Awakenings

by C. D. Espeseth

  He grabbed the rolled length of hose off the hook. “New one!” Jonah called to Branson. He threw the hose down on the ground and thrust it forward. The hose uncoiled as it ran out, Branson caught his end and connected it the grenado launcher. “Go!” he called back.

  Jonah connected his end and flipped the pressure valve back on. The hose sprang to life as if it had just received an electric shock. “Load!” Jonah called to Branson who responded immediately by grabbing the next man-size tube of grenados and slotting it onto the side of the launcher.

  Jonah ran back to his position, and grabbed the twin handles and flipped the release catch. The launcher clicked through degrees satisfyingly as the entire machine swivelled on the big steel disc it sat upon. He locked it at one-eighty pointing directly south and flipped the incline release, glanced at the spinning cups at the top of the sights to check for wind speed. He compensated and locked the launching tube into position. “Acquired!” he yelled. “Firing!” He depressed the thumb trigger.

  THWUMP, THWUMP, THWUMP...

  The launcher spat out the fat grenados at seventy rounds per minute. Jonah watched the arc of giant spheres as they sailed through the air and, before he knew it, the thumb triggers pressure went limp and a flash of compressed air shot from the end of the launcher tube.

  “Reload!” he yelled, and Branson smacked the cartridge release. The great tube made a funny THOOMP sound as it jumped somewhat limply out of the launcher and to the side. Branson already had the next tube on his shoulder and slotted it in. He pulled the release down into lock and patted Jonah on the shoulder twice, signalling they were good to go.

  Commander Naseen raised a long stick with a red flag on it as she sat astride her horse apparently having seen enough.

  Jonah took his hands off the launcher’s handles and gave the cut signal to Sheba who flipped the valve rod to open on the compressor allowing it to vent access pressure while it idled. She closed the furnace door and choked the air flow to the fire. She gave Jonah a thumbs up, signalling they were safe to leave ready stations.

  All four of them lined up in front of their wagon and watched the other wagon crews of the Black Rain follow suit as they secured their wagons for inspection.

  Bamu let out a long deep grunt of annoyance from her position behind them and gave Fin a bump with her massive head. Sheba grinned as Fin rolled his eyes at the great shaggy beast. “Enough of that you stinky monster!”

  “She’s not a monster. She likes you,” Sheba said from the side of her mouth.

  Branson chuckled under his breath.

  “Something funny, soldiers?” Commander Naseen snapped at them.

  “No, ma’am,” they said in unison.

  “You’re gods-damn right there isn’t. What sort of shit-show was that?” Commander Naseen stood watching them, hands on her hips, looking incredulously at them. “Move the hose, then reposition! How many times do you have to hear that?”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” they all said.

  “Run it again! You’re bloody lucky Shi is a good shot.”

  Branson elbowed Jonah as he hid a grin.

  “I have to say, I felt a bit useless with that steam-bow thing,” Fin said looking at the grenado launcher longingly.

  “If we get rushed by those Syklan monstrosities we’ll need every bolt you can fire off with it,” Branson said. “I’d trade you in a heartbeat if I was big enough to lug that thing around. That new new model of yours is a beauty. Those pistons attached to either side of the recurves must have a draw weight of over a thousand pounds! That’ll punch straight through whatever metal dresses they are wearing. Besides, you don’t even need to cock it. Those pistons do the job for you. Plus you can flip the scope onto the top to take targets at some serious range. How many shots can you get off in a minute.”

  “Around twenty-five, maybe up to thirty-five if the targets are tightly packed.” Fin shrugged.

  “Exactly,” Sheba said, patting Fin on the arm, “we need a big handsome bull like you to keep the rest of us safe. Don’t we Bamu?”

  The yamuuk huffed in agreement.

  Commander Naseen rode back to her position, held up the amber flag for attention. “Now we have five more before we get to try this whole thing again on the water where we also get to add combat loading and disembarkation, so get this right, or you’ll be swimming home.”

  Jonah could almost hear his muscles protesting, but he fell into line like a good soldier dreading the fact that when this was all over his real work would just be starting.

  “Enemy sighted. Wheel to three hundred twenty! Distance two hundred and twenty yards! Fire when ready!” The Commander’s orders rang out.

  They scrambled to obey, and the practised movements began to become routine. Hose first, then turn, he said to himself. This time they were in position much faster and were third to finish firing their tube of practice grenados.

  The rest of his day progressed like clockwork: drill and repeat, drill and repeat until the four of them started to look like a well-coordinated unit.

  There was satisfaction in this new technologically superior weaponry, but Jonah couldn’t help missing the satisfaction he had when firing his bow. There wasn’t a time when his mind floated within the void of nothingness he had grown to love about the bow and foot-bow he had used. Eventually, he would become so tired that he couldn’t think about anything else, but it wasn’t the same.

  As if echoing his thoughts, his back gave a funny spasm as he tried to sit down and he groaned with the effort.

  “How is it that everything hurts at once? Most of me isn’t even moving anymore?” Jonah sighed aloud.

  He heard quite a few sympathetic grunts from around the table as he looked down hungrily at his food.

  His entire body felt like lead, and his hands still shook from the vibrations of the firing handles. It was even hard to hold his spoon straight, though he found a way to wolf down the stew which tasted better than anything he could remember. There are fresh carrots in here, he thought to himself in wonder. Carrots, potatoes and some other strange root vegetables called turnips. It was absolutely delicious.

  Branson hadn’t said a word since they sat down. Come to think of it, Jonah couldn’t remember when Branson had gone silent today. The hard old man looked somewhat pained, and he kept rubbing his shoulder.

  “Is that the shoulder you carry the tubes on?” Jonah asked, trying to smile but knew it was a weak effort.

  Branson nodded and kept eating.

  “Maybe we can figure out a way–” Jonah started.

  “I’ll get used to it. I’ll just be sore for a few days is all,” Branson grumbled. “Just need my bunk.”

  It was then Fin sidled up beside him. In the intervening days since Fin’s almost-assassination, the levity and easy manner between the three of them had evaporated. They watched each other warily looking for signs of betrayal.

  Branson’s gut rumbled on Jonah’s other side almost on cue as the stress of their uneasy alliance was getting to him.

  Yet they had to keep up appearances.

  “Hey, big man,” Jonah said with as much camaraderie as he could muster in his state of exhaustion. “What’s the news these days?”

  Fin showed no signs of the stress and his role as a happy-go-lucky soldier-by-chance persona was once again flawless. “Nothing especially interesting to a pair of creaky bastards like yourselves.”

  Fin’s smile looked so genuine it almost hurt Jonah to look on it. He had genuinely like the man Fin had pretended to be, and he missed whatever it was he had called a friend.

  “I’ll give you creaky, you bouncing turd.” Branson held up a fist in mock anger, and Jonah had to commend his old friend on his own acting skills. To anyone watching the three of them, nothing was different, but Jonah could see it, the paranoia and anxiety behind Branson’s grizzled features.

  It was then that a woman walked through the mess hall doors and Fin elbowed Jonah, whispering, “You’ll want to see this.”r />
  She was holding something wrapped in a cloth to her chest.

  “Marco?” the woman called, looking terrified yet determined. She was a local woman, Kenzian from the look of her and she spoke in halting Kutsal. “Marco, are you here?”

  “I am.” A rough and barrel-chested man stood from his table looking confused and quite annoyed.

  Jonah recognised him as another of the Black Rain who had been reassigned to the same role as Fin. Marco was a seasoned veteran, scars all over his thick forearms.

  “Gretta? What the hell are you doing here?” Marco called harshly over the now quiet mess hall.

  Gretta looked nervous, she saw the eyes of nearly a hundred hardened soldiers watching her.

  “Did you set this up?” Jonah hissed at Fin. “What the hell is she holding? Is that some sort of explosive!?”

  “Shut up and watch,” Fin hissed back, his big hand clamped down on Jonah’s arm to keep him seated.

  “Gretta?” Marco asked again. “Now I like you girl. We had fun, but I paid fair and square just like the rules said.”

  “I know,” Gretta said once again in her barely recognisable Kutsal. “But new rules. Empress rules. Must keep now. This yours.”

  “What are you blathering about? I’m bloody tired. I’ve been slogging through the mud all day and don’t have time for this,” Marco growled and waved a dismissive hand at the woman. “Go back to the whore-house.”

  There were snickers from around the mess hall aimed at both the distraught woman and at Marco.

  “I no go! They say no!” Gretta was angry now, embarrassed and crying.

  “Fin!” Branson ground his teeth in anger. “How could you, that poor woman, what is the–”

  Fin stared at them and pointed back to Greta.

  “What are you talking about?” Marco stood again, angry now, and embarrassed, himself, at being the centre of this spectacle. He strode towards Greta, looking intent on escorting the woman out himself if he had to.

  “This your fault. This your baby!” Greta turned the bundle around, and a wail of shock sprang from the surprised infant as it was rudely pulled away from his mother’s warm chest.

  The snickering and whispering stopped as if severed by a blade. The eyes of a hundred hardened soldiers stared at a child that was meant to be impossible. Marco, like everyone else in the Black Rain, like nine out of ten people born in the empire, had been tested again and again by the logistics officers, and all had been declared sterile.

  “What did you say?” Marco had stopped in mid-step as if he had walked into a wall, but his now soft words were confused and unbelieving.

  “I say, this your baby,” Gretta repeated not understanding why the room full of Kutsals now looked at her as if she were holding a miracle.

  “It bloody is as well!” A grizzled old woman artillery officer pointed at the baby in shock. “Look at its face, Marco. I known you since you was a babe yourself and he’s your spittin’ image. Those eyes sure didn’t come from his mumma.”

  Marco stepped towards Gretta as if in a dream.

  It was the look on Marco’s face that caused Jonah’s mind to reel. He remembered what it was like to see his child for the first time.

  Images of his daughter’s face, Amber, crashed through him. The soft touch of her cheek against his finger, her too-big eyes in her pudgy face. The utter innocence and purity that shone out of her.

  All of it snuffed out by Ilene. The slash across Amber’s tiny body. The redness of her blood against her little white dress.

  His hand stabbing down, again and again.

  “It’s all right, Jonah,” Fin said softly beside him, holding him firmly in an embrace as his heart threatened to pound its way out of his chest. “It’s not like that. Watch.”

  Marco reached with his thick hands trembling as he touched the impossible face of his son. A tiny hand reached from beneath the swaddling and grabbed his calloused finger, and Marco’s knees buckled. Tears streaked unabashedly down his scarred face and into his unkempt black beard. He laughed softly and looked at Gretta with agonising hope. “My child?”

  Gretta was smiling. “Yes,” she said simply and gently held the boy out to his father.

  Now it was Marco’s turn to tremble, and the entire mess hall trembled with him.

  Gretta positioned Marco’s muscled arms around the babe, “Like this,” she said, and Marco watched it all in wonder.

  No one ate, their meals forgotten, as they watched one of their own cradle a child which had only been held by clan mothers or the Blood back in Eura. Never had a grunt like Marco ever had such an honour given to him so freely.

  “I’m a father,” Marco said, still not quite believing it. “I’m a rutting father!” He finally looked around the room, and Jonah doubted any man could have smiled more broadly.

  “Yeah you are!” one of the Black Rain cried, and whistling and cheers began to erupt all around them.

  “Gretta, you don’t have to worry. You’re one of us now, part of Clan Carpi de Rasmus. Hells, you’re royalty as far as we’re concerned.” Marco was talking quickly, trying to explain how clans looked after each other back in Eura, how she would never have to go back to any whore house ever again.

  It was then Fin pointed to the man in a white logistics officer’s uniform who had been watching from the far end of the hallway. The joy worn by nearly every face in the room was not shared on his. The logistics officer watched for a moment longer and then ran off into the city and Jonah had no doubt he ran straight to Prince El’ Amin.

  “Marco is not the only one who I sensed had become fertile,” Fin said in Jonah’s ear. “Dozens of our fellow soldiers will find they too can sire children. Distance from Eura has been good for us.”

  “And it changes everything,” Jonah concluded for him. He saw how things would begin to play out, and the bonds of Empire would soon be sorely tested with or without him. “Did you do this?” he asked again.

  “I may have made sure Marco visited a few brothels when we first took Dawn,” Fin admitted. “He was the first I felt change during our time here. No more parents should ever have to endure what you and Ilene did, and if we let the Blood continue to exert their perverse control over us, men like Marco will not be allowed to have the joy we have just witnessed here. That logistics officer will report what he has seen, and Marco and Gretta will be put at the top of the list for ‘urgent medical treatments’, just like Ilene was given.”

  “Stop talking,” Jonah said through clenched teeth.

  Fin looked him in the eyes, “I am committed to this. Have no doubts. The word is already spreading amongst our forces on this side of the Barrier Sea. Change is coming, regardless of what we do.”

  “I know,” Jonah said and grabbed Fin’s forearm in a firm embrace. He nodded towards Marco and Gretta who were now surrounded by cooing soldiers on all sides. “Can we shut up about it now and get those two somewhere safe?”

  “Finally someone talking sense,” Branson grunted with a shake of his head.

  Fin and Jonah grinned at each other and joined the ring of well-wishers around the new father and mother, knowing that they had just taken their first steps towards tearing down an empire.

  14 - Nothing Serious

  One of the strange eccentricities throughout Salucia is the existence of stone monolith circles within each of our current nations, yet we have no satisfactory explanation of who created them.

  While many attribute these wonders to the Jendar, the Chroniclers have recently found evidence within one of their many relics that these stones predate the Jendar culture.

  Stories and myths still survive today, of the travelling druids who coerced the forces of nature to do their bidding. They used rocks, trees, earth, and even animals in each of the stories. And in one particular myth, common in Aluvik, a druid summons the healing powers of ‘the great stone guardians of the wood’, which many have interpreted as the famous stone circle of Havenon, within the heart of the Aluvikan forest.


  Some specimens, especially those in the Asgurdian Belt mountain range, still have runes etched into the stones which match none of the Jendar writings we have found to date.

  What purpose the stones may have held still remains a mystery, and thus should be considered for further study – especially since one such ring exists upon the new Academy’s grounds and another across the harbour bay from it.

  - Request for Academic Study Funding by Henri Callahan to the Council of Historical Artefacts and Research. Twenty years before the start of the Union Wars

  Naira

  The Royal Dockyard, The Academy, New Toeron, Bauffin

  The sun shone through the gap in the clouds, and the sunlight bathed Naira in its warm glow as she reached the top of the long trek, nicknamed Black Fin’s Run, up from the navy harbour.

  The nickname, Naira had learned, came from the propensity of curses directed at Orcanus, the black orca servant of Lady Death, known for dragging sailors down to their deaths, and a sort of demi-god to those who lived a life at sea. The set of imposing, slightly black and bluish stone steps, which, when it rained, did look remarkably similar to the skin of orcas, only fuelled encouragement for the nickname.

  Naira turned around and looked at the soaring white sails of the galleys she and her fellow initiates had just moored at the Academy Harbour. They had been practising giving orders to the crew, to see how the operations were meant to go. The crew knew their business so well Naira doubted they needed orders, but her teachers wanted the routine of it to be instinctual, so they had practised most of the day, over and over again.

  Naira smiled, then, as a gust of wind brought the smell of the sea with it.

  She was exhausted, but she was happy. The certainty of it was odd for her. Naira had finally arrived at the place she was meant to be. The place she had worked so hard to get to, the place she had dreamed of going to. Now it was a reality, and better than anything else, it had turned out to be amazing. One day she would have a ship of her own to take where the wind commanded and patrol the seas of Salucia, keeping the shores and ports safe, keeping merchant lanes free of pirates and coming to the aid of the Nine Nations when called upon.