Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  “You can eat it you doink.” Ephesus replied.

  Moses studied the boy behind the counter, then reached under his shirt for the knife that hung around his neck on a string. It was a gift from his father, many years old now, still sharp and well used. It was his most prized possession, the epitome of both his personal wealth, and his family’s investment in him. A gift that was both rich and symbolic, his induction into adult life with adult tools of his own.

  The owner’s son didn’t give the knife a second look as he took it. “Cube is all yours.” He said, and tossed the knife into a drawer that rattled with other knives. it was a last separation. Moses would go into the army with only what he was given. It felt, freeing.

  “We’ve enlisted.” He told his mother when she answered the cube.

  “Let me grab your father!” She said in a breathless voice.

  “We only have ten minutes.” Moses said. “Is he close?”

  “I don’t know.” She said.

  “Then let it be.” Moses said.He would have liked to find their father there, but it was unlikely he would be nearby. “Just, tell him that I love him, that we love him, and we wanted him to know. We’re sorry that we left without telling him.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “I’m sorry that I left without telling you too.” He told her.

  “Oh, it’s alright.” she choked. “You’re young. Can’t keep you cooped up here. You just remember what I told you, and… and… keep Ephesus safe.”

  “I will.” The call was voice only so he couldn’t tell if the sound he heard was his mother’s labored breathing, or just the wind. “We have to go Mom.” He said. “I just wanted you to know.”

  “I love you.” She said, and the way she said it made him sure she was crying. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I love you too.” He said. “Tell Dad.”

  Chapter 6: Charles // The Fete

  The fete was arranged by Locana. The ostensible purpose of the party was to rally the family behind Falkye and the war effort. It was an effort Charles thought shouldn’t be necessary. “She came to me first.” His mother told everyone at the party. A story he was getting tired of hearing as he nursed his drink and made his courtesies to the other members of dynastic society gathered for the event. “But why hold a party? I asked her. What good will a party do?” his mother’s story continued. “It’s the principle of the thing. That’s what she said! Not all of us can fight the invaders, but we need to remind everyone what’s at stake. We need to let Charles and Falkye, and all the rest of the corporation know that we’re behind them no matter what the cost.” What was at stake indeed.

  All around the Quinn manor, children ran screaming. Up stairs and through ball rooms, under the tables of platters and outside amongst the gardens of foreign plants drawn from colony guild libraries brought a century earlier. Fruit trees and flowers, all cultivated in beds specially treated to knock down the slightly higher than average acidity of Marain’s primitive soil. Where the children didn’t rampage, well dressed adults simpered at one another over cocktails, beer, and persaga tea. He had hoped, somehow, to miss the festivities but now he stood, listening to a girl his mother must have found suitable in some way attempting to tell him about some misadventure of some other society girl he neither knew nor cared for, while Ryker oversaw the formation of the human contingent of their army. There was work he could be doing in his office, there was work he could be doing in the factories, in the labs, in the field, and he was here listening to a lackwhit.

  “I had to force Charles to come.” He heard his mother say to one of the guests, another story he was growing tired of hearing. Her audience was a Knopf if he had to guess, from the slightly coarser quality of her dress, a carry over no doubt from the time, still recent, when they had been little more than wealthy commoners. She was perhaps a sister, or a daughter, possibly a cousin to the hairy old patriarch who’d won their place amongst the dynasties. “He wouldn’t even listen to me until I practically broke into his office to tell him he was attending. You’d think he didn’t support the war.”

  “He is lucky to have you to keep him straight.” The woman said. His mother huffed her agreement, and pride, Charles suspected. He’d been wrong about the Knopf though. Not a daughter. That brand of self righteousness could only belong to the mother of one of the brood running rampant through the manor. Charles made his excuses to the young woman who’d been struggling to make polite conversation through his brooding silence and escaped the manor’s sun room in search of one of a table servitor. His drink needed refilling.

  After his long confinement to the corporate building and corporate affairs, the fete with its concomitant display of each dynasties wealth and regalia was ridiculous. After an hour of vapid conversation he could remember why he’d avoided them in the past. All wealth on Marain flowed from the Quinns. Their corporation and their control of the automata ensured that. What little wealth the lower class settlers did produce was managed and maintained by settlement prospectors whose authority stemmed from corporate leases Charles put the signature on himself. The displays of wealth here served no discernible purpose except to distract and amuse those not there for the more serious purpose no one discussed but which lay hidden beneath every high society party like a trap buried in the ferns. All wealth might flow from the corporation’s hand, but power was a more complicated thing, a thing, his mother was fond of reminding him, that was often determined in the ball rooms and state rooms “of biddy old women like me.” Power, tenuous, fickle, difficult to obtain and harder to hold onto, and always, always, at the heart of every meeting between more than two members of high society, whether they knew it or not. As the eye of that storm, Charles preferred to keep out of such meetings when he could. Let them scramble for influence among themselves. He had the corporation. He also had an persistant mother with goals that did not align with his own.

  At the table servitor Charles surveyed the room, picking up snatches of conversation here and there, about the war, about economics, about the prospects of mines, and towns, and tech. Some women in a corner discussed the latest scandals amongst the family as though no one would dare listen to them, particularly if it was about them, and in a corner his uncle Darren Quinn was telling a small group that included Edward Avakoff about his expeditions into the tidal continent north east of the Mighty River’s headwaters where her sister river, the Sunset, divided the Pampas from the rest of Marain’s supercontinent.

  Charles was deciding between joining Darren’s group or going outside to try and escape the babble when a hand took his elbow.

  “You’re being antisocial Charlie.”

  “Was I?” Charles took a drink to hide the smile, telling himself it was the warmth of the alcohol that made him relax for the first time since arriving at the big family manor. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  The woman at his arm released him and took a few steps to face him. She looked him up and down, as though to make sure that he was in fact the person she imagined he was while he, for his part, admired her simple beauty. Simple, married, beauty, he thought, and felt the alcohol in his belly turn sour as it found the knot that lived there since her wedding.

  “Well you look to be in one piece.” She said.

  “And you.” He said. “Married life seems to be suiting you well Locana.” The words rang false in his own ears and he found his gaze unintentionally drawn towards Falkye who had found his way into their uncle’s circle, the husband of the woman in front of him.

  “Well you wouldn’t know would you.” She said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d been avoiding us since the wedding.”

  “I see plenty of Falkye.” Charles replied.

  “You know what I mean. No soirees, no parties, no dances or society of any kind for that matter until I convinced your mother to drag you to this fete.”

  “That was your idea.”

  She nodded and tossed long dark hair over her shoulder as though inviting h
im to challenge her decision. He gestured with his cup as though in a toast and took another sip. “We’re in a war.”

  “So we are.” She took him by the shoulder. “Come with me. Your mother was just looking for you and I told her I would bring you.”

  “She’s been following me like a servitor since I arrived, she’s showing me off like i’m supposed to be the entertainment for the fete.” He growled.

  “You are my dear.” Locana said with a light laugh. “You’re the CEO of the planet. Wherever you go, socially, the socialites flock to make their requests and demands. The only reason they haven’t been assaulting you all day is because your mother has been intercepting them at every approach. You should be grateful really, I saw Madam Henrietta Colesburn on her way to snatch you from the table you’d been entertaining with such hedonistic designs.”

  “I entertained no hedonistic designs on the table.” He said in a flat voice, amused all the same. Only Locana had ever been able to banter with him like this.

  “Only on the liquor.” She said. “Do you like it by the way? It’s from the Knopf vaults, the finest grass wine on the planet, and so, at least by every Knopf’s consideration, the finest liquor in the galaxy. You might consider extending some patronage to their business, if you’re in need of some favor in the upper strata of the dynasties. An easy currency, far easier than the stuff the Kidawas of Avakoffs will ask for. The Knopfs would be proud simply to have you buying it.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” He liked this part about her as well. The ease with which she navigated the political intrigues that crossed between corporate and society life. The small family favors, the peculiarities of this patriarch or that matriarch, the sons and daughters who showed promise in this and that field. She’d done it since they were no more than children growing up on the estate, keeping the peace when someone’s feelings were hurt or when the games got to rough. She would have made a far better CEO than he had, if she’d been a Quinn. If she’d been born a Quinn instead of just an execs daughter.

  “Oh Charles there you are!” His mother’s voice was a high frightened thing amongst the babble of the other guests. She approached and took Charles’ arm as though she intended to march him to his room as she had when he was a teenager despite the two feet of height he had over her even then. “I was looking all over for you. I thought one of those dreadful succubi from Colesburns or Karamaz families had found you. They have such ideas you know, far above their station.”

  “Tanya!” Locana said, swatting her shoulder. “They are your guests, same as all the rest.”

  “Oh I don’t care who hears.” Tanya Quinn said. “It’s my son I’m talking about. A dependent of a dependent isn’t fit material for my boy.”

  “Neither the Karamaz nor the Coleburns are sub dynasties.” Locana said in a low voice. She was herself from a family of “low birth” in the eyes of high society, an executive’s daughter, whose family remained outsiders even after her marriage to one of the Quinns. If she hadn’t practically grown up under Tanya Quinn’s roof she might have objected to that union too. That might have made for a different present, one in which it didn’t hurt to consider what might have been.

  “I’m not here to find a wife.” Charles said, interrupting their hushed argument. He wasn’t there for much of anything as far as he was concerned. He would have been happiest to leave, or never to have come. The sight of Locana made the knot in his stomach twist even now, two years after the wedding which had ended everything he’d ever hoped for.

  “Nonsense. Of course you are. Why do you think I forced you to come? So you could enjoy the famous Knopf spirits! Pah. Weak stuff if I say so. Fit for the local yokels but never for a Quinn. I much prefer the fruit based stuff the Avakoffs produce. It has a richer flavor, if less of a kick to get you up in the morning. Speaking of whom, there’s someone I’m dying for you to meet.”

  Charles turned to Locana for help but she put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s Sara Tenenbaum.” She said. “She’s brought along her cousin and I’ll have to introduce them to everyone.” She squeezed the Matriarch’s hand with a smile and pecked Charle’s on the cheek then she was gone, a ray of light receding into a black cloud of rain. Charles finished his drink and wished he could attempt being an alcoholic for a while. Instead he set his glass on a table and took his mother’s arm. “Alright mother, lead me to the new and shining toy you’d like me to play with.”

  The woman turned out to be Willow Avakoff, a pretty enough girl, blonde and pale and very thin in a beige and gold dress. She was his age, which was getting old to dodge marriage in a society dominated by scheming friends and mothers all trying to play matchmaker. He had some vague recollections of her from his childhood. A few visits with his father to the Avakoff estates in another valley farther along the western range above the river, a few games of hide and seek with Locana and Falkye and the rest, and a moment when they were teens at the top of the expedition ridge when they admired the view over both mountain ranges of the distant pampas in the sunset and he’d thought that maybe, she might be pretty. Now they were adults, and instead of admiring the sky in silence they made awkward conversation about the war and how exciting it was. Charles was getting thoroughly bored when she suggested they take a turn around the pond. “I haven’t been to the other side since we were children.” She said, then, turning to Charles’ beaming mother. “If you think we’d be alright without a chaperone.”

  “Oh! Oh!” Was all Charles allowed his mother before he said.

  “I’m sure she won’t mind. I believe that’s one of the Coleburns I see over there, and I know that she’s been dying to have a few words with them, haven’t you mother.” He extended an elbow to the young lady before a reply could be made and led her silently out into the yard and along the path that would take them out to the pond.

  The pond had been famous in his time running around it as a child for the huge lungfish his uncle had deposited there after one of his earliest expeditions. The children had all taken to calling it lumpy and throwing in fistfulls of foot bugs into the pond to try and lure it to the surface. The path around the pond was also famous, though for its more adult uses. The path led, not only around the pond, but out of the manors grounds to landing pads and parked flitters that could take an individual, or a couple, anywhere in the inhabited part of the continent within a few minutes if they wanted to find some privacy. It meant Charles got to ignore the curious glances of the gossips along the way as well as the cool sense of pride he felt emanating from the woman at his side. They’d made it halfway round to the statue garden on the opposite side before either of them broke the silence.

  “You’re a man of many words Mr. Quinn.” The girl said.

  “Charles, please.” He cleared his throat. “Call me Charles.” He abruptly turned at a long dock that extended into the pond on metal pontoons. At its end a group of children no older than ten and no younger than six milled around, peering over the edge while a woman in a servant’s simple dress hovered over them nervously. “Lets go over here.” He said. “If I need to play this society charade for another minute I’ll have to start a war before I go back.”

  Willow raised an eyebrow but followed him, watching her step to make sure the small heel of her shoe didn’t dip into the gap between any of the aluminum slats. The water to either side of the dock was a dark brown green that somehow managed to give off the color of a black whiskey while at the same time giving a murky view of the entire course of its depths. Algae floated near the bottom of the relatively shallow pool and here and there reeds poked up in spiky clusters from knots of roots along the basin. A small pyramidal fountain at the center hissed as it spilled its water into the air, the proud rocket of the Quinn family crest rising from the water at an angle as though aiming towards the house. Small fish darted amidst the shadows of the murky reed beds while the children pointed and followed the progress of a larger shadow stalking over their hiding places.

  “I must not interest
you very much if you’re asking me out onto a dock to watch some fish chase each other in the water.” Willow said in an amused tone.

  “Did you have some other destination in mind?” He asked.

  “Oh people will talk. That’s all.”

  “Let them.”

  They reached the end of the dock and the servant asked if he wanted her to take the children away. “No.” He said. “Let them watch. I remember doing the same thing at their age.”

  “There was only one fish in the pond back then.” Willow said. “Only one worth catching that is.” She squeezed gently at his elbow as they stood at the dock watching the fish with the children who narrated the whole drama going on under the surface in excited voices.

  The large fish was a tooth fish, so his uncle had named them when he brought them back and added them to the evolving ecological experiment in the family’s backyard. They were predators from an inland lake where he’d stopped to set up camp and take some samples on his way to the southern edge of the tidal continent. They were arrows in the water. Aerodynamic and bonelessly fluid, one of the old types, according to his uncle. They lacked the powerful mandibles of the lungfish that were taking over the seas, depending on networks of tentacles that opened like a net when they struck at their prey, each one covered in small horny claws, and sucked prey into toothless mouths to digest them still wriggling in semi translucent organs. It was their boneless bodies that he claimed would doom them eventually, but it was also their boneless bodies that allowed them to maintain a foothold in uncle Darren’s favorite places along the marshes of the half submerged continent, allowing them to maneuver through shallow pools and even up storm runoff into the lakes and streams that surrounded the continent sized plot of land that flooded and drained with the planet’s orbit around the sun. “A fascinating biological niche to conquer.” By Darren’s personal account. They were fun to watch shoot through the water after their prey, even as an adult. It would have been peaceful, if it hadn’t been for the Avakoff woman at his elbow.