Rise: Paths (Future Worlds Book 2)

by Brian Guthrie

  "How am I supposed to make sense of this nonsense?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "You're the scribe. You'll figure it out."

  So, I kept at it. Needless to say, I became quite good at being able to tell when Quentin got off topic. My notes became a tumble of lines connecting one section to another so my work later in organizing the narrative from his recording would be simpler. Not necessarily easier. Just manageable.

  If only manageable meant I understood any of where this was going. It went on a lot longer before I came close to that point.

  Chapter 3 - Paths Cross

  My father enlisted in the Force just as the Apollo missions began. He had no desire to go to the water shield. His one wish: to travel to another shell. As the Colberran people turned their eyes upward to watch their ships get closer and closer to their collective goal, my father wished to travel down. The one thing he would always do was obey orders. When the orders came assigning him to one of the Apollo 13 missions, he took his place and headed up toward the water shield.

  He never talked much with me or anyone save for my mother about what happened while on the surface of the water. I never did figure out why he kept it secret. Whenever I'd bring it up, he'd change the subject. As I got older and more versed with the network, I began to do my own research into the events. What is available to the public was even less informative. Colberran records insist only one person survived the event. Those records don't ever mention his name, just that he was an employee of the winning company and a key witness to how the system worked. The disaster has all but been forgotten in the wake of further Apollo missions to the water shield.

  The reason my father's survival isn't common knowledge is that he is assumed to have gone down with the ship. If you look at death records, his name appears there. So, how did he come to live, when the Colberrans had all but left him for dead?

  The other Nomad ship. She picked up the same truncated distress signal. She was farther away but did respond. When she arrived, the second Colberran ship had departed, leaving my father behind on the surface. The Nomads, curious as to what happened, rescued my father and took him back to their shell with them. He spent several months with them as they picked his brain for the information. Frankly, it's a good thing they did, too. It's entirely possible that, had they not picked up the distress signal and come to my father's rescue, they might have ended up on the bottom of the water shield above. You see, the object found by the lost ships was not the only one found that day. The second Nomad ship had found one of their own, and they'd found a way to bring it on board without the help of the Colberrans. You can imagine that, among the Nomads, they partially blamed the loss of their ship on cooperation with the Colberrans. That, as well, has never been proven. Still, it did enough to sour relations between the world's two most populous shells. As such, the outpost the Force had established on the upper edge of the Nomad shell remained isolated. The Nomads were too kind and polite to force the Colberran expedition to leave. They weren't, however, above simply ignoring the expedition, cutting them off from the rest of the Nomad society.

  Because of this, it was several months before anyone of Colberran origin knew my father survived. He spent that time in the care of the Nomads as they interrogated him for information on what happened. I say interrogated, but it appears it was more like intensive questioning. My father suffered no harm from his stay with them, actually coming out on the other end healthier and more fit than when he enlisted. They did not cut him off from the outside world, and he learned much about the Nomads while he stayed with them. Their only reason for keeping him appears to be that they genuinely wanted to know what happened. Can you blame them? They spent a lot of time and resources, not to mention lives, sending those ships to the water. Losing one of them was an extremely costly accident, if it was such as the Colberrans insist in their public records of the event. So, ever attentive to details, the Nomads did a thorough job questioning my father before finally doing the only thing they could do: they sent him to the expedition's landing base on the topmost end of their shell.

  Now, I said the Nomads invested a lot of time and resources in the endeavor to explore the water shell. It wasn't just that. You see, the Nomads are a patriarchal society, tribal in the arrangement of their culture. I won't go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say the society took great care of their people, considering them their greatest resource over even water, possibly the most valuable resource in the world now. To send their people so far away just to explore was a great undertaking. To ensure their greatest resource was protected, they chose men from the finest families to lead their crews. One such family, the closest you will find to a royal family, is the Bilal tribe. It is a vast family that loosely controlled the central portion of the habitable part of their continent around the lone working citadel on their super-shell. That family was not exempt from the responsibility to man the water shield expedition and sent one of their finest men to command one of the ships. The ship that was lost, with all hands on board. You can imagine the national tragedy this caused among the people of that shell.

  Who was that man who led that ship? The man so many insist, without any proof, was so capable that the only way he would have lost his ship was through some Colberran treachery they couldn't prove existed? That man was the son of the Bilal tribe's patriarch.

  Suyef's father.

  #

  The loss of such a prominent member of their society was devastating to the Bilal tribe. It led to a power shift on the shell, with his tribe losing control of the citadel region. They moved to a region that bordered the Colberran settlement, a post seen fit for the lowest family among the clans. The only honor given the tribe was the job of returning my father to his people, more of an insult, really.

  Suyef, still unborn when all this happened, came into that world a few months later. His father became a martyr in a national tragedy and the icon of his family's great fall from grace. You can imagine the effect this had on him growing up, prince of an outcast family. Despite all that, they carried out their duty with honor. Just as Suyef was born, his tribe delivered my father, now finished with his months of questioning, to the gates of the Colberran settlement. He was left there with no explanation to the Force commander.

  To say the Colberrans were shocked to find one of their own deposited outside their gates when no Colberran had been allowed to leave the settlement is putting it mildly. The settlement, an Ancient outpost from long in the past, lay on a finger of a peninsula that juts out from the uppermost corner of the super shell. Surrounded by high peaks, it stood on the nearest point on the mass to the water shield with, coincidentally, the Colberran shell viewable still in the distance. The records don't show why the Nomads left it uninhabited, but that was what the Force found when they landed several months before. They took up residence inside the facility and immediately sent out scouts to make contact with their new neighbors. All of the scouting parties returned with word that they found no one. The residents had vanished, they claimed, moved on farther into the land mass.

  Soon, however, the Force found the shell was much more inhabited then they had previously believed. The third day they sent out scouts, the parties found their way blocked, a massive Nomad army having materialized out of the desert to lay siege to the fortress. It took several days of tense negotiations for the Nomad army to authorize the occupation of the fortress by the Colberrans. That agreement came with a price: no Colberran could travel after core-set and none could travel beyond the sight of the walls surrounding the facility. The Colberran commander chafed at the restrictions but had no choice beyond accepting.

  So, when my father appeared outside their gates, the Colberrans were highly confused and suspicious. He was brought inside and interrogated, of course. They couldn't let anyone that had seen so much of the Nomad shell get away without doing at least that. Unfortunately for them, the Nomads had done a very good job of concealing from my father where he had been and what it was like, out
side of cultural stuff. All he could confirm was what they could see from the settlement's control tower. That's not to say they took him at his word. They challenged everything he said, questioned it more so, and pretty much made it clear to him what they thought of his story.

  It took a chance meeting with an intelligence analyst to finally break the ice surrounding my father and his presence in the settlement. And who was that analyst?

  My mother.

  #

  My mother was raised in a strict environment on Colberra. Very traditional, a no-nonsense kind of family. She was the eldest of many and expected to set an example for her siblings in Colberran society. Her decision to enlist in the Expeditionary Force was met with, well, let's just call it less than stellar reviews at home. That her siblings followed suit, several of them serving on later expeditions to the water shield, only made matters worse. The strife this caused between her and her father nearly ruined their relationship and, when the chance arose to volunteer for the expedition to the Nomad shell, she jumped at it.

  Her job on the mission was simple: decipher the network on the Nomad shell, thus enabling the Colberrans some freedom of information as well as a direct line back to Colberra should the need arise. The network is, after all, the only known way to send information from shell to shell. She and her counterparts spent the first month there cooped up inside a secure section of the settlement, cracking network codes. You know the network systems on each shell will talk to each other, but it takes the citadel control tower of each shell to serve as the translation point between the various systems. With the Nomads in command of that facility, they could keep the Colberrans completely isolated. You can see the importance of finding some way to get into the network.

  During a night shift, she stumbled across a back door into the network. To this day, she insists she found it herself, searching through stacks of what seemed like unimportant data before she spotted an access point. There's no evidence to the contrary, but I've always found coincidences to be highly suspect. How she would happen to stumble upon the one and only entry point available to the Colberrans buried deep in a mountain of useless data I can't imagine. Still, she did it. With that success, the Colberrans had their exploit. They still had to be careful, keeping their usage to minor peaks and shifts of data that would seem natural. My mother's area of expertise lay in shifting data around in clusters to find patterns and break through them. She could spend hours doing it and did so before stumbling across what at first seemed like another useless bit of data.

  What was it she found that finally broke the ice surrounding my father's arrival at the settlement? Again, the coincidence is striking. She managed to piece together one of the crew manifests of the two ships the Nomads sent up to the water shield. As they all knew of the launches, this information seemed useless, until she found the return manifest a few days later. At first, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, she persisted, shuffling the data around like a puzzle, looking for matches and patterns. Finally, several days later, she found the inconsistency she was looking for.

  Two names buried in the return manifest she could prove weren't on the ship when it launched. The first belonged to my father. The second? A man named Mortac.

  #

  Quentin leapt from the bed, flinging the unfinished sketch in anger.

  "That name!" he hissed and ran from the room.

  I grabbed the recording padd and raced after him, colliding with Suyef, who stepped across my path.

  "Leave him be," he whispered.

  "The rage?" I asked, peeking around him to see where Quentin had gone.

  He nodded. "And it's best he be alone." He sighed, a deep long thing that carried a massive weight. "Trust me. When he's like this, he's of use to no one but himself."

  "That name, Mortac," I said, watching the Nomad carefully for any reaction. "That set him off."

  Suyef nodded. "I'm shocked you made it this long without him running off. He must like you."

  "Why would that name send him into the rage?"

  "What sends him into a rage varies," the Nomad said, moving toward the living area and beckoning me to follow. "Sometimes, her name will do it. Other times that one. Usually neither of those will draw as strong a reaction as some other things."

  "What are they?" I asked, seating myself at the table.

  He shook his head. "In time, you'll figure that out. For now, those things aren't pertinent."

  Silence fell on the room. Suyef and I both shifted as it did.

  "The box?" I nodded at my travel sack sitting nearby. "Can we discuss that now?"

  "I don't-"

  "No," I interrupted him. "It was you who delivered it to me. It was you who made me show it to the Queen."

  "No one forced you to do anything," he whispered.

  I smiled. "So it was you."

  "I never denied it. I simply warned you not to speak of it here."

  "What's in it?"

  The Nomad shook his head. "Now is not the time."

  "Well, why would the Queen be afraid of it?" I asked.

  He frowned. "Fear has nothing to do with it."

  It was my turn to frown. "Well, she obviously feels something about it. Else, why force me to show it to her?"

  "No one forced you to do anything."

  "You insisted I had to show it to her."

  He nodded. "And left the choice to you. As with the choice to not look in the box."

  "I believed you."

  "Another choice."

  I frowned again. "Why the focus on my choices?"

  "We are what we choose," he whispered and walked away. "You, more than anyone else, should understand that."

  He left me there with those words.

  "I should understand," I muttered, looking around the living area. "What does that mean?"

  I pondered what knowledge I had of him to decipher his meaning. Beyond his connection to Micaela and Quentin and what Micaela had revealed to me up to that point, there wasn't much to go on. Other than that he seemed to have a connection to the Queen. That gave me pause. Could his connection to the Queen have some connection to his statement? I couldn't see how. Maybe this was digging too deep. He had said that I should understand. So, I contemplated what he knew of me, but couldn't pinpoint much beyond our few conversations here and the initial time we met. I pored over my memory of that discussion, trying to pick out anything about me he might be referring to. A full chron later, I sat there, contemplating the one thing about me he may have meant.

  And it filled me with sadness.

  #

  Quentin's return saved me from diving down into that pit. He strolled in, a serious look on his face and the incomplete sketch in his hand. Seating himself across from me, he stared at me, eyes narrowing and widening a few times. His lips moved to speak, but he never did.

  "Are you ready to continue?" I asked.

  He took in a deep breath and nodded as he let it out.

  #

  I must preface this next part of the story with a caution: I've barely been able to get Suyef to discuss these matters. Internal family issues I wouldn't understand, I believe is how he put it. Suffice it to say, what I know I've managed to glean from him, my parents and a few other sources. That leaves a lot to be learned.

  I never met the man my mother said came back with my father from the water shield. The Nomads don't even state anyone else returned with them besides my father in their public records of the event. They wrapped the mission in as much secrecy as the Colberrans did. Still, my mother's evidence showed someone else came back when they did. The only logical answer is that they dragged him from the water like my father. But where did he come from? No man with that name served aboard the Colberran ships. The name itself is an ancient name. Records show it went out of use soon after the world was split, although the reason for that is a bit fuzzy. Still, a name's a name, and it gave me something to search for. I added it to a list of questions. Who was the man the Colberrans brought back
? Who was Mortac? What did the ships find in the water? The list was growing.

  The knowledge my mother brought to the Colberrans did serve one good purpose: it absconded my father of any suspicion. Using her access, coupled with that information, they were able to confirm his story. To a point. Colberran officials refused to acknowledge he still lived, insisting he went down with the ship. The commander of the Force on the Nomad shell found this odd. For some reason known only to him, he kept it secret that my father was alive and with him. I'm not sure what sparked that moment of clairvoyance on his part, but it served me well.

  My father, you see, soon found out who his savior of sorts was. They met and married almost immediately, my mother needing but a moment to extract herself from what she insists to this day was the worst mistake she'd made after core-set in her life. She never told me more and I didn't ask. My parents married less than two weeks after meeting and are still married today. I was born just over a cycle later, one of the first Colberrans born off-shell. That birth, unfortunately, made it harder for them to keep their presence hidden from the authorities. In order to make my citizenship official, they needed to return to Colberra, which meant finally revealing to the Seekers that my father had survived. You can imagine the stress that put on him when they returned. My mother said she'd never seen him so worried, and he lost most of his hair during those few cycles we lived on the orbiting isles.

  He spent several months of the following cycles being interrogated by the Seekers. He never told us that was what was going on, but we knew. Still, they must not have found anything suspicious, because he always returned. It would seem the Nomads were very good in keeping information from him they didn't want him to let slip to others. With that source of potential information dried up, the Seekers soon grew bored and let him return to the Force. When I was a young lad, nearly ten cycles, we returned to the Nomad shell, with one extra passenger: my younger sister, born a few short cycles after me.