The Galactic Pantheon Novellas

by Alyce Caswell

  He made sure she saw that particular memory, of the job he’d almost failed to complete. All because the mark had looked a fraction too much like Ablar when his scope had landed on her.

  That was the day he’d decided to never hesitate on the trigger.

  ‘But how can I feel without feeling them?’ Isabis asked.

  ‘I listen to Sundafarian music,’ Sanyul offered.

  She glanced at him. ‘Music?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a good way to feel something without actually putting yourself in harm’s way. I usually play it between jobs, when I’m in leapspace.’

  ‘I would like to hear some of this music,’ Isabis said.

  ‘I’d play my favourite tracks for you, but my techpad’s back on Sundafar,’ Sanyul said, smiling. ‘If you promise not to laugh, I’ll sing for you.’

  Her expression grew solemn. ‘No laughing. I promise.’

  The wind tickling his cheeks, Sanyul closed his eyes and began to sing, his voice trembling its way through the notes. The song was both hymn and lament, for the rain had not come and the time to plant was over. There were no seeds in the soil, no promise of growth. But on the horizon, glinting like diamonds, were the droplets of water that would surely come next year.

  ‘So please The Goddess, please and praise her,’ Sanyul finished, meeting the Savine’s gaze once more.

  ‘Of course they would sing about me,’ Isabis sighed.

  Sanyul shook his head. ‘No. It’s not about you. It’s about hope. We don’t see you, because you help us out of sight — I should have noticed that earlier. Without you appearing on command to soothe our worries, we have to make our own hope. We’re good at that, us mortals.’

  ‘Hope helps you live with uncertainty without going mad,’ Isabis said, her golden eyes distant.

  ‘Yeah, despair’s a killer in its own right,’ Sanyul agreed. ‘I guess that’s why I like the song — it’s about what tomorrow might bring, not what today doesn’t have. Uh, I could sing you another if you’d like.’

  ‘What’s this one about?’ she asked.

  She could have read it straight from his mind. But no, she had stayed inside her own skull. It meant more to him than he could say, that she was willing to waste the time on getting to know him, person to person, instead of moving on once she’d scoured his thoughts.

  Sanyul let his gaze wander back to the moons above them. ‘This one’s about loving a woman from far away. She’s the other piece of you but she had to leave the planet to find work. And she can’t return because she has to support her family.’

  ‘Sounds lonely. And sad.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Sanyul assured her, ‘because the singer is sure she’ll be home one day. And he can always see her in his mind if he needs to.’

  ‘Hope again?’ Isabis said with a gentle smile.

  ‘Hope always,’ Sanyul countered.

  And then he began to sing anew.

  • • •

  His voice was beginning to fade a fourth time when roiling emotions from halfway across the galaxy clawed into Isabis and ripped through her mind, again and again. An immediate problem then. One she couldn’t ignore. She was on her feet in moments, Sanyul not far behind her.

  ‘Croanz,’ Isabis said tersely before he could ask. ‘My people there are about to attack each other. If they are willing to lose their lives over something so stupid, I shouldn’t have to…’ She drew a breath. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Croanz?’ Sanyul repeated.

  Without the time to explain, she threw the necessary information into his mind. As small as a moon but following the required path that marked it as a solar satellite, Croanz was home to a colony comprised of vastly different cultural groups that had been knitted together by mutual isolation. A recent discovery of a n’radian deposit was threatening to undo years of peaceful compromise.

  N’radian was strong, rare and expensive — it should have given the colony a stable future. But instead two factions led by twin brothers had arisen. One brother wanted to hire mercenaries to protect the n’radian; the other thought the colony should learn to defend themselves instead.

  The colonists were about to spill blood over this ridiculous debate.

  ‘There won’t be anyone left to enjoy their windfall if they keep this up,’ Sanyul muttered. He glanced at Isabis. ‘Take me with you. I might be able to help.’

  She didn’t hesitate. Isabis called up the golden grass from beneath their feet and spun it into a vortex that, for a moment, reminded her uncomfortably of Renaei’s hair whenever a gust of wind blew it back from the Tirine’s beautiful face.

  Isabis’ heart stuttered and she nearly lost focus, but then she heard Sanyul’s unspoken words: Breathe in. Breathe out. You can do this.

  I can do this, Isabis thought — no, she knew she could. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  The vortex dropped away, leaving them standing on a burnt-orange outcropping above the colony, which was half the size of Sanyul’s hometown and protected by boulders instead of twisted mgunga trees. Clustered in front of the n’radian mine’s entrance were the tight-lipped colonists, all of them armed with mining equipment and all of them prepared to misuse it.

  Sanyul immediately dropped onto his stomach. He was recalling his lessons from the Arms Academy: make yourself as small a target as possible, don’t give any sniper a clear shot at your centre mass and evaluate the situation from a distance, both physically and mentally. Isabis found herself acting on this knowledge, as though she too had sat in on Sanyul’s classes during those years on Leeds.

  ‘Their minds are so noisy; it is difficult to know who is right and who is wrong,’ Isabis murmured as she lowered herself to the ground beside Sanyul. Breathe in, she told herself. Breathe out. The stabbing headache swiftly became a distant nuisance. ‘I have no idea who to punish. And I do not wish to humiliate myself by speaking to them.’

  ‘You’ve had trouble in the past when attempting to make mortals see reason,’ Sanyul said, accessing the memory a moment before she found and presented it to him. ‘They’ve wanted to kill you when you were only trying to help? Mafala!’

  ‘Mafala indeed,’ Isabis agreed, smiling.

  Sanyul gave her an unabashed grin in return. ‘Yeah. I can take a hint.’ He paused for a moment, his forehead creasing. ‘We use a lot of words on Sundafar that aren’t in the galaxy’s main dialect. Did we make them up? Or are they so old that people stopped using them?’

  ‘They’re old. Very old. Older than me.’

  ‘Good,’ Sanyul said. ‘Then I won’t let anyone forget them. Too much of our past has been lost already.’

  Isabis had always loved that the people on Sundafar had not completely forgotten their old ways. Many other mortals had. The bot uprisings had destroyed more records than there were stars in the sky and patchy oral tradition was all that remained of thousands of years of human history.

  Sanyul squinted down into the valley beneath them. ‘The colonists stand to make a lot of coin-chips from n’radian sales. They could easily pay for both mercenaries and training.’

  ‘I agree,’ Isabis said.

  ‘They need a common enemy,’ Sanyul decided. ‘Someone to make them look outwards instead of inwards.’

  His mind was back on Sundafar, recalling where he’d left his lasrifle. He would have no trouble taking out the faction leaders with this particular weapon; the laser setting was the highest on the market and it could slice through lasproofing like butter. Well, the common kind of lasproofing anyway. Sanyul’s suit was filled in with panels made of n’radian, which was impervious to laser-based weapons. Hence why it was so coveted.

  ‘Sanyul…’ Isabis trailed off, not sure if she was cautioning or encouraging him.

  ‘You’re needed elsewhere — I can hear those other voices calling you away,’ Sanyul said. ‘Let me handle this one. I have a plan. But I need my lasrifle, the one I tried to shoot you with. And I’ll also need…’

  She listened to him, gave him his weap
on as well as a promise to supply whatever else he required, and then shed her body. In an instant, she was on thousands of different worlds, able to watch every single one of her followers and help them if she had to. Even though she did not need to draw breath in this form, she repeated the chant — breathe in/breathe out/breathe in — and separated herself from the countless feelings and thoughts accosting her.

  Isabis made sure she kept a large portion of herself behind with Sanyul on Croanz, wanting to keep him safe and curious to see if his plan would work.

  Sanyul was methodical as he set up his weapon, using a tripod to keep it steady. The lasrifle’s scope was digital and could alter one’s perception when it was zoomed in over great distances, especially if one failed to factor in the curvature of the planet they were on. This could put off anyone’s aim, he silently informed Isabis, but not his. Even if his equipment hadn’t compensated for this, there were ways to do it manually.

  Isabis was about to respond when Sanyul was suddenly lost to her, like a lifesign that had blinked out of existence on a ship’s sensors. His mind was still there, still intact, but it seemed to lack any signals or thoughts.

  Only his lasrifle and his targets existed in that moment.

  He pulled the trigger — once, twice, then two more times. Within seconds he was lowering the lasrifle.

  ‘Now,’ Sanyul breathed.

  The rusty soil he was lying on rose into man-sized waves that swiftly buried him. The vortex dropped Sanyul onto his feet a moment later, allowing him to emerge from behind a rock close to where his shots had hit their marks.

  Sanyul smirked as he went out to meet the two opposing sides who were now cowering on the ground, their leaders clutching blown kneecaps. With his lasrifle slung over his shoulder and his suit jacket sharp and buttoned, Sanyul exuded danger and confidence. Compared to him, in their dirty utilitarian clothes, the colonists seemed insignificant — and powerless.

  ‘I have more people up on the ridge,’ Sanyul informed his audience, his shadow smothering the two brothers who had torn their colony apart. ‘They’re all armed. And they’re all aiming this way.’

  The Croanzans gasped in horror.

  Sanyul gave them a mirthless smile. ‘We like the look of your n’radian mine. Nice set-up.’

  One of the colonists rose to his feet and thrust his chin forward. ‘The mine is not for sale — ’

  ‘I don’t give a shit,’ Sanyul cut in. ‘Consider it up for grabs. Now I don’t have the…resources to snatch it off you today. But we’ll be back to stake our claim in one Old Earth month. Any questions?’

  ‘But…’ the colonist tried.

  ‘Don’t make yourself sound as stupid as you look,’ Sanyul told him.

  The man glanced at the fallen brothers, his mind racing. Isabis saw him decide to hire mercenaries, because there wasn’t time for anything else. But after that initial month, it would be a simple matter of paying those mercenaries to teach the colonists to defend themselves.

  His fellow Croanzans were already nursing similar thoughts. This so-called attack had united them in a way that nothing else ever could. It had been a brilliant plan. And it had yielded the intended result within minutes.

  Isabis wondered if anyone would ever impress her as much as Sanyul just had.

  ‘We’ll see you in one Old Earth month,’ the colonist said with a bow of his head.

  ‘No later,’ Sanyul warned, then turned and walked away.

  Once he was safely out of sight, Isabis retrieved him with a vortex.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sanyul clipped his lasrifle back into its designated storage locker then sealed the door, his retinal scan and a whispered password keeping the weapon out of unauthorised hands (well, those hands that couldn’t use a vortex to whisk it away). He glanced at the co-pilot seat, where Isabis had made herself comfortable, and wondered what it would be like to always have someone sitting there as he travelled throughout the galaxy.

  Len had ridden with him a time or two, but it wasn’t the same. Sanyul’s heart didn’t ache at the thought of Len’s absence.

  ‘Do you mean to assassinate all of the gods?’ Isabis asked, a hand stroking the dossiers lying in her lap. ‘Or just the ones who have personally offended you?’

  Sanyul crossed his arms and leaned back against the locker, carefully disentangling his thoughts from hers. He could drown in her mind if he wasn’t careful. If he couldn’t stop himself. Sometimes he didn’t want to.

  Isabis narrowed her eyes. She wasn’t sure she liked affecting him that much.

  He assured the goddess that he was more than capable of handling it.

  Isabis smiled. She liked his mind. It was orderly and logical, just as she’d want her companion’s mind to be. She aspired to be more like him.

  Realising that neither of them had spoken an actual word in over a minute, Sanyul cleared his throat. ‘I don’t care about the majority of the sub-level gods. It’s just a few of them I think the galaxy can do without. And I’m sure there’s a lot more gods out there than I’m aware of.’

  ‘About forty more,’ Isabis agreed with an unrestrained laugh. ‘You thought the water god, Oceania, was also in charge of ice. That is incorrect.’

  Sanyul rubbed a hand over the bristles shadowing his jaw. ‘Ouch. The academy’s intelligence tutors would have failed me for making such an inference.’

  Isabis picked up a clean sheet of paper and teleported a stylus into her grip. Mentally assuring Sanyul that she was aware of his exacting standards, she kept her handwriting small and neat as she created a new dossier for him.

  ‘Rasson is the Iceine,’ Isabis continued out loud. ‘Fayay — that is Oceania’s true name — was counting on him to join our side, but Fayay mistreated him one too many times. I understand Rasson’s reluctance.’

  ‘Our side?’ Sanyul repeated.

  Isabis lowered the Iceine’s dossier. ‘You know there are gods who interfere too much, the Desine among them. They create divisions between people where there should be none. And the mortals in this galaxy don’t need much of an excuse to turn on each other as it is! There wasn’t any of this dissension before, when there were fewer of us — gods and mortals both.’

  Sanyul took a few meandering steps forward, barely aware that his feet were moving. ‘You’re saying that we should go back to a time…when we were all united under one god. The Creator God.’

  ‘No,’ Isabis said sharply. ‘My father has charged me and my siblings with the duty of caring for his creation and I will not disobey him. But we need to unite the mortals under something. I just wish we had some idea of how to do it.’

  ‘You’ll come up with something,’ Sanyul said. He believed she could. She was smart and she knew how to play a long game, even if she didn’t believe him as soon as he thought this.

  ‘What would you do in our place?’ Isabis asked.

  It didn’t occur to him how absurd it was that a goddess was asking for his advice until he was sitting in the opposite chair, his eyes locked onto hers. ‘You have to make them want it, to want to work together despite their differences. And you have to ensure that your side has enough power to entice others to join you. Usually to a mortal like me power means weapons, soldiers, starships — especially starships.’

  Isabis’ gaze grew distant. ‘So a sub-level god appearing out of nowhere and demanding that people unite, because it’s for their own good…’

  ‘You’ll get a rebellion on your hands, Isabis, if you do that,’ Sanyul warned her. ‘We mortals hold grudges and we’d probably demand to know why you hadn’t dealt with this or that. No, I wouldn’t try it. You saw how the people on Croanz responded to my weapon — and my threats. This is the kind of thing that makes us pay attention.’

  ‘You have given me many things to consider,’ Isabis said.

  And many things to discuss with my brother, she thought and smiled sheepishly, apparently remembering that she had an eavesdropper. Fayay’s company is nowhere near as toler
able as your own, of course.

  Sanyul grinned. ‘Glad to be of service. I should add that I enjoy your company a lot more than Len’s. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.’

  Her forehead creased. ‘I could have used your company thousands of Old Earth years ago.’

  ‘That’s not my fault,’ he told her. ‘I’m not in control of when your father spits my soul into a body.’

  ‘I wonder…’ Isabis trailed off. ‘Was your soul in another body before this time and I foolishly did not look for you? I hope not.’

  Sanyul shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m here now. We’re both here.’ He paused, then forced out the words he was sure he was meant to say. ‘I’m sorry for trying to kill you.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Isabis corrected, her lips twitching. ‘You’re only sorry you tried to carry out your mission without being fully aware of your target’s abilities.’

  ‘I’m glad of that oversight,’ he said. ‘Because we wouldn’t be sitting here and enjoying each other’s company if I’d succeeded.’

  They said nothing more for a time, merely sat there and let their thoughts vanish into Sundafar’s deep night. Sometimes Sanyul could feel Isabis dealing with an emergency or some other problem on planets scattered across the galaxy, but for the most part her attention was free to wander — and she kept most of it with him.

  It’s going to be hard to look at that chair and not see her, he realised.

  ‘I should be heading back now,’ was what he said out loud.

  To his relief, the ensuing vortex encased them both. She wasn’t leaving him.

  Not yet, anyway.

  • • •

  Sanyul was immensely glad that he had never been prone to a sweaty grip. He had once thought it useful, because he didn’t need to coat his hands in powders or buy special attachments to accommodate slippery alien appendages — but now he decided it was useful for a very different reason. Isabis’ hand remained firm inside his as they walked, side by side, the sunrise warming their backs and forming a single shadow on the ground ahead of them.