The view sped up. We whirred across the surface of Lin Den in a flash, coming to rest above another city, very large, stretching out over many farruns. It was surrounded by massive, open pits, like deep wounds in the planetary surface. Thousands of tiny figures snaked between larger mining machines; local natives, harvesting their planet. The skies above the city were hazy, and the buildings were covered in soot and grime.
“Welcome to Denaria, our glorious capital, the rotten core of our humble little world.”
The drone flew in low over the city, and I saw how imbalanced Lin Den had become. Expansive structures, obviously built at great expense, were walled off from surrounding hovels, shanties pressed up against each other like a rotted apiary. It had been beautiful once, with magnificent architecture, and the sanded auburn mountains visible on the skyline, but it was decaying now, hollowing out.
“I want to show you something else,” she said. The drone flew further into the city. Soon, I came upon a long, four-story building. Its outer structure was formed from thick columns and grand archways, a heavy, impressive architectural wall protecting the smaller inner structures, which were graceful and delicate, scattered throughout lush, beautiful, water-fed gardens.
Fountains sparkled in the light of the Linstar. People were down there, walking, laughing, sitting, napping, playing instruments. The air above the building seemed remarkably clear.
“Our fearless leaders,” Ifrit said. “They luxuriate in their impregnable bubbles, while the rest of us beg and scrape for their droppings.”
Someone down below looked up and saw the drone hovering above the bubble. Within moments, two robed figures darted out of the shadows and pointed their long staves up towards my vantage. An instant later, the image was spinning wildly, and I found myself streaking towards a cluster of ramshackle homes on the outer edge of the ministerial palace.
As the drone crashed, I heard Ifrit say, “Now you have seen the sickness spreading through Lin Den.”
* * *
I came up gasping for air.
Ifrit stood over me, her face grim. “It’s been like this for decades. I know that it’s not entirely their fault. They are only Linden, and Linden, like all people, are weak and greedy. Which is exactly why the Cendants prescribed the Tenets of Lin: to help us live into our higher selves. But the Fellowship has led us to regress, feeding our baser impulses, and our suffering grows.
“Those of us with the eyes to see it have done our best to rectify the situation. We have tried legal routes, and we have tried illicit ones. We know now, though, that we have merely been repressing the symptoms. A new trade agreement. A murdered magistrate. These have little effect against the relentless promise of more wealth and more power trickling down from the mighty Fellowship. That is the source. Cut the roots, and the creeping vines of influence wither and die.”
I stared at her. Her words made sense on some level, and I waited to see where this would lead.
“There are those who have advised me against this course,” she continued, “but the energies are in motion. Stopping now is impossible.”
“Stopping what?”
“You haven’t been listening. I told you already. We’re turning off the clock. From this point forward, trade with the Fellowship is going dark. Galactic time will become meaningless again. We will live and die on our own time.”
“You have no authority in this matter, Ifrit.”
“You are wrong. Your peoples’ hubris has given me that, at least.”
“Our hubris?”
“For our whole history, we sat on top of our mineral wealth, blissfully unaware of its latent power. But you showed us what is possible. Powering great ships. Drawing energy from a star. Now, it is time to show you what we have learned.”
“Dala,” Divider said, his voice filling the small boarding ship.
Ifrit pivoted her head back and forth with surprise, a wild look in her eyes.
“I have countervailed their masking technology. Tholpausha is dead.”
“What?!”
But before he could say more, a searing white light came in through the windows. I cried out, shielding my eyes and turning away from it.
“Divider!” I shouted. “Talk to me! What is happening?”
“Three small ships just uncloaked inside of the Linstar’s orbit,” he said in a voice incapable of panic. “The light was an explosion. One megaton warhead, at least. Possibly three.” Divider paused for a moment. “The starhub is in tatters.”
I reeled at the implications as bright spots danced before my eyes. Cloaking ships. Nuclear weapons. The starhub destroyed. Tholpausha dead, and likely hundreds more along with him. Maybe thousands. The Linden had learned from us. They had learned far too much. The ripple of this violence would be felt through the whole field.
I looked at Ifrit in shock. Her face was sad, but she did not turn away. My whole body felt numb, as if I might shatter with a gentle hammer tap.
“Dala,” Divider said, jolting me, “the ships are approaching our location at high speed. Scans show that they are heavily armed.”
“Stop them,” I whispered. “Whatever it takes.”
“Understood. I shall try to keep at least one of the vessels intact so that we might understand how much the people of Lin Den have leapt ahead as a result of our technology.”
“That’s… that’s good thinking, Divider.”
Then I grabbed Ifrit’s arm, wrenched it behind her back, and shoved her off of the boarding ship out towards the main room where her men were waiting.
“Worn,” I said, touching my finger behind the base of my ear, activating our local link, “are you in place?”
“Yes, dala. We already have them detained.”
When we came back onto the deck, all of Ifrit’s men were bound and kneeling. Worn stood over them. I pushed Ifrit ahead of me, towards her kneeling men.
“You have made a grave mistake,” I said to them. “There are other, safer ways to wake a sleeping giant.”
They said nothing.
I handed Ifrit over to one of Worn’s securers, massaging my forehead as I turned away from her.
Two more bright flashes lit the star dark sky in quick succession.
“Divider! Update.”
“Two of the ships are vaporized, dala. I managed to override the third, shutting down its propulsion and weapons systems. They are stuck.”
“Good work. Given the nature of their mission, they probably have limited life support. Send them a message. Tell them they better hope their air runs out before the Fellowship returns to clean up this mess. And get word to the Molroundian chancell. We need them to alert the Fellowship.”
“Of course, dala. The signal is already in transit.”
Someone grunted behind me. I turned. The securer who had been guarding Ifrit doubled over, clutching his belly. She brought her knee up to his face and he collapsed. A long, needle-thin dagger was in her hand.
“You are no better than the rest,” she said, and leapt at me, moving fast, aiming the dagger at my heart. I danced backwards, out of her reach, but my heel caught the step behind me. I fell, cracking my head on the steps. She was on top of me in the next instant.
Before she could plunge the dagger down, Worn fired his rifle, full power. The bolt hit her square in the back. She crumpled on top of me, her body convulsing. The smell of seared clothes and flesh filled my nostrils. I heaved her off, retching and gagging.
Worn was at my side, but I pushed him away. There was little blood because the beam had cauterized her wound. I stared down at her body, watching it twitch, the last throes of life trickling out.
“Are you okay, dala?”
Ifrit’s men were screaming, but Worn’s securer force held them back, bound and impotent in their rage. I could not meet Worn’s gaze. I turned away, trying not to let him see my watering eyes. The room was spinning.
“Orendala? Are you okay?” he asked again.
“I’m fine, Worn. I have a thick
skull. Please, just give me a moment.” I took a deep breath, steadying myself. The room stabilized, but a thousand pinpoints of light filled my vision, residue from the explosions mixing with the shock of my fall.
I touched the spot on my head, hissing with pain. A large welt was already swelling there.
“We need to get back to Divider,” I rasped.
“What about these ones?” Worn asked.
“Leave them. We’ll cripple the satellite from Divider and put them in a prison orbit around the star. They can ruminate on their madness until we figure out what to do next.”
Someone started laughing.
It was the man who had called me an idiot earlier. Ifrit’s second.
Worn approached him. “Something amusing?”
He shook his head. “Ifrit was right,” he said in his heavy accent. “You are swollen with hubris. You think that all people across the galaxy will genuflect in awe at your might and grandeur, but you are too blind to see what you have started, and where it has to end.”
“You and your men are pacified. Your leader is dead.” I said, forcing myself to stand, steadying myself on a work table.
“Do you think that it is just us? That this ends here? You have only scratched the surface.” He tried to stand. One of the securers forced him back down.
I knelt over Ifrit’s body and touched my hand to her chest, some small, foolish part of me hoping I would feel her heart beating. Her body was still warm, but she was gone.
I wiped my eyes. “Let’s go,” I said, turning away from Ifrit, gesturing to Worn and the others.
“This isn’t over!” the man shouted after us.
* * *
He was right. It was not over. To mend the dying Linstar, we had pulled apart the very fabric of Linden society. And I watched, helpless, as it continued to play out, a spool of thread unwinding. I tried to stitch what I could, but every time I did, new snags in the fabric appeared.
The moment the Fellowship returned to the Linstar system to build the starhub, this course was sealed. As I stood on the rooftop deck of the royal palisades in the fading twilight, I worried for the thousandth time that it was all coming apart around me and no matter what I did, it would continue until there was nothing left.
In the six months since the explosion that destroyed the Linstar hub, as I waited for the news to reach the Fellowship and my subsequent reinforcements to arrive, I did my best to do what I thought Tholpausha would have done, making it clear to the opportunistic oligarchs of Lin Den that their current economic arrangement with the Fellowship had reached its terminus.
It was, of course, not that simple. After evicting the wealthy Linden elite from the comfortable bubble of their royal palisades, the deposed oligarch elite were forced to seek refuge across the city, hidden away in private homes and safe houses. By scattering them, I scattered their power, though not without risks. With Divider in geostationary orbit above Denaria, I held the upper hand, but they had other means to conspire against me. Three attempts had already been made on my life.
But the resentment and anger of the greater Linden populace was palpable, and the oligarchs knew they were not safe. I promised them what protection I could, and in exchange, I asked for their compliance.
It was just as likely that the assassination attempts came from Ifrit’s secessionists and their sympathizers. In their eyes, my continued presence was an affront to all they stood for, and they decried any party who sought to work with me. The riots of the first few months had quieted, but spurts of violence erupted all over the city as tensions simmered.
Some Linden pledged to restore the principles of Cendants, leaving behind the desiccated city of Denaria to pick up whatever pieces were left and build anew on other parts of the planet. They blamed the secessionists for this mess as much as the Fellowship. By resorting to violence to achieve their ends, Ifrit and her ilk had perverted the peaceful tenets that Lin Den was founded on.
Most people, though, just wanted to make it through to the next day. They stayed on in Denaria because what did they have to go back to? Abandoned townships? Eroded farmland? Tarnished memories? After I commandeered the royal palisades, I repurposed it as a community hall, open to all, a place where the people of Lin Den could come for food, medical attention, and to air their grievances.
There were many grievances.
We catalogued every single one. I vowed that the Fellowship would do everything in our power to make reparations. But hearing so many stories of tragedy, suffering and loss was harder than anything else I’d ever faced. I bore it as best I could, but it tore something from me. So many lives had been lost. My heart felt red with their blood.
“Dala?”
I turned. Divider hovered next to me, inhabiting one of the drones.
“They are here, dala.”
Relief eased the tension from my shoulders and neck. At the same moment, anxiety pitted my stomach.
“Where?” I whispered.
“Look to the north, with your back to the Linstar.”
And there they were. A small phalanx of ships, at least a half-dozen, dropping into the atmosphere. They were twinkling, caught by the fading sunlight filtering up over the southern mountains. The Fellowship. My people. They had come to make things right. The irony of that almost made me laugh.
15 Farewell
I remember my days as a cultivator with a bittersweet fondness. Looking back at those years is like looking through a rusted telescope from the wrong end. The images are crystallized, achingly small and distant. We were happy. Life was rich with the daily rhythms of cultivation that kept our modest land fertile and livable.
Then my wife and son were murdered by a Kefant raiding party, one of the nomadic tribes that ranged out from the western basin and into the highlands. My old life was scattered like ashes.
It filled me with rage, and a terrible, hungry sadness. But it also unearthed a focus, a sense of purpose I never knew I was capable of. Vengeance. The power to defend myself, and anyone else who deserved my protection. I vowed that never again would anyone take that from me. My way forward was the way of dagger and hatchet.
All the years I’d spent tilling the thin soil of the eastern highlands armed me with a wiry strength, and I discovered that fighting came easy to me. Over the next year, I rose to prominence, besting anyone who contested me.
Word spread through the local tribal factions, and soon, the sachem, Adze, could no longer afford to ignore me. My existence was a threat to his supremacy, and he had no choice but to challenge me to single combat.
He was strong and fast, but his power as the tribe’s sachem was his greatest weakness. It made him too cautious. He stood to lose his vaunted status if I defeated him, while I’d already lost everything I’d ever cared for. I could endure anything now.
When he knocked my dagger from my hand, cracking three of my knuckles with his club, I used the opportunity to step inside his guard. I broke his arm, wrenching it behind his back with a brutal hold.
I could have ended his life then, but I showed him mercy. “Adze,” I said, loud enough that all could hear, “you fought bravely and honorably, and you are still welcome here. If we are going to survive these hard times, then we must stand together.” But though I did not kill him, I took his wife, as was my right by the laws of our lands, and, in so doing, demonstrated that my authority was absolute.
In time, we moved on from our simple mountain pastures and traveled to other tribal territories. I faced some of the greatest warriors that had ever lived. And I bested them all. My power grew. The tribe of Helgar became feared and respected for its unrelenting strength.
One evening, as I was sitting outside my sachem tent, bathing in the soft, silver evening light, and listening to the women inside, whispering and laughing, a raspy voice called out, breaking my reverie. “Hello, Oren.”
I sat up with a start. “Who goes there?” I said, trying to hide the nervousness in my voice. “Show yourself.”
She
stepped out from around the edge of the tent. She was short, her thin frame draped with a heavy woolen robe. She pulled back her hood, and said, “I am called Yaohanath.”
She was lean, and her face was worn and scarred, but her presence was electric. Her eyes were bright and lucid beneath her weathered brow. I could not detect a single ounce of fear in her, which was rare. Most people who knew of me knew what I was capable of.
But she had called me by another name. A strange one. Oren. Strange, but familiar somehow, though I could not place it.
“Yaohanath,” I said, turning her name on my tongue. “You are the prophetess. From across the desert of Nooroun. I’ve heard people tell of your foolish promises.”
“Foolish?” She raised her eyebrows. “You forget yourself, Oren. You are playing with history here, and it is an ill-advised game.”
“My name is Helgar, woman,” I said, raising my voice, “and I will not be spoken to like this.” The women in the tent went silent. I stood up from my chair, glaring at this strange but undeniably magnetic creature before me. In spite of her age, she had a youthful, commanding energy. Instead of intimidating her with my aggressive posture, I found myself struggling not to avert my eyes from her steady gaze.
Something deep in my memory was whispering, and I asked her, “Where do you come by this name, Oren, prophetess?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think you can hide here? You think you can escape? You are the one who is foolish. You cannot escape who you are.” She reached into the folds of her robes and drew out two long, curved daggers, holding them up in the silver light of Appollion.
“What are you doing?”
“I found these blades in the city of Noo, in the tomb of an ancient warrior. They are centuries old, and still as sharp as the day they were forged.” She moved the blades through the air, as if she were tracing invisible symbols in front of her. “They are masterful,” she said, gazing at them. She pointed one of the blades at me. “You are strong. You are cunning. And you think you can defy history with your strength. But my death will undo everything you have tried to build.”
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