The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  *

  COLM WORKED SECURITY on the Constantinople, a 40,000-person floating camp, for the next six months. He bunked with Jenny, the Sudanese merc. Yes, a merc. Lee’s contractors knew that’s what they were, and took a twisted sort of pride in it. At least they were honest. But Colm did not accept the label in his heart. He wasn’t doing this for the money ... and just as well, too, because contrary to Lee’s promises, the pay was shit.

  A couple of months into their tour of Juradis’s planet-spanning ocean, Colm was able to confirm that Tan had also got a job with Lee’s organization, working on a different boat ... the one where his family had been assigned. That took a load off Colm’s mind. He didn’t attempt to contact Tan, lest it stir up trouble for him.

  But what had happened to Meg and Axel? God alone knew, and the sentrienza. Shit was getting chaotic on Juradis. Hail Mary ships were arriving every couple of days. Not glitzy FTL liners anymore, either. Cargo haulers with up-engineered holds full of people. Merchant Marine ships unconvincingly repainted to look like they weren’t stolen. Year-old news flashes from home had the Ghosts on the Jovian moons, on Mars.

  One fine midsummer evening, the Constantinople put into the port of Kevesingod.

  Colm applied for shore leave, got it, kissed Jenny, and went ashore with a fake name, a spoofed net connection, and a black-market .38 in his rucksack.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE MIDNIGHT SUN BURNISHED stone buildings clinging to the steep sides of the fjord. Juradis took a quarter of a millennium to go around Betelgeuse. It had been summer at the north pole for 50 years already, and many more years would pass before winter returned. The air was brisk, stingingly clean. Bushes, heavy with chocolate-colored berries, foamed over the walls of neat gardens. Colm climbed up from the wharfs into the town, marvelling at the population.

  Queazels, queazels everywhere! Whisking along the street, pruning the bushes, walking on their hind legs and carrying loads in their forepaws. Many of them wore floaty headgear. Lady queazels?

  Shops lined a diminutive high street. The buildings were about 80% of normal human size, just miniature enough to be charming. There were plenty of humans about, as well, and some shablags. A queazel standing on its hind legs was not that much shorter than an adult human, so they could share buildings without discomfort. The eight-foot mara, on the other hand, were out of luck. He didn’t see any sentrienza.

  Trucks laden with sacks of grain inched along the street. A queazel armed with an electrotaser threw a couple of humans out of a bar. A horde of tawny cat-sized creatures poured down the street, chittering and shrieking. They ran between Colm’s legs and past him. One of them shrilled, in English, “Funny face!”

  Child queazels! On impulse, Colm whirled and grabbed the one that had squeaked at him. He held it up gently by its middle. “You think I’ve got a funny face, do you?”

  “Put me down!”

  “How about this, then?” Colm crossed his eyes, bared his teeth, and flared his nostrils. He wiggled his ears for good measure. The queazel child shook all over and chirruped. Shit, he’d terrified it.

  “It’s all right,” he said, setting it down. “Go along.”

  “Do it again!” The queazel child jumped up and down and clawed at his jeans. “Do it again!”

  OK.

  After doing a whole repertoire of faces, including impressions of human comedians unknown on Betelgeuse, for a circle of delighted queazel children, Colm said, “That’s enough now. Your parents will be wondering where you are. I have a question for you, though.”

  “What?” piped the child that could speak a bit of English.

  “Do you know where I can find Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth?”

  Gil’s name had a magical effect. The entire pack of them fled like cats doused with water. Only the pint-sized English-speaker stayed behind long enough to squeal, “He lives in the castle!” It flung out a forepaw, and fled.

  Colm looked the way the child had pointed.

  Beyond the town, high on the cliff overlooking the fjord, a blocky cairn reared towards the sky. He had thought it was just a crag. Now he saw the squared-off corners. A flag undulated red in the low-angled sunlight.

  Colm’s heart beat faster.

  All right, Gil.

  Here I come, ready or not.

  *

  COLM CIRCLED AROUND the base of the castle. Slit windows stared down from the corner towers. Insects droned in a protective ditch—too narrow to deserve the title of moat—half full of stagnant water.

  Well versed in castle architecture from his days of planning renovations for the Free Church Manse, Colm identified this as a motte and bailey structure. It was not queazel-sized. Might have been built by the sentrienza. A mara could have strode through those gates, if they weren’t locked. There didn’t seem to be a soul about.

  “Gil!” he roared.

  He estimated he’d walked five miles to get here, most of it uphill. Sweat coated his skin and dust caked his throat. The hump of the cliff hid Kevesingod, but he could still see the big boats lying out in the fjord. There was the Constantinople. Splashes twinkled in the water on its sunlit side. The mercs would often let the ‘campers,’ as the refugees were called, swim off the lower decks when the boat lay at anchor. They sometimes went in themselves, too. You’d climb onto the rail and dive straight down into the blue-green water. The ocean had got colder as they meandered north, more like what Colm remembered from home. He half-wished he hadn’t come on this fool’s errand. He could have been out there swimming with Jenny right now.

  He plodded back around to the gate in the curtain wall.

  “GILLIAM TRIPSILION NULTH!!!” he yelled.

  The insects droned in the ditch.

  Fuck this.

  Colm took his .38 out of his rucksack and fired into the sky. The report echoed off the cliffs of the nearby fjord.

  Peacock-blue butterflies clouded up from the scrub.

  The muzzle of a shotgun poked over the castle’s , followed by a doll-sized helmet atop a queazel face.

  “Go away,” the queazel piped. It was not Gil.

  Colm held his gun at his side. “I’ve travelled six hundred light years to see Ambassador Nulth. If he’s not at home, tell me where he is.”

  The security guard bobbed out of sight. Colm waited, getting angrier and angrier.

  A thud spun him around. A postern gate had opened in the defensive tower to his left. The guard dropped a plank across the ditch. “He’ll see you.”

  *

  GILLIAM TRIPSILION Nulth lay full length on a couch in the conservatory built onto the ground floor of the keep. Was he sick? The conservatory smelled like a kennel. The potted fruit trees wanted watering.

  “Drink?” Gil croaked. He flapped a forepaw at a tray. Colm lifted the dark blue glass bottle of ‘muck,’ which was what the mercs called the cheapest sentrienza liquor. It was almost empty.

  Not sick. Just drunk.

  Eschewing the liquor, Colm poured himself some orange fizz and sat down. Queazel furniture: couches instead of chairs. Computers and hard-copy star charts littered a low table.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Gil said.

  “Then why’d you make me stand outside for half an hour?”

  “I did not say I wanted you to come.”

  “Fair enough. Mind if I smoke?” Colm lit up without waiting for permission. Gil waved the smoke away. “Given up?”

  Gil’s neck fur bristled. He pillowed his muzzle on a curve of his body, like a furry snake, and stared fretfully at Colm. Colm remembered drinking with him in that dive bar in Regnar. Doing drugs. Getting emotional as the night got older. Zhanna, Zhanna. Over the last two years, the grief had aged and softened, but not gone away. He carved the ash off his cigarette on the scrolled arm of his couch.

  “Your security goon confiscated my gun, Gil.”

  “Rivizolla is a creature of habit. As am I.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “One doesn’t let a
nyone come armed into one’s home.”

  “Seems like you’re an important person around here. The laird of the manor, sort of thing?”

  “I am no one. I live quietly in retirement.”

  “The kids down the town are scared of you.”

  “It is a small community. We are exiles. Malicious rumor is the armor of the powerless.”

  “Armor against who? The sentrienza?”

  Gil spilled his body off the couch, Slinky-style, and half-stood at the table to mix himself a drink. “This world belongs to the sentrienza. Not to us. We do all the work. They merely collect payments.”

  “You do their dirty work, you mean?”

  “All work is dirty,” Gil said with disdain. He poured the last drops from the muck bottle and added an eyedropper of something black from a different bottle.

  “I could tell the sentrienza a few things about you, Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth,” Colm said quietly. “About Crasibo Lovelace. About this.” He tapped the side of his head, where his esthesia implant had sat inert for the last six months. “You buggered off home without warning, because I was getting too close to the truth—”

  “I was recalled.”

  “—leaving me to find out from a different source that you set me up. This implant’s a Ghost beacon, isn’t it? You used me to draw the Ghosts to Sol system. You may as well have killed Zhanna Kostikova and Fitch Reynolds with your own wee paws.” He measured out his anger word by word. “Now the Ghosts are on Gna, they’re on Mars, there are Stage Ones popping up in the asteroid belt. The Ring Around the Sun has turned into a ring of Ghost FOBs. Earth is under siege ... and that was a year ago.” The uncertainty about what might have happened in the last 12 months drove him mad with urgency to force a confession out of Gil, and then a solution.

  Gil said, “Did the upgrade resolve your pain issues?”

  “For fuck’s sake. Yeah, it did.” Colm was not about to say thanks. He knew the settings upgrade had just been a feeble attempt to throw him off the scent.

  “I told them from the start that positive feedback would have worked better,” Gil said. “But they believe very strongly in the power of pain. Personally, I have always thought pain was something to be avoided.” He lapped from his balloon-shaped glass.

  “Who believes in the power of pain?”

  “The developers of the implant.”

  “Who?”

  “I cannot disclose that. I wish to live out my retirement in peace.”

  “And what about us?” Colm felt himself turning red with fury. “There were dozens of pilots working for Crasibo Lovelace. Hundreds?”

  “One hundred and fifty-six,” Gil said. “I believe you are the last.”

  “What happened to the rest?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Perhaps your God will judge you. I shall not. I, too, ran away.”

  “I didn’t ...” The accusation floored him. it resonated with the part of him he didn’t like to examine. “I thought, if you could summon the Ghosts with a chunk of technology, you could make them go away.”

  “No power in the universe, short of death, can make the Ghosts go away.”

  Colm nodded heavily. “I’ve wasted my time, haven’t I? It was already too late when I left Gna.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it into the tiles with the toe of his boot. He was experiencing a powerful urge to throw Gil through the glass wall of the conservatory. He reminded himself that violence accomplished nothing. Anyhow, the security guard, Rivizolla, was somewhere nearby with his shotgun. There might be other minions around, too.

  “It is not too late,” Gil said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because you are here.”

  Colm frowned.

  The queazel lifted a loop of his body and bridged the distance between them, setting his forepaws on Colm’s thigh, staring up at him with unblinking black eyes.

  “You can save Earth, Colm Mackenzie.”

  Colm threw Gil back onto his own couch and stood up. “Give me a fucking break. I’m an underpaid security guard on a prison ship. I’m not even a pilot anymore.” He picked up his rucksack.

  “But you are a ...” The last part of the sentence broke down into gibberish. The slushy vowels and drawn-out hisses sounded like the sentrienza language. Colm hesitated, suddenly remembering his run-in with the sentrienza on that iceball where they had stopped for water. The ugly memory was the last straw. He headed for the door.

  “I am sorry,” Gil said behind him.

  The door opened. There stood the queazel Rivizolla, on his hind legs, pointing his shotgun at Colm’s belly. Behind him stood three more queazels, similarly armed to the teeth.

  “I told you I did not want you to come here,” Gil said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Now that you are here, you cannot leave.”

  “I fucking can.”

  “Try it,” Rivizolla growled. He pumped his shotgun. Scariest sound in the universe. The finger on the trigger might be a child-sized claw. It could still kill.

  Colm raised his hands in exasperated helplessness.

  The queazels surrounded him, jabbing their guns into his ribs. They drove him up to a tower room with a single window six inches wide. They locked him in and left him.

  CHAPTER 37

  MEG TAUGHT KARATE IN a rented dojo on the south tip of Haravalding. The floor had too much flex, but there was nothing to be done about that: it was seaweed. On the other hand, the rubbery surface was easy for bare toes to grip. A long mirror covered one wall, a screen the other.

  She’d never been a fan of distance learning when it came to karate. You needed to be able to engage physically. In the role of sensei, it frustrated her that she couldn’t touch her students to correct their katas.

  Then again, she wouldn’t have wanted to touch sentrienza flesh, anyway.

  “That’s it for today,” she said. “Seiza!”

  On the screen, in fourteen different rooms scattered around Juradis and elsewhere, eighteen sentrienza in white karate gi knelt with their knees under their butts and their toes curled in front. Meg was still not used to seeing that. She knelt on her heels, facing the mirror. She had installed a little shelf above it. The shelf held a picture of the founder of the Shotokan school of karate, a Japanese flag, an American flag, and some pretty seashells, because you couldn’t get flowers here.

  “Mokuso!” trilled the black belt from Gissthung, another spaceport island. She’d named him the class senpai, or senior student, although he really didn’t deserve that black belt. She suspected his last sensei had given it to him just because he’d been practising for 25 years. Yes, he could perform the katas accurately to the millimeter, but he was still a fragile alien with backwards-bending knees.

  “Mokuso YAME!”

  Meg sighed to herself, realizing that she had spent the brief meditation period privately judging a student for shortcomings he could not help.

  “Shomen ni REI!”

  She bowed to the shrine, and checked in the mirror that all eighteen students were also bowing correctly. This was as important as the practice itself.

  “Sensei ni REI!”

  She hitched herself around, still kneeling, to face the screen. All the students bowed to her. She returned the courtesy, then came up from her bow and gave the command to turn the screen off. The students vanished.

  She went to the bathroom, swigged water, stopped to look out the window. From up here on the 11th floor, she could see all the way to the spaceport, which took up the northern half of the island. She could never look at this view without remembering the awful day she had arrived on Juradis.

  The sentrienza had let her, Axel, and Tan go free because they had useful skills. As Fleet vets, they were expected to find work in the private security industry that had burgeoned along with the refugee population, helping to keep their fellow humans down. Tan had done exactly that. She didn’t hold it against him. It allowed him to be tog
ether with his wife and daughters. But Axel wouldn’t even consider it. Swayed by her own misgivings, Meg had decided to remain on Haravalding with him.

  After all, she had another monetizable skill.

  She could teach karate.

  To her continuing amazement, a lot of sentrienza wanted to learn human martial arts. She taught one class a day, because that brought in enough money, but she could have filled several more classes, and maybe she should. It would keep her mind off other things. She rested her elbows on a windowsill speckled with dry bird poop, looked out at Haravalding, and wondered where Colm was in this overflowing megalopolis. Free, or in custody? Alive or dead?

  A chime sounded. Meg groaned. That would be a student wanting a private word. Glad she hadn’t changed out of her gi yet, she went back into the dojo and enabled the connection.

  “Hello, Emnl. You did very well with Heian Yondan today.” She smiled, and waited out the six-second light speed delay.

  A portion of the screen lit up. Emnl ki-Sharongat, clad in gi and green belt, stood in a formal kiritsu stance in the gym under the sentrienza mound on Sakassarib, the iceball where they had stopped for water last year.

  After the Shady Lady left Sakassarib, Meg had hoped she would never see Emnl ki-Sharongat again. She had wanted to forget the contract she’d signed to buy Axel’s freedom. She wanted to pretend it had never happened.

  But when she first advertised her classes, and was sorting through the deluge of applications, a name had caught her eye: Emnl ki-Sharongat.

  She had known she didn’t have the option of ignoring Emnl’s application. She assumed Emnl was keeping an eye on her, making sure she didn’t try to wiggle out of their deal.

  What took her by surprise was that Emnl seemed keen to learn. In fact, she tried harder than any other student. Over the months, they had developed a genuine, if distant, teacher-student relationship. Their deal was never mentioned, never even alluded to, although it lurked in the background.

  “Meg-sensei,” Emnl said, “I want to understand more about our stomach. You said that we should let the energy flow from our stomach. But I do not feel any energy in my stomach. Where should it come from?”