by Grant Fausey
“Which way?” Jerolda peaked out around the twisted metal. Tee looked at him squinting his eyes. He just shrugged his shoulders
“Follow your instincts—” he said. “Out there, that’a way!” The fury little creature locked his hands tightly on his companion’s audio receptors. Tee could hear the distinct sounds of heavy equipment. The place was anything but dead. The surface was a case of delusion and he hated to admit it, but he had no choice. Jerolda Manchi had indeed found a clue to the departure of the mining crews. There wasn’t an answer, only guesses. His view of the old ruins was obscured by a rather large ridge, which formed both sides of the cobblestone runway.
Tee reeled in his traveling companion and shook his head. Jerolda had managed to get one over on him earlier, but he wasn’t in the middle of the cobblestone runway. Relix’s radar eye opened wide taking in all about to let it happen for a second time. His stubby little friend broadsided him with his foot, sending the old Gandee sailing into the center of the grassy corridor, where he spun to a halt as Jerolda sat there bathed in the uneven light of a fading sunset. A splintered dome archway hovered over him in a semicircle, surrounding him with a spectacular view of the ruins. He was sitting in the middle of a semi-circle. “We’ve a rendezvous to keep, don’t forget,” yelped the Trod reminding the others. “The Proteus Mona will be in contact range shortly, and old Treads will drop a transport on us, unless we have something useful.”
Jerolda raised an eyebrow, wondering if there was no end to the surprises, or apparently, their responsibilities. They were explorers. That was plain enough to see. He had forgotten. Yet, before them, stretched amidst the confines of an enormous hanger, there was an even bigger mystery. The huge cargo mover just sat there waiting to be activated. There was no life in him. Flatbed didn’t run on his own anymore., he was no longer a life form, but rather a mechanized tool. Relix’s radar eye titled up, he could see a maze of tiny workers mounted on the mover like honeybees, disappearing over one another.
The place was at least a hundred levels below were they stood on the platform in the darkness. They were obviously somewhere in the middle. The loading docks were the heart of the operation, like a maze of interconnected honeycombs in an upside down labyrinth. Jerolda was dumfounded, and before he could muster a word, the monstrous shape of the cargo ship came into view. Silent as it was, perched atop the loading dock’s main ramp, the vessel shuttered in the wake of moving landing struts and mechanical wonders of various sizes and shapes. Smaller multi-armed, beetle–shaped machines hovered in the core, suspended by a single appendage, while making minor adjustments to the inarticulate vehicle.
Tee let out a breath of cold, dry air, mesmerized by the sheer size of the spectacle. He looked at Tee with a smile; his senses back on line, and he was ready to go to work. However, he wasn’t alone. Two short, hundred-legged machines crossed the edge of the ship’s umbrella array, weaving in and out of the top framework like giant caterpillars on the wings of a butterfly. The ship was apparently perched for flight.
“Dinosaurs!” yelled Tee in a deafening scream. The corridor was filled with huge legs and powerful feet, pounding like jackhammers against the ramp. Tee’s eyes went wide, the size of saucers. Brontosaurs of all sizes herded like cattle from a hundred lifetimes ago––each driven to market. The Trod leaped out of the way of a large, spidery-looking thing and his co-herder. Six legs smacked the floor with enough force to upturn the rock foundation at the base of the trench. The herders snapped at the Brontosaur’s heels, their feet pounding against the cobblestone in a flight for their lives.
“Run!” shouted Tee, running headlong into the rock wall. The old Gandee collapsed to the floor, where he slid down to sit beside Relix. “Catch your breath,” insisted the Trod, trying to be heard above all the noise. “We have to figure this out.” He was in the shadow of what seemed to be a hundred varieties of living fossils. “The Mystic Thunder departs for the far side of the galaxy at sunset, remember?”
Of course he remembered. There was no point in making a huff about it. He was already scared shitless. The little Trod activated his internal communication network, sending a coded message to the Proteus Mona. His higher functions, converted the message into coded symbols. The message flashed across his transponders in impulses that would reach the ears of the warship’s commander.
“The Eden Sector,” whispered Jerolda. The old Gandee was talking to himself, remembering his earlier conversation with the behemoth forklift. At least, the Trods had something of value to report.
“Priority one,” streamed Relix in a data burst. The uplink was complete. “Team Alpha: Sodin. Regeneration of dinosaur food supplies for possible Industrialist use discovered. Destination believed to be the Eden Sector. Departure imminent. Request rendezvous.” Relix’s radar eye went blank for a few seconds, instantaneously transmitting his position in time and space. But it seemed like decades had past before he received a reply. Most places were forgotten after the Genesis wars. Sodin, however, was a covert operation hidden away in the protection of the Eden Sector. Whatever the industrials were up too, it was a closely guarded secret … one that would take a lifetime to expose. The truth, however, would take longer. Jerolda had no intension of allowing the Trod to follow his instincts.
The Proteus Mona emerged from a transit wave corridor, a shinny new battle hardened replica of the Firehawk, only bigger. Its main gunports opened, ready to do battle, as the ship changed form, altering size and shape to reveal a biomass of living machine and Industrial hardware the Trods had never seen before. The ship rose out of the depths of the abyss and pivoted sharply, coming to rest in a flutter of exhaust as ghostly and misdirected as the darkness of the Triad. The vehicle was from hell itself, the future; compromised.
Tee scurried back from the well of dark bio-matter and faced his companions with sad eyes. Finally, Relix had a real dilemma on his hands. He just didn’t know how far back in time he would have to go in order to reset history, save Crimson from Indigo, and set the record straight. “Tee,” said Relix. The Trod stopped at the edge of the temporal convergence and looked back at his counterpart. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Tee nodded with grave concerned. There wasn’t much point in discussing options: there was only one decision he had to make…to go or not to go! He had to step back in time, face the real threat and extinguish the thread of this ill-fated future he had constructed. Otherwise, everything he had managed to set into motion would have dire consequences. “Proteus Mona,” concluded Relix, his deliberation short-lived. “One for withdrawal.”
Tee signaled his approval. He understood the dilemma. The future of the multi-verse was at stake, each playing out a varied degree of what was transpiring in the other. He would see his partner again sometime, in some other place, be reunited with him at the moment of conjunction. But Jerolda had no idea what the two Trods were up too. He just stood there like a Newby, staring at his companions dumbfounded. The old Gandee was in awe of the happenings.
“No–– Wait!” shouted the biped, but it was too late. Tee was already on the move, heading straight for the vortex at the heart of the wave. The little Trod opened his hand, waved his digits as if they were made of light. Jerolda gasped. He had never seen such a sight. It was as if his fingertips contained a magic wand. In all his years, the Gandee had never seen the unexpected; yet, there he was, in the midst of history, a benevolent observer. Life was happening right in front of him, and it was unexplainable.
Relix turned to face the tree dweller, affirmed his farewell telling the old gray creature: “Put into words what you have seen here today, my friend. Pay witness to that which you have not seen before, for what is to come is far worse than even I have imagined.”
Jerolda stood his ground, fear coursing through his blue-gray veins, frightened by his own shadow. The old Gandee couldn’t believe his eyes––yet there it was, right in front of him––big as life. The portal to the worlds beyond––a gateway to another dimensi
on, another universe: The destinations too many to fathom, the possibilities, endless. The biped stepped up to the swirling vortex and summoned the gateway, strolling through the temporal convergence as if he was nothing more than a ghostly manifestation of life absorbed into the very essence of the bio-matter thriving within the dark ooze of the abyss.
Jerold turned to run, but couldn’t. His feet remained steadfast in time, as if laid in concrete overshoes. He was completely unaware of truth, or that he was witnessing his own demise. No one would believe him anyway, thought the tree dweller, scratching his head. No one would believe the Trods ever existed. But his eyes didn’t deceive him; they were right there in front of him, his eyes as big as saucers. Life had bestowed upon him one of its little pleasures so many spoke of when he was a child. The Master-builders were real: one light, one dark…counterparts to offset one another like night and day, or good and evil. They were like no other beings he had encountered. Yet, there was the infliction of reality; the essence of time travel, forgiveness, even regret. The elders had warned him of the new comers; of how they would one-day influence events and change the ways of the world. It was written in the ways of the lawgiver’s tribunal and the Kalamar Indigna.
Yes, no one would believe him. The future would change right before their eyes and none of them would see it, blinded by the truth. Still, what he had seen was as real as his granddaughter.
“Grolla,” said the old Gandee. “Summon the Knights of the Ronna-Kaa. We have traveling to do.”
“The future, Grandfather?”
“No,” said Jerolda, stepping aside. The talons of the old blast furnace staked claim to the ground, wheeling forth their weight in the wake of the disturbance and again mounted for the sky.
Indigo stepped from the shadows of the temporal abyss, flicked off the safety on his trusted side arm and took careful aim as to not hit the old Gandee or his granddaughter. He tracked the hellhound across the rocks, traced its path across the heavens and waited for the beast to strike.
The beast sprang from the cliff edge, its razor sharp teeth extended, its fierce claws ready to strike. Grolla reined the old Shadowrider skyward, across the heavens. “Mannuka,” yelled Jerolda. The Gandee chief drew a flicker of light from his pocket, shaped it to resemble a boomerang as he tracked the animal. His eyes widened, alternating between shades of emerald green and gray…the beast almost upon him. Its sharp teeth glistened with the image of his reflection. He twirled the glitter of light, rounded its edges like a lasso to tame the wild beast, but flung the radiance. The air vibrated in front of the beast, shuttered like an earthquake in the sky. Split and separated. Opened upon another dimension, the inverted end of a tornadic wind, drawing the deadly Mannukan bear across the threshold. The animal struggled, scratched and scrambled across the dimensions until it vanished into thin air, plucked from existence when the sun touched the sky.
Jerolda turned his attention back to his granddaughter, and tucked his arms around her waist, secure in the thought of the bear’s demise. “Done playing with the house pet, Grandfather?”
The old Gandee chuckled, reaching out to pluck the trickle of light from the heavens, and sighed. “Nothing of the sort,” said the tree dweller. “I gave him a new home.”
Grolla looked back at the elder wild-eyed, and full of laughter. She could just imagine where the beast emerged. If she knew her Grandfather, it would be somewhere extraordinary, a home away from home…another jungle on the far side of Myatek, or the desert plains of Ales Mar, even the garden spot on the Templar de Shadiwe. Either way, the Mannuka was bad news.
Jake Indigo Ramious, however, knew exactly where the beast had landed. The creature materialized on the short end of his gun. Not more than a meter from his face. The beast blinded by fear and utter rage, spiraled out of the swirling vortex in an intense wind, right into the arms of the awaiting bounty hunter and his lovely symbiont, only to tumble to the ground in an embarrassing tuck and roll that lent the creature time on his back. Indigo rolled with the beast, coming up face to face with glistening teeth and a growl that cut through the thick of his breath. The bounty hunter sprang to his feet; twirled, drawing his gun to his hand in a whirlwind of flying claws and snapping incisors. It was all he could do to out maneuver the bulk of the creature and get a beam on him. The weapon fired. A thin line of light met the creature, abruptly splintered into a menagerie of interconnecting patchwork that expanded into a grid of disassembling strands of DNA. The beast roared in a moment of sheer terror, driven back by a display of technological superiority that abruptly ended with the mammal lying entangled in a glittering biomass of living light and techno ooze.
Indigo gasped for air, pulled abruptly from the grasp of his Valconian symbiont, his vantage point on the past revealed. The makeshift laboratory hidden in an old world castle came to light, focused on his shifting entanglement with his former life – the mission at an end – the encounter with the Mannuka ended. His demise assured, but surrendered in the redemption of another moment in time. The beast, rattled in the midst of his capture, bantered with his self-inflicted detainment, only to be freed of his torment. The animal bounced back to his feet righting himself, and leaped for the nearest tree, escaping into the protection of the foliage.
“Did he survive?” asked the symbiont.
Indigo smiled. The bounty hunter nodded reassuring his beloved Crimson of the beast’s continued existence. Their mission suspended. All that was left was the ritual of friendship and love they shared, one future blending with the next in alternate realities: The past of one existence catching up with the other … their lives intertwined. He knew history would repeat itself; reunite them in a moment of bliss. It was inevitable. But for now, his memory of her would sustain him, forage the fires of hell through him until the futures crossed paths to reunite them.
“Remember,” she told him, opening his eyes to the world of their new existence. The bounty hunter’s focus sharpened, drawing him away from the moment with the beast into the realm of another existence. He stood on soft sole shoes; his body renewed in the chilly essence of regeneration, his aura bright as the sun.
“Remember what?” he asked. His mind was a void.
“Everything,” she said with a smile, drawing him to her.
The future would become the past, the world erased. Their love lost, like déjà vu. Yet, she would take his hand and reawaken within him … companion and lover … as friend and confidante. It was only a matter of time. And, for that, she was eternally grateful.
The saga continues …
OF CRIMSON INDIGO
TALES OF THE MASTER-BUILDERS
Visit the Official Website:
www.OfCrimsonIndigo.com
SPECIAL TERMINOLOGY
A - F
ASSEMBLY: Galactic Senate which is made up of representatives from the ruling council of the five major corporate entities: The Hyderon Corporation, Trini Corporation, Border Worlds Corporate Alliance, Oceanna Consortium, and Trithen Industries. The Assembly oversees corporate dealings, territorial disputes and sanctions new entities entering into corporate service. The Assembly is also responsible for maintaining the unification of the Rampian, Trinonian, Myateken, Valconian and Eden sectors of space surrounding the Triad Abyss, as well as the inhabited border worlds of the galaxy.
BOUNTY HUNTER: Corporate operative sent back in time via symbiont connection to a former life incarnation, or adjunct connection to an earlier time in a person’s life.
BOUNDARY INTERFACE: The area of space immediately between the Triad Abyss and the boundary layer separating the threshold of coexisting universes.
BOUNDARY LAYER: An artificially created ring of energy used as a separation device between the thresholds of a manufactured universe and its originating reality.
BORDER WORLDS: The ring of inhabited planets surrounding the Triad Abyss. The border worlds consists of millions of new and emerging planetary bodies, many of which have undergone the Industries’ regenerative process in pre
paration for off-world mining operations, terra-forming, or reconstitution of artificial life.
COMMERCIAL TRANSIT SYSTEM: Gateway travel explicit to commercial entities on official business. Approximates first class travel between worlds.
CORPORATE ASSASSIN: A corporate representative with the authority to eliminate obstructions to corporate needs, including but not limited to elements of past dealings, hostile takeover scenarios, and individuals the corporate entities consider non productive, or a hindrance to the development of influential economic stability.
CORPORATE LIAISON: Representatives delegating authority between corporate interests and world leaders on investment planets.
CORPORATE RUNNER: Entities sent into the past to do corporate business.
COSMIC WAVE BOUNDARY: Edge of an expanding artificially created universe.
G - M
GATEWAY: The mode of transportation used for quick access to border world planets.
HOUND TRACKER: Transit Authority Investigator. The Hound is a ravenous beast-shaped machine designed to remove rogue travelers from both the commercial and tourist transit systems. The creature is feared and considered unstable and extremely dangerous, but has yet to be retired from interplanetary service.
