A score of miners approach, the foreman in the lead. He carries some kind of firing weapon, his voice shaking. “Are you Fiend Slayers going to pursue and kill those monsters?”
“There’s no need.” Cirx wheels Kallstrom around in a hind hoof pivot. “This fiend’s been slain just by unmasking its identity. Stop throwing out spoiled meats. This brings trealhounds around. They’re nocturnal carrion eaters that are also attracted to bellowing noises. Like your technological machinery in the mines.” How Cirx abhors this technology: the mines, the lights, the weapons.
The foreman turns to his men, and a muted discussion ensues under the rain, their voices cracking and rusty with fear. The miner’s eyes are as wide as mirror fish eyes.
“Why can’t you just kill it?” the foreman shouts and turns back to Cirx.
Cirx imagines all of these men leaving in their ships and never returning. “It’s a harmless animal of Staggenmoire. The duty of the Fiend Slayer is as much restraint as it is action. No person’s soul would find peace in the death of those creatures. Fiend Slayers are not blind soldiers slaughtering without a thought, chasing glory without reason. Our duty is helping people. We’re a symbol of salvation, of the afterlife, of honor.”
“Well, Fiend Slayer,” says a lanky miner whose Adam’s apple protrudes nearly as far as his nose, “tell us if this is from those trealhounds. Cause you got some explaining to do.” The man throws something into the mud. A tooth as white as unobscured moonlight, the size of Cirx’s sword.
“Where’d you find that?” Cirx forcibly restrains his excitement, his curiosity seeming to stream from his skull as he inspects the tooth. Mayhaps the creature that grew that fang drove the trealhounds out of the hills.
The lanky miner looks to his foreman before speaking. “I was doing a little hunting on my own time. Found this silvery, bear-looking animal. I shot it and tracked it for hours before I found only its skeleton and this tooth lodged in its ribs.”
A different sound carries over the night. A roar this time, far off in the distant hills. Cirx tilts his head, thinking again of the rumors of the last fiend, the fiend that might have killed his father. He sees his father’s spine trapped between crushing jaws, his skull splintering. Per legend, this last fiend holds some mythic power for regeneration, his favorite tale as far back into childhood as he can remember … until he lost his father to it.
But the fiend and its powers are only a tale.
“I’ve never heard that sound before,” the foreman says.
Cirx glances at Garrabrandt, who raises a dark eyebrow. “It’s your decision, Fiend Slayer. I’ve never heard it either.”
Could this really be Cirx’s chance to find and free the souls of the murdered and bring home a souvenir for his son, so his son will look upon him with pride?
Cirx spurs Kallstrom into the night, for glory.
Elion
Elion elbows his way through an ocean of noise, of chaos. Shouting, arguing, beeping. Perhaps a pulser shot in the distance. No one seems to care.
Rust colonizes houses of cheap metal that stretch down a street as far as he can see, skyscrapers towering and blotting out the central artificial sun. The subtle curve of the ground, the inner sphere of a mobile planet the size of a small moon, is noticeable. Buildings are not visible past the blinding light of the central sun, but in the western and eastern sky there’s nothing but more city and flashing lights rising like soaring mountains. Gravity is kept along the inner periphery of the Majestic Space Pearl by rotational spin. The air smells of recirculators, of plastic, of filth entwined with corruption.
Elion arrived on his own light cruiser ship built for stealth and for no more than a pilot, a passenger, and small cargo. But the ship can travel at lightspeed. With his passcodes, the port granted him entry.
People paid fortunes for the spines he carries. Even acting as a middleman smuggler yielded substantial profits.
A man with shaggy sideburns slaps a woman in a skimpy black dress and takes a glowing purple tube from her. The woman lowers her head.
Salted cheese crumbles between Elion’s molars. A sharp bite like cheddar but lined with a hint of smoke and rum. He takes another bite from a wedge in his hand.
A wild-eyed man wearing a yellow cloak with black highlights hits Elion in the chest with an outstretched palm. “The Angelwians will save the galaxy.” He proffers an electric card, an intangible that can be scanned by any v-rim to reveal its information. “You have kind eyes.”
Religious freaks. I wish I could make them all shit their brains out. I have the laxative.
Elion shoves the man down onto the street and steps over him. Continues on to the Prime Casino of the Supreme Emperor, a towering monstrosity of gold and glitter. People flood in and out, swiping marcs for food, drink, gambling rights, drugs, and other less savory commodities. Armed guards in bodysuits of black carbon fiber alloy watch silently at the doors and on the stairs.
A man runs down the steps, and a guard trips him with a heavy boot, sending the man flying and tumbling down in a ball of whimpers and thuds. Two other guards wrench the man’s arms behind his back and apply taser cuffs. He struggles. His body jolts and shudders like in an electric chair before falling into a boneless lump.
Business as usual.
Elion flashes a golden medallion tattoo on his inner wrist, and a guard speaks into his helmet. Elion waits, a small island of calm amid the tempest.
“You’re late,” says a man in a red suit of similar carbon fiber alloy contoured to every muscle, detailed with a platinum tie. He stands outside the casino’s entrance. A plump little man wearing an interconnected network of red, brown, and yellow glass facets—an Elemiscist’s robe—hovers behind him.
“Had an issue.”
“Yeah, well, the price has dropped every hour past expected delivery.” The man known as Rettinger, the bodyguard of the Supreme Emperor, walks into the casino. Elion follows as Rettinger shoves past hordes of people gambling at tables, injecting themselves, kissing, dancing in only string underwear and jeweled pasties. The Elemiscist trails them.
Elion follows Rettinger into an elevator with gold doors. Up to the penthouse.
“Get his ass in here!” The voice of Drumeth, the Supreme Emperor of the Pearl, yells through Rettinger’s comm.
Gilded doors, the third pair on the left, slide open. The room inside is almost the size of the entire casino on the ground floor.
A man slightly taller than Elion with a protruding gut and flyaway sparse hair crawls off a bed in the center of the room, a bed surrounded by mirrors. Mirrors on the walls, the ground, the ceiling. A woman sits up beneath red silk sheets, covering breasts the size of her head, so firm and veined they look painful, her face that of a late teenager.
Elion looks away.
“What the fuck took you so long?” Drumeth holds out a hand for the pack on Elion’s back. His other hand is jiggling something below his hanging belly, his manhood as limp as a slug, as if he’s forcing his soldier into action. Drumeth jerks the pack from Elion and almost drops it immediately. “Fucking heavy as bricks. Someone get over here and grind this shit up.”
This man supplied the vast majority of Elion’s contracts. Stringy bile claws its way up from Elion’s gut and swims in the back of his throat.
Rettinger takes the pack, dumping two spines into a bowl. An attendant woman in a red dress emerges from a doorway and whisks the bowl away, almost running.
“I want two triple drinks, the ones I ordered last night,” Drumeth shouts to the room, then turns to Elion. “Now get out of here, you pervert, this is my red room. The marcs will be in your account minus the delay fee.”
Back out in the elevator, in silence, Elion ponders the dead woman in his bed again.
Elion technically works for himself as a transporter, smuggler, or bounty hunter, but everyone in the business thinks he works for the Pearl. Clandestine contracts mean all the wrong people know about them. The Pearl is rumored to be owned by the No
rthrite council, although such a link could never be proven. The Supreme Emperor of the Pearl, an egotistical asshole, is probably only a puppet of the Northrite, allowed to run things his way as long as he obeys and offers services and goods the Northrite cannot directly connect to their name.
After shoving his way through the casino and streets to the port where he left his cruiser, Elion locates his ship.
The iris doors are already wide open.
Someone must know the big pack is still inside and has come looking for it.
Elion unslings his unassuming case, flicks on its power, and steps inside his ship without a sound. Two gray this time.
“Why do the ghosts of haunted men feed on brain tissue?” he whispers.
The cargo bay is dark and empty. Maybe the intruder is already gone.
Something rushes past, hits him, knocks him over and slices his abdomen. A tearing sound arises in his gut.
Elion swings his case around and clicks the trigger.
A man collapses, lying still.
Elion tears his larger pack away from the thief and kicks a sonic saber aside.
The thief mumbles and shakes his head, rises and stumbles out of the ship. He will develop skin rashes and blisters, vomiting and diarrhea, headaches and brain fog in one to two hours and be dead in a month from loss of immune function.
Elion examines the gash on his abdomen, where the thief’s sonic saber ripped his skin and muscle apart. A bit of spleen peeks out from the cave of his body wall.
Looks like sausage in a blood stew.
Biting pain washes across his midsection. The cargo bay seems to tilt and vibrate.
After tearing open a med-gear compartment, Elion plasters an adhering bandage over the wound. Blood coagulates. His skin tugs and pulls together. Burns. He slides down with his back against the bulkhead. It will take a week or so, but with the tensile antibiotic bandage, the wound should heal fine.
He’s supposed to deliver the remainder of the spines soon, to some place he’s never been before: a drifting moon where the Frontiersmen have settled. Drumeth is selling some of the harvested spines to someone there for an enormous profit.
Elion crawls on all fours into his pilot seat, his breathing shallow and raspy. He fires up the reactor engines.
***
Elion guides his stealth cruiser into twilight as the red giant sun of Jasilix settles to a red slash on the horizon below. The silver of the quick sea shimmers like an ocean of blood.
A sea of mercury. How do people even live here?
“Maybe they’re all hiding from something,” the ghost girl in his head answers.
She hovers out in space, displayed on his monitor, her brown hair and green cloak lifting in a soft but impossible breeze. She passes through the ship’s walls, the seat. She’s inescapable. Dead girl floating in space, dead girl sitting in his ship, dead girl standing behind him.
Dead girl living in his head.
Elion closes his eyes, throwing back a green bottle. Empty. He crushes its alloy walls in his fist and retreats to the shower station, barely enough space for him to fit. Lukewarm water streams out as he undresses. The sealed wound on his abdomen releases a dull wave of pain. He detaches his v-rim and downs a shot of cold accelerant drink, the taste a muddling of old socks spiced with coffee grounds.
“You won’t find out why you murdered her out here,” the ghost girl says.
“I’m just trying to stay alive. I need payment, marcs, to do that.”
“You’re always a survivor, no matter what happens to others.”
Elion’s knees give way. He drops in the shower, rubbing liquid soap over his long hair, face, chest, and into his eyes, which burn like acid. “I don’t want to talk right now.”
“When?”
“After I get caught up.”
A smack sounds on the overhead speaker.
After re-adhering his v-rim, Elion wipes foam from his stinging eyes and studies translucent images on a virtual screen. A small group of nayaks, small space creatures like blobs with four sets of wings, smash against the front of the ship. He will have to wash the outside or people will think he was playing chicken with a crowd of Angelwians.
He shrugs and slides back under cold water.
It took Elion longer to depart for Jasilix than planned, even considering his inebriated delay. A Strider from the Pearl would not bring him directly to Jasilix. The Strider seemed afraid when Elion mentioned the moon by name. Instead, the Elemiscist Strode Elion and his ship to Jasilix’s neighboring planet, a remarkable phenomenon Elion still has never realized is happening as he sits on an antigravity chair inside his ship. One minute the Pearl appears on the ship’s monitors, the next minute a terrain of desert.
Then Elion flew the remainder of the way but took a circuitous route given the nayaks and skoalers in the area, creatures that have been around for millions of years, monstrosities that plague areas of space, hot zones typically in the vicinity of drifting planets. Creatures ubiquitous in the galaxy, surviving in the vacuum of space, but which gather in territorial regions before moving, following some ancient migratory pattern to live by whatever means such creatures need to survive, their movements determining trade routes between the outer planets.
Nayaks would be crushed by a small cruiser like his, an insect on the windshield of even a standard hover racer, but skoalers are enormous and known to bring down even massive warship carriers. Skoalers are rarely seen up close, as most ships don’t survive the encounter, and legends speak of all different appearances: dragons with beating wings of fire, blobs of sludge that engulf anything they come into contact with, two-dimensional specters that can disappear and reappear in an instant and consume an entire passenger cruiser.
Elion’s never seen a skoaler, and he never intends to. Every autopilot system knows to avoid them.
After traversing Jasilix’s atmosphere, Elion virtually steers his cruiser to the mountainous region beyond the mercury sea and lands atop a peak concealed from a distance, a peak bathed in swarming clouds. The mountain appears split asunder as if from an explosion in the center, the outside peeled open like the husk of dead desert corn. There’s nothing he could mistake about this drop point. He exits his ship, waits, and yawns, yawning so much his jaw feels as if it will dislocate.
Within an hour, a slouched figure in a gray and blue suit and closed visor emerges from the mist, from the inner regions, holding out a hand. No words are spoken. The dealing of these spines is always shaky, but this makes Elion shudder.
Too many Elemiscists in such a short time.
The person’s outstretched fingers clench like hooks. Impatience. The package was already paid for. Elion hands over the pack. The buyer is gone in moments, and Elion’s ship’s doors open. He climbs inside, his hands shaking.
A monitor flashes red. A waiting contract.
Elion clicks through some security checks, and a document opens in his v-rim vision, one that will disappear after it’s read and denied or accepted. He skims it, ignoring the details.
The Northrite?
Elion took a direct contract from them several years ago, and the pay was phenomenal. He cannot ignore a request from them, or he might end up never working for the Pearl again. Or end up dead.
Now they want him to investigate the poisoning of a king on some planet with a sea in its atmosphere.
Elion grabs a silver bottle from a closet. Downs all the smoky liquid in a few swallows.
“Moving on to the next job already?” the girl asks. “For the Northrite?” She sits in the passenger seat, her eyes unblinking and vacant, her face a sunken skull, emaciated before her death.
Elion feels the alcohol start to swirl in his blood. A tingling in his head. The girl seems to fade, her voice less harsh, less real. He brings the reactor back up.
Jaycken
Jaycken exits the abandoned, leaning tower where he often eats now and closes a study-guide virtual screen on his v-rim. He sits on a cold bench carved into th
e cliffside at the edge of the gravel plateau and watches a line of Frontiersmen in their gray and royal blue suits carrying iron bars across their shoulders.
The burdened Frontiersmen struggle up a flight of shale stairs.
Wind stabs at Jaycken’s face with icy needles. He slurps beige goo out of a silver package, a sustenance the Frontiersmen eat a couple of times a day, which contains all the nutrients and calories a human body needs. It tastes like harvested dirt.
Weeks have passed since Jaycken and Kiesen arrived, having no real part in helping the Frontiersmen solve the galaxy’s mysteries, only studying physics and the properties of the elements, assisted by Slyth’s tutoring. Much less glamour and excitement than he first imagined.
At least he and Kiesen are in no danger as long as they can’t harness the elements’ powers. Kiesen is safe, and Jaycken hopes to soon uncover the secret of the beating sun.
From what Jaycken gathered, something is interfering with distant scanning technology, making most readings from the planets in the system with the beating sun useless or not returning anything of interest. So the Frontiersmen intend to perform manual grid searches on the planets, to find answers about the sudden shift in the sun, but they don’t have the numbers to fully man this station on Jasilix and perform the grid searches, thus why they are now recruiting heavily.
Bruan and Nadiri, the recruits who enlisted with Jaycken, slump down on the bench beside Jaycken. Bruan’s pale hair becomes a transected flag in the wind. Nadiri’s shorter brown hair wraps around her face.
Teschner, the stern female officer, and Ethanial, the friend of Jaycken’s dad, pace along the plateau, eyeing the training soldiers. Another man, shorter, broader, brown hair atop his head, white on the sides, walks with them.
“Are they ready?” the new man asks, his hands on his hips.
“No, Undersecretary Marwyn, there are not enough who will be able to withstand five gees,” Teschner says, arms clasped behind her back, her posture unyielding. “These can’t even harness the most rudimentary ability of the Sculptors. Our seekers in the port city are assessing every street magician they find. We need to bring them all in and test them. These Frontiersmen soldiers have no control of their Will.”
The Forgotten Sky Page 12
