The Joining: The Saga of the Shards Book One (The Cycle of the Shards 1)

by Chris Stephenson

  “GET. OUT.” He had slipped too far, and he found himself in darkness, facing off against Kyle himself. He looked down and saw his Marconian body, and realized he was back as himself, his true self. He looked back up at the angry teenager, and prepared to defend himself. He had known that some joinings had led to conversations with the owner of the body in times of sleep or unconsciousness, but this was a wholly new experience to him. He knew that Kyle couldn’t harm him even if he had that ability, but other than that didn’t know what to expect. He could wake up at any time, he supposed, but did want to take the opportunity to speak with the boy.

  Kyle’s voice kept the angry edge but mellowed slightly. “Please.”

  Critock shook his head, keeping his voice even. “I can’t, Kyle. Believe me, if it was an option I’d be right back to my original plan.”

  Kyle paced in front of him, the residual mental image of the consciousness giving him an angry look, more so that he couldn’t do anything about the situation. “This was my life. You’ve taken my life.”

  “And you’ll get it back as soon as I finish here. You have my word.”

  “How do I know if I can trust you? I don’t know you.”

  “Look at my life, Kyle. Look back at who I am. You know I can do what I need to do, you just have to give me some time. One day is all I ask.”

  Kyle stopped and stared at his interloper. “Yeah, I have. What do you think I’ve been doing while you’ve been rooting through my memories for spare parts? I’ve seen who you are, alien. Soldier. You don’t care about this planet, you don’t care about anyone or anything on it, and if you had your way you’d have it blown up instead of doing anything to save it.”

  Critock didn’t bother to argue. “Between this one backwoods planet and a million planets with trillions of lives? Between Earth and the entire Marconian empire? A thousand times over. But I’m here now. In a few hours, Shanna is going to help me get access to the files I need to find who I’m searching for. I get those, I get Pt’ron, I get the Shards. After that, I’m gone. I don’t want to be in your head any more than you want me there.”

  Kyle began pacing again. “Why her? It’s bad enough you’ve gotten me into this, why do you have to involve her?”

  “She knows how to get into the system, it’s purely convenience. I’m not exactly leaving you in a bad place.”

  “In what way?”

  “C’mon kid. The thing with your bully? Shanna falling all over herself to get closer to you? Considering everything that I could find that happened before I showed up, I'd say this day was not going to turn out in your favor."

  "Oh yeah, and having my body stolen from me and finding out the fate of the world depends on some alien hitting on Shanna, and me just being quiet is better? Look, just leave her out of this, she doesn't deserve to get hurt because you can't keep your war to yourself. I've seen the things you've done too, Critock. How many people died because of you, and everything you've done to run away. The one thing I'll thank you for now is that I've learned so much about you and from you."

  Critock stepped up to Kyle, their noses so close that another inch and they would be touching. "Oh yeah? What have you learned? Except for the fact that you should mind your own damn business?"

  "That this whole thing is happening because you didn't do what you should have done two thousand years ago. Now everyone on Earth might die because of you. Because of those shards, because of your friend and your war."

  "You need to tread lightly, you know damn well if I want to I can shut you down for good. You don't have the power to resist me."

  "Oh, so you're just going to be a body snatcher? Can't get the little human's help so you're going to steal his life? Go ahead. Leave her out of it. She's got nothing to do..."

  Critock was jolted out of his conversation within Kyle's mind by the sound of the final bell of the school day going off. All around him students hurriedly and excitedly assembled their books and belongings and quickly headed out of the room while he sat there, almost in a stupor, as Tom floated up to him.

  "I think that's our cue to get out of here." Critock just sat still. "Hey, Critock, you in there?"

  He hadn't realized he was holding his breath until he exhaled. For a moment, there was a slight war within him, and Kyle had struggled to the surface for a moment, but was unable to do anything before Critock had reasserted himself, this time almost smothering Kyle's consciousness, locking him deep within his mind. It had not been an idle threat, Critock always knew that he could take total control if he needed to, he had just been hoping it would not come to that. Perhaps later Kyle would come to understand what he had to do now, but there was no time now, there was only the mission. He scanned Kyle's mind, and was pleased to realize that he had full access. It's not that Kyle was hurt, just contained where he could no longer keep secrets to himself. Critock looked up at Tom, and nodded.

  "I'm okay. The kid took a run at me." Tom started to say something, but Critock cut him off. "He's contained." Then he rose, and moved towards the exit of the room with no hesitation. After a troubled moment, Tom followed, deciding that now was not the time to question exactly what had happened within his mind.

  17

  The last bell was still ringing as the last students left the school, Critock and Tom among them, but where most of them were heading towards home or the buses, the aliens among them were heading off, around and behind the school where few other kids were. As they stopped at a particular spot, right up against the back of the school under a window, Tom investigated a patch of freshly packed dirt while Critock glanced in the window and looked around, checking for any curious onlookers. As everyone else was uncaring about anything regarding the school at this point, nobody noticed a sudden cloud of dust appear and dirt flying through the air, though the boy standing nearest it wasn’t interacting with the ground at all. If there had been any onlookers, they would have eventually seen a small hilt slowly be revealed in the ground, and then move up in the sky before eventually ending up in the outstretched hand of the boy.

  “Pretty good hiding spot.” Critock remarked, as the sword activated in his hand. He swung the sword around, re-accustoming himself to the lack of weight of the weapon.

  “Quit swinging that thing around!” Tom hissed, swirling around Critock nervously and glancing around.

  “Relax, no one is looking at us. Everyone’s getting as far away from this place as possible.”

  “Which is exactly what we should be doing. You need to find a place to hide it. Someplace respectable, this time. It isn’t right for the Sword of Kon to be buried in the ground.”

  “Isn’t that where it was for a billion cycles before the Qua’roti found it?” Critock held the sword straight out in front of him.

  “Well, yeah, and that was long enough, just undignified. How are you going to use it without anyone noticing?”

  Critock chuckled. “All that learning about what it is and you never found out what it can do.” He arranged his fingers specifically, and twisted his wrist. Suddenly the electricity stopped flowing, and the two blades moved together. Quickly, the blade retracted into the hilt, and within a few moments instead of an ancient sword, all it appeared to be was a metal cylinder. Smiling, Critock tossed the cylinder in the air, and then dropped it into his backpack. “And as an actual bonus, I doubt it’d set off the metal detectors. Whatever this thing is made out of, I don’t think it’s anything that Earth has any idea about.” Whistling a Marconian tune, he turned in the direction of Kyle’s home and began walking, almost leaving a stunned Tom behind him before he remembered to follow him.

  It was about ten minutes before the pair arrived, Critock having led the way and reached it without a problem as if he had done it a million times before. He opened the door wordlessly, the two moved inside. Both stopped as they entered, Critock closing the door behind them, and Tom whistled.

  “Classic Earth home. There’s so much space!” He moved around from room to room quickly, wanting to
see everything. Critock just sighed as he placed his backpack on the table. It was easy to get to the house now that he had nothing blocking Kyle’s memories of treading the path so many times, but for some reason he had never thought to see what his house looked like. Now that he was there, despite how alien everything was he felt a sense of familiarity. Every sight and smell in here had a particular memory. The table where the meals were eaten had a slight tinge of regret and anger, and he noted looking at the pictures scattered around that his father still lived with him. No sign of anything to do with the mother, he realized, and thought that it was interesting that the pair may have something in common. Checking within Kyle, he was relieved to find that his father would not be home for some time tonight still, and that would give him ample time to get the information he needed from Shanna. He knew there was at least a couple hours before even she would arrive, so he started to walk around, taking it in though at a slightly less excited rate than Tom.

  “Most humans live in places like this, it’s really not that big of a deal.” Critock said, mostly to himself, but was still impressed. He hadn’t had a real home in a long time, having made his now-destroyed Hopper his residence. Even before that he had drifted since his Military days, and before that…

  “My dormitory with the Qua’roti was the size of their bathrooms. Even their bedrooms are larger than that!” Tom rushed down from the second floor. “There’s two of them up there! Both of them have a bathing area!”

  “What an excess. I bet they probably think of themselves as poor.” Critock shook his head. All the space being taken up by all this nonsense could easily have served a second family. Growing pains of a young society, he supposed. In a few thousand years, maybe they would advance in their thinking. On Marconia, this kind of opulence typically was reserved to palaces. His thoughts turned bitter. Royalty. Still, right now he thought he deserved a little reward for everything that he had gone through. He crossed to their refrigerator, and pulled out a red fruit. Apple, he realized from Kyle’s memory, it was an Apple. Earth did have a lot of indigenous fruits that weren’t found elsewhere, thanks to the efforts of a population that spread like a virus and liked to take their favorite foods with them. Again, not unheard of for a species of this age. He took a crunchy, cold bite, and was startled at a sudden rumbling sound coming from the counter. As Tom zoomed over to investigate, Critock moved to the small black device with a curious eye. It had stopped, then started again, and the front of it lit up with numbers. Tom looked at Critock, who simply said, “Phone.”

  “Ah. Yours?”

  He looked at Kyle’s mind. “Yeah, but working it probably isn’t going to happen. Some things are easier to find than others.” He picked it up as it rumbled one more time, considered it, then put it back down. “If I’m going to figure out how to work anything, it’s going to be that.” He turned, and pointed at Kyle’s computer, sitting against the wall with a printer next to it.

  “Think you can get this one to turn on without your girlfriend?” Critock ignored the wisp, assessing the blank screen and the grey box it was attached to. After a moment, he pressed in a round button that seemed similar to the one that activated the device at school. With a flurry of beeps and whirring, the machine started to come to life.

  “Huzzah! He can be taught! I always had faith in you.” Tom joked, as Critock continued to pretend that he had never met the soul, and sat in the computer chair that was only slightly more comfortable than the school’s seating. He sat and stared at the screen as it went through the motions of booting up.

  “I have absolutely no idea what this is doing.” Critock remarked. “I don’t understand why the user experience is always the last thing these species work on. I should be able to tell the computer exactly what I want to do and have it be done, and instead I’m watching floating colored squares.”

  “Perfect voice and motion control of these systems are closer than a lot of things if all holds. Probably another fifty years? Maybe less? It’s going to be a tight race with AI.”

  “If they don’t nuke themselves, and AI doesn’t realize it’s the right choice to lead Earth.” Critock saw a cursor appear on the screen, resisted an urge to start moving his arms around, and accessed as much knowledge as he could find in Kyle’s brain. Because of not knowing where to look exactly, all Critock figured out how to do was to move the mouse around. As sad as it seems, he did get a small thrill out of doing that. “I was on a bounty once. Sarokian, lots of feathers. Chased him to the closest planet, and it was one where they nuked a world right when their AI came online. So lots of radioactive technology on a world that wasn’t going to be alive again for another million years. Weird place.”

  “You don’t have a lot of faith in people being able to do anything by themselves, do you Critock?”

  Critock stopped moving the mouse, happy with his accomplishment. “I’ve seen a hundred planets like this one, and the contact division of the Military probably have seen a million more. It’s just a matter of odds, Tom. Young race plus technology that they don’t understand and can’t control. Mix in stuff like religion and a dependence on weaponry and you have a nice little recipe for the end of a race. One more set of lights going dark in the universe. I don’t have time to be worried or sad about every one that can’t quite make it.”

  “A little harsh when you’re living among them, don’t you think?”

  Critock rolled his eyes as the computer screen came on fully, and programs began to open. “I’d say it to their faces. It’s their very nature that allowed Pt’ron to hide so easily here. No other race in the universe wants to get caught in the crossfire of a doomed planet. The resources will be here after humans aren’t. So he comes, blends in, goes native. If they were more settled then Earth would have been on the radar, and he would’ve been stuck. Earth’s devotion to their primitivity may have just destroyed half the universe.” The cursor had switched to an arrow, and the computer had seemed to have stopped making grinding loading noises. He looked at the screen strangely. “I have no idea what to do here.”

  “Um…” Tom floated closer to the monitor. “Down there, that one’s flashing.”

  Out of habit, Critock tapped the screen with a finger. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, remembering what he was supposed to do, and grabbed the mouse, moving it over it’s pad. He watched the cursor move down to the flashing block along the bottom of the screen.

  “They have a game here where they do this to try and contact the dead.” Tom noted as the cursor reached it’s destination.

  “This place gets more charming as time goes on.” Critock took his hand off the cursor. “Nothing’s happening.”

  Tom sighed. “I think you have to click it? Like this.” The wisp moved down and prodded the top of the mouse. New windows opened then, and started to fill the screen, surprising Tom and causing him to jump backwards. “I didn’t do it! I just touched it!”

  “I think that’s supposed to happen.” Critock studied the screen, reading the text in the windows that were opening. “Fifty seven new messages. Who knew Kyle was such a popular kid.” He read through them slightly slower than Kyle would have, but still at a fairly quick clip considering he had not encountered the English language until a few hours earlier. All of the messages seemed to be along the same lines. People congratulating him and saying hello like they had known him all his life. He wasn’t too surprised. People wanting to be part of someone’s sudden fame came with the territory. He could still remember back to his first major victories that eventually traced to the War of the Shards. Everyone wanted to know the great Critock at that point, which he knew led to the eventual quick promotions that gave him the title of General but the responsibility of someone of much less rank. Hopefully his experience would teach Kyle something, if Kyle ever decided to crawl out of whatever corner of his mind he had been pushed to after his attempted takeover. Tired of what he considered to be empty platitudes from a host of children that he didn’t care to know, he stood
up and walked away from the computer, and glanced around the room.

  “Anything interesting?” Tom asked, the sheer number of messages overwhelming his senses. He also had figured out how to read the language, he just chose not to.

  “Not a thing. Lot of people want to jump on a bandwagon.” He again looked at pictures, someone that was obviously Kyle’s mom was prominent in one. He walked over and looked at it closer. He decided he didn’t want to pry into Kyle’s memory on this one subject. There was no way it was germane to the mission, and he could see no way it could help them. He glanced around the room, taking in the ambience, and decided to walk upstairs. Most non-royalty residences throughout the Marconian Empire only had one large room that had all the necessities of living and family life, and if there was a second story there would be a complete other family living up there. Most entertainment was done at communal locations, in the interest of preserving space and energy. He found it was mostly the same at most developed planets. As opposed to his general feelings on the primitive nature of Earth, he could see the appeal of both ways, and if he made it back to Marconia he would look into maybe getting a bit more space, and to hell with anyone who would look at him with scorn. Or maybe just a larger ship. With his rank restored, he should be able to score a higher rate of compensation, especially if he pressed for a thousand cycles of past due payments.

  As Critock reached the second floor landing, he took a closer look at the pictures on the wall. Some were family pictures, and still others were still pictures of art. Paintings of flowers and fruits, and some pictures of starry landscapes, most of which he noted were not anywhere close to accurate astrologically speaking. Much like entertainment had moved on beyond passively watching, so had photography. Most photos were either still holograms or ‘active’ moving holograms meant to capture a specific event or moment. There was only so many pictures of food that could be done before scientists had to develop a new way to display them, he thought, as he moved into Kyle’s room.