command Central. People found themselves won over by his strange blend of conviction and charisma. Eiron argued in a subtle way that gradually diffused arguments made against his point of view. Eiron merely turned arguments around until his opponents found themselves outmatched and out of breath.

  Who had ever thought of negotiating? No one had entertained the idea for longer than a moment. But Eiron was causing them to question why they had always scoffed so easily at the suggestion. Why was it really such a bad idea? Had they come to the conclusion themselves or had someone else conditioned them to believe it?

  Now, Kesney felt the weight of his confusion growing day by day. He knew his duty was to protect the civilians of Tiasenne, but he felt more and more inclined as the days passed to agree with Vaikyur and Vaikyur-Erlenkov that something was very wrong with the current state of affairs, and that the Tiasennian government was hiding something significant from the population at large, something about the secretive Orian enemy and its reasons for attacking their planet.

  But what if Vaikyur and his grandson Eiron were wrong? Kesney wondered. What if they were trying to promote disunity just to weaken the Air Corps so that the Orians could conquer the planet and reward their secret Tiasennian allies?

  No! He just couldn’t believe that anymore.

  Vaikyur had no reason to lie.