Born in Darkness

by Thomas Farmer

  Lelantos raised his head, looking out over the valley at the foot of Rivka's palace. A red flag, barely visible as far away as it was, waved above his target. He nodded once, picked up his rifle and pressed the scope to his eye.

  Rivka watched him exhale, all tension leaving his muscles. First one shot rang out. Another followed barely a quarter second later. He relaxed, lowering the rifle back to the table as Rivka pulled up the footage of the target.

  The imagery streamed in quickly. The top of the recording was taken up by the red of the flag. At the bottom of the image floating above her arm were two stacked boxes, no larger than a person's torso each. In slow motion, slowed down even more dramatically then Lelantos's own senses, a bullet crashed into the bottom box. Nothing happened for a moment, then the minor explosive stored inside it detonated, set off by the shock from the bullet.

  The explosion of the first box sent the second one into the air. It rose perhaps twice its own height before another bullet came streaking in and detonated the explosive it contained. The area beneath the target had been cleared some time ago, so the smoldering bits of metal and slow-burning powder were free to fall wherever the wind took them.

  She had typed “EXCELLENT” into the holographic interface by the time Lelantos turned back around. He removed the weapon's magazine, cleared the breech, and engaged the safety before leaving the weapon on the table again.

  His eyes fell on the display above her arm and his mouth twitched into a smile. The movement was jerky, probably, she thought a result of how quickly he was processing information. His mouth turned upwards into a smile a second time and he held it there for a few seconds.

  “ARE YOUREADY TO END?” she typed, realizing the typo only after the message scrolled past.

  Lelantos nodded once. His hand shot to a pocket in his robe. A moment passed as he adjusted the controls on the device wired to the intravenous collars around his upper arms, thighs, and neck.

  When he spoke again, his words were long, drawn out. Everything took two or three times longer than it should. “Is that acceptable?”

  Rivka nodded, then smiled. “That was more than acceptable, Second Lord,” she replied, glad to be able to use her voice again, rather than a text-based interface. “As a matter of fact, I think your ability to cope with the dilation effect has improved remarkably in the last week alone.”

  “I've been spending a lot of time under. It's peaceful,” he replied. The first few words were still a little drawn out, but by the end of the sentence, he was speaking normally. “The real training starts soon enough.”

  Rivka nodded. In some ways, she was reluctant to part ways with him for the final phases of the Project. He volunteered for the job three years ago. That alone was enough to garner her respect, but the fact that he volunteered even after seeing his predecessor lose her mind spoke volumes about the sort of person he was, or had been.

  The drugs changed Second Lord Lelantos in many ways. Some were improvements. He was the single most patient Technocrat that Rivka ever met, capable of waiting hours for the smallest things to happen. She had never seen him lose his temper or even show the slightest rise of negative emotion since the treatments started.

  The physical changes were the most obvious. Early on, Lelantos lost his hair—all of his hair—and it had never grown back. He replaced the hair on top of his head with tattooed designs reflecting his proudest accomplishment—surviving the Project. Below those tattoos, however, Lelantos had a fairly gaunt face which he emphasized with dark makeup on his cheeks and lips. Thanks to the drugs he took to slow his perception of time, his metabolism ran at a rate far in excess of normal.

  Several weeks remained before the Council session where they were all to officially unveil their Titans to the system, then, as Lelantos said, the real training would start. The six of them had to learn to work as a team before assaulting the mastigas ship. Rivka could not be more proud of his accomplishments, but that also meant she felt like she was sending a son off to war without her.

  The others, more jaded in their experience, probably did not feel as strongly about their charges, she presumed. Many of them held seats on the Council when the mastigas first appeared thirty years ago. Perhaps that experience, reading about the mastigas and their ferocity, was enough for them to understand the danger they posed, and the very real risk of losing their Titans and failing completely. For First Lord Rivka, however, the feeling was much more immediate.

  She might have occupied her seat for scarcely more than five years, only slightly longer than Project Titan's own existence, but she rose to her position through blood and fire. The mastigas landed a force on her planet, then belonging to First Lord Diomedes. It was the furthest they ever came. Her Hexarch at the time left orders with her to oversee Kipos's army, save as many people as she could, and push the mastigas off the planet.

  Thousands of people died before the mastigas could be repulsed. When she returned to Diomedes's chambers, she found the Hexarch dead in his chair. In five years, she thought she might be able to forget some of the details of that moment, but she never had. The way he had been slumped in his chair, she thought he might have dozed off. It would have been unlike him, but he also had not slept well in the days between the mastigas's landing and her return.

  The glass on his desk, her desk now, had been empty. Chemical analysis found a dozen different poisons, mostly sedatives, mixed into the alcohol. His suicide note had filled in the rest of his thoughts.

  That note had also done something else. Signed as a Living Will, the document named her as his successor. Over their history, that was an unusual way to do things, but three of the six on the Council had found their seats that way. Diomedes's Will left her Kipos and his entire corporate holdings, as was common for anyone rising from Second to First Lord.

  His Will had also included a small box with no key or apparent latch. The note it came with said it would open “in due time” and instructed her not to tamper with it in any way before then. In five years, it never opened, and even now simply sat on a shelf in her office a floor above where she and Lelantos were training that day.

  “Have you met the others?” she asked, returning her thoughts to the present.

  Lelantos looked up from the holographic screen above his wrist. The pastel blue interface was blank on her side, but she knew from long experience that he would be checking the levels of the various chemicals that made up the chronodrug. He did that, methodically, after every use for two years.

  After a moment, he looked up at her and smiled. His features were relaxed, at least as relaxed as they ever were. She remembered a man, Kiposian militia like everyone else on her planet, who came to her years ago. He survived the mastigas attack, but it let him with a heart full of rage and hate. Lelantos was no longer that man, and there were days, like today, that Rivka wondered if she actually saved his life by letting him join the Project.

  Now a calm, meditative expression was his default. He opened his mouth to speak, still coming down from the chronodrug. “Panatakis, yes, and I corresponded with Helena this morning, but no one else. I enjoyed meeting Second Lord Panatakis, his view of the world is quite literally a world of difference from anything I could have ever imagined. Helena... How do I put this...”

  “Unnerves you?” Rivka offered.

  Lelantos nodded, dismissing the holo interface. “Yes, exactly. I can't put my finger on it, but yes. She said she had to deal with a lot of changes during the Project, so I suppose I can understand,” he tapped the steel collar around his neck that dispensed the most potent of the chemicals, “but there's something in her manner, even in text, that would have made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end if I had any.”

  He paused a moment and quirked a hairless eyebrow. “I take it you've met her?”

  “Only in passing, and only once, but you're right. There was something about her that made me feel uneasy. I've got nothing but respect for First Lord Aegesander, but I know what I put you though,
Lelantos.”

  He nodded and grinned. “And look at me,” he said, smiling wider. “I'm almost sane these days.”

  Rivka, despite the subject, laughed. “That can't be completely true.”

  “Can't it?” His grin never faded.

  “You still work for me, after all.”

  Lelantos laughed. “Of course I do. Do you know the things I've seen since you talked me into getting my brain pumped full of chemicals?”

  “I can't imagine.”

  “Sure you can. Just think of everything here,” he waved at the room, “but very slow. Dust dancing on the wind for hours or the beat of a bird's wing. I just can't hear colors like Second Lord Panatakis.”

  “You've got a point. Still, I can't help but wonder what Aegesander did to Helena beyond her implants.”

  “I asked her, for what it's worth, and she said she never went through anything, quote, 'terribly traumatizing.' Just a lot of training and getting used to using computers with her mind, same as Panatakis. Her eyes, at least, still work right.”

  Rivka settled back, leaning against a nearby table. “I spoke to First Lord Enyalios about his Titan the other day. Apparently he's had some setbacks.”

  Lelantos frowned. “Setbacks?”

  She nodded and a veil of sadness fell across her mind. “Apparently he lost another candidate.”

  “Damn. And so close to the end of the Project?”

  “So it would seem,” she replied. Rivka took a moment to cross the room to the balcony. Unlike many of the Hexarchs, who lived in the same palace their predecessors occupied, Rivka had a new one constructed away from the capital city. The old palace, Diomedes's palace, she converted into a headquarters for her planetary militia.

  After the mastigas attacked, and she assumed the mantle of Hexarch, she mandated that every able bodied adult be issued a weapon and trained. In short order, that militia acquired a small fleet of cruisers that patrolled her orbitals. The mastigas had not moved in five years, but—and with that thought she looked back at Second Lord Lelantos—if they ever did, Kipos was ready. The city was chaos, but it was her chaos, which had a calming effect all its own.

  Here, however, things were quiet. Her air filters were specifically programmed not to filter out the complex chemicals that gave the forest its smell, and she breathed deeply of that earthy aroma.

  He turned a quizzical expression in her direction. “Is everything alright?”

  She shook her head. “Just thinking of the cost of this Project so far. First Tisiphone, then what it's done to you, and who knows what happened to Helena.”

  “Panatakis will never be normal,” Lelantos quipped. “And Tritogenes. Does anyone know what exactly it is he's done?”

  Rivka shook her head. “I've got no idea. Early on, there was talk that he was building a facility somewhere out in the Kuiper belt, but a year into the Project, that entire facility went dark.”

  “You don't think he failed, do you?”

  She laughed. “Tritogenes? No, I don't think that man knows how to fail, and even if he did, I met the person he put in charge of the day-to-day affairs. Second Lord Pallasophia has got a little of Selene in her. I almost expect to see her standing up there with you and the others when the time comes.”

  “I just hope he's had better luck than Enyalios.”

  Rivka's lips drew into a tight line. “Second Lord Nikos, Enyalios's last Titan-Candidate wasn't the first one to perish, either. I always felt he was pushing them too hard.”

  Lelantos nodded and ran a hand across his head. “Yeah,” he sympathized. Then, “what? Ten dead? Twenty?”

  Rivka nodded. “Something like that. Sad.”

  Lelantos sighed, a sharp exhalation. “Crashed terrible is what it is.”

  “Anyway,” Rivka said after a minute's tense silence. Her thoughts were going places she would rather them not be. It was hard enough losing one prospective Titan. To think of losing over a dozen and half that many support staff was disheartening. She had seen worse, especially in the days before being given the Hexarchate of Kipos, but that had been war. To lose that many to the Project before it was even done was more than she wanted to contemplate.

  She strode back into the room. “Will you be ready for another test this evening? I've got a new reaction drill I would like to try.”

  Lelantos nodded. “Of course. See you in a few hours, First Lord.”

  ***

  First Lord Rivka's office sat at the top of her palace's tallest tower not out of any attempt to lord her status over the general population of Kipos, but rather out of appreciation for the local landscape. Even then, “tower” was only accurate in the most literal of terms. The spire rose a mere four stories above the ground, offering bedrooms and workrooms for herself, Second Lord Lelantos, and a few of Rivka's highest officials.

  What gave the tower its height, however, was the very landscape where Rivka built the palace. The bulk of the complex sat at the base of a mountain, nestled between two small foothill ridges. By contrast, the place's living area climbed the face of the mountain itself, eventually culminating in her personal tower which jutted up from the very top.

  Her suite consisted of the usual amenities, a bedroom and sitting room connected on one side to her workroom and on the other to a small kitchenette. The part that Rivka considered to be most “hers,” however, was the vast wraparound balcony. Most of the time she left it open, allowing Kipos's cool mountain breezes to permeate her living area. Ultrasonic devices hidden here and there kept birds out of the suite proper while still allowing them to land on the outer railings of the balcony.

  Automated security and a fiercely loyal security staff protected those balconies as well, which set even Rivka's security-focused mind at ease. They also did so from a series of hidden points, out of her sight, allowing First Lord Rivka at least the illusion of privacy.

  When she stepped out of the tower's lift, Rivka first went to the exact same spot she inspected every day for the last five years.

  She kept clothes two places in her bedroom. The closet held her everyday wear, including three sets of Hexarch's robes and a variety of underclothes. In the back, she also kept a number of older robes from her days a Second and even a Third Lord. Nothing older than that remained, having been long-since recycled.

  The other place she kept clothes was a massive wooden armoire off to the side. Locked in it, Rivka kept her finest robe, a shimmering garment of royal purple silk embroidered with real precious metal wire and silk couching. She took it out of the armoire once a year or so to add some small detail here or there to commemorate her proudest achievements that year. Including her elevation, the garment had only ever been worn once.

  Along with that robe were some of her finest jewels and a few other things of great personal importance. The very top shelf held exactly three items. The first, despite the traditional lack of importance placed on family ties by most Hexarchs, was a holo of Rivka with her parents taken on the day of her elevation. A similar holo sat on her desk, but that one was the official, posed picture. In this one, Rivka's father and one of her mothers fussed over her brand new purple robe while her other mother tried desperately not to glare at the three of them for taking so long.

  Next to the holo sat Diomedes's suicide note, rolled into a tight tube so that no one could read it. Opposite the note was the little lock box Diomedes himself left her. Small, and painted an oddly pleasant shade of turquoise, it contained something her former Hexarch desperately wanted her to have, but in five years she had yet to figure out how to open the frustrating thing.

  So, every day, Rivka checked on it just in case the lock was time sensitive, and every day it simply sat there, inert.

  She nodded at the box and closed the door, going to the normal closet next. There, she stripped off the multi-layered working garment she thought of as her “Project Titan Robe,” and threw the morning's underclothes into a basket to be taken to the wash later. At some point, the robe she just removed needed
to be professionally cleaned, but as long as she considered it a working garment, she could write off the dirt and oil stains as simply part of the charm of doing her own work.

  Rivka briefly considered simply starting work as she was, but outside her tower, autumn waned and the mountain air blew in with just a little more chill than she found comfortable on bare skin. The shirt and pants she put on instead would do enough to keep the chill away. She had been born on Kipos, after all, and found the planet's cooler climate pleasant until the very depth of winter hit and froze everything solid.

  Before doing anything else, she went to her desk and withdrew a small tablet from inside a locked drawer. It projected a single-sided holo in the air, tuned so that it was only visible from a single, specific angle. Rivka also turned her back to the one spot in the room where her own security cameras could not see the display.

  Five years ago, she had to give up the majority of her old profession. It was not seemly for the Hexarch of Kipos to regularly meet with clients in a hidden garden, trading information and secrets like some people traded playing cards or miniatures. Her identity at that point had been “known” in certain circles, ultimately including Diomedes himself, which was how she came to be named in his Will in the first place, but no one one outside of those rather small circles knew who she was.

  Now, as Hexarch, everyone in the binary knew her face. In a way, she longed for those days again, but only very tangentially. Her life now was, while more complicated, vastly better than it ever was back then.

  However, despite her security staff knowing she did something clandestine with that particular tablet, none of them knew what. Rivka prided herself on having kept that particular secret. It was one of few she held onto.

  Before settling into her real work, she took a moment to peruse various messaging systems and private relays. Most days, that was all she did with that access. Rivka simply had no time for the sort of games she played before her elevation. However, every so often she had a day with a few minutes to spare, and so now she actually took the time to leave a few messages here and there.