Copyright © 2011 J. D. McCartney
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1463511175
ISBN-13: 9781463511173
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61914-453-8
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Prologue: The Past
1. The Fifth Angel Blows His Trumpet
2. Entropy in the Outlands
3. And All the Children Go Insane
Part I: The Aberrant
4. Hell on Wheels
5. Empyreal Trespassers
6. Forbidden Planet
7. Burnt
8. Mercy from Above
9. Gauntlet of Fire
10. Aftermath
11. A Wolf in the Fold
12. Eluding the Pursuit
Part II: The Prisoner
13. Awakening
14. The Eyes of a Savage
15. Vigilant’s Master
16. A Pawn is Born
17. Return to the Union
18. Woodland World
19. Shadow Nexus
20. Cry Havoc
Part III: The Slave
21. Mada Elorak
22. Ashawzut
23. Colt .45
24. The Guardians
25. Crime and Punishment
26. A Time to Kill—or Die Trying
27. Banes from Below
PROLOGUE:
THE PAST
CHAPTER ONE:
The Fifth Angel Blows His Trumpet
38,276 B.C.
Fentan Mult scowled, then sighed. His shoulders sagged in frustration. Despite his best efforts, the blue that he had just painstakingly swirled into a unified pigment still remained several shades lighter than the tint he had been aiming to reproduce. He had mixed in the whole of a large, viscous droplet of his purest ebon, and still it had not been enough. The stiffening glob of mixed oils that now sat glumly atop his palette was simply not the color that would faithfully represent the reality of what he meant to convey.
He grunted softly in vexation. He was attempting to replicate the color of the sea where it met the sky, where it was very nearly indigo, and the hue he had just created was missing that dark, inky tone that would have given his ocean the authenticity for which he strove. He shifted his focus from the blotchy palette held in his hand to the holographic image that hung in the air by his canvas. He then held the palette up in a way that put both it and the holograph directly before his eyes. There was no doubting it; what he had was not what he needed. For the hundredth time he contemplated the purchase of an autoblender, and for the hundredth time he rejected the thought. Procuring one would make his hobby immeasurably easier to master, bringing him that much closer to the artistic apotheosis to which he ultimately aspired. But it would also be cheating the craft, and any public knowledge of its use would cheapen—no, negate—any success or notoriety that he might attain in the end.
He reached for his paints, found the black again, and squeezed out yet another, but this time smaller, droplet. Carefully he swirled the mixing brush past it, pulling only tiny lines from the dark orb into the thickening smudge of blue that lay at its side. After a minute, maybe longer, the tint of that smudge darkened into what he believed, after careful comparison to the image he copied from, to be exactly the shade he needed. He checked the color against the holograph one last time before setting the mixing brush aside in favor of a more slender model. After dipping it into his paint, he proceeded to limn a long, thin ribbon of his new tincture across his canvas just below the horizon. When the brush strokes were complete, he stepped back and once again compared his reproduction to the projection next to it. Yes, he thought, much better. The sea he was recreating was slowly beginning to look more and more like the waters beyond the white sands of the beach at Keo Rocca.
Choosing a slightly wider and stiffer brush, he meticulously mixed the new shade into the lighter, more brilliant blue of the water closer to shore, striving mightily to form a smooth transition. When he had commingled the pigments as adeptly as he was able, Mult backed away, halfway across the compartment this time, to survey the scene in its entirety. Although he felt it still not reflective of his best work, it was nevertheless coming along nicely. A few more touch-ups and perhaps he would call it complete, and prepare it, along with the rest of the portrayals he had put to canvas during this voyage, for the transit home. However, there was very little time. He would be debarking in less than forty-eight hours, and at any moment would likely be called to the bridge for the final approach. Mult shrugged as he set his brushes and palette aside; he would take care of the finishing touches in orbit, before the company shuttle brought out the harbor contingent.
The scene he had been painting was of his new home, as seen from the mounting heights that overlooked it, the home he had lived in for only a few short weeks before being called away for his latest trek between the stars. It was a stucco house by the shore, its many tiers and flat roofs nestled against the pure white sand of the dunes, with only them and the wide beach between it and the sea. When he had left, his wife had still been unpacking and only beginning to decorate. The painting was a gift for her, a celebration of and future keepsake for their new and for so long only dreamt of dwelling, and as such he had struggled profoundly over many weeks for sublimity in his depiction of it.
The thought of his mate brought a slight smile to his lips. He imagined the two of them standing on one of the many terraces that overlooked the waves, with the salt breeze caressing their faces and the cries of the gulls overhead. The gay shrieks of their children at play along the water’s edge echoed in his mind. He could almost feel the touch of her hip against his thigh as he imagined holding her closely around the waist, the pressure of his hand over her belly pulling the fabric of her dress tightly over her breasts. Yes, he mused silently, it will be good to be back home again. He thought fondly of spending hours naked in his own bed, holding his beloved’s warm body close to his own.
That was the one of the few disadvantages of commanding an interstellar tow, all the time spent away from hearth and home. Otherwise he was handsomely paid to read, paint, exercise, and in general do whatever he wished. He, like the rest of the crew, was only on board to supervise the ship and of course to provide the completely unnecessary signatures on the uncounted reams of anachronistic authorizations, registrations, and requisitions that the tow and her cargoes generated. The ship was really more in need of an accountant than a crew. If not for the bureaucratic administration involved, Endurant would have been perfectly capable of completing her cruises with no human complement whatsoever. But laws were laws, and they stipulated that even the most reliable machines should ultimately be overseen by flesh and blood. As a result, Mult stood in his quarters in the middle of the day, or what passed for the middle of the day aboard ship, wearing only his uniform pants and an unbuttoned shirt, surrounded by easels all holding one or another of his creations.
He turned away from the fruits of his avocation, drifting out of the main room and into his sleeping chamber. There, he at first sat and then lay back upon the luxurious bed the captain’s quarters contained before curling up dreamily into a near fetal position and closing his eyes, still dreaming of home, of Akadea—Endurant’s next port of call.
Akadea was a man-made wonder of the universe, the most mammoth construction project ever conceived by the collective minds of humanity. It was a replacement for Old Akadea, the home world of mankind, which was now engulfed by the red giant that had at one time been its nurturing sun. The new version of home was very much like its namesake environmentally, but there the resemblance ended. New Akadea was monstrous in size. It consisted of a sphere within a sphere, both rotating in opposite directions around the s
un in the center, the whole of the construct being nearly as large as a small star system.
The outer sphere had a diameter of over 300 million kilometers. Its inner surface was home to untold billions of people, and yet it was hardly crowded. Even with roughly three quarters of the area of the leviathan ball covered with water, deserts, ice, high mountain ranges, entry hatches, or otherwise inhospitable terrain; there were still over 620 quadrillion square kilometers of space perfectly apt for human settlement. So despite the enormous population, there were over 3000 square kilometers of habitable land for each and every human resident that lived within the great globe. Upon its completion, Akadea had put an end to man’s competition for space with his neighbors, as well as his competition with the flora and fauna of both the now deserted home planet and the thousands of other worlds remade in its image and scattered throughout this part of the galaxy. There were no overcrowded cities or endangered species on Akadea. There was only seemingly unlimited space for everyone and everything.
The inner sphere was much smaller, searingly hot, and utterly lifeless. It spun in place over 90 million kilometers from the interior surface of the outer sphere, between the Akadean landscape and its sun. In addition to its dimensions and its sterility, it differed from the outer sphere as well in that it was not solid, but rather slotted perpendicularly across its equatorial circumference. Each slot resembled two slender, spherical triangles joined at the base, projecting both north and south from the equator, their apexes nearly touching at the poles. The hollow globe rotated at a rate that gave any random spot on Akadea alternating periods of approximately twelve hours of sunlight shining through the slotted holes and twelve hours of shadow when the light was blocked, except for an inconsequential area at each pole that was perpetually clothed in darkness. The designers had even thought to leave millions of appropriately sized holes through the sphere’s solid portions, giving the appearance of a starlit evening sky to the residents of the vast landscape beyond.
Inside the inner ball was the sun, a lonely star, its former bevy of planets having been completely consumed during the construction of the spheres. But this star was different from any other in that it would never go dark. It would never cease to send out its life-giving rays to the great Akadean construct, for this star was fueled, nurtured, and fed by a vast fleet of ships built solely for the purpose of bringing in new matter to be immolated in the great fusion furnace that was the Akadean sun. The whole process was controlled and overseen by the most sophisticated artificial intelligence network that had ever been devised. This star would not fail the humans that were dependent upon it. It would last as long as humanity did and longer.
Not only did the star provide heat and light for the construct, but also power. And since nearly all of its energy was captured, there was more power available than humankind could ever hope to exploit. Even after the ravenous hunger of the massive gravity generators was sated, there was still so much energy to spare that some of it was constantly being bled off into space lest the temperate globe become a searing oven.
In addition, the Akadean star was positioned slightly off center within the spheres, the gravity generators holding the giant globes in place, defying the will of nature. It was just enough to mimic the seasons of the old home planet across the whole of the inner surface of the world. The outer shell had also been built not as a perfect sphere, but rather a slightly oblate spheroid. This arrangement provided a close approximation of the varied temperature ranges that had existed on Old Akadea, allowing the complete spectrum of biological diversity of the old world to flourish in the new. It was, as far as Mult could tell from his limited knowledge of ancient history, a near perfect copy of the conditions that had existed on the birth world of humankind.
There were exceptions of course. There were no plates to shift and set the ground atrembling; no powerful, dangerous storms to turn everyday implements into deadly projectiles. There was no sea of magma waiting beneath the surface to someday spew forth and obliterate anything unfortunate enough to be caught in its path; no toxic ash to be sent skyward, obscuring the life-giving rays of the sun. There were none of the perilous and unpredictable banes of nature that, without proper controls, regularly frequented their wrath on the residents of non-engineered worlds; they had all been fastidiously deleted from mankind’s new home. That in itself was enough to make Akadea an extraordinarily pleasant place to reside and raise a family.
Whether the vast construct was flawless or not was certainly open to discussion, but there was no denying that it was indeed benign enough to have drawn, over the centuries since its creation, most of the human race back home from their far flung colonies. There were still a few men and women spread across a fair portion of the Milky Way; mostly scientists and workers, like Mult himself; engaged in the sometimes hazardous process of bringing knowledge and raw materials back for refinement in the academies and factories of home. There were also an insignificant number of colonials, those hardy few who dared to risk the danger and endure the hardships that abounded on conventional worlds. They remained on their distant outposts either out of attachment to the places they had called home for so long or loyalty to one of the many sects, each united by strange creeds and moral codes, that had settled on several dozen worlds spread across the fringes of the outlands.
But on the whole, the creation of Akadea had effectively depopulated the remainder of the galaxy. The last Akadea-forming of a planet had begun before New Akadea was totally complete, and although it and several other worlds were still in the midst of their transformations, there were no new planets slated to undergo the metamorphosis into habitable orbs. When the giant sphere of Akadea had been opened to families, environmental modification had become obsolete. Planetary remodeling took centuries to complete and was prohibitively expensive, so now that living space was no longer at a premium, new projects had been shelved indefinitely.
It was a fact that bothered Mult not one iota. Notwithstanding the daredevil reputation spacefarers and outlanders had engendered over the years, he was hardly the adventurous type. He loved living safely within the sphere of Akadea, and the relative ease of his shipboard life never dampened his eagerness to return to the comforts of his home there while he invariably sank into melancholy as the scheduled departure for his next voyage loomed ever nearer. He looked forward to the day when he could retire, despite the surety that that time was a great many years away. His current body certainly would not last that long. Maybe in his next one, he thought, when the last of his children were grown and gone and both he and his wife were young again. They already had their dream home; all they needed now was to put enough away to support them in style and keep their portfolio growing, and he would be extraordinarily content to do any further paintings mere feet from his own bedroom. He would create exactly the opposite of what he painted now. Instead of generating visions of home from billions of miles away, he would compose scenes of the infinite cosmos from the luxurious opulence of his Akadea-bound studio.
He smiled again. As much as he disliked his job, it had allowed him to see a great many things that others would never have the chance to. The vast majority of the people of Akadea had never seen, at least through their own eyes, the exterior of the sphere in which they lived. They had never gazed through the view-ports of a shuttle as it weaved through traffic amidst the mechanical jungle of robotic factories and shipyards that surrounded the outside of their home. They would never witness the sight of a tow ship suddenly appearing as it went sub-light, its 80-kilometer train of elephantine barges trailing behind, the whole assemblage decelerating into high orbit and gracefully settling in with the thousands of other ships that always begirded Akadea. They would never see the filmy, luminescent brilliance of a nebula or the long tail of dust and debris trailing a comet approaching a star. They would never personally gaze upon any of the wonders of the galaxy that their ships so commonly traversed. Most would live and die inside their globe, having never visited another world.
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The people were, of course, aware of all such things. The entirety of the towering academic achievements of mankind was readily available to any resident of the sphere. Many people owned, and all had access to, physical reality simulators that were touted to be capable of recreating any encounter or happening that one might wish to add to their life experience. And yet, through personal trial, Mult had found that it was never quite the same, as the mind was always aware that for all the attention to every detail, the simulation was exactly that, a simulation. No technology could replicate the simple awareness of the human mind, and the mind would always on some level be cognizant that the simulators were merely generating an illusion; that there was no real ecstasy being enjoyed, no real hardship being endured, no real chances being taken, and no real danger being faced. Mult was of the opinion that the pure essence of reality would never be artificially fabricated with absolute authenticity.
He knew many of his Akadean friends envied him on that basis, envied him due to the unreality of their own experiences, envied him because he had actually traveled the void, living a life complete with real and perilous hazards—hazards that could kill rather than merely frighten for a moment. He lived a life into which actual, poignant excitement intruded from time to time; the kind of life that no longer existed for most of the inhabitants of Akadea.
But very few and quite possibly none of his benevolently caged friends would trade places with him. They coveted his past of having risked danger and surviving it, but they hardly desired a future for themselves of occasionally facing situations that had the potential of threatening their very existence. In that respect most were more than content with the prospect of a long life spent safely within the confines of their protective world. And Mult looked forward to joining their pedestrian and vapid existences on a full-time basis just as soon as he was able.
The Empty Warrior Page 1
