I quickly collapsed seeing the crystal and its tube and stowed the valuable device within my furs. I had to return to the elders. A god had descended to Ravanur, and we were alive to see it. This was a momentous time, an important time, and I was at the center of it. I didn’t dare try to speak to the god without speaking to the elders first. Though I was curious to a fault, even reckless sometimes, I knew I was not worthy to speak directly to the divine. I would speak to a priest back at my tribe’s home, and perhaps they would know how to approach a god. With the consummate stealth of an Erin-Vulur ranger, I crept away from the god’s camp and set off toward my village at a run.
Chapter Seven
Volistad
A Fallen Star
“A god has come to Ravanur,” Elder Perwik repeated, and I could tell, just from the tone of his voice, that he was unconvinced. “A metal god, which rode down in a pillar of fire and smote a burug in its descent, somehow, spared you.”
“Yes, Elder, that is what I saw.” I knelt before the seated elders, my forehead pressed to the wooly rugs that coated the floor of the tribe longhouse, gritting my teeth and struggling to control my temper. I had been kneeling there for more an interminable amount of time, and the tribe’s elders had been grilling me with questions, repeating the same skeptical interrogations over and over again.
Another voice, deeper than Perwik’s, but just as laced with scorn, spoke from the opposite side of the room. “A metal god. I know not of any metal god.” Of course, the priest would respond so. If it wasn’t in his precious High Epic, it might as well not exist to those sunken, staring eyes.
I dared a sideways glance over at the Deepseeker, and to my shock, he was staring back at me, his face a mask. He bore an expression somewhere between fathomless boredom and searing fury, and the effect it had on his face was altogether both alien and terrifying to behold. I returned my gaze to my close up view of the rug. A moment of silence passed, and then the Deepseeker spoke, surprising me again. Judging by the coughs and disgruntled murmurs that passed around the room, he’d surprised everyone else too. They were used to his utter disinterest in their business, and his input wasn’t entirely welcomed by the rest of the Elder Council, which thought he was insane. “The list of things for which you have only ignorance, Vassa, is far longer a tale than the list of things for which you have names.”
I stifled a laugh. Vassa, the priest, sputtered feebly and then went on, not daring to challenge the Deepseeker directly. "The gods are not ones to descend from the firmament. We all know this." There was a pause, presumably during which he looked each of his fellow elders in their eyes, one at a time. "Only the senile or the foolish could forget the Eater-King, which descended to Ravanur in a similar way, no more than fifty full cycles ago. " If the Deepseeker took any offense to the subtle barb, he did not respond. Vassa continued, his practiced speaker's voice filling the longhouse with his resonant tones. "The Eater-King destroyed the Erin-Caval completely, as well as the Maccanda, the Hove People, and the burug-riders. We are fortunate indeed that the demon has not returned to our lands." Falling into his usual, didactic rhythm, Vassa drove his point home. "If a god were to come down, surely the Great Father would have sent it down to us, the elders of the Erin-Vulur, the chosen children of Mother Ravanur. Why would a god only show itself to a lone ranger, and a middling warrior at that?" I grounded my teeth at the casual insult, seeing in my mind the image of an iron spear smashing the smug expression off Vassa's face. He'd always hated me. It rankled in him that I had been made a ranger when his son hadn't even lived through the trials. He would take any opportunity to humiliate and discredit me. "Either the ranger is lying, in a misguided attempt to gain notoriety or the thing that came down from the Firmament is another demon, one which has easily turned the mind of a mere warrior and made him think it to be divine."
A fourth voice spoke, this one high-pitched and sibilant, each word like the note in an eerie, swaying melody that filled the thoughts of all who heard it with thoughts of biting cold, rushing wind, driving snow. “Peace Vasssssa.” Elder Lot, the master of all the tribe's Stormcallers, spoke soothingly, unconsciously dragging out random sounds in some of its words in one of his strange tics. Stormcallers were all strange, but he was by far the strangest. "Perrrrhaps young Volistad is not lying for attention. Perhaps the young rrrrrranger did see a god descend to Ravanur.” There was a pause, in which I could practically hear Vassa’s scowl. “I am sommmewhat inclined to believe, however, that he may have been tricked. Surely no agent of the Great Father would be unknown to the High Priest of His chosen people?” There were mutters of assent. “I sssssuggest that we take action. I will send one of my Stormcallers to destroy this innnnnterloper. If it is a messenger from the Great Father, surely it will identify itself to us. If not, we will dessssstroy it before it becomes too strong to deal with.”
“Agreed,” said Elder Perwik.
"Imprison the ranger," Vassa added, offhandedly. "At least until the false god is destroyed. We cannot risk him wandering free if his mind has been taken by a demon." There was a long silence as the elders waiting for the Deepseeker to speak, but he maintained his silence. After a time, Vassa grunted uncomfortably and said. "So be it. Lot, deal with the false god. Perwik, please secure young Volistad." The meeting ended, and just like that, death had been passed upon the strange, metal god I'd seen. Despite myself, I wondered if it was a demon like Vassa said. It couldn't have gotten into my head, could it? It hadn't seen me! ...Had it? Three of Elder Perwik's guards lifted me to my feet, their grips gentle, but firm. They shot me apologetic glances as they led me away to the prison pit. They didn't like this any more than I did, but they had their orders. The elders had spoken. I didn't resist; I merely allowed myself to be taken away.
Chapter Eight
Joanna
Stormcaller
Three days. I had been on Chalice for only three days, and already things had started to go wrong. Some admittedly pessimistic wise old man once said that no plan survived first contact with the enemy. If that was the case, then all the carefully laid training and plans set out during years of training as a Former shot straight to hell the moment my heavy, armored boot first touched the frozen hell that was Chalice Colony. It became immediately apparent that the moon I was to tame hated me, personally, and would be doing its best to kill me until one of us succeeded in our goal. On the first day, I'd built up a windbreak wall, using the nigh-indestructible Fabricator to change the ice around me into a ring of high, seemingly impervious barriers. I'd even crenelated them like a castle wall from a fairy tale, and when I'd laid down at the base of one to sleep that night, I'd been satisfied with a first day's work well done. When I woke the morning of the second day, they'd been broken down around me by the raw force of a two-hundred kilometer-per-hour gale, and I'd had to start over. By the time I slept again, I had created a new wind barrier. This time, I had gone all out. I sunk a half-kilometer circle I would use as my workspace down into the ice fifteen meters, and then raised the very edges of the pit into small hills so that the wind would pass harmlessly over me. I had woken this morning entombed in something I had originally thought was snow- until Barbas had diffidently informed me that it was actually a drift of tiny flakes of ice. The ice had been scoured from the surface of the vast, planet-spanning glacier by the howling winds and deposited into my pit, burying me. To make this planet even remotely livable, I had to fabricate and deploy a Terraformer Engine, and without adequate protection from the elements, it would never work. Thankfully, I had been wise enough to sink the remains of my bullet into the ice, where weather patterns couldn't tear away the precious reserves of refined metal that I had brought with me. I would need those rarer elements, particularly the gold, silver, platinum, and plutonium, if I wanted to get anywhere with this.
Clearing the pit of its blanket of "snow" was a simple enough effort. I powered up the Fabricator, and with a few short commands, directed its nanite swarms to churn up a tiny whirlwind at my co
mmand. Within seconds, the nanites were blasting the ice dust out of the pit in a silvery plume. A simple wall wasn't going to be good enough. "Barbas," I said out loud- as if he were reachable by my suit's helmet radio. "Do you have any ideas?"
There was a silence for a moment, just long enough that I didn’t think he would respond. Perhaps sentient programs have to sleep too. But then his voice came through my helmet’s speakers, tinny and laced with static. “I’ve got one, but it’s going to be tricky. I had to dig up the blueprints from my back archives. This thing was designed by Chinese- a proof of concept weapon that no one even knows if they tested successfully. They certainly didn’t use it during the War.”
I frowned, watching an indistinct shimmer like a mirage flicker around the edge of the pit and towards the short, unimpressive looking Fabricator. The nanites were returning, finished with their imitation of a snow-blower. “Okay, I’ll bite, what does this thing do?”
“Well,” began the AI. “It’s going to need some modifications, especially if we want to run a T.E. inside of the field it creates, but I think-”
“Barbas,” I sighed. “What is it?" He got like this when he thought something wasn't the greatest of ideas. I had heard the exact same tone when I had told him I wanted to BASE jump off the Pan-American space elevator. In the end, he had been able to render the event in amazing clarity, despite his warnings that if something went too crazily wrong in the constructed dream world, I could suffer a catastrophic aneurysm.
Barbas sighed, resigned. “It’s a hurricane machine.”
“Uh, ‘Bas, you know that we’re trying to stop the storms on this planet from killing us, right? How does adding a new storm help us?”
Suddenly, my Heads Up Display lit up with a holographic construct, a weather map showing me a fearsome-looking storm vortex. Before I could ask any questions, Barbas spoke. “This is a storm cell, like that of a typical hurricane back on Earth.” A second vortex appeared in the simulation, crawling across my vision toward the first. “When two storms meet, typically, the weaker storm will fail, since they’re drawing from the same well of energy to exist- in the case of a terrestrial hurricane, that energy is from warmer waters.” The two holographic storm cells met in a splash of blue across my HUD, and one of them dwindled, seemingly devoured by its cousin. “Now I don’t actually know what source the storms on Chalice are taking their energy from. There isn’t much heat on this moon and I doubt tidal forces could make storms this large and persistent, even if the planet wasn’t tidally locked. But if these storms behave at all like terrestrial ones, we can generate our own storm, a big one, with an eye more than fifty kilometers across.”
I nodded, understanding. In my armor, the motion was more of a strange forward shrug, but it was the thought that counted. “Inside this storm, the weather would be calm, and any other winds that passed through this place would either be subsumed by our storm or deflected around us. Though we’re going to need one hellacious heat source to keep this thing going.”
Barbas chuckled. “That’s the elegant part. I’ve been combining the design with that of the Terraformer Engine. A T.E. puts off a gigantic thermal bloom- at least when it’s configured to transform a place similar to this. If we do this right, we can use our hurricane as a dispersal system for the changes that the T.E. needs to make to the atmosphere.”
“Damn,” I chuckled, smiling as I imagined the look of triumph on Barbas’ face. “Damn, ‘Bas, what would I do without you?”
“Go insane, very quickly,” he answered, his tone light.
“Good thing you’re here then.”
“Indeed.”
We began construction of our “enhanced” Terraformer Engine immediately, drawing up some of the reserves of refined metal from the buried shape of the Bullet. It took shape faster than seemed possible, the stories-high, monolithic bulk of the Engine’s tower stretching up into the sky. It was like a time-lapse video of a fungal stalk growing from the corpse of an ant. All along the length of the structure, strange protrusions and spikes branched out from the main shape, mixed in with more familiar sampling instruments and a vast multi-spectrum sensor array. The T.E.’s fusion reactor came on three hours into the process, and though I knew my suit was thoroughly insulated against thermal change, I thought I could feel the air around me get markedly warmer.
Barbas didn’t speak much to me during this time, preoccupied with the intricacies of his project, but I didn’t mind. During our “vacation”, we had become comfortable with each other, and with companionable silence. Sometimes spending hours reading different books at opposite ends of the cabin’s wide porch, content to simply be near each other. The niggling thought that all of that was illusion didn’t seem relevant to the point. We worked all day, Barbas toiling in the machine mind of the Fabricator and its growing skyscraper child, even as I walked the perimeter of planned hurricane eye, setting sensor stakes and static manipulators into the ice. I listened to an audio book with half an ear as I worked, my brain caught up in the repeated motion and the woes of Edmond Dantes.
It wasn’t until I drove the last of the sensor stakes into the ice that I realized that something had changed. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was- perhaps something about the quality of the light, perhaps a shift in the tone of the wind’s perpetual whine against my suit- but I knew something was wrong. “‘Bas?”
"Yes, Joanna," he responded, his tone distant with concentration.
“Is there a storm coming?”
Barbas made a sound that was halfway between a startled grunt and a little yelp. “Where the hell did that come from? Yes, there’s a storm coming fast, a big one, less than one-hundred fifty clicks from your position!” He sounded both frustrated and confused. “I was tracking all of the nearby storm cells, there shouldn’t be one near enough to threaten you- I don’t know where the hell that thing-”
“Barbas!” I snapped, interrupting him. “I’m exposed here. Can we start up the Engine yet?”
"Not quite," he hissed, clearly stressed. "I need you to make manual adjustments to the projection arrays of at least half of the spikes you set." He swore. "I meant to run some stress-test simulations before we actually used this fucking thing! If our storm collapses, the whole damn tower could come down, and I don't know if we would have enough of the rarer elements left to rebuild it without mining for them!"
I felt myself grinning. This had always been how I had reacted to crisis. When I was a kid, and the war had come too close to wherever I had been living at the time, the sound of falling bombs or passing bullets had always brought to my brain an icy calm and a maniac's certainty that nothing could happen to me. So even as the fear flooded my brain, fear of dying, fear of being flensed down to a smear on the ice by the incoming storm, the terror froze over into hard, obdurate certainty. I was Joanna Fucking Angeles, and I wasn't going to be killed by some two-bit asshole moon in the back end of some no-name star system. "Well, ‘Bas," I cackled. "I guess we're stress-testing the old fashioned way. Give me the navigation points for the bad stakes on my HUD, and I'll run. Let's see what this armor can do!"
Within moments an array of orange arrows popped up in my field of vision, hovering in a gradually curving line over the sites where I had placed the perimeter of stakes. I leaned forward and ran, speeding across the terrain in great, bounding strides. It was a strange sensation since I was used to being less than two meters tall, strange to eat up the distance with the legs of a nine-foot-tall armored titan. I was thankful for it, nonetheless, and before long I was at the first of the series static manipulators, I had to readjust. Barbas projected instructions into my field of vision, one at a time, and I worked quickly, using the array of micromanipulators fitted into the index finger and thumb of my suits left gauntlet. The adjustment work seemed to take a minor epoch, and all the while the howling wind became louder, more insistent. We didn't have much time.
"It's good! Go!" Barbas snapped, and I jumped to my feet immediately, taking a short skipping ste
p to avoid the machine I had just recalibrated. I ran to the next one and repeated the process, which seemed to go more quickly, then I stood and ran to the next, and the next, and the next. All the while I determinedly ignored the environmental hazard warnings that had begun to flash to the far left of my HUD. I worked this way for what must have only been fifteen minutes. It felt like an eternity, each step taken before a darker, angrier sky, each hurried repair job punctuated by a little beep to let me know that the temperature had dropped another fifteen degrees Celsius. And then, I was at the final stake, and I found myself slowed by a growing wind. Every movement was hindered by a gathering force that pushed and shoved and tugged at me, and my actions became rough and sloppy. I was forced to restart that calibration twice before I finally managed to get it right, shifting the instruments into the right configuration before snapping shut the protective cowling. I'd done it. I breathed out a sigh of satisfaction and relief, straightening up, and froze. I could no longer make out the horizon. Instead, there was a storm rushing toward me on the teeth of the shrieking and it was like nothing I had ever seen before.
The storm was piled hundreds of meters into the sky, in a towering, pillar of bulbous, seething black clouds, lit from within by a nearly continuous strobe of luminescent green. Hissing sheets of lime-tinted lightning blasted the ice beneath its towering bulk, and with every flash, I saw boulder-sized chunks of ice flung high into the air. It hurtled towards me with a ground-shaking roar of cascading thunder, and for a moment I just stood there, transfixed. My body was paralyzed, not by fear, but by overwhelming awe at the spectacle of incoming doom. Barbas was screaming something in my ear, but I didn’t hear him. I just couldn’t process the scale what I was seeing. I doubted very much that our machine, grand as it was, could possibly create something to rival this thing.
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 4
