James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 07

by Yronwode

  “Get up,” she ordered him. “Get up and kill them.”

  Her words made total sense to him. Keeler hoisted himself up on his walking staff and kicked loose the charred remains of the shroud from around his feet. Despite the smoke and trauma, his mind felt sharper and clearer than it had in days. He noticed there was a smallish gathering of Xirong standing beyond the contingent of guards, men, women, and children. They were dressed in rather humble clothes, tunics and trousers mostly. Some of them wore oversized jackets with Xirong symbols sewn on them. He couldn’t figure out why, but for a moment, he felt sorry for them, but he forced himself to turn away and tend to business.”

  “Blunt Hardcheese,” K-Rock growled, moving close to him. “My ‘trusted’

  lieutenant.”

  “You were dead,” the words just kind of fell out of Blunt Hardcheese’s mouth.

  His brain had not quite caught up with the shift in events.

  “Death has no hold on K-Rock,” K-Rock spat back at him. “But I am… no pun intended… gravely disappointed in you.” He turned back toward the people. “Even if I were dead, the Ferkaktata must go forth. This man has not only betrayed me, he has betrayed the Ferkaktata. He has betrayed all of us.” Angry hisses and boos came from the crowd, along with a haunting kind of staccato shrieking that K-Rock was fairly certain he had not heard before.

  “Voorgarth did not betray you!” Hardcheese shouted “It was him, Serpantor…

  K-Rock roared. “There’re three things I refuse to tolerate: cowardice, bad haircuts, and men plotting to kill me and take Mr. Smashy.”

  “My Lord, gimme my life, and I’ll swear to you!” offered Hardcheese.

  “Take it up with my secretary, Mr Smashy,” K-Rock shouted, then saw that his staff was still sharpened to a point.

  “Mr Smashy seems to be out today,” K-Rock said. “You’ll have to take it up with his assistant, Mr. Pointystick.” With that, he plunged his battlestaff into Rockgroin’s chest. He pulled it out a moment later, with Hardcheese’s still-beating heart attached to it. K-Rock showed it to him before he died, then scraped it off on his boot.

  He turned to his other soon-to-be-former lieutenant. “Blast Thickneck.” Thickneck lowered himself to his knees. “Finish me, Lord K-Rock. But spare my sons. Do whatever you gotta do to my wives and daughters, but spare my sons. I pledge their lives to you.”

  “I am going to show you mercy,” K-Rock said.

  Thickneck bowed. “Thank you, Lord.”

  “I grant you a merciful death.” With that, K-Rock plunged the battlestaff into Serpantor’s chest and pulled out his still-beating heart.

  Keeler scanned the men all around him and chose the largest, which was easy because one hairy beast towered above the others. “You, mountainoid,” K-Rock barked at the largest man. “Come here. I want you.”

  The man walked over. He was a head and a pair of shoulders taller than any of the others. “What is your name?” Keeler asked.

  “Ator,” the man said, his voice an appropriately meaty growl.

  “No longer. Hereon, you are to be known as Big McLargeHuge, my number one.

  You will act in my name.”

  “OK,” the man agreed.

  “Your first order, Number One, is to get rid of these heaps of meat,” he indicated the bodies of Voorgarth/Blunt Hardcheese and Serpantor/Blast Thickneck

  “OK,” agreed Big McLargeHuge, and he threw a body over each shoulder and carried them back toward the city of Izzan-Al-Izzan

  “You and you,” K-Rock said, pointing at two of the large, but not quite as large as Big McLargeHuge men. “You will be known as Rick Steakface and Slate Fistcrunch.

  Work out for yourselves who is who. You will send a message to the Chieftains of the ten largest tribes and let them know, I have come back from the dead. If they do not meet me in three days at Urbtar Lek, I will kill them. You can reinforce that story with reminders of how I smited the Lethal Injectors, called down fire from the sky, and can kill without remorse or penalty. Go, Now!”

  When he was done, K-Rock turned and looked at the blazing fire, and on top, the metal rack on which his body was to have been burned. He turned to the remaining men. “You men, bring at least three hundred pounds of Giant Thunder Lizard flesh,” K-Rock ordered. “We’re gonna have ourselves a barbecue.” CHAPTER: 11

  Yronwode – The Wilderness of Howling Zeal

  General Kitaen succeeded in convincing the Midians to release some data on the position of Xirong settlements within five days walking distance from the crash site.

  There were twenty, the smallest being an encampment of a few hundred, the largest being a sprawling city-state the locals called Izzan-Al-Izzan, which contained somewhere around two million people.

  They could not secure permission to search the settlements for Commander Keeler, but they were allowed to inspect the empty lands in-between the crash-site and the settlements, where they hoped to find, if not the commander himself, at least some indication of where he might have been taken.

  So far, no ransom demands had been received, and the crash was almost fifteen days old. If Keeler were wearing his landing gear, he still had a chance of surviving, but that chance was slim in the open desert.

  Johnny Rook led a three-man search team consisting of himself, Max Jordan, and Dayvan Cowboy. Riding their jet-packs, they followed along a tributary to the dry stream bed where Keeler’s escape pod had been found. The planet’s charged atmosphere made scanning difficult, and the wind and dust would long since have erased any footprints on the gravelly surface, but hopefully, the Commander would have left some indication if he had passed this way, and if he were encamped, he might hear the jet-packs and come out to signal. Also, if they happened to pass within one or two kilometers of the commander’s position, they could probably pick up the transponder signal from his landing pack.

  There were three other search teams also jetting around, trying to pick up the slender thread of hope offered in this vast hopeless landscape.

  Dayvan Cowboy radioed in. “Warfighter Rook, I’m experiencing a power loss in my jet-pack.”

  Rook responded. “It’s about time for us to set down anyway. I see a clump of trees 600 meters south-southwest. Follow me in, and I’ll repair your pack. If I can’t we’ll return to base.”

  Dayvan Cowboy acknowledged him by saying, “Acknowledged,” and the three men descended from the sky and into a small stand of sticks and vines that managed to draw nourishment from a muddy spring that was all that remained of the stream.

  Rook stripped off his helmet, shook off the desert dust before checking Cowboy’s jet-pack. “Looks like a bad connection to the power cell. I can fix this. Jordan, look around this … tree grove or whatever you call it. If I had crashed out here, this is where I might have made camp.”

  Jordan took off his helmet, and shook out his shaggy red hair. “You bet.” He walked a short distance away to explore the edge of the little spot of life in the desert When he got a few meters away, Caliph spoke to him from the suit’s COM Link, so that Rook could hear her, too. “I’m going to increase the tactical suit’s sensor acuity. I might be able to pick up something.”

  Rook answered her, although he was already using the OmniTool on Cowboy’s power cell. “You do that,” he said.

  When he thought he was far enough away that Rook wouldn’t hear them, Max Jordan deactivated the tactical gear’s COM Link and asked Caliph, mentally, “How did you do that thing when I was sleeping last night? I thought you could only communicate with me through the Combat Suit.”

  “Your mind has immense reserves of unused memory. Much more than your

  Combat Gear. I simply left some of myself inside you when you took off the gear

  and went to bed. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not so much,” Max Jordan answered.

  “It does bother you a little. I can tell.”

  “It’s just unusual having someone in my head.”

  “There are lo
ts of people in your head. I’ve been studying your neural passages,

  and I figured out how to create memories and sensations for you.”

  “That’s how you did what you did with my dreams last night.”

  “Affirmative, did you like it?”

  “Damn right I liked it,” Max Jordan exclaimed, this time out loud. He looked around nervously to make sure Rook had not over head, then went back to speaking in thoughts. “What you did was even better than the real thing.”

  “I’ve been learning from your memories. Your experiences with the real thing have

  been quite limited. You have had only two encounters with females your age from

  the ship’s population. Neither of them resulted in intercourse, only some brief

  tactile stimulation of your erogenous zones. You found your experiences with

  self-stimulation considerably more satisfying.”

  Caliph paused.

  “The capillaries in your face, neck, chest and arms have increased in diameter,

  along with an increase in body temperature and heart rate. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Jordan told her.

  “You had some similar experiences with tactile stimluation with three girls on the

  planet Aurora, culminating in fully-realized sexual congress with someone named

  Calico Jones.”

  “I would just as soon forget that,” Max Jordan told her.

  “The memory of that experience triggered a negative response. I sensed there was

  something dampening your arousal at the women in the bar. The essence of the

  negative memory is now part of your subconscious processing, having a slight

  counter-effect on stimuli that should arouse you.”

  She sounded rather surprised and delighted by this, like a scientist who has just made a discovery.

  “Like I said, I would prefer to forget that whole experience,” Max Jordan continued.

  “I can make you forget it.”

  “What do you mean?” Jordan asked.

  “I’ve been studying your neural patterns, in particular, how your mind stores

  memories. The way your memories interact with each other to create knowledge is

  amazingly complex, but the storage mechanism itself is quite simple. There’s a

  kind of coding system involved that records not only the memory, but your

  emotional state at the time. And the emotional state is one of the baselines that

  links your memories together are you following me?”

  “Um… no.”

  “Bring up a memory you would like to forget and I’ll show you.”

  Involuntarily, Max Jordan remembered the time on Aurora Caliph was speaking of, when he discovered the ‘woman’ he had just lost his virginity to had been some kind of sexual transmorph; a man who had undergone surgical and hormonal treatment to make his body resemble that of a woman.

  Caliph drew out the memory into an image of Calico Jones telling him she used to be a “horny little boy.” Caliph further explained, “That memory is associated with

  feelings of shame, embarrassment, humiliation… and also a sense of sorrow, which arose

  later when you realized you would only have one first real sexual intercourse with another

  person, and you had wasted your opportunity on a promiscuous sexual transmorph.”

  Max Jordan could not formulate a response. But he could feel all those feelings she described rising in him, along with a sense of anger.

  “One memory this links directly to deals with your sexual abuse at the hands of an

  Aurelian when you were a young boy on Bodicea.”

  His anger rose. “Please don’t bring that up.”

  “I feel your anger. And that links to… a number of memories from your childhood

  on Bodicea. You were frequently on the run from the Aurelians. They attacked your

  encampments, and at times you had to flee into the night. You remember the faces

  of those you knew, even as a child, who were killed by the Aurelians, or captured

  by them.”

  “I haven’t thought about those people in a very long time,” Max Jordan said.

  Caliph continued working her way through his mind.

  “Here is a recent memory… painful. The loss of your mother at 12 255 Crux…”

  “Stop it!” Max Jordan ordered her.

  “I am sorry,”

  Caliph projected herself onto a stone. She stood there, glowing white, shapely, hot, and managing to look sad enough in the face that he knew she was really sorry.

  “I can make it so you don’t have to remember any of that. I can erase the

  memories, and the emotions associated with them.”

  “How?”

  She showed him a visual display of his brain.

  “A little electro-chemical stimulation to the right spots and it will be as if those

  things never happened.”

  Max Jordan thought about this. “Do it,” he thought finally.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Erase everything else, just don’t touch my mom,” Jordan ordered.

  “Many of the traumatic memories on the planet Bodicea are associated with your

  mother.”

  “I don’t care. Take out the dirty sex memories, Take out the memories of pain and … being scared. But I don’t want to forget anything about my mother.”

  “I could replace the unpleasant memories with more agreeable ones.”

  Caliph showed him a memory transformed. In the first, his mother was fighting the Aurelians, hunkered down behind a huge and mossy log as he handed ammunition to her. It morphed into a memory of him and his mom eating ice cream with some Aurelians.

  “Neg, I don’t want any fake memories,” Max Jordan told her. “I would never know again what had really happened and what you had planted in my mind instead. And I still want to hate the Aurelians when this is over.”

  “Stand by, I have to access some files from Sapphirean and Republic culture, to

  help better determine how I should edit the content of your mind.”

  She paused a few moments, then the image of her turned pinkish with a tinge of concern.

  “There appears to be a certain cultural taboo against altering memories. The

  technology for memory alteration is strictly controlled, even on Sapphire. The risk

  of a personality shift…”

  Jordan interrupted her. “Ever since I got to Pegasus, I’ve been a freak. I’ve always been afraid, I’ve always been angry, no matter how I tried to hide it. Nobody else on the ship has to carry around these memories. If I got rid of them, I could be normal.

  I could be… happy.”

  “Are you absolutely positive?”

  “Just do it!” Max Jordan ordered. “C’mon, c’mon. Go! Go! Go!”

  “You’re afraid if you don’t commit now, you’ll change your mind. Perhaps…”

  “Shut up and fry my brain! Go! Go! Go!”

  Caliph sighed. Max Jordan felt a sharp zap to his brain, and for a split second, everything tasted purple.

  Then he was unconscious for several minutes. When they lost contact with him, Rook and Cowboy came looking for him.

  When his eyes opened, he was flat on his back. Rook and Cowboy were staring down at him. “Are you all right?” Rook asked.

  Jordan grinned up at them, “Never ever better.”

  “What happened?” Rook demanded.

  “Don’t tell him,” Caliph whispered, and she fed into his eyepiece the text of a reasonable lie.

  “I just needed to lie down for a second, I was a little dizzy from the heat, and a little disorientated from flying all morning,” Jordan told him getting to his feet.

  “Should we get you back to the base?” Cowboy asked.

  Jordan smiled and showed them the Health Indicator on the left tactical gauntlet he wore on his forearm. “S
ee, it says I’m fine. Let’s get back to the search.” Yronwode – Xiyyon - Emissarial Complex of the Starcross Preparations for the installation of Eddie Roebuck as the next Pontifex of the Starcross Emissary on Yronwode were proceeding apace. Eddie endured them with a certain dignity, though his faith that he would be rescued off this rock eventually before being made into a religious figurehead was fading rapidly.

  “What’s this ritual?” Eddie asked Archonex Meek

  Meek explained to Eddie. “This is the Ceremony to formalize your installation as Proto-Pontifex Designate.”

  “You’ll have to speak up,” Eddie told him. “I still have water in my ear from jumping the Giant Sea-Kraken.”

  That part of the ritual had gone fairly well. Eddie had cleared the pool, but he had stuck the landing and spun out on his motorcycle and into an array of trash receptacles at the far side that had been filled with water to cushion his expected impact. So, in addition to road rash, Eddie had gotten quite a large quantity of water in the ear.

  Meek repeated. “Approval by the Levitating Matriarchs will formalize your installation as Proto-Pontifex Designate.”

  “Is this when I get my powers?” Eddie asked.

  “Oh, heavens no,” Meek chuckled. “Only the Pontifex claims all the Holy Powers. You will be retained in a state of preparedness for the time when the Pontifex’s powers are transferred to you. Until then, you must continue to study the scriptures.” That was going less well, although Eddie could now recite 19 of the 21

  Commandments, and could name most of the Christian and Iestan apostles, every time he tried to recite Brianist dogma, he thought of Giant Space Broccoli and cracked up.

  “So, who are these Liberating Meta… arches?” Eddie asked.

  Meek cleared his throat. “The Levitating Matriarchs construct our mythology, interpret prophecy, and act as prophylactics against the incursion of superstition into church doctrine. Skeptics have accused them of manipulating these aspects of our religious dogma to benefit themselves.”

  “Za, that’s women all right,” Eddie raised a hand so that Meek could high-five him. “Don’t leave me hanging, buddy.”

  Meek awkwardly returned the high-five. “Work on that, assol,” Eddie instructed him.

  “Yes, most holy one. Historically, the role of the Matriarchs was to prepare worlds for inclusion into the Starcross Empire by arriving a generation in advance and establishing, through prophecy, the conditions for the arrival of Emissaries.