Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3

by Luther M. Siler

  "How do you find them?"

  "Their abilities call to us," Patience says, closing xir eyes and letting xir head drift backward. Xe waves xir arms in an oddly ethereal gesture; Haakoro cannot feel the breeze that must be animating the sleeves of xir garment, for them to wave so. "Hast thou not felt different, Haakoro, for all of thine life? Hast thou not felt the very universe responding to thy needs, putting that which thou needed in front of thee at the very moment it was most needed? Didst thou not survive in the blackness of deep space, thy body and life-support shredded, thy very being scattered to the stars? Thou art extraordinary, Haakoro. And we have need for the extraordinary. And we require thy service."

  He is suddenly certain that he has blood, for it has gone cold. Freezing, in fact. He's being recruited.

  Patience locks eyes with him. Xe knows that he understands, now.

  "Look upon thy body," xe says, and mirrors the air again. And for the second time Haakoro is certain that he has no interest in seeing what Patience wants him to see. And, for the second time, he is unable to resist.

  Most of his body is mechanical now. Some parts appear to be growing new skin; he can see into his own chest cavity, where his heart beats and his lungs expand and deflate, but his ribs are gone. His chest cavity is enclosed in black metal, with patches of skin spreading like mold across concrete. The parts of him that are not mechanical, that are not growing, are encased in armor.

  Benevolence armor.

  His left arm, his right hand— he thinks it is flesh under that gauntlet, attached to the rest of him via synthetics. His lower body appears mostly intact. His face is a horror. One eye remains; the other is a glowing light. There is flesh where his nose and mouth should be, but they are simply gone, a mass of scar tissue where facial features used to be. A smooth piece of black material— it might be fabric— encases his scalp and comes down over where his ears might be. A sound escapes him involuntarily, and he realizes with a jolt that something is speaking for him. His mouthless face cannot produce speech any longer. Something, built into him somewhere, is synthesizing his thoughts into words.

  "Let me die," he says. "Please." He concentrates his entire will, and manages to force his body to its knees.

  Patience reaches out and caresses his forehead again.

  "We have a gift for you," she says. "If thou wishes to die, thou has but to make the choice. And if thou wishes to live, thou must make that choice as well."

  "What is it?" he asks.

  Patience moves to the side. Behind xir, in the distance, is a pedestal.

  Atop the pedestal is a helmet.

  "Choose," Patience says. "But choose wisely, and choose … rapidly. The door will open to thee, if that is thy wish."

  Xe walks past him, striding to the door, which slides open to admit xir. Haakoro feels full control over his body restored to him. He stands, looking around. A choice? What choice?

  Right then is when all the air goes away. And a moment later, the heat.

  There never was any atmosphere out here, Haakoro realizes. Patience was keeping me alive.

  He can feel his exposed flesh starting to freeze, and his lungs begin to crumple in his chest as what little air was in them is forced out. His internal organs are exposed to the cold. The helmet is only a few yards away. That has to be the choice Patience referred to. He can put on the helmet— he can join the Benevolence— or he can die here, alone and unheralded, a speck on the hull of the largest ship in the galaxy.

  I can't do this, he thinks, and he steps toward the helmet anyway.

  I don't want to die.

  He has to, he thinks. He cannot become one of them. Death is better than this alternative. Joining the Benevolence would be betraying everything he ever wanted, everything he ever was, every person he ever met.

  What did they ever do for you, part of him says. Patience offers you power. Who ever took you seriously, Haakoro?

  "Xe called me extraordinary," Haakoro says, and his hands trace the surface of the helmet. Starbursts explode in his vision as the liquid in his eye begins to freeze. He can feel himself slipping away; one way or another, he only has another few moments. All he has to do is not do anything, and this can be over. All he has to do is make the right choice.

  Haakoro makes his decision. The helmet clicks into place over his head, and the last thing he feels before losing consciousness is the needles snaking their way into his brain.

  * * *

  Thank You

  … for reading Tales from the Benevolence Archives. Reviews are absolutely critical to gaining visibility for independent authors, so if you enjoyed the book (or even if you didn't!) please consider reviewing it at the book site of your choice.

  And Amazon. Please, God, review it at Amazon too.

  About Luther Siler

  Luther M. Siler was born in 1976 and currently resides in northern Indiana. Sharing his house with him are his wife, son and an assortment of pets. He has a job, but it's not as interesting as it used to be and it's probably different now anyway.

  His other works include two other Benevolence Archives novels, the near-future Skylights series, a nonfiction book about teaching called Searching for Malumba, and a collection of short stories, Balremesh and other stories.

  You can follow Luther at his blog at http://www.infinitefreetime.com, or on Twitter at @nfinitefreetime.

  Also by Luther Siler

  THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1:

  Troll evictions! Dwarf pirates! Daring rescues! Angry gods! Impossible technology! Oversized bars! Pissed-off ogres! Disrespectful spaceships! All this and a mild disregard for proper wound treatment!

  THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1 is a novella-length collection of six short stories set in a common universe. Combining elements of space opera-style science fiction and high fantasy, THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES tell the adventures of Brazel, Rhundi, and Grond, a gnome/halfogre team of smugglers.

  THE PLANET IT'S FARTHEST FROM: A simple job in a saloon goes poorly for Brazel.

  THE CLOSET: Brazel and Grond are hired to teach someone why gambling can be a bad idea.

  YANK: Dwarven pirates. 'Nuff said.

  REMEMBER: Brazel and Grond are hired by one of the galaxy's most powerful people for a suspiciously easy job.

  THE CONTRACT: Rhundi tries to get through a simple business negotiation without anyone being shot.

  THE SIGIL: Brazel and Grond encounter something horrifying on a frozen rock in the middle of nowhere.

  THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 2: THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE

  "Go rob that train." Nice, normal. An everyday heist.

  But nothing is ever normal for Brazel, Grond and Rhundi.

  A simple act of motorized larceny quickly explodes into a galaxy-spanning adventure for the two thieves. Blade-wielding elves, a fast-moving global war, a secret outlaw space city, incomprehensible insectoids and one impossibly lucky human are just the start of their problems. And that's before they learn that someone from Grond's past has gotten the Benevolence involved…

  What is happening on the ogrespace moon Khkk?

  Who are the Noble Opposition?

  And what is the secret of THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE?

  BALREMESH AND OTHER STORIES

  A last stand against ultimate evil. A refugee from outside of time. A corrupt governor and a graveyard of wronged spirits. A technological breakthrough that could change human culture forever, or end it entirely. An executioner listening to a genocidaire's final statement. And a door, hanging in the air, a door that must never be opened. These and other tales await you within BALREMESH AND OTHER STORIES, a novella-sized collection of short stories and microfictions in the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres.

  SKYLIGHTS

  August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history.

  February 19
, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost.

  2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: "Mars." Ezekiel ben Zahav isn't talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something— and he's dangling enough money under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.

  SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.

  Read on for an excerpt: the prologue to SKYLIGHTS.

  Flashbulb memory, they call it. It's when you remember exactly where you were when you first discovered something or saw something happen.

  If you're younger than me, which a lot of you probably are, then your first flashbulb memory is probably related to terrorism somehow. Anybody in, say, their early thirties or older probably remembers exactly where they were on September 11, 2001. A little younger than that and your first flashbulb memory is probably one of the bombings in Chicago in 2018.

  I was six years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. It was January 29, 1986, at exactly eleven thirty-nine in the morning. I was in first grade. For some reason— I could look this up if I wanted, I suppose, but my first-grade self didn't know, so I'm not going to bother— NASA had decided that it would be great if they put a schoolteacher on the Space Shuttle. Her name was Christa McAuliffe, and she'd been a middle school teacher, her students not a lot older than I was at the time.

  There was a ton of publicity about her presence on the shuttle. Come to think of it, that might have been the reason that NASA put her there in the first place. Every single kid in my school was watching the flight launch on television. The Challenger took off, and we all clapped. Seventy-three seconds later, an O-ring failed on the shuttle's right Solid Rocket Booster. There was a little puff of smoke from the side of the ship.

  Some of us were still clapping.

  I remember noticing it and wondering, for the split second that I had, what had happened. And then the Challenger, with me and millions of other people around the country watching, silently blew apart. There were a few seconds of shocked silence in the room, and then every kid in the class— every one in the building, probably— started crying at once.

  You know what? Writing that just now, I wondered what my teacher must have done afterwards. I can't even remember her name. I can remember the wood surface on my desk, because I dug my fingers into it so hard that day that they scratched it and I got splinters. I can remember the wood-grain on the television set they had us watching. I can remember being surprised that Rachel Douglas, the biggest butthead in the entire first grade, was crying as hard as I was. But I can't remember a single thing that our teacher did to try and bring everybody back to sanity after watching that happen. That's how flashbulb memories work; you'll remember the event itself forever, but that doesn't mean you'll remember anything else that happened around it.

  Seventeen years and two days later, it happened again. This time, it was the shuttle Columbia, and I was twenty-four and no longer sitting in a classroom. In fact, when the Columbia was falling apart in the morning sky over Texas, I was stuck in traffic and late to work. I found out about it about ten minutes after I got in, when the smarmy dope from the office next door made some sort of comment about it to me. We had the Internet by then— yes, there was Internet back then, although I think we might have still been calling it the World Wide Web— and I saw the entire thing on CNN's Web site. This time there weren't any tears, just a dull sort of ache in the pit of my stomach. I spent the rest of the day on the computer, chasing down eyewitness reports and trying to devour whatever little bits of actual news managed to leak out. It was funny; I hadn't spent much time thinking about space flight since the first grade, but suddenly the families of the men and women on that shuttle were all I could think about.

  I was working for the Indianapolis Star at the time, splitting my time between a biweekly column in the science section and general reporting on local news for the rest of the paper. It was a good job; I was happy enough, and making enough money, but I wanted something different from my life.

  I decided to write a book.

  A year later, I'd completed Nothing to Bury: the Martyrs of the Space Race, a look at the lives of the astronauts who had died on the Challenger and the Columbia, as well as a host of other lives lost in the pursuit of space, and a look at the culture of NASA in between the two disasters. I was pretty proud of it as a piece of work; I wasn't expecting it to necessarily sell well to the general public, but it was a good piece of writing. It did better than I'd expected, enough that I've been able to be comfortable with freelance writing since then. I'm still working for news sites and some of the few print papers that are left, mind you, but I can pick my own assignments and do my own reporting now as opposed to having people assign my projects.

  You know where this is going, don't you? I imagine you do.

  On August 15, 2022, after years of technical and political delays, the space shuttle Tycho, carrying four astronauts, launched on a six-month journey to Mars. They were to remain in orbit around Mars for thirty days, during which they would land on the planet's surface for the first time in human history, then to return to Earth. The run-up to the launch was the biggest public relations bonanza NASA had ever seen. Everything just stopped the day the Tycho launched. It was just like it had been for the Challenger, only times a hundred. They just weren't as good at hype in the eighties, I guess.

  I was watching at home, with a couple of friends— I actually had a little party for the launch. I didn't realize how tense I was until I looked at my hands afterwards. There were furrows in my palms from my fingernails. Then the shuttle took off, soaring into a perfectly blue sky, and I held my breath for a few moments.

  The launch went off without a hitch, though, and pictures of the Tycho blanketed every website and print doc on the planet over the next few days. For the next six months, everyone was obsessed with Mars. The astronauts provided regular updates on what they were doing. You could get daily blink messages from them if you wanted to, and progress along their flight path was updated live on a map running at the top of CNN.com for the entire duration of the trip. Those six months, I'm convinced, inspired a whole generation of new astronauts, astrophysicists, and pilots. I've never in my life seen America more excited about science. It was amazing.

  And then, on February 19th, 2023, when the long voyage was finally over, we... well, we don't actually know what happened. The Tycho was supposed to aerobrake into orbit around Mars, stay in orbit for a day or two, and then the astronauts were going to leave the ship to descend to the planet's surface in a lander. They were going to stay on the surface for two weeks or so, doing experiments, exploring the Martian surface, and making history.

  There wasn't anything resembling photo evidence, not good evidence at least— NASA had been sending a steady diet of pictures and video from cameras affixed to the outside of the Tycho for months, but they failed at the same time as the audio feed. But we were getting audio beamed back from inside the cabin. Right up until the point where the flight commander, a decorated Marine pilot by the name of Alondra Gallegos, spoke the last words that the Tycho sent back to Earth.

  "Is that..." was all she said.

  After that, nothing. No sound, no signals, no big explosion to be played on the news over and over again. Just nothing at all, and what started off as mild concern slowly morphed, over the next few days, weeks, months, into the certainty that, somehow, the ship had been lost. There was hope for a while that there had just been some sort of global communications failure, that the Tycho was still out there but had lost the ability to talk to us. Sadly, those hopes didn't make much sense in reality— the Tycho's communication capabilities were among the simplest systems on the ship, something a talented twelve-year-old would have been able to repair, and there was a redundant backup system. Anything catastrophic enough
to have completely crippled the ship's ability to talk would have caused fatal damage to the rest of the ship as well. We just couldn't figure out what. Conventional wisdom eventually decided there had been some sort of asteroid or meteorite impact, something like that.

  There was no flashbulb moment for the Tycho. The families of the four people lost on that mission— Alondra Gallegos, Harrison Brown, Kassius Newsome, and Ai-Li Wu— will never be able to move on. Many of them are convinced that their family members are still out there somewhere. There was no national mourning like there was for the Challenger and the Columbia. It was as if, after three high-profile ship losses, this time the country just wanted to forget about it.

  I got a few calls for interviews after the Tycho lost contact, and a few more a few months later, once NASA officially stopped trying to reestablish contact with the ship. I turned them all down, though; I didn't want to base any more of my career on profiting from the deaths of people more heroic and important than I was. I didn't want to write about space any more.

  Little did I know.